Belle Cora: A Novel (54 page)

My grandfather, who looked much older, of course, after twelve years, was smiling broadly when he came in. I believe he assumed that Robert had brought home a prospective bride, and the presence of a young woman of suitable age and appearance doubtless seemed to confirm the impression.

“Don’t tell him,” Robert instructed me. “See if he can guess.”

This showed my grandfather that something else was afoot. He looked at me a few seconds, walked up to look closer. “Can it be?” he inquired. “Is it?”

“Say it,” Robert commanded him.

“Arabella?” he said. I nodded. His old eyes welled with tears, and he enfolded my soft young hands within his hands, which had the cracked translucency that mine have today. He brought my fingers to his lips;
then he released them, and his arms enfolded me. “Oh, what a providence it is.” He gazed into my eyes with a tenderness that made me forget the countless times I had cursed him for abandoning me, and I began to tremble and sob. “It’s a miracle, a miracle.”

He pulled a chair over to the couch, and we sat, leaning toward each other, while he had us narrate the story of our chance meeting on West Fourth Street. He asked Robert if I knew that the family had found Lewis, too, and asked me to tell him what I had been doing since I had left Cohoes. I had just begun the story I had prepared when he said, “But this is unfair to Mother,” and dispatched a maid to fetch my grandmother. He told the maid who I was—“Isn’t it amazing?”—but instructed her to tell my grandmother only that someone she would be very pleased to see was waiting for her downstairs.

Presently, she came in. The years had been harder on her than they had been on my grandfather; she was wizened and hunched, and her cane was very necessary to her. Also, I think her mind had deteriorated, just enough to make her subterfuges transparent. It was evident that she had overridden my grandfather’s instructions to the maid and demanded to know exactly who was downstairs. She recognized me with improbable dispatch and broad acting. “Merciful heavens—can it be?” She opened her mouth and popped her eyes, looked left at Robert and right at my grandfather. “Is it Arabella, my granddaughter? Come to me, my child; a few years earlier I would have hurried to your side, but now I am so frail that I must bid you to come to me.”

I kissed her, and felt the chill. I was more convinced than ever that the reason my brother and I had been sent to live with strangers in the darkest hour of our lives twelve years earlier was that my grandmother had not wanted the noise and worry of young children underfoot; consumption’s disdain of country air had been a convenient pretext. You’ll think it wrong of me to resent it, when I had only just left my son, Frank, in the same place. I see your point, I guess.

EARLIER IN THE WEEK, I HAD MOVED
some of my belongings into the apartment of Ann Dunlop, who lived with two other women above a dress shop she owned. For a fee, Miss Dunlop agreed to pretend that I owned the store, giving a semblance of reality to the story I was telling
about myself. Soon Robert and my grandfather visited. I showed them the shop. I showed them where I lived: the apartment, neat and clean, but rather cramped for four women, created an effective impression of honest spinsterhood.

As soon as they left, I went back to the house on Mercer Street, where I still in fact resided in order to keep a close eye on my affairs.

At a series of dinners at my grandfather’s house, over the course of several weeks, I was reacquainted with the family and brought into my grandfather’s social circle. For the first of these, Lewis was brought down from school, and the two of us acted out our conception of the emotions we should have felt on meeting again after a four-year separation. At this dinner and subsequent ones, I met several of my grandfather’s business and political allies. Some of them were staying to eat, some were leaving as I arrived, for my grandfather had become busy with politics. He received letters from people who were famous at the time and are in the history books today, and at one of these dinners I met both William Lloyd Garrison, editor of
The Liberator
, and the dusky pastor of New York City’s Abyssinian Presbyterian Church.

It was at the second of these meetings that Robert took my arm and said, “He got Arthur Heywood to come, the
Courier
editor. Remember I used to read it to you, about the steamship disasters, though I wasn’t supposed to?”

“Yes, I remember.” I felt dizzy; my face was burning, and my feet were very far away from me. I wondered if I ought to plead a sudden illness. “Isn’t he a Democrat?”

“Yes, but Grandfather hopes to make him a Free-Soiler, at least when it comes to California.” In a lower voice, Robert added, “Be prepared, Heywood’s not far above the majority of his readers; the wife is a little more refined.”

