Benjamin Franklin's Bastard

by Sally Cabot

  So it was that Deborah stepped into the upholsterer’s shop looking down at her shoes, uneasy about the mud ending up on Grissom’s floor; when she lifted her eyes they were met by a pair of gray ones she’d once claimed to know well. The eyes neither dropped in shame nor blinked with nerves; Deborah, the legal wife of Benjamin Franklin, would not be the one to avert her eyes. She lifted her chin and stared at the girl, that brazen, vile, witch of a girl, that kidnapper who had supposedly been banished to Boston instead of being thrown in gaol, a thing that Benjamin had explained would have called unwanted attention to poor William. Poor William! That was what Benjamin had said. Poor William. As if Deborah had suffered nothing at all.

  After a time Deborah became aware that Grissom stood at her side, that he touched her elbow, that he in fact tugged at her elbow.

  “Mrs. Franklin, I’m most pleased to see you.”

  Deborah turned to face Grissom, glad for the excuse of looking away from those gray eyes that had once stolen Deborah’s compassion, but as usual she found herself without speech.

  Grissom tried to help. “How do you fare, Mrs. Franklin? How fares your delightful boy?”

  And William may be declared my legal heir. That was the other thing Benjamin had said.

  “My boy is dead, Mr. Grissom.” Deborah handed him her basket. “Please give this to your wife.” She walked out, stamping the mud off her shoes and onto the floor.

  DEBORAH RETURNED AS SHE came, but this time smelling nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing of Philadelphia. She walked into the shop, through the shop, and out the back to the press, where Benjamin stood in his leather apron, his compositor’s stick cradled in his hand as if it were a jewel-encrusted sword. He looked up. “My dear!”

  “I’ve come from Grissom’s,” she said, and waited.

  Benjamin handed the compositor’s stick to his apprentice; he came over to Deborah and took her by the elbow. She was tired of people tugging at her elbow. She was tired of the shop and the press and Benjamin and William and the whole great lot of them. She pulled free, left the shop, and climbed the stairs. Behind her she heard Benjamin’s heavier tread.

  THEY SAT ON EACH side of the cold parlor hearth, Benjamin leaning forward with his hands on his knees, just as he sat with his important friends whenever he was attempting to appear at his most earnest, coddling them into a vote for a militia, or a hospital, or a school. “Of course I knew she was there,” he explained oh-so-reasonably to Deborah. “I called on Grissom and discovered her. I saw her on the Boston ship myself but she came back, Grissom took her back. I tried to talk Grissom into sending her away again, but I failed. Apparently she’s good at her work. Better than most. He’d not had a girl—” Somewhere in amongst his ramblings, Benjamin saw his mistake. He stopped. “Debby,” he said. “I haven’t been back to Grissom’s shop since I found her there. I shan’t go again. I’m in the bed I wish to lie in with the woman I wish to lie with, as you well know, or if you don’t, I’m not the fellow I think myself to be. And such hard work I put into it too!”

  He smiled. Deborah did not. His brow pinched in impatience and she could read his thoughts as if they marched along the grooves. I’ve left James in charge of the composing . . . there’s no one to attend the shop . . . I wonder if anyone’s waiting for his post . . . “Now come, Debby,” he said. “You’re not going to be silly over this, are you?”

  Deborah stood up. “Yes, I am. ’Tis the best word for it too. Silly to object to being deceived over this lesser thing after having been deceived many times over the larger. You never did even ask them to dine, did you? No, of course you didn’t. Because you were afraid he might—no, your friend Grissom never would, but his wife just might—mention that girl in the shop. Last time you deceived me you gave—and I took—some blame for it to myself. This time you alone may take the blame for my shut door.”

  Benjamin, even in the great rush of the day, sat where he was for some time, as if pondering what she’d said, which would be the first occasion for it. Perhaps Deborah was getting better with her words.

  32

  Philadelphia, 1740

  WHEN WILLIAM WAS APPROXIMATELY ten or eleven, his parents moved into a more fashionable home, still on Market Street, but a home that even to a boy spoke of something finer than what had been.

  William also noticed that as they moved four doors along Market Street the spinning wheels and looms didn’t come, that his mother began to buy her cloth from the shops, her meat fresh instead of dried, their bowls made of china instead of pewter. William noticed these things, but none of them changed his life to any great extent, until the following year when his father enrolled him in Alexander Annard’s Classical Academy, a school far above the reach of any other tradesman’s son. One day William was lording Pirate over all his horseless friends, the next he was looking for a friend who didn’t have a horse; he was amongst the rich Quaker boys now, the oldest, most influential families in Philadelphia—the Graemes, the Shippens, the Penns.

  But William was glad enough for the change. At the old school a word had just begun to shadow him as he fought his way among the sons of bricklayers and smiths and cordswainers, a word he understood only in its sense and not its exact meaning—bastard—but at the academy the word got magically left behind. For a time William did have to struggle to fit in, but he was sharp and he was quick; soon enough he’d learned what clothes to wear and what words to speak, and one day one of the boys invited William to his home. William had thought his new Market Street house was fine but soon saw its lack of space and glitter and lawn. It was true, he did overhear his friend’s mother: “Only think what he comes from!” But the boy’s father countered, “He’s polite enough and pretty enough; he’ll get on.”

