The Widow's War

by Mary Mackey

  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.

  There are three identical doors on each side of the hall. Deacon stops in front of the second door on the left and pauses as if listening. Carrie listens, too, and hears nothing.

  “Knock,” she whispers.

  He knocks and enters without waiting for a reply. Carrie crosses the threshold after him. The drapes are drawn, and the room is as dark as the inside of a cave: a junglelike, slightly green-tinged sort of darkness that smells damp and unhealthy, as if the carpet needs to be taken out and aired and the mold washed off the walls with white vinegar. Directly in front of them, occupying most of one wall, is a large, elaborately carved bed piled with blankets and pillows tossed helter-skelter as if someone had begun to strip off the sheets and stopped halfway. Mrs. Presgrove should be in that bed, but it appears empty.

  A large, red-faced woman stands by the night table with her arms folded across her bosom. She wears a dark blue dress made of coarsely woven cotton, and her hair is tied up in a white kerchief. Deacon approaches the bed and peers into the blankets as if trying to locate something. Straightening up, he turns to the nurse.

  “How is Mrs. Presgrove doing this afternoon, Aideen?”

  “Ah, the poor soul is not doing well, bless her,” the nurse replies in a lilting Irish accent.

  “Did she take her medicine?”

  “No, sair, she did not. I tried to give it to her, but she refused it.”

  Deacon gives an exasperated sigh and turns back to the bed. “Mother Presgrove,” he says.

  There is a scuffling sound, and a small, withered figure rises up from the mound of blankets and props itself against the headboard. “What do you want?” a slurred, shaking voice inquires.

  The woman who speaks looks so different from the woman Carrie remembers that Carrie has the sensation of having come into the wrong room. Matilda’s beauty is a thing of the past. She cannot be more than forty-five, but she looks decades older. Her eyes are red-rimmed as if she has been crying. Her glossy black hair has turned into a dull, gray tangle that hangs around her face in stringy curls, and every inch of her skin is folded and wrinkled as if she has been dried in the sun. On the third finger of her left hand she wears a gaudy gold wedding ring, half an inch thick. Perhaps the ring fit her on the day she married Bennett Presgrove, but now the only thing that’s keeping it from slipping off is a diamond-studded ring guard.

  “What do you want?” Matilda repeats in that same strange, slurred voice. This was once a woman who spoke clearly and decisively, a woman who could sing loud enough to rattle church windows. Carrie notices a small clay pipe resting on the night table among the medicine bottles.

  “Opium?” she whispers.

  Deacon nods. “For the pain.”

  Matilda waves her hands in front of her face and makes a motion as if sewing cloth. “Who . . .”

  Deacon raises his voice. “Mother Presgrove,” he says clip
ping off the end of each word. “It’s me, Deacon. I have returned from Brazil, and I have brought my wife to meet you. You know her, Mother Presgrove. She is—”

  “Deacon, you say?”

  “Yes, Mother Presgrove, Deacon, your stepson.”

  “I don’t want Deacon. I want William.” Matilda clutches at the hem of the sheet. “Where is he? Where is my son? Why isn’t he here? Why hasn’t he come to see me? Deacon, you evil boy, why do you tear up William’s letters and refuse to give them to me?”

  “Mother Presgrove,” Carrie says gently, “William can’t come visit you. William is—” Deacon lays a warning hand on Carrie’s arm and shakes his head. Carrie begins again.

  “Mother Presgrove, it’s me, Carrie. Carrie Vinton. You remember. I was William’s childhood friend, and now I’m Deacon’s wife.”

  “Carrie?” Matilda’s eyes light up for a moment. “Carrie, dear, you must not keep climbing trees. You’ve ripped your pinafore again. Come closer and I will mend it.” She lifts her right hand and again makes a sewing motion.

  “She knows me,” Carrie whispers.

  “In her way,” Deacon agrees.

  “And William? She doesn’t know he . . . ?”

