The Bride of Texas (8 page)

He had a wonderful weapon but he couldn’t sell it. Why? For all practical purposes, the sole customer for this type of product is, of course, the army. The army commission that tested all the various weapons systems ranked Ambrose’s patent as the best. So Ambrose went to Washington with the naive idea that he need only sign a contract with the Secretary of War, John Buchanan Floyd, and the Rhode Island factory could start production in earnest. Floyd’s assistant, however, indicated to him — in fact, he was unabashedly candid about it — that the quality of a weapon is one thing, and its sale something else entirely. The sale can only be made by someone who has certain army contacts. This someone would be available for twenty per cent of the profit Burnside stood to make from the contract.

Ambrose was horrified. “But — that’s bribery!” he said with rising indignation.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said the man with the contacts. “Let’s just call it a commission?”

“And if I refuse?”

“The army has several other models to choose from.”

“But my system is the best! That’s what the commission decided. No one tried to influence them, nor would it ever have occurred to me to try!” Ambrose’s blood was boiling now. “This weapon will enhance the army’s fire-power. The army’s effectiveness — indeed the lives of its soldiers — will depend on it!”

The assistant looked at Ambrose as though he were a figure in a fairy-tale. “Exactly, sir,” he said. “Aren’t the lives of those soldiers worth twenty per cent of the profit?”

“But that — but that — Bribery is not consistent with military honour!”

“Hmm,” said the secretary pensively. “Am I to understand that your private sense of honour is more important than soldiers’ lives?”

Ambrose took a deep breath but couldn’t come up with a coherent response. Instead he walked out and slammed the door behind him, which ultimately led to the sale of his sword and epaulettes for thirty dollars. But even as he was going through the door, he was aware — he wasn’t
that
innocent — that his military honour might cost him dearly. And yet.…

It was still bothering him in Cincinnati, when the old wounds had long since healed and I, past thirty, was no longer a tender beauty, or even much of a campaigner for women’s rights any more, although I smuggled many a radical idea into my tales of bright young women and handsome young men, ideas the wise men of this world would hardly have approved of had they happened onto them. I had learned to camouflage such ideas carefully, and I had abandoned entirely my struggle in the cause of temperance, which had been the secondary theme of my first novel. The critics had approved, but it was far less lucrative than Eros.

“Dear Ambrose,” I told my former fiancé, “the bribe would
have been a specific amount in hard dollars. How could you possibly calculate how many more soldiers died because they used an inferior system, say one of Smith and Wesson’s, instead of one as undoubtedly superior as yours?”

“They ended up using my rifles anyway,” said Ambrose. “When I went bankrupt, the patent was one of the assets I had to turn over to my creditors. In time I paid the rest off in cash.”

“And what did they do with the patent?” I asked.

“Well,” said the general, stroking his magnificent side-whiskers, “well, Mrs. Tracy —”

“Lorraine.”

“Lorraine.” He said it almost as melodiously as he had years before in Liberty, and a delicious shiver went up my back. “When the war broke out, the army had a serious shortage of weapons. Smith and Wesson signed a contract for two thousand units a month —”

“Without a bribe?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I’d say yes, without a bribe. After Lincoln’s appeal there were suddenly seventy-five thousand volunteers who had to train with sticks instead of rifles. The army was buying up everything it could lay hands on. I suspect that was the end of bribes for a while.”

“So two thousand of your rifles a month —”

“At the beginning. The demand was far greater; the manufacturers started producing more and pretty soon they were delivering five thousand a month. At Bull Run about a third of the infantry regiments had my breech-loaders.”

“So you indirectly saved a lot of lives, and your honour too.”

“Well,” said the general, again fingering the fringe around his face, “the casualties at Bull Run were still too high. I managed an orderly retreat.” There was a slight trace of pride in his voice … poor Ambrose. Bull Run was one of his very few
military successes, and at that it was only partial. He kept his regiment from panicking while others — they were all volunteers — fled in disarray. Unlike most commanders, he emerged from the defeat with his professional reputation more or less intact. “But otherwise,” I heard him say, “some units got mixed up — there was great confusion —”

“You saved your honour, and on top of it the soldiers got your splendid rifle. Did you get anything out of it yourself? I mean in dollars and cents?”

