All Other Nights (23 page)

“I—I shall,” he stammered, but she had already taken off, her dark dress hurrying across the green. He watched her vanish and could think of nothing but Jeannie running from the cemetery, promising that she would come back.

I
T WAS PRECISELY TEN O’CLOCK ON MONDAY NIGHT AS JACOB
approached Solomon’s Inn—half an hour early, but he couldn’t keep himself away. The night was cool, with a full moon and stars shivering in their places above the dirt road to the tavern on the edge of the woods. A few times along the way, he allowed himself to wonder what would happen, why she had invited him, what she might want from him, whether it really could be what he thought it might be. Trying to apply sense to anything in his life had become a useless exercise. Instead he trailed Abigail like an animal, following her scent.

When he came to the inn, he saw that the door was closed, and the few windows on the tavern level were shuttered and dark. The only light, other than the moon and the stars, came from two windows on the second floor, where lamps glowed behind drawn curtains. He took his watch out of his pocket and lit a match to check the time, hoping he wouldn’t have to wait long. To his dismay, it was still only a few minutes after ten o’clock. He stood outside the front door for a time, afraid to knock. He quickly grew restless, and wandered around the side of the bramble-covered lair until he was standing at the edge of the forest that backed up against the property. On a whim, he stepped into the woods.

The last time he had walked alone in the woods was in Virginia, when he was fleeing from Lottie, but it had been daylight then, and the plants and trees had been familiar even to a city boy like him—ordinary maples, oaks and elms, occupied by ordinary chipmunks and squirrels. But these woods were enchanted. He was standing in a corridor of towering trees that he couldn’t even identify, with heavy curtains of Spanish moss that hung down to his knees and swayed slightly in the cool night breeze, a shivering upside-down forest. The forest floor was a tangle of pale thorns and patches of black mud, and the air rattled with the voices of hidden crickets and croaking frogs. In the silver moonlight that seeped through the branches and vines, he saw a path on the ground between the brambles, leading to the brightness of a clearing just beyond the first few rows of trees. He followed it for about a dozen yards, and came upon a pond.

The pond was small, only about twenty yards wide, and surrounded by curtains of heavy moss. The gleaming pool of water lay on the forest floor like a mirror dropped by a giant, its surface gently rippled by the breeze and the occasional fallen leaf. He had barely emerged into the clearing when he heard a soft splash, and saw the water shiver as if shattered. He heard the frogs croaking; an animal must have jumped into the water. Despite his time sleeping in tents, he was still a city boy, and the suggestion of wild animals nearby unnerved him. He started to turn to go back to the inn when he noticed a dark sheath of something dangling from a low-hanging branch near the water’s edge, about twenty feet from where he was standing. As he squinted in the moonlight, he recognized that it was a dress, hanging next to something rectangular and pale, perhaps a petticoat. He heard a burbling sound, and saw a dark head emerging from the surface of the pond. It was Abigail.

She had her back to him, and she didn’t notice him at first. She rose from the water slowly, tilting her head to the sky until he could almost see the crown of her forehead, her dripping dark curls flowing into the water in a ragged triangle against her naked moonlit back. Her shoulders were bare and round above the water’s surface. He watched as her pale silver hands rose from the water into the air, her elbows framing her head as her fingers trickled into her hair. His heart pounded, intoxicated. An animal memory, the kind one feels in the body instead of recalling in the mind, thrummed within him: a week after their wedding, Jeannie had surprised him by pulling him into their bedroom in her dressing gown just after she had emerged from a bath. Once he was inside, with the bedroom door closed behind him, she had turned her back to him and let her robe fall to the floor, so that he could see her dark hair dripping down her bare body as she slowly slid a comb through it, while she grinned deliberately at a small mirror on the wall that revealed only her face. When he asked her to turn around, she had laughed at him, teasing him, until he had no choice but to pounce.

Now he watched Abigail in the water and held his breath, praying that she would turn to face him, his entire body stirring to life. But instead she sank back down into the pool until she was submerged to her neck, her hair floating around her head like swirls of dark ink on the surface of the water. She turned slightly, paddling her way back toward the edge of the pond where her dress was draped on the branch, her head parting the water into a thin channel of waves. Then she saw him, and screamed.

