Brooklyn Rose (11 page)

I was, in a sense, running away to make Rene worry.

What I really wanted was to go home, but this would have to do for now.

Bridget waited with me until the trolley came, and then I looked at her. "I'll be back on the last trolley. Don't tell anyone."

"The master will have my head," she complained.

"Don't tell him," I ordered. "You work for me, not for him." And then I boarded the trolley.

IT WAS PAST
twilight when I boarded the trolley, the melancholy of an autumn evening. There were more shadows than remnants of sunlight, and in the west the sky was streaked with red and purple.

There was nobody on the trolley but me.

"Where to, missy?" the conductor asked.

"The end of the line."

"Kind of late for a pretty little missy like you to be going that far."

I felt a pang of fear. "I have friends there," I said.

We started off. As we bumped along, the houses grew more and more distant from each other, less grand, and more lonesome. Yet there was a beauty about the sand dunes and salt marshes and the wind that swept through the grasses. In some places I saw children playing, and as if that were a signal to the babe inside me, he quickened. And I thought: Will he grow up here, running and playing at 1600 Dorchester, or will he grow up on another beach down south? I already knew what name to put on what I was doing.

I was running away. As surely as if I'd packed a bag and taken a trolley to the steamer line at the docks.

I was running away like a child. And if Rene wanted me back, if he truly loved me, he would come and fetch me home.

If he truly loved me. I felt an ache inside. A knowing that made me realize why I was doing this. It wasn't being mistress of the house so much as it was wanting Rene to stand up to his mother for me. I wanted proof of his love. Childish, yes, but it was all I wanted at the moment. Even while I was angry with him for allowing his mother to come into our house and turn it all topsy-turvy.

Because then I knew. I loved him. I had all along and I was growing, daily, in my love for him. And this wasn't supposed to happen. I married him because of my parents, so they wouldn't lose their plantation, so Rene wouldn't be able to bring himself to foreclose on the plantation if he had to.

And now I'd fallen in love with him. And I was darned if I was going to love him if he didn't love me.

I needed him to come to me, to prove that he loved me.

I had a brief moment of panic then, thinking: What if Bridget obeys me and doesn't tell him where I've gone? I could be on the sand dunes all night! And then I thought: What if he is angry and doesn't want to come?

I quelled these fears quickly and sat back to enjoy the scenery, and before I knew it we were at the end of the line, where the trolley turned around, where the sand dunes and marshes beckoned.

I got off with a cheerful nod to the driver, as if I knew what I was about. There were a few scattered cottages around, so it wasn't completely the end of the world. Then I stood and watched the trolley disappear from sight.

I was alone. Except for the wind and the gentle lapping of the waves and the cry of the seagulls. Several were picking their way along the beach, and I wished I had brought some bread for them. I could have been the last woman on the face of the earth.

I felt a well of loneliness inside me. Why did I have to be the one out here in the wilderness when I was indeed the Mistress of Dorchester? Was I the vanquished one?

If Rene didn't come, I decided, by the time of the last trolley, I'd go back home. He would have failed in this test of his love for me, and I would have to leave. I'd go home and pack a bag and leave for Mama and Daddy's place tomorrow. I'd take Bridget with me.

I felt better now that I had a plan in place. I found a place to sit on the dunes to watch the gulls. And then I had a thought: Suppose Rene was hard at work and didn't miss me? It led back to Bridget again. If I knew her, she'd tell him. She was afraid of him and, though she served me, ultimately worked for him. I knew that.

I made myself comfortable. The sand was warm from the sun, but soon it would be cold on this early November evening. I knew that. I wished I had the means to make a fire. Why hadn't I thought of it? But no. That might attract attention.

What time did the last trolley come? Nine o'clock. Suppose Rene missed it? No, don't think of that.

I lay down on the sand and I thought of home. Of Benjamin and Mama and Daddy, of Heppi and her husband.

It was all as if they had never existed. Oh, I wanted to go home. I felt tears gathering inside me.

What would Mama say about all of this? No matter how much help she had, she was always the mistress of her kitchen, of the house. Everybody knew it. Why couldn't I be like her? Because I had failed was why. I'd failed to keep my household and so I'd failed in my marriage.

I looked up at the sky, at the faint outline of moon, the hint of gathering of stars.

It was then that I fell asleep.

I DON'T KNOW
how long I slept, but it was one of those sleeps where you know you are sleeping yet can't wake up. I was so tired. I snuggled with my cloak around me. If I picked my head up, I knew the wind would be cold, but down here, close to the sand, there was no wind. There was no anything, except beautiful sleep.

The trolley roused me from sleep. The last trolley of the night, coming in the distance. Oh, how I dreaded its appearance. What if he wasn't on it?

I sat up as it got closer, seeing only its lights, like two ghost eyes coming at me. It came with a great shrug and a great heave, as if to say, "Sorry, Rose, I stayed away as long as I could."

The first man who got off was fat and roughly dressed and bore a lunch pail in hand. A workman. Then I held my breath and waited.

The second man was tall and slender with broad shoulders and a hat like my husband wore. He turned back to the driver of the trolley and spoke some words with him. I saw him hand up some money. Then he came onto the sand dunes and called my name.

I'd forgotten. If Rene had come to fetch me, he'd have to retain the trolley for the ride back. Why hadn't he had Charley hitch up the barouche? Because he didn't want to create a fuss is why. Rene liked to do things as quietly as possible.

Oh, my thoughts were reaching and clutching and falling. I couldn't get a grip on a decent idea.

And then he was close to me.

