Christmas Bells (6 page)

“No, of course not, but I was really disappointed when—” Sophia sat back, cupped her hands around her coffee mug, and frowned into it.

Lucas could not resist. “When what?”

“When he said that the entire problem could have been avoided if they had just taken the precautionary measure of exchanging Christmas lists.”

“Precautionary measure?”

“That's an exact quote. When I tried to explain that their gifts were a symbol of their profound love for each other, he got this panicked look on his face and asked me not to cut my hair, because he prefers it long.” She shook her head, and for a moment Lucas thought he glimpsed tears in her eyes. “Then, as we were leaving the store, he said that the wife came out ahead in the deal, because her hair would grow back, but the husband's watch was long gone.”

“Sophia, I—” Lucas sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “I'm really sorry. I'm sorry he didn't understand, but you shouldn't feel stupid.”

“And yet I do,” she said, forlorn. “To top it all off, we were so busy arguing that Brandon forgot to buy his mother's present, so the entire trip was a waste of time.”

“I'm sorry,” Lucas said again.

“You know something?” Sophia brushed her long hair away from her face and studied him. “Sometimes I wish Brandon could be more like you.”

Pained, Lucas managed a shrug. “That's not really fair to Brandon. It's taken me years to achieve this level of awesomeness.”

She smiled then, and he felt both rewarded and profoundly sad.

It wasn't until much later, after he had seen her home and had returned to his own apartment, strewn with his books and papers and maps and models, that his churning thoughts settled upon one irrefutable fact: He loved Sophia, and he was tired of her not knowing. He would never deliberately create a rift between her and Brandon, but evidently one already existed. Nothing prevented him from telling her the truth. Lucas would tell Sophia how he felt and let her decide if instead of wishing her boyfriend were more like him, she would choose him to be her boyfriend.

His Christmas gift would speak for him, would say all he had been unable to say for far too long. He would buy Sophia a set of exquisite combs with jeweled rims, like those Jim had given Della in the story. Sophia would understand what it meant.

It took some searching, but Lucas was determined, and two days before Christmas he found the perfect combs in a boutique on Brattle Street. On Christmas Eve he wrapped them carefully and wrote out a card, a simple message of love and friendship. Determined not to lose his nerve, he tucked the gift in his bag with his sheet music, dressed in his concert attire, and walked to St. Margaret's, arriving a record thirty minutes early.

He and Sophia always went out for dessert together after the Children's Mass, after the singers and parishioners had departed, after they had cleaned up for the adult choir's performance at Midnight Mass. They usually went to a favorite café to celebrate with coffee and pie and to exchange gifts, usually CDs or concert tickets or books. Once Sophia had given him a huge bucket of
LEGOs so he could construct a multitude of houses and cityscapes, take them apart, and rebuild anew. Anyone else would have considered it a gag gift, but not Sophia, and not Lucas. Whenever he grew frustrated with classes or work, he would pull out the little plastic bricks and build something impossible, something never before dreamt of, and afterward he would remember why he loved what he had chosen as his life's work.

Sophia's gift was one of the best he had ever received. That year, he hoped to give her one as meaningful.

His hopes ran so high on Christmas Eve that when Sophia took him aside before the concert and profusely apologized for the late notice, it took him a moment to understand that she could not go out for their customary post-concert dessert. She—she and Brandon—had to hurry off to her parents' home to share some very good news with them.

When she took a deep, shaky breath and clasped her hands together, interlacing her fingers, he knew what was coming before she spoke. The jewelry store—Brandon had not really been shopping for a bracelet for his mother but analyzing Sophia's preferences in engagement rings. Earlier that day, Brandon had proposed, and Sophia had accepted.

Lucas went numb. He could only stare at her, nodding automatically and frowning thoughtfully as if he were in a lecture hall listening to a professor expound on a particularly inscrutable architectural concept.

“We can still do our gift exchange,” Sophia was saying apologetically. “I just can't go out tonight. Or maybe we could do it another time?”

“Yeah, why don't we do that instead?” Lucas's voice sounded as if he were strangling. “Actually I—I couldn't believe it when I checked my bag just now but—well, I forgot to bring your gift.”

“Oh, okay.” Smiling, Sophia reached out and touched his arm. “You look so upset. It's no big deal.”

He forced a smile and agreed.

They settled on December 27 and lunch at their favorite Indian buffet, and then it was time to warm up the choir for the concert. Lucas had never played more mechanically, but somehow he got through the hours, and afterward he remembered to congratulate Sophia. Her radiant smile when she thanked him struck him like a punch in the gut.

