Ollie's Cloud (32 page)

Chapter 23

It has been gnawing on him, this fierce beast of guilt. Jonathon would love to continue his self-righteous conceit—that Oliver is wholly to blame for William Kiekuk’s suicide—but he knows better. He knows that he is equally to blame for this tragedy, for there is no difference between the sins of commission and the iniquities of omission when both lead to terrible pain and catastrophe.

In the dim gaslight of the darkroom, as Jonathon removes a plate from the fuming box, he is filled with regret. He alone, perhaps, holds the secret that could have prevented Ollie’s misguided behavior. It’s time to correct his omission, no matter what the consequences. Slipping on his rumpled jacket and buttoning it on the run, he catches a carriage and gives the driver the address of the boardinghouse.

He can feel the daguerreotype in his breast pocket. He has carried it there for weeks, always intending to find the right time to reveal it.

This may not be the best time, but it is a better time than later.

Phebe is mourning with relatives in Connecticut. The boarding house has been left in the maladroit hands of Beatrice, the servant girl, who is growing more distraught by the minute as unfulfilled responsibilities cascade into calamity, or so she believes.

Following breakfast, Ollie steps outside for a walk just as Jonathon Fury is racing across the street towards the house. Both men hesitate for a moment—
how will the other one react to this sudden reunion?
—but then both wave acknowledgement.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Ollie says matter-of-factly, trying not to show his great pleasure at seeing Jonathon again.

“Our last time together was not a pleasant one,” Jonathon replies.

“Yes, I know. But surely you can’t hold a grudge against me for confronting Mary’s killer. Certainly she deserved some kind of justice, a concept that seems entirely foreign to the police.”

“I can’t argue against justice,” Jonathon says quietly. “But the matter of whether justice was served is what I came to see you about.”

Ollie won’t be drawn into a philosophical argument. “It’s a tired old topic, my friend,” Ollie says. “Anyway, I have some very good news to share with you. My mother’s coming to New York.”

“I thought you were estranged?”

“No longer. She wrote to me and apologized. Wants to see me. Ohh—and she’s getting married to Herbert, my mentor. I’m very anxious for you to meet my family.”

Jonathon pauses. This conversation is not going as he had planned. He hesitates to bring up the subject of the daguerreotype’s secret for fear that it will dampen Ollie’s spirits.

Ollie takes Jonathon by the arm and starts to walk toward the street. “Let’s walk,” he says. “It’s such a beautiful day.”

And so they walk together for over two hours. Where before Ollie protected his history like a dam holding back a deep reservoir of personal experience, his story now streams out like a whitewater river. Astonished by the details, Jonathon scarcely speaks. He had not known that Ollie was half-Persian, that his mother was enslaved by the Turkoman, or that his father was a member of the Qajar dynasty. He learns of the harsh days at the Charterhouse, the narrow escape from the lair of Reginald Pennick, the betrayal by his own father and his mother’s downward spiral from spirituality to infamy. The man who has been his employer—this brittle English journalist—becomes a human being.

The two men stop at a park and claim a wooden bench. “It occurs to me,” Ollie says, “that I’ve monopolized the conversation. Forgive me. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Forgiven. But I had no idea who you were and where you came from.”

“Maybe you can tell me who I am. Sometimes I don’t know.”

Jonathon starts to speak, but Ollie holds up a hand to stop him. “No more about me, please. But since I’ve shared some of my secrets with you, perhaps you’ll reciprocate. I know about your orphanage experiences and how you learned the art of daguerreotype, but almost nothing more. I know the book-ends, but none of the books. Now please, tell me about your life after the orphanage.”

Jonathon is not prepared to discuss his life. He never is. But he knows he cannot refuse after Ollie’s candid outpouring.

“My life is no match for yours, I’m afraid. Rather dull stuff. Grew up with my step-parents, went to the seminary, and left before graduation. Trouble is I have an abundance of questions and far too little faith. My religious questions were never answered. The way I see it, though, my education opened my eyes to the real Truth, that religion is designed for small minds and deep pockets.

“I traveled around a bit and sketched many immigrants. Such wonderful faces! Inevitably my conversations with them led to that old topic of religion, for many of these people practiced faiths that I had barely heard of. I wish that I could say I found a faith to believe in, but I didn’t. I found an abundance of piety and empty ritual, and more discouragingly, I became even more confused. So many faiths, so many practices, so many beliefs.

