by Sally Cabot
Anne had come to know something of honest faces and counted John Hewe as one; his appearance came as no great surprise to Anne, who having taken her own dislike to the wife decided the husband must likely share in her assessment. He needed more time than most but was more grateful than most, and more fun besides, entertaining her with tales from the Pot that might not have measured up against a Franklin yarn, but served her well enough in the lack.
With the new ones Anne had taken to keeping her candle lit despite the cost, just to watch out for anything nasty coming her way; in doing so she discovered that apparently it was not the habit of whores—or wives—to conduct their business in clear light. The sight of a dark triangle against white thighs appeared to be worth something to a certain kind of man; she began to charge for the extra price of a candle and met no complaint.
Of all the men who climbed her stairs, the shipmaster was the greatest surprise. At his first visit, he asked her in all politeness if she would be so kind as to put on his breeches, apparently so he might pull them off her, which Anne could see no reason not to do; at the next visit, he brought a young man around Anne’s age, and paid out his coin for Anne to attend to the young man while he watched from the door. At the next visit, as the young man entered her, the shipmaster went behind him and did a thing that Anne understood from tavern talk could get the pair hanged, but it didn’t seem to distract the young man from his work. Every visit thereafter there was always this same young man—Robert, he was called—between them.
BUSINESS WAS INCREASING BELOW stairs as well. A young girl named Maria was brought on to take over the stuffing of feathers; Anne took over the horsehair, winding it around wooden rods for curling, removing the curls, setting them in careful layers inside a tick sewn up on the sides like an open box. The new work required a new skill; at first Grissom hovered at her shoulder to watch over every curl, and Anne was unable to make her above-stairs appointments as freely as before. Where she could, she worked them into a regular schedule: Wilkes and the corder—whose name turned out to be Pettengill—shared Monday; Hewe kept to Wednesday; Wilkes’s pockmarked friend, who called himself Mr. Black—although Anne doubted it was his name at all—came around every other Friday as he could afford. The shipmaster—Allgood was his name—sent a boy for ribbons or braid whenever he was in town; the boy stopped by Anne with the same message each time: “Sister sends greeting,” and Anne answered each message with “Tell sister to call Tuesday nine,” or Thursday or Friday or whatever time remained. She kept Saturday and Sunday for herself.
Around the time Anne mastered the horsehair mattress, another penny appeared in her wage. She was eating well, her family was eating well, they all dressed better. Franklin had been right—she’d begun to make something of the job—and sometimes, especially on those nights when her hands happened to be gripping the broad, well-muscled back of the corder, she would think of Franklin and wonder if he’d foreseen both of the ways she’d manage to do it. Only later in the night, when she was too tired to stave it off, would she think of William.
ANNE BEGAN TO ENJOY her daytime work; like Peter, she found some satisfaction in pleasing Grissom with a neat and timely job, in offering a useful suggestion that was taken up with that singular, mute nod and quiet smile. This came as no surprise to her; it did surprise her that she could come to like her night work too. She found that if, when using her candle, she took some cloth away slowly, from the edges, she could turn any man breathless before he’d even touched her, and she found she liked watching their chests heave, their eyes glitter, their parts strain against their breeches. She liked deciding when and where they could touch her and when and where they couldn’t, changing it up to keep the game new. She was in utter charge of these strong, proud men, smarter than them all, or so she felt until she opened the door one night to let out the pockmarked Black and found Grissom standing in the hall.
Grissom looked after the man who pushed past him, waistcoat in hand, sweat just drying on him. He looked at Anne, standing there in her shift with a shawl pulled around. He said, “Business thrives, then?”
Anne peered at Grissom and attempted to take the mood of the man. He stood with joints locked, fists knotted, brows pinched. A dark mood, yes, but how dark? Was she about to be discharged? Evicted? Accosted? But business, he’d said. If he’d called it a business . . .
