Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (10 page)

“Wednesday nine,” Anne repeated. She dropped her voice. “Stairs at the back.” She looked hard at the man till he caught on. That Grissom hadn’t was only by luck of a distraction from Peter, but the risk to the job seemed worth it that Wednesday when Anne heard the happy clink of three shillings hit the bottom of the jar she’d commandeered for the purpose.

One night, when Anne had been expecting Wilkes, a mud-stained traveler appeared instead, who insisted when Anne tried to close the door on him, “Wilkes said! Wilkes said to take his turn!” He pulled out his pocketbook and waved it in the air. Anne considered. The mud would come off the coverlet with a stiff broom, and without Wilkes Anne would be out the night’s wage, but she didn’t like the idea of a stranger; she didn’t like the idea that the shipwright would think he could pick her custom for her. “No,” she said, and kicked closed the door.

Anne settled Wilkes when next she saw him, but just the same, her popularity grew—another man from the Penny Pot whose name and work she never did know; a friend of his she liked the look of; a poor, pockmarked man again sent by Wilkes, but this time to the shop to “inquire.” A shipmaster she took up on her own after she overheard him remark to Grissom that she was the finest-looking thing in the shop. She managed to cross near as he left so she could whisper her price and her time; he was something of a risk but well kept, obviously well to do, and possessed of an honest face.

Anne had come to know something of honest faces and counted John Hewe as one; his appearance came as no great surprise to Anne, who having taken her own dislike to the wife decided the husband must likely share in her assessment. He needed more time than most but was more grateful than most, and more fun besides, entertaining her with tales from the Pot that might not have measured up against a Franklin yarn, but served her well enough in the lack.

With the new ones Anne had taken to keeping her candle lit despite the cost, just to watch out for anything nasty coming her way; in doing so she discovered that apparently it was not the habit of whores—or wives—to conduct their business in clear light. The sight of a dark triangle against white thighs appeared to be worth something to a certain kind of man; she began to charge for the extra price of a candle and met no complaint.

Of all the men who climbed her stairs, the shipmaster was the greatest surprise. At his first visit, he asked her in all politeness if she would be so kind as to put on his breeches, apparently so he might pull them off her, which Anne could see no reason not to do; at the next visit, he brought a young man around Anne’s age, and paid out his coin for Anne to attend to the young man while he watched from the door. At the next visit, as the young man entered her, the shipmaster went behind him and did a thing that Anne understood from tavern talk could get the pair hanged, but it didn’t seem to distract the young man from his work. Every visit thereafter there was always this same young man—Robert, he was called—between them.

BUSINESS WAS INCREASING BELOW
stairs as well. A young girl named Maria was brought on to take over the stuffing of feathers; Anne took over the horsehair, winding it around wooden rods for curling, removing the curls, setting them in careful layers inside a tick sewn up on the sides like an open box. The new work required a new skill; at first Grissom hovered at her shoulder to watch over every curl, and Anne was unable to make her above-stairs appointments as freely as before. Where she could, she worked them into a regular schedule: Wilkes and the corder—whose name turned out to be Pettengill—shared Monday; Hewe kept to Wednesday; Wilkes’s pockmarked friend, who called himself Mr. Black—although Anne doubted it was his name at all—came around every other Friday as he could afford. The shipmaster—Allgood was his name—sent a boy for ribbons or braid whenever he was in town; the boy stopped by Anne with the same message each time: “Sister sends greeting,” and Anne answered each message with “Tell sister to call Tuesday nine,” or Thursday or Friday or whatever time remained. She kept Saturday and Sunday for herself.

Around the time Anne mastered the horsehair mattress, another penny appeared in her wage. She was eating well, her family was eating well, they all dressed better. Franklin had been right—she’d begun to make something of the job—and sometimes, especially on those nights when her hands happened to be gripping the broad, well-muscled back of the corder, she would think of Franklin and wonder if he’d foreseen both of the ways she’d manage to do it. Only later in the night, when she was too tired to stave it off, would she think of William.

