Tom Bedlam

by George Hagen

  Some funerals become joyous celebrations of a man's character—real or imaginary—but Mansworth's was less about the man than about the war's cessation. The strangers who wept did not weep for him but for their loved ones and the lives that would never be the same. The figure carried through London would be forgotten quickly by most, though his fanfare would linger in the memories of a generation as a milestone of grief and a marker of the next era.

  Eve wept for Josephine because she knew what it meant to grow up with the loss of a parent; Mansworth's absence would change her daughter's life in unimaginable ways.

  Tom suffered through the service—embittered by the pomp accorded a man like Geoffrey Mansworth and disgusted at the power of the strong over the weak, the well-placed over the rank and file, and the evil over the good.

  As for William Bedlam, he made a spectacle of himself, weeping copious tears, wailing, and shaking his head. If he had known of his first son's vast wealth, he might have convinced him to pay for his return to the legitimate stage. It was a tragedy indeed.

  Paddy Pendleton did not weep. His stoic grimace endured throughout the eulogies, the procession, and the somber embraces. He had been waiting for the end of the world his entire life, and it insisted on eluding him. Surely now, he thought, after such a war, people would show a little wisdom, mend their ways, follow the commandments, and respect their elders.

  Iris and Charity attended their uncle's funeral. Charity's face was swollen from her injuries, but she looked much improved from the night when Iris had found her.

  Iris kept up a steady banter during the service. “Mark my words, Arthur is wandering Europe. Perhaps he's suffering from amnesia, or he's joined the circus, or been taken into slavery.”

  “Perhaps he's become religious,” Charity added.

  Iris shot her sister a cautious glance. Religion had been a taboo subject; the Pendletons had not been discussed since the newspapers announced that Isaiah Pound had fled overseas with a fortune stolen from the Pendletons' bank accounts.

  “Perhaps he has,” said Iris.

  Charity shuddered. “God forbid.”

  Then Iris issued a riotious shriek, and the two daughters ducked their heads in silent hysterics.

  EVE HELD A FAREWELL party for the Chapels and the Limpkins in Bedford Park. It was an opportunity for William Bedlam to meet his granddaughters, Eve to meet her nieces, and of course, Tom to give his father what the old man had yearned for—a chance to take center seat, surrounded by his progeny, and be showered with respect, gratitude, and forgiveness.

  Tom feared that his daughters might be appalled by his father's monstrous ego, his shabby manners, and his inflated sense of importance (now he considered himself father to the late minister of war), but for most of the evening, people mistook Paddy Pendleton for Tom's father. The colporteur claimed a comfortable chair and was greeted, welcomed, served wine and delicacies on a fine china plate, admired for the resonance of his baritone voice and the gravity of his features.

  Meanwhile, Bedlam surveyed the ornate plasterwork and paintings like a pauper in Ali Baba's cave, oblivious to his family. Beneath the ruddy cheeks and straight nose, a wide smile acknowledged his potential good fortune. After his second drink, he began to hover near Eve, determined to charm his daughter-in-law into some act of generosity. His charisma, however, had become coarsened by so many performances on London's streets. When he asked for Eve's shoe so that he could perform a juggling act involving an apple and a wine bottle, she demurred.

  Hastily Tom drew his father away and reminded him that he was not obliged to entertain the crowd and should show some dignity.

  “Dignity? Well, it appears that Paddy has cornered that act! Look at him swilling the posh brandy! What better company could she have than her father-in-law? I've known suffering and loss, haven't I? Besides, she might want company now she's left with nothing but her daughter and a generous inheritance from my late son!”

  “I wouldn't get your hopes up about her money,” Tom warned him.

  “Her money? How dare you!” cried Bedlam, his white hackles quivering with indignation. “I am not as shallow as all that! But even if I was, the fact remains that I am her daughter's grandfather! Where is her gratitude?”

  “As I said, I wouldn't get your hopes up,” Tom replied. “You've been no more doting a grandfather to my children than you were a father.”

  “I thought we'd let bygones be bygones!” the old man roared.

