All Other Nights (39 page)

He imagined her prayers for retribution mingling with her father’s, rising up from their mouths to God’s ears. In the dim light, she examined his eye patch and his cane. He saw that her disgust had faded somewhat; she was becoming accustomed to his ugliness, able to look at him without complete revulsion. She didn’t ask him how it had happened. In her own way, she knew.

“But everything changed when Lottie came back,” she continued. “Because then I remembered all the things she had done to me.”

He wasn’t expecting this. “What—what do you mean?”

“When the cavalry captured me and Lottie, they gagged us and locked us into the back of a wagon together,” she said. “At one point Lottie’s gag fell off and she started shouting at me, unforgivable insults.” Her cheeks were flushed as she spoke. “She screamed that I had sold her off like a slave, and then that I was a whore, that I had sold myself to you, that I—that I—” She bit her lip, looking at the candle. “At the time I was shocked to hear her say those things. But later I understood that it was no different from everything she had done before I met you. She was the one who convinced me to go back to William, so that he could become our contact.”

“What do you mean, to go back to William?”

She bit her lip again in the dim light, her face darkening. “William had proposed to me the previous year, and I had refused him,” she said. Jacob hadn’t known this, though he could hardly be surprised that she had never told him. “It was beyond humiliating for me to crawl back to him like that. But Lottie told me that it ought to mean nothing to me, that I was being selfish, that I was betraying our mother—and I believed it all. I didn’t know at the time that I could have said no.” Jeannie was watching him now, taking in his whole mangled form before her. “Later I understood that you had been my escape.”

Jacob’s eye began to water, his vision blurring. Suddenly, with painful, unforgiving clarity, he understood that he would never be worthy of her.

“How did you manage to come to Richmond?” she asked, with strained cheer, after he had been silent for too long. “I hope you weren’t smuggled down in a coffin.”

She meant to lighten the air between them, he knew. But he shook his head. “I can’t tell you,” he said.

A shadow crossed her face. “Oh no. No. Don’t say that.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Jacob, it isn’t like it was before. They hang everyone now. You can’t continue.”

He remembered what he needed to tell her. The space behind his missing eye throbbed as he understood what it meant: that this was not only his first time seeing her again, but likely his last. “No one is continuing, Jeannie.”

“What do you mean?”

“The government is preparing to evacuate. They’re abandoning the city.”

She leaned back, alarmed. Then she laughed, as though she had just understood a clever joke. “That’s an old rumor, Jacob,” she said. “People were talking about that months ago, but it’s not true. Everyone is still laughing at the rich people who left.”

“No, Jeannie, it’s true. I work in the State Department. The government has already distributed the evacuation plans. Even Judah Benjamin is going to escape to England somehow. He told me that himself.” She leaned back against the wall, bewildered. “Jeannie, you have to leave. As soon as possible. Go with your whole family. Tomorrow morning, if you can. Is there somewhere you can go?”

Her eyebrows pulled together, a knot of worry lodging itself at the base of her forehead. He recognized her expression, from Philip’s face. “My uncle once had a cousin in Lynchburg,” she said. “But we haven’t heard from him in years. I’m not even certain that he—”

“Good. Go to him. Get on the first train you can find. All of you. Leave tomorrow morning. Bring everything with you.”

She was still shocked. “What about you?”

“I have to meet a courier at the old cemetery on Sunday evening, at midnight,” he said. “I’m meant to bring him a message, but I plan to ask him to take me back to Washington with him.”

Jeannie’s eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you just wait for the Yankees to come and save you?” she asked, and he heard in her voice the slightest edge of a sneer. “Someone always saves you. You never save yourself.”

Was that what she thought of him? Surely it was, and rightly so. But it no longer mattered. “It’s more difficult than that, Jeannie. I’ve seen the instructions for the militia when the government evacuates. They’re going to burn down the city. I doubt I’d survive it.”

“Burn down the city?” Her voice was strange, childlike, stricken with wonder. But she quickly recovered. “Jacob, that’s absurd. Why on earth—”

“Oh, they only intend to destroy a few resources, of course, so the enemy won’t be able to use them. They merely want to burn all the tobacco warehouses, and burn all the food, and scuttle all the ships, and blow up all the ordnance, and…well, if their only intention was to destroy the supplies, then why didn’t anyone suggest simply dumping the supplies in the river?”

“Surely there must be some reason behind it,” Jeannie said.

“The reason is irrelevant. Almost every building in this city is made of wood.”

He saw her glancing around the tool shed, at the coffin and the barrel and the chains. He couldn’t begin to imagine what she was thinking. But he had seen how impossible everything had become, and how impossible it would remain. Whatever was left of her love for him was poisoned by pity, and his for her was poisoned by regret. “Promise me you’ll leave,” he said.

She sat motionless, still astonished, as he struggled to form the words for what he now knew he had to tell her.

