Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (25 page)

“What did I say to you?”

“William,” his father said, “listen to your mother.”

William dropped his hand and looked straight through Deborah at his father. “I should like to,” he answered, “if someone would only tell me where to find her.”

The room turned still.

His father broke through the quiet first. “Your mother stands there. And it would behoove you to remember your duty to her.”

“She’s not my mother. Since the whole town knows it, I’d have thought you’d know it too.”

“I shouldn’t like—,” his father began, but Deborah rounded on her husband, damp, red, raving.

“Do you see? Do you see what he is? The greatest villain that ever lived! Oh, that I must ever claim him as mine!”

William turned, stepped back through the door, and slammed it closed. Behind him he could hear his father, his voice raised as it rarely ever was.

“Debby! Dear God! Think of the boy! Where’s your heart?”

“Tired. My heart is tired and sore and sick to death of the sight of him.”

And somewhere inside another door—the bedroom door, most likely—slammed closed.

LATER THAT NIGHT WILLIAM’S
father came to his room. “I expect you to apologize to your mother.”

“And who might that be?”

“Below stairs lies your mother,” his father said, in that voice that William could never find it in himself to cross.

The next day William apologized to Deborah, but Deborah retracted none of her words.

THAT SAME YEAR WAR
with Spain was declared from the courthouse steps, and the cannon on the hill fired off round after round all day long. Soon the French had entered into it, stirring up the Indians along the frontier, attacking settlements nearer and nearer to town; William’s father became the loudest voice in favor of building a militia for the defense of Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, but the solid Quaker voting block against all things militaristic held sway. William ground out the rest of the year at the print shop, but at the beginning of the second year, when the privateers began sailing up the Delaware into Philadelphia and flashing about their gold, William began to make some plans of his own.

33
Philadelphia, 1745

ANNE WOKE TO A
late-night tap on her door, by now such an alien sound she wasn’t sure she’d heard it; she’d kept her promise to Grissom and entertained no men in her room or anywhere else. At first there had come the expected random knocks from those former, overfond patrons who could not latch on to the idea that this particular door was now closed. In time, however, the message was absorbed, and Anne was left alone. The fact that Anne was indeed alone required some adjustment on her part, but soon enough she discovered a new serenity in the falling away of all pretense; she began to practice pleasing herself of an evening, and found she could excel at that too. She borrowed books from Solomon Grissom and now and then dipped into her pouch to purchase a special one; she took more pains with her sewing, and with a bit of trim here and there managed to turn her wardrobe—and her room—into something that told another story of Anne than the one she’d told before. As for the daytime, she worked as she’d worked before and soon made her way back from bed ticks to tassels to hangings, from there to being trusted with the running of the shop now and then.

But Anne was not the only thing in Philadelphia that had changed, and from what she heard from Grissom’s customers as they came in and out, much of the change could be laid to Franklin. The streets had been paved and culverts run under them to divert the water. A thing called a “fire engine” had appeared, to be used by the fire company Franklin had formed for the express purpose of responding to alarms, and it came just in time, containing a terrible fire at the warehouses along the wharf. A learned society had been formed, “to promote useful knowledge amongst the British plantations of America.” With the announcement of war and the news of repeated Indian and French attacks on the Ohio border had come an even bolder move: Franklin defied the pacifist Quakers who controlled the assembly and began lobbying to form a private militia. But perhaps the most talked about of all Franklin’s innovations was the “Pennsylvania Fireplace,” an invention he refused to patent so that all could share in its benefit, the benefit being the reduction by two-thirds of the amount of wood required to heat a home. What the corders at the waterfront had to say about this Anne didn’t know, but she knew what everyone else said of it: Franklin was now called genius
and
philanthropist.

Other, private changes in Franklin’s life had come to Anne’s attention as well—the move to a more fashionable home, the birth of a daughter, a partner brought into the printing business. It was rumored that much of Franklin’s new free time was spent on experiments regarding a thing called electricity, and Anne found herself regretting one single aspect of her old life: the chance to hear firsthand what such a thing was and what it could mean—what it could mean for William—for this was how she took note of everything regarding Franklin.

