Wednesday 19 June ’22
The Countinghouse
No, Recompense, my beloved;—my sister never did return. No body nor any more of her possessions washed up at the Luquer Mill, nor was her slender form found by the fishermen downstream. We sent notice of her disappearance to every municipality from Albany to Philadelphia & Suffolk, and offer’d a reward for news of her whereabouts; but all those who came seeking it proved adventurers. So far as I knew, Pearl Winship had never gone farther than Fly Market under her own power, yet she had seduced a man of God, committed arson, and ventured out untraced into the world. I had clearly taken her measure incorrectly. If she had not changed overnight, then she had never been the woman I’d supposed her.
All my years, I’d lived in loathful fear of death. I had eaten my self with worry about how people lived on the Other Side; had kept on in my father’s business because it was my debt to the departed; had dreamed up a fitting monument to soar over the water & memorialise my terrour of and curiosity about what might come. Yet to ken the suffering of grieving for the dead could not prepare me for the pain of not knowing if Pearl walked amongst them. At least, I thought, had she managed to burn down both bridge & distillery, I would have been ruined outright, had cause to despise her, & begun my life anew in some other locale. Had she died, your Aunt Tem & I would have laid her in the churchyard, mourned her, & bid her adieu. Had she sent news from Boston that she never desired to see us more, we could likewise have said, Fare thee well.
But you see, we could do naught. I challenge any man who claims haunting by the dead to feel the chill of being haunted by uncertainty; & I will shew you a changed man. Her absence asserted it self by degrees, like each day’s new dawn; but the moment I began to feel at leisure to wallow in my grief, the chair by the fire, in which she had so liked to sit, would suddenly have a hopeful air of prophecy about it, as if it awaited her return to its lap. Or if a morning came on which I felt a tingling sensation she might be nigh, by day’s end I would have seen Mr. Severn,—who knew to the depths of his faith she was dead, and mourned her accordingly, his heart cracked open by pain. I some times thought he had far more knowledge than I, & must surely be correct; & I some times thought, how could he think otherwise? To have lost her to untimely death was tragick, but for him to imagine her purposing to leave him would have been intolerable misery.
I began to treat even Pearl’s mottled cat as a potential sign. When, in the first few weeks of its solitude, it would cry for her, I believed its mistress must soon come home; and when, late in winter, it crawled beneath her chair and died, I suffered anew. I had never cared a jot for this critter, but I buried my face in its cold fur and wept for all we both had lost. I tied the small corpse in a pillow slip & buried it in the yard, all around which the crocus were just beginning to push up their shoots. I marked its sepulchre with the rosemary plant Abiah has ever since used to flavour chickens & potatoes, that should my sister ever return, she would be able to find her departed friend. No doubt its cat flesh has nourished you well, just as we have all feasted on British soldiers all the years we’ve enjoyed asparagus in summer time.
On certain days, I found it unbearable to see to rebuilding the distillery & the bridge, when Pearl occupied my every thought. On others, I counted it a blessing to have such work to distract me from my more intimate cares.
The monies from our ensurance came through soon enough, but were a mixed blessing: Associated Underwriters provided us ample funds to rebuild & to replace the lost machinery, but with a concomitant increase in our rate so steep, I thought it should do us in within the year. The war for independence had largely been fought over taxation; why, I wondered then, had no one bothered to cry out against the usury of ensurance? Nevertheless, there seemed naught to do but proceed. Winship Daughters Gin ordered timber & lumber almost worthy of a bridgeworks, all through Theunis van V., whose profit thereby was at least some consolation. We managed to keep all our indentured servants and nearly all our hired men employed full-time in the rebuilding; & the new rectifying stills & press were slated to arrive in spring, so we might resume production then. The repairs progressed as well as anyone could hope,—we would have roofs on all our new buildings before the equipment arrived,—but each morning when I woke, I felt as if the bank & the ensurance company each held a silken noose about my throat. I imagined them finely made & gossamer, yet capable of choking me nonetheless. That the hangman would in truth come not for me but for your father provided no solace.
