by Robert Hicks
And what do I mean by beauty? The other men might have looked at us and seen only a rough man and a pretty girl. But I saw that if I had gone through my life intent on the ugly and difficult (as I had!), shedding every delicate and perfect part of my soul like so many raindrops, Anna Marie must have followed behind me gathering what I sloughed off so that one day I might sit in a ballroom in New Orleans and see for myself what I had lost. No other man could have seen what I saw, which was the light that went with my darkness.
I don’t know how else to say this: I was confirmed at that moment in all that I didn’t know that I knew, simultaneously aware of the beautiful pieces and assured of their truth. I wanted to kiss her and more, and had I not been hobbled, I might have jumped up and done just that. Instead, I could only look up at her and hope I wouldn’t foam at the mouth.
She sat down next to me, so close I could hear her breathe and watch the fine hairs on her arm rise up in goose bumps.
“You are a famous man,” she said. “I care very little for fame, it makes a person so tedious and unnatural.”
She could have told me she was a goat with a preference for clover and I still would have loved her. “Infamous might be the better word,” I said.
“Not among my people, they think you’re a hero! The great Confederate! The misunderstood American Achilles!”
“I would like to meet these people of yours to thank them properly.”
“Oh, I don’t know that they would actually want to meet you, my parents and my cousins. They just like to know you exist.”
She blushed and held her hand to her mouth.
“I’m sorry, that was terribly rude of me. I sometimes forget that there are real people at these things, and not only masked boys in borrowed frippery.”
I bowed my head and noted how her hands lay enfolded on each other in the caress of her lap. Extraordinary.
“I am pleased to meet you, ma’am, whoever you are.”
“Anna Marie Hennen. I have somehow lost my chaperone.”
By somehow I came to understand that she meant through great effort and ingenuity.
“And where is your chaperone, General Hood?”
“I did not know I required one. I am remiss.”
“You have your reputation to consider.”
“I am at risk?”
“Well, perhaps not you. But one should be careful.”
“Are you careful?”
“I have nothing to fear.”
Her words spooled out relaxed and precise, the cadence of an educated person. Sure and bemused. Her face was white but her arms, where I could see them above her gloves, were brown and freckled. She sat erect and I had the impression she sat this way because she was strong and had a good back, that she was unafraid of work even if she had no need of it. She had not been cinched up and trussed into the posture of a superior and mysterious being. She naturally sat that way. I took solace from the gap in her front teeth and the freckle on the edge of her earlobe, but even these imperfections could only be exceptions to the rule.
I have nothing to fear. She couldn’t know how these words jabbed at me, and how much I wished she did fear for her reputation while in my company. I wished that I seemed the kind of man who could, for instance, bend her over my arm and trace the ligaments of her neck with my lips. My God, what am I thinking? I took control of myself.
“I shall be your chaperone, then, while you’re without one. I am the Gallant Hood, after all, and I assume gallant means the same here in the humid latitudes as it does elsewhere?”
“I’m certain ‘gallant’ means the same. But what of ‘Hood’?”
“I don’t understand.”
She rolled her eyes and reached over me to pick up my wood leg. The straps and buckles jingled softly against the wood. She rubbed it along its shin, feeling the fine finish. She seemed to be daydreaming.
“What I thought to say was, What does Hood mean? And more specifically, What does he mean for me?”
“I mean nothing for you at the—”
“Does he mean, for instance, to escort me into the courtyard through that door?” She pointed at a small door at one end of the foyer. Through the fanlight above I could see Mars. “Does he mean to escort me into the garden and down by the gardenias, where there is a secluded bench perfect if I were to swoon at the effect of the flowers and the excitement of the evening and at the scent of the stranger next to me?”
“I—”
“I wonder, because that is how it is done here in the humid latitudes when a lady has abandoned her chaperone in order to make the acquaintance of an unsuitable man. We are all about to die, there is not time for procrastination, General, so get to your feet.”
As I said before, under her brief influence I was already better known to myself. I did not know what Hood meant until we walked through that little door and into the sweet, swaying garden, but I soon understood and would never forget.
The bay leaves and sweet olives reflected silver in the open night sky, but the slick leaves of the gardenias that surrounded us on that wrought-iron bench seemed blacker and deeper in the light, as if they could draw around us and keep us perfectly hidden. Anna Marie, as she’d promised, leaned her head against my chest. Without thinking, I stroked her hair with my good hand. We talked about our lives as children. She had been a wild girl, hauling fish in from the river under the guidance of her family’s negro gardener, who ate nothing but what he could find in the river and what she could sneak out of the larder. I told her that the dirt of our Kentucky farm was fine and cool on early April mornings. Between our retreat and the tall, glowing windows of the ballroom stood a statue of St. Joseph—husband of Mary and patron of loyalty and peaceful death—atop the lilies of a tittering fountain. She asked me if I went to church, and I said that I was a believer who had not yet found a church as fine as the field on which a friend baptized me before battle. She asked me if I was always so laughably dramatic and sentimental, and I said yes.
“You don’t have a chaperone, do you?” I asked.
