To Paradise

XII

There was no choice for him. He sent the hansom driver home with a message for his grandfather saying he was meeting Charles Griffith that night, and then, turning and wincing from the lie, he watched the driver round the corner before he began running, not caring about the spectacle he made. His potential embarrassment now meant nothing against the promise of seeing Edward once more.

At the boardinghouse, he was let in by the same whey-faced maid, and hurried up the flights of stairs. It was only at the final landing that he hesitated, aware that beneath his excitement lurked another set of sensations as well: doubt, confusion, anger. But it was not enough to deter him, and even before he’d finished knocking, the door was opening, and Edward was in his arms, kissing him wherever he could, as eager as a pup, and David in turn felt his earlier misgivings disappear, swept away by happiness and relief.

But when he managed to hold Edward at arm’s length, he noticed his face: his right eye blackened, his bottom lip split and seamed with dried blood. “Edward,” he said, “my dear Edward! Whatever is this?”

“This,” said Edward, almost pertly, “is one of the reasons I was unable to write you,” and after they were able to calm themselves, he began to explain what had happened on his ill-fated visit to his sisters.

In the beginning, Edward said, all went well. His trip was uneventful, if bitterly cold, and he detoured to Boston to spend three nights visiting some old family friends before continuing onward to Burlington. There, he was greeted by his three sisters: Laura, who was soon to deliver her baby; Margaret; and of course Belle, visiting from New Hampshire. Laura and Margaret, who were close in age and in everything else, shared a large wooden house, with each sister and her respective husband occupying a different floor, and Belle was settled in Laura’s section and Edward in Margaret’s.

Margaret left in the mornings to her schoolhouse, but Laura and Belle and Edward spent the days talking and laughing, admiring the tiny sweaters and blankets and socks Laura and Margaret and their husbands had knitted, and when Margaret returned in the afternoon, they sat before the fire and talked of their parents, and their memories of growing up together, while Laura’s and Margaret’s husbands—Laura’s husband, a teacher as well; Margaret’s, an accountant—completed the chores the sisters would normally have done themselves so that they might have more time with one another.

(“I of course told them about you,” Edward said.

“Oh?” he asked, flattered. “What did you say?”

“I said I had met a beautiful, brilliant man, and that I missed him already.”

David found himself blushing with pleasure, but said only, “Go on.”)

Six days into this blissful visit, Laura gave birth to a healthy baby, a boy, whom she named Francis, after their father. This was the first child born to the Bishop siblings, and they all rejoiced as if he were their own. It had been planned that Edward and Belle would stay for an additional two or so weeks, and despite Laura’s exhaustion, they were content: There were six adults to dote on one baby. But being together, the four of them, after such a long time, made them think as well of their parents, and on more than one occasion there were tears as they discussed how much their mother and father had sacrificed on their behalf to give them better lives in the Free States, and how, whatever their disappointments, they would be so pleased to see their children together.

(“We were all so busy that I scarcely had time to do anything else,” said Edward, before David could ask him why he’d not written. “I thought of you always; I began a hundred letters to you in my head. And then the baby would cry, or there would be milk to heat, or I would need to help my brothers-in-law with the chores—I’d no idea how much labor one small baby could generate!—and any time in which I might have set pen to paper would vanish.”

“But why did you not write me with your sisters’ address, at least?” he asked, hating himself for the tremor in his voice.

“Well! That I can only attribute to my idiocy—I was certain, certain that I had given it to you before I left. In fact, I thought it very peculiar that you hadn’t written me at all; every day, when one of my sisters came in with the post, I would ask if there was something from you, but there never was. I cannot tell you how sorrowful it made me: I feared you had forgotten me.”

“As you can see, I had not,” he murmured, trying to keep the petulance from his voice as he indicated the embarrassingly fat bundle of letters that the maid had tied with twine and which now sat, unread, on the trunk at the foot of Edward’s bed. But Edward, once again anticipating David’s injury, put his arms around him. “I saved them in hopes I might see you and be able to explain my absence in person,” he said. “And then, after you had forgiven me—as I so desperately hoped, and hope, you will—that we might read them together, and you could tell me everything you were feeling and thinking when you wrote them, and it would be as if our time apart had never happened, and we had been together always.”)

After almost a fortnight, Edward and Belle prepared to leave; they would go to Manchester, where Edward would stay with his sister for several days before finally making his way back to New York. But when they reached Belle’s home, Belle calling out for her husband as they entered the front door, they were greeted only with silence.

