March (26 page)

She laid a gloved hand on my arm and gave me a kindly look. “I do hope you find Mr. March improved today.”

I started to convey my thanks for all her kindness, but she cut me off. “Not at all, my dear. From what I hear from Miss Clement, he is a most remarkable man and the two of you deserve every consideration. And you would do the same for me, I daresay.”

Well, Mrs. Hale, I thought, when Markham closed the door and left me alone in the Chinese room, perhaps I might have done the same for you at one time, but it was long since such grand hospitality was in my gift. The room was beautiful. Light poured from two tall windows onto a red lacquered bed hung with heavily embroidered silk. Fresh-cut flowers in a T’ang vase spilled a jasmine scent that spoke of a distant springtime. There was an armoire inlaid with mother-of-pearl and a writing desk with ornately carved legs. On the back of a matching chair lay the warm, quilted robe I had borrowed on my previous visit. I felt like falling onto that soft bed, cocooning myself in its silkworm luxury, and sleeping for a week. Instead, I set my few things in the armoire and hurried off for the hospital.

Miss Clement had clearly mobilized all the resources of the Hale family. I had dreaded finding Nurse Flynn on duty and when I reached the top of the stairs and saw her just leaving the ward, my impulse was to shrink out of sight until she passed. But her pebble eyes missed very little. She recognized me at once, drew in her brows, and strode purposefully to where I stood. She nodded curtly. “Surgeon Hale asked to be told when you arrived,” she said, in a voice that was surly but also a little awed. “I shall let him know you are here.”

She had evidently just seen to my husband, for his bed was freshly made and there was greenish salve on the ulcers around his mouth. His color seemed better. I lay a hand on his brow and found his fever only slightly elevated.

Presently, Surgeon Hale arrived. He made me a most civil greeting and apologized for his brusqueness at our earlier meeting. “I am not as young as I was, Mrs. March, and I have a deal of trouble keeping the medical cases straight in my mind. The surgical cases-now, that’s another matter. Plunge a knife in a man, you remember it; but one fever or flux is much like another, wouldn’t you say?”

I did not know what to say, so I held my peace. Surgeon Hale was a small, delicate man, in his middle sixties, with a soft cadence to his voice that spoke of Southern origins. This need not have surprised me, for until the outbreak of war, and indeed even after, Washington had been more of a Southern town than a Northern one. But Mrs. Hale had a crisp Yankee diction, and I wondered how the two of them had come together.

I have no idea if the doctor had troubled himself much with examining my husband when he had first been admitted. I could not think so, given the demands of the surgical wards. But now he made a most thorough investigation: sounding every inch of the chest, laying hands on the abdomen, raising eyelids, and probing in the mouth. It was difficult to watch; impossible to turn away. When the surgeon had done, I hastened to adjust the gown over my husband’s withered nakedness and return him to the privacy of his coverlid. Surgeon Hale had turned his attention to some notes that Grace Clement had given him. He shook his head. “According to this, your husband’s bowels have moved eighteen times in the last thirty hours. This is incompatible with any hope for recovery. The calomel-that is mercurous chloride—targets his fever, and has reduced it, but it is a strong laxative, and the opiate tincture is not binding him sufficiently. I propose that we make a trial of discontinuing both drugs, and see how he does on quinine alone. If you will see to it that he gets fluids-barley water, rice water, broths-every hour, without fail, we will watch his condition and see if we can turn the tide here.”

“Will he-will he recover?”

He shook his head. “I cannot say. His age is against him. The bodies of the young are more resilient and can bear more insult. Hope, Mrs. March. That is all we can do.”

Hope, he said. So I hoped. I hoped so hard that Hope seemed to take corporeal form, my thoughts and wishes reaching out to him and wrapping themselves around him, as avidly as my body had wrapped around him when we both were young. I wanted to transplant my vivid spirit within his depleted one, to root out the memories that troubled his sleep and sow in their place a vision of every good moment we had spent together. So I sat by his bed, all day and into the evening, whispering reminiscences of sunlit days and crisp fall apples, of girlish laughter and great minds brilliant with new ideas.

