Brookland (21 page)

I too
, Pearl wrote, thankfully on a fresh sheet.

—Och God
, Mother said, exactly as Johanna would have done. She was shaking her head.

Father drew his lips between his teeth. I thought his expression did not bode well. After a moment he said,—Well, why did'n't you say so, monkey? He gave a strained and somewhat ominous laugh here, I thought for Mr. Severn's benefit.—I did'n't press you into service at the distillery, you know; you've always done as you wished. (I thought as he said this it was not so;—I had fought to be trained in the making of gin, & had had to prove myself against his skepticism. Still I understood this
performance was for Mr. Severn & not for me, so I kept mum.) If it's sermonizing you hanker for, I suppose you may go and get some without coming to any lasting harm; only,—and you'll excuse my saying so, Mr. S.,—do'n't say I did'n't warn ye. If it's church you want, church you shall have, but I wager you'll find it terrible dull and chiefly wrong-headed besides. Again, Mr. S., beg your pardon.

—No offense taken, Will said, though how he could fail to be discomfited by the foregoing escaped me.

—And you, Temmy? Father asked.

—I'll not go, she said, but I never did,—

Here Pearl reached over and clouted her sharply on the knee.

Tem said,—Ow! but said nothing further, which was surely Pearl's intention in thwacking her.

Mr. Severn was still scarlet. Father said,—Perhaps they could in some way profit by your instruction, sir. Perhaps you could learn 'em to sit still, at least, better ‘n I have done.

—Oh, he said. But my school is only for boys,—

Mother said,—I'm certain he meant that metaphorickal-wise.

Pearl wrote a new note & held it up for each of us to see in turn. It read, Ire
shall look forward to beefing a Sermon. We shall come on Sunday
.

—I believe you'll regret it, Father said.

With his eyes cast down, Mr. Severn added,—At nine, then.

He remained talking with us another hour. The whole while, I felt torn between delight in his presence & desire to see him leave, lest he tell our parents some other thing we did not want them to know. It redounded to his credit with me, he had not taken that first opportunity to inform them about our visits.

So it was thus Pearl & I began to go, with our parents' grudging and bewildered consent, to church. I felt awkward & ugly when I put on my one dress, but too afraid of my parents' teasing to ask for a new one; likewise, the first time we took our seat in one of the rearmost pews, the eyes of half the village spun round to look at us, & I did not like their expressions. Every countenance seemed to bear the message,
There's plain Prue Winship, sweet on the minister & come to get him to pay court
. A few seem'd to add,
Plenty of money, too, for all her peculiarity. She'll get what she wants
. After that first Sunday, however, Ben contrived to come sit beside
me, and held my hand tightly in his. This was no more proper than the sin of which my neighbours' glances correctly accused me, but I felt glad of his friendship all the same.

My dear, I am begun to think, if instead of writing you these letters, I were to put my pen to some topick of broad social interest, I might manage to submit a column weekly to the
Long-Island Courier
. I enjoy the writing, & it is some comfort to know that if for years I have been short in my replies to you, I may now redress that wrong, and learn you some of what you wish to know. But the answers I receive from you divulge little, except your interest in furthering the story along. You have ever been impressionable, and I know a new city, a new husband, and a babe within do not go unremark'd in your mind & heart. I realize I may not have altogether earned the right to be your confidante, but I would gladly be so, if I may.

So. I shall proceed, but first I await yr word—

Faithful
^y
PW

V
isitors stopping by the Winship household after Johanna's death might have surmised, from the house's condition, Roxana's spirits had finally picked up. No housekeeping could change that the house was old, Dutch, and dreary, but in her cleaning after the funeral Abiah Browne had scrubbed the windows with newssheets and vinegar. Later in the week she returned to begin training a trumpet vine Matty had transplanted from the Horsfields' yard to grow over the long-neglected trellis. Against Roxana's wishes, Matty went to Jacob and Henry Hicks and asked if they'd be willing to share Abiah's services a few days per week. As they were not, he took Abiah aside and offered her substantially larger wages than the Hicks brothers paid her. She gave her former employers a few days to advertise for a replacement, then tied her possessions in a bundle and walked downriver to the Winship house.

