Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (13 page)

Anne had been in the Slade house three weeks, all told, when Grissom came to collect her. He looked her all over, no doubt searching for scars, laid a finger on the single pockmark on her temple. He’d borrowed a chaise from somewhere and made to help her into it as if she were heavy and awkward with child; she shook herself free and stepped up into the carriage without his helping hand, but her legs felt like someone else’s—indeed, a child’s.

Grissom pulled up to the front of the shop and beckoned to Anne to come with him. She thought at first he meant for her to return to work at once, but no—he beckoned again, toward his stairs.
That
work, then. But again no. A supper of cold chicken and applesauce had been left out, no doubt by Mrs. Hyde, and if Anne could have picked the single meal in all the world that might have suited her just then, that would have been most all of it; Grissom poured out a cup of honeyed tea and that was the whole.

When Anne had disposed of a third of the food, she paused to ask, “What news at Franklin’s?”

Grissom was more comfortable with silence than any man Anne had thus far ever known—he used it before he spoke and after he listened, he used it to make his point or to absorb another’s, he used it to fill the space he didn’t know otherwise how to fill. In Anne’s new weakness she was longer in comprehending the source of the latest silence, longer still in gathering her nerve to ask, “What’s happened to the boy?”

Grissom set his spoon down. “ ’Tis Franky.”

“Franky!” A terrible relief swept over Anne, terrible in its single-mindedness, but it was also tinged with anger at Grissom’s thickness, that he wouldn’t know she would think first of William. “What of Franky?” she asked, but even in her own ears it sounded offhand, cold.

Grissom seemed not to notice; he seemed concerned enough for two. “The child wasn’t fully recovered from the dysentery when he contracted the smallpox in the natural way,” he said. “Two days and he was gone.”

“Gone! You can’t mean to say—?”

“Dead.”

Anne sagged back into the seat. Franky. A child only—she counted back from William’s six—four years old.

“You may imagine his parents’ state.”

Yes, thought Anne, and indeed, she could feel a sympathetic ache in her own heart now—a child removed, a hole left, the heart closing in around it, scarred and grown cold to the outside world. She looked at Grissom, ready to meet his concern now, but he looked away; there was something more. Something about William.

Anne sat forward. “You said William took the inoculation.”

“He took it. He’s fine.” But Grissom looked away again.

Anne reached across and gripped his wrist. “You must tell me,” Anne said. “You promised me. Any concern, you said.
Any concern
.”

“’Tis nothing. ’Twas painful to see, is all. I’d called around to express my sympathy and arrived at an awkward moment. Mrs. Franklin had been resting, but she got up and came into the parlor where we sat amusing William. Things were said.”

“What things?”

No doubt Grissom would have gladly retreated into his silence, but he’d already gone either too far or too near. He shifted himself in his chair, he looked down and began to turn his spoon end over end, he lifted his eyes and stumbled on. “It seems she was feeling some resentment against William, that he should live while Franky died. She pointed at William and cried out something about God’s mistake, his taking the angel child and leaving the devil child behind. Indeed, it was as if her grief had unbalanced her mind.” But now begun, Grissom couldn’t seem to leave off. “Half mad she looked.
And
sounded. And poor Franklin! Good God. He caught her up before she reached the child and carried her off to her room, set the servant to keep by her; he plans to take on another girl to take care of William until his wife recovers.”

The final words seemed to bring Grissom to. He rose. “Come, Anne, I’ve arranged for you to stay here till
you
recover; I’ve brought a few things around. You’re to keep out of the shop and rest here another day or two.”

Anne followed Grissom to his room, allowed him to remove her shoes and bodice and skirt, to tuck her into his down and quilts like a sick child. After a time Grissom came in and curled around her like a split cocoon, smoothing her hair in a way that was no doubt intended to ease her into sleep, but Anne’s head still chased after his words.
Devil child. Angel child.
She lay awake imagining William’s face, frightened and pale. She heard Grissom’s other words—
He caught her up before she reached the child.
What had Deborah Franklin planned to do to William when she’d reached him? Anne pictured the woman’s thick hands twisting around William’s throat, William’s face reddening, swelling, blackening . . . She woke sweating in the November cold, with dawn just outlining the window. At first she didn’t understand where she was; she looked around and saw her trunk jammed into the corner, her winter cloak and best gown hung on pegs on the wall. She looked again, frantic, and spied her pot of money on the chest of drawers, alongside her brush and hair combs and mirror, even her father’s books of plays she’d brought with her from home.

