The Bride of Texas, page 34
It later turned out that Ambrose’s choice for the tribunal of “good men one and all”, as Hascall had put it, was not the happiest. Fortunately, this didn’t become obvious until after the fact. By then Clem was residing at the beautiful Clifton House Hotel on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. Shortly thereafter, he was evicted, because emissaries from Chicago were arriving to visit him under the influence of whisky and the hotel’s clientele, mostly wealthy widows, complained. He had to move to the somewhat less savoury Table Rock Hotel, where he finally found out the details about his tribunal.
The first of Hascall’s “good men”, Captain Mayer, had had a noteworthy military career. Before offering his services to the Union army, he had served in several European battalions and helped in the suppression of a number of rebellions. But he had neglected to become naturalized in America, so his right to sit in judgement over a citizen of the United States was unquestionably questionable. Another member of the tribunal, Colonel Harred, was born in America but just before the war had served a prison sentence for “running a house of prostitution”, and hence might have been better addressed as “Madam” than as “Your Honour”. But the star of Ambrose’s gallery was the military prosecutor, James M. Cutts. Several months after the Vallandigham trial, a bellboy at Burnett House caught him standing on a chair and peering through the transom into a neighbouring suite, where the daughter of Senator Hawkins of Indiana was getting ready for bed.
So Ambrose’s choices were less than fortunate, but none of this came out until after Judge Leavitt issued his verdict. He puzzled over the legal conundrum for five days, and finally came to a conclusion that was about as American as General Order Number One. Years later, my grandson (or was it my great-grandson?), a philosophy student at Columbia University, declared that Leavitt’s decision was in the spirit of a theory known as pragmatism, which, in the words of my grandson or great-grandson, consists in “modern man’s turning away from abstraction, from purely verbal solutions, from pretended absolute knowledge and terms, towards concrete facts”. That was somewhat erudite for me, so I told the boy that Leavitt had simply been acting in the spirit of common sense. The honourable judge had written: “If the doctrine is to obtain that every one charged with and guilty of acts of mischievous disloyalty not within the scope of the criminal laws of the land, in custody under military authority, is to be set free by courts or judges on habeas corpus, and that there is no power by which he could be temporarily placed where he cannot perpetrate mischief, it requires no argument to prove that the most alarming conflicts must follow and the action of the Government be most seriously impaired. I dare not in my judicial position assume the fearful responsibility implied in the sanction of such a doctrine.…” In other words, he decided not to decide.
9
Maggie got up and started to pace the parlour floor; the second decanter was now far from full. She stopped in front of the marble bust of a Roman girl with one blue eye and stared at it for a long time in silence. Then she walked to the window and gazed out at the May night. Jasmine appeared, assessed the situation, and vanished again. Maggie returned to the armchair.
“The lout that Ambrose confronted turned out to be a journalist,” she said. “The next day he wrote an article for the St. Louis Dispatch about the ball, ‘the dignified course of which was disturbed only by the unseemly behaviour of some snob with grotesque side-whiskers in the uniform of the United States Army who thought that the society of St. Louis was not sufficiently refined for his lady friends to mix with.’ ”
“I presume Ambrose challenged him to a duel,” I said.
“In a manner of speaking,” said Maggie. “He showed up at the editorial offices of the Dispatch with a bullwhip, and he was charged with assault and battery.”
I was surprised. “I had no idea Ambrose was ever behind bars.”
“He never was, of course. A man with Ambrose’s good looks had too many female admirers in St. Louis for some boor to do him any damage. The judge decided that he had acted in just if somewhat prolonged indignation over the insult to his ladies, and the lout was put to such shame that he had to leave town. I understand he was next seen as an auctioneer at the slave-auctions in New Orleans.”
In the candle-light her complexion no longer looked quite as ashen.
“I could probably write novels too,” she sighed. “But who would read such tragic stories?”
“You wouldn’t write tragic stories. I’m glad that — that in spite of everything you’ve been through — you’re still the same as ever.”