He jumped, and tripped into the shallow edge of the pond, catching himself with one boot submerged to his knee. He stumbled out of the water with a series of clumsy splashes, unable to right himself, as if the world were shifting under his feet. He stammered in the dark. “Miss—Miss Solomon, please pardon me, Miss, I—”

“Sergeant Samuels?” he heard her ask, with a note of relief.

He regained his footing, then tried not to continue watching her as she sank lower into the water, down to her chin. He saw the water rippling and could feel in his stomach how she was folding her arms across her breasts under the water, her naked legs curling together below the opaque surface of the pond. Her invisible movements left an imprint on his gut. He forced himself to look at the ground as his body burned. He began babbling, his tongue caught between his teeth.

“Please—please p—pardon me, Miss Solomon, I—I—I was—I wasn’t—I—I didn’t—please, Miss, I—”

“You are early,” she said. “You were supposed to come at half past ten.” To his astonishment, she laughed. “Did Frank tell you I was here? I’ll murder him.”

Her boldness astounded him almost more than her nakedness. When he allowed himself to look up again, he saw her head dipping back into the water, her face a small oval on the water’s surface. Then she raised her head very slightly, and looked back at him. He watched her wet curls grazing the surface of the water and had to stop himself from panting.

“Turn around, you imbecile,” she said.

He gulped at the cool air and turned to face the forest, agonized, watching the hanging moss in front of him as though it were a theater curtain. Then he listened to the hollow thunking of the water as she climbed out of it, the delicate swishing as she wrung out her hair and brushed the moisture from her legs, the almost inaudible rumpling of dry undergarments against damp skin, and then the louder rustling as she lifted her dress over her head, the fabric fluttering as it alighted on her body, falling into place like the beating wings of a bird. These noises were at once intimate and shockingly familiar: the audible, unnoticed landscape of the ordinary life of every married man. Each sound seeped into his body like a smell, overripe and saturated with an unspeakable sadness. He stood watching the moss, awed and alive, surprised by a sudden and electrifying grief.

“I really didn’t intend for you to see me like that,” he heard a voice say beside him.

He was still shuddering when he turned toward her. She had tied her hair back behind her head, but the errant curl still hung along the side of her face, dripping and glistening in the moonlight. Her dark dress clung tightly to her wet figure, the neck and bosom damp and stunning, a silhouetted version of the shape he had seen rising from the water. Her feet were bare and pale. As she seated herself on a fallen log, the hem of her dress rose until he could see her ankles, long, thin ankles that shimmered as he imagined the long living legs that flourished beneath her skirt. He looked at her bare toes, watching them sink like roots into the dark earth.

“I didn’t intend for you to see me that way, but I did intend for you to see me alone,” she said.

This was almost impossible to believe. For an instant he thought of glancing behind him, the adolescent’s ingrained habit of checking for someone nearby who would forbid it. His body vibrated with the memory of his first evenings with Jeannie, of trying to control himself, waiting for Philip to walk in the door. But Abigail lived free of parents, fully liberated from anyone who might stop her. The world was an open gate. She motioned for him to sit down beside her, a slow wave of a thin pale hand. He felt something he hadn’t felt since the first time he had met the three officers, when they told him to assassinate Harry Hyams: the strange and comforting sensation of the ebbing of his own will. He sank down onto the log beside her, hypnotized.

“I’ve never met a man this way before. On my own, I mean. There was always some sort of arrangement,” she said. He tried to listen, mourning her covered skin. “It was always awful. Usually it was some peddler I was supposed to meet. Invariably he was twenty years older than me and spoke nothing but German.”

He watched her in the dim moonlight, dazed. Clearly she wanted to have a conversation, but the memory of her naked body rising from the water was almost too much for him to bear. She was looking up at the sky, gray light illuminating her face and neck. Then she turned to him, waiting for him to speak. He tried to think, and largely failed. At last he thought of something to say. “My father always used to joke about how I was going to marry the daughter of one of his business associates,” he said. “It was only when I turned eighteen that I understood he wasn’t joking. That was why I enlisted.” To his surprise, the words slipped out painlessly, freed from memory.

“She must have been rather awful for you to prefer risking death,” Abigail said, smiling at him in the shadows. He winced at the implied insult to poor Emma, a vestigial shame left over from a lifetime of holiday meals full of pity. “Whom did you marry instead?” she asked.

He looked at Abigail’s dark damp hair, then looked away. “The daughter of one of my father’s business associates,” he answered.

Abigail laughed out loud.

“A different one,” he added.

