All Other Nights (27 page)

O
NE CAN ALWAYS TELL THE STATE OF A NATION BY STANDING
alongside the doors of a big city exchange and watching the faces of the men walking in and out. Jacob noticed this the very first time he ever went to the stock exchange in New York, when he was fourteen years old. His father had sent him there to bring someone a message, and he had waited just outside the doors on a hot, late summer afternoon. The ’57 panic had begun, and as he watched the men coming through those doors, rivulets of sweat dripping down their cheeks and necks as they emerged into the heavy humid air, he saw how none of them looked at anyone else, even if they were involved in conversation with the men beside them. Each man’s eyes were focused on the narrow strip of bare ground just in front of his own feet, and each man’s brows were drawn together, a tight knot of worry lodged at the base of each man’s forehead. Even at fourteen, Jacob had sensed the queasy dread of every man there, the seasick feeling of a ship’s deck falling away beneath one’s feet. Now Jacob saw the faces of the men outside the Philadelphia Board of Brokers and recognized once more that seasick fear. For a few moments he stood by the towering Greek columns and watched harried, worried bodies shuffling in and out, their eyes fixed on the ground, and he searched for Philip among them. But he couldn’t stand up for long without pain, and he didn’t want Philip to see him suffering. At last a group of men vacated a bench alongside the steps leading to the entrance. Jacob sank down onto it, overwhelmed with relief. And then he saw Philip coming down the stairs.

At first Jacob didn’t recognize him. His hair was completely gray, and even with his overcoat Jacob could see that he had become rail-thin. His unbuttoned coat and dark suit hung on his gaunt frame like clothes on a scarecrow, and he held a battered top hat in his hands. His pince-nez looked new, smaller, and he squinted through the lenses in the bright sunlight. Jacob watched as he descended the marble stairs. His shoulders were hunched, as though the sky were pressing down on him, forcing him to bear its weight. The first time Jacob tried to call to him, his voice stuck in his throat. It was only after several tries that he finally managed to shout his name.

“Mr. Levy!”

Philip stopped and looked around. Despite his stoop, he seemed quite alert, almost anxious. But when he turned in Jacob’s direction, he looked through him, his eyes passing right over the eye-patched cripple on the bench. “Mr. Levy!” Jacob called again.

Philip turned toward Jacob, and flinched. But Jacob had become accustomed to that. He stood, an effort that required all the time it took Philip to cover the distance between them. Then they were standing face to face.

For a moment they looked at each other in silence. Jacob had imagined, on the long anxious train ride that morning, that Philip would look at him with that same expression of contempt that Abigail’s brother had given him in Holly Springs, or even that Philip would draw out a revolver and point it at his chest. Instead, Philip looked at him for a long time, taking in his eye patch, his scars, his cane, his hobbled legs. Then, very slowly, he extended his hand to Jacob.

Jacob raised his right hand to take Philip’s, balancing himself with his left hand on his cane. It was a gesture that he had long perfected, but now he stumbled, and fell against Philip’s chest. Locked in a grotesque parody of an embrace, Jacob felt Philip’s damp cheek on his neck.

They sat down on the bench, side by side. Philip’s eyes were sunken into his skull. He had become an old man. When he finally spoke, his voice was cold.

“My regards to your father,” he said. “Please thank him for me, for sending you.”

The words turned Jacob back into a child, one whose behavior the adults will no longer tolerate. He bit his lip, feeling himself sinking into the ground. He had never seen Philip’s letter to his father—what had Philip written? His heart fluttered like a child’s, afraid that his father knew what he had done.

“Did you tell him—” Jacob started to say.

“No,” Philip said. Jacob breathed with relief. “I didn’t want to endanger you,” Philip added, “in case you were still working—well, in the field.” In all the time Jacob knew him, he had never heard Philip use the word “spy.” Philip coughed, and continued. “I merely inquired after your family. I wrote that I remembered you in passing, and asked if you had enlisted. He told me you were wounded and had come home. I hoped we might see each other.”

Jacob wanted to ask him, then, why he didn’t seem to despise him. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask; perhaps Philip did. Instead he asked, “How did you come here?”

Philip looked down at his knees, avoiding Jacob’s good eye. “I was exchanged for my daughter,” he said. For an instant Jacob’s soul ignited, flaring with hope. Philip added, “For Charlotte.”

