Brookland (12 page)

“You'll ruin your eyes,” her mother scolded in passing.

“Leave her be,” her father counseled, though Prue knew he neither approved nor disapproved of her fancy. It was a solace Cornelis Luquer also took an interest in the physical world. They could share their books and discuss their way through whatever seemed unclear.

At ten years old, Prue had thought it a marvel to travel to New York City and ponder her late misconceptions about the place. At fourteen,
when Congress was sitting in that city while it awaited a more permanent home, Prue's head was full of belts and batches, but she still thought about bridging the East River. It would ensure easy shipping of gin in winter, after all; she continued to dream about it when she stood gazing out over the straits. She brooded on the terrible thing she had done to Pearl, the one truly mean-spirited action of her life thus far, and still worried someone in her family would learn her secret. Though she no longer had as much time as she'd had in childhood to ruminate on death, she remained anxious it would come for her father or her sisters, to whom she grew daily more attached. Where once New York had seemed a sacred destination, she now made deliveries there in all kinds of weather, and had twice been pitched into the cold, salty water en route. She knew the streets on which a small pedestrian was likely to be run down, and those on which she could buy candy; she knew her father's customers by name. She accompanied him regularly to the gloomy bank. Over time, his banker—Timothy Stover, who had the carriage and voice of a Quaker but lacked the sober manner—came to answer her questions as carefully as her father's.

When she had begun her training, her sisters had been too small to be tutored in much besides kneading wads of dough and embroidering with huge needles and yarn. Though Johanna by then had spent half her day in bed with headache and the rest in her chair, working her lips and muttering, her face had lit up as if Jesus Himself had appeared in the room whenever Pearl had brought her handiwork for inspection. Johanna would slide her palsied fingers over the fabric with pleasure and deliberation; and when she'd descried whatever Pearl had made thereon—usually a series of stabs and lunges intended to represent flowers, trees, or the inevitable cat—she'd praise Pearl lavishly for it. Pearl must have sensed it was Johanna who'd nursed her in her fragile infancy, for she loved her out of proportion to the old woman's personal merits. Prue's praise, or their parents', was welcome enough, but Johanna's approbation made her bounce up and down as if she needed to use the pot. Prue knew she had no right to feel jealous; she was, after all, down at the manufactory all day, while Pearl spent hours in Johanna's company. Still, Pearl's glee irked her. Had Johanna possessed her sight, she would not have known what she looked upon.

“You can't tell what it is,” Prue protested on one occasion.

Pearl crossed her black eyes at her, while Johanna merely lifted and shook her chin.

“You can't tell what that is!” Prue shouted.

“I can, indeed,” Johanna squawked in return. “ 'Tis a barn cat, is it not, Pearlie?”

Pearl stroked Johanna's wrinkled cheek in reply.

Johanna placed the piece of linen—which resembled nothing so much as bare winter branches—on her lap and stroked it. “Remember when you tried to knit a muffler, when you were hardly older than she, Prudence Winship?
Jezus Christus
, you may as well have tried to knit a sheep.
Jezus
, have mercy on her soul!”

Pearl laughed, her throat clicking quietly. Some of the neighbor children thought this sound eerie, but it fell easy on the family ears.

Prue tried to imagine what Ben would do in such a situation, but realized he was too blithe to get himself into such a corner in the first place. She stalked outside, determined to pull her jealousy out by the roots but feeling an ounce of coldhearted pleasure, meanwhile, that no one ever complimented Tem's sloppy needlework or lumpy porridge. Prue disliked that as soon as Tem was big enough, she would also be trained at the distillery; Prue wanted to keep its secrets as her own, and would have told no one her hope that, as Tem hadn't yet shown an aptitude for anything, she would also prove second best at making gin. Prue went over to the chicken coop to see if any of the hens had laid; and though they clucked as if she was a nuisance, they let her take three eggs.

