“There’s nowhere else I can be,” I replied. “Why has thee come?”
“But why can’t thee be anywhere else?” asked Johan.
Beneath my shawl, I squeezed Charlotte gently. She gave out a string of peculiar sounds, kicked her legs, and wriggled. A puzzled Johan observed my moving shawl. I pulled the cloth away and our baby inclined her head toward the men, eyes blinking against the gaslight.
The whole truth penetrated Peter at once; the hue and curl of Charlotte’s hair left little doubt as to her paternity. He dropped his face to his dirt-stained hands. But Johan stared at the baby, furrowing his brow.
“Whose child is this?”
“Can’t thee tell?” I asked, offended.
Charlotte kicked her legs and expelled air in grunts, pleased with herself for existing.
“Why didn’t thee answer my letters?” said Johan fiercely. “I went to the post office every day I could for the entire year.”
He was going to lie? Gorge rose to my throat. “Letters? I received none.”
“I sent them,” he insisted. “I pleaded for letters back. Thee doubts my word?” He stood and dumped his satchel to the floor.
I took in a breath and prepared to tell him that I certainly did doubt his word. But Peter raised a hand to stop our argument. He moved closer, so that I smelled the sawdust that must be in his very veins.
“I got thy letter,” he said. “We came right away.”
“Right away? I wrote in Fourth Month! I worried and worried when I didn’t hear.”
“I wasn’t expecting mail till I wrote Father for money. I only went to the post office this week.” His color rose as Johan rolled his eyes. “The point is, Johan and I returned as soon as we learned thee wasn’t well. To help thee.”
To help thee! That precious sentiment. But Johan had already gotten that chance through the solicitor. I looked at him; his stiff face seemed to be holding back an unsorted mass of feeling. As I watched, he surrendered his weight to the cool marble floor, stretched his long legs forward, and stared at Charlotte. His expression moved from sorrow to confusion. The broad planes of his cheeks became mottled, and he turned to me.
“If this is our child,” he demanded, “why didn’t thee write to tell me?”
“I had no address!” Frustration tightened my throat. “Then a solicitor visited thee in Pittsburgh. But thee was married to Olivia Stone and denied knowing me!”
Johan snorted. “A solicitor? Found me married?”
“Why didn’t Father help?” Peter asked. “Why not go home?”
“I couldn’t, with a baby and no husband. Besides, Patience told me never to come back.” I reached to my neck and fingered the scab from the rock she’d hurled.
“Get outta here!” called a deep voice. A hostile rumbling spread among the would-be sleepers. I struggled to my feet and pointed to an archway leading to a carriage bay.
Peter lifted my valise. Johan held my arm with his good hand. I tucked Charlotte close, and together we walked there and settled onto a set of moveable stairs.
We sat in silence, momentous concerns suspended between us like moisture after a heavy rain. To my one side, Peter turned his head so as not to be seen; the fall of his shoulders suggested grief. Charlotte settled in the shawl sling at my front, poking out her tiny toes and waggling them. To my other side sat Johan, who reached his unhurt hand forward to encompass Charlotte’s feet. The shackles on my heart opened slightly, exposing wounded flesh.
What higher wisdom had lured me off that train toward Pittsburgh?
“I named her Charlotte, after my grandmother,” I told him.
His eyes warmed in his dirt-streaked face. “She’s truly ours?”
“There’s no other possibility.”
“Dearest,” he said in a thick-throated voice. “I never should have left thee!” He bent his head and placed his lips over mine, then cupped his hands at my cheeks, framing our kiss.
The odors of his unwashed body were strong. His velvety mouth pressed mine with too much fervor. I disliked it until I smelled his breath—like fresh-shucked corn. His breath always had been sweet, as if it spoke more of his soul than of his body. But he seemed to have forgotten Peter beside us, the infant in my lap, our dirty and disheveled state, our year of separation. I pulled away to find Peter wiping his eyes and staring ahead. Johan stroked my cheek with a finger, watching our baby as she drifted toward sleep.
I sent two prayers into the ether: that Johan’s claim of constancy would prove true, and that I could find a way to accept him back into my damaged heart. And in this odd configuration—or so I hoped—four outcasts began to assemble their souls into a little family.
*
The next morning, Peter and Johan got their hair trimmed and beards shaved at a barber’s, then rented us a room. They left me and Charlotte out of the story they told the property owner in her Market Street office. On the promise of two men’s gainful employment, along with Peter’s pocket watch for security and six dollars for the first month’s rent, she was willing to lease them a large, third-story room in one of her many buildings. It’s below Girard Avenue, a half-mile or so from the Schuylkill River—near to the noise and soot of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, but a thousand times better than the street.
The vigilance that kept me upright on the street burned out as soon as we had shelter. For days I had much trouble rising from a horizontal position. I did manage to write Father, telling him nothing but my new address and asking him to forward any letters that Johan might have sent to Germantown. I expressed the matter as urgently as I dared.
The days have passed with no word from Father, and keeping Johan at bay is difficult. On being anywhere near my body, he wants to touch. If Peter isn’t in the room, and sometimes when he is, then to press against me, to stroke my neck, to smell and embrace me is Johan’s main intent. He seems never to have left that place of na?ve pleasure we occupied before he went away. In fact, during the hardships of Pittsburgh, he says he lived in a frenzy of desire, with its object being to hold me close, and its pain being…well, he claims he believed that a lack of love kept me from answering his letters.
Shortly after arriving in Pittsburgh, he found rich fodder in a tattered copy of a chapbook called Leaves of Grass by a man named Whitman, whom Johan called the Camden bard. “Listen,” he said the first time we were alone, when Peter had gone out to buy food and furnishings. He read these lines and more from the book that lies beside me now:
I love you, oh you entirely possess me,
O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and lawless,
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea….
O you and I! what is it to us what the rest do or think?
What is all else to us? only that we enjoy each other and exhaust each other if it must be so.