Benjamin Franklin's Bastard (7 page)

“These are my
concerns,
” Anne said. “Report them or not. Good day, sir.”

The stranger bowed—not a common sight in the alley—and left.

ANNE FOUND WORK AT
the Indian King Tavern on Third and Market, two blocks inland from the Penny Pot and the alley and patronized by a less watery clientele. The work was much the same as the Penny Pot, and easier in some aspects because Anne no longer wasted time on smiling. She ran amongst the tables like the dog running inside the wheel that turned the spit at the fire; the first day she fed the dog a crust off a plate, but by the second day she examined her thin wage and thrust the leavings into her own pocket.

The work was hard, but not as hard as leaving William. The first morning Anne had left the boy dry and fed and smiling and come home to find him wet and hungry and shrieking like a crow; when she took her mother to task her mother said only, “I’ve got six others to care for; I can’t spend all day pampering your brat.” Anne tried to assign the boy’s care to Mary for the promise of a halfpenny, but the money only gave Mary a better idea; by the end of the first week Mary had put herself out to work burnishing leather at the shoemaker’s for twice the wage Anne made at the Indian King.

The first time Anne saw the stranger with the money pouch at the Indian King, it was as if an imaginary figure out of some ancient tale had sprung abruptly to life. He took a table by himself and waited till Anne drew near; he asked for his rum but held her with questions.

“How long have you worked here?”

“A month.”

“Every day?”

Anne nodded. She left to get him his rum, and by the time she’d returned to his table she believed she’d figured in her head his purpose. He would report to Franklin:
She’s making her own wage now; she’s no need of more from you
.

THE SECOND TIME THE
stranger came, Anne didn’t see him right away. She’d been engaged by a young and eager lawyer who’d almost convinced her it was time to think about earning a real wage again; she looked up and saw the stranger’s eye fixed on her. Well then, let him put that in his report, Anne thought; if she worked it right she’d do a good deal better that night than her usual wage and Mary’s put together, and after the lawyer there’d be another just as eager. She
didn’t
need Franklin’s pouch.

9

“YOU KNOW MY WIFE,”
Benjamin would say, or “Allow me to introduce Mrs. Franklin to you,” and that, he believed, was sufficient. Perhaps for him it was—the whispers followed her, not him—but Deborah didn’t care about her public life while the private one was so exactly all she wished. They settled in above the print shop, and since Deborah had expected so busy and popular a man to be absent most evenings, she was pleasantly surprised by the number of nights he climbed the stairs at the end of a long day in as much apparent eagerness for the sight of her as she was for him.

“My wife!” he would cry, with never even a joke about it; he would surround her with strong arms, pull her against his wide chest, and kiss all the skin of her that showed and as much of the non-showing parts that he could reach before she pushed him backward. But sometimes she didn’t push backward, and on those nights supper was late and often cold; always on those nights Benjamin made a point of saying, “Delicious!” but with a look that took in all the other things he found delicious. There were those days when Deborah did worry about her fragile status—until they’d cohabited seven years she could never be called his legal wife, and then only if Rogers didn’t appear—but treated to every courtesy, wrapped inside the warmest affection, those days of worry arose less and less. Deborah’s confidence grew; she began to stare down the whisperers on the street; she was Mrs. Benjamin Franklin, and woe to him who dared to question it.

THEY’D SPENT SIX MONTHS
as contentedly as Deborah could imagine any man and wife to be when Benjamin came through the door one evening and approached her where she was stooped over the soup pot. He took her by the hand and pulled her away from the fire, drew the spoon from her hand and left it dripping on the hearth.

Deborah shook her elbow free, recaptured the spoon, and scraped at the brick with her shoe. “Here, now! Look at the mess you make!” She moved to return the spoon to the kettle, but Benjamin again retrieved it, this time carrying it to the table. He returned to collect Deborah’s hand and drew her to the chair. By now she’d looked at him more closely and dropped readily enough into the seat, her insides hollow and ringing. “What? What is it?”

