Emma Barry (4 page)

Margaret nodded. She understood entirely too thoroughly what the phrase “but Mother” could communicate. If he were still using it, then he saw less than she hoped he might. Refusing to give up entirely, however, she tilted her head and asked the question that disquieted her sleep, “Will this war achieve something?”

He leaned back and considered. “If it doesn’t, it will be a grievous failure and one we as a nation can ill afford. I believe in this cause as much as I have believed in anything. These United States are knit together by history, brotherhood, and commerce. Our united republic must be protected. Equally strongly do I believe slavery is an evil that must end. It poisons our liberty and threatens our civic virtue.”

His words were, by themselves, harmless enough. Strung together in this way, they might appear in any number of newspapers and magazines littering the end tables of Middletown’s parlors. Yet taken together, out of Theo’s mouth, they sounded disharmonious. How many times had he said this precise thing to her before? And here he was pontificating again and still not acting on his passion.

Margaret felt a scream building in her throat at his continuing inertia, but she swallowed it and said only, “I see.”

Theo canted toward her, his blue eyes lit with the fire burning within him — the fire he seemed only to be able to douse. “Don’t you agree?”

She pursed her lips and spoke precisely, knowing he would not appreciate the specificity of her language. “That slavery is a stain that must be eradicated? Aye, I do. But must it be by war?
That
is a force that cannot be contained or controlled. I know loss, as do you, and that knowledge will proliferate ’ere the guns are stilled. You may be right but, Theo, I fear for us all.”

The words might be of politics and war, but this was a conversation about why things hadn’t changed between them in two years. His core was racked with passion but his actions too restrained. She was all caution and practicality. A fine pair they were.

“There are times when war is necessary,” he was saying, the all-too-familiar fervor still in his voice and face. “Millions are in bondage. ‘The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.’”

“Don’t quote John Brown to me,” she snapped, no longer able to pretend this was not personal. “I taught Mrs. Stowe before it was fashionable to do so. But don’t act so sanguine about the trail of blood that led from Kansas to Harpers Ferry and which is poised to overwhelm the nation. If we let go of the very things that make us human, there is no telling where this ends — if it ends. War is a hungry beast. Who will feed it?”

Theo nodded, processing her words. He sipped his soda water and turned to stare out on Main Street. Then, with a coolness that dashed all the delicate longings in her stomach, he said, “I detest sitting here uselessly knowing I could be elsewhere doing
something
.”

She sighed, a deep, defeated loosening of breath. With those words — so accurate and so daft — the hope that he might have changed vanished, leaving her empty and peeved. Her jaw set and she swallowed.

With as much patience as she could muster, she said, “Long have I encouraged you to act on your ambitions. But today, I ask what you will do if you enlist but find yourself no more convinced of your usefulness.”

“I feel more certain I will never act at all than that I could act and remain … ”

“In a state of
ennui
?”

“As you say, Margaret.”

He smiled at her with something in his face, the lines around his eyes crinkled with warmth and affection. She felt an overwhelming desire to box his ears, the foolish, adorable man.

Instead, she told him the truth, as directly as she could, knowing it would extinguish the hope she wanted to believe in but couldn’t. “Your mother will agree to your enlistment eventually, I have no doubt. Whether you will remain frozen is, as it ever was, up to you.”

• • •

Theo wasn’t sure what had happened. One minute he was watching Margaret’s lips. He experienced her voice as much as heard it. It was low, musical, husky, and enthralling. Had she always sounded so? The cadence vibrated through his body, awakening every nerve. He hadn’t felt this attentive in years. His life was a pale imitation of itself without Margaret in it.

There was too much space between them, however. A week ago, he’d been able to hold her. This afternoon it was all propriety and distance. For the first time in memory, he wished someone would announce there was to be a dance.

Then he understood what she’d said and everything went silent.

Into the void came his startled voice. “Pardon?”

Margaret sighed as if his request taxed her. “The source of the lethargy is not your mother or Josiah Trinkett. It’s you. If you want your life to change, Theo, change it.”

