The Bride of Texas (7 page)

“It’s not logical,” I said, “it’s only psychological. It is logical, though, to protect your generals, because it costs a great deal of money to teach them their trade.”

Ambrose sighed. “That all depends.”

“On what?” I asked, annoyed because I knew what he meant. He had never wanted to be commander-in-chief but, naturally, he obeyed Lincoln. An order from him was like one of the Ten Commandments. Lincoln was fond of Ambrose. He also thought he was smarter than Ambrose. And he was — except
for one thing. Ambrose knew himself better than anyone else did, including Lincoln.

Dear Ambrose. He was simply the most honourable, the most truthful, the most loyal, and the bravest soldier in the Union army.

He also cut quite a figure.

I count myself among the many who have wronged him in his lifetime, although in my case there was an extenuating circumstance: I was young at the time, and correspondingly foolish. Perhaps more so than average.

A time would come when Ambrose would take embarrassment in his stride. But back then —

It was ghastly. Rather than strength of nerves, it must have been some kind of physical spasm that kept me on my feet after I turned and fled up the aisle from the altar, with those appalled faces gaping at me on either side. Nothing like this had ever happened in Liberty for as long as anyone could remember, and most of the congregation, perhaps all of it, had never even thought it possible. That spasm held me together as I ran outside into the searing sunshine and climbed into the carriage, where I even managed to wait for my maids of honour, Maggie and Sarah, who came rushing out of the church behind me. Only after they plopped down on the seats across from me did I instruct Sam to drive us home. And it was not until I got back to my own room that it all sank in, and I became so hysterical that I thought I could simply run back and put everything right again. But for the first time in my life, my legs wouldn’t obey me. And besides, there was that letter from the publisher in Boston on my writing desk.

“Good Lord! Maggie, Sarah! I have to explain to him!”

“How?” asked Maggie curtly, and stared at me without an ounce of sympathy.

A good question.

“I’ll go get him,” said Sarah, sweet soul that she was.

“Save yourself the trouble,” said Maggie, but Sarah was already out the door. Maggie turned to me. “You really are a prize idiot, you know!”

There was no point in arguing. She was right.

So I burst into tears.

“Stop bawling,” said Maggie, “it’s not your style.”

She was right again. But nothing like this had
ever
happened in Liberty. It was an extraordinary circumstance.

I bawled. Mama came into my room, sat down on the bed beside me, and stroked my hair.

“You’ve really done it now, girl,” she said. “Papa went to the cellar and then upstairs. He’s locked himself in his study.”

That meant Papa had taken a gallon of whisky from the cellar. If we were lucky, he’d drink himself speechless. If not, he’d have all too much to say. This was his easy solution to everything, from a toothache to family problems to metaphysical questions, if and when any occurred to him. When my little brother ran away from home and we got a letter from Santiago, where he’d dropped anchor with the whalers, Papa made the trip to the cellar and back up to his study and that settled the matter, as far as he was concerned.

“Go ahead, get those tears out,” said Mama. There was no reproach in her voice. Perhaps she was feeling sorry for herself. She could have done what I’d just done, twenty years ago, except in those days Papa hadn’t yet taken to retreating into his private alcoholic haze. Or if he had, Mama didn’t know about it.

She stroked my hair a little longer and then left.

“If I did something that cuckoo, my folks would tear me
apart,” Maggie said. “Be thankful for the parents you’ve got, you dimwit.”

By then I wasn’t sobbing so hard. I knew I deserved this. Then Sarah rushed in, all out of breath, and said that Ambrose was gone by the time she got to the church. The moment he’d come to his senses, they said, he was out of there like a shot. So good old Sarah rushed over to the Burnsides’, but Bob wouldn’t even let her in. The lieutenant had just stopped by for his valise, and then left for the station.

I looked at the clock on the dressing table. It was almost three. The train to Connersville would leave at a quarter past. Ambrose would have to wait an hour in Connersville for his connection.

I could catch him there.

I had no idea what I would say.

The truth is, it wasn’t fair. I wasn’t ready to marry Ambrose. But that’s how life is: not exactly fair.

