The Deserter (29 page)

At once she went to her chest of drawers and found the little hooked case that enclosed the likenesses of herself and Seth. The glass rectangle over Seth's face was smudged where Ida had so often kissed it. Sorrowfully now she kissed it for the last time and wiped the glass clean. Working slowly and carefully, she edged out the gilded frame and with gentle fingers slid Alexander's picture in place over Seth's and pressed the glass down over both of them. Then she straightened the crocheted edging of the dresser scarf and positioned the open case next to the daguerreotype of her father.

Perhaps it was time now to take care of other things. Ida pulled open the drawer in which she had stored away a sacred collection of handkerchiefs among the gloves and winter stockings. She had been making them for Seth—so long ago! Most of them had never been embroidered with the letter
S
, and therefore they had never been sent. But there was a single exception, the handkerchief with the terrifying crimson hem, the one given back to her by Lieutenant Gobright on that fearful night on the battlefield.

Also in Ida's dresser drawer was Seth's last letter, written from an encampment in Maryland, and two more sad things—her own last letter to him and the pamphlet from the American Tract Society. Also in the drawer were the three perfumed letters from Lily LeBeau that had caused her so much anguish.

Under Lily's letters lay other dreadful things, the playbills that had been given out in handfuls by shouting boys on the Avenue when Ida had been living at Mrs. Broad's. She had always taken them eagerly, hoping to find Seth's name printed boldly on the swaggering lists of actors. It was never there, but another name had appeared on every one of them, large and black and abominable. She wanted to throw all the playbills in the fire, but they were heart-wrenching memorials of a bitter kind, and she couldn't let them go.

At least she could make them less hateful. Ida picked up her sewing scissors, remembering an innocent conversation in the cars on the way back from Washington—her mother and Eben, Ida and her baby.

Her mother had wanted to hear about the exciting life of the nation's capital. Had there been public exhibitions with transparencies and fireworks? Had she seen the president and his wife? Famous generals and fashionable ladies in beautiful gowns?

The baby had been fretful. Ida's mother had taken him and asked another question. “Did you see any famous plays, Ida dear?”

“Or famous actors?” said Eben. Ida's brother was thin and pale from lying so long in a hospital bed, but he, too, was eager to hear about the thrilling life of the city.

“Maggie Mitchell?” said Ida's mother. “Charlotte Cushman?”

“Edwin Forrest?” said Eben.

“What about that other one,” said Eudocia, trying to remember, “that famous young Shakespearean actor? Wasn't he another Edwin?”

“No, not Edwin.” Ida held out her arms for the baby. “His brother, I think. I feel sure it was his brother.”

Now Ida snipped and snipped, cutting out pieces from the playbills. Finished, she put them back in the bottom of the drawer and covered them with cotton stockings. Then she undid the ribbon around Alexander's letters, added the new one, tied up the bundle again, laid it down on her Sunday gloves, and softly closed the drawer.

Something else had come in the mail, the new copy of
Peterson's Magazine
. For a moment Ida leafed through it, and then, smiling, she took it downstairs, deciding to make a present for Alexander—perhaps the handsome smoking cap on page one. “We give here a design, full size, printed in colors, for this very stylish Smoking Cap, so that any subscriber can make it for herself, a very pretty gift for a gentleman.”

PART XXI

UNBOUND
REGIMENTAL PAPERS

GOD BLESS THE
ARCHIVISTS AND ALL
THE LIBRARIANS

F
rom the window a moist breeze from the river lifted and ruffled the papers. Letters scudded across the table and fluttered to the floor. Homer stooped to gather them up. “The trouble is, these things aren't good enough. It's got to be more official. You know, regimental. We'll never convince the lords of creation to change that tablet in Memorial Hall with this kind of flimsy evidence.”

Mary ran to the window and slammed it down. “I'll bet there's a military archive somewhere. There must be some sort of official record of who died in that regiment at Gettysburg.”

“Of course, but where?”

“In Washington, I'll bet.” She looked at him brightly. “The National Archives. I'll bet they're open to visitors.”

“Washington!” Lightning flashed over the river and in its unearthly light, Homer saw the nature of his coming sacrifice. Hollowly he said, “Look, my darling, do we really care this much about your dear old great-great-grandfather?”

“Oh, Homer, we can't give up now, not when we've come so far. I can't possibly go anywhere right now, you know that. You're the one with time on your hands.”

Time on his hands! Homer groaned at this jab below the belt. The reason he had time on his hands was the near approach of his retirement, his sense of being politely edged aside. Whereas Mary …

Well, there was no help for it. Homer put his arm around Seth Morgan's great-great-granddaughter and drew her away to bed.

True to his expectation, the journey was a nightmare. When Mary picked him up at the airport, Homer was a physical wreck. His shoulders sagged, his whiskers were wild, his ancient seersucker jacket was sweat-stained and shapeless, and the clammy garment beneath it was clearly an undershirt.

In the car he snoozed in the back seat. At home he collapsed on the sofa, whimpering, “Give me a drink.”

It took two whiskeys before Homer could do anything but complain about the horror of his travels, the humiliating disagreement over cab fare, the eight-dollar cheeseburger, the effect on the human body of passing from jungle heat into polar chill, the rain that had poured down on the head of a miserable wretch without an umbrella.

“Oh, my poor darling,” said Mary. “I'm sorry it was so awful. But come on, Homer, tell me what you found out.”

“Oh, that.” Homer sat up and drained his glass. “Well, as a matter of fact, I found out a lot. There were really good folks in the National Archives. Oh, of course it took time, Jesus.” Homer stretched a limp arm in the direction of his backpack, couldn't reach it and fell back in a swoon.

