Belle Cora: A Novel (88 page)

One day not long after we had gone into hiding, Jeptha read to us a fiery oration delivered in the United States Senate by Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts. Sumner was already a hero to Jeptha, and for days he quoted felicitous lines from the speech—including the famous passage in which, speaking metaphorically, Sumner says that his honorable colleague South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler keeps a mistress whose ugliness he is too besotted with love to see; and her name is Slavery.

I could see that Lewis, though very bored and hungry for any distraction, found Jeptha’s excitement over this faraway quarrel rather bewildering.

Since the news from the States reached California after unpredictable delays, it was not until two weeks later that we all read what had happened to Sumner only two days after he made his eloquent remarks about the senator from South Carolina. Butler’s nephew had struck Sumner in the head with a cane when he was sitting alone at his desk on the Senate floor. While he was reeling from the first blow, the Southerner had beaten him half to death, making Sumner—it was believed then—a permanent invalid. Jeptha, highly agitated after reading this, stood and walked away and walked back; I think this gave him a better understanding of how cramped our quarters were for us, because at the moment they were too cramped for him. One could see that the story spoke to the man in him and the schoolboy in him, and, like a million other Northern men, he pictured himself on the Senate floor with a cane in his hand, avenging Sumner. Lewis did not share these emotions, but at least for once they were of a kind he understood, and he watched Jeptha with an approving smile.

HAPPY VALLEY, NOW A PART OF DOWNTOWN
west of Market Street, was then a suburb of San Francisco, with houses that were surrounded
by big yards, vegetable gardens, trees that had been here before ’49, and with broad meadows on the hills. Jeptha’s house was two stories tall. On the walls along the stairs were framed daguerreotypes of Jeptha’s mother and father and of Agatha and Elihu, looking much older than when I had last seen them, dressed in the finest clothes they had ever worn, and staring with the grim Calvinistic fixity of expression and shocked eyes which people in these pictures have, partly because of the long exposure times and partly because of the old-timers’ sheer astonishment that likenesses can be preserved by mechanical means. The walls throughout the house were papered in wildflower patterns, a different flower and color for each room. Casting my eyes over the fringed chairs, the lace curtains, the fading rugs, or the broken chairs and stools awaiting repair in the attic, I had a great sense of having surprised Jeptha in his home, of seeing the life he lived with his lawful wife—a life not necessarily happy but complicated and with, until now, no visible sign of me.

It was hard for me, living there and never being alone with him: hard just to hide in an attic and not even be able to look out a window or take a walk outside. It was hard for me, and for Lewis it was impossible. Often I would wake to the steady creaking of the boards under his pacing feet. He would sit for an hour, staring through a chink in the shutters of the window, waiting for the slim section of a live-oak branch to shake with the departure or arrival of a finch; then, for variety, he would go to watch the view from a crack in the other window’s shutters; or he would stay on the stairs, just to vary his surroundings. He spent many hours honing his already impressive skills with coins and cards and his pocket knife: he whittled pine blocks into the shapes of boats and birds and fish, and one day, while I begged him not to do it, he whittled them all down into wood chips. When I woke the next morning he was gone. I crept swiftly downstairs—like some supple lizard, I had become so good at it—and sounded the alarm, and Jeptha and Agnes and Phoebe went through the house and the yard.

I searched my bag for the list of names I had compiled based on information given to me by the three men whom I had paid to join the Committee of Vigilance:

These were the men who had broken into my house and raped all the females they could find, including my maids and me. At the bottom of the page were the addresses of seven of these men. I emptied my bag onto the floor, but the list was nowhere to be found. I paced the attic in sick fear, muttering, “Lewis, Lewis, you fool, you fool.”

Jeptha and Agnes were at pains to comfort and reassure me. They did not know of my list or the true story of what had happened at my house, but they both knew what Lewis was like. They reminded me that Lewis knew he was being hunted and would continue to hide. He would know enough to stay away from San Francisco.

