All Other Nights (29 page)

Jacob was surprised by how much he enjoyed watching Edwin’s handsome face change color. His skin faded from red to a cold, pale white, draining into a death mask.

“You would never do that,” he breathed.

“I have turned in people much closer to me, when it has been necessary,” Jacob said, his voice utterly bland. “You cannot possibly imagine the sort of devotion I am capable of. Two years ago I assassinated my own uncle, and later I turned in my own wife.” Jacob watched as Edwin shrank before him, his confident posture slouching down toward Jacob’s crippled form. To Edwin, Jacob had become precisely what his disfigured face symbolized to everyone who saw him, the visceral element in his hideousness that made everyone flinch: pure evil. Jacob smiled. “You have to be careful with devoted men like me,” he said. “I owe you nothing.”

Edwin Booth’s glamorous lips contorted into a sneer. “You disgust me,” he spat. “All of you disgust me.”

Jacob was quite accustomed to disgusting people. He laughed. “I have explicit instructions from Richmond to send everything through you,” Jacob said. A bolt of brilliance flashed through his mind, and he seized it. “Unless,” he added, “you are willing to appoint me as your substitute.”

Edwin Booth steadied himself and nodded. His nodding continued so long that it became ridiculous, like a manic puppy unable to control his bobbing head. “A substitute. Yes. Yes indeed,” he yelped. “That’s a capital idea. Capital.” He began pacing the room, waving his hands in the air again. “Tell them I’ve got consumption. Or yellow fever. Tell them I’ve had a stroke. Tell them I’ve gone mad. I don’t care what you tell them. I’m through.”

His ranting gave Jacob time to think. By the time Edwin had thrown his hands in the air for the last time, Jacob was ready. “I can’t simply send everything along myself,” Jacob told him. “There is a chain of command in place. Benjamin would need to be informed, and to approve it.”

Had he bet right? Edwin Booth nodded again. He had. “So send him a telegram,” Edwin said, with a wave of his hand.

Half of deception is condescension, making everyone assume that one’s wisdom is above reproach. Jacob snorted, insulted. “You know that’s impossible. And even if it weren’t, he would never trust any message unless it were delivered in person.”

Edwin Booth pulled at his own cravat, glancing again at the mirrors around the room. “Then go and tell him yourself,” he said. “Surely you have a way to go back down to Richmond.”

“Of course,” Jacob said. “But I shall need you to put your appointment of me in writing, for Benjamin. Then I shall bring it to him in person, and we shall reestablish the route to Toronto.” It was amazing how many assumptions were floating in the thick air between them, waiting to be pulled out and put to use. Meanwhile Jacob thought it through again. Could he be sure it was
that
Benjamin?

“I shall do it right now,” Edwin Booth said, and jumped to where Jacob was sitting. Shoving Jacob aside, he tugged open a drawer in the dressing table and pulled out a sheet of paper, a pen, and a small pot of ink.

His shove caused Jacob great pain, though Jacob struggled mightily not to show it. Jacob rose from the stool, slowly, and limped over to the crate where Edwin had been sitting. Edwin Booth drew out the stool and planted himself on it. Then he opened the inkpot, set it down beside the paper and dipped his pen into it. He didn’t risk dripping ink on the paper. Instead he bent away from the desk toward the clothes tree, and wiped the pen nib along the bottom of his toga. Jacob had just taken his new seat on the crate opposite, watching the actor’s sweating face in the mirror, when Edwin began declaiming the words as he wrote them down.

“‘For the Secretary,’” he announced, in a grand theatrical voice. “‘Insofar as I have been incapacitated by sudden and grave illness, I am unable to render the services requested. I hereby humbly ask that you accept my appointment of the bearer of this notice, Mr.—er, Mr.—’”

“Jacob Rappaport.”

Edwin glanced at Jacob, his eyes full of contempt. “Spell it,” he hissed.

