Belle Cora Page 9

  My grandfather told me, “Christina can have Robert and Edward’s room. They are going to a boarding school. I know you’ll miss them, but you must realize that even if your mother and father had lived they would have gone away soon.”

  It was a shock. We had all just sworn to stick together. “But,” I said, to show that I was reasonable, “we’ll see them in the summer and on holidays.”

  He was still for a moment. “Perhaps,” he said, and I knew it meant no. “If—if you would please, for the moment, refrain from interrupting. Your grandmother and I enjoy your company. We wish you could stay with us. But it would be selfish of us to permit it. I’ve made arrangements to send both you and Lewis to live with your uncle Elihu and your aunt Agatha on their farm near Livy, in western New York State, south of the canal. As you’ll see when you make the trip, the distances are considerable, and the roads near the end are so rugged that travel between there and here is infrequent. It may be a long time before you see Robert and Edward again. But you’ll have Lewis, and a new family closely related to you by blood.”

  What had I done wrong? I wanted to plead with him, but he had told me not to interrupt, and I did not want to make him angrier.

  He paused. “You’ll want to know why.”

  “Yes, Grandfather.”

  I was on the brink of tears; I’m sure he noticed.

  “For your health. I know Dr. Boyle has explained this to you. You and Lewis are both of the consumptive type. One day, if we are not careful, you may fall ill and perish like your poor brother Frank. To you this seems a distant prospect, because now you are well—though we have all noted the dry cough, which we must take seriously because of the wasting disposition you have inherited. The future comes whatever we do, and you and your brother will have the best chance of a long life—indeed, the best chance of living to be grown—if you are taken from the city’s noxious vapors and nervous stimulations.”

  The young child in me wanted to weep and beg, to promise that Lewis and I would be good and never do it again, whatever we had done, and make him happy that he had kept us. But a wiser part of my suddenly divided self was sure that childish emotions would be discounted. I must think.

  Struggling not to seem argumentative, and yet to show myself the smart girl he had always liked, I insisted that Lewis and I were both unusually healthy children—our energy and strength often drew comment. That was why Lewis was such a handful! The coughs meant nothing. Everybody has a cough now and then. Besides: “My mother stayed here.”

  “And she died,” said my grandfather.

  “Why did she stay?”

  “Because she was a good woman, and her duty was here.”

  “But wasn’t there another reason?” I queried, drawing on conversations overheard. “Because travel is harder for women! It’s not natural, it’s very hard for them to leave their loved ones, their dear ones, dear to their hearts. And we’re children, so it’s even harder. We don’t know these people.”

  “They’re your close blood relations,” he rebuked me. “You mustn’t speak of them that way.”

  “But I don’t know them. They’re just names. I don’t guess Lewis even knows their names. I don’t mean any disrespect; it’s just true. They’re strangers to us. It’s bad for someone with a wasting disposition to have a shock, isn’t it, and wouldn’t it be a shock to be sent away? It would be worse for us. It would make us sick. Or at least it might, and in that case why do it?”

  I thought I had spoken well, and my grandfather seemed to think so, too, but it was useless. I was being told, not consulted. “Don’t think the considerations you have just advanced have not occurred to us. Of course they have. We’ve discussed them. We’ve worried and fretted and prayed for guidance, and at last we have decided on this course, which is the recommendation of all the physicians who have examined you.”

  He reminded me that I must not argue this way with my aunt and uncle. They were country people with old-fashioned ideas.

  Robert and Edward were informed at dinner, after Lewis had bolted his food and left the table, his departure accompanied, as always, by a look of relief from my grandmother.

  I was dismayed to see how little the news bothered my older brothers. We must stick together, they’d said, sincerely enough, the night before we left our childhood home, but now they were looking forward to beginning their own separate lives. To make me feel better, they extolled the virtues of farm life. The golden grain! The fresh eggs and butter! The clean, healthy air!

