by Sally Cabot
15
Philadelphia, 1732
ANNE HEARD THE NEWS, delivered in one of a dozen conversations that came up throughout the day between Grissom and his customers. Most of this talk Anne heard only as she heard the cartwheels rumble by in the road—the background noise associated with the day’s work getting done—but the talk between Grissom and the clock maker brought Anne’s head up and her needle still.
“Franklin’s got his boy at last,” the clock maker said. “Two years married, and now it comes. Franky, they call him. A fine, healthy infant.”
Grissom cast a look at Anne—dark, changeable, unreadable. “Excellent news,” he said to the clock maker. “Franklin must be a happy man. Two fine sons.”
“Well, let’s see what happens to that other with a legal heir on hand. Now do you have it right? Four chair casings, a bolster, two pillows—”
“I have it right,” Grissom said, and he looked again at Anne.
. . . .
ANNE TURNED AWAY THE pockmarked man that night, pleading illness; she was too distraught to play her games. Franklin’s got his boy at last. What does happen to the other one now there’s a legal heir on hand? She slept little, and next day in the shop fumbled her thread into knots four times. At the end of the day, even though the October dark had already fallen, she walked the three blocks up Market Street to Franklin’s house and stood outside, staring at the single yellow square of light above the print shop. No doubt the infant Franky slept as he should, his stomach full, his hands and feet warm. No doubt he would have stolen the attentions of father and mother both for now, but surely, after almost two years, that other boy must have secured his own place in their hearts?
For a fortnight Anne walked past the Franklin house in the dark; at the end of it she claimed an off stomach, gave up her midday meal, and walked by the house in daylight, but she could see nothing to either ease or disturb her mind in the blank panes of glass. Her claim of an off stomach became true; she ate so poorly at the noon meal that Peter began to pucker his brow as he looked at her; anyone who passed up food was clearly dying or near to it.
At the end of the next workday, Anne held back in the shop long enough to approach Grissom. They’d grown no more conversant over the many months they’d been working side by side in the shop, and Grissom looked up in some surprise as she drew near.
“I wonder, sir, if you hear anything of the Franklin household, of the new infant. If you hear that all are well?” She’d intended no particular emphasis on the word all but heard it just the same; Grissom didn’t appear to.
“I hear no news to the contrary,” Grissom said, his words crisp and bare as a week-old crust. A poor offering, but Anne carried it with care up to her room.
. . . .
ANNE HAD BARELY USHERED Isaac Wilkes into the room and closed the door behind him when a second knock sounded; she opened it on Grissom. He looked at Wilkes and made several adjustments to his features in rapid succession, as if deciding something and then deciding again anew. He said, “Leave us, please. I’ve some business with the lady.”
Wilkes squared himself. “Have you, now? Well, I’ve some of my own. You just hold on to yourself and wait your turn.”
Grissom didn’t raise his voice or change his posture; he simply measured out his words again. “Come back another time, Mr. Wilkes.”
Wilkes looked at Grissom, at Anne, at Grissom again; he walked to the washstand, slapped his hand down on the coins he’d left there, and drew them back into his palm. He walked out, jostling Grissom as he went past, but Grissom might not have felt it for all he seemed to care. He shut the door tightly behind Wilkes, turned back to Anne, and with little adjustment to his speech said, “I came to tell you I’ve been to call on the Franklins. I found them well. All four.”
Anne’s hands began to fly up; she pushed them down and buried them in her skirt.
“The infant was shown off in the usual style, but soon afterward Franklin brought the older boy into the room with as much pride as any father could claim. I played a handkerchief game with the child; he’s as sturdy and healthy as you’d like. I gave out my praise at his cleverness, and both father and mother looked to be equally pleased.”
Anne opened her mouth to speak but the movement loosed tears. She closed her mouth and dashed a hand at her eyes.
Grissom said, softer now, “’Tis a happy home. I thought you should like to know.” He opened the door and stepped through it. Gone.
