Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (6 page)

“Will she live?”

A strange male voice answered. “She’ll live, but she’ll not have another. Just as well, I’d say.”

The doctor. The doctor whose bill would be twice the midwife’s and half as likely to be paid, which he must know if he’d ever been to Eades Alley. Anne caught a flash of an unfamiliar object shaped like a curved knife, and a new pain beyond all the others went up from Anne’s womb to her brain like a bolt of lightning, blocking all memory of what came beyond, till she woke to the taste of broth on her tongue and a damp cloth on her head. She’d forgotten where she was and why she was until she heard a terrible noise and realized it was an infant crying—William crying—crying as if he’d been tossed in the fire to cook. Anne struggled to sit upright, but her mother pushed her down, rude and hard.

“Bring him.” Anne said the two words with all the poor strength she owned, but she said them in her Penny Pot voice, and her mother brought him and fixed him in Anne’s arms, propping him with pillows because she was too weak to hold him on her own. William took her breast and stopped crying, but not for long.

WILLIAM DIDN’T THRIVE. HOW
could he? Anne was too weak and hungry and so was her milk. He cried all but the single hour after his watery meal, and the weight he’d worn into the world flaked off him as if he were a too-dry pastry crust. Anne’s mother gave Anne what she could off her own plate, and from time to time Mary—thin, pale Mary—stuffed her sister’s pocket with a bit of potato or a few nuts. Her father, too ill now to care about anything beyond his own comforts, fussed each time the babe wakened him, so as soon as Anne was strong enough, on those days when the December air was soft enough, she wrapped the infant in her shawl and took him out to walk, the
slap-slap-slap
of her feet against the ground being one of the few things that could soothe him to sleep.

How many days before she saw him? Not many. She spied him about to enter the clock maker’s, dressed in the simple coat and breeches of old but with something of his new success in the smile he dispensed to all he passed, as if he could afford any generosity. She watched him step into the shop, and she lingered on the street opposite for no reason that made any sense, staring at his back through the window. She’d heard of his so-called marriage and had felt little at the news, so was surprised at the resentment that clawed at her. Anne had never for a minute dreamed of a place for herself alongside a man such as Franklin, but now, because of William, she
would
dream, at least enough to get William what he might need in life. But the rumors that followed Franklin made out that he’d taken on this wife in charity; if so, he’d not be on the lookout for a second case.

Franklin stepped out of the shop and had turned halfway to look behind him when he saw her. At first his eyes registered nothing particular other than the general recognition of pauper and child in the street, but it appeared he was not one to dismiss a pauper as quickly as another might. He let his eyes rest on her that second longer and that was enough for him to call her up out of his past, to register the child in her arms. Apparently he was not one to dismiss his past either. He stepped into the street and began to cross to her; he drew close enough so that if he wished to he might see what Anne had seen in that tiny face, and Anne believed he did see. His words started and stopped. “By heaven! This is . . . I daresay—”

“Mr. Franklin!”

He turned. Anne hadn’t noticed the woman going into the shop, but she noticed her now, calling to Franklin as she came down its steps; Anne took note of the well-fed, square face and the firm jaw. She was not pretty, but more surprising, when she called again, even Anne, who’d been educated only as far as the Bible, could hear the fault in her grammar. “We’d best get on. The deliveries is arriving soon.”

Franklin turned back to Anne. He said, “Where do you live?”

“At my father’s house yet.” But of course he did not know where her father lived. “Eades Alley.”

“Eades Alley!”

The woman called again. Franklin turned again. He crossed the street to rejoin her, took her arm, and started off up Market Street. William began to cry and Franklin made to look over his shoulder but checked himself; Anne made no move to quiet the child—indeed, she found she could make no move at all. She stood fixed in place and watched the Franklins continue up Market Street, their heads bent toward each other as he talked and she listened. What did he talk of? Anne wondered. Ants? Singing glasses? The effect of a fire’s heat on a face? She couldn’t look at that woman and picture it.

