To Paradise

IV

The weeks passed swiftly, as they always seemed to in late autumn, and although of course the arrival of Christmas was never a surprise, they were doomed, it appeared, to be ill-prepared, no matter how strenuously they had vowed the previous year to plan further in advance, so that by this Thanksgiving, the menus might be determined, the gifts for the children bought and tied with ribbon, the envelopes of money for the servants sealed, the decorations hung.

It was in the midst of this activity that he met for a second time with Charles Griffith, in early December; they had attended a concert of early Liszt works performed by the New York Philharmonic-Orchestra, and afterward had walked north, to a café on the southern end of the Park where David sometimes paused in his perambulations of the city for cake and coffee. This time as well the conversation came easily, and they spoke of books they had read, and plays and exhibits they had seen, and of David’s family—his grandfather and, briefly, his sister and brother.

Arranged marriages inevitably demanded an acceleration of intimacies, and, subsequently, a falling away of standard proprieties, and so, after they had spoken for a while, he was emboldened to ask Charles about his former husband.

“Ah,” Charles said. “Well—I suppose you already know his name was William, William Hobbes, and he died nine years ago.” David nodded. “It was a cancer that began in his throat and took him very quickly.

“He was a teacher at a little school in Falmouth, from a family of lobstermen in the North—we met shortly after I had returned from California. It was a very happy time for both of us, I believe; I was learning how to run my family’s business alongside my sister and brother, and we were both young and adventurous. In the summer, when school let out, he would come with me to Nantucket, where all of us—my younger sister and her husband and their sons, my brother and his wife and their daughters, my parents, my other sister and her family on their visits from up North—lived together in the family house. One year, my father sent me to the border to meet some of our trappers, and we spent almost the entire season in Maine and Canada with our business partners, going from place to place: It is such a beautiful land there.

“I thought I would be with him my entire life. We decided we would become parents later: We would have a girl and a boy. We would go to London, to Paris, to Florence—he was so much smarter than I—I wanted to be the one who would show him the frescoes and statues he had read about all his life. I thought I would be the one to accompany him to those museums. I dreamed of it—we would tour the cathedrals, we would eat mussels by the river, I would get to see those places I thought beautiful but never appreciated as much as he would, and this time I would see them with him and therefore I would see them anew.

“When you are a sailor, or when you have spent significant time with them, you understand that to make plans is folly—God will do what he wishes, and our plans are nothing against His. I knew this, and yet I was unable to stop myself. I knew it was silly, and yet I was unable to stop myself—I dreamed and dreamed. I planned the house I would build for us, on a cliff overlooking the rocks and the sea, with lupines all around it.

“But then he died, and a year later my younger sister’s husband died in the sickness of eighty-five, and since then, as you know, I have lived with her. The first three years after William was taken from me, I was consumed with work, and in work I found solace. But, curiously, it is as I have moved further from his death that I think of him more—and not only of him but of the companionship we had, and that I imagined we always would. And now my nephews are almost grown, and my sister betrothed, and I have come, these past few years, to realize that I—” And here Charles stopped, suddenly, his cheeks coloring. “I have spoken too long, and too plainly,” he said, finally. “I hope you will accept my apologies.”

“There is no need to apologize,” David said, quietly, though in truth he was surprised, albeit not embarrassed, by the man’s forthrightness, his near-confession of loneliness. But after this, they neither one knew how to re-begin their conversation, and their encounter ended soon after, with Charles thanking him, formally, but without offering a third meeting, and the two of them retrieving their coats and hats. Outside, Charles went north in his hansom, and David south in his, back to Washington Square. On his return, he considered this strange encounter, and how, despite its strangeness, it had not been unpleasant, and had indeed made him feel consequential—there could be no other word—to be brought into another’s confidence as he had, to be allowed to be the witness of such vulnerability.

So he was more unprepared than he ought to have been when, sitting in the parlor after Christmas lunch (duck, its skin crisp and pimpled from the oven, and surrounded by pearl-like crimson currant berries), John announced, a trace of triumph in his voice, “So, David, I hear you are being courted by a gentleman from Massachusetts.”