ANNE LOST SOME TIME in a spate of renegade tears, old and new crowding each other out and down her face, disregarding all her orders to cease. When she’d finally regained command of herself, it was as if the detritus had been washed away and she could see clearly the thing that was left to do. She went down one set of stairs, through the dark shop, up the other. She tapped once and no one answered; she tapped again. He came to the door in his stockings, the fire behind him casting his face in darkness but lighting his knuckles and the red-gold hairs on his wrist where his hand gripped the door. By now Anne had learned a thing or two about men; he could strike as indifferent a pose as he pleased, but she could hear his breathing and knew all she needed to know. She stepped into the room, laid her hands along the finely turned angles of his jaw, and ran a thumb over his mouth. At first his lips stayed hard, but she knew how to soften a man. She knew how to harden one too.
LIKE. DISLIKE. LIKE THE person but dislike what she’s done, dislike the person but like what she’s doing to him now. In Grissom’s big, dense bed, the tick stuffed with the finest goose down, Anne felt the likes and dislikes rolling and tumbling under and over and around her so fast she had trouble keeping track of the up and down. She’d begun in charge of it, had begun standing in the kitchen with her hand in his breeches, but somewhere her feet had come up off the ground and she’d found herself sinking into something that felt like clouds. Grissom’s mouth came looking for hers, but that was not part of the act at all, this long, deep kissing that stopped her breath; she pushed against his chest and he kicked back onto his haunches.
“Was this not the idea?”
It was, but only while it was hers. She rose up on her knees, pushing him down at the same time, drawing her hands over his chest, letting him feel the weight of her pressing him down; he must learn the rules. She said when and what and where, and no kissing the mouth ever; she must be allowed to breathe. She worked at him until she could hear his own breath raw as a storm in a chimney before she fitted herself over him, rising and sinking, faster and slower and faster again until all that breath came out of him in one long groan.
Anne clambered off the bed, reassembled her clothes with care, began to assemble her words with equal care. “Do you plan to visit the Franklins again soon?”
Grissom said nothing.
“I only ask because—”
“I know why you ask.”
“Well then.”
“I’m to see him Wednesday next, to look at some books arriving for the library.”
Anne bent down and pulled on one shoe, then the other. Carefully. Carefully. “Perhaps I’ll see you Thursday next.”
Grissom didn’t answer for so long that Anne was wondering if he could possibly have fallen asleep, but at length his voice rose up from the dark. “Thursday’s your free night, then?”
“I’ll keep it so.”
Grissom sat up, rolled off the bed, pulled on his breeches, and began to fumble about with a jacket or waistcoat, or so it looked in the dark. He came to her, caught up her hand, and slid one, two, three cool shillings into her palm. How did he know?
“Thursday may be free,” he said, “but you’re not, are you?”
16
IT WAS FIXED BETWEEN the two men—every Wednesday Grissom was to call on Franklin to discuss the workings of the new library—and so it was fixed between Grissom and Anne; Thursday nights she climbed the stairs and was led silently up the second set of stairs to the big, soft bed. At first Anne did as she liked with him, but after a tim
e he began to make requests of his own: leave the stockings . . . stand there . . . turn so. The game then became to discover what he would request before he could request it, but Anne’s request of him was always the same: Did you see the boy?
Often he had; Grissom didn’t say, but Anne began to wonder if Franklin made it so. She pictured Deborah Franklin attempting to put William early to bed, Franklin saying, “Oh, leave him till Grissom comes; he loves to play handkerchief with Grissom.” Even the times that Grissom didn’t see William he always had some kind of report to make: “I inquired. Franklin says he’s well.” The first time Grissom made such a report Anne suspected that he’d made it up to placate Anne, to keep her in her giving mood; she took the report without question, but after she’d settled him she said, “Did I please you well enough, Mr. Grissom?”
He sighed a laugh. “Don’t you know?”
“Very well then. If you’d like me to continue to do so, I ask but one thing in return. Whatever it is you find on your visits to the Franklins, you tell it to me as you find it. I’m no child in need of humoring. Were I to find you hid something from me—” She left the sentence to hang.