“Are you saying I’m a coward?”

“No. I’m saying you have become accustomed to stasis, so much so you’ve forgotten you are capable of achievement. If you wish to act, act.”

Theo took another sip of his soda water. He could feel his shoulders harden and his hands close into fists due to her words. The instinctive response made him even angrier. She was, as ever, correct. Hang her.

“Well, if we’ve established that I don’t change, it’s at least a relief to know the same is true of you,” he finally spat out.

“In what way?” she asked.

“You too are dissatisfied with your life, are you not? Yet you don’t alter it. You’re ever ready with advice for others, but you don’t take your recommendations to heart.”

She shook her head. “I’ve not your resources. Your money. Your job. Your sex.”

“Rarely have I met a woman so gifted.” Theo could see the breath catch in her throat. As angry as he was, Margaret equally stirred him. He had difficulty separating out which feelings were the result of her calling him a coward and which were caused by movement in the vicinity of her bosom. It was a stupid emotion to have on any account, but particularly in reference to such a maddening woman.

This conversation was at an end. He rose. “I apologize. I have permitted my frustration to get the better of me. I can tell you are busy. I shan’t keep you.”

Margaret looked surprised and hurt, but Theo was already collecting his hat and backing toward the door.

“Good afternoon!”

Once on the street, Theo began walking briskly toward his office. He had covered his rendezvous with Margaret by telling Mother he needed to retrieve some documents. Now he had to obtain some fool paperwork or else it would raise her suspicions.

He jammed his key into the lock and, after a moment’s struggle, managed to open the door. It clanged in protest, but he stomped over to his desk enjoying the ruckus his feet made. As he shifted things around, attempting to find a prop to convince Mother, emotion overcame him and he sat with a thump.

Margaret was right.

Here he was, looking for some pretense to hide the fact that he wanted to meet a woman. In a few weeks, he would be forty-years-old. What was he doing?

Since he had finished college, he had told himself the time for action would come. He had whiled away years on the promise of later. Later had come and gone a thousand times over. From the first, the only thing in his way had been himself.

He lacked fortitude, certainty, and the capacity to
do
. But he had done, hadn’t he? In countless ways he had erected barriers to change. Out of fear or laziness or complicity, he had been the author of his own misfortune.

He could have insisted that Mother leave Middletown with him. He could have run for public office. He could have written about the causes close to his heart. He could have worked for change in so many unknown ways because he had never thought to
act
. He had dawdled and dithered and debated. Even a quarter of an hour prior, he had rationalized why he couldn’t serve in the war even as he had articulated precisely why service was so vital.

Margaret had seen it from the first, hadn’t she? Oh, Margaret.

He’d given away a lifetime’s happiness because he had thought she would never let him know rest. Without her, he had known nothing but rest. He had been asleep, and her words had awakened him. And how had he repaid her, but with anger and resentment?

Theo stalked across the room and began digging through a bin of old newspapers. Finally, he found the one with a notice about the organization of new companies for the Fifth Regiment in Middletown. He sat at his desk and began preparing a letter. His life was going to change, starting this instant.

• • •

“Tell us why you want to serve as an officer in the Union Army,” Henry O’Brien prompted.

In the two days since his fight with Margaret, Theo had written expressing an interest in joining a regiment going into the Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, undergone a physical exam, and was now interviewing for the position. It had been a heady blur, particularly since he was trying to keep things from Mother and Josiah at least until the matter was settled.

The charade would soon end, as settlement of his enlistment was in sight. At the ad hoc recruiting office, he sat with James Cook, who was to serve as the regiment’s captain, and O’Brien, the designated second lieutenant. If this conversation went well, he’d enter the army as a first lieutenant.

“I believe in the cause for which we fight.”

James nodded, his brows knit together. “
The
cause? The perfidy of the southern states? The honor and tradition of our great nation?”

“No, the bondage of the slave,” Theo responded.

“Don’t tell the recruits they’re fighting for that,” Henry said, gesturing across the room at the boys waiting to be examined by the doctor. “They’ll not believe you.”