“Not courted,” replied Grandfather, quickly.

“An offer, then? Well, who is he?”

He let Grandfather provide only the barest of sketches: shipper and trader, the Cape and Nantucket, widowed and childless. Eliza was the first to speak: “He sounds lovely,” she said, staunchly—dear, cheerful Eliza, in her gray wool trousers and length of paisley silk knotted around her plump neck!—while the rest of his family sat in silence.

“Would you move to Nantucket, then?” asked Eden.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t considered it.”

“Then you haven’t accepted,” Peter said: a statement, rather than a question.

“No.”

“But you plan to?” (Peter, again.)

“I don’t know,” he admitted again, feeling himself grow flustered.

“But if—”

“Enough,” said his grandfather. “It is Christmas, and besides, it is for David to choose, not the rest of us.”

The party dissolved shortly after this, and his siblings went to gather their children and nannies from John’s room, which had been made into a playroom for his and Eden’s sons and daughter, and there were goodbyes and well-wishes, and then he and his grandfather were alone once more.

“Come back up with me,” his grandfather said, and David did, resuming the same seat he always took in his grandfather’s drawing room: across from his grandfather, slightly to his left. “I have not wanted to pry, but I admit I am curious: You have had two meetings now. Do you have any sense of whether you might want to accept the gentleman?”

“I know I ought, but I don’t—Eden and John made their decisions so quickly. I wish I knew, as they had.”

“You must not think of what Eden and John did. You are not they, and these decisions are not to be made rashly. The only thing you are required to do is consider the man’s offer seriously, and, if the answer is no, inform him immediately, or have Frances do so—though really, after two meetings, it ought to be you. But you must take your time, and not feel bad for doing so. When your father was matched with your mother, it took her six months to accept.” He smiled, slightly. “Not that that ought to be your example.”

He smiled, too. But then he asked the question he knew he must: “Grandfather,” he said, “what does he know of me?” And then, when his grandfather did not answer, only stared into his glass of whiskey, he ventured further. “Does he know of my confinements?”

“No,” his grandfather said, fiercely, his head snapping back up. “He does not. And he does not need to know—it is not his business.”

“But,” he began, “is it not a kind of duplicity not to tell him?”

“Of course not. Duplicity suggests we would be intentionally withholding something meaningful from him, and this is not meaningful—it is not information that should affect his decision.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t—but wouldn’t it?”

“If it did, then he would not be a man worth marrying to begin with.”

His grandfather’s logic, usually sterling, was here so faulty that, even were David in the habit of contradicting him, he would not, for fear that the entire edifice of his grandfather’s story would come tumbling down. If his confinements were not meaningful, then why should they not be divulged? And was not the way to judge Charles Griffith’s true character by telling him, fully and honestly, the truth of himself? Furthermore, if his illnesses were not in fact a source of shame, why had they both taken pains to conceal them? It was true that they had not beforehand learned everything about Charles that they might have—Grandfather had grumbled, after that first meeting, about being ignorant of his time in San Francisco—but what they had learned was simple and irrefutable. There was no evidence that Charles Griffith was not an honorable man.

He worried that, though he might not know it himself, and would be insulted to hear it, his grandfather had somehow decided that David’s weaknesses were a reasonable burden for Charles to assume in exchange for marrying a Bingham. True, Charles was wealthy—not as wealthy as the Binghams, though no one would be—but his money was new. True, he was intelligent, but he was not educated; he had not attended college, he had no Latin or Greek, he had traveled the world not in the pursuit of knowledge but in the pursuit of business. True, he was worldly, but he was not sophisticated. David had not thought himself someone who believed such things, but he wondered if he was defective enough so that his grandfather was thinking of him and Charles as belonging on two sides of a ledger: His illnesses for Charles’s lack of refinement. His lack of industry for Charles’s advanced age. At the bottom, would the two of them come out the same, a zero underlined once in ink in his grandfather’s hand?

