Dreams of Glory

by Thomas Fleming

  “No,” Flora cried with intensity that sent hope thundering through Caleb’s divided mind. She was not a spy.

  “I thought that would be your reaction. That’s why I resolved to withdraw from the contest. Yet, we’re all social beings. When one side or the other wins, we must live with them. Where can a neutral man go in a world ridden by fanatics?”

  “Ah, Mr. Chandler, if you knew how many hours of sleep I’ve lost trying to answer that question. For a while, I told myself that two lovers can make a world for themselves. But I’ve lost faith in that idea.”

  “Why madam?”

  “The world is too cruel. I think it hates genuine love, Mr. Chandler. Love that is ready to sacrifice everything, that is its own happiness. It fills many people with a kind of rage. Do you think I’m wrong?”

  “Not at all,” Chandler said. He had stood listening to her like one of those beings whom the ancient goddesses turned into trees or pools, thinking as her elegiac words and her emotion mingled, she can, she will destroy me.

  “Perhaps death is the only place where lovers can find peace.”

  In two strides, Caleb crossed the parlor and seized Flora’s hand. He was improvising now. Nothing in Stallworth’s narrow vision of this woman could have anticipated this response.

  “My dear Mrs. Kuyper. Flora. I won’t let you talk that way. This terrible winter has affected your mind. Life, love, will bloom again for you. No doubt with someone far more worthy of your beauty, your accomplishments than I. You heard me say I was resigned to loving you from a distance.”

  She shook her head. “It’s the other way around,” she said. “It’s I who am unworthy of your goodness, your admiration.”

  “Something, a memory, a fear, must be prompting those bizarre words,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Nothing, and everything,” she said. “Come. Let us have some supper.”

  They dined on chicken, potted and baked in a pie with the lightest crust Caleb had ever tasted. There were side dishes of sweet potatoes and pickled beets. For dessert there were pancakes folded over a boysenberry filling and sprinkled with powdered sugar. The wine was a soft Moselle. Caleb’s mind grew more composed as he ate. He began to wonder at the luxury Flora Kuyper seemed to take for granted. How could she afford it without some secret source of money? The war had made farming a profitable business. But for most Americans the perpetual inflation of the price of everything quickly devoured the surplus.

  Meanwhile, she drew him out on his plans. Would he not be suspected if he quit the army? Would it make it difficult for him to obtain a living in Connecticut? Did he think that the army was as cruel as Caesar had made it sound? Caleb told her that he would feign an illness to protect himself from resentment at home. As for the army’s cruelty, he was in complete agreement with Caesar. He described the constant whippings of the common soldiers, their starvation rations and wretched clothing. “Yet the country as a whole has never been so prosperous. There’s talk of millions made by merchants in Boston and Philadelphia. The farmers’ barns are overflowing from two years of magnificent harvests. But they hide their grain from the army commissaries in hope of seeing prices rise still higher. The universal lack of patriotism disgusts me.”

  Caleb stopped, bewildered, appalled by the realization that he was telling the truth. He was disgusted by the selfish devil-take-the-hindmost attitude that prevailed everywhere, even in Connecticut. He had heard his own father swear that he would not sell another barrel of flour to the American army until the Connecticut legislature doubled the fixed price.

  Flora Kuyper nodded. “I was prepared to believe in the Americans at first,” she said. “In spite of slavery. But the more I’ve seen of them, the more I’m convinced that they don’t deserve this freedom they worship so loudly.”

  She stirred her coffee. Caleb decided it was best to say nothing.

  “I have reason to loathe the British,” Flora said. “And yet, I find myself drawn to them, as you are.”

  Again, she hesitated, and he remained silent, tension knotting his chest.

  “You’re not a stupid man, Mr. Chandler. You must know I couldn’t live here, so close to their lines, without some sort of arrangement.”

  “You mean you’ve taken a protection?” Caleb said. “I’m told that there are hundreds in this part of Jersey who have done the same thing.”

