1896

Franklin and Mrs. Newcombe had just come from the little crooked houses of the Point, where they had—with other members of the Ladies’ Anti-Indigent League—distributed a wagonload of groceries to the poor, going from house to house with their smiles and their kind words. Franklin had never before walked about the Point and he was struck by how mean and close the houses were. In some earlier century they might have been charming, he supposed, filled with plain-dressed Quakers and Puritans forever sweeping their floors, but now they were given over to hordes of Irish children with their smutched faces. It was all Franklin could do to stand politely in the front room while the wagon driver and his boy carried boxes around to the kitchen.

Afterwards they had taken tea at Baylor’s Coffee House, and then, when the children and their governess arrived, had walked down to the wharves, for there could be no trip to town without James wanting to see the ships and the railroad cars. Ellen had her parasol up, and Franklin his cane, and as they went there was a consciousness between them, Franklin thought, of how like a family they were. James led them onto Long Wharf and then alongside the railroad yard, only prevented by the governess from running to the roundhouse with its turntable, behind which was the chuffing stack of a waiting engine. Out past the roundhouse one of the New York steamers was docking, the wharf filled with hacks and carriages awaiting the disembarking passengers.

He had survived Mr. Ryckman. Whatever the man thought of him, whatever final interview had occurred between him and his daughter—Franklin liked to think that Ryckman had had to listen to Ellen enumerate Franklin’s many fine qualities—he had not managed to persuade her to abandon the path she was on, or even to retreat. Indeed, if anything, she looked at Franklin now, spoke to him now, as if they had come through some trial together, as if her father’s opinion of him had only served to strengthen her purpose. She was not, after all, a shrinking woman. She had her own money and her own station, which was now, frankly, above that of her father’s. Perhaps the man cared only to deliver himself of an imprecation and, having done so, had withdrawn with his hands washed. If that indeed were the state of things, then was not the last impediment removed, and did not the way to Windermere truly lie before him?

He took in the woman strolling beside him. Strange and unexpected thing! For he found he rather liked her. She with her homely face, and her fierce love for her children, and her simple honesty. Just the day before, as if she had been laboring under some scruple, she had felt compelled to explain to him why she had undertaken the planting of the maze. It was a last gesture toward her late husband, she had said with a nervous glance at him. For the maze had had its genesis during their honeymoon in England. She and her husband had been so taken with Hampton Court that they had vowed they would re-create its maze on the Newport property that had been a wedding gift from her father. But oh! children and architects, and setting up house in New York, and then the work of building Windermere itself (there was the old Doubling Point cottage that had first to be pulled down) had delayed them. And then her dear husband had sickened! It was, she said—she meant the planting of the maze; she had turned to look wistfully at it, for they were strolling upon the lawn at Windermere—a living monument to him, in memoriam, she meant. She hoped he did not mind.

He had told her he found it charming, charming! And her loyalty to her late husband—how well it spoke of her!

Now, walking beside her along the wharf, he wondered: Did it make it better that he actually liked her? Or worse? Would it—the thing he did; the life that loomed—would it, after all, be more easily accomplished, more easily endured if the woman were unlikable—vain, foolish, inconsiderate, a receptacle for his contempt?

Not for the first time he entertained an idea: Was what he was doing—well, he wouldn’t use the word “evil” with its antique reek and its cloven creatures—but all the same, would not the world consider what he was doing immoral? Not his marrying for money, of course—people did that every day—but the other thing, the one great, deep lie, the duplicity with which he cloaked himself and which she would find out about only when it was too late. For had he not masked his true self with polish just as he did his graying hair? All his charm and his doting asides, his taking her hand, the chaste kisses. She would soon enough learn—dear God, that first night!—that they were not the prelude she thought they were.

And was that evil? He supposed it was. The sheer amount of deception the thing entailed, the designing, the fabrication, the spinning of the web. And still he knew he would go through with it. He had never for a second wavered, was not wavering now. If the world had no place for him as he was, if it must call him the most vile names and force him into falseness and deception merely to exist, then did he not have the right to use that deception, that falseness, in the prosecution of his life—in short, to turn the rules of the game to his favor? And after all he was not planning on enslaving the poor woman. She would be quite free to live her life as she wished. She could continue with her reform movements, her gardening, her children. She could entertain, and visit, and drink her tea with milk as she did. And he would be there by her side when required, attentive, well-dressed, with always a charming smile for her and her guests. And who knew? He had heard that some women did not care for the bedroom, that the passions of their husbands were something they tolerated but did not encourage. He would hold on to that happy possibility.

“It’s the Puritan,” he heard beside him. They had come down past the chandlers’ and the shipwrights’ buildings and were now where they could see the steamer at its moorings. He had booked passage on the Puritan’s sister ship, the Pilgrim, for the following day.

“I won’t be gone long,” he said.

“But a week,” she said with a pout she sometimes used and which did not suit her. “Does it need to be so long? The season’s passing.”

They stood and gazed softly at each other. Little Sarah was holding her mother’s hand and asking could they not have an ice. Franklin let a thoughtful expression come over him, and then gazed away across the harbor waters down to the leadworks with its great octagonal shot tower.

“It’s not just New York,” he said finally. “I must go to Baltimore. There is a matter of some importance about which I must speak to my father.”

He let it hang between them, yet another filament. It was quite bracing, the discovery that one was capable of such spinning.