Belle Cora: A Novel (52 page)

Here is the letter I asked them to pass on:

Judge me, reader, if it gives you satisfaction. I was not without feelings for little Frank. When I was asked how I could do such a thing—I was asked this question by his nurse, by Monique, and even by a couple of gentlemen who knew I was disposing of Frank without knowing where—I told them that it was because I was growing more attached to him every day, and I feared that if I did not do it now it would be impossible.

Let us think about this, shall we? Think seriously. Even though growing up in a fancy parlor house, where your mother is the madam and can see to it that you are treated well, need not be unremittingly sordid, it doesn’t compare very favorably with growing up on a prosperous farm. If I had hated Livy, that was only because of Agnes and Agatha, and because I had missed the city. Frank would not remember it, and so he would not miss it. One day he would enter a world where reputation matters; he wouldn’t thank me for letting him start life in the character of a prostitute’s bastard. Anne, who had had four miscarriages after Susannah, would be happy to have him. She was the best of mothers. I had often wished I had been raised by her. Melanchthon was a good father, and he would be pleased, both with the child and the $120, which he would use to buy livestock or make other improvements. It was also consoling to realize that my aunt, who would have loved to dandle a baby again, would be rebuked by my conspicuous choice of Anne and Melanchthon.

Finally, like many other women who abandon their children, I told myself that it was temporary. Who knew but that perhaps, in two or four or five years, when I had enough money to feel really safe from the threat
of poverty, I would dissolve the parlor house, open a grocery, or a laundry, or even a dress shop, and return for him.

MY AUNT HAD TOLD ME BY LETTER
that Jeptha’s family had moved to Ohio years earlier. I need not fear meeting them. Still, I could not help wondering, wondering and dreading, what it would do to me to be so near the fields and forests where once we had walked. To make life endurable, I had put the part of me that loved Jeptha to sleep, but I had never been able to bring myself to kill it.

I returned to upstate New York at the beginning of April 1849, in the company of Jocelyn and Monique, and Frank. We took a steamboat up the Hudson, the New York Central Railroad, and a stagecoach. We went in comfort, stopping like tourists to view famous falls and locks. We dressed simply and used plain names. I was Arabella, Monique was Sarah, and Jocelyn was Martha.

It was eleven and a half years since my grandfather’s clerk Horace had brought Lewis and me to our uncle’s farm, two children who had just lost both their parents. I mentioned this to my companions, and Monique, seizing greedily on the opportunity, began to cry, which helped me to keep my own eyes dry. “There, there, Monique,” I said. “It didn’t happen to you; surely that’s a comfort.” But as we went south from Rochester, and the roads became ruder, and I noticed that a certain stream was just the same but the bridge over it was different, and signs announced the approach of Patavium—I had decided to stay there, where there was less chance that I would be recognized, rather than in Livy—I felt a steady loss of strength. “What’s wrong?” Jocelyn asked. “You look pale.”

“I’m dyspeptic,” I said. “That breakfast. This coach. This road.”

I closed my eyes and slept, and they woke me when we were in town.

We all wrote our false names in the hotel register. Since there would be talk anyway, when a child appeared in Anne’s family and she told the far-fetched story I had given her, it might have been better to have acted less furtively. But I didn’t have the courage, not here.

I sent Jocelyn and Monique out to see the town. They were to tell people that they were members of the New York Female Reform Society, charged with the blessed work of bringing orphans of Anglo-Saxon heritage to be raised with good Christian farm families. Yes, the Christianity
of people hereabouts was famous. In wicked New York City, everyone talked about it with awe.

I dreamed that I was with Jeptha on my uncle’s farm. He took my hand and pulled me into the corn. Willingly I surrendered my precious virtue, and before the end of the dream we had a child and named him Charley. When I woke up, Frank was crying; I lifted him from his trundle bed. He snuggled into me, saying his terrible word: “Mama.”

“No, you don’t,” I told him.

In the morning, I had the egg with crackers sent up to us. “Eggy!” I said, and he grinned pinkly with a little glint of white suddenly showing through the gum on top: a new weapon in his arsenal. I broke the crackers finely into the yolk until they had softened enough for him, and I spooned them into his mouth—“eggy, yum yum, eggy”—feeding him, as I thought, for the last time. I felt sorry for him, to lose his mother so young, and I felt sorry for myself, too. I foresaw a very bad time coming in the moment of going back without him. I foresaw many nights of regret. But it was the right thing to do. And he would not be so far away. I could visit him. Next year or the year after, I could change my mind, tell Anne that he was mine, and take him home with me.

When it was time to take him to Melanchthon’s farm, I told the other women: “You take him. Say I had business back in New York City, I couldn’t come in person.”

“Are you sick?” asked Jocelyn.

“I don’t know.”

“Should we ask about a doctor?”

“No, just take him.”

He was asleep with his thumb in his mouth when they picked him up to take him to the carriage downstairs, but I made the mistake of holding him one last time, and he woke; and then, when they took him away, he cried until he turned red, as if he knew he might never see me again; it was a bad few minutes for both of us. “Hush,” I begged him, “hush,” and to Jocelyn and Monique I said, “Stop looking at me that way.”

