Yet if this seems to you an unlikely thing that my father would be so generous to a mulatto girl he did not know and who could do him no conceivable benefit, then I can only say that you did not know this good man. Moreover, I am convinced by the high regard in which he was held by all who knew him that this was but one of many comparable deeds, and notable only in that by its circumstances we were made aware of it.
How changed was my poor father’s condition when last I saw him alive! That was the time my mother took me to the insane ward at Pennsylvania Hospital to visit him.
It was a beautiful, blue-skyed day in June.
I was fifteen years old.
Philadelphia was a wonderful place in which to be young, though I did not half appreciate it at that time. Ships arrived in the harbor every day with silk and camphor from Canton, hides from Valparaiso, and opium from Smyrna, and departed to Batavia and Malacca for tin, the Malabar coast for sandalwood and pepper, and around the Cape Horn with crates of knives and blankets to barter with credulous natives for bales of sea otter skins. Barbarously tattooed sailors were forever staggering from the groggeries singing oddly cadenced chanteys and pitching headlong into the river, or telling in vivid detail of a season lived naked among cannibals, married to a woman whose teeth had been filed down to points, all the while and with excruciating exactitude slowly unwrapping an oilcloth packet unearthed from the bottom of a sea chest to reveal at the climax of the yarn: a mummified human ear. The harbor was a constant source of discontent for me.
As were the grain wagons which came down the turnpike from Lancaster and returned west laden with pioneers and missionaries bound for the continental interior to battle savage Indians or save their souls for Christ, each according to his inclination. Those who stayed behind received packages from their distant relations containing feathered headpieces, cunningly woven baskets, beadwork cradleboards, and the occasional human scalp. Every frontiersman who headed up the pike took a piece of my soul with him.
Our hotel was located in that narrow slice of streets by the Delaware which respectable folk called the wharflands but which, because a brick wall two stories high with an iron fence atop it separated Water street from Front street (the two ran together, but Water street served the slow-moving wagon trade of the wharves, and Front street the dashing gigs and coaches of the social aristocracy), we merchants’ brats thought of as the Walled City. Our streets were narrow and damp, our houses and stores a bit ramshackle, our lives richly thronged with provincial joys.
Philadelphia proper, by contrast, was the sort of place where much was made of how wide and clean and gridlike the streets were, and a Frenchman’s casual gallant reference to it as “the Athens of America” would be quoted and requoted until Doomsday. Yet, within its limits, it was surprisingly cosmopolitan.
The European wars had filled the city with exiles—the vicomte de Noailles, the duc d’Orléans, a hundred more. The former Empress Iturbide of Mexico could be seen hurrying by in her ludicrously splendid carriage. In the restaurants and bookshops could be found General Moreau, a pair of Murats, and a brace of Napoléons, were one to seek them out. The count de Survilliers, who had been King of Spain, had his own pew in St. Joseph’s Church off Willing’s alley. We often saw him on the way there of a Sunday, though we ourselves went to St. Mary’s, half a block away, for our family had sided with the trustees in the church fight which had resulted in the bishop being locked out of his own cathedral. Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who was a naturalist, could be encountered stalking the marshes at the edge of town or along the river, in forlorn search of a new species of plover or gull to name after himself.
Still, and despite its museums and circuses, its (one) theater and (one) library and (three) waxworks, the city was to a young river rat little more than an endless series of enticements to leave. Everything of any interest at all to me had either come from elsewhere or was outward bound.
But I seem to have lost the thread of my tale. Well, who can blame me? This is no easy thing to speak of. Still, I set out to tell you of my final memory—would to God it were not!—of my father when he was alive.
And so I shall.
My mother and I walked to the hospital together. She led, concentrated and brisk, while I struggled not to lag behind. Several times she glared me back to her side.