Jacob trembled, a reflex that lingered after two full years. “For Lottie?”

“It only happened three months ago,” Philip said, his voice low. “No one explained it to me at the time. A military escort took me out of prison and brought me to the lines. Federal troops were waiting for me there. Later I was informed that it had been your idea.”

Since his injury, Jacob was prone to headaches, a hard dull burn inside his skull behind where his right eye used to be. Now he felt the pain seeping in, deep within his head. He pressed the heel of his hand against his temple and tried to think. It was his idea? But his idea had been to exchange Philip for Jeannie, two years ago, when she was still alive!

At last Jacob spoke. “You were still in prison three months ago?” he asked. Months and years had melted away for him; he could no longer remember how much time had gone by.

Philip sighed, a deep defeated breath. “Jacob, my trial was a nightmare. The incident apparently didn’t pass muster as a proper duel. The prosecutor came up with character witnesses, old clients, neighbors with grudges, people I hadn’t spoken to in years. I didn’t know it was possible to be that humiliated. I was sentenced to twenty years for murder of the second degree. I was probably lucky it wasn’t more. The Union secret service saved me. I suppose I ought to thank you for that.”

Jacob noticed that he stopped short of actually thanking him. But now Jacob was the prisoner in the dock. He was silent, awaiting judgment.

“I saw Charlotte when we were exchanged,” Philip said.

Jacob watched as Philip swallowed, his heavy eyebrows drawing together, a knot of worry tightening at the base of his forehead. Jacob tried to think of something to say, but Philip continued before he could say a word. “I saw her, but I couldn’t speak to her. We were both in chains, and surrounded by guards.” The image sickened Jacob, but Philip forced him to listen. “She looked horrid. It was frightening. She was wearing rags, and she was so—so thin. Her skin was almost translucent. But what frightened me was the way she looked at everyone. She was so angry, so full of fury. I almost didn’t recognize my own child. When you’re a father, you always imagine them as children, you picture them running toward you, throwing their little arms around your legs. It’s—”

He turned away from Jacob, looking at his fingers in his lap. Jacob tried to think of something to offer him, some way to begin begging him for absolution. But Philip had more to say. He had been planning it for years.

“There is something many women know instinctively, but few men ever understand,” he said, “which is that raising children is one of the only things you can do with your life. My wife taught me that years ago. One can devote oneself to a cause, but what cause could be worth more than a child?” Now he was looking straight ahead, gazing at the white marble steps as they turned yellow in the late afternoon light. “Dying for a cause is the last resort of those too weak to live for one. That’s something my daughters never understood.”

Jacob heard, beneath his words, everything he hadn’t said, everything he refused to say. Lottie was a proxy for another daughter, for an unnamable grief.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” Jacob said.

Jacob saw him blinking, and waited.

“For a long time I used to curse you,” Philip said at last. “I cursed myself, too, for being foolish enough to let you in. I knew why you had come, almost from the beginning. But I—I saw how the girls changed in your presence, how happy you made them. It was so exhilarating, to see them that way. I had forgotten it was possible.” Jacob pursed his lips, and felt his remaining eye watering as Philip continued. “As a result I became a bit delirious. I had the notion that you would be exceptional somehow, that you would give up whatever glory or respect you were after for something that mattered more. Of course there are no exceptions. You did what you were told to do. I suppose you had to. What sickens me is that I was naïve enough to expect something different from you.”

Jacob looked down at his knees. For an instant he thought of defending himself, of explaining how he had tried to save Jeannie even if he had turned Lottie in, how he had at first even tried to save them both by keeping the evidence to himself, how Lottie had been the one who had wanted him dead—but he understood now that all his half-measures had been pointless. He rubbed at his scars.

“Eventually I forced myself to understand that all of it might have happened just as easily without you, or that without you it might have been even worse, if such a thing were conceivable,” Philip said. “I know now that it was all the girls’ fault, or my own fault—that I failed as a father, that I failed to protect them, or to prepare them. But I can’t even tell you how many months I spent praying that God would exact revenge on you.”

“He did,” Jacob said.

