Watchfires (22 page)

The Joanna Handy of the
Franklin Pierce
was a very different woman from the Joanna Handy of 417 Fifth Avenue. She was still inclined to simper and gush, and she kept her old way of looking at people as if she feared they were going to strike her unless she could disarm them with a desperate giggle, but her fussiness and nervousness seemed to be coordinated now in a kind of steady flurry of hard work. The soldiers smiled at her, but it was always clear that they liked her. With her unsmotherable good will and her happy way of joining in any laugh against herself, she had become a kind of ship's mascot.

Aboard a strange ship, without other members of the family, Rosalie was not surprised to find herself developing a new relationship with her sister. What did surprise her was the extent to which Joanna, formerly so meek and self-effacing, except for occasional flaring tantrums, seemed to take the upper hand. It was not that she was in the least bossy or officious. On the contrary, she was the soul of consideration and helpfulness. But she was quicker at adapting herself to shipboard conditions than Rosalie. She seemed to need to be told everything only once, and was always on the alert to add to her knowledge. Rosalie found that, when she had forgotten an instrument or had left something off a doctor's tray, Joanna was often silently at her elbow to repair the omission. And she seemed to do it, too, as much for her as for the doctor. Rosalie was aware of a deeper sisterly affection than she had ever suspected in the past. Poor Jo! They had all taken her so much for granted!

Jo, however, had not taken any of
them
for granted. How well she had observed her younger sister came out in a talk they had on the long, tense morning when the Confederate iron-clad
Merrimack
steamed out of Norfolk harbor to challenge the tiny Federal
Monitor
in Hampton Roads. The
Pierce
was far off, anchored
off
Fortress Monroe to await the shipment of wounded, but they could hear the distant firing to the east, and all hands stood on deck facing anxiously in that direction. It was a mild, misty morning, and the sun streaked the light clouds with a tawny orange and cast a muffled sparkle on the slaty waters of the quiet Chesapeake.

"If that big gunboat licks the
Monitor,
what do you think will happen?" Joanna asked Rosalie.

"I suppose it'll sink everything in sight. Nothing can stand up to it, they say."

"You mean it could sink our whole navy? Ship by ship?"

"If it could ever find them all."

"And break the blockade? Do you mean the Rebs might win the war with a single boat? Oh, Rosey, what a fantastic world we live in! Would it sink the
Pierce?
"

"A hospital ship? No! Or would it? Maybe there are no gentlemen on ironclads. Maybe they went out with sails."

"And it's all being decided right now, over there!" Joanna faced towards the distant booming and shivered.

"Are you frightened? I know
I
am."

"Do you know something?" Joanna turned to her sister with glittering eyes. Then she giggled. "I'm not. Not a bit!"

"You're very brave!"

"I'm not a bit brave. I'm simply happy. Isn't that an awful thing to say? Happy when we all may be blown to bits? But I am! I've never been happy in my whole life. Never, until I came on board this ship. Is that very wicked?"

Rosalie was moved by this echo of her own thoughts. "Why should it be wicked? Mustn't God want us to be happy every minute, if we can manage it? Even in the most awful times? Didn't we used to hear in Sunday school of whole families of martyrs singing their way happily into the arena?"

"But I never believed any of that. I didn't, really. I believed in God, but I didn't believe he believed in me. Is that heresy? I don't care. I've always thought of God as someone like Father. A person you had to do things for, but who would never do anything for you."

"Why, Jo!"

"Well, it's true. No one's ever done anything for me but you.
You
were the one who got me on this ship. You were the one who shamed Father into letting me go!"

"And you were never happy at home? Really never?"

"Did you think I was?"

"I suppose not, really. But I thought you just wanted a husband."

"Of course I wanted a husband! But that was only
one
of the things I wanted. I could have made do with anything or anyone if I'd only felt
needed!
"

"And you didn't feel that with Frank, at Saint Jude's?"