Abigail’s smile disappeared. He watched as she wound a dark wet curl around her finger. “One that you loved,” she said.

It wasn’t a question. Abigail leaned toward him, digging her pale toes deeper into the muddy earth. “Tell me something about your wife,” she said.

He swallowed, tasting the cool night air. Again he felt that amazement that he had felt when he sat with her on the village green, the astonishment of her deep familiarity, her comfort and intimacy with the dead.

“What would you like to know?” he asked. He wondered what he could possibly say about Jeannie. That she was an actress? A magician? A liar? A spy?

“Oh, anything, really,” Abigail said. “How old was she?”

“Nineteen,” he answered. His reply was mechanical, as though he were filling out a census form.

“What did she look like?”

He glanced at the brambles beside his boots, trying to picture Jeannie, and was horrified to discover that he couldn’t. At that moment her face had faded from his memory like a photograph left by a sunny window. Then he turned to Abigail, and saw her.

“She looked like you.”

Abigail laughed again. He dug his fingernails into the soft damp bark of the log they were sitting on, his fingers inches from her skirt. He felt something warm move across his knuckles, the brush of Abigail’s sleeve. Then she planted her palms against her knees, very unladylike, very Jeannie-like. She leaned toward him. “Close your eyes,” she said.

“Why?” he asked. Suddenly he was afraid.

“Consider it an experiment,” she answered, with a smile.

This was absurd, he knew. But he couldn’t help himself. His will was ebbing away, as though he were being tugged toward a sweet, delicious dream. He closed his eyes. Blind, he sensed the entire forest closing in around him, the sounds of crickets rattling the cool wet air. He felt warm breath against his neck, and heard Abigail’s voice.

“Imagine that I’m your wife,” he heard her say softly in his ear. “What would you say to me?”

He imagined Jeannie emerging naked from a Mississippi pond, her dark hair rising in the moonlight as she turned to face him.

“Please come back,” he said.

“I’m here,” she whispered, and took his earlobe between her lips. For the rest of that evening, he drank in his beautiful dead wife.

T
HAT MONTH PASSED IN A FEVER DREAM. NEARLY EVERY NIGHT
Jacob met Abigail at the pond, even as the weather turned colder, arriving late and staying even later, creeping back to the camp past midnight and collapsing into a deep and dreamless sleep, waking at dawn to sleepwalk his way through endless drills in the woods, and then waiting for nighttime to arrive and return him to his imaginary life. The men in the regiment noticed his transformation, and mocked him at every opportunity for taking up with someone McAllister had described to them as “the lady sphinx.” When they asked him for details, he didn’t respond, though he couldn’t have answered them truthfully even if he had wanted to. Because it wasn’t Abigail in his arms at all, but Jeannie.

Jacob and Abigail spoke little. When they did, they talked only of their original families, their mothers and fathers, her brothers, childhood neighbors, childhood friends—children’s memories, from lives over and done with. They never spoke about the war, or the future. It was better to pretend that neither existed. As soon as she was in his arms, the delusion was total. All he had to do was close his eyes and Jeannie was there, summoned before him, running her fingers along his skin, pushing him to the brink of euphoria. More than once he suspected that Abigail felt the same way, that for her, he too was someone else, a warm body that she could hold while she closed her eyes and imagined that he was another man. But he didn’t care. He was delirious, hypnotized.

The walk from the camp to the inn each evening was part of the hypnosis, his slow, gradual passage from one realm into another, from public to private, male to female, north to south. The camp was always at its most disgusting at the hour when he left: men getting drunk on dirty tree stumps, those too tired to get drunk passed out in their blankets in the mud, the air thick with pipe smoke and the makeshift latrines reeking from the long dull day. When he left the camp, everything changed. The tall trees whose name he didn’t know, the hanging moss, the brambles along the starlit path, the dim-windowed inn, the gleaming pond beyond it: all of it was a promise that a better world existed, a place where there was no future and no past, only a beautiful fantasy of the here and now, where he was someone he could never be. One night as he walked along the path, transporting himself between reality and dream, it occurred to him that six whole weeks had passed since he and Abigail had first met by the pond. If he were a wiser man, or a better man, he might have thought for a moment about Abigail, about whether there might be consequences to this age of delusion. But he was living in a world without consequences, and all he could think of was that six weeks was precisely how long he had been married to Jeannie before he ran away.

