The Pox Party Page 3

  It happened at about this time that the English took the Isle of B—, and my mother was taken on an English ship — the Incontrovertible, Captain Julian McFergus, Master — and brought to the shore of America. It was not an easy passage, for she was pregnant; and notwithstanding her state, the sailors clamored to commit the most indecent and inhuman violence upon her person; in which design they were only halted by the sword of Captain McFergus. For which, each night when I said my prayers, my mother always asked that I remember this same McFergus, and pray that he was well, and still walked in the ways of righteousness.

  Having arrived in America, she found she did not fancy the southern ports to which she was taken — Savannah, Charleston, and New-York — and so, finally, she reached Boston. Mr. Gitney — that is, 03-01 — reading of her arrival in the papers, went to the dock to greet her, and being impressed with her bearing and mental acuity, offered her a place in his home. He asked only, as a special favor, that I be brought up according to various philosophical principles, chief among which was the need for thorough tutelage in the Classics and in all the achievements of Europe.

  My mother was, at this time, some thirteen years of age, big with child, and in little state to refuse.

  So began our curious life in the College of Lucidity.

  My mother was surrounded always by admirers: scholars, poets, painters, bucks, and blades. She let them all pay homage; for though she was now in low estate, she had been bred for the court, and was accustomed to the crush of supplicants. She hearkened little to the insinuations of flattery or the curtseys of obsequiousness, but returned all idle, pretty chatter in its own coin.

  If she sought to leave a room, to guide me, perhaps, up to my bed, one of the scholars would cry, “But Mademoiselle, you are the bright center of our system. How may the sun, around which we all revolve, leave its planets spinning?”

  And she would reply, “Sirs — you have gravity enough without me. And when I return, comet-like, to your orbit, you will welcome me all the more for my rarity and dazzle.”

  They applauded her understanding and the deep science of her counter-flattery.

  She would rush me up the stairs and sit on my bed. She would tap her fingers while I prayed, and seemed vexed by the number of animals for whom I asked safety. No sooner had my “Amen” flown out my mouth, drifted its way to the ceiling, and popped — she would rise swiftly, and bid me good night, rub my chin once, and rush back to the salon below.

  Increasingly, I was in awe of her majesty, and did not know what I might say to please her. I fear now that I failed to engage her; that I was too sallow a character. Indeed, as time went on and I reached my seventh, and then my eighth, year, I became aware of how dull my wit was when confronted with her beauty, how drab my bearing; and so, gradually, I came to stand in relation to her as another admirer, seeking a few words, a kiss, a sign of favor. I vied for her attention only as one man of many.

  She smiled upon me to chasten the others, to spurn their envious glances at me when I was taken by her up to bed.

  Her spirit was so light, so luminous, so gay, that I feared how leaden was my solemnity and silence. I assayed to try my own hand at bons mots, saying to her in the morning, “You are — you are come down to the breakfast room as the — some dew on the flowers. Falling.”

  She would say, “A few more years, Octavian.”

  But this is the grossest filial ingratitude; there is no object in the world that should inspire greater affection and enchain the heart of man more than that wellspring of all that is sweetest, that dear first progenitor, a mother; and if I speak now in a way that makes her seem the coquette, I do so only because there is no preserving a spirit in lying about them; a portrait that improves upon its subject, that removes the moles, undrops the double-chin, suspends the sagging cheeks — that is no portrait at all, and preserves nothing for all time but a fancy. In the painting of such a likeness, the subject has slipped away, evaporated; and after death, all that is left is a canvas of someone else, a likeness of a smiling fiction, and the spirit does not hover near, and cannot speak its comfortable words.

  So here, in limning her portrait, must I paint her as she was, a girl of little more than my own age now. I do not know what she felt, nor what fires burned in her bosom, what memories she entertained, what plains she saw when she dreamed, what grasses, what beasts, what faces of mother, father, sister, lover.

