The Bride of Texas (46 page)

“Don’t tell me you read this kind of thing?”

Maggie smiled. She still had pretty white teeth, though they had looked prettier in Liberty. Back then, she had some colour to her complexion; now she was ashen. “Are you surprised?”

“It’s just that you never were much for romance novels.”

“That’s because I thought I was above all that. As sometimes happens, though, life has disabused me of that illusion.”

Then she noticed another book on the table that I hadn’t thought to conceal. Its spine was also of pink pseudo-leather but the book was slightly thicker. Maggie squinted at the title. The golden letters on the spine said
Getting Even
by Laura A. Lee. She looked at me and said, “I’m more surprised at you.”

I felt myself beginning to blush. “Well, you know —” I began defensively, but Maggie interrupted: “I’d have expected to find Thackeray, or Poe. But not this.”

My shame was ridiculous. Although I spoke of my books as little romances, I was proud of them, and besides, I enjoyed writing them — I was on the verge of lying when Maggie started talking again. “I haven’t read this one yet. What’s it like?”

The identity of Laura A. Lee had apparently remained a
mystery to my old friend. Thank heavens I had responded to my publisher’s wish to satisfy numerous readers’ requests for a picture of me by giving him a daguerreotype of my late aunt, Rosemary Wayne, who had been killed at nineteen in a fall from a horse. She had been a platinum blonde who insisted on having her picture taken with a pince-nez to hide the fact that she was cross-eyed, which was the only flaw in my poor aunt’s beauty. That was why I had chosen her picture.

“It’s not bad,” I said. “The heroine is a little more intelligent than usual, I think.”

“But not the hero, I hope.”

Her critical perspicacity warmed my heart. I said, “It wouldn’t be Laura Lee then, would it?”

“She must be an insufferable woman,” said Maggie. “I imagine her as fat as well as cross-eyed.”

“I saw her picture in
Ladies’ Companion,”
I said. “She’s fairly pretty, and she doesn’t really look fat.”

“But she is cross-eyed.”

Was she toying with me? Did she know that Laura Lee was me, and intend to confront me with it? “I never noticed,” I said.

“Why do you think she wears a pince-nez? I’ve seen that picture too. True, you can’t see anything below the neckline, but —”

She looked at me with her deep, dark eyes and I couldn’t tell what she knew.

“— but that beautifully alliterative name doesn’t fit somebody fat,” she said. “It would go better with someone like you.”

I felt the blood rush to my face again.

“But you’re a redhead,” she added. Maggie ran her fingers over the gilt letters on the spine of the book. “God knows if it’s her real name.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She’s probably from high society and isn’t anxious to be known for silliness like this. Even though it’s not sheer silliness. You probably don’t think so either, otherwise you’d be reading Thackeray instead.”

I felt a wave of authorial pride. “It isn’t Thackeray, but it does have —”

“Guts,” said my friend. When we were girls, she was always the vulgar one. “Even though she is — at least I hope she is — a woman.”

I still wasn’t sure if she knew, but then Maggie sighed, “I used to turn up my nose at this kind of reading, until it saved my — well, not my life, exactly, but my sanity.”

“Really!”

“I lost a baby, did you know?”

“Maggie!”

“It was a miscarriage.”

In my privileged position as a friend of the commanding general, I didn’t have to rely on an unreliable press. I heard the report of Vallandigham’s arrest straight from Captain Hutton. I found out about things that weren’t public knowledge, like the crinoline Mrs. Vallandigham had left hanging in the hall that Hutton got tangled up in when he came to arrest her husband, and how his soldiers were stumbling around in the dark because Comely Clem had hidden in the bedroom and no one had thought to bring a lantern. Ambrose was busy writing his speech for court that afternoon, but two other men with moustaches sat in my parlour, adding their own distinctive commentaries to Captain Hutton’s dry report. The young, rosy-cheeked Lieutenant Pettiford was there too. In fact, my Loretta appeared
to find him fascinating, which I took as a sign that her congenital tomboyishness was beginning to wane. One of the moustaches, a black one contrasting with the silver hair above it, belonged to the handsome General Hascall, who had clearly noticed Jasmine as soon as he came into the room. The second moustache graced the face of a legend, Colonel Jennison of Kentucky, who had volunteered to help Hascall catch deserters in Ohio. Before the war he used to ride with one of John Brown’s bands of desperadoes, but they never caught him. He was said to suffer from chronic itchiness of the trigger finger.

