Brookland (51 page)

The neighbors, down to the smallest children, were clean-scrubbed, and the workers, who were generally coated either in malt dust or sweat, all looked like gentlemen. The last leaves of the neighborhood's small oak trees were beginning to turn brown, but in patches still shone bright yellow against the periwinkle sky. Some people danced, while others stood and ate. After all the worry and tumult of that spring and summer, Prue was happy simply to see people enjoying themselves.

She was relieved Joe Loosely and his wife had come. Joe had not signed their petition out of deference to Losee, but Prue had hoped his memory of her father would prevent him from holding a grudge. He arrived with two large jugs of cider, and his wife with a set of embroidered table napkins; and Prue was thankful her hopes in their quarter had been fulfilled. A few of New York's aldermen also came, though they looked uncomfortable out in the mill yard in their fancy coats. Prue asked Isaiah and Cornelis to look after them, and knew they would do their best to make them welcome. But Prue had also invited Losee and Petra, and she kept looking out to see if they'd arrived. He had stared off toward the water while she spoke to him, and she did not expect him; but in the middle of the afternoon, she saw Petra's white-blond head bobbing along the Shore Road, and behind her, her father, his bandy-legged gait recognizable from any distance. He stood at the outskirts of the gathering awhile, as if he were not certain he saw anyone of his acquaintance. Ben was by then engaged in horseplay with Jens Luquer, and while Prue watched them with half her attention, the remainder wondered what Losee would do.

He took his time meandering through his neighbors, who as they parted seemed to give him the same space and caution they would give an excitable dog. Petra stationed herself before a tray of cinnamon pretzels Peg had baked. Her father came over to Prue, and stood, with his hat in his hands, watching Ben and Jens; they straightened up immediately, as if they were still rowdy boys, and Losee one of the many who might punish them. Ben wiped his hair back from his eyes, and extended his hand without a trace of wariness. “Losee,” he said. “We're honored you've come.”

Losee also extended his hand and, after replacing his hat on his head, clapped Ben on the shoulder. “I wish your parents were still with us. They would have been so glad.”

Ben said, “Thank you, yes.” He and Prue had spoken long that morning about missing them. “I'm glad you've come.”

Losee said, “I, too.” He turned and looked straight at Prue for the first time in months. “No need saying how this would have pleased your father.”

“Everyone says that,” Prue said, “but he always thought Ben a bit of a monkey.”

“Ah,” Losee said. “But he meant it out of love.” He cleared his throat, reached into the vest pocket of his coat, and said, “I've brought you a wedding gift. Something small.”

Prue held out her hand, and Losee pressed it with both of his, engulfing it. What was in his palm tickled against Prue's own. When he took his hands away, Prue saw he'd given her his wife's necklace—a delicate enameled forget-me-not on a fine golden chain. From her earliest childhood, Prue remembered, it had glinted from his wife's throat. “I'm sorry, I cannot accept this,” Prue said. She hadn't cried all day, but the necklace choked her with tears. “It should be Petra's.”

Losee took it back, but only to unhook the clasp. “Petra has other things from her mother. She wants you to have it.” He looked around for her, to corroborate this, but she was eating pretzels and talking to Peg. “Please take it.”

Prue bowed her head toward him, and he fastened it around her neck. When she stood again, she felt its cool, rounded petals with her fingers. “I can't thank you enough,” she said.

Ben moved her hand so he could see it. “It's beautiful,” he said.

Losee said, “Wear it in good health. And accept my apologies for how difficult things have been between us. You know where I stand, but I know you don't mean me any harm. It's a dream of yours, and I cannot fault you for wishing to realize it. And your father would be proud of what you're attempting. You're very like him, you know. He had that same enterprising spirit.”

Prue thanked him again. The tears were still thick in her throat, but she laughed all the same. Ben put his arm around her. “It's good to have you talking to me again,” she said. “And good, however incorrect you are, to know you think I resemble my father.”

