The Emancipator's Wife (14 page)

Crickets and cicadas made a strident chorus outside as she crept down the wide staircase, her long braids lying thick down her back. Somewhere a dog barked.

Hoodoo?
she wondered. Though Mammy Sally would deny it to every white member of the household, the old slave knew more about nursing than the herbs and willow-bark she'd employed to get Pendleton through the cholera. More than once, on her stealthy trips to the outhouse, Mary had seen the old nurse out at midnight, drilling a hole in the south side of one of the chestnut-trees at the bottom of the yard, to “blow the chills” out of her own body and into the tree. Mary knew, too, that servants from other households would sometimes come to their kitchen, asking for a conjure of peace-plant and honey to sweeten up a harsh mistress, or balls of black wax and pins to send an importunate master away. These they'd deny wanting, if they saw Mary watching.

The dining-room with its graceful table and glass-fronted cabinet of silver service was a cavern of nameless shadow. Mary kept to the wall, feeling her way along, till she reached the pantry door, and slipped through into the kitchen, smelling of grease and ashes, warm as a bake-oven even hours after the big hearth-fire had been banked.

From there she stepped out at last into the blackness of the porch. Shadows stirred in the dark beneath the house's tall brick walls, and Mary saw the harlequin squares of a man's gingham shirt, the brief flash of eyes.

“Lou?” came Mammy's voice, and a whisper replied, “'S'me.” A moment later Lou stepped across to the bottom of the kitchen steps. In the moonlight Mary identified him; one of Mrs. Turner's slaves, whom she rented out as a day laborer to the hemp and bagging factory in which Robert Todd was a partner.

Mammy stepped out of the shadows, handed Lou a bundle. Not bulky enough for blankets, Mary guessed; it had to be food or clothes. “There's a hay-barn five miles down the Louisville road,” Mammy whispered. “Don't sleep there, they always look there, but there's a cave in the creek-bank just behind it.”

“Patrols ride that road mostly early in the night,” added Nelson. “Whatever you do, you keep away from them.”

“With Mrs. Turner behind me,” said Lou, “you got no worry there.” In the kitchen Mary had heard talk of Mrs. Turner, things the white folks of Lexington never knew. The chill-eyed Boston woman was hated and feared throughout the slave community. If even half of what Mammy and Nelson and Jane had whispered was true, Mary wasn't surprised Lou would run away.

“When you get to Louisville keep to the edge of town. There's a tavern on the south side called Bridges, the owner don't care who sleeps in his sheds. Look for Mrs. Chough that lives behind the Quaker meetinghouse there, she'll get you across the river. You see this sign on a fence, it means they'll take you in.” Kneeling, Mammy sketched something in the dust of the yard, smoothed it over at once. “You see that sign, it means they'll give you food at least. When you been gone three days, I'll let Tina know you got away.”

Lou bent quickly to kiss Mammy's sunken cheek. “Tell Tina I'll send for her, I swear it....” Tina must be the woman he loved, thought Mary, in some other household, some other kitchen in the town. “Tell her I'll find a way somehow.”

Nelson said, “She knows you will.”

“God bless you.” The runaway clasped Nelson's hand, kissed Mammy again. “God bless you both.”

The two Todd slaves waited until Lou had disappeared into the dark of the trees. Like a ghost Mary fleeted away before Mammy could reach the top of the steps from the yard. In the dark of the downstairs hall she paused for a moment, overwhelmed with a wild urge to laugh, to cheer, to dance.

She felt she had learned a secret, and the secret was this:

That the people most concerned in the subject of freedom weren't sitting around tamely waiting for the abolitionists and the colonizers to quibble the matter out between them. The people most concerned didn't really care whether Mr. Clay and his friends were thinking “what was best for the darkies,” or whether the issue was moral or political, or whether, as Nate Bodley's father claimed, abolitionist pamphlets stirred up slave revolts.

