The Family Greene (3 page)

I should have read the ones from my mother. Another time I would have. But I picked up instead a yellowed parchment from Benjamin Franklin, detailing how he and she had tarried several days in Newport before she was married, though he was married and a father. And how they had been so in love.

But there was nothing to indicate that they had been lovers.

When they separated after that trip was over, he still wrote to her. In one letter he complained of her "virgin innocence" on the Newport trip.

I rushed through the letters breathlessly, hoping to find something that would either incriminate Aunt Catharine or free her of the charge. But all I found were references by Franklin of two visits he'd made to this house after Uncle Greene had married her.

Oh, there were constant references to how he loved her, would never forget her, but no words that would link them together as lovers.

I had set the final letter down in my lap and was gazing at a bee that had just flown in the open window and settled on the fold of the drape, not knowing whether to be relieved or disappointed, when I was jolted out of my romantic reverie by Aunt Catharine's voice from the doorway of her room.

"So! Here you are, you little minx! Well, you have some explaining to do! What are you about, going through my personal things?"

I wanted, at that moment, to be that bee, to be able to fly out the window into the blue afternoon. My head whirled. My head hurt of a sudden with the effort of turning to look at her.

"You're not supposed to be home yet," I said stupidly.

"Well, you miscalculated, didn't you? Dishonest people usually do."

Dishonest? She considered me dishonest, then!

She came into the room and across the highly polished hardwood floor and brightly braided rug, throwing aside her shawl and bonnet at the same time as she scooped up the letters that were on my lap and all over the floor.

"Get up," she ordered.

I got up.

"Is this how I can trust you? The minute I leave you alone you search about in my personal things?"

I felt as if she had slapped me. "Aunt Catharine, I'm not dishonest. I'm trying to straighten something out, to bring out the truth about you."

She stood before me, straight and justified. "There is no truth to bring out. Or is it that old saw about me and Mr. Franklin again?" She glanced at the letters in her hands. "These are all from him. Is that it? Who's been feeding you gossip?"

I did not answer for a moment. Then I said, "I cannot betray a confidence."

That seemed to mollify her. "Very well, if you won't tell me who fed you the gossip concerning me and Mr. Franklin, then tell me this. Do you believe it?"

I lifted my chin and looked her full in the face. "No," I answered. "I mean, I think he loves you, Aunt Catharine. But I don't think you did anything wrong. Did you?"

"No," she said. "But if the gossips want to believe it, let them. Go on. There is more. Tell me what is eating at you. I don't think you're the kind of person who would hold it against me if I did carry on with Mr. Franklin. There is too much of me in you, Caty Littlefield. But you came up here to find out for another reason. Now, what is it?"

I sighed and told her then. "Uncle Greene has a sorrow about him. I believe he thinks you did. And I think you should tell him you didn't and take his sorrow away."

She was silent, pensive, for a moment. Then she spoke. "He should trust me. I have been a good wife to him. We have a good marriage. And trust is part of it," she said. "I shouldn't have to tell him something like that."

Then she gathered the letters and put the chest back under the bed. "But you should know this, Caty Littlefield," she said, and she stood, looking at me. "We women always have the right to flirt.
If
it is kept a harmless pastime. Men expect it from us. Done properly, it gives us power, and Lord knows we have little of that. It is even our responsibility as a hostess. But it
must be learned to be done properly.
Do you understand?"

I said yes, I did.

She expected Uncle Greene to trust her. Was that right? No, I concluded. Uncle Greene reminded me too much of Pa for me to allow him to suffer. And if he needed her reassurance in face of the gossip, she should give it to him.

And if she wouldn't, somehow I would.

***

I
AVAILED MYSELF
of the opportunity one day a week later. Some important men were coming for supper, and Uncle Greene did what he never did. He went into the kitchen to make sure the table would be set with food in great plenty. He personally set his best wines on the sideboard.

I watched him carefully.

"They will be grim-faced with me tonight, child," he said. "I have not yet written my letter to Mr. Franklin."

