He didn’t understand at first. “Why should I want to see my patients anywhere I don’t see them now?”
“The trustees don’t want the hospital to serve only the poor. They hope ordinary people will come as well, and some of them think all the doctors who do anything there should be Jewish. So if anything good happens, we get the credit. Mr. Simson thinks it’s a terrible idea. He said that because Jews were the objects of prejudice, that is not an excuse to start practicing it.”
Nick took a moment. “Very well,” he said finally, “but I think you should make sure they have a supply of chlorinated lime.”
“Yes.”
“And I take it that somehow your not wanting to weigh in publicly on the question of germs is connected to the matter of this Jews’ Hospital.”
Ben shrugged. “I only don’t want to give them more ammunition.”
“What else could I tell him?” Ben didn’t wait for Bella to answer. “Half the trustees have consulted him about their own illnesses, their relatives’ illnesses. But when they open their hospital, Dr. Turner can’t be listed on the roster of doctors who see patients there.”
“Have more tea,” his wife said. “You’ll feel better.”
“No, I won’t. It’s a disgrace.”
“But you told me they said the hospital must be available to everyone. Whatever their religion.”
“Patients, yes. And Mr. Simson and most of the others think any doctor in good standing should also be welcome to practice.”
Bella bit her lip. It was a way she had when she wanted to say something and didn’t want to, both at the same time. “What?” Ben said. “Tell me.”
“The some who don’t want Dr. Turner to be welcome at this new hospital…Ben, don’t be angry, but is it that they don’t want all goyim or only Dr. Turner?”
Ben put down his cup because his hand had started to shake. “I never thought…You mean they know about him and Mrs. Devrey? Way up there on Seventy-first Street where no one lives but maybe some wild cats and some pigs?”
“People talk in this city, Benjamin. I think sometimes that’s all they do. And she’s been…well, not like most ladies.”
“And he’s very successful and well thought of.”
“Exactly. It’s mostly jealousy.”
“Not entirely,” he said. “It’s prejudice as well. We have to stop this, Bella. If Jews are going to be successful in America, we have to be like everyone else. This afternoon, after I left the office, I went to see the rabbi.”
“What rabbi?”
“On Chrystie Street.”
Bella bit her lip again.
“What? What aren’t you saying? We agreed. It has to be different here.”
“You went to Chrystie Street to arrange for David to be a bar mitzvah,” she said. It was not a question.
“Of course.”
“At Temple Emanu-El.”
“On Chrystie Street. I already said that.”
“What about your father?”
“He will have to accept it. Or not accept it. I don’t care, Bella. I cannot stand that things should not change. That a man like Dr. Turner should not be accepted because he’s not Jewish.”
“I told you. That’s not why.”
“I don’t care about that either. Services in Hebrew when no one understands—”
“At Temple Emanu-El the service will be in English?”
“No, in German. And the women sit separately now, but some in the congregation think that should change. Someday you’ll be able to sit beside me, Bella.” He saw the expression on her face. “Your own grandfather was involved in the reform, Bella, back in Prussia. Papa told me. And you and me, we talked about it. You said you agreed.”
“About some things only. And David doesn’t speak any German. Not a word.”
“He doesn’t speak Hebrew either,” Ben said. “To do it at B’nai Jeshurun he would have also to learn his Torah portion by heart.” Papa would say that was Ben’s fault. That it was shameful he had not seen to it that his son learned Hebrew.
Bella rang for the maid to come and take the tea things away. “It will be on a Sunday?” She did not look at him when she asked the question.
Among the reformers Sunday worship was preferred. In the countries in which they found themselves, they said, that’s how things were done. Adaptation was the key to survival. So they would meet to pray on Sunday and there should be an organ, like in a church. Flowers also. Who could object to flowers and music? No man would wear a skullcap or the traditional prayer shawl, not even the rabbi. He would wear black robes like a minister, and the congregants would not cover their heads, because that was the custom in Western society. The Chrystie Street rabbi also mentioned to Ben that there was some question about whether a thirteen-year-old should be asked to commit himself to life as a Jew, if maybe fifteen or sixteen wasn’t the better age. He wouldn’t tell Bella that.
