The Banished Children of Eve

by Peter Quinn

  A young boy in his teens was sitting at the base of the fence. He was wrapped in a blanket and had a crudely woven cap on his head. He was playing the fiddle with hands wrapped in burlap. A girl his age was dancing a jig to the music. She had a shawl over her head, but her face was visible. It was red and pockmarked, and there was a half-healed wound on the bridge of her nose that was an ugly shade of purple and yellow. People stopped and then quickly moved on. Hughes moved closer. The girl’s feet were wrapped in burlap, and there were dark stains of blood around the toes. The fiddler was off-key. Either his fingers were numb or he was drunk, or perhaps both. But Hughes recognized the music. “The Bride of Annologhan.” Annologhan. His village.

  They were coming by the thousands now. What was once a thin stream of immigrants had turned into a river, the river into a raging torrent, an entire nation on the move, or the remnants of a nation, the final stage of a defeat suffered long ago and confirmed in every generation until this was all that was left: tattered, exhausted dervishes bleeding away into the gutters of history. Ireland had became a wound that would not clot.

  The emptiness inside him was physical, as if his heart and liver and lungs had been removed. He wanted to move on, but he couldn’t. The emptiness had become a kind of paralysis. And then he understood. The years of resentment and bewilderment had confused him, but in this moment he saw a truth so obvious he didn’t know how he had missed it. God had chosen this people. He had steeled them through centuries of persecution, and now He was taking them from Egypt into the desert, preparing them to spread the faith across the face of the continent that He was raising to preeminence. Their suffering was a mark of being chosen. Their temples were ruined. Their possessions taken. Hunger and servitude their lot. But for a reason. Israel in the desert. Israel coming into the land of Canaan. God making the last first and the first last.

  Corrigan didn’t move. He cupped his hands and shouted through them, “Your Grace, step back, in the name of God …” The wind whipped the words away. He dropped his hands to his side. He had done all he could. Hughes shouted something back. Corrigan couldn’t make it out. Hughes pointed west across the old terrain at the city’s edge to the Palisades beyond. He shouted again. Corrigan strained to hear, but couldn’t. He looked helplessly at the gaunt figure silhouetted against the clouds, his cloak and cassock fluttering around him like a flag twisted on its pole. In the distance a single slash of lightning cut the sky in half.

  A pillar of fire.

  III

  AUDLEY WARD BOWED HIS HEAD in prayer. He felt the presence of the divinity in this room more than anywhere else in the house, more even than in church. The table he sat before was as hallowed as any altar. Shipped by Andreas Vandervort from Holland to his home in New Amsterdam, it arrived in January 1651. Over the years, it had survived the Anglo-Dutch wars, Indian uprisings, the British seizure of New Amsterdam, the fires set by rebellious slaves, the Battle of New York and the conflagration that followed, the British occupation, the Great Fire of 1835, the migration over two centuries from wooden farmhouse to brick town house to here. The faces on the walls had once been real presences at this table, supped here, argued, deliberated, communed, generation after generation. Ward envied them their ignorance of the fate that had befallen the city they had helped found.

  Charles Bedford bowed his head also. No prayer came to mind. He looked up. Ward was still conversing with the Deity. No wonder. A lot he should be thankful for. The use of this house, Bedford’s house, its food, drink, servants. The carriage at his disposal. Ward’s head dropped a little lower. The reverence of an aristocrat, the respect for Him who put the few above the many. Still, Ward prayed. Bedford felt his impatience shading into anger. He picked up his soup spoon and banged it twice on the table.

  Audley Ward raised his head, and said softly, “Amen.” The maid ladled soup in his bowl from the tureen she carried on her tray; she then filled Bedford’s bowl.

  “Will ya be wanting the wine now, sir, or should we wait until dinner is served?”

  “Now, bring the wine now,” Bedford said.

  He lifted a spoonful of soup to his mouth, blew on it, sipped it carefully. He sat silently, but the silence unnerved him. Capshaw. Morrissey. His debts. His mind wandered to the things he was trying not to think about. Better to talk. It provided a distraction.

