Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle (26 page)

“That’s what I said to myself, madam.”

“Women—if you’ll permit a generalization—act more privately, more obscurely. According to the dictates of the heart.” She spoke in a strangely bitter tone.

“Besides,” he added pragmatically, “how would these creatures know enough to even mimic the correct procedures?”

Mrs. Gomez leaned slightly toward him. “Indeed. Consider my own case: I’m only too painfully aware that a woman alone, confronting the full weight and complexity of the law, might as well be lost in the bush at night.”

“Ah, but what gentleman but would be only too happy to escort her home, with a lantern?” He’d got the gallant tone just right, Huddlestone considered, though he wasn’t sure about the two
but
s.

There was some private darkness about her, he thought, lying awake that night; he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. It wasn’t just bereavement; he’d met many women who’d lost husbands, and they’d never had such complicated eyes.

“During marriage you were a nonperson, legally,” he explained the next morning, “but now you’re considered
feme sole
once more. You could even take up your husband’s business, if his trading partners didn’t object,” he added playfully.

Mrs. Gomez sucked in her lips. “Oh, sir, I couldn’t imagine anything more grueling. No”—her lovely face settled into fixed lines of sorrow again—”I don’t even wish to maintain a household here.”

“You’ll sell your blacks, then?”

“I wish you to sell
everything
for me,” she told him, with a new decisiveness. Was widowhood stiffening her backbone? “My husband’s stocks, chattels, the house …”

“Very well. The proceeds could be put out at interest, to provide you with a guaranteed annuity.”

She shook her head, little curls escaping from her cap at the temples. “I’d prefer the whole sum in gold, to take with me back to my father in Jamaica.”

He frowned.

“I am always a foreigner here,” she told him. “It is best to go, and the sooner, the better. To turn the page.” She pressed her fingertips to her mouth as if she had said too much.

Somehow Huddlestone didn’t like the idea of that glittering, winking fortune being carried off on a ship. It should stay in New York. Mrs. Gomez should stay, too.

That night he twisted in his sheets, irritated by the lumpy mattress. He relished his freedom, he reminded himself; what needs had he that servant and tavern and coffeehouse and laundry and (once in a while) a harlot picked up at the Battery couldn’t meet? He’d never envied his married friends, with their snobbish wives and drooling infants. But Mrs. Gomez, with her dark lips and quivering lashes, her helplessness and her several thousand pounds …

By the time dawn broke over the East River, Huddlestone had made up his mind. This was his moment, he could taste it like spring on the air.
Nothing ventured,
as the proverb went. When the Gomez business was done, instead of sending in his bill, he would present himself at the mansion in Pearl Street and ask for her hand.

His heart lurched in his ribcage. Although Huddlestone Senior might object to the lady’s religion, the young attorney considered himself quite free of prejudice. Nor was the widow likely to turn him down on those grounds, since the supply of eligible bachelors in her tiny congregation could not be ample. How better, how much faster to
turn the page
than to take a new husband? Of course she’d felt like a foreigner, cooped up in that little nest of Caribbean Israelites. With an American husband—a bluff young attorney—her real life could begin.

A brief qualm struck him: the merchant had sired no children on her. But Huddlestone was sure he could do better; didn’t her every curve seem to breathe ripeness? He reckoned it a positive advantage that she had experience of wifehood, she was like a well-broken horse. With her fortune—their fortune, he corrected himself, grinning in the dark—mightn’t they take their place in the upper echelons of New York, alongside the great officials and landowners, and raise sons whose only trade was
gentleman?
He imagined a great canopied bed; guests sipping from cut crystal; sleigh rides to the Bowery.

The next day he felt as if he were suffering from a fever. Not scarlatina, he joked to himself, just love. His father, over Sunday dinner, accused him of a
coy expression.
Huddlestone drank too much at night; by day, he neglected all other business but the Gomez estate. He brought the will’s witnesses into court, harried debtors, and organized a public
vendue
to turn the contents of the house on Pearl Street into cash. (It seemed a shame to part with the handsome, heavy furniture and silverware, he thought, but this way, the newlyweds could begin afresh, with everything in the latest style.) Huddlestone worked with a thorough zeal that was strange to him, and all the while the image of Mrs. Gomez floated in front of his eyes. She might wear pale blue to their wedding; she might wear lilac. Oddly enough, he thought he liked her best in black.

