“But, by damn, I wrong you, Bill. For, as is obvious to a man of education, I have placed in your mouth, as it were, the words I wish to speak. I have, and I pray you forgive me, written you. You’re a damned character of mine, and for that I must apologize. Though not overly. For I have given you harsh truths to convey. And truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty. Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams. Do you say, Lizzie? Mal? Have I heaped upon this good, this finest, fellow a burden of truth too heavy to bear? Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, by the undergarments of both Saints Peter and Paul! And Hawthorne in his grave and me in mine.”
He shook his head slowly back and forth as it drooped toward the table. Elizabeth excused herself, gestured to Malcolm, and they began to clear.
“May I help, ma’am?” I asked her. But she affected not to have heard.
Her husband had. He said, “But you have helped, good fellow. We have spoken together of whales and cabbages and kings. Of Dutchmen and their papers, of poor Poe buried and remembered, and other scriveners buried and forgot.” His voice had grown softer, and he spoke now as though he had a sore throat. “You know, Bill, I am not unaccustomed to the minstrations of Dr. Charles Eliot Norton himself. He has called me mad. Poor fellow! I am but weary. I might sleep.”
Malcolm, returning to his place, said, “My father cannot always manage his wine.”
The father’s reddened eyes grew wide. His chin came up as if the end of his beard were a gunsight. He squinted down his face at Mal. “And you, sir,” he told him, “seem to know too much about such management. Or, anyway, to profess too much acquaintance with it.”
Mal held his stare, and I was astonished to watch his large, pale face seem to swell, as if it were a flower that opened before me. The boy’s lips, of a sudden, seemed thicker, and his nostrils more flared. Even the bones beneath his white cheeks gave the impression of broadening. Lizzie stood before her place at the table, gripping her napkin as if it were fastened to the solidity to which she needed, for safety’s sake, to hold. Her sad, sweet features seemed the face of a woman about to faint. The glow of perspiration I saw on Malcolm’s upper lip I also saw on his mother’s. His smile became a sneer, and I worried that father and son might fall upon one another.
I could imagine the boy as he strode through an Indian encampment, shooting the sick old men and terrified women. I could see him firing a rifle from the seat of a lurching wagon in some Western province, picking off an Indian rider not because they fought each other, but because the man was passing on a horse and made for a difficult shot placement and thus provided the boy with sport. And I saw him, of course, in Mrs. Hess’s parlor, too drunk to remember the fellow with the store-bought face, all but poisoned with the excess of his pleasures.
M’s red eyes narrowed, and he wiped at them as if the sight he had seen were too exhausting for the very tissue of his flesh. “I did not raise my son to be a lout. Nor to demonstrate my failures in fatherhood before a stranger at our board.”
“Sir,” Malcolm said, his face seeming to shrink.
“Whom do you address, boy?” his father whispered.
“Sir,” Malcolm said to me, “I am heartily sorry. And sir”—he had turned to his father—“I regret my impulsive words. I respect no man as you, sir.”
M’s eyelids were fluttering, and he seemed not to hear.
“None,” Malcolm said, as if he were dismissing a servant who proffered food.
And M lay his large head, as if it weighed fifty pounds and the muscles of his neck had given in, upon his cutlery, and he closed his eyes.
Again, Elizabeth said, “Oh.”
“I have stayed too long and exhausted him,” I said. I placed the mask beneath my arm and rose. “I brought brandy,” I said. “It might remain in the pocket of his coat.”
“He will doubtless find it,” she said. “You were good to sell us the gun.”
“It is a gift, ma’am. You will tell your husband the Colt is a gift of a former soldier and a grateful reader. Will you say that to him?”
“Exactly, I think you wish, as you have said it to me.”
I affected a little bow. It was a botch because the veil began to slide forward and I had to mash my hand, already burdened with my hat, upon the top of my head to keep the veil in place.
She said, “I have watched him, grinning like a great, pale cat, pat the trees in Madison Square and thank them for growing. I have heard him, on the other hand, look as if into stormy winds and say nothing for a week at a time. He … ebbs and flows. With or without liquor, in the drinking of which he overindulges. His mother was a woman of appetites. His father was said to be a man of such swings of spirit, and I know for a fact it was an affliction of his brother. Sometimes I fear I see it in you, Mal. Oh, Mr. Bartholomew, it is as he said! We burden you. Forgive us.”
Mal stood behind his chair, staring at her with dark eyes in a white face. He might have wished her dead, for all the affection I saw in his features.
“I would serve you, ma’am,” I said, and I said it again at the door.
Someone, at any rate, would be served.
A little before dawn, when I finally slept, I dreamed a dream, and it wakened me. I dreamed, or I speculated upon, as I fell into sleep, or I was haunted by, the chambered drum of the Colt revolving. I could see it and, though it hung before me in this reverie, I could at the same time feel its weight in my hand. The weight was vast, but the drum turned smoothly, immensely, inevitably. It seemed to me that I felt the tremendous turning of the earth itself in the revolving of the drum.
She lived on the ground floor, and even her children helped, at dawn, to carry in the water she would use all day. They stored it in wooden barrels from pickled cucumbers and olives and whiskey I had seen her haul, as big around as she, from the alleys behind the merchants. From the steam above the tub, while Chun Ho poured more water in, as her stove roared and heated the room sufficiently to almost send me to sleep, I said, “The future of the nation is in railroads. I will, surely, invest more heavily. It would be useful to you and your children if I could invest some dollars on your behalf. And I would be pleased to extend you credit. May I do so?”
She had been looking at me. I could tell from the way she turned away as my gaze came up. Her clothing, which resembled a soldier’s union suit, was soaked from steam and spilled water, and it clung to her child’s limbs and womanly torso. Now it was she, with her immobile face, whose eyes interrupted mine and sent them skittering off.
“The Union Pacific to the West, of course. Mr. Vanderbilt’s New York Central bringing trains across the Hudson. Any number of manufacturies of railroad cars, and steam boilers, and now our own American steel. Soon, Chun Ho, the island of Manhattan will boast an elevated railway from Battery Place up to Thirtieth Street on the western side — near Greenwich Street. Can you imagine? You can be drawn by steam, as I am here parboiled by it, virtually through the air above town. Would your children enjoy an aerial ride?”
She stood beside me, leaning away, looking away, to hand down a heavy bar of brown soap.
“Thank you,” I said. “Where are your children?”
As if exasperated by my mannerliness, she turned toward me her smooth, expressionless face. Her eyes fell, and I felt the fall, as if of cold rain, upon my unmasked face, and then my throat and chest and then the water that covered my lap.
“Children — mother. Mother of Chun Ho.”