Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  He embraced the others. I was last in line. I did not dream of calling him “dada,” but what are dreams at a farewell luncheon party?

  “Father,” I said, “I shall miss thee.”

  He held me in his arms and kissed me right between the eyes—that kiss landed like a silver bullet.

  “And I shall more than miss ye, Johnny One-Eye, but that will not prevent me from ripping your heart out should you ever abandon Gertrude and Clara.”

  Ah, what a commander in chief! To curse and kiss in the very same breath.

  And he walked out of Black Sam’s, abandoning all of us, even his clown.

  BUT WE DID NOT ABANDON HIM. We scuttled behind the commander in chief, some of us still clutching our wineglasses. His Life Guard had assembled, while half the populace of Manhattan stood outside Black Sam’s like startled, shivering birds; children reached out to touch him, their mothers all agog. But he was still too torn with emotion to deliver even the faintest of smiles. I stood beside him now, saw the spasms in his cheek, this measured man who was suddenly at the very border of control. He stopped. I thought he would swoon, but he whispered in my ear as I clutched his hand.

  “Johnny, where the Divil am I?”

  “In Manhattan, Excellency. Near Whitehall.”

  He was a farmer returning to his farm. Perhaps I espied the end of a certain possibility—of boldness itself—a life without his redhead, without Gert.

  “Child, will you walk with me a while?”

  We proceeded to Whitehall Slip, where a barge was waiting, all decked in garlands, like some floating arbor. But I lost the clasp of his hand as we approached the barge. His Life Guard had bumped me out of the way. They helped him aboard, and while a gaggle of men, women, and children mobbed the ferry slip, I wept like a little boy. I feared I would not see him again as I watched the children wave goodbye to the commander in chief, most of them clutching garlands. But his eyes and theirs never did meet.

  “Adieu,” shouted several of his officers, who did not accompany him. But he was far away, in some territory inside himself—dreaming of his redhead, I’d like to imagine.

  The barge pulled away from Whitehall the moment he was seated and vanished into the mist, tho’ we could still hear the crash of oars for a very long time.

  Sixty-Eight

  I SHIVER TO REVEAL WHAT HAPPENED NEXT. ’T was almost as if Washington or some remnant of him—substance and shadow—remained with us. I wonder now if his appearance at the castrato’s dressing closet had been staged for my benefit alone. All I can tell you is that the shoe closet at the Queen’s Yard began to fill with shoes a shelf at a time, like some supernatural symmetry.

  Then articles of clothing appeared in the nuns’ own closets—a hat, a kidskin glove, a bodice braided in gold thread. Gertrude suspicioned Clara, said the house was possessed of demons Clara had sent all the way from Dominica. I could not agree. Demons would fill a house with dread, not nuns’ shoes.

  My logic was soon borne out. The nuns themselves arrived in our garden with hatboxes, porters carrying their trunks and storage chests. They immediately moved into their closets without uttering a word to Queen Gertrude or myself. They did not demonstrate the least curiosity about Mum’s Purple Heart. They would sit in the parlor and smoke their pipes. Gert was bitter about it. I was not.

  The nuns were waiting for their very own queen. And she appeared the next morning, with Feltrinelli at her side. Clara’s woolly blond hair was coiffed to heaven—she broke off the branches of our wilted apple tree with her headdress. The waist of her emerald-colored gown was so pinched ’t was a miracle she could breathe at all. She hadn’t decorated herself to win over any yob or pirate. She’d come to battle with the other queen of Holy Ground, to defeat Gert with the sheer wonder of the way she looked.

  She raged against my mother for her “cold-bloodedness,” as Clara might have called it, her willingness to sacrifice her own son to “the stupid dance of war,” to sacrifice the nunnery, Clara, and herself for Washington’s sake. But truth is, Clara could not live without the nunnery, and there was no nunnery without Gert. She loved my mother and loathed her with equal vehemence, and the confusion had agitated Clara to such degree there wasn’t even the littlest chance of parlaying with her.

  She walked into Gert’s boudoir, lowering her headdress like some engine of war. But Gertrude wasn’t unprepared. She sat on her bed, her own red hair puffed out, the Purple Heart pinned to a magnificent velvet robe, her eyes painted a most subtle blue—she looked like a wild flower in a sea of pillows.