“Let me get you a glass of cider.”

“I want no cider! Tell me, Benjamin! What’s the trouble? Is it Rogers?”

“No, not Rogers. Here, let me get us both some cider.”

“I want no cider! Tell me what the trouble is!”

Benjamin fetched the cider anyway, two large mugs, and set them on the table, settling himself with alarming deliberateness in the chair closest to Deborah. “Before I begin, Debby, you must understand one thing: What I speak of now is a past event—the mathematics will prove it to you if my word does not—’tis nothing that came during the time of our marriage.”

“What, Benjamin! For the love of God, tell me this instant! What didn’t come at the time of our marriage?”

“I suppose it is indeed my trouble, but now I must ask you to share in it. Believe me, my dear, I am well aware that I could ask such a thing only of a woman with a heart as large as yours.”

“With a heart that’s ready to burst! As you value my life, tell me!”

Benjamin took a long draft of cider. He lifted Deborah’s mug to her lips but she slapped it away.

“There’s a child. A child of mine. An infant. Born to a woman of brief acquaintance. His circumstance is such that he cannot thrive where he is. I ask a favor I have little right to ask—the only thing that perhaps gives me that right is my great faith in you, and my trust that you share a like faith in me. I ask you to allow this child into our home and raise it as ours. ’Tis a boy named William. In truth, I have grave doubts he will live long enough to trouble us greatly, but he is my son, and I cannot leave him to suffer and perhaps die where he is. You will understand this, Debby, or I don’t know you as I believe in my heart that I do know you. You will understand and accept him no matter the pain to us, because our pain can be only a piddling thing compared to what his must be if we turn our backs.”

Benjamin stopped talking. Deborah was fairly sure he stopped talking, although her head still rang with his voice—his words—but jumbled together inside her head as they were, she couldn’t get them into a proper order. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I don’t understand you in the least.”

Benjamin began to talk again, but this time Deborah couldn’t hear him on account of the ringing left over from the last bit of speech making. At some point in the throes of it, she discovered she’d stood up.

“Deborah. Debby.”

Deborah held up her hands, shook her head. “No,” she said. “No.” She began a slow walk toward the stairs, but found herself careening up them. She dashed into the bedroom, shut the door, and fell facedown on the bed. Sleep, she thought. She would sleep, and when she woke she would discover it but a dream. A nightmare.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Leave me be!”

The door opened. Deborah rolled away from it. She felt the bed sag behind her, but he didn’t touch her. She imagined him peering over her raised hip, attempting to get a glimpse of her face. She pushed it deeper into the bolster.

He said, “I know I should say to you that this is your choice, but I confess some difficulty in uttering anything resembling the word
choice.
What choice do we have in this? How can we live with ourselves if we turn this child away?”

Deborah sat up and swung around on him.

“Who is this child’s mother?”

“No one.”

“I want to know her name.”

“She’s no one, Debby. I declare, I never heard a last name and would be hard pressed to remember the first. She was part of an old, unhealthy habit I’ve long since given up.”

“Long since given up! And how old is this infant?”

“Very well then, perhaps not
long
since given up, but given up, I promise you, well before I took you to wife. I’ve been a faithful husband to you.”

Deborah got up off the bed and walked out of the room, leaving Benjamin sitting as he was. She took the stairs and continued at the end of them until she found herself in the street. She began to walk, thinking her mind might work better with some blood pumping into it, but instead her mind stopped thinking altogether. After a time she began to notice the many passersby in the busy street, and there her mind became an unfriendly companion. At every woman she saw she thought, Is this the creature that lay with him? At every man, she wondered if he knew her husband’s secret.

