Saints (37 page)

Emma looked at him and smiled grimly. “She’s a strong woman, Joseph, but she isn’t stone.”

“What did she say to you? The last thing she said before I came in? I couldn’t hear.”

Emma raised an eyebrow. “I had asked her if she had ever done something she would be afraid to have judged. And she said, ‘I wanted him to be the one who was fit to judge me.’”

“And I’m
not
? Because I wrestled with a river rat and ran him out of town?”

“That’s the least of what hurt her, Joseph.”

“And you, why were you crying?”

“Was I?” Emma reached up in surprise and brushed a tear off her cheek. “Oh, yes. Well, I don’t know.” She laughed at herself, a bit embarrassed. “I was crying. Isn’t that funny?”

They saw all the guests to the door, and finally had the house to themselves. Because the spell of the party was still on them, they could not sleep for a while; they were not at a loss for how to fill the time. But afterward, when Emma slept, Joseph still lay awake, thinking about Dinah Handy, this woman so fragile he had broken her heart, this woman so harsh that she had condemned him on the evidence of one day. She had faith enough to leave her children for the sake of the Church, and yet was not afraid to criticize the Prophet to his face at their first meeting. She was dangerous and desirable, and her beauty stayed with him like a headache half the night.

“Read to me,” Dinah said.

“It’s near midnight,” Charlie answered.

Dinah stood and held him by the force of her need. Read to me, Charlie, she said silently, put some words into my head or I’ll have no sleep tonight.

“All right,” Charlie said. He shuffled through his box and came up with four volumes. He shuffled them, trying to decide which to read. “What do you want? Tennyson? Wordsworth?”

“Charlie, I’m afraid,” Dinah said.

“Of what? How can you be afraid? We had a wonderful time tonight, I’m going to Springfield tomorrow on the Prophet’s errand, the Prophet’s brother is the best friend I’ve ever had in my life, this is the happiest we’ve ever been.”

Dinah could not answer him. Charlie was too damnably content. Either he would not understand her, which would make her feel even lonelier than now, or he would, which would break the fragile crystal of his perfect day. I have two little children in England, Charlie, and I haven’t embraced them in months, and today I saw the Prophet of God brutally embrace another man and break him, I saw the Prophet boasting like a street bully, I saw the Prophet of God look at me with eyes that wanted to own me—

“Read, Charlie.”

“Coleridge? ‘Recollections of Love’?”

“I don’t care.”

“‘How warm this woodland wild recess! Love surely hath been breathing here; and this sweet bed of heath, my dear!—’”

“No! Not that!” Dinah knew she was baffling the boy, knew that he could not satisfy her tonight, what she wanted was beyond human power to give; that was the problem, she knew, that there was no living man who could be what she wanted. “Never mind, Charlie. Go to bed.”

“I can read something else,” he said.

Now I’ve worried him. He thinks I’m losing my mind. Well, I am. “Go to bed.”

Charlie did not leave his chair. Dinah knew he was studying her, trying to understand her. You cannot understand me, Charlie. Understanding people isn’t your gift.

And then, to make a liar of her, he began to read another poem. “It reminds me somehow of Nauvoo,” Charlie said. “But I don’t know why.” He began to read about a strange city of beauty and pleasure beside the river Alph, with walls and towers, and blossoms on incense-bearing trees, and forests ancient as the hills. It was not by any means the shabby town of Nauvoo or the ragged woods that spotted the prairie land or thickly bent over the Mississippi. And the mud of that river was surely not sacred.

Yet as Dinah listened, her eyes closed, she began to hear Charlie’s voice as if it came from Joseph Smith, standing there in the late afternoon sunlight slanting in under the clouds, his naked chest covered with mud and sweat, not hairy like animal men, like Matthew, but clean and strong as a god, and Joseph said to her, with those eyes that owned her,

and it was you, Dinah, I saw you, and on your dulcimer you played, singing of Mount Abora.

Beware! Charlie cried to her as he read the poem. Beware his flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise….

“Are you asleep?” Charlie asked her.

Dinah said nothing. Let him think that I’m asleep. Go away now, Charlie. Thank you, Charlie.