“I hear,” he said, when Captain Hutton finished his report, “that Burnside is preparing to try that wretch before a military commission?”

Lieutenant Pettiford laughed. He laughed whenever anyone made a joke, or whenever he thought they had.

“The trial starts tomorrow,” said Hascall. “The general convened the tribunal yesterday. They’re good men, one and all.” He raised an empty snifter and Jasmine poured him some cognac. “Thanks, dearie!” General Hascall said, twirling the end of his moustache around his index finger. Jasmine flashed him a flirtatious smile, which surprised me because that morning, as I looked out the window, I’d seen her resolutely reject the advances of Judge Parker’s black coachman from next door. I hadn’t heard what the coachman said, but the rejection was clear, and it was hand-delivered.

“A waste of time,” declared Colonel Jennison. “You should have hanged him on the spot. Or” — he turned to Captain Hutton — “at the Kemper barracks at the latest.”

Hascall laughed. “That would have been a solution — not a legal one, perhaps, but under the circumstances an ideal one.” Lieutenant Pettiford guffawed and slapped his shiny boot. General Hascall wound the other tip of his moustache around his finger, and gave Jasmine a sidelong glance. She smiled
again, then turned and went to get the coffee, wiggling her behind as she walked, though she usually moved like a nun.

“Oh, Maggie! I’m so sorry to hear this!”

“You have two children, don’t you?”

I nodded. Maggie looked around and the portraits of Jimmy and Loretta on the cabinet caught her eye.

“What do you call them?”

I told her.

“Mine would have been Lorraine. Or Ambrose, depending.”

I was touched. Maggie nodded towards Humphrey’s portrait. “Is that your husband?”

“Humphrey.” I rang for Jasmine. “Can I offer you some coffee?”

“It doesn’t help,” said Maggie. She looked around the parlour again. On the table by the window stood a decanter of cognac. She started to say something, but Jasmine came in and I instructed her to bring coffee and some pastry.

Maggie picked my book up off the table and said, “It’s a good thing Laura Lee is so prolific.”

“There’s no shortage of prolific women writers in America.”

“I’ve tried a few, but I keep going back to Laura Lee.”

“Surely you don’t mean the woman can bear a second reading?” I asked, trying to sound condescending.

“She’s even better the second time around. I’ve even read some of them three times.”

I was elated, but also suspicious. Jasmine walked in with the coffee. “Thanks, Jasmine.”

“You’re welcome, Miz Tracy.”

“Like Thackeray,” said Maggie.

“How do you mean?”

“He’s better the second time around.”

“Maggie, you’re exaggerating.” I got up and walked over to the table by the window. She had lost a baby. A woman in that situation might well read some sort of opium like Laura Lee. I came back with the decanter and poured some of that other opium into her coffee.

“Why spoil good fire-water?” said Maggie. “Put a drop in a glass for me, will you?” When I did, she said, “I said a ‘drop’ just to be polite.” I corrected my error and, after a brief hesitation, I poured a drop for myself as well. Maggie wrapped her thin fingers around the snifter and looked again at the portrait of Humphrey between my two cherubs.

“He’s nearly as handsome as the one you jilted,” she said. “On the other hand, he hasn’t got as much on his conscience, either.”

“Ambrose —” I started, huffily, but Maggie just waved a hand.

“I know. A fellow can’t help it if he’s a bit wet. And your husband is all right. Maybe if he grew some side-whiskers —”

“And what about your husband?” Then I thought, what if she’s a widow? A war widow? But would she be wearing a green dress?

“Do you want to see what he looks like?”

“Of course I do!”

She opened her bag, pulled out a framed photograph, and handed it to me. It was not a conventional portrait, but more like those photographs by Matthew Brady that had so appalled New York society when they were shown in public. It showed a meadow, and a hillside sloping up to a low stone wall. On the meadow lay a pile of dead soldiers. Above them on the empty hillside, by the stone wall, lay an isolated corpse in the uniform of a Union officer.