  We were all assembled now—Clara, the castrato, the nuns, even the one Life Guard Washington had given Gert to protect us from pillagers. I sat on a gilded chair, smoking a pipe Clara had left behind. She knocked the pipe from my mouth with its burning timbers—rather have violence than nothing, nothing at all.

  But Gert had to bear the brunt of Clara’s attack.

  “Mother, what in God’s name is that little rag you wear upon your chest?”

  ’T was a fatal blow. Gertrude started to sob, and her eyes bled that blue paint.

  “You are pitiless, Clara. ’Tis a Purple Heart, given to me by the general. Only two others are permitted to wear it.”

  “Did the other two also send their boys to Canada?”

  “I did what had to be done.”

  “Mother, should I tell you what it was like having to sleep in the same tent at Yorktown with Mad Mal?”

  “I will not listen,” Gertrude said.

  “You most certainly will. ’T was like having a cold pea pod on your belly.”

  I knew not whether to laugh at that pea pod or cry at its proximity to Clara. But my darling continued her attack. “Pray, are all of Mr. Washington’s Purple Hearts redheaded crows like yourself, Mum?”

  “And you,” Gert said, “with snot in your nose when I found you. I had to pick the lice out of your hair.”

  “And have I not repaid you a hundredfold lying on my back with strange men who ne’er even heard of a monthly wash? I had to scrub their balls—I’d call it yeoman’s service.”

  I was in dangerous waters listening to Clara—I did not like her attention to such detail. Some yob’s filthy genitals would haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

  Mum was at a decided disadvantage, ignorant as she was of Clara’s strategies. Clara had discovered her war cries in the African quarters of Dominica. The slaves would constantly mimic their masters, have mock battles in which they’d shout and scream in the voices of their masters and mistresses, hurling insults like musket balls—they called it fantaisie, or fancy talk, in their creole.

  Clara had told me about that fantaisie when we were children, and we’d have our own epic battles of words in my narrow bed. But Mum could never have mastered its cruel play.

  I longed to break into their fight with my own fantaisie. But I waited, lads, like a crouching tiger. And then Clara, my poor lovely child with her pyramid of hair, deigned to attack Gertrude’s one and only son—me.

  “Mother,” she said, “I hear that your Johnny once resided in Mr. Washington’s britches, as his pet homunculus.”

  “That is a most bitter lie,” Mum said.

  “I believe he sucks on a biberon all day, like the infant he has always been and will always be.”

  And I leapt in. “Methinks you could use a biberon, Clara dear. It might serve you well the next time you have to wash a man’s balls.”

  She did not take kindly to my fantaisie. Her face contorted. “I’ll biberon you,” she said, and lunged at me with her painted fingernails—that first rip felt like a razor right under my eye patch. I was about to swoon. And that’s when my mother shrieked and plummeted off the bed. And Clara stopped flailing.

  I’d lost the privilege of helping me own mum—Clara scooped her up and placed her on the pillows. The furor was gone from Clara’s green eyes. Seeing my mother fall must have settled that confusion of loving and loathing, settled it like a kindly slap in the face. But who
could ever be certain with Clara?

  “Gertrude,” she said, “you should order me from this house. I bring havoc. I always have.”

  “I love your havoc,” Gertrude said. “I will not live my life in an empty house—sons abscond. Their shadows are so short. But daughters can fill a closet—”

  “With havoc,” Clara said. “And all the necessary little noises.”

  I was seething, mates. I watched them conspire like a pair of lady pirates. They kissed one another, cried in each other’s arms.

  “Clara dear,” Gert said, “I have just decided. You will dwell in my bedchamber. ’T will be your headquarters.”

  Clara arched her eyebrows with a certain elegance. “I will not steal your closet, Mum. Never.”

  “But yours is much too small.”

  “’Tis infinity, Mum, if I feel it so—I should not have called you a redheaded crow, nor mocked your medal.”

  “I am a redheaded crow,” Gert insisted. “And Mr. Washington said that this Purple Heart was as much yours as mine. Did he not say so, John?”

