All Other Nights (9 page)

Jacob watched as she rethreaded the needle, moistening the end of the thread with the tip of her tongue. She slipped the wet thread through the needle’s eye. His body shuddered, plucked like a string on a harp.

“Papa was one of the last people in town to stop doing business with the North,” she said. “My sisters and I found it rather revolting, considering what happened to our mother.”

Jacob sensed that he shouldn’t ask anything more. But he couldn’t help himself. “What do you mean?”

Now she looked back at him, her sneer vanished. Her voice dropped. “You mean you don’t know?” she asked.

Jacob looked at her, confused. “I suppose I don’t.”

She glanced at him once more, then looked back down at the stocking. A long moment passed before she spoke. “We used to keep slaves in the house,” she finally said, her voice strangely still. “One of them was an old woman who took care of my sisters and me when we were small.” She put the stocking down on her lap, though she continued looking at it, rather than at him. “One day she went out to tend to the garden, and she came back into this room holding Papa’s shotgun. She started cursing some tribe that had sold her mother in Africa, and then she screamed that our parents were devils—the ‘carnation of evil.’ That was what she said.” Jeannie paused. “If you look at the south side of the room by the door, you can see where we patched the wall. Papa was barely able to get the gun away from her before she killed anyone else.”

Jacob glanced at the wall next to the door and noticed a small swath of paint that was a slightly darker shade of green than the wall around it. He stared at it in disbelief. Jeannie would have been eleven years old at the time. Surely she had misremembered it somehow, or was recalling it secondhand. But Jeannie wasn’t finished.

“And Papa freed them,” she said, with the slightest quaver in her voice. “Can you imagine? The old woman was hanged, but there were two other slaves in the house who knew all about what she was planning. They must have. Papa didn’t even sell them off. He just set them free. Lottie was thirteen then, and she hasn’t respected him since.”

Jacob breathed in. Against every element of his upbringing, he didn’t offer his condolences, or even try to say anything comforting. Instead he glanced again at the patch on the wall across the room and asked her, “Did you see it happen?”

She looked at him, and for the first time he saw she was serious. Without her laughter, her eyes had a firm and terrifying power.

“All of us saw it,” she said.

And then Lottie came in, and the two sisters hurried upstairs.

J
ACOB BEGAN TO NOTICE THAT HE AND JEANNIE WERE BEING LEFT
alone more often by her sisters, particularly when their father was out. At first it appeared to be coincidence: Jacob would enter the front room in the evening, and Phoebe and Rose would immediately remember that they had some cooking for the next day to be done in the kitchen that couldn’t possibly wait. On other nights it was Lottie who vacated the room, announcing that she had forgotten to refill the lamps upstairs or to take the laundry in from outside when it looked like it might rain. Jeannie and Lottie still had their little cabals, of course, racing up the stairs together after William Williams or Major Stoughton had departed, but on evenings when neither appeared, Jacob found himself alone with Jeannie again and again. Each time she was curious, eager, asking him questions about his life in New York, speaking to him more than any woman had ever spoken to him before. He answered her, startled by the warmth of her words, by how welcoming she was, by how, for the first time in years, he suddenly felt at home.

“Did you often go to the theater in New York, Mr. Rappaport?” she asked one evening, after Philip and Lottie had gone out and Rose and Phoebe had hurried upstairs.

“Of course,” he replied, though the memory was unpleasant. Each time his parents had brought him to the theater, he had the distinct sense that they were there not to see the plays, but to be seen by the other people in the audience, as though they themselves were the ones onstage. Yet there was something about speaking with Jeannie now that set him at ease, as though his entire former life were nothing more than a vaguely remembered dream. He continued to search her words and gestures for some sign that would reveal her inherent evil. Instead, to his astonishment, he had found a friend.

“What was the best performance you ever saw?” she asked.

Jacob hesitated. Surely he ought to name something by Shakespeare, if he were to impress her. But instead he found himself telling the truth. “A hypnotist,” he said.

Jeannie glanced at him, her smile descending into a smirk. “I saw one of those a few years ago,” she said. “It seemed quite clear to me that the volunteers were all arranged in advance.”

“My father felt the same way, and he wanted to prove that it was all a trick,” Jacob said. “But he was afraid that the hypnotist would mock his accent in front of everyone if he were to volunteer, so he told me to volunteer instead.”

Jeannie watched him. Her fingers moved along the armrest of her chair, and for an instant Jacob wondered if she wanted to reach for his hand. “How old were you?” she asked.

“Fourteen,” he replied. “I raised my hand, because I was sure I wouldn’t be chosen. But before I knew it, I was onstage.”

“So was it real?” Jeannie asked. Her tone was genuine; he saw how her eyebrows rose, her body angled gently toward his.

“Well, I decided that I would pretend to be hypnotized, just to prove my father wrong,” he said. Jeannie smiled, and he felt emboldened, honest. “My father doubts everyone, you see. He reserves his faith for God. He’s never trusted another person.”

“My father is like that too,” Jeannie said. “At least, he’s never trusted me.”

