Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (40 page)

Anne left the graveyard, but paused before stepping into Market Street. The street was busy now, the crowd from the State House dispersing, heading toward their homes or their favorite taverns; indeed, Anne spied a number of her patrons heading toward Vine Street. She spied Grissom heading toward his shop.
I had naught to do with Grissom’s shop. That was his own suggestion.
But why? Because he admired her courage, even back then? Or had he foreseen the other use Anne might be to him in time? Or was he simply largehearted, as Franklin himself had once called him?

Anne stepped into Market Street and paused, waiting for Grissom to catch her up. They greeted each other and walked together in the old silence, toward the water, toward the upholstery shop and the Penny Pot, Anne pummeled by her own thoughts of old worlds and new, Grissom no doubt wrapped in his. She was startled when at last he spoke to find his thought her own, that the trick did not belong exclusively to Franklin.

“I cannot decide, on such a day, if the world really is new, or if it only seems so.”

“ ’Tis officially at war; there’s all I know of it.”

“Yes.”

They walked in silence again until Anne started to feel its weight. She looked sideways at Grissom and saw him more clearly now in the brighter light by the river. The angles of his face had softened slightly with age, but the eyes had greatly livened since she’d last been so close to them.

“I see you’re back at your shop,” she said.

“I am. You were right. I was needed there.” He cleared the damp from his throat. “I see you do well with your tavern.”

“No thanks to your custom.”

“I dislike interruption while I eat.”

“I now have a quieter room in the rear.”

He looked at her, then away. “I further dislike going back and finding someone else in my chair; I’ve grown used to having my own.”

“I see. That makes it the more difficult.”

They’d come level with the shop, but Grissom made no move to turn in, continuing on with Anne toward the Penny Pot.

“Do you remain friends with Franklin?” he asked.

Friends
. The word stopped Anne, the surprise echo of it. “I’ve spoken to him but twice since his return.”

“He’s a busy man. Elected to Congress almost the day he got off the ship, seemingly on every committee, and now this declaration. I recall reading some of his advice to Parliament in the London papers. ‘If you send troops to America you will not find a war, but you will make one.’ Prescient, was he not?”

“I don’t suppose there’s such a word as
instigent.
”

Grissom slowed, peered at Anne, smiled. “You know your friend well.”

They’d reached the tavern. Anne looked out over the river, its surface summer smooth and blinding in the midday light. She thought of her first swim in it, of her second. She thought of the man who’d been with her on that first swim, the man she’d turned to at the end of the second. She thought of friends, sons, sons’ sons. She thought of how long—how very long—she’d attempted to cling to that other life that was never her own; she thought of the immense waste of it.

“Mr. Grissom,” she said, “I have an even more private room, above stairs, in which, since my husband’s death, I’m never interrupted. Would you care to come up and share supper with me? If you like, you may bring your own chair.”

Grissom smiled that indefinable half smile. He paused, as he always and forever would. But if Anne were to live another kind of life now—her own life—there should be more room in it for waiting, for defining.

Anne waited, and in time Grissom reached around her, pushed open the door for her, and followed her through.

55
Litchfield, Connecticut, 1777

WILLIAM FRANKLIN LAY IN
his dark cell, for once undisturbed by the lice and the flies and the rats, the letter that had just been slid through the hole in the door crushed in his hand. Elizabeth, his beloved Elizabeth, who had struggled alone through a year of hell in New Jersey until she was forced to escape to New York with only such possessions as she could gather as she ran, had died, brokenhearted and alone. William had been informed of her decline and had begged to be allowed to see her; he’d written to General Washington, who had appealed to Congress; the request had been denied. They’d seen a contrite William Franklin before; they’d moved him out of gaol into a private home, with the freedom to ride about the countryside, a freedom he’d used to marshal the local farmers to the Loyalist cause. Now, in punishment, he was back in a cell even more foul, his latest and most urgent request denied.