  I was wrong about me mum—she had as much force as Clara’s fantaisie.

  Sixty-Nine

  CLARA AND I LIVED LIKE ENEMIES IN THE SAME house—seems I was not included in her rapprochement with mum. She ne’er said a word to me. But I could not fathom her relations with the castrato, who flaunted himself with the nuns. I’ll wager he slept with every one.

  His tenure at the playhouse was now complete—it had other occupants, a troupe of jugglers that recited Shakespeare while tossing cannonballs and stuffed parrots into the theatre’s little sky. I did not bother to investigate its fare. I would sit with Feltrinelli between his trips to the nuns’ closets. He was a most singular fellow, quite eager to recount his adventures with Clara. He’d first met her while strolling on the docks. She had just fled Holy Ground with her hatboxes—had run from Gertrude. Feltrinelli could not recall the exact date. His own calendar was occupied with Polyphemus and Galatea. She, who could have become the concubine of half a dozen nabobs or British generals, decided to rot away on the docks.

  The Angel of Bologna was moved by her audacity. He brought her to his dressing closet. He smiled, figured he would seduce her with a song. The Cyclops always worked best, so he plied her with Polyphemus’ saddest songs. And when he embarked on the pleasant little road of kissing Clara, he had a rude surprise. She asked him to pay for the kiss.

  Whatever manly arts he had were shattered—he, Il Gran Feltrinelli, who cured kings of melancholia while sleeping with their wives, had never once paid for a woman.

  He felt like a fool, but he argued his case to Clara—mutilation, he said, had turned him into a marvel, a “geldling,” as he called himself, with his own sexual trumpet that could perform for hours.

  Clara was penniless, without a home, and yet she laughed. “Maestro, you still have to pay me ten London pounds—’tis my fixed fee to look at a geldling or any other creature who hath no balls.”

  “Could you not fall in love?” the geldling asked with a meekness that was unusual for him. “Would love not lower your fee?”

  “But I already am in love—with a one-eyed rascal, and for him, yes, I might lower the fee.”

  He couldn’t even adopt Clara—Clara was the one who adopted him. Her household of nuns arrived on John Street, two at a time, and the geldling was suddenly blessed with a family, while Clara’s own one-eyed rascal was not included.

  And then the prodigal daughter returned to Holy Ground with her entire brood.

  I COULD NOT GET NEAR CLARA’S DOOR. Whenever I approached, she would hurl a shoe at me. And one day, as Christmas neared, she fell into a deep melancholia without apparent cause. She could not leave her closet. Gertrude would call upon her, queen to queen, but Clara’s condition did not improve.

  Gertrude brought in doctors and metaphysicians who wanted to bleed the girl—have worms and beetles sit on her belly—but she would not succumb to their tricks. Feltrinelli sang to her the whole of Handel’s Saul, but Clara seemed to suffer through the mad peregrinations surrounding this melancholy king. The more he sang, the sadder she grew.

  The nuns prepared poultices and potions of molasses and sage tea. But Clara would neither wear the poultices nor drink the concoctions of tea. And these same nuns, who had been ignoring me, who wouldn’t even share a pipe, suddenly had need of Gentle John.

  They took me by the hand, like elves in a fairy tale, led me into Clara’s closet, and locked this lad inside. How to explain my fright? I was alone at last with my tall nymph, my Galatea, who had such strangeness in her green eyes. Gertrude or the nuns must have covered her shoulders with a shawl. And she sat on her quilts without a nod of recognition.

  Ye gods, the freckles had fled from her face!

  “Clara, I wouldn’t be here had the nuns not captured me and—”

  I had to halt as she gazed upon my own miserable mien.

  “Johnny, One-Eye, must you be an imbecile? I have been waiting for ye.”

  “’Tis a most peculiar wait. To toss a shoe at me the minute I approach.”

  “But you claim to be a pirate—more, a seasoned man of the world. Yet you cannot surmount a shoe? You might have tossed it back in my face.”

  “Darling,” I said, “if you torture me like this, I will surely cry.”

  “I have plenty of criers. And I have no need of one now—I am turning into stone and I cannot stop it.”

  “How may I help? Speak! And I’ll challenge the Divil.”