“It will soon be a new year,” his grandfather said into this silence, “and new years are always more revealing than old ones. You will make your decision, and it will be yes or no, and the years will keep ending and beginning and ending and beginning, whatever you choose.” And with this, David understood he was being dismissed, and he stood and then bent to kiss his grandfather good night before climbing to his own room.

Then, too soon, the new year was almost upon them, and the Binghams gathered once again to toast its arrival. It was their tradition that on the last day of the year, all the servants should be invited to have a glass of champagne with the family in the dining room, and the group of them—the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the maids and footmen, the cook and butler and housekeeper and coachman and their various underlings—stood gathered around the table where the maids had earlier placed bottles of champagne wedged into crystal bowls of ice and arrangements of oranges pierced with cloves and dishes of roasted walnuts and platters of mincemeat pies, to listen to Grandfather salute the new year. “Six more years until the twentieth century!” Grandfather crowed, and the servants tittered nervously, because they disliked change and uncertainty, and the thought of one epoch ending and another beginning made them fearful, even as they knew that in the house at Washington Square, nothing would change: David would occupy the room he had always, and his siblings would come and go, and Nathaniel Bingham would be their master forever and ever.

Several days after that celebration, David took one of the hansoms to the orphanage. This was one of the first institutions of its kind in the city, and the Binghams had been its primary patron since its founding, which was only a few years after the Free States’ own founding. Over the decades, its population shrank and grew as the Colonies passed through periods of either relative wealth or worsening poverty; the journey north was a difficult and arduous one, and many of the children had been orphaned when their parents died en route, attempting to escape to the Free States. The worst period was three decades ago, during and directly after the War of Rebellion, just before David was born, when the refugee population in New York reached its peak and the governors of New York and Pennsylvania had sent mounted soldiers down to the latter’s southern border on a humanitarian mission, to find and relocate escapees from the Colonies. Any unattended children they encountered—as well as some with parents, but parents clearly unfit to tend to them—were, depending on their age, sent either to one of the Free States’ trade schools or to one of their charitable institutions, where they would become available for adoption.

Like most charities of its kind, Hiram Bingham’s housed very few infants and toddlers—there was such a demand for them that they were adopted quickly; unless they were sick or deformed or an imbecile, it was rare for a baby to remain more than a month in the orphanage. Both of David’s siblings had procured their children from here, and if David himself were ever to desire an heir, he would find him within the institution as well. John and Peter’s son was a Colony orphan; Eden and Eliza’s children were saved from the squalid hovel of some wretched Irish immigrant couple who could scarcely afford to feed them. There were frequent lively debates, in the newspapers and in drawing rooms, about what to do with the ever-increasing number of immigrants finding their way to the Manhattan shores—these days from Italy, Germany, Russia, and Prussia, not to mention the Orient—but one thing everyone had to agree upon, even if grudgingly, was that the European immigrants provided children for couples who wanted them, not only in their own city but throughout the Free States.

So fierce was the competition for a child that recently the government had introduced a campaign encouraging people to adopt older children. But this had been largely unsuccessful, and it was well understood, even by the children themselves, that those over the age of six were unlikely to ever find a home. This meant that the Binghams’ institution, like others, concentrated on teaching its wards how to read and do sums, so that they might be prepared to learn a trade; when they were fourteen, they would be apprenticed to a tailor or a carpenter or a seamstress or a cook or any number of people whose skills were essential to the continued prosperity and functioning of the Free States. Or they would join the militia or the navy, and serve their country in that way.

In the meantime, however, they were children, and as children, they attended school, as was required by law in the Free States. The new philosophy in education was that children would grow into healthier, better citizens and adults if they were exposed not just to the necessities of life (math, reading, writing) but to art and music and sport as well. And so, the previous summer, when his grandfather asked him if he might want to assist in the search for an art teacher for the institution, David had surprised even himself by volunteering for the responsibility—for had he not studied art for many years? Had he not been looking for something, some useful task, with which to define his days?

