Watchfires (25 page)

***

Joanna came for dinner that night; Mr. Handy had gone to a party. Dexter retired early; Charley Fairchild took the boys to a dramatic version of
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and the sisters passed the evening in the parlor together. Rosalie told Joanna of her present resolution to quit the
Pierce,
and they heatedly argued the merits of her decision for an hour. When Joanna at last appeared to have accepted it, she then told Rosalie that she had made the same decision for herself.

"Oh, Jo! No!"

"I'm perfectly calm about it. You needn't worry about me. I've had my cry, and it was a good one. I've faced the fact that so long as I'm doing this of my own free will, so long as nobody is
making
me do it, I can live with the fact."

"But it's too absurd! You're not in my fix. Father's perfectly all right. Look where he is tonight! And, anyway, I'll be here to keep an eye on him."

"You'll have your hands full with Dexter and the boys. And Father is
not
perfectly all right. He is rapidly losing the sight in one eye. He fell on the stairs yesterday and only by a miracle didn't break anything. Doctor Strong tells me he thinks he's had a small stroke and that we must expect more. He may become totally incapacitated at any time. Of course, he could live for years, but he is definitely going to need someone to look after him and run the house. The place is a mess. I'm going to have to fire three of the maids, as it is. No, Rosalie, I must do it, that's all. R's hard on me, and it's hard on you. The war's hard on everyone."

"But, my dear, we could get a housekeeper and a nurse, if need be..."

"No, Rosey." She had never seen Joanna so calm, so firm. "He needs a daughter, and I'm going to be that daughter. I shall go back now. I don't want to talk about it anymore. And, of course, there will be hospitals where I can work here. Father won't require all my time. Not yet, anyway."

"And I'll work with you!"

"Yes. I shall like that." Joanna peered out the hall window and saw that her father's carriage was there. Rosalie helped her into her coat and tied the strings of her bonnet under her chin. Joanna kissed her. "Good night, dear."

"I wish to God we were back at Fortress Monroe!"

"Listening to the, gunfire? How bloodthirsty you are, Rosey! But so am I. Is this our penance?"

Rosalie, watching her sister lift her black satin skirt as she descended the stoop to take the proffered hand of the coachman and step into the landau, wondered if it could be the same woman who had cleaned the deck of the
Pierces
galley on her hands and knees and had helped the male nurses with the chamber pots.

O
N
N
EW
Y
EAR'S
D
AY
of 1868 the sky was white and clear, and the long icicles that hung down the windowpanes outside the dining room on Union Square made Dexter think of the diamond pendants that his brother-in-law, David Ullman, had bought for Jane to celebrate his firm's purchase of a million acres of phosphate mines in Georgia. After reading Horace Greeley's passionate call for the impeachment of the President, he glanced up at the impassive brown countenance of his son Fred bent over the financial page.

At last those slaty gray eyes were lifted to meet his.

"Something in your mind, Dad?"

"Just that everything seems to point to a rather exciting new year."

"Well, it should be one for me. If the old Commodore makes good his threat to grab Erie."

Fred worked for Bristow & Mayer, one of the brokerage firms associated with the "Vanderbilt crowd." Bristow had married the old man's niece. Fred was totally absorbed in his work.

"Oh, I wasn't referring to anything as earthshaking as
that
" his father retorted with rather labored sarcasm. "I was thinking of this proposed impeachment."

"Do you suppose they'll really go through with it?"

"I'm betting they will."

"And you think it a good thing? You want to see Ben Wade President of the United States?"

"It's not that," Dexter retorted with a grimace. He paused to consider his words. He knew that he tended to become highly agitated at what he considered the outrage of the South's regaining in peace what it had lost in war, and nothing irritated his son more than what Fred called "waving the bloody shirt." Fred was still, at least to his father's eyes, the lean bronzed hero of the Wilderness Campaign, the youngest aide on Grant's staff, whom a year of horror had changed from a meticulous, almost prissy youth into a cynical and hardened veteran. After three years of peace, during which he had rather grudgingly lived at home, Dexter was still afraid of him. "Let me put it this way. I do not believe that Andrew Johnson has so purged his heart of Southern sympathies as to be able properly to administer a reconstruction program to which he has been overtly hostile."