When they were gone, I wept a little; after a while, I composed myself. Between parting with Frank and being in Livy again, it would have been more than I could bear. Everyone would have read it on my face; they’d know I was his mother.

I read fifty pages of a novel by Eugène Sue, and then they were back, and Frank was with them, sleeping again.

“What’s this?”

“Your aunt Agatha was there,” said Monique. “Anne says she won’t take the baby unless you come.”

“But I’m not here, remember? You were supposed to tell her that I wasn’t here!”

“They didn’t believe us,” said Jocelyn.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I said, shutting my eyes, and I didn’t know whom I meant. “Now I’m going to have to part with him all over again.”

Monique, happy to tell me something good, said “Oh—I just remembered—he has a tooth!”

“Dear Lord,” I said, putting my palm to my brow. “Precious Lord.”

“Don’t you want to see it?”

“I’ve seen the tooth! Do you think I’m made of stone? Help me. Don’t make it harder. I won’t have him raised in a brothel. I won’t have him meet life as a whore’s bastard. It’s all been decided. I’m doing this. You are supposed to help me.”

They apologized and embraced me and cooed, saying that they could tell, from the way I was acting, that I had maternal feelings after all. While I dressed, I had Jocelyn and Monique prepare me for the meeting ahead. What had been said about me and asked about me? Had anyone mentioned Lewis? No. What about Matthew? Was he walking? Short distances, with two canes, same as in Agatha’s letters. Matthew greatly reformed, religious now. Fine, I thought: so long as he couldn’t walk without canes.

The carriage was driven by Toby, the ten-year-old son of the hostler whose establishment adjoined the hotel. It was a lulling journey. The boy’s back swung from side to side like an inverted pendulum, obsidian flies glistened on the velvet rumps of the horses, and twisting gray fences, deeply etched with the lengthwise grain of the wood, seemed to wriggle and leap as we rode by. I held Frank, cushioning the knocks for him.

MELANCHTHON HAD BEEN FETCHED
from the fields in expectation of meeting us. His hair was grayer. Anne had become a little plump; so had
Susannah. My aunt looked more intensely herself: haggard, desperate, driven.

Frank kicked to be let down, and I put him on the grass. He walked several stiff steps and fell over on his face in the weeds. He rolled over and sat up. He sat for a while, as if deciding what to do next, and whether it would be a good idea for him to cry. He reached his arms out to me. I picked him up.

“Poor motherless creature,” I said. “He’s become attached to me, I fear.”

I introduced Monique and Jocelyn to Susannah and Melanchthon, who had not met them. I introduced them as “Sarah” and “Martha,” respectively. Melanchthon told Toby where he could refresh the horse, and to come and join us when he was done.

Anne asked to hold Frank. When I gave him to her, he began to cry, pushing her away, reaching for me. “Mama! Mama!” I took him back. With the baby between us, we could not embrace, but she pressed her cheek on mine, and I was moved. She had always been kind to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “As I said, he’s been mostly in my care until now.”

“Never mind,” said my aunt. “I suppose he’ll get attached to Anne soon enough when he finds he has no other choice.” When Anne and I had given each other that half-hug, Agatha had worn an affronted look. It was not that she longed for my embrace, but she felt, probably, that the embrace was hers by right, that a better girl would have done her that homage in return for caring so wonderfully for her when she was a helpless orphan.

Two tables were put together to make one long enough, and chairs were brought in from other rooms, and we all ate together, including the hostler’s son. I asked about William Jefferds. Anne told me that he had died in his sleep while living on the Weemses’ farm. At the time, he was no longer our family’s pastor—my aunt and some other members of the congregation having quarreled with him over Adventism—but of course it was sad; certainly he had been a good man. I asked about Agnes. Had she and George Sackett planned a date for their wedding?

“Not yet, no,” said Agatha vaguely.

My aunt had never been any good at keeping secret the existence of a
secret. I knew she was hiding something. I looked at Anne and decided that she was in on it.

“Where exactly are they living now? Maybe I’ll go see them after this,” I said, hoping that the threat of a visit, where I might find out the truth, whatever it was, would force my aunt to tell it to me now.

Indeed, she looked alarmed and reminded me that Agnes and I had never gotten along very well. I replied that that was all water over the dam, and she said, “Well, I would give you her address, only I don’t know it. It keeps changing. You see, she and George are going to California as missionaries, and they, they”—I watched her trying to improvise; she was as incompetent as a child—“the first, the Boston mission society that was going to send them couldn’t quite come up with all the money they needed, so they’re looking for another, and traveling, seeing people to raise the rest of the money.”

This was plausible. Among the newspaper articles we were all devouring about California in those days were some inspired by the mission societies, talking of how wicked it was bound to be with all those unruly men and hardly any good women, and efforts were being made to send ministers. Men in my house joked about it. I had heard, from Lewis, that my grandfather was involved in these efforts. So that much was true; whether it had anything to do with George and Agnes, I didn’t know.

“Oh, I see.” I sat watching them awhile, thinking about all this. I looked at Jocelyn and Monique, and I looked back to Anne and Agatha.