William lay shivering with the perpetual fever that gripped him now, thinking backward, again.
Had
he been wrong? If he’d yielded to his father and resigned in 1775, if he’d but acknowledged wrongdoing to the Burlington tribunal in 1776 and accepted a gentleman’s parole, if on his release he’d renounced the Crown instead of inciting the Loyalists, would Elizabeth be alive? If he’d married Maude and raised Temple as his own, would his son be with him now instead of in France with his grandfather, working for the rebel cause? Would Elizabeth have married an Englishman and be alive and well and a world away from this war that would forever be blamed on the wrong side?

Right. Wrong. The words tipped back and forth, up and down, side to side in William’s fevered mind, coming to rest where they’d first begun. The one constant in William’s life had been and would forever be his king. He’d not been wrong in his loyalty to the Crown; if he’d been wrong in other things, he’d not been wrong alone. He’d done what seemed best at the time, or he’d done the best he could at the time; perhaps now he could grant that his father, his stepmother, even that phantom woman who’d given him birth and pursued him down the years to land with him here could all say the same. What wrong turns they’d made belonged to all of them together; the lives they might have lived had escaped them all together. But what could any of it matter now? Elizabeth was dead in New York, Deborah Franklin was dead in Philadelphia, his father and his son were a continent and a cause away; any words that remained unsaid amongst all parties would remain unsaid through time. Oh, what he should have liked to say to Elizabeth! But what should he have liked to say to Temple, to his father? To explain himself, perhaps, to find just the right string of words at last, but as William had never succeeded at finding them before, what hope should he have of finding them now? The great irony of it all, of course, was that he
had
found the right words once, and had even managed to speak them aloud—to Deborah Franklin.

SHE’D LAIN SLEEPING WHEN
William first arrived. He took his turn of the room, speaking to all present—the minister, the upholsterer, the new press man, several others he didn’t know, leaving his sister, Sally, to last, Sally the best of them all. He took a seat a distance away and watched his stepmother sleep, watched her chest rise and fall and stutter and rise and fall again, but when Sally got up to greet a new visitor, William took his excuse and followed her from the room. Worse luck, he ended up standing trapped, listening to some no doubt well-meaning and yet meaningless babbling of a former servant; better off back inside the quiet torture of his stepmother’s sickroom. At his first chance William ushered the visitor into the room and followed behind her, only to discover his stepmother now awake and staring at him, struggling against her sheets, striving to speak to him. To
him.
At last. William had even taken a tentative step forward when he heard what his stepmother was saying—not his name but his label—the only thing he’d ever been to her all his life. William froze, hardening his shell against her as he’d done so many times, but suddenly the word softened, rounded, turned into what William should have guessed it would be all along.

“Beh-min! Beh-min!”

Benjamin.

William stared at the addled woman in the bed, struggling to reach that tall form that had just walked in the door, so sure it was her husband come at last, ignoring all the years of lessons that had been forced on her up to now. What kind of love was this that could hope so violently, right up to the end? Well, William’s. Here he’d stood at the door and believed his stepmother struggled to call his name, forgetting about that boy who’d stood in so many other doors, waiting for a similar word. William had hurt, but he’d never understood how Deborah might have hurt until Elizabeth had explained her mother-in-law’s heart to him. But now, standing in the sickroom door, listening to his stepmother’s struggle, William understood something else too: He and his stepmother were the same in another way, each wanting the attention of a man who too many times had too many other things to do; perhaps that further explained a good deal of the resentment that had built up between them. Perhaps too, each had found it easier to blame the other than to blame the man around whom their hearts and minds had perpetually orbited.

William looked again at the woman lying twisted and struggling in the bed. It seemed in keeping with so many of the ironies of his life that he should come to a final understanding of her when she lay so close to death and so uncomprehending, when it was too late to make amends or to ease her mind. Or was it?

“Beh-min,” Deborah cried again.