WHEN THE KNOCK SOUNDED,
Anne and her mother and the two next-oldest girls were in the kitchen, the three besides Anne washing clothes, with some resentful looks at Anne while she coped with William’s fussing. Mary went to the door and opened it on Franklin. He seemed to have lost his old sociability; he said, abrupt almost to rudeness, “I should like a word with Anne.”

Anne’s mother dropped her work without question and herded the girls from the room. Once they were gone Franklin looked the kitchen over with the care of a rents agent; when he’d finished he returned to the babe, reached out and touched William’s dandelion hair, felt his stemlike neck.

“Boy or girl?”

“Boy. William’s his name.”

“He’s in health?”

“Fair.”

Franklin drew his eyes from the babe to her, and proceeded to study her much as he had the kitchen. “And you?”

“The same.”

He said, “Annie,” but nothing more, fixing his attention again on the babe. After a time he held out a small cloth pouch, tied tight with a strip of leather. Anne put out her hand and felt a comforting weight drop into her palm. She closed her hand around it and pressed it to the babe’s back.

“Would you like to examine the contents? I might hold the child while you do.”

Anne shook her head.

“I should like to hold him.”

Anne looked down at William; the tugs and jerks were growing stronger and he’d begun that telltale
unh, unh, unh
that would soon turn to shrieks. She held him out and Franklin took him with confidence, tucking the infant’s head into his elbow, jiggling him gently up and down; either the motion or the new combination of smells widened the child’s eyes and quieted his mouth. After a time Franklin removed his gaze from William and looked again at Anne. “If you examine the pouch—”

Anne set the pouch on the table, unopened. She reached for her child. Franklin handed William over and at once he began to cry. A look Anne had never before seen crossed Franklin’s face: uncertainty, perhaps even shame.

He left.

8

WHEN ANNE SHOWED THE
money pouch to her mother she grabbed it, peered inside, and flushed to her cap. She handed it back to Anne and took William from her arms. “We need cornmeal, oats, eggs. Salt pork. Salt beef or venison. Dare we have a fowl? Yes, yes! Pick us a good one! And sugar. Mustard and onions for your father’s poultice. Chamomile.” She seemed to see William in her arms for the first time. She hefted him as if weighing him. “And flour. This infant needs pap.” She pointed to the pouch in Anne’s hand. “There will be more?”

Anne shook her head.

“Then be sure to get your best price,” Anne’s mother said, but she removed nothing from the list.

THE DAY WAS WET
and cold and showed the alley to its worst advantage, the sparse streams of smoke from its chimneys promising little warmth to those huddled inside. For Anne, outside, the rain slanted into her face no matter her best efforts to prevent it; the other walkers she passed had pulled hats down and collars up, and even the larger houses on Market Street, built tall and thin and close, seemed to have been pushed together as if for warmth. The stall keepers too were as cold as Anne, and impatient to sell out and close up; Anne made out well with little bickering. She completed her purchases, carrying what she could, giving directions for delivery of what she couldn’t, and headed home. As she passed the Penny Pot she thought of how deeply the one day’s shopping had dug into the money pouch even at storm-day prices; it was time to wean William and go back to work. But not at the Penny Pot.

ANNE BEGAN TO FEED
William the pap, soaking the insides of a fresh loaf of bread in water until it had softened into a gumlike paste; almost at once the incessant crying stopped. She continued to nurse as she could but perhaps she got the more out of it—William had a way of fixing his eyes on her when he was at breast that spoke at certain times of devotion and at other times of reproach, and Anne found herself unable to look away from him, staring into the small, puckered face, trying to decide which it was. But she also found herself coming to a new understanding about love. Even amid the bustle of the house she felt as if William and she were walled off inside their own private shell; her mother could not—any other woman could not—know what it was like inside that shell. This boy, this small thing come out of nothing, despite all the trouble he had and would cause her, had wound himself around her heart like a snail around a clam, pried it open and devoured it. He’d made her glad of him, and yet when she recalled the doctor’s words at his birth—
she’ll not have another—
she was glad of that.

