A Passionate Girl (46 page)

“Why do you find fault with your father for all this? Others say these things.”

“You don't understand,” he said. “You're a foreigner. Are you really from Ireland? You don't talk like Hannah and Kate and the other girls.”

“I have more education,” I said, “so my way of speaking is closer to the English.”

“You're Protestant. They're Catholic.”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Of course. Do you?”

“No.”

Here was precocity beyond my imagination. He really meant it.

“Why do you say such a thing?”

“If God is good, why did He kill my Uncle Paul and not my father? He made Paul go to war. He killed thousands of people. He even killed—”

He paused and his face flushed. It was the first time I had seen him show emotion. “Who? What were you about to say?”

“Nothing.”

He rearranged his soldiers for another battle. “What one is this?” I asked.

“Chancellorsville,” he said. “There is Stonewall Jackson's men.” He pointed to one body of gray-coated soldiers. “They're coming through the woods. The Union Army doesn't know they're so close. They attack! It's a slaughter!” He swept down ranks of blue-clad soldiers. “The whole Union Army is being routed, until they reach Father's division. One regiment breaks, the division starts to panic. The color sergeant starts running with the flag. Father picks up a gun. Blam! He shoots him dead. He catches the flag before it falls and leads them back to the battle line. A bullet hits him in the face. He ignores it. They fight like madmen and Jackson's men are stopped. The Union Army is saved.”

Rawdon's eyes were bright like a patient with a fever. He was as violently excited as a soldier in the very battle.

“How do you know so much? Did your father tell you all this?”

“No. I have a scrapbook. But you can't see it. No one can see it. Father would make me burn it.”

“Why?”

“You're a foreigner. You wouldn't understand.”

“But I want to understand. I'm here to become an American. If you don't let me share such things we shall never be friends. I mean it sincerely when I say I want to be your friend.”

He looked away from me, down at his soldiers, for a moment. “No,” he said. “You'll show it to him.”

“You've hurt my feelings,” I said, “to accuse me of having such a low idea of friendship.”

He shook his head. I saw it was too soon and did not press him. Jackson came by and told us dinner would be served at seven. Mrs. Kent informed me that George was calling for his promised story. I told Rawdon to dress and filled George's little head with one of the legends of Lake Fergus. I left him humming himself to sleep with
suantraighe
, Fer Fi's magic slumber music.

I had thought Mrs. Stapleton might send for me before dinner, but she seemed content to meet me at the table. What a formidable woman she must have been in her time. Her face was as imposing as her son's, in another way. It was wide and strong-boned, with a full sensual mouth. Were it not for a graceful, very feminine nose, it might have been a man's face. Her large eyes must once have been luminous and striking. Now they were clouded by age and grief.

“How do you do,” she said in a rather chilly way when her son introduced me. “Jonathan tells me you have been trained in London.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you enjoy your time there?”

“To tell you the truth, I saw little of it,” I said. “The lady who ran the school I attended would not let us go far alone. She said it was unsuitable for young ladies to go about London.”

“Yes, I suppose she was right,” Mrs. Stapleton said. She sighed. “How I long to ride along Pall Mall again. I sometimes think a single day of it would restore my spirits.”

“There's no reason in the world for you not to go and try it, Mother,” Jonathan said.

“You may think so, Jonathan,” she said, “but I can't allow your sons to grow up with army manners or worse. They need a woman's influence.”

“Precisely why I've hired Miss Stark,” he replied.

“You said that when you hired Miss Hardy, but she didn't stay long.”

That was the end of family conversation for some time. There was no sound but the click of knives and forks on the gold-rimmed china. The food was all cold, sensible in such hot weather—largely beef, ham, salad, and bread. It was served by one of the maids under Jackson's supervision. The drink was cold cider. I held my tongue, feeling it was hardly my part to lead the conversation. But as the silence deepened with the twilight, I began to realize that none of the Stapletons was going to speak another word. Rawdon busied himself with several helpings. Mrs. Stapleton ate moderately, while her son Jonathan barely touched his food.