He taught his class every Wednesday, toward the end of the afternoon, just before the children had their supper, and initially, he had often wondered whether their fidgeting and tittering was at him or in anticipation of their meal—he had even considered asking the matron if he might teach his class earlier in the day, but she was fearsome to adults (though, curiously, beloved by her charges), and although she would have had to accede to his request, he was too intimidated to do so. He had always been wary of children, their unflinching, unbroken gazes that suggested they could see him in a way that adults no longer bothered to or could, but over time, he had grown first accustomed to and then fond of them, and as the months passed, they too grew steadier and calmer in his quiet presence, toiling away with their sticks of charcoal over their pads of paper, trying as best they could to reproduce the blue-and-white chinoiserie bowl filled with quince he had placed atop a stool at the front of the room.

He heard the music that day before he even opened the door—something familiar, a popular song, a song that he did not think was right for children to listen to—and he reached for the doorknob and turned it sharply, but before he could express either consternation or anger, he was struck at once by a number of sights and sounds that left him mute and motionless.

There, at the front of the room, was the decrepit, long-neglected piano that had been relegated to a corner of the classroom, its wood so buckled that, he had assumed, the instrument had been rendered hopelessly out of tune. But now it had been repaired, and cleaned, and positioned in the center of the room as if it were a grand, fine thing, and sitting at it was a young man, perhaps a few years younger than he, with dark hair slicked back as if it were evening and he were at a party, and a handsome, lively, beautiful face, one that complemented his handsome voice, with which he was singing: Why are you single, why live alone? / Have you no babies, have you no home?

The man’s head was tipped back on his neck, which was long but supple and strong, like a snake, and as he sang, David watched a muscle move in his throat, a pearl traveling upward and then sliding down:

“Bright lights were flashing in the grand ballroom,

Softly the music playing sweet tunes.

There came my sweetheart, my love, my own,

I wish some water, leave me alone!

When I returned, dear, there stood a man,

Kissing my sweetheart as lovers can…”

It was the kind of song you heard at low places, at music halls and minstrel shows, and thus highly inappropriate to sing to children, especially children like these, who given their circumstances would be naturally inclined toward such sentimental entertainments. And yet David found himself unable to speak, as mesmerized by the man, by his sweet, low voice, as the children were. He had heard this song performed only as a waltz, syrupy and plaintive, but the man had changed it into something jolly and brisk, so that the mawkishness of its story—a young girl asking her ancient bachelor uncle to explain why he had never fallen in love, never coupled and had a family—was reborn into something winking and bright. It was a song David hated in part because he felt that it might be a tune he would someday be able to sing from experience, that in it was his inevitable fate, but in this version, the man in the song sounded jaunty and careless, as if by never marrying he had been not deprived but delivered from a dismal future.

“After the ball is over, after the break of morn,

After the dancers’ leaving, after the stars are gone,

Many a heart is aching, if you could read them all—

Many the hopes that have vanished after the ball.”

The young man finished with a flourish, and stood and bowed to the assembled twenty or so children, who had been listening raptly and now broke into cheers and applause, and David stood straighter and cleared his throat.

At this, the man looked at him and smiled, such a broad, brilliant smile that David was once again flustered. “Children,” he said, “I believe I’ve made you late for your next lesson. Now, don’t groan, it’s very rude”—David flushed—“just go and get your drawing pads and I shall see you next week.” He began, still smiling, to make his way over to David, still standing at the door.

“I say, that’s a very strange song to play for children,” he began, trying his best to sound severe, but the man laughed, unoffended, as if David had been only teasing him. “I suppose it is,” he answered, good-naturedly, and then, before David could ask, “I am being very rude; not only have I made you late for your class, or, rather, your class late for you—you were on time!—but I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Edward Bishop—I am the new music teacher here at this fine establishment.”

