The Bride of Texas, page 55
Such was the end of Vallandigham. He defended freedom beautifully, but what was he really after? He wasted his extraordinary ability playing gallows games.
Perhaps I have not been unfair to him.
13
I never saw my dear friend Ambrose again after the war. He too went into politics. For a while he was Governor of Rhode Island, the state where he had once tried to become a manufacturer. Then he represented Rhode Island in the Senate, and then, unexpectedly, he lost his wife, Mary. I never did meet her. She was young, just forty-nine years old, and Ambrose survived her by only five years.
It was said, as it often is, that his wife’s premature death killed him. I believe that. Ambrose had never lived primarily for himself.
The last time I saw him was in Chicago in the spring of 1864, when the war was still dragging on. Ambrose was preparing the campaigns that would lead him through the nightmare of the battles of The Wilderness to the disastrous Crater at Petersburg and his discharge from the army. He had come to Chicago from Virginia, where he was reassembling his old Ninth Corps, which would soon join the Army of the Potomac to plunge into The Wilderness. On March 20, the Chicago Republicans held a banquet. Ambrose had been invited to make the formal speech. I went with Humphrey, who had so neglected his professorial duties during the recent election campaign that I began to fear that he would soon have to bid adieu to the academic life I found so comfortable, since it demanded so much less of a wife than the life of a political candidate. All the same, I found time during the campaign to write a novel about clever Maud and her skilful manoeuvring to bring the handsome Jonathan — who had fallen victim to the recurrent madness of politics — to his senses and, eventually, to the altar.
Many Republicans in Chicago had not forgotten the unpleasant situation Lincoln had inflicted on them by rescinding Ambrose’s order to suppress the Times. Storey took malicious advantage of that, too, though only briefly; Gettysburg and Vicksburg and the overall reversal of the fortunes of war had taken the wind out of the sails of those who, like the publisher of the Times, were wrapping themselves in the Constitution. The Chicago Republicans read this shift in fortune in part as evidence that Ambrose had been right about the Times, and even contended that his vigorous action against Vallandigham, and the slap in the face he had given Storey, had broken the Copperhead conspiracy almost as effectively as Grant and Meade had defeated the Rebel forces on the battlefield. The hope was that, now that the president was riding on a wave of battlefield victories and criticism could no longer do him any damage, Ambrose would remind him that, less than a year ago, in Chicago, he had miscalculated.
Ambrose disappointed them. “I entirely acquiesce in all the president has done,” he declared in his powerful yet quiet voice, standing tall behind the lectern draped in a colourful Union flag, “and I feel now, tonight, just as I felt the moment I issued that order that was later rescinded.” In his beautiful blue uniform, his ruddy face framed by his incredible chestnut whiskers, he stood there and said, “I am as much an advocate for the liberty of speech and of the press as any man on the face of the globe can be, but when I am sent into a department to command soldiers who are to be strengthened in all possible ways by giving them encouragement, and by giving them clothes to wear and food to eat, and recruits to fill up their ranks; when I find men in the department opposing all these means of strengthening the soldiers in the Army, I will strike these men in precisely the same way that I would strike an enemy in arms against them.” Ambrose’s eyes gleamed in the light of the chandeliers, the gold tassel on his sword glimmered against the fine fabric of his trousers, the kind that Jasmine had once spilled cognac on and that soldiers deserve because they so often die. I had tears in my eyes, I who was perfectly capable of evoking them in my gentle readers but rarely shed them myself, and at that moment, at that pretentious banquet in the Republican Club of Chicago, surrounded by gentlemen in tails and ladies in elegant gowns from Worth’s, I loved that grand, childlike man. Tomorrow he would gallop off along muddy roads towards a winter of savage combat in order that those here might live as they did, but also in order that Jasmine and her shiftless Hasdrubal might live at all. “I would fail in my duty if I did not risk all I have in the world in the way of reputation or position, or even of life itself, to defend and strengthen those poor soldiers who are in the field risking their lives in defence of their country. That is all I have to say with reference to this order which I issued and which was rescinded.”