“No,” Losee said, “I'm right as rain.” Petra was beckoning to him across the crowd, and he said, “I should go see what she wants. But again, my congratulations.” He shook both their hands. Prue sighed deeply once he had gone.

“It's cause for celebration, not mourning,” Ben said to her.

“I know,” she answered. “I believe I'm doing both.”

The mayor had declined to come, and the aldermen left early—on a boat Mr. Fischer had bedecked with garlands of autumn leaves for the occasion—but the neighbors talked and danced until the last speck and drop were consumed and the sun hung low over Manhattan. Patience had long since gone home with her infant, and Tem and Pearl had gone down to the retaining wall to watch the sun set over the crying gulls and the late-day ships. Isaiah's three- and one-year-olds were scratching with shells in the packed sand in the middle of the mill yard and shouting incoherently at each other as they played. Prue leaned her head against Ben's shoulder.

“It was a good day,” Isaiah said. Ben rocked Prue against him, perhaps in answer. “Business as usual Monday?”

“What choice have we?” Prue answered.

Isaiah laughed, one of her favorite sounds. “None.”

“None at all,” Ben said. “You'll make gin, and I'll start inquiring into materials for our bridge. Business as usual, indeed.”

The light was draining from the sky. In a quarter hour it would be dark.

“Well,” Isaiah said. He wiped something from his sleeve. “Have a good night, and a good day of rest. Will we see you in church tomorrow?”

Ben said, “Perhaps.”

Prue thought of her father, damning it to Hell. She was glad Ben was holding her close, as the wind was picking up from the river.

“Monday, then. Israel! Joan!” he called to his children. They heard him, but affected not to have. He whistled through his teeth. “Come! Your Aunt Maggie's making supper.”

Small Israel pocketed his shell and tried to drag his sister toward them by the armpits. She began to cry, squirmed free, and started crawling toward her father across the sand. The wind whipped through her fair hair. Ben bent down to pick her up and kiss her. He passed her off, still screaming, to Isaiah, who stowed her under his arm and carried her along the Shore Road, with Israel capering at his heels. As Isaiah walked, he dusted the sand from the baby's kicking legs.

Prue called out, “Tem?” and when she did not reply, “Pearl?” She
drew Ben toward the water to see where they'd gone. In only a few minutes, the river traffic had dropped off for the evening. Tem and Pearl were seated on the retaining wall, two dark forms leaning back to back upon each other, before the dark water. “Hoyay,” Prue said, not loudly enough to startle them. The sound of the water purling past must have dampened her voice, but one of them turned as if she might have heard something, and waved her hand when she saw them coming. Prue knew the waver had to be Pearl—Tem would simply have shouted—but in the dim light, and with both of them in women's clothing, they were indistinguishable. “Hello,” Prue said. “What are you doing?”

“Watching the water. Beautiful,” Tem said. She leaned heavily into Pearl and turned her face toward Prue, who could see she'd been drinking.

“Don't you wish to come in?” Ben asked. “It's grown chilly.”

“Your beautiful bridge,” Tem said, to no one in particular. Pearl had her book right up near her face, and when she finished writing, she beckoned Prue to her. Prue had to remove the chain from Pearl's neck to get the words close enough to see, and she tilted them back and forth in the moonlight. Pearl had written,
Mess in the Yard,—should'n't we clean it?

“No, it can wait till tomorrow,” Prue said.

Pearl gestured she wanted her book back, and wrote,
I'll fetch Abiah. Yr not thinking about Annimals
.

Ben saw it this time, and said, “Oh, Pearlie, if the coons and coyotes want cheese rinds and beer drippings, we should let them feast.”

She put her pencil back in its hasp, strung the chain over her head, and leaned back and whistled at Tem.

“Very well,” Tem said. Ben offered her his free hand, and she nearly fell as she stood, but didn't want to be supported as she walked.

Pearl reopened her book and wrote,
Wager she'll have a good Puke befor we get home
.

“Never mind if she does,” Ben said. “We'll look after her.”

When they arrived at the house, Abiah had a fire going, and some toast and tea. “I assume you ate your fill during the day,” she said, in apology for the meager supper.