Jeptha went about his usual duties, preaching sermons on Sunday and visiting members of his congregation, and seeing to the affairs of the Orphan Asylum, the Drunkard’s Mission, and the Mariner’s Hospital. A few days after Lewis left, Jeptha officiated at the funeral of a small child, and he and Agnes had an argument. She wanted to talk to the parents about the spirit world, and to tell them that they could hear the voice of their child again if their need was great and they took certain amazingly simple steps. “You don’t even believe in heaven anymore; and people can tell you don’t,” she said. “You’re torturing these people. You’re torturing them, and they don’t have to be tortured, there’s no reason for it!”

In the attic I listened like a child spying on her parents’ quarrel. There was more, some in low voices, so that I couldn’t hear, and she said, “You can’t stop me!”

I heard her making preparations to leave, and watched through chinks in the shutters as she walked out the door. My heart leapt when
I saw that Phoebe was going with her. I watched them take a shortcut across an empty field.

I went down to the second-floor landing. Jeptha was standing by a window, watching them go. I stood with my back to the wall, waiting until he turned toward me. I beckoned to him; I took his hand and led him to the bedroom and the spring bed and the feather mattress where each night he slept lawfully beside his wife.

“I can’t feel like this anymore. I need to feel something different,” I told him. He looked down at me and over at the bed, as if to say that it was the marriage bed and we would be doing it under her nose and nonsense like that, and I grabbed him by the collar, my two fists under his neck, and whispered, “Right here right now. I don’t care about her at all.” I ran my fingers down his cheek with one hand, and, with as much confidence of possession as if I were in my own house reaching for a comb in a dresser drawer, I unbuttoned his fly. He raised my skirt and my petticoats, and put his palms under my bare thighs, and lifted me onto the edge of the bed. “Hurry,” I said, reaching between my legs to guide him. With that my work was over. It was all up to him now. I felt sleepy and helpless. My movements were feeble. Taking me beneath my shoulders, he dragged me roughly farther up the bed. He seemed to realize that tenderness didn’t fit the occasion. I wanted to feel his weight on me. He stretched me out flat and pinned my arms to my sides.

When we were done, we lay content for a long time; at last I asked, “When is she coming back?”

“An hour, maybe.”

“Precious hour,” I said, resting on his chest. After a while I said, “Is this the first time she’s gone out? How often does she go out?”

“Now and then.” He thought for a moment, then said, “She has just one fixed appointment, on Wednesdays, for a séance across town,” and, guessing my thoughts, he added, “Phoebe goes with her. One o’clock. Back by four.”

“It isn’t easy for me in that attic, Jeptha.”

“It isn’t easy for me down here,” he said.

So after that our time was Wednesdays between one and four. We had our fun, and we lay and talked—we talked about Charley and Agnes and
Lewis. We talked pretty freely, but still there were things I kept from him, and I was sure he knew that.

ONE DAY, WHEN JEPTHA WAS OUT
and I was reading by candlelight, I heard footsteps on the stairs, and a moment later Agnes and Phoebe stood in the doorway. “We were wondering if you would like to join us in a spiritualist experiment,” said Phoebe.

The three of us crept backward down the stairs. We came to the kitchen, where a small round table had been put in place of the larger rectangular table where we had our meals. When I had last seen this table, it had been covered with oilcloth. Now it was bare. Around its perimeter, inlaid into the oak, were pieces of a darker wood shaped into the numbers “o” through “9,” the letters “A” through “Z,” and the words “Yes” and “No.” In the center of the table was a heart-shaped board equipped with little casters so that it could move around the table when our hands were on it.

“This is a talking board,” said Agnes. “Before we begin, there is something I want to say to you, Arabella.” She turned her melting eyes toward me, and my stomach clenched with my old hatred at my first, deadliest enemy, who had never offered me a token of kindness that was not the envelope of a secret poison. “Phoebe knows what it is. I have confessed to Phoebe. I have told Phoebe about our childhood in Livy.”

“Have you,” I said, smiling, with inappropriate lightness.

“I
have
,” she said. Her emphasis admitted that I had a reason to be skeptical.

