The Deserter (24 page)

Lunch had been spread and the men were at table, all the ones who could leave their beds. Ida walked down the center aisle, trying to keep out of the way of the men and women carrying pots of soup and setting down pitchers of water.

As usual, her swollen shape attracted attention. Heads turned as she approached. Ida didn't care. Mockingly she told herself again that she was the cynosure of all eyes.

The joke brought an ache, a vision of Seth's smiling face, wasted now perhaps and hollow with disease.

It was only a vision. Seth's face was not to be seen at any of the far-flung tables. Nor was he lying on a cot in any of the long wards or sitting up in a wheelchair. Ida saw only strangers among the patients, row upon row, with hospital stewards and nurses in hurried attendance. Often she saw other women—wives and sweethearts who had managed to find their men.

Some of them nodded kindly to Ida. Others whispered behind her back. Sometimes men called out to her, but never in derision. Ida suspected they had wives at home in the same condition. One man in delirium lunged upright, reached out his arms and called out, “Rose, Rose.”

Ida smiled and passed by, sorry not to be his Rose.

At Campbell Hospital, the story was the same—long wards, long rows of cots and hundreds of young men suffering from battle wounds or sick with fever, coughing or tossing from side to side or lying very still. Out-of-doors a row of veterans sat in the sun, each of them missing a leg or an arm. Perhaps they felt lucky to be alive. At least they would never stand apart as pitiable oddities. For the rest of her life, Ida knew, she would see battle-scarred men on the street everywhere.

If only Seth were one of them, honorably wounded in his country's cause. Ida had begun to think that perhaps it was from shame that he had left his family and abandoned his wife. How terrible if he should die before she could tell him that she felt no shame at all.

Deserters, after all, were commonplace. On Ida's first afternoon in the city she had seen a troop of men in dirty blue uniforms tramping along the Avenue with armed guards marching beside them. She had asked a woman on the street why Union men should be under guard.

The woman's sneering answer had delivered a pang. “Deserters, look at 'em, it's a wonder they's any good men left, the way thousands skedaddle every time they have a fight.” Leaning over the curb, she spat into the gutter.

Ida had backed away, feeling ashamed but relieved at the same time, because her husband was not the only man who had run away from a battle.

She had watched the huddled men in their filthy uniforms as they marched away. Some were shame-faced; others looked defiantly left and right, their bloodshot eyes gazing straight back at the staring people on the street.
You laugh at me? I'd like to see you try it. I'd like to see you walk so smart, right up to the cannon's mouth
.

SOMEONE KNOCKING

E
ven though her hospital visits in the daytime were full of sorrow, Ida preferred them to her theatergoing in the evening.

Of course it was bizarre to think of her dear Seth, that sober Concord citizen and classical scholar, posturing on the stage in costume. Sometimes it seemed impossible to Ida that he could have chosen an exotic career behind the footlights over the idyllic quiet life of his own family at home.

But then she would remember his stories about the club he called the Pudding, when he and his friends had romped onstage, singing hilarious songs composed by one of their classmates. Painfully, she remembered the laughter of her young brothers and sisters whenever Seth had wrapped himself in a shawl and sang his Rosebud song—“Thou Hast the Petals, I the Thorns.”

Perhaps by comparison, his old Concord life had not really been so idyllic.

Uncomfortably, Ida recalled a winter evening in the parlor, with Seth sitting at the table trying to translate the
Odes
of Horace, while her mother sat at the piano, battling her way through “The Tic-Tac Polka,” Alice banged her fists on the keys, Josh and Sally bickered in the kitchen and Seth's own mother sat whining in the corner.

It would not be surprising if domestic life had failed to measure up to those happy old times when he and his classmates had been ridiculous together, performing their comic farces and singing their nonsense songs.

So perhaps the theater was the right place to look for him after all, in spite of Lily's sorry fables about battle wounds and a possible case of jaundice. In running away from the war, perhaps Seth had run straight toward the dazzling excitement of an actor's life.