Anne always watched for William as he made his way about town but rarely saw the boy near to; if she was seen first, mother or father or Min took care to either turn him around or distract his attention another way. In time William grew into a tall and finely made young man who began to go about on his own, but whenever he passed Anne he did so without a single flick of recognition. Anne lay awake many of those early nights debating the gain and the loss of making her identity known to the boy, but in the end decided that when she did so, she must do it as someone who would cause him no shame; there were still too many about town who remembered the whore. Give it a few more years, she decided, until no one remembered anyone but the upholstery worker—then would be the time.

Solomon Grissom too had changed, taking to married life so well he’d fathered a child every odd year, pausing at a current tally of two girls and a boy. Anne had been exceedingly pained at the arrival of that first girl, the memory of William’s earliest days in her arms brought fresh to life with every cry of hunger or distress, but in time the child had come into her own red curls, her own way of dimpling, her own distinctive voice. So had the next girl. They were not William. But then came the boy, and by the cruelest act of fate he came as fair haired and bright as William; Anne couldn’t keep her eyes from him whenever he happened into the shop hand in hand with his father. Elisha, he was called, and Anne went out of her way to make a friend of him, tying up a yarn dog for him, or sewing a stuffed cat, keeping a piece of molasses candy in her pocket to treat him. When he became ill with dysentery and didn’t appear for a week, Anne’s attention fell off and she bungled the accounts; Grissom, already gray from lack of sleep, had to keep late in the shop to sort them out.

Another thing occupied Anne’s mind in addition to William and Elisha: Solomon Grissom’s marriage. Contrary to her prediction, Grissom
had
left Anne alone, and as glad as Anne was of it, she was just as puzzled. She began to make a study of the pair, watching the Grissoms together and apart, and noticed how they listened for the other’s tread and lit up when the other appeared, how well they attended not only each other’s physical selves but each other’s looks and words. Through the wife, Anne came to a greater understanding of the husband; she learned that his silence was not always empty, that his acuteness was not always barbed; she began to feel freer in his presence now there was no doubt his heart had rooted firmly in some other ground. Anne watched Sophie too, and learned something of those other things that could be given to a man besides that single thing that was all Anne had ever allowed. The other things were things Anne had never seen the point in learning, but it fascinated her just the same, and at times, at night, she would warm herself by hovering in her imagination over the Grissoms’ hearth.

SO FIVE YEARS HAD
gone by, and here was the old
tap, tap, tap.
Or more accurately, as Anne had failed to move at the first sounds,
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Grissom at last? Her thoughts too disordered to sort, Anne threw back her bedcovers, wrapped her shawl around her, lit a candle, and went to the door. Franklin stood there, but not the same old Franklin of the confounded and confounding half smile, the smile that could never decide if she were angel or devil—this Franklin had decided what she was.

“Where is he? Where’ve you got him?”

“Grissom?”

“Grissom! So that’s how this happy marriage works! No, not Grissom, blast it! William. Is he here?”

“Why on earth would he be here?”

“He’s run off. I know you told him who you are. Where else should he go but here?”

“I’ve told that boy nothing.”

Franklin stopped looking frantically around Anne’s room and brought his eyes back to her face. Anne looked back without a flinch. At forty Franklin had grown even wider in the shoulders and back but had begun to thicken at the waist, his hairline had begun to creep backward, slightly lengthening his forehead, but his chin remained firm, his eyes keen. The decided look in them softened to a rare confusion.

“Do you mean to say you’ve said nothing to him? Not when you took him or any time since then?”

“He knows nothing of our relation. He knows nothing of me at all. He doesn’t even recognize me when we pass.”

Franklin took a visible breath and it gusted into the room like a small tornado, lifting the loose hairs that lay on Anne’s neck. He peered at her a time longer. “I find I must believe you in this, although I was quite convinced otherwise. He’d begun to ask questions, abuse his mother. I assumed you’d explained yourself to him and painted her black in the process. It seemed the logical—” Franklin stopped, and looked at her in new defiance. “It was no ill usage at home that brought him to this, I promise you!”

