Dreams of Glory Page 16

  “Really, Mr. Stapleton,” she would whisper, “where do you think you are, in the Holy Ground?”

  “It’s where I hope to be later tonight,” he would say, slipping his hand over her breast. She would spring from his grasp, blushing and crying, “One blasphemy at a time is all I can stand.”

  She had totally forgotten the life of prayer that had been such a central part of her country days. Her husband had become her god, so violent was her love for him, so complete her desire to please him. I want an amorous wife, he had said, and she was soon as amorous as Madame de Pompadour. I want a beautiful wife, he had said, and she was ready to spend eight hours a day enduring the tortures of the hairdresser, lacing her whalebone stays to the point of anguish, prowling the shops in search of new skin creams and lotions. She saw herself as redeeming him from his faithlessness, his doubts about married love. When he chided her for being too shy, for acting like a bumpkin at their first dinner parties, and forbade her to use the Quaker “thee” and “thou” except in the intimacy of their bedroom, she had been as humble as a penitent under rebuke from the monthly meeting, indeed from all the monthly meetings of all the Quakers in the world. She had forced herself to become as forward, as blasé before the “hells” and “goddamns” and wenching talk that were the staple of New York parties, as the most loudly and proudly self-proclaimed women of fashion.

  Then the bad dream, the war, had begun. It had been hard to believe its reality at first. It had gone so swiftly from rioting and mobbing to regiments of grim-eyed Yankees parading New York’s streets with muskets on their shoulders while the King’s ships-of-the-line loomed above the town, with their tiers of cannon. Hugh kept saying it was all madness begun by Boston fanatics. He and other merchants had tried to be voices of moderation, of peace, and were soon suspected and reviled by both sides.

  She was pregnant with their second child when the trouble started. Hugh had sent her out to the family mansion in Hackensack, where old Malcolm Stapleton sat morosely drunk most of each day, bemoaning the idea of opposing the King and destroying the British Empire he had helped to found by drubbing the Spanish and French and their Indians in previous wars. Yet he was ready enough to roar defiance of Parliament at committee meetings. He was a born fighter and Hannah shuddered at the thought that her children might inherit his warrior blood.

  With business at a standstill, Hugh decided to go to Amsterdam and set up a partnership with one of his Dutch relatives. He was his mother’s son. Nothing, not even a war, was as important as “improving some moneys.” No sooner had Hugh transferred his capital to Holland than war began in earnest in Massachusetts. Instead of coming home, Hugh became the unofficial representative of a half-dozen Dutch firms at St. Eustatius in the West Indies, where he was soon funneling tons of badly needed gunpowder, muskets, cannon, and uniforms to Washington’s army. Hannah was left to cope with managing all the affairs of the Stapletons at home. Old Malcolm was a hopeless businessman. Paul Stapleton, driven out of New York by the war and living at Great Rock Farm to avoid his father, professed only irritated indifference to the family’s finances. Like his father, he devoted most of each day to getting drunk. Hannah was left to preside at the Hackensack town house in Catalyntie’s place and simultaneously supervise the operation of a 500-acre farm, an iron furnace, and a copper mine.

  As she struggled with accounts and listened to the smiling lies of the foundry master, a fat, cunning German named Klock, somewhere Hannah could hear Catalyntie Stapleton laughing. Tell me the good of your love and humility now, my little Quaker. Now you are learning how much the world values them. Humility gets stepped on. Love gets neglected. Hugh is like me. He knows the only thing worth loving: money.

  Then came not tales of war from distant Massachusetts, but war itself, sweeping over New Jersey like a giant wave from the depths of the Atlantic. First the sullen beaten Americans, then the confident pursuing British, then the mob.