“He’s the one by the wall,” said Maggie. “The name of the place is Marye’s Heights.”

I went over the bare facts again. A unit of the United States Army, on orders from their military commander and without the authorization of a civilian court, enters the private quarters of a lawfully elected member of Congress, and arrests him without a warrant for exercising his constitutional rights in a manner which was not to the liking of the military commander. All this flouting the First Amendment, issued almost three-quarters of a century ago by another general, more important and certainly more renowned. And here am I, an intelligent American woman, a writer, in fact, though only of books for adolescents, but still a woman whose life is in the written word —

I returned to the reality of the parlour.

“Moved him? Where to?” Colonel Jennison asked, in dismay.

“To Burnett House,” replied General Hascall.

“That scoundrel? To the best hotel in the Middle West?”

“Vallandigham’s a prominent prisoner,” said Hascall, “and General Burnside —”

“Burnside is soft!” yelled Colonel Jennison. “If he could, he’d have the noose lined with velvet!”

Lieutenant Pettiford roared with laughter. I glanced at the seasoned officers around me and felt very ill at ease.

An hour later the decanter on the table was empty, and I saw my surroundings through the prism of memories of Liberty,
that town of frame houses. Jasmine appeared with a fresh pot of coffee and then, seeing we didn’t need two full pots of coffee, took it back to the kitchen and returned with a full decanter of cognac.

“Head over heels, Lorraine,” my old friend was saying. “It happened to me exactly when it happened to you. I was a few steps behind you, and what Ambrose had become in the few years he’d been gone swept me off my feet as well. But Mr. Jenkins introduced him to you. Nobody paid any attention to me. Not Mr. Jenkins, not you, and certainly not that beautifully transformed ex-tailor.”

I wanted to say something appropriate, but nothing came to mind.

“Back then I could live with it,” said Maggie. “But then you left him standing at the altar and the world began to seem awfully unfair. That was why I called you a dimwit.”

“It fit perfectly well,” I said.

“What really happened?”

I almost told her about the letter from the Boston publisher, but stopped myself in time. I took another sip of cognac. “You know how it is,” I said.

“No, I don’t know how it is. But I suppose it was the doggerel rhymes that opened your eyes, the stuff he memorized and then spewed out for you in the grove.”

“My God, how did you know that?”

“I was so mad about him that I used to follow you and hide in the bushes. You were always so literary. I wasn’t, but even I saw what was going on when you started quoting Poe at him.”

I smiled at the memory, although it hadn’t been funny at all.
“ ‘It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea — ’ ”

I stopped short and didn’t continue. But Maggie just said, “I was right, wasn’t I? It was something like that, wasn’t it?”

“Something like that.”

“As soon as you left Liberty —” Maggie stopped. “It was the disgrace of jilting him you were running away from, wasn’t it?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I made a bee-line for St. Louis. I got my cousin Clara to invite me, she was always telling me about going dancing Saturday nights with the handsome young officers from Jefferson, which you must know was where Lieutenant Burnside had gone to lick his wounds.”

I wasn’t feeling well at all. Lieutenant Pettiford’s laughter was even worse than Colonel Jennison’s loud offers of Kentucky hangmen. At the top of his voice he explained to General Hascall that in Kentucky they’d hanged all the traitors like Vallandigham, and now that they were at loose ends they’d love to keep in practice. I could see that even Hascall was wearying of this blood-thirsty guerrillero, and I was grateful when he suddenly rose to his feet and said he had an urgent commitment elsewhere. Jasmine saw the visitors to the front door, where General Hascall allowed Jennison to precede him and then tried to do the same with Pettiford. The young lieutenant politely refused, and Hascall unceremoniously shoved him out into the street. I watched through the half-open door of the parlour as the general took my chambermaid by the hand and said something to her. She bowed her head; the general raised her hand and touched it to his moustache-adorned lips. I felt very disapproving. The best that could be said was that at least the general didn’t hold Negroes in contempt, as so many people did, even in the North. Then again, the seduction of black women was never taboo, even in the code of the South.

When Jasmine returned to the parlour, I told her irritably
to do something about the smudges the colonel’s dirty boots had left on the carpet.