The Dog Said Bow-Wow (15 page)

This at a time, mind you, when the reward for a runaway apprentice often ran as high as ten dollars! Mr. Thomas Cuttington obviously thought himself a man grievously ill-served.

At last my father emerged from the parlor with the newspaper in his hand. He closed the door behind him. His look then was so dark and stormy that I shrank away from him, and neither my sister nor I dared uncork any of the questions bubbling up within us. Grimly, he fetched his wallet and then, putting on his coat, strode out into the rain.

Two hours later he returned with one Horace Potter, a clerk from Flintham’s counting house, and Tacey’s indenture papers. The parlor doors were thrown wide and all the family, and our boarders as well, called in as witnesses. Tacey had by then been clothed by my mother in one of Patricia’s outgrown dresses, and since my sister was of average size for a girl her age, Tacey looked quite lost in it. She had washed her face, but her expression was tense and unreadable.

In a calm and steady voice, my father read the papers through aloud, so that Tacey, who could neither read nor write, might be assured they were truly her deed of service. Whenever he came to a legal term with which she might not be familiar, he carefully explained it to the child, with Mr. Potter — who stood by the hearth, warming his hands — listening intently and then nodding with judicious approval. Then he showed her the signature of her former master, and her own mark as well.

Finally, he placed the paper on the fire.

When the indenture went up in flame, the girl made a sound unlike anything I have ever heard before or since, a kind of wail or shriek, the sort of noise a wild thing makes. Then she knelt down before my father and, to his intense embarrassment, seized and kissed his hand.

So it was that Tacey came to live with us. She immediately became like another sister to me. Which was to say that she was a harsh, intemperate termagant who would take not a word of direction, however reasonably I phrased it, and indeed ordered me about as if it were I who was
her
servant! She was the scourge of my existence. When she was seventeen — and against my mother’s horrified advice — she married a man twice her age and considerably darker-skinned, who made a living waiting upon the festivities of the wealthy. Julius Nash was a grave man. People said of him that even his smile was stern. Once, when he was courting her and stood waiting below-stairs, I, smarting from a recent scolding, angrily blurted out, “How can you put up with such a shrew?”

That solemn man studied me for a moment, and then in a voice so deep it had often been compared to a funerary bell replied, “Mistress Tacey is a woman of considerable strength of character and that, I have found, is far to be preferred over a guileful and flattering tongue.”

I had not been looking to be taken seriously, but only venting boyish spleen. Now I stood abashed and humbled by this Negro gentleman’s thoughtful reply — and doubly humiliated, I must admit, by the source of my mortification. Then Tacey came stepping down the stairs with a tight, triumphant smirk and was gone, to reappear in my tale only twice more.

Yet if this seems to you an unlikely thing that my father would be so generous to a mulatto girl he did not know and who could do him no conceivable benefit, then I can only say that you did not know this good man. Moreover, I am convinced by the high regard in which he was held by all who knew him that this was but one of many comparable deeds, and notable only in that by its circumstances we were made aware of it.

How changed was my poor father’s condition when last I saw him alive! That was the time my mother took me to the insane ward at Pennsylvania Hospital to visit him.

It was a beautiful, blue-skyed day in June.

I was fifteen years old.

Philadelphia was a wonderful place in which to be young, though I did not half appreciate it at that time. Ships arrived in the harbor every day with silk and camphor from Canton, hides from Valparaiso, and opium from Smyrna, and departed to Batavia and Malacca for tin, the Malabar coast for sandalwood and pepper, and around the Cape Horn with crates of knives and blankets to barter with credulous natives for bales of sea otter skins. Barbarously tattooed sailors were forever staggering from the groggeries singing oddly-cadenced chanteys and pitching headlong into the river, or telling in vivid detail of a season lived naked among cannibals, married to a woman whose teeth had been filed down to points, all the while and with excruciating exactitude slowly unwrapping an oilcloth packet unearthed from the bottom of a sea-chest to reveal at the climax of the yarn: a mummified human ear. The harbor was a constant source of discontent for me.