Prue cupped them gently in her two hands, as she had no apron or skirt to gather up for a basket. It should have been enough, she reasoned, that Tem and Pearl had ferreted out their dark eyes and straight black hair from some dim corner of the cosmos; Tem was the prettier of the two, but they both had an enviable regularity of feature. Put another way, it seemed fair that if Prue herself was to have to make do with a head of kinky curls and a face that would never quite hang together, she should also be allowed more responsibility and entrusted with more arcane knowledge.

As she brought the eggs back in, she realized that Tem, while not marked by the same gloom that colored her own mind, was tainted in her
own way: She was ever enthusiastic at the beginning of an inquiry, but her interest flagged once the subject became known to her. This struck Prue as potentially a more insidious defect than mere dark-mindedness, with which, after all, their mother had still managed to marry, bear three living children, and make a life for herself. Tem's first day reading was full of struggle and delight, but when she discovered the days to follow would be equally strenuous, she began to slouch into the posture of a comma, her small head, to all appearances, too heavy for her spine to bear. She beamed with satisfaction when she learned to write her capitals, yet behaved as if it were a personal affront that she must also learn her minuscules. Prue thought she might pitch out of her chair when the topic of cursive script arose. Tem had no intrinsic talent for numbers, nor for any of the tasks that kept a household in order. Were she entrusted with the tinderbox, she couldn't make the flint catch. Pearl, by contrast, could strike a spark as well as her parents, and deliver it safe into the hearth without causing a moment's worry. Seeing that she liked the responsibility, Matty brought her a small silver tinderbox from New York and afforded it a place of honor on the mantel. Meanwhile, if Tem was even sent to poke a fire, it sputtered; if she was asked to dust a room, she would leave cobwebs in the corners and clouds of hair beneath the rug.

At the age of six, however, Tem seemed to know she could make up for her near-universal want of useful skill by cultivating her native sociability. It was clear to Prue her father was popular in the neighborhood as much because of the spirit he was born with as the spirit he distilled; and Tem had obviously chosen to emulate him in this regard. Her capacity to mimic was unrivaled in Prue's experience; she could tremble in perfect synchronization with Johanna's seemingly random fits of palsy, turn her gaze inward exactly as their mother did, and throw back at Prue the slight catch in her voice when she was afraid of something, thus nearly bringing her to her knees with embarrassment. In emulating their father, Tem learned to look the distillery workers—even the slaves—in the eye, call them by “Mr.” and their surnames, and commit to memory the names of their children, though they would never be brought by to play. She learned to walk down the street with her head held high and a smile on her lips, no matter how many gaps her departing milk teeth had left in her grin. She learned to whistle nearly as well as Pearl did. None of these talents could immediately be shown as handy as if; for example, she'd
proven masterful at sums or had an unusual gift for language, but she clearly wasn't stupid.

It was no surprise Pearl should turn out to be more studious. On the day Prue had explained to her what writing was, and what were its uses, she may yet have been, as their father called her, a “little piss-pants,” but she'd opened her mouth and bawled with happiness. She'd understood writing would free her from isolation, and had taken up the study thereof with a fierce dedication. Her diligence sobered Prue. Unlike Tem, Pearl would finish an evening's lessons, then ask for more; and since the age of five, she had been able to write clearly enough on a slate for her words to be intelligible to people outside the family. As soon as she'd learned to express herself thus with any specificity, some of the pantomimes she'd thitherto used to assuage her desires became unnecessary, and from a distance she appeared a more ordinary child, except for her size; she was unusually slight, and Tem had shot up past her while they were still in diapers. (Prue wondered if this, too, might not somehow be her own fault.) Up close, anyone could see from the expression with which she listened that she was a bright child, a quick study. Pearl showed herself so capable of numeric manipulation, Prue had to turn her tutoring over to their father when Pearl was only seven. The patterns she began to devise for the ornamentation of pillow slips and napkins were proclaimed by those neighbors who still spoke of the Pierreponts (who early in the war had been exiled, as vociferous Loyalists, to the barrens of New Jersey, leaving their huge white house vacant) to be fine as any that family had brought from France. Anything that existed in nature she could draw with pencil or needle; and when nature ceased to provide sufficient inspiration, Prue and her father began bringing books unlike any they'd previously acquired home from their journeys westward. The library upon which he'd educated Prue had released its secrets only upon perusal of dense blocks of text, but for Pearl he bought
The Cyclopædia of Natural Wonders
and
A Compendium of the Beauties of Art
. The illustrations in these books were etched in more shades of gray than the water of the East River contained, and they were veiled behind sheets of tissue that crackled to the touch and hinted at intricacies they only half concealed. In this way, Prue and Pearl learned, by firelight, the flora and fauna of Europe, the Americas, and the Indies, the magnificent buildings of the Egyptians and the Chinese, the many-limbed gods of the Hindus, and the heroic
paintings of Italy. Tem would sometimes glance at the plates, but if their parents would let her go out, she was happier rolling hoops and tossing quoits with the Luquer boys, doing imitations for them of pious Patience Livingston, whose jaw practically never moved when she spoke, or gathering huckleberries from the side of the road. It didn't matter to Tem that the laundrywoman cursed her each Monday for coming home with grass or berry stains on her clothes. Books were not her pleasure—being out with people was; and if she devoted her learning to games, she was learning how to win them with moderate frequency. She made no apologies for her predilections, and announced them so adamantly, the adults made little effort to control her.

