The Black Swan

by Day Taylor

  Without words he held his daughter. His voice was thick and choked. "I'm an old fool, Dulcie Jeannette. He's your man. Can you forgive me?"

  Jem had changed. Time and worry and the war had robbed him of vitality. Even his hair was tempered with gray. Missing from his eyes was the warm, abiding pride for his dream, Mossrose. She saw the deep sorrow and fear that he'd lost the love of his daughter. And Dulcie knew

  that he loved her more than his own life. Whatever he had said or done in the past, he'd done thinking to protect her from the heartbreak that was to come anyway.

  "Daddy, there's nothin' to forgive. That's what Adam said to me, and I'm goin' to believe it. We're goin' to start all over—all of us. Oh, Daddy, a whole new world is beginnin' for me! I don't ever want to look back. I love you now. I'll love you always!"

  During the following days Dulcie felt herself surrounded by the love of Adam's family and her own. Though she basked in it like a sun-starved flower, it made her sad as well. Adam had said they would begin again and never look back. With him she did that. He made it easy for her. There ■ wasn't a moment when she couldn't feel or be aware of his love. He left notes on her pillow. She found flowers beside her plate at the breakfast table. He brought her small gifts explicit in their sentiment. His eyes followed her into and out of a room. His hands spoke to her whenever he touched her. In his every move he made her know he loved her. He made the future promise a lifetime of starlit nights and soft hours of making love and long days of being loved.

  But he couldn't stop her from questioning. Adam had found a way to close the door of the past, but she hadn't. In the beginning she thought it was because Adam was stronger than she. He always had been. When she had struggled and compromised herself merely to survive, he had been able to keep looking ahead, to see farther than the boundaries of himself. Adam always had a capacity to see and feel beyond himself, that she never had. Humbly she followed his lead and obeyed him, never looking back, never referring to what had happened to them, and never thinking the name of Edmund Revanche.

  They had been together only two weeks when Dulcie became convinced that there would be no future unless she and Adam lived to themselves and found their way back through the past.

  She broached the question coyly, waiting until she was snugly curled in the curve of his body in front of the fire. "Wouldn't it be marvelous if we had a house of our own? A yard that was ours—furniture, walls, floors all ours?"

  "We will someday."

  Dulcie feigned a carefree attitude she didn't feel. "Why

  wait for someday? Everybody in New York moves in the spring. Mrs. Burris says it's a near ritual, the rite of a New York spring. People begin now to hunt for new places, then on May first the whole city packs up and everybody trades houses. Let's be a part of it, Adam!"

  Frowning, he said, "You mean it." He got up, busying himself with the first papers he could lay hands on. "We have a perfectly satisfactory arrangement here."

  "Really, Adam! I'm not one of your stuffy clients, that you should talk to me that way. Won't you even consider it?"

  "I see no reason to uproot ourselves because you want to be out on the streets with the rest of the city on May first."

  Dulcie bit her lip, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. "You're bein' umreasonable. I would not move simply to be a part of the crowd. We need to have a home. Some place that says Adam and Dulcie live here. I love your mother, and Rod likes havin' us here, but it is their home, not ours."

  "This isn't something I want to discuss, Dulcie."

  "Do you have some good reason for not wantin' to move?"

  "We'll only remain in New York as long as it takes you to get well."

  "I'm not sick!"

  "I've said all I'm going to say." He picked up his coat "I'll be back later."

  "Where are you going?"

  "For a walk. I'd ask you to come, but you tire too easily," he said nastily and left the room.

  Dulcie made ready to throw the pillow after him, then let it fall. They were going to find a house. She would see that they did. Adam simply would not risk trying to understand the painful past year and a half. He was hiding as surely as if he had disappeared into his beloved swamp. Yet, neither she nor Adam could long endure the pretend world of no disharmony he was trying to create. She might lose him again if she pressed him. She would lose him for certain if she did not.

