Chapter One
TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK
It is quite possible that emily bedlam was simply a very good woman, but to her
son, Tom, she appeared insane. She was the embodiment of Christian virtue. “God
Bless!” she would say to the surliest stranger with a giddy and well-meaning
smile. When she received a fearsome oath in reply, Mrs. Bedlam held no grudge.
She tried again the next day. And the next. She never spoke in scorn, nor did
she gossip or disparage her neighbors. She provided for her only son through her
employment at Todderman & Sons Porcelain & Statuary, and remained faithful to
her husband though he had deserted her many years before. Never had the boy met
a woman as selfless and self-effacing. She had been robbed, sworn at, and
gossiped about, but she always turned the other cheek. Since Tom had never seen
an angel, he was tempted to assign his mother’s virtues to a category of folk he
had seen on the rough city streets-the simple, the touched, the witless. In
Vauxhall, southwest of the City of London, Tom accompanied his mother to the
factory every morning. Through the wrought-iron gates and across a windswept
courtyard, they would pass Mr. Todderman greeting his employees from a parapet
on the second floor of his domain. Behind him, two smokestacks from the factory
released a black smear across the London skyline, while next to him, the
cripple, Brandy Oxmire, clutched a slate for the purpose of marking down
absences and latecomers. “Morning, Mrs. Bedlam!” her employer shouted. “God
Bless, Mr. Todderman!” came the gay reply, “and thank you for Mrs. Todderman’s
shoes!” Then she’d pause to display the gaudy red-leather shoes on her feet.
Todderman acknowledged them with a weary growl. “It was a pleasure, Mrs.
Bedlam.” She’d been thanking him for his wife’s castoffs for weeks, even though
he’d subtracted a small fee from her wages in compensation for them. “You need
not thank him,” Tom had whispered many times. “Nonsense, Tom,” replied his
mother. “D’you know what these shoes are worth? If nobody acknowledged a good
turn, just imagine what an unkind city London would be.” Tom needed no
imagination. He’d seen their tenement landlord turn out folk on the second of
the month for missing the rent; there was always a supply of desperate faces at
Mr. Todderman’s gates looking for work; and of course, there was the daily
unkindness of the street-the strangers who mocked his mother’s patrician manners
because she wore secondhand clothing, the neighbors who joked about her married
name, and the factory biddies who told his mother to bless herself, for she
needed more blessing than they did. Was she stupid? No, for there was a solid
Christian philosophy behind her disposition. Three dog-eared Bibles on her
bookshelf confirmed it: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; and
Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. But
as Tom accompanied his mother through the glazing rooms and the clay shops of
Todderman’s factory, he couldn’t prevent her cheery greetings to her co-workers.
“Morning, Esther! Hello, Mary! God Bless, Bonnie! … Oh, Mrs. Mudd, you look
very nice today!” The replies were rare. As for Mrs. Mudd, her pudding
face-round, mottled, and grimy at the edges-didn’t acknowledge the compliment;
she grunted and spat, striking the heel of one of Mrs. Todderman’s precious
shoes with a milky clod of phlegm. Mrs. Mudd knew her workmate was more valued
and chose to believe that it was not Mrs. Bedlam’s skill with clay but her
genteel accent that earned her a shilling more a week. “You’re disgusting!” Tom
cried in his mother’s defense, but Mrs. Mudd shook off the nine-year-old’s
protest with a sneer. “God Bless, Mrs. Mudd,” said his mother faintly as she
wiped her heel and took a seat at her bench. “It doesn’t help that you forgive
her so easily,” the boy whispered. “It was a mistake, my love,” his mother
replied. “What sort of world would it be if we took offense at every mistake?”
Would Mrs. Bedlam’s blithe philosophy change the world for the better? Tom
looked doubtfully at Mrs. Mudd. She was a notorious slut who tried to shock his
mother with her spitting and raunchy language. He never forgave a remark he had
heard from her lips: “What a pathetic ‘un with that barmy smile, every bloody
morning, and a son who’s never seen his father!” Mr. Todderman made a
considerable profit from reproducing the delicate figurines that were popular in
Paris and Dresden, and Emily Bedlam had a remarkable talent for imitation; she
could fashion anything from the fine white porcelain clay-miniature duchesses,
dukes, swans, amorous goatherds and coy shepherdesses. Each delicate figure
subtly echoed Emily Bedlam’s own naïve features. Ten hours a day, his mother
labored here. Above, a skylight admitted the occasional ray of sun, reflecting a
million tiny white particles. It was always snowing in the porcelain factory;
everybody had a cough; and the mucus was always milky white. When Tom was ten,
he was employed to run errands between the various departments. Mr. Todderman
needed a few boys of Tom’s size, small enough to retrieve pieces at the back of
the kiln and navigate the warehouse without damaging the stock. Tom did many odd
jobs, taking messages to the glazing shops, the furnaces, the accounting
department, and fetching pieces from the cramped underbasement, where racks and
racks of identical dukes, duchesses, and shepherdesses (not to mention the busts
of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria) were stored for shipment. On the factory
rooftop, where silt rained down from the two billowing smokestacks like black
hail, Tom took refuge from Mr. Todderman’s heavy-lidded scrutiny. On this roof
he surveyed the grimy streets of Vauxhall, the muddy brown ribbon of the Thames,
and the grander vista of the City of London that lay beyond Westminster Bridge.