Jacob considered this remark, and wondered what it might mean. But her hair was coming loose again, and with a brush of her hand across her exquisite forehead, his thoughts of her father dissolved. “My father’s lack of faith is quite extreme,” he said. “He always assumes that everyone is trying to exploit him or humiliate him, or even to destroy him. I suppose that was what happened to him before he came to America, and he never changed. I wanted to make him believe in something.”

“By deceiving him yourself,” Jeannie said with a grin.

“Yes,” Jacob admitted. The air was cool in the room that evening, cleansed and fresh from the afternoon’s gentle rain. “But the strange thing was that it turned out to be quite real. The man really did hypnotize me.”

Jeannie squinted at him, skeptical. “How do you know?”

“Because he made me sing onstage, and I never would have sung in public out of my own free will.”

“What did you sing?”

“‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

Jeannie laughed. But Jacob remembered that night and felt a swell of strange pride. His plan had failed twice over, he had discovered when he returned to his seat in the audience: his father didn’t believe he had been hypnotized, and assumed Jacob had simply played along. But to his astonishment, his father was proud of him. For months afterward, he heard his father boasting of how his son had stood up in front of hundreds of real American strangers to sing the national anthem. And Jacob was secretly proud of it too: thrilled by how he had been freed, for that fleeting moment onstage and away from his parents’ accents, from any reason to be ashamed. The memory of it made him feel lighter than air, his limbs cool and weightless as he admired Jeannie’s body in the chair beside his. He listened as Jeannie launched into stories from her acting career, and caught himself feeling happier than he had felt in years.

But the next day the message from the bakery demanded to know how long the command would have to wait for a wedding, or at least more definitive information. And when Jeannie was alone with him again in the front room that night, telling him how she once ran off to Richmond for a week to play the lead in
Romeo and Juliet
, he knew he could no longer wait.

“Mr. Williams had arranged for me to take the role there, and I told Papa I was visiting a friend in the next town,” she was telling him, her smile radiant. “But Papa saw the review of the performance in the newspaper. It was a wonderful review, too. Apparently I was quite convincing in my portrayal of the dead maiden in Act Five. Of course Papa had no appreciation at all. He told everyone he knew that he was ready to strangle Mr. Williams, and after that he barely let me leave the house. But a month later he went to New York—to meet with you, I suppose—and Mr. Williams and I performed an illusionist show in Petersburg. Fortunately Papa was still in New York when they printed the review.”

She laughed, and Jacob tried to laugh with her. But he couldn’t. Instead he coughed, and watched as she waited for him, her laughter fading. She saw that something had changed.

“Miss Levy,” he said abruptly, “I hope you will forgive my prying, but I have been mad with curiosity. What are your intentions with Mr. Williams?”

To Jacob’s surprise, Jeannie did not seem at all caught off guard. She paused, then ran a hand through a curl along her ear, and smiled. He wondered if it were his imagination that made her seem relieved.

“Why do you ask?” Jeannie replied, perfectly calm.

He swallowed. “Well, it seems to me that a gentleman in his position ought to be more eager to propose,” he said. He fidgeted with the chain of his watch, unable to control his nerves. He thought of the latest note from the bakery:
Y
OUR PROGRESS IS ESSENTIAL TO VICTORY
,
he had been grandly reminded.
THE LIVES OF YOUR FELLOW SOLDIERS ARE IN YOUR HANDS
.
But somehow the officers’ vague threats seemed secondary now, irrelevant to the presence of this woman before him. To hide his nervousness, he stood up and took a few steps toward the corner of the room, pretending to straighten a picture on the wall.

“You’d like to know my intentions with Mr. Williams?” Jeannie asked. He had turned back to face her now, from his spot near the corner. For an agonizing moment, she twisted a lock of hair around her finger, refusing to reply. Then, just as he was about to shrivel into the wall, she laughed out loud. “Oh, please!” she said, after a breath. “Mr. Williams is just—just—well, Mr. Williams, I suppose. He cares for me quite a bit more than I would ever care for him.”

Jacob didn’t know whether to believe this. She had followed him a bit when he got up, moving from where she was sitting toward a tall ladderback chair just a few feet away from where he stood in the corner, and now she settled down on the chair. Immediately he noticed that the skirt of her dress had gotten caught on the knob on the edge of her seat, which hitched her skirt up so completely that it revealed her leg to the knee.

Jacob looked away, and coughed, watching her out of the corner of his eye and waiting for her to notice and pull the skirt back down. But he was shocked, and shaking. She wasn’t wearing any stockings. He hadn’t seen a woman’s leg since he was a child. Jeannie’s skin was silk-like, gleaming, surely never once exposed to the sun. He allowed himself a glimpse, and couldn’t look anywhere else. Her skin shone in the room’s dim lamplight.

“Miss Levy, pardon me—but your—your—oh—” he stammered. It was only then that he understood that she had done it on purpose.

She rested a hand on her bare knee. “Forgive me, Jacob. It’s so stifling here,” she said. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to have to be under all these skirts all the time. A lady can hardly stand it.”

Jacob had never before heard her say his name, except as “Mr. Rappaport.” His eyes bulged.