  Dulcie feigned sleep when he returned. She ignored the caress along the line of her hip as he slid under the blankets. She made no response to the tickling of his breath as he kissed her neck and ear.

  All the next week, in every way he could devise, he apologized. Dulcie accepted them all and did not mention the house. She counted on his sensitivity. And she was proved correct. Adam sensed that no matter what he did or how yielding Dulcie became, there remained between them the barrier of the house.

  He gave in with better grace than she expected, but it also became another thing they weren't to mention again. He was totally unwilling to give importance to anything that showed tension between them. He ignored that side of their life as though it didn't exist.

  Jauntily he brought her flowers, bowing low before her. "Madame, would you take a carriage ride with a gentleman who adores you?"

  He took her to see several houses that were for sale and others that were for rent. They saw nothing that satisfied them. Dulcie was ready to believe they never would.

  New York's traditional moving day came and went. She and Adam saw it only as amused spectators. It had been a day Dulcie would remember, for they had walked the streets, gawking at the immense stretches of storefront and cobblestone. People hurried in New York. They hardly had time to take a deep breath, so busy were they keeping up with the tempo of the city. The flurrying bustle to get ahead, to move from one place to another without time to stop along the way to enjoy the day, grated on Adam. She had never known him to judge people or criticize, but of late he frequently complained of this client or that. He, too, hurried more and enjoyed less what he was doing. The small things collected, and each day Dulcie felt greater urgency to thrash out the problems that stood untended between them.

  Not until the end of May did any house satisfy them both. Through Mrs. Burris's special fondness for Dulcie, they found a furnished ten-room brownstone. Mrs. Burris helped them arrange a lease, smoothing the way so that Dulcie felt as though she were living in a hotel again. Even the servants went with the house. The arrangement was less than she'd hoped, but it pleased Adam, particularly because it was not permanent.

  Once they had moved into the house and properly christened it with a party, to which they invited Dulcie's family and Adam's, they settled into a routine. Adam made a great show of the Yankee clothing he had had made

  for himself. He was the prosperous young businessman. Disturbed, Dulcie watched him set up a grinding, unnatural regularity to his movements. He went to the office at a particular time each day and returned home at a precise time each night. His rigidity lent an air of importance otherwise lacking in his way of life.

  In her own way Dulcie fell into the same trap, filling her days with charity work, needlessly doing her own shopping and making certain their evenings were crowded with social events. Both of them were standing still at a very great rate of speed.

  Dulcie had heard Mad and Patricia speak of the deplorable conditions at the Colored Orphan Asylum. Perhaps as a kind of penance she chose that as her particular charity. Though it was odious and exhausting work, it became the one thoroughly satisfying part of her life.

  Small dark faces looked appealingly to her for aid and comfort. It was the closest she could get to "home'* in the North. And it was there, away from him, surrounded by a sea of black-skinned children that she felt closest to Adam. It hardly made sense to her. Why should a bunch of pickaninnies be able to give her a sense of complete loving that sleeping beside him could not?

  She didn't have many answers, but she clung to the few instinctive truths she had,
trying to sort out where her hopeful imagination ended and truth began. Adam sometimes chose to leave the office early on the days she worked at the orphanage. His visits to meet her were not regular, and she couldn't count on his coming, but he did it often enough for her to know there was something particular that drew him. And when he did come, he was a different man.

  He strode through the grounds with a pack of prancing, chattering children at his heels, every inch the sea captain as he delighted them with tales of frightful voyages and stories of their people making free.

  Yet, he wouldn't talk to her about what drew him. He refused to admit that it was more than a visit to the orphanage for her sake. He talked to her of nothing of importance. With growing severity, he was closing Dulcie out of his inner life. He had thrown up a glass wall, and though she could see through it, she couldn't penetrate it.

  Often they joined the parade of Sunday strollers along Fifth Avenue. The avenue was a stage upon which New York's changing character was displayed. Bold new edi-

  faces occupied the spaces where beautiful old homes had been torn down to make way for the march of commerce. Many of the elite had moved farther uptown, developing the city as they ran from its commercial heart. New department stores crowded against old mansions where die-hards lived in crumbling majesty, hanging on to the simple, elegant life of a Dutch city that had long since vanished.