If he had known then that the engagement would come to an abrupt and inglorious end ten months later, he wouldn't have shown up at his parents' house that night in a daze of misery, wouldn't have had too much wine at dinner and more after dessert, wouldn't have ranted drunkenly to his brothers or cried to his sisters, wouldn't have woken up the next morning in the bottom bunk of his old bed in his old room with a throbbing head and a sour throat. His family treated him kindly, gently, when he staggered down the stairs, knowing most of the story and piecing together the rest. They knew him, and they knew how he felt, and no one tried to comfort him with falsely cheerful declarations about the millions of other women out there who would consider themselves lucky to have him. For that, he was thankful.

•   •   •

Two days after that bleak Christmas, he had unwrapped the jeweled combs, had found the receipt in his wallet, and had made it as far as the entrance to the store before deciding not to return them for a refund. Why he had not, and why he had kept them ever since, he could not say. The exchange period had long ago expired and he could not imagine giving them to anyone else. Nearly a year later, they were still in the box, still at the back of a drawer in his bedroom.

He should give them to one of his sisters, if only to make more room for socks.

•   •   •

Lucas dragged out the warm-up as long as he could, but he finally ran out of ideas. “Well done, kids,” he said, rising from the piano bench. “As soon as Miss Sophia arrives—”

“She's over there,” Alex interrupted, pointing. Startled, Lucas turned to look, evoking giggles from the sopranos.

“We're all here now, so let's continue,” Sophia replied as she joined Lucas at the piano, her eyes bright, her cheeks flushed, and the faint scent of cinnamon in the air about her. “Let's begin with ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.'” As the children opened their binders, Sophia inhaled deeply, sighed, and quietly added, for Lucas alone, “Some very lucky person nearby has coffee.”

“Yes, you.” He would have handed it to her except he would have dropped his sheet music, so instead he nodded to the mug and paper bag on the floor beside his bench. “I figured your concert would run late and you wouldn't have time to stop. There's a cranberry scone in the bag if you're hungry.”

“Lucas, you didn't,” she exclaimed, picking them up. “You're a lifesaver, a saint, an angel.”

“Not really. Just a guy who walked past a coffee shop on his way here.” He spared a glance for the children, who were becoming cheerfully restless. “How was the concert?”

“The concert was great, but—” To his astonishment, her face fell. “I lost my job. Or I'm going to. In June.”

“You're not going to teach us anymore?” shrilled Alex. “Father Ryan fired you? He can't do that! We like you too much.”

“No, no, Father Ryan didn't fire me,” said Sophia quickly. “I meant my other job. I'm not leaving St. Margaret's. Everything's fine.” As the anxious looks faded from the children's faces, she murmured to Lucas, “Curse his sharp young ears. I didn't mean for him to hear that.”

“It's okay,” said Lucas, his brow furrowing. “Take a deep breath. Have some coffee. We can talk about it afterward.”

Cradling the mug in her hands, Sophia nodded, closed her eyes, and took a long drink of coffee. Lucas hoped it retained at least some of its warmth.

The children were waiting.

“Trebles, let's hear from you first.” Sophia straightened her shoulders, but her smile seemed forced. “Remember the eighth rest before you come in. Lucas, if you will?”

He nodded, wishing he could comfort her, waiting for her to raise her baton in the signal to begin. He could not help imagining how beautiful her long, dark hair would look held back from her lovely face by the jeweled combs. He ached to run his fingers through the silken locks, draw her to him, and kiss away her tears.

January–April 1861

The people of the North were shaken by the news of South Carolina's secession, but Major Anderson's daring occupation of Fort Sumter heartened them. In Henry's study at Craigie House, Charley and Ernest spread maps of Charleston Harbor on the floor, studied them eagerly, pondered Major Anderson's defenses, and speculated about the likelihood of a rebel attack upon the fort, what South Carolina militia forces would be involved, and from which direction they would strike.

“I'd love to be with Major Anderson when the battle finally opens,” Charley declared fervently, and not wishing to appear a coward, Ernest chimed in that he would too. Henry, a lifelong pacifist, recoiled at the thought of his sons marching off to war, and he said a silent prayer of thanksgiving that they were too young to enlist. Only after he murmured a final amen did he realize that he had not prayed for war to be averted. It troubled him that some element of his understanding, deep within his mind or heart, had assumed that war was the inevitable outcome of secession.

“It pains me to admit this,” he confided to Fanny when they were alone in the parlor one snowy night early in the New Year, “for it contradicts some of my most ardent convictions, but war would be preferable to appeasement. If we simply let South Carolina quit the Union, our democracy will fail and the scourge of slavery will endure. It may even spread to the west.”

“You're torn,” Fanny said soothingly. “I am too. All peaceable abolitionists are. We want slavery to end, but is war too great a price to pay? We want to avoid bloodshed and destruction, but if war is the only way to end slavery, should we not be willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of the long-suffering people held in bondage? These are the great questions of our time.”

