Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (16 page)

Harris took two cakes. Deborah slid behind the counter to make his change and wrap his parcel. Her hands shook, but if either man noticed he hid it well. When Harris had gone Benjamin took Deborah’s face between his hands and leaned down as if to touch his lips to hers, but his smile sat too comfortably on his mouth. Two cakes of soap did not bring Franky back; it did not suddenly return the world to the way it was. Deborah averted her face.

22

ANNE’S SYMPATHY FOR DEBORAH
Franklin surprised her. It began, she knew, when she’d looked at Deborah Franklin’s face and saw her own. Such pain! She would wish it on no one, even though she could likewise be glad that it kept Deborah in her chamber and away from William. The boy was again Anne’s. And what a boy he was! So handsome she couldn’t take her eyes from him, so bright she must struggle to keep up, and with so much love there for the taking that within a day Anne felt herself made rich from it. Talents she couldn’t know she possessed emerged; she could soothe William’s bewildered tears, or encourage him with his numbers and books, or simply make the poor boy laugh. On his own he began to climb into her lap or slip his hand into hers; he looked to her face for hints as to how best to respond to his mother’s—was his mother angry or just sad? Anne always, always explained Deborah’s behavior as nothing to do with William, and a thing that wouldn’t last, all the while secretly believing—hoping—it would; perhaps that was why Anne was able to look at Deborah Franklin’s neglect of her son with so little resentment.

As to the father, Anne saw at once that William looked to him for one thing: praise. The boy did in fact receive a good deal of praise, but never evenly distributed—the irregular pattern of Franklin’s attention was probably the thing that put William in such a constant state of uncertainty and need, and there Anne could only calm but never cure. To give him his due, Franklin was often distracted by business or company and, now, his grief, but unlike the situation with Deborah, Anne could find in her little sympathy for him; in his hands he held all the power that now mattered in her world. It was true that whenever Anne was able to spy on him unaware it was as if he’d run out of strength to hold up his features—they sagged against his bones, all the old delight long gone from him—but as soon as he saw Anne everything sharpened. Franklin was not comfortable with Anne in the room or, indeed, in the house, and she knew he would work to find a way to be shed of her as soon as he could. Sympathy and fear seldom walked hand in hand.

That the Franklins were not comfortable with each other either grew more and more clear to Anne. One evening Anne and Deborah were standing together at the kitchen table attempting to repair a mop when Franklin entered. He came up behind his wife and laid his hands on her shoulders; Deborah bent her knees, ducked from under him, and crossed to the other side of the table. Anne looked at Franklin and saw something flick across his face like the touch of a whip end, but still she could feel little sympathy for him. She did watch in some awe as he adjusted himself to this new wife; he was no less attentive, but his attention grew less personal; he withheld something of himself from her. For Anne’s part, all her attention went to William, her heart spilling out all the years of hoarded love she’d kept for him.

AFTER A TIME INSIDE
the new, blighted world in which the Franklins lived, some shadows of the old appeared. Franklin had returned to his press as Deborah returned to the shop, and this seemed to give the needed signal to Franklin’s friends and acquaintances—callers began to come, not to mourn with the Franklins, but to talk to Franklin himself. Or to listen to him talk. Or to listen to him
think
, as it began to seem to Anne, and she listened too, as she’d always listened to Franklin. One night as Anne walked past the parlor door she heard Franklin explaining the workings of northeast storms; on another night she heard him exclaim, “Here now, sir, up on your chair! There, do you feel the greater heat nearer the ceiling? Now, onto the floor. You feel the air is cooler. Do you see how it is that hot air rises and cold air sinks? You see which air goes up the chimney? You see the waste?”

Anne couldn’t hold herself from peering around the doorjamb, where she saw a distinguished gentleman lying prone on the floor, coat twisted up under him and wig askew.

Later that night, after the visitors had left but before the fire had died away, Anne crept into the empty parlor and stood on the chair. Hotter. She lay on the floor. Cooler. She lay there accustoming herself to this new idea until a voice said, “I see you continue as you began.”

