I cut my meat into very small bits and brought them on my fork, one at a time, underneath the hem of the gray silk veil.
“May I ask,” I said between bites, “how Elizabeth fares?”
“Lizzie,” he sighed. He turned to Sam. “My son,” he said, “is recently dead.”
“I am so aggrieved on your account,” Sam said. “I wrote of the matter. In the Advertiser?”
M set his implements down. He rubbed at his beard and then tugged it, then tugged it again. “You are the gentleman who wrote of my Malcolm’s staying out late?”
Sam said, “It was known to many.”
“Needed it be said? And how late? And how often? And why a matter of concern? To Lizzie? To me? To the both? To the readers in Boston who do not read me but do read of me?”
“It is history, recorded and observed, sir.”
“And it needs to be said?”
“I do need generally to say it, sir. I believe it ought to be.”
“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” he murmured, pulling down his whiskers. “And why do you ask in your paper how Malcolm came by the pistol? Should he not have had one, he a military man? Your article seems to suggest an impropriety. Should we have prevented him from arming himself? Is it now that soldiers of the National Guard ride into danger unprotected and unarmed? There had been rumors of their riding into danger in the West. Now I sit at my desk and, as I work, I look up at its bookcase, and on the shelves, behind the glass doors, I see recollections of the War. Each is by a military commander. Each makes no mention of casting aside weaponry but, rather, of gathering together all that money may buy or that may be impounded or borrowed.
“And is there some speculation that something was said that night, at the door, at the late hour, by my wife, who admitted him to the house? Or that something may have been said by me early in the day or in the week or month before his late arrival, or even afterward, through the locked door to his room?”
Sam looked miserable. “Sir,” he said, “about the weapons: My editor thought it required saying, and so I said it. He is, if you know our paper, keen on the matter of civilians handing over their arms. I meant nothing subversive by it. I was pained by your pain, and still am. In no manner am I qualified to judge you as man or as parent to a son. I regard you too highly ever to trifle with your private feelings. I am grateful to receive their fruits, in your work, and I sorrow for you, and it is all.”
“Sam is your name?”
“Yes, sir. Sam Mordecai.”
“Yes,” he said. He put his fingers to his eyes and rubbed gently at the closed lids. I have never been in the presence of someone whose eyes seemed so uncomfortable. When he had finished rubbing, they looked threaded through with bloody vessels, and almost unseeing. His face wore a bland expression from that moment through much of the night. “Mordecai, you say?”
“Yes,” Sam said warily.
M placed his hand above Sam’s dinner plate. “Shake, then. We may speak of it again. We may not. But we’ll act as friends. It may be that we’ll be friends. We’ll be civil, though. A night is a long time to be together if we aren’t.”
I thought that Sam might weep for relief and for pleasure. “I’d always do my best for you, sir,” he whispered.
M looked in my direction and raised his brows, then shook his head. “I look at you, shipmate, and I see the screen that is set over everything.”
“Pleased to be of some use, then,” I said, but more bitterly than I intended. He sat back as if I had gestured with menace. “I am being humorous,” I said.
“You are not, I think, although I think you mean to be. It is my discourtesy. A man should not be employed by another as his emblem. Listen to us, then. We’re all apologizing to one another for the wrongs in the world and the flaws in heaven. We’ll have all the ills of the universe renounced by the time Mr. Cheerie brings us pies and puddings. And a tot or two more of this wine. We’ll toast to right navigation, shall we? To the poor fellows who forgot how to put a bight in a hawser, or who forgot how to snug a hawser on a bollard. Their coal barge,” he said, shaking his head, “drifted loose. It happens. It shouldn’t. And the tide met the current in a grievous chop. And over went a small mountain of coal. And down went the barge, for having shipped too much river aboard. And now we’ve a tidy navigational hazard on the waterway. It’s like making your way upriver in what we think of as actual life,” he said.
I waited for him to explain, but he drank at his wine.
“Do you know the Tenderloin?” I asked him, pouring out the last of the bottle.
“I have been to places on the western side of the city,” he said. “It is not where I would take Elizabeth and the girls for a stroll. Do you mean brothels and gambling dens, dance halls, saloons?”
“I do. And the remnants of Africa.”
“But that was in the lower end of the city,” he said. “Canal Street, Grand Street, am I right? Laurens? Thompson? It’s all but disappeared.”
“Because of the Loin.”
“I have seen a number of dark faces there.”
“White men pay to have black women,” I said.
“Better than the old way,” he said, “where they paid to own black women, who then gave birth to black women they might have.”
The corner of Sam’s notebook was in his hand.
“I am told that you are moderate on the Negro question.”
“Oh? Moderate? I am not for any more war, if that’s what you mean. Nor, though, am I — nor should I be! — moderate on the matter of the holding of slaves. It’s the holding of grudges I would warn against, either side, either army, either color. Now is the time to get the black man what we may without requiring the South to carry it to him on bare feet. I said in a tale of mine once that the shadow of the Negro is a long one.”
“Babo!” Sam said.
He reached to pat Sam’s arm in acknowledgment. Sam’s sallow face began to glow, though all the while his jaw muscles worked and his eyes, as if on mechanical swivels, moved from M to me and back.
“We are in for a difficult time,” he said.
Sam said, “You mean tonight?”
“And tomorrow, shipmate. Many tomorrows from now.” His focus disappeared, and his eyes seemed made of slate, absorbing light and giving little. He might, for all I knew, have been thinking of his son and then of his son, of his daughters, and his baffled, unhappy woman.
Sam had surrendered. His notebook was out, I had watched it move from his inside breast pocket to his hand and then to his lap, where, with a stub of pencil, he scribbled while saying, “Sorry. Very sorry — a moment, if I—”
M did not hear him. I, consulting my watch, declared against dessert and signaled for the bill.
As if waking of a sudden, M smiled his resigned, baffled smile. “So we’ll voyage into darkest New York. We’ll mingle with the darker brothers.” He nodded his head. “I see them daily at the docks, of course. Once,” he said, “I shipped with them. I slung a hammock beside theirs. I labored on the decks and in the rigging with them.”
Sam, I saw, was racing across his little pages to get it all down. But Adam was waiting outside, I was certain, so I replaced the veil with the mask and I chivvied and prodded until Sam had tucked his notebook away and had hovered, assisting M from his chair, as if he were not more lithe and graceful than Sam himself. Cheerie threw a little salute, and I returned it, then we made our way among the tables and through the frightened or fascinated stares and out to the street where Adam—“You ax”—was waiting as I thought he would be.