Ambrose had gone off to West Point before he turned eighteen. He was a thin lad, a tailor, and his shop, which wasn’t even on Main Street, wasn’t what you’d call elegant. Business was only fair, and his hairline was already receding. Not that any of this bothered me at the time. I was twelve and considered a tomboy. Girls didn’t interest me, boys did, because they would take me fishing and let me play soldiers and Indians. But when one of those Huck Finns suggested I play an abducted beauty that the American cavalry would rescue from the clutches of the Shoshones, I got mad and said I was no beauty and just let anyone try to abduct me. I said they should ask Becky Thatcher. She was the beautiful one, and she read
her older sister Jocelyn’s romance novels. So they did, and of course Becky said yes and dressed up in her Sunday best for it. I was Chief Flat Feet of the Shoshones, and I abducted Becky in order to slay her. I was well brought up, I knew the only reason beauties were abducted was to be slain.

Or, if the abductors were Indians, to be tortured to death at the stake.

What actually happened to abducted beauties was something I didn’t learn until my mother noticed that it was time to tell me the facts of life. Still, I remained a tomboy until I was almost seventeen and started reading articles by Margaret Fuller. Instead of flirting with young men, which I was now inclining towards, I decided to fight for the rights of women. I also decided never to marry, so that nothing would distract me from the struggle. This decision wasn’t just because of Margaret Fuller; Mama’s position in the family had something to do with it too. Papa was — well, inaccessible to reason. His cellar was too well stocked for any rational conversation.

I may have been a case of arrested development, rather than the great intellect that poor Margaret Fuller was. Be that as it may, my life till then had not prepared me for the figure I saw one sunny morning in front of Mr. Jenkins’s saloon on Main Street.

His head was the first thing I noticed — I had never seen anything like it. It was beautifully framed by a dense chestnut moustache that seemed to spread from below his nose, then swoop down across both cheeks and up past his ears, and meet over his forehead. No one in Liberty had ever seen a moustache like it. Nor, for that matter, had they ever seen such chestnut-brown eyes under eyebrows so dense. The eyebrows emphasized his high forehead. It never entered my head that this signalled the beginning of baldness.

The young man, or rather his exquisite head, bowled me over completely.

Only then did I note how well the uniform of a United States Army lieutenant suited him, and how thrilling the low-hung pistol looked in its holster at his waist.

And only then did I — no, I didn’t actually notice Mr. Jenkins standing beside the young man, I only heard him call, “Lorraine! Come here!”

I recall hearing someone behind me sigh deeply, and I suppose I responded. In any case, I found myself standing in front of the young man. Those chestnut-brown eyes were looking down at me and Mr. Jenkins was saying, “Now, do you know this young lady, lieutenant?”

“I can’t say as I’ve had the pleasure,” said the young man, shaking his head. “I’d surely never have forgotten such a lovely young lady.” He sounded smitten already.

“The butterfly emerges from its chrysalis,” said Mr. Jenkins. “This is the Hendersons’ Lorraine.”

“Ah,” went the handsome lieutenant. Someone behind me sighed again. The lieutenant bowed from the waist and kissed my hand.

And that was all it took.

There and then — for a time — I lost interest in women’s rights.

That was all it took. I was caught in the eye of a hurricane; he spun me like a top, and I couldn’t find my feet. That very same evening there was a ball at the Campbells’. He came for me in a hired carriage and I, who was essentially against men, who avoided balls and therefore had never learned to dance properly, I floated across the dance floor with him all evening like a feathery cloud. The next day brought an excursion on horseback to
Green Springs, where he declared his love for me in a romantic valley, a love that was fresh but all the more profound. The following day … well, to make a long story short, we went through the whole gamut of romantic courtship in a single week — including love letters, though we spent only a few hours each night apart.

He had only two weeks’ leave.

A champagne picnic — it was summertime — and under the August moon he recited a carefully memorized poem. I didn’t like the poem, but I loved his moustache. An awful lot. An outing on horseback to Gloucester Valley, croquet in the garden of the Methodist manse, and Sunday afternoon he came over to ask for my hand and we were engaged. The wedding was set for the following week, after which we were to go straight to join his garrison at the Jefferson Barracks in Missouri. More champagne, my father tearful, his appetite for whisky stronger than usual after champagne, my mother dry-eyed. But that didn’t strike me as odd.

Then on Monday the letter from the publisher in Boston arrived.