When the great day came, and Huddlestone arrived at the almost empty mansion with two strong men carrying a trunk full of gold, Mrs. Gomez let out a little cry.

“Not a penny more than you merit, madam. May I congratulate you,” he asked, “on bearing up so bravely, these weeks past?”

She shook her head as if overcome.

He inquired gently whether there would be a funeral.

“Oh, yes,” she assured him, “I mean to do all that money can.”

This casual reference to the trunkful of gold made Huddlestone’s stomach twist. Did she not realize that a really splendid funeral, with a hired
inviter
and barrels of wine and tobacco, commemorative gloves and scarves and rings for all the mourners, could cost several hundred pounds? “May I offer a word of counsel, Mrs. Gomez? The governor looks askance at the fashion for extravagant funerals. In the absence of a body, in particular, it might seem improper …”

She hadn’t thought of that; perhaps he was right.

“Of course, whatever form the obsequies may take, I need hardly tell you that I shall be present as—if you’ll permit—your advisor, your prop, your staff.”

“Oh, Mr. Huddlestone.” A wet glitter in her eyes. “Such excess of kindness—lavished on an undeserving woman—”

“Nonsense!” What could explain that air of sorrowful mystery about the young widow? he wondered. What could have infused such infinite regret into that perfect face? He longed to understand it almost more than to wipe it away.

“These past weeks—”

“The pleasure has been very great. And all mine,” he said incoherently.

“I can only say how sorry I am for all the trouble to which I’ve put you.”

He was briefly speechless; his arms made a circling motion as if to say that all that he was, all that he could do, was at her feet.

“You must be sure to send in your bill promptly,” she reminded him in a whisper as the servant came to show him out.

The days that followed were full of pleasurable anticipations, and the nights brought scalding dreams. His sheets were dreadfully stained; he had to send them out for laundering. His best silk suit was aired and brushed, ready for the funeral. Perhaps he would act directly afterwards, while the widow was at her most vulnerable. He mulled over the wording. He tried out every variation, from
May I be so bold as to make a proposal which may be of mutual benefit,
to
I insist that you be mine.

Huddlestone was in his window seat at the coffeehouse when his eye was caught by the name.

One Mr. Gomez, a merchant, given out for dead of the scarlatina, yesterday arrived in New York, perfectly well, to the astonishment of his family.

He gripped the paper so hard, it tore. The coffee turned to bile in his mouth. He’d come so close, his fortunes had trembled on the verge of transformation…. To hell with this Lazarus, and to hell with Connecticut peddlers for reporting rumor as truth!

How ecstatic Mrs. Gomez would be this morning. Would she throw off her weeds at once and appear in white swanskin and taffeta? It was like a Bible story: all her wifely grief rewarded by this miraculous resurrection. If she’d ever felt anything for her attorney—a mild trust, at most, Huddlestone thought in humiliation—it was nothing compared to her wifely fervor.

Just wait till they see my bill!

Out in the street, the air stank; somebody had to be burning oyster shells. Huddlestone talked himself from rage to mere gloom. What kind of demon was he, to begrudge the woman her newfound bliss? After all, she’d never given him any open encouragement, promised him nothing. Wasn’t it her melancholic modesty, her shrinking from any selfish desire, that had attracted him?
Come, man, it’s nobody’s fault.

Perhaps he would pay a call. His feet were already taking him toward Pearl Street. It was common decency to congratulate the widow-turned-wife, to wish the happy couple well.

(But he would leave it to some other attorney to sort out their legal muddle.) He would drop by only briefly, to take one last glimpse of that scarlet, startled mouth.

At Pearl Street the manservant annoyed him by insisting that his mistress was gone abroad. “I think you mean,” said Huddlestone, “that she
intended
to go back to her family in Jamaica. But under the circumstances—”

No, the fellow wouldn’t budge; Mrs. Gomez had shipped out of New York a week ago, she’d missed the master’s return by a matter of days. Would the visitor like to speak to the master?