  William took even greater care with his dress and his manner after that and he did get on. Other invitations came, to horseback rides and skating parties and sleigh rides; soon enough he began to think of himself not as a printer’s son but as that other kind of boy, the kind who might expect to go to Eton or Oxford, to become a merchant or a lawyer or a politician if he chose.

  And then one morning, coming down the stairs early, he heard his mother’s voice from behind the bedroom door.

  “I’d like to know what you think you’re doing to that boy, puffing him up so full of himself, as if he belongs with that kind, when it’s a printer’s trade he’s to inherit. He’s already past the age of half the apprentices in this town; he should be at the press learning his job. What’s that school costing you? And you’ve another coming soon to feed and clothe.”

  Soon after, William’s sister, Sarah, was born. The sister was a blow; by then William had come to understand something more of the meaning of the word bastard, and saw at once that if he was one, his sister wasn’t; he also saw that his mother preferred the one who wasn’t. As to his father, William could not have foreseen how eagerly his tall, strong, proud father could debase himself over a cradle of uncomprehending pink flesh, even if it was his own. His own and Deborah’s. Theirs together. So. What more did William need to know of it? He understood things now. The charmed Franky. His mother’s wild raillery at this “devil child” who was never hers but the product of some other passion between her husband and . . . whom?

  Many nights William approached his father’s study ready to ask the rapidly all-consuming question, but each time he began his faltering sentence, something in his father’s eye dried out his mouth. One night he finally managed to get a single sentence out.

  “I should like to know who my mother is.”

  “Your mother is Deborah Franklin. And this is no longer a subject between us.”

  And so it wasn’t.

  All the while, the child Sally grew and sparkled and charmed her father, pulling him to her as if she were a flame and he a light-seeking insect. “My Sally!” he would cry, and scoop her up and tease her into giggles and words and soon—William must admit it was precociously soon—even letters, the father exclaiming over the daugh
ter’s little slate as he so rarely found time to exclaim over William’s ever-denser pages.

  But worse was yet to come. Shortly after Sally was born, William’s father took him out of Alexander Annard’s Classical Academy, where he’d worked so hard to achieve and belong, and put him to work in the print shop. As much as William liked being at his father’s side, printing was still messy, smelly, strenuous work, and William still hated it. Feeling for the letters, in constant fear of picking the wrong one, the lining up of the letters—backward—into a word, the words into sentences, the sentences into a page, the inking, the hefting about of ream after ream of paper, the swinging of the heavy arm of the press time after time. His father, William decided, had way too much to say. But beyond that he would not blame his father for this new life chained to the print shop. He knew who to blame. He’d heard Deborah’s words.

  Deborah. Inside his head, William stopped calling her mother, and started to think of her by her given name, but the game was only a satisfying one at the start—soon it turned on its inventor, grew talons and horns, butted at him night after night. If Deborah should not be called mother, who should be?

  One night, after William had painfully clawed his way into his teens, he came home from the shop tired, hot, ink stained, out of sorts with the world in general and with one person in particular. He’d been so hot and tired he hadn’t made proper use of the turpentine rag to clean the ink off his hands, and as he gripped the doorjamb to swing himself through it, he left an inky smear on the woodwork. As luck had run for him of late, his house-proud mother stood just on the other side of the door.

  “Get your filthy hand off the paint!” she shouted at him.

  That was the moment it first occurred to William that perhaps Deborah was speaking of ink and perhaps she wasn’t speaking of ink; in either case she’d spoken it at the wrong time. He leaned more heavily into the hand where it rested against the doorjamb.

  “What did I say to you?”

  “William,” his father said, “listen to your mother.”

  William dropped his hand and looked straight through Deborah at his father. “I should like to,” he answered, “if someone would only tell me where to find her.”

  The room turned still.

  His father broke through the quiet first. “Your mother stands there. And it would behoove you to remember your duty to her.”

  “She’s not my mother. Since the whole town knows it, I’d have thought you’d know it too.”

  “I shouldn’t like—,” his father began, but Deborah rounded on her husband, damp, red, raving.

  “Do you see? Do you see what he is? The greatest villain that ever lived! Oh, that I must ever claim him as mine!”

  William turned, stepped back through the door, and slammed it closed. Behind him he could hear his father, his voice raised as it rarely ever was.

  “Debby! Dear God! Think of the boy! Where’s your heart?”

  “Tired. My heart is tired and sore and sick to death of the sight of him.”

  And somewhere inside another door—the bedroom door, most likely—slammed closed.

  LATER THAT NIGHT WILLIAM’S father came to his room. “I expect you to apologize to your mother.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Below stairs lies your mother,” his father said, in that voice that William could never find it in himself to cross.

  The next day William apologized to Deborah, but Deborah retracted none of her words.

