Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (5 page)

ONE VICIOUSLY HOT DAY
in August Anne saw Franklin passing by on the opposite side of Market Street. He might have seen her, he might have not, but if he did see her he could not help but note her condition; at six months, in a dress worn thin from washing and plastered to her with damp, her condition was more noticeable than Anne herself. That was how she felt most days—an invisible creature pushing a bright red wheelbarrow ahead of her—people saw the barrow and nothing else. Picking out amongst the market crowd the people who would still speak to her and the people who would not, she began to see what lay ahead. She’d figured how it would be at home—she’d take over the now discarded cradle and pull it next to her side of the bed; she’d add another hungry mouth to a house too full of them; as soon as she could wean it, she would leave the infant with her mother and go off again in hunt of work. She recalled Mary’s remark. Was she, after all, to live her mother’s life? Had that other life, that different life that Anne had plotted out for herself, already escaped her and her child both?

6

IN AUGUST, DEBORAH’S MOTHER
died. The woman had been no more than half alive for a long time, but at her death a curious thing happened to Deborah: She began to feel only half alive herself. With her mother gone, what was left between Deborah and that life ahead, which could only be described as bleak? She pushed on in this half-dead state, putting her mother in the ground and settling her affairs; she discovered her mother’s frugality had left her sufficient to live without resorting to the hatter’s shop, but it wouldn’t allow of a new dress or more than a single roast a month. Deborah wept tears that were only half for her mother, at times begrudging her even those; her mother was dead, but only after living the kind of family-rich life that Deborah could now only despair of. How different if she and Benjamin had been allowed to marry when they’d wished! Deborah’s grief and anger mingled, each doubling each.

Sympathy callers stopped in. Deborah was surprised at the number of them—it reminded her of how remiss she’d been in paying such calls—but she’d just gotten into the habit of them when they ceased altogether, as if some unwritten rule were being followed that required so many days of attention to the bereaved and nothing past it. Deborah spent the first day without a visitor sitting in the parlor staring blindly at the back of the door; the second day she climbed the stairs and began to sort through her mother’s things, few that there were. The third day she stayed in bed an hour past daylight; the fourth day, two. The fifth day she could not account for at all, or, indeed, for many of the days that followed. She couldn’t recall cooking or eating a meal, or washing up, or sweeping, or any of the usual chores. She did know she had her hands in wash water when a knock finally did sound on the door, because when she went to dry them on her apron she looked down and noticed how soiled it was, how rimmed with grime her nails were. She also noticed she didn’t care. She went to the door and opened it on Benjamin Franklin.

Near to, he looked different than he did in the street—more solid, more foreign somehow—more of the world and less of Market Street. For once, he seemed to have her same trouble with words. Deborah could think of only one thing to say, so she said it.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come to express my great sadness on the death of your good mother. I was away at New Jersey and have only just returned to hear the grim news. My affection for her was always strong, as I believe hers was for me, despite some understandable reservations as to my prospects. I only hope—”

“Thank you for your sympathy.” Deborah made to close the door, but Franklin gripped it by the edge and stayed its motion.

“Debby. Please. I come to make amends. I don’t enjoy this weight of my past behavior on my conscience. You wrote two letters. Indeed, I attempted to answer them, but I could never come across a single proper thing to say. Should I have written that London was the world I had always dreamed of? Should I have written how many things there were in such a city to distract a young man, that I was busy day and night and even into the next day, too busy to think of you as I ought? I told you I should not be home soon in my first letter, and the more I considered the matter, I discovered that was the only honest thing I had yet to say; having said it, what more was there to write? Then I came home and discovered your unfortunate situation, and what was there to say to that?”

“Nothing.” Deborah pushed against the door again, but Franklin pushed it the other way; he won out; it opened and he stepped into the hall.