  I know but what I saw, and that was her glittering accomplishments; and then, on some nights, some very few nights, she would come to me, and sit by my bed and watch me sleep (or attempt to sleep, as sleep was impossible with her gaze so fiery upon me). She would betray no sign of emotion; but she read my prone form like a pamphlet that contained words to save her.

  Often, if I moved uneasily beneath her gaze, she would bark that I should remain still; but once, me waking to find her near, she instead begged me: “Touch my hair.”

  She laid her head down upon my lap, burying her face in my chest, and I patted her head; and after a time, lying there as she clutched, I felt that I was become her mother, and she my son.

  A man in a topiary maze cannot judge of the twistings and turnings, and which avenue might lead him to the heart; while one who stands above, on some pleasant prospect, looking down upon the labyrinth, is reduced to watching the bewildered circumnavigations of the tiny victim through obvious coils — as the gods, perhaps, looked down on besieged and blood-sprayed Troy from the safety of their couches, and thought mortals weak and foolish while they themselves reclined in comfort, and had only to snap to call Ganymede to their side with nectar decanted.

  So I, now, with the vantage of years, am sensible of my foolishness, my blindness, as a child. I cannot think of my blunders without a shriveling of the inward parts — not merely the desiccation attendant on shame, but also the aggravation of remorse that I did not demand more explanation, that I did not sooner take my mother by the hand, and —

  I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.

  I do not know what we may do, to know another better.

  Some days after our jaunt in the country, when we had all crawled in the Blissful State of Mammalian Repose, I was alone with Bono (for so I thought of him now, and not by his number). I watched him cleaning his master’s woolen coat; he was wrapping wet scraps of brown paper about hot coals, and, with a tongs, dousing grease spots with the steaming paper.

  I asked him, “Why do you wish to change your name from Bono?”

  “It was give me as a jest,” he said.

  I said, “I do not understand the jest.”

  He lay down his tongs, and soaked another piece of paper.

  “What jest?” I asked him.

  “I understood you was a silent boy,” he said.

  I knew it was of importance that I pursue my inquiry.

  I waited while he soaked another spot. The paper was tearing. He swore as the coal streaked black on the lapel. He cast aside the tongs.

  I asked, “May I assist you?”

  He fixed me with a look.

  I offered, “I could hold the tongs and coal.”

  “I been plenty of things,” he said, “but I never been on fire.”

  He stretched his arms out, and turned his head one way and the other to make his neck crack. He noted that I still watched him, and said, “You want to know?”

  I nodded.

  He seemed to be considering. He sucked in his cheeks. Then he released them.

  At length, he said, “I was in my mother’s womb when she was bought. My master purchased me and her, one price. My name’s Pro Bono. For free. They got two, my mother and me, for the price of one.”

  I did not know what to say.

  He put his hands on my shoulders, and said, in tones facetious, “See, Prince O., we’re alike in more than just our skin.”

  I watched him carefully.

  He said, “You and your mama were a single lot. See? The girls, they’
re cheaper when they’re pregnant. Masters lose some months with her coming to bed, and the baby suckling. . . .”

  He smiled at me. “You didn’t know this,” he said. It was a question, but I had no answer, for perhaps I had known it.

  I said, “My mother is a princess.”

  He pulled forth another piece of brown paper and wrapped it round a coal. “Your mother was a princess,” he amended.

  I started; I stared.

  Cautiously, I asked, “Where is your mother?”

  “Cook,” he answered. “At one of Mr. 03-01’s nephews’ houses. Can’t remember which number nephew. Maybe 03-17.”

  “You were sold to us?” I asked.

  He fixed me with a solemn and ironical gaze. “To you?” he repeated.

  “My mother,” I said, “chose to come here because she had heard such things about the town of Boston while on the Isle of B— that she wished to visit it.”

  I was surprised when this magisterial explanation met only with a look of pity and impatience.

