The Widow's War (10 page)

Senator Presgrove is in his mid- to late fifties, tall and broad-shouldered like Deacon with the added bulk of several decades of good eating and soft living. He wears an elegant black suit and carries a heavy gold-headed walking stick. Like Deacon, he has high cheekbones and a long nose, but the senator’s nose is red-tipped and slanted to one side as if it has been broken in an accident, or perhaps, Carrie thinks, a fight, and his eyes are a bloodshot blue with whites the color of yellowed linen. Beardless and square-chinned, he wears his gray hair to his shoulders in the senatorial fashion. He might have once been a handsome man, but in old age he is as spotted as a turkey egg with the jowls of a bulldog and a voice to match.

“Mah dear girl!” he roars upon catching sight of Carrie. “Welcome! welcome!” Striding toward her, he envelops her in an embrace redolent of cigar smoke and brandy. Crushed into the starched linen of his shirtfront, Carrie has the momentary sensation of being taken prisoner by a bear. No wonder the senator has been such a success in Congress. Even she, who disagrees with everything he stands for, is impressed. He is a natural force like a hurricane or an earthquake. Who could resist him?

Senator Presgrove releases her, stands back, and holds her at arm’s length. “I have always wanted a daughter,” he says in a Southern accent much stronger than Deacon’s, “and at last I have one. Frankly, I never thought Deacon was going to settle down. The cards and ponies always called to him more than the ladies—”

A sharp cough from Deacon interrupts whatever the senator is about to say next.

“Daddy,” Deacon says and stretches out his hand. Instead of taking it, Senator Presgrove envelops his son in his arms and lifts him off his feet.

“My boy! My wandering boy! Welcome home!”

“Daddy,” Deacon pleads, “please put me down.” Carrie is amused. She has never heard Deacon beg before. Senator Presgrove deposits his son on the platform and steps back.

“You have to shave off that moustache, son. It may do well enough in that godforsaken country you’ve been living in, but lip hairs aren’t worn in Washington, at least not by respectable men. Great Gawd, what were you thinkin’? You look like a pirate. If your mama were still alive, I’d have to take you to a barber before I could bring you home.”

Deacon turns bright red and bites his lower lip. He is obviously furious, but all he says is: “Yes, Daddy. I’ll see to it.”

“You do that, son.” Having dispensed with Deacon’s moustache, the senator turns back to Carrie. “I hear you are recently bereaved.” For an instant Carrie thinks Deacon has broken his promise and told his father about Willa, but then the senator continues. “The loss of a parent is a grievous thing.”

“Yes,” Carrie agrees, “it is.”

“Y’all aren’t wearin’ mourning?”

“No, sir.” She wonders if she should be calling him “Father,” but she cannot bring herself to give him that name yet. Perhaps in time.

The senator stares at her as if trying to pick something out of her brain with a sharp needle. “Does your choice to eschew black spring from religious convictions or lack of sentiment? Frankly, honey, I don’t know which would be worse. Although you’re as pretty a little thing as has ever entered this city of windbags and tobacco chewers, I’m not pleased by the thought that my only son has married a girl who belongs to some cant-ridden, abolitionist sect. And the very idea that a child doesn’t love her father enough to mourn him, particularly when that father left the girl with a nice fat pile of Double Eagles, so to speak, well I—”

Another sharp cough from Deacon interrupts this line of conversation, which is fortunate because Carrie is starting to take a strong dislike to her father-in-law. Resisting an urge to tell him just how much she loved her own father and how poorly he stacks up in comparison, she forces herself to give him a polite reply.

“My father was opposed to the wearing of mourning,” she says. “He would not have wanted me to dress in black on my honeymoon. Besides, he always said that only Englishmen, fools, and madmen wear dark clothes in tropical heat, and . . .” The desire to be polite passes. On less than three minutes’ acquaintance he has just made a nasty crack about abolitionists and insulted her family.

“Now as far as I can tell, Senator, the difference between Washington and Rio isn’t worth spit when it comes to heat. The day is sultry, sir. I see that you have on a black suit. You’re certainly not an Englishman, so . . .”

“Carolyn!” Deacon cries.

