Remember the Morning (29 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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“Where can I find someone to carry four million guilders of gold to Frankfurt?” I said.
Philip Hooft shrugged. “After that story in Vondel's paper, I'm sure you can command almost anyone. Vondel himself. Or me.”
“I can't imagine how I could persuade him—or you—to undertake such a large task,” I said.
In fact, I saw exactly what I was expected to do. “We could discuss it at Vondel's rooms over a good dinner,” Philip Hooft said. “Tesselschade is taking our son to visit his grandfather. She won't return until tomorrow.”
Forty thousand guilders. Eight thousand pounds. In return, I would let Messrs. Vondel and Hooft do what they pleased with me for a day and a night.
Was it so terrible?
the Evil Brother asked. I would have Philip Hooft hungrily awaiting my next visit to Amsterdam. Meanwhile he would be making strenuous efforts to improve my account on the Exchange.
Suddenly Clara was whispering in my head:
This will prove you love nothing but money.
Somehow I found that unacceptable. I wanted to believe I loved Malcolm—and our son. I wanted them to love me. But how would accepting Hooft's offer affect this love, which only existed in distant New York? They would never learn about my infidelity in Amsterdam. When I was in New York, I would continue to love them extravagantly. Money would enable me to prove it with gifts, power, influence.
It will prove it to the only person who matters: yourself.
Did the resistance hardening around Clara's words mean Catalyntie Van Vorst had a soul? A spiritual self that she valued more than money, perhaps even more than her heart's desire? It was not a Dutch or an English soul—any more than it was an American soul—though it partook of that last word. It was a woman's soul and in the name of that invisible, evanescent inner self, was I going to say no to Philip Hooft's tempting offer?
Not quite. I would show him that Americans, particularly those raised by the Seneca, had more than their share of guile. How often had I heard stories in the longhouse of warriors who were trapped by their enemies and outwitted them with clever words or stratagems?
I smiled boldly into Philip Hooft's protruding frog's eyes. “Dear Philip. I wouldn't dream of putting you or Mr. Vondel to such a journey. I'll take the ducats to Frankfurt myself. If I can survive in America's forests, surely I can manage in civilized Christian Europe.”
“I wouldn't dream of letting you do it. Unscrupulous men are always—”
“Perhaps your uncle, Captain Van Oorst, can accompany me.”
Stymied, he had to let me go in search of Captain Van Oorst. One of the servants at the Hooft house said he was staying at the inn, Ster Van Oosten. By now it was noon. The innkeeper told me the captain was still
in his room. I mounted to the second floor and pounded on the door. The captain opened it in his woolen underwear. Behind him a slouching dissolute-looking young man peered impudently at me.
“Let me in, goddamn you,” I said. I shoved my way into the room and began telling the captain how low I thought he was. “You transported me to Amsterdam like a piece of goods to be auctioned off to your nephew-in-law and his friends for a few thousand guilders. When I get back to New York, I'll tell my husband and he'll fillet you like a flounder and feed you to the sharks.”
“I don't know what you're talking about!” Van Oorst protested.
“The hell you don't,” I said. “Get on your clothes. You and I are going on a little trip to Frankfurt.”
“Who
is
this creature?” asked the young man. He talked and acted more like a woman, flouncing around the room, picking up his clothes.
“A passenger,” Captain Van Oorst said. Something in the way he said this made me wonder if I should return to America aboard his ship. I might join the first Catalyntie in the depths.
The muttering captain got himself dressed and accompanied me to the Hooft Bank on the Dam. There we found an agitated Philip Hooft on his way out the door. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I'm afraid the deal with the ducats is off. The price of gold has just gone down in Frankfurt. A messenger arrived with the news only a half hour ago. Are you sure you won't join me for dinner at Vondel's? There are many other opportunities we could explore.”
“I'm so sorry,” I said with the same exquisite courtesy. “But I must begin buying the goods I'll need for next season. I have a long list.”
“She's a woman of business, isn't she, Captain?” Philip Hooft said. “The Senecas couldn't change that Dutch trait.”