They were doing whatever they had to, to be free.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

F
OR THE MOST PART, HOWEVER,
M
ARY
'
S AWARENESS OF THE SHADOW-WORLD
that underlay the gracious brick houses of Lexington, the horse-races and picnics and the ubiquitous network of kinship ties that spread from Kentucky to the Virginia tidewater, was simply that: an awareness, like her awareness of the earth underfoot. Cash, and Mr. Clay, and increasing numbers of men in the town might be preoccupied with the subject of that earth—might see everything in terms of mud and worms and stones—but except on those occasions when the veil between the worlds of black and white lifted, Mary's days were shaped and colored by other things.

She turned sixteen. Nate Bodley kissed her in the shadows of the cherry orchard behind Rose Hill; she slapped him, and burst into tears, as a young lady must (Betsey said), but the sensation of being held, of being touched, of being wanted stirred her deeply. She found herself watching for opportunities to engineer such a scene again.

Along with the girls she'd gone to Ward's Academy with—some of whom were now day-students at Rose Hill as well—she and her sisters were part of the vast web of Todd cousinry that stretched back into Virginia and extended its tentacles across the river into Illinois: Porters and Parkers and Stuarts, Logans and Russells and Richardsons and ramifications still more distant. Girls and young men, they had known each other from childhood parties, from picnics in the woods and on the banks of the Town Branch and the Kentucky River, chasing each other through the trees as Nate Bodley had chased her. And as she now looked at Nate, they all looked at one another with changed eyes.

It was a happy time. In addition to Nate—and half a dozen other beaux—Mary had her studies and her beloved books at Rose Hill. She had Frances and Eliza and her friends, friends she'd known all her life. No longer forced to live under Betsey's roof, she came to dearly love the small half-brothers and half-sisters whom she had formerly so resented. Secure in the knowledge that she would be returning to her own pleasant room at Rose Hill on Sunday afternoon, she could hold little David on her lap, play with small Margaret and small Sam, and bask in their uncomplicated love.

There were balls and cotillion parties almost every week, either in the long room above Giron's Confectionary or in the private houses of friends. Summer lemonade or Christmas eggnog, crickets calling in the warm nights or the diamond glow of silent winter stars. Her father and the other men arguing cotton and politics. There were lectures at the Lyceum about nitrous oxide, galvanic batteries, cold-water cures for fever, and the Reverend Zaccheus Waverly's talks on travel in the Holy Land, from which Nate or one of the young law students at Transylvania would beg for the privilege of walking her home.

There were exhibitions of waxworks, and rides under the lilac trees of Ashland, Mary straight and graceful in a rifleman-green riding habit that flowed down over the left side of the neat-stepping little hackney her father had bought for her. There were student plays at Rose Hill, not amateur fit-ups but careful productions with elaborate props and scenery:
Pizarro, Hernani, Macbeth
in which everyone exclaimed over the passion with which Mary played the mad scene to a couple of tall, thin senior students grimly bedight in false beards. There was the true theater too, with troupes visiting from New York or Philadelphia. There were bonnets and coiffures, and the always-delightful challenge of extracting promises for new frocks from her father, and holding him to them with tears; there was
La Belle Assemblée
and the
Royal Ladies Magazine.

The second Monday of every month was Court Day, when the justices of the peace would assemble in the County Courthouse. But most of the people who crowded the square before the Courthouse had little
interest in what went on inside. Peddlers, horse-traders, trappers from the hills would set up their pitches, shouting the virtues of bloodstock or coonskins, milk-cows or Old Sachem Medicinal Bitters. Slave-dealers would be there, too, to buy up debtors' Negroes at the Courthouse door: stony-faced black men tricked out in blue coats and plug hats and women in neat-pressed calico (“Strip off, gal, let the gennleman have a look at yuh....” “See his back? Not hardly a stripe on 'im; he don't need much whippin'....”).

On the benches along the iron fence, idlers spit and whittled, smoked and swapped tales: Nate Bodley in his ruffled shirt bought a peg of hard cider for ragged old Solly the gravedigger, who had once been so drunk and disorderly that in desperation the town council had sold the old white man to a free Negro woman for thirty cents so he'd have someone to look after him.

