The Family Greene

by Ann Rinaldi

  "Mama, this is important! General Wayne has nothing now! His plantation is failing. He's been put out of Congress. And..."

  "And what?" she asked.

  Oh, how I longed to tell her that I knew of her agreement with Phineas Miller. That Wayne knew of it and that it was killing him. But I could not. For I had promised the general that I would never let on to Mama that we knew of her plans to wed Miller.

  My hands, my tongue, and my heart were tied.

  I sighed and turned away, tears coming to my eyes.

  But Mama discerned my distress. "What is it, Cornelia? Why are you so concerned about General Wayne?" Her voice had softened.

  I bit my bottom lip before answering. I said what I could say. "I observed his face at the party you had, Mama. When you were dancing with Mr. Miller."

  "And?"

  "He still loves you, Mama."

  She looked down at the magazine. "I never did more than flirt with him, Cornelia. Women always have the right to flirt, if it is kept a harmless pastime. Men expect it from us. If we do it properly, it gives us power, and Lord knows we have little of that. But we must learn to do it properly. It's about time you learned how, don't you think?"

  I just stared at her. I did not answer. Is that what she calls what she'd been doing with Phineas Miller the day I caught her in the schoolroom with him, so long ago now? And what she'd done with all the others? Even General Wayne? Is that what she dismisses it all as now? Flirting?

  "I do not wish to do this thing, Cornelia. If I ask the president this favor, he will grant it. And then Wayne will go far away."

  Something fell inside me, smashed into bits on the floor of my soul. She still loves him, too! And she wants him around! Though she might wed Miller, she cannot bear to let Wayne go! She would rather keep him on a line, like a fish, and watch him struggle and suffer! What kind of love is that?

  "Mama," I begged, weakly now. "Please, if President Washington will grant your favor, please ask it. In Pa's name. Please."

  Then I left the room.

  ***

  GENERAL ANTHONY WAYNE put in for a commission with the president of the United States. He did not know that I had asked Mama to write to George Washington. I did not tell him. If Mama ever did, I do not know.

  I only know that he not only received his commission from the president, but was named commander in chief of the army.

  He was to go west with the army, to the frontier, to the region of the Great Lakes.

  Congress gave him much power and many advantages. They told him that they knew he would conduct a well-administered, well-planned, and well-executed campaign.

  They knew he would finally bring peace to the frontier.

  He came to see us before he left.

  Nat and Martha were home by then, for it was now well into 1792. Mama had not yet married Phineas Miller. I was older now and in possession of a knowledge that weighed on me like a suit of armor.

  I knew things inside my soul that often made tears appear for no reason at all, things no daughter should be conscious of, things my sister Martha had yet no inkling of.

  We had a special dinner in honor of General Wayne's departure.

  Phineas Miller was not present at the table. The fault was mine.

  At the cost of my well-being, my good standing with Mama, I had gone to him in the stable the day before and spoken to him.

  In the king's English I told him plain that General Wayne was coming to sup the next day to say goodbye. That he was going away for years.

  Mayhap for good. That we might never see him again.

  There were tears in my voice when I told him this, and I did not try to dispense with them.

  "He and my mama have been friends since the old days," I said, "since the war. Since Mama was first married to Pa. Since Valley Forge. It was because of his exertions in Congress that she had her petition answered. Or she, and we children, would be beggars now. She has—how shall I say it?—feelings of delicacy for him. Do you understand, Mr. Miller?"

  He said yes, he quite understood.

  I said, "Good, then you will also understand why I would be beholden to you if tomorrow evening you told Mama that you almost forgot, but of a sudden you remembered that you had a previous engagement and could not make the dinner appointment. Could you do that? Not for me, Mr. Miller. There is no reason on God's good earth why you should do anything for me. But for my mama. Would you do it for my mama? So she could have one last evening with General Wayne. Remember, they may never see each other again. He is going off to the frontier, to try to tame the wild Indians. Wild Indians aren't easy to tame, you know."

  He said yes, he would do it.

  I forgave him for everything then. I don't know what I would have done if he'd said no. Likely picked up a shovel and knocked him over the head and rendered him unconscious so he wouldn't be able to come to the supper, anyway.

  ***

  THE DINNER WAS OVER. Outside it was twilight. Somehow I had managed to get Martha and Nat and Louisa away from the table so Mama and General Wayne could linger alone over their coffee.

  The March air was soft and warm and in the west the sky still held the red and orange streaks of a leftover sunset. And leftover dreams.

  "I think," I proposed to my sisters and brother, "that we ought to go upstairs and leave them to themselves to say goodbye."

  I had summoned the strength of the eldest. Martha, having been under the thumbs of the nuns for so long, had become submissive and was no longer threatening.

  I, on the other hand, had learned what I must, being so exposed to life here, living under nobody's thumb, not even Mama's. I had learned to be obstinate, persistent, stubborn, self-reliant, and cagey.

  The others complied. We went upstairs to our separate rooms.

  About nine, according to the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall, we were summonded by Emily.

  General Wayne wanted to bid us goodbye.

