Apr. 5, 1747. At Coffins. Liza. In poor way.
Apr. 6, 1747. At Coffins. Lizabet improves. Rec’d 2 lbs. Pease.
Apr. 7, 1747. Home. Find Josiah returned.
Connie paged deeper into the journal, finding several entries of an almost identical content. She sifted through the stultifying repetition, trying to read between the lines to uncover details that Prudence would not have thought to state explicitly. Of course a woman who produced much of her own food would think that the weather was an important matter for her journal. She would have pored over almanacs for the same reason. Connie could feel frustrated that this distant daughter of taciturn Puritans would not have had the cultural knowledge necessary to reflect in print on her inner life, but that frustration would be misplaced. In some respects, Prudence’s daily work was her inner life. Connie read further, working her way through day after day of weather reports, gardening projects, comings and goings of the inscrutable Josiah, repeated calls to aid suffering neighborhood women. All of a sudden Connie laughed when she realized the obvious answer.
“Of course!” Connie said aloud. “Prudence was a midwife!” The librarian glared at her from behind his desk.
“Oh, c’mon, there’s no one else here!” she called across the room, annoyed.
“Shhhhhhhh!” he shushed, finger held to his lips.
Connie cackled to herself, enjoying her minor rebellion while jotting comments in her notebook. Maybe she gave in to her desire to defy the librarian in part to offset the taciturn restraint that bounded Prudence’s experience. The more she read, the more she had to fight the urge to stand up on the table, turn a cartwheel in the aisle. She almost felt like she owed it to Prudence to misbehave.
Connie wrote down every fact that she could glean from the dates in the journal, trying to peer through the dull words on the page to see the living, breathing life that they portrayed. After four hours of concentrated work, she had read every entry from 1745 through 1763: nearly two decades of weather reports, domestic labor, and payment for delivering women’s babies. Connie stretched, bringing her arms overhead, bending her shoulder blades over the back of the library chair. The blood drained down from her fingertips, and she flexed them, pencil held aloft. She pushed the open journal away, rubbing her eyelids, and then turned to her notes.
So far the journal mentioned nothing about Prudence’s infamous grandmother. The contours of Prudence’s life slowly emerged: she was a midwife and apparently a skilled one, as she had not yet lost a mother, and had lost only a handful of babies. She was married to a man named Josiah Bartlett, who appeared to make his living as a shoreman, loading and unloading ship cargo when it landed at the Marblehead docks. The Bartletts seem to have been long-standing friends of Prudence’s family, though Connie could not quite pinpoint how she had gathered that impression. Prudence seemed well regarded by her neighbors, though perhaps lacking in what Connie would have called friends. She lived in Marblehead but attended church sporadically. She traveled only when called to see a patient, but those were scattered throughout Essex County: in Danvers, Manchester, Beverly, as far north as Newburyport and as far south as Lynn.
A few entries stood out enough to warrant copying verbatim, and Connie looked over them again.
Octo. 31, 1741. Growing cauld. Olde Pet. Petford dies. May God forgive him.
Connie was not sure what this entry could mean, but Prudence so rarely commented on anyone other than her own patients and her family that the note about Peter Petford—whoever he was—had leapt off of the page. Connie drew a dark asterisk next to the name in her notebook, a reminder to look for him elsewhere.
Novem. 6, 1747. Snow. Paines through much of the night. Safe deliver’d of a girl. Patience. I have staid at home.
Connie smiled. She had stared at this entry for all of five minutes before she deduced that it marked the day that Prudence herself gave birth to a daughter, whose name was as ponderous as Prudence’s own.
Jul. 17, 1749. Rain and wind. Endives sav’d. Jeded. Lampson reported lost at sea.
Connie was not certain but felt reasonably sure that this entry marked the death of Prudence’s father. She sat back in her chair, thinking. What restraint, Prudence writing such a sterile entry for a lost parent. She could not imagine responding so coolly if she had been aware when Leo went missing overseas. And though Grace rarely spoke of Lemuel Goodwin, her father, when she did so it was always with tenderness and regret. What was Mercy’s response to the loss of Jedediah Lamson? The journal did not say. What had Granna done when she lost Lemuel? No historians that she knew of ever really talked about the mental world of women who outlived their men.