“We may yet avoid war.”

“Perhaps.” Fanny stared into the fire, pensive and beautiful in profile. He reached out to stroke her hair, and she turned to smile wistfully at him. “Another question for our times: How long will Major Anderson and his men be able to hold out on that little island in the harbor?”

Henry had posed the same question to his friend Sumner, who by virtue of his position in the Senate knew more than he could share even with his closest friend. What Sumner could entrust to the mails was deeply troubling. Fort Sumter had been planned about forty years earlier as a bulwark to defend the shipping channels of Charleston Harbor. Its large, octagonal structure could accommodate 650 troops and 135 guns, but construction had never been completed, and scaffolding, stone, and piles of other building materials littered the interior. Only fifteen cannons had been installed, and the brick-and-mortar walls, though five feet thick and satisfactory to the standards of the 1820s when the fort had been designed, could not long withstand bombardment by modern artillery. Major Anderson's garrison was comprised of only eighty-seven officers and enlisted men, insufficient to fully staff the defenses, but too many for their
limited supplies of food, beds, and blankets. Isolated by the same deep waters that protected his garrison from an infantry attack, the major was limited to only sporadic communications with military headquarters. In his reports, he emphasized that he and his men were determined to hold the fort, but they would eventually need reinforcements and supplies.

While Anderson's commander in chief, President Buchanan, dithered in Washington, Southern militiamen eager to wrest Fort Sumter from federal control poured into Charleston. Before long 3,000 armed men were organized under the command of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, a vain, fastidious Louisianan who had resigned as the superintendent of West Point to join the rebellion. Henry found it both ironic and ominous when he learned that, years before, Beauregard had been one of Anderson's students at the military academy.

“Major Anderson will hold out longer than his enemies would ever expect,” Henry told Fanny, recalling certain telling phrases from Sumner's letters. “He won't surrender unless he sincerely believes he has no other choice.”

“Imminent starvation may compel him to,” said Fanny, “unless President Buchanan summons the courage to act before it comes to that.”

Henry could not disagree, and he worried that starvation was the likelier outcome, for the president seemed content to wait out the rest of his term twirling his thumbs in the White House rather than take measures to resolve the crisis.

Henry had lost all faith in the hesitant, immobile commander in chief, so he was astonished a few days later to read in the
Boston Daily Advertiser
that Buchanan had authorized a civilian steamer to carry provisions to Major Anderson and his men. The
Star of the West
had sailed from New York the previous Saturday afternoon with a cargo of beef, pork, and pilot bread, enough to sustain the beleaguered garrison for several weeks. “But
yesterday the rumor gained ground in New York,” the report continued, “and is doubtless true, that she stopped in the lower harbor and received 200 or 300 troops (marines, according to one account), after which she went to sea.”

In subsequent reports, other newspapers confirmed the story, noting when and where the
Star of the West
had been spotted as it traveled south along the coast. Henry's astonishment that President Buchanan had finally taken action was tempered by grave concerns about the frequent accounts of the steamer's journey. Editors customarily studied one another's papers and reprinted stories of particular interest to their own readers, and if anything, secession had augmented the practice. Surely the citizens of Charleston knew that the
Star of the West
was on the way, and their military forces would be ready and waiting when she arrived.

A few days later, his concerns were proven justified by shocking headlines in the morning papers. The previous day, the
Star of the West
had sailed into Charleston Harbor and had been fired upon by militia and young military cadets positioned on the shores. Struck in the mast but not seriously damaged, the steamer nonetheless had been forced up the channel and back into the open sea.

Major Anderson and his men had not been harmed in the firefight, but the departing steamer had carried off any hope that they would be resupplied and reinforced anytime soon.

Even as the South Carolina militia and cadets were driving away the
Star of the West
, delegates in Mississippi were voting in favor of secession. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” they declared in a statement explaining why they were obliged to leave the Union, which was published in papers throughout the North soon thereafter. “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

The next day Florida seceded from the Union, and the next, Alabama.

One after another they broke off, like the edges of a sandy bluff that had withstood years of steady pounding of the surf only to crumble into the sea at the strike of a single, long-expected but overpowering tempest.

“Does no voice of reason and prudence remain in the South?” Fanny asked, pushing the papers and their dreadful reports aside. As if in response to her plea, former president John Tyler, writing from Richmond, Virginia, called for a peace convention in Washington where both sides could make one last attempt to resolve the crisis. Privately, Sumner told Henry that he had no hope for its success.

