Brookland (23 page)

“Yes.”

“Pearl,” he said quietly, “take Mr. Severn's coat?”

Pearl did, and he bowed his head to her as she took it from him.

“I am not an old man,” their father continued, “but I have been set in my habits of mind since my youth. I am not a churchgoer, nor ever shall be. But if I may speak plain, sir, we are desperate. My wife seems almost beyond help, and if there is, as you say, any succor in your presence, we would be most grateful if you could offer it to her. That is all.”

Will Severn's small mouth drew closer in upon itself, as if hearing of Matty's suffering gave him a physical pain. Prue wondered what his temperament had been like before the untimely deaths of his parents. She could imagine them his mooring ropes, and him a rowboat drifting on the open water without them. He did not seem to have any brothers or sisters. “I only wish to say it is never too late to welcome the love of God into your heart,” he said simply.

Matty nodded and looked off toward the window. His collar and cuffs—usually so neat, they were the envy of men of leisure—were wilted. “You are kind to come, Mr. Severn, but you are under no obligation to remain.”

“I disagree,” Prue said. “You must help her, Will.”

He said, “Of course I shall do what I can. Where is she?”

Pearl, with her head ducked down, walked toward the stairs and beckoned him to follow. After they'd gone, Matty raised his unshaven chin toward Prue and said, “ ‘Will'?”

“It's his name, Daddy.”

When Pearl returned alone, he poured them each a thimbleful of gin, with which Tem feigned unfamiliarity. They sat down together to wait.

The hall clock—a masterpiece of irregularity the Winships had acquired with the house from the Joralemons—cycled through two quarters of an hour, meaning somewhere between twenty and forty minutes had elapsed when Will Severn returned, with his gray hair disheveled, as if he'd had his hands in it. “Mr. Winship,” he said, “should we step into the parlor to speak?”

Matty scratched his fingers through his stubble. “There is nothing you may not say before my daughters. I've more or less raised them to be boys.”

Severn looked around at all of them. He had come up behind Pearl's chair, and put one hand gently on her shoulder. “I sat by your wife this while and prayed for her with all my heart. I asked God to have mercy on her and show her the way to salvation. Then I asked if there was aught I could do for her, if I might speak with her or give her the Blessed Sacrament. She did not respond.”

“It has been some while since she's spoken,” Matty said.

“Not even with a glance,” Severn added.

Prue said, “I would take the Sacrament for her.”

He patted Pearl's shoulder, since it was the one he could reach. “That's good of you, but I fear it doesn't work that way. We can pray for her, however. Did your wife never pray, Mr. Winship?”

“My daughter seems to be calling you Will,” he said, with what sounded like pique; “you might as well call me Matty.” Prue's heart jumped when she realized no one would call her father “Reverend” once her mother was gone. “Roxana hasn't prayed in all the years I've known her. Which is twenty-six. No doubt about as long as you've been alive.”

He nodded. “Does she yet take sustenance?”

“Of the most meager sort.”

Will Severn looked down at the table, as if this required the sum of his concentration. “If the doctors can uncover nothing—”

“Nothing,” Matty said. “No physical cause.”

“—and if Mrs. Friedlander can do naught to improve her condition, then I can only conclude she suffers from some malady of the spirit. And I am neither wise nor holy enough a man to cure her if she does not desire my intervention. I don't know that any man could, short of a saint.” All trace of oratory had deserted him, and he was speaking as quietly as Prue had ever heard him speak. “And if your wife will not accept help,” he went on, “then perhaps the kindest thing, the only thing to do is, with as much grace as we can muster, to allow her to resign herself to God.” At this, Matty Winship closed his eyes and pressed his thumb and forefinger over them. “I am sorry if I have spoken out of turn.”

“No,” Matty replied. “It's the trouble that troubles me, not hearing it named.”

“May we offer a prayer together?”

“Please,” Prue said.

Matty shook his head no.

“Will you send for me if her condition changes, or if she experiences a change of heart?”

“Without fail. Thank you, Reverend,” Matty said. “We shall remember your kindness.”