"Rose." The voice was not kindly. "Rose, I know you're here. Where are you?"

"Over here." I gathered up my things.

"What in the name of bloody hell are you doing out here in the dark? This isn't funny, Rose. You scared the devil out of me."

Never had I heard this tone before. He stood in front of me now. "What have you got to say to me, Rose?"

"I'm running away," I said.

For a moment or so he didn't answer. I was starting to be able to make his face out in the dark. "I wanted to go home," I said.

"You've picked the wrong direction."

"If you didn't come and find me I was going home tomorrow." I couldn't keep my voice from shaking.

He came toward me. He stood in front of me, silent for a moment. I could scarce see the expression on his face. "Rose, are you crazy? Has having a baby made you addled in the head? I didn't know where you were. Do you know what that does to a person?"

"I'm sorry. I had to leave. I didn't want to stay anymore."

"Does this all have to do with my mother?"

"Yes."

"You couldn't handle it like an adult? You had to run away like a child?"

"There is no handling her like an adult, Rene. You know that. Everybody is a child around her. All right for you and Adrian because you're grown. But I'm still a child inside. And I struggle every day to be grown-up and to please you."

He was silent. Then his arms came around me. "You do please me, Rose. You know that."

"Sometimes I don't," I said.

He told me then that I always did. "Didn't I marry you?" he asked.

"Why did you marry me, if you won't stand up for me with your mother?" I pushed.

He said he would, tonight when we got home. I told him it was too late, I didn't want it anymore. My mind was made up. Let her run the house. He grabbed me by the shoulders and said, "Rose, I wanted you to do it because I know you
can
do it. I don't want you treated like a child, by her or by me. I had confidence that you could do it, only you didn't. And I wanted you to see you could. I wanted you to have confidence in yourself."

"I'm too young for you," I said. "I'm only fifteen. Why did you marry me?"

"Because I love you. The question, I think, is why did you marry me?" he asked.

So I told him. "Because you hold the mortgage on our plantation. So you wouldn't foreclose on Mama and Daddy."

He said, "What?"

And I told him again why I married him.

He said, "What?" again. And then he said, "Where in God's name did you get that?"

"You do," I told him. Then he said he never heard such rot. I asked him, wasn't it true? And he said no, it isn't. But I was told, I said. And he asked by whom? So I told him, Amelia Caper.

"That girl was jealous of you," he told me. "She just wanted to ruin your happiness."

It all came to me then, like the surf behind me, sweeping everything clean. He didn't hold the mortgage. So it was all right to love him. But then, I'd loved him all along, hadn't I? And tried not to?

"Come on," he said, "that driver won't wait forever, and you have to get home if you're going to pack and leave tomorrow."

"But I'm not leaving tomorrow," I told him. "I'm staying and going home with you at the end of the month as we planned."

So we got on the trolley and sat in back so we could talk. "I tried not to love you," I told him again. "I didn't want to love you."

"Well," he said, "you did a shabby job of it."

"I thought you held the mortgage," I went on, "and I married you to protect my parents. But I caught myself loving you all along and had to stop myself. What kind of person am I? Can you ever forgive me? What'll I do, Rene? What'll I do?"

"I'll work on the forgiving," he said. "We both will. We both have a lot of things to work on."

WHILE BASED ON FACT
, the story about Rose and Rene is fiction. They were my grandparents. Rose did live on a plantation and was fifteen when Rene, a silk merchant, came to visit. He did wed her and take her back to his house in Brooklyn. He did own two silk-importing houses with his brother. And he was a very wealthy man.

Rose had her first child at sixteen, and for that birth, and every other (she had five children), she went home to her mother and the plantation.

But in the early years of her marriage, she was still a child herself. I heard a story once about her having to be called in from skipping rope to feed the baby. I know she was a great influence on her neighborhood, but through her church, not through civic work. She died in 1961, much mourned, except by those closest to her. Her grandchildren did not know she existed. My mother (her first child) died shortly after I was born, and when my father remarried we were completely cut off from our mother's family.

I first saw Rose in her coffin. I was in the house on Dorchester Road only once, after she died. But I remember it well.

I don't know when Rene died. I only know that it was sometime between the two great wars and that on a visit to South America he was assassinated while going to collect a debt, and they sent his body home to his wife.

Up until recently these two people, who gave me a lot of my DNA, were quiet in my background. And then one day I thought, I
write stories about fifteen-year-old, girls all the time, why not tell the one about my grandmother and the first year of her marriage?

So I set out to launch this story. When young people ask me what it is about, I am at a loss to say and usually end up saying, "It is my grandmother and grandfather, as I imagined them to be."

And then I add, "If you have grandparents, get to know them. Ask them questions. And if you don't, ask others about them. For we all have a Rene and a Rose in our lives. And someday you may need to know them."

Beaufort, South Carolina, After the Civil War, 1865–1950.
National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Beaufort Historic District, Beaufort, South Carolina.

Bridges, Anne Baker Leland, and Roy Williams III.
St. James Santee, Plantation Parish: History and Records, 1685–1925.
Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company Publishers, 1997.

PBS, American Experience.
America 1900.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/1900
.

Rosengarten, Theodore, with the journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822–1890).
Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter.
New York: William Morrow & Co., 1986.

Snyder-Grenier, Ellen M., for the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Brooklyn! An Illustrated History.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

Sullivan, Mark.
Our Times, 1900–1925.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939.

Younger, William Lee.
Old Brooklyn in Early Photographs, 1865–1929: prints from the collection of the Long Island Historical Society.
New York: Dover Publications, 1978.