Philip indulged a long glance at Jacob’s eye patch, at his cane, at the distorting scars on the right side of his face and neck. Like all cripples, Jacob had become accustomed to people deliberately looking away from him. He was surprised by how much he relished having someone look, at last, at his damaged body. “How were you wounded?” Philip finally asked.

Jacob paused, reminded of the hansom driver. What could he say? “During a prisoner exchange,” he replied.

Philip smiled, a cruel smile. “‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’” he quoted. He removed his spectacles, rubbing at the lenses with his handkerchief. It was intended to seem like a casual gesture, but Jacob saw how hard he was rubbing at nothing, trying to distract Jacob from his shuddering hands. At last he put them back on his nose, and glanced down at his lap.

“I haven’t been able to find out anything about what’s become of the girls. Not Charlotte, nor—nor any of them,” Philip said slowly. Here it was, Jacob knew. He listened as Philip paused, gathering strength. “My brother told me that he read in the newspaper that Eugenia—” Philip paused, swallowed. “That Eugenia—that she—she—” He swallowed again, before adding, “—perished in prison.”

He glanced at Jacob, registering his lack of surprise. Philip had expected him to know. For a long time Jacob said nothing, afraid of what he might say, and afraid that saying it would make it false. But Philip spoke first.

“Perhaps you are wondering why I am even speaking to you now, if I know that,” he said, and glared at Jacob. “For that sort of retribution, I would need to ask God to remove your other eye too, along with your heart.”

Jacob couldn’t endure Philip’s eyes. He bit his lip and blinked his own good eye, rubbing it with the back of his hand. Those who believe in a hell in the afterlife cannot possibly imagine what it means to be damned while still living, he thought, the unrelenting torture of the conscience. For eternal suffering, nothing more is necessary.

“The only reason is that I don’t believe it,” Philip announced. “I won’t believe it. I haven’t even said Kaddish for her. I won’t until someone proves to me that it’s true, even if I have to wait until this entire war is over. Even if I have to wait for the rest of my life. I know it’s a delusion, but I—I indulge it. It’s all I can do.”

Jacob looked at him again, afraid to speak. Philip was crouching with his elbows on his knees, pressing the heels of his hands against his brow. He glanced at Jacob briefly, with a slight sneer. “I had an absurd thought when I wrote to your father. I foolishly believed that seeing you would ease my suffering somehow, or even put it to rest. I don’t know why I thought such a thing. You are irrelevant to me, utterly irrelevant. I only want my daughters back, and that you cannot give me.” Jacob cringed, but Philip’s eyes were closed, pressed against his hands. He was in another world. “Foolish girls, all of them,” he muttered. “But I only blame myself.”

Jacob looked down at his own lap, which was now in the shadow of a tall oak tree behind them. Since the injury, his vision often failed him at odd moments, his single eye unable to take in the full revulsion of the world, and his mind would substitute memory for life. Now his hands in his lap blurred, and a bright pale space expanded between them. In that instant, seated outside the Philadelphia exchange, he suddenly held Abigail’s letter before him, the paper stiff and certain in his hands, the words dark and crisp and clear in Abigail’s handwriting:
three weeks after you have surely been sealed in the Book of Life
. At last he dared.

“I think Jeannie is alive,” he said.

Philip raised his head, and turned to look at Jacob. For the briefest of instants, a light moved across his eyes. But it disappeared just as quickly as it had come. His face darkened, and he stared at Jacob, seething, barely able to contain his rage. “Don’t do that to me,” he said, his voice cold. “You have no right.”

Jacob shook his head, panicked, suddenly believing it. “I have a reason to think so,” he said. “I—”

“You have no right,” Philip repeated.

Jacob could see how Philip was struggling to control himself, to keep himself from strangling him on the spot. Philip’s hands were pressed against his thighs, his fingers clutching his knees. But Jacob couldn’t help himself. He asked, breathless: “Do you have family in Mississippi?”

Philip’s brow unknotted itself, his wrinkled face easing, as though Jacob had changed the subject. When he spoke, his voice was light, curious, puzzled. “My wife’s sister Sarah. She died about five years ago.” He looked at the air in front of him, as if searching for a face in a crowd. “Her husband was killed in a battle over there. I really pitied the children,” he added, his voice distant. Then he turned back to Jacob. “Why do you ask?”