He shook his head. He was perplexed, I thought. “I told you, the patent wasn’t mine any more,” he said. “I’d given it to my creditors as partial payment of my debts.”

So there you have Ambrose. He knew how to make a better gun. But he could never quite fathom matters of honour and bribery, and the life and death of soldiers.

So how could he have fathomed the problems awaiting him in Cincinnati?

But back then, on the way to the Connersville railway station in the uncomfortable saddle, I gave no thought to this side of Ambrose’s personality. What was going through my mind was how the horror of the second week of our courtship had given way to the horror of what I had done to him.

The nightmare of that second week had urged me to break off this engagement while there was still time, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Once, I interrupted one of those abominable poetry recitations in the middle of a would-be sonnet. “May I recite a poem for you, lieutenant?” I said and, without waiting for a reply, I began. I hadn’t consciously memorized it, either, I’d simply fallen under Poe’s spell:

When I finished, he just stared at me in silence with his beautiful, guileless eyes.

That was Wednesday. After that he stopped reciting poems to me, and he pruned back his odes to the glory of nature, too. So now it was I who babbled, about everything except what I wanted to say, what I should have said. I’d look at those devoted and suddenly desperate eyes of his — and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Once, when I was ten, some boys were jumping off a cliff that must have been twenty feet high, showing off and daring me to do the same, and teasing me for being just a girl, and they made me so mad that I climbed the cliff, but once I got to the top I looked down and I was terrified. The boys were like the seven dwarfs at the bottom of a chasm, egging me on. I took a deep breath and shut my eyes, but I was afraid to jump. I tried again, but the same thing happened. I could hear their voices mocking me, but I still couldn’t do it. Then, when the voices became a single, huge, taunting roar, I opened my eyes and saw the whole gang walking away, chanting, “Girls are fraidy-cats! Girls are fraidy-cats!” So I shut my eyes again, and this time I — or someone — shoved the fear away and I was flying, my skirt filled with air, falling for what seemed like ages; then I opened my eyes and hit the ground with a crash. Something in my leg went crunch, and when I tried to get up I fell back like a ninepin. The boys had to carry me home on an improvised stretcher made of branches. My right foot was a swollen lump. Luckily I had only sprained an ankle and bruised my tailbone.

That was the kind of fear that stopped my tongue every
time I tried to tell Ambrose that it was all a mistake, that I couldn’t marry him because I was actually fond of him and if we did marry —

But there was no chorus of little boys mocking me, and I couldn’t push away the fear.

Saturday came and they dressed me in white lace. I got out of the carriage half conscious. Sarah and Maggie held up my train as I stumbled down the aisle. I stood before Reverend Morris.… I could hear him asking me if I took this man … and I finally mustered the strength to leap into the chasm. I said, clearly and unequivocally, “No!”

And now, as I rode side-saddle down to Connersville, the memory gave me shivers of mortification.

I could see him from a distance. He was sitting on a crate by the tracks, near a couple of farmers smoking their pipes on a pile of logs, and a little farther away a Negro family with about eight children warmed themselves in the evening sun. I reined in Andromeda, slid out of the saddle, hitched her to the railing, and walked over to him.

What on earth would I say?

He was staring at the ground, but some sixth sense must have told him I was coming — the vile person who had shamed him in front of all Liberty. He looked up and jumped to his feet, visibly embarrassed. I stopped two steps away from him.

“Ambrose —” My voice came out in a squeak.

“Yes, Miss Henderson.…” There was a despondent note of defeat in his voice. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be his last defeat, though the later ones weren’t caused by an arrow from Greek mythology.

“Lorraine,” I corrected him.

He said nothing, but looked at his feet.

“You know, Ambrose, I —” Then it burst out of me. “My novel is going to be published,” I said, encapsulating the whole tangle of reasons in a single sentence.

“Novel?”

“That’s right. I wrote a novel and Little and Brown in Boston are going to publish it. They — they even sent me an advance — thirty dollars.”

“My congratulations,” said Ambrose.

I must have seemed demented. “I’m not fishing for compliments. I’m telling you to — to explain —”

“There’s nothing to explain, Miss Lorraine,” he said helpfully. “I was — tried and found wanting.”