ANNE BEGAN TO ENJOY
her daytime work; like Peter, she found some satisfaction in pleasing Grissom with a neat and timely job, in offering a useful suggestion that was taken up with that singular, mute nod and quiet smile. This came as no surprise to her; it did surprise her that she could come to like her night work too. She found that if, when using her candle, she took some cloth away slowly, from the edges, she could turn any man breathless before he’d even touched her, and she found she liked watching their chests heave, their eyes glitter, their parts strain against their breeches. She liked deciding when and where they could touch her and when and where they couldn’t, changing it up to keep the game new. She was in utter charge of these strong, proud men, smarter than them all, or so she felt until she opened the door one night to let out the pockmarked Black and found Grissom standing in the hall.

Grissom looked after the man who pushed past him, waistcoat in hand, sweat just drying on him. He looked at Anne, standing there in her shift with a shawl pulled around. He said, “Business thrives, then?”

Anne peered at Grissom and attempted to take the mood of the man. He stood with joints locked, fists knotted, brows pinched. A dark mood, yes, but how dark? Was she about to be discharged? Evicted? Accosted? But
business,
he’d said. If he’d called it a business . . .

“Do you come for your share?” she asked. “Or do you prefer to take it in goods? I’ve Thursday free.”

Grissom’s eyes flickered over her body and dismissed it. He turned and walked back down the stairs.

ANNE WAITED NEXT DAY
for the summons that would discharge her or evict her, but it never came. Grissom spoke to her as little as before, but there was an ill-defined change in his tone, a new vagueness, as if he’d suddenly forgotten her name. As the days went by and he never called her to account in any way, she began to understand; he could not discharge her, he owed it to Franklin to keep her on. In time another suspicion began to take hold—that Grissom just plain didn’t like her; she counted it a good day if Grissom came by her table and nodded at her progress, but that was the best she drew. Against that she could hear a “Fine, Maria, fine!” or a “Good work, Peter, my man!” It was true that there were days when a terse correction might cause a line to form between Peter’s eyebrows, or an instruction delivered with an undercurrent of impatience might set Maria’s fingers trembling; Grissom never called Anne to account in such a way either, but it didn’t make up for the absent praise.

It shouldn’t have mattered one way or the other to Anne whether Grissom liked her, but she found that in fact it did; she’d grown used to extracting whatever degree of attention she wished from men and took it as a black mark that she was unable to draw this one. But had she really tried? Or rather, had she tried in the way she was best at? One day as Grissom drew near her table to check her progress in filling a particular mattress that was to go to a new customer, Anne noticed he’d picked up some threads on the back of his jacket; she stood up to pick them off, balancing her off hand against his waist, holding out the threads to show him.

“In case you were to go out,” she said, as if in apology. “How your cloth looks must hint to your customers how their cloth will look, after all.”

Grissom only stepped aside to peer into the ticking box. “I want this on its way by tomorrow noon.”

She attempted a like attack a week later, leaning forward and allowing her breast to brush his hand as he tested her mattress for supportiveness, but he only withdrew his hand and said, cryptically or not, “That will do.”

At first Grissom’s disinterest left Anne feeling as if she’d been cast adrift at sea with no idea of which way to paddle toward home, but soon enough she came to feel more as if she were floating in a still pool, surrounded by a raging stream. She took a deep breath, let it out, and set her mind to securing her place in Grissom’s shop by excelling at her below-stairs work alone. She’d been good enough before; she became better now, so fast and precise in laying out the horsehair that Grissom soon had to find her other things to do. He put her to work sewing the costly bed hangings that only the wealthiest Philadelphians could afford; her first set of hangings was aligned so precisely that she never stuffed a bed tick again.

14

DEBORAH FRANKLIN SAT BY
the fire hemming a new shift for William; as he neared a year or so of age he was grown out of all he’d first owned. The late September fire was the first one she’d actually enjoyed, welcoming its heat on a raw day, and had hoped that Benjamin would feel the same and come sit by her side, but instead he was dangling a ball of yarn above William’s cradle and exclaiming. Again.

