An Undisturbed Peace (16 page)

In the spring, it was Abe's turn to marry. He traveled to the Milner farm during the winter thaw to formally request Hannah's hand. During his ride there, he grew increasingly anxious, wondering if he'd made the right decision. Had his heart's wounds over Marian, so eager for healing, taken him down the garden path? He enumerated Hannah's virtues to himself. She was sweet and smart, a hard worker, so her mother bragged. She made him laugh. What else could a man want? When he arrived at the Milners' front gate, she burst through the door and ran to him, auburn hair flying, her skirts lifted against tripping. His heart leapt. How lovely her calves, he thought. How beautiful her hair. Her face is as pretty as a china doll's and all afire with happiness just from the sight of me. Me! How brilliant it is to be loved and desired! Tender feeling toward her suffused him. He had a notion that maybe Marian's spirit had guided him to this moment as a sign of her forgiveness. With aching heart, he thanked her.

He dismounted Hart and embraced Hannah there, in the open, for all to see. How easy it was to yield to the warm pleasures of her flesh! He looked up. Tobias and Esther stood at the doorway all smiles and nods of encouragement. “Someone's been sharing secrets,” he whispered into Hannah's ear. “How could I not tell them? You've made me so happy, they guessed!” By nightfall, a date for the wedding was settled. Two days later, Abe took his leave of Hannah reluctantly, all his doubts assuaged.

Abe rode back to Greensborough past streams rushing with melted snow. Nesting birds cried out in songs of mating. The sun coaxed tiny green buds from the barest trees and bushes. He happened across a solitary pink-and-yellow flower whose name he did not know and the sight of it, pushed up from barren rocky ground, its petals sparkling with dew, affected him unexpectedly. His eyes smarted. His throat closed up. Marian, he thought, Marian. I need to say goodbye once more. He turned Hart about to ride to her cabin. All along the way, which was half a day's ride, his heart trembled, as he realized that his hope she might still be alive had never completely forsaken him. As he rode closer and closer to her, that hope grew. He spoke aloud while he rode, saying, “Forgive me, Marian, forgive me. For your sake, I renounce Hannah Milner, I renounce my stepfather and mother, I renounce the fortune that is coming to me and all the white man's world, if only you would forgive me. Henceforth, I will be your slave.”

When he arrived at the outskirts of her homestead, it was plain to see that everything remained derelict, yet still he dismounted to approach her cabin, now covered in wild vines, with humble reverence. He knocked on the door. Immediately, as if that door had waited half a year to deliver to him alone a mortal message, it fell off its hinges. Inside, forest creatures and insects had made dozens of nests in the room where Abe and Marian once negotiated the sale of gunpowder. Curtains of spiderwebs obscured the windows. The picked bones of one animal were strewn amid the dried droppings of another. After staring at nature's mess for a long, melancholy while, Abe turned about and remounted his horse. He vowed to weep no more for Dark Water of the foothills, to never again entreat the ghost that lived in the Englishman's portrait. A shadow fell over a chamber of his heart and closed it down.

On his return to Greensborough, he related to Isadore and Susanah the details of his visit to the Milner farm. He told them the bride's price they had settled on and the date in early May on which Hannah and her family would arrive in town for the wedding. The elder newlyweds noticed the change in his demeanor and found it dear. “He's got oh-so-solemn now he's about to be a family man,” his mother told her husband with a tender smile. “May it only spill over into the business,” Isadore joked. And it did. With a fiery intensity, Abe drafted a marketing plan to boost sales of rubber straightaway. He had a flyer printed with the company slogan “From the Jungles of Brazil to Boston to Your Door, Compliments of Isadore Sassaporta and Son” as a heading. Underneath were hand drawings of boots, hats, tarpaulins, and pots. Between the drawings were printed testaments to the waterproof and insulation properties of rubber. At the bottom were the words “Coming Soon” writ large. For the flagship store itself, he drew up designs for large posters to put on the doors and change out as the time required. They read
rubber goods of all kinds, coming soon!, rubber goods here next month!, rubber goods —it's only weeks now!,
and
rubber goods—next wednesday!
For extra measure, he arranged for like announcements to appear progressively in the
Carolina Patriot
and the
Miners' and Farmers' Journal
. He then distributed sheaves of advertisements to all Isadore's foot and mounted peddlers to hand out along their early spring routes. He gave bundles of them to the postmaster that his man might drop them off at trading posts. He even thought to find a Cherokee half blood who could write the new Cherokee alphabet and had a portion of those destined for the trading posts printed in that language. Isadore cautioned restraint on that score. “The Indian Removal Act will surely pass the Congress,” he said. “Soon all the land east of the Mississippi will be cleared of Indians. The Georgians want this and so does President Jackson. We may expect the Act to call for the tribes to leave their lands voluntarily, but believe me, I've seen how these disputes worked in the old countries. Their removal will be mandatory before long. Only those who can read the writing on the wall will leave right away. The smart ones. The ones who know that life has its way with you no matter what convictions you hold here, in the heart. The rest will leave under the snout of a gun.” Abe convinced him to worry about that when the time came. “While on my routes, I made a study of the native heart,” he claimed, without revealing his study consisted of a single woman called Dark Water of the foothills. “Some may withdraw to their higher peaks, but they will not leave the land so fast. Not without a fight. Between now and then, if force is made law at all, the opportunities for sales are staggering.”