Even young Mr. Presby would stop to hear the news and ask what was being said in New York and Philadelphia. The young ladies went in rustling groups with aunts or brothers or fathers to shop for ribbons and silk flowers, but Mary found herself drawn as always to the men who argued about improvements and the National Bank.

“Good gracious, Mary, you don't want gentlemen to think you're a bluestocking!” exclaimed Frances, and Mary flipped her fan at her and lowered her long eyelashes, and said, “Silly!” Mary was always meticulously careful not to “parade” her learning more than was seemly for a girl, and in any case a girl with as many beaux as she had was in no danger of being considered “blue.”

But afterwards at the Court Day cotillion, Mary was hard-pressed to keep her mouth shut when Buck Loveridge or Jim Rollins speculated on possibilities of government contracts and the jobs that could be traded for favors, votes, and influence. Her newspaper reading gave meaning to chance fragments of conversation overheard at dances: “What the hell we need some Yankee Congressman takin' money from us, every time we turn around?”

“Because if Congress didn't build a road down to Louisville with its taxes you'd sit on your tobacco and starve,” Mary retorted. The men all laughed, but later, as she edged her way to the lemonade table through a flowerbed of petticoats and gowns, she heard Arabella Richardson purr to Nate Bodley, “Honestly, Mary's so quick with a comeback, I just don't know how she does it! Myself, I never could tell a demi-crat from a demi-john.” And Bella smiled meltingly up into Nate's bedazzled eyes, like a trusting child.

A few evenings after this, Mary treated the other boarding-students at Mentelle's to a hilarious imitation of Bella's simpering, during one of those quiet evenings when the handful of boarders gathered after supper in the library to study their lessons. From the secretaire in the corner where she was doing the household books, Madame observed her without comment. But when the other boarders went to bed, she crossed to where Mary sat reading at the marble-topped circular table beneath the chandelier, and said gently, “It hurt, didn't it?”

“What did?” Mary looked up from
Les Trois Mousquetaires.
“Little Miss Demi-crat?” And she mimed Arabella's languishing flutter of eyelashes—then had to turn her face aside at the sudden sting of tears.

Growing from girl to woman hadn't lessened the wild swings of her moods. At balls and cotillions she still burned with the wild glow of exultation, simply at the pleasure of dancing; from this she could pass almost instantly into volcanic anger that left her ill and shaking. She still had those strange periods in which it seemed to her that she was two people, that she stood on the edge of saying and doing some unthinkable word or deed. And try as she would to control her temper, in her anger she would still say cutting things that had to be apologized for later, with agonies of anxiety and tears. She had wept on and off, in secret, for two days, for Quasimodo and Esmeralda when she'd finished
Notre Dame de Paris;
sometimes it only took a caring look or a gentle query if she felt all right, to bring on tears she could neither explain nor control.

But she refused to weep for the “slings and arrows,” as she scornfully termed them, aimed at her by the other girls in the town, the ones who said she was a bluestocking, or who raised their eyebrows or rolled their eyes when she'd quote from Shakespeare. She shrugged and replied, “As if I care what that little—” She fished in her French vocabulary for the word for “knothead” “—imbecile thinks.”

“You are right not to care, child,” said Madame gently. “In five years what will she be? The wife of some planter who fritters his money away on pretty dresses and jeweled earbobs, with nothing to look forward to in this life but the squalling of children and listening to her husband talk of horses and slaves.”

Mary's mind returned to the cotillion, and Bella in her gown of shell-pink silk, surrounded by young gentlemen. To herself, likewise the center of a group who vied to get their names on her dance-card. To the sheer sensual thrill of the fiddles, the sweet scents of the night outside. To Nate in his ruffled shirt and coat of black superfine, swinging her out onto the dance-floor with such gay strength. To the joy of being held, and the empty ache when she looked through her little chest of her
father's gifts.

