Lawless (26 page)

And damn the consequences.

Dressed in a plain cotton nightgown, Eleanor Kent sang to herself and danced on the worn carpet of the parlor in Yorkville.

She held the hem of the nightgown up around her calves, trying to remember the step one of her school friends had shown her.

She was nine years old. A slim, well-formed girl who already showed signs of growing up to be a beauty. Large brown eyes dominated an oval face. A large mouth revealed dazzling white teeth when she smiled.

Upstairs she heard her mother’s voice, raised loudly because Eleanor’s baby brother, two-year-old Will, had cried out with a bellyache that had been troubling him since noon. Mama was in a terrible mood tonight.

Of course, Eleanor thought, missing a step and then stopping altogether, that wasn’t unusual lately. More often than not, her mother and father seemed out of sorts. They were always arguing, too, about things which puzzled Eleanor.

Papa’s safety. Or his traveling too much. Or Mama wanting some particular article for the house and not being able to buy it out of the allowance he gave her. Or Mama simply saying she didn’t have everything most wives had.

Eleanor glanced around the parlor. The room was jammed with furniture and potted plants, as current custom dictated. Nearly every inch of space on the papered walls was crowded with knickknacks, ornamental plates and framed pictures. On the tables there were more plants in smaller pots and a Rogers group—one of those highly realistic little sculptures reproduced by the thousands in gray or brown plaster finish. Every well-furnished American home had at least one John Rogers piece: his famous slave auction, or President Lincoln reading a proclamation, or some farmers playing checkers.

They had a lot of things, Eleanor thought. Yet Mama wasn’t satisfied. And lately she’d been acting very peculiar. Sometimes she vanished for an hour, and Eleanor would hear rattling in the cellar. A bottle or a jar, she didn’t know which. Then she’d hear crying. Finally Mama would reappear, her eyes slightly red and her breath smelling in a strange way. She didn’t walk steadily, either.

Once Margaret had lectured her daughter on the evils of drink. She’d used as her example a town idler who could frequently be seen weaving up and down the streets of Yorkville. This evening, quite without warning, it struck Eleanor that her mother’s lurching walk was just like the town drunk’s. Her cheeks burned, and she felt ashamed of thinking that, but she couldn’t help it.

She stared at the parlor mantel. On the wall above it hung an old sword and an equally old musket. Below them stood a green bottle filled with some dry tea, and a glass display case with wooden ends. The case contained a medallion and a piece of tarred rope.

All were things that Eleanor’s father said were important to the Kent family—just like the picture in Papa’s study showing that ferocious ancestor of hers, Philip Kent.

Tonight Eleanor paid no attention to any of the mementoes. She glanced at the clock. Papa was very late coming home. And Mama had been in a stormy mood ever since the afternoon post brought a letter and a photograph from the Territory of Wyoming.

Mama had examined the photograph with tears in her eyes. She’d angrily refused to answer Eleanor’s questions about it, except to say that it had been sent by Uncle Michael’s wife. Eleanor knew very little about Uncle Michael and Aunt Hannah except that their last name was Boyle, not Kent, and that Papa didn’t like them and said so.

Hoisting the hem of her nightgown again, she began to sing softly.

Listen to the mockingbird, listen to the mockingbird,
Oh the mockingbird is singing all the day—

Her feet moved in rhythm. At last she had the step. She kept dancing and singing. She delighted in both.

Papa had taught her to love to sing, and she’d watched street dancers in the city. She loved performing for people, but her practicing was not well tolerated by her mother, who disapprovingly called her a little show-off. In theaters—places she’d only heard about—people were actually
paid
to sing and dance and show off!

Papa had offered to take her to a theater, but Mama disapproved of that, too, even though she had once enjoyed attending plays when she was a young girl in Richmond. Some things about Mama had certainly changed, Eleanor thought. She didn’t know why, but she was very sorry about it.

Papa had a fine voice. Sometimes he sang with his daughter—another cause of arguments with Mama. Lately Eleanor had concluded that she didn’t want to fall in love and get married if what she saw and heard around her every day was the result. Even though she was taught that girls were supposed to become wives and mothers when they grew up, that wasn’t for her if so much quarreling and bad temper went along with it!