“Jeannie, I don’t know when I will see you again, but it may be a very long time, or never,” he said.
Because I have become too ugly
, he meant,
and you have become too beautiful, and mercy and longing are only corrupt cousins of love, and neither of us can ever return to the people we once were
. But he did not need to say it. She knew. “Please don’t wait for me,” he finally told her. “I—I release you, Jeannie. If people ask, tell them I’ve died. Find another father for Deborah.”

For a moment she was silent. She lowered her head, bowing before him. Perhaps she knew that he was right. Then she spoke, and her eyes gleamed with tears. “Deborah started speaking clearly a few months ago,” she said. “She isn’t even two years old, but she understands much more than one might expect. I told her about you. She knows how to say ‘Papa.’”

He was too small for this, he saw, too damned to deserve it. Suddenly she sat up, straightening in the shadows. “What time is it?” she asked.

He might have thought the question odd, but he was barely present, his mind awash with regret. Without thinking, he slipped his watch out of his pocket, as though he had been asked for the time by a stranger on the street. “A quarter past midnight,” he answered. It was later than he expected, though he cared not in the least.

Jeannie was fidgeting, anxious, as if he had broken a magic spell. “I have to go home to Deborah,” she said.

It was strange to hear her say these words, as though Deborah were an actual child rather than an impossible fantasy. For Jacob, the very idea was inconceivable. But Jeannie had given her life, sustained her, and enabled her to reach this very moment—and now somewhere in this doomed city, an almost-two-year-old child who looked exactly like him was lying in bed asleep, waiting for her mother. To Jacob it was nothing but a dream, unearned and unreal.

“I have to go home,” Jeannie repeated, when he didn’t reply. “My sisters will be frantic. They may even send Lottie to fetch me. It isn’t safe for you if I stay here any longer.” It was true, he knew, though he wondered if it were also an excuse, a way for her to take leave of him without guilt. She didn’t invite him to join her; they both already knew that he never could. But she also didn’t rise from her seat. Instead she leaned toward him, her face hovering over his scars, and he felt her breath against his cheek. “Forgive me, Jacob, but it’s difficult to look at you,” she said.

He said nothing as she stood up. Her cloak narrowed her dress and her body beneath it into a thin column before him, a pillar of white smoke. Before he could struggle to his feet beside her, she bent down and blew the candle out.

Darkness enveloped them, and suddenly he felt her arms around him, her lips against his fingers, his neck, his mouth, as she drew him to his feet. Her tongue against his skin was so electric that he became delirious: he tried to stand on his own, and forgot that he no longer could. In an instant he crashed to his knees on the hard dirt floor.

Pain shot through his legs, but he ignored it, overwhelmed by a sweet new agony. He groped in the darkness until he felt her shoes, and then her legs beneath her dress, the unbearable curve of her flesh rising beneath his fingers as he reached up to her, pulling her down until she was kissing him again. Then his hands were slipping beneath her corset, trembling against her breasts, and he felt how stunningly strange they were, reshaped by the baby, large and unfamiliar and beautiful in his hands. But she straightened, vanishing beyond his reach, kissing the top of his head like a child as he knelt before her in the dark, and his shattered legs failed him: he could not rise up again.

“I have to go home to Deborah,” she repeated in his ear as she pulled him back to his feet. “They’ve surely missed me by now. I don’t want my sister to—” She couldn’t support his weight. He sank down on the cotton bale, drowning in regret. “I’m so sorry, Jacob. I shall come back to you, I promise. I’ll come back with Deborah, when you leave the city. I shall wait for you,” he heard her whisper in the dark, as he panted for air. He could detect the pity in her voice, and he knew she said it only to comfort him. She kissed him again, but now her comfort compounded his pain. She had always been a liar.

From his slouch on the cotton bale, he saw a tall gray rectangle of light appear as the door to the shed creaked open, dim lamps from the house and the street illuminating the room. The silhouette of her body was painted in black against the light. He took his cane from the ground and struggled to his feet. “Jeannie,” he called, but she was already turned toward the door.

“I’ll come back,” she said. He knew better than to believe her; he had heard her say it before. She vanished, leaving him staring at the coffin with its open trapdoor. Three days later, the end of the world arrived.

T
HE WORLD HAS ENDED MANY TIMES BEFORE, AS MEN LIKE OLD
Isaacs of the Old World know. But when it is your first war, no matter how often you were warned, you are invariably surprised.

The Jews of Richmond were the last to hear. It happened during the magical hour, on a bright Sunday morning when everyone else was in church. Jefferson Davis was the first to be surprised, approached in his pew at St. Paul’s with a telegram. When he read it, his face turned gray, and he rose in the middle of the sermon and hurried out of the sanctuary. The rest of the congregation soon followed, talebearers dispatched from church to church, and shortly thereafter every preacher in the city was announcing the news to the faithful. The Hebrews were still taking their Sunday walks when the Christians returned home early, rushing to pack their bags and running to the railroad depot. Jacob had remained in his rented room, but when he heard the shouting outside, he immediately loaded all the gold he still had into the various pockets of his suit and made his way to the office, where he expected Benjamin’s letter to be waiting for him.