Grissom lay in silence so long Anne suspected he was forming up a numbered list of all William’s ills. “I’ve told you naught but the truth of the boy.”
“And of any concerns you might have?”
Grissom stopped again, seeming to understand that was another kind of thing. “I’ve kept no concerns from you.”
“Nor will you?”
Grissom lifted her hand and placed it on his heart. “Nor will I.”
“Well, then.” Anne worked her mouth along the sinews of his neck and from there continued down.
ONCE IN A GREAT while Anne got to see for herself how William fared, spying him out walking with his father, the boy such a perfect, healthy, handsome little creature that she couldn’t doubt, she mustn’t doubt, he was where he belonged. Once she came upon them too close to be ignored; Franklin picked William up in his arms and began to distract him with a rapid stream of nonsense: “Shall we go to see the ships? Let’s go see the ships. I wonder how many ships we’ll see. How many do you think, William?”
“Two!” William shouted, and Anne was amazed that he knew the number at all until she remembered; William was two now.
Anne discovered other things as she walked about the town; Wilkes was married and lived two doors down from his shop in a house with a hanging shutter, Mr. Black was single and favored the Indian King, Pettengill was widowed, Captain Allgood lived in the well-to-do Fairmount section of town with a pretty wife and twin daughters who often accompanied him in his carriage as he rode about town. If Wilkes or Pettengill or Black happened upon Anne while in company, they grew flustered and looked away; Allgood, on the other hand, looked straight ahead without flinching, perhaps better used to secrets—or bigger ones.
GRISSOM BEGAN TO FORGET himself in the shop, a little something more each time. One day he leaned over her and laid his palm against her back, another day he touched her wrist, on yet another he used his deeper, richer bed voice to call her. One night after Anne had climbed the stairs to Grissom’s room, after she’d given him his joy and he’d begun to doze, she lingered in the warmth of that luxurious bed longer than she liked to do, the night being one of their first hard frosts. At length Grissom began to stir; Anne made to slip from the bed, but Grissom caught her arm. She turned back willingly enough—he wouldn’t argue the double pay, she knew—but when she went to reach for his part he stayed her hand. He said, “I’ve had my turn.” He took her by the shoulders and pushed her, gently, slowly backward, as if knowing just how fast and hard to go without raising the alarm. He said, “Now keep still.”
Anne kept still, thinking it another part of their old game, but it was nothing like; it was a new one. When Anne discovered it she made to fend him off but by then he’d worked one hand to her nipple and one between her legs, and before she could collect herself it was too late. She was pulling him into her as hard as he was pushing; she felt the racing, racing, racing that she’d created in him so many times, and then she heard a voice—her voice—giving way with an alien sound.
As soon as she could command her limbs again, Anne pushed herself away from Grissom. The wealth of down seemed to suffocate her, to drag her back in and swallow her, but she fought her way to her feet and hurried into her clothes. Grissom called to her when she was already through the door: “Here! Anne!” But she didn’t turn around. She returned to her room and by the time she got there she was trembling. She dove under her bed rug and lay there trying to comprehend what it was that had disturbed her so, but she had no words for the new feeling—only two old ones: Afraid. Alone.
17
THINGS WERE CHANGING AT Eades Alley. The youngest child, Elizabeth, an ailing little thing never as big as her name, died of a malignant sore throat and was put into the ground next to Anne’s father. Next, two of Anne’s brothers went out to work—one as apprentice to the clock maker and the other to muck out the livery in exchange for a cot in the loft. At her first visit in the New Year, Anne was greeted with the news that Mary was to be married to one of the shoemaker’s customers, a man named Ezekiel Lee.
Ezekiel Lee. It was no more than a name to Anne, which she considered a good thing; if she’d known more of him, it wouldn’t have been the kind of thing she’d want to share with her sister, but it did trouble her that her sister had been uncharacteristically quiet about sharing with Anne. When they were left alone in the kitchen, Anne said, “Come, Mary, what can you tell me of this Lee?”
