by Lauren Groff
When he did so, he turned to me. Richard, my boy, he said: come. He leapt onto his charger and held out the reins of the mare for me. But I could not leave my mother like that, alone, trembling in humiliation, and so I averted my eyes. I burnt. My father gave a grunt, put his spurs to his mount, and rode off, and for a long time afterward I believed I did hear a crack when my heart broke. Still, I rode beside my mother through Burlington, timidly touching her wrist. When we passed my grandfather’s house, she leapt lithe as a cat from the wagon and took shelter in her father’s garden. I had no choice. I accompanied her, watched as my father disappeared down the road, feeling as if that was the last I would see of him, utterly bereft.
Thus, when, at last, my mother and I rode through the hard wilderness all the way to Templeton, my soul nearly burst of joy. Although it was still but a small settlement, still rude, that day we arrived, it seemed perfect to me. Jacob was born nearly as soon as my mother entered the Manor, screaming for attention as he always would. After his birth, my mother had no eyes for me anymore. Jacob was a beautiful child, so spirited it took Remarkable and my mother both to care for him, so wild that sometimes they would fall asleep together in their chairs and poor Mingo would have to follow the boy as he climbed over all the furniture in the parlor. The pet of everybody, not only in the Manor, but also in the town, and it was no wonder he turned out the way he did. There were times I thought that since nobody else was being strict with him, I, as the elder brother, should try. I would scold him for some minor infraction or another. But he would stare at me with his sparking black eyes and either kick me in the shins or go screaming off to our mother, who would look at me and wonder aloud why I must torment my brother when I was a man and he was but a baby. He’d watch me with those laughing eyes, sucking a finger, this child who, at two years old, said things about me to his tutor that made the old Frenchman giggle into his beard. When he was five, I ceased trying. The result, I must say, was uneven, at best.
But in the first months after my mother and I had reached Templeton, I was young, and, since I had failed my entrance exams for university (my tutor, the poor, blighted soul, having neglected to teach me anything), I clung close to my idol, my father. He was busy, seemed even larger in his own town. Neck-deep in papers, the little Indian amanuensis Cuff took one look at me, so eager, and saw a replacement. In a fortnight, he had fled, and I became my father’s secretary.
The years clicked by, and my admiration for my father only grew. He was the one the settlers ran to when they wanted a road leading to their parcel, when they wanted to marry, when they had a squabble. He was the strong man, the one nobody could wrestle to the ground. I became my father’s sergeant, taking over more and more as he began meddling in politics. I rode to the distant farms and accepted the rents; I kept the books. All for a slap on the back. All that effort, that work, hard, dirty, cold, so that my beloved father would reach his arm to me and ruffle the hair on my head late at night, as I wrote a letter from his dictation, cramping my hand for hours.
When I was only a boy, I sometimes longed to be like all those rosy young people I saw laughing in their sleighs and playing games in the park. But at fourteen, I didn’t know how to speak to young men, young women; I didn’t know I even had the right to look at a girl in admiration. During the long months after poor Anna passed away, I sometimes looked at the taxidermied catamount in the Men’s Club, feeling an uncomfortable likeness to it. Like the wire and cloth within the beast, my father had stuffed me into his own form.
Late, my father became a Tory. If I had doubts at the time, I kept them to myself. I believe, though, that I was still too enamored of my father to have had real doubts. I barely noticed when Elihu Phinney turned away from us. I never heard the gossip about my father, all that talk of the serving girls, the bribes. I barely noticed that my father, who had once been a poor, uneducated soul, began to scorn poor, uneducated souls.
And then came that trip to Albany, two months before the election. My father, a senator, went to sit in session, and his infernal lawyer Kent Peck and I came along. From the day he arrived in Templeton, I hated Kent Peck, that carved face, that rancid stink coming from his clothing. The way he called himself a third son of my father. On their trips, my father and Peck had long been in the habit of taking a cup of whiskey from every roadside inn and tavern along the way, and so by the time we reached our boardinghouse in Albany, they were falling off their mounts. I never drank, and so I was tending to the baggage and then the horses when my father and Peck stumbled out of the door of the boardinghouse, a hunk of cheese and bread in each hand, ready for their rounds of the town. My father saw me, in the stables, in the light of the lamp.
