Dreams of Glory

by Thomas Fleming

  As the last notes of “David’s Lamentation” sounded from the lips of the singers, two young blacks placed the lid on Caesar’s coffin. Joined by two others, they carried it out to the open grave beneath a huge, winter-stripped oak tree, on a hillside about a hundred yards from the Kuyper house. The moist earth beneath the frostline still smoked in the bitter air. Because of the cold, Caleb said only a brief final prayer for Caesar’s soul. The blacks trudged off to their nearby farms and the pallbearers began shoveling dirt into Caesar’s grave.

  In the house, Flora Kuyper thanked Caleb for his assistance and offered to pay him whatever he suggested. “Madam,” he said, “your hospitality last night has more than rewarded me for my journey.”

  She briskly ordered Cato to prepare the sleigh and horses for the trip back to Morristown. On the road, Cato was again eager to discuss theology. He had been impressed by the sight of Caesar’s coffin descending into the smoking earth. He wanted to know if Caleb thought that salvation could be won by an unrepentant sinner if he sought it only at the moment of his death.

  “You think Caesar was a sinner?”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  “May I ask the nature of his sin?”

  “I . . . I don’t feel free to say.”

  Caleb changed the subject by teaching Cato several Billings songs, including “When Jesus Wept” and “America.” Cato especially liked “When Jesus Wept,” which was a fugue to be sung by several voices, a new idea in church music.

  Except for a dispatch rider and a farmer or two in sleighs, they met no one on the road. The great cold continued to paralyze New Jersey. The sky remained slate gray. The wind hurtled out of the north with the cutting edge of a Toledo sword. Flora Kuyper’s two powerful horses swept the sleigh along at a rapid pace. By mid-afternoon, they were on the outskirts of Morristown. In a few more minutes, Cato said good-bye to Caleb at the Widow Clark’s door.

  Inside, the chaplain found Lieutenant Rutledge and a friend playing cards in the parlor. “Say, Chandler,” Rutledge said, “they want to see you at headquarters right away. Told me not to let you leave again if you came back. You in some sort of trouble?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “You promise to go to headquarters direct? Now?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I hate to take this bad leg out in the snow. The cold gets into the bone.”

  Caleb trudged down the road to the Ford house. In the center hall, he encountered General Washington’s aide, Colonel Alexander Hamilton. “Weil, Mr. Chandler,” Hamilton said, “we thought you might have decamped to New York.”

  “What in the world are you talking about, sir?” Caleb replied.

  “Go in there.”

  Hamilton pointed to an empty parlor on the west side of the hall. Caleb sat down in one of the straight-backed chairs, bewildered. A tall, lean man with a hard, hatchety face appeared in the doorway. He wore a Continental Army uniform.

  “Mr. Chandler?” he said, in an accent that unmistakably identified him as a New Englander. “I’m Major Benjamin Stallworth. I’ve been ordered by General Washington to place you under arrest for the murder of Caesar Muzzey.”

  “I dell you, Coongressmun Stapleton, unless more is done and done soon, the peoples will fall away from us like leaves from a rotten oak.”

  Cornelius Ten Eyck, corpulent chairman of the Bergen County Revolutionary Committee, added a puff from his clay pipe to underscore every third word of this doleful prophecy. The other seven members of the committee, each as Dutch and most of them as fat as Ten Eyck, puffed on identical pipes and nodded in ponderous agreement. Dressed in their sober Sunday black suits, the committeemen sat around the crude plank table in the dining room of the house at Great Rock Farm. On the walls hung several paintings of scenes from Greek mythology done by Congressman Stapleton’s brother, Paul, in the style of the French court painter, Boucher. The pink-cheeked cupids and golden-haired nymphs clashed violently with the rough timbered walls and beamed ceiling of the old house. The elegant art only increased the congressman’s irritation. It reminded him of his comfortable prewar life in New York. It also reminded him of his embarrassing brother.

  “I wish I could assure you that something - anything - will be done,” Hugh Stapleton told the committeemen. “But I can only report a general indifference to New Jersey’s sufferings. New England, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, haven’t seen a British soldier for so long they find it hard to believe Jerseymen are fighting for their lives.”