"I was beginning to. That was the beginning of
this
, really. But this is the real thing!" She stopped again to listen to the firing. "They must be so close together." She shuddered. "Tell me, Rosey. You liked Frank, didn't you? Oh, I don't mean wickedly, like Annie. But in a dreamy kind of way?"

Rosalie wondered at her own total ease at such a question. "Yes. In a dreamy kind of way."

"I have lots of little private 'affairs' like that. I don't suppose there's any harm in them, really."

"Unless you're married."

"Oh?" Joanna looked startled. "You mean there's a wrong? To Dexter?"

"Yes."

"But if he doesn't
know
, Rosey? And if there's nothing to know, anyway?"

"It's what it does to him. In my mind. These little affairs, as you call them, have a way of tweaking a husband's nose. When they're over, he doesn't look quite the same to you."

"You mean he's
worse?
"

Rosalie smiled. "No. Just a mite smaller."

"And that's not so good, is it, if he wasn't too big to start with?"

They looked at each other in surprise and then both laughed. A sailor ran up to give the report that the two ironclads were actually touching. But the
Monitor
was holding her own!

"I feel as if we were present at the end of the world!" Rosalie exclaimed. "And I'm as calm as if it were Sunday afternoon at Oaklawn!"

Joanna laughed bitterly. "Better the
Merrimack
than that! Oh, Rosey! Have we ever been like this before?"

And the sisters turned again towards the distant firing, gazing across the gray, untroubled water, their arms about each other's waists.

D
EXTER
had never experienced such frustration as he met working for the Sanitary Commission. Now that the first enthusiasm for the war had spent itself, it was proving more difficult to induce people to contribute, even the things most sorely needed. He spent his days and nights calling on businessmen, railroad officials and politicians, arranging for the contribution or purchase of medical supplies and their expeditious passage to the fighting fronts. As men of affairs began to take in the likelihood of a long, hard war, and even of possible defeat, they were less inclined to forgo a profit or incur an inconvenience. Dexter felt at times as if he were hauling a heavily laden barge down a canal. It was impossible to get any way on; the barge would stop dead in the water the moment he relaxed his pull. The war began to seem to him like the ocean in a storm; the commotion was all on the surface, and in the dark deep below the wide-eyed fish poked about the rocks and rushes as usual.

There were some bright spots. His cousin Charley, in what seemed a miraculous change of habits, gave up drinking and began to work hard at the office to save the practice that Dexter had had largely to give up. Fred and Selby turned into model sons, cooperating with Mrs. Lindley, the housekeeper, to make the house function without Rosalie. And there were the sweet moments when other members of the commission congratulated Dexter on some job particularly well done. But he nonetheless found that he had to keep fighting a growing vulnerability to dark depression.

It seemed to him that his lights had gone out, that he was laboring now, so to speak, for mere survival, rather than for the attainment of any high goal. Always in the past he had worked towards an ideal. He had been on his way, or so he had fancied, to becoming a great lawyer, maybe even a great judge, in a system of jurisprudence that every decade, if not, indeed, every year, brought a step closer to the ultimate coincidence of the arcs of ideal and practical law. He had been on his way to founding a family that would carry on the highest traditions of good citizenship and public leadership. And, finally, if war should prove inevitable, he had been looking forward to playing a major role in the attainment of emancipation and the guarantee of permanent union.

But what had happened instead? All his ideals seemed to have been blown away in that terrible stampede from Bull Run. The government was vacillating; the military, incompetent; the business world, greedy. The only persons who really cared were the young men sent off to die uselessly. The war would end in a draw; slavery would survive; the law would be tarnished; the Fairchilds would remain a dull, ordinary, middle-class family. And Dexter himself? Well, what was he
now
but a forgiven adulterer whose wronged wife had taken such glory as was left off with her to a ship on the Chesapeake, leaving him to the bleakness of a motherless home and a city that cared only for profit?

He would tell himself that he was being absurd. New York was full of people who cared about the war. Did not his own son Fred talk passionately about enlisting as soon as he was of age? Did not Mr. Handy organize committee after committee? Should he not take into consideration that a beggar (and that's what he was, a beggar for the commission!) was bound to be confronted with the worst side of the people he had to approach? Come now, Dexter Fairchild, he would tell his image as he shaved in the morning, you must pull yourself together!