  “She’s been told. Father informed her of his death as soon as he got my letter. He says he’s told her repeatedly, but she never remembers. She believes my stepbrother is still alive. She even imagines that he came back from Brazil and paid her a visit and told her—” Deacon pauses. “I am not sure I should tell you the rest, my dear. It will only cause you pain.”

  “Tell me. I can’t imagine anything William’s mother could say that could cause me more pain than I’ve already experienced.”

  “My stepmother is under the illusion that William came to her and told her that you were dead. She imagines that he grieved terribly for you and that she comforted him. I’m sorry, Carolyn; this must be very painful for you.”

  “Where is William?” Mrs. Presgrove repeats. Her voice cracks and tears roll down her cheeks. “Carrie, where has he gone? Why isn’t he here?”

  Deacon approaches the bed, puts his hands on his stepmother’s shoulders, and gently pushes her back down onto the pillows. “Mother Presgrove, you must not agitate yourself.” Curling in a ball with her knees to her chest, Matilda begins to cry.

  “Poor thing,” Carrie says.

  “Her heart is not good. The doctors warn that these fits may kill her if we can’t control them.” He picks up a bottle from the night table, uncorks it, measures out a spoonful of brown liquid, and mixes it with water.

  “Here, Mother Presgrove,” he says. When Matilda refuses, he lifts her upright, opens her mouth, carefully pries her lips apart, and pours the medicine down her throat. Finished, he turns to the nurse. “See that Mrs. Presgrove gets another dose of medicine before supper.”

  “Yes, sair.”

  “If she refuses, call one of the male servants to help you administer it.”

  “Bless ye, sair, I can take care of Mrs. Presgrove my ownself. The poor soul is as weak as a newborn babby.”

  “Well then, you must be firm with her. We cannot allow her to refuse her medicine.”

  “Yes, sair.”

  A moan comes from the bed, soft as a breath of wind blowing across the mouth of a bottle. Carrie starts toward the sound, but Deacon restrains her.

  “You can’t comfort her, Carolyn. God knows I wish you could, but you can’t. She no longer knows where she is or what she’s doing. She’s living in a world of dreams.”

  “More like a world of nightmares,” Carrie says. She removes his hand from her arm, approaches the bed, and looks down at Mrs. Presgrove who has burrowed back under the blankets. She feels heartsick. Matilda had been like a mother to her. If only she could rip those hideous curtains off the windows, let in light and air, throw away the opium pipe and the medicine bottles, take William’s mother in her arms, and tell her . . . Tell her what? That William is dead? Perhaps it’s a mercy she doesn’t know.

  “Come away,” Deacon says. “You’re upsetting yourself unnecessarily. There’s nothing more we can do for her.”

  Blinded by tears, Carrie lets him take her by the hand and lead her out of the room. She remembers that moment for the rest of her life: the bedroom door swinging open, light from the hall flooding in, a clean white wall laced with the shadows of blowing leaves, a gold-framed painting, the cool, rough sensation of Deacon’s hand in hers. Although she does not yet know it, this is the last time she will completely believe anything he tells her.

  In the months that follow, she will think of herself as a blind woman, a woman unwittingly crossing a chasm on a thin sheet of ice, a woman trapped in a net, a woman hooked like a fish. She will search in vain for the perfect metaphor to describe how quickly things fall apart after that sickroom encounter: an explosion, a wildfire, a single glass jerked from the bottom of a pyramid of glasses, but no comparison she can come up with begins to describe the terrible rapidity of events.

  The first hint that things are not as they seem comes in the form of a question, and Carrie is the one who asks it.

  “How long has your stepmother been ill?” she says when she and Deacon are again alone together.

  “For years, as far as I know.”