Deborah stepped back. Franklin made some study of her, and no doubt marked her advanced age, for his next words were “Do you not sometimes wish we could tinker with the clock and turn it back? Perhaps to the place where we went wrong, to begin over again and take a different turn? I should like to go back across the sea, remove the blinding glare of London from a young man’s eyes, and write a different letter to a woman who deserved something better.” Franklin’s eyebrows lifted and Deborah almost smiled, remembering those eyebrows that talked as well as he did. “But I wonder that if I did so, would the letter be answered?”

“I answered your letter!”

“The old letter, yes, but now you’re wiser and no doubt colder in your thoughts toward me. Perhaps you’d say I’d had my chance and lost it.”

“You have lost it. I got married.”

Franklin grew thoughtful. “Yes, yes, that damnable situation. I feel in part responsible. Or do I take too much on myself? Or do you think it possible that if I’d been better with my letters—”

Deborah threw her hands in the air. “Letters! Why do you come here and talk to me of letters?”

Benjamin raised his own hands—large, square palms upward, miming her question. “Why indeed? Better I ask what I came to ask and take my dose, sweet or sour, whichever it might be. Here, then, is my question: Will you do something better for yourself than that regrettable apron and come out for a walk with an old friend? Or best yet, will you push what you remember of that old, neglectful friend aside and try stepping out with this new one? He’s wiser and kinder and anxious to draw that awful scowl from your face to see if he can uncover the pleasanter one he remembers.”

Deborah stared at him. “You come here to take me walking?”

“ ’Tis a small thing, I know, but we must start with something.”

“I don’t go about.”

“You see? This is why I’ve come. Whatever do you mean, you don’t go about? Of course you do. Come.”

No, she thought; he’s too late, and he offers too little. Or was it so little? To take her walking, to publicly acknowledge an interest in a woman with no honorable prospects, this would be no small thing on Market Street. She studied his face, trying to separate the new from the old, to wipe away the new confidence and find the old boy she’d once known. She failed. But in the course of the effort, she’d neglected to pay close enough attention to her apron, and somehow it had already been untied and hung on the nail; now her hand was taken up and drawn through his arm, and they were stepping out into the healthful air.

HE CAME AGAIN. AND
again. He did most if not all the talking—of London, of the people he’d met, of the warmth of his reception at every foreign door he darkened. Between the words, Deborah believed she knew who was behind some of those doors, but she also believed she heard his apology for it, and as his words poured past her ears like sweet cream she began to see those London years in a way she hadn’t before—he’d been young, she’d been younger—and what was one plain-faced, unfashionably dressed, rough-speaking Philadelphia girl against all of polished London?

After a time Deborah talked of Rogers, or she began to talk of Rogers, but Benjamin seemed to know the whole before she could tell the half. She made her one particular point again—that she’d left Rogers’s house
before
he’d run off—and this time Franklin said, “I know it. And I’m proud of you for it,” a curious echo of Deborah’s small pride in Franklin’s accomplishments. She began to think of her act of defiance as perhaps something not so small; she began to feel, as she walked the outskirts of Philadelphia with her arm through Franklin’s, as if someone had just given her a warm quilt on a cold night.

More walks. More words. More warming. More coming to life inside that warmth like a chick in its egg. She invited Franklin in for tea and once, when she returned to the room after refreshing the kettle, she noticed something had been spilled on the hearth, the ants swarming it.

“Look at the ants,” Benjamin said. “See how they communicate one with the other!”

Deborah went to the hearth, stomped on the ants, and brushed them into the fire. She turned and found Benjamin gaping at her queerly, either amused or annoyed, she couldn’t distinguish. Did he think she didn’t know how to keep house? Deborah looked around and for the first time noticed the dust that had accumulated on the chair rungs, the cobwebs in the corners, the dullness of the pewter. Well, perhaps he
should
think it.

The next time Benjamin came, the hearth had been scrubbed and a few other things too, and she’d gone to the trouble of making gingerbread, his favorite. The time after that he made her laugh, and the time after that she made
him
laugh, which was even better, so like the old days it seemed that she could almost forget her situation. Almost. Benjamin Franklin might fit that chair by the fire well, but he could never be anything but a visitor in it.