When Roxana saw her, she wept. She had been keeping Johanna's room almost as a shrine, and not allowing the girls in; she could not tolerate the notion of a new person moving into the place her friend had occupied. Abiah stared at the floor while Roxana ranted at her, and sat down at the table when Roxana ran upstairs and shut her door. Pearl came up and wrote a note intended to comfort her, and thus discovered Abiah couldn't read. As if Prue did not have sufficient responsibilities already, Matty set her to teach Abiah in the evenings, “As,” he said, “it will be a hardship for Pearl if she cannot communicate with her.”

Pearl missed Johanna, and sometimes cried for her; but she did her best to welcome Abiah with an open heart, despite that the two could
barely communicate. Abiah was young and mild-tempered, and seemed like springtime itself compared to their mother's gloom.

Roxana suffered no malady either Dr. de Bouton or Dr. Philpot could diagnose, only the despondency that had afflicted her in bouts as long as Prue could remember. Dr. de Bouton counseled that time would help heal her; Dr. Philpot recommended small doses of his Eugenic Water, to ease her toward the oblivion she seemed to desire. Roxana preferred the second prescription, and soon had her husband or her daughters walking up to the Twin Tankards for a bottle of the elixir on a regular basis. She would ask Abiah for nothing.

Roxana's grief was genuine, and Prue could imagine how low she herself would feel if Ben were to die, or Mr. Severn; yet as the weeks and months wore on, her mother's misery began to grate upon her. “I don't understand,” she told her one night, as they stood together drying dishes at the sideboard. “We all grieve for Johanna,” Prue for more complicated reasons than any of her kin could know, “but she was old and ill. Her time had come.”

Roxana sniffed at her in exasperation. “You'll see when you get older, Prue. You form attachments to people—you grow to love them—and sooner or later you lose them all. Your parents, your friends; you might think you'll be able to keep your children a spell, but if my womb offers any forecast for yours, you'll lose half of them, too, by and by. Even if you have the good fortune to live into your decrepitude, you die and leave all you loved behind you.”

This was unsettling to a girl of nineteen. It also raised her dander. “All those circumstances cause sadness, I know. But she was an old woman. She was a slave, not your child—you may have loved her, but you also
bought
her of Mr. Remsen.”

Roxana glared at her with her lips shut tight. They had begun to sprout wrinkles at their corners from so often holding this expression. “You're a coldhearted creature,” she said, then refused to speak to Prue the rest of the evening.

Prue had a hundred reasons to find this infuriating, chiefly that at one level her mother was right: Prue had cursed her infant sister and hated the family's frail old slave, and now could muster no sympathy for her own mother's grief. But she could not lash out at her; it would have been unfair, when her mother's spirits were so depressed. Abiah, who already
had opinions about the affairs of the household, concurred. One morning, after a row that had sent Roxana weeping to her bedroom, Abiah took Prue aside and whispered, “You say Philpot and de Bouton don't know what to do. But has your father brought in Mrs. Friedlander?” As a result, Prue walked out across Boerum's Hill that morning though the expedition would make her late to work, and brought the old woman back with her. Mrs. Friedlander smoothed Roxana's brow and left Abiah with the dried petals of a red flower with no English name, to be steeped twice daily into a tisane. No one saw any improvement result from the medication, but the family remained hopeful it would work given time.

Despite Abiah's industriousness, a pall fell over the Winship house—in part from legitimate grief and in part from Roxana's distortion of it. Though the family did not discuss it, those who could began to spend less time at home. For Tem, little changed, as she had always preferred to be out in the company of the Luquer or Remsen children. But where Matty had formerly retired to the tavern one evening in three or four, he now began a regular program of kissing his daughters after supper, going upstairs to kiss his wife, and leaving to drink with Joe Loosely. He told his family all the most thoughtful men of the neighborhood—himself, Israel Horsfield, Joe Loosely, Nicolaas Luquer, old Mr. Boerum, Dr. de Bouton, and Theunis van Vechten, who was Brooklyn's sawyer by trade, but had always fancied himself a bit of a natural philosopher—had “formed a Junto, for the discussion of subjects of merit, based on that model society for debate founded by the estimable Mr. Benjamin Franklin.”