Tem fell asleep in the chair by the fire, and it was not even eight before Pearl began to yawn. She woke Tem up and coaxed her to go upstairs. “Should we retire, too?” Ben asked.

Abiah prepared a candle for him—as, Prue realized, he did not know his way around their house in the dark.

Prue turned by rote toward her childhood bedroom, then reminded herself to go the other direction, across the hall. Abiah had made them a good bedroom fire, turned back their sheets, and placed her wedding flowers, a bunch of the same white chrysanthemums she and Pearl had worn, in a pitcher on the writing desk. They had a sharp odor, even against the strong scent of the fire, but this didn't bother Prue; the flowers reminded her of the day.

She did not write more of her wedding night to her daughter. She couldn't attribute this to modesty—she had, after all, been frank with Recompense about their escapades in the years before they'd married, and had prepared her for her own wedding night, though the conversation had made Recompense squirm. Yet there was something inalienably private about her memory of her first night with Benjamin Horsfield in their own bed; not so much their physical intimacy as her memory of his puzzlement over how the blue dress unhooked, and of the way the wind had rattled the windowpanes. She remembered taking off the forget-me-not and not knowing where to put it for the night, as she had never had a necklace before. She had never had a ring, either, and had been surprised to see it there when she'd awakened the following morning.

What was private, Prue supposed, was to recall that moment of transition from her life alone to her life with Ben. Of course she had felt herself joined to him a long time already, and there was no real separating their marriage from their friendship from their collaboration on the bridge. Neither was there any way to mark out her love for him from the fruit of it, which was the very person to whom she wrote. Yet she wanted to draw a curtain around them that evening, and keep for herself the way the bed-ropes had creaked when Ben sat down to remove his shoes, and how they had both burst out laughing at what her sisters would think. Perhaps she simply wanted to remember what it was like in those last moments before their hopes began to sour into disappointments. And she did not know why it was so difficult to tell her daughter this, except that Recompense's prospects looked so hopeful still. There is nothing the young like to hear less, she thought, than that those who are old and disillusioned
were once as optimistic as they; there is nothing they believe less than that they themselves should someday face those same hardships, or others like them.

She was dramatizing, she knew. Recompense may not have been a particularly reflective person, but she was compassionate, and she seemed to know her parents, not simply to love them blindly. This, Prue reasoned, was precisely the reason her daughter would not fault her for this lacuna in the narrative. She drew the curtain closed across her wedding night, and signed her letter with love.

“But I would have liked to hear the story,” Recompense told Jonas in bed the evening she received it. A few weeks previously he had noticed her mother's letters in her workbasket, and she had confessed the correspondence, and conveyed to him the entire long history. She had blushed the whole time, as she had been unable to account for her behavior in hiding the letters from him. Certainly he had listened with interest and respect when she had told him the tale; certainly the letters contained nothing of which she should be ashamed.

“Why should you want to hear it?” he asked, and, gritting his teeth together, shook his head as if he had a chill. “There is nothing I wish less to envision than how my parents fared on their wedding night. The less I know, the better.”

“I understand,” Recompense said. His parents were more staid than hers; she did not wonder he had no interest in imagining their youth, as they did not appear ever to have had one. She pulled the covers up around her shoulders, and the baby did a flip in her belly, as it always did when she settled down for the night. “Still, I can't help wondering what she might have told me.”

“You've a different constitution than have I,” he said, and curled up around her.

Recompense fell asleep that night imagining her parents in their youth. No portrait had ever been made of her father as a young man, but she could imagine his face from her cousin Israel's; her mother she had seen both in the painting in the countinghouse and in her own reflection. She could conjure up her parents on their wedding day vividly, even
down to that now tattered blue dress, which her mother still kept in her cupboard. Recompense knew both her parents had been buffeted by the life they'd led; so she was more pleased than she could articulate to see them, smooth-skinned and not yet disappointed, fumbling with the complicated hooks on that gown, the night of their marriage.