“I’ve grown weary of mystical speculation. I’ve come to appreciate facts. And the material world. If I worship anything, it’s the superficial. The surface of things. The way that light plays on a church steeple is now a spiritual experience for me. I care not at all what goes on in the sanctuary below. I see fulfillment in reality, and disappointment in religion. So many people are awaiting the coming of their Savior. So many are hopeful, but will be disappointed. My religion is art, and I am seldom disappointed.

It occurs to Jonathon that by releasing his own flood of self-revelation he has created the perfect opportunity to fulfill his mission of Truth. Almost as if to redeem his self-indulgence, he bends his words to suit his new purpose.

“You are a writer, Ollie,” Jonathon continues, “but sometimes a picture can reveal a truth that words cannot describe—or verify. Would you like an example?”

Ollie nods his head, not sure what to expect.

Jonathon removes a daguerreotype from the breast pocket of his coat. “Here is a picture that you have never seen, yet it reveals a truth that concerns you deeply. Take a close look.”

Ollie takes the metal plate and studies it carefully.

“It’s Nick Moore’s House,” Ollie says. “The tavern at the Elysian Fields.”

A bittersweet twinge. Memories of a happier time.

Jonathon looks at Ollie’s moist eyes as they stare at the picture. “I took this picture the day I met you there. You were with Phebe, and a short time later Mary joined you.”

“Yes… a wonderful day. Some day I’ll write about it. Haven’t been able to yet.”

“And when you do,” Jonathon says quietly, “will your words tell the truth? Will they tell the truth as well as this daguerreotype does?”

“I don’t understand you. There is no one I know in this picture—not Mary or Phebe, not me. What does this picture have to do with me?”

“This little picture,” Jonathon says, “reveals the truth of Mary’s life—and death.”

“Nonsense!” Ollie says. He doesn’t like the new direction that this conversation is taking. “It has nothing to do with Mary. It’s just a picture of a tavern with a bunch of stupid people standing in front of it staring at your camera.”

“There’s more, if you look harder,” Jonathon urges.

“I think we should start back. I’m not interested in this historical record of people I don’t know.”

“You know one of them. At least you know who she is.”

Jonathon looks at the picture again and shakes his head. “I don’t know any of them,” he explains.

“One of them is the person that Mary came to see that day. The reason she went to the Elysian Fields.”

“She went there to relax with her mother and me.”

“A secondary benefit of the excursion,” Jonathon suggests. “But her main reason was to meet someone about a matter of great importance. Quite literally a matter of life and death.”

“What can you possibly be talking about?” Ollie asks.

“I arrived at the Elysian Fields to take a picture of Nick Moore’s House,” Jonathon says. “I know the proprietor, an immigrant I befriended once. I don’t mind making an extra dollar here and there—by the way, I’ve calculated your share. When I arrived at the tavern, I saw Mary inside. She was seated at a table across the room talking to another woman, a woman I knew from a sketch I once made. The woman’s name is Madame Restell.”

To Ollie, the name has a familiar ring to it. And then suddenly he recalls the sketch by Jonathon Fury in the newspaper that he came across at Mr. Bickford’s reading room. The evil woman with a smirking, bat-like demon clutching a dead infant in front of her belly.

Madame Restell, the abortionist.

Ollie holds up the picture, studies the faces. Yes, there—the third face from the left—that could be Restell.

Ollie looks up at Jonathon. His face asks the question, and Jonathon replies, “I leave it to you to decide what business Mary may have had with Madame Restell, but after she left the room—I suppose to compose herself before rejoining you—I asked the other guests to join me outside for a picture. Who could refuse being the subject of a daguerreotype? This image is the result.”

Ollie slumps. “Mary was pregnant?”

Jonathon looks at his friend and speaks again. “Daniel’s child, I’m thinking. When we were looking for her, I returned to the Elysian Fields. I spoke with one of the guests who told me that Madame Restell and Mary were there the day that Mary disappeared. He’s the old gentleman on the far right side of the picture. He’s always there. But he wouldn’t tell the police what he knew for fear that he’d be implicated.”

Ollie looks up with sad eyes. “You think that Mary went there for an abortion the night she disappeared?”