Huddlestone shook his head hurriedly; it occurred to him for the first time that Gomez might see him as having been culpably negligent, to rush through the probating of the will without a proper proof of death.

His head was throbbing with confusion. Down by the docks, he interrogated some sailors, to disprove the servant’s ridiculous story. Just as he thought, there’d been no ships embarking for Jamaica in the past fortnight. The only sailings had been to Liverpool, Rotterdam, Lisbon, and the Cape. Besides, why would Mrs. Gomez have left New York in such a scramble, before the funeral, with the house not yet sold, without saying a word to her attorney? By what sickening stroke of ill luck could she have just missed being reunited with her husband?

It was only then, his eyes on the choppy waters of the East River, his nostrils full of the stench of fish, that Huddlestone woke, as if he’d been slapped. It came to him that he’d been a sleepwalker, tangled in the kind of muddy dream in which, while it lasts, monstrosities make sense.
Of course, of course.

Why, a halfwit of thirteen could have seen through Mrs. Gomez’s performance! The signs shone out now as if carved on the pale gray sky over the harbor. The missing corpse; the unavailable documents.
Oh, he did write a will?
The shows of ignorance.
I’d prefer the whole sum in gold.
The pleas for urgency.
To turn the page.
She’d appealed to Huddlestone’s vanity, and to his gallantry. His avarice. His sweaty dreams.

He walked back up Dock Street like a frail old man, jostled by the crowd. She’d practically waved the truth in his face:
The sooner the better. I mean to do all that money can.
Why had the Jewess played such a terrible trick on her husband, he wondered dizzily? Had Gomez been miserly, malicious, a brute?
I tried to perform my duty,
she said coolly in Huddlestone’s head,
I ran his household. We were not so blessed.
What could the merchant have done to deserve being robbed of his whole life’s estate?

The strange thing was, it struck him, the will had been dated only last year. Could adoration have gone septic so fast? What was the hard black cherry pit at the core of their marriage?

Unless she’d forged the document, somehow. It struck Huddlestone that he’d underestimated the education of Sephardic girls. Those two taciturn men who’d testified in court that they’d seen Gomez sign the will, could they have been her accomplices? Her lovers? His imagination reeled.

Most likely he would never know. But of course he didn’t really care about her treachery to Gomez. She’d betrayed Huddlestone, her husband-who-might-have-been, when he’d only meant to help her. She’d robbed three weeks from his life, but it felt as if he’d been in her thrall forever.
Women act more privately, more obscurely,
she’d remarked.
According to the dictates of the heart.
Was that a coded warning?
Such excess of kindness—lavished on an undeserving woman.
Had she been laughing at him all along, or had there been some true regret mixed in with the fake?
I can’t sleep, sir,
she’d told him,
I can’t find any peace. I can only say how sorry I am for all the trouble to which I’ve put you.
Such sad eyes. He needed to believe one line at least, a single shard saved from the wreckage.

He would always be puzzling now, always doubting. Never understanding the real story. Liverpool, Rotterdam, Lisbon, the Cape? Never knowing where in the world she’d gone.

As Huddlestone mounted the stairs to his apartment, and let himself fall onto his bed, it came to him that he would live and die a bachelor.

The Widow’s Cruse

This intriguing sentence was preserved by Carol Berkin and Leslie Horowitz in their
Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives: Documents in Early American History
(1998). Huddlestone and Mrs. Gomez are fictional members of two real New York families, bottom-drawer lawyers and Sephardic merchants respectively.

TEXAS

1864

B
efore the War there’s two women in the house but last year Marse done took them to auction. Now’s just me, the cook and all-round boy. My name Nigger Brown, I don’t got no other, I was born here. Missus done came in the kitchen this morning, unlock the butter barrel.
Law,
she say,
that’ll be gone in a week.

She don’t call me boy, like Marse do. She don’t call me nothing. She only marry Brown a couple years back, too late for chillun. Some say hims took her for the money from her laundry but she ain’t ugly, I done seen worse. I say,
Maybe I make you some ash cakes?