  Some of the mob were loyalists, who sincerely believed that the rebellion had been started by scheming malcontents who deserved to be punished. But most of them were farmhands, runaway slaves, indentured servants, hungry for a chance to vent their hatred of the rich, hungrier for loot. They gathered in front of the Stapleton house, howling for “the congressman.” Malcolm Stapleton had been a member of the Continental Congress but had resigned rather than vote for the Declaration of Independence. Until Congress approved that document, he had denounced Yankee extremists as ferociously as British oligarchs. Thereafter he had swallowed his disapproval and stood with his country. Too old to join Washington’s army, he had accepted command of the revolutionary militia in Bergen County. To the loyalist-led mob, this made him a traitor.

  They dragged the old man out of the house and hustled him across the Hackensack green to the dank stone jail. Then they swarmed through the house, smashing the crystal chandeliers, hacking the Chippendale furniture, stuffing the silver forks and spoons, the silver bowls, the teapots and trays into sacks. Hannah had rushed into the street to find the British commander, a bored young captain who told her that as long as his soldiers were not looting, what the loyal Americans did to the disloyal Americans was none of his business.

  She went back to the wrecked house and told the black nurse, Maggie, to take her frightened little sons, Charles and Malcolm, to Great Rock Farm. She would stay in Hackensack; it was her duty. Her father-in-law would need food and drink and firewood in that vile jail. She would be safe enough, she assured Maggie. There was nothing left to steal. The mob had already turned its attention to the other houses on the green.

  Two hours later, as the chaos outside subsided, Hannah heard footsteps crunching through the broken glass on the first floor. She went to the head of the stairs. They looked up at her through the twilight, the huge Dutch boy with his floppy hat and the short, squat Englishman with the dirty red soldier’s coat. She knew what they wanted. The obscenity was gleaming in their eyes, shining in their smiles. “No,” she said. “No.”

  They did not say a word. They started up the stairs. She stood at the top, frozen with dread, disbelief. The Englishman had a shark’s face, the same recessed jaw and gleaming upper teeth she had seen on one of those sea killers hanging on a Delaware River dock. The Dutch boy’s smile was closer to a grimace, a scar. The fading light from a round window on the first landing touched their faces but left their bodies in darkness, converting their ascent into a vile parody of salvation. On they came, their boots striking each step in unison, each crash echoing through the empty house.

  Suddenly there was a shadowy figure at the bottom of the stairs. “Stop,” shrilled a voice that might have been a woman’s. “If you touch her, I guarantee I will have you hanged. I am a very personal friend of Major Walter Beckford, aide-de-camp to General von Knyphausen.”

  It was Paul Stapleton.

  The two faces ceased their ascent. The huge Dutch boy turned toward the speaker, who had neither gun nor sword. “I kill him, John?” he asked.

  “No. No, lad,” the Englishman said. “It never pays to kill an officer’s personal friends. Even if we know what kind of personal friends Major Beckford is likely to have.”

  “I’ll remember that, Nelson,” Paul said. “Once this rebellion is suppressed, the first thing we’ll do is put scum like you in your place. Now get out of here.”

  Slowly, sullenly, the two monsters clumped down the stairs and out of the house. Paul joined Hannah on the second-floor landing. She wanted to thank him, to make some gesture of gratitude. But she could not move or speak. She felt separated from her body, outside it, watching herself stare blankly at Paul as if he were a total stranger. Terror had turned her into one of those wax figures of the famous and infamous that sculptors displayed in galleries. Terror and something worse, a fear, even the knowledge, that the world had been transformed, that God had turned his face away from it. Or worse, that He had never been here, warming her heart, her life.

  Her hands still gripped the newel post, as if it w
ere a stanchion on the deck of a careening ship. The darkness seemed to swirl from the stairwell to engulf her. Paul touched her cheek. “It’s all right. They’re gone,” he said.

  Hannah shook her head, trying to tell him that they would never be gone, that the terrible truth they signified had become part of her flesh. But there was no point in telling this to Paul Stapleton. He was a walking, talking mockery of the God of Love that Hannah Cosway had worshiped. She remembered her husband’s words the first time his brother had come to dinner in New York, accompanied by a handsome young man. He’s a Williamite. She had had to ask, in her country naiveté, what that meant. The sin of Sodom. It’s very popular in London, which is where Paul acquired the taste. We’ve got quite a tribe of them here in New York. So far, no fire or brimstone has fallen on either place.