  Meetings with the local politicians who had sent him to Congress were an inevitable part of Hugh Stapleton’s visits home. This one, like all the others, was a litany of complaints in a cloud of tobacco smoke. The congressman’s constituents wanted Washington’s army to protect them from British raiders; they wanted Congress to stop the army from seizing their grain in exchange for nothing but promissory notes; they wanted, above all, something done to stop their money from depreciating.

  “On Thursday last, Coongressmun, ve haf an auction in Hackensack,” Chairman Ten Eyck said. “Marinus Van der Donck died of a cancer and his goods go for sale. The prices, Coongressmun! An old mare, supposedly to be eleven years but probably fifteen, sold for eight hundred and five pounds. That’s four thousand and twenty Coontinental dollars, Coongressmun! A frying pan sold for twenty-five pounds; three roosty knifes and forks for twenty-two pounds-”

  “I know, I know,” Hugh Stapleton said. “The prices in Philadelphia are no better.”

  “What’s to be done, Coongressmun? How long can any peoples support such a government?”

  Not a politician by nature, Hugh Stapleton did not know what to say to the lamentations of these earnest Dutchmen. They seemed to be implying that everything Congress did wrong was his fault.

  Stapleton’s wife, Hannah, and two black servants emerged from the kitchen and began refilling the committeemen’s tankards with hot cider. By now each of them had consumed a gallon of the stuff, a country drink that Hugh Stapleton’s city palate loathed. Watching his wife in her loose flannel gown, a soiled apron tied carelessly around her waist, her hair undressed and lank, waiting on these querulous Dutchmen, Hugh Stapleton’s mind drifted to Flora Kuyper, only thirty miles away, in her tasteful parlor wearing modish silk and brocade.

  The congressman had been barely civil to his wife since he arrived home. At dinner the first day, she had pestered him with questions about their elder son, Charles, who was living with their Kemble relatives outside Morristown and getting excellent instruction from a local schoolteacher, Ashbel Green. The congressman had managed a brief visit with the boy during his three days at Morristown. Hannah asked the usual maternal questions: Had Charles lost weight? Was his color good? Were his spirits lively? Did he ask for her? “He did not so much as mention you,” the congressman had snapped.

  Hannah’s eyes had filled with tears. His brother, Paul, had glared at him. Succeeding conversations had been equally unpleasant. That night Hannah had descended on him with the accounts for the family’s ironworks, Principia Forge, and for Great Rock Farm. She began demanding a host of decisions and opinions. She was sure the forge master, an oily German named Klock, was cheating them. She rattled on about ditching and crop rotation and other agricultural procedures about which Hugh Stapleton knew nothing. A glance at the accounts for the forge made it clear that Klock was cheating them. But the amounts were trifling compared to the money Hugh Stapleton was making as a merchant and privateer owner in Philadelphia. He could see no point in a trip into the Ramapo Mountains in this abominable winter weather to argue with Klock about how much he was paying ax men to keep the furnace stoked. The congressman had - curtly once more - told his wife that men of the world understood that a little thievery was inevitable. When she tried to argue with him - she had no idea how much money he was making in Philadelphia or how much he had made in the West Indies - he had slammed the books shut and told her to go to bed.

  The committeemen finished their final rou
nd of cider and went home. Hannah and the servants collected the empty tankards and retreated to the kitchen. Hugh Stapleton sat in the smoky dining room, thinking about Flora Kuyper. It would not be easy to find a pretext for visiting her again. She lived too close to the British lines to make her house a sensible destination for a Continental Congressman.

  “Mr. Stapleton? Hugh.”

  Through the haze left by the committeemen’s pipes Hugh Stapleton saw his wife sitting at the opposite end of the dining-room table.

  “Now what is it?”

  “I have a need, a wish, to talk with you. Art thou - are you - angry with me?”

  “No,” he said. “Why should I be?”

  “Thy - your manner of address to me, since you came home, is often so harsh. I’ve searched my conscience, thinking there must be some reason for it. But I can find none.”