Ash cakes, are they colored fixings?

I tells her,
Taste real fine. All’s I need is meal, water, pinch of lard.

Missus smile, almost.
Very good. How much flour’s left?

Less ‘n a barrel.

She jangling her keys like a rattle. She know she ain’t quality, she still got laundress hands. She come down to lock and unlock her stores before most every meal, sometime I reckon she come to the kitchen just so’s not to be upstairs with Marse. Same thing, she work the garden with her India rubber gloves on, I’s a-digging and a-toting and a-watering, days pass. We’uns don’t talk much, we’uns know what we doing.

She open the sugar cupboard, now, there ain’t so much as a hogshead full.

Can’t you order some more, ma’am?
I says.

Her breath hiss.
I’m afraid the store won’t allow us another thing, with times as they are.

Since the blockade, no cotton’s getting shipped out, port’s quiet like a cemetery. I hear Marse at dinner sometime boasting the damn Yankees ain’t got into none of Texas yet and never will. He sing out,
This here’s the last frontier.
Planters coming down from Georgia and Virginia with all thems darkies to make a stand.

How much coffee’s left?
ask Missus now.

Half a sack.

She give a long sigh.

In these parts four out of five is colored. The buckras, they’s always sniffing out plots among their blacks but there ain’t no trouble in this part of Texas. We’uns just waiting the War out. Passing on what stories we hear tell, sitting tight.

For dinner I roast the last of the gobblers, with ash cakes and corn and the end of the catsup.

Afterwards I’s eating leftovers in the kitchen. Missus come in and start counting the preserves.
He means to ride to town with you tomorrow.

That so?

You know why?

No, Ma’am.

Guess,
she say, like playing with a chile. I can see her teeth but she ain’t smiling. I shake my head.
Guess,
she say again.

My collar feel real tight. I been in this house since I was born.
Marse won’t do that.

Some might call that back talk but Missus like a straight answer. She come up close, her fingers all tangled.
I tell you, I’ve been married to Brown five years come June, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do.

He mean to sell me?

The man said to me just now, That nigger buck’s worth a thousand dollars.
She lean on the table.
Don’t you see? You’re all he’s got left.

I think I might fall down.

He intends to leave you with a dealer in town tomorrow, buy some calves instead.

That ain’t gone happen.
I says it real quiet but I know she hear me.

Missus nod.

Mary?
That’s Marse a-shouting for her. She shoot off like a rabbit.

I got a lot to do. I find some old bags in the larder, start filling them. Cornmeal, flour, salt pork mostly. A couple handful of coffee for when I need to stay wake. The littlest pot for boiling.

Missus come back in so quiet I don’t hear her till she touch my elbow, and I jump. She don’t wear no clickety-clackety heels like other missuses. Too late to hide what I’m doing. She could call in Marse and have me whupped for thieving right this minute.

Take this,
she whisper, holding up a jar of peaches.

I shake my head.
It get broke,
I tell her.

She set it down, unlock the sugar cupboard, start a scooping.
Where do you plan to run?

Now here’s where I reckon I should seal up my mouth, but Missus, she already done got the noose round my neck.
Mexico, I reckon,
I says, real soft,
or the Arizona Territory.

I’m coming,
she say. Like she was talking about a party.

My face is stony.
Missus Brown—

That’s not my real name,
she remark.
I’m only called Brown the same way you are, because of him.
She jerk her head upstairs, where Marse’s lying on his’n couch with his’n bottle.

Missus, you talking crazy. You can’t come nowhere along of me.

Well I can’t stay with him,
she mutter, still a-scooping the sugar.
If I stay in this house another month—

Listen,
I start.

I’ll pick up this knife and put an end to it,
she say. Her hand be on the handle, skin on bone.

What this man done to her? I look in her brown eyes.
You slow me down,
I says,
I gotta move fast. I be a stray buck, contraband.

She smiling now, strange.
But I know how to sign for him, you see, I’ve practiced. I can sign a travel pass for you with my husband’s name! We’ll go in the carriage, and if patrollers stop us, I’ll say I’m going to visit my family.