I could feel my pulse in my face, so frightened was I, but I determined to brazen it out. His wife was here. Even if she hadn’t been here, he would have wanted to keep his relationship with a whore a secret. Each of us had something to lose. On the other hand, the story that Solomon Godwin’s daughter was a parlor-house madam—what a wonderful story for a Democratic newspaper.

“Jonathan Wheeler is here,” Robert added, as we walked up the stairs and into the dining room. “You remember we mentioned Mr. Wheeler?”

“The young Presbyterian minister.”

“That’s right.”

“With his fiancée?”

Robert didn’t answer.

I had waited impatiently through three evenings with my grandfather before he had finally gotten around to mentioning his work as the chairman of the California Missionary Committee and their search for a suitable young couple to send west to minister to the miners. The committee was determined to send a man and his wife. By all reports, good Christian women were so rare in the gold regions that they were accorded a respect scarcely short of worship. A wife would not only be a comfort to the missionary but multiply his effectiveness tenfold. But of the candidates they had interviewed so far, one married couple was too old for the journey and not terribly keen. Another, though young and zealous, were a pair of Methodists, and the committee was lukewarm on this sect. Finally, there was Jonathan Wheeler, a recent seminary graduate, young, ardent, a Presbyterian, but, unfortunately, a bachelor.

“What a coincidence,” I had said, and I added that when I was back in Livy, placing an orphan there for the Female Reform Society, I had learned that my cousin Agnes and her fiancé, Jeptha, a seminary-trained clergyman, were determined to go to California as missionaries, and were trying to raise money for the trip. I didn’t know their address, but perhaps my aunt Agatha would. My grandfather said he would write to Agatha.

He then asked what religion they were; when I said “Baptists,” his enthusiasm waned a little, but he said he would contact them; perhaps they would do if Mr. Wheeler failed to find a wife. But he rather thought he would. Mr. Wheeler was a handsome man, and my grandfather had a woman in mind for him.

AS ROBERT BROUGHT ME IN
, the men who were standing bowed and the men who were seated rose. Most of them were members of the California Missionary Committee, important, established men, variously equipped with bushy eyebrows, nostril hairs, bald spots, double chins, wattles, warts, and crow’s feet. Except for Edward and Robert, only one man was young, so he had to be Jonathan Wheeler: tall, with a Roman nose, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a clean suit that fit as if he had borrowed
it for the evening from a smaller, less impecunious friend. He was very stiff, and became even more nervous when he saw me, and suddenly I understood that the woman my grandfather had in mind for Wheeler was me. It was very good news, really.

Arthur Heywood, who had been eating an hors d’oeuvre when he saw me, stopped chewing with the soft mass still in his mouth. I was introduced here and there, taking their hands. By the time I got to him, he had swallowed without mishap, and was composed, though with an almost imperceptible look of disbelief in his eye.

By then I felt comfortable enough to say, “You look familiar to me, Mr. Heywood. I wonder if we have crossed paths sometime, on a steamboat or a horsecar, some place where newspaper editors may encounter their readers in the flesh.”

His tuberous nose crimsoned, and his smile reproached me for teasing him, and he bowed.

We had met in the forest, dancing with Satan, and had to keep each other’s secret.

Later in the evening, when we were near to each other and no one else was by, Heywood said, “Have pity. Say you are who I think you are.”

“I am.”

“And an impostor? Or …?”

An impostor. That had not occurred to me—that he might wonder if I were pretending to be a girl who had disappeared, last seen here when she was a child. The idea was no stranger than the truth. “Well, I’m not exactly what they think I am, but I’m Arabella Godwin. I began as Arabella Godwin. How is Philip getting on?”

“Tolerably.”

“I’ll send you a message. We’ll meet. I’ll satisfy your curiosity.”

WHEELER WAS SO FRIGHTENED OF ME
—of any woman, I think. When we stood apart from the others later that evening, he spoke about his mother, who had encouraged his religious calling over the objection of his brute of a father. He thought that his mother and I would like each other. He had heard that my mother had died when I was young.