“Right. I laugh so as not to cry. It’s been less than six months since Fredericksburg, and I’m not in mourning for Leonidas.” All the laughter had vanished from her eyes again. “But at the outset, Leonidas didn’t behave like a gentleman,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Ambrose was the one who behaved like a gentleman.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Dear Lorraine, how could you?”
10
The thrashing Ambrose gave the lout from St. Louis was comical. The second thrashing — in fact it was just a slap in the face — was less comical, but that was mainly because the baby died. Our lives, I think, are coloured by our demise. It is our end that sets the tone, not our beginning. The baby survived its deferred death by only a couple of months. Had it died when it should have, Maggie would have been spared twelve years of misery which ended only at Marye’s Heights.
Good intentions sometimes — often, in fact — have evil consequences, while evil intentions may lead to fortunate ends. Maggie had left St. Louis. She was living in Cincinnati with her rich though unmarried aunt, Hermione Collins, who had found Jasmine for me after that unfortunate disaster in the lake. I was alone in our large house — my husband was lecturing in Chicago — and I lay in bed, listening to the sad songs coming from Jasmine’s little room — “Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down, Oh, yes Lord! Sometimes I’m almost on the ground, Oh, yes Lord!” — and I knew that that scoundrel Leonidas had been right, but that Maggie had been saved from a terrible sin and had been punished terribly for it. She was saved not by a guardian angel but by a vision of hell: the pedagogies of our inscrutable Creator, Whose ways are indeed strange.
Leonidas had taken her to a house by the river that resembled a skull: a whitewashed façade, two darkened windows on the second floor, an open door on the ground floor, with a reddish glow behind it that came from a blazing fireplace. Maggie’s knees gave out and Leonidas had to push her inside. A bare white cot stood in front of the fire in a spacious room. The cot was clean — the doctor’s clientele came from the best families in St. Louis — but it was bare as a catafalque, and behind it stood an old crone dressed in black. The doctor wore a vest, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a red cravat, and on a table before him lay an open case with his instruments laid out on black velvet. Maggie began to weep. Leonidas held her up, the doctor and the crone exchanged looks, the old woman stepped over to Maggie and cooed to her in the voice of a nursemaid, “There, there, little darling, there, there.” She reached out to stroke her cheek, but Maggie pushed her away, screaming. The doctor watched for a while, with the cold eyes of a practised demon, then put his instruments away and snapped the case shut. Maggie kept on screaming.
“Well, lieutenant,” said the doctor, “your lady is apparently unwilling.” He started to roll down his sleeves and Leonidas replied angrily, “Wait, I’ll see to it —”
“Not here, lieutenant,” said the doctor, putting on his jacket and pointing to the door.
“I paid in advance!” Leonidas exclaimed.
“And falsely informed me that the lady had agreed.”
“Oh, but she will!”
“In that case, when you get her permission you may call on me and we shall arrange another appointment. Of course” — he looked at Maggie — “you don’t have much time. You should have had it done much sooner, as it is.”
Leonidas allowed Maggie to drag him towards the door. He turned back to say, “And my money?”
“Consider it payment for my lost time. Good evening, lieutenant.”
Maggie looked at me. “Had it done much sooner?” she said. “I didn’t want to do it at all. To snuff out the flame of a tiny life.… Would you have agreed?”
I shivered. “Did you love him, a little at least?”
“I hated him. He never turned up after the ball in St. Louis, and that was fine with me. But when I discovered I was pregnant I wrote him a letter. He came and the only thing he could talk about was that doctor. I started hating him then.”
My poor friend had fallen into an eternal female trap, and after fleeing the devil’s kitchen she had married Brumble. That was how things were done in Liberty.
“I fell into a gentleman’s trap,” said Maggie with a crooked smile.
“Again I don’t understand you, Maggie —”
“How could you?” she repeated. “I’d been determined to remain alone, unmarried, with the baby. I probably would have moved here to Cincinnati. Aunt Hermione would have taken me in. She was the spitting image of Miss Marlowe, if you’ve read Hubris and Humility.”