  New York was the North. It pulsated and shimmered, its heart a ticker tape, its limbs long roads of cement and stone, its tongue that of the marketplace.

  In small green patches of yard boxed-in May flowers struggled to bloom among iron-front buildings and miles of paved land, Bridlewreath spirea drooped in thick, foamy lace, dragged down by the weight of its own bloom into the uncleaned streets. The tulips had come and gone, their leaves already braided by hired gardeners, A few tenacious crocuses smiled skyward. Robins hopped across cobblestone to the small grassy patches, cocking an ear for worms in the soil left wet by last night's rain.

  But Adam scarcely noticed. He was restless, unable to fit himself into the Sunday ritual of a city that had already lost touch with the earth on which it sat. Thoughts of other places and times tormented him. Tears threatened as Dulcie remembered the endless expanse of green trees and white cotton fields on the red earth of Mossrose.

  Quickly Adam hailed a carriage. "Rod's having a get-together to introduce Ma to some friends she hasn't met. We might as well take part in the festivities. Ma doesn't know it, but this could go on for years. Rod knows everyone who ever lived in New York."

  Dulcie smiled. "I think it's nice. He's proud of her, always wantin' to show her off."

  Adam squeezed her arm. "Today Rod and I will show our women off together."

  The day was spent in being exhaustingly friendly to innumerable strangers and acquaintances. She and Adam had not spent a moment alone since the aborted walk on Fifth Avenue. There seldom was a time when they were alone, and when those moments did come, Dulcie found herself too tired to take advantage of them.

  She was exhausted when they returned home, and fiercely determined to hide her weariness from him. Yet,

  when he sent her upstairs with a peck on the cheek and a murmured excuse about business that waited, she did not resist.

  Dulcie propped herself up in bed and opened the book she'd been trying to read for the last week. She wanted to be awake when Adam came upstairs. He wouldn't bother her if he thought she was asleep. He was so considerate of her need to recover that she wanted to scream at him, "Did you think how much you hold me back by tell in' me I'm too tired or that I'll make myself sick again? I can't fight both of us! Let me decide when I'm too tired and when I'm not! I'm fine! I'm fine!"

  She wasn't fine, but she reasoned she would never be well if she didn't keep trying. So, she pushed a little harder each day, and each day concerns for her health were shoved into those dark recesses that hid things the Tremains no longer talked about—Andros and Justin Gilmartin and Mam'bo Luz and Edmund Revanche, a cache of unforgiven sms.

  Dulcie pulled herself away from the edge of those forbidden thoughts to look up and smile as Adam entered. "Did you finish your work?"

  "Mr. Bailey won't be happy, but all his bills and information are in order. Shippers are charging whatever they damned well please these days. If that damn fool thinks his wife can't live without a marble floor for her ballroom in the middle of a war, then he should expect to pay many times its value."

  "I do believe, Captain Tremain, that you do not favor the estimable Mr. Bailey."

  "As far as he's concerned, there is no war! All he thinks of is that damned monstrosity of a house he's building in the country. Marble floors! Why the hell does he need a marble floor? Why take a whole ship to bring a dance floor to the North? That ship—"

  "If you feel that way, why don't you do somethin',about it? Tell the man what you believe."

  "What good will it do? WiU it stop the South from being crushed? Will it bring back the burned fields and the ruined cities? The dead are dead, Dulcie. Talk won't revive them." He sighed and flopped back on the bed, turning so that she would rub his back. "I don't suppose Mr. Bailey's marble floor will do any harm either."

  "Perhaps it will, and that's what's botherin' you," she said

  hesitantly. "Perhaps any idle ship makes a difference to the South."