That night the air was cold, a Mississippi winter night. Abigail was sitting on the log where they had first kissed. On many nights he had found her seated there, waiting for him, but this time something subtle had changed. The moon was waning that night, and she had a lantern at her side. Usually she didn’t bother with lanterns, preferring the darkness, as he did. He saw the lantern and immediately felt uneasy. The light illuminated her body in her dark cloak, and he saw how she was sitting with her back rigid, her feet, no longer bare, pressed together in the mud. She didn’t greet him. Instead, she motioned for him to sit down, with the lamp resting between them. She wasn’t smiling.

He was certain, then, that he knew what she was going to tell him—and he vowed to himself, in that instant, that he would do for Abigail everything that he had failed to do for Jeannie, that he would make her every promise that needed to be made in order to maintain the illusion forever. But when Abigail finally spoke, she took him by surprise.

“I can’t love you, Jacob,” she said.

He said nothing. For a moment she looked at him, and he avoided her eyes, leaning forward, pressing his elbows against his knees. It wasn’t what he was expecting, and in every way it was worse. He was waking from a dream.

“I thought I could,” she continued. Her words were slow, deliberate. It occurred to him that she had practiced this, that she had taken pains to find the gentlest possible way of destroying his imagined world. He listened to the rippling of the pond behind them, the gulp of a frog emerging from the water in the dark. “I thought I could make myself love you, make myself marry you, and then you would make everything easier for me and my brothers. But I can’t.” She paused, and he could hear her breathe. Then she said, “I’m in love with someone else.”

In his delusional state, all he could think of was that he was in love with someone else too, and that she must have experienced the same thing that he had: a love affair with the dead. “With your husband?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

Now he was frightened. The idea that someone existed beyond the fantasy that they had created was like a cannonball tearing through the woods.

“I told you I never cared for my husband,” she said. “I meant that. But I was in love with his brother.”

“His brother?” he repeated, like an imbecile.

“His younger brother, Michael. My father wanted me to marry David, because David had the money to buy the inn. I agreed to marry him in the end, because I knew that if I said no, I would never see Michael again.” She paused, swallowed. “At the time it was a ridiculous choice, but now it isn’t anymore. David died at Shiloh. Michael was there too, but he survived.”

For a moment Jacob was stunned, and insanely envious. The best his dreams could conjure up was a dead woman, but here he had been lying in her arms, substituting for a living rival. If he were a different man, he would have exploded with rage. But in his deadened state, all he could do was curse the world, and wish the man dead.

Abigail was still talking, more and more animated. “I haven’t seen him since my wedding. And I hadn’t heard from him for the past three months. I was certain he was dead.” So he had been a corpse in her arms too, he thought. “But I just learned this morning that he is still alive. Someone brought me a letter from him today. He’s in the army with General Van Dorn. They will be coming up from Vicksburg to meet you. They expect to be here in less than a week, and then I shall see him again. And when he comes, he is going to marry me.”

To marry her! Jacob thought of the past six weeks, of his imaginary affair with an imaginary woman, and felt as though the muddy earth were swallowing him whole.

But Abigail was ecstatic. He looked at her and was astonished to see something he had never seen in her face before: happiness. She was laughing, crying, unable to control herself. She grabbed him, startling him, giddily holding his hands, dancing in place. Her face was shining. “Jacob, I can scarcely believe it. I’m going to see Michael again!”

“I—I am very happy for you,” he said slowly. All human relations, he was learning, were eased by lies. But he almost meant it. She deserved it, he thought, far more than he ever would.

“It’s like a dream,” she was saying, her eyes full of tears. “I’m only sorry that I have to say goodbye to you. You have been so kind to me.”

He watched her, dumbfounded, as she stood. After a long time, he finally spoke. “Abigail, if anything should change—” he said, and hesitated, wondering if there was a way to express it. “If—if you should ever need me—for—for anything at all—please know that I am here for you,” he stammered. “I promise you that.”

“Thank you, Jacob,” she said. She looked at him, but there was nothing left to say. He walked her back to the inn, and she let him kiss her on the doorstep. Then she closed the door, and he turned back to the dirt road that led to the camp.

The moss was still hanging from the high branches as it was before, the tall trees still glowing in starlight. Now all he could see were the brambles on the ground, the deep, thick mud as he returned to the wastes, the residue of a dream. The next day, General Grant expelled the Jews from the Department of the Tennessee.