Dear God, my daughter, I am glad you were not among us then; you would have thought you had automata for parents. We had to tread so carefully;—manage each day’s work to perfection, and stretch each penny to the size of a half dollar. We still could not say if our plan of adjusting the angles of the bridge’s two levers would result in a stable structure, and this caused us daily anxiety. We renounced meat for our table, and ate beans & vegetables, like the poor. Your bright-spirited father grew grim as a shade. For my part, although I suffer’d nightmares over the twin prospects of failing at the bridge & the distillery, there was no thought induced more dread than the notion of Patience packing up her four children & linens in a cart & cursing me as they drove away to who knew where. For her sake, I had to keep my mind on our eventual success. & such fancies were yet as nothing compared to my dreams of Pearl. No matter to what task I attended, images of her accompanied me. As springtime burgeoned, I marked the time when she might have given birth to a child, as sloe-eyed as she’d been on emerging from the womb. As spring turned to summer, and the Brookland lever began to arc gracefully on its now slightly diverted course out toward the river’s centre, I imagined the baby smiling & drooling, holding up her own wobbling head,—for although I knew naught of this child, including that it had not been drowned in the East River & et by sea creatures, I believed her a girl child. & I sensed that, in direct proportion to the way I’d theretofore been denied the consolation of the fruits of my womb, this girl would be Pearl’s balm of Gilead,—the restitution for all she had suffered, & the emblem of her love.
I believed if my own father had brought me home to meet my Pappy, bearing that old man so little affection as he did, Pearl would one day bring this gell to meet us. I recognised I had done Pearl a grievous wrong,—both in cursing her & in treating her as cursed, the rest of her days,—but I thought she must know I had loved her the more deeply because of it. She had a temper, but she had also a good heart, and I thought the seed of forgiveness must already have taken root there. I imagined various scenarios for her return: a simple arrival, on the ferry or the stage; or a letter written in her energetick hand, containing little news but the name of her daughter & the place of her abode. I almost wished it might be the latter, that I could craft with care my reply to her,—pour out the contents of my heart and the apology I had been wrong never to muster when she walked amongst us. She might write back directly, or hold her peace; but when the weather next turned fair, she’d begin the slow journey home, the child exclaiming on every thing from the back of the mail coach or the side of the boat.
& surely you know this is why your father and I visit the Twin Tankards whenever a roaming balladeer arrives;—because I still hope one may bring a ballad of Pearl, scrubbing floors for a living in some northern town, or married to a wealthy New Bedford seaman. Though she will be a woman of middle years by now, I will recognize her by her silent tongue and her raven-black hair, shot through, like Aunt Tem’s, with grey. I will recognize her by her beautiful bastard child. And I will leave the distillery in the capable hands of your aunt and your Uncle Izzy, and travel north, south, east, or west to speak with her or fetch her back home. If ever you & Jonas hear such a tale, I pray you,—report it to me right away.
We resumed production of gin in May of 1802. Many of our customers took pity on our misfortune & doubled their usual orders. A few,—Elisha Green of Albany among them,—sent charitable contributions to help us regain our footing after the disaster. The bridge we had begun to repair & realign as soon as the weather had turned warm and the timber merchant had been able to ship our materials down the North River; there was almost enough delay in this to make me despair of the bridge’s eventual completion, as we now needed more than we had supposed, & our demand sorely taxed the new merchant’s supply. Your father and his crew traveled to New-York each day to continue work on their realigned lever. Marcel & I did the sadder work of making up lost ground on the Brookland side. For each day’s progress, and for each section of the arm compleated without fatal accident, we ought to have given thanks; but I found I could think of nothing but the unlikelihood the two arms should actually meet midstream, & how far behind New-York’s side we were, & how we had already once been where then we stood, but in happier circumstances.
By the end of that building season, the bridge stood close to completion. The New-York lever had arrived at its ultimate length, and its course seemed to have been corrected; my own lagged perhaps three months’ labour behind. Oh, Recompense, I’d have danced round a fire & called out the names of the native gods could I thus have ensured even another week of clement weather, so anxious was I to see the thing done. I cannot express in words the bittersweet way its grandeur struck me. Not even a drawing as large or lovely as your Aunt Pearl’s could begin to approximate its beauty as it arced so much of the way across the straits; & yet, each day it was not finished, its expenses mounted, and I began to think it was worth neither the hundreds of thousands of dollars it had cost nor the trouble it had brought us. I sometimes thought, if we eventually ruined our selves over it, at least it would be a grand thing over which to be ruined. At other times I remembered our unwilling partner, Patience, & knew such thoughts were folly.
