by Sally Cabot
Franklin stepped out of the shop and had turned halfway to look behind him when he saw her. At first his eyes registered nothing particular other than the general recognition of pauper and child in the street, but it appeared he was not one to dismiss a pauper as quickly as another might. He let his eyes rest on her that second longer and that was enough for him to call her up out of his past, to register the child in her arms. Apparently he was not one to dismiss his past either. He stepped into the street and began to cross to her; he drew close enough so that if he wished to he might see what Anne had seen in that tiny face, and Anne believed he did see. His words started and stopped. “By heaven! This is . . . I daresay—”
“Mr. Franklin!”
He turned. Anne hadn’t noticed the woman going into the shop, but she noticed her now, calling to Franklin as she came down its steps; Anne took note of the well-fed, square face and the firm jaw. She was not pretty, but more surprising, when she called again, even Anne, who’d been educated only as far as the Bible, could hear the fault in her grammar. “We’d best get on. The deliveries is arriving soon.”
Franklin turned back to Anne. He said, “Where do you live?”
“At my father’s house yet.” But of course he did not know where her father lived. “Eades Alley.”
“Eades Alley!”
The woman called again. Franklin turned again. He crossed the street to rejoin her, took her arm, and started off up Market Street. William began to cry and Franklin made to look over his shoulder but checked himself; Anne made no move to quiet the child—indeed, she found she could make no move at all. She stood fixed in place and watched the Franklins continue up Market Street, their heads bent toward each other as he talked and she listened. What did he talk of? Anne wondered. Ants? Singing glasses? The effect of a fire’s heat on a face? She couldn’t look at that woman and picture it.
WHEN THE KNOCK SOUNDED, Anne and her mother and the two next-oldest girls were in the kitchen, the three besides Anne washing clothes, with some resentful looks at Anne while she coped with William’s fussing. Mary went to the door and opened it on Franklin. He seemed to have lost his old sociability; he said, abrupt almost to rudeness, “I should like a word with Anne.”
Anne’s mother dropped her work without question and herded the girls from the room. Once they were gone Franklin looked the kitchen over with the care of a rents agent; when he’d finished he returned to the babe, reached out and touched William’s dandelion hair, felt his stemlike neck.
“Boy or girl?”
“Boy. William’s his name.”
“He’s in health?”
“Fair.”
Franklin drew his eyes from the babe to her, and proceeded to study her much as he had the kitchen. “And you?”
“The same.”
He said, “Annie,” but nothing more, fixing his attention again on the babe. After a time he held out a small cloth pouch, tied tight with a strip of leather. Anne put out her hand and felt a comforting weight drop into her palm. She closed her hand around it and pressed it to the babe’s back.
“Would you like to examine the contents? I might hold the child while you do.”
Anne shook her head.
“I should like to hold him.”
Anne looked down at William; the tugs and jerks were growing stronger and he’d begun that telltale unh, unh, unh that would soon turn to shrieks. She held him out and Franklin took him with confidence, tucking the infant’s head into his elbow, jiggling him gently up and down; either the motion or the new combination of smells widened the child’s eyes and quieted his mouth. After a time Franklin removed his gaze from William and looked again at Anne. “If you examine the pouch—”
Anne set the pouch on the table, unopened. She reached for her child. Franklin handed William over and at once he began to cry. A look Anne had never before seen crossed Franklin’s face: uncertainty, perhaps even shame.
He left.
8
WHEN ANNE SHOWED THE money pouch to her mother she grabbed it, peered inside, and flushed to her cap. She handed it back to Anne and took William from her arms. “We need cornmeal, oats, eggs. Salt pork. Salt beef or venison. Dare we have a fowl? Yes, yes! Pick us a good one! And sugar. Mustard and onions for your father’s poultice. Chamomile.” She seemed to see William in her arms for the first time. She hefted him as if weighing him. “And flour. This infant needs pap.” She pointed to the pouch in Anne’s hand. “There will be more?”
Anne shook her head.
“Then be sure to get your best price,” Anne’s mother said, but she removed nothing from the list.
THE DAY WAS WET and cold and showed the alley to its worst advantage, the sparse streams of smoke from its chimneys promising little warmth to those huddled inside. For Anne, outside, the rain slanted into her face no matter her best efforts to prevent it; the other walkers she passed had pulled hats down and collars up, and even the larger houses on Market Street, built tall and thin and close, seemed to have been pushed together as if for warmth. The stall keepers too were as cold as Anne, and impatient to sell out and close up; Anne made out well with little bickering. She completed her purchases, carrying what she could, giving directions for delivery of what she couldn’t, and headed home. As she passed the Penny Pot she thought of how deeply the one day’s shopping had dug into the money pouch even at storm-day prices; it was time to wean William and go back to work. But not at the Penny Pot.
