To Paradise

XIII

It was a Bingham family tradition to throw a party on March twelfth, on the anniversary of the Free States’ independence, though the gathering was meant to be less festive than reflective, an opportunity for the Binghams’ friends and acquaintances to review the family’s collection of artifacts and ephemera that documented the establishment of their country and the significant role that the Binghams had played in its founding.

This year, though, the date would coincide with the opening of a small museum that Nathaniel Bingham had founded. The family’s papers and memorabilia would constitute the primary holdings, but the hope was that other of the founding families would donate pieces, letters and diaries and maps, from their own archives as well. Several, including Eliza’s family, had already done so, and it was expected that many more would follow after the museum’s unveiling.

The night of the inauguration, David stood in his bedroom before his mirror, brushing his jacket. It had already been brushed, and rebrushed, by Matthew, and was not in need of further grooming. He was hardly paying attention to his ministrations, at any rate; the movement was meaningless, but soothing.

It would be his first evening outside the house since he last had seen Edward, now almost a week ago. After that extraordinary night, he had returned home and had taken to bed, and for the next six days, he had not left. His grandfather had been alarmed, certain his illness had returned, and although David had felt deeply guilty for this deception, it also seemed an easier explanation than trying to convey the profound disquiet he felt—for even had he the words to communicate it, he would have also to find a way to introduce the idea of Edward, who he was and who he was to David, and that was a conversation for which he felt completely unprepared. And so he had lain there, mute and unmoving, allowing their family doctor, Mister Armstrong, to come and examine him, to prize open his eyes and mouth, to measure his pulse and grunt at the results; the maids to deliver trays of his favorite foods, only to retrieve them, untouched, hours later; Adams to bring (at his grandfather’s order, he knew) fresh flowers—anemones and posies and peonies—daily, acquired from places unknown at prices unbelievable during the bleakest weeks of late winter. All the while, for those many hours, he had stared at the water stain. But unlike a true spell of sickness, in which he would have thought of nothing, here he could do nothing but think: of Edward’s inevitable departure, of his shocking offer, of their conversation, which David had not fully comprehended in the moment but to which he now returned, again and again—he argued with Edward’s definition of freedom, and his suggestion that David was chained, bound to his grandfather and his name and therefore to a life not fully his own; he argued with Edward’s assuredness that they would be somehow spared from the punishments visited upon anyone found to have violated the region’s anti-sodomy laws. Those laws had always existed, but since their reinforcement in ’76, the West, once a promising place—so promising that a number of the Free States’ legislators had even considered trying to bring the territory under their control—had become in certain ways even more perilous than the Colonies; it was not legal, as it was in the Colonies, to pursue discovery of their kind of illegal activity, but if it was discovered, the consequences were both severe and unpardonable. Not even money could secure the freedom of an accused. The one thing he could not do was argue with Edward himself, for Edward had not called upon him or sent any sort of message, a fact that would have bothered David had he not been so preoccupied by the quandary with which he had been presented.

But though Edward had not communicated with him, Charles had, or had at least tried to. More than a week had now passed since David had last seen him, and Charles’s notes to him had, over the days, become beseeching, unable to quite disguise their author’s desperation, a desperation David remembered from his own latter letters to Edward. But the day before, an enormous arrangement of blue hyacinths had been delivered, the card—“My dearest David, Miss Holson told me you were feeling poorly, which I am deeply sorry to hear. I know you are in excellent care, but if you should need or desire anything at all, you need only say so and I shall be at your service immediately. In the meantime, I send you my good wishes, along with my devotion”—expressing what David interpreted as a palpable relief that his silence was not due to lack of interest after all, only illness. He looked at the flowers, and at Charles’s card, and realized that he had once again forgotten his very existence, that all it had taken was the reappearance of Edward in his life for everything else in it to dim or become inconsequential.

Mostly, though, he contemplated leaving—or not even that, but contemplated whether he could even contemplate leaving. His fear of the West and what might happen there to him, to them, was inarguable and, he felt, justified. But what of his fear of leaving his grandfather, of leaving Washington Square? Was that not also what stopped him? He knew Edward was correct: For as long as he remained in New York, he would always be his grandfather’s, his family’s, his city’s, his country’s. That too was inarguable.

What was not was whether he even desired another life, a different life. He had always thought he had. When he was on his Grand Tour, he had in fact tried to experiment with being someone else. One day in the Uffizi, he had stopped in the hallway to gaze down the Vasari Corridor, its symmetry that discomfited in its inhuman perfection, when a young man, dark and slender, had stepped beside him.

“It is unreal, is it not?” he had asked David, after the two of them had stood in silence for a moment, and David turned to look at him.

