by Max Byrd
“You do everything with just one hand.” Elizabeth sat down heavily on the straw facing him. “And you never talk about it or complain. You never even ask for help. I could have held the flint for you.”
He was silent, listening to the rain.
“You’ve cut your wrist.” She reached forward and held up his hand, so that both of them could see the thin red gash bleeding raggedly into his muddy cuff. She gripped his wrist with her left hand and began to wipe the blood away with a damp corner of her blouse. He shifted to brace the hand on the sawhorse and felt the small circular motion of her chest against his shoulder. His pulse began to thump. Slowly he became aware of the stiffened tip of her breast, and almost at the same moment she stopped and sat back.
“Not exactly a case for the ambulance,” she murmured.
“But it’s my writing hand.”
She laughed and rested her chin on her knees. After a moment she said, “Is this where … it happened?”
“No.” He looked down and opened and closed his fist. “Cold Harbor was just about three weeks after the Wilderness. June third, and fifty miles south of here, almost to Richmond.”
She sat quietly in the darkness. Half her face was lit by the flickering lantern, a soft, radiant oval of white against a backdrop of restless shadows. The first time he had ever seen her, he thought, the day he had clownishly blundered into her dressing room, she had also been soft, radiant, sheathed in light. Her skirt rustled as she moved her legs. He leaned farther back until his head touched the wood.
“After the war,” he said, “I used to make a little mental list of ‘accomplished amputees,’ as I called it. My hero was Major John Wesley Powell. He went down the Colorado River in a rowboat and mapped the Grand Canyon. And there was O. O. Howard, who lost an arm at Seven Pines but still commanded the Army of the Tennessee at Atlanta, under your uncle. And Ulric Dahlgren, minus one leg, a brilliant cavalry officer. The best of all was a Confederate enlisted man, I never learned his name, lost both arms in the Wilderness. When he went home to North Carolina, he had no money, no hope, no future. He told his wife to hitch the plow harness around his shoulders and guide him, and up and down the fields he walked, plowing ground. I was twenty-two years old. An arm or a leg here or there, I told myself, it wasn’t a brain, it wasn’t a heart.”
He got to his feet and walked to the open door. The rain was falling, if anything, faster than before. He stepped into it and stood for a moment with his face to the sky, feeling the wind and water, then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and came back in.
Elizabeth was still sitting in the same position. He eased his back against the wall again. “Oddly enough,” he said, “if I hadn’t been an officer I might not have lost it. The surgeons always treated the officers first, then the enlisted men. But the field hospitals were so bloody and dirty, often the privates who were just left alone out in the ambulance wagons did better.”
Thunder rumbled far off in the distance, but still strong enough to make the barn roof shake, and a three-second gust of wind sent a new cascade of water pouring down past the door. Her hair was wet and long and the scent of it reached him even in the darkness. He felt his blood pound in his veins like a drum. He felt rather than saw Elizabeth stretch out a tentative hand and touch the cuff of the empty sleeve that hung from his left shoulder. “In Chicago,” she said, “I was afraid you would think I didn’t come to the park because of this.”
“No.”
She touched his shoulder, then the flat plane of his chest. Her fingers found a button, skin. The wick of the lantern flared in a sudden draft, and light seemed to blow hard against the glass, the walls. Her face drifted behind a veil of shadows. He saw the curved outlines of her cheek, throat, white on black. He bent forward and kissed her lips. He murmured in French, English; cursed in French the acreage of clothes a fashionable lady wore. “Hold this,” she giggled, “and this.” The wet cloth fell away from her breasts in a sweet whisper. When he kissed her nipples the wind groaned. When he touched her waist the wind said his name, and then light and shadow arched their backs and turned together. His hand touched her thigh and parted a sea of petticoats, stroking gently upward till he reached bare flesh, and he thought as she held out her arms and drew him in that poor befuddled Actaeon himself never went to his doom with such a cry of pleasure.
AFTERWARDS THEY SAT SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE BLANKET around their shoulders and watched the chill rain as it pelted the grass and weeds outside.