Senator Presgrove gives Carrie a surprised look, then throws back his head and laughs so loudly heads turn. “Why aren’t you the spunky one! Deacon, you are gonna have to keep this pretty little wife of yours on a short leash. In fact, I’m not sure you’re man enough to handle her.”

“I don’t need to be handled,” Carrie says. “I can handle myself.”

“Please!” Deacon begs. Carrie suddenly remembers the pains Deacon has taken to get along with his father. Swallowing her anger, she turns the conversation to more neutral subjects—the voyage, the weather, the food on the train—and within a few minutes she is no longer the center of Senator Presgrove’s attention. In fact, it would be fair to say Deacon and his father forget about her entirely; or at least if they don’t, they appear to.

Senator Presgrove summons porters who carry their trunks and boxes to his carriage. As they roll north on Pennsylvania Avenue toward Georgetown, Carrie finally sees elegant shops and fashionably dressed women. She is just wondering if the haughty lady in brown silk is the wife of a senator when she becomes aware that Deacon and his father are discussing politics. Their conversation is not what she expects, and the more she hears of it, the more alarmed she becomes.

The Missouri Compromise, which has outlawed slavery north of thirty-six degrees latitude for more than thirty years, is apparently on the verge of being overturned. It seems that in January, Senator Presgrove’s old friend and colleague Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced a bill that would allow settlers in the western territories to vote to decide whether or not they want to permit slavery. In other words, the plebiscite act Deacon warned her about is on the verge of becoming a law.

“The Senate went for it right away,” Senator Presgrove says, “but the House has been draggin’ its feet all spring, squabbling like a pack of coonhounds fightin’ over a squirrel. Then, mirabile dictu!, last Monday the House finally voted. Result: thirty-five yeah, thirteen nay. A Joint Committee of Congress approved the whole kit and caboodle on Friday, and if Pierce can sober up enough to hold a pen, he’ll probably sign it sometime this week.”

Carrie is not surprised by the news, but she is astonished by Deacon’s reaction to it. Deacon and his father are supposed to have argued bitterly over slavery. If territories above thirty-six degrees latitude are allowed to enter the Union as slave states, slave owners will soon be able to seize control of Congress. In no time at all, slavery could be legal from Canada to the Mexican border. Deacon should be outraged, but instead he’s sitting there smiling and nodding as if this is the best news he’s heard in months. How can he laugh, accept a cigar from his father, and talk to him in level tones while the whole future of the country is hanging on the pen stroke of a President who claimed in his inaugural address that the Constitution supported slavery?

Suddenly Deacon looks up and sees Carrie staring at him. Something in her face must convey her shock and dismay, because he abruptly shifts from politics to horses. To be fair, he warned her in advance that he would need to humor his father by pretending to agree with him, but this . . .

Carrie stares grimly out the window. She had no idea her husband had such a talent for acting. If this is what it is going to take to get along with her father-in-law, perhaps they should return to the station and board the next train to Boston.

S
enator Presgrove has rented an elegant house in Georgetown surrounded by a lawn so smooth it looks as if it has been clipped with embroidery scissors. It is a ship of a house with white pillars that look like masts, odd windows shaped like portholes, and a railed widow’s walk that reminds Carrie of the deck of
The Frances Scott
. In back is a large garden in the French style, each tree and bush cut into a geometric form, each path a hedge-bordered grid that ends at a bit of marble sculpture or a fountain. If the jungle is nature with its hair let down, this is nature with its hair put up in a tight bun, and as Carrie gazes at the garden through the windows of the back parlor, she feels pity for the flowers, which must grow in straight lines or suffer execution at the hands of the senator’s gardener.

She and Duncan have washed off the soot of the train, changed their clothes, and spent a mercifully short quarter of an hour talking to Bennett before he climbed back into his carriage and disappeared on official business. Now it’s time for something that Carrie has been looking forward to for months. She thought it would occur sooner, thought the woman she longs to meet would be standing beside Deacon’s father on the platform when their train rolled into the station, but the near-mother who won her heart long before she met Deacon is nowhere in sight because, as Deacon explains, she is ill.

“How ill?” Carrie asks as they step into the front hall and begin to wind their way up the great caracole of stairs that fills the center of the house.