  It fell to me to tell Lewis. I emphasized the thrills of the journey, the vast distances and differing methods of conveyance: a steamboat up the Hudson, then a packet on the Erie Canal, bad roads, swamps, and mountains, in a virgin land from which the red man had been swept only a generation earlier. We traced the journey on a map. The country was smaller then, and with only a little exaggeration we could imagine that we were going out west.

  AS PREPARATIONS FOR OUR DEPARTURE WERE MADE, my grandmother and I worked together to make me what she called, to excuse its extravagance, a “Sunday frock.” She based it on pictures in Godey’s Lady’s Book, using the most expensive fabrics in her collection and every fancy stitch she knew.

  Lewis and I were sent to a dentist, who pulled one of Lewis’s teeth and filled one of mine. My grandfather had made these appointments for us on the recommendation of the famous revival preacher Charles Finney, who had once searched in vain for a dentist when he suffered a toothache in a town thirty miles north of Rochester. Finney had said that the absence of dentists was an obstacle to temperance in the West, for many good people took spirits to dull the pain caused by rotten stumps in their heads.

  ONE DAY, WHEN WE WERE SEWING my “Sunday frock,” my grandmother said that there was a keepsake of my mother that she had been meaning to give me. She left the room, and returned bearing an oval object the size of a pocket watch.

  “Do you know what this is?” she asked me.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied.

  It was a miniature, one of the tiny painted images courting couples used to exchange in those days. Once or twice during my earlier childhood, my father had shown it to me. Executed on ivory with almost inhuman patience and precision by techniques now forgotten, it was mounted in a hinged metal casing with a loop on top so that it could be worn as a locket. The cover opened like a door to a vanished day: There, behind glass, was my mother, aglow with health, in a lace cap I had seen her wear in life and a shawl I had never seen her in, holding a soft-looking leather-bound Bible. The details of the room had not been neglected. I recognized pieces of furniture now stored in a shed behind my grandfather’s Bond Street house. On the reverse side, trapped in some hard transparent resin, a lock of my mother’s hair had been worked into a design resembling a shock of wheat.

  From the moment it passed into my hands, I thought of it as a magical connection to my mother and I felt that if I lost it I would be cursed.

  VIII

  MY UNCLE WROTE TO MY GRANDFATHER, saying he preferred for us to come after the grain harvests. Thus we lingered at the house on Bond Street for months longer, interpreting the delay as a reprieve, and hoping that my grandparents would change their minds. In September, Robert and Edward left for boarding school. On the morning of their departure, Robert made three trips to my room in order to bring me, twelve books at a time, his thirty-six volumes of Buffon’s Natural History. They were mine now. “If you can manage to read them, you will be a savant where you are going,” he said, for Robert was a snob, and, despite a serious desire to reconcile me to my fate, he simply could not refrain from making disparaging remarks about the fools he expected me to meet at my destination.

  I knew the books were dear to him, and I embraced him for a long time, pressing my face against his coat. I noticed that he had grown faster than I had in the last year, and I wondered what our relative heights would be the next time we met.

  When Edward heard that Robert had given me his books, he was annoyed. “Are we s
upposed to give presents?” he demanded. “You should have told me.” He rummaged in his bags and came out with a pincushion that my mother had made with her own hands and given to him on her deathbed.

  “Mother gave you that,” I told him, really shocked. “You can’t give that to me. You can’t give that to anyone. You have to keep that forever.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and gave the pincushion to Lewis instead. My parting with Edward was a good deal less sentimental than my parting with Robert. We all embraced again outside the carriage, driven by one of my grandfather’s servants, and we watched them go.

  Finally, the day came, early October, chilly but clear. Servants loaded our trunks, carpetbags, and portmanteaus in the back of a hack; and—hoisting Lewis up in the air by way of greeting—there was my grandfather’s clerk Horace, charged with bringing us all the way to our destination in the Finger Lakes. Fool, I thought without any judgment when I saw him, because my brother Robert had twice referred to our trip here in the wagon and what a chattering fool the driver, Horace, had been. But I was glad to see him. He was familiar: indeed, Horace had a way of seeming like an old acquaintance a quarter of an hour after you met him.

