Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  “But you must have loved him—even for a little while.”

  “Yes. As much as you can love a pirate.”

  “I’m a pirate,” says I.

  “But you’re my son. I have no choice.”

  Pirates and generals, pah! I had to peruse my past with a different candle. “I am older than you say I am, but by how many years?”

  “Two,” she said.

  “And you hid me from Washington, did you not? He appears at the inn where you work, him a soldier back from the Indian wars, engaged to Martha Custis, and he falls in love with your flaming hair—Washington told me so.”

  Her anger was gone. “You talked to him about me?”

  “At his headquarters in New Windsor. He did most of the talking.”

  “You should not have listened,” she said. Mum was not a skeleton now; the color had come back to her cheeks. “And I should never have struck you with the marmalade.”

  She began to cry.

  “’T was twenty-five years ago, a full twenty-five. And I the runaway wife of Jack Jennings, suddenly a tavern girl with a child on her hands. Yes, I hid you from him. I was frightened that he would think ill of me and fall out of love with my red hair. But he was cleverer than I. He saw you in the tavern, recognized your own red hair.”

  “Mother, I protest. That is the baldest of lies. I have never been the least bit carroty.”

  “But you did have one reddish curl—as a baby.”

  I was vanquished again. I would never fathom all the divagations, not even the least red curl, in mum’s past and in mine. I hugged her, held mum in my arms.

  “Johnny,” she said from beneath my shoulder, “promise me you will not search for Clara—should she desire it so, she will search for you.”

  I did not promise.

  “Mother, I worry about seeing you all alone in this ruin.”

  “I am not alone,” said she. “Mr. Washington has placed a guard in the house.”

  “I saw no such guard.”

  “You were not meant to see him. Besides, I will have my own pirate for company until he returns to Canada.”

  But Mum’s pirate had only one plan—to find Clara.

  Sixty-Five

  PIRATE JOHN KNEW WHAT WAS KILLING GERT—the prospect of a life without the commander in chief. Revolution had reconnected them both, pulled him from his own cloister at Mount Vernon into the hurly-burly of a war without real perimeters or rigid lines. He had to carry a whole new nation around with him on the rump of his horse. And he had to seek some kind of sanity—call it my mother’s red hair—amid all the confusion and morass. Retreating, running from place to place with his prodigious camp bed, he would summon up a woman whose scalp and freckles had once been on fire. Soon he had to see those freckles for himself. His secret refuge would become a bordello in British New York—this bordello and its mistress were his one true headquarters.

  And suppose a penniless farmer, sick with dysentery from the Indian wars, did stop at a country inn and dandle me on his knee twenty-five years ago. That still didn’t make him my dada. He was a man of great emotion under his dour demean. And he took comfort in sharing his bed at New Windsor with Gertrude’s child.

  How perverse that I’d been much closer to his bed than my mum would ever be. And how sad that Gert would probably never see him again. The farmer was going home to Mount Vernon. He had little need of a brothel that had been a house of refuge for himself and his spies. And he could not even visit Gert now that a band of patriotic women watched Holy Ground like malignant hawks.

  And hawks could certainly not help me find my Clara. I didn’t have one friend in the ruins of Manhattan save Prince Paul, my old comrade in arms from the Black Brigade. But I couldn’t hire a sedan chair to haul me into Little Africa, even with my promises of silver. Sedan chairs did not travel into Out Ward day or night.

  And so I walked. Ye gods, had I been gone so long? I could not find Little Africa—or at least with Africans inside its boundaries. It had the same old hovels, the same lampless streets, but these hovels were inhabited by other refugees—artisans and mechanics who sat idle with their wives and broods of children. There was little work to be had in this ghostly village of Manhattan the Brits had just abandoned.

  The Crown had emptied Little Africa, housed blacks in barns, thus giving redcoats room for their own camp followers and whatever artisans they happened to need.

  No one knew where the barns were, or had ever heard of an African prince named Paul. And I had to trudge back across the Negroes Burial Ground, through the old Indian barrier, and onto the late Queen Street—some committee had already rechristened it as Pearl, with little markings on the streetlamps.