“You see, Debby? You see how he knows just when the yarn will swing his way? He understands a pendulum already! There! He’s grabbed it again! You see?”

“He should be sleeping,” Deborah said. “Leave him be.”

But Franklin could not leave him be. Deborah had not expected it to go exactly so—Benjamin spending long days at the print shop, then home to play with William, then half the night at the tavern with his Junto—a group of friends who worked at bringing new things to one another and to Philadelphia by exercising their minds—this was how he described it to her. It had robbed a good deal of Benjamin’s time of late because of his newest idea, the first Deborah had ever heard of such a thing—a lending library. In July his talk was all of the agreement struck; in August it was all of the fifty subscribers he’d already acquired. September was filled with lists of books he planned to order, and then he brought the books home and attempted to read them to Deborah, but who could be interested in such books? Law, astronomy, government, philosophy! She fared some better with
Gulliver’s Travels,
but nonetheless, Benjamin looked so many questions at her as he read that she was sure there was something more to the thing that had gotten past her and disappointed him accordingly. It was the same with the
Iliad;
even her sense of accomplishment at having survived to its end was dashed to pieces when he came at her with another by the same author called the
Odyssey
! The books had put a new space between them, she saw that, but she knew it to be a space created by her own deficiency and could not resent him for attempting to include her in a thing so important to his very being.

The thing Deborah
could
resent was the infant. Yes, she would admit it. There were many times—indeed, most times—when Deborah was alone with William that she felt only what she should, or what she imagined she should. If the child had been hers as much as Benjamin’s, she doubted she’d have felt a minute’s pain over the attention Benjamin so generously lavished on the boy, but as he wasn’t, she could only look at the pair of matched faces and feel the outsider to it all. There was none of her in that little face, no shape of nose or color of hair or any smile she could call her own.

And who
could
claim the other half of that face? Deborah could not leave the thought alone. She searched the boy over for some notable thing not come to him from Benjamin that she could seek out as she walked the street, but it was a difficult thing to compare an infant to a grown woman; it was difficult and it was foolhardy, for what could she do if she one day suspected a match? Nothing. Nothing at all. She might point to the woman and demand of Benjamin, “Is
that
her?” but she doubted Benjamin would say. She knew the woman must be some kind of low creature, lower than a common-law wife, but that didn’t help Deborah either—if the woman hadn’t been so low a thing, would she have become Mrs. Benjamin Franklin instead of Deborah? And what would have become of Deborah? There Deborah arrived each time, and each time she arrived there she resolved to be a better mother to William, if only for Benjamin’s sake, Benjamin who had saved her. Sometimes Deborah was successful in her resolve, but sometimes she found herself turning away from that puzzling small face in frustration, unable to address its hidden question any longer.

AT LAST BENJAMIN LEFT
the babe and came to the fire, bending to kiss Deborah on the brow, his fingers weaving themselves into the hair tied up at her neck, bringing the knot down. “Come,” he said, and lifted her from the chair, his other hand already at her laces. “Come and warm your husband on this damp night; think of it—only September! We’ve a long winter ahead of us, my dear!”

“You don’t go out tonight?”

It was an idle question—his hands had already come up under her skirt and around her buttocks—and as he caught her up and drew her toward their chamber door she thought as she thought every night: Perhaps tonight we’ll make a child of our own.

THAT NIGHT PROVED NO
different from the others before it; there was no child, and although Deborah did her best with William, she could not block out the idea of Benjamin and William and this other, shadowy, enticing woman forming a triangle locked tight at each corner, forbidding Deborah to enter. When callers arrived at the house it was more of the same; the callers were always men; their talk was always of matters scientific or civic, far beyond Deborah’s ken. She would make her greeting and provide the proper sustenance and then retreat, but to where? To the kitchen where she could hear the comfortable talk and hearty laughter? Above stairs where she could stare at the strange child in the cradle who seemed to smile in his sleep as if he already understood the talk below stairs?