“Looking for your papa?” Brandy the cripple grinned. He had followed Tom up
there this morning. “Well, I won’t find yours, will I?” Tom replied. Brandy was
an orphan. His right foot had been mangled in an explosion in the kilns when he
was fourteen. Dubbing him Brandy for the scar tissue over most of his face,
Todderman used him as his eyes and ears about the factory. The cripple’s
distorted face on the parapet every morning also assured the other workers that
their employer had some tender, fatherly spirit in him. “Todderman’ll gimme this
here factory when he dies, I reckon,” said Brandy, pausing to stoke a little
white clay pipe. “He has a nephew. You’ll get nothing,” Tom replied. “I have a
living,” Brandy declared, squinting as the wind changed direction and black
smoke wafted down from the stacks, showering particles across his distorted
features. “What did your father ever give you? Only a name I reckon!” Prompted
by such challenges to learn more about his father, Tom might as well have asked
the miniature dukes and shepherdesses for an answer. His questions to his mother
rarely elicited more than an assurance that she was legally married to Mr.
William Bedlam, that he was away on business and would return someday hence.
Then Tom was reminded not to listen to the gossips. “Do you think I’d take a
name like Mrs. Bedlam for no reason, Tom? I married for love, and gave up much
for it,” she would say, though she would never explain the nature of her
sacrifices. And what kind of a man had married a righteous woman like his
mother? Was Mr. Bedlam righteous too? Or did he stray from the flock? None of
Tom’s many questions were answered to his satisfaction. The reply was always the
same: “I wouldn’t be telling stories about your father, Tom,” she said. “He
toils under God’s blessing, same as the rest of us. And if you can’t speak
pleasantly about a person, it’s best to say nothing at all.” Because his mother
considered tact one of the prime virtues and would reveal nothing more about her
past or his father’s present circumstances, Tom sincerely hoped that William
Bedlam would make his appearance soon and speak for himself. A WISH GRANTED The
room they shared was in a tenement that leaned against Todderman’s factory.
there was an imploring quality to the structure; its cracked windows dimly
reflected the sky, and its front door was ajar in the same way that the mouth of
a bitter man gapes open. The bricks were caked with black silt from the
smokestacks next door, the stairway was a fresco of grubby finger marks, and the
steps were dusted with fine porcelain powder. Every inch of this building bore
the stain of Todderman’s factory, as did most of its tenants. Rooms were divided
and subdivided as necessity warranted. A hole in the floor of the entrance hall
tripped unwary visitors. Tenant outrage over the building’s condition matured
into apathy and her offspring-acceptance and willful damage. Every week the hole
grew; perhaps somebody thought that improvement would come about only by making
the structure even more squalid and treacherous. In one corner of the tenement
room Tom shared with his mother, he would press his ear to the wainscoting,
listen to the visceral clamor of the building, and try to make sense of it, just
as he listened to the beat of his own heart with his fingers pressed tightly to
his ears. It was a wet autumn evening in London. The cries of the eel fishermen
could be heard echoing across the muddy Thames at high tide as Mrs. Bedlam
counted her savings. Her system was simple: she collected her coins until they
could be exchanged for paper money, then the note would be deposited in one of
her Bibles, a one-pound banknote for each chapter. Currently, the Bible
contained twenty-five pounds. When she reached Revelation, Mrs. Bedlam expected
to have enough money to move to the country with her son. Far from the white
dust that collected in milky tears in the corners of their eyes, far from the
stifling black smoke in the skies, far from the filth that contaminated the
streets, and the offal house nearby, Tom could have an education, and his mother
could raise chickens, a cow, and perhaps some sheep. “It won’t be long until
we’re living in the country, Tom,” she promised with a frail, giddy smile. “And
it won’t be long until you go to school.” Tom said nothing; this promise was all
too familiar. With his ear against the wainscoting, he identified the footsteps
of his neighbors in the same way a country boy quickly distinguishes the call of
a wren from that of a curlew. Mr. Bottle, for example, always dragged his feet
slowly up the stairs in anticipation of the verbal taunts he would receive from
his bedridden and demented daughter. The Limpkin children stampeded to the
second floor with peals of laughter. The entire Limpkin family could be seen
outside the building on the twenty-ninth of any month offering up their pots and
pans, furniture, clothing (and sometimes Mrs. Limpkin’s pastries) in a desperate
attempt to raise funds for the rent. Mr. Hull, whose head hung below his
muscular shoulders, ascended the staircase with bovine snorts much as the
Minotaur must have stalked Theseus in the labyrinth. Tom had learned about the
monster from Oscar Limpkin, a boy Tom’s age, whose fertile imagination was
matched by an incredible grasp of mythology. Suddenly Tom heard new footsteps.