  “I’m not aware of the least harshness in my address,” the congressman snapped. “We’re old married folks, my dear. We can speak bluntly to each other when the occasion calls for it.”

  “True enough, I suppose. But. . .”

  She twisted a handkerchief in her hands. He saw tears in her eyes. “Why don’t you think of me instead of your own sensitivity?” he said. “Twelve hours a day, I sit there in Philadelphia listening to fools argue about nothing. Don’t you think that’s enough to sour any man’s temper? Must I play the smiling sunbeam when I come home for a few days? I’m not one of your Quaker kinfolk with a heart overflowing with universal love. What do I find when I get home? Nothing but your woeful face and my brother’s silent reproaches when I give you a short answer. I really think he’s half in love with you. If it were any other man, I’d worry about you misbehaving.”

  “That’s cruel and vicious,” Hannah cried. “Paul can’t help what he’s become. He has a loving heart. I believe a loving God will forgive him.”

  “Oh? The sinner merits forgiveness but your husband is condemned for failing to treat you with perfect politeness?”

  “Paul may have been a sinner once. But he’s struggled against his weakness. You seem to take pleasure in your faults.”

  “Faults? What faults? I’ve tried to make it clear to you, madam, I’m not aware of any fault whatsoever in regard to you. If there is a problem between us, it’s caused by your overheated imagination, and your ridiculous political ideas.”

  “I have no pretension to political ideas,” Hannah said. “I only try to tell you what I see before my eyes. What you and every man in Congress should know. We’re losing this war. The people are abandoning Congress, the cause. You heard what the committeemen said.”

  “Ah!” Hugh Stapleton dismissed the committeemen with a wave of his hand. “They’ve been saying the same thing ever since I went to Congress.”

  “And you’ve been giving them the same answer. If you care about the country, about your sons, you should be urging them to resist - resist to their last bullet - instead of feeding their prejudices, their self-pity, by telling them that New Jersey is the most put-upon of the states, doing more than its share, without a jot of appreciation from the rest of the continent.”

  “That’s nothing less than the truth!” Hugh Stapleton roared. “But, madam, what right have you to eavesdrop on my political sentiments? What I said to the committee was in the utmost confidence, as their representative in Congress. They’re entitled, as my constituents, to a frank report.”

  “They need your leadership, your moral guidance,” Hannah said. “They hear the same complaints you aired to them tonight from every coward of a militiaman who won’t turn out to fight. Your father, sick as he was, with four times as many British soldiers in New York, and just as little help from the Continentals, never talked that way in ‘77.”

  “My father has nothing to do with this argument,” thundered the congressman. “Will you stick to my main point, the impropriety of your eavesdropping?”

  “I was not eavesdropping. I was in and out of the room serving food and drink, and could not help hearing what you said.”

  “Nevertheless, you have no business correcting my politics. As a woman you have no head for it, in the first place. In the second place, as my wife you’re duty-bound to respect my opinions.”

  “I never heard such nonsense in my life,” Hannah said.

  “Madam,” he said, “you will do me the greatest favor if you will leave me this instant. You’ve tried my temper to its breaking point.”

  She sat there like stone, then with no warning began to weep. “Husband,” she said, “I didn’t come in here to quarrel with thee.”

  “If so,” he said, “you’ve beautifully disguised your intentions. Now please go.”

  Hannah fled upstairs, sobbing. The thought of sleeping in the same bed with her was so repugnant, Hugh Stapleton sat up for hours reading a report on the army that Washington’s aide, Alexander Hamilton, had prepared. It did not improve his humor. Most regiments were at half strength. Officers were resigning by the score. The enlistments of two-thirds of the men in the ranks were expiring in May and there was little hope of reenlisting more than ten percent of them. While the congressman pondered these ominous facts, his mind roved down the road to Bergen, where Flora Kuyper slept, he presumed, alone.

  A door slammed. The congressman sprang up, shivering violently. He had let the fire go out. The parlor was as cold as an icehouse. “Who’s that?” he called.