NO ONE COULD KNOW
then that the expulsion would last only three weeks—that a group of those expelled would make their way to Washington and win an audience with Lincoln, who had never heard of the order and who gladly overturned it, even though it meant spiting his best general. At the time when it was issued, there was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t last four hundred years.

Jacob heard about it first through a memorandum from headquarters, posted and distributed to all officers in the camp. There had been talk, in the previous few weeks, of how something desperately needed to be done to control the endless stream of war profiteers who had overrun the Department. The other officers were likely less alarmed than Jacob was by the form the order actually took:

Nearly everything Jacob had read in the past few months had been difficult to believe. He read through the memorandum once, then twice, and was reminded of nothing more than the article in the copy of the
Washington Daily Chronicle
that he had idly picked up on the train to Tennessee—a decree that could not possibly be true, that reversed every hope one had ever had of what the world might be, but that somehow was nonetheless undeniable and even predictable, a jolting but inevitable waking from a deep, beautiful dream. As he read it for the third time, he understood that everything he had done in the past year, all the lives he had destroyed, including his own, had been for absolutely nothing, that there was nothing waiting for him at the end. Judah Benjamin had been rewarded in his own ostensible country, but that was only an imaginary country, a delusion. In his own real country, Jacob never would be.

The order didn’t seem to apply to Union soldiers, because in the camp no one sought him out—though later he heard that Captain Trounstine, the only other Hebrew officer he knew of, chose to resign. He was a braver man than Jacob was. Instead, along with the order, Jacob was handed a particularly heavy schedule of drills to run in the camp during the next two days. The additional drills were gratuitous, he slowly understood, designed to keep him out of town. He ran the drills as though asleep, trying not to think of anything that mattered, and succeeding grandly at it. It was only when he saw McAllister the following day in the mess tent in the camp that he understood what he had lost.

“I was out enforcing the new order this morning, and you’ll never guess who we arrested,” he said to Jacob, spearing potatoes with a fork. “Your lady sphinx!”

Jacob had blocked out any thought of Abigail after reading the order, burying her in his mind beneath thick layers of shame. But now, mid-swallow, he choked. “What?”

McAllister jabbed his fork at the air. “The pastor and the mayor gave us the names we needed, and she and her brothers were on the list.”

The absurdity of this was so vast as to defy any attempt to respond. McAllister swallowed a few more mouthfuls before speaking again. “We managed to clear out nearly everyone else in town without any problems. Especially the old people. I was surprised. We were afraid we would be dragging grandmothers out of their beds, but most of them were already packed when we came for them. It was as if they were expecting it.”

Of course, Jacob thought, remembering old Isaacs. They would have been expecting it for fifty years. Their only surprise would have been that it had taken so long.

“Even that brat from the tavern must have had some sense knocked into him, because he went with his brother on the next train to Illinois,” McAllister continued. “But it was different with your lady friend. She screamed and screamed, and then she started kicking us. She was like a lady possessed. She even bit Lieutenant Hicks.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, wide-eyed and grinning. The whole affair was merely an entertaining episode to him, as though he were relating something improbable that Hoff had done while drunk. “I was guarding the jail just before I went off duty,” he said. “By the time I left she was raving hysterical.”

The image of Abigail hysterical in a prison cell was more than Jacob was willing to picture. “When she saw me leaving,” McAllister added, “she started shouting about you.”

“About me?”

“Yes, you.”

For an instant he was ashamed, horrified of what she might have said. But as always, Abigail surprised him.

“She started screaming that you should guard the tavern, to make sure no one takes any of her parents’ things,” McAllister said. “Heaven knows how she expects you to manage that.”

He smiled at Jacob, then turned and waved to someone. Jacob followed his eyes and saw Hoff, who had just appeared with his own rations, ready to join them. Without excusing himself, Jacob rose from his seat and ran out.

There was no point in trying to go to the jail; he knew that route would only lead him to an unwinnable argument with whoever was on guard. Instead he went to headquarters and made every plea he possibly could to be heard. At first he was told that no one was there to register his complaint; finally, on his ninth attempt, he managed to get a lieutenant there merely to record his concerns on paper and promise him further inquiry. He returned to the camp, defeated. He already knew that nothing would be done. But the following day, when the commanders requested additional guard duty for the new supply houses in town, he volunteered, and had himself stationed at Solomon’s Inn.