It took two days for the change of regimen to show a result. On the third morning, Hope triumphed. He awoke to the world, took my hand and held it, and would not surrender it, even when I required it of him so that I could help him eat a little custard-the first solid food he had taken in weeks. By the end of that day, he was able to sit, supported, and the next to stand for a few moments. By the end of a week, he could make his way, on an orderly’s arm, to the privy. We talked then, of all that had befallen him, and I tried to make him turn his face from the ashes of his endeavors, and to look at the sparks of hope that still flickered, here and there, for the greater cause he had served. Sometimes, it seemed he listened. Other times he became weary and I let be, thinking that there would be time to mend his spirits as his body continued to heal.

By then, the weather, too, had changed, and on Sunday morning I walked to church with the Hales and Miss Clement through falling flakes and a city suddenly made lovely to me. On the mornings that followed, I would wake in my warm chamber and look out on a clean, sparkling world. It seemed that everything in my life was being made fresh and restored to me.

I was able at last to write good news to the girls, and they replied with merry mock dispatches and songs to cheer the invalid.

I sat by his bed, reading from the latest parcel of missives. Jo had included a “pome,” a “silly little thing” that she had entitled “Song of the Suds,” about her struggles to master domestic arts, which I read to him:

“And see? She signs it ‘Topsy Turvey Jo’.”

“How I miss them!” he sighed.

“You will see them, soon enough,” I said brightly. Now that his needs were less pressing, I had taken to bringing a basket of needlework to his bedside, mending clothes for the convalescents. I bent down to put the letters away and took up a shirt with a torn seam. I was examining it to see the extent of the rend and did not look up until I heard his breath catch in a sob.

“Why, whatever is it?” I said, laying the shirt aside and reaching over to stroke his cheek.

“I can’t go home to them,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Well, of course,” I said, soothingly. “Dr. Hale says we must not think of moving you while the snowstorms persist. But he says there is every good chance that if the weather eases, we may have you home in time for Christmas.”

He shook his head. “No. I cannot go home. I am not discharged from the army.”

“But that’s only a formality-Dr. Hale says it can be effected in a matter of a day or two ...”

“I am not prepared to seek a discharge.”

“What are you saying? Are you still delirious?”

As soon as the words were out I wished them unsaid, for I did not wish to recall to him the cruel torments of those hours.

“My work,” he said in a whisper, “is not finished. The efforts of the past year, all of them bore rotten fruit. Innocents have died because of me. People have been dragged back into bondage. I cannot go home—to comfort and peace—until I have redeemed the losses I have caused.”

“And how,” I said, my voice grown cold, “do you propose to do that? When you set out a year ago, you were merely too old for the venture. Now you are both too old and a ruin. Who, precisely, do you think you can help? You, who cannot make his water without assistance?”

He winced, and I bit my tongue. He needed my understanding, not my anger.

“Not all you did went for naught,” I said gently. “The education you gave to so many, that cannot be taken away. Why, the letters you taught that girl—you said her name was Zannah—saved your life. Had you not taught so well, you would in all probability be dead now. How can you doubt the value of that?”

He waved a hand weakly, as if to dismiss the hard effort of so many months. “What good are letters to a woman who has lost her only child? Or to a man who has lost his liberty?”

“You did not kill that child, a Confederate did. As for the captive Negroes, the war does go on without you, you know. There are others whose efforts might have something to do with liberating those people—all of them—your friends included. It is pride that makes you think like this, that makes you feel as though you are indispensable.”

“Pride?” he said, smiling weakly. “How could you accuse me of pride? I have no pride left to me. I despise myself. I-I did not always act bravely. I left wounded men behind at the battle of the bluff I let go of Silas Stone in the river...”

I cut him off, for once his mind turned to these matters it began a cascade: weeping led to coughing, which gave him pain, which caused him to lose his appetite, which arrested the essential daily increase in his strength.

“You must stop this. Think of your girls and how their hearts lift at the thought of having you home ...”

“How may I revel in thoughts of my own homecoming, without reflecting on those who will never get home? Those wounded I left, crying; young Stone, drowning? They will never go home, because I was not brave enough.”

“Brave enough! How brave do you need to be to satisfy yourself? I said pride, and pride it is, when you speak so. For it is not enough for you to be accounted commonly courageous. Oh no: you must be a Titan. You must carry all the wounded off the field. You must not only try to save a man, you must succeed at it, and when you can’t, you heap ashes on your head as if all the blame were yours-none to spare for the generals who blundered you into that battle, or the stretcher bearers, who also fled for their lives; or for Stone’s own panic, or for the fact that he never troubled to learn to swim, not even a modicum of blame for the man who shot him ... You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah’s child. The war killed both of them. You must accept that.”

