The Bride of Texas (47 page)

“In St. Louis, fortune smiled on me,” said Maggie. “Except that fortune has a deceptive smile. It turned out that Clara knew Burnside, and she was a matchmaker by nature. That Saturday, she took me to the public ball given by the Democrats of St. Louis, because she knew Ambrose would be there. And he was. He came with three other lieutenants and, although Clara tried her best, he danced one short dance with me, just for propriety’s sake, and then turned his charm on the matchmaker.”

“And to think I was consumed with guilt,” I said. I was genuinely upset to hear this, for I had drunk more than a little cognac and was having vivid memories of the sad episode at the railway station with Ambrose.

“He was doing what he could to recover from your irresponsible emotional impetuosity, Lorraine,” said Maggie, putting me in my place.

“From what you say, he succeeded,” I remarked.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Maggie. “Meanwhile, I was dancing in the arms of another lieutenant. The only nice thing about him was his name — half his name, at least — Leonidas Brumble. Then four country bumpkins from the South trying to pass for Southern gentlemen came into the ballroom, clearly under the influence. They noticed Clara right away, and one of them, the ringleader, spoke to Ambrose: ‘Lieutenant, your lady appeals to me. I believe I’ll have a dance with her!’ and he reached for Clara. Ambrose caught his wrist and said, ‘I beg your pardon, sir!’ and reached for Clara. My partner, Brumble,
saw what was happening, stopped spinning me around, and pushed his way through the dancers to Ambrose. I followed, and so did the other officers, with their ladies in tow. ‘I beg your pardon, sir!’ the Southerner said mockingly, and for a while they stared at each other, until finally the Southerner said loudly, ‘Didn’t you hear what I said, lieutenant?’ All the dancing stopped, and the tension in the room became thick as a fog.”

“Did they come to blows?”

“Nothing as vulgar as that,” said Maggie. “Ambrose asked us ladies to follow him, and he made a way for us through the crowd. The Southerner called out after us, ‘The United States Army is scared?’ Ambrose ushered us gallantly to the staircase, then turned to confront the Southerner. ‘Our ladies don’t dance, sir, with the likes of you,’ he said in an icy voice. His Yankee accent provoked some bruiser among the bystanders to ask ominously, ‘Our gentlemen aren’t good enough for your ladies, Yankee?’ In his best West Point manner, Ambrose looked him up and down, and his sideburns bristled. ‘Gentlemen like you? Certainly not, sir!’ Then he turned and followed us up the stairs to the balcony. I spent the rest of the evening watching Clara wind him around her little finger, instead of matchmaking as she was supposed to.”

“She didn’t succeed, did she?”

Maggie looked at me maliciously. “She just cured him. And I —”

“You what?”

“I left with Brumble.”

“Where did you go?”

“I can’t tell you because I don’t know. I know one thing for certain.”

“What’s that?”

“I lost my virginity that night.”

“My goodness!”

“And something else.”

“What?”

“What do you think?”

Ambrose wasted no time with Vallandigham. The trial, in early May 1863, lasted all of three days, and as soon as the verdict was reached, Vallandigham’s lawyer turned to Judge Humphrey Leavitt of the Federal Court of the Southern District of Ohio seeking a writ of
habeas corpus
. If the judge had granted the writ, the case would have been moved to a civil court where the general had no influence. The sword over Vallandigham’s head hung by the thread of Judge Leavitt’s decision. Leavitt was faced with a dilemma that no one envied, because after many debates in the press, at political meetings, in taverns, and in private salons, it boiled down to an apparently unanswerable theoretical judicial question: does General Order Number One — as Vallandigham referred to the Constitution of the United States — have the authority of natural law or not?

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.

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?”

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!”