“Now a better planner, of course,” Trist said, pulling her closer, “a French lover would have had a bottle of wine and a basket of food stashed away in the straw.”
She shook her head and smiled. “No wine, thank you very much, monsieur.” She used one finger to trace the outline of his jaw. At the door of the barn a brown-and-white rabbit hopped into the light and stood on its back legs. “I see enough,” she said in a faintly weary tone, “of bottles of wine and liquor.”
“Senator Don.”
“Senator Don,” she agreed softly. “The Pennsylvanian sponge.” She let her finger drift down his jaw to the underside of his chin; scratched a bristle of beard where the razor had missed. “I have never,” she said, “understood men.” She shifted under the blanket and brought her little gold watch out to see. Trist read it over her shoulder. Half past four. The rain was lighter now. The wind had almost stopped. “I don’t suppose,” Elizabeth said as she stood up, “that Clover Adams or Emily Beale has told you the scandalous story that I was once engaged to somebody else, secretly, before the ever-thirsty Senator.”
Trist watched her reach behind her back to do something complex and sibylline with hooks and clasps. “Not a word.”
“His name was Joe Russell, and I was seventeen and he was twenty, and I was about as desperately in love as a girl could be, and we plighted our troth in a rather sweet and innocent Ohio way, and then my mother and father went—what would be the French expression for stark-staring-out-of-their-heads with puritan horror?”
“You would have to use English.”
“Yes. They said Joe Russell drank and he wouldn’t be a suitable husband, and besides—and here we came to the point—he was as poor as a church mouse and likely to stay that way.”
“Whereas the Senator—”
“My uncle John Sherman already had his eye on the Senator. He was a widower. He had older children, but the famous Maudie was still just a baby. He had an enormous fortune. The family controls Pennsylvania politics and Uncle John had thought of that too—they laid down the law to me in Ohio and then shipped me off to Washington for a season of dancing and twirling in front of the gentleman’s eyes—I felt like a slave girl at a genteel auction, or a sacrificial lamb—and before very long we were engaged and married and the lamb was in the Senator’s private railroad car on our first night of wedded bliss, and of course he staggered in drunk and heavy and—” She turned swiftly and kissed him, full on the lips. “He was not a French lover,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I cried all day before the wedding, and my mother came in and slapped my face. The only one ever on my side was Uncle Cump. I remember at a reception in Washington—it was at General Beale’s house, Decatur House—and I was standing with a group of blighted Camerons and Uncle Cump came striding through the door in his full-dress general’s uniform, looking as angry as Mars, and he walked right up to me without speaking to anybody else at all, and he glowered left and right at all the Camerons and said in a voice you could hear across the street, ‘Permit me to say, my dear, that I wholly disapprove!’ Then he spun on his heel and marched out again.”
At the door of the barn they stopped and she held out her palm to test the rain. “When we get to the Fredericksburg station,” she said briskly, “tell them we stayed in a farmer’s house with his wife and family.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE RABBIT IN THE BARN PUT TRIST IN MIND OF AN EPISODE the autumn before the Wilderness—he couldn’t remember the date or th
e place exactly, somewhere in late ’63 along the Maryland border, a pitched battle for a field and a hill. There were five or six infantry regiments on each side, two or three of them with heavy artillery attached, and the noise of the cannons and muskets was, as always, terrifying, apocalyptic. The ground and trees shook, and at eye level the air itself seemed to burst into flames, catch fire, and turn into smoke—and then, suddenly, unbelievably, out of the burrows hidden beneath the trampled grass and along the roadside, hundreds and hundreds of tiny rabbits came running and hopping across the battlefield, crazed with fright. And more amazing still, they ran for protection, not to the woods or the road, but directly toward the soldiers. Trist and his men were lying down on the hump of a cleared ridge, firing at dug-in Rebels seventy yards away, and the rabbits simply swarmed all over them and huddled under their legs and arms, nestled trembling in their coat flaps, pockets, against their belts and under their chins. For five or ten minutes at least the troops on both sides held their fire and watched, or stroked the rabbits’ ears and bellies, and comforted them. Finally some idiot in one regiment or another began to fire again, and everything reexploded back to normal.
