Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (24 page)

“Thank you.”

There Benjamin, apparently forgetting it was time for bed, sat down, opened his book again, and began to flap about amongst the pages.

THE NEXT MORNING DEBORAH
had just finished stocking her shelves with some new offerings—palm oil, mustard, and cheese—when Benjamin returned. “I regret to say the Grissoms have declined our invitation. As I suspected, his wife is not disposed to go into company. Grissom sorely regrets missing the evening, and plans to come to talk books again soon.”

To talk books. Which Deborah could not do. And so where was her entertainment in it? “The Fulsoms, then,” she said. “We know
they
go out to dine.”

Benjamin looked to prefer the idea of books with Grissom, but Deborah had made up her mind. Was it not, by now, her house too, at least in part, at least to use as she liked now and then? She pushed on. “I shall invite the Fulsoms.”

MIN WAS SENT AROUND
to the Fulsoms with a note, and a note was returned; the Fulsoms were unable to dine on account of an ill child. Deborah sent an answering note with a pot of chicken soup and a repeated invitation for any date as soon as the child was well, but heard nothing from the Fulsoms regarding the soup or the invitation. Deborah sent another note to the Greens, who couldn’t dine and didn’t trouble to give a reason. She tried the Larchwoods, who had entertained Benjamin a number of times in the political vein, but was again refused, although that answer was most polite: A painful attack of gout was anticipated to keep Mr. Larchwood indisposed for some time. The next morning Deborah saw Mr. Larchwood out riding. In hindsight, Deborah wondered at her foolishness in expecting Philadelphia’s society to abruptly take Deborah Read-Rogers-Read-Franklin into its bosom just because she’d crossed that magic seven-year line. She sent no more notes around.

IN TIME, HOWEVER, DEBORAH
began to think again of Solomon Grissom. She’d always felt an affinity for the man, as he seemed to possess as few ready words as she did; he appeared completely at ease with her own lapses into silence, and she very much liked the idea that his wife might be the same. If the woman was shy, all the more reason to attempt to bring her out, to make of her a friend of Deborah’s own. Besides, Grissom was a successful shop owner and certainly pleasant enough to look at, and Deborah had never been able to imagine why he’d remained so long a bachelor; she wanted to meet the woman who’d brought him to this end. If Mrs. Grissom wouldn’t come to see her, she would just have to go there and see her for herself.

The next morning Deborah told Benjamin that he and his apprentice must take care of the business of the shop and the press and the post office between them; she had an errand to run. She made up a basket of gingerbread, biscuits, and jam and stepped into the street. She looked west and saw a woman who’d been caught picking pockets now tied to the courthouse rail for her shaming. She looked east and saw the sky pierced with mast after mast, from London, Genoa, Lisbon, Cadiz, Ireland, Newfoundland, and the West Indian islands, or so her husband’s
Gazette
had recently reported. The new trade had brought new sights and sounds and smells to Philadelphia—the stink of the overworked slaughter houses, tan yards, and lime pits that lined the Dock Creek; the competing shouts of the corders and fishmongers on the wharves; the blur of different-colored costumes and faces all around her; she could even feel the change in the overtrodden mud slipping about under her shoes. She would speak to Benjamin about that mud—he ran the
Gazette
and
Poor Dick
and had started a library and a fire company and was now clerk of the assembly—surely he could do something about too much mud on the shoes!

So it was that Deborah stepped into the upholsterer’s shop looking down at her shoes, uneasy about the mud ending up on Grissom’s floor; when she lifted her eyes they were met by a pair of gray ones she’d once claimed to know well. The eyes neither dropped in shame nor blinked with nerves; Deborah, the legal wife of Benjamin Franklin, would not be the one to avert her eyes. She lifted her chin and stared at the girl, that brazen, vile, witch of a girl, that kidnapper who had supposedly been banished to Boston instead of being thrown in gaol, a thing that Benjamin had explained would have called unwanted attention to poor William. Poor William! That was what Benjamin had said.
Poor William.
As if Deborah had suffered nothing at all.