“Do you wish me to begin instructing Master Rawdon in French?” I finally asked.

“As soon as possible,” the general said. “I also want you to select some good histories of England and France, and some essays and novels—Lamb, Dickens, and the like—for him to read. His mind is full of nothing but rubbish from newspapers.”

“I like newspapers,” Rawdon said. “They tell you the truth.”

“For every inch of truth in a newspaper, there's a yard of lies,” Jonathan Stapleton snapped. Turning back to me, he added, “I've hired a young engineer from the city to tutor him three hours a day in mathematics and natural science. In the four years I was away, his mother and grandmother left him at the mercy of the public school. I fear his mind may be too rotten to rescue, but we must make the attempt.”

This was a shocking thing to say about an eleven-year-old boy—especially to his face. I thought Jonathan Stapleton's mother would rebuke him. Instead, she sharply informed Rawdon that he was using his dessert fork for his main course. She ordered Jackson to take it away from him and replace it with a fresh one. “I hope you'll concentrate on making this young man a gentleman,” she said. “He persists in resisting me. Don't despair. His father and his uncles were the same way when they were his age.”

For a moment her face softened. “Those were my happiest years, when the boys were growing up,” she said. “Did I tell you I dreamt of Paul last night, Jonathan?”

He was staring blankly past us into some shadows in the corner of the room. His mind was far away from us.

“Jonathan.”

“Yes, Mother?”

“I dreamt of Paul last night,” she said. “He was about Rawdie's age. At first I was shocked. He held out his hands to me, and they seemed covered with blood. His mouth, his chin, was the same way. Then I realized he'd been out picking raspberries. He smiled and showed me his basket. It was full of berries. He loved to scare me with that kind of joke.”

“I wish you'd let me go to the cemetery with Grandmother,” Rawdon said. “I'd like to say a prayer for Uncle Charles and Uncle Paul.”

“Say it tonight, right here. You can pray anywhere,” his father replied.

“Why does Grandmother go every day?”

“She worries about the flowers on their graves.”

“Do people in heaven know what we do for them?”

A nerve began twitching in Jonathan Stapleton's bullet-scarred cheek. “Do you believe Uncle Charles and Uncle Paul are in heaven?” Rawdon asked.

Jonathan Stapleton flung the contents of his cider glass in Rawdon's face. “How dare you even ask such a question?” he roared. Whirling to me, he said, “Get him out of here.”

“Jonathan,” Mrs. Stapleton cried. “You're impossible. How can you ever hope to teach your son manners? I'll no longer eat at the same table with you.” She flung down her napkin and stalked from the room.

I sat paralyzed. I saw triumph glittering in Rawdon's eyes. He made no move to wipe the cider from his face or shirt.

Jonathan glared after his mother, then whirled back to me. “Did you hear what I said? Get him out of here.”

“Come, Rawdon,” I said, rushing around to his side of the table. I hurriedly wiped at the cider and pulled him toward the door. He stood up, shook his arm free of my hand, and said, “I don't think you believe they're in heaven, Father.”

I remembered what Rawdon had said to me earlier about not believing in God. This conversation with his father had been malice from start to finish. I gazed at Jonathan Stapleton's pale, twitching face and saw myself there, as in a mirror, tormented by death's irrevocable power and shorn of consolation. Where a moment before I had been full of outrage and detestation, I felt a rush of sympathy.

That sympathy, the memory of it, was what enabled me to play a part in the war between Rawdon and his father. I suspect that the previous governess had swung from one extreme to the other. She had begun by condemning Rawdon for his seeming hatred of his father and ended by condemning Jonathan Stapleton for the intemperate words and acts that virtually justified Rawdon's attitude. My advantage, if it can be called that, was my sympathy, which became a small flickering light that led me into the darkness of the father's inner life.