Jonathon nods. “And it went badly. I don’t think they killed her on purpose, but when she died they must have dumped her body—“

“My God!” Ollie yells. “Kiekuk.”

“Nothing to do with it. Was with his friends the whole time, just as they told the police.”

Suddenly Ollie stands angrily. “And you knew about this! Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you wait until now?”

Now Jonathon slumps. Sighs. Looks up pleadingly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I came to apologize. I think I was afraid of hurting your feelings—about Mary being pregnant. It was wrong.”

“My God,” Ollie says again. “We killed him.”

Hearing those words so coldly stated pierces Jonathon’s heart. The two men remain speechless for a long time.

The next afternoon, Ollie and Jonathon place flowers on William Kiekuk’s simple grave and Jonathon recites the Lord’s Prayer for the first time in five years.

He has not forgotten a word of it.

Chapter 24

The pain in his chest threatens to burst into the rest of his body. Ollie knows that the pain is not physical; it is the anguish of deep sorrow and remorse, the festering of blame and unfulfilled revenge, the open wound of unanswered questions—all of this infected by the blasphemous notion that God, above all the human villainy, is the One Most Responsible for the tragedies of Mary Rogers and William Kiekuk. What a scheme He has devised! Evil reigns and unfairness prevails.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the iniquities of their parents and serve as chattel for the selfish ones who rule without the hindrance of conscience or compassion.

Ollie holds the entire system to blame from the captains of industry in their regal castles ruling their slum-bound serfs, to the priests and bishops who just as rigorously control their minions through the never-yielding harness of sin and conveniently re-legislated laws of God. It is a system obviously condoned by God, else why would the same abuses of power continue to exist over such a vast expanse of time?
And God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was filled with suffering for all but the most ruthless.

How different God looks on this side of the world.

It is early Sunday morning in the dark sitting room of the Rogers boarding house. It is God’s day, and Ollie wishes he did not believe in God. He would pray for the courage to be an atheist, but how can one ask for help from the very Entity one wishes did not exist?

Of course, his fevered thinking is wrong. The Truth is that there is a God, and God would not create suffering, therefore suffering must be an invention of humankind. Why God does not intervene to prevent suffering is an open question at the moment—but perhaps it is because He has not been asked, or not asked with the correct protocol.

Ollie considers his current spiritual life and finds that he has none. He has not read the Bible in months. For a year or more he has not listened to the words of God, except for Jonathon’s quiet recital of the Lord’s Prayer at Kiekuk’s gravesite. The God-intoxicated child who longed to be a mulla has slid into a shadow-world where God is most often invoked by swearing, a habit that has replaced prayer in Ollie’s life. It is so satisfying to enjoin God to condemn some foul person or hateful action to the fires of hell. As if God is there merely to serve the whims of His creation.

Discipline.

God is disciplining Ollie. This occurs to him in a blinding flash of insight. It is simple reward and punishment. So far, mostly punishment. That it is unfair for Mary and William to have been sacrificed to abet Ollie’s discipline makes no sense in a material world, but who among men can judge spiritual justice? If Ollie is to experience the rewards of God’s labyrinthine system, he must read the signposts and navigate a new course. Perhaps take up prayer again, or read the scriptures. Or go to church. Then maybe the pain will disappear and God’s reward magically will manifest itself.

During this tortured reasoning Ollie suddenly shudders with the understanding that the fate of his mother is in his own trembling hands. Anne Chadwick, right now on a steamer from London to New York City, is a necessary player in the unfolding drama of Ollie’s discipline.
Punishment:
she perishes on the journey.
Reward:
she reaches New York, reconciles with Ollie, and the two live happily ever after.

Is it this simple? And this terrible?
My God
, he thinks, quickly turning the curse into a prayer.
I am such a fool!

It is Sunday morning, one week before his mother arrives. Is it possible to redeem his entire life in one week? Are seven days of piety sufficient to halt—or even simply ease—the inevitable punishment?

No, his thinking is too self-serving, a mockery of God’s justice. He must not think of himself, only his mother.
Her protection.
Everything he does must be done for her sake, not his. There can be no reward for selfishness. Only more punishment. And yet he cannot keep his thoughts from wandering to the pain
he
will surely experience if she is taken from him again, especially after the heart-wrenching loss of Mary Rogers.

He must go to church!