Anne leaped up. Franklin stood in the doorway, the fire lighting his face, causing an illusion of the old delight flickering across it. “You always appreciated my little experiments, did you not? I seem to recall you particularly liked my singing glasses. I have an idea to create an instrument using those glasses, fitting them one inside the other, on a rotating spindle, with a tray underneath to hold the water. But horizontal or vertical? I can never decide.”

“Horizontal,” Anne said, already picturing it, a thing like a harpsichord, with the broad, skillful fingers moving gracefully back and forth over the glasses.

“Yes, I believe you’re right. Like a harpsichord.” He wandered off.

AT FIRST ANNE SHARED
a room and a bed with Min in the uppermost half story of the Franklin home, not unlike her old space above the upholstery shop. Anne didn’t mind sharing the bed, as she was used to it at home, and besides, more nights than not Min was summoned to attend Deborah Franklin by a bell on a wire Franklin had rigged to run up through the floor. But after a time Min stopped coming to the above-stairs room to sleep at all—she shared Deborah Franklin’s bed, while Franklin retreated to a small bed in his study.

One night, after Anne had slept alone a number of weeks, she woke to the sound of a heavier than usual tread across the floor. She opened her eyes to discover Franklin, shirt to his knees, shawl wrapped over his shoulders, candle in his hand, standing just inside the door. Anne scrambled upright, pulling her bed rug in tighter. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“My son has died,” Franklin said.

The nonsensical thinking that comes with the dark put one word in Anne’s mind.
William.
But before she could speak her fear, Franklin went on.

“My beautiful Franky has died, and my wife’s turned half mad because of it.”

Anne gathered herself. “Yes, sir, but she comes along. Perhaps you’d best attend to her now.”

“Attend to her! How? She prefers Min in her bed. She can’t bear to blame herself for any least little bit of it, so she fabricates a way to blame me for the whole. ‘We must get the boy his inoculation,’ I said, but she said, ‘No, he’s not well enough,’ and so it went, on and on.”

Franklin stepped farther into the room, and Anne could smell the wine on him.

“I’m very sorry for the situation, sir, but you do none of us any good if you’re found here. You must go below and see to your wife.”

“She blames me because of William. She thinks God punishes me for the old sin by taking the golden child to heaven and leaving the blackened one on earth. Good God, how she frightened me! I looked at her in her madness and actually believed her capable of terrible things. I must be half mad myself. Why, of course I’m half mad; what more proof do I need than the sight of you sitting up here under my eaves? What madness could have overcome me to allow such a thing to happen?”

All the heat left Anne’s extremities. This was why Franklin had come up to her chamber—to tell her she must go. She clawed through every argument against and began to spew them out. “ ’Tis no madness, sir; you’re right to fear what your wife might do. She’s not balanced in her mind. I’m here to keep our son healthy and unharmed. While I do it I’m bringing some comfort to your wife. If she were to discover me suddenly gone . . . If she were to learn by some mischance of my relation—”

But Franklin cut her off. “No, my dear. That trick won’t work anymore. You might not flinch at causing my wife and me some trouble, but I’ve seen you with William now, and I know you would never do anything that might cause him shame.”

“Perhaps not. But think of the greater damage to all were Deborah to discover you in this chamber.”

“You needn’t fear that, I promise you. Anyone in such a laudanum daze doesn’t go about climbing stairs.”

“Sir, I’m heartily sorry for your poor dead boy—indeed, I could hardly be more brokenhearted were he my own, but you must—”

It was as if she’d jostled a tankard of ale. The tears began to course down Franklin’s face, winking gold in the candlelight before disappearing into the shadow beneath his jaw. “My poor dead boy,” he said. “My poor, poor boy.” The candle in his hand wobbled and tilted dangerously, casting shadows like disturbed ghosts against the walls. Anne leaped out of bed and took the candle from Franklin’s hand, setting it on the floor, attempting to steady him with a hand beneath his elbow; he felt as fragile as a piece of dry straw. She led him to the bed and sat him down.

“I beg you to forgive me,” he said. “But ’tis an odd thing, is it not? That you alone of all my acquaintance can best understand exactly what it is I suffer? The one boy dead, the other . . . the other—”

“The other is a fine boy. He’s committed no sin. Don’t allow your wife to make him carry ours. But he’s like any other boy, sir—in want of his father’s regular attention.” Anne stressed the word
regular
but the word Franklin heard was another.