  “You’re wrong, Audley,” Bedford said. It was a conversation they had begun in the drawing room before dinner. Bedford had cut it off. Now he began it again.

  “The draft is not only necessary, it’s desirable,” he said. “The South already has it. They started this conflict, and neither the spirit nor the substance of their efforts seems to have suffered in the slightest from the imposition of compulsory military service.” He put the spoon down. The soup was watery and tasteless. When Mrs. Bedford returned from Europe, he reminded himself, the first piece of business would be the hiring of a new cook.

  Ward hadn’t touched his soup. He wasn’t hungry. He wouldn’t be able to eat until tonight’s lecture was over. A little wine, that’s all he would take for now.

  “I wasn’t talking about the military success enjoyed by the Secessionists,” Ward said. “I was talking about the future of the country. The draft may help win the war, such an eventuality is outside my purview. Yet if a republic is unable to defend itself except by the mass impressment of its citizens, then even though it may win a war, it has shown itself bereft of the qualities it needs to continue.”

  Bedford put his elbows on the table and tore a piece of bread in half. “You’re talking philosophy again. I’m speaking about practical matters, Audley, the here and now, the stuff of survival.” He pointed a piece of bread at Ward. “The side with the most men and the biggest guns will inevitably wear down its opponent. We have the guns. We need the men.”

  The maid poured Bedford’s wine. He gulped it.

  “The roast will be out in a minute,” she said.

  “Fine.” Bedford picked up his fork and shook it at Ward. “War isn’t philosophy. It isn’t filled with complexities, subtleties, nice distinctions.”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said the fact that we must force our citizenry to defend the Republic means that no matter whether we enjoy victory or defeat, the Republic is doomed.”

  “Would you be happier if Congress had voted down the three-hundred-dollar exemption, if it had decided to draft everyone regardless of their value to the country, if they planned to surround Wall Street and impress the financial community of this nation into the infantry? Would that satisfy you?”

  “No, not at all. The three-hundred-dollar exemption has a certain wisdom to it. It extends the principle of substitution, which is an ancient one, and allows the men conducting the nation’s commerce to stay at that work. I am not worried about the men of substance. Those that can will do their part. They always have. It is the men of no substance who disturb me. We no longer have a yeomanry to fight our wars, the solid farmer or craftsman who serves the Republic out of a sense of duty. With the draft, we have shown that we must ultimately rely on a military force composed of those with nothing to defend, with not even a simple spirit of patriotism to inspire them. We have brought the barbarian across the Rhine in order to help defend our frontiers. A terrible mistake.”

  “Impressment has never seemed to weaken the British. They manned their navy with it.” Bedford picked up another piece of bread, ripped it in halves, then quarters, and dropped them into his soup.

  “Britain is not a republic. It rests on a philosophy of aristocracy. The nobility may make concessions for the sake of maintaining order, but British institutions have never drawn their authority from the voluntary subscription of the lower orders.”

  “And ours do?” Bedford asked, his voice rising.

  “They did, until the draft.”

  Bedford dropped his spoon into the bowl. He looked down the table at his wife’s uncle, a small man in an old
-fashioned frock coat, bald, a half circle of white hair combed forward in the Greek Revival style of some years before, a head that looked as if it were made to be cast in bronze or molded in clay, a soft Dutch face, full but not fat, the blue eyes behind two silver half frames, a beard that ran under the face, two creases in his cheeks that made his nose seem noble and important. He bore more than a passing resemblance to Horace Greeley; Ward was an older, shorter, plumper version of the editor of the Tribune. It was a comparison Ward despised.

  Ward’s niece, Sarah, had been no richly endowed bride. She brought to Charles Bedford a few small lots, some land outside Albany, a minor interest in a moribund trading company, some stocks, portraits, silverware, ancient furniture. It was the dowry of a Knickerbocker family that had been foolish enough to sell off its ancestral farm, a hundred acres of meadows and woodlands, to a syndicate of buyers who eventually turned it into blocks of houses and shops, harvesting a rich annual crop of rent. The family had invested what it had been paid, a pittance in retrospect, into a series of languishing ventures, and its fortunes went into a steady decline, especially in comparison to the new wealth that was making its appearance in the city.