She frowned. Of course, most of the men that she had come across while looking into Deliverance’s family had not just predeceased their wives; they had died in accidents. Violent, wretched accidents. She suspected that if she ever found more information about Nathaniel Dane, who predeceased Deliverance, he would fit the pattern as well. Dangerous work, living in the past.
No other evidence for the first name of Mercy Lamson’s husband had manifested itself, but she could see no other reason for the event to be recorded as part of Prudence’s day. Her suspicion was bolstered by an entry from the following month.
Augs. 20, 1749. Sun, quite hot. Mother arrives. Work’d in the gardin.
Prudence had made no previous mention of her mother, but following this entry Mercy appeared periodically, illustrated using the same language that Prudence employed for other members of her household. Mercy was described going to church, often taking baby Patience (called “Patty”) with her, or working in the garden, or occasionally traveling with Prudence to visit an expectant mother. They seemed to settle in together, though no mention was made of Mercy’s helping with the household expenses. She appeared to have been taken in by Prudence out of pity rather than preference.
Why Prudence had paid no visits to her mother in the preceding four years before they combined households, Connie could not fathom. Had they not gotten along? Of course mothers and daughters with strong personalities might see the world from very different points of view. She wrinkled her nose, uncomfortably aware of this echoing truth in her own relationship with Grace. Or Grace’s relationship with Sophia, for that matter. Connie’s hypothesis about their troubled relationship received modest support from an entry some years later.
Decem. 3, 1760. Very cauld. Patty unwell. Mother looks for her Almanack. Very vexed when told it given to the Sociall Libar. Makes her poultice. Patty improves.
Connie looked over this jotting, unsure. The journal writing was so brief and focused that reading tone or intent into the chosen words smacked to her of overinterpretation. Even so, this entry felt significant to her. Angry, almost. Connie rested her forehand in her hands, tapping at the top of her head with her fingertips, eyes fixed upon her notes.
Then, in 1763, Connie found the event that the church records and the probate office foreshadowed. She hazarded a look over her shoulder at the young librarian behind the desk and saw him absorbed with reshelving. Under the table Connie tugged on each gloved fingertip, slipped her left hand out of its warm cotton cover, and crept the naked hand across the desk to brush her skin over the handwriting on the page. Prudence’s own hand had moved over that same page, pressed into the paper. The ink carried little ancient flecks of her skin where she had licked her quill tip, or had rubbed out a word. Connie tried to reach into the realm that Prudence and Mercy had occupied, tried to conjure the sensation that would illuminate Prudence’s vanished self. Her fingers came to rest on a narrow block of passages written at the end of the page, words cramped together like little ants disassembling a beetle.
Febr. 17, 1763. Sleet and rain. Mother has ben unwell. Patty attends her. We have stayd at home.
Febr. 18, 1763. Rain continues. Called to Lawr. Slattery’s wife. Patty goes to her. We have staid at home.
Febr. 19, 1763. Wet and caulder. Mother continues unwell. Josiah to town for doctor. Mother very vex
ed. Patty at the Slatterys.
Febr. 20, 1763. Cauld continues. Mother sleeps, though poorly. Asks after Patty. Asks for almanack. Josiah at Salem. Patty at the Slatterys.
Febr. 21, 1763. Cauld. I have staid at home. Patty returns. Mrs. Slattery safe deliver’d. Rec’d 6 sh. 3 p.
Febr. 22, 1763. Too cauld for snow. I have stayd at home. Mother very unwell. Rev’d Bates visits.
Febr. 23, 1763. Cold. Josiah returns with dr. Hastings Mother will not see him. Asks for me. Seems much agrieved.
Febr. 24, 1763. Too cauld to write. Mother dies.