Husband.
It was a word Benjamin had uttered, but was it a true one? The answer, of course, was no, it was not—Benjamin was not her husband by any law and therefore not in any way that bound Deborah to obey him and accept this child born of his uncontrollable lust. But as Deborah walked on and on she discovered herself looking at the question from the opposite side of it—he was
not
her lawful husband, and therefore what bound
him
to this “marriage,” when out on the street somewhere walked a woman who had already borne a child for him? How objectionable must this woman be for Benjamin to cast her aside for an unlawful marriage to a woman without any great beauty or learning or means? Or was that the answer to the riddle, no doubt being asked yet throughout Philadelphia: Why should a Benjamin Franklin take pity on a Deborah Read, or a Deborah Rogers, as she perhaps still was to them? Had Benjamin known of this child and planned to drop it on Deborah from the start? Was that the bargain, then, his sudden return to her after he’d already been four years home, this hasty “marriage” where no real marriage could ever take place, all in exchange for adopting this child out of God-knows-what?

Deborah walked on and on, and after a time she discovered that her thoughts had turned the matter around again. What if Benjamin
hadn’t
known of this child before he claimed Deborah as his wife? If that was the case, nothing now prevented him from leaving Deborah behind and marrying this other creature, this mother of his child, and yet he hadn’t even hinted at such a course. Instead, he’d come to her and asked her to take this child as her own boy.

Her own boy
. Deborah and Benjamin had lain together many times, both before he left for London and after it, but nothing had grown in her. What if this child was all that was to come to them of children? What if that cradle on that hearth she’d been dreaming of so long was to lie empty forever? Would she prefer another woman’s child to no child at all? Was this then her choice?

Choice.
Deborah had walked the length of the busy section of Market Street and deep into the unpopulated outskirts; she kept going, thinking on that word
choice.
Benjamin felt he had none, felt he owed this child he’d spawned a chance at a better life. He’d gone so far as to include Deborah in this lack of choice, and in truth, what
was
her choice? For whatever reason, this man had claimed her where no other man likely ever would and treated her not only as if she was his lawful wife, but as if she was a most treasured one. And what did
she
most treasure in this world? That affection Benjamin Franklin bathed her in day after day. Was that the bargain, then? In exchange for that affection, this child?

Child
. Despite herself Deborah felt her heart give a little leap. Of late Deborah had secretly begun to fear a life without any children, had feared Benjamin’s turning away from her because of her failure to produce one. Instead, he was offering her one, as he’d offered her everything else: his name, his protection, her life.

Deborah turned around. She didn’t hasten her steps, but took them with all deliberation, letting her mind turn again and again as she walked, one minute seeing one side of Benjamin, the next seeing the other; one minute seeing one side of the child and the next the other. By the time she reentered the house, she was of no one mind on either thing. She looked in the kitchen and parlor and study but found no Benjamin, and a shudder took her; what if he’d despaired of the size of her heart and left? What if he’d gone to that other woman, whoever she was, having given his false wife her fair chance, free now to take a true wife, to take his true son into his heart?

Deborah climbed the stairs, pushed open the bedroom door she had slammed behind her on her way out, and there he lay, on their bed, hands folded across his chest, eyes closed, profile strong and stark against the weakening light. He turned to her as she entered, but she could see nothing of his expression in the shadows, no clues to either an eleventh-hour regret or a genuine relief. If only he would say something, anything, some words that would allow her to summon the right words to say back!

Benjamin lifted his hand, and that proved to be enough. It drew Deborah across the room and down beside him on the bed.

“Dare I ask? Is it
yes
?”

Deborah nodded, relieved to have no need of words after all.

Benjamin clasped her fingers in both his hands and held them tight against his chest. “My wife,” he said. “My remarkable wife.”

10
Philadelphia, 1731

HE APPEARED AT EADES
Alley so late that all but Anne and Mary were asleep. The girls were trying to catch up on William’s dirty clouts, and the kitchen smelled of scalded urine and wet cloth drying. At the knock the girls looked at each other in some alarm, but Mary was first to drop her clouts and go to the door to call through the crack, “Who is it?”

“Mr. Franklin.”

Mary rounded her eyes at Anne and lifted the latch; Franklin stepped into the tiny kitchen and stood silent, stared blankly at Mary until she turned and continued up the stairs. He came up to Anne without greeting and held out a folded paper.