“Go in to bed, Dinah,” Charlie said, gently shaking her shoulder. “You can’t spend all night on a chair.”

“In a minute,” she whispered.

Because he was Charlie, he did not argue, even though he slept out here in the front room, and couldn’t go to bed until she left: “All right,” he said. And then, because he was Charlie, he had to ask, “Was it a good poem?”

She answered his real question. “You read it beautifully, Charlie. I thought I was in Xanadu again.”

He chuckled. “Again? You’ve been there before?”

Today, Charlie, and it made me afraid, because I did not come here for a pleasure dome. I came here for sacrifice. I knew the Prophet would be a man, I was prepared for him to have human failings, but I did not know he would own me with his eyes as if he had a right, that he would be strong enough to break a man in his arms, and that I would want—that’s not what I came here for. That’s not what I left my children for. A prophet of God should make me want holiness. To deny the flesh and live in the spirit. To be caught up by God to dwell in light.

“Do you know why I love that poem, Dinah?”

Not now, Charlie.

“Because Xanadu is the secret city of Nauvoo. Within that flowing sea of mud they call a river there’s another river, the clear, sacred Alph, and the muddy dooryards are gardens bright with sinuous rills and within every filthy shanty in Nauvoo there’s another building, the dream building, the walls and towers—”

“They must be very tiny walls to fit inside these cabins.”

“Not even inside the cabins. Inside the mind of every man and woman here. That’s why people are happy in this place. They know what they will turn it into in ten years, in twenty years. And Brother Joseph is Kubla Khan, he hath drunk the milk of Paradise, beware of him.”

Dinah trembled, as if Charlie had discovered her secret understanding of the poem.

But Charlie did not suspect what Dinah was in her own unspeakable dream. He was too caught up in his own. “Do you know what
I
shall build, Dinah? What this cabin is already in my mind? A factory. A clean, new building, painted glorious white, and men will come here to sweat and make something where it was not before, and I’ll sell it outside Nauvoo, and bring money back to the city. And this cabin is just a corner of the true house, the new house where we’ll all live. I shall make it happen, Dinah. All I lack is money.”

All I lack is money.

Dinah got up from her chair. “Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

“You don’t believe I’ll do it,” Charlie said.

“Of course I believe you,” Dinah answered.

Charlie smiled happily. “If you believe in me, Dinah, then I know I can. It’ll be a factory as fine as any we saw in Manchester.”

A factory as fine as Robert’s, Dinah thought, and sighed inwardly as she closed the door to her tiny room. She undressed half-ashamedly, as if Joseph Smith himself were watching her. I am surely out of my senses, Dinah thought. I’ve just been too long away from a husband, and so a man’s body—

She changed her line of thought, could not bear where that led. She was merely disoriented, she told herself. She had lost her sense of direction in this new place. The other English-women all depended on her like the centerpole of a tent, but she herself stood in a mire. The light of God had burned within her, but she could not find it now, it was spattered with mud, it was shaped like a man, and it could not dwell within her in this place. She had to find some purpose. Charlie had a purpose, and he was happy.

She sat on the edge of her bed with a board on her lap and tried to write a letter to Val. I am in Nauvoo. This city is so new that it won’t even be on the best and newest map you can find, and we are building it from nothing. All we lack is money.

She crumpled the paper and started another. Darling Val, I cry every night when no one can see me because I can’t put my arms around my boy. Do you cry for me, too? Someday we shall see each other again. Perhaps your father will let you visit me in this new city of Nauvoo. Or perhaps I have made a mistake coming here, trading one vain man for another, and losing you in the bargain.

She crumpled that paper, too, and set aside the lap board. She could not speak to Val through paper, for the words would also be read by Matthew. Could not speak to her son because she must tell Val the truth and could not bear to let Matthew hear it. Perhaps if she wrote a letter to Robert, he would speak to Val privately sometime. That’s what she would do, write to Robert tomorrow, and give him a message for little Val, and have him tell her children how their mother loves them even though she is far away.

She wrote the letter, baring more of her heart to Robert than she ever meant to, begging more than her dignity would ever allow if she had to speak the words aloud. When the letter was done and sealed, she felt a little better, felt as if she had done something to reach back into the past and touch her children, who after all had been herself for years.