“I asked if maybe we could have the service on a Saturday. The rabbi said—”
The door opened. It was their eldest daughter, ten-year-old Rebecca. “I can take the tea tray away, Mama.”
“Yes, I know you can. But why should you? Where is Liza?”
“She’s busy.”
“What do you mean, busy? And if she is, why didn’t Sofie come?”
“She’s busy too.”
Ben wasn’t paying a great deal of attention. Domestic things were entirely Bella’s province, and she was wonderful at managing them. His household always ran smoothly. Except that right now Bella was looking…the only word was thunderous. Thunder from Bella was a great rarity and not something to ignore. “What are both Liza and Sofie busy with, Rebecca?” he asked. “I think you must tell us. Immediately.”
“They’re just busy.” Rebecca attempted to take the tea tray and escape.
Bella put out a hand and stopped her. “Leave that. Yesterday when I came home from shopping and wanted someone to take my parcels, you came. Not Liza and not Sofie. That’s what you said then, that they were both busy.”
“Mama, I don’t want to say any more. I promised and I can’t break my word. You always say that’s a terrible thing to do.”
“Yes,” Ben said. “Your mother is right. Breaking your word is a shameful way to behave, but lying to your mother and father, that is a sin.”
“But I’m not lying! I never said anything. How can it be a lie if I don’t say anything?”
“Rebecca Spinoza,” he said under his breath. Bella, who for all her intelligence knew nothing about seventeenth-century Jewish philosophers, looked puzzled. His daughter tried again to take the tea tray and go. Ben stood up. “That is a sophistic argument, my darling Rebecca. And once we have settled this business about Liza and Sofie, I will explain what sophistry is and why I do not approve of it. Now put down the tray and take us to where whatever it is that is going on is going on.”
There were a black man and woman in the cellar of his house, way in the back behind the coal bin. The woman was moaning, delirious. It was the effort to silence her that was occupying the Kleins’ household help.
“Runaway slaves,” Bella said, though it did not require saying.
“I didn’t want to tell.” Rebecca was in tears. “Papa made me.”
Liza looked at the girl and shook her head. Sofie made a clucking noise that was, Ben thought, supposed to offer some comfort. He turned to his daughter. “Stop crying. That is a waste of energy and no one has time for it just now. Do the other children know about this?”
“Only David.”
“Good. And is this the first time there have been such…such visitors in our cellar?”
Neither Liza nor Sofie looked at him, but Rebecca shook her head to indicate it was not.
“Very well,” Ben said. “We will talk more later. Now go get your brother. I want both of you down here immediately. You are to bring my bag.”
Bella took a step forward. “Benjamin, I don’t know—”
“I know, Bella. Please, m
y dear, go upstairs and look after the rest of the children and the house. If anyone comes to the door, say I am out and you don’t know when I will return. Say I’ve gone to visit a patient.” He turned to Sofie. “Is anyone else likely to come?”
“Not nobody what’s to do with us, if that be your meaning.”
“It is.” And to his wife and daughter, “Go. Both of you.”
Though Ben found it hard to believe that anyone in this country still had a musket rather than a rifle, the delirious woman had a musket ball in her thigh. She’d been shot four days before, according to the man who had arrived with her. Not by the overseer of the North Carolina plantation they’d run from, but by some old man whose barn they’d hid in during their last night in Maryland. “Barn be wide open, like it was meant for us. Should’ve known that meant a bounty hunter.”
They were married, the man said, and he’d carried her all the way from Philadelphia. “We had a mule before that. But it be dying soon as we crossed on out o’ Pennsylvania. There was places we was s’posed to go where they be looking after us, but I couldn’t find none of ’em. Lost my way like. ’Til I got here.”