The thing is, I had written a novel. Secretly. Inspired by literature — Margaret — and by life — Papa, his cellar, and the increasing frequency of decreasingly adequate jugs. When I was writing the novel, I began, for the first time in my life, to dream. Not about romantic or even just ordinary lovers, the way Sarah and almost everyone else, perhaps even Maggie, did. As young as I was, I was overcome by the spell of pen and ink, the ecstasy of giving birth on paper. The advantage is that you can create your children any way you please. You can make them clever but naughty, beautiful, foolish, generous, ugly or plain, and no matter what they become, you love them all. I dreamed, as my characters appeared and grew under my fingertips, that this magic would make me an independent woman,
freed from the necessity of choosing between some drunken but well-heeled bridegroom and a quiet but defeating life of poverty as an old maid.

By then Papa was up to his ears in debt and was beginning to see white mice. I dreamed that my novels would make me rich, that I would do nothing but fight the good fight with my pen, and have Mama come to live with me. That was my fantasy.

For a week, Lieutenant Burnside — quite unlike the former young tailor, now the perfect embodiment of an Achilles, a comely warrior and lover — changed all that.

But on Monday the letter from the publisher arrived. Thirty dollars in advance, ten per cent on every copy sold.

A peculiar change came over me. It may well have been a chemical change.

Though at seventeen and a bit I could be a gentle beauty when the need arose, there was still a little of the tomboy in me. I ripped the bridal veil over my head, pulled on my everyday calico dress, and saddled my little filly, Andromeda. Mama appeared in the doorway.

“Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind again, Lorraine?” she asked me.

“No — but I did such an awful thing to him!”

Mama didn’t say a word. From Papa’s upstairs window came the sound of singing. Lately, he’d taken to singing to his white mice and watching them dance.

“I must talk to him!” I shouted, like a truly hysterical female. I jumped into the saddle as Mama retorted drily, “What about? The weather?”

Then Andromeda was trotting along the path beside the
tracks. In the distance ahead of me I could see smoke pouring out of the locomotive’s smokestack. There was still time. I’d make it.

As I rode along in that uncomfortable side-saddle, my mind continued to work, for of course the mind can’t be stopped, and it recapitulated on its own that awful week before the wedding that didn’t happen. Poor Ambrose was a victim of the chemical change in me, and all that remained of the spell he’d cast was that aura of — what? Masculinity? Ingenuousness? Ambrose embodied all the best masculine virtues, but he was such an innocent.

And I had written a novel, and Mr. Little in Boston was going to publish it.

The first week of our acquaintance, I had paid no attention to what Ambrose was saying. All I could hear was that velvet voice. The poems he’d swotted up so eagerly from some handbook for young men in love didn’t impress me much, but that voice!

The second week I began listening to what he was saying.

He was babbling inanities, probably from the same handbook. They were mostly about the glories of nature and the individual components of it deemed to possess a particular beauty, such as roses, butterflies, stars, and the full moon. He would intersperse these with his memorized poems and, because I happened to be reading Poe at the time, my mind involuntarily set Ambrose’s verses against “Ulalume” and “Israfel”. Ambrose lost in the comparison. Slowly at first, and then with increasing intensity, panic began to set in, and by Wednesday it had become abject terror. Good heavens! Was I to listen to this drivel for the next half-century, some of it in rhyme? I realized that his sumptuous side-whiskers had intoxicated me, and as I sobered up my rational powers returned. I knew that sooner rather than later Ambrose would stop reciting bad poetry and
talking about the mellifluous song of the nightingale — but then what in heaven’s name would he talk about?

Of course, I was young and foolish myself and should have known that love turns most men, temporarily, into gibbering idiots. Most women too, as I’d discovered for myself. It turned out later that, although Ambrose was an innocent, he was no fool. He went on to design a breech-loading rifle that was better than any other manufactured at the time. When the war began, they armed several divisions with it. So take that rifle: he designed and built it, but he didn’t know how to sell it. After six years of struggling to stay on its feet, his munitions factory in Bristol, Rhode Island, closed down and he found himself in such dire straits that he had to sell his sword and the epaulettes from his dress uniform for thirty dollars so that he and his young wife, Mary, wouldn’t starve. Then he took a job with the railroad.