First person.
Trist put down his pen and read his paragraph over; then folded it once with his elbow and placed it in his thick manuscript notebook. When the knock on the door sounded, he had already drawn out another sheet of paper and picked up his pen, and Elizabeth Cameron, closing the door quickly behind her, leaned her back against it, cocked her head in her new spring bonnet, and smiled.
“A writer not tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth,” she teased. “Stop the presses.”
She pulled off the floppy bonnet with an easy, practiced motion and tossed it to the floor as she crossed the room, and together they swayed, spun, fell laughing onto the bed. She was, in Washington, in the more or less civilized setting of his rented room, with real mattress, pillows, clean sheets, even more uninhibited a lover than before. She pushed him aside and sat up, then unfastened catches front and rear, twisted, wriggled her dress from her shoulders and rolled under the covers. When she sat astride him and lowered her breast to his mouth she murmured “Sweet, sweet” and then “yes” and at the last moment, shuddering, “Love, love, love.”
“A noisy girl,” she said later, holding the sheets demurely to her chin.
Trist poured tea from the little pot he kept on a kerosene burner (strictly illegal) and carried her cup back to bed.
“It’s your Sherman side. The wild woman of Wyoming.”
“Say that three times,” she said and kissed him. While he was back at the burner pouring a second cup for himself, she added, “My Uncle Cump is notorious that way, you know.”
“I drink more tea in Washington,” Trist told her, “than I ever do in London.”
“Uncle Cump has dozens of women, in towns all over the country. They write him notes at his hotel after he gives a speech, and they pursue him like demon lovers—one of them’s a sculptress right here in Washington—that’s where he went after Mrs. Adams’s dinner—and I think the old-time generals actually trade the ladies around among themselves, even with the Confederates. After all, they all went to West Point together, a thousand years ago.”
“Your Uncle Cump is married,” Trist said as he sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Ah.”
“And about as inconspicuous as a comet.”
“Ah again.” She let the sheet drop a few inches, leaned forward. Her fingers traced a slow line from his naked stomach to the top of his thigh; lower. “We are not alone, Mr. Trist,” she whispered.
At ten minutes to five she looked at her watch, gave a little yelp, and hurried out of the bed. “Dinner at Mrs. Adams’s house,” she said, gathering dress, bonnet, shoes, white silk items he couldn’t quite, from the bed, classify or describe. “A command appearance, because their famous Boston architect is here this week and Clover means to have him show the plans and a wooden model and, if the weather holds take us over the site. ‘My modest mausoleum,’ she calls it. So there’ll be Clover, Henry, the Beales, the Bancrofts, two or three of their tame Senators.”
“You will charm them with your hat.” Trist stretched his arm and placed the bonnet upside down on her hair. She tugged the laces together under her chin, stared at him, then made a face and crossed her eyes.
At the door she stood in front of the mirror and smoothed her skirt.
Trist touched her cheek gently. “In Chicago,” he said, “you were so fearful.”
She looked down at her shoes, up at the mirror. “That was three years ago,” she said in the brisk voice he had heard before. She smoothed her skirt again. “And I’m still fearful.”
“We’re very careful.”
She studied her mouth in the mirror; rubbed a spot on her cheek. “When he has enough whiskey in him, my husband is a very jealous man. He hates it when I have lunch with any of the Sherman men. Or tea with Henry Adams.”
“And me?”
She stood back from the mirror and tied the laces of her bonnet in a quick, decisive bow. “I don’t think he sees you,” she replied, “actually. You’re not wealthy, you don’t have a house or a carriage or belong to a club or own a state, you don’t write books he would ever read.”
“We live in different worlds,” Trist said, and hated the stiffness in his own voice, but Elizabeth seemed scarcely to hear.
“Yes,” she said, and opened the door. “Yes.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
ELIZABETH CAMERON WAS NEVER, EVER GOING TO CHANGE.