“Aye,” said Captain Van Oorst sourly. Once more I thought I saw murder in his eyes. Was a fat commission vanishing?
Suddenly my heart, which had been clutched like a fist in my breast, soared into the blue December sky. I almost wept with gratitude for Clara's presence in my soul. Perhaps with her help I was destined to outwit the Evil Brother after all.
F
OR THE NEXT TWO MONTHS, PHILIP Hooft watched hungrily as I came and went from his splendid house on the Heerengracht. Each day his eyes seemed to protrude a little further, his pendulous lower lip seemed to thicken and droop another fraction of an inch. Soon I could think of him only as the Frog. Behind this derision I was scrupulously polite and occasionally flirtatious. I complimented him on his colorful Parisian clothes. Everyone in Amsterdam aped the Paris fashions. I let him take me iceboating on the frozen Amstel, and rode with him and Tesselschade in a
schuit
—a canal boat, towed by horses—for a visit to the Hague, the ornate capital of the Netherlands, where I was presented at the court of the current Prince of Orange, the country's theoretical ruler.
I attended concerts, plays, readings of poems as Philip Hooft's ghostly third, the woman of his wilderness desires. Occasionally we encountered Vondel, who one night asked me candidly how long I was planning to torture his friend. Was my skill in this black art something I had learned among the Senecas?
I pretended I did not know what he was talking about. “In America, we women are
innocent
about such matters. Why don't you put that in your paper?” I said.
At the Hague, we met a fat cheerful older woman, the Countess Van Osteen, who greeted Philip with great affection. She had read about me in Vondel's paper but assured me she did not believe a word of it. The countess talked in brilliant spurts of sarcasm and wit about the probability of war in Europe between the Catholic and Protestant powers. The Spanish were prodding the French into it, hoping they would demolish the Netherlands. The Dutch were depending on the English to protect them, in the name of Protestant solidarity. “We certainly can't protect ourselves,” she said. “Our so-called government is a joke.”
Tesselschade Hooft agreed. She explained to me that the Prince of Orange was more figurehead than ruler. Fearing tyranny, when the Dutch won their independence from Spain they had left most of the power in the hands of the cities, who frequently chose to ignore the Hague's feeble attempts at guiding the country. “Politics bores us. We prefer to make money—or love,” Tesselschade said.
“At my age, money is more interesting,” the Countess Van Osteen said. She began quizzing Philip Hooft about the best buys on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
On the way back to Amsterdam, Tesselschade told Catalyntie that the countess had been a great beauty in her youth. “Philip's father was one of her lovers.”
Philip Hooft gazed longingly at me, his frog's eyes pleading.
See?
they groaned,
I am asking you for nothing truly forbidden.
Over the past three months, I had almost grown sorry for him, watching him endure the icy irreversible loathing with which his wife regarded him. However, in the best Dutch tradition, I did not permit pity to interfere with business. I used Philip's name to obtain a line of credit from the Bank of Amsterdam to finance the Mohawk River store, as well as to buy two thousand pounds of luxury merchandise for the Universal Store in New York City.
As I bought my goods at shops and warehouses in the port section of the city, I saw women from the
speelhuisen
or “musicos” where men went for the satisfaction they could not obtain from their wives. Like most prostitutes, they were sad tattered-looking creatures by day. Was Philip reduced to these women? I wondered. But I remained firmly anchored to the resolution I had made that morning in the Hooft Bank on the Dam.
Finally, the last of my goods was safely stored in the hold of
The Orange Prince.
It was time to depart. I had decided to sail with Captain Van Oorst after all. I had said nothing to the Hoofts about his fondness for young men—and this had restored our relationship to something approximating an armed truce. The longer I stayed in Amsterdam, the less fault I found with his advertising me as an acquiescent Indian princess. Everything in this vast commercial city had a price.