At first, they were unconcerned. “He must still be at the clinic,” Belle said, cheerfully, and sent Edward up to the spare room while she went to the kitchen to make them something to eat. But when Edward came back downstairs, he found her standing immobile in the middle of the room, looking at the table, and when she turned to look at him, her face was very white.

“He is gone,” she said.

“What do you mean, he is gone?” Edward asked her, but as he looked about him, he noticed that the kitchen had not been occupied for at least a week: The hearth was blackened and cold, the dishes and kettles and pots dry and traced with a light layer of dust. He seized the note Belle held and saw it was in his brother-in-law’s hand, apologizing to her and telling her he was unworthy, but he had left to make a life with another.

“Sylvie,” Belle whispered. “Our maid. She’s not here, either.” She swooned, and Edward caught her before she could fall, and helped her into bed.

How upsetting the next few days were! Poor Belle vacillated between silence and weeping, and Edward sent word to their sisters to inform them of the unhappy news. He stormed down to his brother-in-law Mason’s clinic, but both of his nurses claimed ignorance; he even went to report Mason’s absence to the police, but they said they were unable to involve themselves in domestic affairs. “But this is no mere domestic affair,” Edward cried. “This man has abandoned his wife, my sister, a good and faithful woman and spouse, stealing away while she was attending to her pregnant sister in Vermont. He must be found and brought to justice!” The police were sympathetic but claimed powerlessness, and with each day, Edward felt his anger rise, along with his sense of despair—seeing his sister staring mutely into the empty hearth, her hair twisted sloppily into a bun, kneading her hands and wearing the same wool dress she’d worn for the past four days, made him ever-more aware of his impotence, and ever-more determined to, if not recover his beloved little sister’s husband, then to at least avenge her.

And then, one night, he was out at the local tavern, drinking a cider and thinking of his sister’s predicament, when who should he see walk in but Mason.

(“He looked the same as ever,” Edward replied to David’s question. “I realized then that I had thought that if I saw him again he would look somehow transformed, as if his poor character and caddish ways would somehow have announced themselves on his countenance. But they had not. Thank goodness he was not with that girl, Sylvie, or I’d not have been able to do what I did.”)

He’d no plan when he stalked over to Mason, but just as he could see his brother-in-law recognizing him, Edward drew back his fist and walloped Mason in the cheek. Mason, once he’d recovered from his initial shock, responded, but their tussle was quickly ended by a number of the other patrons, who separated them—though, Edward noted with some satisfaction, not before he was able to tell them of his erstwhile brother-in-law’s despicable behavior.

“Manchester is a small place,” he said. “Everyone knows everyone else, and Mason is not the only doctor in town. His reputation will never recover, and why should it, for he has damaged his own prospects by his poor behavior.”

Belle, Edward said, expressed horror at his actions—and, indeed, Edward was remorseful as well: not for assaulting Mason but because his confrontation brought her further pain and embarrassment—but, he ventured to think, she was also secretly pleased. The two engaged in a long conversation the following day, after Belle had cleaned his face and sutured his lip (“I do not mean to boast, but I’m certain Mason got the worst of it, though I also must admit that throwing punches wasn’t the wisest recourse, given my profession”), and agreed that Belle could not stay in either Manchester—where Mason’s entire extended family lived—or the marriage. Laura and Margaret had already sent first a telegram and then a letter urging Belle to come live with them in Vermont—there was plenty of room in their house, and Belle, who, David would recall, was trained as a nurse, would be able to find good work there. But Belle was reluctant to interfere in such a joyous and busy time for Laura, and besides, she confided in Edward, she yearned for some quiet, some time and room to think. And so the siblings decided that Belle would accompany Edward to Boston, where he would once again stay for several nights in the home of their family friends before at last returning to New York. Belle was very fond of these friends, and they of her, and there she would be able to consider her options more calmly: She would divorce Mason, that was certain, but whether she would stay in Manchester or perhaps join her sisters in Vermont was undetermined.

“So you see,” Edward concluded, “the trip was by no means what I’d anticipated, and every good intention I had vanished in the face of Belle’s difficulties. It was wrong of me—so very wrong of me—not to communicate with you, but I was so consumed with my sister’s struggles that I neglected everything else. It was terrible of me, I know—but I hope you can understand. Please tell me you forgive me, dear David. Please tell me you do.”