Mary grasped it and handed it over. “Yes, yes, it took time. First you had to fill out a lot of forms, I'll bet.”

“Not just forms.” Homer sat up. “I had to pass through a metal detector and be photographed and then I had to find my way to the right room for Civil War records, room 400, that's what it was, and make out a special form, and then—” Homer yawned and dozed off again. Mary poked him. “Oh, well, then of course I had to wait. But the stuff didn't come to room 400, it came to room 203, but I couldn't go in there with my backpack, so I had to stuff it in a locker, and then room 203 turned out to be a big important room in the Archives, with a lot of scholars in little compartments, and the compartments had these see-through partitions so nobody could mishandle a precious document without being observed, but of course all those dedicated scholars didn't care because they were all lost in their own individual fields of research.” Homer's eyes closed again on this vision of paradise.

“Homer!”

“Right you are.” Homer opened his eyes and carried on. “Well, I had to persuade the archivist to let me see the originals of the muster rolls for one particular regiment at one particular time, and of course it took a good deal of dancing around artfully on my verbal toes.”

“Actually, Homer dear, it's what you do best.”

“So at last they brought them out and set them in front of me, three brown boxes.”

“Three brown boxes,” murmured Mary greedily, sharing Homer's affection for all the paraphernalia of historical investigation—archival envelopes, file cards, flickering images on computer screens and brown boxes.

“So I opened them up one by one and took out the papers delicately, using only the tips of my fingers. The stuff inside was bewildering at first. There were muster rolls for every company in the regiment. They were for two-month periods, so the musters for those three days at Gettysburg were just lumped in with the rest. You could see who was present on June thirtieth, the day before the battle began, but the next roll wasn't till the end of August. But it was better than nothing. I could see that Morgan and Pike were both in the company that was commanded by Captain Thomas Robeson on the day before the battle, but of course they were missing on the later roll in August, and so was Robeson. Well, Robeson's name is up there on one of the tablets in Memorial Hall because he was one of the victims in the assault on Culp's Hill.”

“And he's in my scrapbook,” said Mary.

“Well, so far there wasn't much we didn't know already. Then the great guy at the desk told me there were some extra papers, not just the official forms.” Homer put his hands together in prayer and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “God bless the archivists.”

“And the librarians,” said Mary, laughing. “Don't forget the librarians.”

“Oh, of course. God bless all the librarians.”

“Homer, go ahead tell me what was in the extra papers?”

“They were in another lovely brown box, box number 1727, and they were a gold mine.”

Mary gave a delighted laugh. “We keep finding gold mines.”

“That's the great thing about libraries and collections of archives,” said Homer joyfully. “Buried deep down in their secret vaults are all these precious deposits of ancient papers, glittering there in the dark, just waiting to be dug up by you and me. And that's what these papers were, ‘The Miscellaneous Unbound Regimental Papers of the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.' They were a mother lode.”

MISCELLANEOUS

Anyone who has cleaned out a family attic knows the difficulty of deciding what is worth keeping and what can be discarded. Imagine the task of sifting through the accumulated records of a nation's official life.…

—P
AMPHLET,
N
ATIONAL
A
RCHIVES OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES

M
iscellaneous papers,” chortled Mary. “Oh, of course. Miscellaneous things are such a nuisance. They don't fit any tidy little category.”

“Exactly. Whenever you don't know what to do with something, you file it under Miscellaneous and let it rot there for the rest of your life.”

“I've got a drawer like that in the kitchen, a whole drawerful of miscellaneous gadgets that don't belong anywhere else—you know, Homer, corn holders, corks, rubber bands, chopsticks, cup hooks, nuts and bolts, wing nuts—”

“Wing nuts? Why on earth have you got a bunch of wing nuts in the kitchen?”

“I haven't the faintest idea. Take my wing nuts, Homer, take them, take them.”

There was a blank pause, and then both of them pounced on the notes Homer had copied so laboriously from “The Miscellaneous Unbound Regimental Papers of the Massachusetts Second Volunteer Infantry,” in room 203 of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

“My friend the archivist explained it,” said Homer. “Since this report came from somebody in another regiment after the army had marched away somewhere else, it was slow in reaching the right adjutant. And then it wasn't on one of the report forms the adjutant was accustomed to, so he probably just stamped it and added it to the regimental records, and maybe he didn't even read it, and then when all the Union army records were gathered together after the war, it was the sort of thing nobody else knew what to do with either, so they invented this category of ‘Miscellaneous Unbound Regimental Papers' for irrelevant reports, just like your cup hooks and wing nuts.”

“Oh, Homer, what was it that was so interesting?”

“It was a letter from an officer in another regiment. He's in your scrapbook too.” Homer grinned at his wife. “Lieutenant Noah Gobright.”

“Noah Gobright!” Mary jumped up, ran for her scrapbook, plopped it on the coffee table and opened it to the entry for Go-bright. “Look, Homer, here he is. And you're right, he wasn't in the Second Massachusetts at Gettysburg, he was in an artillery regiment. And, oh, Homer, all the men in my scrapbook were in Hasty Pudding, and so was he. He must have known Seth Morgan and Otis Pike.”

“He sure did. Listen to his letter.” Homer cleared his throat. “It's addressed to ‘Captain John Beardsley, Tenth Maine, Commander, Provost Guard, Twelfth Army Corps,' and the first part's dated July tenth, 1863.”

“A week after the battle ended? Bring it in the kitchen,” said Mary. “Read it to me while I do something about supper.”