Rarely did the Hoofts invite people to dinner without the prospect of improving some moneys. Vondel's paper was wholly owned and financed by Philip Hooft. He used it not merely to further his erotic ambitions but to spread news that made his speculation in currencies and commodities and investments in cargoes more likely to succeed. A Vondel-pushed rumor of war between Spain and England sent the price of grain soaring, doubling the value of the bank's investment in this year's Baltic fleet.
Politics both in Holland and England were viewed entirely in commercial terms. The Protestant succession, the English Patriot Party, were amusing—or annoying—excrescences to the main point: profits on land and sea. England's corrupt prime minister, Robert Walpole, against whom Malcolm Stapleton and his friends railed in the name of patriotism, was a hero in Amsterdam. Philip Hooft praised the way Walpole had ignored for years now the demands of the Patriots for war against Spain for seizing British ships and abusing British seamen in the Caribbean. With the largest merchant marine in the world and no army or navy worth mentioning,
the Dutch wanted war with nobody. As they saw it, only fools and fanatics fought wars, which multiplied death, debt, and taxes—and interfered with business. On this point Philip and I were in hearty agreement.
On the day I sailed, Tesselschade Hooft revealed how much she knew about the inner drama of her American guest's visit. “I can't decide whether I should thank you or chastise you for failing to requite my husband's passion,” she said in her aloof way.
“Do you really wish I had?” I asked.
“I suppose I would admire you less,” she said. “But I would have understood. He would have showered you with guilders. He calls out your name in the night. I've never seen him so obsessed.”
“I would have admired myself less.”
“Are you sure your husband has been faithful to you all these months?”
“We can't be sure of anything in such matters,” I said. “But I hope so.”
“I hope so too, for your sake,” Tesselschade said.
Those last words coiled around my throat and burned there like the switches of a thornbush for the entire voyage back to New York. Sailing on a springtime ocean, we scarcely saw a single angry wave—but that only made me more anxious. By the time we sighted the looming highlands of New Jersey, I could barely think about anything but Malcolm Stapleton crushing me against his huge chest with a welcoming kiss.
I left Captain Van Oorst unloading the ship in Sag Harbor—yes, I was still a smuggler—and hired a horse and chaise that took me to the Brooklyn-Manhattan ferry. Rushing up the muddy garbage-strewn streets to our brick house on Depeyster Street, I found only Shirley, our African cook, and my son, Cornelius Hugh Stapleton, with his nurse, Bridget. The two servants were both cooing over the baby, who was sitting up, gazing with alert but puzzled eyes at this strange lady looming over him. When I picked him up, he burst into tears and reached for his nurse.
“Aw now, Hughie darlin', it's all right,” Bridget said.
“Hughie?” I said. “That's not his name.”
“It's what his father calls him. I don't think we could break the habit now,” Bridget said.
“Where is his father?” I said.
“Like as not he's at Hughson's.”
“Go down there and tell him I'm home,” I said.
In ten minutes Malcolm was in the hall calling: “Catalyntie?”
I handed the baby to Shirley and ran to meet him. My kiss was violent enough to meet any standard of romance—but the ferocity all came from me. He barely responded with any force of his own.
I clung to him, burying my face in his shirt. “I thought of you every night,” I said. “Did you think of me?”
“Of course,” he said.
The words were flat, perfunctory. There was no vibration of desire in them. My heart struggled to accept the inevitable. He was a man, after all. He had gone to the whores to relieve his need. What else did I expect? Still, Tesselschade Hooft's thorny words tightened cruelly around my throat.
Malcolm decreed a dinner party to welcome me home. Adam Duycinck, Clara, her partners, the Hughsons, Guert Cuyler and his wife, and two Patriot assemblymen friends and their wives joined us for a merry feast. We had something to celebrate besides my homecoming. Governor Clarke had settled my lawsuit against my uncle resoundingly in my favor. Johannes Van Vorst had been ordered to pay the full value of Cornelius's property in cash—and the Mohawk lands had been wrested from the Van Sluydens and restored to me.
“You're a bloody princess!” Adam Duycinck howled.
“The question is—shall we live to spend the money,” Malcolm said.