Jacob smiled, thinking of Rose. “
R–A–P–P–A–P–O–R–T.
”

“‘
R–A–P–P–A–P–O–R–T
,’” Edwin repeated, with a schoolboy’s sneer. He looked at the paper, mouthing the letters as he wrote them, and glanced at Jacob. “What the devil sort of name is that?”

“Italian,” Jacob replied. It was true. Porto di Mantova, his father had once told him, was the name of the town in Italy where their ancestors—a family by the name of Rappa, originally Rabba, descended directly from the biblical high priest—had set up their first merchant business before making their way over the Alps. They had arrived in Italy in the first Christian century against their will, as slaves brought from Jerusalem to Rome. Their fellow Hebrews had bought them and set them free, following the ancient law that still held Jacob in its grip: the obligation of every Hebrew to redeem Hebrew captives, no matter the cost.

“I’ll be damned,” Edwin Booth muttered. He paused to share a scowl with Jacob, one that multiplied thousands of times in the mirrors around him, before continuing. “‘I hereby humbly ask that you accept my appointment of the bearer of this notice, Mr. Jacob
R–A–P–P–A–P–O–R–T
, a gentleman with a long and unimpeachable record of service, as my most honorable replacement,’” he read aloud as he scribbled. Once he had finished, he glanced up at Jacob. “I presume I am correct concerning your devotion to the cause.”

Jacob thought of Philip Levy, and remembered why he had come. For the first time in years, he felt no shame. “You are hardly one to question my devotion,” he said.

Edwin Booth spat at the ground, barely missing Jacob’s foot, and slammed down his pen on the dressing table. The cologne bottles jumped, startled. “Well, then, you may have it,” he concluded. He lifted the paper and began waving it in the air, flapping it back and forth in front of Jacob’s face as the ink dried. “Is this sufficient for your needs, or do you expect cash payments as well?”

Jacob felt it unnecessary to push his luck. “Just sign and seal the note,” he said. Edwin let out a loud puff of relief. But Jacob wasn’t ready to relinquish control. “For now, that is. If it is necessary for you to fulfill any financial obligations to us in the future, I shall keep you informed,” he added, and grinned.

“You bastard,” Edwin muttered.

Jacob laughed. Edwin blushed, grumbling as he signed his name, with an absurd flourish. Then he pulled open the dressing table drawer and fished out an envelope, a red stick of sealing wax, and a brass seal. “You are scum, all of you,” he announced, stuffing the letter into the envelope. He dipped the stick of wax into the flame of the lamp by the mirror and melted it onto the envelope flap, pressing his seal into it. “Pure scum,” he repeated, and handed the letter to Jacob. “I shall take pains to avoid all of you upon my arrival in hell.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” Jacob sang. He waited a moment for the seal to dry, touching the hardened raised monogram
E.F.B.
before putting the envelope into his vest pocket. Then, with considerable discomfort, he bent over and picked up the ring, which had been lying on the floor where Edwin Booth had flung it down, and slipped it into his pocket with the envelope. His future lay pressed against his chest.

He took up his cane and rose, slowly, taking his time and enjoying Edwin Booth’s handsome defeated eyes as they observed his broken body. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Booth,” he said. “It has been a pleasure doing business with you.” He meant it.

“You are scum,” Edwin repeated. “Now get out of my dressing room.”

Jacob smiled. Edwin stood before him, his pitiful subject, and then turned back to the mirror, readjusting his cravat. He pursed his lips proudly at his reflection, but Jacob could see that he was beaten, humiliated. Jacob glanced around the room, at the thousands of dejected Edwin Booths with their backs turned to the thousands of triumphant cripples. He turned around and hobbled out of the star-studded door.

WHEN JACOB RETURNED HOME,
his parents were still out for the evening. He didn’t wait for them. Instead he wrote them a letter, thanking them for everything they had given him and vowing that he would see them again, though he could not promise when. After that, he lay in his childhood bed and allowed the familiar pain to keep him awake until daybreak, when everyone else was still asleep. He placed the letter on his own bed, left the house, and took the first train south, where the cause of his devotion was waiting for him.