Applause, ovations, the dear, masculine, somewhat comical countenance — its whiskers already a synonym for dandyism. I never saw him again in my life. It is with this demeanour and with those words that he has remained alive in my mind.
Chicago
THE LANTERNS rattled like little tin drums in the rain. They were brass, polished and new, and they bordered the entranceway. Raindrops glinted coldly in the light of the lamps. A beige carriage drove up; a Negro pulled down the step and raised a large beige umbrella. The rain poured down. A lady’s foot in a patent-leather laced shoe emerged from the darkness inside the carriage into the golden light and placed itself on the step. The Negro footman took the lady delicately by the elbow and helped her down. She lifted her pretty face to look at the sign illumined by the glow of lamplight. In gold and red letters on a black background it read THE WITCHES’ KITCHEN, and beneath it, on a banner hanging down like a flag, were the words GALA OPENING. The lady walked under the umbrella to the door, and her red locks swung above the iridescent taffeta that covered her shoulders. The rain drummed down.
Houska gave a low whistle.
“Houska, shush!” said his pretty wife, Ruzena.
“Don’t be vulgar!” said Salek. “You’re not in North Carolina any more.”
“It’s my asthma,” said Houska, and they all turned to watch the lady walk through the frosted-glass doors, past the Negro doorman, who bowed to her, and past the restaurant owner, who attempted a similar bow but couldn’t quite do it because of the rheumatism in his back. The lady entered the restaurant, the music, and the dense cigar smoke.
(illustration credit 9.1)
Shake approached the owner and handed him a book.
“For your newly arrived nephew,” he said.
Puzzled, the restaurant owner looked down at the book, and then he remembered. “Oh, yes, yes. Much obliged to you. What do I owe you?”
“That’s all right, I’ll take it out in drinks,” said Shake. “And in food.”
He kept watching the red-haired lady. She gave off a coppery glow as she made her way among the tables.
“Who is she, colonel?” Bozenka Kapsa asked Mr. Ohrenzug.
“Some woman author,” replied the restaurateur. “They say she’s famous.”
They stared at the lady, who shone like a candle. At a booth at the head of the dining room, beneath portraits of Lincoln and Grant, a youngish high-yellow woman also dressed in iridescent taffeta got up and ran over to the author. The lady opened her arms and they floated towards each other like two glittering birds, down the aisle between the richly laid tables under the red, white, and blue streamers. They met in the middle of the dining room and fell into each other’s arms.
“And who’s the other one?” asked Bozenka.
The sergeant felt a spasm, as though he’d been struck by a minnie. He had never seen Cyril’s yellow tea-rose; he had only an imaginary picture of her in his mind, drawn from Cyril’s sorrow and from people they saw in deserted plantation houses. This was what she would have looked like, though she would have been younger back then.
“Her?” he heard Mr. Ohrenzug say. “She runs a sort of — well, it’s a restaurant too, on South Street. She’s the one who told me that this author woman is so famous.”
A new guest walked through the door, and the doorman bowed to the sound of the little tin drums.
Burning snow was falling on the Congaree River.
“She died?” Cyril’s voice cracked. The sergeant saw the old Negro woman nod. He looked around. A drummer boy was marching down Carolina Avenue; his drum — riddled with bullet-holes — sounded hoarse, almost malevolent. He looked about twelve years old. A general’s field-glasses stuck out of his back pocket and a smoking cigar protruded from his boyish lips. Behind him, under a ragged banner, marched a platoon of bearded men carrying a long pole on top of which was a dummy made of cotton-filled burlap sacks topped with a painted tin pirate’s head. They had cut the effigy down somewhere in a looted tavern and hung a sign around its neck that read JEFF DAVIS. A red-bearded soldier in the first rank, right behind the drum, tossed an empty bottle at the window of an ornate building across the street, but he missed and the bottle shattered against the wall. A young Negro in a lace shirt that was too small for him jumped out of a group of dancing blacks on the sidewalk and placed a fresh bottle in the bearded soldier’s hand. The damaged drum sounded as though it were drumming a man to the gallows. The sergeant had witnessed a number of executions, and they were always worse than any death in war.