  THAT SAME YEAR WAR with Spain was declared from the courthouse steps, and the cannon on the hill fired off round after round all day long. Soon the French had entered into it, stirring up the Indians along the frontier, attacking settlements nearer and nearer to town; William’s father became the loudest voice in favor of building a militia for the defense of Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, but the solid Quaker voting block against all things militaristic held sway. William ground out the rest of the year at the print shop, but at the beginning of the second year, when the privateers began sailing up the Delaware into Philadelphia and flashing about their gold, William began to make some plans of his own.

  33

  Philadelphia, 1745

  ANNE WOKE TO A late-night tap on her door, by now such an alien sound she wasn’t sure she’d heard it; she’d kept her promise to Grissom and entertained no men in her room or anywhere else. At first there had come the expected random knocks from those former, overfond patrons who could not latch on to the idea that this particular door was now closed. In time, however, the message was absorbed, and Anne was left alone. The fact that Anne was indeed alone required some adjustment on her part, but soon enough she discovered a new serenity in the falling away of all pretense; she began to practice pleasing herself of an evening, and found she could excel at that too. She borrowed books from Solomon Grissom and now and then dipped into her pouch to purchase a special one; she took more pains with her sewing, and with a bit of trim here and there managed to turn her wardrobe—and her room—into something that told another story of Anne than the one she’d told before. As for the daytime, she worked as she’d worked before and soon made her way back from bed ticks to tassels to hangings, from there to being trusted with the running of the shop now and then.

  But Anne was not the only thing in Philadelphia that had changed, and from what she heard from Grissom’s customers as they came in and out, much of the change could be laid to Franklin. The streets had been paved and culverts run under them to divert the water. A thing called a “fire engine” had appeared, to be used by the fire company Franklin had formed for the express purpose of responding to alarms, and it came just in time, containing a terrible fire at the warehouses along the wharf. A learned society had been formed, “to promote useful knowledge amongst the British plantations of America.” With the announcement of war and the news of repeated Indian and French attacks on the Ohio border had come an even bolder move: Franklin defied the pacifist Quakers who controlled the assembly and began lobbying to form a private militia. But perhaps the most talked about of all Franklin’s innovations was the “Pennsylvania Fireplace,” an invention he refused to patent so that all could share in its benefit, the benefit being the reduction by two-thirds of the amount of wood required to heat a home. What the corders at the waterfront had to say about this Anne didn’t know, but she knew what everyone else said of it: Franklin was now called genius and philanthropist.

  Other, private changes in Franklin’s life had come to Anne’s attention as well—the move to a more fashionable home, the birth of a daughter, a partner brought into the printing business. It was rumored that much of Franklin’s new free time was spent on experiments regarding a thing called electricity, and Anne found herself regretting one single aspect of her old life: the chance to hear firsthand what such a thing was and what it could mean—what it could mean for William—for this was how she took note of everything regarding Franklin.

  Anne always watched for William as he made his way about town but rarely saw the boy near to; if she was seen first, mother or father or Min took care to either turn him around or distract his attention another way. In time William grew into a tall and finely made young man who began to go about on his own, but whenever he passed Anne he did so without a single flick of recognition. Anne lay awake many of those early nights debating the gain and the loss of making her identity known to the boy, but in the end decided that when she did so, she must do it as someone who would cause him no shame; there were still too many about town who remembered the whore. Give it a few more years, she decided, until no one remembered anyone but the upholstery worker—then would be the time.

  Solomon Grissom too had changed, taking to married life so well he’d fathered a child every odd year, pausing at a current tally of two girls and a boy. Anne had been exceedingly pained at the arrival of that first girl, the memory of William’s earliest days in her arms brought fresh to life with every cry of hunger or distress, but in time the child had come into
her own red curls, her own way of dimpling, her own distinctive voice. So had the next girl. They were not William. But then came the boy, and by the cruelest act of fate he came as fair haired and bright as William; Anne couldn’t keep her eyes from him whenever he happened into the shop hand in hand with his father. Elisha, he was called, and Anne went out of her way to make a friend of him, tying up a yarn dog for him, or sewing a stuffed cat, keeping a piece of molasses candy in her pocket to treat him. When he became ill with dysentery and didn’t appear for a week, Anne’s attention fell off and she bungled the accounts; Grissom, already gray from lack of sleep, had to keep late in the shop to sort them out.

  Another thing occupied Anne’s mind in addition to William and Elisha: Solomon Grissom’s marriage. Contrary to her prediction, Grissom had left Anne alone, and as glad as Anne was of it, she was just as puzzled. She began to make a study of the pair, watching the Grissoms together and apart, and noticed how they listened for the other’s tread and lit up when the other appeared, how well they attended not only each other’s physical selves but each other’s looks and words. Through the wife, Anne came to a greater understanding of the husband; she learned that his silence was not always empty, that his acuteness was not always barbed; she began to feel freer in his presence now there was no doubt his heart had rooted firmly in some other ground. Anne watched Sophie too, and learned something of those other things that could be given to a man besides that single thing that was all Anne had ever allowed. The other things were things Anne had never seen the point in learning, but it fascinated her just the same, and at times, at night, she would warm herself by hovering in her imagination over the Grissoms’ hearth.