Soon enough, Isadore and Susanah could not open their door, walk down the street, or enjoy a stroll in the meadows near the town without neighbors coming up to them and mentioning rubber. The questions “When is it coming? Is it truly waterproof? How is rubber pliable for one use and hard as a rock for another?” rang in their ears everywhere they went. The two were proud to bursting of their son. In early April, the rubber arrived and flew off the store shelves. Everyone for miles about had to have at least one item made of the miracle stuff. Isadore placed an order with the factory in Boston for replacement rubber goods that doubled the original amount. At the end of the month, the Milner family prepared to make their way to Greensborough for the wedding, just as peddlers were trickling back to the camp town to restock for the late spring sales season. Rubber invoices bulged from every pocket. Abe could no longer hide the truth about Hannah's lineage from his parents. One night as he'd come from the building site of his future home where the matters of paint and wallpaper were put off until his bride might choose them but where everything else was nearly done, he decided the moment had come to tell them their new daughter was born a Christian.

Isadore's jaw dropped at the news. After a few painful seconds, he sputtered, “What barbarous news is this? I have the rabbi coming from Durham in two weeks' time and now you tell me? Susanah, do you hear him?” His wife's mouth worked, her eyes blinked back tears. Speaking quietly, oh, so quietly, she shocked them both. “It's a new world, Isadore. What can we do? He will have whom he will have. She sounds a good girl and her parents have not complained that she wants a Jew. Did not similar unions take place on occasion in London? At least he's not converting the way those London Jews would to cement a mixed alliance. In the meantime, he's come a fine man, an honest steward of your business. We have much to be thankful for out of him. If our son wishes to marry a gentile, he will be no different from the patriarchs of old. Did not Abrahan make Hagar his wife? Did not Solomon have a princess of Egypt as his queen? When the children come, I'll be there to make sure they know they spring from Abrahan, Yitzak, and Yacov.” After a long stretch of quiet, Isadore nodded his head from side to side. “You make a good argument, my love. Life in America undermines the old ways a thousand times a day. If she's ok by you, she's ok by me.” Abe embraced them both, overwhelmed with gratitude.

The night before the Milners were due to arrive in Greensborough, Abe went to his parents to thank them again for their support on the question of his choice of bride. It struck him that he was on the threshold of an eternal union with a young woman he much admired but barely knew and reminded himself there was nothing unusual about that aspect of their arrangement. Only second marriages like Isadore's and Susanah's were commonly matters of knowledgeable choice. For men his age, love began as an urge for family or an expansion of land or business. Whatever came next, people made the best of things. He had no desire to avoid his situation. Every fiber of his being told him this would be a good thing, that this marriage was the next best match to one with Marian, who was, in any case, dead, but why his mother had approved the idea remained a nagging mystery. So on the night before his bride and future in-laws arrived, he said to her at a moment when they were alone, “Mother, why do you sanction my union to a gentile girl? When you first came to America, I had the idea only a Jewish daughter would please you. In fact, I half expected last fall to return home and find Ariella Levy waiting for me.” His mother clucked her tongue and, reaching up, brushed the forelock away from his eyes. “My dear son. I confess I tried. But Ariella was already promised by the time word got to her family. No, my change of mind is based on my own heart's adventures since I arrived here, events that taught me tolerance in these matters, although I'll speak no more of them to you. Now that I'm married to your uncle, it would be shameful to do so. The whole
megillah
is not for a son's ears.”

