The Deserter (22 page)

“I see,” said Ida.

“Well, thank Gawd, ma'am, this here's only a passenger train with decent folks like you on board.”

“Can you tell me when we'll arrive in Washington?”

He pulled out his watch. “Couple hours yet. When the train pulls in, I'll help you down with your things.”

“Oh, no, that's all right,” said Ida, uncomfortably aware that she had no things. “I won't need any help, but thank you just the same.”

IDA FORLORN

A
s the time of arrival grew near, Ida gathered her strength for the ordeal ahead. Whatever happened, she must not miss Lily. She would keep her place in the cars and watch all the passengers as they moved along the platform below her window.

The outskirts of Washington were ugly with cattle yards and wagon sheds. An enormous corral held thousands of horses. The smell of a slaughterhouse seeped into the car. Ida was disappointed. Could they really be approaching the great capital city of the United States? She had seen photographs of splendid marble buildings like temples in ancient Rome, but so far, it looked more like a stockyard or cattle market.

With a hiss of steam and a squealing of brakes, the train slowed down and chugged into the station. At once all the other passengers stood up and collected their bags and bundles and moved along the aisle. A moment later they appeared on the platform below Ida's window.

The station was an imposing building with a tower that rose high above the track. Ida watched intently as streams of passengers from the other cars flooded slowly toward an open door—well-dressed businessmen, or perhaps they were congressmen, sharp-looking salesmen with heavy cases, shabby women in untidy bonnets, handsomely dressed ladies, whole families with children and babes in arms and strolling clusters of men in uniform, black soldiers as well as white. Some of their uniforms were outlandish, with baggy red trousers and tasseled fezes—like pictures in
The Arabian Nights
.

In the sodden August heat even the fashionable women looked disheveled, their crinolines tussled in the push and shove of other people's baggage. One well-dressed man took off his tall hat and mopped his bald head, and Ida thought he must surely be a senator. A boy with a tray hanging from his shoulders was selling iced lemonade, and for a homesick moment Ida wondered if the ice had come from one of the ponds at home, packed in the hold of a ship that had sailed all the way from Boston harbor, the great blocks keeping each other cold.

She caught her breath and leaned closer to the window. Was that Lily's pretty parasol?

No, it tilted sideways and the face beneath it was not Lily's.

“End of the line,” said the conductor. “May I help you, missus?”

“Oh, thank you.” But Ida was grateful for his hand as she stepped heavily down to the platform.

She had missed dozens of people. Hungrily Ida stared right and left, looking for Lily. But the crowd was thinning, the train was gathering steam and blowing its whistle and the powerful rods on the driving wheels were beginning their mighty seesawing motion. The great wheels turned slowly at first, then faster and faster and faster. The locomotive whistled and thundered out of the station, followed by its rattling train of cars, leaving no one on the platform but a couple of baggage porters, a stevedore with a cart piled with mailbags, the lemonade seller packing up his ice—which came, perhaps, from the North Pole—and Ida, forlorn.

Only then did she see that there were two doors into the station. Lily must have gone into the farther door, never passing Ida's window at all.

Almost running, she made her way through the other door. In the lofty waiting room a few people were sitting on benches and a few more were heading out the wide portal into the street. Ida hurried after the departing passengers, looking for a pretty plump woman in a soaring bonnet and a fetching outfit. When she had boarded the train in Baltimore, Lily had been wearing her favorite gown, her “Clothilde,” with its lacy little cape.

Outside on the broad avenue, cab horses were ranged along the curb. One had a nose bag, and Ida was reminded that she had not eaten a morsel since a hasty breakfast in the station at Baltimore, and then it was only a bun.

People were climbing into the hacks, the men handing in their wives, the wives gathering up their billowing skirts and settling down.

Ida hurried along the row as the drivers flicked their whips across the broad backs of their horses and set off at a trot, heading for splendid lodgings or magnificent hotels somewhere else in the city. Soon all the cabs had sped away in the direction of an imposing marble building a little farther up the avenue. The dome of the building was covered with scaffolding. Ida had seen pictures, she knew what it was. It was the Capitol of the United States.

Painfully disappointed, she sagged down on a bench beside the door of the depot. Every one of the passengers from the Baltimore train had left the station, including Lily LeBeau.

THE NEW SHAPE
OF THE WORLD

O
nly a few weeks ago, Ida had trembled on the verge of finding her lost husband. Now she was alone and friendless in a strange city. She had only one harum-scarum acquaintance, and now Lily LeBeau had become a needle in a haystack. How would Ida ever find her in this labyrinth of unknown streets? Where might she have gone? To some nameless hotel or boardinghouse? To a theater? Was she dashing helter-skelter to a rendezvous with Seth?

Despairing, Ida stumbled away from the station. Turning her back on the Capitol, she began walking up an avenue, heading away from the glaring sun. Tramping along heavily, she was the object of inquisitive stares. But by now, Ida was grimly accustomed to being “the cynosure of all eyes,” and she ignored the curious looks and the knowing grins.

And in the open air she soon recovered her spirits. Ida, after all, was a fatalist of the sturdiest New England kind. She was the daughter of a farmer who had endured one natural disaster after another—the wild winds that had torn the apples off the trees, the demented sow that had devoured her piglets, the gripe that had seized the milking cow, the early thaw that had brought along too soon the blossoms on the fruit trees, the lightning stroke that had set fire to the barn, the rainy spring that had flooded the lower field, the wasting disease that had taken Aunt Clara, the strange troubling of Seth's mother's mind and, most terrible of all, the tree in the woodlot that had twisted on Father's ax and crushed him where he stood.