As she lay in bed, finally letting sleep come at her from the edge of the room, she began to dream of the same fine house that Charlie dreamed of, only she cared most for the knock at the door; she opened, and there were Val and Honor, older now but still as glad as little children, crying out, “Mother, Mama,” and embracing her, then running through the house saying, “Is this my room? Oh, I shall play here! And here is where we shall have school, isn’t it, Mama!”

Then, because it was all made of ice, it melted, and the children melted, and Dinah wept in her sleep. I must make it real, she thought. All I lack is money.

Springfield wasn’t much of a town, but to John Kirkham anything was better than Nauvoo. It had been hard enough keeping everybody happy back in Manchester; in Nauvoo he was hemmed around with righteousness till sometimes he wanted to say something disgusting just for the pleasure of hearing the words. There’s a devil in me, John Kirkham figured, but God made me as I am so it isn’t my fault. That particular line of reasoning freed him to estimate the town of Springfield through the eyes of a calculating Londoner. He knew the street women for what they were, even though they shunned anything so obvious as paint in broad daylight. He knew the legislators, too, knew which ones were hungry and which already had their share of power and bribes and pleasures of the flesh. John was amused at how innocently Charlie misunderstood everything, how he kept talking about the excellence of democracy and how things were obviously so much better here in America where power was with the people. Power with the people? But John didn’t bother correcting him. Charlie wouldn’t understand. Like any child, Charlie could read people’s clothes and tell rich from poor, but he had no notion of what their manners meant, what the look of a man’s eyes told about the condition of his heart.

And yet, John had to admit to himself, Charlie was not an utter fool. The lad might not know
why
, but sometimes he could tell when a man would be useful. As soon as they had reached Springfield and tied up their horses, Charlie looked around and pointed straight at a short fellow in a fine new suit. “That’s our man,” Charlie said. And with that Charlie marched right up to him, lifted his hat, and said, “We’re from Nauvoo, sir, and we’re trying to find John Bennett. Could you help us?”

He could. His name was Stephen Douglas, and John liked the look of him. Hungry, but not for money. Small though he was in stature, this man was above corruption. He wanted power. In large draughts. “Not only can I tell you where he is,” said Douglas, “I’m going right now to the same hotel—his room is down the hall from mine. You have news from Mr. Smith?”

Naturally, Douglas looked to the elder of the two for an answer, but John Kirkham deferred to his son. That, at least, was no longer painful—Charlie liked being at the fore and John was much happier standing back, watching. Charlie and Mr. Douglas conversed about this and that, Douglas pumping Charlie for everything he knew, which wasn’t much, and Charlie talking away, oblivious to how he was being used. John walked beside them, pretending to care what they were saying. He was studying Douglas’s face. Douglas was one of the few men John had met whose portrait might be worth painting. But the little man would no doubt resent the way John would paint him. It was no accident that John Kirkham had never made money in London. People liked to look like heroes in their portraits. John Kirkham’s eye was too honest. His brushes were too frank. He had never known a man who could look without some pain at his own portrait as John Kirkham drew him. Douglas was not so remarkable as to be an exception to
that
.

As they stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel, a tall, spindly-legged man with a face like a gnarly tree tipped his hat at them. John and Charlie responded, but Douglas stared straight ahead and walked on into the lobby of the hotel as if he hadn’t noticed. Charlie looked at his father in surprise, and John winked. “They must be friends,” John said.

Charlie didn’t take the hint—he wasn’t good at letting things lie. “Who was that?” he asked their guide.

“Oh, that’s ‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln.” Douglas said the name without love.

“He seems a pleasant fellow,” Charlie said. John winced. Charlie had neither tact nor a sense of proportion.

“He’s not a friend to the Mormons,” Douglas said coldly.

John was delighted at this little politician’s lack of subtlety. Did he really think the Mormons divided the world so easily into friends and not-friends? Of course, John remembered, the Mormons might very well see the world in just that way. Americans were so simple about these things. “He
seemed
friendly,” John said, putting a bit of regret into his voice.

