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.