That winter,—the same in which you were at last conceived,—proved the bitterest anyone could recall. A person could’n’t go outdoors without his eye lashes turning to icicles & the hairs freezing in his nostrils. A number of our chickens lost their combs to the frost bite, despite how well we’d packed their coop with straw; and Ivo Joralemon lost two toes of his remaining foot to exposure when he fell in a snow drift & took three hours to attract the attention of a rescuer.
The frost heave was prodigious come spring, tumbling fences that had withstood twenty winters. The papers predicted a dire fate for the bridge, but your father and I knew it was founded well below the frost line. To our horrour, however, the soil must have shifted deep beneath the Brookland footing, for it settled by three inches on its downriver side. You can imagine the panick on your father’s countenance as he and Adam checked and rechecked their measurements, their boots sinking into the mucky springtime sand.
—It cannot be, he once said, as we sat together in this countinghouse, poring over his figures a fourth time. —Jesus God! We drove the piles to refusal; what could have moved? He looked to the ceiling as if it might answer him. —Some soil we did not account for. Jesus, Prue! We have only just corrected the misalignment in plan, and now we’ve one in elevation.
—The Schermerhorns shore up their buildings each spring, I answered him. Surely we can do likewise?
He shook his greying head. He could fret and curse until the trumpet blast, but the numbers kept coming up the same. —I cannot go on hiding this, he said. I’m certain the worry has cost me my old age. I shall write to Mr. Clinton.
—And to Mr. Pope, I said.
—And to Mr. Pope.
We anxiously awaited their replies. Mr. Pope’s came first, indicating that he would board the stage as soon as it was practical, & offer whatever advice he might. The governor’s response was slower to arrive. It did not reach the countinghouse until two weeks after the building season ought to have commenced. Our workers were camp’d in the yard with naught to do but drink & gamble, to facilitate which Joe Loosely set up a regular roster of cock baitings, dogfights, & greased pig contests to lure the men from Fischer’s new alehouse, which stood a quarter mile closer by. Governor Clinton’s letter, when at last it came, advised us to seek counsel from Mr. Pope, whose age & experience would guide him in directing us. If he believed the Brookland foundation could be adequately propped to prevent further sinking, then we were to proceed with the bridge. If not, Ben was to write Mr. Clinton at his earliest convenience for further instructions.
There was no longer any need for both of us to continue on the works, especially while the men idled in anticipation of Pope’s inspection. I returned full-time to my distillery, which had never been a more welcome refuge from the greater world, though the bridge took up perhaps more of my thoughts than ever. Your father seemed the victim of a temporary blindness. As if it were truly a remedy, he began asking his men to cut the timbers for the sides of the lever to account, ever so subtly, for this new divergence from true. To the eye, of course, such trickery would be invisible, but the chisel knew it, & the wood plane; and I thought the abutment was destined to know it, too. Before Mr. Pope’s arrival, Ben also organized a second crew to build a structure to shore up the sinking side of the anchorage with stone & iron. Mr. Pope scratched his head over it when he came, as he did not see how anything above ground could compensate for a faulty foundation. Your father unleashed his powers of persuasion, however, and ultimately convinced him to think it a wise addition to the plan. Pope wrote to his colleague Mr. Avery in Massachusetts for corroboration; when it arrived, Ben considered himself to have permission to proceed.
When I had once expressed my concern about his methods, your father ceased to discuss them with me. He was as sweet with me as ever, but it was as if I wore a black veil when I spoke with him; there was something gossamer-thin but noticeable between us.