  As we rolled downtown, he told us that it would be easy getting help carrying our baggage onto the steamboat, because times were hard—and, in fact, when we reached the docks we were approached by men eager for day labor, some of them in fine clothes recently soiled.

  On the steamboat, we pushed our way to the rail with the other passengers, men in straw hats, stovepipe hats, and caps; women whose true shapes were a mystery housed somewhere within bulky dresses with wide shoulders and leg-of-mutton sleeves and many petticoats. All of us felt the sudden jar—some staggered and grabbed the rail—and the paddle wheel churned foam, and with what tumult in my heart I cannot express, we left the island on which I had spent my whole life. As we moved upriver, the piers seemed to turn like spokes of a wagon wheel. The shores behind us began to fold upon themselves. The shores ahead began to open. The buildings nearest the shore shrank. The top story of a tall edifice rose behind them, and though I knew the North River was on the west side of the island and Pearl Street was on the east, I asked Horace if it might be my grandfather’s warehouse.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Do you see it, Lewis?”

  “Which one?” Lewis inquired, squinting.

  “Why, of course, the tallest. Is it still the tallest, Horace?”

  I was looking at the building when Horace answered, “Yes,” and though his voice was almost inaudible in the hubbub, it sounded strange to me. When I turned back to look at him, he was already looking at me, with a sober expression that was quite unlike him.

  Later that day, I overheard passengers talking about a young woman named Victoria who a few months earlier had become the queen of England. In all the years since that day, every time Queen Victoria has been mentioned, my mind has flickered back, however briefly, to that moment. People were friendly. Whenever they learned we were orphans, they clucked and knit their brows, and when Horace told them where we were going, they promised us that we would love it there. Men put Lewis on their shoulders and pointed out the sights on the river and the shore.

  There was a merchant who, when he was told about our journey, said that he was taking almost the same route, except he was going farther, to Ohio. There would be another canal, and then Cincinnati. He was in a hurry. It would take six days.

  This made me think, and a little later, as the boat was preparing to stop at West Point, I asked Horace if my father had died in Cincinnati or in some town on the way.

  “In Cincinnati,” answered Horace firmly.

  “Are you sure, Horace? I don’t see how that can be, if it takes six days to get from New York to Cincinnati. He wasn’t gone that long. He was gone only two days when we heard that he had died.”

  “I see.” He gripped my hand. “Yes, I see what you mean. But, you see, your father’s business was more urgent than the business of that man, and he went by fast coach.”

  But when the boat had docked and we were on the pier, he said that he was not absolutely sure that my father had reached Cincinnati. It might have been on the way.

  He had to tell me that, because once I started doing arithmetic I would discover that it takes three days for a fast coach to reach Cincinnati from New York. And even if in 1837 there had been rails linking the two cities, enabling the merchant to travel at today’s superhuman speeds, and my father had died promptly on reaching his destination, there was no telegraph or telephone to send a report. A human being or a letter would have had to bring the news back to New York. It was simply impossible for my father to have died in Cincinnati, but I had been told a dozen times that he had, by Mrs. Fitch, by my grandfather, my grandmother, and Horace.

  From this point on, I knew that I had been lied to. I didn’t know what to do with this knowledge. They were all good people, these liars. I knew that they were trying to protect me, and that was frightening, because they had failed. I was unprotected from the dangerous truth, whatever it was. I wished they had lied more skillfully.

  IN ALBANY, BY PREARRANGEMENT, we spent Saturday and Sunday in the house of a portly clergyman and his homely family. On Monday we started out again and had our first encounter with canal travel. I remember coming to feel that I had never known anything else but this: the laborer in muddy trousers leading a pair of horses on the shore, the long ropes sagging and tightening, the strip of brown water that ambled through the country with a strange intimacy, only the towpath separating us from a farmer’s field or the center of a big town. I had become a pair of eyes, upon which God had imposed the duty to inventory Creation: this cow, this fence, these blackened stumps, this forest, this miserable log hut, this sallow woman in rags who abruptly locked eyes with me.

