Astray (6 page)

She hadn’t thought of that; perhaps he was right.

“Of course, whatever form the obsequies may take, I need hardly tell you that I shall be present as—if you’ll permit—your advisor, your prop, your staff.”

“Oh, Mr. Huddlestone.” A wet glitter in her eyes. “Such excess of kindness—lavished on an undeserving woman—”

“Nonsense!” What could explain that air of sorrowful mystery about the young widow? he wondered. What could have infused such infinite regret into that perfect face? He longed to understand it almost more than to wipe it away.

“These past weeks—”

“The pleasure has been very great. And all mine,” he said incoherently.

“I can only say how sorry I am for all the trouble to which I’ve put you.”

He was briefly speechless; his arms made a circling motion as if to say that all that he was, all that he could do, was at her feet.

“You must be sure to send in your bill promptly,” she reminded him in a whisper as the servant came to show him out.

The days that followed were full of pleasurable anticipations, and the nights brought scalding dreams. His sheets were dreadfully stained; he had to send them out for laundering. His best silk suit was aired and brushed, ready for the funeral. Perhaps he would act directly afterwards, while the widow was at her most vulnerable. He mulled over the wording. He tried out every variation, from
May I be so bold as to make a proposal which may be of mutual benefit,
to
I insist that you be mine.

Huddlestone was in his window seat at the coffeehouse when his eye was caught by the name.

One Mr. Gomez, a merchant, given out for dead of the scarlatina, yesterday arrived in New York, perfectly well, to the astonishment of his family.

He gripped the paper so hard, it tore. The coffee turned to bile in his mouth. He’d come so close, his fortunes had trembled on the verge of transformation…. To hell with this Lazarus, and to hell with Connecticut peddlers for reporting rumor as truth!

How ecstatic Mrs. Gomez would be this morning. Would she throw off her weeds at once and appear in white swanskin and taffeta? It was like a Bible story: all her wifely grief rewarded by this miraculous resurrection. If she’d ever felt anything for her attorney—a mild trust, at most, Huddlestone thought in humiliation—it was nothing compared to her wifely fervor.

Just wait till they see my bill!

Out in the street, the air stank; somebody had to be burning oyster shells. Huddlestone talked himself from rage to mere gloom. What kind of demon was he, to begrudge the woman her newfound bliss? After all, she’d never given him any open encouragement, promised him nothing. Wasn’t it her melancholic modesty, her shrinking from any selfish desire, that had attracted him?
Come, man, it’s nobody’s fault.

Perhaps he would pay a call. His feet were already taking him toward Pearl Street. It was common decency to congratulate the widow-turned-wife, to wish the happy couple well.

(But he would leave it to some other attorney to sort out their
legal muddle.) He would drop by only briefly, to take one last glimpse of that scarlet, startled mouth.

At Pearl Street the manservant annoyed him by insisting that his mistress was gone abroad. “I think you mean,” said Huddlestone, “that she
intended
to go back to her family in Jamaica. But under the circumstances—”

No, the fellow wouldn’t budge; Mrs. Gomez had shipped out of New York a week ago, she’d missed the master’s return by a matter of days. Would the visitor like to speak to the master?

Huddlestone shook his head hurriedly; it occurred to him for the first time that Gomez might see him as having been culpably negligent, to rush through the probating of the will without a proper proof of death.

His head was throbbing with confusion. Down by the docks, he interrogated some sailors, to disprove the servant’s ridiculous story. Just as he thought, there’d been no ships embarking for Jamaica in the past fortnight. The only sailings had been to Liverpool, Rotterdam, Lisbon, and the Cape. Besides, why would Mrs. Gomez have left New York in such a scramble, before the funeral, with the house not yet sold, without saying a word to her attorney? By what sickening stroke of ill luck could she have just missed being reunited with her husband?

