“Yes, indeed, and they are very dear to me. But I should like to have children of my own, someday.”
Here he knew he should agree, should say that he too yearned for children, but he found himself unable to do so. But Charles easily filled the space where his response should have been, and they spoke of his nephews, and sisters and brother, and his house on Nantucket, the conversation once again moving along, until Charles finally stood, and David did as well.
“I must leave,” Charles said. “But I have had a lovely time, and am so glad you chose to meet me. I will be back in the city in another fortnight; I hope you might choose to see me again?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, and rang the bell, and the two of them shook hands again before Norris escorted Charles back to the entrance, and David knocked on the door on the opposite side of the room, and when he heard a voice beckoning him, entered directly into his grandfather’s office.
“Ah!” said his grandfather, standing from his desk and handing his accountant a stack of papers. “Here you are! Sarah—”
“Yes, sir, right away,” Sarah said, and left, silently closing the door behind her.
His grandfather came out from behind his desk and sat in one of the two chairs facing it, indicating that David should sit in the other. “Well,” said his grandfather, “I will not be coy, and neither must you; I have been eager to see you and hear your impressions of the gentleman.”
“He was—” he began, and faltered. “He was agreeable,” he said at last, “more agreeable than I’d imagined.”
“That is a fine thing to hear,” his grandfather said. “Of what did you speak?”
He told his grandfather about their conversation, saving the part about Charles’s time in the West for last, and as he relayed it, he watched his grandfather’s silvery eyebrows raise. “Is that so?” his grandfather asked, mildly, and David knew what he was thinking: that such information had not arisen in their investigation of Charles Griffith, and because Bingham Brothers had access to the most prominent figures in all professions—doctors, lawyers, investigators—he was wondering what other things they might not know, what other mysteries might remain to be uncovered.
“Will you meet him again?” Grandfather asked when he was finished.
“He will be back in a fortnight, and asked if he might see me again; I said he might.”
He had thought his grandfather would be satisfied with this answer, but instead he stood, with a pensive expression, and walked to one of the large windows, lightly stroking the edge of its long, weighty silk curtain as he looked down at the street. For a moment he remained there, in silence, but when he turned again, he was smiling once more, his familiar, dear smile that always made David feel, no matter how dire his life seemed, that he was someplace comfortable.
“Well,” his grandfather said, “then he is a very lucky man.”
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.