  SUDDENLY THERE WERE soldiers on my trail. I could not imagine what crime I had committed—hadn’t been in Manhattan long enough for much larceny. Then I recognized Washington’s Life Guard and their banner, CONQUER OR DIE, with the emblem of an eagle in the corner. They’d been scouring the broken streets for a one-eyed man in a velvet suit. Gertrude must have sent a note to the commander in chief about her pirate son.

  The Life Guard escorted me to Washington’s temporary Manhattan headquarters on Broadway—the commander in chief and his staff were now occupying the same little mansion where Benedict Arnold and his Peggy had stayed in New York. I could not help but feel ’t was a deliberate ploy to wipe out Arnold’s traces, one by one.

  The vestibule was packed with supplicants, yet I did not have long to wait. A minute after the Life Guard declared I was on the premises, Washington strode out of his office. His back was stooped. He’d aged more than I could ever have imagined—there were deep lines along his mouth. His eyes had little luster. He did not smile or say hello.

  He touched the tricorn that seemed so small and out of place on his gigantic crown of reddish gray hair and rasped, “Come with me.”

  WE WERE A SMALL PARTY OF MEN—the commander in chief, two aides, one Manhattan commissioner, and myself. Washington overwhelmed us with his size, stooped as he was, his tricorn rising above our own little assembly. He did not require a horse in Manhattan, yet he seemed a bit irregular on the ground, as if he could not survey the landscape without a chestnut mare.

  He must have known the presence he had. People watched us from every window of the island, from the remains of their porches, from the dead earth of their little gardens, from tents at the side of some road, staring at us with disbelief. He had not run after fame from a war tent in the middle of nowhere, from a dark bridge collapsing under his feet, from a cramped bedchamber overlooking the Hudson, or a field of soldiers with filth on their faces. But in spite of his long silences, his discomfort with speech, he had become America’s irresistible man—a king in a tricorn rather than a gold hat.

  Yet he would not be our king. It wasn’t only because of his distaste for the tyranny that all kings bred. Perhaps he understood that a king was but an exalted jester, a clown put in place to amuse the people while he whipped them and stole from the public treasure. And Washington was not here to amuse or steal.

  I began to notice the landmarks of our journey. He visited men who had posed as Loyalists during the war to shield their identity as Washington’s agents. So successful was this disguise that the populace abused these men once the redcoats were gone. And Washington had to repair the damage. He did not make a public display. He entered the shop of a Tory tailor on Partition Street, and the mob that accumulated behind him looked in awe. He would not bring the tailor out to greet this mob.

  I watched him kiss the tailor and present him with a bag of gold pieces. And I was startled when he turned to me with half a smile. “’Tis not a bribe, John. Tailor Montague risked life and limb to protect our liberty. I will not have men shun him.”

  We pressed on, visited an apothecary on Nassau Street and a bookman on Golden Hill Street who had been the Crown’s own printer in the colonies. There was always a kiss, a hug, and that little bag of gold. We chatted with the bookman for twenty minutes
over a dish of tea. This bookman became a hero of our time the moment we left his shop.

  “It astonishes,” Washington said, “how people turn on you, then rush to kiss your hand.”

  “His Excellency,” I said, “we are all jesters, are we not?”

  “Still, even jesters should deport themselves better.”

  We continued to chat as if the other men in our party were but silent witnesses. The grim lines were gone from his face.

  “Johnny, I haven’t got a bag of gold pieces to give you.”

  “But I do not merit any gold, sir.”

  “I talk now of Malcolm Treat. I protected him, and abandoned you. Treat was brazen, willing to thrust himself into the mouths of lions. We had lads right inside Clinton’s quarters thanks to Mad Mal—I’m afraid your Clara will never forgive me.”

  My eyepatch quivered, but I did not interrupt.

  “I am to blame,” Washington said. “I had her send you away and could not answer why I punished you rather than Mal, why I let his madness go unbounded—I had need of the madman.”

  “Excellency, I would suffer Saint John all over again were I to learn where my Clara is.”

  He did not enlighten me, and it took another moment to realize we had come to Holy Ground.