“From the de Ribordeaux plantation in Texas? No. Weren’t nobody. And Missy Ribordeaux, she died. Who? Some old white lady? Sorry, massa,” said the Negro woman, “my memory is full of holes.”
A pipe joined the drum. Cyril took off his cap and wiped his forehead. “It would have been an older white woman,” he said. “Not old. Just older than her. And she wouldn’t have been a lady, more like white trash. She was supposed to bring her here, to Miss de Ribordeaux.”
The Negro woman thought hard, the drum pounded, the pipe trilled. “About three years ago, you say?”
“It would have been in the summer of ’61,” said Cyril, “at the very start of the war. And she wasn’t a lady. Her husband was a blacksmith in Austin.”
“The last company Missy Ribordeaux have was almost a year ago, and she wasn’t no white trash, it was Miss Sullivan from the Glenwood plantation.”
“No, that’s not it. This would have been right at the beginning of the war. And she wouldn’t have been a lady.”
The old woman closed her dim eyes. “Sorry, massa, my old head. Beginning of the war, you say — like before Massa Lincum —?” She opened her eyes. “Long about then Missy stopped walking. She’d just sit here in the armchair, never move,” and she pointed behind her at the big room full of furniture. By the leaded glass window stood a velvet armchair with a lace antimacassar on the back. Burning snow was falling outside the window, and the drum was pounding.
“A white lady,” repeated the old Negro woman pensively.
“She wasn’t a lady,” Cyril insisted.
“Once, towards fall, Missy de Ribordeaux had a visit from the widow of Mr. Lemaître — used to be overseer at her cousin M. de Ribordeaux’s plantation. But” — she paused, the drum sounded — “she wasn’t no white trash. I don’t know, massa,” she said anxiously. “I’m awful sorry I can’t help Massa Lincum’s soldiers. It’s just this old head of mine.…”
“I swear to you, big brother, I swear to you,” Lida said miserably, clutching a basin with some solution in it while a wounded man behind her moaned, “by everything that’s holy —”
“What’s holy to you?” he interrupted her, but his voice was as full of misery as hers. A strange light flashed in his sister’s eyes.
“I swear by his memory,” she said softly, almost in a whisper.
They paced in the smoke and noise of the house where the sergeant’s general had set up his quarters.
“Why?” said Cyril. “She must have made it up. Otherwise I’d have killed her.”
“Her story’s too complicated to make up,” said the sergeant.
“Protect Dinah?” said Cyril bitterly. “She should have left her in Austin, in that little house. In the end, she badgered Étienne all the way to Savannah. And when he got there she badgered him to death.”
“That was before she knew the old man was going to disinherit him,” said the sergeant. “She didn’t want Dinah anywhere near Étienne. You know what she’s like —”
“To Columbia!” Cyril struck himself in the forehead. “That’s more than a thousand miles! Did she expect me to believe that?”
“In the summer of ’61 it wouldn’t have been so hard. By train from Vicksburg.…”
They walked around the demolished building, which had taken a direct hit by Captain DeGress. An old Negro man was gathering bricks from the ruins and piling them on a cart.
“Maybe Dinah ran away from the blacksmith’s wife on the trip,” said the sergeant.
“Then she’d have been waiting for me in Austin.”
“She didn’t make it. Something —” He stopped short.
“They caught her,” said Cyril bitterly. “Without papers!” He looked around at the burning cotton floating down over the scorched roofs. “Where could she be?” he wailed.
“It’s still harder to believe that Lida lied,” the sergeant said softly. Although, he thought, a thousand miles is a long way. But at the beginning of the war, a blacksmith’s wife and a black slave girl travelling together? Still, the men of the South are gallant. And she had sworn to Cyril, on the memory of —
Cyril sat down on a pile of bricks and put his head in his hands.
“Cyril, my friend,” said the sergeant, “maybe she found a place to hide and she’s waiting till the war is over. It’s almost over now.”
Burning snow, on the Congaree River.