  “You might call it that,” Flora said, studying him over her gold-rimmed coffee cup. “I have rendered the British certain services, without compromising myself with the rebels. I own nothing in the world but this farm I inherited from Mr. Kuyper. Even a small risk fills me with terror. If I were condemned, the farm would be seized; Cato, the rest of the slaves, would be sold at auction.”

  “Yes,” Caleb said numbly. He had a sudden sensation of sliding down an icy hill toward a precipice.

  “If you’ve told me the truth, Mr. Chandler, and I believe you have, I don’t think you’ll betray me. Am I right?”

  “Madam, you have my promise to protect you at all hazards.”

  He could say that and mean it. He would protect her against Stallworth, against all the preachers and politicians in New Jersey and Connecticut, arrayed in righteous panoply. He told himself that her services to the British were probably trivial and eminently defensible.

  “I think I could arrange - if we truly understand each other - I could arrange for you to render the British certain services, too. Without revealing your disaffection from the rebels. So that whoever wins, you’ll be on the right side. That’s the only way that I can see to survive in this chaos. For people like us.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re undoubtedly right.”

  “It would involve carrying messages between here and Morristown. There is very little risk. You would never see the men who send them or the men who receive them. You would pick up the messages in a certain place in Morristown and leave them in another place, here on the farm. You could combine it with pastoral visits to Cato and his people. And with me.”

  Caleb put down his coffee cup to conceal his shaking hand. He was back in his part again, reciting words Stallworth had written for him. “Madam, are you mocking me?”

  “Nothing of the sort.”

  “You know my visits to you won’t be pastoral. Please don’t joke at my priestly profession. I took it seriously once. I still do, in some unhappy way.”

  Was that true? Caleb wondered dazedly as he saw contrition and concern on her lovely face. Or had Stallworth made him such a consummate liar even he could not tell the difference? All he knew was the sliding sensation, over the precipice now, falling through the darkness, with her green eyes impaling him. If she was sincere, what could he wish himself but death and ruin?

  “Forgive me,” she said. “I was only trying to make it seem less terrible. There was such a stricken look on your face.”

  “Let us ban stricken looks, in the name of clever treachery,” Caleb said, retreating to Stallworth’s bombast again. “Madam, you’ve convinced me. I’m at your service. Together we’ll outwit both sides and rescue affection from a worthless world.”

  “That calls for a toast,” she exclaimed with a radiant smile. “Cato!

  “Our best brandy,” she said when Cato appeared. He returned with a green bottle that looked a hundred years old and filled two cordial glasses. Flora raised hers. “To treachery. And affection.”

  Caleb drank the expensive liquor, brewed by French monks of the previous century. Flora refilled his glass and her own, and told him to take the bottle with them to the parlor. There she sat down at the harpsichord. They sang only French songs. “It’s what I sing when I’m happy,” Flora told him. After a half-hour of cheerful rondos and caprices, she paused and let her fingers find a more delicate chord. “This is one I haven’t been able to sing for a long time,” she said. “It’s called Plaire à celui que j’aime.”

  As with earlier songs, Caleb translated the French poetry into English prose. But there was nothing prosaic about
these words. There was an unmistakable invitation in them.

  Pleasing the one I love

  Is my sole victory

  And my talents for him

  Are new tributes.

  I have cultivated them

  Without thought of glory.

  I have sought for love

  A new, a better language.

  Was she sincere? he wondered. Or had Stallworth been right when he predicted that Flora Kuyper would take him to bed with her to guarantee his loyalty to the King.

  “Sing it with me,” Flora said.

  Caleb sang Plaire à celui in his barbarous French, telling himself that if Flora Kuyper was sincere, she would put her hands over her ears and burst out laughing at the thought of loving this provincial parson. Instead, when the song ended, Flora stared at her hands holding the last chord on the ivory keys and asked, “Do you think you could learn a new, a better language for love, Mr. Chandler?”

  “I wish - I wish I had more confidence in my skill,” he said.

  “Much depends on the teacher,” she said.