T
HIS IS A LOVE STORY:

When Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America, was a lieutenant in the army in the war against the Black Hawk Indians in 1833, he served under General Zachary Taylor, who would later become the twelfth president of the once and future United States. He fell in love with the general’s daughter.

Her name was Sarah Knox Taylor, and by all accounts she was beautiful: blue-eyed and captivating, freezing every American man in his tracks. She was hard to please, too, always smirking at the men who tripped over each other to open doors for her and offer her seats as though she were a cripple. Like many women who see the advantages of being treated like a cripple, she was also clever, parrying every fawning compliment with remarks so witty that the recipient usually laughed out loud before noticing that he had been insulted. But the first and only future president of the Confederacy devoted himself to winning her affections, and—with the bewildering and unabating shock of anyone who has ever, while attempting to prove a point, stumbled upon a new world—he succeeded, and married her. His success was unfathomable to him. At night he would sometimes rise and light a lamp just to watch her sleeping: to behold, in awe, the curls of her hair as they rested on the pillow beside her impossibly soft cheeks, to watch how her face and breasts gently rose and fell with each unspeakably delicate breath, marveling at the bounty and beauty of this vast new continent of happiness. Surely it was just a dream, unearned and unreal. Three months after their wedding, at the bayou plantation where they had built the home of their dreams, Sarah died of malaria.

After her funeral, Jefferson Davis abandoned their home and retreated to his brother’s plantation, where he locked himself into a single room. He spoke to almost no one for the next eight years. Eight years later, he met and married Varina Howell, the only First Lady of the Confederacy. At eighteen, she was barely more than half his age, and fully prepared for happiness. But while he was on the riverboat that would take him from Mississippi to their wedding in Tennessee—as he stood on the deck breathing the wide open river air and noticing that the world had at last become bright and beautiful again—someone tapped him on the shoulder, another passenger who happened to be on the same boat on the same day. It was Zachary Taylor. When his former father-in-law congratulated him on his impending marriage, the world once more came to an end. As Zachary Taylor walked away, Jefferson Davis fell back down into the abyss of those eight dark years. One week later, on his honeymoon, he took his new bride to visit Sarah’s grave. He was a man who knew what devotion was—no matter how cruel it might be to those who had to endure the future, and no matter how lost the cause.

THIS IS ALSO
a love story:

Judah Benjamin was in love with America. Like Jefferson Davis’s, his was a tortured and tormented love, one that left his passion forever unrequited and unfulfilled.

By all accounts, this country he loved was beautiful, more beautiful than any he or his ancestors had seen in centuries: more beautiful than his native St. Croix in the Caribbean, where hurricanes blew half the island to pieces every autumn; more beautiful than England, where his mother had grown up with Finsbury’s cold rain and even colder neighbors; more beautiful than Holland, where his grandparents had lived in sagging homes on Amsterdam’s man-made landfill; even more beautiful than Spain, where his ancestors had been chased to the sea in the wake of Columbus in 1492. Like all the rest of the country’s immigrant suitors, Judah Benjamin would do anything to win his country’s love. He tried to attract her, to make up for his lack of conventional beauty with his brilliance, his wits, and his charms. He tried to impress her, becoming an attorney who had mastered the very laws that made her who she was. He tried to marry her, acquiring a patrician American wife, though that failed spectacularly—not through death or even divorce, but abandonment, the most profound depth of indifference. He tried to serve her, taking his seat in the United States Senate, committing himself to her with absolute devotion. In her moment of greatest trial, when she suffered the nature of an internal insurrection, he stood at her side—on the side where he had lived his entire life—forever dedicated, willing to risk absolutely everything for her. But she was always hard to please. So he moved into Jefferson Davis’s office, spending fourteen hours a day with the eternally brokenhearted Confederate president as they tried to save whatever could be saved, committing every last ounce of his soul to his beloved, devoting himself to what would become the grand lost cause.