She finished the song and turned her head toward the table which bore their one Rogers group, the rustics seated over a checkerboard. Next to it lay the wrapped photograph which had caused so much distress. With a hesitant glance at the darkened hall outside the parlor and an ear cocked to the sound of Mama berating Will upstairs, Eleanor drew in a long breath. She reached for the picture.

Heavy boots on the veranda startled her. Her hand jerked and hit the piece of statuary. As the front door opened, the Rogers group fell off the table. She tried to catch it.

She wasn’t fast enough. The plaster shattered.

Horrified, she covered her mouth. There was no possession her mother prized more. She’d nagged Papa for weeks before he finally brought it home as a Christmas gift.

Yet the moment Eleanor turned and saw Gideon, she forgot the damage and the certain punishment that would be hers.
“Papa!”
She hurled herself against him. He was dirty, his coat was torn, and his face was covered by cuts and two huge, purpling bruises. “Papa, what happened to you?”

He managed to grin as he hugged her. “Never mind that, young lady. Why are you still up?”

“’Cause Will’s got the bellyache and he’s making so much noise, I can’t sleep. Papa, please, please tell me who hurt you!”

He ruffled the lustrous dark hair that hung loose around her shoulders and shimmered in the lamplight. He walked to a chair and collapsed in it, his blue eye looking a trifle glassy. His shoulders slumped as he said, “The same kind of men I’ve run into before, sweet. Only this time they really took me by surprise.”

He sat forward, wincing. Eleanor stood in front of the pieces of the Rogers group so he wouldn’t notice. He probed his side with his fingertips. Oh, how she loved him! He was so handsome and tall, still as dashing as any soldier. She wished he and Mama could be happy together.

He sighed and sat back. “Don’t think anything’s broken.”

Rapid footsteps came down the stairs. Eleanor turned toward the hall, still shielding the plaster bits by standing directly over them and tugging her nightgown down as far as it would go. The hem was an inch above the carpet.

Her mother rushed in, stricken first by the sight of Gideon slumped in the chair, bruised and dirty, and then by Eleanor’s bare toes poking out from under the gown. Margaret Marble Kent was her husband’s age, twenty-eight, with brown hair and eyes and a pretty though snub-nosed face. Her bosom and waist had thickened and now had a matronly look.

Flour whitened Margaret’s gingham skirt and bodice. Strands of loose hair flew around her shoulders. She let her anger win out over her concern as she turned on her daughter.

“Why aren’t you in bed?” She grabbed Eleanor’s earlobe, hurting it. Eleanor stumbled, pulled off balance. “I ordered you to your room an hour ag—”

She saw the fragments of the sculpture. Her dark eyes filled with tears. “Oh, no.
Oh, no!”

She pushed Eleanor aside, knelt and tried to fit two sections of the statue together. Gideon stared at her, a stunned expression on his face. Then color rose in his cheeks. Anger animated his shoulders and arms with a quivering tension.

Suddenly Margaret exclaimed, “You did this, young lady! You broke the only Rogers group we own!” She slapped her daughter’s face, and not lightly.

Eleanor reeled back. She was more shocked than hurt. All she could think was,
Mama smells funny again
—
what’s wrong with her?

“For Christ’s sake, Margaret!” Gideon roared, leaping to his feet. Margaret reached for her daughter’s shoulder as if she meant to hurt her further. Gideon jumped between them. He pushed Margaret away from the terrified girl.

“Eleanor, go to bed. This instant!”

Eleanor fled up the stairs while Gideon shook his wife by the shoulders.

“Control yourself, Margaret.
Control yourself!”

She tried, dabbing her eyes with the back of her wrist. “I—I’m sorry. It’s been a terrible evening.”

“Obviously.” He was weary of wondering why her breath smelled as it did. “What have you been drinking? The port from the cellar?”

She looked as stunned as Eleanor a moment ago. Quickly, she backed away. She started to cover her mouth but realized what she was doing and dropped her hand back to her side. Her tone grew defensive.

“Drinking? Nothing!”