At first I welcomed the challenge as an escape from my own troubled past. I saw myself as beginning a new American life here, within this family with its deep roots in America's past. I learned all I could about them and about the city in which they lived. I made the butler, Jackson, and young Rawdon my teachers. It was an excellent way to draw Rawdon's attention from the troubled present. He took me on long walks to show me the houses of their numerous relatives along the boulevard, which was called Hamilton Parkway. He showed me maps of the family railroad, which spanned the state. He took me down to the cotton mills on the river, built before the war under the direction of Jonathan Stapleton's late father, Senator George Stapleton.

I took special interest in what Rawdon had to tell me about the portraits of previous Stapletons that hung on the walls of Bowood, in particular his great-great-grandfather, who had been a member of the Continental Congress and a leader of the American Revolution in New Jersey. Rawdon's favorite was a younger man, a cousin named Kemble Stapleton, who had died in a charge against an enemy fort toward the end of the Revolution. Alas, even here Rawdon found cause to criticize his father. “He was a real hero,” he said, gazing at Kemble's thin, intense face in the portrait. “He made the charge himself. He didn't order other men to do it for him.”

I soon grasped that the Stapletons were as wealthy as any New York tycoon and far more powerful. But they preferred to exercise their power largely within the state of New Jersey. It was a revelation to me, the distinctiveness of an American state, when seen with an insider's eyes. I had been in the habit of lumping them generally into the South and North, or New England and Midwest, with Tennessee, for obvious personal reasons, an anomaly.

What brought this distinctiveness home with special force to me was Rawdon's scrapbook of the Civil War. A month to the day after my arrival, he offered to show it to me. It was, I knew, part of his campaign to win me to his side of the quarrel with his father, but it was also an acknowledgment that I had made some progress in my efforts to become his friend.

The scrapbook was a collection of stories and articles from the local newspapers. I was staggered to discover how violently people in New Jersey had opposed the Civil War, especially in the city of Hamilton. General Jonathan Stapleton had been repeatedly denounced for his active support of it. He was called a traitor to the Constitution and to the Democratic Party, which his family had long led. When the casualty lists lengthened, someone fastened the name “Butcher” on him.

The scrapbook was both disturbing and pathetic. It was an attempt by a lonely, confused boy to understand the mortal struggle that was tearing his nation and his family apart. It was both a reaching out to a lost father and an indictment of him. I longed to show it to Jonathan Stapleton, but it was impossible given the disordered state of his nerves.

For an entire month I scarcely saw him. He immured himself in his room for days at a time, never seeing anyone but little George, whom he ordered sent to him each day for an hour or so. He issued strict orders, through Jackson, to keep the two boys apart. He seemed to regard Rawdon as infected by some contagious moral disease from which he was determined to save George.

Mrs. Stapleton continued to take George with her on her daily visits to the cemetery. At first I regarded her with pity. She was a woman who had lost her husband and two sons in the space of six horrendous years. But as I got to know her better—she returned to the dining room in spite of her declaration the night Rawdon got cider flung in his face—I began to change my mind. She was a formidable woman, with strong opinions about American politics. She detested New England abolitionists and blamed the war on them and the “gullible” in other states who followed them. This was hardly an endorsement of her older son's politics. She did not lecture Jonathan. It was unnecessary. He was visibly suffering from the aftereffects of four years on the battlefields. Mrs. Stapleton seemed to take a morbid satisfaction in his state of mind. More to the point, she made no attempt to correct Rawdon's opinion of his father.

The Stapleton family's woes were hardly therapeutic for my own personal sorrows. I found myself waking in the middle of the night to stare into the darkness, wondering if there was any hope for me. At other times I awoke from a recurring bad dream. I saw Michael's face with the film of water on it. Sometimes he was in Lake Fergus and I could see our family farm in the distance. At other times he was in the East River. I stood at the end of the pier, with New York looming behind me.