His name was Morgan, and he was from London, on his own Grand Tour, the son of a barrister, a few months from returning home to, he said, “Nothing. Or nothing interesting, at any rate. A position at my father’s firm—he insists—and, eventually, I suppose, marriage to some girl my mother will find for me. She insists.”

They had spent the afternoon together, walking through the streets, stopping for coffee and pastry. Up to this point in David’s trip, he had spoken to almost no one but the various friends of his grandfather’s who greeted him and hosted him at each stop, and talking with another man his age was like slipping back into water and recognizing its silk on his skin, remembering how comfortable it could be.

“Have you a girl at home for you?” Morgan asked him as they walked through the Piazza Santa Croce, and David, smiling, said he hadn’t.

“Just a moment,” said Morgan, peering at him. “Where in America did you say you were from, exactly?”

“I didn’t,” he said, smiling again, knowing what would follow. “And I’m not. I’m from New York.”

At this, Morgan’s eyes widened. “Then you are a Free Stater!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard so much about your country! You must tell me everything,” and the conversation turned to the Free States: their now mostly cordial relations with America, in which they maintained their own laws of marriage and religion but adopted for themselves the Union’s laws of taxation and democracy; their support, financial and military, of the Union in the War of Rebellion; Maine, which was mostly sympathetic to them, and where Free Staters’ safety was more or less assured; the Colonies and the West, where they would be in varying degrees of peril; how the Colonies had lost their war but seceded anyway, sinking further into poverty and degradation by the year, even as their debt to and therefore resentment toward the Free States burned hotter and brighter; the Free States’ ongoing struggle to be recognized as its own, distinct nation by other countries, a recognition denied them by everyone besides the kingdoms of Tonga and of Hawaii. Morgan had studied modern history at university and asked scores of questions, and in answering them, David was made aware both of his love for his nation and of how dearly he missed it, a sensation made more acute after he and Morgan had repaired to Morgan’s dingy room in his ill-maintained pensione. As David walked back to his host’s house late that evening, he was reminded, as he often had been on this trip, how fortunate he was to live in a country where he would never have to hide behind a door, waiting for someone to tell him that it was safe for him to leave without being seen, where he might stroll arm in arm across a city square with his beloved (should there ever be one), the way he saw male-and-female couples (but no other variants) do in squares across the Continent, where he might one day marry a man he loved. He lived in a country in which every man and woman could be free and could live with dignity.

But the other aspect of that day that had been memorable was that in it, David had not been David Bingham; he had been Nathaniel Frear, a name hastily patched together from his grandfather’s and mother’s, a son of a doctor, taking his year in Europe before he would return to New York to attend law school. He had invented a half-dozen brothers and sisters, a modest and cheerful house in an unfashionable but homey part of town, a life lived comfortably but not excessively. When Morgan had told him about a great residence of his former classmate’s that was to have hot running water in all its water closets, David did not reveal that the house on Washington Square already had hot-water plumbing, and that he had only to nudge a faucet handle to one side for a clear stream to at once gurgle forth. Instead, he marveled with Morgan at the classmate’s good fortune, the innovations of modern life. He would not deny his country—to do so seemed a form of treason—but he did deny his own biography, and there was something about doing so that made him giddy, even light-headed, so much so that when he finally entered his host’s home—a grand palazzo owned by his grandfather’s old college chum, a Free States expatriate, and his wife, a frowning, clomping contessa whom the man had obviously married for her title—his grandfather’s friend had looked him over and smirked.

“A good day, then?” he’d drawled, seeing David’s dreamy, unfocused expression, and David, who had spent his week in Florence leaving the house early in the morning and returning late at night, so as not to suffer his grandfather’s friend’s hands, which seemed always to be finding ways to float over his body, birds of prey that would one day dive and grab onto something, only smiled and said it had been.

He did not think often of this incident, but now he did, trying and failing to remember how he had felt in the moment of invention, and realizing that whatever ecstasy he had experienced was partly attributable to his being aware of the flimsiness of his deception. At any moment, he could have declared his actual self, and even Morgan would have known his name. It was a performance known only to him, but beneath the performance was something true, something meaningful: his grandfather, his wealth, his name. Were he to move to the West, his name would stand only for vice, if it stood for anything. In the Free States and in the North, to be a Bingham was to be respected and even revered. But in the West, to be a Bingham was to be an abomination, a perversion, a threat. It was not that he could change his name in California but, rather, that he would have to, because to be who he was would be too perilous.