In the
National Republican
and the
Evening Star
, there were theatrical notices, and everywhere on the street small boys hawked playbills:

LAURA KEENE'S VARIETIES
!!
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN AS LADY MACBETH
!!

Ida reached for the playbills and studied them eagerly. Lily's name appeared on the playbill for
The Marble Heart
, but Seth was not listed anywhere.

But perhaps, thought Ida, doing her best to imagine his strange new career, he had taken a stage name. If so, then the playbills were not enough. She had to see the players with her own eyes.

Therefore, nearly every evening she made her way to one of the theaters—Graver's National, the new Ford's or the Washington Theater. But when none of the players turned out to be Seth she would stand up, brush past the whisky-smelling men, step carefully over the puddles of tobacco juice, and make her way home to Mrs. Broad's.

The plays did not interest her. They all seemed posturing and melodramatic, although occasionally there was a spark of wit that made her laugh.

But it wasn't the dramatic productions themselves that made playgoing so disagreeable, nor even the tobacco juice. It was the necessity of showing herself among the queenly women who came to the theater in carriages, resplendent in their coronets of flowers and voluminous skirts of white silk.

Often the magnificent women were escorted by officers who rivaled them in splendor. The full-dress uniforms of colonels and major generals were adorned with sashes and fringed epaulets, and the swashbuckling cavalry officers swaggered in short jackets and buccaneering boots.

Ida could not help comparing their sparkling regalia with the ragged coats of the miserable deserters on the street or the bloodstained bandages of the men who lay in those endless perspectives of suffering white cots. How strange that the theatergoers seemed so happy and carefree, as though Washington were not a city of hospitals, as though the war were not grinding on and on, as though battle would not forever follow battle.

And no matter how accustomed Ida had become to inquisitive stares, it was hard to bear the looks of shocked disgust on the faces of the women in the glorious gowns whenever she stepped into the lobby of a theater. And then, after heaving herself up the stairs to the furnace heat of the topmost balcony and finding a seat among the boldly staring men and looking down at the women as they flowed into the boxes and removed their shawls and bared their white arms, she could almost hear them whispering,
A woman in a family way alone on the street at night, imagine
!

The hurried walk back to Mrs. Broad's was troublesome too. In the neighborhood of the National Theater Ida had to run the gauntlet of Rum Row. Sometimes she made a wide circuit to Harvey's cheerful Oyster Salon on C Street or to the glittering magnificence of Willard's Hotel. Of course she never ventured far south of Pennsylvania Avenue, because Mrs. Broad had warned her about the dreadful things that went on down there in “Hooker's Division,” things that she, Mrs. Broad, would not stoop to mention.

But all the hard walking and humiliation would be worth it if only Ida might find Seth's name on a printed program or see him appear when the curtain rose, estranged from her and playing a part, but alive and well.

The days went by. Ida saw
Macbeth
and
Othello
and
The French Spy
and
The Apostate
. Some of the performances were fine, and some perfectly inane, like the posturing of the actors in
The Marble Heart
.

From her high balcony Ida watched as Lily LeBeau warbled her slave girl's song. Another young actor had a farcical speech: “Naturally, Diogenes, gold cannot buy genius, at least not that much gold. How about coughing up a little more?”

In the sweltering gloom near the ceiling, Ida peered at the damp program in her hand to see who was playing the part so absurdly. At once, she was startled to see that the funny fellow was one Adolfo Sethius O'Morgan. Dizzily she dropped the paper and leaned forward to stare, then sat back, limp with disappointment.

The actor was nothing like Seth. He was heavier for one thing, and surely Seth would never have spoiled his good looks with side whiskers and a drooping mustache.

She had seen enough. Gathering her strength, Ida rose and excused herself to her neighbor, then edged along the row of seats while Lily, the singing slave girl, wrung her hands and informed Adolfo Sethius O'Morgan that slaves, alas, had no right to love.

The journey back in the dark was grueling. Slowly and heavily, Ida put one foot in front of another. At the house on G Street she found Mrs. Broad waiting up for her, a candle in her hand. “Oh, dear girl, I've had such qualms.”