“Do you come for your share?” she asked. “Or do you prefer to take it in goods? I’ve Thursday free.”
Grissom’s eyes flickered over her body and dismissed it. He turned and walked back down the stairs.
ANNE WAITED NEXT DAY for the summons that would discharge her or evict her, but it never came. Grissom spoke to her as little as before, but there was an ill-defined change in his tone, a new vagueness, as if he’d suddenly forgotten her name. As the days went by and he never called her to account in any way, she began to understand; he could not discharge her, he owed it to Franklin to keep her on. In time another suspicion began to take hold—that Grissom just plain didn’t like her; she counted it a good day if Grissom came by her table and nodded at her progress, but that was the best she drew. Against that she could hear a “Fine, Maria, fine!” or a “Good work, Peter, my man!” It was true that there were days when a terse correction might cause a line to form between Peter’s eyebrows, or an instruction delivered with an undercurrent of impatience might set Maria’s fingers trembling; Grissom never called Anne to account in such a way either, but it didn’t make up for the absent praise.
It shouldn’t have mattered one way or the other to Anne whether Grissom liked her, but she found that in fact it did; she’d grown used to extracting whatever degree of attention she wished from men and took it as a black mark that she was unable to draw this one. But had she really tried? Or rather, had she tried in the way she was best at? One day as Grissom drew near her table to check her progress in filling a particular mattress that was to go to a new customer, Anne noticed he’d picked up some threads on the back of his jacket; she stood up to pick them off, balancing her off hand against his waist, holding out the threads to show him.
“In case you were to go out,” she said, as if in apology. “How your cloth looks must hint to your customers how their cloth will look, after all.”
Grissom only stepped aside to peer into the ticking box. “I want this on its way by tomorrow noon.”
She attempted a like attack a week later, leaning forward and allowing her breast to brush his hand as he tested her mattress for supportiveness, but he only withdrew his hand and said, cryptically or not, “That will do.”
At first Grissom’s disinterest left Anne feeling as if she’d been cast adrift at sea with no idea of which way to paddle toward home, but soon enough she came to feel more as if she were floating in a still pool, surrounded by a raging stream. She took a deep breath, let it out, and set her mind to securing her place in Grissom’s shop by excelling at her below-stairs work alone. She’d been good enough before; she became better now, so fast and precise in laying out the horsehair that Grissom soon had to find her other things to do. He put her to work sewing the costly bed hangings that only the wealthiest Philadelphians could afford; her first set of hangings was aligned so precisely that she never stuffed a bed tick again.
14
DEBORAH FRANKLIN SAT BY the fire hemming a new shift for William; as he neared a year or so of age he was grown out of all he’d first owned. The late September fire was the first one she’d actually enjoyed, welcoming its heat on a raw day, and had hoped that Benjamin would feel the same and come sit by her side, but instead he was dangling a ball of yarn above William’s cradle and exclaiming. Again.
“You see, Debby? You see how he knows just when the yarn will swing his way? He understands a pendulum already! There! He’s grabbed it again! You see?”
“He should be sleeping,” Deborah said. “Leave him be.”
But Franklin could not leave him be. Deborah had not expected it to go exactly so—Benjamin spending lon
g days at the print shop, then home to play with William, then half the night at the tavern with his Junto—a group of friends who worked at bringing new things to one another and to Philadelphia by exercising their minds—this was how he described it to her. It had robbed a good deal of Benjamin’s time of late because of his newest idea, the first Deborah had ever heard of such a thing—a lending library. In July his talk was all of the agreement struck; in August it was all of the fifty subscribers he’d already acquired. September was filled with lists of books he planned to order, and then he brought the books home and attempted to read them to Deborah, but who could be interested in such books? Law, astronomy, government, philosophy! She fared some better with Gulliver’s Travels, but nonetheless, Benjamin looked so many questions at her as he read that she was sure there was something more to the thing that had gotten past her and disappointed him accordingly. It was the same with the Iliad; even her sense of accomplishment at having survived to its end was dashed to pieces when he came at her with another by the same author called the Odyssey! The books had put a new space between them, she saw that, but she knew it to be a space created by her own deficiency and could not resent him for attempting to include her in a thing so important to his very being.