As were the grain wagons which came down the turnpike from Lancaster and returned west laden with pioneers and missionaries bound for the continental interior to battle savage Indians or save their souls for Christ, each according to his inclination. Those who stayed behind received packages from their distant relations containing feathered head-pieces, cunningly woven baskets, beadwork cradleboards, and the occasional human scalp. Every frontiersman who headed up the pike took a piece of my soul with him.

Our hotel was located in that narrow slice of streets by the Delaware which respectable folk called the wharflands, but which, because a brick wall two stories high with an iron fence atop it separated Water street from Front street (the two ran together; but Water street served the slow-moving wagon trade of the wharves, and Front street the dashing gigs and coaches of the social aristocracy), we merchants’ brats thought of as the Walled City. Our streets were narrow and damp, our houses and stores a bit ramshackle, our lives richly thronged with provincial joys.

Philadelphia proper, by contrast, was the sort of place where much was made of how wide and clean and grid-like the streets were, and a Frenchman’s casual gallant reference to it as “the Athens of America” would be quoted and re-quoted until Doomsday. Yet, within its limits, it was surprisingly cosmopolitan.

The European wars had filled the city with exiles — the vicomte de Noailles, the duc d’Orléans, a hundred more. The former Empress Iturbide of Mexico could be seen hurrying by in her ludicrously splendid carriage. In the restaurants and bookshops could be found General Moreau, a pair of Murats, and a brace of Napoleons, were one to seek them out. The count de Survilliers, who had been King of Spain, had his own pew in St. Joseph’s Church off Willing’s alley. We often saw him on the way there of a Sunday, though we ourselves went to St. Mary’s, half a block away, for our family had sided with the trustees in the church fight which had resulted in the bishop being locked out of his own cathedral. Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who was a naturalist, could be encountered stalking the marshes at the edge of town or along the river, in forlorn search of a new species of plover or gull to name after himself.

Still, and despite its museums and circuses, its (one) theater and (one) library and (three) wax-works, the city was to a young river rat little more than an endless series of enticements to leave. Everything of any interest at all to me had either come from elsewhere or was outward bound.

But I seem to have lost the thread of my tale. Well, who can blame me? This is no easy thing to speak of. Still, I set out to tell you of my final memory — would to God it were not! — of my father when he was alive.

And so I shall.

My mother and I walked to the hospital together. She led, concentrated and brisk, while I struggled not to lag behind. Several times she glared me back to her side.

For most of that mile-and-some walk from our boarding-house, I managed not to ask the question most vexing my mind, for fear it would make me sound lacking in a proper filial piety. Leaving the shelter of the Walled City at Market street, we went first south on Front then up Black Horse alley, while I distracted myself by computing the area between two curves, and then turning down Second past the malt houses and breweries to Chestnut and so west past the Philadelphia Dispensary, where I tried to recall the method Father Tourneaux had taught me for determining the volume of tapering cylindrical solids. South again on Third street, past the tannery and the soap-boiler’s shop and chandlery, I thought about Patricia’s husband, Aaron, who was in the China trade. Somebody — could it have been Jack? — had recently asked him if he planned someday to employ me as a navigator on one of his ships, and he had laughed in a way that said neither yea nor nay. Which gave me much to ponder. We cut through Willing’s alley, my mother being a great believer that distances could be shortened through cunning navigation (I ducked my head and made the sign of the cross as we passed St. Joseph’s), and jogged briefly on Fourth. One block up Prune street, a tawny redhead winked at me and ducked down Bingham’s court before I could decide whether she were real or just a rogue memory. But I was like the man commanded not to think about a rhinoceros, who found he could think of nothing else. At last, the pressures of curiosity and resentment grew so great that the membrane of my resolve ruptured and burst.