“
Our
sin! You would call it ours? No, my dear, you were no whore, at least you weren’t till I got through with you. ’Tis my sin alone.” Franklin dashed a hand at his wet face and pulled himself free of her grip. “I
have
tried to make it right. You must grant me that. I’ve tried to make it right for all. And what is the result? The four of us here together. I thought to myself, I’ve mastered my old passions; I’m able to manage this, such an old tale needn’t be retold. And then you lay down on my parlor floor.”

He
is
mad, Anne thought. And perhaps ill. He attempted to stand and staggered. “I seem to have lost my knees,” he said. “Entirely fitting that I crawl about upon them, I know, but just the same, it makes for something of a difficulty when it comes to those stairs.” He barked out a laugh. “Perhaps I should give over my wine and take up Debby’s laudanum.”

Anne took his elbow again. “Here. Rest a minute.”

Franklin sat down on the bed again and leaned forward, head in hands.

“I seem to have lost all my strength just when everyone needs it most,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m to do for any of us now.”

He was trembling. Anne stood, looking down at the top of the soft, fair hair that had left so clear a mark on her son. The boy and the man were one the part of the other, and he’d never denied it, had, indeed, tried to right it, taking on considerable trouble to himself in the righting. Anne thought of husband and wife alone in their separate beds and wondered what on God’s earth she might possibly do to help them—how the pair would comfort each other with their touch, if they could only find their way there! How Franklin needed that touch! And right then all the pity for Franklin that Anne hadn’t managed to conjure up in the past began to run over her like warm oil. She sat down beside Franklin and peeled away the nearest hand that still covered his face; the fingers were as cold as an unlit stove. She took the hand between hers and rubbed it, then took up the other. He drew his hands out from hers and lifted them, cupping her face. “My Annie,” he said. “My sweet Annie. Can you know how I delighted in climbing those stairs with you at the Penny Pot? Can you know what utter joy and comfort it was?”

Comfort.
That he would use the word Anne had just pondered seemed significant to her—that they would come to the same place at the same moment; so large a word in one sense, but also so small a one, requiring so small a thing. Anne leaned forward and touched her lips to Franklin’s forehead as a mother might kiss a despairing child, or a whore might kiss an old and favored customer long after the whoring had stopped. And then she kissed him again, as the whore would.

Franklin pulled back, looked at her. “Here’s the truth of it, Annie. I am, by nature, a monogamous creature. I am not, by nature, a celibate one.” He smiled as bitter a smile as Anne had ever seen in him. “How fortunate that Man is possessed of reason; he may reason his way into everything he yearns to do.” He reached for her but she slid away, rose and shut the door, collected the candle and moved it beside the bed. She pushed him down onto the bed tick, loosened the drawstring on her shift. She was concerned about the drink in him, but he rose to meet her as of old, only this time it wouldn’t be as it was of old, this time she would be the one who said when and where and how.

FRANKLIN DIDN’T CLIMB THE
stairs to Anne’s room for another week. Anne knew something more of the man now, and could watch the old battle between his monogamous self and his non-celibate self rage; indeed, she happened to witness the exact moment when the monogamous self lost. One morning in the kitchen Deborah shrugged out from under his hand, as had become her way, and Franklin looked across the table at Anne and caught her eye as if to say,
You see, I’ve tried; now I give myself over to you.
Anne would admit to a kind of thrill shooting through her as she met and read that look—Benjamin Franklin
, hers.
But soon enough the fact of the thing bore down on her. Anne could never claim Franklin as Deborah had claimed him, but it didn’t matter; she only needed the piece of him that kept him climbing the stairs to her room. At first Anne had feared that was the piece that would get her cast out of the house, but now she saw that it was the very piece that would keep her here, near William. She was not the Anne of the Penny Pot days. She could now do all the things that she’d learned to do so well, old for her but new for Franklin, and she could read the same fresh delight in his body as easily as she used to read it in his eyes. The Franklin that Anne now eased above stairs was not about to send her away anytime soon.