Douglas knew the value of sounding magnanimous. “Oh, he’ll support your city charter. Democrat or Whig, they’ll all help you in this legislature. You Mormons’ve got enough votes to swing this state. Just remember that
we
believe in the same principles as you.
We
were your friends before it was smart.”

John nodded as wisely as he could. “And you’re Whigs?”

“Democrats,” Douglas said testily.

“He must be a remarkable man,” Charlie said.

Douglas looked puzzled.

Charlie glanced back toward the door where Lincoln had passed them. “He must be remarkable, if people call him ‘Honest’ as if it were part of his name.”

Douglas hooted. “That’s rich. Part of his name! Don’t you know, he probably thought of that himself? Probably invented the stories that go along with it, too. No, out here in the West a man’s name is whatever he says it is. Though for all I know it might be his Christian name. I can picture his mother, arocking her little baby, singing Tooraloo, Tooraloo, go to sleep, Honest Abe. I heard of a man named Doctor Philastus Hurlbut. That was his name—Doctor. It got him all kinds of respect, and saved his parents the cost of providing him with a college education.”

Douglas’s penetrating voice filled the hotel lobby, and dozens of men laughed with him at the joke. John looked at the crowd, sized them up. Not a hard group to convince of anything, he estimated. If this was a fair sample, America was the greatest argument against democracy that could be devised. If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.

But that judgment didn’t mean John Kirkham wasn’t happy to be here. He had already made quite sure that this hotel was exactly what he hoped: it did a little whoremongering on the side. The ladies in pleasant conversation here and there were discreet enough, but John knew their trade—they had the look about them that was advertising enough among people of the world. Would Charlie be clever enough to catch him at it? John doubted it. Charlie would have to see them in bed before he’d suspect. That was the charm of the virgin boy. He could stare at sin and never notice it.

It turned out Bennett wasn’t in and hadn’t left word. The sky was darkening outside, and Charlie was willing enough when John suggested they find a hotel less dear than this one. A couple of horses the Mormons could provide their messengers—a decent traveling allowance, however, was beyond their means.

John waited until Charlie was lying on his bed, well buried in a book, before he got up and stretched and said, “I think I’ll take a walk. The air is close and I need to work my legs after such a ride.” Charlie barely mumbled a reply, and John was out the door and free of his son in the darkness. So easy.

The smell of liquor on his breath would be too plain; with regret John passed the pubs—no, saloons—without doing more than breathing in the alcoholic air. He knew what he was after and made no pretense to himself. He had long ago learned that while lying to others was his Christian duty, so that they could be happy, lying to himself was dangerous. And so he didn’t pause a moment, didn’t deviate from the course that led to the ladies he had seen earlier in the day.

There were none in the lobby of the hotel when he arrived—just a couple of amateurs who probably told themselves they were looking for husbands. So John bought a newspaper and waited, holding it in front of him but not bothering even to glance down at it. Within the quarter-hour he had caught the eye of a lady who carried herself almost as if she believed her own costume. Her eyes, though—it was the eyes that drew him. She looked like she could see through anything with those eyes. Such a woman would be worth the depletion of the little sum he had managed to squirrel away out of whatever money his family left carelessly within his reach. She smiled at him. He fancied it was more than a professional smile. It pleased him to pretend she saw his true worth.

An hour later, as he left her room, full of her laughter and empty of love, a grand young man swept by through the hall with all the airs of an earl at least. He grinned at John’s lady, and the lady smiled back. “Good-night, Doctor,” she said.

John watched the man go by and open a door well down the hall. “Doctor?” he asked his lady, cocking his eyebrow.

“You have a filthy mind,” she said. Then she shrugged. “Well, somebody has to clean up, or we’d all be out of work in a few months, you know. And anyway, he
is
a real doctor, too. A specialist in women’s ailments.” She laughed. “I like to think of it, sometimes. In the same day he goes from examining a fat rich lady to cleaning up for us. There’s some fun in that, isn’t there?”

John grinned at her. Better than saying anything. He knew that to the whores such men were as useful as blacksmiths were to cavalry, but John could not be philosophical about abortionists. Not just because they were usually swinish men, but because they went about removing the inconvenience from corruption. John did not see anything hypocritical about this opinion. He knew that he was corrupt—but he expected to bear the consequences of it, too. This abortionist had obviously never heard of consequences; he did not act as if he had ever heard of shame. That was America for you—a man could be in every social class at once. No sense of where people
belonged
in the world.