Mary, all grown, plumper and healthier than Anne had ever seen her, turned to her sister with a strange half smile. “I can tell you he’s a man of enough means to buy himself more than a single pair of shoes.”
Anne smiled back. “So this is his charm, then—his means.”
Mary’s smile spread all the way to her dancing brows. “No.”
What was this new thing in her? It was a thing Anne didn’t know.
BY JUNE MARY TOO was gone, moved to Ezekiel Lee’s farm at the outskirts of town, nearly into the country. When Anne made her first call, she found a small, plain home in the middle of an insignificant patch of farm—a single outbuilding with a fenced area that contained a lone horse and cow and calf, a dusting of chickens, a disorderly vegetable plot, and a hay meadow beyond; as Anne looked it over she began to think that Mary had meant her new husband could afford only two pairs of shoes. But there was a curious soothing air about the place; perhaps it was the regularity of the work going on, or the sense of everything growing, or even more simply, the fact that food was always at hand just outside the door. Anne found herself spending fewer Sundays at Eades Alley, leaving her mother more money in between to keep her till she returned, but with only two young boys left to feed and clothe, there were by now ample resources to go the whole way around.
THINGS HAD CHANGED AT the upholsterer’s shop too. Anne had kept away from Grissom’s bed for two weeks, turning away from the impatient whisper in the shop, “What’s the trouble, Anne?” But she couldn’t go three weeks without news of the boy. She climbed the stairs determined not to allow Grissom to overwhelm her in that way again, and for some weeks she succeeded, but eventually he managed to slip through, clever with it, sneaking in under cover of his own pleasure until it was too late for her to deny her own. The next time she went to him in utter, cold command, taking away nothing but her coins, but before too many more weeks he’d managed to level her again. And so a new game was born.
MARY GAVE BIRTH TO her own boy in the same, undecided month of November in which William had been born. Anne went to her sister’s as often as she could, finding her own joy in Mary’s contentment as she sat with her babe secured in her arms. One day as Anne came in after one of her visits, Solomon Grissom said, “You’ve been to your sister’s.”
“How do you know?”
“You come back all peace and roses, that’s how I know.”
&n
bsp; Perversely, the remark disturbed Anne. She wanted her own peace and roses, not her sister’s. Indeed, she’d time and again found comfort, if not complete peace, in the fact that three-year-old William was as strong and healthy as a child could be, or so he’d appeared when Anne had last spied him in the Franklin carriage five—no, it would have been six months ago now.
WILLIAM WAS NEARLY FOUR when Anne read Franklin’s advertisement in the 1734 Gazette for “a servant that is a scholar and can teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Anne read the word—children—plural—and saw in it all the rest of it, all she’d dreamed for William and more. He was to have a tutor, and if he was to have a tutor he was to have a good school, and if he was to have a good school he was to have it all. The paper lay on Grissom’s kitchen table; she’d picked it up and read it as she waited for him to finish dealing with the fire. When he returned to the table, he looked at her and said, “What’s set you alight, girl?”
Anne pointed to the advertisement, unable to say what it was that she read in it beyond the few words, but Grissom read it, dropped a hand on her shoulder, and squeezed. No remark from him could have said more. That night Anne found something inside her opening and expanding until she lay emptied out against him, taking a heretofore unknown comfort in the arms that seemed willing to hold her as long as she lay willing to be held.
ANNE MUST HAVE RELAXED her attention then, for the days began to leap on without pause. What month was it when she began to make tassels, fringe, braid in Grissom’s shop? What month when she became the one to supervise Maria and the new girl, Rose? What year did Peter’s voice crack and drop? What year did Mary have the second boy and what year the girl? When had Anne stopped fighting Grissom in that big, smothering bed, some nights settling in till dawn in his arms? The unnumbered days and weeks and months and years dripped down over her into one big pool of nameless days until Anne knew every angle of Grissom’s face, every red-gold hair on his body, every look and mood his changeable eyes could take on, but she knew only as much of William as the most distant relation might know.