  It was happening, as Stallworth told him it would happen. But there was so much that challenged Stallworth’s cynical explanation. So much that made Caleb want to believe in Flora Kuyper’s sincerity, even if she insisted on seducing him. What if it was not seduction, what if she was offering him genuine affection, what if everything she said about the Americans and the British was not only sincere but true? Then he would become her betrayer lover, her loving betrayer.

  Caleb’s next words owed nothing to Stallworth. “Madam - Flora,” he said, “I never felt such a wish.” He sat down on the harpsichord bench beside her. “It’s more than love. It’s a desire to make you happy, to preserve your happiness, against all the powers of this world.”

  “Let’s not speak of the world,” Flora said. “There’ll be time enough for that. Too much time.”

  “I . . . I can’t ask you for the gift that would be precious to me. Not yet. Not until I ask it with a clear conscience.”

  “I thought you’d stopped believing in your New England God.”

  He stood up, hoping a few feet of space, several moments of silence, would somehow brake the momentum, would give her time to control her feelings (if she was sincere) and take advantage of his stated reluctance. But her eyes still challenged him. She forced him to give her the only answer his masquerade permitted.

  “It’s not that childish conscience,” he said. “It’s my inability to match my words. To make you genuinely happy. I have no living but my minister’s profession, which I find more and more intolerable. I have neither money nor powerful friends. It’s folly to talk of protecting you.”

  “Is that how you see it? As a kind of transaction, a bartering of my body for your protection? Is that all the feeling you have for me?”

  “My God, no,” Caleb cried.

  Flora was standing beside the harpsichord now, anger and sadness mingling on her face, in her voice. “I have loved only two men in my life, besides my father,” she said. “For both of them, I was ready to do, to risk anything. I regret some of the things I did for those loves. But I don’t regret why I did them. For love, without any thought of my reward, my profit, or my future losses.”

  Caleb saw that they were going over the precipice. Whether she was taking him or he was taking her, he was no longer sure. Was Stallworth right, was he being seduced into the service of the King, or was he winning a profound profession of love? Between the brandy and his conscience and Flora Kuyper’s inviting breasts, Caleb was not sure of anything. He only knew that Flora was coming across the room and he was moving to meet her vowing that if she was sincere he would somehow purify this act, he would live up to his promise to protect her. Simultaneously seeing her willingness as proof that Stallworth was right, unable to believe that this woman could really love Tom Brainless.

  The kiss lasted so long Caleb began to drift in and out of time. He was home in Lebanon, seeing Deborah Hawley, knee deep in buttercups in her father’s pasture, wanting her then, with a sharp, specific hunger that had shocked him. He was in New Haven, gazing at the trollops in the Long Wharf Tavern; he was in Morristown, looking down at a soldier who asked, Do you think I’m damned? He was staring up at Benjamin Stallworth’s hatchet-edge of a face, hearing, she fucks for the King.

  Upstairs, as he fumblingly undressed her, she interrupted him with a half-dozen kisses. In bed, Caleb’s clumsiness, his lack of knowledge of female anatomy, caused some awkward moments. Flora bridged them with more kisses, with patient whispers of affection. Her obvious experience only intensified his suspicion. As he entered her Caleb saw a vision of damnation, of flames leaping in a hell beneath the bed. But the terror vanished as a wild commingling of pleasure and desire, affection and passion, consumed him. He was in her, possessing her, but she also seemed to be within him, not only her tongue deep in his mouth, but her breasts, her thighs, her hands seemed to become part of his body. They were still over the precipice, still falling through the night like damned angels. But they were enjoying delights those bodiless creatures never knew.

  Flora began to teach him the subtleties, the thousand smaller pleasures of love. The touches, the kisses, the bites, the teasing refusal and the sudden, laughing acquiescence. She made him aware of his body as he had never known it. Her fingers, her lips explored flowing muscle and soft flesh, and invited him to do likewise. He found the other meaning of the verb to know.