Two days after John Tyler published his call for a summit, Georgia seceded, as if in contempt of the former president's plan. Two days after that, five senators from Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi—some defiantly, others in sorrow—rose to offer farewell speeches before resigning from the Senate and departing Washington for their Southern homes. The papers somberly described how Senator Jefferson Davis, the last to speak, had declared that states did have the constitutional right to leave the Union, and that his home state of Mississippi had justifiable cause for doing so. Even so, he regretted the conflict that had divided them. “I am sure I feel no hostility toward you, senators from the North,” he had said. “I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well; and such, I feel, is the feeling of the people whom I represent toward those whom you represent.” He expressed hope that their separate governments would eventually enjoy cordial diplomatic relations, and he apologized for any pain he might have inflicted upon any other senator in the heat of debate.

There was something very ludicrous, Henry thought, when
seen from a distance, about the theatrical strut of the Southern senators as they quit the Union. “Our future Molière will have a fine field for comedy,” he wrote to Sumner, who had witnessed the spectacle, “and the Southern Planter will figure as funnily as any of his farcical characters.”

In truth—and Sumner knew him well enough to understand this—Henry was not at all amused, but outraged and apprehensive. He felt powerless to do anything but observe and record his impressions as the dissolution of the Union wore on, slowly and inexorably. Behind it all he imagined he heard the low murmur of the slaves, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, prophesying woe.

Five days after Jefferson Davis and his compatriots made their farewell speeches in the Senate, Louisiana seceded. Nevertheless, and in what increasingly seemed to be a futile effort, delegates from both sides of the conflict scrambled to arrange the peace conference. Soon it was agreed that the summit would open at the Willard Hotel in Washington City on February 4, with former president John Tyler himself serving as chairman.

Three days before the conference opened, Texas seceded from the Union, as if to mock any lingering, vain hopes for peace. “Perhaps some good may yet come of the summit,” said Fanny, but her expression betrayed her doubt, which Henry shared.

They were disappointed, but not surprised, when the papers declared the conference a failure from the outset. Only twenty-five of the thirty-four states had answered the opening roll call; none of the seven seceded states had sent delegates, nor had Arkansas, nor five western states. Meanwhile, on the same day far to the south in Montgomery, Alabama, representatives from the seceded states met to organize a unified Confederate government. John Tyler's own granddaughter raised the Confederate flag at the opening ceremonies.

As February passed, gray and cold and bleak, the conference proceeded doggedly on. President-elect Abraham Lincoln
departed his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, to embark on a long, winding journey to Washington City for his inauguration. Cheering crowds greeted him at cities and train stations along the way, and his eloquent speeches won praise for their brevity and moderate tone, but threats upon his life had been made as well. Throughout the North, tensions soared as his train drew ever closer to the capital.

Early one morning in the last week of February, the pealing of bells beckoned Henry, still in his dressing gown, to the window. The world outside seemed strangely still, the eastern sky glowing crimson with the sunrise. On the snow-dusted sidewalk a laundress bustled past, a heavy, covered basket on her hip; then a grocer's wagon rumbled over the cobblestones, its driver slouched wearily upon the seat, the reins clasped in one gloved hand. It seemed an ordinary morning. Nothing except the tolling of the bells—no distant rumble of cannon, no panicked citizens thronging the streets—indicated that anything was amiss.

He heard the rustle of Fanny's nightgown before he felt the touch of her gentle hand upon his back. “It's the twenty-second,” she murmured. “They're ringing the bells in honor of George Washington's birthday.”

“Of course.” Henry put his arm around his wife's shoulders and drew her close, his gaze fixed on the street outside. To him, the bells ringing in celebration of the great national hero had a melancholy sound, reminding him of the wretched treason in the land. What would Washington, triumphant general and first president, think if he had lived to see the nation he had helped establish splintering into contentious fragments?

For several months, Washington had fought the war for independence from within the same walls that now sheltered Henry, Fanny, and their children. When the Revolution commenced, the house's original owner had remained loyal to King George, and when he had fled Boston in fear for his life, his property had been
confiscated, his estate occupied by the colonial Marblehead Regiment. In July of 1775, during the Siege of Boston, General Washington had made the residence his headquarters, and for nine months he had commanded the Cambridge Common of the Colonial Army from the gracious residence on Brattle Street. In December his wife, Martha, her son, and her daughter-in-law had joined him; the family had chosen the two eastern rooms on the second floor for their private quarters, while the southeast room on the lower level became the general's study and dining room, the adjacent room a parlor for his wife, and a chamber in back an office for his staff. Henry often wondered in which room Washington had received the news that General Henry Knox, a Boston bookseller, had succeeded in bringing the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga over the mountains and through the snow to the heights of Dorchester south of the city, where they forced the astonished British to evacuate in haste or risk the destruction of their fleet.