Even entertaining these thoughts made him remorseful, especially because he was often jolted from his reverie by the appearance of his grandfather, who visited him before he left for the bank in the morning, and then twice in the evening, once before he dined, once after. This third visit was always the longest, and Grandfather would sit in the chair near David’s bed and, without preamble, begin reading to him from the day’s paper, or from a volume of poetry. Sometimes he would merely speak of his day, delivering a calm, unbroken monologue that David experienced as if floating in a placid, flowing river. This, to sit by him and talk or read, was Grandfather’s method for treating all of his previous illnesses, and although his gentle constancy was not in any way proven to help—or so David had once overheard his doctor informing his grandfather—it was stabilizing, and predictable, and therefore reassuring, something that, like the wallpaper stain, kept him in the world. And yet, because this was not one of his illnesses, just a self-imposed simulacrum of it, David felt only shame listening to his grandfather now—shame that he was causing him concern; further shame that he would even consider leaving him, and not just him but the rights and safety that his grandfather, and forebears, had fought to secure for him.

His grandfather had not reminded him of the museum’s unveiling, but it was to alleviate this shame that, on the day of the opening, he rang for a bath to be prepared and his suit to be pressed. He looked at himself in his brushed clothes and saw he was pale and drawn, but there was nothing to be done about that, and after he’d shakily descended the stairs and tapped on the door to his grandfather’s study—“Come in, Adams!”—he was rewarded with his grandfather’s astonishment: “David! My dear boy—are you better?”

“Yes,” he lied. “And I wouldn’t miss tonight.”

“David, you needn’t attend if you’re still ill,” his grandfather said, but David could hear how much he wanted him to come, and it seemed the least and only thing he could do after so many days spent contemplating betrayal.

It would have been only the briefest of walks to the townhouse on Thirteenth Street, just west of Fifth Avenue, that his grandfather had purchased for his museum, but Grandfather declared that, given the cold and David’s weakened state, it was best to take a hansom. Inside, they were met by John and Peter and Eden and Eliza, and by Norris and Frances Holson, and by others of his family’s friends and acquaintances and business associates, along with a number of people unknown to David but whom his grandfather greeted warmly. As the museum’s director, a trim little historian long employed by the family, was explaining to some guests an exhibit featuring drawings of the Binghams’ onetime property near Charlottesville, the farm and acreage that Edmund, a wealthy landowner’s son, forsook in order to venture north and found the Free States, the Binghams followed their patriarch as he moved about the room, exclaiming over things both remembered and not: Here, under a sheet of glass, was the piece of the parchment, now almost in tatters, on which David’s great-great-grandfather Edmund had drafted the Free States’ ur-constitution in November 1790, signed by all fourteen of the founders, the original Utopians, including Eliza’s maternal great-great-grandmother, promising freedom of marriage and abolishing slavery and indentured servitude and, though not allowing Negroes full citizenry, also outlawing their abuse and torture; here was Edmund’s Bible that he had consulted in his studies with Reverend Samuel Foxley when the two were law-school students in Virginia, and with whom he had conceived of their future country, a place where there might be freedom for both men and women to love whom they wished, an idea that Foxley had formulated after an encounter in London with an idiosyncratic Prussian theologian who would later count Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher among his students and disciples, and who encouraged him toward an emotionally and civically minded interpretation of Christianity; here were the first designs for the Free States’ flag by Edmund’s sister, Cassandra: a rectangle of scarlet wool at whose center a pine tree, a woman, and a man were arranged in a pyramid, with eight stars, one for each of the member states—Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island—arcing above them, and the motto, “For freedom is dignity, and dignity freedom,” stitched beneath them; here were proposals for laws allowing women to be educated and, in 1799, to vote. Here were letters dated throughout 1790 and 1791 from Edmund to a college friend testifying to the future Free States’ squalid conditions, the forests full of vengeful Indians, the bandits and thieves, the battle to win over the existing residents, one swiftly accomplished, not with guns and bloodshed but with resources and infrastructure, the religiously fervent, those who found the Free States’ beliefs repellent, paid off and sent south, the Indians driven west in hordes or slaughtered, quietly, in mass roundups in the very forests they had once terrorized, the native-born Negroes who had not assisted in their fight to gain control over the land (as well refugee Negroes from the Colonies) ferried to Canada or west in caravans. Here was a copy of the papers hand-delivered to the President’s House in Philadelphia on March 12, 1791, announcing the states’ intention to secede from America, but vowing to stand with the country against any attacks, domestic or foreign, in perpetuity; here was President Washington’s biting response, accusing Foxley and Bingham, the letter’s authors, of treason, of starving their country of its wealth and resources; here were the pages and pages of negotiations, Washington finally, grudgingly, granting the Free States’ right to existence, but only at the pleasure of the president, and only if the Free States swore that they would never recruit any future American states or territories to their cause, and continued to pay taxes to the American capital as if they were its vassal.