Ben knelt beside the woman he now thought of as his patient, therefore under his protection. The wound was inflamed and swollen, and she had a high fever, but the leg had not turned black. “I think we can save it,” he said, with a nod at the handle of the kitchen knife poking out of Liza’s pocket. “You’re quite right. The musket ball must come out. Only not here.”
David and Rebecca arrived with his bag. “I want you both to see what is involved in this enterprise in which you’ve implicated yourselves,” Ben said. “David, you and I will carry her upstairs. And we must do so without any of the younger children seeing, in case they should say something by mistake. You go ahead, Rebecca. Make sure the way is clear.”
“It is called the underground railroad,” Ben said when he came up to bed.
“I know,” Bella said.
It was after ten and he thought by now she would be asleep, but she was at her dressing table, brushing her hair. It gleamed, so he thought she must have been doing it for some time. She put down the brush. “Where are they?”
“Liza made up beds for them by the kitchen stove.”
“I see.” She got up. “Sit. I’ll help you take off your shoes.”
Ben sat on the side of the bed. Bella knelt in front of him and began loosening the laces of the shoes he’d been wearing since six o’clock that morning. “Oh…that feels good.”
She smiled. “Here, give me the other foot. Benjamin, I have been thinking about—”
“I know what you’ve been thinking about. And I admit it’s dangerous, but I cannot turn onto the street a woman with a musket ball in her thigh. Or permit someone with no idea what they’re doing to dig it out with a knife that ten minutes before she used to chop cabbage.” Because of germs, which he already believed were transferred from one thing to another thing, carrying disease with them. Though he wouldn’t admit that to Dr. Turner.
Bella reached up under the legs of his trousers and loosened his garters so she could roll down his hose. “Please stop talking and listen to me. I am not thinking about that. Tell me again the names of the men who will be the trustees of this Jews’ Hospital.”
He was astonished that she would want to talk about that when two runaway slaves were sleeping in their kitchen, but she had taken off his stockings and begun massaging his feet. “That’s wonderful,” he said, and so she wouldn’t stop, recited the names of the proposed board.
“All Sephardim,” she said, when this second telling confirmed what she thought she remembered. “All from the ones who came first, members of Congregation Shearith Israel. Not even one of us.”
She meant not one German Jew. “I know.”
“And do you think it’s right?”
“Of course I don’t think it’s right. But the business with the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim, that’s an old story. And it’s maybe why the Chrystie Street rabbi isn’t wrong.”
“Maybe. But right now I am not thinking about Temple Emanu-El and my grandfather, may his name be for a blessing, and the reform. I am thinking about how people always look for someone they can be better than. And about Mr. Tappan.”
“Tappan the silk merchant? What has he got to do with this? Oh, you mean because always he was so strong for abolition.”
“Exactly.” She helped him out of his trousers and extended her massage up to his knees. “Do you remember after the fire, after he’d rebuilt and got his business going again, how then the bad money times came and his business collapsed?”
“I remember.”
“You remember what people said?”
“Not everyone,” he corrected. “Just one man.”
“One man said it first, but plenty of others joined in. ‘Mr. Tappan has failed,’ they said. ‘All you nigras come and help him.’ They didn’t mean anyone should help him. They were gloating. Because they’re afraid of abolition they were enjoying his failure.”
“That’s an ugly idea.”
“I agree. But buying and selling people is worse. The men who oppose abolition, who say that without slaves the South will collapse and everyone in New York will lose enormous amounts of money, they said also that it had to be that Hashem did not approve of the New Evangelists like Mr. Tappan and their ideas about reforming society, about giving women the vote and having for everyone free schools. If Hashem approved, they said, Mr. Tappan would have been protected from failing.”
“They don’t say Hashem, they say Go—”
“Don’t! I can’t hear that, Benjamin. Not in my house where my children are sleeping. I am not so sure about all this reform.”