The lie shocked him, then filled him with a confused sadness as she faced away and put a hand over her eyes, gasping out her words between bursts of crying, “But it’s a wonder I don’t drink after all I’ve gone through. Will’s been sick most of the day, and you didn’t come home and didn’t come home, and Eleanor’s so willful, she refuses to go to bed when she’s told. All she cares about is practicing her singing and dancing in secret—”

Margaret’s eye fell on the shattered statuary. She sobbed harder than ever.

Again Gideon’s face showed anger. He overcame it, walked to her, drew her against him. She caught the odor of the liquor with which he’d cleaned up. She wrenched away.

“You’re a fine one to make ridiculous accusations about drinking! You smell like a distillery. Were you in a saloon brawl?”

“How kind of you to ask! I thought you were more concerned about the Rogers group than about me. No, I was not in a saloon brawl. The
Beacon
was visited by some gentlemen hired to protest my editorial about the Washington railroad lobby. I managed to survive their tender inducements to stop writing about Jay Cooke’s brother.”

“I’ve told you before, Gideon,” she breathed. “It’s going to keep happening unless you
quit.
Over and over, it’s going to
keep happening.
Beatings. People shooting at you on dark streets—”

Staring at her, he was struck by a sudden insight. During their courting days in Richmond early in the war, he’d known little of books, or of the kind of ideas which shaped and moved the world. In terms of those things, he’d been much like an infant barely able to crawl.

After the war, Margaret had helped him learn to walk. She’d read to him at the supper table. Encouraged him to try to read increasingly difficult material on his own, then to attempt to write short paragraphs expressing his personal convictions.

Perhaps she regretted all that, as Jephtha had said parents regretted their children growing to adulthood. Margaret had taught him to walk so he could leave home and, intellectually, he had done so, moving into a deeper and deeper involvement with the world. He was like the grown child who would no longer be directed and controlled.

And she was the parent who would not gracefully let go.

The insight made his scalp prickle. He knew it was right. Didn’t she tend to be domineering with her daughter and her son? Her fury over Eleanor’s disobedience demonstrated that all over again. Somehow he had become not merely her husband but also another of her children—the most independent one, the most troublesome one. God, why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? It explained so much about her recent violent moods.

It disturbed him, too. Profoundly. All at once he craved a drink.

In the regular liquor cabinet, none of the bottles seemed to have been disturbed. He poured a generous shot of bourbon and drank it to ease the aches in his body and the newer one in his mind.

She was staring at him, awaiting a response, her eyes sullen. With all the patience he could muster, he said, “You mustn’t take everything so seriously, Margaret. Of course I got hurt a little tonight. But the men didn’t mean to do me any permanent injury.”

“What about the shooting?” she blazed at him.

“In Baltimore?” He structured a careful distortion. “That was an isolated case. One random shot, late at night. I’m not even positive it was aimed at me.” That was an outright lie—to spare her.

“Well—well”—she staggered to a chair, sat sideways in it, her head averted, her eyes closed—“you know what happened to my father in the Mexican War. Then I nearly lost you to the Yankees, and not just once. Manassas. The Peninsula. Yellow Tavern. That damnable prison—”

Her eyes flew open. “Now I’m in danger of losing you all over again. I worry all the time!”

He doubted it, but felt unkind for thinking it.

“—and—and”—half speaking, half crying, she let it pour out—“I’m so sick of it, Gideon. So sick of—the way we live. Grubbing—when there’s—so much money—and a job waiting at the
Union
—a high-paying, safe job—if you’ll just—speak to Molly—”

He was angered that she brought up the same old requests again tonight. But he fought the anger and went to her side a second time. She recoiled from the touch of his fingers on her shoulder. Forcing himself, he spoke in a calm voice.

“Margaret, I have explained again and again that if we lived any more lavishly, no one would take the
Beacon
seriously.”

“Who cares if they do?” she cried softly. “Who cares? I don’t!” Suddenly more coherent, she gazed at him, something hard and uncompromising in her dark eyes. “I want you to give it up, Gideon.”

I don’t want you to grow up and leave me, Gideon.

“You know I can’t.”

“Won’t. You mean
won’t!”

“What’s happened to you, Margaret? There was a time—and not too long ago—when you encouraged me. You were the one who taught me to read and write and think, and now you act as if you hate the result.”