  Horace, who had grown up on a farm, often told us how much he had liked it, and how much we would like it. He made bad jokes, some of which Lewis did not understand, and Lewis laughed anyway. Lewis pestered Horace with questions: about mountains and waterfalls, the family who apparently lived—dirty children, dog, dangling laundry, and all—on a barge coming the other way, the names of towns, the purposes of various tools, the special uses of the wood from the various trees we passed. Whenever I saw Lewis looking thoughtful, I knew he was trying to come up with a question for Horace.

  In Rochester, we slept in a cheap inn, and when we woke, our legs were covered with red spots. Horace bought a horse and painted wagon and we set off south. With each mile the scenery became ruder, with more unpainted houses, crooked fences, and underfed livestock. Roads of logs shook the wagon. Roads of mud were full of sky-reflecting puddles. Horace made us walk ahead of the wagon, testing the ground with a stick. We ate at farmers’ houses. We slept in the wagon. In the morning, we couldn’t find Lewis. We yelled his name into the forest. Only the wind and the birds answered. Then a voice above us said, “Here I am!” His arms and legs encircled a silvery-barked branch of an old beech tree that had been shedding yellow leaves onto the road and the wagon all night. He was near the top of it. “Look at me, Horace.”

  “Well, well, look at Lewis.” Horace clapped his hands.

  “Lewis, you promised not to scare me,” I reminded him.

  “Watch this, Horace,” cried Lewis.

  “No, it’s too high!” I shouted.

  “You’d better come down slowly, Lewis,” said Horace.

  He climbed lower, then jumped, and the only reason he didn’t make a hole in the wagon’s flimsy roof was that he slid off it headfirst. He might have broken his neck if Horace hadn’t caught him.

  I didn’t let myself care about Horace. Horace was temporary. I should think ahead, to my aunt and uncle. I tried to picture them. All I could see was our parents, not dead after all but hiding, living a new life as a farmer and his wife in upstate New York.

  IX

  THE TOWN OF LIVY BORE THE NAME of a Roman historian: so my brother Robert had said when we we
re discussing this trip, snobbishly adding “a fact of which I’ll wager most of the villagers are innocent.” It had grown up around a stream, which provided power to a sawmill, a gristmill, and a cider mill but was broken by falls that made it useless for transportation. There were several two-story clapboard houses for the local grandees, and a number of one-story and one-and-a-half-story houses. There was a wooden bridge; a livery stable; a general store; a tavern; churches for Presbyterians, Methodists, and Free Will Baptists; and a one-room schoolhouse.

  On the day the painted wagon bounced over the deeply rutted road into town, I noticed only how bare it was. Little in the way of fences or grass distinguished the yards from the nameless dirt streets. Balding cows and scrawny, big-headed razorback hogs roamed them both in perfect freedom.

  Horace tipped his hat to some odorous checkers-players—one missing two fingers on his right hand, another toothless, face collapsed like a decaying jack-o’-lantern—who were sitting on crates on the front porch of the general store where we stopped to ask directions. As we entered the store, the stink of whiskey breath and flatulence gave way to spices, leather, tallow, and turpentine. Ahead of us, a man and a boy brought two bushels of oak barrel staves to the jowly storekeeper, who counted them, inspected them, and discarded several of them as unusable. The man addressed the storekeeper as “Colonel.” The storekeeper called the man Jake and the boy Jeptha. We witnessed a disagreement between Jake and the colonel, who smiled a lot, patted Jake on the back, and pointed out some figures in a ledger. Jake, who did not seem to like having six of the barrel staves refused—or to like being patted on the back, either—accepted the storekeeper’s judgment with an almost imperceptible nod of his head. The colonel wrote in the ledger and fetched a sack of flour and a tin of patent medicine from the shelves.