Belle Cora: A Novel

by Margulies, Phillip

  “Let go of me,” Lewis demanded. “My hand hurts. I can’t see.”

  I let go as Robert grabbed him under the armpits and jerked him up roughly onto his shoulders. “Now you’re the highest one of all,” said Robert.

  “Jump,” said Lewis.

  “What?” Robert asked in bewilderment.

  “Jump up.”

  “What?”

  “To be higher. Then we’ll both be higher.”

  “Oh,” said Robert, and he jumped up and down.

  I wanted my father to stop them. “Father,” I said, trying to catch his eye, and I was struck by the darkness of his expression. We had all experienced sudden ambushes of dejection since Frank’s death, when we were stopped in the middle of whatever we were doing by the reminder that he was not here to enjoy this moment, but waiting for us in a land beyond the sky. I assumed that my father was thinking this now, but if you had asked me even at that age I could have supplied other explanations for his gloom. His wife was dying. Earlier that year, he had been on a business trip to Cincinnati; there had not been much talk about it afterward, and there would have been if it had gone well. Though I would not have been able to put it into words back then, I knew that my father did not fit into the good, pious, humorless family into which he had been born. He was a likable man with a witty mind, but in his circle charm counted far less than business sense and high moral purpose, qualities he tried to acquire, earnestly and in vain. Many people having woes greater than his are cheerful anyway, from sheer animal spirits. That is their nature. His nature was to be melancholy.

  After a while, the clouds were above us, bringing a premonition of rain. My father said it was time to go home. As soon as Lewis was on his feet he ran to the edge and dropped a large, heavy rock over the side of the warehouse. He’d hidden the rock in a pocket of his coat and brought it all this way with the express intention of dropping it from the roof.

  When we got to the bottom, we found the rock broken into five pieces on the cobblestones, a yard or so away from a dead pig. Two dogs were already sniffing the corpse.

  My father went into the store and gave orders for the pig to be removed.

  “You killed that pig,” I scolded Lewis. “It could have been a man.”

  “It’s a pig,” said Lewis in a distant, philosophical tone.

  “Yes, luckily, but what if you had dropped the rock over the edge when a man was walking below? You’d have killed him!”

  “Think of it, Lewis,” said Edward, to tease me. “You’re very young for a killer.”

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  “I could have killed a man,” Lewis echoed, impressed with himself. He picked up the largest fragment of the rock.

  “Put it down,” I demanded.

  “Oh, let him have his souvenir,” said Edward. “It’s done its damage.”

  Robert seconded him. “He knows he mustn’t do that again—don’t you, Lewis?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He’s learned his lesson. Let him have it.”

  “Let him,” said my father absentmindedly.

  The next time we had pork chops for dinner, Lewis ate his share complacently, and no one said a word, afraid to break the spell. From then on, pork was like any other meat to him, and throwing brickbats at pigs became his favorite amusement.

  The piece of the rock with which he had killed the pig was forever afterward his lucky stone. It would be among his possessions for many years, with him whenever he needed luck, whenever he gambled, and whenever he killed someone.

  V

  ON THE DAY MY MOTHER FELL INTO her final illness—at the very moment when she was lifted for the last time onto her deathbed—I was walking home with Rebecca, a new girl at the subscription grammar school that I had been attending for three years, along with around thirty other children of the neighborhood, in the second story of the Union Presbyterian Church. The teacher, a young, choleric man, never looked at peace with himself except when he caned the boys; then he had a poetic countenance, like a concert pianist playing an exquisite passage. He didn’t cane girls. For girls it was the ruler smacking the palms, which seemed to tremble with their own fear, separate from mine, as I held them out to receive correction.

