Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (28 page)

Yet none of this Deborah could say. “You know my dislike of traveling over the water.”

“Which would vanish entirely should you let me teach you to swim. But let me assure you, these ships are safe as houses nowadays—there’s not been a soul lost between Philadelphia and London.”

But there had been souls lost between Boston and London and New York and London; this Deborah knew because she’d read of them in her husband’s paper, and that he would give her such a quibbling kind of answer took away that argument and his next together. But what choice had she? She felt like a horse pulled behind a cart, futilely attempting to dig its hooves into the earth to slow its forward progress.

DEBORAH MADE EVERY EFFORT
to ignore the subject of London, but by the next week Benjamin had begun to scold her about the need to begin her packing. He’d commissioned a new suit of clothes for himself already, and three new shirts, and new shoes, and a half-dozen pairs of stockings. Deborah began to sort through her most fashionable things and layer them into her trunk, her spirits sinking lower as the level in her trunk rose higher. She did not want to go to London. She was tired of trying to keep up. Indeed, she was more tired of keeping up than she was afraid of staying behind.

Staying behind.
The words came at Deborah with enough weight to cause her to sit down on the bed amongst her unsorted clothing. She was
not
a horse. There was no rope tying her to Benjamin’s cart. Why
not
stay behind? A mere three months it was, and she’d been without Benjamin that long a number of times: when he’d gone off to the frontier on his famed military expedition, when he’d ridden his postal routes, when he’d gone to visit his sister in Boston. She sat utterly still, thinking it out from both sides and top to bottom and around again until she was quite sure of her mind. This one thing she
could
choose. Or could she?

Deborah considered. Benjamin couldn’t physically carry her aboard, but he could cut off her keep if she stayed behind, although it would result in a public scandal that he would surely wish to avoid. What more clever means of persuasion might be brought to bear on her she couldn’t guess at, but to give him—and her—a clear sense of her determination, she reached into the trunk and piece by piece began to return every already packed item to its original place.

Benjamin came in. He found Deborah unfolding her favorite quilted petticoat and shaking it out. “Ah! My old friend! Yes, yes, yes, you must be sure to take that along—’tis quite damp in London. Are you near finished with your packing? You amaze me. And here I’ve just received word that we’re delayed a week. We leave a fortnight Monday.”

“Then ’tis just as well I didn’t start your washing.”

“True.” But there Benjamin happened to peer into Deborah’s trunk and saw bottom. He lifted his eyes. “Now here, you don’t seem so far along after all. Was it not half full this morning?”

There had been a number of times in Deborah’s life when Benjamin had something important to say to her—
The governor wants to send me to London . . . There’s a child . . . Are you my wife yet—
and before each of those times he’d taken up her hand first, as if to signal the import of the words before he spoke them. Deborah now took this lesson from Benjamin and turned it back on him; she sat down on the bed, reached up and took her husband’s hand, drawing him down beside her, but there all subtlety failed her.

“I don’t want to go to London,” she said. “I’ve considered long and just now decided. ’Tis best Sally and I stay here in Philadelphia.”

A line that usually indicated a mild disturbance—or annoyance—creased Benjamin’s brow. “Come now, Debby. We’ve little time for this; there’s much to be done.”

“Yes, there is much to be done. This is how I’ve thought of it too. Best you go and take care of your business at London while I stay here and take care of your business at home. Manage your accounts, collect your rents, look after the post office.”

“I’ve arranged with David Hall to manage my affairs.”

“Mr. Hall has enough to do with the shop and the press. ’Tis the thing I’m best at. Leave it to me.”

Benjamin folded his other hand over hers; Deborah looked down and couldn’t see her fingers at all. “Debby. My dear child. Of course you must come. What shall I do in London without you?”

“Just what you should do with me. And don’t forget you’ll have William.”

Did he detect the jibe? No.

“William is not my wife. And you must think of Sally.”

“How do I not think of Sally? She’ll be all that’s left to me. Sally can’t sail.”