He usually took an omnibus between his lodgings and the government offices—a distance he would have happily walked, if he were able—but the combination of the Christian Sabbath and the Confederate apocalypse had eliminated that option. It would have been impossible regardless: the streets were jammed with every imaginable type of carriage, coach, and wagon, those already loaded unable to move because of all the furniture and belongings being carried into the streets. He made his way through the city slowly, forced to stop every thirty yards or so both by his legs and by the traffic on the sidewalks, and he grew increasingly nervous. Had Jeannie listened to him? He prayed that she had, that she and her family were long gone, though he still stared at every young woman he saw in the streets. It took him hours to traverse the distance to Capitol Square. By the time he arrived, the sidewalks were already on fire.

Small fires, this time: pyres had been lit in front of the government offices, and soldiers were burning large bundles of documents in the street. Jacob made his way around them, glancing at the piles of papers and wondering if there might be anything in them that he ought to rescue. But it had all become moot; his very presence had become unnecessary, redundant. The only paper he needed was the one in Benjamin’s safe. He made his way into the building and limped toward Benjamin’s office. He was about to knock on Benjamin’s half-closed door when he heard Benjamin’s voice inside, speaking in French. “I have nothing in particular to say to you, but I wanted to be sure that I shook your hand before we left,” he heard Benjamin say, remembering what he had learned in French lessons years ago, in his rich boy’s life. “We shall return in three weeks. Four at the most. I appreciate your services, Monsieur.” Then the door opened, and the French consul emerged, looking utterly bewildered as he hurried down the hallway. Few people are ever prepared for the end of the world.

Judah Benjamin was. Jacob found him seated at his desk, arranging papers in neat stacks. As Jacob entered, Benjamin slid one of the stacks into the fireplace, as routinely as though he were inserting it into a drawer. “I have been waiting for you, Rappaport,” he said, slipping another stack into the fire. “I expected you hours ago. We shall be leaving for the depot in an hour and a half.”

“I do apologize,” Jacob replied. “There was a bit of traffic on the way.”

The perpetual smile emerged again, Benjamin’s private shield against contempt. Jacob saw it and felt almost nostalgic. Benjamin may have been the enemy, but Jacob knew how much he had suffered, how he had borne his entire life as a burden of proof.

“I trust that you recall the assignment I mentioned to you,” Benjamin said, and crossed the room to open the safe. The safe was empty now, Jacob saw, except for the little envelope with Benjamin’s seal. The gold was finished; everything was finished. Benjamin handed the envelope to Jacob. “It is exceedingly urgent that this message be delivered to the courier without fail. He will be at the burial ground at Shockoe Hill at midnight. I know that I may depend on you.”

“Of course,” Jacob said as he tucked the letter into his vest pocket—though at that very moment he was remembering the evacuation orders, thinking of how difficult it had been simply to walk across town in the crowds, and considering whether he ought instead to be heading to the depot himself. Wasn’t his work here finished too?

It was, as far as Benjamin was concerned. Benjamin stood and reached out to shake Jacob’s hand. “I’m sorry, but I must take leave of you now. I have a great deal to accomplish in the brief time remaining,” he said. More documents to burn, Jacob assumed. “I hope we shall meet again someday, under kinder circumstances,” he added. Then, to Jacob’s surprise, Benjamin bowed to him. “I am grateful for your loyalty, Rappaport. It has been a great comfort to me to have someone here whom I could trust.”

Jacob was speechless, but Benjamin was already ushering him to the door. “Remember me to my sister,” he said. Before Jacob could reply, he had closed the door behind him, the scent of burning paper wafting into the hallway.

Jacob hobbled down the corridor, his last trip back to his shabby clerk’s room, and wondered what he might be able to salvage from the papers there. But the room had already been thoroughly stripped, the shelves and drawers completely emptied, the papers presumably already incinerated in the street. Nothing remained except a few unused stationery supplies. Jacob took an envelope the same size as Benjamin’s letter and slid it into his pocket. He wouldn’t be able to reseal it, but it would have to do.

He left the building, passed the burning documents in Capitol Square, and retreated into an alley by a horses’ stable. Then he tore open the letter and began to read.

The message startled him. Were there really people in the field who were still planning to kidnap Lincoln, despite it all? Or was Benjamin afraid that the agents would become rogues, that their rage couldn’t be contained without specific instructions? The latter, Jacob decided. But if the agents couldn’t be trusted to refrain from acting on their own—from going through with the kidnapping, or something even more dire—then how on earth would this mere message succeed in restraining them? The letter’s final line was painfully poignant: to what defunct court would such charges be brought? What reason would these agents have to obey such an order at all? Only loyalty, Jacob understood: delusional devotion to a lost cause. That they surely had. He slipped the letter into the new envelope, and knew that he had to deliver it.