“You’d like him,” she said.

“Do you think so.” He did not let his tone of voice encourage her.

“You’re two of a kind.” Perhaps she saw that this did not please him, for at once she corrected herself. “In some ways, I mean. He’s got education, like you.” She tweaked surreptitiously at John’s thigh. “And he does a right fine hornpipe on his middle leg.”

John kissed her again and left her quickly. He’d been out more than an hour now, and if Charlie was awake he’d wonder why he had been out so long in such cold weather. As for that, John wondered why he had come here himself. He wasn’t starved for love—Anna saw to that, the woman was not cold. Why then did he hunger so for a woman of this sort? Perhaps because with a whore he did not have to pretend to be a decent man. They throve on indecency, they lived off it, the world’s decay was their aliment: here he was needed, not for what he should be, but for what he was. It was a little ache he had, and for a price they physicked him. That was it. He could couch himself in such ladies, let his burden down, leave his sins behind. Surely there was a hymn in that somewhere. I am a very holy man, he told himself as he opened the door to the room where Charlie’s breaths were whispering. I am a holy, holy man. And he laughed himself so quietly to sleep.

Charlie went early to meet with Bennett; John Kirkham stayed behind to do some sketching. It was a good day for it, sunny and cold and the air crisp and still. John liked the way winter gloves on his hands distorted what his pencil did. It wasn’t like nature—but sometimes it seemed truer. He sketched a few legislators and they came out like newspaper cartoons. John wondered for a moment if that might be a place where he could sell some work. Then he thought of seeing his name in one of these miserable rags, attached to a jest base enough for these people to understand it, and he shuddered. There was a bottom limit, after all.

At suppertime John got hungry, and figured Charlie ought to pay for a meal about now. He went looking for an hour, and finally found his son at a dining table in the best hotel in town. Alone—and so, as always, caught up in a book.

“I didn’t know you were so flush,” John said by way of greeting.

Charlie looked up, startled. “Oh! Yes! Did you get the note I left in the room?”

John shrugged. “Didn’t see it when I left off my papers. Can we really eat here?”

Charlie was embarrassed. “Actually, we can’t. I was invited here. And now he’s late—I think they’re wondering if I plan to eat or just use their table as a study.”

John sat down opposite his son. “Did you get much done today?”

“I took near forty letters for him.” Charlie flexed his fingers. “The man has more words in him than I had ink—had to buy another bottle halfway through.”

“But your work is done?”

“He had a meeting with the secretary of something. State. Commerce. Army. I think Army. The one person in America he didn’t write to, and so he had to meet with the man so he didn’t feel slighted.”

John laughed harder than the wit deserved, but the boy’s humor was so rare that it sounded funnier than it ought when it finally came. He was laughing when a hand touched his shoulder.

“Are you still waiting for your meal, or have you already finished?”

Charlie looked up at the man. “General Bennett,” he said.

John Kirkham turned in his chair, already smiling a greeting. He expected to meet a stranger. Instead he looked up into the face of the abortionist from the hotel corridor. For a moment he was afraid—this man had seen him coming out of a whore’s hotel room. But he calmed himself immediately. Bennett was vulnerable, too—John Kirkham had nothing to fear from him. Of course he allowed none of this to show. John had lived in a part of London where it didn’t do to let people know your feelings from your face—there wasn’t so much as a pause in his turn or a slackening of his smile. And Bennett was just as poised.

It was Bennett’s poise that was so provoking. The man was not abashed at all. Even though he could not know that John Kirkham had heard he was an abortionist, Bennett should have been at least a little reticent about his supposed religious faith. Instead he sat down and immediately began to discourse fervently on theology. It was all about some idea he wanted to discuss with Joseph Smith when at last his work in Springfield was accomplished. John Kirkham watched in awe at the utter confidence of the man. Even without a conscience, surely he felt some fear of being discovered—yet if he did, he showed no sign of it. John wondered whether Bennett believed in a God. No doubt he would claim he did, but John was pretty sure that Bennett was his own Creator, and his own Savior, too.