Ida was almost fainting. For the last quarter mile she had lumbered along, trying to run, aware that two burly men were moving up behind her. Now Mrs. Broad caught at her arm, pulled her into the house and helped her into the kitchen. “Sit down, my honey,” she said tenderly, pouring sherry into a teacup. “Another letter's come from your poor mother.”

Ida sipped the sherry and leaned back and closed her eyes. “I know what it will say.”

“Dear child, don't you think it's time? Shouldn't I send Annie for Mrs. McCool?”

“You sound just like Mother.” Ida smiled and sat up. “No, no, dear Mrs. Broad. I'm finished with the theater, and there's only one more hospital I mean to see. If I don't find my husband in the Patent Office, I'll start for home, I promise.” She pushed down on the table with both hands and struggled to her feet. “I'll be fine, Mrs. Broad. I won't need Mrs. McCool.”

But Ida was aware that under the mounded bulk of her skirt someone was urgently knocking.

PART XVII

INVITED BACK

TOO FANTASTIC

H
omer Kelly had taken to the written word at infancy, chewing
Peter Rabbit
in his crib, licking the cookbooks and sniffing the bottles of CINNAMON and NUTMEG, gaping at fluffy words in the sky and running his small fingers over letters carved on the trunks of trees. At last, when the Hardy Boys came Homer's way—blond-haired Joe and dark-haired Frank—he had never looked back.

Therefore by now, as an aging professor dreading retirement, Homer could squeeze a book like a lemon, mash it like a potato, press it like a clove of garlic and extract all the good stuff in a hurry. He worried about the fact that his brain was losing thirty-thousand molecules of gray matter every day, or maybe thirty million, but the technical know-how of an experienced scholar was still alive in his head. His fingers could twiddle swiftly through a card catalogue, and he had at last abandoned his rage at the computer reorganization of Widener Library. His wife had taken him by the hand and led him through it like a little child, and now Homer preened himself on his magisterial command of Hollis, the computerized catalogue of all the libraries in the university.

He also continued to receive bolts of revelation from on high, or wherever bolts of revelation come from—music, dreams, snatches of conversation, birdsong, rainbows in the twirling spray of lawn sprinklers, glimpses of young women with golden hair. Homer's inspirations were sometimes wrong, but often they came straight from the horse's mouth.

These days, while patching together a set of lectures for the coming semester, Homer took time out to ponder the Otis Pike/Seth Morgan connection and the mysterious relation between the Hasty Pudding Club of 1860 at Harvard College and the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Battle of Gettysburg.

There were books, any number of books, whole libraries full of books about that single three-day battle. Homer had discovered the remote corner of the Widener stacks where they could be found. Every moment of those three terrible days in July of 1863 had been recorded, and all the separate actions on every part of the field had been documented, from the exact placing of General Henry Hunt's two hundred pieces of Union artillery to the position of every regiment in the seven corps of the Army of the Potomac, from Culp's Hill on the north to the Round Tops on the south.

Like Mary, Homer was moved by the fact that Mudge and Robeson, Pike and Morgan had all been revelers in the comical productions of Hasty Pudding before finding themselves members of the same regiment in the Union army. But it was only Mudge, Robeson and Morgan who had risen in rank—Charles Redington Mudge becoming a lieutenant colonel, Thomas Rodman Robeson a captain and Seth Morgan a first lieutenant. Poor old Otis Pike, who had been recruited into the regiment as a special favor after a serious scrape in civilian life, had remained a private.

And then at Gettysburg, Robeson and Mudge had fallen on the morning of the third day. And so had the often-absent Otis Pike, if his regimental history was to be believed.

So what about First Lieutenant Seth Morgan, Mary's great-great-grandfather, who had been cited for bravery before Gettysburg, who had been
mentioned in dispatches
? In a history of the regiment written by its chaplain, Homer found Seth's name and an account of the part he had taken in the Battles of Cedar Mountain, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. His story began well but came to an abrupt end—

Missing; dropped from the rolls at Gettysburg, 4 July, 1863
.