Here was an engraving, from 1793, of Edmund’s wedding to the man he had lived with since the death of his wife in childbirth three years prior, and the first legal union between two men in their new country, officiated by Reverend Foxley, and another, from fifty years later, documenting the marriage of two of the Binghams’ longest-serving and most loyal footmen. Here was a drawing of Hiram being sworn in as mayor of New York in 1822 (a tiny Nathaniel, then just a boy, was shown standing by his side, his eyes lifted adoringly); here was a copy of Nathaniel’s letter to President Lincoln, pledging the Free States’ loyalty to the Union at the beginning of the War of Rebellion and, beside it, the original of Lincoln’s reply thanking him, a letter so famous that every Free State child could recite by heart its contents, the American president’s implicit promise to respect their rights of autonomy, the vow that had been invoked, time and time again, to justify the States’ existence to Washington, D.C.: “…and you shall have not only my eternal Gratitude but our sworn recognition of your Nation as one within our Own.” Here was the agreement drafted shortly after this letter between America’s Congress and the Free States’ own in which the latter promised to pay enormous taxes to America in exchange for their uncontested freedoms of religion, education, and marriage. Here was the legal declaration allowing Delaware to join the Free States shortly after the war’s end, a voluntary decision that had nonetheless once again imperiled the country’s existence. Here was the charter from the Free States Society of Abolitionists, cofounded by Nathaniel, which provided Negroes passage through the country and financial assistance to resettle in America or the North—the Free States had had to protect itself from an influx of escaping Negroes, as its citizens of course did not want to find their land overrun with them, and yet were also sympathetic to their miserable plight.

America was not for everyone—it was not for them—and yet everywhere were reminders of the careful, constant work that had been and was still being done to appease America, to keep the Free States autonomous and independent: Here were the early plans for the arch that would crown the Square, commemorating, as did the Square itself, General George Washington, that the Binghams’ next-door neighbor had had built five years ago, from plaster and wood; here were the subsequent drawings of the arch, now to be rebuilt in glittering marble quarried from Bingham family land in Westchester, for which David’s grandfather—who had bristled at the idea of being upstaged by a minor businessman who lived across Fifth Avenue from them, in a house not quite as stately—had largely paid.

All these David had seen many times before, but even so, he, like the others, found himself perusing everything as carefully as if it were altogether new to him. Indeed, the room was hushed, the only sound the women’s swishing silk skirts, the men’s occasional coughs and cleared throats. He was examining Lincoln’s spiky hand, the ink faded to a dark mustard, when he felt rather than heard the presence of someone behind him, and when he straightened and turned, he saw it was Charles, his expression shifting between surprise and happiness and sorrow and pain.

“It is you,” Charles said, in a small, strangled voice.

“Charles,” he replied, not knowing how to proceed, and there was a silence before Charles bumbled onward.

“I heard you were sick,” he began, and, after David nodded, “I’m very sorry to sneak up on you like this—Frances invited me—I had thought—that is to say—I do not wish to embarrass you, nor for you to think I was trying to catch you unawares.”

“No, no—I didn’t think that. I have been sick—but it was important to my grandfather I come, and so”—David made a helpless gesture with his hands—“I did. Thank you for the flowers. They were quite beautiful. And the card.”

“You’re welcome,” said Charles, but he looked so unhappy, so distraught, that David was about to step toward him, thinking he might collapse, when Charles instead moved to him. “David,” he said, in a low, urgent voice, “I know this is neither the place nor the time for me to speak to you like this, but—I am—that is to say—do you—why have you not—I have been waiting—” He was quiet, his movements contained, but David froze, thinking that everyone in the room must sense the fervor, the anguish, that surrounded the man, and that everyone too must know that he was the cause of such anguish, that he was the source of such distress. Even in his horror, for Charles and for himself, he could see how Charles had been affected—his jowls gone slack, his round, good-natured face blotchy and damp.

Charles was opening his mouth to speak again when Frances appeared at his elbow, patting him on the arm. “Charles!” she said. “My goodness—you look as if you’re to faint! David, do get someone to fetch Mister Griffith some water!,” and there was a general parting of the crowd as she led Charles to a bench and Norris slipped away to find some water.

But before Frances escorted Charles away, David had seen the look she darted at him—disapproving; disgusted even—and he abruptly turned to leave, understanding that he must get away before Charles recovered and Frances sought him out. As he did, though, he nearly collided with his grandfather, who was peering over his shoulder at Frances’s back. “What on earth is happening?” Grandfather asked, and, before David could form an answer, “Why, is that Mister Griffith? Is he feeling ill?” He began moving toward Charles and Frances, but as he did, turned around to look at the room. “David?” he asked the space where his grandson had once stood. “David? Where are you?”

But David had already left.