“All right, I’m sorry. But something else I think you are sure of. What are you trying to tell me, my lovely Bella?” He put out his hand and touched her hair. When it hung free like this, it reached her shoulders and formed a beautiful black cloud.
“That I don’t think we should be worried about the anti-every-kind-of-reform people. They are small-minded and petty, and they put their purse above everything else. If we have to be on a side, Benjy, let it be the side of Mr. Tappan, not those who are against him. Otherwise we are simply like the old men of Shearith Israel. We resist others because they are not exactly like ourselves.”
“Not all of them.”
“Benjy, please.”
She usually called him Benjy only when they were most intimate, here in the bed. Her hands on his legs felt wonderful and she looked beautiful, but he was so tired he could barely move. “Darling Bella, I don’t think I can—”
“I know about the Fugitive Slave Act. I know what President Fillmore said. ‘Hashem knows that I detest slavery, but the constitution protects it.’ And don’t tell me he didn’t say Hashem. I know that too.”
“I wasn’t going to say…Bella, how do you know so much about politics?”
“I can read, Benjamin. Do you think with all the papers that come in and out of this house I never look at one? But we are discussing those two people downstairs. And”—her head came up in defiance—“many more just like them. We must help them get to Canada. I know if we are caught, it means six months in prison, and a thousand-dollar fine. And that probably no one will ever want you again for their doctor. I don’t care. Right, Benjy, is right. So we will tell them that from now on we are a regular stop on their underground railway. The train comes to Hudson Square.”
It amazed Carolina how much she loved going up to the turret of the house on Sunshine Hill. At first it had almost made her dizzy; now she adored it. The vastness of the view was intoxicating, even on a cold January day like this one. She could train Nicholas’s telescope on the harbor and watch for any ships that might be flying the Devrey flag, particularly the clippers. Hard to miss them with their great drifts of sail.
Sometimes, however, the view close up was the most interesting of all.
A small carriage had stopped at the foot of the hill. Th
e double gates to their driveway were always locked, and a substantial bell hung beside the gate for visitors to ring to attract attention, but in all the years they had lived here the bell had been rung exactly three times. On each occasion it was someone coming from the town to summon Nick to a patient’s bedside. Today Nick was in his office on Crosby Street and easily reached there, and Carolina recognized the person who had gotten out of the carriage.
She practically flew down the stairs, out the door, and down the precipitous path that led to the road. The clanging of the bell still echoed when Carolina flung open the gate. “Mrs. Klein? Has something happened? Is Nicholas all right?”
“Oh dear, I didn’t mean to alarm you. He is fine. Please forgive me, Mrs. Devrey. I should have realized you would immediately assume…Dr. Turner is fine. I didn’t come with bad news. I give you my word.”
Carolina took a second or two to catch her breath. “Then why? I’m sorry. I am being extremely rude.” She unlatched the second gate and began pushing them both apart.
Bella had come in a small, half-closed carriage known as a doctor’s buggy, designed to be driven without a coachman. She was swathed in furs, but her face was bright red from wind.
“You must be exhausted as well as frozen,” Carolina said. “Come, drive inside the gates and I’ll close them. Then I’ll get in, if I may, and we can ride up the hill together.”
“Thank you, that was delicious and very welcome.” Bella put down her cup of chocolate, now empty, and dabbed at her lips with the fine linen napkin Carolina Devrey had provided. It was, Bella noted, monogrammed with an R for Randolf, which she knew had been Carolina’s maiden name. A nice finesse of the irregular situation.
“I should be giving you brandy after that difficult journey,” Carolina said. “In fact, I think I shall.” There was a tray with a decanter and glasses on a nearby table; she got up and poured a drink for her guest and one for herself. Bella did not immediately take the bulbous snifter out of her hostess’s hands. “Take it,” Carolina said with a smile. “You have driven yourself five miles up Manhattan in bitter cold and come to call on a woman who, as you know for a fact, is living in sin. Surely you’re not going to balk at a few sips of cognac. Nothing will warm you more quickly.”
City of God Page 45