Did he? He both did and didn’t—he felt for Belle, of course, and yet, in his selfishness, he could not but persist in thinking that Edward might have found time to jot him even the briefest of notes; even that Edward ought to have, because if he had confided in him, he might have been able to help somehow. How was unclear—but he would have liked the opportunity to try.

Though to say any of this would have been too childish, too small. So “Of course,” he told Edward. “My poor Edward. Of course I forgive you,” and was rewarded with a kiss.

But Edward’s story was not yet finished. By the time they arrived at their friends’, the Cookes, Belle was already much calmer, more resolved, and Edward knew that a few days with them would steady her further. The Cookes, Susannah and Aubrey, were a married couple a little older than Margaret; Susannah, herself a Colony escapee, had lived with her parents in the building next to the Bishops’, and she and her siblings and Edward and his had grown up as great friends. Now she and her husband owned a small textile factory in Boston and lived in a handsome new house near the river.

Edward was pleased to see the Cookes again, not least because Susannah and Belle were so fond of each other, with Susannah assuming the role of a third elder sister—the two would repair to Belle’s room and talk late into the night, while Edward and Aubrey remained in the parlor playing chess. On the fourth evening of their visit, though, Aubrey and Susannah told the Bishop siblings that they wished to speak to them about an important matter, and so, after dinner, they all retired to the parlor together, and the Cookes announced that they had important news.

A little more than a year ago, the couple had been contacted by a Frenchman with whom they had traded over the years, and who presented them with an irresistible proposal: to establish California as the New World’s preeminent silk-growing region. The Frenchman, Étienne Louis, had already secured a lot of nearly five thousand acres north of Los Angeles, planted almost a thousand trees, and established nurseries that could house tens of thousands of worms and eggs. Eventually, the farm would become its own self-sustaining colony: Already, Louis was employing the first of what was anticipated to be one hundred people expert in various aspects of the silk-making process, from tending the trees to feeding the worms to harvesting the cocoons to, of course, spinning and then weaving the silk itself. The workers would be, for the most part, Chinamen—many left indolent after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, unable either to return home or, due to the laws of ’92, to bring over their families from the Orient. An alarming number had fallen into destitution, depravity, and opium addiction, among other unsavory activities—the Cookes and Louis would need to pay them only a pittance; the city of San Francisco, where most of them lived, was even helping Louis find likely candidates that he might convince to come south. The plan was that the colony would begin its operations in the early fall.

The Bishop siblings took nearly as much excitement from the Cookes’ announcement as the Cookes did in the telling. It was, they all four agreed, a brilliant plan—the population in California was growing so rapidly, and there was so little organized textile industry, that they were certain of a handsome return. Everyone knew the sort of money a clever and industrious person could make in the West, and the Cookes were not just one clever and industrious person but two. They were bound for success. It was a cheering development, made more so after a difficult week.

But this was not the only surprise the Cookes had. For they intended to ask Belle and Edward to oversee their enterprise. “We were going to ask you anyway,” Susannah said. “You both and Mason. But now—and dear Belle, you will know I mean this with no malice—it seems providential. It is a new opportunity for you, a new life, a chance to begin again.”

“That is so generous of you,” said Belle, once she’d recovered herself. “But—neither Edward nor I know anything about textiles, nor running a factory!”

“It’s true,” Edward said. “Dear Susannah and Aubrey—we are very flattered—but surely you need someone with experience in such matters.”

But Susannah and Aubrey persisted. There would be a foreman, and Aubrey himself would travel west in the autumn to meet with Louis and oversee the business during its early days. Once Belle and Edward arrived, they would learn as they worked. The important thing was that the Cookes might have people they trusted. So much about the West was mysterious to them that they needed business partners they could rely upon, whose histories and characters they knew completely. “And whom do we know better or trust more wholly than you?” Susannah cried. “You and Belle are almost siblings to us as well!”

“But what about Louis?”

“We trust him, of course. But he is not known to us as you are.”

Belle laughed. “Dear Aubrey,” she said, “I am a nurse; Edward is a pianist. We know nothing of silkworm cultivation, or mulberry trees, or textiles, or business! Why, we would ruin you!”

Back and forth the four of them argued, spiritedly but good-naturedly, until, finally, Aubrey and Susannah extracted a promise from the Bishops that they would consider their offer, and then, it being very late, they went to bed, but with smiles and congratulations on their lips, for although the Bishops still thought the idea improbable, they were flattered to be asked, and full of new gratitude for their friends’ generosity and faith.