  Tom steered his father into the dining room in an effort to calm him down. “Look, Father, you know you have my forgiveness, but let us be frank. Your motives are suspect. Eve is taking her daughter to America,” he explained, “and I'm returning to Gantrytown. Iris and Charity are coming with me for Margaret's wedding. You must accompany us.”

  “Africa?” Bedlam wilted. “Why would I want to go there?”

  “Because it's the most beautiful place in the world,” Tom replied. “And because your family will be there: your grandchildren, your son. I'd like you to come, Father.”

  “But what would I do there?” The old man stared at his son, mouth open in despair, while his hands stuffed food from the buffet table into his coat pocket. “I'm sorry, my boy” he concluded. “I'm a Londoner. I'd be a fish out of water anywhere else!”

  IRIS AND CHARITY were introduced to Audrey by Tom. They didn't know what to make of her—this small, crippled woman with large eyes who seemed to wield such intense power over their father. Tom stood beside her, his frame tilted down as if to bend his ear to anything she said. His dependence on and deference to her peeved both daughters.

  Iris, true to form, made the first strike: “So, jail for nearly three decades. How was that, I wonder?”

  Audrey laughed. “Iris, thank you so much for asking! I was hoping to hear you speak your mind. I've admired your poetry for such a long time. One of my regrets is that I missed seeing you perform.”

  “You didn't answer the question,” Charity replied.

  “Jail, you mean?” Audrey met the girl's skeptical eye with a candid frown. “It was torment, Charity. It was rigid, it was unending, but it was predictable—and sometimes predictability is a comfort. I don't know if you've ever wondered about your place in the world, but as a young woman, I was torn in two directions. Then, suddenly, a judge decided my place. For twenty-eight years, it was no longer a matter of debate.

  “Today, I'm happy to leave that question unanswered.”

  THE GRAY SEA

  THE EDINBURGH CASTLE WAS PART OF THE FLEET OF THE UNION-Castle Line. She had been fitted with defense armaments during the war and had carried troops and mail in the convoys between Port Elizabeth and Southampton. Thinking the ship's name was a good omen, Tom booked three second-class cabins for the trip home in December 1918.

  A good omen for what? He dared not think it, even. Iris kept mentioning the newspaper items she found about soldiers who turned up after being presumed dead. She never mentioned Arthur, of course. Tom wouldn't allow it. He had declared the matter closed. Arthur's fate, however, was scarcely out of their minds.

  Audrey had received a shocking letter from her son. Apparently he had lived up to his reputation as a ne'er-do-well. While celebrating the cease-fire in France, Jonah had made friends with a few South Africans, who captivated him with stories of the fortunes to be made mining in the Transvaal. Lured by a dream of making millions, Jonah convinced them to lend him a uniform from the Transvaal Scottish Regiment and smuggle him aboard a South African troopship bound for Port Elizabeth. This meant, of course, that he would be branded a deserter by his own army and face a long jail term if caught.

  Audrey saw this news as a sign that she should accept Tom's invitation to visit Gantrytown, contact her son, and set him back on the right course.

  When Tom stood upon the Edinburgh Castle, watching the green and pleasant coastline recede, he silently bade farewell to Arthur for the last time. Gravely, he looked across the deck at his daughters and took stock of them. The
y were an odd pair, to be sure: Iris wore red slippers and tights, an enormous bearskin coat, a green scarf wrapped around her head like a turban, and one solitary peacock feather twitching above the whole ridiculous ensemble. What an eccentric she had become. Dressed in Chinese silks she drove death from the Chapel's door; she stole her sister's first love; and crossed continents clad (or unclad) as Victory. Iris, Tom concluded, would always stage dramas—or provoke them. By contrast, Charity was a figure of modesty and taste, haunted with yearning. She altered the black woolen coat Tom bought for her in London, taking in the waist and flaring the hem. Her small and pretty face had healed well, but it evoked disenchantment. Though Charity might regard all subsequent prophets with skepticism, Tom feared she would never kick her attraction to them, or quash a desire to find the real thing.

  In short, neither daughter would find satisfaction in Gantrytown. He would have to make the most of their company during Margaret's wedding.

  “GOODBYE, ENGLAND!” CRIED IRIS. “Farewell, France!” she added, scanning the faint rim of land to the east of the railing. “Piglet, I know you're there … somewhere!”