For most of that mile-and-some walk from our boardinghouse, I managed not to ask the question most vexing my mind, for fear it would make me sound lacking in a proper filial piety. Leaving the shelter of the Walled City at Market street, we went first south on Front, then up Black Horse alley, while I distracted myself by computing the area between two curves, and then turning down Second past the malt houses and breweries to Chestnut and so west past the Philadelphia Dispensary, where I tried to recall the method Father Tourneaux had taught me for determining the volume of tapering cylindrical solids. South again on Third street, past the tannery and the soap-boiler’s shop and chandlery, I thought about Patricia’s husband, Aaron, who was in the China trade. Somebody—could it have been Jack?—had recently asked him if he planned someday to employ me as a navigator on one of his ships, and he had laughed in a way that said neither yea nor nay. Which gave me much to ponder. We cut through Willing’s alley, my mother being a great believer that distances could be shortened through cunning navigation (I ducked my head and made the sign of the cross as we passed St. Joseph’s), and jogged briefly on Fourth. One block up Prune street, a tawny redhead winked at me and ducked down Bingham’s court before I could decide whether she were real or just a rogue memory. But I was like the man commanded not to think about a rhinoceros, who found he could think of nothing else. At last, the pressures of curiosity and resentment grew so great that the membrane of my resolve ruptured and burst.
“I do not fully understand,” I said, striving for a mature and measured tone but succeeding only in sounding petulant, “exactly what is expected of me.” I had not been to see my father—it had been made clear that I was not to see him—since the day he entered the hospital. That same day my littlest sister had fled the house in terror, while this gentlest of men overturned furniture and shouted defiance at unseen demons. The day it was decided he could no longer be cared for at home. “Is today special for any reason? What ought I to do when I see him?”
I did not ask, “Why?” but that was what I meant, and the question my mother answered.
“I have my reasons,” she said curtly. “Just as I have good and sufficient reason for not informing you as to their exact nature just yet.” We had arrived at the hospital grounds, and the gatekeeper had let us in.
My mother led me down the walk under the buttonwood trees to the west wing. A soft southern breeze alleviated the heat. The hospital buildings were situated within a tract of farmland which had been preserved within the city limits so that the afflicted could refresh themselves with simple chores. Closing my eyes, I can still smell fresh-mown hay, and hear the whir of a spinning wheel. Sunflowers grew by the windows, exactly like that sunflower which had appeared like a miracle one spring between the cobbles of our back alley and lasted into the autumn without being trampled or torn down, drawing goldfinches and sentimental young women. You could not wish for a more pleasant place in which to find your father imprisoned as a lunatic.
The cell-keeper’s wife came to the door and smiled a greeting.
My mother thrust a banana into my hand. “Here. You may give him this.” Which was the first intimation I had that she was not to accompany me.
She turned and crunched off, down the gravel path.
The cell-keeper’s wife led me through the ward to a room reserved for visitors. I cannot recall its furniture. The walls were whitewashed. A horsefly buzzed about in the high corners, irritably seeking a passage into the outer world.
“Wait here,” the woman said. “I’ll summon an attendant to bring him.”
She left.
For a long still time I stood, waiting. Eventually I sat down and stared blindly ab
out. Seeing nothing and thinking less. Hating the horsefly.
The banana was warm and brownish yellow in my hand.
Aeons passed. Sometimes there were noises in the hall. Footsteps would approach, and then recede. They were never those of the man I fearfully awaited.
Finally, however, the door opened. There was my father, being led by the arm by a burly young attendant. He shuffled into the room. The attendant placed him in a chair and left, locking the door behind him.
My father, who had always been a rather plump man, with a merchant’s prosperous stomach, was now gaunt and lean. His flesh hung loosely about him; where his face had been round, loose jowls now hung.
“Hello, Father,” I said.
He did not respond. Nor would he meet my eyes. Instead, his gaze moved with a slow restlessness back and forth across the floor, as if he had misplaced something and were trying to find it.
Miserably, I tried to make conversation.