My God, how could that early farce of mine remind Maggie of — “I’ve read it,” I said, “but I truly don’t understand —”
“Even if life were the kind of comedy Laura Lee, thank the Lord, makes it out to be,” Maggie interrupted me, “Aunt Hermione was too down to earth to harbour ideas that silly. My aunt is not from a farm but from Cincinnati. Somebody else got the marriage idea. And it was my fault.”
She stroked the pink spine of my latest thick opus. “But what I suffered in that skull-like house — it was like something straight out of your favourite poet —” said my friend, who was probably better read than she admitted. “That may have been an extenuating circumstance. I’d like to have seen you in that situation, Lorraine.”
“I’d have fainted,” I said, to make Maggie feel better. But she knew me too well.
“You? Chief of the Shoshones? I didn’t faint either. I just fell to pieces, and once I was in pieces I confessed everything to Clara. She was certainly the right one to confess to!”
11
When I finished reading Leavitt’s verdict, something drew me to Humphrey’s library, and I was just about to reach for the shelf where he kept his favourite philosophers when my two youngsters burst into the room screaming. Jimmy was holding his hand over his nose and blood was streaming between his fingers and down onto his brand-new clothes. Still the tomboy despite Lieutenant Pettiford’s influence, Loretta defended herself with a classic phrase: “Mama, he started it!”
So I didn’t reach for the book among Humphrey’s philosophers until years later, when I heard how Comely Clem had met his end. The end sets the tone.
Ambrose had wanted to put Vallandigham away in Fort Warren, a bleak prison in Boston Harbour, but Lincoln, fearing that prison would make him a martyr, amended the sentence and ordered the King of the Copperheads exiled to the Confederacy. Such justice, however appropriate, was too complex for Ambrose’s political sensibilities, and he balked. The tribunal, made up of “fine officers” (before they were exposed), had considered deportation and decided against it. If he was obliged to change the decision now, his prestige would suffer — prestige he would need in the coming weeks, when a number of similar trials were expected for which the Vallandigham affair was a precedent. Lincoln held his ground, and Ambrose, as usual, obeyed his president’s wishes. On May 22 the prisoner boarded the gunship Exchange in the Cincinnati River, and was conveyed to St. Louis, where he was transported by a special train to Murfreesboro and turned over to General Rosecrans. From there he was driven to the nearest front line. Following complications with grudging Southern officers, who found Vallandigham a somewhat distasteful ally, Rosecrans’s Major Wiles fobbed him off on Colonel Webb, who hadn’t had time to get proper instructions from his commanding officer, General Braxton Bragg. Comely Clem had become a hot potato, and when he left for Canada they were probably glad to see him go.
12
It was Dayton’s Weekly that pronounced the last word on the Vallandigham trial, when it wrote that through his oratory Vallandigham had been quickly digging his own political grave, and that Burnside had resurrected him. But as the future showed, Ambrose was not such a miracle-maker. The resurrected Clem was far from the old barn-burner of the wild days of May 1863, when the little snake raised its coppery head and Vallandigham gambled on martyrdom. He lost. In the October elections of that year, he ran in absentia from Canada. His stay in the South had been brief; he was on to Lincoln’s game, and had no intention of compromising his peace-loving followers in the North by fighting for the cause while safe under the wings of Confederate President Jeff Davis, who in turn wasn’t stupid enough to try to keep him there. But despite the martyr’s halo and the juicy anti-Negro slogans that marked his campaign, he was defeated. So he returned to Illinois — Georgie Morton “lost his way” en route from Indianapolis to Columbus so he wouldn’t have to arrest him — but he failed again at the Democratic Convention in 1864.