After a time Deborah became aware that Grissom stood at her side, that he touched her elbow, that he in fact tugged at her elbow.

“Mrs. Franklin, I’m most pleased to see you.”

Deborah turned to face Grissom, glad for the excuse of looking away from those gray eyes that had once stolen Deborah’s compassion, but as usual she found herself without speech.

Grissom tried to help. “How do you fare, Mrs. Franklin? How fares your delightful boy?”

And William may be declared my legal heir.
That was the other thing Benjamin had said.

“
My
boy is dead, Mr. Grissom.” Deborah handed him her basket. “Please give this to your wife.” She walked out, stamping the mud off her shoes and onto the floor.

DEBORAH RETURNED AS SHE
came, but this time smelling nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing of Philadelphia. She walked into the shop, through the shop, and out the back to the press, where Benjamin stood in his leather apron, his compositor’s stick cradled in his hand as if it were a jewel-encrusted sword. He looked up. “My dear!”

“I’ve come from Grissom’s,” she said, and waited.

Benjamin handed the compositor’s stick to his apprentice; he came over to Deborah and took her by the elbow. She was tired of people tugging at her elbow. She was tired of the shop and the press and Benjamin and William and the whole great lot of them. She pulled free, left the shop, and climbed the stairs. Behind her she heard Benjamin’s heavier tread.

THEY SAT ON EACH
side of the cold parlor hearth, Benjamin leaning forward with his hands on his knees, just as he sat with his important friends whenever he was attempting to appear at his most earnest, coddling them into a vote for a militia, or a hospital, or a school. “Of course I knew she was there,” he explained oh-so-reasonably to Deborah. “I called on Grissom and discovered her. I saw her on the Boston ship myself but she came back, Grissom took her back. I tried to talk Grissom into sending her away again, but I failed. Apparently she’s good at her work. Better than most. He’d not had a girl—” Somewhere in amongst his ramblings, Benjamin saw his mistake. He stopped. “Debby,” he said. “I haven’t been back to Grissom’s shop since I found her there. I shan’t go again. I’m in the bed I wish to lie in with the woman I wish to lie with, as you well know, or if you don’t, I’m not the fellow I think myself to be. And such hard work I put into it too!”

He smiled. Deborah did not. His brow pinched in impatience and she could read his thoughts as if they marched along the grooves.
I’ve left James in charge of the composing . . . there’s no one to attend the shop . . . I wonder if anyone’s waiting for his post . . .
“Now come, Debby,” he said. “You’re not going to be silly over this, are you?”

Deborah stood up. “Yes, I am. ’Tis the best word for it too. Silly to object to being deceived over this lesser thing after having been deceived many times over the larger. You never did even ask them to dine, did you? No, of course you didn’t. Because you were afraid he might—no, your friend Grissom never would, but his wife just might—mention that girl in the shop. Last time you deceived me you gave—and I took—some blame for it to myself. This time you alone may take the blame for my shut door.”

Benjamin, even in the great rush of the day, sat where he was for some time, as if pondering what she’d said, which would be the first occasion for it. Perhaps Deborah was getting better with her words.

32
Philadelphia, 1740

WHEN WILLIAM WAS APPROXIMATELY
ten or eleven, his parents moved into a more fashionable home, still on Market Street, but a home that even to a boy spoke of something finer than what had been.

William also noticed that as they moved four doors along Market Street the spinning wheels and looms didn’t come, that his mother began to buy her cloth from the shops, her meat fresh instead of dried, their bowls made of china instead of pewter. William noticed these things, but none of them changed his life to any great extent, until the following year when his father enrolled him in Alexander Annard’s Classical Academy, a school far above the reach of any other tradesman’s son. One day William was lording Pirate over all his horseless friends, the next he was looking for a friend who
didn’t
have a horse; he was amongst the rich Quaker boys now, the oldest, most influential families in Philadelphia—the Graemes, the Shippens, the Penns.