Other things in the house changed along with William. Anne could visit her father with a happier infant and soon discovered how the one’s smile could draw the other’s, how the father she had long cherished was still alive inside his illness. Something in the child brought out Anne’s father’s voice as well, and between the coughing he spoke words to Anne that she hadn’t known she’d missed so much till she heard them new. “My Annie,” he called her, as he used to do, and he began to call William “my boy.” Despite the cheeks bright with fever and the shirt crusted with bloody spittle, Anne could see some new life in her father, and she started to hold out some hope of him after all.

So high had Anne come in those hopes that one morning when she carried William in to see her father and found him sleeping with all the flush of fever gone, she laid the back of her hand against his cheek expecting to feel the cool of health. Instead she felt the cold of death. She must have been gripping William too hard, for he began to whimper, but Anne made no move to quiet him—his noise could disturb her father no longer. She stepped back and stared at the man who had occupied that bed almost the whole of her life, who had been too much there and not enough there for years on end, and could only think in surprise how empty the house now was.

THEY BORROWED A CART
from the butcher and carried Anne’s father the few blocks to the Christ Church burial ground, the minister saying words of poor comfort over his grave and laying him in amongst the stones. Anne’s father’s grave was to be marked by a thin wood slab, engraved stone being as far beyond their reach as even the possession of a cart, and Anne examined the elaborately engraved markers to her left and right with resentment. She wanted such a stone for her father, she wanted a cart for her father that wasn’t stained with blood, she wanted what only the most renowned Philadelphians had—a service of prayers right inside the elegant brick church itself. Anne wanted it known in death that her father had been more than the rotting alley that had symbolized the last years of his life.

Walking home to Eades Alley, trailing their scraps of funeral black and their funeral tears, the house felt so full of gloom and damp that Anne could barely make herself enter it. William seemed to taste Anne’s bitterness in her milk; he turned away from her breast and within two days of the burial had all but weaned himself. The pap was not enough, however, and he began to lose weight again; Anne was so fearful of some dread ill in him that she found herself leaping up to watch his sleep so often she fell ill herself.

ANNE’S FATHER HAD BEEN
dead a week when a man came to Eades Alley. Anne hadn’t seen him at the Penny Pot; if she had she’d have remembered the distinct angles of his face and the shadows those angles cast on it. He looked no more than thirty, well but plainly dressed, with a look of newness to him, as if he’d recently come to the degree of prosperity he exhibited. The kitchen was crowded with girls and work much as before, but as soon as the man said, “I come with a message for the girl named Anne,” they fled like so many geese, so it was no great trick for him to look at the babe and look at her and say, “You’re Anne.”

Anne made no answer. The stranger looked over the kitchen much as Franklin had done; when he said, “You may guess who sent me,” she nodded.

He held out another weighted pouch. Anne saw it, but only at a glance—she’d discovered some difficulty in looking away from the man behind it. He was as finely honed as a blade, as opposite Franklin’s anvil-like build as nature could have made him. He gave the pouch a little shake, as if impatient to be gone, and Anne reached out to take it, but once she’d done so he made no attempt to leave, or, in fact, to take his eyes from
her
. So, he was expected to report, then.

“I’m instructed to ask if there are other concerns,” he said.

Anne could feel a fine rage building. She could see Franklin sitting at his desk, not looking up from the ledger where he’d made careful note of the sum he was handing across to this man, speaking over his shoulder as if in afterthought,
Find out if there are other concerns.

“Do you mean do I have other concerns besides a hungry child in a leaky house in a stinking alley?”

The stranger’s hair was that red-gold that explained the ready flush. “I think if you look in the pouch you’ll find a not-insubstantial sum.”

Anne flung her arm wide. “Enough to sweep all this away, then?”

The man said nothing, but his eyes stayed fixed on her, changing with the flushing of his face from more brown to more green; Anne would have preferred them to stay one thing or the other. Or perhaps she only preferred them to be fixed away from her.