“Very.” There is something about the stark simplicity of the word that makes her not want to ask for details. Up they go, round and round, doubling back on themselves, always a little higher, until the parquet floor of the entry hall looks like a chessboard seen at a great distance. Here and there round windows appear, punched into the walls, letting in thick shafts of light.

Carrie looks at Deacon who is making his way up the steps just in front of her and thinks how strange it is that despite everything, William’s mother has become her mother-in-law. For that is who lives on the top floor of this house like an angel gone into flight: Mrs. Bennett Presgrove, formerly Mrs. Patrick Saylor. Too ill to meet the train, too ill to come downstairs and greet Carrie and Deacon when they arrived, so ill that Carrie and Deacon are lifting their feet carefully from step to step as if she can be shattered by sounds.

Fourteen years have passed since Mrs. Presgrove and Carrie last met. Mrs. Presgrove has been widowed, lost her only son, seen her health destroyed, and according to Deacon, become an invalid who never leaves her room. Will she greet Carrie with the warmth and affection Carrie remembers so well, or will she blame Carrie for William’s death?

The staircase turns and Carrie’s mind turns with it, running back into the past. She remembers that years ago, when Matilda Presgrove was still Matilda Saylor, she was always laughing. During the eleven months Carrie spent living in Mitchellville with Grandfather Vinton and Aunt Jo, she visited the Saylor house almost daily, coming and going like a member of the family. Mrs. Saylor was always there, sitting by the fire in the winter or on the front porch in the summer, drinking lemonade, telling jokes, and fanning herself with a Chinese paper fan that looked like a multicolored lollipop. Carrie was fascinated by that fan—she had never seen one like it. She knew if she asked for it, Mrs. Saylor would give it to her, but she never got up the courage, and besides she knew Aunt Jo, who had very strong ideas about what was suitable for young girls, would never let her keep such a gaudy trifle.

Years later she realized Mrs. Saylor had probably pitied her for being motherless and living with a grandfather who was never at home and an aunt who had about as much of the milk of human kindness as a crow, but at the time Carrie never suspected William’s mother was making a special effort to comfort her. Mrs. Saylor teased her, fed her sweets when she was not supposed to be eating them, and sometimes even took Carrie’s side against William when the two squabbled. Carrie can still recall Mrs. Saylor hugging her and putting a bandage on her knee when she skinned it playing catch, and when she ran away from her grandfather’s house, Mrs. Saylor was the only person in Mitchellville besides William who seemed to understand.

One of Carrie’s most vivid memories of Mrs. Saylor is how pretty and exotic she was. She came from New Orleans and claimed to be three-quarters French. Born Mathilde Gabrielle Vallios—a name no one in town could attempt to say without sending her into a fit of giggles—she was under five feet tall, with delicate hands, tiny feet, a narrow waist, and a thin, fine-boned face. Her hair was black and it curled in ringlets, framing her forehead and emphasizing her large, dark eyes.

“Folks say Mama’s quite a looker,” William once volunteered, and even Carrie, who at nine was not much of a judge of the beauty of adult women, had to agree. Yet there was an aspect of Mrs. Saylor’s beauty that would have been a warning sign if Carrie had been old enough to understand it: Her complexion was on the dark side, but her cheeks were always red.

Aunt Josephine and the other women in Mitchellville whispered disapprovingly that she painted, but they were mistaken. The truth was, Mrs. Saylor drank and used patient medicines to control the coughing that would sometimes wrack her body with such violence that she once cracked a rib. Carrie discovered this by sneaking a sip of Mrs. Saylor’s lemonade and finding that it was laced with whiskey and something called Madame Bonville’s Female Restorative.

The spiral staircase gives one final turn and coils out onto the third-floor landing. Deacon turns right, and Carrie follows him. The hall is long and narrow. At the far end, large windows look out over the back garden. As Carrie and Deacon walk down the hall, the sound of their footsteps is muffled by the carpet.

I wonder what made Mrs. Saylor cough like that,
Carrie thinks.
I should have asked William.
She thinks of all the other things she never bothered to ask him, and a small pain, like a sliver of glass, passes through her.