All Other Nights (26 page)

That evening and as the fast continued the following day, he chanted the public confession of sins along with the congregation, the alphabetical litany of crimes against God, and marveled at how many of them he had personally committed. His father didn’t question him when he remained at his side for the memorial service for the dead, attended only by those who have lost parents, children, siblings, or wives. The names of the congregation’s war dead were read aloud, and Jacob saw the dead boys’ parents watching him, burning with envy as he burned with shame. For the entire twenty-five-hour fast, he recited the words in the prayer book, confessed his sins with the congregation again and again, privately begging God for forgiveness, just as he had done in that very same room on every Yom Kippur from when he was thirteen until the war began. But now, for the first time in his life, he felt no relief from it, no unburdening, no answer to his prayers. Usually the end of the fast is an exhilarating moment: an ancient trumpet is sounded, and everyone hurries home happily to food and family, washed clean of their sins. But when the day ended and the gates of repentance had swung shut, Jacob knew that God had not forgiven him, and worse, that he could not forgive himself. He and his father walked out together in a leaden silence. When they sat down to break the fast, Jacob had no appetite. He was twenty years old, and he was an old, old man. The following day he went back to work in his father’s firm, at last admitting defeat.

During his second long, blank year—the bloody fall and winter and spring as the wretched 1863 turned into the abominable 1864, after he had returned to work, but not to life—he slowly came to understand that there is something perversely appealing about defeat. After one has been beaten enough, Jacob discovered, falling on one’s knees is no longer humiliating. One simply makes a home for oneself groveling on the ground, thrilled to be left as a simpering shell of the person one might have been, relieved at last of the terrible burden of owning one’s own life. Jacob had long accepted this state of affairs when his father came to him, in the autumn of 1864, and unwittingly offered him freedom.

“J
ACOB, THERE’S A CLIENT OF OURS IN PHILADELPHIA WHOM WE
ought to meet in person,” his father said one morning in the firm’s office, with a deliberate casualness in his voice.

Jacob looked up from his desk, where he had been sorting through account books, searching for ways to cut losses. It was the kind of work he had done for Philip Levy, and it felt oddly comforting. His life, if one could call it that, had resumed a sort of tedious routine, the tedium of which was his only source of solace. The fewer people he had to speak to, the calmer he became. With his father he barely spoke at all. His father, too, seemed to prefer it that way, and encouraged his isolation. Usually he even tried to keep Jacob away from the clients, and for that reason, his remark struck Jacob as strange. It was as though he suddenly wanted to include Jacob in the real work of the business, returning him to the person he had been years before. Impossible, Jacob thought. He looked at his father, waiting.

His father was looking right at him, something he rarely did anymore. “I’m sure the client would be pleased to come to New York, but—well, I wondered if you might be willing to go to Philadelphia to meet him instead,” his father said. Then he winced, as he often did now when doing anything involving Jacob, hiding it by fidgeting with the chain of his watch.

Jacob watched him carefully as he looked away. Did he mean it? He listened as his father coughed, hesitant. The blond hair on his father’s wrists bristled along his carefully pressed cuffs as his fingers twitched. His whole body seemed to sag, empty and tired. Jacob did not respond. Finally his father looked at him again.

“I thought it might be an opportunity for you to start developing your own clients,” his father said, with the faintest hint of hope in his voice. His father spoke to him in German—or, as Jacob had been made aware in his occasional contact with “real” Germans, in something closer to the German-Jewish jargon, though Jacob could only vaguely tell the difference. “It would be a short trip, only a few days. Though you might stay longer if you found it necessary.”

His father was getting rid of him. Jacob was more than ready. “Of course,” he replied, in English. When he was a boy he used to answer his father in German, but he had stopped doing that when he was thirteen years old. Speaking English to his father was something he once associated with being someone different than his father—someone more intelligent, more sophisticated, more American. He had since learned that it was easier simply to meet expectations, to succumb to someone else’s will. He added in German, “Tell me what to do.”

“Wonderful,” his father said, slapping the desk hard with his palm. It was a gesture he used with clients, usually, at the end of a deal. “I’ll give you all the account information and the correspondence. They’re restructuring their firm, and I would like for us to acquire them as a subsidiary. The head of the firm took on his brother as a partner recently, and I used to work with the brother before the war. He’s the one I’d like you to meet.”

His father stood, stepping over to the shelves by Jacob’s desk and taking down some account books, rifling through the pages. He paused for a moment, and looked at Jacob. “You may even remember him, from before the war. He used to own P.M.L. Shipping in Virginia. Philip Levy. Do you remember him?”

Fortunately Jacob’s injuries made it a fairly common occurrence for his father to hear him gasp. He bit his lip and watched as his father tried to hide his own wincing, mistaking Jacob’s astonishment for agony.

