March: a novel

by Geraldine Brooks

  She took Mrs. Hale’s place on the sofa and poured tea into the dish Hester had set for Mrs. Hale, but which had remained unused. Her back was straight as a ramrod, her gestures elegant and unhurried. It might have been her drawing room, her bone china tea service. She took a sip of tea, set the dish down, and folded her hands in her lap. Now the unwavering gaze to which I was subjected came from eyes of honey gold.

  “Mrs. March, I have known your husband since he was eighteen years old.”

  Her words struck me like a fist. I had to dig my fingers into the chair to keep myself upright. “I will tell you the whole of it,” she said. She began with her own history in the Clement household, and then disclosed in full what had passed between her and the callow Connecticut peddler. Then, she recounted, in detail, their reunion after the battle of the bluff.

  When Meg was little, someone gave her a kaleidoscope filled with shards of colored glass. For a long time, it was her favorite toy. She loved the way that the gentlest turn sent the pieces cascading into new patterns. I felt, as I sat there, that Grace Clement had shattered my marriage into shards, and every sentence she spoke shifted and sorted the pieces into something I did not recognize.

  How he had lied to me! I had been proud, when I read his words from Harper’s Ferry, telling of the inspiration that had led him to quit his unit and go south to teach the contraband. Now I realized the demeaning truth of it: he had been caught by a fellow officer in a compromising position with this woman and been driven out by the threat of a ruinous scandal. I felt the blood beat in my head. I called on years of discipline to keep my composure as her mellow, uninflected voice went on.

  “Two months later, when my father died, I did as your husband had urged me. I wrote to the colonel, and he in turn recommended me to Surgeon Hale. It has been a most fortunate situation for me. Dr. Hale has taught me a very great deal, and Mrs. Hale has been kinder than I could have conceived possible. They have become my family. In return, I do what I can to lighten Dr. Hale’s many burdens. About three months ago, Dr. Hale delegated to me the duty of meeting the hospital ships and selecting which patients should be transferred to his care at Blank Hospital. That was how I happened to be at the docks the night your husband’s vessel, the Red Rover, came in.”

  She described the scene to me, and once again she spared nothing. The ship was full beyond its large capacity; it had picked up a great number of burn patients, scalded when the steam boiler in their ship had been hit by a shell. Men were laid on every inch of boat deck, even on its stairs and gangways. Stretcher bearers carried them off the boat and placed them on the wharf She worked by torchlight, moving carefully among the mass of groaning men, laid out like merchandise, and felt herself watched by hundreds of imploring, worried eyes. “They are afraid of being stepped on, you see, for they have been: by soldiers running over them as they lay helpless on the battlefield; deckhands treading on them aboard the boats. So they fear boots in the dark.”

  Her concern was with the surgical cases, but one of the nurses from the Red Rover, a nun, had watched her work and, deeming her competent, asked her to take note of a fever case, a chaplain who had been much beloved for his efforts among the contraband. The nun told Grace the story of the Negro mute who had brought him into the Union lines, of the scrawled words on the turquoise scarf. But my mind was on fire now. Had this mute woman been his lover, too? Why else would she have trekked dangerous miles to bring him to safety?

  Grace Clement seemed to have no conception of the turmoil her words were creating within me, for she went calmly on with her narration. The nun had written a new tag: “Captain March of Concord,” which she had sewn onto his blouse. When Grace read the name, she knew him: “Though without it, I assure you I would not have recognized him, in the uncertain torchlight, changed as he was.

  “I saw to it that he was transported in our ambulances. When I looked in on him at the hospital later that night, he was muttering in his delirium. I leaned over to adjust his pillow and called him by name. He came very close to consciousness-as they do, sometimes-and he recognized me. He thought we were back on Mr. Clement’s plantation, and that I was bringing him coffee, as I had done, the morning after the bluff defeat.