“I know you have fear of this crossing but only because this is an unknown thing to you; here’s the beauty of an unknown thing—it becomes a known thing with such ease! You only step aboard the ship and there—’tis known.”

“No, Benjamin. I should be put to better use here.”

“Nonsense! You’ll be put to better use by my side.”

“ ’Tis only three months.”

“I can’t promise three. I told you. Perhaps six.”

“Three or six. ’Tis no great stretch when looked at amongst the whole. What of those printers you set up in Carolina and New York? And your tenants on Market Street? To leave them to strangers—”

“Better than leaving me to strangers.”

“They won’t stay strange long. Not to you. To me they should stay strange forever.”

Benjamin leaned in to peer more closely at her—at fifty years of age he’d begun to wear glasses for close work and to complain of the lack of clarity in the images afar. Deborah sat in the space between the two problems, a third problem, but a problem for him, not her; she could not go on being pulled after Benjamin anymore. He was clever enough to see the truth in what she’d just said, and she watched him see it, consider it, shift things around inside his mind; when he began to speak again, the tone of the conversation had changed. He talked of the pain of parting and the debilitating effects of loneliness and the great drag of time he must now live through till he was again by her side. In other words, he’d heard and seen the truth of it and he’d accepted it; he would depart for London without her.

38

PHILADELPHIA HAD CHANGED. EVERYWHERE
Anne looked there seemed to be another new industry or shop of some kind—a rum distillery, a steel furnace, a glassworks, a brass button shop, a mustard and chocolate works, even an Italian sausage maker. The streets were lit and paved. The Godfreys, Shippens, Hamiltons, Norrises, and Logans had all built new mansions with sixty-foot frontage and foreign columns and—or so Anne had heard—fancy papering glued to the walls. The Quakers who’d once controlled the town were down to a quarter of the population, the Anglican Christ Church had a new, majestic steeple; the Presbyterians, Lutherans, Moravians—even the Catholics who had never till now been permitted public worship—all had churches or chapels of their own.

Other changes: Isaac Wilkes had died, crushed by an overturned cart. Allgood, and no doubt Robert, had been lost at sea. Two corders and a shipwright had been brought down by the yellow fever, some said come from the filthy water in the Dock Creek. And yet when Anne passed Benjamin Franklin now and again she saw that past fifty he remained as fit and strong as ever, wigged now and more fashionably dressed, an important man in Philadelphia. Whenever he appeared at the distance in the street she felt the queer pull of the man; they couldn’t be separated by more things—background, education, wife, past adversity—and yet the things that tied her to him were so strong. Franklin was the first man to seek her, to open her, to change her life course for good or ill; he taught her things she could have learned from no other and he could, she knew, teach her more. She could make music from a glass, she understood the travels of heated air, she could swim; but she didn’t understand what this new thing called electricity was, or why sparks were being collected inside jars, or how a metal rod could keep a house safe from fire. She wanted to understand. She wanted to
know.

And then there was the thing that connected them forever and above all: William. The hungry boy had drained her breasts and her heart and now the hunger was all hers—she’d watched, listened, even prowled, and discovered her boy—
her boy—
growing only handsomer and smarter and more polished every day, meshing seamlessly with the highest social circles. This new air, this study of law he’d undertaken, the shimmering young beauties he took about all seemed to suit him; a good deal of the old sourness had left his features now. Anne still saw nothing in William’s face that told her he remembered her, but she could also tell herself that was just as well; she gleaned what news she could and took a silly pride in her son’s success. It was enough. For now.

Solomon Grissom had fared well for a time, fathering seven children all told, but his wife, Sophie, had not recovered well from the last. Grissom had brought his son Elisha into the shop to work at an early age, and when Peter moved on to his own shop, Grissom allowed his boy, now sixteen, to take on much of the management role, setting Anne back into her place along with the other new seamstress, Grace, who’d been brought on to meet the increased demand. The change did not sit well. Anne could ignore Elisha’s apparently forgetting every toy or piece of candy Anne had ever bestowed, but she couldn’t ignore his increasingly sharp tongue when Anne resisted his urgings for speed over quality. Grissom, preoccupied with his wife’s health, made only brief appearances in the shop, and when he did appear he didn’t seem able to concentrate his mind; customers began to complain and fall off, but if Grissom even noticed, Anne couldn’t tell.