  “Poor Arthur,” sighed Charity to her sister. “I was so unkind to him all through his childhood. I shall carry that shame with me forever.”

  Iris tipped her head, as if to cast her own misgivings into the water. “I suppose it would be callous to wish for another war. I had such a good time.”

  “Poor Papa, what a sad life he's had,” said Charity. “He's lost so many people—a mother, a brother, a wife, a child.”

  “Yes, for that reason I shall conduct my life as a comedy, not a tragedy,” Iris resolved.

  The women looked across the deck at their father. He wore a thick black coat with the collar pulled up to his ears. His hair seemed almost silvery in the diffuse light of this overcast day. His arm was tucked in Audrey's.

  “Do you think he'll marry the murderess?” said Iris.

  Charity frowned at her sister. “Don't say that,” she whispered.

  “Well, that's what she is” Iris shrugged. “I'd love to be called a murderess.”

  “WHAT ARE YOU THINKING, Tom?” Audrey inquired, slipping her fingers between his.

  “Arthur,” Tom admitted. “Iris sold him to the Horvaths one afternoon as a piglet; for the rest of the evening he squealed and scampered across the floor. Arthur always tried to be the person that people expectedhim to be. I wonder if his death is merely another accommodation.”

  “What do you mean?” replied Audrey.

  Tom paused, waiting for his emotion to subside. “Foolish of me, I know,” he gasped, “but I still can't believe he's dead.”

  THE CHAPEL DAUGHTERS watched Audrey console Tom.

  “Well,” conceded Iris, “he's entitled to a little affection, isn't he?”

  Charity nodded. “Yes, I suppose so. We're all entitled to a little affection.”

  “Yes,” Iris agreed with a doomed expression.

  “Still,” added Charity, “I hope he doesn't marry her.”

  “It's just one more murderer in the family,” said Iris with a casual yawn. “Have you forgotten about his brother?”

  Charity looked startled. “Of course not. I meant that I'd be jealous if both Margaret and Papa suddenly got married, leaving us—”

  “Oh.” Iris frowned. “Well, I won't stay in Gantrytown! Charity, I'd go mad. I can't believe Margaret is marrying that man. I'll never find a man there. Oh, God!” she lamented. “What if the best days of my life are over?”

  “I don't believe mine are,” Charity replied.

  Her expression was defiant, and Iris regarded her with surprise.

  “I'm so glad to hear you say that. When I found you that night in Brighton, I felt as if it was all meant to be—the end of the war, you there on the beach, my finding you, it all had a purpose, there was a point. We were brought together by … Providence.”

  Charity looked at her sister thoughtfully.

  “One night,” she said, “I think it was near Newcastle, we had a rally in a field, and everybody in the audience was given candles and told to spread out in the darkness while Isaiah stood onstage and looked over us for some message from God in the arrangement of all of those little points of light. There was a breeze, I remember, and my candle suddenly blew out. After a moment, Isaiah told us that he saw the all-seeing eye, clear as it could be, and everybody got very excited, because this was a sign, a message that our mission was part of God's plan.

  “I was quite upset. I felt excluded from the mission because my candle was out; and perhaps my faith was corrupt. So I got back on the stage and stood there, behind Isaiah, and I looked out over his shoulder, but I saw no picture, no all-seeing eye, nothing like it—just all the pretty lights, the amazing beauty of this gathering, everybody wanting to get along with one another. Being happy. It was sublime but not portentous. That was when I began to think that perhaps the Rapture was nonsense but that anything that stops people tearing one another to pieces is probably a good thing.”

  Iris looked shocked. “Darling, don't you believe there's such a thing as Providence?”

  “Not really.” Charity looked ashamed; she considered her lack of conviction a personal failure. “I'd like to believe such a thing, but I don't think I can anymore.”

  The sisters leaned against the railing with their arms around each other's waists. The Edinburgh Castles engines began to throb. An endless horizon surrounded them.

  “I'll miss the soldiers most of all,” fretted Iris. “They were always my best audience.” She tapped the railing. “What a wretched journey this will be. Weeks with nothing to do!”