  “But surely . . .” Carrie stops herself from asking the question that is on her lips: But surely your father would not have married a woman so sick unless . . . She pauses, warns herself not to make hasty assumptions, and then decides the question is worth asking. If she is going to live in the same house with Senator Presgrove, she needs to know why he has chosen to marry an invalid who smokes opium and does not recognize her own stepson, or perhaps for that matter, the senator himself.

  “Deacon—” Carrie pauses, searching for the right words to convey her suspicions. None spring to mind. Perhaps it’s better to be blunt.

  “Is your stepmother wealthy? William and I didn’t talk much about his mother. We were too busy taking care of the sick and trying not to fall sick ourselves, but before he became ill, he told me that, like you, he and his father had quarreled over slavery, and that his father had cut him out of his will. I assume that means that when William’s father died, your stepmother inherited all of his estate—”

  Carrie stops speaking. Deacon’s face has darkened. For a few more seconds she believes his expression conveys nothing more than the jealousy a newly married man might feel on hearing his wife mention her lover’s name. Then he speaks.

  “Carolyn, are you asking me if my father married my stepmother for her money?”

  “No, of course not.” Although, of course, that’s exactly what she’s asking.

  “Why my father and Mrs. Saylor married is none of our business. I trust you appreciate that.”

  “Yes,” Carrie says, but she doesn’t say it meekly. Deacon has never spoken to her so sharply before, and she hopes he’s not going to make a habit of it.

  He gives her another look that she does not like in the least. “If you must know, it was a love match. Mrs. Saylor was not bedridden when they met. My father was besotted with her and she with him. In fact, I have never seen a couple so devoted to each other.”

  He smiles. As always, it’s a charming smile, but Carrie does not return it because at that moment she knows beyond all doubt that he’s lying.

  The second indication that she is being deceived comes the following Tuesday in the form of cannon fire. The concussions are so loud, they rattle the chandeliers, make the windows tremble, and knock a small porcelain shepherdess off the parlor mantelpiece. As Carrie hurries toward the front door to see what is going on, gunshots ring out from the back of the house. Reversing direction, she runs toward the garden. There she finds Deacon and Bennett standing beside a fountain, shooting their pistols in the air, and whooping at the top of their lungs.

  “What’s happened!” she cries. “Are we at war?”

  “He signed it!” Deacon yells.

  In the distance, over the cannonades, Carr
ie can hear church bells simultaneously ringing and tolling in a wild cacophony of joy and grief. A series of smaller explosions fills the air, smoke trails from fireworks, and Roman candles crisscross the sky.

  “Seventeen!” Senator Presgrove bellows as the cannons thunder.

  “Eighteen!” Deacon cries.

  “Nineteen!”

  “Twenty!”

  “Twenty-one!”

  The salute being over, the cannons fall silent. Laughing and cheering, father and son embrace and slap each other on the back, and as they do so, Carrie realizes two things: first, President Pierce must have signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act; and, second, Deacon and his father are both happy about it.

  That night at dinner Deacon makes no attempt to hide his joy at the prospect of Kansas entering the Union as a slave state. As Carrie sits at the far end of the table, feeling invisible, he and his father drink, smoke, and talk politics, and what she hears them say makes her feel as if a blindfold is being ripped off her eyes.

  All day the telegraph wires have been speeding the news to other parts of the country and bringing back descriptions of how Americans are reacting to President Pierce’s approval of the plebiscite. The evening papers are reporting that in Massachusetts people are wearing black armbands. In Indiana they are flying the American flag at half-mast. In Chicago banners have been strung over the streets, proclaiming: NO MORE SLAVE TERRITORY! NO MORE SLAVE STATES! NO MORE SLAVERY!!

  Yet as effigies of President Pierce burn all over the North, the South is celebrating. In Charleston people have taken to the streets to express their approval. In Atlanta wealthy slave owners are rejoicing, balls are being planned, and women have sewn victory banners onto their parasols.

  Senator Presgrove throws aside the newspapers and thumps his fist on the table so hard the water goblets dance. “By God, we’re winning!”