  “Fie!” she said. “I could challenge the Divil all by myself. I am laden with remorse—over you. Mr. Washington can come prancing on one knee. But he cannot acquit my own sin. I tricked ye into leaving the battlefield at Yorktown. I crept into your tent like some wanton girl employed by the Continental Army. ’T was the witch in me that did it, not Clara.”

  “Perfect,” I said, trying to reason like a philosopher at College Hall. “Then I will exorcise the witch. Burn her to death.”

  The dullness went out of her eyes. “Burn the witch, Johnny, and you might burn Clara.”

  “Better still. I’ll be done with both of ye.”

  Now she even laughed.

  “The maestro’s singin’ makes me deaf. I miss your fairy tales.”

  I climbed onto her bed like a barking dog. I charged into her with my skull.

  “Clara, once upon a time there lived a very tall witch, so tall that she could ne’er enter a house with her very own head.”

  “Pray then, what did she do?”

  “Twist it right off at the stem, and reconstitute it once she was inside.”

  “You must not harm her,” Clara said. “Methinks I like the witch.”

  “Harm her?” I said. “I will paddle her bum ’til it is raw. I will ravish her in hot oil.”

  Delight, pure delight, exploded upon her face.

  “If you boil her, John, I shall never leave you, not in ten thousand years.”

  We kissed like children on a rampage. We chewed at each other’s mouth with such monstrous labor, I worried we would shed all our teeth, tear the roof right off my mother’s castle, and never come to Christmas.

  Seventy

  WHAT MARVELOUS COIN THE HOUSE OF GERTRUDE suddenly had—it rose right out of the ruins. And not because of any nun’s business, but because of Washington’s public visit to Holy Ground, and my mother’s Purple Heart. Madame was now the sage of Robinson Street.

  Daughters of Liberty, dressed in homespun and calico, waited in line to sit with Gert and have China tea with a woman they had scorned throughout the revolution. The Committee of Mechanics, Grocers, Retailers, and Innholders, which had captured most of the seats on the new Common Council, sent their own representative to meet with Gert—said representative was not against reopening Robinson Street, were it done in an orderly and quiet manner, without nuns of any kind parading on the porches in their undergarments. The committee itself would become a silent partner in the operation.

 
But after conferring with Clara and the nuns, Madame refused this offer to rebuild as a brothel. The nuns had grown too fat and were disinclined to have some yob in their closet. They preferred to remain part of Feltrinelli’s private harem.

  Madame saw little future in any Manhattan “street of shame.” ’T would not be compatible with her Purple Heart, and she disliked silent partners. No, she would turn the Queen’s Yard into some grand salon and millinery shop. Gert was shrewd enough to gamble that once all the fervor died down these new American nabobs would want to clothe their revolutionary wives in the best European fashion. And should one such nabob catch the fancy of a particular nun, who was Madame to oppose the contours and contortions of love?

  This was all odious to Clara, who had risen out of her melancholy. She despised any mercantile exchange with a committee of grasping mechanics and grocers, despised having innholders in the house. But ’t was also a convenient cover. In fact, the Queen’s Yard remained a house of spies. But the warfare had changed considerably. There weren’t redcoated combatants, or British generals in Broadway mansions. We were a different breed of warriors now, tho’ Clara let me cling to the illusion that I was her own personal pirate.

  She had been shielding African slaves throughout the war, hiding them in barns along the Hudson, so the Brits could not press them into service as cooks and common mules in one of their Caribbean colonies—but neither Clara nor Gertrude had bothered to tell Gentle John. We lads fight our little wars, while women circle around us, like falconers with their own invisible falcons.

  ’T was not the British who had dismantled Little Africa, tho’ they believed in their little myth. Clara and the denizens of Little Africa understood that blacks would be slaughtered one day by some vicious drunken gang taking revenge on a “Negro rising” that had never happened.

  She had tried to smuggle some African slaves aboard the Lady’s Adventure, the Mars, the Hesperus, and other British ships that carried Loyalists to Canada this past spring, but her own plans misfired. The captains of these vessels couldn’t protect runaways who were not listed in the “Book of Negroes,” that invidious record of all freed blacks. And Clara’s runaways were soon returned to their masters.