  What Bedford had really obtained by marriage was a great fortune of names and dates and dead ancestors, a genealogy he could never keep straight. But it was an asset for a boy from the clam beds of Long Island, the son of a farmer, to have these portraits on his walls, heroes of the Revolution, mayors, merchants, men and women with round, substantial faces, serious and dignified, the Lares and Penates of commerce and civic duty. They stared down at his dinner guests. They said; Here is continuity and carefulness, an ability to make money in war and peace, to preserve wealth from generation to generation without interruption. An illusion, but a useful one.

  “It seems to me,” Ward said, “that the recent passage of the Enrollment Act will be remembered as the moment in our national life when spiritual bankruptcy was translated into political bankruptcy, when a disease of the lower extremities finally spread upwards and inflicted itself on the brain of the Republic, a fatal transference.”

  “You use two metaphors there, Audley, one financial, one medical. You should stick with the latter. It is more within, as you put it, your ‘purview.’”

  Bedford sat back in his chair. He rubbed his napkin back and forth across his lips, restraining himself from saying what he wanted to say: This is my house. I paid for it, for the servants, the wine, the food, the coal and ice, the gas, the water charges, the tax assessments, and I won’t be lectured about finances by a man who if left to his own income would find it hard to afford a second-rate boardinghouse.

  “The metaphors are unimportant,” Ward said. “They are peripheral to truth.”

  “Perhaps.”

  The maid came into the room with a platter of sliced beef. She put it down on the table next to Bedford, and removed his soup bowl. He lifted three slices of meat onto his plate. Ward held up his glass. “More wine, please.”

  When the tray was brought to him, he took one small piece. He watched Bedford cut his meat and eat it. A voracious appetite, omnivorous, suitable for a bear. Ward had spent the afternoon preparing his talk to the New-York Historical Society. After drinking Bedford’s wine and eating a small portion of his food, he would ride in Bedford’s coach to the Society’s building, on Second Avenue, near Astor Place. There was no loss in inviting Bedford to go, especially since Ward knew he wouldn’t.

  “Will you accompany me this evening?”

  Bedford scooped potatoes from a serving dish onto his plate. He chewed and swallowed before he spoke. “I’m afraid not. I have financial matters that require my attention.” He put more potatoes into his mouth, a forkful.

  Ward stood up, placed his napkin on the table. “I have to put my notes in order. I worked this afternoon, but some little bit remains to be done on the ending.”

  “What’s the subject?”

  “The Battle of New York as seen through the eyes of its citizens.” Ward pointed to the portrait on the wall behind Bedford. “Anne Vandervort Holcomb was one of them.”

  “Your mother?” Bedford asked.

  “My grandmother. Sarah’s great-grandmother. This table comes from her house, a part of her dowry as a Vandervort.”

  Bedford swiveled halfway in his chair and looked at the painting. He really should commit these faces to memory. “Yes, I know, of course, Sarah’s great-grandmother, but I never knew she participated in the Revolution.”

  “She was an observer, not a participant.”

  Ward turned his head from Bedford and stared at the portrait, a large picture in an ornate gold frame, the corners chipped, the white molding showing through. Anne Vandervort Holcomb, his paternal grandmother, the great-grandmother of his niece, Bedford’s wife. She had been born on the Vandervort farm, near Cherry Street, her marriage to John Holcomb bridging an old division, Holcombs and Vandervorts, English gentlemen and Dutch tea merchants, the ancient grudge between the city’s first settlers and their usurpers finally forgotten. She was no longer a bride in her portrait. A heavy woman in her middle age, she wore a blue velvet dress, her hair drawn up in a brown hive. In the corner of the portrait was a large window, and through it was visible the outline of Mount Pitt, the northern border of the Holcomb farm. It had stood on what was now Grand Street, another part of the intricate terrain of this island’s landscape that had been reduced to an unremitting sameness, farms, ponds, hills, forests, meadows, villages, streams, fens, all bowing to the relentless leveling imposed on the island’s topography, a surveyor’s grid, streets meeting avenues at perpendicular angles.

  “I have my last paragraphs,” Ward said.

  Bedford went back to his food. “Your what?”