Connie lifted her head and gazed across the vaulted reading room. She thought back to Deliverance’s probate list, a telescoping lens through which Connie could peer back in time and look into the living room of a distant woman. Here she held in her hands a daily log of the entire second half of another woman’s life, and Connie felt like she knew her even less. Prudence’s cold practicality, her obstinate refusal to reveal her feelings, no matter how culturally proscribed, created in Connie a whistling void of incomprehension. She wanted to throw the journal across the room, to bunch its fragile pages up in her hands and rip them into shreds, to shake Prudence out of her reserve. But Prudence sat removed from her frustration, insulated by a two-hundred-year-long wall.
A drop fell from somewhere, smudging the dandelion sketch in the margin of Connie’s notes. She wiped her arm across her eyes and pushed the antique book away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Marblehead, Massachusetts
July 4
1991
“FRANKLY, I AM A LITTLE SURPRISED THAT HE WOULD CALL YOU,” said Grace. Her voice sounded mild, but Connie perceived a perturbed undercurrent in her choice of words.
“He was just really curious to find out what I learned from Prudence’s journal,” Connie assured her. “He knew that I had an appointment at the Athenaeum yesterday. And he knew that it was vital that I find a mention of the recipe book, or else I wouldn’t know where to look next.”
“How did he take it when you told him?” Grace asked, carefully. Grace always sounded careful when she crocheted. Connie wondered what form was emerging from Grace’s rapidly moving crochet hook while they talked. She pictured her mother seated in her living room, phone receiver tucked into her shoulder, lap overlaid with a spreading, rainbow-colored confection of yarn, collecting in a heap around her feet.
Connie brushed her fingertip down the spiderwebbed surface of the entryway mirror and sighed. “To be honest, he sounded pretty upset.”
In fact, angry might have been a more fitting word than upset. Manning Chilton telephoned her that morning as Connie sat, sipping coffee over her copy of the Local Gazette and Mail (headlines: “Fireworks Planned for Nine O’Clock”; “Model Sailboat Regatta Boasts Record Number of Participants”; “Rotary Club Meeting Postponed”). When Connie told Chilton that she found no explicit mention of the physick book in Prudence’s journal, and had learned nothing apart from the fact that Prudence was a fairly grim woman who made her living as a midwife, he demanded to know what her next step would be. Connie, baffled enough by her advisor’s telephoning her at home, on a holiday no less, had been caught unprepared for the question.
“Upset how?” asked Grace.
Connie hedged. “I think he’s just excited, you know. It’s such an intriguing source, and he really wants to see me do well….” Which is a nicer way of putting what he really said, which was What in God’s name have you been doing wasting your and my time like this, and Frankly I had expected much more of you. Connie shuddered, remembering the conversation.
“Upset how, Connie,” Grace pressed.
Connie sighed again, cursing inwardly for having always wished for Grace to express interest in her work. “He sort of…screamed at me,” she admitted, hastening to add “but it totally wasn’t a big deal,” at the same moment that Grace cried, “Oh, Connie!” and threw down her crochet hook in irritation.
“It wasn’t, Mom,” Connie insisted. You had better put your mind to find ing it, Chilton had said. Else I will seriously doubt your commitment to the study of history, and will not be able to guarantee your scholarship support in the coming year. Her stomach contracted at the memory, but she told herself that he was only trying to keep her motivated—strong-arming though his techniques may have been. Grace only exhaled through her nostrils, blowing her hot breath over the telephone receiver and into Connie’s ear.
“He just really wants me to find the book. But right now I have no way of knowing what Prudence Bartlett did with it, and so he’s upset. I just should’ve been more prepared.” Connie walked into the dining room, stretching the telephone cord out behind her until it stopped her just short of the crockery shelf. She had spent part of the previous week finally rinsing the heavy layer of dust off each of the dishes, and they now glowed in the dim corner of the room. Connie picked up a mug, examined it—British, nineteenth century, with a hairline crack—and replaced it on the shelf.
“He’s got a point, anyway,” she continued. “I’ve got no clue what to do next. Prudence didn’t leave a probate record, and she didn’t mention it in her journal. If I can’t figure out where the book went next, I’ll have to rethink the whole project.”
“Hmmmm,” said Grace, with barely perceptible disapproval. “Why do you think he’s so invested?”
