Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [157]
“Do I know?” I said.
“Perhaps you do.”
Jonathan laughed a laugh so hard he spit bubbles of ale across the table.
“Pardon, pardon,” he said, “I am not usually this less-than-fastidious.”
“I ask you, Cousin, what do you have in mind?”
“In mind? In mind? The long history of our people, darkened by slavery in Egypt, long in bondage there until our savior Moses led us out of the land of captivity.”
“A long procession through the ages,” Joseph Salvador added, “up to where we sit now, with Jews like myself in the state legislature.”
“That is not what my cousin was saying.”
Jonathan feigned innocence.
“And what might I have been saying except what I said?”
“You were speaking about our freedom, and thinking about certain aspects of your own private life here.”
“Or perhaps I was thinking about your private life here? Might there be a certain dark woman who figures in that?”
“What, dear Cousin, might you know about that?”
“Know? So there is something to know?”
“It is time to go,” I said, pushing back from the table so brusquely that I nearly overturned it.
“Oh, yes, Cuz, because we have one more meeting.”
“Another?” Now I was not merely angry with my cousin but mystified. I would have been even more mystified, not less, if I had been aware that I was approaching a cross-roads in my life, knowing only that I had a deep sensation that great change was in the works.
Jonathan gave Joseph Salvador a conspiratorial glance.
“Jonathan,” I said in protest, “has your wife tried to put me in that company of her cousin Anna again?”
“Anna?” Salvador shook his head. “No, no, don’t fear the fires of social obligation. This is something quite outside the bounds of etiquette.”
“What then?” I said.
The pair of them ignored my question.
Our meeting had gone from morning, through mid-afternoon, and now the sun, as we stepped out onto the brick walk before the house, was swinging westward toward the end of the day.
“Will there be some food and drink at this mystery rendezvous?” I inquired.
“Plenty for the belly and the spirit,” my cousin said.
Salvador gave a shake of this thick red mane and bid me climb aboard the carriage.
***
The ride to the fine house at the edge of the Battery took no time at all. Liveried servants ushered us inside. My cousin and his brother-in-law made conversation about this and that with a slave woman as dark as night and shoulders as broad as a man’s. She served us tea in the parlor. Yours truly still fumed, but not so much that he could not admire the fine portraits on the wall and the deep, cushiony carpets, some with abstract weaves, others depicting certain scenes from our history, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the burning of Washington.
Music from a spinet drifted down from the floor above.
“And where are the other conspirators?” I asked of my cousin.
“They will be here momentarily,” he said.
Sure enough, within moments we heard voices in the hall, and a quintet of beautifully dressed slave girls walked lightly into the room.
“Is this the meeting?” I said, standing up.
My cousin shook his head at what he took to be my impossible attitude. I certainly did feel impossible and stupidly surprised.
“Can you ever rest your busy mind, Cousin?”
“Sorry,” I said with a shake of my head, “this is not what I had in my mind at all. I am not passing any judgments on you, Cousin. This is just not…” I stood up. “If you will excuse me, I am going to take a stroll.”
His manner quite cold my cousin said, “Meet us here in two hours, or walk back to The Oaks.”
“Very well,” I said and left the room.
A servant let me out of the house just as a trio of stringed instruments sounded in the hall. I walked down the steps and fairly well loped across the park to the