One evening as she led Benjamin to the door he tried to pull her into his arms, but she pushed violently against him. “We can offer each other naught but trouble,” she said. “Leave me be.”

Franklin drew back and studied her, dimple winking, eyebrows lifting. “We could offer each other
something
,” he said.

Yes, she thought. And she’d risked everything for that something and lost.

Twice.

“Leave me be,” she said.

HE DID NOT.
SHE
did not; she could blame him only partway in it. She sat in her mother’s parlor cold and lonely, remembering how it had been once, especially when Franklin reminded her inch by inch, first with a thumb rubbed across the back of a hand and next with a finger drawing the line of her cheek and finally the whole hand cupping the back of her head, and without Deborah even feeling the tug somehow drawing her into those old, familiar kisses. Once there, the familiar smell of him—wool, tobacco, ink—brought back other familiar things, and Deborah, made by the earth gods and not by any saints, was soon following him up the stairs.

Deborah remembered Benjamin’s strong and finely made physical self, but she hadn’t remembered his utter command of
her
physical self. This was new—this was something brought home from London—and on the heels of the liquidity that always followed their successful union, she felt the first trill of fear. The Deborah and Benjamin who had begun together at nearly the same starting place were at the same place no longer, and now it was left to her to catch up. Beneath that lay the old problem, now intensified by the risks she took in sharing her body. Bigamy carried a penalty of thirty-nine lashes and life imprisonment; there could be no man and wife here—there could be nothing but shame and disgrace. And yet she could neither end it nor accept it. So it went.

IN THE END BENJAMIN
solved it, although he said that Deborah did. They lay curled together in her bed, Deborah thinking how like before it was, and how she only wished it
was
before, so they could make another kind of end to it. Just as she was thinking it, Benjamin said it. “ ’Tis like before. That is, like before I left. How happy a time it was! And how foolish I was to walk away from it! ’Tis time to fix it.”

“It cannot be fixed,” Deborah said. “ ’Tis too late for that. Or for me,” and as quick as that the old deadness filled her limbs.

“Nonsense,” Benjamin said. “We do as you did before. You didn’t trouble with the law when you left Rogers and took back your name; why trouble with it now? You come to my house and take my name.”

Deborah blinked, stupid and frozen as a rabbit with a fox in sight.

Benjamin took her elbow and gave it a shake. “What could be simpler? All the town knows of Rogers. The sympathy will be with us.”

The sympathy would be with him, she thought, for taking pity on poor, stupid Deborah Read, but despite herself she could feel the lightness, the life, flooding back into her half-dead self. She pretended to think the thing through for a time, but the truth of it was that she loved this Benjamin Franklin even more than she’d loved the old one, and she would take his love if it was love, but if it wasn’t she would take his pity.

And so it was done.

7

PAIN—ANOTHER KIND OF PAIN,
but somehow reminding Anne of that first virgin pain, as if it were a late-due payment. Her mother had refused to call in the midwife in a bit of economy that Anne had the time and the trouble to resent in growing waves as the event progressed and her mother stood useless at the foot of the bed. Anne made no noise, not liking her mother to know her suffering, until the very end when it all came out of her in one big gush and gasp.

“A boy,” her mother said. “Not that it will help him any,” and took him away to be cleaned and swathed. When he was brought back to Anne, he looked such a size that she understood better the weight she’d carried all those nine months, and the fight she’d just survived, if indeed she would survive it; the bed looked to be awash in more blood than a body could afford to lose. Anne took the babe from her mother and looked him over, thinking she could see a familiar wide forehead and clear, intelligent look; she knew the name she should give him and she knew the name she couldn’t. She and Mary had been named for queens, her brother George for a king; this one would have like honors. “William,” she said.

THE BLEEDING KEPT ON.
Someone took the babe from her, but later, when she asked for him, no one would bring him to her; after that she remembered nothing but soft and loud, light and dark, hot and cold. After a time she heard her mother’s voice.