  I went downstairs and watched as the others dutifully said goodbye. They hugged him while I stood aside. They tendered their best wishes, promised to be good, wished him well. Mama was nowhere to be seen. They went up to bed. I hung back in the corner, in the shadows in the front hall.

  He started to walk to the front door, and with his back to me, gestured with his arm that I should follow.

  I went with him, out onto the front veranda.

  We stood there a moment. Priam was bringing around his horse.

  "Well, then," Wayne said to me.

  "Yes, sir."

  "I want to thank you."

  "For what, sir?"

  In the near dark, broken only by torches in huge iron sconces in the ground, he took my hand. "For whatever you did to get Miller out of the way tonight. And for getting your mother to petition the president for me."

  "Sir, I didn't—"

  "Shhh. I am the one who taught you to lie, remember. I know lies when I hear them. I know your mother wouldn't have done such on her own, that she wanted me around. I know you wanted me around, too, Cornelia. Real love is courage. Thank you."

  I wanted to flee. I was going to cry.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. Then he touched the side of my face. "I don't know when we'll see each other again, Cornelia, but I want you to know some things."

  I took a deep breath. Is he going to tell me now that he is my father?

  No, I decided. Because he's said that real love is courage, that's why.

  "You may marry before we see each other again. Be careful in that direction. Remember what I told you of the rights women lose when they wed. That doesn't mean you should not wed. There is no more beautiful thing than a good marriage. Just make sure you pick the right one."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Write to me, if you wish, and tell me about him. Letters do find their way, you know."

  "Yes, sir."

  His hand had reached my hair now. He was fondling a strand of it, tucking it behind my ear. "And always guard your honor, Cornelia. I tell y
ou this like a father. The man you choose must respect you."

  I nodded. Like a father!

  But he would never tell. He would face the most savage Indian before he would tell me. He would not allow me to disrespect my mother because of something they might have done a long time ago.

  If it was true, he would not allow me to change my allegiances from my pa to him.

  And if it were not true, well mayhap, just mayhap, he wanted me to believe, in a small corner of my heart, that there was the remotest possibility that he was my father.

  He would never, never tell.

  And now, standing there before him in the near dark, I knew that I did not want him to.

  "Goodbye, Cornelia," he said.

  "Goodbye, General Wayne."

  We hugged. He held me close. The hug said all kinds of things we could never say to each other. And the best part about that hug was that we both knew it, when he turned and mounted his horse and rode off into the night.

  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  I NEVER SAW General Wayne again.

  I did write to him a few times, and he to me. I received a letter from him from Pittsburgh, where he was training his troops. It was in the fall of '92 and he seemed very vigorous and happy.

  I wrote him of the arrival, at Mulberry Grove, of a man named Eli Whitney, another Yale graduate, whom Mama had met aboard ship on the way home from New York with Miller. Whitney had been coming to Savannah to teach, but became sick, and Mama invited him to Mulberry Grove to recuperate. I wrote how he and Mama and Miller went on home, and I stayed on the winter in Philadelphia with the Washingtons. And the president asked after him.

  And how, when I got back home in the spring, Whitney was still there at Mulberry Grove and toying with an invention he had in mind.

  Something he called a cotton gin. He and Miller spent hours poring over it.

  I told him Miller and Mama were still not yet wed.

  He wrote back that he was going on north and was naming a place in Ohio Greenville, in honor of Pa.

  By the next year, I received another letter from a place called Fort Defiance. The battered and spattered envelope had taken three months to get to me. He said Fort Defiance was at the junction of the Maumee and Anglaise rivers, north of this place called Greenville. The Indians had refused his offer of peace. And he was going to meet them.

  I said I would pray for him. I told him that we were all together again at Mulberry Grove, that George had finally arrived home, that he was strong and well educated and sent his best hopes and wished he could be with him.

  Wayne wrote that I might not hear from him for a while and not to worry if I didn't. And if I had another letter, to send it on to this same address, as it would, sooner or later, find him.

  I did have another letter.

  I sent it to him that spring of '94, only a few weeks after George returned home.

  George had invited a friend named Stits to stay the summer, I wrote. And he and Stits had launched a canoe in the river. They were going in the canoe all the way to Savannah. The river was swollen from the spring rains, and about an hour after they left, Stits came back, scarce able to walk, muddy and ashen-faced. The canoe had overturned. He had barely been able to get himself above water, then could not find either George or the canoe. He walked on the muddy shore back to us. All of the household, I reported to Wayne, went out to search for George. We went in boats, in the direction in which the boys had gone. We searched the rest of the day and half the night. No George.

  Then, at dawn, my brother's limp body washed ashore in front of Mulberry Grove. Mama was unable to be consoled, I told him. And oh, how we needed you. Only you could have consoled her. And I know, sir, that even as I write this I am unfair to do so.

  In a return letter, he said he had written to Mama to console her, best as he could. And to me he sent his most profound sympathies for the loss of my brother, who "would most likely have turned out to be as good a man as your pa. I mourn his untimely passing, which is nothing less than a tragedy."

  He was in a place called Fallen Timbers, he said, a place the Indians called "the sharp ends of the guns." It was where they broke and ran before his army. "We hope," he wrote, "for surrender within the year in Greenville."