  “Your brother,” Paul said. He came into the parlor peeling away scarves and gloves.

  “Where have you been?”

  Paul smiled mockingly. Underneath his greatcoat he was wearing one of his best outfits, a vermilion coat with a pale green waistcoat and rose breeches. His white silk gold-clocked stockings descended into bright red shoes with enormous silver buckles. He was wearing his blond hair powdered and rolled around his ears in a sort of parody of an old-fashioned wig. Two patches of rouge shone on his powdered cheeks. He was a total anomaly in this country parlor, with its rundown furniture and unpainted wood walls, a New York macaroni in the middle of snowbound New Jersey.

  “What have you done,” Hugh Stapleton said, “brought one of your pretty boys from New York and hidden him in Hackensack to fool your poor sister-in-law?”

  “That,” Paul said with a toss of his head worthy of a leading lady on a London stage, “is nonsense. I’ve been playing chess with a friend.”

  “Does he also dress in the latest style? Or is he one of those who likes to prance about in skirts?”

  “Brother, your manners are as dismal as your politics.”

  “I’ve made it clear a dozen times that I’m utterly indifferent to your morals. I shouldn’t even mention them were it not for a lecture I just got from my wife about your goodness of heart and my failings in this department.”

  “If we’re going to debate the merits of that remark, for God’s sake put some wood on the fire.”

  Hugh Stapleton threw some brushwood and a fat log on the coals, and the room gradually regained a semblance of warmth. Paul stood with his delicate painter’s hands held out to the blaze, the firelight playing on his brilliant clothes and handsome, brittle-featured face. From childhood Paul had been a thin, dreamy boy with no interest in wrestling or football, hunting or fishing - the despair of his soldier father, the pet of his merchant mother. Hugh Stapleton had long resented the way his mother had indulged and spoiled Paul, virtually ignoring her elder son. She had capped this favoritism by giving Paul enough money to spend three years in Europe, improving his art and ruining his morals. These memories did not dispose the congressman to accept the sermon on benevolence that Paul began giving him.

  “The truth is, brother, you’ve treated Hannah abominably since you came back from the West Indies. On this visit you’ve outdone yourself. You speak to her as if she were a servant, when you speak at all.”

  “Since you know absolutely nothing about living with a wife, I suggest you shut your mouth.”

  Paul became intensely agitated. For a moment the congre
ssman thought he was going to burst into tears. “I’ve vowed to talk to you about this, no matter what you say to me. Hannah loves you with a violence that, to be frank, dismays me. I always thought you were like Mother, incapable of loving or being loved by anyone. I assumed you’d marry a mirror image of yourself, a woman of fashion who’d cherish some faint affection for you as long as you kept her well housed and gowned. But you surprised me completely with Hannah. Even more by winning her love. You can’t ignore a fact like that, Hugh. It becomes a . . . responsibility.”

  “Responsibility!” the congressman snarled. “I’m sick to death of responsibility. First, I have to apologize to eight blockheaded Dutchmen about the way Congress is losing the war and then I’m supposed to cringe because my saintly sodomite brother calls me a failed husband. To hell with all of you.”

  “We are losing the war.”

  “What do you mean, we? You have nothing to fear. Neuters like you can laugh at fools like me. I might have imitated your bad example if it weren’t for my patriot wife. That alone is reason for me to snap at her. Without her exhortations I would have gone back to Holland in ‘78. But I had to come home and rescue the family honor. My country needed me. Dear God. I could be sitting in Amsterdam at this moment, with a plump trollop on either knee, singing an old-fashioned drinking song instead of arguing with you about responsibility.”

  “You came home because you loved her, Hugh. I saw you in New York in those years. You were the happiest husband in America. I envied you that happiness.”

  “If I was happy, it was because I had a wife who tried to please me. Now it seems I’m supposed to please her, by prating about patriotism and lying about our glorious cause. I’ll be damned if I’ll do it any longer.”

  “Hugh, try to understand how we live here. In terror every night. Only when you come home does the place get any protection. Hannah’s nerves are bad. You can’t live in constant fear without having it depress your spirits.”