Quickly he dresses, races to the street and summons a carriage. He directs the driver to Jonathon’s small apartment on Ruth Street and with pounding fists on the vibrating door wakes his red-eyed companion from a sound sleep.

“What on earth—” Jonathon moans upon opening the door.

“Get dressed, man. We’re going to church,” Ollie explains.

“Church? Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s Sunday. Now hurry up!” Ollie pushes the owly young man into his bedroom.

“Church,” Jonathon mutters. “I should get extra pay for this.”

“You’ll get something extra, all right. In heaven. Now hurry up!”

Jonathon scrambles to find suitable clothes, begins to put on a shirt. “What church do you have in mind?” he asks.

“Thought you might have a suggestion,” Ollie replies.

“You’re in a hurry to go to church, but you don’t know what church you’re going to. Am I understanding this fully?”

“Yes, indeed you are. I’m sure you know a good church. You were a religious man in your former years as I recall.”

“I know many of the churches in New York mainly because I have made pictures of their exteriors. What’s your preference? Catholic or protestant? Certainly not Jewish.”

“And surely not Catholic,” Ollie says.

“Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Congregational, Dutch Reformed or Unitarian?”

“Rather like a menu, isn’t it? From which plate did you eat?”

“Baptist.”

“Then Baptist it is.”

“Big or small? Plain or fancy?”

“Don’t care, really. Just take me to the Baptist church that most impressed you.”

“The people or the building?”

This stops Ollie. He thinks for a moment before replying, “Jonathon, take me to the damn church where you think God is most welcome.”

“I no longer believe in God.”

Ollie rolls his eyes, exasperated.

Jonathon pulls on his pants. Suddenly livened he says, “But if there were a God, I think he would feel most welcome where there’s some vigor. I know just the church.”

The carriage ride, under Jonathon’s direction, takes just over an hour and transports Ollie out of the city proper. New York City is still overwhelmingly rural compared to London, pastoral as far north as Fourteenth Street and mostly swamp beyond. Grand brownstones and gray factories rise next to fields and groves, and slums fester within earshot of farmland. Lavish Victorias and sporty phaetons patrol the rutted streets alongside dilapidated hay wagons.

The carriage route takes them up Broadway, past the rebuilt Trinity Church and its majestic spire, past Astor’s Opera House, Washington Hall, Gothic Hall, the New York Hospital, and under the arched stone bridge at Canal Street. Past the bridge, the graded streets degenerate for a time into uneven horse paths, but after Union Square the carriage turns up Fifth Avenue to again find pockets of New York opulence.

Within several blocks the carriage enters a swampy shantytown of muck and garbage, ragpickers and half-feral pigs. The carriage wheels slip sideways in the slime, causing the horses to lean heavily into their task of wrenching the carriage through this fetid pestilence. Then at last the slum is behind them and the road hardens. Within fifteen minutes they are all the way to 174
th
Street, trotting easily over the High Bridge and its huge stone arches to arrive at the other side of the East River.

Jonathon points out a plain wooden church on a hilltop above a small settlement. “The Lord is welcome here,” he says, “and the Devil visits at his own peril.”

The carriage pulls up outside the church, which is surrounded by farm wagons and tethered horses. Already the building is bloated with bodies—a wall of backsides block the front door, window sills serve as improvised pews—and still more people are arriving. Had not Ollie known that this was a church service, he might have guessed it a siege. Within minutes the fragile structure is completely surrounded by people—families with crying infants, tobacco-spitting grandpas, matrons with breadbasket bosoms and boxes of food. Children run and dance in the coarse grass, old men listen in vain at the windows and doors. Only muted shouts and gasps emit from the clap-board heart of this gathering humanity.

And then the building explodes, or so it seems. Red-faced people begin to stream out the doors, children leap out the windows, all of them motioning for the onlookers to join them in a march toward a meadow behind the church. The early October breezes are cool, but the churchgoers seem overheated. At last the preacher, a solemn and sallow matchstick figure, awkward-limbed and stiff-jointed, grimly steps down the three creaking stairs to the ground and slowly marches to the front of the outdoor assemblage. Jonathon and Ollie take seats in the grass among the others.