Prue's sisters were as unlike in temperament as in interests. Tem was accustomed to being the center of attention in groups of children, and to earning their approbation through her mimicry; but she would prickle the moment she perceived a slight. Pearl, by contrast, possessed a workmanlike good cheer, which at the time Prue thought almost miraculous, given the hardships of her existence, but which she later came to remark in others who kept company with misfortune. Pearl seemed to have been born understanding how a neighbor's unease could be disarmed with a forthright smile, and how pity could be brushed off likewise. As a result, when children squabbled in the market, their mothers would hold Pearl up as an example. “You'd not hear Miss Pearlie crying about it!” was often barked at a sniveling child; along with, “Be thankful you're better off than that blighted little Winship, God bless 'er.” These scoldings had two effects: first, to make the berated child dislike Pearl, and second, to mortify Prue. Pearl, who should have been bothered by the neighbors' example-making, bore it lightly, bowing her pretty head, and making sly remarks on her slate about the perpetrators once the sisters were past their purview.
(Lees't I don't have the Blight of a Foul Temper lyk her Daughtr
, she commented once, in response to something Mrs. Livingston had said; and about Mrs. Remsen, she one day simply wrote,
Cow
.)

Prue held out hope Tem's inattention would prevent her wanting to come into the distillery; but the thrill of all the people and bustle clearly outweighed the difficult work the place would require of her. Her parents began discussing the possibility in the summer of 1788, when Tem had recently turned nine years old. Pearl was busy sketching the banner Matty would have his men carry in a forthcoming parade to support New York's
ratification of the Constitution. Prue found the verse Pearl had come up with,

Broklands Distillers,
Prowd & true,
Stand with Publius,
As shld you
.

rather limping, but the two workers she'd drawn flanking a cask of gin were true as life.

“One's enough in the business,” Roxana argued. She was wrapped in a shawl though it was warm outside, and feeding Johanna porridge from a bowl as if she were an infant. “Pearl'll live with us always, but Tem we might manage to marry off.”

Pearl flared her nostrils from over her sketch, but Roxana was too busy with Johanna's supper to notice. Johanna smacked her lips and closed her eyes after each bite, as if she could conceive of no better meal than this. Prue was confused by the scene: sad, afraid, and at one level relieved to see Johanna brought so low, and jealous to see her mother caring for her so artlessly.

Matty said, “I think we ought to let the girl decide. It's only fair.” He looked squarely across the table at Tem, who was trying to draw a horse with a piece of charcoal. “What do you think, missy? You want to join your elder sister in the distillery?”

“Sure I do,” she said, without glancing up from her drawing.

Prue felt her temper simmering, but managed to hold steady. “Do you realize how hard the work is?” she asked Tem, trying to prevent her annoyance leaking into her voice. “Do you realize how much studying you'll have to do?”