  My friendship with Rebecca had all the thrills and terrors of a love affair. It was she who befriended me, very actively like a practiced seducer. And virtually from the instant I surrendered, I was worried that she would realize how dull I was and regret the intense effort she had made to fascinate me, which had been so flattering because she had so many tools of fascination at her disposal. She was the daughter of a hotel proprietor, and lived at the hotel and had enjoyed a more numerous variety of amusements and met a greater variety of people than any other girl I knew. She had met Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians; she had been up the Hudson by steamboat; she had seen a trotting race in Brooklyn and a diorama of the Battle of New Orleans, and when I told her about the view from the tallest building in New York City, she told me of the view from a mountain. She had been to ice-cream saloons, as they were called then, and she had met a 150-year-old colored woman who was said to have been George Washington’s nurse.

  My own life seemed uninteresting by comparison, and when I was with Rebecca I had little to say, except to echo her opinions.

  At school she would pretend to be dainty and squeamish; spotting a centipede on her trousers, she would give a shriek and beg someone to remove it. She said “limb” instead of “leg.” Yet, when she was walking home with me once—her father’s hotel was on the way—her vocabulary was suddenly easy and vulgar, and she took her hand out of her trouser pocket and showed me a centipede crawling over her palm.

  “I’m a hypocrite,” she confided proudly, as one would say, “I’m double-jointed.” (“Me, too!” I almost said.)

  It was from Rebecca that I first learned what men and women do with each other. She told me on our last day together.

  “They do what dogs do,” she said, and when I said I didn’t know what she meant, she said, well, surely I had seen what the dogs in the street were doing sometimes, when people threw rocks to separate them, and parents covered the eyes of their children?

  I had not. So, as we walked home, Rebecca explained. I was amazed, without really grasping the significance of the secret she had imparted to me. I was always stupid with Rebecca. I studied her speech and gestures in order to reproduce them for her approval, and I missed a great deal of what she actually said.

  My life was about to be kicked in a new direction, like a child’s ball, so in later years I often thought back to this moment. It was a warm spring day. Sunbeams, squeezed through tiny random openings in the canopy of sycamores, made golden disks that winked and shimmered when the wind rose, and leaf shadows stroked the back of Rebecca’s yellow blouse when I was behind her and her skin when she faced me. We came to the point where we always said goodbye. We paused there. I was glad to realize that she wanted to linger, that she took pleasure in my company. We said, “See you tomorrow,” and we believed it.

  Walking on alone, I noticed a dog sniffing the curb. I looked at its hindquarters. While I was thus distracted, an impossible idea crept into my mind: that some of Rebecca’s remarks applied to my parents.

  Then I saw Dr. Boyle’s carriage on the street outside the house.

  I banged the brass door-knocker. Christina let me in, and there was a look on her face that I do not remember, but it caused me to cry out.

  “What? What is it? What?” I demanded. “What’s happened?”

  My brother Robert lay prostrate, sobbing, on the sofa where he usually read his newspapers and his books.

  I shouted “Mama!” and turned toward the stairs, but Christina flung out an arm to stop me.

  “She lives a little longer. Go to the pump,” she said. “Get wash water.”

  I went out to the back of the house. Lewis was digging in the garden, where everything was in bloom, for it was May. He was digging a deep hole with a ti
n spoon. I took a bucket to the pump and pumped water until the bucket was full, and carried it to the washtub. Stupid Christina, who thought the idea that my mother was to live “a little longer” would reconcile me to spending another minute away from her, came out carrying a great heap of sheets, and, seeing the bright-red blood they were drenched in, I said, “Oh no,” in a small voice. My mother had hemorrhaged from her lungs while the other children and I were filing in two rows out of our schoolroom at the back of the Union Presbyterian Church. Edward had run to fetch the doctor when Rebecca was telling me about dogs and men. Christina dumped the bedding into the washtub and said, oddly, “Good.” What in the world she was thinking I have no idea, because I never thought to ask.

  I felt the flimsy boards of the back porch shake under the feet of Dr. Boyle. “Let me talk to the little girl,” he told Christina. He was wiping his hands with a rag. Slowly, giving a distinct impression that, for him, sitting down called for as much effort as moving a grand piano, he lowered his great bottom onto the edge of the porch and patted the place next to him. “Your mama is resting,” he said when I had sat beside him. “We let her rest so that she may stay with us a little longer. There will certainly be time to say goodbye, days or more, and she may even be able to give you a few words of encouragement; I know she would use her last breath to help you in any way she can. But we must prepare.”