“I do not fully understand,” I said, striving for a mature and measured tone but succeeding only in sounding petulant, “exactly what is expected of me.” I had not been to see my father — it had been made clear that I was not to see him — since the day he entered the hospital. That same day my littlest sister had fled the house in terror, while this gentlest of men overturned furniture and shouted defiance at unseen demons. The day it was decided he could no longer be cared for at home. “Is today special for any reason? What ought I to do when I see him?”

I did not ask “Why?” but that was what I meant, and the question my mother answered.

“I have my reasons,” she said curtly. “Just as I have good and sufficient reason for not informing you as to their exact nature just yet.” We had arrived at the hospital grounds, and the gatekeeper had let us in.

My mother led me down the walk under the buttonwood trees to the west wing. A soft southern breeze alleviated the heat. The hospital buildings were situated within a tract of farmland which had been preserved within the city limits so that the afflicted could refresh themselves with simple chores. Closing my eyes, I can still smell fresh-mown hay, and hear the whir of a spinning wheel. Sunflowers grew by the windows, exactly like that sunflower which had appeared like a miracle one spring between the cobbles of our back alley and lasted into the autumn without being trampled or torn down, drawing goldfinches and sentimental young women. You could not wish for a more pleasant place in which to find your father imprisoned as a lunatic.

The cell-keeper’s wife came to the door and smiled a greeting.

My mother thrust a banana into my hand. “Here. You may give him this.” Which was the first intimation I had that she was not to accompany me.

She turned and crunched off, down the gravel path.

The cell-keeper’s wife led me through the ward to a room reserved for visitors. I cannot recall its furniture. The walls were whitewashed. A horsefly buzzed about in the high corners, irritably seeking a passage into the outer world.

“Wait here,” the woman said. “I’ll summon an attendant to bring him.”

She left.

For a long still time I stood, waiting. Eventually I sat down and stared blindly about. Seeing nothing and thinking less. Hating the horsefly.

The banana was warm and brownish-yellow in my hand.

Aeons passed. Sometimes there were noises in the hall. Footsteps would approach, and then recede. They were never those of the man I fearfully awaited.

Finally, however, the door opened. There was my father, being led by the arm by a burly young attendant. He shuffled into the room. The attendant placed him in a chair and left, locking the door behind him.

My father, who had always been a rather plump man, with a merchant’s prosperous stomach, was now gaunt and lean. His flesh hung loosely about him; where his face had been round, loose jowls now hung.

“Hello, Father,” I said.

He did not respond. Nor would he meet my eyes. Instead, his gaze moved with a slow restlessness back and forth across the floor, as if he had misplaced something and were trying to find it.

Miserably, I tried to make conversation.

“Mary finished making her new dress yesterday. It’s all of green velvet. The exact same color as that of the cushions and sofa and drapes in Mr. Barclay’s parlor. When Mother saw the cloth she had chosen, she said, ‘Well, I know one place you won’t be wearing that.’ “

I laughed. My father did not.

“Oh, and you recall Stephen Girard, of course. He had a cargo of salt at his wharf last summer which Simpson refused to buy — trying to cheapen it to his own price, you see. Well, he said to his porter, ‘Tom, why can’t you buy that cargo?’ and Tom replied, ‘Why, sir, how can I? I have no money.’ But ‘Never mind,’ said Girard, ‘I’ll advance you the cost. Take it and sell it by the load, and pay me as you can.’ That was last summer, as I said, and now the porter is well on his way to being Simpson’s chief rival in the salt trade.”

When this anecdote failed to rouse my father — who had avidly followed the least pulsation in the fortunes of our merchant neighbors, and loved best to hear of sudden success combined with honest labor — I knew that nothing I could hope to say would serve to involve him.

“Father, do you know who I am?” I had not meant to ask — the question just burst out of me.

This roused some spirit in the man at last. “Of course I know. Why wouldn’t I know?” He was almost belligerent, but there was no true anger behind his words. They were all bluff and empty bluster and he still would not meet my eyes. “It’s as clear as…as clear as two plus two is four. That’s…that’s logic, isn’t it? Two plus two is four. That’s logic.”