Belle Cora: A Novel (9 page)

I lay beneath many blankets, shivering, half awake, and distantly aware of Christina undressing Lewis.

I dreamed of the blackened streets, the treasure drifting downriver, the smoldering ruins behind the marble pillars of the Exchange, and an angel, who with one arm wielded a sword he pointed north, east, south, and west, and with the other arm carried me safely through the air across the burning world. Worried faces surrounded me. I spat up into a bowl. Christina fed me beef broth, which I promptly spewed onto my nightshirt. My coughs carved deeper and wider spaces within my chest as if bent on hollowing me out completely. It occurred to me that I might die before my mother.

Later, using all my strength, I turned my head slowly to watch Dr. Boyle hold a candle with which he was setting bits of paper alight on Lewis’s chest. He covered the paper with a wineglass. Then Dr. Boyle was holding a lancet. Lewis’s blood dripped into a white china basin. With another slice of the lancet, the blood flowed.

Frank was brought in. He was sick, too. We were fed, cupped, bled, and purged.

When I was conscious once more, the other beds in the room were empty, and my mother was stroking my hair. That she was alive was wonderful, and her touch was a comfort to me; yet I knew that something terrible had happened. “What is it?” I asked weakly. “What?”

“Don’t talk,” she said, her eyes brimming.

Next I was sitting up in bed, eating Irish potatoes. Christina was there with my mother.

“Who?” I asked. My mother turned away.

“Your brother Frank is in heaven,” said Christina.

IV

IT WAS NEVER DETERMINED WHAT HAD CAUSED
our general attack of “fever,” as Dr. Boyle called it. The suspects were bad food—maybe an inferior ham that Sally had purchased, which we had finished off the night of the fire—and bad air from an open drain. No one said the word “infection.” I suppose there were doctors who thought that illnesses were contagious, but they were backward or foreign; Dr. Boyle was not one of them. He believed in ventilation.

I had a lingering bronchitis afterward, and for months I was obliged to spend several hours each day in bed or sitting in a chair. I passed the time reading books. I read
The Fairchild Family
twice. I read Genesis in the family’s big picture Bible. Robert began reading
Robinson Crusoe
aloud to me, and when he wasn’t there, I went on by myself. It was much harder than the Bible or
The Fairchild Family
. I remember how the last page looked, down to a little pea-soup stain, on the day I finished it, and that at first no one believed that a seven-and-a-half-year-old child had really read such a grown-up book. Eventually, I was given Frank’s books.

MY GRANDFATHER WAS WELL KNOWN
by this time as the abolitionist merchant who helped to found an antislavery newspaper, and who had the minister of the Abyssinian Presbyterian Church as a guest at his table. Today it is believed that all Northerners were foes of slavery, but in fact the cause dearest to my grandfather’s heart was unpopular in New York City, where many people depended for their livelihood on trade with the South. New York insurance companies had refused to take his money, and he had used a Boston firm instead; this worked to his advantage after the fire, because the New York insurers went bankrupt, and my grandfather had more capital than his competitors did during the period of rebuilding. By the following year, fifteen months after the fire, a new store and warehouse had arisen, seven stories high, the tallest edifice in the city of New York.

I have alluded to this building earlier. I heard that phrase, “the tallest building in the city,” on the lips of every member of my family very often from the time we knew that that’s what it would be. We bragged to
the other schoolchildren about it. I walked down the street with Lewis’s hand in mine and told him that he was a lucky boy since his grandfather owned the tallest building in New York.

One day soon after it had risen to its full height, the family, all excepting my mother, made a visit to stand on the roof of the warehouse and enjoy its immensity. All around us, the grays and browns of the waterfront were replaced by the tawny hues of raw wood, and the air smelled of paint, bricks, and sawdust.

We were all panting by the time we reached the top, and as we stepped out onto the flat roof, I gripped Lewis’s sweaty, slippery hand tightly. He had recently voiced the alarming opinion that a person who wished hard enough, with perfect faith, might learn to fly.

We had lived all our lives on flat land in the city, with occasional excursions to the farms of Brooklyn and New Jersey, so we were very impressed by the view from seven flights up. We could see the ships on the river, and more buildings, streets, wagons, carriages, horsecars, omnibuses, and people than our eyes had ever beheld at once. We noticed the fire’s legacy in the broad swath of the city—like the track of God’s paint-brush—where everything was new. Humpbacked clouds cast shadows on neighborhoods in sun and neighborhoods in rain. We found our house.