She noticed. “Of course,” she said, “it’s not nearly as hot here as it is on the stage. Do you know how many lights are used on a theater set?”

“N—no,” he mumbled. Her leg seemed to stretch on infinitely. He envisioned it continuing well beyond her hand, up and back and underneath.

“Almost a hundred. They have gas lamps set up along the edge of the stage, and on the ceiling too, and there’s no breeze at all,” Jeannie was saying. “One can’t allow any kind of breeze, actually, because then the lights might dim and the audience couldn’t see a thing. You can’t imagine how sweltering it is to be surrounded by those lights, and with everyone watching you, too. And doing all sorts of things onstage, and pretending to mean them all.”

Jacob’s eyes were still glued to her leg. She stood up, and the skirt fell back down to her foot. “William was even jealous when I once kissed an actor on stage. Just because it wasn’t him. Isn’t that ridiculous? It was the theater, the theater’s all make-believe. How absurd can he be?”

“I—I don’t know,” Jacob mumbled, mourning the covered leg. Her reference to William, by his first name, irritated him. Then he noticed that he was missing a chance to denigrate him, and tried to recover. “I mean, absurd, you’re right,” he said loudly. He wasn’t making sense, he knew. But he had taken one step toward her, then another. He couldn’t help it.

“Please don’t think whatever you’re thinking about William,” she said. “He’s nothing to me, really. Truly nothing. I can’t explain it to you now, but someday I shall.”

This was astonishing, Jacob thought—though not nearly as astonishing as her spectacular leg. Her eyes seemed filmy, distant. He had only seen her look like that once before, when she had told him about her mother. For no reason, and for every reason, he believed her.

“I haven’t been in a play since before the war,” she said, in a voice softer than he had ever heard her speak. She was standing just inches from him now. “I know it’s wrong to complain about it—the war’s been hard on everyone, and this is such a silly thing. I know no one has a right to complain until they lose an eye or something like that. But I miss it. I really, really miss it.”

“I would be pleased to remind you of it,” he said softly.

Everyone reassures the young that they will know what to do when the time comes. It isn’t true. Jacob hadn’t the faintest clue what to do when he found Jeannie’s astounding delicious lips suddenly pressed against his own. Fortunately, Jeannie did. And he didn’t regret that he had more than one kiss to give for his country.

“MR. LEVY, I HAVE
a question for you,” Jacob said to Philip one Saturday morning. “It’s about Miss Eugenia.”

Jacob had by then endured many nights of savage kisses from Jeannie after her sisters had gone upstairs, ones that drove him insane by never going as far as he desperately needed. The woman’s sleight of hand was absolutely maddening. One night she would reveal a leg; the next, her dress’s neckline would be off-kilter, stretched almost to the point of revealing her breast before she would laugh and shift it back into place. In the meantime, while his eyes popped, she would have somehow managed to grab his pipe out of his pocket, or his handkerchief, or once—to his horror—a coded letter (luckily sealed) that he was about to send to his contact, which he convinced her was a business receipt. From then on he buried his unsent messages in the lining of his hat. And still her kisses left him reeling for days. She would invariably excuse herself and retire to her room, insisting that her father might return home and catch them, at precisely the moment when he felt he could never let her go. She was right, too; the tavern closed at ten o’clock, and Philip invariably returned within moments of Jeannie’s escape up the stairs, leaving Jacob only seconds to compose his sweating, stirring body into that of a bored gentleman reading a newspaper. He stopped sleeping; he was burning alive. On other nights she was tender, resting her head on his chest almost innocently and telling him things about her mother and sisters. He told her everything he could about his family, relieved to live without fear. He was surprised how much was left of his life that he still could freely tell her. The little smiles from her sisters made it clear that there were no secrets among the women of the house. Lottie laughed aloud whenever she saw him. Rose sent him scraps of scrambled verse, “from Jeannie,” then giggled when he begged her to translate them; she never complied. Phoebe even whittled a snuff box for him, “from Jeannie,” in the shape of a heart. He was on his knees.

Some things had failed to change. William Wilhelm Williams the Third still came to call quite regularly, and Jeannie still enraged Jacob every time she went out to the veranda with him. She assured Jacob again and again that she was merely letting William down gently, that she was certain that if she told him straight out, he would return to the house with a shotgun and a grudge. Jacob had no choice but to accept what she said, though his face burned every time he heard William’s unctuous voice at the door. He even began thinking about ways to kill him, though he could not determine whether these thoughts were serious. They felt serious to him. His ultimate mission loomed in the back of his mind, but he managed to hide it well behind the vast pillars of desire that had become his reason for living. He sometimes ignored the messages that came through the bakery insisting on updates, replying only to one out of two or three with something vague about how everything was progressing as planned. Except for the fervid meetings between Jeannie and Lottie after Major Stoughton or William Williams departed—which he had of course reported, though the girls were far too cautious for his eavesdropping to succeed—he had almost no proof; in the way of concrete evidence he had collected nil. He still allowed himself to dream that Jeannie might be perfectly innocent, that they could live an actual life together, that his initial intentions would become irrelevant, that someday soon the war would end and no one would ever have to know that it hadn’t always been real.