30
Key West
1846
Time ?ew by. I was busy with the factory, with my children and Dorothy’s family, and looking out for Gran. There was little time for socializing; I just did not have enough hours in my day. And with no man in my life, I was becoming as chaste as a nun.
When I had moments to myself, I still recalled those happy and amorous moments with Andrew: Quite suddenly, yet another daydream would surface and drift me toward Wreckers’ like a bird in the wind. With a smile, I found myself caught up in thoughts of my mischievous seduction of him up in the lighthouse tower—his astonishment at how I reveled in my boldness. In my mind, I sometimes relived pressing against him in my bed on cool nights, the light from the tower stretching, caressing his features as he slept. And my dreams still included Ebony—the moments when I cuddled and nursed her, even though when I opened my eyes, I knew the terrible truth.
Martha and Timothy had been getting restless in Key West and wanted to go to school in New York City. I wasn’t sure why they chose New York instead of New Orleans or Baltimore, which were closer, but I felt if that was what they wanted, I should not deprive them of it.
Martha, now sixteen, had found out about an art program in New York run by nuns; Timothy, now ?fteen, was hoping to be accepted in a preparatory school which would eventually lead to studying architecture at King’s College in New York. I wasn’t sure I could bear the idea of both of them leaving home at once, but I wanted them to be happy, and, I told myself, at least they would have each other there. In the early spring of 1846, I sent out applications to the schools, secretly hoping that one winter in the cold Northeast would be enough for them.
I also decided that no matter how ill the journey made me, I would accompany them to New York to get them settled. I had the entire summer to prepare.
Around that time, Tom Farrell told me about a friend of one of his clients who was interested in buying a Key West business. There had been inquiries made about my cigar factory, and they wondered if I would be interested in selling. Tom and Dorothy brought him around one evening for dinner, and Juanita served us one of her splendid paellas.
Jonathon Levy was about my own age—thirty-?ve or so. A New Yorker, he was, much like Tom—smart, educated, and very handsome. I quite enjoyed his company.
“I’m very impressed with your cigar operation here, Mrs. Salas,” he said ?nally, over Juanita’s orange-?avored ?an. “Is there any chance that you might like to sell it?”
Even though I was prepared for the question, I still hesitated. I had been running the business since Pedro died, and I enjoyed doing it, but my enthusiasm was beginning to wane.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was my husband’s favorite enterprise. And I’ve found managing it an interesting challenge.”
“I would offer you two hundred thousand dollars for the business, including the building,” he said.
That was twice the book value. I immediately countered with $300,000, without even thinking the matter through.
“Would you take two hundred and ?fty thousand dollars?” he asked.
I looked at him for a long moment. “Done,” I said, and with that, I had sold the last of Pedro’s businesses. After dinner, I felt an incredible weight lift from my shoulders. I directed Tom to draw up the papers before Mr. Levy changed his mind.
When I told Jonathon Levy that I would be going up to New York with my children for six weeks in the fall, he urged me to stay with his sister, Abigail Dreyfus. A liberal bluestocking who was popular in literary circles, Abigail was well known for the salons she hosted for New York’s literati in her beautiful town house on Washington Square. The home he described was ?lled with books, antiques, and splendid art.
When he wrote to his sister about me, she readily agreed.
“You may ?nd my sister unusual, Emily,” he warned me. “She has quite … outlandish ideas about many things. I just hope she doesn’t shock you.”
I smiled. “I’m not easily shocked, Jonathon.”
Of my miserable voyage on rough seas up to New York City in late August, I will speak little. We were traveling at the height of the stormy season, so the weather was unpredictable and the seas choppy. But the children, both good sailors, were in great spirits. They listed with each pitch of the ship and slept like babies, unlike their mother. I practically kissed the ground when we arrived in New York.
Abigail Dreyfus sent her brougham to meet us at the ship. At her stately town house, we were welcomed by her servants with dinner and comfortable rooms. The children would stay with me for a couple of days, and then, with her brougham at our disposal, I would take them to their respective schools. I knew it would be many months before I would see them again after this trip, and during the next few days I had to restrain myself from hugging them tightly at many random moments.
I ?nally met Abigail the day after we arrived. She was a pretty auburn-haired woman in her mid-thirties, with a pert nose dusted lightly with freckles. She had wide blue eyes and perfect teeth set in a full sensuous mouth. Her hospitality was overwhelming and she seemed genuinely happy to receive us. Abigail’s husband, Anton, an art dealer, was in Paris. I would not meet him for a few weeks.
I discovered that I loved New York. After Key West, which now numbered about seven hundred inhabitants, it was exciting just to walk the busy streets of a big city again, absorbing the sights and smells of strange foods. And I found hearing diverse music and accents very stimulating. New York was a port, like Key West, but there the similarity ended: It was a huge and in?nitely more dynamic place. There were endless streets to explore, carriage tra?c to watch for, tall buildings, and crowds of people—many of them speaking in foreign languages.
I cried when Timothy and Martha ?nally had to leave me.
“We’ll write to you every month,” Timothy promised.
“And we’ll visit each other on our days off, and explore the city together while you’re still here,” Martha assured me.
But I could only hug them tighter, dreading the time I would return to my empty house in Key West.