  He patted my head. I drew away, and he pulled his hand back. I didn’t want him to work on my emotions, even if it would make me feel better. I wanted my mother.

  “You know, I think …” He paused. “You know that your mother inherited a predisposition from her own mother, and she has probably suffered in some degree from consumption for over twenty years. What began it is not certain. She puts the blame on a fall from a horse; I suspect a croup when she was fourteen.” He brushed a fly away from his big red face absentmindedly. “Not everyone who has a consumptive parent inherits the predisposition. We can tell, though, from the signs which God in His wisdom has placed upon the patient’s face and form. Oval face, bright eyes, large pupils, clear complexion, fine hair.”

  I felt his gaze make the inventory of my features. I understood; this was what he had wanted to tell me. I had inherited a tendency to consumption. I had heard all that. I had dismissed it. I was strong. I was healthy.

  “She has remained among us longer than expected,” he went on. “I attribute her survival mainly to her dutiful attention to her own improvement. Now the time is upon us. In a sign of God’s mercy, consumption has helped to make her ready. As her mortal part decays, her spiritual part beams forth with increased luster. She’s three-quarters angel already, is she not?”

  Oh, she was! His words took me against my will, as my own mother’s words sometimes had, when she wanted me to feel contrite, and I wept on the coarse weave of Dr. Boyle’s waistcoat, smelling sweat, stale tobacco, and blood.

  My father had come home while Dr. Boyle was talking. Reverend Fowler, our minister, whom my mother had known for ten years, had come to sit by her bed, and Mrs. Fitch, a member of my mother’s consumptive sewing circle, arrived to help Christina with the housework. At the dinner table, Dr. Boyle, Reverend Fowler, and Mrs. Fitch carried the burden of the conversation. Believing that small talk would do us good, they asked us about school, and my father about the events of the day.

  Only two months after our optimistic climb to the top of my grandfather’s new warehouse, the country had descended into an economic crisis, with businesses failing, banks refusing to issue specie, clerks and mechanics thrown out of work. This was discussed for a while, with Reverend Fowler asking questions and my father pulling himself out of a blue funk to answer him. The subject changed to a recent steamship explosion in which eleven men and three women had lost their lives. Then Mrs. Fitch talked about a trip she and Mr. Fitch had taken up the Hudson to attend a revival, and how many had been saved on that occasion, and she and Reverend Fowler compared the abilities of various revival speakers. I thought of the violence that sickness had wreaked upon my mother’s body, that she would never see the return of good times, and of the great crossing that lay before her.

  Christina came down to announce that my mother had woken and was asking for us. We all went upstairs.

  Her skin was pale, the fine blue veins were numerous and prominent, and her eyes glittered in their deep cavities. Her body by this time was a bundle of sticks, a grotesque puppet cruelly burdened with a soul. Christina had wrapped her as tightly as a mummy, and only the arms lay above the blankets now; in her wrists, which projected out of the sleeves of her nightshirt, the veins and tendons were like tangled string, the knuckles too big, the fingernails flattened.

  Propped up on her pillows, my mother addressed us by our names, not omitting Dr. Boyle, Mrs. Fitch, and Reverend Fowler. Her eyes moved in her immobile head as she looked at each of us in turn, and finally she said, as if surprising herself, “Frank.” She tried to blink away her tears. Christina dabbed at my mother’s eyes with a handkerchief. My mother said, smiling and weeping, “I’ll be with him soon. If you have any messages for him, my darlings, give them to me now.”

  “Give him,” said my father, beginning smoothly, but choking on the words, “our love,” his throat constricted, and Robert said, “Yes,” and Edward said, “Yes, give him our love,” and we all wept.

  “Mama, don’t go,” cried Lewis, and he began to climb into bed with her.

  My father stopped him. “No, Lewis.” He may have feared Lewis would tax her strength and end the life she was clinging to so feebly. Or it may have been his sense of decorum; my mother herself had very definite ideas of what was fitting at a deathbed.