  He said, “Surely it don’t have anything to do with them selling the sickliest slaves up New England way after no one buys them down South.” He shook his head. “No,” he said, “she walked down the gangplank with page boys and trumpets.”

  I struggled to understand his jest; and when I recognized what he imputed, my mother’s low condition, I knew not what to say. I wished it to be a lie.

  I put my arms about myself and spake no more. I desired no more explanations from Pro Bono.

  He looked at me. “You didn’t know,” he said again. “You did not know?”

  I watched him. He did not move, but held the steaming coal in the tongs and stared at me.

  He said, “You can — this once — start crying.”

  I moved not a hair.

  He said, “That will be the last time in your life when you’re free.”

  [From The Boston Gazette, June 12, 1759]

  . . . of Tremont Street announces that he will keep the famed RICHELIEU at stud this season. The horse is renowned for his strength and valour, and sires acrobatic colts. For all seminal endeavors, he may be engaged for 5s. the single leap or by seasonal subscription for £2 4s. Mares shall not complain of the performance. Enquire with owner.

  In the days that followed this conversation with Bono, I began to look about me with new eyes — that is to say, with eyes from which the scales had new-fallen, where bedazzlement was harsh and all about me; and I saw for the first time and understood that in our house and the houses we visited, there were black and white, bonded, freed, free-born, indentured, enslaved, and hired.

  Perhaps I may be pardoned my naïveté; I was but eight, and had given little thought to service and recompense.

  Knowing, now, that my mother and I had been purchased, I began to revolve the question, For what purpose?

  And though the solution to this mystery was, to my young mind, occulted, yet did I know where it lay: behind the forbidden door. Thither — in spite of my fears — would I have to repair for answers.

  No words can tell the agitation of my spirits occasioned by merely the thought of throwing open that portal and beholding the secrets of the gloomy closet within. Consider that on the door itself was pasted my visage, open-mouthed, above crossed bones. I fancied that, should I be discovered, I should be caged and tortured like the animals in the experimental chambers, burning compounds applied to my skin, incisions made near my eyes.

  When I would pass the door in the morning, I would hesitate before it and regard its latch and its lock. I considered furtively when I might find occasion to slip into the room without detection. 03-01 and some of the other academicians repaired there with some frequency, and it was of utmost importance that they not discover me dabbling in their mysteries.

  I found my opportunity one night when I knew them to be holding a dinner and entertainment for other wealthy men of the colony who protested Britain’s yoke; that evening Mr. 03-01 and his brethren were to open their doors to a large company of prosperous merchants, doctors, lawyers, smugglers of Dutch tea and Madeira wine, owners of slave-ships, speculators in real estate, and colonial gentry who wished to give voice to their outrage and resist, as they said, the oppression of royal ministers and the bondage imposed upon them by Parliament. Well did I know that I would spend my evening in bed, from whence I could slip out, once they had begun their discussion in earnest and all ears were fixed upon the transports of incendiary disputation.

  The chambers set aside for experiment were not lit at that hour. Though there were blankets over the cages, I could hear the animals stir as I passed by them, the floor creaking beneath my bare and chilled feet.

  I stopped to watch the antics of the squirrels. They observed me in return. Their eyes were black as obsidian in the night. They stood upon their haunches.

  “Play,” I whispered, but they would not; their attentions were absorbed in my endeavor, as if they knew what was to come, and wished particularly to witness it.

  I passed by them to the forbidden door. Over the lintel was affixed the ancient dragon’s skull, its browning sockets gazing down the corridor.

  On the door itself was the sketch of my own face.

  I regarded it with that giddiness that comes of sin. I raised my hand and touched the metal latch, pressed it with my thumb, and found it, as I had suspected, locked; all the while hearing voices two rooms away which complained that Parliament would reduce honest men of business to the status of slaves.

  In the days previous, I had observed the key used to open the door. It was a simple thing with but one tang. It was a matter of moments, then, for me to bend a wire so that I might motivate the tumblers of the lock and spring it open.