O'Hanlon! thought Abe. O'Hanlon was her route to comprehending Hannah.
O'Hanlon!
He wondered if the reason his mother refused the Irishman was out of loyalty to her people, or because she truly preferred Uncle Isadore. It was hardly a question he could ask. Without pretending to comprehend the marital decisions of others, he fell to examining his own. Once again, he decided there was no fault he could find in Hannah. None at all. But, ah, he thought, the stuff of Sassaporta marriages is complex!

The second of these unions went exceedingly well at first. The families were cordial, even warm from the first hello as if Christians had always loved Jews and vice versa. After the first family dinner before the wedding, Isadore announced that he would forgive all Abe's debts, including those related to the purchase of land and the building of the marital home, as a wedding gift.

Abe's jaw dropped at the news. Tears of gratitude sprang to his eyes. Until that moment, to be debt-free felt a whimsy, a dream, and a farfetched one at that. The only way he could envision himself free of obligation to his uncle and stepfather was to imagine him dead and his mother twice-over widowed. Fantasies of financial independence thus inspired tremendous guilt and he rarely entertained them. But in a single pronouncement, Isadore Sassaporta absolved him. Esther Milner's eyes sparkled with grateful tears on her daughter's behalf while she rushed to kiss the merchant on his bearded cheek. Susanah clapped her hands and kissed Tobias Milner's shaven cheek in kind and they all laughed while a teary Abe raised his glass of tea and toasted, “God Bless America!”

The night before the nuptials, Abe took the portrait of Marian, which, true to his vow, he had not studied since his final visit to her cabin, and hid it under a floorboard of the new house. The Indian Removal Act had narrowly passed Congress days before. While the president might or might not be successful in his negotiations to have the tribes remove themselves from the Southeast voluntarily, he at least had authorization from the people to try. It was 1830, a date to remember. A new American era had begun. If things went according to Jackson's plan, the United States would no longer be hindered by patches of Indian territory everywhere she wanted to spread her wings. Abe considered the pushing out of Cherokee a tragedy, queerly related to the tragedy of his lost first love. But the destiny of nations and the passions of a Dark Water could not be stopped by such as him. There, he thought, nailing the floorboard down, that's it. The ultimate vestige of a great love gone. Buried. Past. The page is turned, the book closed. If the sun rises tomorrow, there'll be a future for me and it will be good.

The next morning was particularly bright and clear. Abe and Hannah married in the town square under a trellis of dogwood and wisteria, which Isadore and Susanah viewed as nature's most glorious
chuppah
. The mayor of Greensborough officiated. Farmers from here and there, Isadore's peddlers, and the tradesmen of the town all attended. There was feasting and dancing. Even the Quakers among them deigned to take a step or two. The wedding night was extraordinary. Abe's breath was stolen by the contrast of a virgin's passion weighed against the caprice of a mature woman. Where Marian had been casual, if generous, Hannah was hungry for his sex and strove with every muscle and sinew to give him pleasure without knowing in the slightest what men might like or women deserve in kind. Her eagerness near overwhelmed him. More than once, he whispered to her, “Slow down, my love. Slow down.” She obeyed instantly for as long as she could stand and then she was at it again, grasping, straining, heaving against him. Later, when he collapsed against her breast, panting with exhaustion and release, he glanced up to see her smiling at him in the most gleeful manner, her mouth stretched wide, her eyes large and merry. He asked if she found him ridiculous and she answered, “Far from it, my husband. I'm only thinking how different love has been for me than for my sisters. Both instructed me to close my eyes and think only of Jesus when you came to me, that our union should be the worst five minutes of my life, but something I should get used to for the sake of family harmony. Oh, those poor silly geese!” Her body shook with laughter. He found her so adorable in her mirth that he kissed her deeply again and again when their second exploit of love occurred without either expecting it. It was an event both agreed was a good omen of the highest degree. In fact, for the first month of their marriage, nothing transpired between them that was not delicious, ecstatic, and unworldly in its deepening layers of sweet emotion, until the happiness of those early days was broken by the stench of spoiled rubber, carried into the store one day by a party of disgruntled Cherokee.