“But I
might
have saved them. There was a man, Jesse, he handed me a gun, and I handed it back to him. I valued my principles more than I valued their lives. And the outcome is, they are slaves again, or dead.”

“You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point.”

“Then what, pray, is the point?” His voice was a dry, soft rattle, like a breeze through a bough of dead leaves.

“The point is the effort. That you, believing what you believed-what you sincerely believed, including the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’-acted upon it. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you-I grant you, that is hard,to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong-how can you not see?
That
is what would have been reprehensible.” And even as I said this, I knew that if I stood again in the cattle show ground, and heard him promise to go to war, I would hold my piece, again, even knowing what terrible days were to follow. For to have asked him to do otherwise would have been to wish him a different man. And I knew then that I loved
this
man. This inconstant, ruined dreamer.

He closed his eyes, his brows drawn. His breathing had become labored from the strain of our exchange. I fetched a cloth and made to bathe his forehead, which was beaded with sweat. He submitted for a moment or two, and then he pushed my hand away.

“Leave me now,” he said. “I need to sleep.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to school my voice so as not to reveal my hurt and confusion. “Yes, that would be best.”

I leaned down and kissed his brow. He did not open his eyes or respond in any way.

I gathered my things and walked toward the exit of the ward. Before I passed through the door, I turned back. His eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling. He did not see me go.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

State of Grace

I kept my eyes closed till I thought she had gone. I lay there, listening, as the click of her heels on the wooden floorboards receded into silence. But I made a mistake and opened them too soon. She had paused, merely; turned in the doorway to look back at me. So she saw I was awake. I felt the power of her troubled gaze, but I did not turn my head. I could not bear to talk of it anymore; there was no way to make her understand.

I lay there, sleepless, and let the ghosts come. I offered myself up to the torment of their visions and their accusing whispers. And when exhaustion finally claimed me, just before dawn, I let them inhabit my dreams. It was the least I could do.

I had grown used to waking and finding her beside me, ready with warm cloths and a bowl of oats or grits which she coaxes me to eat. But she wasn’t there that morning, and I was glad of it. How could I explain to her that all her kindly ministries were a torment? That her warm cloths seared me and her oatmeal caught in my throat like ground glass? For I did not wish to be clean and fed when others lay cold and hungry in their filth.

The morning wore on, and except for some perfunctory attentions from the nurses, I was left mercifully alone. I dozed fitfully for a time, and when I opened my eyes, the young man, John Brooke, was sitting in her accustomed place, and still I was glad, for he at least would not presume to tell me that I had done enough.

He wished me a civil good morning, and asked if I wanted anything. I shook my head. Only then did I notice that he had a rather gray cast to his features, and his dark eyes, always grave, were sunken and somber. He had a paper scrolled up in his hand. He kept twisting it nervously.

“Is there something you must tell me, John?”

“Sir, I-I do not wish to lay a burden upon you, but I’m afraid I have some grim news. Laurie-my pupil-sent a telegraph yesterday evening. It-it appears that young Beth has had scarlet fever for some days, and Mrs. Mullet bade the girls conceal it from Mrs. March, knowing she was bound here with you. But Teddy-young Mr. Laurie, I should say—became increasingly alarmed, and convinced his grandfather that the little girl’s illness was such that Mrs. March must know of it. The short of it is, she left last night, and should be there by the early hours of tomorrow morning. She left a note for you. She said it is but a line. She did not have time to write more.”

Brooke handed me the scrap of twisted paper. I could barely read it through the blur.
Now you must see the need to be together. Remember that we are a family. Hope with me, and come to me as soon as you can.

I fell back on my pillow. “Pray God she arrives in time!” I barely heard Brooke as he recounted what he had learned from quizzing the nurses on the course the fever takes. I knew enough: we had sat up, fretting, when Meg and Jo had contracted it, but they were strong girls, tough in the fiber and robust. Beth was delicate. Her whole short life had been marked by illnesses whose journeys took her out to the very edge of existence. Sometimes it seemed to me that her hold on this world was no firmer than the petal’s to the blown rose. And yet she was the best of all of us. Was I to have another ghost to join the reproachful throng at my bedside? Already, I heard the reedy whisper that would haunt my dreams: “Papa, why did you leave your little Mouse? If you had only stayed with us...”