“Let go of me,” Lewis demanded. “My hand hurts. I can’t see.”

I let go as Robert grabbed him under the armpits and jerked him up roughly onto his shoulders. “Now you’re the highest one of all,” said Robert.

“Jump,” said Lewis.

“What?” Robert asked in bewilderment.

“Jump up.”

“What?”

“To be higher. Then we’ll both be higher.”

“Oh,” said Robert, and he jumped up and down.

I wanted my father to stop them. “Father,” I said, trying to catch his eye, and I was struck by the darkness of his expression. We had all experienced sudden ambushes of dejection since Frank’s death, when we were stopped in the middle of whatever we were doing by the reminder that he was not here to enjoy this moment, but waiting for us in a land beyond the sky. I assumed that my father was thinking this now, but if you had
asked me even at that age I could have supplied other explanations for his gloom. His wife was dying. Earlier that year, he had been on a business trip to Cincinnati; there had not been much talk about it afterward, and there would have been if it had gone well. Though I would not have been able to put it into words back then, I knew that my father did not fit into the good, pious, humorless family into which he had been born. He was a likable man with a witty mind, but in his circle charm counted far less than business sense and high moral purpose, qualities he tried to acquire, earnestly and in vain. Many people having woes greater than his are cheerful anyway, from sheer animal spirits. That is their nature. His nature was to be melancholy.

After a while, the clouds were above us, bringing a premonition of rain. My father said it was time to go home. As soon as Lewis was on his feet he ran to the edge and dropped a large, heavy rock over the side of the warehouse. He’d hidden the rock in a pocket of his coat and brought it all this way with the express intention of dropping it from the roof.

When we got to the bottom, we found the rock broken into five pieces on the cobblestones, a yard or so away from a dead pig. Two dogs were already sniffing the corpse.

My father went into the store and gave orders for the pig to be removed.

“You killed that pig,” I scolded Lewis. “It could have been a man.”

“It’s a pig,” said Lewis in a distant, philosophical tone.

“Yes, luckily, but what if you had dropped the rock over the edge when a man was walking below? You’d have killed him!”

“Think of it, Lewis,” said Edward, to tease me. “You’re very young for a killer.”

“It’s not funny,” I said.

“I could have killed a man,” Lewis echoed, impressed with himself. He picked up the largest fragment of the rock.

“Put it down,” I demanded.

“Oh, let him have his souvenir,” said Edward. “It’s done its damage.”

Robert seconded him. “He knows he mustn’t do that again—don’t you, Lewis?”

“Yes, I know.”

“He’s learned his lesson. Let him have it.”

“Let him,” said my father absentmindedly.

The next time we had pork chops for dinner, Lewis ate his share complacently, and no one said a word, afraid to break the spell. From then on, pork was like any other meat to him, and throwing brickbats at pigs became his favorite amusement.

The piece of the rock with which he had killed the pig was forever afterward his lucky stone. It would be among his possessions for many years, with him whenever he needed luck, whenever he gambled, and whenever he killed someone.

V

ON THE DAY MY MOTHER FELL INTO
her final illness—at the very moment when she was lifted for the last time onto her deathbed—I was walking home with Rebecca, a new girl at the subscription grammar school that I had been attending for three years, along with around thirty other children of the neighborhood, in the second story of the Union Presbyterian Church. The teacher, a young, choleric man, never looked at peace with himself except when he caned the boys; then he had a poetic countenance, like a concert pianist playing an exquisite passage. He didn’t cane girls. For girls it was the ruler smacking the palms, which seemed to tremble with their own fear, separate from mine, as I held them out to receive correction.

My friendship with Rebecca had all the thrills and terrors of a love affair. It was she who befriended me, very actively like a practiced seducer. And virtually from the instant I surrendered, I was worried that she would realize how dull I was and regret the intense effort she had made to fascinate me, which had been so flattering because she had so many tools of fascination at her disposal. She was the daughter of a hotel proprietor, and lived at the hotel and had enjoyed a more numerous variety of amusements and met a greater variety of people than any other girl I
knew. She had met Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians; she had been up the Hudson by steamboat; she had seen a trotting race in Brooklyn and a diorama of the Battle of New Orleans, and when I told her about the view from the tallest building in New York City, she told me of the view from a mountain. She had been to ice-cream saloons, as they were called then, and she had met a 150-year-old colored woman who was said to have been George Washington’s nurse.

My own life seemed uninteresting by comparison, and when I was with Rebecca I had little to say, except to echo her opinions.