Jacob tried to speak, then choked, and at last managed to relax his face into a bemused frown. “I don’t—I don’t think so,” he stammered.

His father smiled, satisfied that Jacob’s pain had subsided, and sat down in a chair across from Jacob’s desk. “Levy was my age, but looked younger,” he said. “Tall, dark hair, dark mustache, spectacles, very well-dressed, a bit of a drawl. You really don’t remember him?”

“No,” Jacob lied. He pictured Philip as he had last seen him, at the jail: stooped in his shackles, his clothes covered in mouse droppings, squinting without his spectacles. Philip was in Philadelphia? But how? He looked at his father, and noticed how his father had glanced away from him, unnerved by what he thought was Jacob’s discomfort. Jacob was only beginning to appreciate how easily a cripple is able to hide.

“Well, he remembered you,” his father said. “He asked after you in his last letter.”

“Me?” Jacob nearly gagged on the word. “What did he say?”

“About you? Oh, nothing, really,” his father replied. “He just said he remembered meeting you at the office a few years ago, and he wondered if you had enlisted. I told him you were wounded and had come home. He sends his condolences.” Jacob’s chest heaved, a sigh of relief that his father clearly assumed was related only to his physical pain. But there was more.

“In fact, he asked me if he might meet with you, rather than with me. It was his idea,” he heard his father say. “His company in Virginia collapsed, and he’s working with his brother in Philadelphia now. God knows how he managed to cross the lines. I was afraid to ask. That’s another reason why I wanted you to meet him in person. There’s a very small possibility that he and his brother are trying to set up a sham company, to funnel money south. That’s something a person can’t determine from correspondence. It’s easier to detect lies in the flesh.” His father looked at him carefully, with an expression that might have been an attempt at a grin. “I know you don’t like to talk about your—well, your service, but I suspect that the army gave you a nose for detecting traitors.”

Jacob’s eye patch was large and distracting enough, along with the various scars on the right side of his face, that it was almost impossible for others to notice when he blushed. He nodded. “You may depend on me,” he said.

“Wonderful. I shall send you down on the train tomorrow,” his father replied, and left the room.

Jacob sat back in his seat, his body tingling with the first anticipation he had felt in almost two years: the gleaming possibility of redemption.

P
HILADELPHIA WAS A POOR MAN’S NEW YORK, RICHER IN INTEGRITY
and tradition, and poorer in everything else. The buildings were older and more stately in design, but also smaller and more decrepit; the people were better educated, but less fashionably dressed; the food was worse, but cheaper; the smell of manure in the streets was less intense, but the wait for an omnibus or hansom cab was at least three times as long. When one of the conductors helped Jacob off the train at the station on Broad Street, he looked around and felt strangely at ease, as though he had arrived in the countryside. On that afternoon in early November 1864, the breeze outside the station was chilly, but not yet cold; the trees on the streets, freshly denuded of their leaves, spread their gray branches gently alongside the old tilted brick row houses, and the air smelled of fresh possibilities. He hired a porter to carry his bags to a hotel near the station. After a long, exhausting wait outside the hotel’s front door, during which he was too ashamed to lean against a tree or the hotel’s façade for the support he desperately needed, he at last found a cab to take him to the Board of Brokers, the Philadelphia stock exchange, where he was to meet Philip Mordecai Levy by the entrance at half past three o’clock. He hadn’t taken a cab alone since before the war; after his injury, he almost always had his parents or a servant accompanying him to the few places he might go. But the office hadn’t been able to spare anyone to join him for his trip. Jacob suspected that this was intentional, his father’s secret test for him. He was determined to pass.

The cab that finally stopped for him was an open-air type, with nothing dividing the driver from the passengers. The driver was older than Jacob’s father, a wiry man with a sagging belly and thinning blond hair like his father’s combed across his narrow head. Jacob had hoped to find a carriage with a younger driver, someone who would have less trouble helping him up to the running board and into his seat. But when the driver stopped the carriage and saw Jacob with his patch and cane, he immediately came down to assist him. Jacob tried to wave him away, but he was surprised by how strong the older man was. Without a word, and with utter dignity, he lifted Jacob’s body up into the cab. As he returned to his perch, he smiled at Jacob, asked him where he was going, and told him the fare. Jacob settled back in his seat and was enjoying the ride on that bright afternoon, relieved and thrilled to have been treated as though he were merely another human being, when the driver turned to him and asked, apropos of nothing, “Where were you wounded?”

It occurred to Jacob that, for a driver picking him up at a hotel, the more normal question might have been “Where are you from?” But normalcy no longer applied to him; he had become a walking symbol of defeat. He grimaced, and answered.

“Mississippi,” he said.

“Vicksburg?” the driver asked.

