The Bride of Texas (82 page)

Ursula spoke quickly. “No! Don’t tempt your luck. They say luck is fickle.”

It certainly is, he thought. Ursula said, “When I saw them on Hannelore, my heart stopped. I knew then that you’d made it to America.”

“Why didn’t you answer my letters, Ursula?”

“I never got any letters,” she said
.

Didn’t you, thought Kapsa
.

“Her uncle, the pencil magnate, bought them for Hannelore,” said Ursula. “He has three sons but he always wanted a daughter. I’ve never met him, to ask him where he got them.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Sergeant Kapsa. “The main thing is, they brought us luck.”

“— I’ve got cancer, Kapsa,” said Fircut. “It’s no use.”

In the saloon, a player piano played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
.

“His woman was a servant of hers in Cincinnati,” said Mr. Ohrenzug.

“What’s it about, Bozenka?” said Padecky, changing the subject glumly. He had been silent for quite a while, mulling over the book he couldn’t read because of his ignorance of the Latin alphabet, an ignorance reconfirmed over
The English Language for Émigrés from Russia
.

“It’s hard to explain,” the sergeant’s wife replied. “Lots of things happen in it. You’d have to read it for yourself.”

“I don’t have my spectacles, dammit!” swore Padecky. “Anyway, don’t bother your little head. It must be full of straw if you can’t even tell a fellow what a stupid book’s all about!”

“Why are you interested, if it’s stupid?” asked Molly Schroeder, but again Padecky ignored the merry ex-widow.

“It’s about a girl named Geraldine,” said Bozenka. “At the beginning she gets engaged to someone called Patrick who’s a doctor. In the end they get married, but in between it keeps going back and forth between looking like the wedding is never going to come off and looking like it is. Mainly because, if you ask me, he’s a dimwit.”

“See? Stupid,” said Padecky. “I didn’t even have to read it to know that.”

“It’s a very nice book,” Bozenka protested. “And a big one. I just wonder, if the fellow is such a dimwit compared to Geraldine —”

“So?” Padecky looked out on the dance floor in annoyance. “Look at him!” he said, pointing to Houska’s face moving in and out of the cigar smoke like a sweaty moon as he spun around with his pretty wife. “He too got himself married! He even broke up her first marriage, although it’s true it was a bad one!”

“But he came back from the war a hero,” said Shake.

“And didn’t you?” yelled Padecky. “With a medal and all! But you’re still batching it!”

“I have my reasons,” said Shake.

“What reasons, I ask you? Is it that you’re —” Padecky stopped short. “Well, you know what I mean. There’s ladies present.”

“You mean us?” Molly Schroeder asked impudently, but Padecky continued to ignore her.

“Yes, I know what you mean,” said Shake. “No, that isn’t why. Actually, I think Miss Laura Lee would understand,” he
said, with a wistful glance towards the famous author standing with the doorman, who was still bending her ear. “God knows,” he said, with feeling. “Maybe I should tell her my story. She might turn it into a beautiful novel.” He paused. “It could be called
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
. And, my dear lady” — he turned to Bozenka — “it would contain a similar problem: how someone so pretty and apparently so smart could fall in love, even though just briefly, with, as you put it, such a dimwit.”

“You’re a jester, Mr. Schweik,” said Bozenka. “But that wasn’t the strange thing about the book. Sure, a girl who’s pretty and smart can marry a —” She hesitated and glanced at the sergeant, who just made a face. “Although it doesn’t often happen.”

“Hardly ever,” Shake interjected sadly.

“What I wondered,” she went on, “was how such a fool as this Patrick fellow ever got to be a doctor. I wouldn’t let him write me a prescription for Hoffman tonic.”

“Well, doctors like that do turn up now and then,” said Shake. “I knew one, a German called Schlaflieber, and he was a past master at messing up prescriptions.”

Bozenka blushed beet-red. But that had been long ago, and time was a better healer than Schlaflieber, M.D., or the fictional dimwit Patrick. The sergeant smiled at his wife and she flushed an even deeper red, although that was impossible. He felt a pang of conscience, but that had been more than long ago — it was deep in the abyss of time. And more recently —

When he returned from Chicago to the farm and got into bed beside his wife, deep in the well-deserved sleep of a young farmer’s wife, he stared at the summer stars and meditated on the many mysteries of love that his wife read about in her novels. He looked at her face and love poured over him like honey. He recalled the summer sky long ago in a distant land, in a mysterious cottage on a
hill, on God’s own little table, in a beautiful time now deep in an abyss that the war had covered over, the same war that had buried Kakuska
.

Six months later he had to go to Chicago again, and in a fancy lawyer’s mahogany-panelled office he received a cheque for a staggering five thousand dollars willed to him in a moment of deathbed guilt by Fircut, who — as he admitted in a hastily penned note attached to the cheque — had not sold the nest of crystal eggs to a Jew, but had discovered a more lucrative market, which in turn had moved the goods by some uncanny route to the lovely throat of the pencil magnate’s young niece. An hour later the sergeant found himself standing in front of a mansion by the lake, with a heraldic eagle scowling down at him from over the door — an eagle different from the bald one that had witnessed his entry into a new and better, though cruel and dangerous, chapter of his life — and moving to a side entrance, pulling the bell rope, and saying in English to the chambermaid who answered the door, “Tell Madam Consul that someone would like to speak with her, a sergeant —” He hesitated. “Sergeant Tasche,” he said
.