"He doesn't have to administer it. The army does that."

"But he's working against it, Fred. He's undermining it!" Again Dexter paused, aware of his now more tensely beating heart. He could not seem to subdue his indignation. Were four years of holocaust to have been in vain?

"By firing Stanton?" Fred demanded. "Isn't it going a bit far to impeach a President for removing a contumacious member of his own cabinet?"

"That is only the legal reason."

"Is it even legal? Isn't there a serious constitutional question there?"

"Undoubtedly." Dexter snatched at the temporary calm of legal analysis. "Johnson may have power under the Constitution to rid himself of his secretary of war. The true question is whether he is unconstitutionally opposing the reorganization of the rebel states. That is how the article of impeachment should be drafted. Do you believe, Fred, you, who have put your life on the line for our union, that those states should be readmitted before they have genuinely accepted the principle of negro suffrage?"

"But is military occupation going to make that acceptance any more genuine?"

"General Grant seems to think so. Isn't he your hero?"

"He
was
my hero. I'm not sure one should have heroes in peacetime. Anyway, I'm glad I have nothing to do with the occupation. It's always a shabby business, and brings out the rats."

"But if it's necessary, Fred?"

"Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't."

"If it's shabby, it's because all the right young men, like yourself, have left it to the regulars."

"Well, what are we supposed to do? Stay in uniform forever? I did my stint, Dad. As you have said, often enough."

Fred went back to his newspaper, and Dexter tried to do the same, but he found he could not read. Fred was always so prickly about anything concerning the war. Sometimes it seemed impossible for his family either to speak about it or be silent. Dexter would never forget the terrible time, in '64, when Fred had been hospitalized with a head wound in Alexandria, and he had taken advantage of a business trip to the capital to make a flying visit to his son's bedside. He had been struck by the remarkable alteration in Fred's looks. Pallor and emaciation had brought out the fine, strong lines of his bone structure. The shining gray eyes, the rich chestnut curls of his hair seemed to give life to a beautiful marble mask. Dexter had allowed himself to go overboard in an editorial for the Sanitary Commission
Gazette.
He had ventured the opinion that the phoenix of American youth would arise triumphant from the ashes of war, that young men like his wounded son would be better citizens for the stress they had undergone. Fred, unfortunately, had seen the article and had bitterly resented what he had termed his father's "capitalization" of a minor discomfort.

"I guess you're not really out of uniform when you're working for old Vanderbilt," Dexter ventured now, hoping that he was moving to a safer subject. "Is Harlem-Central really going to make a grab for Erie?"

"Everything points to it, Dad." Fred again put down his paper. "Central needs a line to Buffalo. Look at a railway map. It fits like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle."

"Dan Drew is going to be a hard man to take over. And I hear those youngsters, Gould and Fisk, are the trickiest things in town."

"True. But Vanderbilt knows all about them. They're out for money and nothing else. They've been milking Erie dry. They're too greedy for their own good, that's the point. I'm sure we can take Erie, if we go about it right."

"You really admire men like the Commodore, don't you?"

"There aren't any men like the Commodore! He's unique. You should watch him in action, Dad. For seventy-four, he's astounding. You talk about heroes. Well, he's the Ulysses S. Grant of 1868!"

"Who's the Ulysses S. Grant of 1868?"

Rosalie had just come in to take her place at the end of the breakfast table. She no longer appeared in the dressing gown to which Dexter had privately objected some years before, but he sometimes now missed it. For if she had then seemed inclined to linger too long in the house, to dally overmuch in facing the demands of her day, she now had the air of being ready to sally forth too early, to leave behind the domestic hearth too cheerfully, even too ruthlessly, in order to offer her brisk attention and alert presence to friends—or opponents—who might assail her on her very stoop. This morning she was arrayed in sober gray and had on a box hat that seemed to deny every principle of femininity. But the large troubled eyes, the brief, deprecating smile, were all of the old Rosalie.

Fred explained his reference.

"That old pirate! Really, Fred, I don't know where your values have gone. Isn't it bad enough to have you working for him without singing his praises under our roof?"

