Authors: Benjamin Markovits
The Syme Papers (60 page)
Tom turned to the letters with a quick hand.
Sam said, ‘Not tonight, Tom’
‘Let me see who wrote
‚
’ said Tom.
‘Not tonight.’
Tom stopped looking. Sam had been quiet all day, taut with the
prospect of his speech in Philadelphia. It was altogether an affair of a
different mass than the other lectures. He braced himself against the
weight.
James poured the lemonade, and the three
of us
sat
companion
ably enough, used to one another’s silences. I reflected on the fourth.
He was a kindly, sweating man. His hair was always moist and his
hand always damp. He ran to fat, too, like Jeb; but James’s spread
ing waist seemed accretions of hesitant contentment, too polite to
form actions or words. He was still a young man, though he would
not be long. I watched him rise again, return to the kitchen, and
bring a glass for himself. He sweated silently.
We turned early to bed. The cottage had two bedrooms and the
cousins shared one of them. I heard James laughing through the
wall, louder than I would have guessed, with the loose tongue of a
young man. They talked deep into the night. Sam and I still said not
a word, accustomed to each other’s well-worn presence; or, rather,
to speak plainly, rendered perhaps a little shy of each other by the
cousins’ easy fellowship. I listened to our neighbours happily
enough, and followed their chatter into sleep. Before I drifted off, I
remembered the letters on the dinner table, as one might pause on a
staircase some night before knocking on a door. I had a sense of post
ponement, but postponement of what I could not imagine at the
time. The world felt far from me that night. Tom’s laughter, ringing
through the wooden wall, seemed as alien as the tune of the rubbing
insects in the dry grass outside.
I expected to awake with a lighter heart. Sam sat in the dining
room, still in his undershirt, when I shook myself out of bed and
came in. James was fussing over breakfast. He seemed more cheerful
and prated to me with a sudden confidence, a sweet trust, while
busying himself with bread, plates, cups and a pail of fat fresh milk
from a nearby farm, hauled in a surging unsteadiness through the
warm dawn.
He said, ‘I have always been an early riser. It is the saviour of an
idle man. Tom, as you see, needs no saviour,’ he added, laughing.
Tom still lay a-bed, spent with the night’s talk and making a
sabbath of Sam’s preparations. He had done his part. Perhaps he
idled now with a wilful luxury to let us know it.
Sam tossed me a pair of letters, neatly bound by James. They were
from my father.
My dear boy,
The bailiffs have come today. Ruth was beside herself and I had
to hold her from them, whereupon she turned her fury on me.
The neighbours stared openly from the window and watched,
drinking their coffee. Hespe has been useful enough, in his way,
but he skulks about in such shameful fashion, I can’t bear to look
at him
–
as if he does not wish to know us
any
more, and would
not, but for Ruth. She adjures me to be kind to him, and says, of
all people, I should have no eye for finding fault. This is unfair,
but
I
have no heart to argue the point
any
more
–
the old point,
or rather cause, on which I have wasted my life, or whatever is
left of it, after the sum I have spent on both of you. But now is
not the time.
They have rifled your mother’s jewels
…
He stood accused of embezzlement, of a rather moderate sum. The
crime was treason in our court, and by law he stood a bankrupt in
our country’s eyes. Even our house was forfeit to the crown, though
as yet
he had been spared imprisonment
–
that would come. I tore
open the next letter, dropping the last at my feet.
Well, it has all come out now, as they say, and I confess a
part of me is not sorry at the turn of events. Hespe, it seems,
has played the spy,
and betrayed me to our Prince
–
first
in
the
trifling matter of our accounts, and now regarding what he
calls the ‘den of revolutionary brigands’ I maintained in our
very sitting room!
–
in
short, the rather silly, extremely drunk
en coterie of discharged soldiers and idle students who used to
crash about the parlour, whether I would or no. The best of it is
that we are quit of him at last; and Ruth won’t speak ‘another
word to him, as long as he lives’
–
or of
him, it seems, to me.
I must say I am surprised to see how she’s taking the news; and
sometimes I wonder whether she grieves more over a ruined father
or a lost lover
–
but this is the way
of things, I suppose, and I
must bear it, consoling myself with the thought of a dear son who
shall soon return to me. She says only, in her cryptic way, that
there ‘are things a father don’t know’
–
and don’t wish to, either,
I suppose
–
and in
that at least she is in
the right.
Bad and worse, I’m afraid, is all I have to tell. They have ‘locked
me up’ until the trial
–
the Prince, I must say, is proving himself a
proper stubborn fool and a willing ear to the wildest improbabili
ties. It seems lama regular Karl von Moor, and a threat to civic
Peace, and the honour of German womanhood to boot, I make no
doubt. Thank God they have granted me paper and a pen, and as
far
as they go I am
happy
–
and the two, as you know, go far.
They
have put me, as a matter of state dignity, in the
palace wine cellar,
mostly because the wine had all been drunk by French
soldiers years before, so it was sitting empty. An ordinary prison, it
seems, won’t do for men as desperate as your father.
Hespe has been declared Primary Assistant Deputy First
Minister by way
of reward
–
no one yet
has been able
to explain
to me what that means, except to say that his special duties
involve military security (God have mercy upon us), for which he
has been promoted to General, second class.