  NO ONE HAD WARNED GERTRUDE that the commander in chief would be stopping at the nunnery. She did not have time to paint her eyes or preen in front of a mirror. She had to greet Washington and his men in her peignoir—I did not count, of course. I was but her whelp, who could see her disrobed every day of the week.

  Washington’s jaws began to clench. He was filled with emotion, and perhaps that is why he had brought along his little assembly—to prevent him from breaking down.

  He was not aloof. He sat beside her.

  “Child, thou art so pale.”

  He could have been back at that country inn with Gertrude twenty-five years ago.

  I had never seen my mother purr.

  “Johnny, be a dear and find some French biscuits and marmalade for Mr. Washington and his friends.”

  I didn’t have an inkling where to look. But Washington rescued me.

  “Gertrude, ’tis a formal occasion, not fit for marmalade.”

  She purred even harder.

  “Formal, General? What could be so formal that it might redress my marmalade?”

  He removed a piece of purple cloth in the shape of a heart and pressed it lightly to her own heart with a gold pin—the cloth was all braided in silver.

  “General, I have seen no such wonder in all my life.”

  “Only two others wear it, two as brave as thee.”

  “Don’t forget my nuns,” she said, rising enough to examine herself in all her multiple mirrors.

  He smiled and seized my mother’s shoulders with much affection.

  “Then might I impress Gertrude Jennings to wear the Purple Heart for them all? Would that Clara could see it!”

  “Later,” Mum said. “Not while she is lost to us.”

  He turned from her to wipe his eyes and asked me to walk with him through the carcass of the Queen’s Yard. He was trembling, yet would not lean upon his aides. He clasped my hand for a moment—’t was a mite easier now for a lad to measure his love for Gertrude, tho’ perhaps it could not be measured, this one great incaution in the life of a very cautious man.

  We stopped outside the front door. The mob was waiting—my mother had become immortal of a sudden. And they looked upon me, the whoreson of Robinson Street, as if I’d sprung whole-born out from under an angel’s wing. But ’t was Washington’s kiss that mattered, not their emulation.

  “Child,” he said, “your Clara is with the castrato.”

  And he plunged into the wreckage of Robinson Street with all the mystery of that remark.

  Sixty-Six

  THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE WORLD MORE DANGEROUS than an artiste. Pirates paled in comparison. Regulators too. I had seen his image pressed to a wall on my marches through Manhattan.

  IL GRAN FELTRINELLI,

  Angel of Bologna,

  CURRENTLY AT THE JOHN STREET THEATRE,

  CASTRATO EXTRAORDINAIRE

  He seemed to have a small head on a very large body. He wore a little cap, a kind of metal skirt, had greatly muscled calves, and a scimitar hanging from a sword belt—how could I have dreamt of Clara with a castrato, or any other artiste? But once I knew about the Angel of Bologna and his John Street address, Gertrude was suddenly eager to discuss Clara.

  We sat on her bed licking marmalade off our fingers, a silken handkerchief over the Purple Heart. She would not soil it, would not take it off. Clara, it seems, was estranged from my mother’s affections for the first time in their lives. She did not have Gertrude’s fortitude, Gertrude’s steadfastness about the war. She could not obey a command she did not believe in. She was the best silver bullet Washington had ever had—no less bold than Mad Mal, and with more daring.

  She’d slip into an enemy camp, seduce some aide of a significant general—I did not relish hearing this—and return with that general’s marching orders. But she was unpredictable, her own wildcat, who would not always hurry home with the “bullets” she was carrying. She might stop to feed a wounded woman among the camp followers, share a pipe with African stevedores, bandage up some raving man in the hospital tent.

  But then she was told by Gert and Washington himself to “seduce” me into quitting the battlefield at Yorktown and hiding from Mad Mal. Clara had a simpler solution. She offered to strangle Malcolm Treat in his camp cot. But Washington couldn’t spare him—a chief of intelligence who would sit in the dark and string secret agents together like a bunch of rag dolls.

  Clara did get me to quit Yorktown, but that was her very last silver bullet. She herself quit Washington’s camp, slipped back into Manhattan, and fell into the foulest of moods. She would not eat or converse for days. She would smoke her pipe and play with the dolls she had brought with her from Dominica.