The sergeant stepped over to the window, leaned his forehead against the cool glass pane with the raindrops running down it. The rain tapped on the brass lamps. The band was playing and couples in evening dress were swirling around the dance floor. The famous lady author was dancing with an officer, and his own Bozenka was dancing with Houska. Padecky was clutching a beer stein, his stiff leg stretched out in the aisle between the tables, a hazard to guests on their way to the dance floor. Scowling, Padecky watched Molly Kakuska on the arm of Schroeder in his colonel’s uniform. She looked offended but she carried herself like the great lady she was quickly becoming back home in Milwaukee. She disappeared from Padecky’s sight on the crowded dance floor, and he glowered around the room as though looking for someone.
“If they so much as stick their noses in here,” he raged, “I’ll tear them off and feed them to the dogs! This is an American party, and subjects of the emperor are not welcome!”
“They had wives, children, and businesses,” said Shake.
“And their pants were full of shit,” declared Salek.
“Ja, das war wirklich unerwartet und — unangenehm,” said Ursula.
“Sorry,” said the sergeant in English. “I forgot my German over all those years.”
“Unexpected, and unpleasant,” said Ursula, placing a finger on the back of his hand. She wore a beautifully engraved wedding band on her third finger, and on her middle finger was a huge stone that looked like a glass egg. One from the nest that Fircut —
“Mein lieber Mann,” she said. “You still understand that much, nicht wahr?” He turned his hand over and tried to clasp her fingers but Ursula pulled her hand away, laughed, and continued in English. “My husband didn’t understand it right away. He knew them both. One of a consul’s duties is to keep an eye on people like that. Our agents often filed reports on them. They never missed a gathering.”
“It’s easy to beat your gums so patriots will buy more of your sausages, right?” hollered Padecky in Slavik’s Tavern. “But when the going gets tough —”
“It’s easy for you to talk, neighbour,” said Talafous the butcher. “Now, with your leg, you don’t have to go to war —”
“What do you mean, don’t have to? Can’t, Ferda! I can’t! That’s a Jesus big difference! If I could” — Padecky slapped his plaster-encased knee and howled with pain — “I would, wife or no wife, kids or no kids —”
“I rather enjoyed reading the reports,” said Ursula, smiling. “I’m not exactly an admirer of the house of Hapsburg, even though I married a member of the imperial diplomatic corps. But I didn’t marry again because I was forced to, as I was when I was sixteen —”
“It’s not just the cowardice!” Padecky yelled, his eye lighting on Molly, who was all dressed up and looking lovely on the arm of the portly officer. She had noticed Kapsa, Bozenka, and Shake, and was pulling Schroeder over to their table. But Padecky snapped at her as she went by, “Not here, you don’t!”
Molly was startled. “Why not?”
“You know perfectly well why not!” Padecky exclaimed. “Your husband is barely cold in his grave —”
“I got the letter. General Schofield signed it himself.” Molly blushed. “Franta died in September of ’64.”
“Died!” hollered Padecky. “They tortured him to death at Andersonville! Franta’s a martyr! And you’re a martyr’s widow. The cannon-fire barely dies down and you —”
“Was sagt er?” Schroeder couldn’t understand this tirade in Czech.
“And a bloody German at that!” Padecky ranted on. “One bloody German torments her husband to death at Andersonville and she can’t wait to marry another one!”
“He was Swiss,” Molly objected. “And Fritz here fought the whole war on our side. With Haecker. And that Wirz fellow got hanged after the war!”
The colonel understood only that they were talking about him. He smiled. “Jawohl,” he nodded, “mit Haecker.” He started counting on his fingers, comfortably mixing his mother tongue with English. “And mit Siegel und in the end mit General Burnside at The Crater, where mein Glueck left me and I got eine kugel in den Arm.”
Schroeder’s bullet in the arm shut Padecky up for a minute. He stared at the German with the expression of someone proved wrong, then growled at him in Czech, “You could at least learn to talk right, instead of your gobbledygook. After all, you’ve got yourself a Czech girl!”
Shake asked, “What do you speak at home, Molly?”