I wants to shake her real hard.
You think Marse won’t lep up, soon’s he find his bed empty, ride over to Stern’s plantation and put the alarm out?

She chewing on her lip.

They come for us with dogs. They come with irons.

Damn you,
she say, eyes shining wet,
I can’t—
She turn round, she gone into the house.

On my own in the kitchen I gets a-thinking. She ain’t bad, for a white woman. I wouldn’t much mind her coming along. Like she say, take the carriage, show a pass, get farther faster that way. If it wasn’t impossible, it be a good plan.

My mind a-hopping about like a fly. If she could sneak out in the night without Marse knowing. If he sleep long, sleep all night and all day—but no, we’uns need more of a head start than that.

Halfway through the afternoon Missus come in again. Her eyes red but she got a hold of herself.

About supper,
I says, before she speak a word.

I don’t give a damn about supper.

I takes a breath, I says,
You don’t care for okra, do you?
I don’t say Missus.

She shrug.

Okra. It not your favorite.

Well, no. My favorite would be sweet potato,
she say,
the way you fix it with molasses.

I be sure to fix some sweet potato tonight, just for you.

Do, if you like,
say Missus, like some girl.

You be eating that sweet potato instead of that okra.

She look at me again, hard.

Since you don’t care for okra. Specially not the way I’s fixing it tonight.

She don’t say nothing.

I can’t be sure. I don’t know how much to tell her.
Marse gonna like it, though. Eat hims fill, bet you he does.

She take a step over to me.
What’s in the okra?

Never you mind,
I tell her.
I’s the cook. Yeah?

I suppose.

So leave the cooking to me.

When she gone I get the rest of supper all fixed and then I make the okra. My heart a going boom-boom. I’s never made it till now but I know how, my pappy teach me. I done pick the stuff in the woods months back, it be always in my charm bag round my neck. There come a moment I feel bad, but I says to myself,
Marse mean to leave you with this dealer tomorrow, buy some calves.
I taste the okra, just touch it to my tongue to be sure, then stir in more sugar. Marse, he like hims fixings sweet.

I bring in the supper like always. While they eating I wait outside. I think I hear talking, dishes and lids, plates and glasses. After while I don’t hear nothing. Not a word, not a holler. That’s worse. I wait.

This the moment. This’s it. I feels like some blind man. This the time my life split like a peach, and there’s a rotten side and a sweet yellow side, and which it gonna be?

Missus come out. Mary, that her name. I think maybe she gonna scream murder after all. Did we’uns understand each our selves? Did she think hims only going sleep? Or maybe she scared, now it come to it, maybe she say
Go.

Instead she put her hand in mine, real cool, smooth. No speaking.

I follow her into the room where Marse lie facedown in the okra. We stand for a little, make sure he not moving none.

Should I clear away?
I ask, not sure what I mean, except to get him out of sight.

Missus shake her head.
Never mind that.

It should be three, four day before any neighbor think to ride over to Brown’s. Maybe a week. He not a social man.

She turn, look in my face, she say
I packed my bag.
Her hand like a knot in mine.

Last Supper at Brown’s

A clipping from the
Tucson Star,
pasted in Scrapbook No. 1 at the Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott, Arizona, records that Negro Brown, aka Nigger Brown, killed his master in Texas in 1864 and “throughout all his wanderings … he was accompanied by his slain master’s wife.”

Susan Johnson, in “Sharing Bed and Board: Cohabitation and Cultural Difference in Central Arizona Mining Towns, 1863–1873” (in
The Women’s West,
edited by Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, 1987), rounds up various newspaper accounts that suggest the wife in question was Mary Brown, aka Mary DeCrow. The runaways’ romance seems to have lasted no longer than the journey into Arizona. That state’s 1864 census lists “Negro Brown” as living with “Santa Lopez” and a baby, and “Mary Brown,” a forty-two-year-old laundress from Texas, as living with a twenty-nine-year-old Mexican blacksmith called Cornelius Ramos (or Ramez or Reamis). She married Ramos the following year; they ran a boardinghouse, then worked mining claims and set up a goat ranch.