But William was glad enough for the change. At the old school a word had just begun to shadow him as he fought his way among the sons of bricklayers and smiths and cordswainers, a word he understood only in its sense and not its exact meaning—
bastard—
but at the academy the word got magically left behind. For a time William did have to struggle to fit in, but he was sharp and he was quick; soon enough he’d learned what clothes to wear and what words to speak, and one day one of the boys invited William to his home. William had thought his new Market Street house was fine but soon saw its lack of space and glitter and
lawn
. It was true, he did overhear his friend’s mother: “Only think what he comes from!” But the boy’s father countered, “He’s polite enough and pretty enough; he’ll get on.”

William took even greater care with his dress and his manner after that and he did get on. Other invitations came, to horseback rides and skating parties and sleigh rides; soon enough he began to think of himself not as a printer’s son but as that other kind of boy, the kind who might expect to go to Eton or Oxford, to become a merchant or a lawyer or a politician if he chose.

And then one morning, coming down the stairs early, he heard his mother’s voice from behind the bedroom door.

“I’d like to know what you think you’re doing to that boy, puffing him up so full of himself, as if he belongs with that kind, when it’s a printer’s trade he’s to inherit. He’s already past the age of half the apprentices in this town; he should be at the press learning his job. What’s that school costing you? And you’ve another coming soon to feed and clothe.”

Soon after, William’s sister, Sarah, was born. The sister was a blow; by then William had come to understand something more of the meaning of the word
bastard,
and saw at once that if he was one, his sister wasn’t; he also saw that his mother preferred the one who wasn’t. As to his father, William could not have foreseen how eagerly his tall, strong, proud father could debase himself over a cradle of uncomprehending pink flesh, even if it was his own. His own and Deborah’s. Theirs together. So. What more did William need to know of it? He understood things now. The charmed Franky. His mother’s wild raillery at this “devil child” who was never hers but the product of some other passion between her husband and . . .
whom
?

Many nights William approached his father’s study ready to ask the rapidly all-consuming question, but each time he began his faltering sentence, something in his father’s eye dried out his mouth. One night he finally managed to get a single sentence out.

“I should like to know who my mother is.”

“Your mother is Deborah Franklin. And this is no longer a subject between us.”

And so it wasn’t.

All the while, the child Sally grew and sparkled and charmed her father, pulling him to her as if she were a flame and he a light-seeking insect. “My Sally!” he would cry, and scoop her up and tease her into giggles and words and soon—William must admit it was precociously soon—even letters, the father exclaiming over the daughter’s little slate as he so rarely found time to exclaim over William’s ever-denser pages.

But worse was yet to come. Shortly after Sally was born, William’s father took him out of Alexander Annard’s Classical Academy, where he’d worked so hard to achieve and
belong,
and put him to work in the print shop. As much as William liked being at his father’s side, printing was still messy, smelly, strenuous work, and William still hated it. Feeling for the letters, in constant fear of picking the wrong one, the lining up of the letters—
backward—
into a word, the words into sentences, the sentences into a page, the inking, the hefting about of ream after ream of paper, the swinging of the heavy arm of the press time after time. His father, William decided, had way too much to say. But beyond that he would not blame his father for this new life chained to the print shop. He knew who to blame. He’d heard Deborah’s words.

Deborah. Inside his head, William stopped calling her
mother,
and started to think of her by her given name, but the game was only a satisfying one at the start—soon it turned on its inventor, grew talons and horns, butted at him night after night. If Deborah should not be called
mother,
who should be?

One night, after William had painfully clawed his way into his teens, he came home from the shop tired, hot, ink stained, out of sorts with the world in general and with one person in particular. He’d been so hot and tired he hadn’t made proper use of the turpentine rag to clean the ink off his hands, and as he gripped the doorjamb to swing himself through it, he left an inky smear on the woodwork. As luck had run for him of late, his house-proud mother stood just on the other side of the door.

“Get your filthy hand off the paint!” she shouted at him.

That was the moment it first occurred to William that perhaps Deborah was speaking of ink and perhaps she wasn’t speaking of ink; in either case she’d spoken it at the wrong time. He leaned more heavily into the hand where it rested against the doorjamb.