“Mary finished making her new dress yesterday. It’s all of green velvet. The exact same color as that of the cushions and sofa and drapes in Mr. Barclay’s parlor. When Mother saw the cloth she had chosen, she said, ‘Well, I know one place you won’t be wearing that.’”
I laughed. My father did not.
“Oh, and you recall Stephen Girard, of course. He had a cargo of salt at his wharf last summer which Simpson refused to buy—trying to cheapen it to his own price, you see. Well, he said to his porter, ‘Tom, why can’t you buy that cargo?’ and Tom replied, ‘Why, sir, how can I? I have no money.’ But ‘Never mind,’ said Girard. ‘I’ll advance you the cost. Take it and sell it by the load, and pay me as you can.’ That was last summer, as I said, and now the porter is well on his way to being Simpson’s chief rival in the salt trade.”
When this anecdote failed to rouse my father—who had avidly followed the least pulsation in the fortunes of our merchant neighbors, and loved best to hear of sudden success combined with honest labor—I knew that nothing I could hope to say would serve to involve him.
“Father, do you know who I am?” I had not meant to ask—the question just burst out of me.
This roused some spirit in the man at last. “Of course I know. Why wouldn’t I know?” He was almost belligerent, but there was no true anger behind his words. They were all bluff and empty bluster and he still would not meet my eyes. “It’s as clear as … as clear as two plus two is four. That’s … that’s logic, isn’t it? Two plus two is four. That’s logic.”
On his face was the terrible look of a man who had failed his family and knew it. He might not know the exact nature of his sin, but the awareness of his guilt clearly ate away at him. My presence, the presence of someone he ought to know, only made matters worse.
“I’m your son,” I said. “Your son, William.”
Still he would not meet my eye.
How many hours I languished in the Purgatory of his presence I do not know. I continued to talk for as long as I could, though he obviously could make no sense of my words, because the only alternative to speech was silence—and such silence as was unbearable to think upon. A silence that would swallow me whole.
All the time I spoke, I clutched the banana. There was no place I could set it down. Sometimes I shifted it from one hand to the other. Once or twice I let it lie uncomfortably in my lap. I was constantly aware of it. As my throat went dry and I ran out of things to say, my mind focused itself more and more on that damnable fruit.
My mother always brought some small treat with her when she visited her husband. She would not be pleased if I returned with it. This I knew. But neither did I relish the thought of emphasizing the cruel reversal in our roles, his abject helplessness and my relative ascendancy, by feeding him a trifle exactly as he had so often fed me in my infancy.
In an anguish, I considered my choices. All terrible. All unacceptable.
Finally, more to rid myself of the obligation than because I thought it the right thing to do, I offered the loathsome thing to my father.
He took it.
Eyes averted, he unhurriedly peeled the banana. Without enthusiasm, he bit into it. With animal sadness he ate it.
That is the one memory that, try as I might, I cannot nor ever will be able to forgive myself for: that I saw this once-splendid man, now so sad and diminished, eating a banana like a Barbary ape.
But there’s a worse thing I must tell you: For when at last I fell silent, time itself congealed about me, extending itself so breathlessly that it seemed to have ceased altogether. Years passed while the sunlight remained motionless on the whitewashed wall. The horsefly’s buzzing ceased, yet I knew that if I raised my head I would see it still hanging in the air above me. I stared at my poor ruined father in helpless horror, convinced that I would never leave that room, that instant, that sorrow. Finally, I squeezed my eyes tight shut and imagined the attendant coming at last to lead my father away and restore me again to my mother.
In my imagination, I burst into tears. It was some time before I could speak again. When I could, I said, “Dear God, Mother! How could you do this to me?”
“I required,” she said, “your best estimation of his condition.”
“You visit him every day.” One of my hands twisted and rose up imploringly, like that of a man slowly drowning. “You must know how he is.”