People always asked that, Jacob had noticed, if they ventured to ask at all. At least his disfigurement ought to have contributed to a battle the Union had won, they seemed to demand, so that they could count Jacob’s missing eye and hobbled legs to be the worthy price of victory, and look at him without guilt. “No, I never made it that far,” Jacob said, and reddened with shame.

The driver sighed, and in his sigh Jacob was alarmed to hear less pity than disgust. “Revolting, isn’t it,” the driver said.

“Pardon?” he asked. The few people who dared to speak to him since his injury had invariably congratulated him, praising his “service,” his “valor,” his “sacrifice.” They used words like “heroic” and “courageous.” Of course, “revolting” was what they were all actually thinking, he knew. But never before had he heard it said aloud. Perhaps he had imagined it.

“It’s absolutely revolting,” the driver repeated. “All you boys dead or mangled, and for what?”

It was the question that the entire country was afraid to ask. Jacob’s remaining eye opened wide.

“I’ll tell you for what,” the driver said. His voice wasn’t angry, or even harsh. To Jacob it sounded radiant, the outer edge of prophecy.

“I’m listening,” Jacob said. He looked at the woolen scarf wound around the driver’s narrow neck, and at last succeeded in ignoring the pain in his legs as the carriage bumped over loose cobblestones. It was exhilarating just to be sitting alone with this driver in this cab, far away from his parents and New York, independent again, and at last close to the truth. No one had ever even tried to answer that question for him before, and it was the only question he needed answered. “Tell me,” he said.

“For niggers, abolitionists, Republicans, and Jews, that’s for what,” the driver announced. “Blame the Rebels all you want, but that’s who did that to you, my friend. They’re the only ones with something to gain. The niggers and the abolitionists got what they wanted, and now it’s the Republicans and the Jews running the show. It always was, behind it all. The Seligmans are the ones making the uniforms. The more boys like you who are killed or mangled, the richer they get. Your blood is their gold.”

Jacob thought of Rebecca Seligman—the daughter of the founder of the Seligman dry-goods empire, who was a client of his father’s in New York. Once, at a luncheon at another family’s house when he was six years old, Jacob had gone to the cloakroom to fetch an extra handkerchief and had come across seventeen-year-old Rebecca Seligman with her bodice and corset opened, panting in the arms of the son of one of her father’s rivals. It was Jacob’s first glimpse of breathing beauty. In the back of the hansom, he briefly engaged in a small mental fantasy in which he spat in the driver’s face and jumped down to the street without paying the fare. But his crippling had consequences, and he was the driver’s prisoner. He shifted his lame legs, and thought of another way to escape.

“Sir, you are absolutely right,” he replied. “And I am so relieved to finally meet someone who isn’t afraid to say it.”

The carriage just in front of theirs had stopped, and now the driver turned to look at Jacob. He grinned, thrilled.

“Thank you!” he cried. “And what a relief for me, to finally meet someone who isn’t afraid to look for a little dignity for himself.” He offered Jacob his hand. “My name is Donaldson—Charles Hunt Donaldson. What is your name, young man?”

Jacob paused for an instant, and then smiled. “Edwin McAllister,” he said.

The driver took his hand and squinted at him, examining his face. For an instant Jacob wondered if the man had somehow recognized him, if he knew who he really was. But then the driver spoke. “The McAllisters from Bucks County? You wouldn’t be Chester McAllister’s brother, would you?”

Jacob hesitated, before deciding he had nothing to lose. “I am,” he said.

The driver’s face turned grave. Adopting the liar’s habit, Jacob adjusted his own face accordingly, glancing back down at his knees. “My profound condolences,” the driver said, and clasped Jacob’s hand in both of his. “I used to work up near Bucks, and I heard about it from one of my passengers last year. What happened to your brother was a crime, son. Executed for trying to desert! Absolutely obscene. It was murder, that’s what it was.”

Jacob looked up again, trying his best to keep his face severe, grateful for his scars and his eye patch. “I can’t say I disagree,” he said.

“My most profound condolences. May the Lord compensate him in heaven, and may his soul be avenged on earth,” the driver said. He pumped Jacob’s hand. “It is truly an honor to meet you, Mr. McAllister,” he said. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet someone with some sense still left in his skull, in a country full of fools.”

The carriage in front of them had moved, and now the driver whipped the horse into a brisk trot, leading them around a corner. On the right Jacob saw the tall white columns of the Board of Brokers rising above the street, recognizing it from his last visit, four years earlier. Tight knots of men in top hats gathered on the marble steps, just as they had four years before, as though this place were a tiny coin that had fallen through a hole in time’s pocket. He scanned the crowd for Philip, but didn’t see him. Then he slipped his watch out of his vest and saw that it was a quarter of an hour too soon.