In the last few weeks, blows like a dozen falling trees had fallen on his eldest daughter. They might have broken any other young woman, but Ida's mental habit had always been to absorb harsh tidings and step forward briskly into the new shape of the world, whatever it might be.

She stepped forward now, looking about her, curious to understand a city in which marble temples alternated with shanties and weedy vacant lots. The faces on the street were both white and black—the colored were free now. When a middle-aged white woman smiled at her, Ida spoke up boldly. “Excuse me, ma'am, I wonder if you know of a boardinghouse nearby?”

The woman was in mourning dress. “Why, yes, my dear, I certainly do. There's my own.”

What good luck
. Walking along with her, Ida learned that Mrs. Broad had been forced to take in lodgers after Mr. Broad was killed by a runaway horse while crossing New Jersey Avenue, only just around the corner from this very spot, and how in the blink of an eye poor Mrs. Broad had found herself a widow, forced to turn her home into a respectable boardinghouse. “Of course, I only take in folks of the better sort. You know, dear, what I mean.”

Ida didn't know, but she said, “Oh, yes.”

“I have six spare rooms but only four ladies at present, and one gentleman and wife, because Mrs. Poff got so wearied of working in the Dead Letter Office, she went home.” Mrs. Broad took Ida's arm and whispered, “My dear, when are you expecting?”

“Next month,” said Ida gratefully. “But I'm fine. I'm here for just a few days, and then I'll go home.”

“Well, I have a woman friend experienced in the healing arts who could be of assistance, just in case.”

Mrs. Broad's was a neat wooden house on G Street. She showed her new tenant around, starting with the parlor, where two women looked up from a checkerboard and an anxious-looking man lowered his newspaper.

Mrs. Broad introduced them as Mr. and Mrs. Tossit and Miss Whitley. “Mrs. Morgan is here just for a little spell,” she explained, “before returning to …”

“Massachusetts,” said Ida. She bobbed politely, then followed Mrs. Broad up the carpeted stairs.

“Here's your room,” said Mrs. Broad, throwing open a door.

The room was small but neat, and the bedding was clean. A shining white bowl and pitcher sat on the washstand and a matching vessel was visible under the bed.

“It will do very well,” said Ida.

She pulled off her shawl while Mrs. Broad explained the rent and mealtimes and gossiped about the other lodgers. “The Tossits, they're here from Maryland. One of those battles, his barn got burned down and so did his cornfield. He's here to get compensation, three thousand dollars he feels like he's owed, so every other day he goes to his congressman to present his case, and next day he goes to the quartermaster general. Miss Whitley, she's on night duty in the Capitol.”

Ida was interested in the lives of people in other places. “Does Miss Whitley work for a congressman?”

“Oh, laws, no.” Mrs. Broad laughed heartily. “She's a baker. All the soldiers in the city, thousands of them, they got to be fed, and there's thousands of poor wounded men. So there's a big bakery down there in the basement of the Capitol. Another of my boarders is in the Sanitary.”

“The Sanitary Commission? She's a nurse?”

There were screams from outdoors. Mrs. Broad lifted her hands in a gesture of dismay. “It's Annie's boy, she does the wash.” Mrs. Broad went to the window, threw up the sash and shouted into the backyard, “You there, Jacob. Those sheets, you leave them be.”

Ida looked out too. The backyard was full of laundry. A small black boy and girl were running in and out. One sheet sagged to the ground.

“You hear me, Jacob?” screeched Mrs. Broad. “You peg up that sheet.”

“Mrs. Broad,” said Ida anxiously, “you say the city's full of wounded men?”

Her landlady closed the window. “Oh, my goodness, yes. There's hospitals all over. They ship them upriver from Virginia or carry them down from the North in the cars. That big fight in Pennsylvania, those poor young soldiers, they're dying all over this town.”

THE LIVING STATUE

I
da's first impression of the nation's capital was renewed next morning when she began a pilgrimage to the city's theaters, following the directions of Mrs. Broad. Blocks of marble cluttered the grounds of the Capitol, there were coal and lumber yards along the Mall and a muddy canal ran through the heart of the city. Often she saw cattle being driven along the grandest streets, and Mrs. Broad complained that there were more pigs than cats.

The four theaters were not far apart. Ida was a tall young woman with strong bones. Even carrying a robust infant eager to be born, she could walk for miles, pausing only once in a while to lean against a picket fence or rest on a marble stairway.

One afternoon she was glad to board a car of the Washington Horse Railroad Company on Seventh Street, although she wasn't sure where it was going. The only sign on the car was not helpful:

COLORED PERSONS
MAY RIDE IN THIS CAR

But the horse was plodding in the right direction. On the Avenue, Ida descended and walked over to Tenth Street to try the last of the theaters on Mrs. Broad's list. At the first three, Grover's National and the two music halls, the Varieties and the Canterbury, no one had heard of Lily LeBeau.

In front of the fourth theater, there was a crowd on the street. They were all staring up at a man stepping carefully along a tightrope stretched between two buildings. Ida watched too, holding her breath until he reached the other side. Then she turned to the gaping man beside her and asked her question about Lily LeBeau.