  Gertrude guarded her silences, did not interfere with Clara. The nuns had precious little to do. The Queen’s Yard was now off-limits to British officers and to everybody else. And then Gert asked her to carry one final bullet for the commander in chief. Washington had dire need of information from Charleston, the last British stronghold in the south.

  Clara refused. Mad Mal appeared, having come into British Manhattan dressed as a kind of rag doll. He threatened and cajoled, said he would chop off Clara’s teats with a tomahawk. Clara laughed in his face. He leapt at her, and she thrashed him, would have flayed him with her own fingernails had the nuns not climbed on her back and called for the queen.

  “Mother,” Clara begged, her nose bleeding not from the little major but from the very force of her exertion, “either kill him or kill me.”

  Mad Mal had to lie abed for days, shivering while the nuns held him in their arms. And Clara vanished from the nunnery with her shoes, her dolls, and her pipe—eleven months ago, December last.

  She must have felt that Mum had chosen Mad Mal over her, and the man behind Mal—George Washington. Clara’s war was always personal and abrupt. She could not lie or cheat for some larger good. And both Gert and the farmer had forced her to cajole. Seems Gert was shrewd about everything but Clara’s convictions.

  “I will never, never forgive that selfish girl,” Mum told me. But ’t was evident in every corner of her scrunched face that she missed Clara beyond comprehension—wasn’t only George Washington that was helping her waste away. At first Mum had thought Clara was living down by the docks. She had the nuns search everywhere. Finally they discovered her outside the John Street Theatre with a strange man in a little cap a child might wear. He was taller than Clara, tall as the commander in chief—Feltrinelli, master castrato, who could make the hearts of both men and women miss half a beat. He sang arias from Handel in so high a pitch that even the Divil would have wept to hear it.

  Gertrude sent an emissary of nuns to John Street. The nuns came back. Clara, they sa
id, did not have a single matter to discuss with the queen of Holy Ground. Gertrude sent them out again. This time only half the nuns bothered to come back. And Gertrude had to shiver at her own revelation—the nuns were siding with Clara. And within a week they all crept away with their shoes and panniers and pipes. Clara had become their new abbess and queen.

  “Johnny,” Gertrude said, with the Purple Heart pinned to her chest. “I think to die—I am some forlorn thing without my Clara.”

  “Mum, I will drag her back by her curly hair.”

  “No,” Gertrude said. “I swore I would not involve you in this intrigue.”

  “But loving you both, I already am involved.”

  I TRAVELED TO JOHN STREET, passing seven cows, a runaway horse, and a rodent as long as a man’s arm. The theatre sat in much debris. John Street was like an obstacle course with spent cannons, loose wagon gear, and torn tents. ’Tis a wonder any lad could find his way within. But I did, and there was not a particle of chaos or debris inside the playhouse, with its chandeliers and pitched balconies and plush seats. And the Angel of Bologna had his own assistants, it seems—Gertrude’s nuns, now Clara’s. They sat in “paradise,” the mountainous peak of the uppermost balcony. I could see the telltale coals of fire in their pipes, but not their faces.

  I sat down, and shortly the theatre began to fill. No one had bothered asking me to buy a subscription, and I’m not convinced there was one to buy. But within an hour we all sat in such close proximity I had half a dozen knees next to mine.

  I had never met such a variety of rabble. Sailors, strumpets, and beggars, mingled with Hessian deserters and their newfound wives, several itinerant merchants and foreign noblemen stranded in Manhattan. There was also, I soon discovered, a whole gallery of madmen and melancholics that did not miss a single performance of John Street’s male soprano, who had the reputation of curing melancholy princes and kings.

  I watched his sinfonia assemble in the pit—five ragged men with two horns, two violas, and a harpsichord. They practiced on their instruments like charter members of a children’s asylum delivering its own lamentable noise. I saw little future in it. Then the curtain rose and all the lamentation stopped. Feltrinelli stood on stage alone. He did have a metal skirt and an infant’s cap. And without the slightest introduction, or the scampering of some hired clown, the Angel of Bologna burst into song, his rib cage pumping like a bellows.