I felt my chest tighten, and then the spasm, and I surrendered to it. I let the coughs wrack me, thinking that my heart might burst. Indeed, I hoped for it. At that moment, the idea of oblivion seemed to me no more than the promise of a sweet release.

 

When I had surrendered all belief in mercy, so mercy was granted me at last.

I will not say I woke to the good news, for I kept vigil with my distant child that night, and did not sleep. But in the first gray stir-rings of morning, I turned to see Mr. Brooke enter the ward, his face stamped with manifest relief and joy so complete it did not need the elaboration of the telegraph’s few words. Marmee had arrived to find our Beth recovering: the fever had turned as she traveled northward, so that our little daughter awoke from her long struggle to the sight of her beloved mother’s face.

The letter that followed in due course stated the simple obvious: that she would remain with our small recovering invalid and not return to Washington. She wrote that she proposed to entrust my recuperation to the capable supervision of Mr. Brooke, and that all at home awaited the easing of the weather in the confident expectation of our speedy reunion.

But what she expected was not possible. I did not know how to judge her letter; whether it was calculated, in that she reasoned if she pretended to assume a certain course of events, I would become more pliable to her vision, or whether her obtuseness was unfeigned, and nothing I had said to her had pierced the carapace of her obstinacy.

The fact was this: I could not go home. I had not earned the right. My service was not completed. If I struggled now to speed my convalescence, it was because I was anxious to set my feet on the path of atonement, and find some niche in which a diminished man could be of modest use. Mr. Brooke, of course, misconstrued my new willingness to accept food and take exercise. He naturally assumed that my redoubled efforts were born of a desire for reunion with my family. Since disabusing him would be too complicated, I let him think what he would.

Slowly, I regained the strength of my limbs and was able to take my place for a few hours each day with the other convalescents, the corps of the feeble, who tried our best to sweep and scour, fetch and carry for those sicker than ourselves, and so relieve the nurses of such routine burdens. And if these duties more often took me downstairs, to the surgical ward, than to any other place, then I will not apologize for that. For I took satisfaction from any small effort I could make that lessened the tasks of Grace Clement, whose skills at nursing were become as prodigious as those of many who claimed the higher titles of healing.

Grace herself was not in favor of using convalescents as attendants, or so she told me one day as she taught me how to drench the stump of a boy named Cephas White. “He should have walked out of here on two legs, had they not overburdened him with heavy tasks before his injury was fully mended,” she said. The boy was still unconscious following his surgery, which was fortunate, for the poison had spread so far from his wound that, as well as taking off the leg, the surgeon had been forced to debride the flesh of his thigh and groin so that it looked raw and disgusting as beef on a butcher’s block. He would wake to certain agony.

As Grace directed me, I slowly poured the cold water on his dressings until they saturated, and then adjusted the oilcloth beneath his bed to catch the falling drips. He had developed a fever, so she laid a cold compress upon his brow. “It will be remarkable now if he leaves this place alive,” she said. She looked at me across his ruined body. “You would do well to consider your own strength, and not exceed it, or you, too, may be here longer than you need to be.”

“And what would that matter? I must find some way to be of use. Here, at least, I can be a little help to you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Maybe, but not for many weeks more. They are forming a medical corps to serve the planned colored regiments, and Dr. Hale has agreed that I should join it.”

The jug handle slipped in my hand as she said this, and water splashed onto the oilcoth. I had not realized how much store I set in being of service to her. To be deprived of her company, so soon after our unlikely reunion-this seemed a cruel prospect.

“I had planned, that is, I had hoped, that we might work together, that I might learn some basic skills that would be of use to you, as you are of use and learn from Dr. Hale...”

“You should think instead about going home, and growing strong again,” she said. “There is no way you can make a full recovery here. Most likely in your weakened state you will succumb to some hospital malady. And even if you do not pick up any new affliction, you know the nature of your fever. It is bound to recur.”

“But I do not look for hearth and healing! How can I seek comfort when others—like this boy here—suffer still? My conscience will not let me rest idle at home.” I dropped my voice then. “You know there are grave matters-mistakes, failings-for which I need to make amends.”

“You are not the only one who has to live with a troubled conscience,” she said. “There are many of us who bear guilt for what we have done-what the circumstances of our lives have led us to do.”