“I see,” he said, uncertain how the conversation had slipped from his control so quickly. “Well, I must say that I was quite surprised to hear—”

“And I know who you are,” the young man interrupted him, but so charmingly, so warmly, that David once again found himself disarmed. “You’re Mister David Bingham, of the New York Binghams. I suppose I don’t need to say ‘New York,’ do I? Though surely there’s another set of Binghams somewhere in the Free States, don’t you think? The Chatham Binghams, for example; or the Portsmouth Binghams. I wonder how they must feel, these lesser Binghams, knowing that their name will always only mean one family, and they not a part of it, and therefore condemned to perpetually disappoint when people ask, ‘Oh, of the Binghams?’ and they having to apologetically say, ‘Oh, I’m afraid not; we’re of the Utica Binghams,’ and watching their inquisitor’s face fall.”

He was made quite speechless at this delivery, which had unfurled with great gaiety and speed, so that all he could muster, stiffly, was “I had never thought of it like that,” which made the young man laugh again, but quietly, as if he were laughing not at David but at something clever he had said, and the two had shared a confidence.

And then he placed his hand on David’s arm, and said, still merrily, “Well, Mister David Bingham, it was very nice indeed to meet you, and I apologize once again for disrupting the schedule.”

After the door closed behind him, something essential seemed to leach from the room; the children, who had been alert and attentive, suddenly became wan and defeated, and even David could feel himself slumping, as if his own body were no longer able to participate in the farce of enthusiasm, of uprightness, that a well-modeled life demanded.

Nevertheless, he plowed onward. “Good afternoon, children,” he said, receiving a tepid “Good afternoon, Mister Bingham,” in reply as he assembled on the stool the day’s still life: a creamily glazed vase in which he arranged a few branches of holly. As usual, he took his position at the back of the room, both so he could supervise the children and so he too could sketch if he so chose. Today, though, it was as if the only object in the room he could see was the piano, which stood behind the stool with his poor arrangement and, for all its batteredness, seemed the most beautiful, most compelling object there: a beacon, something shining and pure.

He glanced over to the student on his right, a frowzy, tiny eight-year-old, and saw that she was sketching (poorly) not only the vase and the flowers but the piano as well.

“Alice, you are just to draw the still life,” he reminded her.

She looked up, all eyes in her pinched little face, her two protruding teeth resembling chips of bone. “I apologize, Mister Bingham,” she whispered, and he sighed. Why would she not want to include the piano, when he too was unable to stop himself from gazing at it, as if he too might be able to conjure its player simply by hoping, as if his ghostly form lingered still in the room? “It’s all right, Alice,” he said. “Just start again on a clean sheet.” Around him, the rest of the children were silent and sullen; he could hear them shifting in their seats. It was foolish to feel so pained, but he did—he had always thought they had enjoyed his class, enjoyed it at least almost as much as he had come to enjoy teaching them, but after witnessing their earlier delight, he knew that even if that had once been true, it no longer was. He was a bite of an apple, but Edward Bishop was that apple baked into a pie with a shattery, lardy crust pattered with sugar, and after a taste of that, there was no going back to the other.

At dinner that night, he was morose, but Grandfather was in a cheery mood—was everyone in the world so happy?—and there was David’s favorite roasted squab for dinner, and stewed cardoons, but he ate little, and when Grandfather asked, as he did every Wednesday, how his class had been, he murmured only “Fine, Grandfather,” whereas normally he tried to make him laugh with stories of what the children had drawn, and what they had asked him, and how he had distributed the fruit or flowers from the still life among the students who had done the best work.

But Grandfather seemed not to notice his inwardness, or at least chose not to comment on it, and after dinner, as he was trudging upstairs to the drawing room, David had, preposterously, a vision of Edward Bishop, and what he might be doing as he himself prepared to spend another night indoors near the fire, across from his grandfather: In it, the young man was at a club, the kind David had been to only once, and his long throat was exposed, and his mouth was open in song, and around him were other handsome young men and women, all dressed in bright silks, and life was festive, and the air smelled of lilies and champagne as, above them, a cut-glass chandelier tossed wobbling spangles of light around the room.