The pace, the weight of each tread, and the agility of the person were
unfamiliar. Usually he expected a shout and a curse as every newcomer misjudged
the widening hole in the foyer-but today this obstacle was nimbly traversed
without even a scramble. As Tom changed his position by the wall, Mrs. Bedlam
looked up from her counting. “Who is it, Tom?” “A man, I think.” “There’s a new
man on the fourth floor,” suggested his mother. “He works in the furnaces. Dear
me, such an awful place.” But Tom’s ear remained pressed to the wainscoting as
the strong footsteps came up the first flight, paused on the landing, and
proceeded to the second. A stranger always took a moment to consider the smells
emanating from sixteen households, the trick step (seven up from the landing)
that promised a bruised shin, and the spokelike shadows of the banisters on the
grubby walls; but this person proceeded up the second flight without such
contemplation. It seemed obvious to Tom that he knew somebody here. But what
surprised Tom next was the silence that greeted the second floor, his floor.
There was no creak from the spinster’s door, and no sound from the Limpkins’,
whose children could be counted on to greet any creditor with shrieks of
hostility (and any friend with jubilant cries). Tom rose from his bed and stared
at the crack at the bottom of the door. A pair of feet blocked the dim red glow
of gaslight. For a long moment they remained in place, as if their owner were
staring directly through the wooden door at Tom. A sudden rat-a-tat-tat on the
door was made with a flourish, like a stage knock. The sound startled Emily
Bedlam. Like a jointed doll pulled rigid by a string, she became taut, eyes
wide, mouth trembling. She snapped the Bible shut and hid it among the other
books on a shelf while casting one tentative glance in Tom’s direction. Then,
hurriedly preening herself, she went to the door to release the bolt. WILLIAM
BEDLAM He was tall, with a shock of silvery hair and a black woolen overcoat,
the high collar thrust up to his ears. His silhouette was distinct, and his nose
ramrod straight-a prominent profile, handsome, even in the dim gaslight. Tom
watched his mother open the door a crack. There was an urgent exchange between
her and the visitor; Mrs. Bedlam was firm, but the visitor persisted; his voice
was, by turns, explosive, cajoling, merry, and despairing until she relented and
withdrew, permitting him entry. In the next instant, the stranger sprang across
the room and knelt by Tom, assuming both his height and an absurdly innocent
expression. “Hello then,” he said, in reaction to Tom’s scrutiny. It seemed to
Tom that the man was pretending to be a boy. Not a very convincing one, but the
sort who gets laughs on a stage. The man rubbed his nose carelessly, tousled his
own hair, and playfully flicked his ear with a finger. “Who have we here, eh?”
he said. “What’s yer name?” Tom stared at his interlocutor, puzzled by such
mockery, and puzzled also that he needed to identify himself in his own home.
“You named him Tom, remember?” Mrs. Bedlam replied. “Tom, yes-of course!” The
fellow stood up slowly, now mimicking Tom’s serious expression. “You must be ten
years old. Good heavens!” He frowned. With a tilt of his silver mane, he bowed,
sweeping one hand elaborately while offering the other. “William Bedlam at your
service!” The man’s coat was drenched, and his boots whistled through their damp
stitches; yet even in this condition he seemed most concerned with Tom liking
him. Bedlam spoke to his wife in an obvious stage whisper. “What’s the matter
with him?”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Tom Bedlam
by George Hagen
Copyright © 2007 by George Hagen.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2007
George Hagen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6222-5