One night toward the end of September, when the summer's heat had abated and nothing prevented me from sleeping but my own brooding mind, I went down to the kitchen to make myself some tea. I was pouring hot water into the pot when I heard a footstep behind me. I turned to find Jonathan Stapleton, his eyes glaring with menace. It was a glimpse of how he must have looked when he led his men against the Southern trenches.

“Ah. It's you, Miss Stark,” he said. “I told you—I worry about thieves. We're a likely target.”

“I'm sorry if I disturbed you,” I said.

“No, no. I'm awake for most of every night. A bad habit I contracted in the war.”

My eyes traveled to his hand, which was clutching a huge black pistol. He half smiled and looked down at it. “Don't be alarmed,” he said, no doubt thinking I had never seen a gun before. “It's a good friend. I sleep with it beside my bed.”

I thought I heard a hidden message in those words. I asked him if he would like some tea. He nodded. We sat down at the kitchen table, all stiff formality. I tightened my night robe about me. He did the same with his robe, an old tattered silk thing with the sleeves out at the elbows.

“Please excuse these rags,” he said. “Moths got at most of my civilian clothes. I've been meaning to go to New York and outfit myself, but I can't seem to organize myself for the trip. How is Rawdon?”

“In good health. But he misses you. I wish you would spend more time with him.”

“I doubt if he misses me. When he comes near me he does nothing but antagonize me.”

“I fear Rawdon's mind is terribly confused. I'm sure he feels great love and admiration for you. But so many of the people here in the city reviled you during the war. I had no idea such opinions were current in the North.”

He brooded over his steaming tea for a moment. “Before it was over, I became a butcher. We were all butchers. Lincoln, Stanton, Grant, Sherman, Lee. But knowing this, and hearing it as an accusation, a condemnation, are two very different things.”

He took a swallow of his hot tea, ignoring the pain it must have caused him. “You can imagine how I felt when I came home and found my own son believed this. I heard him telling it to little George. I—I almost went berserk. I beat Rawdon with my belt. I told him he was a traitor to his country. I said stupid foolish things.”

At last he was telling me the whole truth. “Could you not apologize—or at least try to make it up with him? Show him you no longer feel that way?”

“No,” he said, his voice going cold in the way that had chilled me on the train. “I begin to think that there's something seriously deranged in his character. I suspect he uses his dislike of me as a subterfuge to hide his laziness. His teachers all say he's bright but indolent. Deplorably indolent. Whether he likes me or not is irrelevant. He must learn to like responsibility.”

This was the general in him speaking, the man who had steeled himself to bear hatred and suppress compassion. I should have seen this, but I didn't know him well enough then. I tried to alter his mind by direct argument. I told him about Rawdon's scrapbook and tried to explain the meaning I saw in it.

He dismissed my sentiment with a curt wave. “Where is it?” he said. “I'll put it in the fire, tonight.”

“I don't know where it is,” I said, “but if you search it out and tell him how you learned of it, I'll resign instantly and go my way.”

Fury gathered on his haunted face. “I'm giving you an order, woman,” he said.

“You may order till doomsday,” I said. “I won't obey it. I promised Rawdon the secret of his scrapbook was safe with me. I regret telling you even this much.”

We sat there glaring at each other. The nerve twitched in his cheek. “A woman of honor,” he said.

“You don't think a woman is capable of honor?”

Anger faltered on his face and retreated to sadness. “They allow other concerns to overcome it.”

“That's true,” I said. “But once a woman sees the disastrous results of such a weakness, she may become more devoted to honor than a man.”

“You're one of those?” He was openly skeptical.

“You're trying to make me ludicrous,” I said. “We're talking about a very small piece of honor, here.”

“It's all one thing. A seamless garment, my grandfather used to call it. If you could teach that to Rawdon—”

“You must. No one but you can do it.”

He shook his head. Sad, slow shakes. “You're looking at a man who miscalculated his strength, misjudged himself, his country. I'm an anachronism, Miss Stark. A leftover from another age. I begin to think there's only one solution for such a creature.”