“And in five years,” she asked softly, “what will I be, Madame?”

Madame's hand rested gently on her shoulder. With her angular face and mannishly short-cropped hair, she looked like the embodiment of all those sniggering warnings:
virago, harridan, bluestocking.

If you're not careful you'll end up like that. . . .

Mary didn't even know whose voice it was, speaking that warning in her mind. Because in a way she envied Madame. Madame was happy, with her husband and her daughter and her books and her fiddle, doing exactly what she pleased and not caring what others said.

Mary wondered what it would be like, not to be always looking over her shoulder, wondering if Betsey or Elizabeth or Granny Parker were approving of what she did.

“The world is an enormous place, Mary, and there is a great deal in it. Good plays by actors a notch above the strolling players who come to Mr. Usher's theater. Opera, sung by men and women of talent and long training. Buildings that are older than your grandmother and that speak of the ages they have seen.”

For a moment the schoolmistress's pale eyes softened, remembering perhaps those gray streets of Paris in the days of the kings, where lush moss grew on stones that had been set into place before the first Pilgrims boarded the
Mayflower.
Then she smiled, and shook her head: “Somehow, child, I cannot see a girl of your intelligence spending the whole of her life within a dozen miles of the Kentucky River.”

No,
thought Mary. And yet sometimes as Nelson would drive her to her father's house on Main Street on Friday evenings, and back to Rose Hill on Monday mornings, and she'd watch the slaves sweeping down the board sidewalks in front of McCalla's Pharmacy, or old Mrs. Richardson gossiping with Mr. Ritter—M'sieu Giron's cook—in front of the confectionary, she'd wonder how she was ever going to leave this place.

Meg was gone, at Sigoigne's Select Female Academy in Philadelphia. Her letters were full of playhouses and opera and dazzling dresses. Frances and Eliza were fully occupied with the leisurely lives of helping Betsey run the household, making dresses, riding out with their friends to pay
“morning-calls.” Though Mary loved her studies at Rose Hill, loved the exhilaration of taking first in recitations and of knowing more about history than any other girl, she sometimes wondered what Betsey's reaction would be if she said some Sunday evening, “I don't want to go back.”

Would she reply, “You must”?

Rose Hill was her home, and Madame Mentelle like a mother to her, giving her what no one ever had. But as the years flowed stealthily by, and her father and Mr. Clay started talking of who would run for President again—as Mary realized that from being among the younger girls at the school she was now eighteen and the oldest—she began to feel a kind of desperation.

It wasn't that there had been any falling-off of her suitors. A belle to her lace-gloved fingertips, she knew how to make the most of her rosy prettiness, and had the advantage of being sharply intelligent, well-read, and with a name for witty repartee. She was skilled enough on the dance-floor to follow even the most awkward gentleman and make him feel he was actually dancing rather well; she used a variation of the same technique in conversation.

Nate Bodley continued to seek her out at subscription dances and cotillions and balls, and there had been a number of kisses stolen in quiet parlors and secluded woods.

If she had loved any of the regiment of town boys and sons of planters whose names filled her dance-cards, she knew it wouldn't be difficult to find a husband.

But she didn't. And a husband wasn't what she wanted to find.

She didn't know the name for what she wanted to find.

Increasingly, it was dawning upon her that many of the Lexington boys frightened her. It wasn't that she disliked them, although she considered a number of them complete idiots on the subject of paper currency. Some, like Cash and Nate, she was deeply fond of.

But the first time Cash got into a duel after his wedding—with Mary Jane expecting their first child—Mary was shocked, and furiously angry. The whole scene in the parlor, this time of White Hall, was repeated, except without the wedding-dress lying like a mute and gorgeous intimation of tragedy over the back of the sofa. Mary Jane weeping, Frances and Mary and Mary Jane's sisters all gathered around to comfort her—old Mrs. Warfield, too, muttering, “I told you how it would be....” in the background, and Cash, of course, nowhere to be found.