I grew impatient with her. “You!” I said. “You can know nothing of this. You are the noblest person I ever met. Your choice, to care for that man, your so-called father, when you could have abandoned him and no one to blame it-”

“This is no place to speak of such things,” she said sharply. She dropped her voice. “But you are quite mistaken. Walk with me if you will, this afternoon. It is milder today. If it remains so, I believe a short walk in the full air might be beneficial to you. I will wait for you, a little after three o’clock, by the ruins of the French minister’s house. There was a fire there; the building was quite gutted. Anyone will be able to direct you. It is not far.”

She turned away then, and instead of going on to the next bed, whose occupant also was unconscious, crossed the ward to change the dressings of a man who was quite alert. There was no way to continue our conversation, as she had clearly purposed.

So I swept the floor and then went to lie down so that I would have the strength to walk. At three o’clock I borrowed a greatcoat and some gloves from an orderly. Just before I set out, I thought to look in on the poor boy, White, and see if he had regained consciousness, and if so, to ensure that he had been given something to ease his suffering.

When I got to his bedside, it was evident that suffering, for him, was over. I went looking for an orderly to take the body to the dead house, but everyone was occupied just then, transporting wounded from newly arrived ambulances. So I returned to White’s bedside, thinking to remove the pillow beneath his head before the rigor set in. As I did so, a paper fluttered to the floor. I bent to retrieve it. Upon it was a verse, scrawled in an uncertain hand.

The boy had written this before the amputation. I expect he had seen enough by then to know his likely fate.
I am ready not to do.
The line burned me. How could an unlearned youth such as White write with such wisdom and resignation, while I, brimful of philosophy and book learning, was unable to still my heart into patience?

I set the paper carefully with White’s few effects and left the hospital. The cold air hit my face like a welcome slap, breaking me out of morbid reverie. I stretched my legs, feeling pleasure as the muscles once again answered to my will, and allowed myself the luxury of anticipation. There was so much I wished to say to Grace; all of it impossible in the close confines of the hospital.

It was, as she had said, easy to find the blackened shell of a mansion that she had appointed for our meeting. The ruined house abutted a little wilderness of cedars bisected by a narrow, silvery brook where Georgetown’s black washerwomen gathered to do their clients’ laundry. Since my pace was slow, Grace had reached the place before me. I told her about White, but did not mention the poem. She nodded gravely. She had not expected him to survive; that he had passed without further suffering was, she said, a mercy of a kind.

When we had passed into the trees and away from eyes that might be scandalized, she took my arm as any nurse might do, to support my still-unsure steps over the uneven pathway. When we had gone a little distance, she turned to me and addressed me with an abrupt severity.

“You have to stop wallowing in this notion that you are somehow at fault in all the ill things that have happened this past year. War is full of misfortune. Cannot you see? It is folly to let this self-flagellation shape your future.”

I was angered by her tone and by her obtuseness-she, who had never seemed the least obtuse. “You do not know what you are speaking about,” I said, abrupt in my turn. “You have always done the highest and best thing; the self-sacrificing thing. What can you possibly know of a conscience ablaze with guilt? What can you know of sin?”

Her reply came like a whisper, or a hiss.

“Is not incest a sin? Is not murder?”

“What?”

I stopped still on the path. The cedars sighed above us.

She let go of my elbow. She held herself stiffly, as if some struggle were under way within. Her lips were drawn tight and her hands were balled into fists. She pressed them together, and pushed them against the underside of her jaw. She breathed in deeply then and rubbed her hands over her face, flexed her shoulders, and began to speak, her voice low and measured.

“I told you Mr. Clement’s son died when his fowling piece discharged in his face. I told you he tangled his boot in a thicket of honeysuckle. I did not tell you—I have not told anyone—the full account of that accident, and I do not propose to tell it now.” She gave me that assessing look that I remembered from years earlier. “But you are not the innocent who arrived at the Clement house that long-ago spring. I think you have seen enough of evil now to understand very well how things stood. All I will say is this: that he, knowing the truth of my parentage, knowing he was my brother, committed a sin whose magnitude has ever been understood, even by savages. And do you know what the worst violation was? That I realized my father had intended just such a thing. That I had been kept, perchance, for just such a purpose, to be used in my turn as my mother had been used. What happened to him was, in part, an accident. But only in part. I don’t believe I meant to kill him, but I rejoiced in his death, Mr. March.”