  Lewis kissed her cheek and begged her, “Stay with me, Mama.”

  She told him that she hated to leave him when he was so small, but if the Lord was calling her, there must be a good reason for it. She asked Reverend Fowler to back her up on this point, and he agreed. She told Lewis to respect his elders and obey his father and his sister and try to lighten their burdens. Then, in a weak voice, but with a confident mastery of this moment for which she had so long prepared, she moved on to Robert and Edward and to me, giving each of us a particular word of warning and encouragement.

  “You will continue to take good care of your brother Lewis, Belle?”

  “Yes, Mama, oh yes.”

  “You must always be watchful and loyal. Promise me.”

  I promised.

  She said that we had all been a great blessing to her, that we had given her great happiness, and that thanks to us she counted herself among the most fortunate of women.

  “I shall be watching you,” she said, and a shudder racked her body, and her eyes shut, and I cried out, “Mama!” but Dr. Boyle went close and leaned his head next to hers, then announced, “She’s sleeping.”

  After that we all took turns keeping vigil by her bedside, calling the others into her room when she seemed to be at a crisis, so that we should all be there when she expired. At her request, friends from her sewing circle came to say farewell. One, Mrs. Wilder, was obviously very sick herself. “You and I will not be separated long, Mrs. Wilder,” my mother predicted, and Mrs. Wilder, with a rueful smile, agreed.

  Giving directions from her bed, my mother dispensed presents, some she had made or purchased especially as gifts, some from among her possessions. I received her sewing kit and pins and brooches; a blank diary purchased especially for me; Advice to a Young Married Woman, by a minister, which she asked me not to read until I was older, though I need not necessarily wait until I was married; Exemplary Letters for Sundry Occasions; The Whole Duty of Woman; and some of her own volumes of Walter Scott’s novels, which I might enjoy when my reading had improved. With a glance at Reverend Fowler, whose advice she had sought in this matter, she said that, for a sensible girl such as she knew me to be, novels by respectable authors could provide harmless amusement, but I must remember not to neglect my duties for them, not to demand that my life be a romance,
or overstrain myself with too much reading.

  She gave Robert and Edward some of her books as well, and she had bought each of them a writing kit and a copy of Advice to a Young Man, and she gave them decorative pincushions and other needlework she had made herself, stitching in pain so that they should have the work of their mother’s hands to remember her by.

  Under her direction, we read to her from the Bible and sang her favorite hymns. She conducted her leave-taking with such assurance, it began to create an illusion that she wasn’t dying, that our lives had entered a permanent new phase of visiting and giving presents and praying at her bedside, with a difficult but tolerable undercurrent of dread. Then, early in the morning, with a dry gasp, she died. I was woken from my sleep to be told—“Your mother is in heaven”—by my father, who looked, most of all, weary.

  MRS. FITCH STAYED ON IN THE HOUSE to help us. With my mother gone, the burden on Christina was considerably eased, my own chores were lighter, the house became noticeably cleaner and tidier, and our meals were better cooked. Mrs. Fitch sympathized tactfully, without calling attention to herself.

  A few days after the funeral, we heard the cry of a rag picker, “Any old clothes, any rags, money for your old rags,” and Christina went out to the street with a bundle for him; I followed her. He was a Negro man, not old, pushing a cart laden with burlap sacks stuffed with old clothes and other broken and worn-out articles. When Christina handed him the bundle, he unwrapped it, and I saw that she was giving him the sheets stained with my mother’s blood, which she had not been able to wash out after all.

  THAT SAME AFTERNOON, A MAN WHO I LATER LEARNED was the First Ward constable came to the house, accompanied by a clerk from Grandfather’s firm, and they spoke to Mrs. Fitch alone. At dinner, we noticed the strain in her effort to be cheerful. “Are you well, Mrs. Fitch?” I asked her. She said that she had had a slight attack of her own illness, nothing serious, adding, “The young man whose visit you have noticed has told me that your father will not be home tonight. He has been called away unexpectedly.”