The bridge’s last slightly torqued timber was secured to its position on the fifth of June, 1803. The men let up such a raucous cheer, Elliott Fortune & I heard it in the fermenting room, and hurried above ground to see what was amiss. To see it there, its span compleat, was a joy incomparable, despite all we had endured. (When I crowed my happiness at that moment, you made a flip in my womb to let me know the bridge pleased you as well.) Your father came running off the bridge and down the mill yard, hollering like a wild man, & scooped me up, weeping and laughing. The workers applauded for this, we set them free on the gin for the rest of the day; a public celebration would follow, but that afternoon, those who’d built the bridge reveled. That evening, we roped off the entries to the bridge on both sides of the river and hired guards to watch over it, lest it be swarmed with curious folk. Your father wrote to the governor, the newly appointed mayor of New-York (who was also the governor’s nephew;—a circumstance I assumed was no accident), Mr. Willemsen, & Mr. Pope that very afternoon, and the date was set to dedicate the bridge in honour of the Fourth of July.
Had you been a sentient being in those next few weeks, you might have thought your native village was preparing for General Washington to march into town triumphant. Every tavern and shop in Brookland & New-York had its red, white, & blue bunting over the door and its flag of the Republic flying, and nearly every house sported in at least one of its windows a paper silhouette of the bridge. Hawkers on New-York’s streets sold paper fans & woodcuts adorned with what they called the “Rainbow Bridge,” and broadsheets with at least a dozen different songs and poems in its honour could be had for a federal penny. Joe, the Phi1pots, & Mr. Fischer laid in prodigious supplies of ale, and Tem & I stepped up production at the works, for we knew a great deal of gin would be drunk from our storehouses. Peg Dufresne was an old, old woman by then, but she set to candying fruit and baking, lest a good opportunity for profit pass her by.
I went out at dawn to observe the bridge on the morning of the Fourth, & already Brookland and the New-York docks were bustling. All three ferry boats were shuttling across the water, carrying those who wished to assure themselves the best view to station themselves near the abutments. Brookland’s roads were usually quiet enough until eight in the morning, but that day, carts were rumbling in on the Ferry Road & the Jamaica Turnpike. Pedestrians streamed up the Shore Road and down Joralemon’s Lane, many waving pennants with images of the bridge or patriotic slogans.
By nine, thousands of people must have packed the waterfront, and we could see a similar crowd across the water in Mannahata. Ben & Tem & I stood in our appointed place before the Brookland anchorage; and as I looked round at the cheerful, red-faced throng, I wondered if Pearl or perhaps her shade might be hovering at its periphery. I believe Tem saw me thinking this, as, without explanation, she reached up her palm to cup my cheek & held it there longer than I thought entirely comfortable. When Governor Clinton’s boat entered Buttermilk Channel near the Luquer Mill, a huge cheer went up from that quarter & echoed up the straits. On hearing it, the regimental band the Philpots had hired struck up its blaring tune, and thousands of banners of welcome began to wave. The roar of cheering and applause when the governor set foot on Brookland’s soil was louder than a thunderstorm. Soon after the governor landed, Mr. DeWitt Clinton, the new mayor of New-York, arrived on a bark of his own, surrounded by every last one of the aldermen. The day already promised to be sultry,—the straits stank of salt & fish,—but all these men wore their finest and most formal attire, and dabbed at their faces with lace-edged handkerchiefs.
—May I have your attention? Governor Clinton called out. The crowd quieted, but his voice could not have carried more than ten or twelve heads deep into the assembly. —Ladies and gentlemen, he went on. Today marks a great occasion for our state, the fair city of New-York, & the village of Brookland. Not only does the day commemorate twenty-seven years of freedom from the tyranny of British rule; but it marks New-York’s ascendancy as the foremost city of this nation, & Brookland’s as a vibrant port and place of manufacture in her own right.
At this last, the cheers were deafening. He continued:
—No other state has yet financed a public work of such magnitude or importance. If it has been alleged by men of the Old World that the New has no wonders of which to boast, we give them the lie today.
Mr. Clinton acknowledged Ben & the workers; & Mr. Clinton his nephew gave also an eloquent speech; and I thought back ruefully on the simple words Will Severn had spoken when we’d dug up the first spadeful for the Brookland foundation. He stood in the crowd that day,—his head bare,—and although I harboured profound anger against him for his role in my sister’s disappearance, his expression tore at me. By then his physiognomy had congealed into an attitude of resignation that could have melted the heart of a much colder woman than I. Within the year he would receive a calling from a church in the Carolinas, and go forth from amongst us.