“What's a subject of merit?” Tem asked. Her tone did not indicate real interest.

“Something like the affairs of France. We shall begin, however, with something closer to home—the necessity of and difficulties militating against bridging the East River. There's a proposal been put forth by an Englishman, name of Thomas Telford. Heard of him, Prue?”

Prue nodded. She hesitated to express her eagerness to learn of the project and see the design. Her mother's scorn for her fascination with the distillery had done nothing to temper her enthusiasms, but had taught Prue to keep the outward signs thereof in check. “He's a famous man, Daddy—a county surveyor by trade, I believe. He built a masonry bridge a few years since, well known for its harmonious proportion.”

“Hmm,” Matty said. He seemed more interested in his roast and potatoes.
“You know more of it than Joe, and he's the one who's set up the Junto.”

“May I join in the discussion?” Prue asked.

“No, lambkin, it's a club: men only.”

“But I—”

“I know,” her father said. “You're as versed as any of us on the question. You know the difficulty the sand poses, and the breadth of the span, and the need to build high enough to admit tall ships. But I won't have my daughter spouting opinions in a smoky barroom.”

Prue did, at least, convince him to take good note of what he heard at the Junto and relay it back to her; but his report the next morning disappointed her. “It won't do,” he told her as they walked down the lane to begin the day's labor. His face looked swollen from too much drinking or not enough sleep, and his black hat wanted blocking. “We're none of us a bridge architect, of course, but Telford's plan wouldn't clear the water by a sufficient distance to admit the masts of an oceangoing vessel. He's proposed a sort of drawbridge for the river's center, but it's not sensible.”

Prue had never considered a drawbridge, and her mind was already spinning out the possibility. “Why so?”

“Our ports'd lose half their custom if the straits could only be navigated by one ship at a time; and he estimates the time to raise and lower the thing at two hours, despite an ingenious block and tackle system and using oxen for the brunt of the work. A terrible plan; though beautifully, persuasively drawn.”

“I should still like to see it,” Prue said.

“Joe's got it at the tavern. I'm sure he'll show it off, if you ask.”

He did not report any of the Junto's further findings or discussions to her. Prue never saw him reading up on anything, though their own small library might have been of tremendous value to him; and she wondered at times if he'd concocted the idea of a Junto to explain his ever-presence at the Liberty Tavern. She didn't have the heart to ask Israel Horsfield if her father's story was true.

Pearl could do little to escape their house, and Prue could see how much this tried her; but she herself began going down to the distillery earlier in the morning and remaining later in the afternoon, to recheck belts that had already been checked, and to rewrite the inventory logs in a
cleaner hand. She also shirked her lessons with Abiah and began to take evening rambles with Ben.

She had no sense if this was truly how she wished to spend her leisure. She worried about leaving Pearl to her devices in so sad a house, and agonized over how it was her fault her sister could not communicate with Abiah except by the grossest signs. Yet she could not force herself to remain at home; and Abiah never reproached her over the missed tutoring. Prue's love for Will Severn meanwhile burned unabated, but Mr. Severn did not go out walking with her, and had none but the most pastorly advice about her mother's ailment. He thought Roxana should repent and pray, and Prue grew uncomfortable trying to convey to him the unlikelihood of such a change of heart. Ben, by contrast, always took Prue's side when she recounted an opinion or disagreement, and registered his views with oaths and exclamations. He still reminded her of a puppy, though of a nearly grown one. His hair had gone light brown, but retained its slight curl; and with his blue eyes, still too large for his pointy face, he continued to regard her as if she were both trustworthy and humorous. Without doubt he was her closest friend, and the only person who heard her current difficulties without offering pious counsel; even Isaiah was apt to mention “duty” when pressed. Both boys had finished school the previous year and were employed in learning the business of their father's small farm, that they might choose to manage it, if so inclined, or else learn through physical labor the value of pitching upon a more learned profession. Both were released from responsibility when the sun went down, but it was always Ben with whom she went out.