Theo knew this to be true. Inside every paper, he found a different rational for the conflict: pride, culture, economics, history, rebellion, and loyalty. For him, all those other reasons blurred into a background for the cause in which he placed above all others: liberty for enslaved peoples.

He said as much.

“So you’re an abolitionist?” Henry asked, tone guarded.

Theo considered how Margaret might answer this question. To be an abolitionist required action. He had never acted. He had read, talked, and stewed. After a pause he replied, “I’ve done nothing to warrant the title. But I’m in sympathy with them.” This response seemed to ease the tension creeping into the conversation.

James tapped his fingers on the desk. “You should know, Ward, that I very much disagree with the assessment of the war one sees in the papers. At West Point, I got to know many southern boys who have now departed from under the banner of the stars and stripes.” His eyes flashed in anger as he spat the words out. “The traitors won’t give up easily. This” — he waved at a box of uniforms behind him — “isn’t going to be a brief sojourn. Some happy adventure.”

“I never thought it would be,” Theo replied. He recalled studying
The Iliad
while a young man at Yale. He could hear the words of King Priam, pleading with Achilles to give him the body of his son so it could be properly buried. Before this war was over, there would be thousands of Priams — thousands of mourning parents whom nothing could comfort.

But that was the point, wasn’t it? For decades, he’d treated his political ideals as a game. Social reform had been a post-dinner conversation for him, nothing more. He hadn’t meant to. He’d taken his reading and the debates seriously. But he’d simply been unwilling or unable to
move
. The war changed the reckoning, however. If anything was going to force his hand, it was this moment. He could either commit now or give up entirely. If the latter, he might as well dig his own grave and lie down in it.

It was a pity he hadn’t found his fortitude two years ago. There had been just enough abstraction in ’59 for him to hide. The slightest sliver of a chance of avoiding conflict had been enough. So he’d chosen inaction, or less chosen it than fallen into it as the easiest way of living. No longer.

He wouldn’t blame Margaret a whit if she could never forgive him; he’d failed her repeatedly. At this moment, however, he had to find the strength within to forgive himself. Enlisting was a tangible step, a promise to himself everything was
not
going to go back to normal, and he was going to change. How to convince them?

“To me, this war is … a chance. To live differently and more fully. I believe in the rightness of our cause as much as I’ve believed in anything. Give me this opportunity, and I won’t let you down.”

James nodded. “Very well, Ward. As if we could turn you away.” They all laughed.

Henry leaned across the desk and shook Theo’s hand firmly. “Welcome aboard. We’ll have a few weeks’ furlough to fill the rolls before we begin drilling. We’ll depart for Hartford at the end of next month.”

“Good,” Theo said with a nod. “That will give a chance to wrap things up with my legal practice, with my family, with my … fiancée.” Once things were settled here, he had plans for Margaret. His campaign of change would continue until she surrendered.

“You have a wife?” James asked off-handedly, his attention mostly consumed by the papers he shuffled around on the desk.

“I will have.” Theo was impressed by the confidence in his voice and hoped it would somehow carry over into hastening the event he very much wanted.

Henry, unaware of the anxiety that served as a foundation for this, merely smiled. “Well, will she object if we keep you out a bit to celebrate?”

Theo laughed at the private joke of Margaret’s ignorance of his plans. “No, not all.”

What was a half hour’s delay?

Margaret lay in bed, searching for sleep but failing to find it. She was still seething from her fight with Theo two days prior. She had forgotten how exasperating he could be. At the dance at McDonough House, he had bewitched her with his blue eyes. Like drinking from the Lethe, it had been. But now she
saw
. Theo Ward would never stand on his own two feet. It was hopeless to pretend otherwise.

She rolled over, pressing her head into her pillow. After a long, quiet moment in which she thought rest might finally come, Margaret was startled awake by a noise at the window. It sounded like hail. There was a pause and then it started again. Clink. Clink. Clink. She heard a voice half whisper, half call her name. She leapt from bed, wrapped herself in a shawl, and ran to ascertain the source. It was Theo.