  “I spent the night with him, once the surgeries were done. He talked a great deal. Ravings, mostly. But amid the babble, he told me things ... hard things... about the bluff battle ... things that he had not confided in me at the time. He blamed himself for the death of a soldier named Stone. It seemed that the boy couldn’t swim, and he was helping him across the river. He said he kicked him away in midstream, to save his own life, and watched the boy die when he could have rescued him.

  “The next day, he had lost all memory of me. He confused me with another slave, perhaps the one who saved his life. He wept, asking pardon for the death of a child; for other deaths he thought he should have prevented, for captives carried back into bondage.” She sighed, and looked down at the still hands folded in her lap. “I tell you all this not because I wish to lay burdens upon you. But if you are to help him, I believe you need to know what troubles his heart. He has been dipped in the river of fire, Mrs. March. I am afraid that there may not be very much left of the man we knew.”

  I had held myself in check until that point, absorbed by the effort of fitting her narrative to the fragments of what I thought I had known from his letters-his pathetic, dishonest letters! But this reference to “the man we knew” snapped my trance. How dare she couple herself with me in relation to my husband!

  I stood up, pacing. All this false candor was nothing but a sham. I had asked him about her and he had said “my love.” I knew now that when he said those words, he had not meant me.

  “He loves you,” I blurted.

  “You are wrong, Mrs. March.” She stood then, so that we were face to face, her gaze as level as if she merely told me I was mistaken about the time of day. “He does not love me.” She turned away and walked to the window, looking out on to the rain-drenched street. There was a bowl of greenhouse blooms on a polished table near the sill. Absently, she plucked at a stem of orchids, improving the symmetry of the arrangement. “He loves, perhaps, an idea of me: Africa, liberated. I represent certain things to him, a past he would reshape if he could, a hope of a future he yearns toward.”

  She turned to look at me. “Am I wrong to suspect that he lives for ideas, that he builds his whole world of them, and that it is you who are left to deal with the practical matters of life?”

  That she knew him so well only kindled more suspicion in me. Her composure also was irksome. Who was she, a jumped-up housemaid born of lustful indecency, to tell me the truths of my marriage?

  “You have been lovers! Admit it! Why else does he keep a lock of your hair-” and here my voice failed me. I pulled out the little silk bag and tore at it with wild fingers, dropping the curl onto the marble table top. She frowned and looked at it, and then her frown relaxed. She sat down again upon the sofa, reached up, and commenced untying the complex knot fixing the scarf around her head.

  I imagined him watching her do so; watching her, by candlelight, as she bared her body for him.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  But it was done. The white fabric fell away from her brow. And then I blushed. The hair that tumbled from beneath the scarf was thick and black, but it fell in loose, heavy waves-nothing at all like the tight-sprung ringlet lying upon the table.

  She raked a hand through the fall of her hair as if considering it for the first time.

  “I have my father’s hair, you see.”

  “Then who ... ?”

  She took up the ringlet and ran it between her long fingers. “Who can say? But my guess is that it is the hair of a child. See the ends? They are so fine. It appears like a lock one might retain from an infant’s first haircut.”

  It was a few moments before I could trust my voice.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then say nothing.” She tilted her head o
n that slender neck, first to one side, then the other, half closing her eyes as she did so, and breathing deep as if to release an inner tension. It was the first sign she had given that this conversation had cost her something; that the composure she seemed to wear so easily was a garment put on with a hard discipline. She rose.

  “They were drying your cloak in the kitchen. I will see if it is ready. The rain seems to be easing now; I will bring some more tea, and perhaps it may stop entirely while we take it.”

  “Please, no; I have imposed here long enough.”

  “Not at all. I am very glad you came. I do not think many women would have done so.”

  She went out, and I turned to the fire, storing up the warmth for my cold walk back down the hill. Despite her words, I felt sad and very foolish and, yes, belittled by the morning’s revelations. There was so much I had not known. So much that he had not seen fit to share with me.