“And I shall pray for Mrs. Winship.” Mr. Severn took up his coat and hat, looked around at all of them, and said, “God bless you. Any hour of the day or night, you may call on me.” He touched Pearl's shoulder one last time, then took his leave.

After he'd left, Pearl wrote,
I believe in God
, on her pad, and put it on the table for all of them to see.
Cannot I have some Infloonse wth Him, on her behaf?

“Pray, Pearlie,” their father said. “By all means, pray. You, too, if you feel inclined,” he said to Prue.

Prue went to sit on the retaining wall down by the water to offer her prayers. The current rushed loudly beneath the thin layer of grubby ice nearest the shore, and as the last river commerce of the day concluded, men shouted and hallooed to one another. Prue could not imagine how God could hear her prayers when she could barely hear herself think, and she wondered if the time for intercession might not have been when her mother was still well. But it was no use wondering. This was her holy ground; this the view she had observed while she had both dreamed her fondest dreams and committed her worst transgressions. She could only beg for mercy, and hope the cry of a single human soul might be audible above the water and the ships.

Abiah was usually first up in the morning, but Prue was often second; and in the weeks that followed, she took to stopping in the hallway outside her parents' door to see if she could make out the sound of her mother's quiet breath beneath the louder rising and falling of her father's. Prue could not go downstairs or go on about her tasks until she'd heard that sound. As February wore on, Roxana began refusing food, and then water; until at last she would take nothing but Dr. Philpot's sweet philter on a spoon. She stopped opening her eyes even to see if it was coming, but she must have been able to hear the cork popping out of the bottle, or smell the nostrum's spicy perfume. One evening as she gave her the dose, Prue whispered to her, “Why are you doing this?”

She did not expect a response, but Roxana worked her tongue in her
dry mouth a moment, then whispered a reply so quiet, Prue could not hear it.

“What did you say?” she asked.

But Roxana's face had already slackened into sleep. She never spoke again, and Prue wished she had been able to make out those words.

Roxana died one night in early March of 1791. She must not have struggled, for Matty slept peacefully beside her until dawn. Prue awakened that morning to hear him crying quietly in his bedroom and whispering, “No.” She felt her heart seize up in her chest, but she could not say anything or even force herself to sit upright. She concentrated on her father's weeping as if she could will it to stop, as if she could will its cause to vanish. She might have remained there an hour had her sisters not rustled in their bed. When Prue rolled over to face them, Tem was sitting up with her palm over Pearl's ear. They both had their dark eyes trained on the bedroom door, but looked immediately to her for succor. Dawn had hardly broken, and the light coming through the window was a pale gray-blue, but she could see the terror on their faces. She stepped across the cold floor to their bed and took both of them in her arms, though she herself was shaking. She wondered how they would approach their father, and if it was possible to prepare herself to see her mother's corpse.

Prue had known her mother's death would come, but this did little to relieve the shock of her passing. All along, the family and neighbors had spoken in low voices of Roxana's illness and declining health, but Prue knew the name for what she'd witnessed, and though she dared not speak it aloud, in her heart she called it
suicide
. She could not reckon how one could call it anything else, when her mother had, after years of unhappiness, simply given up her desire to live and laid herself down to die.

As they lived through the first awful hours of that morning, Prue found herself wondering what her mother had been thinking the night before her death, under the influence of the Eugenic Water. She knew this line of reasoning availed her nothing, yet it was as if she saw her father and sisters through a scrim, so vivid were her imaginings. She wondered if Dr. Philpot's nostrum, or the proximity of death itself, had given her mother new expanses of vision, and if she'd seen Tem and Pearl, incandescent as water nixies, sharing a lukewarm bath in the kitchen, or her
husband leafing through one of Pearl's books of art and architecture, the images rebuffing his gray eyes. She wondered if her mother had seen her fear.

As the evening had worn on, Prue imagined the ponderous eaves of the house had gone translucent as glass, the woodwork, masonry, and furniture like so much aspic. Perhaps for the first time in all the years Roxana had lived there, the old Dutch house had been full of evening light. She might have seen every woman passing on the Ferry Road with a baby in her shawl, every bare branch of the Winship cherry trees, and the broad dome of the evening sky, with dark wisps of cloud blowing past overhead. If she had looked out over the shipping lanes and roiling Manhattan, she would have seen the marshes of Jersey beyond.