“And it was nothing I said that brought him to it, I promise
you
.”

Franklin, calmer now, studied her longer. He may have decided to believe her, but he wasn’t through blaming her. “God’s breath, woman! It was madness to take him!”

“Yes, it was. I admit that to you now. I saw it aboard the ship, when I realized that
I’d
carried him into danger—” Anne stopped. “The ships.”

Franklin stared. “Good God! The ships! Of course it would be the ships! ’Twas all he ever talked of! What can be wrong with me that I shouldn’t think of a ship, with the pirates running all over town flashing their gold and calling for crew.” Franklin wheeled for the door.

Anne dropped her shawl, picked her gown off the peg, and pulled it on over her shift. She wrenched open her case of drawers in a hunt for a pair of stockings and Franklin heard the complaint of the wood—he swung around, saw her standing with the stocking in her hand and plucked it out of her fingers.

“My dear Anne, you can’t think to come with me at this hour.”

“I might help you search. Think of all the ships tied up just now at the wharfs! I might—”

“He’ll be on one of the privateers—there are but four of them in port. Think how it will look. You must keep here.”

Of course he was right. Of course she couldn’t help search. Again, as Grissom once told her, it was more of that madness only love for her son ever drove her to. Franklin tugged the stocking free of her hand, crossed to the bed, and, taking into account the circumstance, laid it out with considerable care.

“You must send me word at once,” Anne said.

“I shall.” Franklin strode to the door a second time, stopped a second time. He came back into the room, picked up her hand, kissed it. “God love you, my girl,” he said, “for God knows I cannot.”

ANNE SAT UP WITH
some of her mending, waiting for a message from Franklin, thinking about what he’d said of pirates. She might have thought of the ships, but she hadn’t thought of pirates, and she didn’t like to think of it. She’d heard of them, of course, seen them, in fact—privateers authorized under the king’s letters of marque, set loose to rob and plunder any ship sailing under a French or Spanish flag; she’d also heard of some of those men—and boys—killed, some of the ships sunk. It was true that some came home rich as kings; Anne could imagine the fifteen-year-old William as she’d known the seven-year-old William, eyes alight at even the thought of a ship, but she could also imagine the fifteen-year-old William lying on a ship’s deck, painted all over in his own blood. She’d once thought William not bold, and here he was, ready to sign on to as bold an adventure as could be, while she—a woman whose courage had once been admired—sat trembling.

Anne sat up watching the dawn come on, but no message came from Franklin. She dressed herself and went to the shop, but what work she did was a poor effort. At noon a messenger came to the shop, carrying a letter to Grissom. Grissom opened it and crossed the shop to Anne’s table. He handed her a separate, sealed piece of paper and Anne saw her name scratched across it in Franklin’s familiar hand. She tore it open.

He was discovered aboard the
Wilmington
and removed. A thousand thank yous. You took and now you give back—the score is settled between us for this life.

The letter was unsigned. Of course.

34

WILLIAM FRANKLIN DOUBTED THAT
his father would ever understand what it had taken for him to board that privateer. To a man like Benjamin Franklin, who could take an idea—any idea—and leap after it with the confidence of one who saw exactly where it led long before anyone else had even registered the words, such a step would seem small enough, but to William it was as large as the sum of his young life. As large as death.

It was Deborah who drove William out of the house day after day, but as he wandered through the stark, late-day streets he felt no great affection for his father either, a father who’d allowed his wife to stand there and call William a villain, who’d told
William
to apologize for doing nothing but attempting to find out the simple truth about himself, a truth his father had long denied him, continued to deny him, even after his own wife had as much as admitted how false the original account was. Deborah Franklin was not his mother. She was ashamed to call herself his mother. And instead of thinking of himself as the legitimate offspring of one of Philadelphia’s most admired citizens, William must now consider that he was likely the bastard son of that man and . . . whom?
Whom?