“Oh, of course I do,” she said, sitting up and tucking her hair behind one ear. “She just happens to also be a widow just out of her black. She has her own interests, shall we say.”
“Very convenient.”
“She is a very popular chaperone this season.”
In the light from the ballroom, St. Joseph cast an open, beckoning hand across Anna Marie’s cheek, and I kissed it. My beard tickled her face, and she said so. She reached up and smoothed the whiskers from my mouth.
“There.”
I kissed her again, hard. Unwilling to trust my instincts—Did she not know I was an animal, a predator, a killer?—I sat back again to watch the night sky and listen to the night. Anna Marie relaxed against my shoulder. Mars had almost set beneath the treetops. For the first time, I heard other people around us: whispering over in the corner of the garden beneath the magnolia, rustling crinoline behind the old, spindly lilac. This was how it was done in the humid latitudes? Fine then.
I did not deserve such happiness, of course, but I would accept it before its inevitable disappearance. I had learned that much about happiness, at least—it was best to take it and consume it before it flitted away, incontinent and fickle. Love it now, hate it later. This was the miserly wisdom I had taught myself.
For the moment, the happiness could only last until the music stopped and the shadows in the tall windows quit moving past.
“May I call on you?”
I couldn’t hear her answer. She had dozed off with her head buried against the lapel of my coat.
“I suppose that’s a no?”
“No, no. I mean, yes,” she said, straightening up. “I’m sorry, I know you’re not a pillow, but you are so comfortable. But yes, you must call on me. Bring your best leg.”
“I only have one.”
“Then polish, polish, polish, my boy. First impressions and so on.”
She laughed. I told her I would set my leg on f
ire and wave it about her like a torch if she kept mentioning it, and she recoiled in mock horror. We giggled—I giggled.
A stillness. That’s the only way I can describe what became of me in the months following that night. I was still. There was a man who lived next door to my solitary bachelor’s apartment on Decatur overlooking the docks. He was an old yellow-toothed man who limped worse than I did and whose family were all dead or gone for good. He had been in the habit of telling me that what I needed was a woman, that a woman would smooth me out and scare the gray out of my beard and polish my baton and so on, and though I didn’t disagree with him, I always declined his offer of introduction to women of his acquaintance.
“You got more gray than I do, General, and you know why of course! Of course!” He’d smack his lips and say it nearly every morning. He was old enough to be my father.
A week after I began courting Anna Marie, he stopped talking to me. I would see him out in the courtyard eating oranges, always avoiding my eye. I wanted to tell him that there had been no baton polishing, but I decided to let it lie. I supposed I was too smoothed out to be trusted on that score.
I squired Anna Marie here and there, and we ventured into the harder and dirtier districts on something of an exploratory mission. I kept her under my protection, and the street people made way for us. I shielded her from the coarser sights, I didn’t want to upset her or corrupt her. She was a lady.
I never felt in danger of losing her, and I nearly never felt I needed to apologize for my deformities while in her presence. She didn’t seem to care. I began to trim my beard. I bought cigars for her father, the judge. Her mother introduced me to a cobbler who made very fine shoes for my wooden leg, and I always wore those shoes to their house, whatever the weather. I was grateful to the Hennens.
Her father was impressed with me, I think, though he took pains to conceal it. Later he would tell me that I had always enjoyed his support in the courtship, that a commander of men could command his daughter. No, that’s not how he put it: It requires a commander of men to command my daughter. What he did not know, what few besides Anna Marie knew, is that I, General Hood, had no interest in commanding anything anymore. Command had coarsened me, and separated me from God and His mercy. I had lost my way. I tried to learn to ask for forgiveness, and Anna Marie taught me some of the words. I was the General only when I was angry, when I was at my end, and then I became a frightening and foolish man, a man at war with himself. I suppose that, at last, I married Anna Marie because she had no desire to know the General, and didn’t care one bit for him. A fresh start.
We were married the next year, 1868, and less than a year after that Lydia was born. Now we have a house full of children and very little money. I’m afraid I have not provided, nor have I always made Anna Marie happy. There have been months that we’ve hardly talked at all. I have kept myself busy with work, true, but that is not the whole story. There are times when I do not feel that there, on Third Street, rests my house and family, times when I’m sure that they are strangers. Or I am the stranger, a guest in the house. During those times I have stayed away, keeping myself busy. Busy, busy, busy. I also have my hiding places, and I admit now that I have hidden like a coward in them.
But this last year, this last year since the great epidemic, has been a revelation. I have had little else to do but chase after the children and take walks with my wife. Anna Marie and I have spent hours talking in the dark, and I feel like I did once before: still. I feel stillness.
That is, until she makes her jokes about my leg and starts saluting me, and then I grab her and carry her off to our rooms.
CHAPTER 3
From the Diary of Anna Marie Hennen Hood, Written in Ledger Books Between April 1879 and August 1879
Something has happened that I must explain, Lydia. I do not know whether I have been brought to ruin by this marriage, or whether I have been saved by it. They do not tell you when you are veiled and kneeling before the altar, your man at your side, that you will ask this question and that there will be no answer. Or that the answer is both ruin and salvation. The pen will sort this for me. Before it answers, before I set this down, I wish to stipulate (as your grandfather the attorney would have put it) that there was never any question of love. I have loved, and I do still.