Her words were wormwood to Dexter, though of a wormwood that now seemed to be part of a daily diet. If he stood too much in awe of their oldest son—and he admitted such a tendency—surely Rosalie erred in the opposite extreme. She loved Fred, certainly, but on her own terms. She had worried about him desperately in the last year of the war, but now that he was home safe she seemed to have put that behind her. She knew as well as Dexter that Fred was paying marked attention to his boss's daughter, Elmira Bristow, a great-niece of Commodore Vanderbilt, but did that induce her to moderate in the least her strenuous language about the
tycoon
of Central? And the extraordinary part of it all was that Fred, however openly resentful of his mother, seemed to care for her approval more than that of anyone else, including Elmira Bristow.

"I have noticed, Ma, that people who are concerned with civil rights tend to assume omniscience in all political and financial matters. You might find it helpful to face the fact that you know nothing whatever about the business world."

"I know it's dog eat dog, and that's enough for me."

Dexter could never seem to stand apart in these mother-son confrontations. He suffered from an uneasy compulsion to run between the bristling opponents, for all the world like some silly Sabine woman, a babe in arms, thrusting herself between the pikes of her embattled kinsmen. "I suggest, my dear, that Fred views these things in a somewhat different light," he observed mildly. "He sees Mr. Vanderbilt, if I take him correctly, as a creative force—perhaps a rough one, but still creative. When the Commodore marshals his millions to some vast acquisitive end—as, say, purchasing control of the Erie line—it is with the purpose of imposing order on chaos."

"You mean a monopoly."

"Well, what's wrong with a monopoly, Ma?" Fred demanded hotly. "If it's in the right hands?"

"I'd like to ask the poor men in Erie that question."

"The poor men in Erie!" Fred turned to his father, in a hopeless appeal from female obtuseness. "Do you think, Dad, Mother has any conception of how corrupt and rotten a man like Gould is? Of course not! Where would she have met such a type?" He faced his mother again with a pitying condescension. "Take it from me, Ma, the objects of your sympathy are the vermin that come in through the drains."

"I suppose that's just your opinion, Fred. There could be others, couldn't there?"

"Not about Jim Fisk, anyway."

"Well, I don't presume to have any informed judgment about the directors of Erie. But I do note that in your attitude these days, my boy, there seems to be a considerable dose of Number 417."

Dexter was startled to hear Rosalie, for the first time, refer to her father's general philosophy simply by his address. Did this represent some ultimate step in her long emancipation from the paternal authority? And might not Union Square be lumped in her mind with Fifth Avenue? Was not his own tense concern with the rivalry at that very breakfast table underlined by a fear that it might be the embryo of a more domestic conflict?

"Grandpa has probably seen more of the leaders of our business world over a longer period of time than any man living," Fred retorted. "I imagine that he has attained some degree of wisdom."

"Does the Commodore go to Papa's now? I remember when he was considered beyond the pale."

"Mr. Vanderbilt doesn't go about in society," Fred replied with dignity. "He keeps a kind of court of his own."

Dexter fixed his eyes upon his plate for a breathless moment, waiting to hear if Rosalie would now attack the Bristows. But no, even she had her limits. He seized the chance to shift, once again, from a dangerous topic.

"Speaking of your father, Rosalie, will you be going there today? I shall start my calls at noon, and I expect to end at Number 417 about five." He was relieved to note that Fred had already returned to his newspaper.

"I'm afraid I shall have to work on my agenda for the Equal Rights Association."

"Oh, darling. On New Year's Day?"

"Particularly on New Year's Day. If I want it to be a good year. Anyway, I don't care to mingle with the Radical Republicans that Papa cultivates these days."

Dexter frowned. What was irking her so? For months her temper had been steadily shortening. There was always the excuse of menopause, but that was supposed to be over. Sometimes he wondered if she did not still begrudge him her hospital ship. He was the one who had benefited by her renunciation, becoming almost famous, after recovering from his pneumonia, for his work on the Sanitary Commission. Whatever he might argue, the fact would always remain that his war career had waxed as hers had dwindled. But whenever he tried to induce her to discuss this frankly, she would brush him off with an "Oh, it's nothing, nothing. Only nerves. Face it, my dear. You're saddled with a nagging middle-aged wife."