“Yes, and my father at the same time.”

He reddened and said haltingly, “So—so I heard. But I don’t—I don’t—it’s all right. That doesn’t matter.”

He meant the suicide, and the disgrace of it, and perhaps the bad blood, all of which he was willing to overlook.

I cast my eyes downward. He cleared his throat twice, wiped his chin with his hand, and cleared his throat again.

He was clumsy, but people were helping him, and on a Sunday afternoon only a few days later, I found myself alone with the young minister in my grandmother’s garden, the landscape of which was her main occupation when she was not arranging social gatherings in aid of my grandfather’s good works.

Jonathan Wheeler and I were left alone to stroll through these grounds. It was May, the sky almost clear, with songbirds, and a gravel walk lined with cherry trees with silvery bark and pink blossoms. He walked with his hands behind his back; the gravel crunched beneath his boots; there was a sprinkling of dandruff on the dark jacket of his suit, which was his own this time, and was rubbed to a shine at the sleeves and cuffs. He wasn’t well-off; he wasn’t claiming to be. He claimed only to be righteous.

He coughed into his hand, gave me a smile, asked me to sit on a bench, and paced. “Do you believe in Providence?” he asked me.

“I suppose so,” I said.

“I do as well. Nothing, I find, happens entirely by chance. I have often discussed it with my mother. She sees instances of it everywhere. Did we but know it, we are surrounded by miracles!” And he told me a story, which went on far too long for the occasion, about meeting my grandfather by accident, and how it had led to his candidacy for this missionary work. “And now, a matter of weeks before the date set for the ship’s departure, when I may leave my mother perhaps forever”—here he paused, and there was a catch in his throat—“at this very time, you meet your long-lost brother, also by accident. Do you see what I am trying to tell you?”

“I have to say that I do not.”

“I do not believe this has occurred by chance.”

“Jonathan, if you would wait a moment …”

“I believe it was meant, that we are to be—”

“Jonathan, I must go into the house. I’m unwell.”

“Oh,” he said, and I left him.

I found my grandfather in his study, sitting in a chair that he must have kept from his old house on Bond Street, though nothing else in
the room was the same. “He’s an honest fellow,” I said, “and with his good looks, and help from friends and relatives, I have no doubt that in time he will find a young woman who does not frighten him too much, and he will marry. But I do not think it will happen this summer, and I am bound and determined that it will not be me.”

My grandfather was still for a moment, and nodded, accepting my judgment. “Forgive us. We thought—we thought we would try. We never had any daughters.”

Despite my grievances, I felt a stab of affection for him—each time I saw him he seemed a miracle, alive after all, like the youths in Daniel stepping unhurt from the fiery furnace, and I stood here in his study as though nothing much had ever happened to me. “It’s something you would have done if I had grown up in this house.”

Had my mother and father lived, or even if they had died but I had not been sent away, such scenes might have occurred—eligible prospects sighted, dinners arranged, the old folks retiring discreetly at the right moment. They’d have done it like this, except that the young man left alone with me would have been rich.

What exactly was it that made them put me in a garden with a penniless seminary graduate? Was it my father’s suicide? If so, it showed them to be extremely ignorant in these matters. Such tragedies occur in the best families. People overlook them. As the granddaughter of Solomon Godwin, with my beauty, a little luck, and ingenuity, I could have snared an Astor or a Vanderbilt. Then, if I stayed in the East, I’d have been ruined. Too many prominent men knew me as Harriet Knowles. But my grandparents didn’t know about Harriet Knowles, so it could not be that. I thought perhaps it was the rape. Lewis had told them about it.

“Would you speak to the young man?” I said. “I’d rather not see him again. If you don’t mind, I will stay in here until he is gone.”

He nodded, rose with a grimace, and walked to the door. As he passed me he said, “I wrote to your aunt yesterday,” which alarmed me—I thought he’d written to her a week ago. Now it would be better if he had
not
written to her; I could have claimed that I had written to her myself, and told him where Jeptha and Agnes were—I had just learned it from Jocelyn, my spy in Boston. They were right here in New York.

XXXIX