He stopped, and roared at me, Richard, my boy! Come with us, come, come. Let us see if thou hast what it takes to be a man.
I would have declined—I always did on our trips, liking more my journal and a bit of supper and a fire before I slept, disliking what spirits did to my brain—if Kent Peck hadn’t spoken. Who, Richard? he sneered, then gave a little hiccough of a laugh, almost falling into the rain barrel under the eaves.
That did it; I threw the currycomb to the yawning stableboy, and followed my father and Peck out into the night. For hours, I trailed them, grimly. First to the gentleman’s club, where all sorts of granite-faced men shook my father’s hand vigorously. A stop to sup on some pickled herring and roast pork. A tavern at which Peck spat toward the spittoon, never quite achieving it.
At last, we went into the dark night, my father and Peck with their arms around each other, singing And I’ll drink out of the quart pot, here’s a health to the barley mow, and as we neared the river, the buildings became seedier and seedier, rats scuttling freely in the street. At last, we knocked on the door of a squat, stone building and my father hissed something into the door, and we entered.
It was a dim place, smelling oddly, I thought. There were men sitting in any number of chairs around the fireplace, some of whom we had already seen on our trip through Albany that night. There seemed to me to be too many serving girls carrying mugs of punch, all of whom were extremely poorly clad. I felt a fire in my cheeks, and looked at my feet, glancing up from time to time.
One by one, the men disappeared, although I never saw any go out the front door. The girls did, too. At last, I watched the back of Peck’s head, disappearing behind a curtain. I saw my father whisper in the ear of a fat red-head, who was sitting on his lap. She smiled, looked at me, came wobbling over. She sat beside me, began stroking my knee.
Such blind ignorance. It wasn’t until the red-head began breathing her salty breath into my ear, and I saw my father take the hand of a tiny brunette, that I knew where I was.
I watched my father stand, head bowed for the low ceiling. Then I pushed the girl away, stumbled out into the night. I wept as I ran; me, a great man of twenty-four.
At last, I found my way to the inn, took my things, saddled the horse, and rode through the long morning. All that time, I thought of my poor mother. So small, so devout. I must tell her everything, I thought. She should know, though her spirit would certainly break with the news.
Through the long ride, though, my resolution faded. At last, as I rode through the gates of Templeton Manor, my heart heavy, I knew I had to protect her from what I knew. Though it left a terrible, bitter taste in my mouth, I would have to swallow my disgust with my father, act as if nothing had happened.
Inside, my mother embraced me, and I had to explain what I was doing home so early. I hid what I knew in short answers, in my usual silences.
When my father and Peck returned, my father pulled me aside. Richard, my son, he said. I have no excuse. I would ask of thee only thy discretion. Out of love for me, he said. Please. I bit my tongue and nodded. I pretended little had changed. Though in the end I had to pretend for only a few months, my acting took a terrible strain on me.
The night my father died, when Mingo first began his howling, I knew what had happened. And as I sat for a
moment in the Eagle, before I stood and rushed to the street, the feeling that first rose in me was not that of anguish. The black spot on my soul is this: it was relief.
All those years, all those years. My hatred buried in my journal, for my mother’s sake. My fury at Jacob, as he sapped our fortunes slowly, with his merchant marines, with his gallivanting in Europe with silly Sophie and his too-many daughters, into the journal. My journal accepted what I felt when I watched my mother mourn for the absence of her favorite, my younger brother. My jealousy went in that book when Jacob came home. When Anna died, my grief. Without her, I became a skeleton of a man. Without her, my goodness in me flew away. I stopped finding words on my lips for kind people, laughter at jokes. The gentleness of certain people of Templeton—Davey, Hetty, Mudge—would bring tears stinging to my eyes.