But nothing seemed to work. He made his hours longer, and he simply found himself more tired at night. When Rosalie wrote him about the Vermont lad at whose deathbed she had assisted, he replied bitterly:

It makes me wonder what right we have to ask young men who lack three hundred dollars to buy a substitute to lay down their lives. I suppose in all wars the young and strong have died for the old and weak, but I wonder if even in Nero's Rome people were not less indifferent to the legions fighting for them in distant Gaul than our New Yorkers are to the boys dying in Virginia.

Charley Fairchild, with whom he sometimes lunched at the Patroons', began to be worried about him.

"You're going to wear yourself out, Dexter. You should bear in mind that it may be a long war."

"How can I complain? Nobody's amputated
my
legs on a rolling hospital ship."

"Is that what Rosalie writes you about? I think she ought to come home. I think you need looking after."

"I might say the same about you and Annie."

"But I don't
want
Annie back! Annie and I are through. You know that!"

"But you're not divorced."

"Dexter, do you honestly think you're the one to advise me about my marriage?"

"Forgive me! I don't seem to know what I'm saying these days."

"Forget it. Annie writes that she's decided to live permanently in Paris. She'll bring Kate up as a French girl. That's all right. If the war's ever over I'll go across the ocean and see my little mademoiselle. And maybe one day buy her a nice French husband. American girls are always happy in Paris."

"What about Bleeker?"

"Oh, that's bust up already, hadn't you heard? He's gone to London. I think he has a position on the
Times.
Annie should be able to be at least half-respectable. You can manage that in Paris. She will be
cette charmante petite Madame Fairchild,
with an always absent husband, who is
just
discreet enough about her admirers to keep her from becoming a demimondaine. In middle age she will have a recognized, accepted liaison with an elderly duke. And when she's old she'll play cards and be converted and become a
dévote.
"

"Charley, what have I
done
to your life?"

"What have you done to your own, old man?
You're
the one I'm worried about!"

Later that same afternoon Dexter was scheduled to meet with Silas Cranberry at the latter's great department store on lower Broadway. He had a splitting headache and felt faintly feverish, but would this have excused a soldier on the eve of battle? Promptly at four o'clock he presented his card at the information desk of the emporium.

Cranberry liked marble, in his store as in his mansion. The huge square building, which covered a whole block, boasted a white marble façade, and in its center, a white marble courtyard, filled with ferns and palms and covered with a giant skylight. In the middle of the courtyard was a fountain surrounded by marble-topped tables, one of which was permanently reserved for the coffee breaks of the proprietor himself, who liked to mingle with his customers at fixed points of the day. It was here that he received Dexter.

"The Edgeworth property runs along the Sound near Roslyn," Dexter explained. "It's the perfect site for a sanitarium. The buildings are easily adaptable for public use. I figure that we could put up five hundred convalescents and fifty cases of permanent disability. Colonel Edgeworth is willing to donate the entire hundred acres, with all buildings and furnishings, plus a starting endowment fund of a hundred thousand dollars."

Cranberry's eyes, small dark spots in a moon of white, blinked. "I suppose he can afford it."

"No doubt. Nevertheless, I am overwhelmed."

"I thought you were too used to picking the pockets of the rich to be overwhelmed by anything, Fairchild."

Dexter smiled carefully. He had learned to check his feelings at the gate when he came for money. "I still feel that Colonel Edgeworth has shown himself a great patriot."

"He inherited half his money and married the rest. Why shouldn't he give it away?"

"Not all in his position feel as he does."

"Colonel Edgeworth's a member of the Patroons', ain't he?"

"He is."

"How do I know he isn't the member who blackballed me?" There was an ominous pause. "Well, you knew I'd been blackballed, didn't you, Fairchild?"

"How could I not? It was as great a humiliation for your sponsor as for you."