The thing Deborah could resent was the infant. Yes, she would admit it. There were many times—indeed, most times—when Deborah was alone with William that she felt only what she should, or what she imagined she should. If the child had been hers as much as Benjamin’s, she doubted she’d have felt a minute’s pain over the attention Benjamin so generously lavished on the boy, but as he wasn’t, she could only look at the pair of matched faces and feel the outsider to it all. There was none of her in that little face, no shape of nose or color of hair or any smile she could call her own.
And who could claim the other half of that face? Deborah could not leave the thought alone. She searched the boy over for some notable thing not come to him from Benjamin that she could seek out as she walked the street, but it was a difficult thing to compare an infant to a grown woman; it was difficult and it was foolhardy, for what could she do if she one day suspected a match? Nothing. Nothing at all. She might point to the woman and demand of Benjamin, “Is that her?” but she doubted Benjamin would say. She knew the woman must be some kind of low creature, lower than a common-law wife, but that didn’t help Deborah either—if the woman hadn’t been so low a thing, would she have become Mrs. Benjamin Franklin instead of Deborah? And what would have become of Deborah? There Deborah arrived each time, and each time she arrived there she resolved to be a better mother to William, if only for Benjamin’s sake, Benjamin who had saved her. Sometimes Deborah was successful in her resolve, but sometimes she found herself turning away from that puzzling small face in frustration, unable to address its hidden question any longer.
AT LAST BENJAMIN LEFT the babe and came to the fire, bending to kiss Deborah on the brow, his fingers weaving themselves into the hair tied up at her neck, bringing the knot down. “Come,” he said, and lifted her from the chair, his other hand already at her laces. “Come and warm your husband on this damp night; think of it—only September! We’ve a long winter ahead of us, my dear!”
“You don’t go out tonight?”
It was an idle question—his hands had already come up under her skirt and around her buttocks—and as he caught her up and drew her toward their chamber door she thought as she thought every night: Perhaps tonight we’ll make a child of our own.
THAT NIGHT PROVED NO different from the others before it; there was no child, and although Deborah did her best with William, she could not block out the idea of Benjamin and William and this other, shadowy, enticing woman forming a triangle locked tight at each corner, forbidding Deborah to enter. When callers arrived at the house it was more of the same; the callers were always men; their talk was always of matters scientific or civic, far beyond Deborah’s ken. She would make her greeting and provide the proper sustenance and then retreat, but to where? To the kitchen where she could hear the comfortable talk and hearty laughter? Above stairs where she could stare at the strange child in the cradle who seemed to smile in his sleep as if he already understood the talk below stairs?
On another cold night Benjamin came in late from the tavern and slipped shivering into the sheets, tucking himself around her and warming her in a way that had become one of her favorite things about her life with him. Sometimes he didn’t speak, allowing her to choose whether to be awake or asleep to him, but usually he did speak, and usually afterward he came into her, on tavern nights sometimes even as she lay, too impatient to even wait for her to roll over. So it was on this night, but afterward, thinking of the great number of times she’d collected that hot seed in her without a single sprout, she burst out, “How often, Benjamin? How often did you lie with her?”
Benjamin was not the kind of man who would pretend to need additional explanation to such a question, but he did take some time in forming his answer. Did he see the trick in it? To say many times would not soothe any wife Deborah knew; to say once only would merely emphasize Deborah’s failure. But Benjamin Franklin was cleverer than most. “Once would have been too many,” he said. “But look what we gain of it. Look at our fine boy.”
And there Benjamin moved to a new subject, a thing he’d begun to do around her of late. “I must hire a girl for the shop,” he said. “Young James and I cannot keep leaving off setting types or spreading ink to sell a bit of stationery.”
