Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [29]
But she was no less shrewd in the skewering of colonial custom.
A gentle neighbour, to whom I give the name Mister Mowberry, return’d but a fortnight from the town of Duxbury, has latterly regal’d me with a tale of utter Degradation wrought by zealous upholders of colonial Virtue.
Your gentle correspondent knows well of what she speaks, having witness’d in fair Salem such brazen Gatherings of shiftless Acorns.
Consider a gentleman prepar’d to export to the Colony the purest product of England, namely the wealth of its culture and mental training, who borrows against inheritance in the pursuit of credentials in Land-Surveyance & Committment of Quitclaim, only to arrive in Boston, expecting no more than a civil welcome, to be greeted by stone-throwing ruffians who mock his clothes, his cultivated accent; estate-agents in his chosen City who refuse the Let of lodgings lest he pay a year’s deposit in advance; & the Assurance from those courthouse Jesters who constitute our native Aristocracy, that no Claim adjudicated by an Englishman has a chance of being Recorded.…
GABRIEL LEGGE was a compulsive seafarer, signing on as a mate whenever he could secure a boat. He’d be gone for six months at a stretch, then home for a few weeks, jolly as always, establishing a market for the silks and gemstones he’d secured on his travels. For Hannah, whom he’d wooed with tales of adventure and travel—in some cases transparent with fabrication if not outright fraud—forbearance settled in as the handmaiden of passion. She, who had been raised in a home in which Robert Fitch was never absent, but the income depended upon her sewing for the barest subsistence, accepted the crude arithmetic of survival: man out the gate, worth the wait; man in the house, mend your blouse. Lacking a reliable means of comparison, Hannah counted herself a contented wife.
Since she was to write so movingly of sexual passion in her later years, in a voice that is unique among women in her time and place, I have tried to read carefully between the lines of all her correspondence. Her written record is one long chronicle of discoveries, her curiosity extends to every branch of knowledge she ever had contact with. Except sexual love, at least with Gabriel Legge. They lived together in Stepney fewer than three months before he shipped out the first time.
GABRIEL WAS an artful salesman; on each official voyage he did some buying and selling of his own, and always for outrageous profit, and always brought home a pouchful of Golconda diamonds the size of acorns. He wasn’t greedy like the ship’s captain, who took with him cargoes of porcelain and cut glass, hunting dogs, horses and cases of rum. The Captain brought back gold-handled flyswatters, brocades fit for duchesses, spices that smelled up all of London. What manner of bejeweled insect earned its dispatch from a gold-handled swatter? Gabriel’s tales of the wealth of India, its utterly useless wealth, employed to no end, ignorant of investment, leading to no greater social good, seemed calculated to confront, to subvert, even a reluctant Puritan’s finer sensibilities. To admire a thing in and of itself, to honor an activity merely for being, these were alien and uncomfortable concepts.
Gabriel got his kicks from haggling, not from hoarding. He wanted Hannah to overcome her Puritan failing of frugality and spend. And Hannah did, at first to oblige her husband; later, because she loved fine things. She decorated the house in Stepney; she made and sold garments from the exotic cloths; portable curios, like jeweled smoking pipes and flyswatters, she sent to Susannah, Robert and Thomas with trustworthy emigrants.
The maritime trade museum in William Maverick’s old house just outside Salem holds many of those objects under glass. Even Mr. Satterfield fails to understand: Hannah’s hands are on everything.
For what could Gabriel Legge