  Just about this time, the first cotton gins, invented successfully by Eli Whitney and manufactured in New Haven, came to Savannah. These gins, run by one man and a horse, cleaned cotton so much better than the older machines that took the labor of fifty men. The invention was turning the South upside down. Visitors by the score were coming to our plantation.

  Northern industrialists were sending representatives to investigate the possibilities.

  One such was a young man named John Nightengale. He was twenty-four and an heir of a prominent New England family. And the possibility he saw was in my sister Martha.

  They were married in the spring of 1795 at Mulberry Grove.

  Right after that, General Wayne wrote to me that the Indians had surrendered to him at Greenville, Ohio. I thought how fitting that they should do it there, in the place he had named for Pa.

  There was a scrawled postscript to the letter. The truth of the matter you so dearly need, my dear Cornelia, is that I really don't know. Out here in the wilderness I have decided that I owe you the truth, that you are old enough to take it. And that is all the truth I can give. Forgive me.

  I clutched the letter to my breast while tears ran down my face. Dear man. Oh, you dear man, thank you.

  I wrote back to him immediately. I congratulated him on his victory. And then I included a postscript that said, simply, Thank you and God bless you always. There is nothing to forgive. You have given me much. Love, Cornelia.

  Mama wed Phineas Miller on the last day of May in 1796. I did not write to Wayne to tell him. I am glad I did not tell him. And I am glad I sent a letter back to him immediately after he wrote to me. I received a last note from him from Detroit, in November.

  It said, briefly, Thank you, dear girl, thank you for your forgiveness. That was all.

  General Wayne died on the fifteenth of December of 1796 in Erie, Pennsylvania, on his way home from occupying Detroit.

  Mama cried when she found out. I cried with her. And I never told her what Wayne had finally told me.

  In April 1801, I married a man named Peyton Skip-with Jr. I was twenty-four. All I will say is that although he was from a leading family from Virginia, he was no pantywaist. He reminded me a lot of Wayne. I followed General Wayne's instructions as to a husband, and I know Wayne would have approved.

  In 1803, Dungeness, the home Pa so wanted on Cumberland Island, was finally finished. It was built just as Pa wanted it. And the room on the fourth floor was there.

  My sister Martha never claimed that room. Peyton and I stayed in it when we visited.

  And every time we visited, I looked for that horse I had seen that day, a lifetime ago now. Several times I thought I saw it, but when I ran to find it, it was gone.

  It was as if I were running after a dream. Like I had so often run after the truth of General Wayne being my father.

  And now there was always the possibility that he was.

  And what was I to do now with that possibility?

  Just smile sometimes to myself, and nourish it.

  For it is possible, then, that I have had two fathers. Both wonderful. Twice the love. And twice the loss. For I have lost both.

  * * *

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Catharine Littlefield Greene, wife of Major General Nathanael Greene, has always been known as one of the most famous women of the American Revolution. She is listed right up there along with Martha Washington and Lucy Knox, wife of artillery officer Brigadier General Henry Knox, and other wives who spent the terrible winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge.

  When Caty Greene arrived at Valley Forge in February of 1778, she had left her two children with family in Rhode Island. She had not seen her beloved husband since the summer before. It was
here that she met the Marquis de Lafayette, with whom she conversed in French, and the dashing young major general of the Continental Army Anthony Wayne.

  It was the time of the French Alliance. There was a great celebration to honor the occasion. Caty Greene rode in the carriage with Martha Washington, who had taken her under her wing, and with whom she had become fast friends, as she had with many others in those trying times. Including General Wayne.

  Reading about Caty Greene, often called Kitty, so enticed me that I was driven to go back to her childhood and learn more. That childhood was even more rewarding. I found that she grew up on Block Island, off the coast of New England, twelve miles off Rhode Island. There was, we are told, "a sense of timelessness on the isle." And Caty's life, as a child of a family of means, was sheltered and secluded. She ran free. Her father was "a distinguished man, a deputy to the General Assembly, a man of love, warmth, and fun, who liked to cuddle little children in his lap and tell them stories," according to the book Caty: A Biography of Catharine Littlefield Greene, which I mention in my bibliography.

  Her mother died when she was ten, and shortly after, she was sent to live with Aunt Catharine Greene, in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

  Caty Littlefield, as she was then, grew in character for me, as is necessary for a personage to do to become a protagonist in my book.

  "But what will you do to satisfy my readers?" I asked her.

  "You just wait and see," she promised. "You don't know anything about me yet."

  Well, I waited. Soon she met young Nathanael Greene, from a good Quaker family, but himself a Quaker no more, for he had other fish to fry. He was near six feet tall, with a firm jaw, with fire in his soul for the Whig cause, yet with clear, quiet eyes and a gentle manner. She introduced me to him. After I got to know Nathanael and his family, she convinced me that she should marry him, despite the difference in their ages.

  He was all of twelve years older than she was.

  Well, that was something worth sitting up and taking notice of, I supposed.

  When she came of age, they wed. Caty Greene was beautiful, lively of spirit, spritely, and gay. And she and Nathanael were wed only a short time when the war came.