She did not grip my hand. She offered no comfort. She did not apologize. “I have stood by your father through sickness and health,” she said, “and will continue to do so for as long as he gains the least comfort from my visits. But I have for some time suspected he no longer recognizes me. So I brought you. Now you must tell me whether I should continue to come here.”
There was steel in my mother, and never more so than at that moment. She was not sorry for what she had done to me. Nor was she wrong to have done it.
Even then I knew that.
“Stay away,” I said, “and let your conscience be at ease. Father is gone from us forever.”
But I could not stop crying. I could not stop crying. I could not stop crying. Back down the streets of Philadelphia I walked, for all to see and marvel at, bawling like an infant, hating this horrible life and hating myself even more for my own selfish resentment of my parents, who were each going through so much worse than I. Yet even as I did so, I was acutely aware that still I sat in that timeless room and that all I was experiencing was but a projection of my imagination. Nor has that sense ever gone entirely away. Even now, if I still my thoughts to nothing, this world begins to fade and I sense myself to still be sitting in my father’s absence.
From this terrible moment I fled, and found myself back upon the dory, returning from my father’s burial. Our hearts were all light and gay. We chattered as the doryman, head down, plied his oars.
My baby sister Barbara was trailing a hand in the water, a blaze of light where her face should have been, hoping to touch a fish.
“Will,” said Mary in a wondering voice. “Look.” And I followed her pointing finger upward. I turned toward the east, to the darkening horizon above Treaty Island and the New Jersey shore, where late afternoon thunderheads were gathering.
Scudding before the storm and moving straight our way was a structure of such incredible complexity that the eye could make no sense of it. It filled the sky. Larger than human mind could accept, it bore down upon us like an aerial city out of the Arabian Nights, an uncountable number of hulls and platforms dependent from a hundred or more balloons.
Once, years before, I had seen a balloon ascent. Gently the craft had severed its link with the earth, gracefully ascending into the sky, a floating island, a speck of terrestriality taken up into the kingdom of the air. Like a schooner it sailed, dwindling, and away. It disappeared before it came anywhere near the horizon.
If that one balloon was a schooner, than this was an armada. Where that earlier ship had been an islet, a mote of wind-borne land carried into the howling wilderness of the air, what confronted me now was a mighty continent
of artifice.
It was a monstrous sight, made doubly so by the scurrying specks which swarmed the shrouds and decks of the craft and which, once recognized as men, magnified the true size of the thing beyond believing.
The wind shifted, and the thunder of its engines filled the universe.
That was my first glimpse of the mighty airship Empire.
The world turned under my restless mind, dispelling sunshine and opening onto rain. Two days casually disappeared into the fold. I was lurching up Chestnut street, water splashing underfoot, arms aching, almost running. Mary trotted alongside me, holding an umbrella over the twenty-quart pot I carried, and still the rain contrived to run down the back of my neck.
“Not so fast!” Mary fretted. “Don’t lurch about like that. You’ll trip and spill.”
“We can’t afford to dawdle. Why in heaven’s name did Mother have to leave the pot so long over the fire?”
“It’s obvious you’ll never be a cook. The juices required time to addle; otherwise the stew would be cold and nasty upon arrival.”
“Oh, there’ll be no lack of heat where we’re going, I assure you. Tacey will make it hot enough and then some.”
“Get on with you. She won’t.”
“She will. Tacey is a despot in the kitchen, Napoléon reborn, reduced in stature but expanded in self-conceit. She is a Tiberius Claudius Nero in parvum when she has a spoon in her hand. Never since Xanthippe was such a peppery tongue married to such a gingery spirit. A lifetime of kitchen fires have in the kettle of her being combined—”
Mary laughed, and begged me to stop. “You make my sides ache!” she cried. And so of course I continued.
“—to make of her a human pepper pot, a snapper soup seasoned with vinegar, a simmering mélange of Hindoo spices whose effect is to make not one’s tongue but one’s ears burn. She—”
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 54