Mostly I wish for the trial to come. (And go.) Till then there is
nothing to be done.
Your loving, etc.
Tom came in, wearing his long night’s sleep as a young man
wears wet hair, coming out after a swim. He began tearing thick
pieces of bread and dipping them in the milk jug without sitting
down. He glanced over my shoulder. Still chewing, he gathered his
pile of letters in one hand and sat down contented in the high-
backed rocking chair by the window. Sam did not look up. He had
turned to the small heap of correspondence that had gathered
through our travels, like a pile of leaves in autumn. He pushed one
to me across the table.
I recognized the quaint, archaic script of Edward and skimmed
through it.
Dear Son,
Your mother bade
me pen
a line
to you, as she … nothing to
alarm you, just a sudden weakness, brought on, as I told her it
would be, from her excessive spirits of the night before. She
wished to dance, you know, with her infirmity and already that
evening complained of the Headache
…
She could scarce stand
when she awoke, so we brought her a-bed again, and put her feet
in
bowls of water, for it is damnation hot
…
and you will have
guessed the truth, won’t you, that it is nothing but heat, for your
mother has always taken the heat most fearfully, and worry, for
you, my Son, in your long silence. In this I share her Affliction,
but trust you are well and thinking kindly of your
loving Mother &
Father
A dust of powdered ink marked the top of the page, shaped after the
side of his hand. I recall noting that his father wrote left-handed.
Before I had well finished, the next note came, written on small, thick
paper from a sharp, thin quill a little choked with the summer heat.
My grief was swallowed by a nearer and stronger grief
–
but
then, everything that happened to Sam seemed greater than my own
affairs. I put my letter aside and read on.
Dearest Son,
Your mother continues poorly, though the doctor is hopeful, and
indeed she looks almost well
today
…
we all think she Mends,
except the poor victim herself, who moans as if strapped to Ixion’s
wheel, in
this heat too
…
Bubbles has seen her, and agrees with
me entirely, that it is only a Ploy to starve her Figure, by keeping
a-bed and refusing even Tea, drinking only boiled water and bis
cuits
…
though she do seem to suffer hard from her Digestion,
which is hardly to be wondered at, and she could not keep down
the last real Food we pressed upon her, though the doctor is con
vinced
it is sheer wilfulness …
but that she desires it, and is
grown Implacable in her requests, I would not trouble you, my
Son, knowing her ways and your too tender Fears. So consider
this note to bring the expected Relief, and know that she herself
will compose the next sweet emissary of her recovered Health.
Believe me then,
your loving Scribe
(& Father)
The next note came, with a swift rasp, as regular as a clock. The
miracle of ink absorbed us, two young men across a table, deep in
the world scratched so lightly on the pages before us that a gust of
summer wind could scatter it. And yet it was a world, somewhere,
as hard and unchangeable as the ground beneath us; indeed, further
and harder, frozen as it was by passed time.
Dear
etc
.…
We are all grown quite vext with her. Even Bubbles can scarcely
keep her Temper. We believe it is all wilfulness. I think she has
begun drinking on the Sly, we can scarce enter the Room for
Stink, though she does seem to be in
great Pain,
poor thing …
the Doctor has begun to suspect her Liver, and we have already
sent Betsy to her mother, for though she was just a girl, she was a
smuggler of Liquors as brazen as any
on the Cornish
Coast
…
she would not confess, but cried a great deal, and desir’d to be
excused, which we did, silly child that she was, though she was
the only girl as could manage Annie’s temper of an evening and
now we know Why
…
And the next came, while Tom looked on, sensing the drama play
ing
out beneath our fingers
–
yet
too
far
from us,
by the space of an
opened doorway, to look on. A purely material gap that a
single stride could mend
–
but did not; and it grew harder to bridge
when the moment passed without him. I, for an hour at least (but
such an hour!), had taken Tom’s place.
She continues Obstinate. Her sister Beth has come to us, quite
distress’d at the Change, though we scarce note it now. But
Annie will not hear a word from her, has grown Petulant and if I
ask you to return, soon, my Son, though only if it be convenient,
it is because you have
always had a way
with her, not because
there is any Cause for Alarm.
I glanced at the overleaf.
This was the first note with scribblings
on
the back, scribblings I say, for the hand that wrote told as eloquently
as the thoughts it served the story of the sick-room. Hesitant
scratchings, blotted here and there by a quick hand, the quill chewed
and the fine tip bitten to a rough end, that splayed and spilled over
the page. And so the gestures of grief are often mere sketches, the
full force and colour of misery takes too long to tell.
Perhaps I am much to blame, but let not that keep you from her
though it might from Me … and if I am
to blame, it is you who
have always stood in my Stead, far better than I believed I could,
my Son,
so I retreated … then, above all Things, you must come
now to serve the Purpose my negligence
–
true, my sickly Will
–
nonetheless has thrust upon You.
Then another came, joined its white brothers at my elbow, scat
tered like the feathers of some ominous bird. How small the world of
death seemed, confined to the black bones of ink. And how I was
tempted, with a blot here, an omission there, the simplest of
corrections, to change with a fine penmanship the tale before me,
and alter by the stroke of a pen what no other hand could do.