AND THIS TOO
is a love story:

Three months after his arrival in Richmond, through the providence of God, Jacob saw Jeannie on Main Street. She was standing just across the street from where he stood, facing an old vendor who was shouting at her over a sack of potatoes she was trying to buy. He nearly fainted.

She looked much thinner than he remembered her, and smaller too—shorter in simpler shoes, her face less full, her curls calmer against her thin face. Her threadbare cloak hung open on her shoulders, though the afternoon was cold, and he could see that she was wearing a plain dark dress that he remembered her wearing many times. But the dress looked shabby now, even from across the street, and in it her figure looked less womanly, her beautiful curves diminished. She had suffered, he could see: she winced in the face of the shouting vendor as though she were still a young girl, her old confidence shriveled. Jacob was captivated, and held his breath.

He almost yelled her name, but in the same instant he thought better of it. He was in the Confederate citadel, and the threat of capture and hanging awaited him on every corner. How could he be sure that she wouldn’t turn him in? He watched her for a moment before deciding that he did not care, that he was prepared to risk everything. And so he called.

“Jeannie!” he shouted.

The street was busy, horses and carriages passing back and forth between them. She didn’t hear him. He shouted her name again, and his heart quickened as she finally glanced in his direction. He would have waved both arms in the air, if it hadn’t taken all he had just to remain balanced on his cane. But she didn’t see him, or didn’t recognize him, and turned back to the potato vendor. She returned the sack of potatoes to the vendor’s cart and quickly walked away.

At that moment he would have given absolutely anything just to run after her, to dart through the traffic on the street and sprint behind her, to capture her at last, to seize her and never let her go. Instead, as she disappeared into the crowd, he sank down to the sidewalk, suddenly struck by the overwhelming force of everything he had lost. He buried his face in his hands, swallowing sobs.

“Don’t do that,” someone said in his ear. “The ladies will see you.”

When he uncovered his good eye and turned around, he saw a man seated on the sidewalk just behind him. He must have been Jacob’s age, but a haggard beard like an old man’s covered his emaciated face. He was resting awkwardly on the ground, with a battered tin tankard in front of him. Jacob glanced down at him and saw that the man’s right leg below his knee was missing.

“Believe me, you don’t want the ladies to see you like that,” the man said. “I made that mistake myself.”

Jacob did not want to listen, but it would have been too painful for him to rise just then and walk away. The man coughed, and continued. “When I enlisted, there was a lady waiting for me at home,” the man said. “I wrote to her after I was wounded, and she promised me over and over that she would love me forever no matter what. But when she finally came to see me in the hospital, the whiskey was wearing off, and I was weeping from the pain. She told me that she could never marry a man she had seen cry. Later I found out that she had taken up with another fellow while I was away. But I still think that everything might have been different if she hadn’t seen me crying.”

The man looked Jacob over in the way only cripples look at each other, free to admire one another’s wounds. When he was done, he put his hand on Jacob’s shoulder, briefly, and then took it away. “Once the men start crying, then the entire cause is lost,” he said.

At that moment, Jacob looked past the man’s bearded face and saw a young lady walking down the sidewalk, about to pass them by. It was Jeannie.

This time she looked right at Jacob, without recognizing him. To her, he was just another crippled veteran languishing in the streets. He would have said her name, but he could barely breathe. He watched, every part of his body pulsing with pain, as she bent down and dropped some sort of coin into the bearded man’s cup.

“Thank you, miss,” the man said. “May the Lord reward you with a long and happy life.”

She was very close to Jacob now. Her face was too thin, almost gaunt, but even so he could see how fresh and beautiful she looked, even more so than when he had known her, as if time had not passed for her, but had rather moved in reverse. His wife was a young girl, innocent. She smiled, and in her smile he noticed a disturbing distortion in her features, as if she too had been disfigured. Then she spoke.

“No evil I did,” she said, in a clipped and cryptic voice that didn’t sound at all like Jacob remembered. “I live on.”

As she hurried away, Jacob realized that it wasn’t Jeannie at all. It was Rose.