His eyes went to the gun, which he had put on a cabinet a few feet away. I saw with horror where his wounded spirit was veering.

I also saw his isolation, his need to explain himself to someone, even a person as trivial as I was to him then. Like an invisible thread, my sympathy led me into the labyrinth of regret and guilt in which he was thrashing himself to death.

“When we met on the train,” I said, “you promised you'd tell me a true history of the war.”

“I decided it would be a waste of time. You're too much a stranger. A foreigner. Even though I said the opposite when we met. My mind veers between choices these days. I find it hard to decide anything.”

“Tell me now. We have the rest of the night. I sleep no better than you.”

He began a rambling, spasmodic discourse. Its central theme was his conviction that the secession of the South was an act of madness and folly that could not be permitted. He narrated his father's role in the numerous compromises that the politicians had constructed in the decades before the war to heal or at least to prevent the breach from widening. He quoted letters and speeches his father had made apostrophizing the federal union as the source of America's greatness and strength and denouncing the extremists, the abolitionists, and the defenders of slavery who were undermining it.

There was a heavy irony in the story. His father had convinced his sons, especially his oldest son, Jonathan, that the Union was a sacred cause. But when the moment of decision came, and the South left the union, the son was ready to fight to preserve it, while the father could not bring himself to shed blood in its name. What had been the shadow world of theater, sentiment, to the older man was living flesh, reality, to the son.

The son had a hidden source of strength. As a boy he had revered the memory of his great-grandfather the Congressman, the leader of the Revolution. He had imbibed from him a vision of America as a colossus, a continental nation in which freedom and honor flourished equally with power. The son had struck down the father in the name of that vision. “I saw the future of the nation hang in the balance in this house, Miss Stark. If I hadn't silenced my father—yes, silenced him—he would have spoken for secession, when the North chose war. My mother urged him to speak. His voice would have carried New Jersey with him. The mayor of New York, that despicable opportunist Fernando Wood, was preaching secession there—”

He poured himself more tea and gulped it scalding hot, as if he welcomed the pain. “It wasn't an easy thing to do. I loved my father. But he'd lived too long. He'd made too many compromises. Of every kind—moral, political. But he was right in his warning that the war would last a long time—and demoralize the winners and the losers. To think I almost laughed at him. I was sure it would be over in three months. And now—”

He was scarcely talking to me. He was facing the ghosts of his dead brothers, the ghostly ranks of his dead soldiers. Listening, I felt my sympathy flower into a kind of love, a nostalgic thing but also new and exalting. I saw in him the purity of purpose, the nobility and courage, that I had seen in my brother and had dreamt of finding in the Fenian cause. More important, for the first time I met a man who believed in America, who saw it not as a place to make his fortune, to win power or fame, but as a purpose, a faith, which he was committed to guard.

Jonathan Stapleton was not like William Seward or Andrew Johnson or Fernando Wood or Bill Tweed, men who had risen from the mass of the people by an unstable combination of talent and luck, whose link to the inner American faith existed in minds equally absorbed with the main chance. America beat in Jonathan Stapleton's blood as well as in his mind. His great-grandfather had heard George Washington speak. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had dined at Bowood's table.

With the special sight of one who had made a similar plunge, I saw the poignancy of his choice. I also saw its power and intensity, which leaped like a flame from earth to sky, utterly dwarfing my small spark. I saw the white fierce light of his soul, as vivid and profound as the facade of the Presbyterian church where I took Rawdon each Sunday, and wondered at the father's absence. I understood now where his faith had gone. It had departed that original shrine to enter the vast distances of the American prairie, to surge over Niagara and pulse in the Mississippi. He was borne on the windlike memory of the founding fathers' vision, the toil of a wilderness won, of victory over the primary imperial enemy, England, personifier of old Europe's imperial greed. He could not let the great experiment fail! Yet what it had cost him, what it had cost them all.