It was only then, his eyes on the choppy waters of the East River, his nostrils full of the stench of fish, that Huddlestone woke, as if he’d been slapped. It came to him that he’d been a sleepwalker, tangled in the kind of muddy dream in which, while it lasts, monstrosities make sense.
Of course, of course.

Why, a halfwit of thirteen could have seen through Mrs. Gomez’s performance! The signs shone out now as if carved on the pale gray sky over the harbor. The missing corpse; the unavailable documents.
Oh, he did write a will?
The shows of ignorance.
I’d prefer the whole sum in gold.
The pleas for urgency.
To turn the page.
She’d appealed to Huddlestone’s vanity, and to his gallantry. His avarice. His sweaty dreams.

He walked back up Dock Street like a frail old man, jostled by the crowd. She’d practically waved the truth in his face:
The sooner the better. I mean to do all that money can.
Why had the Jewess played such a terrible trick on her husband, he wondered dizzily? Had Gomez been miserly, malicious, a brute?
I tried to perform my duty,
she said coolly in Huddlestone’s head,
I ran his household. We were not so blessed.
What could the merchant have done to deserve being robbed of his whole life’s estate?

The strange thing was, it struck him, the will had been dated only last year. Could adoration have gone septic so fast? What was the hard black cherry pit at the core of their marriage?

Unless she’d forged the document, somehow. It struck Huddlestone that he’d underestimated the education of Sephardic girls. Those two taciturn men who’d testified in court that they’d seen Gomez sign the will, could they have been her accomplices? Her lovers? His imagination reeled.

Most likely he would never know. But of course he didn’t really care about her treachery to Gomez. She’d betrayed Huddlestone, her husband-who-might-have-been, when he’d only meant to help her. She’d robbed three weeks from his
life, but it felt as if he’d been in her thrall forever.
Women act more privately, more obscurely,
she’d remarked.
According to the dictates of the heart.
Was that a coded warning?
Such excess of kindness—lavished on an undeserving woman.
Had she been laughing at him all along, or had there been some true regret mixed in with the fake?
I can’t sleep, sir,
she’d told him,
I can’t find any peace. I can only say how sorry I am for all the trouble to which I’ve put you.
Such sad eyes. He needed to believe one line at least, a single shard saved from the wreckage.

He would always be puzzling now, always doubting. Never understanding the real story. Liverpool, Rotterdam, Lisbon, the Cape? Never knowing where in the world she’d gone.

As Huddlestone mounted the stairs to his apartment, and let himself fall onto his bed, it came to him that he would live and die a bachelor.

The Widow’s Cruse

We hear that the wife of a certain Merchant of this city, while her husband was in the country, broke open his scrutore, and took out his will, of which she was executrix; and went in widow’s weeds to Doctor’s Commons, under a pretence that he was dead, and prov’d the same; by virtue whereof she receiv’d all his money in the stocks, and is gone over sea.

New York Weekly Journal
(May 26, 1735)

This intriguing sentence was preserved by Carol Berkin and Leslie Horowitz in their
Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives: Documents in Early American History
(1998). Huddlestone and Mrs. Gomez are fictional members of two real New York families, bottom-drawer lawyers and Sephardic merchants respectively.

TEXAS

1864

LAST SUPPER AT BROWN’S

B
efore the War there’s two women in the house but last year Marse done took them to auction. Now’s just me, the cook and all-round boy. My name Nigger Brown, I don’t got no other, I was born here. Missus done came in the kitchen this morning, unlock the butter barrel.
Law,
she say,
that’ll be gone in a week.

She don’t call me boy, like Marse do. She don’t call me nothing. She only marry Brown a couple years back, too late for chillun. Some say hims took her for the money from her laundry but she ain’t ugly, I done seen worse. I say,
Maybe I make you some ash cakes?

Ash cakes, are they colored fixings?

I tells her,
Taste real fine. All’s I need is meal, water, pinch of lard.

Missus smile, almost.
Very good. How much flour’s left?

Less ‘n a barrel.