ANNE BEGAN TO FEED William the pap, soaking the insides of a fresh loaf of bread in water until it had softened into a gumlike paste; almost at once the incessant crying stopped. She continued to nurse as she could but perhaps she got the more out of it—William had a way of fixing his eyes on her when he was at breast that spoke at certain times of devotion and at other times of reproach, and Anne found herself unable to look away from him, staring into the small, puckered face, trying to decide which it was. But she also found herself coming to a new understanding about love. Even amid the bustle of the house she felt as if William and she were walled off inside their own private shell; her mother could not—any other woman could not—know what it was like inside that shell. This boy, this small thing come out of nothing, despite all the trouble he had and would cause her, had wound himself around her heart like a snail around a clam, pried it open and devoured it. He’d made her glad of him, and yet when she recalled the doctor’s words at his birth—she’ll not have another—she was glad of that.
Other things in the house changed along with William. Anne could visit her father with a happier infant and soon discovered how the one’s smile could draw the other’s, how the father she had long cherished was still alive inside his illness. Something in the child brought out Anne’s father’s voice as well, and between the coughing he spoke words to Anne that she hadn’t known she’d missed so much till she heard them new. “My Annie,” he called her, as he used to do, and he began to call William “my boy.” Despite the cheeks bright with fever and the shirt crusted with bloody spittle, Anne could see some new life in her father, and she started to hold out some hope of him after all.
So high had Anne come in those hopes that one morning when she carried William in to see her father and found him sleeping with all the flush of fever gone, she laid the back of her hand against his cheek expecting to feel the cool of health. Instead she felt the cold of death. She must have been gripping William too hard, for he began to whimper, but Anne made no move to quiet him—his noise could disturb her father no longer. She stepped back and stared at the man who had occupied that bed almost the whole of her life, who had been too much there and not enough there for years on end, and could only think in surprise how empty the house now was.
THEY BORROWED A CART from the butcher and carried Anne’s father the few blocks to the Christ Church burial ground, the minister saying words of poor comfort over his grave and laying him in amongst the stones. Anne’s father’s grave was to be marked by a thin wood slab, engraved stone being as far
beyond their reach as even the possession of a cart, and Anne examined the elaborately engraved markers to her left and right with resentment. She wanted such a stone for her father, she wanted a cart for her father that wasn’t stained with blood, she wanted what only the most renowned Philadelphians had—a service of prayers right inside the elegant brick church itself. Anne wanted it known in death that her father had been more than the rotting alley that had symbolized the last years of his life.
Walking home to Eades Alley, trailing their scraps of funeral black and their funeral tears, the house felt so full of gloom and damp that Anne could barely make herself enter it. William seemed to taste Anne’s bitterness in her milk; he turned away from her breast and within two days of the burial had all but weaned himself. The pap was not enough, however, and he began to lose weight again; Anne was so fearful of some dread ill in him that she found herself leaping up to watch his sleep so often she fell ill herself.
ANNE’S FATHER HAD BEEN dead a week when a man came to Eades Alley. Anne hadn’t seen him at the Penny Pot; if she had she’d have remembered the distinct angles of his face and the shadows those angles cast on it. He looked no more than thirty, well but plainly dressed, with a look of newness to him, as if he’d recently come to the degree of prosperity he exhibited. The kitchen was crowded with girls and work much as before, but as soon as the man said, “I come with a message for the girl named Anne,” they fled like so many geese, so it was no great trick for him to look at the babe and look at her and say, “You’re Anne.”
Anne made no answer. The stranger looked over the kitchen much as Franklin had done; when he said, “You may guess who sent me,” she nodded.
He held out another weighted pouch. Anne saw it, but only at a glance—she’d discovered some difficulty in looking away from the man behind it. He was as finely honed as a blade, as opposite Franklin’s anvil-like build as nature could have made him. He gave the pouch a little shake, as if impatient to be gone, and Anne reached out to take it, but once she’d done so he made no attempt to leave, or, in fact, to take his eyes from her. So, he was expected to report, then.
“I’m instructed to ask if there are other concerns,” he said.
Anne could feel a fine rage building. She could see Franklin sitting at his desk, not looking up from the ledger where he’d made careful note of the sum he was handing across to this man, speaking over his shoulder as if in afterthought, Find out if there are other concerns.
“Do you mean do I have other concerns besides a hungry child in a leaky house in a stinking alley?”
The stranger’s hair was that red-gold that explained the ready flush. “I think if you look in the pouch you’ll find a not-insubstantial sum.”
Anne flung her arm wide. “Enough to sweep all this away, then?”
The man said nothing, but his eyes stayed fixed on her, changing with the flushing of his face from more brown to more green; Anne would have preferred them to stay one thing or the other. Or perhaps she only preferred them to be fixed away from her.
“These are my concerns,” Anne said. “Report them or not. Good day, sir.”
The stranger bowed—not a common sight in the alley—and left.
ANNE FOUND WORK AT the Indian King Tavern on Third and Market, two blocks inland from the Penny Pot and the alley and patronized by a less watery clientele. The work was much the same as the Penny Pot, and easier in some aspects because Anne no longer wasted time on smiling. She ran amongst the tables like the dog running inside the wheel that turned the spit at the fire; the first day she fed the dog a crust off a plate, but by the second day she examined her thin wage and thrust the leavings into her own pocket.