In time, I tried my hand at a story. Nothing too large. Nothing in great long sentences the way my brother wrote, nothing in words I was uncertain how to spell. I tried to tell a truth about our father, Marmaduke Temple, and it was not a pretty truth, but it was what I knew. I liked it and called it The Pilgrims of Templeton. I wrote the fair copy into my journal.
But one day I returned late to the office and found my journal disappeared from the safe where I kept it. I remembered, then, how that afternoon, as I sat at my father’s desk in the Manor, I heard, like an undercurrent or a fly’s buzz in the room, my brother talking downstairs to our mother, telling of a great story he was going to write, the greatest. That night in the office, I stared at the empty safe, and for a long hour I felt red fall over my eyes. Had he been before me, I would have crushed my brother’s thin neck under my thumbs, to feel the life drain from him, pulse by weakened pulse. I would leave his girls fatherless. I would bloody my hands. For I understood what had happened: my brother, who worshiped our father, had read my words, and was shocked at what I had written. He knew his version of the story was the one to last the ages. He rid himself of alternate versions of our father. He drowned my story like an unwanted kitten.
In the end, though, I could not harm him. He was my brother, blood thicker than anger. I sat at the supper table beside my mother that evening, and listened to the din of my brother’s daughters and heard my brother boast to his guest of the day—they were always having guests—about his new story. A masterpiece, he proclaimed. About our father, the great man, Marmaduke. My mother twittered in joy, Sophie dreamed aloud about the carriage they’d buy when he sold the book. Jacob’s eyes darted at me; we were children again; he was daring me to tell. I said nothing. Silently, I blessed my brother. I hoped that he would prosper and be happy. I ate my lake bass and parsnips. Then I went home to Edgewater, my brick house on the lake, my house I had built for Anna and our brood of children we had dreamt of. The servants were away at a dance and the empty house echoed.
For hours, as night spooled long, I sat in the silence, weak, eaten by grief. Without pages to put my anger into, I could feel it grow black and thick within me. In time, days or years, it would eat me, I knew. Already, I sensed, it was halfway finished with its meal; soon, I knew, too soon, it would begin on what was left.
Richard Temple
In an etching, circa 1833. He is standing on the porch of Edgewater, which he built for his bride and finished shortly before she died in childbirth. Note how the illustrator, though he has tried to make Richard as smooth-skinned as possible, cannot keep himself from drawing masses of fur all over the poor man’s jawline. He was extraordinarily hirsute.
24
What Happens When the String Is Pulled
IN THE LIBRARY, a few days after my mother’s breakup with Reverend Milky, I realized that Jacob Franklin Temple almost never wrote about women. Or, rather, he wrote about a few cardboardy women who were necessary to offset the inherent nobility of his men. His Native American scouts were noble and mostly silent; his sailors were noble and mostly singing; his lords were noble and mostly refined; his best character, Natty Bumppo, was just plain noble. Even Natty Bumppo’s gun was an extremely long-barreled and noble rifle. La longue carabine, it was called.
I hadn’t read my ancestor since my one summer of Jacob Franklin Temple-mania when I was in my early teens and infused with a boiling pride in our hometown novelist, my kin. I would take the book I was reading down over the long sweep of the lawn almost to the lake’s edge. There, the ancient willow tree in our backyard that had been struck flat by lightning a very long time ago would make a natural fort twelve feet in diameter, and I’d sit until lunchtime, engrossed. I was reading for plot then, and finished four of his books quickly, because if there’s one thing Temple could do as a writer, it was to spin a ravishing yarn.
But now, with my speed-reading through his canon on that miserable day of mid-August heat, I was looking for ideas about the man himself. Hazel Pomeroy snoozed and muttered to herself, while digging up increasingly esoteric volumes for me. Peter Lieder rubbed my shoulders, which only made them tense higher toward my ears.
I learned:
That, like me, JFT was a cynic. He said, in Notes from an American Waistcoat, that “Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.”