When the war was over, Vallandigham decided to bet on what my learned husband called panta rhei. Though he used to appeal to the past as though it were holy, a source of divine inspiration, he now said, “The past must be forgotten. What has been, has been. We need to stop taking it into account.” But there was a less philosophical term for Vallandigham’s transformation, and it was applied not only by the Republicans but also — perhaps because they didn’t know Greek — by members of his own party: turncoat. There was no need to explain that Clem himself stood to gain the most from his “new tasks”. His idealism should obviously be taken with a grain of salt, for the martyr of the Constitution was — and had probably always been — an opportunist.
In that, perhaps his critics were being unfair. Be that as it may, things went downhill for him from then on. At the first post-war Democratic Convention, in 1866, he was accused by his long-time colleagues Jewett and Campbell of having “flirted with high treason”, thus confirming, after the fact, Judge Leavitt’s common sense and Ambrose’s instincts. Then he tried to win the Democratic nomination, first for Congress and later for governor, but he lost both bids and returned to the practice of law.
And there he won everything.
In 1871 he defended a violent murderer, Thomas McGehan, and saved him from the gallows. But for himself —
I read a detailed account of his death in the Dayton Journal in the college library in Cincinnati. They quoted Vallandigham’s last words before he lost consciousness: “Oh, Murder! O what a blunder!”
There were only a few students in the library at the time. I got up, walked over to the shelves, and pulled out the book I had wanted to get long ago. I took it over to a window that overlooked the college garden. It was dark already, and the July stars were high in the sky — the same stars the general had once looked up at from my balcony.
Everyone gazes at them, because they shine so brightly. Only a few of us try to look deeper, to look inside ourselves as well, because, as a rule, the darkness there is profound. And in that darkness lies something more important than the stars.
13
“There wasn’t a lot of time, and Leonidas was having nightmares about what I would do to embarrass him,” said Maggie. “He came twice to implore me to change my mind, and the third time I told him I wanted nothing, only to be left alone. You could tell how relieved he was. ‘Don’t worry, Maggie, I’ll take care of the child.’ ‘How?’ I said. ‘Will you marry me?’ He was startled. ‘But you said — ’ ‘Don’t worry, I won’t force you to the altar with a shotgun.’ He looked at me as though he had something to say but couldn’t, then at last he blurted out, ‘I inherited a little something from my Uncle Bart. If you’re going to need money — ’ ‘Of course I’m going to need money,’ I said. In the end, he reluctantly gave me three hundred. I was so sick of the whole thing that I took it. That was my worst mistake.” Maggie sighed. “Because in the meantime, Clara was matchmaking again.”
It was like this: Lieutenant Burnside was Brumble’s immediate superior, and Clara had him in the palm of her hand. She stepped into a play that was on its way to becoming the drama of a courageous and independent young woman, and introduced some traditional gentlemanly elements into it — so successfully that the whole play became a melodrama, complete with a so-called happy ending. What followed the happy ending was a tragedy, but melodramas never go that far.
A young woman from St. Louis arrived unannounced at the Jefferson barracks. The black footman jumped down from her carriage and exchanged a few quiet words with the officer on duty, who stepped over to the vehicle, opened the door, and escorted the lady to Lieutenant Burnside’s office. The lady spent some time with him behind closed doors, then Lieutenant Burnside escorted her back to her carriage. Lieutenant Burnside’s face was red. He locked himself in his office, and word spread through the garrison that the womanizer Burnside had gotten a society lady from St. Louis in trouble. The next morning, Second Lieutenant Brumble returned from a two-day furlough to find that Lieutenant Burnside urgently requested his presence. The office door was closed again, for a long time; then came a sound that an inquisitive sergeant identified as a slap. Voices were raised. The gossip was modified. Next day, two officers in dress uniform were shown into the parlour of Clara’s parents, and Lieutenant Brumble asked Maggie for her hand in marriage. She fainted dead away.
“Really?” I wondered. “Did you actually faint?”
“Don’t be silly, Lorraine. I had to gain time to think it over. In the end, I finally did say the momentous ‘Yes’.”
Maggie’s gaze fell on Humphrey’s humidor. She opened it and took out a slender Virginia cigar. I held a candle for her to light it.