He gave his head a shake. The doorman had opened the door for someone else, and the drumming of the rain interrupted his thoughts and brought him back.

“I mean, she was her servant,” said Mr. Ohrenzug. “Only until she made it in — in the restaurant business. You know, neighbours, it’s like something Mrs. Laura Lee might have thought up.”

The doorman was standing alone again. The sergeant looked around and saw the author and the young woman sitting in a booth, the author’s mouth open as if in astonishment at what her companion was telling her. She took a handkerchief from her décolletage, patted her pale forehead — was it that hot in here, wondered the sergeant. Mr. Ohrenzug was telling the others how the abolitionist Mrs. Morris had asked
her father for the girl as a birthday present and then drowned in the lake, and how the girl had got a job with the famous woman author, whose real name was not in fact Laura Lee.

“Anyway, Mrs. Lee hired her as a chambermaid,” continued Mr. Ohrenzug, “and the girl was going to save her wages to buy her husband’s freedom. That shouldn’t have been a problem — how much could they want for someone as lazy and useless as Hasdrubal? His mother” — Ohrenzug grew thoughtful — “now, that was another matter.” But even that they had figured out. The liberated loafer would put a spell on her and her price would drop to zero, especially since she was short a leg. “But man proposes and God disposes,” said Mr. Ohrenzug. “Before they could do anything, the South seceded, the chambermaid was stuck in Cincinnati, and Hasdrubal was still on a plantation. Luscious as she was, the girl was so gone on the loafer that she only cheated on him once, and that was with a general who was here in Illinois arresting journalists.”

“Burnside?” asked Shake, amazed.

“You leave him out of this!” Padecky cried. “He’s the one who nabbed that bastard Vallandigham!” A memory burst in the sergeant’s mind like a shooting star. “And he should have given him the noose, too!” Padecky went on. “Big mistake, not stringing him up!”

“You mean the one with the
peyzes
?” asked Mr. Ohrenzug. “No, it wasn’t him, he was a decent fellow. This one’s name was Rascall, and that’s exactly what he was. Not because he locked up reporters — I approved of that. But he was a libertine. She only did it as a way of thanking him for fighting to free her race. He was sneaky, that rascal. He thought nothing of taking advantage of nobler emotions.” Mr. Ohrenzug was gradually getting as angry as Padecky, but he forced himself to calm down and went on to tell about how, as soon as the war was over, the Negro girl packed a suitcase and got on a train to
South Carolina. In the suitcase she was carrying her wedding dress.

“I’ll bet that’s who the Carolina Bride is going to be!” exclaimed Bozenka.

“What bride, damn it?” growled Padecky.

“In the book I read,
She Played It Safe,”
explained Bozenka, “it said at the end that Mrs. Lee was working on another story, ‘a tragic romance of the War of Secession’. It said the new book would be called
Carolina Bride
and would be a big surprise for all her readers, because there’ll be entirely new tones in the story, never used before by Mrs. Laura Lee.” She glanced over at the booth, and so did the sergeant. The famous writer was just setting down a liqueur glass. The pretty Negro woman was gesticulating earnestly, the way people do when they are eager to be understood.

“Tones? What tones?” Padecky asked.

“What?” Bozenka responded absently.

“I said what tones? Is it about bagpipes or what?”

“Mrs. Kapsa was speaking figuratively,” said Shake. “The new novel will contain new stories, told in ways the author hasn’t used before.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Padecky. “A girl packs a wedding dress in her valise — what kind of new stories or tones or what? Just maybe she was too sure of herself, since she’d cheated on him, only once, true, but still. Dumb biddy. If it was me —” Padecky fell silent, because two waiters stepped up to the table with trays laden with steaming food, and he was overcome by the long-forgotten fragrance.

— and the sergeant, a sparkler exploding in his mind’s eye, saw the training camp in Washington where he had tormented volunteer recruits by drumming Austrian-style drill into them, but all for a good cause, for the kind of freedom he had found in this country, even in the army, and the kind that was missing in Cyril’s story
.

One day a politician came to the camp. He was elegant and he made eloquent speeches, and the recruits — defiant and reluctant to obey orders shouted at them by some kid from the village back home just because he happened to have stripes on his sleeve — stood around a hastily constructed platform, their faces growing darker as the congressman from Washington pontificated against the war. They never let him finish. They lifted him bodily down from the platform and sat him on a rail. Four men went for a barrel of tar and two more came running up from the mess hall with five freshly slaughtered chickens, plucking them as they ran, but then Colonel Farrar blocked their way and rescued the speaker. But before the handsome politician climbed off the rail and was escorted out of camp on the colonel’s orders, the sergeant approached him and —