This was Emily Beale’s view, and Emily Beale was twenty-one years old—almost twenty-two—and experienced in the ways of the world.
She watched Mr. Trist balance his teacup and saucer with his sad one hand and listen, nodding, to Clover Adams’s description of the recent “Architectural Visitation” and all its delays and outrages. On the other side of the Adamses’ parlor Henry and Elizabeth sat chatting cozily side by side on the sofa; but Elizabeth’s eye kept straying to Trist, from time to time Elizabeth turned or twisted her shoulders on the sofa almost as if to show her torso and present herself.
In Paris two years earlier, Emily knew, Elizabeth had gotten herself into a peck of trouble. It was one thing to be madly flirtatious in Washington, where the men lived just for politics. But in Paris, while Senator Don was travelling around Europe on government business, Elizabeth had beguiled a Russian prince-in-exile named Orloff, who invited her one day to a rendezvous in a private room in the rue Royale, and when Elizabeth had refused to grant what Emily’s mother always called “the last favor,” Orloff had flung her into the corridor half naked, and it had taken the embassy itself to hush up the scandal, from the French and Senator Don. Elizabeth needed men, Emily thought, as Elizabeth gazed an instant too long at Mr. Trist, the way a cat needed birds. But Elizabeth needed safety and social position—and money—even more, and that was something else that wouldn’t change.
“Emily, dear, come back to earth.” Clover Adams put her cup on the table and beckoned Emily to follow her into the “studio.” With a last glance at Henry and Elizabeth, curled up now on the sofa like a pair of gossiping sisters, he carefully braced his one hand on the chair arm and stood. Poor, Emily thought, Mr. Trist.
The “studio” was, in fact, only a kind of glorified storage room for Clover’s chemicals and cameras—the new house, whose foundations they could see through the window, bright and cheerful in the April sunshine, would have a special room designed just for photography. Some of her less elaborate equipment, Clover explained to the two of them, she kept upstairs in her bedroom, the rest down here. She pulled out albums and folders from a set of overcrowded shelves as fast as her hands could fly. There was a notebook in which she wrote, in a large and loopy hard-to-read script, the particulars for each photograph she had taken since 1882: date, subject, exposure, light conditions, chemicals mixed for development. She riffled its pages and thrust it back. There was another notebook of short “aesthe
tic” observations—the nature of shadows, the difficulty with indoor photography—and there were, of course, wrapped individually in clean white tissue paper, like big white teeth, Clover said, the photographs themselves.
The first that she handed to Trist was of her parents-in-law in Massachusetts, the redoubtable Charles Francis and Abigail Adams, staring at the camera (or photographer, Trist thought) with ill-concealed dislike.
“This is my father,” she said, and unwrapped a portrait of an elderly man in a derby hat and handsomely tailored country coat and trousers, sitting on a carriage behind a horse.
“A doctor,” Emily Beale remarked, in the wary voice, Trist thought, of one much acquainted with doctors.
“An ophthalmologist, in fact.” Clover took back the photograph and studied it a moment before rewrapping. “He was a volunteer surgeon at Gettysburg. He wrote me wonderful letters about the troops when he was caring for them—I was still at Professor Agassiz’s school for girls in Cambridge—but that was the first time he had actually practiced medicine since my mother’s death. He went out of sheer duty and humanity. She died of tuberculosis, you know; I was only five. Then her mother died not long after that, and my Aunt Sturgis before I was twelve, and my Uncle Hooper—sometimes I think, my dear Emily, Boston is just one big charnel house. Henry and I have made up our minds that when we die we’ll be buried right here and not shipped back to Boston like canned terrapin.”
Trist guessed that Emily might profit from a change of topic. He reached for a photograph.
“That is our Neo-Agnostic Architect Richardson on an earlier visit, Mr. Trist. You see the monk’s cowl he wears, I don’t exaggerate.”
Emily had rather boldly unwrapped the photograph of Dr. Hooper again. “You do look alike, you two,” she said wistfully. General Beale was a tall, strapping man, athletic of build, square of shoulder; he didn’t in the least resemble his now invalid daughter.