When the speeches were done, Ben handed our governor a pair of scissors polished to a glinting sheen; & with all due ceremony, Mr. Clinton cut the ribbon stretched across the accessway to the bridge. A great shout went up all round & hats were tossed in the air; a moment later, one could see and hear a similar cheer reverberating across the water. The newsmen scribbled on their books. As the whooping continued, Mr. Clinton & his nephew began to process across. The assemblymen followed, as did we; & behind us, the whole crowd began to surge through the archway in the Gothic abutment. I half feared we should be swarmed & trampled, but for all their excitement & their great numbers, people remained in line. On the New-York side, the crowd jumped, hollered, & waved their flags at us with gusto; they could not cross in the opposite direction until our group arrived and Mr. Clinton cut their ribbon as well.
We spent that hot, bright day reveling among the New-Yorkers; and none could have been more awed than I at how wonderful it was to traverse the East River in so novel a fashion. It took four hours to cross in either direction, so many times was your father stopped for congratulations. When at last we were safe home in Brookland, long past sunset, your father, Aunt Tem, & I were all burned red as sour cherries by the sun. As I rubbed the sliced end of a cucumber over Tem’s burned nape, I thought of how freckled Pearl had grown, her last summer among us,—and I prayed to God that if my sister yet lived, she would hear news of the bridge’s compleation, forgive me my trespass, & come home.
The New-York & Brookland papers gave varying estimates of the crowds that day, but none less than five thousand souls. Only the New-York Journal printed doomful prognostications about the bridge’s future; and when I complained of this to Isaiah, he promised me the piece had been written by some foolish old Luddite, & would be little attended to. C. Mather Harrison wrote of nothing but the bridge’s beauty.
It was a good year for the bridge. However many thousands of people had crossed it that first day,—and however subtle our adjustments to the structure itself, to make its two levers meet,—it had held true; & henceforward, people seemed to have no fear of it. The charge to cross, after that first day, was but a penny, so th’inhabitants of our village and her sister city used it not just for commerce but for sport; and I wondered if I would have to retire my trusty barges, now it was so easy to load gin onto wagons and whisk it across. Ben & I knew years would elapse before the state recouped her investment, we erased our debts, & anyone saw a dollar in profit; but I felt safe in hoping this would not take too many years.
The winter of 1803 and aught four proved milder than the previous one. It began to seem your father’s subterfuge, sanctioned by Mr. Pope, had safeguarded the bridge against further settling. You were a sleepy dumpling of a baby, & I strapped you in a shawl to my back so that in all kinds of weather your father and I might travel out to measure the bridge & check its solidity in plan and elevation. We began to think we had been spared the worst possible fate; and the New-York Journal’s attacks upon the bridge subsided to mere grumblings & whispers.
Everything proved thus sound until the thaw came in March of 1804 & great cracks began to yawn along the bridge’s downriver facade. Your father first hired men to pitch these, then to drive iron tie rods through the bridge as a whole, to embrace it tight with brackets. (You can surely imagine what the newssheets had to say about this.) When he took new measurements of the structure at the beginning of the summer, however, he found it was warping: listing so severely to southward on the Brookland end that sooner or later, it seemed, the bridge would snap in two, like a wad of dough one breaks in half by twisting. I had never seen Ben look so ashen. What could we do for it, however, but continue to pitch its cracks and pray? That July, we wrote desperately to Mr. Pope & to his colleague Mr. Avery in Boston, asking their advice; but it was too late. Early one morning in August of 1804, a farmer from Flat Bush travelled over in his ox cart, and in the wake of the conveyance, some three central feet of the roadway plummeted into the river, narrowly missing a wherry headed up toward Hell Gate. The cart slipped back over the precipice a moment & lost its bales of hay, but the driver whipped his beasts into a phrenzy to drive them onward, and two men crossing in the other direction leapt off their horses and helped pull the cart up to safety. At last all three men, the oxen, & the cart were safe, but there was pandemonium on the bridge. Within the quarter hour, both accessways were secured against further traffick; and when your father & I arrived on the scene & could make sense of the accusations & conflicting reports that greeted us, we both suspected it had been nothing less than divine intervention had prevented the farmer & the wherryman on the river being killed. When the debris later jammed in the trash rack without breaking the Luquers’ mill, this seemed the working of Providence as well.