“All advisors are invested in their students’ success,” said Connie, conscious as she did so that she sounded unconvincing. Like a brochure.
“Things must have changed since I was in college.” Grace sighed as Connie started to correct her by saying “graduate school,” and Grace amended, “Of course, my darling, graduate school. Is it really that important?”
Connie inhaled sharply.
“I know,” said Grace, before Connie’s snap could finish taking shape. Connie squelched a sigh and decided to change tack.
“Are you doing anything for the Fourth?” she asked, toying with one of the dead plants still hanging in the dining room. Her mother released a peal of merry laughter.
“Not hot dogs and fireworks, if that’s what you’re asking. The co-op is running a bake sale and carnival to raise money. Any surplus will go to our subcommittee on the ozone layer. I’ll be reading auras.” Connie said nothing but thought, And what color is my aura right this minute, Grace? “You know, it might help if you think about this book in a different way,” Grace said, filling Connie’s silence.
“Oh?” Connie asked.
“Perhaps this woman—Prudence—didn’t think of the book like a recipe book per se. She might’ve used different language to describe it. She’s a hundred years after her grandmother, after all. Sometimes people see things differently from their mothers.” Connie could hear the smile in her mother’s voice and grinned in spite of herself. “And how are you celebrating the holiday?” Grace asked.
“Liz is coming up for the weekend. We’ll make dinner and watch fireworks with Sa—with this guy I know. Go to the beach. Dodge my advisor’s calls. The usual.” Connie turned a blackened jar that stood atop one of the chests in the dining room, digging a dark circle into the layer of dust surrounding it.
“At last, the boy appears,” Grace remarked. “I can’t know his name yet?”
She waited while Connie smiled into the silence.
“Oh, all right. Well, that sounds like fun,” Grace said, brightly. “But I must run.” She paused. “And, Connie,” she said, sifting through her words, “I’m not sure what to tell you about your Chilton situation.”
“What do you mean? All advisors get on their students’ cases. I gave Thomas fits last semester. It’s the same thing,” said Connie, shrugging.
“I don’t mean anything. Just tread lightly, my darling, that’s all.”
Connie threaded her fingers through the telephone cord and said, “I will, Mom. Don’t worry.” And just as she hung up she almost thought she heard Grace say blue.
CONNIE SAT AT GRANNA’S CHIPPENDALE DESK, ONE FOOT FOLDED UNDER he
r, paging yet again through her notes on Prudence’s journal. She had read through the entire document and found no mention of Deliverance Dane, nor any indication of what might have happened to the book. Her frustration with Prudence deepened. Day after day after day of gardening, cooking, and delivering babies. Of course if it was frustrating to read, it must have been vastly more frustrating to live. Not that such a realization did anything to assuage Connie’s aggravation. Prudence was a staid, practical, even harsh woman—a woman living up to her name.
As Connie worked, Arlo stretched out on his belly in the entryway, nose pressed against the crack under the front door, fur blending in with the color of the Ipswich pine boards. Presently his tail began to swish, and growls of excitement escaped from the corners of his mouth. His ears crawled up to the top of his head. Connie turned over another page in her notes, her molars stealing an unconscious gnaw on the inside of her cheek.
“Hey there, Captain Grody!” called a woman’s sudden voice from the front door, and Connie, shaken out of her reverie, turned around from her desk to find Arlo, tail and hind legs a blur of pleasure, borne into the arms of Liz Dowers.
“Liz!” she exclaimed, rising from the desk in surprise. “I didn’t even hear your car! Hi!”
“Today is a holiday, you know,” Liz chided, hugging Connie with her unoccupied arm. “You’re not supposed to be working.”
“Tell that to Chilton,” Connie groaned. “He even called this morning expressly to tell me what a total disappointment I am, and how I am completely wasting his time.”
“Professor Chilton,” Liz announced with solemnity, “is a bastard.” Connie opened her mouth to respond, but Liz held up her hand to stave off disagreement. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. He works you too hard. I’ve watched it for years. Now come on. There’s groceries in the car.”
Connie smiled at her friend. “Not too many groceries, I hope. Remember, there’s no fridge.”
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane Page 17