  Gently, Paul pried Hannah’s hands from the newel post and held them for a moment. “They won’t come back,” he said. Then, with the same deliberate gentleness, he embraced her. She was amazed to discover that this simple gesture made her feel human again, in spite of the liquor on Paul’s breath. A gust of grief swept over her; tears, tears of mourning, spilled from her eyes; something, someone, had died. Was it God or Hannah Cosway, the trusting, loving Quaker girl?

  “In spite of its being late in the day - which means I am thoroughly drunk,” Paul said, “the moment I heard you were staying alone, I rode here at a gallop. I know these sort of swine travel on the fringes of the army, looking for loot and anything else they can find.”

  “Your father - he’ll need-”

  “He can manage on bread and water for a night. Come out to the farm with me now.”

  Paul put Hannah on his horse and walked her to Great Rock Farm. The next day he used his influence with friends in the British army to free his father from the county jail. The old man joined them at the farm, where he resumed his habit of getting drunk every day and bemoaning America’s imminent humiliation.

  Paul drank with him. In a daze that was almost as bad as drunkenness, Hannah tried to make the old farmhouse habitable. A series of overseers and their families had lived in the house for the previous three decades, leaving it a near wreck. Its age - it had been built around 1680 - compounded her difficulties. Meanwhile, the fortunes of war underwent a startling reversal. George Washington won his miraculous victories at Trenton and Princeton, and the British retreated from most of New Jersey. But the war did not go with them. Bergen County became a frontier across which both sides waged a savage partisan struggle. Fear remained part of Hannah’s days and nights.

  Those were the days when Malcolm Stapleton began telling her his war stories. He stopped drinking and tried to organize the county’s militia to give the civilians some protection. But age and brandy had sapped the physique that had once been indifferent to Canadian winters. In February, the old man died of pleurisy, his last words a lament: “My poor country.” His daughter-in-law and son were left to confront a war that now seemed endless. When Paul started drinking again after his father’s burial, Hannah begged him to stop. “If not for your own sake, then for my sake,” she had said.

  To her surprise - she had had no hope of success - Paul stopped. He got out his easel and brushes, and announced he would make amends by painting the subject of her choice. “Why not that snow lark?” she said, pointing out the window at the familiar bird, sitting on a bare branch. Three days later Paul presented her with a superb watercolor of a male snow lark. He had caught with remarkable exactness the pinkish-brown back and darker tail, the pale yellow throat.

  “I see you love birds as much as I do,” she said. “In the spring you must paint my favorite, the yellow titmouse.” One June day, Paul gave her the painting framed and ready to hang beside the snow lark. Once more his perception of color was amazing. He managed to blend a subtle green into the golden-yellow coat, precisely as it was on the living bird.

  “I can almost hear him singing,” Hannah said.

  That summer, with the British army back in New York, Paul went before a Bergen County magistrate and declared his neutrality. He took an oath not to speak or act against the interests of the United States and requested permission for a pass that would permit him to travel between New York and New Jersey at will. His friends in the British army had already assured him of a welcome in New York. Hannah could barely conceal her disapproval of this decision. Paul was clearly not a soldier. New York was the only place he could hope to earn money as a painter. But she found it hard to tolerate his abandonment of his country’s cause.

  Hannah concealed her opinion from Paul; they both tried to avoid politics. She told herself that his neutrality was a small price to pay for seeing him return to the practice of his art. She was fascinated by the mystery of his talent, how he could transfer life, in all its subtle colors and varied shapes, to a blank piece of paper or canvas. “It’s a little like watching God at work,” she told him. He said it was the highest compliment anyone had ever paid him.

  Paul called the portraits he painted in New York money painting. The other pictures he called personal painting. They included more watercolors of birds and landscapes, portraits of his two nephews, and dramatic visions of his mother and father. His mother appeared as a sibyl in a classic fable, gold coins in one outstretched hand; the other hand dripping blood. His father was on a parapet, leading an assault. But Paul’s favorite subject rapidly became Hannah Stapleton.