Grissom hadn’t brought a few things around, he’d brought it all.

Grissom opened his eyes, saw her, and smiled.

Anne said, “How long were you thinking of keeping me here?”

The smile faded, but only from Grissom’s mouth. “ ’Tis a thing worth thinking on, is it not, staying on with me here? I’m able to keep you better than you’re able to keep yourself, and you needn’t—” He paused. “You needn’t work at your other job anymore.”

“You mean I need only work at it with you.”

The smile faded from Grissom’s eyes as well. As it did, Anne saw what she’d almost missed, that he’d allowed her a brief minute of reading him clear through, and she could see that she’d wounded him. But where lay the fault for that? Not with Anne. Grissom would see what he liked to see instead of what was; best he understand what was and wasn’t now. She might have said so—in truth, she felt some small unease at the idea that she might be at fault henceforth if she
didn’t
say so—but Grissom had already pushed back the quilt, pulled on his clothes, and left the room.

ANNE DID TRY TO
stay in Grissom’s big, soft bed for a time, reminding herself as she sank into it of the beaten-up straw mat she’d slept on at Eades Alley, but soon the bed began to feel like her enemy, fighting all her weakened efforts to raise herself, and she thrashed her way out of it, suddenly desperate to get out of the house too. She dressed herself, glad it was November and she could inconspicuously add the winter cloak with the hood that she could draw close around her face; she picked her way down the stairs and into the street. Her legs felt weak but they wanted to move, and she let them tug her where they would; soon enough she found herself outside Franklin’s print shop, staring up at the rooms above the shop as of old, but it was no longer enough. She needed to see William, to see for herself that Grissom told the truth—that he’d come to no harm.

18
Philadelphia, 1736

DEBORAH FRANKLIN LIVED IN
a discolored rainbow, gray in the middle and banded in black at both ends. The doctor had come and given her some kind of anodyne that greatly clouded her mind; she knew her darling son was dead and she knew she’d done something wrong because of it, something that had put Min in that chair by her bed and caused her husband to look at her nose instead of her eyes, but what it was she didn’t know. How odd it was to forget a single thing out of all of time, especially as she could think back and remember every minute of the past five years of utter happiness. There was the shop and all she’d done to it and for it, her husband’s great joy in it and in her, the sheer contentment of working so close to Benjamin’s inner and outer self. To discover that she didn’t need to know what was in a book in order to sell it had changed her and him; they could share in the books just the same. And the
almanac
—
Poor Richard’s Almanac
it was, but she called it
Poor Dick
and made him laugh. He wrote about Poor Dick’s wife in the almanac, and they laughed over that together, knowing it wasn’t her but knowing she was part of it just the same. He always showed her his latest collection of old saws and a time or two allowed her to pick out her favorites.
Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.
Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits.

Poor Dick
made them more money than all the rest of it together—the press and the shop—and even so frugal a man as Benjamin couldn’t help but revel in the new knowledge that they would never starve. Deborah bought their first china porringer and silver spoon, declaring that Benjamin deserved to eat as other successful men ate, and it seemed to please him that she should think to spoil him so. Deborah wouldn’t say that she was spoiled in return, but she dressed well, ate well, slept well, and then the best of all gifts arrived in the form of that sweet little boy, so good natured she might have known God would want him back.

William was around the age of two when the new child came along, and he hadn’t given over his half of his parents’ attention gladly. Deborah felt true sympathy for the older child; after all, she’d felt the outcast when Benjamin had first brought William home and knew the pain of watching a smile full of love directed at another. When William had first arrived, he’d put such a spell over Benjamin that Deborah couldn’t help suspecting it was the memory of the mother that held him, not the child, but once they had Franky, Deborah could better understand the power an infant could hold over a parent in its own right. It was true that Benjamin continued to indulge his first son beyond what seemed suitable to Deborah, but her heart was now too full of love and pride to hold on to old resentments.