The work was hard, but not as hard as leaving William. The first morning Anne had left the boy dry and fed and smiling and come home to find him wet and hungry and shrieking like a crow; when she took her mother to task her mother said only, “I’ve got six others to care for; I can’t spend all day pampering your brat.” Anne tried to assign the boy’s care to Mary for the promise of a halfpenny, but the money only gave Mary a better idea; by the end of the first week Mary had put herself out to work burnishing leather at the shoemaker’s for twice the wage Anne made at the Indian King.
The first time Anne saw the stranger with the money pouch at the Indian King, it was as if an imaginary figure out of some ancient tale had sprung abruptly to life. He took a table by himself and waited till Anne drew near; he asked for his rum but held her with questions.
“How long have you worked here?”
“A month.”
“Every day?”
Anne nodded. She left to get him his rum, and by the time she’d returned to his table she believed she’d figured in her head his purpose. He would report to Franklin: She’s making her own wage now; she’s no need of more from you.
THE SECOND TIME THE stranger came, Anne didn’t see him right away. She’d been engaged by a young and eager lawyer who’d almost convinced her it was time to think about earning a real wage again; she looked up and saw the stranger’s eye fixed on her. Well then, let him put that in his report, Anne thought; if she worked it right she’d do a good deal better that night than her usual wage and Mary’s put together, and after the lawyer there’d be another just as eager. She didn’t need Franklin’s pouch.
9
“YOU KNOW MY WIFE,” Benjamin would say, or “Allow me to introduce Mrs. Franklin to you,” and that, he believed, was sufficient. Perhaps for him it was—the whispers followed her, not him—but Deborah didn’t care about her public life while the private one was so exactly all she wished. They settled in above the print shop, and since Deborah had expected so busy and popular a man to be absent most evenings, she was pleasantly surprised by the number of nights he climbed the stairs at the end of a long day in as much apparent eagerness for the sight of her as she was for him.
“My wife!” he would cry, with never even a joke about it; he would surround her with strong arms, pull her against his wide chest, and kiss all the skin of her that showed and as much of the non-showing parts that he could reach before she pushed him backward. But sometimes she didn’t push backward, and on those nights supper was late and often cold; always on those nights Benjamin made a point of saying, “Delicious!” but with a look that took in all the other things he found delicious. There were those days when Deborah did worry about her fragile status—until they’d cohabited seven years she could never be called his legal wife, and then only if Rogers didn’t appear—but treated to every courtesy, wrapped inside the warmest affection, those days of worry arose less and less. Deborah’s confidence grew; she began to stare down the whisperers on the street; she was Mrs. Benjamin Franklin, and woe to him who dared to question it.
THEY’D SPENT SIX MONTHS as contentedly as Deborah could imagine any man and wife to be when Benjamin came through the door one evening and approached her where she was stooped over the soup pot. He took her by the hand and pulled her away from the fire, drew the spoon from her hand and left it dripping on the hearth.
Deborah shook her elbow free, recaptured the spoon, and scraped at the brick with her shoe. “Here, now! Look at the mess you make!” She moved to return the spoon to the kettle, but Benjamin again retrieved it, this time carrying it to the table. He returned to collect Deborah’s hand and drew her to the chair. By now she’d looked at him more closely and dropped readily enough into the seat, her insides hollow and ringing. “What? What is it?”
“Let me get you a glass of cider.”
“I want no cider! Tell me, Benjamin! What’s the trouble? Is it Rogers?”
“No, not Rogers. Here, let me get us both some cider.”
“I want no cider! Tell me what the trouble is!”
Benjamin fetched the cider anyway, two large mugs, and set them on the table, settling himself with alarming deliberateness in the chair closest to Deborah. “Before I begin, Debby, you must understand one thing: What I speak of now is a past event—the mathematics will
prove it to you if my word does not—’tis nothing that came during the time of our marriage.”
“What, Benjamin! For the love of God, tell me this instant! What didn’t come at the time of our marriage?”
“I suppose it is indeed my trouble, but now I must ask you to share in it. Believe me, my dear, I am well aware that I could ask such a thing only of a woman with a heart as large as yours.”
“With a heart that’s ready to burst! As you value my life, tell me!”
Benjamin took a long draft of cider. He lifted Deborah’s mug to her lips but she slapped it away.
“There’s a child. A child of mine. An infant. Born to a woman of brief acquaintance. His circumstance is such that he cannot thrive where he is. I ask a favor I have little right to ask—the only thing that perhaps gives me that right is my great faith in you, and my trust that you share a like faith in me. I ask you to allow this child into our home and raise it as ours. ’Tis a boy named William. In truth, I have grave doubts he will live long enough to trouble us greatly, but he is my son, and I cannot leave him to suffer and perhaps die where he is. You will understand this, Debby, or I don’t know you as I believe in my heart that I do know you. You will understand and accept him no matter the pain to us, because our pain can be only a piddling thing compared to what his must be if we turn our backs.”
Benjamin stopped talking. Deborah was fairly sure he stopped talking, although her head still rang with his voice—his words—but jumbled together inside her head as they were, she couldn’t get them into a proper order. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I don’t understand you in the least.”
Benjamin began to talk again, but this time Deborah couldn’t hear him on account of the ringing left over from the last bit of speech making. At some point in the throes of it, she discovered she’d stood up.