I wonder if you can imagine our terrour as we awaited word from Governor Clinton, Mr. Pope, & Mr. Avery. The bridge, to both our minds, had now thoroughly failed, and seemed unlikely to be rebuilt, & although the distillery was thus far successful in battling off John Putnam’s incursions, we were mortgaged & ensured to our eyeballs, & did not know how we might pay off the debt. More awful to consider was how your father’s heart was bound up in the thing, perhaps even more than mine:—his heart, & his reputation. Mr. Pope never wrote us, though we received a letter from his secretary telling us the great bridge architect was taken ill with nervous exhaustion & the doctor had requested all unfortunate news be kept from him. Mr. Avery, however, arrived at his earliest convenience, and first thing, shook his head in pity to see the beautiful thing so ruined. He wrote his recommendation to the governor that the entire Brookland end of the structure should be torn down & rebuilt upon a deeper & sturdier foundation; the which he himself would help us design, for a moderate fee.
As I’m sure you recall, August in Brookland was always long,—pestilentially hot and foul-smelling. That year the month dragged out even more than usual, as we could do nothing but look at the broken hulk until the legislature reconvened. September, for all its beauty, likewise threatened to last an age; but in the middle of the month Ben received his letter from Governor Clinton. Though that gentleman stood in favour of the bridge & of Mr. Avery’s proposal, he reported to his great sadness that the state was already far too deeply in arrears as regarded our bridge, & could not afford to invest a penny more in it. If we could raise the needed funds at home, the governor sent his blessings; if not, it was his suggestion we sell off the bridge’s materiel & remit whatever price they brought to the state. This, he wrote, would discharge our debt, as the bridge had been a brave & noble effort, & its failure could rightly be blamed only in part upon us.
I thought your father might tear out his own hair in grief; & he boarded a boat to Albany next day to plead with the legislature; but to no avail. We could no longer afford the kinds of bribes had got us our permission in the first place. Mr. Clinton was persuaded to return your father to his post as King’s County’s surveyor, but no more than that. He came home to me with his hands empty, and I wondered if his misery would at last be the thing to do us all in. With his last vestige of good humour departed, our home seemed a dark, dark place. He hired as many workmen as he could muster for the demolition; but it was nowhere near so enticing or skilled a job as raising a bridge, & there were fewer volunteers.
The sale was set for the fifteenth of October, advertised in every town within a three days’ journey; & with the exception of C. Mather Harrison, who remained our supporter to the end, the newssheets were full of ridicule. Broadsides circulated featuring vitriolic cartoons of your father as a bumpkin in short pants who traced out the idea for the bridge in the dirt, and of the men building it drunk on gin, & of me as an Amazon warrioress, breaking the span with my oversized boot. Joe Loosely himself volunteered to conduct the auction for the thousands of tons of timber, iron, & stone.
—You know I never favoured the bridge, Prue, he told me, as we sat together at his bar. In my lap, you sucked on the yolk of a boiled egg, & spat crumbs of it onto my britches, oblivious as you were to the situation’s gravitas. —Yet it still pains me to see my friend’s daughter brought so low. It is why I wish to do it myself. Do you unnerstand?
—I do, I said. My own egg was ashes on my tongue.
Joe nodded grimly. I thought he looked old all of a sudden; & I wondered if, despite his protestation, he had felt even the slightest flicker of cold-blooded joy at our misfortune.
The auction was held on a lovely harvest moon day, very like that on which my father had died. I watched from the crowd’s periphery as the Hickses, Sandses, and Whitcombes bought up wood for new houses at a dime on the dollar, & as ambassadors from New-York & Pavonia & places even farther afield acquired limestone for city halls, &c &c. No one of my neighbours would meet my eye;—so grief-filled must have been my countenance, or so thorough my disgrace. Joe was generally a lively auctioneer, but though his voice was strong that morning, I could see the work pained him. He had no smiles nor jibes to offer when his hammer came down. He would simply move on to the next lot of timber or iron, & cry it without emotion. For myself, I do not know how I managed not to weep.