The next day, Edward was to depart, but after bidding the Cookes goodbye and before catching his coach, he and Belle took a short stroll. For a while, the siblings walked in silence, arm in arm, pausing to look at the few ducks who flew down to the river and, upon dipping their webbed feet into the water, flew off once more, cawing loudly and angrily, offended by the water’s chill.

“You would think they would know better,” Edward said, watching them. And then, to his sister, “What shall you do?”

“I’m not quite certain,” she said. But then, as they neared the Cookes’ house once again, where Edward’s luggage waited, she said, “But I do think we might consider their offer.”

“My dear Belle!”

“It could be a new life for us, Edward, an adventure. We are both still young—I am only one-and-twenty! And—don’t speak—we wouldn’t be completely alone: We would have each other.”

Now it was the two of them who argued back and forth, until Edward was in danger of missing his coach, and they finally parted, tenderly, Edward promising Belle that he would consider the Cookes’ proposal, even though he had no intention of doing so. But once he was in the coach, and then over the many hours of the first part of his journey, he found himself thinking more and more about the idea. Why would he not go west? Why would he not try to make his fortune? Why would he not want to have an adventure? Belle was correct—they were young; the venture’s success was assured. And even were it not, had he not always yearned for excitement? Had New York ever really felt like his home? Already his sisters were far from him, and he was alone in a city whose casual brutalities—of money, of status, of climate—chipped and chafed at him, so that even though he was only twenty-three, he felt much older, weary of living in a place where he was never warm, where he was always scrabbling for money, where he still felt, more often than he would have imagined, that he was only a visitor, a Colony child waiting to alight on his final destination. And, too, he thought once more of his parents, who themselves had made a long, transformative journey from one place to another—was it not time for him to make his own, mirrored journey? Laura and Margaret had found their home, and it was in the Free States, and he was happy for them. But if he were to be honest with himself, he would have to admit that his entire life, for as long as he could remember, he too had been hoping for that sense of contentment, of security they possessed, only to have it elude him year after year.

After several days of thinking like this, he was back again in New York, and it was as if the city, sensing his wavering conviction, had amassed its most unpleasant qualities to visit upon him in an endeavor to help him reach the correct, the inevitable conclusion. His first step back on city soil was not upon earth but into a large puddle that had formed in a rut in the road, a lake of icy, scummy water that soaked him to mid-calf. Then there were the smells, the sounds, the sights: the peddlers pulling their wooden carts with their misshapen wheels that jostled off the sidewalk into the mud-lapped streets with a thunk, the men bent like mules; the gray-faced, starved-eyed children filing dully from the factory where they’d spent hours sewing buttons to poorly made garments; the hawkers desperately trying to sell their few wares, things that no one wanted except the most destitute, the devils without even a penny coin to pay for an onion as stunted and dry and hard as an oyster shell, a tin cup’s worth of beans that writhed with gray-white grubs; the beggars and touts and pickpockets; all the poor, cold, struggling hordes of people trudging through their small lives in this impossible, proud, heartless city, the only witness to so much human misery the stone gargoyles that leered, meanly, with their sneering smiles, from their perches on grand buildings high above the teeming streets. And then there was the boardinghouse, where he was handed by the maid a letter threatening eviction by the unseen Florence Larsson, whom he appeased by paying an extra month’s rent in advance along with the rent his long trip had made delinquent, and where he climbed the stairs once more, those stairs that smelled of cabbage and damp even in the summer, and then into his freezing room with its meager possessions and bleak view of the bare black trees. And it was then, breathing on his fingers so he would have enough feeling in them to go fetch some water so he might begin the wearying labor of warming himself, that he made his decision: He would go to California. He would help the Cookes begin their silk concern. He would become a rich man, his own man. And if he ever returned to New York—though he did not imagine why he ever would—he would do so without feeling a pauper, without feeling apology. New York could never make him free, but California might.

There was a long silence.

“You’re leaving, then,” David said, though he could barely speak the words.

Edward had been looking above and beyond him as he spoke, but now he turned his gaze to David’s. “Yes,” he said. And then: “And you are coming with me.”

“I?” he finally managed. And then: “I! No, Edward. No.”

“But why ever not?”

“Edward! No—I—no. This is my home. I could never leave it.”