Anne had passed forty but had been lucky enough in it, her hair silvering but her health good, her back straight, her teeth sound. She told herself it little mattered what happened to the shop as long as her work continued as it was, but already her long hours had begun to fall off, and she was able to leave the shop well before sunset. Oddly, the shorter the days became the longer they felt, the more restless her spirit grew; since her enforced swim she’d spurned the river, but now she found herself taking long walks along it at the end of each day, moving northward to the sand spit where Franklin had once taken her. At first she only looked and moved on, but one early summer day she found herself shedding her clothes and swimming, drying stretched out in the sun. One day, however, she found her walk taking a turn in another direction, until one turn and another brought her to Eades Alley and her old door.

The alley looked the same, smelled the same; the door looked the same. Anne leaned forward and laid her palm against the splintered wood, curious to discover how uneasy she felt as she touched it, as if her connections to this one unchanged place hadn’t been severed as irreversibly as she’d imagined. She left the alley and found herself following the old route to the Penny Pot; she stood at the corner and watched the Pot traffic, about to move on when John Hewe stepped out the door.

Hewe had been one of Anne’s most disappointed customers when he’d discovered she’d given over her old occupation; he’d come back three times before she’d finally convinced him
no
meant
no
. She heard he’d lost his wife in the yellow fever epidemic, which no doubt accounted in part for him looking at her now with something of the old hope resurrected, but she could little account for the pleasure she took in seeing him.

“Here now!” he cried. “Will you see what I see! Have you come to visit me? Perhaps to tell me you’ve fallen back on old habits?”

Anne couldn’t help but smile. “I’m afraid no.” And yet she stood there looking at the hungry John Hewe, feeling something of the old days stirring her. She’d honored her promise to Grissom, understanding better and better with the passing of the years just what he’d done for her, and not just as a debt owed Franklin—he’d faced down Franklin, after all. John Hewe, though, could be no violation of Grissom’s rule about taking men into her room above the shop; this was something from before the rule, something of the old Penny Pot way of doing that had never involved Grissom at all. And standing in front of the tavern as she was, the older memories began to blank out the ship ones—she could recall the satisfaction of the dance, the game, a game for which she made the rules. But no. “I’m sorry to say—”

“Oh, bosh! You’re sorry, I’m sorry, we’re all sorry. Come have a bite with me.” He lifted both hands in the air to stop her next refusal. “I won’t pester you anymore about the other. All I’m after is to sit across from you for an hour and remember finer times. Come, eat. A piece of whortleberry pie and my finest wine and a chance to make a lonely old man happy. What’s to argue there?”

Anne couldn’t help but laugh at the idea of a lonely tavern keeper, but even as she laughed she realized as she stood there in the street that
she
was lonely, that she’d always liked John Hewe. And she’d always liked whortleberry pie. She followed Hewe inside.

“TEN SHILLINGS.”

“Ten shillings! Cheaper to marry you! Come now.”

Anne pushed back the chair from the private table John Hewe had set up in his private room. The wine had turned the room soft and warm and the bed hangings that framed the bed in the corner—hangings she’d made herself in Grissom’s shop—took on the look of old friends. John Hewe took on the look of an old friend. That didn’t mean that business wasn’t business, and Anne had heard the fancy whores in the London shop windows charged a guinea for a lie down. Perhaps she wasn’t so fancy and she wasn’t in London, but she knew her trade with the best of them.

“Ten shillings,” she repeated.

“Gah!” But even as Hewe roared he fished a ten-shilling note out of his pocket, dashed around the table, and grabbed Anne in a fierce embrace.

“Hold now,” Anne said. “Let me show you the full ten’s worth.”

Hewe eased back, gave himself over to Anne, and let her lead him as she liked, help him through his old man’s problems, bring him to his desired end. Afterward, as Anne got up from the bed and began to reconstruct her attire, Hewe spoke from behind her.