  I lifted the elbow of the lock from the door’s hasp. Face to face with the cartoon of my own infant anxiety, I lifted the latch, and opened the door, and beheld the secret chamber.

  Perhaps I had expected masks and robes and all the imagined gimcrackery of cultism: bibs of animal teeth, screws for boring into the head, phials and plungers to extract and titrate the soul; perhaps, merely, I had wished for these things, knowing too well what I would find instead.

  It was a small room, taken up mostly with a wide plank desk and three stools. On bookshelves were bound volumes with my name and my mother’s embossed upon the spine beside a date; the dates stretching back to the time of my birth. Upon the wall, writ large, was a chart labeled “MAMMALIA — or, Beasts that Give Suck.” And first upon it:

  Below that, the primates continued in their course, each one named — the ape and the orangutan, the monkey — and then, the brutes, the feræ, the glires, all the beasts from sloth to pigmy shrew, arrayed silently in ordered cavalcade as if waiting admission to the Ark.

  There was nothing, thus far, to affright. I had just leaned over to examine a print hung upon the wall, the figure of a woman unclothed, when I heard my name called. The painter, 07-03, was calling to the company, “He is not above-stairs!”

  There was a cry of, “Music! We must have music!”

  I ascertained that they wished me to perform, and it behove me to comply, that I might avoid detection. I backed out of the room, and had almost shut the door when my eyes fell again upon the engraving of the naked woman on the wall; and I saw that it was my mother.

  “Octavian!” called 03-01. “Octavian? Your presence is cordially requested in the audience room! We have your violin!”

  I stepped back into the forbidden chamber. I pulled the door shut behind me, and held my candle toward the print, viewing now more clearly than before her face, still and impassive, the close-cropped hair I rarely saw except concealed by wig or cap. I thought it strange that they should have a portrait of her here, especially in such a state of dishabille. Her portrait was entitled, “PLATE XVII. PUBESCENT FEMALE OF THE OYO COUNTRY IN AFRICA.” I squinted, and edged my gaze down to her breasts, her stomach, the lines that marked her; which extended out from her prone form to letters worn like mechanical bouquet
s in the blank space where her image floated. She hung there corpse-like; her hands turned outwards, as, in paintings of Christ, he stands when with gentility he reveals to Thomas the holes torn in his side and palms.

  “A puff of breath would have extinguished your candle,” 03-01 chided, standing in the door — which now was wide open — behind me. I turned. He said, “A mere whisper across the flame. There could be no strategy simpler to pursue, nor so effective in delaying the punishment which is, as you are aware, contingent on your passing through this door.”

  I could not speak for awe of him.

  He leaned back and shouted to the others, “I have found him! Proceed without us!” He stepped back into the chamber and shut the door behind him. “Set the candle down upon the desk,” he said. “Sit upon a stool.”

  He sat beside me. He smiled faintly and watched my face. He said, “You have seen your mother.” I did not reply. He offered, “In the illustration.”

  I could not look at him anymore. My spirits were so disarranged, my nerves so clamorous in their confusion, that no course of thought, speech, or action presented itself.

  His breeches were satin. It was a fancy evening.

  He sighed, and offered nothing. The candle guttered between us. From a far chamber, I could hear the conversation of vital men, men on whom depended the colony’s well-being.

  At length, he demanded, “Why have you trespassed here?”

  “I wished . . . to know . . .”

  “You know,” he said, nodding. “You have already divined our purpose.” He smiled. “In these volumes are recorded each bit of data that we have collected in the years since your mother came to live with us. Your height . . . your weight . . . your diseases . . . your sustenance both in its ingress and egress. Through the collection of such details, we hope to establish, in the broadest sense, the means by which children grow, the astounding systems of ingestion, decoction, and waste, the development of skills and the reception of ideas and language by the infant brain.”