“You were not found wanting!” I exclaimed, so loudly that one of the farmers looked around at us. “You deserve someone better than —”

“No, no,” he interrupted me again, “I deserve exactly what I got. How could I have been so vain? I know my limits —”

“You aren’t the least bit vain, Ambrose! And what I did — well, it was awful. Dreadful!”

The train whistle sounded from a distance. I didn’t have much time. I was supposed to be a writer, but I couldn’t find the right words. What could I possibly say in the few moments before the train arrived?

“I was a vain fool. You’re bright and I — Those verses I recited … and you responded with ‘Annabel Lee’ —”

The pain struck me like lightning. He had recognized it! I thought he’d hardly read anything except those verses from his handbook, yet he recognized real poetry when he heard it. Oh, God! It must have been worse for him than I realized. This handsome, honourable, sensitive mountain of a man — how did he ever end up a soldier, anyway?

Should he have remained a tailor?

“You know, Miss Lorraine, I’m not very smart,” he said sadly. “But unlike a lot of other fools, I’m smart enough to know that I don’t have a whole lot up here,” and he tapped his forehead.

“That’s not true!” I exclaimed, but I was interrupted by the shriek of the locomotive braking. He bent down and picked up his valise. “You’re intelligent and sensitive,” I insisted. “Any girl would be proud to — but I —” How do you explain the inexplicable, when it’s as clear as a slap in the face?

“They’re going to publish your novel,” he said sadly.

“That’s not the point,” I said. The stationmaster was calling all aboard. “It’s just that I don’t really want to get married! I want to be independent! I want to write novels and work for —”

Ambrose had mounted the steps to his car when he said something unexpected. “You’d be wasted on me. I’d be no good for you. I’m not up to it.”

The train started to pull out.

“That’s not the reason, Ambrose, believe me!” I called after him.

He waved.

“Forgive me, Ambrose! Ambro-o-o-ose!” I was screaming like a hysterical female. I could hear Andromeda neigh uneasily from the railing.

The train and Ambrose vanished, and that was the last I saw of him until thirteen years later, in Cincinnati, when he was named commander of the Department of the Ohio. By then he had his only real military success of the war, the capture of Roanoke Island, under his belt. And he’d been through Fredericksburg, probably the worst military catastrophe ever endured by a Union general. I had been married to Professor Tracy for years, had two children, Jimmy and Loretta, and under the pseudonym Laura Lee I was the country’s most popular author of novels for young girls. I wove into these novels my mildly
subversive messages about young men who were invariably described as “handsome”. That was all that remained of my dream of being a great champion of women’s emancipation. I was now a lady, the wife of a college president and professor of philosophy at the Academy in Cincinnati.

My curiosity about the impact of time on his beautiful side-whiskers moved me to send him my calling card when he arrived in Cincinnati. I was somewhat nervous about it, but I believe that time is a sieve that allows the bad things to pass through and retains only the good ones. I also knew that he had married not long after the disaster in Liberty, that he was a model husband, and that his marriage was a happy one and as solid as the rock of ages. In the meantime, side-whiskers had become all the rage, both in the army and outside it. People had taken to calling them “sideburns”, a word they’d coined by twisting Ambrose’s surname, thus ensuring him a place in history long after everyone but the historians had forgotten that he’d botched the job at Fredericksburg, or at least earned the reputation of having done so.

Actually, when you stretch the chain of cause and effect to the limits, the catastrophe at Fredericksburg was Lincoln’s fault.

“As long as he was merely offering me the supreme command,” Ambrose admitted in a weak moment, while he was trying to sort out the conundrum of Vallandigham, the traitor in his eyes, and
The Chicago Daily Times
— which he finally resolved like Antigone, correctly, so my husband says. “As long as he was merely asking me to take it, I kept saying I wasn’t worthy of the honour. But Lorraine, the president had little choice — and then there was Roanoke and the retreat at Bull Run. I
was only in command of a division there, that’s something I’m up to — but the president didn’t consider that. He probably said to himself, ‘If he can do that well with a division, he won’t be likely to do much worse with an army.’ In any case, he ordered me to take the command. I’m a soldier, Lorraine.”