Reverend Starkweather may look like a dead man already embalmed, but his voice—oh, that resonant voice, by turns a raspy roar, a sensuous whisper, or a ghostly wail quivering with the vibration of angels—that voice instantly exerts an extraordinary influence over the crowd. It burrows into their minds, obliterating logical thought and allowing deeply buried emotions to surface. And the man’s face, that cadaverous face, begins actually to shine and he takes on a most pleasing, almost handsome countenance. As he speaks, the stiffness in his limbs transforms into the supple grace of a dancer, and the October clouds above seem actually to separate and bathe the preacher and his throng in a holy light.

“Brother William Miller,” the preacher is saying, “by the power of God Almighty, has unlocked the most impenetrable mystery of the universe. The time of the Second Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ. The return of our Savior. Sometime during the year 1843, Jesus Christ shall return to earth in His glory, Hallelujah!”

A chorus of shouted Hallelujahs rises to the heavens.

Ollie is stunned. He has not heard of this man named Miller, but the man’s message is abundantly familiar, for 1843-44 corresponds to the Islamic year in which the Qa’im, the Promised One of Islam, is to appear. He shivers at the prospect that two Manifestations of God might appear almost simultaneously. The cherished teachings of Islam, nearly erased by his Christianity, begin to flood Ollie with tender remembrances that mingle oddly with the apocalyptic revelations of Reverend Starkweather.

“Those of us who have been converted,” Starkweather is saying, “will never taste the sting of death. We will be gathered up into His loving arms—” Starkweather gracefully swoops his arms around a mass of air that becomes, for many of the wide-eyed listeners, an armful of Christians— “and spared the unspeakable horrors that are in store for those left behind. And yet, how can we know for sure that we will be among those who are taken up with Him into the clouds? My brothers and sisters, listen to me, for that auspicious hour draws nigh. True conversion must not be only of the spirit, but of the body as well.”

Ollie is suddenly seized with such a sense of foreboding that he begins to tremble. He can see laid out before him his miserable life, his turning away from God, his failure to abide by God’s system of justice. He can see the swollen and bloated face of Mary Rogers in the dark waters of the Hudson, and the limp corpse of William Kiekuk staring up at him with accusing eyes, and the pathetic body of Reginald Pennick dredged up from the riverbank, all of them sinners condemned not by their own sins but by Ollie’s lack of discipline.

Most terrifying of all, he can see the delicate hand of his mother reaching upward from the deep abyss of the sea in one last desperate attempt to be saved… and to save him.

“My dear friends,” Reverend Starkweather is saying, “your bodies must experience your redemption just as surely as your souls, for your bodies will be taken upward to the bosom of Jesus on that great resurrection day. Ask God to wash away your sins and claim your body for his higher purpose.”

And then, in a grand demonstration of his command, the Reverend reaches skyward and begins to shudder, imploring God for a sign of his own redemption. His legs quake and his eyes roll back in his head. He chants an unintelligible string of syllables and tearfully falls to his knees. An elderly man near the tree-stump pulpit stands and yells “Glory!” then goes rigid and falls over stiff as a board. A few mothers begin to roll upon the ground as if writhing in pain. A frightened young girl foams at the mouth and shakes until her sharp bones nearly break through her skin. Others jump up and down hysterically with their eyes closed, babbling in some unknown tongue, or laugh giddily, or vomit into the grass, or sob heartbreakingly because the miracle of their redemption has for some reason been withheld and they fear the torment of being left behind. The cries and chants and shouts commingle and soar upward to buffet the clouds that one day will serve as Jesus’ throne.

A searing pain inside Ollie’s head has become unbearable. He scratches at his face and tears at his hair, trying to rip out the source of his misery. Then his entire frame begins to quake uncontrollably. His joints feel as though they will fly apart. His teeth chatter, bloodying his blasphemous tongue. He falls onto his back, gasping for air and struggling to beg God for redemption.

Terrified, Jonathon leaps onto his friend and tries to dampen the shaking with his own body, but finds himself pulsating wildly.

Between bone-jarring convulsions, strange words flow from Ollie’s lips. Jonathon believes them to be hysterical gibberish, but they are not. The language is Farsi, and to a Persian the words mean, “Dear God, forgive me and protect my mother.” And then Ollie passes out.

In the carriage on the way home, Jonathon is still too weak and frightened to talk about the events in the meadow. He had brought Ollie to this church half-jokingly to demonstrate the absurdity of religion, and now he feels responsible for his companion’s horrifying experience.

Ollie is speechless, too, but at peace.