We were alone in the dining room. I was allowed to light the candles. As I lighted the last one on the table, I looked across the white cloth at him and summoned all my courage.

"Uncle Greene, may I have a word with you? I have something important to tell you."

It may have been the look on my face. Or the tone of my voice. But he knew something was in the air, something as palpable as the fragrance of the candles I had just lighted. He looked about for a moment, then gestured that I should come with him into the darkened parlor. I followed.

And there, in the midst of shadows and the halfhearted light from the candles in the dining room, which gave flickering hope, I told him about my transgression, my searching of Aunt Catharine's trunk of letters and how she found me and told me she and Mr. Franklin committed no transgression.

I saw his eyes go soft. But he said nothing.

"She said if people want to believe it of her, they can go ahead and gossip," I told him. "I'm telling you, Uncle Greene, in case any of your friends says anything against her. You mustn't let them say it."

"I would never let them say it, child."

"She said she never told you this. I told her she must."

"There is no need, child." He smiled his lie. "Our marriage is based on trust."

Now I smiled my lie. "Of course." Then I hugged him. "How silly of me to think otherwise. Come, we must go back and finish lighting the table."

His friends were grim-faced that night, just as he suspected, and though they ate and drank with gusto and tried to keep the conversation general, Aunt Catharine ordered the coffee in the parlor for them because the noises they made about the Crown were getting louder and louder. Soon the smoke in the parlor got thicker and the conversation got louder, and I heard Uncle Greene say, "Tomorrow I post my letter to Benjamin Franklin," and the doors of the parlor closed.

I went to sleep that night knowing that I had done the right thing.

***

O
UTSIDE ON THE STREET
a week later, there was a Tory walking up and down and scolding the Patriots. We were used to him. He came all the time to "watch" Uncle Greene's house.

"Traitors! Whigs!" the Tory was chanting. "There's still time to take the king's shilling and declare your patriotism!"

He had been chanting it for a full five minutes before we inside could make out the sense of it. Aunt Catharine slammed her fist down on the desk. "Isn't there any peace and quiet around here?" Then she got up and swished her skirts away from the desk and went out a side door, slamming it behind her.

A page of a letter flew onto the floor. I rushed to pick it up. And that's when I saw the salutation: "Dear Benjamin."

She was writing to Benjamin Franklin!

I read on. And I read very fast. She was writing to him in London and asking when he would be home. When he came home, he must come to her house for dinner!

She asked after his favorite sister, Jane Mecom, and told him about how I was living with them now.
Please come home soon,
she begged.

I put the page back on the desk. Aunt Catharine was coming into the house. I quickly went to greet her at the door. "Was he a Tory?" I asked.

"Yes, and the worst of them. The king's shilling, indeed. What does the man think we use now? Gold doubloons?" She gathered up her skirts and sat herself down again in her chair by the desk. "I must finish this letter. Do you think you could post it for me, darling? I do want to get it in the mail today."

I said yes, I could.

***

J
UST AROUND
the corner from our house, on my way to posting the letter, I saw him standing there in the middle of the street under the arching trees, looking at me.

"Ah, the little miss who belongs in the big white house. What is your name, little miss?"

"Are you the Tory who's been yelling at us all day?"

"I wouldn't call it yelling, child. I would call it trying to enlighten some poor souls who have lost their way in the middle of all the claptrap that's been circulating around the colonies of late. I would save you from yourselves. Why do you go against your king?"

"I think you should get off our street."

"This is, by rights, the king's highway."

"Well, I don't see him anywhere about, do you?"

"Ah, a feisty little piece, is it? We could use you on our side. What do you say?"

"I didn't know there were sides."

"Come, now. Isn't your uncle the popular Whig known as Greene?"

"He's my uncle Greene, that's all I know."

"And he attracts the Whigs round and about to his abode. To discuss dissension."

"Could you please let me by? I have to post this letter and get home. It'll soon be suppertime."