“But why not?” Edward slipped from the bed and knelt at his feet, taking both of David’s hands in his own. “Think of it, David—think of it. We would be together. It would be a new life for us, a new life together, a new life together in the sunshine, in the warmth. David. Do you not want to be with me? Do you not love me?”

“You know I love you,” he admitted, wretchedly.

“And I love you,” Edward said, fervently, but those words, which David had waited and wanted, so keenly, to hear, were eclipsed by the extraordinariness of the context in which they were spoken. “David. We could be together. We could be together at last.”

“We can be together here!”

“David—my darling—you know that’s not true. You know your grandfather would never let you be with someone like me.”

To this he could say nothing, for he knew it was true, and he knew Edward knew it, too. “But we could never be together in the West, Edward. Be sensible! It is dangerous to be like us out there—we would be imprisoned for it; we could be killed.”

“Nothing will happen to us! We know how to be careful. David, the people who are in peril are people who are, who are—excessive in who they are, who flaunt who they are, who ask to be noticed. We are not those kinds of people, and we never will be.”

“But we are those kinds of people, Edward! There is no difference between us! If we were ever suspected, if we were ever caught, the consequences would be dire. If we couldn’t live as who we are, then how would we be free?”

And here Edward stood, and pivoted from him, and when he turned back, his face was gentle, and he sat next to David on the bed and reclaimed his hands. “Forgive me, David, for asking this,” he said, quietly, “but are you free now?” And, when David was unable to answer him: “David. My innocent. Have you ever thought of what your life might be if your name meant nothing to no one? If you were able to escape from who you are meant to be and become instead who you want to be? If the name Bingham were just another, like Bishop or Smith or Jones, instead of a word chiseled into marble atop a great monolith?

“What if you were merely Mister Bingham, as I am merely Mister Bishop? Mister Bingham of Los Angeles: A talented artist, a dear and good and clever man, the husband—secretly, perhaps, yes, but no less true for that secrecy—of Edward Bishop? Who lived with him in a little house on a vast orchard of silvery-leafed trees in a land where there was no ice, no winter, no snow? Who came to understand who he might want to be? Who, after a period—maybe a few years, maybe many—might move back east with his husband, or might come alone to visit his beloved grandfather? Who would have me in his arms every night and every morning, and who would be loved by his husband always, and more loved because his husband would be only his, and his alone? Who could choose, whenever he wished, to be Mister David Bingham of Washington Square, New York, the Free States, eldest and most cherished grandchild of Nathaniel Bingham, but would also be something less, and therefore something more; who would belong to someone he chose, and yet would belong, too, only to himself. David. Could this not be you? Could this not be who you really are?”

He stood, yanking himself from Edward’s grip, and walked the single step over to the fireplace, which was cold and black and empty, and yet into which he stared as if gazing at the flames.

Behind him, Edward still spoke. “You are frightened,” he said. “And I understand. But you will always have me. Me, my love, my affection for and admiration of you—David, you will always have that. But would living in California really be so different in certain ways from being here? Here, we are free as a people but not as a couple. There, we would not be free as a people, but we would be a couple, real to each other and living with each other, and with no one to tut at us, no one to stop us, no one to tell us that within the walls of our home we might not be together. David, I ask you: What use is the Free States if we cannot be truly free?”

“Do you really love me?” he finally managed to ask.

“Oh, David,” said Edward, standing and coming behind him and wrapping his arms about him, and David remembered, involuntarily, the feeling of Charles’s bulk against him, and shuddered. “I want to spend my life with you.”

He turned to face Edward, and in that instant, they were tearing at each other, and when, later, they lay spent, David found the bewilderment come over him again, and he sat, and began to dress, as Edward watched him.

“I must go,” he announced, retrieving his gloves, which had fallen beneath the bed.

“David,” Edward said, wrapping the blanket about himself and climbing to his feet, standing in front of David and making him look up. “Please consider my offer. I have yet to even tell Belle. But now that I have spoken to you, I shall tell her of my decision—though I would like to inform her, in either this letter or in one soon after, that I will join her as a married man, with my husband.

“The Cookes had suggested that, were we to accept, one of us should leave in May, the other no later than June. Belle has no one else to consider but herself—I shall have her be the pioneer, and she will not only be worthy of it, she will enjoy it as well. But, David—I will go in June. I will, no matter what. And I hope, David, I do hope—I cannot convey to you how much so—that I will not be making the journey alone. Please tell me you’ll consider it. Please—David? Please.”