She jangling her keys like a rattle. She know she ain’t quality, she still got laundress hands. She come down to lock and unlock her stores before most every meal, sometime I reckon she come to the kitchen just so’s not to be upstairs with Marse. Same thing, she work the garden with her India
rubber gloves on, I’s a-digging and a-toting and a-watering, days pass. We’uns don’t talk much, we’uns know what we doing.

She open the sugar cupboard, now, there ain’t so much as a hogshead full.

Can’t you order some more, ma’am?
I says.

Her breath hiss.
I’m afraid the store won’t allow us another thing, with times as they are.

Since the blockade, no cotton’s getting shipped out, port’s quiet like a cemetery. I hear Marse at dinner sometime boasting the damn Yankees ain’t got into none of Texas yet and never will. He sing out,
This here’s the last frontier.
Planters coming down from Georgia and Virginia with all thems darkies to make a stand.

How much coffee’s left?
ask Missus now.

Half a sack.

She give a long sigh.

In these parts four out of five is colored. The buckras, they’s always sniffing out plots among their blacks but there ain’t no trouble in this part of Texas. We’uns just waiting the War out. Passing on what stories we hear tell, sitting tight.

For dinner I roast the last of the gobblers, with ash cakes and corn and the end of the catsup.

Afterwards I’s eating leftovers in the kitchen. Missus come in and start counting the preserves.
He means to ride to town with you tomorrow.

That so?

You know why?

No, Ma’am.

Guess,
she say, like playing with a chile. I can see her teeth but she ain’t smiling. I shake my head.
Guess,
she say again.

My collar feel real tight. I been in this house since I was born.
Marse won’t do that.

Some might call that back talk but Missus like a straight answer. She come up close, her fingers all tangled.
I tell you, I’ve been married to Brown five years come June, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do.

He mean to sell me?

The man said to me just now, That nigger buck’s worth a thousand dollars.
She lean on the table.
Don’t you see? You’re all he’s got left.

I think I might fall down.

He intends to leave you with a dealer in town tomorrow, buy some calves instead.

That ain’t gone happen.
I says it real quiet but I know she hear me.

Missus nod.

Mary?
That’s Marse a-shouting for her. She shoot off like a rabbit.

I got a lot to do. I find some old bags in the larder, start filling them. Cornmeal, flour, salt pork mostly. A couple handful of coffee for when I need to stay wake. The littlest pot for boiling.

Missus come back in so quiet I don’t hear her till she touch my elbow, and I jump. She don’t wear no clickety-clackety heels like other missuses. Too late to hide what I’m doing. She could call in Marse and have me whupped for thieving right this minute.

Take this,
she whisper, holding up a jar of peaches.

I shake my head.
It get broke,
I tell her.

She set it down, unlock the sugar cupboard, start a scooping.
Where do you plan to run?

Now here’s where I reckon I should seal up my mouth, but Missus, she already done got the noose round my neck.
Mexico, I reckon,
I says, real soft,
or the Arizona Territory.

I’m coming,
she say. Like she was talking about a party.

My face is stony.
Missus Brown—

That’s not my real name,
she remark.
I’m only called Brown the same way you are, because of him.
She jerk her head upstairs, where Marse’s lying on his’n couch with his’n bottle.

Missus, you talking crazy. You can’t come nowhere along of me.

Well I can’t stay with him,
she mutter, still a-scooping the sugar.
If I stay in this house another month—

Listen,
I start.

I’ll pick up this knife and put an end to it,
she say. Her hand be on the handle, skin on bone.

What this man done to her? I look in her brown eyes.
You slow me down,
I says,
I gotta move fast. I be a stray buck, contraband.

She smiling now, strange.
But I know how to sign for him, you see, I’ve practiced. I can sign a travel pass for you with my husband’s name! We’ll go in the carriage, and if patrollers stop us, I’ll say I’m going to visit my family.

I wants to shake her real hard.
You think Marse won’t lep up, soon’s he find his bed empty, ride over to Stern’s plantation and put the alarm out?