His eyes had been on the letter in my hand. "You
are
feisty, aren't you?" He was speaking softly now and in a hypnotizing tone. "Aren't you afraid I'll report you to someone important?" All the while he was reaching his hands out. With one, he took my wrist. With the other, he wrested the letter from my hand. "Important correspondence to a Boston Whig, perhaps? Shouldn't it be stamped and taxed by the Crown?"

I tried to resist him, but it was too late. He had the letter. And in no time he had it opened.

"Give that back to me!" I demanded. "It's my Aunt Catharine's private correspondence!"

But he held it above my head, and me at bay while he read it. "Ah, so I see. She corresponds with the most notorious Whig of all. Benjamin Franklin. 'And when are you coming home?' she asks. 'You must come and have dinner with us.' Good to know, little miss. Now we'll really have to keep an eye on your house."

I was crying out of agitation by now. Hating myself. I couldn't even post a letter without failing.

"Don't cry," he told me. "Here, I'll restore the envelope for you." And out of his haversack he took some magical things and resealed the letter so no one would know it had been played with.

He gave it back to me with a mock bow. "Go on your way, with God," he said in a most polite manner.

All kinds of wonderful words wanted to run off my tongue, words I'd learned from my cousin Sammy Ward, but I could only nod and run, terrified by what had just happened.

I had been accosted by a Tory! He had taken a letter of Aunt Catharine's from me and read it, and now he knew Benjamin Franklin was coming!

I ran all the way to post it and all the way home again. When I got there Aunt Catharine knew something was wrong, but I would not tell her. I could not tell her. I just said I'd been chased by a wild dog.

I
N JULY
, Benjamin Franklin did come to dinner.

He and his nineteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, drew up in a chaise in front of the house. In back of the chaise a saddle horse was tethered.

Aunt Catharine ran out to meet them. She hugged Sarah and then, after Mr. Franklin gingerly allowed himself to be helped down by his daughter and Uncle Greene, she embraced Mr. Franklin, too.

"Easy, my dear." he advised, even as he returned her embrace. "Easy. I suffered a fall on leaving Mecom relatives in New York. I bruised my chest."

"Oh, my dear." Aunt Catharine drew away, but placed a hand on his coat front, tenderly. "The poor chest." Then she kissed the side of his face.

I was embarrassed for her. How
could
she act so? I looked quickly at Uncle Greene, but he was only smiling.

"And did you not yet invent something to heal it?" Aunt Catharine asked coyly.

We brought him into the house, into the parlor, where Aunt Catharine immediately brought coffee for him and Uncle Greene. She hovered over Mr. Franklin while he and Uncle Greene launched into a lively discourse about the Stamp Act, which Mr. Franklin said would be repealed soon. "Until they come up with something else," he added.

What I was taken with most was the flirtatious manner that Aunt Catharine used toward him. And so openly!
How can this be?
I asked myself.
Uncle Greene is a good-looking and respected and prominent man. How can she flirt so openly with Benjamin Franklin, in face of all the gossip that has swirled around about them?

In face of the fact that she herself had never cleared up the matter of the affair which she still thought lived between her and her husband?

The Franklins stayed for a week. In that time, I twice came upon Aunt Catharine and Mr. Franklin alone in the parlor. Once they were sitting together on the settle, heads bent over some papers they had in hand, giggling about something.

Another time Mr. Franklin was seated in a chair and near to dozing and Aunt Catharine came up behind him to wrap a throw around his shoulders in the most tender manner.

He came sharp to attention to look up at her. She smiled lovingly down at him, put her head down near his so their cheeks touched, then their lips brushed and, for a brief second, lingered.

I gasped. Both looked up to see me.

And then, from her position behind him, Aunt Catharine gave me a wink and a small smile. And I recollected her words to me:
Women always have a right to flirt.
If it is kept a harmless pastime. Done properly, it gives us power.

I ran from the room, my feelings swirling in my head. I admired Aunt Catharine on so many counts. I wanted to be like her in so many ways. But in that place inside you where you know things are wrong but you don't know yet why, and you don't want them to be wrong, I knew that someday I would find that she was lying.