When I named you, my oldest daughter, I thought I would never have another child, and so I gave you the longest possible name. Lydia Marie Hennen Hood. I wanted to be sure that there was a child who would carry all of the important names: my sister, Lydia’s; my father’s, Duncan Hennen; my husband’s, John Bell Hood; and me, your mother, who always loved the Marie more than the Anna in her name.
You will find this explanation amusing for two reasons, and they are contained here in the little swaddled lovely asleep in the bassinet next to me as I write this. You will find it funny because the baby, your sister, is my eleventh child. There was never a shortage of children to bear names, I should not have feared that, of all things. We ran out of names. She is the second daughter I’ve named Anna. Your little sister Anna Bell had eight years alone with her name, perhaps she won’t mind sharing it with this one, Anna Gertrude. Or, perhaps, only Gertrude. Is that a prettier name? Marie is still prettier, but we have three Maries already: you and the twins Marion Marie and Lilian Marie. It’s too much to expect much more sharing of that name.
Anna Gertrude has a cold. I hear her breathing, a rasping and rattling. She coughs so quietly it’s a rough whisper. Her eyes are pale blue like her father’s, but her black hair is mine. (You have my eyes, Lydia, nearly black. They’re pretty on you.) Anna Gertrude is as beautiful and mysterious as every one of our babies. I am grateful. She sleeps in a wicker bassinet that has sprung most of its weave. Sharp, broken pieces poke out on every side. The paint has mostly flaked off, and in certain spots it’s still possible to see some of the seven other shades of color your father added to the contraption. Now it is falling apart. The bassinet will not last much longer, and most of my old friends would have burned it years ago. It wobbles on its legs, it sags in the center where ten other babies once lay. It is the vessel, though, that has borne each of my children along into the world, and I will not give up on it so easily.
I begin this way because I am nervous, Lydia. I imagine that you are reading this when you are old, and that you hate me and your father for the life we led. You are poor now, and perhaps you are still. Most of the children don’t remember the servants and the fine flatware and the bolts of paisleyed French cloth propped up in the corners, from which we had men sew us our dresses and curtains and bed coverings. You, at least, would remember the prestige of being the family of John Bell Hood, you would remember the men who paid court to him and laughed at his half-remembered jokes. You would remember when the stray dogs were afraid to sneak through our fence, and when the roses still produced flowers and didn’t just ramble across the yard. Because you would remember all that, I wonder if you hate us for abandoning it all.
There are many reasons for me to write to you now, and the bassinet is one of them: I should explain why the bassinet fell into such a state, and why I still keep it and love it.
There are many things like it in this house now. The floors are scratched and rutted, the stove is broken and will not fire anymore, John Junior has outgrown his short pants but has nothing else to wear. What furniture is left has been tied together at the joints, and the old trap is missing some of the red spokes from its right wheel. It sits in the sideyard gathering to it vines and some chipped pots in which I’ve planted lilies. We walk nearly everywhere now. The horse is long gone, and there is no oil for the lamps. We still have candles, though I’ve noticed that you children have no more interest in them. Or, rather, that you have no more interest in doing the things that require candlelight. You and your brothers and sisters sleep when the sun sets and rise when it warms the counterpane. I think this is healthy, though our neighbors must think us eccentric.
Only John still insists on mastering
the night. I hear him thumping around the parlor now, I hear him cursing, and then I hear the snick of a match. He moves too fast, even with his wood leg. I try to tell him that the wind he makes walking so quickly will always snuff a candle, but he will not slow himself. He worries about me, and this makes him want to move, to grab up things and put them back down. I have heard him arranging and rearranging his books. I have heard him shaping the hollies outside into perfect round balls of green, using only his old bayonet which he keeps paper-thin sharp. God help us, he has even cooked our food, which as you know always comes out of a big pot. He cooks us camp food in the fireplace. It is garrison food, the food that soldiers make for themselves when all they have is the overripe turnips and sprouted potatoes and bacon ends they scrounge from trash heaps and on old harvested fields. He makes for us the food of desperate men grateful for small things, and I suppose that is what we are now, though I wouldn’t mind if he would discover salt, pepper, maybe some thyme. Perhaps you will help him with that. My little helper Lydia.
Surely you have noticed how empty this grand house has become. You’ve seen how we rattle around inside, hidden beneath its soaring roof and filigreed gables, loose inside its solidity like seeds inside an old, dry, and still perfect gourd. The life we live now is not the life this house was supposed to contain. It is a house of great ambition, built for entertaining and leisure amid beauty and grace. It is a house that was built by much younger people who had every reason to think that they would have everything they ever desired and that they would need a place to put it all before they ran out of room and found a larger house to fill. I have all I desire now in this rickety bassinet and the sound of you children crawling into your beds, but I’m afraid this is too little for such a house. There is grief in it, as if the house itself could see and feel and harbor wishes that could be dashed. It must know now that it will never again be so grand as the two who built it, just as we ourselves will never be so grand. I hope it does not resent me.