That day, he sold every thing but a vestige of the Brookland anchorage, which as well you know, still mars the distillery’s landscape. As, numb with sorrow, your father and I left the scene, our neighbours gave us a wide berth. I imagined this was how we would be treated if we harboured typhus in our home. By the next day, however, small gifts had begun to appear on our stoep: a parcel of fresh egg noodles, three pumpkins, & an apple pie so lovely, it could only have come from Peg Dufresne. We took these gifts gladly, and counted them & you our only succour. By the next week, the winning bidders had begun to send their barges & carts to take the spoils home. Neither of us could watch this. I kept to the distillery & never once looked out the huge windows of the countinghouse. I thought if I might focus all my efforts on the business my father had left me, this might mitigate my sorrow. Your father sat round the house, wondering when someone would offer him a commission in his old employment.
Even at that sorrowful time, perhaps the oddest thing about the whole affair seemed to me how people on both sides of the river had well nigh forgotten I’d had aught to do with the disastrous bridge. I was still Prue Winship, Distiller of Gin; but your father, wherever he went, was the Architect of the Folly. Few but Ben, Isaiah, & my own two sisters had ever known that the idea, at its origin, had been mine alone; but it struck me as passing strange how even Simon Dufresne & Theunis van Vechten lamented Ben’s misjudgment of the foundations, without once mentioning how I had drawn up the articles of our misfortune. When I gathered the courage to begin venturing out once more with my deliveries, I found the story every where the same: That your father was a good man, but had been deluded; & that I was lucky he had not taken down my business entire. He bore up as well as a person could under this calumny, & urged me not to seek to redress it.—It will all pass in due time, he told me, as every thing does.
You see it was not the first nor the last occasion on which it served me well to follow his advice. I think the bridge lives on in people’s memories, but it seldom appears in conversation. (I believe a similar situation obtains about my sister Pearl.) It was best to leave it all unspoken. I hope you do not cast blame on me for all these years of silence, exactly as I hope you do not disapprove of me for thinking, even now, my lost sister might one day return home. But at least, if you do, we may now speak of it. At least it need not stand between us.
Dearest:—tell me of your life. Tell me how your womb grows daily, & what pleasure or trepidation it brings you. I cannot continue to live knowing you so ill.
For the nonce, I send all my love,—
Yr mother, PWH
As she closed the letter, Recompense wondered if it was wrong of her to blame her mother as she did. She had mistreated her sister Pearl, and it was almost as great a transgression to have let her own husband carry the burden of a misfortune that had chiefly been her own doing. Recompense thought her mother had been uncivil and inhumane; and yet, Recompense’s own childhood had been, if not entirely happy, then comfortable enough. She could not reconcile these opposing views. She reckoned this had something to do with how she herself could never have dreamed up a bridge.
When at last she confessed to her husband the extent of her concerns, Jonas urged her to forget her mother’s errors and remember instead how difficult it must have been to vouchsafe them to her daughter. He reminded her how precious a burden such confessions were to bear. Recompense knew her husband was correct, and did what she could, the remainder of the summer, to engage her mother warmly and not to dwell on the repercussions of her actions. If there was some art, some dishonesty, in her own letters, Recompense preferred this to the possibility of driving her mother off forever. She surprised herself, harboring such a preference.
In early October, Recompense was delivered of a healthy daughter, who did, indeed, have the strange sloe-black eyes. Jonas gave his consent for the child to be named Pearl Horsfield Sutler; but the infant seemed to have little in common with her namesake, and babbled the day long. In the spring of 1823, Prue left the distillery in Tem’s care, and she and Ben traveled up the Hudson to meet their granddaughter. By then, Recompense had forgotten much of her righteous anger over her aunt’s and her father’s mistreatment; or if she had not forgotten, she did when she saw her mother’s face light up in happiness upon first holding the baby girl.
Pearl Sutler died of malaria that summer, before learning to walk or talk. Though the disease had been rampant that season, both Recompense and Jonas were shocked numb by the blow, and Recompense could not even bring herself to inform her family of it until well after the funeral. When she did, she considered writing her mother how even she now kept her eyes open for Pearl Winship, a small older woman, her black hair streaked with gray; how whenever she saw a dark-haired woman her own age disembark from the ferry, she wondered if it might not be her lost cousin. Then she thought better of it, and simply sent her mother the news.