That, unlike me, he was a bit of a prude. In At Home, At Last he said that on his travels abroad, “The women had the abominable custom of dropping belladonna in their eyes to make them sparkle like the diamonds that crusted their hands; painting rouge in pink spots on their cheeks and lips to simulate lascivious thought; and baring the great white expanses of their bosoms, all their voluptuousness on display for the consummation of Society.”
That he, in a vastly different manner than me, had a major daddy-problem. In Luciferslips, his protagonist, Cornelius (Corny) Legge, is the son of the patroon of Albany, a young gent who cannot do anything right, and his father disowns him in favor of his brother. Corny goes to the town of Luciferslips in the gloomy wilderness, so named because there are two lakes there in the shape of a pair of lips, reputedly from when Lucifer was cast from heaven and did a mighty face-plant on the ground. There, Corny learns how to be a great man and slowly becomes rich and mighty. He returns home to Albany to show his father who he is, when the great man recognizes the prodigal son and chokes to death on a piece of mutton.
But I found nothing at all about women. No adulterer appeared in any of the books. No mistress is mentioned at all. Women are pristine and innocent in the world of Jacob Franklin Temple, the best of them both chaste and courageous.
Still, I was not without hope. When I called Clarissa the day before, her voice had been rich with excitement. “I just put something in the mail,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but it was pretty fascinating to me.” And, though I pried and coerced and threatened her, she just chuckled and refused to tell me what it was. “You’ll see,” she kept laughing. “Wilhelmina Upton, just you wait and see. It’s good. Oh, boy, is it weird.”
In the meantime, waiting for her package, I sat in the library, searching, searching. That afternoon stretched long before me, and when at last Hazel’s goaty bleats turned loud enough to chase me out of the library, I yawned and stretched and ran my fingers through my hair. All day, my stomach had cramped, but I was fixated enough on the books not to pay attention. Now, though, I had nothing else to think of, and so when I put my arms down, I felt the insistent cramps now like dagger-jabs in my stomach. I pressed my hands to them and closed my eyes.
When I opened them, it was to Zeke Felcher, bright golden in a beam of light on the far end of the library, in a chair, watching me. He had a Jacob Franklin Temple book in his lap. He saw me watching and gave a smile and the far cheek seemed to dimple. Like that, I didn’t notice the Carhartt jumpsuit; like that, I didn’t notice his thinning hair.
But he said nothing until I began to smile, too, and I
said, “Ezekiel.”
“Wilhelmina,” he said.
There was a very long silence between us. Outside the lake glittered. A flock of white seagulls fell like scraps of paper onto the lawn. Hazel wheeled the squeaky cart into the back room and, still, we looked at each other, beginning to smile like fools, and that is when another spasm came.
I winced and pressed my hands to my gut again.
“Willie?” said Ezekiel Felcher now by my side. “You okay?”
I groaned and said, “No.”
“I’ll take you home,” he said, and his arm was around my shoulder, and I had a moment to sweep a pile of books into my bag, and then we were out of the musty library and into the day, and he was helping me up into the messy truck with its bobble-headed Pirates player on the dash. The cramp passed. We were out on West Lake Road already when I opened my eyes to see the Farmers’ Museum passing on my right.
“Ugh,” I said.
“You okay?” he said. “You’ll be back soon.”
“I’m okay for now,” I said. “I must have just had a bad lunch.”
“Gross,” he said, and gave me a tiny smile of concern.
Out the window, the Otesaga Hotel slid by, all red-gold in that light. We went up Lake Street, past the mansions, and into the driveway of the Averell Cottage.
Then Ezekiel Felcher very deliberately turned off his truck and turned to me and seemed to want to say something but didn’t, but then leaned close, then closer, and I could smell the metal of his breath before his lips touched mine. I was still staring straight ahead, surprised, when I saw my mother run out of the house only in the top part of her nursing scrubs, her vast white underwear like a button-top mushroom above her fleshy thighs.
She knocked on the window, and Ezekiel pulled away, flushing red. I hopped out of the truck, and my mother said, breathless, “Sunshine, Clarissa’s on the phone, and she sounds bad. She didn’t say why.”