“Of course, maybe this whole war is simply divine punishment for the fools, for being duped into electing a nigger president,” the driver called to him over his shoulder. “Heaven help us all if he is elected again. Perhaps we will be blessed to see Providence make an end to him.” The carriage slowed, and the driver pulled the horse to a stop. He turned his head toward Jacob. “Of course, Providence might well benefit from the assistance of mortals,” he added.

The driver looked at Jacob with a strange elation in his features, his reddened face pinched with glee. He was a man who rejoiced in being infuriated, Jacob saw—drinking up rage like liquor, reveling in it, dependent on it, always eager for more. He had what Harry Hyams, for all his throttled fury, had lacked: the delight in anger that makes real evil possible, that makes destruction fun.

“I could think of no more worthy task than to serve Providence in that respect,” Jacob said.

The driver paused, watching Jacob, judging. His smile vanished. Then he turned around completely in his seat, bending down until his face was nearly level with Jacob’s. “I would like to know whether you really mean that,” he said.

At that moment, anything was possible. For an instant Jacob felt his heart lurch toward fear and failure, felt himself about to laugh the whole thing off as an exaggerated joke. But in the last remaining second, he rallied, and looked the driver in the eyes.

“Yes,” he said. He shifted his cane across his lap, pressing his fingers against his knees, trying not to wince. “And I’m not afraid to say it.”

The driver glanced at the street. There were three cabs in the line ahead of theirs; no one was standing nearby. He leaned toward Jacob, and lowered his voice. “There are some men you might like to meet,” he said. “Men who feel the way you do.”

Jacob braced his cane against his legs. “Really,” he replied. “Who?”

The driver glanced again at the street. This time a man was approaching the side of the carriage, starting to climb up onto the platform, waiting to board. The driver waved at him. “Sorry, sir,” he called. “No more rides now. Horse’s shoe is a bit loose. I’ve got to get him back to the stable.” The man paused, and glanced at Jacob before quickly looking away, as nearly everyone who looked at Jacob did. Jacob watched as the man climbed down and waved away the few other men in top hats who had gathered beside the platform. Then the driver reached under his perch for a wooden sign, painted with the words
OFF DUTY—WILL SOON RETURN
. He hung it on the side of the carriage, and turned back to Jacob. He reached into his pocket and withdrew his hand, his fingers balled into a tight fist. Then he grasped Jacob’s hand, and Jacob felt something small and metallic pressed into his palm. When the driver took his hand away, Jacob opened his fingers and was surprised to see a small gold-colored ring.

He held it between his thumb and index finger, examining it. He thought of how he had held Jeannie’s mother’s ring in the air at their wedding, and tried not to notice how his blood was draining down into his damaged legs. The world circled around him, fierce and dizzying. He clutched his cane, holding still.

“We are the Order of the Sons of Liberty, formerly the Knights of the Golden Circle,” the driver said. Now his face was inches from Jacob’s. Avoiding the driver’s eyes, Jacob looked down again at the ring, weighing it in his palm. It clearly wasn’t made of gold; brass perhaps. This time he noticed the engraved words circling the ring’s inner surface:
COME RETRIBUTION
. “Our responsibility is to protect American liberty when no one else will,” the driver continued. “We have been attempting to recruit more men like you, men who know the Federal army well. You yourself can avenge your brother’s death.”

Jacob looked up at the driver, pressing his lips together. Without a word, he nodded.

“You have business to take care of this afternoon?” the driver asked, waving a hand at the columns on the right.

“Yes,” Jacob said.

“The head of our Philadelphia group has a seat on the exchange. His name is John Clarke. You can introduce yourself to him with this ring. How long will you be here in town?”

“Not long,” Jacob said. “I—I have a business obligation in New York.”

“The Order exists in New York too. I’m not certain who the leaders are there, but you might contact Clarke’s brother-in-law. Look for a man named Edwin Booth. He’s a partner in Clarke’s firm. Wherever you go, show them the ring. Tell them what happened to your brother. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Retribution shall be yours.”

“Thank you,” Jacob said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his change purse. But when he presented the driver with the fare, the driver pushed back his hand.

“Please, you owe me nothing,” the driver said. He came down from his perch and lifted Jacob bodily out of his seat, transporting him from the carriage to the platform to the sidewalk. As the driver carried him, Jacob closed his good eye, almost enjoying it. When he was standing upright again, the driver once more shook his hand, and then climbed back up to his perch. “Long live liberty!” he called, and flicked his whip against the horse’s back.

Jacob watched as the carriage with its sign moved from the curb and drove away. Then he walked toward the exchange, and began waiting for Philip Mordecai Levy. It was a bright autumn afternoon, and for the first time in years, for reasons he did not quite understand, he felt a lightness and liberation that almost resembled happiness. He had been off duty, but he would soon return.