  "One ship makes no difference. A flotilla wouldn't help. The South can't hold out much longer. You read Ben's last letter. The blockade is tighter than ever. We lost six runners in the first nine days of February this year. It used to be a good pilot could run through those Yankee cruisers with no more than a fast rowboat."

  Dulcie's hand massaging his back faltered. Why was she trying to make him return to blockade running, when everything he said told her his chances of being captured or killed were greater than his chances of success? "I'm glad you're here, safe and beside me."

  His voice rumbled on. "Last month the Confederate Government passed an act prohibiting the importation of civilian luxuries. The runners can't carry anything that isn't necessary or of common use. Runners aren't men who like being told what they can do. Davis also said that a full half the cargo space must be Confederate freight at a fixed price, all to be paid off in cotton. Between the blockade and the restrictions, a lot of men won't run it anymore. The greatest profit has always been in civilian goods."

  "But you've always said the runners are a dedicated lot. They won't quit now that the South needs them more than ever."

  "It was easy to be an idealist at the beginning of the war, Dulcie. There was money to be made, and the South was bursting with life, a man with financing could be anything he wished. Many thought they'd return after the war and live like kings. But it's all changed. There is no South, not as we knew it. The war can't be won now. And once a man's made his fortune, more money is hardly incentive to take the risks he must now take. A dead man can't spend much. I wouldn't do it for the money. Ben doesn't."

  "But you would do it for the South."

  "The South is dying. Blockade running doesn't help as much as it used to. A good portion of what's brought in never reaches the Confederate soldier. Sheridan and Grant and Sherman destroy in a week what it would take Ben and me a year to haul in."

  "Well, somethin' must be done!" she said shrilly.

  "What? It becomes impossible to take them everything they need. Arms, equipment, clothing, food, drugs, the list is without end."

  "But, Adam, they are our people! Your family— Mammy, Leona and Garrett, and Angela are there—and my cousins. What will happen to them?"

  He said nothing.

  Dulcie curled her body to fit his. "Maybe we're just feelin' dire tonight. It can't be that bad. Ben hasn't stopped tryin'. As long as there are men like you and Ben, the South will get along. We have spirit. We have a cause worth fightin' for. We have faith and the land and—"

  "All gone—or going. The land is burned and fallow, and the spirit is in the same tatters as our uniforms. The Nor
th marches proudly against a land of ashes and rags."

  His bitterness was overwhelming.

  June saw New York sweltering in hot, humid weather. The city was sweating, dusty, and oppressive. The weather reminded Dulcie of the South or Nassau, but there wasn't beauty in New York. There wasn't the easy grace of those lost southern days, nor the boistrous cameraderie of the last days of Nassau. She longed for Nassau so often, she felt she had divined Ben's letter.

  Dulcie sat on the arm of Adam's chair peering over his shoulder as he read. Ben chronicled a slapstick run into Wilmington. It was amusing, but there was nothing of substance, for Ben and Adam had lost their common ground. Unwritten but easy to read was Ben's hope that Adam would return to the sea and Nassau. Each letter brought home with galling clarity the emptiness of Adam's life in New York. He criticized the Southern sympathizers living in New York, men who bemoaned the heartrending breakup of the Great Cause, while secretly fondling money belts bulging with their war profits.

  Yet, deep within, he knew he was the greatest hypocrite of them all. He had the power to do something, and he did nothing. He went from one mindless social function to another, watched endless plays, savored French brandies, dressed his wife in the finest fashion, while Ben carried medicine, munitions and food to those who fought for his homeland. They were being crushed. The South was already in its death throes, writhing in the agonies of inevitable defeat, being laid open to the onslaught of vengeance and hatred that was sure to follow a bitter war. But Adam Tremain sat warm and useless in the North, a missing pall-

  bearer at the funeral of the land he had always loved and had pledged himself to serve.

  The more fiercely he felt his abandonment, the more precarious became Adam's and Dulcie's hold on their marriage. They slept touching each other, they made love with an undertone of desperation, trying by sheer physical contact to repair a marriage endangered because neither of them could open his heart for the other to see.