Prue imagined that as evening fell in the workaday world, the sun grew brighter for the dead and those soon to join them. Roxana's own mother, Susannah Parker—from whom Roxana had not had even a letter since she'd run off with Matty Winship, and whom Prue pictured as no older than thirty and slim as a cattail—had come in with a picnic luncheon. She'd spread a cloth on Roxana's wasted lap, and set out a lard-fried chicken, pork ribs, a crock of potato salad, damson plums, and a jar of homemade cider. After all those weeks starving herself, Prue's mother sat up hungrily. Prue pictured Susannah Parker with a mole on her right cheekbone. Roxana's dead sister, Louisa, had come to sit by her feet, and struggled to keep in check all the wiggling infants who'd never been named. The largest had sucked happily on a rib bone. Other women, whom even Roxana did not recognize, had stood guard around the edges of the room, doing needlework far stranger than Pearl's. All those weeks, Roxana had not realized how famished she was. The day seemed warm, though she knew it was late winter. When she had finished her lunch, she lay back on her pillow and closed her eyes. The sun burned swirling patterns on the backs of her eyelids, and heated her cheeks till she was sure they would freckle. Metal cups clanked around her, and the womenfolk spat plum pits out through the empty walls. After a time, they finished eating and fell silent, but the breeze continued to play among the branches, and out by the river, the gulls began to cry.

Through the fog of all this imagining, Prue saw that Tem had returned to her bed and was bawling there, and that Pearl, in a daze, was
drifting around the house, touching things. Prue ran out to the back fence and scrutinized the river, but of course there was no spirit ferry. Her mother had been a dire sinner—a person of no belief; a person whose despair had led her to neglect her family, and to value her own immortal soul as lightly as a cast-off feather—but wherever she had gone, it was not as simple as Manhattan. A passing schooner rang its warning bell, as if to tell Prue her reasoning was correct. The breeze seemed especially salty that day and stung her cheeks. She knew she should not wonder if her mother and Johanna had gone to the same place; she should go back inside, and help her family in whatever way she could.

To Recompense, half a lifetime later, she wrote:

I cannot wish you should die before me as that lies not within the bounds of any mother's heart. But neither do I wish upon you the task I performed that day of washing down my mother's body for the coffin. How many hundreds of times she had bathed me in my infancy, I could'n't say; but it seemed stark wrong to take a cloth soap to that nude & lifeless form. Her skin had never look'd so pale, nor her hair so dull and orange, & when I held her in my arms, she weighed no more than Pearl. Abiah spent the morning stitching the shroud.

Prue thought her father seemed unnaturally subdued. She had heard him weeping that morning, but by the time he had come to tell his daughters their mother had passed, his eyes had been dry and his face expressionless. He had remained thus ever since. During all the months of her mother's decline, Prue had feared the way her father's floodgates would burst open at the loss of his beloved. She had imagined he would come unhinged, and had brooded over how she and her sisters would help him. Instead, he seemed as if a gun had gone off near his ear and he was momentarily deaf. He went out; Prue thought he'd gone to arrange for a funeral, but was relieved to discover he had been to knock on Israel Horsfield's door. Israel sent Ben and Isaiah down to keep watch over the girls and shepherded his friend to Mr. Severn's home. He left him there and went down to call off all operations at the distillery, except to commission the carpenter to build a coffin.

All that day and night, the people of Brooklyn came and went as Roxana
lay, with her eyes closed with coins and her jaws bound shut with a clean strip of linen, on the cooling board—an old wooden door—in the parlor. She had candles around her, and a garland of rosemary, but Prue thought she could already smell the stench of the grave, and wondered others did not comment upon it. Ben wanted to hold her hand and bring her tea cakes and liquor, but she could do nothing but sit in a corner and cry. The wake passed in what seemed rather a jumble of events than a straight line, but she recalled seeing, from time to time, one of her sisters come unraveled and some woman of the town taking her upstairs or into her arms to recover.