Benjamin talked on in that direction; Deborah listened and took herself off on her own, a new idea that made her feel instantly more spirited. She sat up, leaning over Benjamin, straining and failing against the dark to see his face. She splayed her hand flat on his chest instead, to feel his answer.
“Give the job to me,” she whispered. Yes, she felt that quick hiccup of surprise, but she kept on. “You could then hire a girl to help in the house for half what it would cost to hire one for the shop.”
The chest under her hand didn’t appear to breathe at all. Deborah gave it a jiggle. “I’m better at my numbers than my letters, Benjamin. You know it. I helped my father with his accounts. I could make something more of that shop for you. For instance, what of my mother’s recipe for itch ointment? She couldn’t keep it on hand no matter how much she made of it—someone called for it every week. And coffee and tea. They’ll come in for their paper and books, but they’d take the coffee and tea if we had it. Why, we might add any number of things! I could think of many—”
Benjamin cut her short with a laugh. “I already see how you work at sales. Very well, only be kind to your master when he comes home and you may see a rise in it for you.”
Was it a joke? She was so seldom sure. But there he was, rising, pressing against her. She rolled into him, gripped his buttocks, and clamped him to her, hurrying him on, not caring for her own interest, thinking that perhaps it was her heat that killed off the tender seed. He came to a satisfyingly violent end in quick time and rolled away sweating and gasping. Deborah lay still, eyes closed, legs squeezed tight to contain her husband’s fluids. She thought Benjamin already asleep when he rolled over again.
“Have you noticed how our bodies’ warmth increases with the speed of our pulses? I believe this is the proper measure of effective exercise, not time or distance.” This drew him on to some other thoughts about the comparative effects on the pulse from a carriage ride, a horseback ride, or a walk; whatever thoughts he was drawn to next, Deborah never heard them.
THE WOMAN THEY HIRED was no girl but the gray and creased Min; she took William in hand without fuss, and Deborah, in turn, took up her new position in her husband’s shop. At once her world grew by half. She’d never felt any great interest in what went on at the printer’s shop beneath her home, but once in it, she spent the first part of her first day touring its workings with growing fascination. The cases of types, capital letters in the upper case, small letters in the lower case, were selected by the feel of a small notc
h in the metal and placed backward into a small tray Benjamin called his compositor’s stick. The letters were then hammered into a larger tray, the page to be printed growing laboriously line by line. Next the tray was carried to the press and a pair of fleece-and-leather-covered objects, much like thick, sheared-off Indian clubs, were used to pat the type with ink; the fine linen paper was then placed over the tray and the heavy lever swung across to engage the press. For every question Deborah asked, she received at least a half-dozen incomprehensible answers, but at the end of it she knew what she wanted to know: It took eight hours to set a single page of type, and the Gazette being four pages, printed once a week, she better understood her husband’s long hours.
Deborah soon discovered she had a shopkeeper’s instinct for a likely sale, and added other items to the slates and pencils and quills and inks and sealing wax and various papers. Benjamin left the decisions to her, along with their success or failure. As it happened, she succeeded, making her sales and keeping her accounts, not only to her satisfaction but to her husband’s. When in February she knew herself to be with child, she believed there was nothing left the world could offer her.
In October a son was born, named Francis after one of Benjamin’s Nantucket forebears, and the last of Deborah’s fears flew away. A daughter might have come second even to the bastard son, but a legitimate son could not. A son of theirs. It was true that a rollicking boy nearing two must be more entertaining to a father than a newborn infant who could only sleep and cry and suck, but Benjamin fussed over the cradle sufficiently to ease Deborah’s mind as to his true affection. Better still, in this tiny new face Deborah could at last see something of hers, and sensing that William was now the one left out, she allowed the great, violent rush of love she felt for her own son to sweep up William too.