“Why shouldn't we?” I said.
“Haven't you heard? We're at war with Spain.”
I listened, bemused, as Malcolm discoursed passionately on the way the Patriot Party had finally embarrassed Prime Minister Walpole into declaring war. A sailor named Robert Jenkins, who had been seized by the Spanish eight years ago during a Caribbean melee in which they had severed his ear, had appeared before Parliament calling for revenge, with the ear pickled in a jar. The uproar in the newspapers had been so severe, Walpole had been forced to declare war on the unrepentant Spanish.
Now the question was how hard the “Great Corrupter,” as Malcolm and other Patriots persisted in calling Walpole, would fight the war. Would he abandon the exposed American colonies to the depredations of the Spanish fleet—or would he take the offensive and seize the Spanish islands of the Caribbean? Malcolm hoped New York would play a leading part in such an assault. He was calling for a militia bill to raise an American army that would be ready to sail as soon as the British fleet arrived to transport them to the Caribbean. He had sent messengers to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, urging them to join New York in this warlike measure.
Listening to my husband and his excited friends, I could only imagine how they would be viewed at a dinner table in Amsterdam. I could hear Vondel or Philip Hooft dismissing them as naive idealists, colonials hopelessly out of touch with Europe's reality—and menaces to business in the bargain.
Clara had little to say during the dinner. She and her partners, the
Hughsons, did not seem enthusiastic about the war. “I've never seen a war do much but drive up the price of bread for the poor,” Hughson said. Clara seemed more interested in persuading New York City's Common Council to give more help to the poor—which the cost of fighting a war would prevent. She talked of several people who had frozen to death in unheated rooms during the bitter cold of January and February.
Finally, the guests departed and Malcolm and I were alone. I kissed him boldly on the mouth and whispered: “That party could have waited until tomorrow night.”
“I thought you'd want to celebrate the good news about your lawsuit,” he said.
“There's only one thing I want to celebrate,” I said.
In bed, I readied myself for the usual swift, almost violent assault. He was still my heart's desire—that was the only thing that mattered. I would not insist on niceties. But a different man took me in his arms. The bedroom gladiator had vanished. He kissed me softly, tenderly, and said: “We must become more like lovers. Don't you want that?”
“Yes, of course,” I said, barely disguising my amazement.
Instead of a swift fierce conquest, there was a slow dreamlike mixture of kisses and caresses, a minuet instead of the throbbing drums of an Eagle Dance. When he entered me, he was gentle, almost meditative. Slow careful thrusts were followed by more kisses, more caresses. I began to puzzle over the mystery of this transformation. What explained it? I had expected the old mixture of anger and lust. Now I began to wonder if I preferred it. This gentle dance was lasting too long; my blood was barely stirring.
No, there was a rising tide of desire, it lapped at the edges of my mind. But it never engulfed that restless entity as he came with a small groan of satisfaction. In that instant I found the answer to the mystery of my new lover-husband. He had gone back to Clara. He was loving his wandering wife with some if not all of the tenderness, the gentleness he had learned in Clara's arms.
As he drifted off to sleep, I lay there, stunned, bewildered—and finally enraged. I did not want Malcolm Stapleton's tenderness on Clara's terms. It was a borrowed commodity, something I could never regard with an iota of pride or satisfaction. Should I accuse him now? Shove him out of my bed forever? That was what I was tempted to do. I was ready to revoke my agreement with the Evil Brother. Surely this was a violation of our contract!
In his mocking way, my dark companion offered me his rueful wisdom. I would lose far more than I could ever hope to gain if I furiously denounced Malcolm. I should play this game as a sophisticated Amsterdamer, rather than a naive American.
In the morning, I returned to Sag Harbor and hired a dozen wagons to transport my smuggled goods to Manhattan. I paid Van Oorst and told him about the declaration of war. Would it interfere with future voyages to Amsterdam? He shook his head. The Spanish navy was a lackluster affair. But if the French came into the war on Spain's side, that might upset things at sea.

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