“I am not sure I want to discuss this,” I said. “I would love to hear from Charley, or to have word of my brother Frank, my father, my mother, but I’m afraid that if we talk over old times we will quarrel. I doubt they will put me in a receptive frame of mind.”

“That is why we must clear the air. While we are still in the body. I think we ought to try. Arabella: do you remember the day some of us thought the world was going to end, and we sat around the fire, and my mother wanted us to confess and apologize to each other, and I used my turn to accuse you rather than to confess, and you said, ‘Agnes, can this be, that you really think that Jesus is about to come and take away the saved and leave the rest to burn, really believe it, and yet you are using the
occasion to add to the calumnies you heap upon me’? Do you remember that?”

“I remember thinking that; I don’t remember saying it.”

“You did say it.” She wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. “You said it and you were right; I did believe it! I really did believe that the world was coming to an end and almost everybody in it would be tortured forever, and I could not stop myself from damning myself, as I thought, by slandering you, when I had already slandered you so criminally, when I had already done everything I could to ruin you!”

Her voice shaking, she kept looking at me and then looking away, looking around as if to seek help. Phoebe, touching her arm, said, “Agnes, perhaps not all at once. More when you are feeling stronger.”

“Phoebe, this will
help
me; let me go on. Arabella, let me do it now, what we were supposed to do on that day in 1844, let me really do it. I don’t know if we can ever be friends. It is too much to hope. The debt lies heavy on me. I can never do you a good turn that would equal it. I could give you Jeptha, but what is that when I no longer want him myself! It seems almost a fresh insult for me to ask your forgiveness—I have no right to your forgiveness when I have done so much to turn your life away from the path it should have taken, and I have only myself to blame. I was such a proud girl, Arabella. I told myself that I hated you because you were wicked, but it was really because you were the first girl I had ever encountered who possessed a force that was stronger than mine; I feared that if I let you be my friend you would rule me, and I could never brook being ruled by anyone.”

“You were religious. Weren’t you ruled by God?”

“I chose a ruler who lived far away, as I thought, so that I would not have to submit to anyone here. And I kept God far away: I never felt anything like grace.”

There was more; she admitted what she had always denied, never asking my forgiveness outright, but making her need of it plain.

At last I said, “Agnes, you must give me time. I perceive that you have changed and that you are sincere, but I think it will take a long time for my feelings about you to change. You’ve known the new Agnes for years; I’ve only known her a few weeks.”

She bowed her head. “It is more than I hoped for.” When she looked
up, she put her hands on the talking board. “We can begin. If you feel up to it.”

“Yes. All right.”

With the help of her little machine, we had our séance. There was gibberish, which Agnes said might be an ancient language or a language from some other planet. Then the spirit of Philippe Toissante announced itself, saying that he was happy in the Summer-Land, and Jeptha should not trouble himself about his death. (He often visited, said Agnes, but Jeptha would not believe. Jeptha would not be comforted.)

Charley did not speak to us.

We put the oilcloth back on the round table and replaced it with the long table and ate a meal—whether in the company of incorporeal spirits, I cannot say. A few hours later, Jeptha came home. He had been to the post office, and the catch included an envelope with no return address, but it was in Lewis’s handwriting. Inside was a letter sheet, one of a series produced in those days whose illustrated side glorified the actions of the Committee of Vigilance. The picture was of a supposed “Mass Meeting Endorsing the Acts of the Vigilance Committee.”

On the reverse, in Lewis’s handwriting, was this:

Michelle, while pinned by a man who kept his hand on her mouth, had heard a voice saying, “Let her yell, Andy.” That must have been Andrew Gray.

I was happy he was dead, but I couldn’t be happy that it was Lewis
who had killed him. I hoped fervently that he had the sense to lie low now. If he had been careful and gotten Gray when he was alone, and not left a piece of rope in his mouth, there was a chance that the other men did not yet know there was an assassin on their trail. If another died, they would suspect they were in danger. A third would erase all doubt, and they would begin to take precautions.