William stepped up to the bed, sat down, and took Deborah Franklin’s hand between his. He dropped his voice to that hearty register he’d listened for in his childhood bed for fifteen years. “Hush, Debby,” he said. “I’m here.”

Afterword

THE IDENTITY OF WILLIAM
Franklin’s birth mother remains unknown. In creating the character of Anne I sifted through the rumors flying around Philadelphia (and parts beyond) at the time, discarding what seemed highly improbable or obviously politically motivated, combining what seemed most probable with the few known historical references—old and new—that survive. I studied and took into account what the record revealed of the characters of the individuals involved and have presented here what I consider to be a plausible version of the various scenarios offered through time, as pondered by William Franklin and others in these pages.

This is, of course, a work of fiction, but dates, events, and portions of the dialogue and most of the letters attributed here to the three Franklins are, in the main, historically accurate. For plot purposes, however, certain liberties have been taken, perhaps the most glaring the fact that Deborah Franklin’s mother did not predecease her daughter’s “marriage”; she and her other children and Benjamin Franklin’s nephews and apprentices all lived under the Franklin roof at one time or another. William Franklin did attend his stepmother through an earlier stroke, but at her final illness only managed to arrive in time to see her into the ground. Benjamin Franklin was, as stated here, still in England when William’s chastising letter announcing the death arrived two months later. Benjamin Franklin’s regretful remarks to Anne at the Penny Pot were, in fact, his remarks at the time.

The following additional historical facts round out the tale:

In 1776, at the age of seventy, Benjamin Franklin did indeed take his grandson Temple to France on a diplomatic mission to enlist the aid of the French in the American cause. Franklin was successful—and hugely popular—in France; numerous accounts exist of his scientific, political, social, and amorous escapades while there. In 1785, fearing the end of his life was growing near and disliking the idea of dying so far from home, Franklin returned to Philadelphia. A lifelong slaveholder, he spent a good part of his remaining years agitating for the abolition of slavery. He died in 1790, lauded by all for a list of scientific, philanthropic, social, and political achievements, any one of which would have placed him amongst the greats for all time. He chose for his and his wife’s tombstone the simple words:
Benjamin and Deborah Franklin 1790
—a curious notation, since Deborah had died sixteen years before.

After a prisoner exchange in 1778 finally set William Franklin loose in New York, he continued to annoy General Washington and the Continental Congress by serving as president of the Board of Associated Loyalists, organizing raids on American forces and even becoming involved in a revenge hanging of a rebel captain. In 1782, as the war drew to a close, he escaped to England, possibly to avoid being hanged himself. In France that same year, Benjamin Franklin signed the treaty to end the Revolutionary War, with Temple serving as secretary to the delegation.

In 1784 William Franklin wrote to his father:

Ever since the termination of the unhappy contest between Great Britain and America I have been anxious to write to you, and to endeavor to revive that affectionate intercourse and connection which until the commencement of the late troubles, had been the pride and happiness of my life . . .

This was a letter that might have had better results if he hadn’t then gone on to defend his conduct.

If I have been mistaken . . . it is an error of judgment that the maturest reflection I am capable of cannot rectify; and I verily believe were the same circumstances to occur again tomorrow, my conduct would be exactly similar to what it was.

Not surprisingly, the elder Franklin answered with his own defense:

I am glad to find you desire to revive the affectionate intercourse . . . It will be agreeable to me . . . [But] indeed nothing has ever hurt me so much as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause wherein my great fame, fortune and life were all at stake . . . few would have censured your remaining neuter, though there are natural duties which precede political ones.

In 1785, at William Franklin’s urging, Benjamin and Temple Franklin traveled from France to England to meet with William on their way home to America. The meeting did not go well. Old monetary debts were settled but not old grudges, and William was not invited to Benjamin’s farewell fete. The next morning Benjamin and Temple sailed for America, avoiding a final good-bye.