  When she returned, her hair was bound up again in a fresh cloth. As she bent close to me to set down the teapot, I caught a sharp scent of starch and a hot iron. As I sipped the scalding tea, anxious to be done with this encounter, she asked where I was staying. I replied civilly, trying to make light of the vicissitudes of my situation. But she knew Georgetown, and the squalor of the canal, and she knit her brow. There was an irony here that at other times would have made me laugh: an ex-slave, feeling pity for my hardships. She wouldn’t let me leave until the rain had entirely abated, and then she walked with me out the front door and some way down the street. She would, she said, look in on me at the hospital when she returned later in the afternoon.

  As I picked a careful path down the hill, I knew I could forgive my husband for his momentary weakness regarding such a woman. What manner of man—adrift and lonely, far from home, emotionally ravaged-would not be drawn to Grace Clement?

  But I did not know if I could forgive him for the years of silence, and the letters filled with lies.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Reconstruction

  He did not wake again that day, even when the laudanum might have been expected to have lessened its grip, and even though his fever had abated somewhat.

  Grace Clement looked in, as she had promised, felt his pulse, sounded his chest, and, when she had done, her concern was clear in her face. “His spirit is like a guttering candle,” she said. “I believe the torments of his mind are acting on his body, preventing it from healing. I have seen like cases, and I have seen their opposite. When the mind wills it, sometimes a patient pulls himself back from the very brink of the grave. But when the mind is troubled, as his is ...” Her words trailed away. “His pulse is feeble, his chest-it is not yet the death rattle I hear, but very like.”

  I will not say it did not chafe my heart, watching her touch him and tend to him with skills I did not have. But even as I felt the hot pangs of jealousy, I knew they were unworthy, and strove to subdue them, asking, as humbly as I could manage, for her counsel.

  She smoothed the coverlid and lifted his hands so that they lay pale against the white sheet. “If-when-he returns again to consciousness, I think you must find a way to speak with him that will diminish the guilt he feels about the past. He must be brought to care about the life—the future—that awaits him. I think you have daughters?”

  “Four of them,” I said.

  “Speak to him of them, remind him of their needs, his duty. That girl—woman—whoever she was—who saved him: she was right in what she struggled to set down about him: he is a good, kind man. But I don’t think he sees himself that way anymore. It will fall to you to convince him of it, if you want him to live.”

  After she went to her other duties, I thought about her words. There was wisdom in them. But to do as she asked would not be easy. As a mother, I often had asked my girls to forgive each other; “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,” I had instructed them, when the small and great slights of childhood set them against one another. Now, I would be tested. I would have to follow my own preachments. He had failed me in so many ways. He had not provided the material life I had expected, but I had adjusted to that long ago. He had not considered me, in deciding to go off to war, but I had feigned acceptance of that and held my peace. Now he had subjected me to a wound even more profound. He had betrayed me in the deepest, most personal way; harboring secret feelings toward another woman. And though I understood how it had come to happen, still it hurt me. Others had known truths about my marriage that he had kept hidden from me.

  Somehow, I would have to unpack the anger and humiliation I carried in my breast, put it away, deep in an imaginary box, and store it somewhere on a high shelf of my heart, where I would deal with it much later. I was not sure if I had the discipline to do it. Even to save him.

  How easy it was to give out morsels of wise counsel, and yet how hard to act on them. Before I left home, I had advised my girls to lessen their worry by being about their work-“Hope, and keep busy,” I had said. Well, that advice, too, might be as good for the mother goose as the goslings. So in the hours that followed, I tried to find solace by making myself useful to some of the other men in the ward. I wrote their letters or adjusted their pillows or fetched fresh water. They were touchingly grateful for these small attentions, and the doing of them provided a distraction from my own concerns and raised my spirits a little.