When Abigail saw I was on my own, she invited me to join her many activities. “Now that you’ve settled the children, you must live your life to the fullest,” she announced cheerily. “We can go to the theater, the new opera, and go shopping!”
Jonathon had been right about his sister: Abigail was an intellectual who loved to receive clever and famous people for dinner parties and salons. Yet she was very involved in social issues, and like a busy cricket, she hopped from one meeting to another.
“There is a group of us who support voting rights for women,” she told me. “I’ve been attending meetings lately to see how I can help. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could achieve that equality?”
I could barely imagine a world where I would actually have a right to vote and have any say in government. But it was an exciting idea, and I greeted it with enthusiasm.
Abigail abhorred the concept of slavery. “I’m working with some Quakers and Mennonites who are abolitionists,” she said another time, lowering her voice. “I’ve been helping people involved with the Underground Railroad.”
“Why, that’s wonderful,” I said, and urged her to tell me about the inner workings of the movement—for it was one that reached deeply into my soul. There had been talk of such clandestine groups who assisted slaves, and I wished that Andrew had known about them in New Orleans, for they might have offered him help. It was heartening to hear that there were good people like them risking their own safety to abolish the evils of slavery so others—like Andrew—could live freely.
Around Abigail, I began to feel like I was just waking up after a long sleep. I had been leading a very insular life on a tiny island detached from the world, while people like her were involved in solving social problems. Her ideas made me dizzy; it would take a long time for them to ?lter down to a backwater like Key West. But they were heady views indeed.
During Abigail’s dinner parties and salons that autumn, I met a number of creative people—writers like Alexis de Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe; artists like John William Casilear and DeWitt Clinton Boutelle of the Hudson River School, whose works Abigail and Anton collected.
But it was the French poet Charles Baudelaire who was of particular interest to me. I’d heard much of Baudelaire and his dissolute lifestyle before actually meeting him. His writings, while brilliant, were mostly about decadence and eroticism. He had, it was said, a fondness for opium and hashish—and for spending inordinate amounts of money, having squandered a fairly large inheritance. He was now on a stringent allowance from his family, who recognized his dark side and tried to rein in his pro?igate ways.
Abigail told me that debts, loneliness, and a lack of prospects had weighed heavily on him the previous summer and he had attempted suicide by stabbing himself. Fortunately, his resolve had not been as strong as his need for attention, and the knife wound had been merely painful, not life-threatening.
But the incident had created an aura of sensual sadness and melancholy around him that was strangely charismatic. Dressed entirely in black, Baudelaire cut a bizarre ?gure. He was an attractive, delicate-looking young man of about twenty-?ve, with ?ne, thinning hair. On his arm was his beautiful mistress.
“Madame Salas,” he said, kissing my hand when Abigail introduced us. “May I present the woman who brings love and inspiration to my life, Jeanne Duval.”
She was a lovely young woman of about twenty, with a glowing complexion and curly raven hair. Her lips were full and sensuous; she wore a ?tted gown of brilliant scarlet, which accentuated the charm of her smoldering dark eyes. I guessed that she might be from French Polynesia rather than the Caribbean. And her skin was as dark as Andrew’s.
Baudelaire adored Mademoiselle Duval. Clearly, she had given him a reason to go on living. He held her close all evening, proudly introducing her to everyone. At one of the salons, he read a poem about her tresses, La Chevelure, just one of many verses she had inspired him to write. Here was a pale young white man with a dark-skinned lover—he called her “my Black Venus”—and nobody there seemed to care.
One evening, I begged Abigail to seat me next to Charles at dinner so that I could learn more about him and his mistress. I had to ?nd out how they ?outed their love so openly, without fear of recrimination or arrest. For I still had not given up on the possibility, however remote, that Andrew might one day be free and come looking for me in Key West.
“Everyone wants to sit next to Charles.” Abigail laughed. “But you’re a special guest, and your French is good. Yes, of course.”
And with a shu?e of her place cards, I found myself sitting next to France’s most notorious Romantic poet. I was delighted to be speaking French again, the language of my childhood, and bursting with curiosity.
When Jeanne Duval was out of earshot, I took a direct approach: “Tell me, monsieur, is your mistress well received when you take her to social gatherings in France?”
He thought about it for a moment. “In Paris, she is regarded as something of an oddity, perhaps. But we French welcome people who are a little … different.”
“And she is never made to feel … inferior?”
He cocked his head and looked perplexed. Then he laughed. “I would not tolerate such an attitude! If she is not welcome, I am not, either. She is my muse.”
“Are there black slaves in your country?”
“No. Slavery has been abolished.”
After much hesitation, I decided to con?de in Baudelaire about Andrew and my poor little Ebony. He nodded sympathetically as I told him what had happened, and appeared shocked only when I explained why, even if I were to ?nd Andrew, we could not be together openly in the South.
“If he ever comes back into your life, take him to Paris!” he said grandly. “There, nobody will care. It isn’t perfect, of course—after all, France wrote the brutal Code Noir for its colonies. But that is all in the past. The consequences you describe would never happen in Paris now, I assure you.”
Before he left for his hotel, Baudelaire gave me the address of the apartment he shared with Jeanne Duval on Ile Saint-Louis, in the heart of Paris. “If you ever ?nd this man you love so much, write to me,” he said. “Perhaps I can help you.”
Flushed with gratitude, I reached out and pressed his hand. “Thank you,” I whispered.