Or perhaps the core of Deborah’s new sympathy for William lay in the fact that as Franky grew and shined, it became clear that it was
her
child who would carry away all prizes. William might be handsomer, cleverer, but Franky was by far the sweeter, the kinder. Yes, William was, in the main, a fine-looking boy, but his face had begun to pinch in on itself, his eyes to follow her about, haunting her the whole day long; he never asked for a thing outright but began to sneak when her back was turned. No one comparing the two children could doubt how superior Franky was to William. Was Deborah’s love equally divided between the pair? Perhaps not. But she’d like to find another woman who would have taken in her husband’s bastard and treated him with as much care as she’d treated William.

A rough patch surfaced the next year; Benjamin had begun to mingle in another kind of crowd than the tradesmen’s set to which he’d previously belonged. They were a better-dressed, better-spoken sort; a number belonged to the influential Quaker sect that even Deborah knew controlled most of Philadelphia politics. When Benjamin met these men in public, Deborah was untroubled; when they began to entertain him in their homes and exclude her from the invitation, her uneasiness began to grow. Benjamin excused it at first by describing these events as political and not social, for men only, “pipe-and-Madeira affairs,” but once Benjamin let slip about a Mr. and Mrs. Logan arriving late, Deborah learned: Deborah Franklin—no doubt Deborah Rogers yet to those in this new circle—would not do. Deborah’s pride kept her from mentioning the subject again, but she could tell that Benjamin felt its effect on her; after his slip about the Logans he stayed at home three nights in a row. On the fourth, however, he returned to whichever party sent a note around requesting that he call. What did Benjamin want with all these people? It became clear when he was appointed clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly of Delegates. He came home overflowing with the news, the smell of spirit and smoke strong.

“You do see what it means for us, do you not?” he asked. “I’ll have a clear view on all the affairs of the colony. And no little side matter, I’ll be sure to get all the government printing now. ’Tis worth a few lonely nights, is it not?”

It was not, but ever since the episode regarding Mrs. Logan, Deborah Franklin had been feeling much more like the old Deborah Rogers and decided not to say so. Besides, she had Franky.

And then Franky died.

Benjamin had said to her but the day before, “He looks better today.”

That night he said, “I believe his eyes less sunken this evening.”

In the early hours, waking to find Deborah still sitting beside Franky’s bed, he touched the child’s forehead and said, “He feels cooler now.”

Deborah tried to believe Benjamin even as she swabbed the boy’s dry lips and saw nothing but darkening hollows around her son’s eyes, as he stopped taking even the small sips she tried to drip into him, as he stopped opening his eyes, as he stopped breathing. She grabbed up Franky, shook him, clutched him, screamed sounds, not words, until Benjamin had to take him from her and hand him to Min. There came the blank space where Deborah remembered nothing until she turned and spied William standing in the corner, staring at her with that haunted look. Deborah cried out some words. What words? She couldn’t remember them but she could remember the frightened look in the child’s eyes. Why should he be so afraid? He lived! He breathed! She rushed at him, or she tried to rush at him, but Benjamin caught her up—Benjamin, always so confident, always so sure he was
right—
Benjamin who’d been so wrong this time. She flailed at his thick shoulders and powerful arms but couldn’t weaken them; he pulled her tight against his chest with one arm, brought the other under her knees, and carried her out of the room.

DEBORAH SLEPT AND WOKE
into that fuzzy gray rainbow again, but the hard black edge of it remained clear. God did this to them. Deborah knew this. Everyone knew this. And everyone knew that God did it because of her husband’s sin, because of that bastard child. How dare Benjamin look away from
her
when
he
was the one who’d caused Franky to die! God would take the best for Himself. God would take Franky, the best of them all, and leave the child of sin behind.