  Mr. Brooke joined me in the waning afternoon and said that he would keep vigil at the bedside if I wanted some respite. Since there were still no signs of returning consciousness, I said yes to his offer, as the strains of the day had fatigued me. When I reached the cottage, Mr. Bolland had returned from his employment. A fire smouldered in the grate and he sat close by, engrossed in a newspaper. There was only the one chair, and as he did not offer it, I proceeded upstairs to sit upon my bed. I wanted to write something to the girls before I lay down to rest; I had, until then, left it to Mr. Brooke to convey the details of our situation. I fetched out my writing things, but found myself shivering. Generally, I tolerate cold very well. But there was a damp chill in the stoveless attic. An icy wind fingered its way through the cracked window panes. So I returned downstairs—a mean fire better than no fire at all-and upended the empty kindling box to serve as a stool. I returned my attention to my writing things. I inscribed my greeting.

  But it was not so easy to go on from there, and not only because of the distraction caused by Mr. Bolland’s constant and apparently ineffective throat clearing. The young man had a dreadful case of catarrh. Every three or four minutes, he would cease his reading, snap his newspaper, and begin a painful effort to loosen the phlegm in his throat. I tried my best to block out the disagreeable sound and focus on what I wished to convey to my girls.

  But what did I wish to say? My news was cheerless. What could I say of their father’s condition? That his apparent recovery may have been chimerical; that he had relapsed and remained in grave danger. And what of myself? An honest accounting of my hours would hardly make fit reading: that I had thrown soup over one nurse in the morning, and spent the subsequent hours interrogating another as to their father’s secret past. That I was lodged in a miserable slum by a reeking sluiceway, cheek by jowl with a stranger who had egg stains on his waistcoat.

  The ink dried on my nib as I searched for a style of truth that would not completely dishearten its recipients. And then I realized that this was exactly the dilemma he had faced, day following dreadful day, in camp or on battlefield: the lies had been penned, the truths unwritten, because he was ashamed, yes, on occasion; but also, and more often, because he had wanted to spare me from the grief that an accurate account would have inflicted. How he must have toiled over those pages, denying himself the satisfactions that come with unburdening the heart, censoring his every sentiment so that I could continue to think only the best of him and cast his situation in a tolerable light. And I had been ready to condemn him, for what had been, perhaps, a daily act of love.

  I sat there as the light faded and Mr. Bolland folded awa
y his broadsheet. I became aware that he was staring at me, my dry nib, my blank pages. When I returned his gaze, he looked away, embarrassed. I felt constrained to speak.

  “Have you been in the capital very long, Mr. Bolland?”

  “Too long, Mrs. March. It will be a year in January.”

  “But surely the city affords some pleasures to a bachelor such as yourself?”

  “I am not a bachelor. My wife and child reside with my parents at their farm on the Delaware, and I miss them grievously. The salary I make as a copyist is insufficient to allow me to relocate them here. No, Mrs. March; apart from the occasional improving lecture at the Smithsonian, there is little here to enjoy, if you set it beside the domestic happiness one might possess.”

  Mr. Bolland’s words dropped unanswered into the bleak little room. My attempt at a natural exchange between strangers had misfired. Somehow, the thought of this man, also sundered from his family, was a final weight laid upon my depressed spirit, and I found I could not go on. What kind of life could one have, after all, if a family allowed itself to be torn apart-by war, by necessitous circumstances, or by a wedge driven into the heart by a crisis of trust? I knew then that whatever it cost me, I would bring my husband home. With my emotions suddenly stirred, I did not have it in me to make any answer to Mr. Bolland. Certainly I had no reserves from which to draw polite words of cheerful consolation. So I folded away my abandoned attempt at a letter, excused myself, and climbed up to the attic where I could at least lay my throbbing head upon a pillow. I drew my cloak around me, as well as the thin coverlid, and put gloves on my icy hands.

  I fell asleep, though I had not intended to. When I awoke it was fully dark, and the waning street sounds told me the hour must be very advanced. I rushed down the stairs, anxious to return to the hospital, but Mr. Brooke was waiting for me by the fire.