  Caleb was infinite miles, ages of years from Morristown, where dirty bitter men bared their backs at whipping posts in the blowing snow, where every path and road was guarded by bayonets, and an army’s stench pervaded the icy air. Benjamin Stallworth’s lash of a pulpit voice, his iron mouth demanding treachery in the name of victory, preaching love as a form of betrayal, all became ghosts, demons out of some nightmare. This alone was real, this woman giving herself to him, opening her sinuous arms, her languorous mouth to him, taking him into her body, with sighs of welcome, murmurs of praise.

  At last, there was that yielding and giving moment, that blending of wish and fulfillment. “Caleb, Caleb,” Flora said after a few minutes, “now I must tell you everything. There can be no secrets between us. They’re the murderers of love. I know that from experience. But now I have another fear.”

  He cradled her in his arms, suspicion stirring again. Now if Stallworth was right, she would tell him the whole truth. His answer was bombast. “That word - fear - is banned from this room, from this house.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “We will see what love can risk-”

  “I want to know why you’re often so melancholy,” he said. “I want to banish that word, that humor. Whatever its cause.”

  “What do you think is its cause? Have you guessed?”

  They were speaking with their arms around each other, their lips only inches apart.

  “It has something to do with Caesar Muzzey,” Caleb said. “At the funeral I saw you weeping for him. Do you feel responsible for his death?”

  “Yes. But it’s more than that. Caesar was my lover.”

  Involuntarily, before his mind could do more than record the astonishing fact, Caleb felt his body stiffen in revulsion. She felt it, too.

  “I knew it,” she said, shoving herself away from him. “I knew it would disgust you.”

  “It doesn’t,” he lied.

  “Don’t deny it, in your stupid Protestant way,” she said. “It’s better to confess and repent, to admit your evil feeling. I felt the disgust run through your body. It disgusts you to think that Caesar’s lips, his hands, his black thing, have been where you’ve just been. In spite of all your fine words about Negroes, you don’t really like them. They disgust you. Isn’t that true? Their blackness disgusts you?”

  “Yes,” Caleb said.

  “Then let me tell you something even more disgusting. I’m one. White as I am, I have a grandmother, probably still alive in New Orleans, who’s as black as Caesar. If we have a child by what
we did together, your child could be black. Black as soot, black as mud. What do you say now?”

  She was sitting up in the bed, the covers clutched around her against the cold. The firelight played on her face, which seemed to cast a light of its own, a blaze of pride and despair. Caleb lay on the pillow, gazing up at her, feeling more and more uneasy. He groped for something genuine. “Perhaps you’re teaching me what love means,” he said.

  She began to weep, not tears of grief, Caleb saw, but of joy, hope. She fell back into his arms. “I wasn’t sure of you,” she said. “I wanted to turn you away now, when I could still deny everything.”

  Caleb’s conscience leaped to savage life; a hell localized in his mind. How sound, how sure her loving instincts were. How many times would he have to stifle them with lies?

  “There’s no escaping it. You must tell me everything now.”

  “Promise me, no matter what you hear, you won’t despise me.”

  Here it comes, Caleb thought. Stallworth’s vindication. The true story of why Flora Kuyper wants Caleb Chandler to spy for King George. Did he want to hear it? “Stop talking nonsense,” he said. “I’m ready to hear your life’s confession and give you eternal absolution. For penance I’ll command you to love me forever.”

  “Don’t, she said, putting her hand over his mouth. “Don’t mock my Catholic faith. Caesar did that too often.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She began.

  “How care you appear in public with that woman and child?”

  “I’ll appear where and when I please and with whom I please,” my father replied.

  Those words are my earliest memory. I heard them standing between my mother and father in the Place d’Armes, the dusty central square in New Orleans. I was about five and was wearing a blue silk dress with a red sash. My mother was wearing a much plainer white dress. My mother was not beautiful, but her height and bearing gave her great dignity. She glared at the black-mustached man who had just insulted us. He was Vincent Pierre Gaspard de Rochemore, commissaire ordonnateur, the second most powerful man in New Orleans.