  “My last paragraphs for tonight’s lecture. They’ve just come to me.”

  Bedford took a drink of wine, wiped his lips with his napkin. “Where did you find them? In your wine?”

  Ward walked toward the foyer, down the length of the old oak table where two centuries before Dutch burghers had discussed how to secure their city against the designs of the English. He looked at the portrait as he went, and almost crashed into the maid as she entered the room with a dish of pudding.

  “Pardon me, sir,” she said.

  “I found them there.” Ward pointed at the portrait. “Behind my grandmother.”

  Bedford turned once more in the chair. Anne Vandervort Holcomb looked down at him, scowling.

  “A formidable source of stimulation, your grandmother.” Bedford returned the scowl with a smile. He admired the bulk of her body, the plump contours beneath the dress, solid and sensual, like the two stone goddesses that supported the pediment of the building where he had his office. Caryatids of commerce and prosperity. Their arms above their heads, their full breasts pressing prominently against the folds of their robes. Some days he had been tempted to reach up and rub those breasts, round and round, gently, two at a time, just for luck. It couldn’t have done any harm. Maybe he should have. He straightened himself in his chair. Sarah had breasts like her grandmother’s. Firm, voluptuous. When she straddled him in bed, a knee on each side, he pushed her nightgown up slowly, navel, stomach, the ascending curve, the hard nipples, round and round he rubbed. Not much left between Sarah and him now, but occasionally, like the night before she left for England, he tried her door to see if it was unlocked. It swung open noiselessly. They didn’t speak. Each knew what to give the other, and what to take. Bedford pushed his spoon around the pudding in his dish. It quivered when he touched it. He ran the spoon around its surface, as if to caress it.

  Ward waited a moment by the door, He watched Bedford toy with his pudding and supposed he was enjoying a merchant’s reverie: the mental abacus never stopping, the counters sliding eternally along their rods. He crossed the hallway to the stairs and went up slowly, stopping at the first landing to catch his breath. A weak heart, another Vandervort inheritance, like the table and the portrait. At the second floor, he
paused again before he went down the hallway, past the child’s room that had never been occupied, to the back of the house. Entering his room, he lit the paraffin lamp on the table by the door and carried it over to the desk. He noticed that the wick hadn’t been trimmed or the reservoir filled, another sign of the incorrigible inattentiveness of the servants, a chronic problem that seemed only to grow worse. He sat, picked up his pen, hesitated a moment, and began to write rapidly, stopping only to dip the pen into the inkwell, the blackened metal point scratching across the surface of the paper.

  Long before the Revolution, the Indians had a settlement near where the Holcomb farm would be. From this village of Rechtauk, on the East River, there was a sylvan trail that led to Werpoes, the chief settlement of the savages, on the western shore of the Collect Pond, where the city prison, the Tombs, now stands. Rechtauk was situated between the river and a small sweet-water lake. The trail to Werpoes began in the high-grass fields near the river. Somewhere below Grand Street it entered a wood and moved in a straight line until the vicinity of Canal Street, when it meandered eastward, in true Indian fashion, toward Werpoes.

  For centuries this trail was barely more than a faint imprint upon the grass and the forest bed, a slight presence on the land, like the Indians themselves. When the white man came, he trod the savage’s forest path in boots rather than in bare feet. Instead of a leather quiver on his back, he carried his implements, guns, plows, clocks, in heavy-wheeled carts pulled by oxen or horses. He cleared the trees and planted wheat in the fields where the savages had grazed on blackberries and wild onions. Eventually, the trail became a country road, the road a city thoroughfare, Division Street, as it is now called.

  By the time of my grandmother’s childhood, the savages were long gone. But though Rechtauk had disappeared and the forest been hewn down, the land was still soft and undulating, still green. The steeples in the city rose in the distance. This is where Anne Vandervort Holcomb came that September morn when she first heard the report of heavy musketry from across the river. A servant hitched up a wagon and drove her the short distance to Mount Pitt. She scaled its steep side in breathless haste. Her husband of four months was over there somewhere, and now the British assault on Brooklyn Heights was under way. The smoke and sound told her the day of reckoning had begun.