  He painted a series of portraits of her. For the first, he asked her to put on the Quaker clothes of her girlhood. She found it strangely exciting to lift the old brown dresses and white collars from her trunk. The portrait restored her youth. It was uncannily close to how she remembered herself. Innocence shone from the unlined face. Hannah almost wept when she saw it.

  Next Paul dressed her in her most expensive New York gown, a green paduasoy embroidered with cloth of gold. He recreated the elaborate hairstyle, the rouged cheeks, the pearls Hugh had given her on their first wedding anniversary. Again, the effect was mysterious. She felt catapulted back in time, yet facing a stranger.

  For her third sitting, Paul insisted she put on one of the faded house-dresses she wore for kitchen work. He sat her on a straight chair and painted her in winter light. It was chilling, dismaying. Did she look that gaunt, that tired? “Couldn’t you leave out a few lines in my poor face?” she asked.

  “I’m painting history here,” Paul said. “Nothing should be left out of history.”

  While Paul painted they talked. Gradually Hannah lost her repugnance for this different brother. She began to admire his ruthless honesty. He was amazingly frank about the course his life had taken. He blamed it on his mother. She was a cold woman. She gave him everything but affection and meanwhile destroyed his feelings for his father. Paul admitted what Hugh had told her of his sexual attraction for handsome young men. He now regarded it as an affliction. For one thing it was dangerous; the law made it a crime punishable by death. One never knew when a former lover, a secret enemy, would betray him. Since the war had driven him back to New Jersey, he had lived a celibate life. It had been difficult at first. That was why he drank. “For a time, I considered killing myself.”

  She cried out at the thought. “Paul! You’d abandon your soul to-”

  “Nothing. I don’t believe in your hell or heaven.”

  In a calm, empty voice, Paul told her that he believed things happened in the natural world according to laws of cause and effect that men were gradually discovering. He described the universe as seen by Isaac Newton and other scientists, a vast, impersonal machine. “Newton called God the prime mover, the force that put the machine in motion. I’m inclined to think it’s always been in motion. I think we’re all part of it, including our minds. We’re bound by cause and effect even when we think we’re free.”

  Hannah refused to accept this vision of the world. “You weren’t bound to risk your life to rescue me that night in Hackensack,” she said. “You could have stayed here at the farm. You could have run whe
n that monster Bogert threatened to kill you.”

  “What if I was really looking for death?”

  “You could find that here at the farm, anytime.”

  “Why won’t you concede the possibility of my explanation?”

  “Because I see what you’re doing. You won’t let me or anyone else love you.”

  A few weeks later, Paul asked Hannah if she still prayed in spite of the war and his lectures on atheism. “I try to pray,” she said. “I don’t always succeed.”

  “How do you do it? Do you recite formulas?”

  “No. I talk to God. Sometimes I argue with Him. I ask Him for faith.”

  The next day, Hannah sat for Paul again. Early spring sunshine streamed into the kitchen. He told her to look out the window and think about prayer. To pray, if she preferred. He wanted to capture the expression on her face.

  “Are you praying?” he asked after a few minutes of silence.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Talk out loud,” he said. “Or is it too private?”

  She smiled. “I’m talking about you.”

  “I’m flattered. Let me listen.”

  She stared at the empty north pasture. “I haven’t done it in so long. I don’t have any light.”

  “Light?”

  “That’s what Quakers call bearing witness in church. When someone stands up and talks.”

  “Try.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and tried to find her way back to the sunlit meeting house in Burlington. She imagined the surrounding green fields and orchards. The nearby shining river. She tried to remember the silence in the meeting house, the sense of the ingathered love she felt there.

  “Heavenly Father,” she said. “I’m thinking about my brother Paul. A man of great gifts. A man with a proud spirit. A man who has never known your love. He’s too proud to ask your help, Father. But you are too loving to refuse it. I believe that, Lord, even though I may never see a proof of it.”