  As they contemplated their bleak prospects, a chorus of voices struck up in the distance:

  Wash me in the water that you washed your dirty daughter in And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall!

  “OH, MY GOODNESS,” Iris gasped. “Charity, I do believe there are soldiers on board!”

  Quickly, she led Charity down the stairs to the lower deck and circled to a platform from which they could look down upon the rear deck.

  Several thousand troops—a sea of khaki uniforms—were gathered for their journey home, chatting, joking, singing. It was an assortment of the healthy, the wounded, and the shell-shocked.

  Iris stuck one red stockinged leg through the railings and addressed the men nearest to her. “I beg your pardon,” she said innocently, “but can anyone tell me what time it is?”

  Twenty men surged forward, offering the time as well as their names. She might as well have been onstage, for the company swelled around her. Charity covered her mouth, amazed to see how adroitly her sister sized up a willing audience.

  “I am Iris, and this is my little sister, Charity! Say hello, Charity!”

  Charity issued a timid wave and received a chorus of whistles in return.

  “Now, now!” said Iris, in a tone of mock reproach. “You must be kind to Charity,” she said. “She's just been released from a convent, and she's a little afraid of men!”

  Overhead, seagulls swooped and cried in competition with the sympathetic noises from the troops, but it was impossible to break the magic between two young women and a company of soldiers with a long ocean voyage ahead.

  ON THE DECK ABOVE, Tom was in a reverie of his own. Had he accomplished anything by making this journey? His adult life had been directed by a fierce determination to be the man William Bedlam had failed to be—a doting, committed father. Perhaps that had been Tom's mistake, to live with a backward eye, intent on repairing his past instead of preparing Arthur for the world at hand. Would his children now throw themselves into an effort to better his mistakes? How else do generations proceed?

  As the soldiers began singing “Pack Up Your Troubles,” Tom remembered his father's performance with Paddy Pendleton on the street and wondered, now that the war was over, whether the sentiment of the battlefield would wear thin, and what the fellow would do to raise a crowd.

  No matter, h
e decided. There is peace between us.

  IRIS'S REEDY SOPRANO rose above the voices of the soldiers, and Tom noticed that many other passengers were gathering at the railings to witness her performance.

  He and Audrey walked away to escape the crush. Overhead, smoke billowed from the single funnel of the ship. Tom watched it blend with the wintry sky, a shade of gray all too familiar—the stain of Todder-man's smokestacks over London, the eyes of Sissy Grimes, the smudge of fingerprints on a tenement wall, the coal ash on a furnace boy's boots, and the rolling Atlantic.

  Tom tightened his grip on Audrey's arm and left his memories on the deck, for a frigid wind was picking up and there were many miles to go before Africa's warm shores welcomed him back.

  BALLYDORP DAILY MAIL

  GANTRYTOWN HERO!

  BÉTHUNE, FRANCE—February 1, 1919. Monsignor Marcenat visited his Béthune diocese after hearing reports of a heroic priest and found, to his astonishment, a lad from Gantrytown.

  Several reports had come to the French prelate of a man who had persuaded a German bombing party not to destroy the town's only standing church, Saint-Agnant, a minor masterpiece of Gothic architecture built in 1255.

  The stories were hard to believe; not only was this priest a virtuoso on the organ and a capable doctor but he was fluent in several languages. A local postal officer claimed that the priest had cured his gout. A teacher attested to the man's familiarity with Bach's preludes and fugues. Many claimed that his prayer and expert medical care had saved their loved ones from the devastating influenza that had wiped out thousands in this war-torn region.

  The monsignor decided to pay an unannounced visit to the church during the Sunday mass to meet this amazing man. But to his astonishment, the words he heard spoken by the priest during the mass were not Latin nor, in fact, of any recognizable language at all! Furthermore, the famed priest of Saint-Agnant was barely twenty.

  When confronted, the young fellow freely admitted that he had attended no seminary and held no qualifications as either a doctor or a man of the cloth. His name was Arthur Chapel, and he was an assistant bombardier in the South African Heavy Artillery. It was then that the mon-signor, in spite of the cries of the laity, called for the priest's arrest.