The Widow's War (7 page)

Carrie is impressed. Surely no man who was merely interested in her money would confess to being the son of a slaveholding father. Still, what he is proposing is impossible.

“This is a generous offer,” she says, “a kind offer, very possibly a well-meant offer, but, Mr. Presgrove, I cannot accept it. My answer is still no. I cannot marry you. I will go back home dressed in mourning and tell people I am William’s widow.”

“Miz Vinton, that may work for a while, but although Brazil is on the other side of the globe, ships sail from the States to Rio more frequently than you might imagine. In the end people will find out. Sooner or later, they always do. I know my proposal has been unromantic, but do not think the less of me for that. I realize I can never take William’s place in your heart. I would never try. But what I would try to do is make you happy.”

Pulling out his card case, he removes a card, picks up Carrie’s pen, dips it in the inkwell, and writes something on the reverse side. “Here are names of some people who know me. And here is where I am staying. I have friends and business acquaintances in Rio. You can ask them about my financial status and my character. They will confirm what I have told you. Please at least think over my offer, Miz Vinton. If you discover something about me that makes you adverse to becoming my wife, then I will never mention the subject again. But if after verifying my story, you change your mind, I would be honored to be your husband.”

“I do not wish to be rude,” Carrie says, “but I would appreciate it if you would leave now.”

Mr. Presgrove rises to his feet, politely bids her good day, gives her a courtly Southern bow, and leaves. Two hours later a messenger arrives bearing a huge bouquet. There are so many flowers, Carrie cannot find enough vases to hold them. With them is a note, which reads:

A
fter pillaging the flower market of its most spectacular blossoms and ordering them sent to Carrie, Deacon hails a cab and spends the remainder of the afternoon making calls. Traveling to the docks, he speaks to two business acquaintances. Then he pays a short visit to the banker who handles his commercial transactions and asks for a favor. His banker is delighted and promises to do as Deacon has requested.

“You may rely on me,
Senhor
Presgrove,” he says, shaking Deacon’s hand with so much enthusiasm that a bystander might have thought Deacon had just been elected to political office.

After leaving the bank, Deacon dismisses the cab and strolls through the city. His pace is leisurely. From time to time, he pauses to admire something: a cage of green and red toucans being offered up for sale, piles of orange cashew fruits, clay pipes imported from Holland. Around four, he stops in a café for a small cup of coffee so strong and thickly sugared he can almost stand his spoon up in it. Legless beggars clack along the street in small wooden carts painted with the faces of saints, vendors hawk an unidentifiable purple fruit that looks like grapeshot, barefoot female slaves in ruffled skirts and turbans pass by balancing trays of sweets and baskets of laundry on their heads.

Tossing a few coins to the waiter, Deacon gets up and begins to walk again. When he reaches a section of smart shops, women dressed in the latest Paris fashions sweep by him like flocks of exotic parrots.

As he crosses the Largo do Praço, he sees a toothless old man in a battered straw hat clutching a lamppost with one hand and a bottle of rum with the other.
Rum is sugar and sugar is selling for next to nothing
, Deacon thinks. This is a thought that should worry a man in the sugar exporting business, but Deacon’s mood remains sunny.

Pausing in front of the Igreja de Nossa Senhora de Candelária, he looks around for a cab. The church, which as usual is adorned with scaffolding, is still not complete. Deacon has long thought it should be renamed “Our Lady of Perpetual Construction,” but he has not found anyone he can share this witticism with. Brazilians are touchy about foreigners making jokes about religion.

A cab appears. Deacon hails it and gets in. Half an hour later he is sitting in the parlor of the home of the military attaché to the American Diplomatic Mission, drinking sherry and having a lively conversation with the attaché’s wife, a small, redheaded woman from Tennessee named Nettie.

“My stars!” Nettie cries. “You are the most amazin’ man, Deacon Presgrove. How do you do it?”

“Necessity, my dear,” Deacon says. “Pure, unadulterated necessity.”

Nettie laughs and refills his glass, which, Deacon is sorry to note, is hardly larger than a thimble.

“You simply must take part in one of our amateur theatricals before you leave Rio. You are too talented to let yourself go to waste. Christ Church is putting on a passion play at Easter, and you would be perfect for the role of Judas.”

Deacon smiles and toasts her with the miniature sherry glass. “I will take that as a compliment, Mrs. Wiggins. Alas, I will be long gone before Easter, out on the high seas, tossed by the elements.”

“Why, you selfish old thing, you. You simply cannot leave without sharin’ your talents. You were such a favorite back in Washington City. I still remember the night I saw you do Shakespeare at the National Theater. I never saw a more handsome Romeo. I can’t for the life of me recall the name you acted under?”

“Donald Lane. But my acting days are long behind me, Nettie. I had a brief career on the boards, again out of necessity. A single season only. Hardly a soul except you remembers and, darlin’, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t remind them.”

“My lips are sealed,” Nettie says. She takes a sip of sherry and laughs. “At least until you sail. Now don’t go givin’ me that dark look, Deacon. I’m only teasin’. Honey, you are lookin’ at me like Othello looked at poor Desdemona just before he wrung her neck.”

I
n later years when Carrie thinks back to the weeks when Deacon courted her, what she remembers most is how considerate he was. The day after he proposes marriage for the first time, he returns to her house and asks to see her. Instead of telling the maid to send him away, she admits him to her parlor to thank him for sending her the flowers.

That at least is the ostensible reason. The truth is, she’s lonely. Deacon Presgrove is the only person in Rio she can talk to about William and the only person who knows she’s carrying William’s child. She decides in advance that if he renews his proposal, she will ask him to leave at once, but he never mentions the subject. Instead he is sympathetic and considerate, and they have a long conversation that leaves Carrie feeling as if she has found a friend.

Three days later, he comes back again, and again the day after that. Gradually she begins to expect him to call in the late afternoon and to look forward to his presence in her parlor. Deacon is charming, amusing, friendly; he distracts her from her grief, encourages her to imagine how much better her life will be once she leaves Brazil, and reassures her that she will not be lonely in the States.

Sometimes they talk about her baby: whether it will be a boy or a girl, whether or not it will look more like her or more like William, what name she should give it.

On other occasions, they discuss less personal things. Deacon is well-educated, well-read, and intelligent. He can talk about art, literature, and politics without being pompous or boring, and although he knows almost nothing about botany or even, to Carrie’s surprise, how sugar is grown, he knows an amazing amount about the theater. His stories of the plays he has seen in Washington and New York help her remember there is another world beyond Brazil. Sometimes he acts out the best bits for her, calling up the lines from his apparently inexhaustible memory.

He is always most eloquent when he speaks against slavery. His commitment to the abolishment of the trade is not only absolute, it is passionate. Once, while speaking of the horrors of the slave ships that ply the Middle Passage, he breaks into tears, and Carrie finds herself comforting him.

The most amazing thing she discovers about Deacon is that she can say anything to him. One afternoon she confesses that she thinks he looks like William. Yes, he says, he and William also noticed the resemblance. In Salvador they were taken for brothers, which, Deacon says, flattered him, since he knew he was not nearly as handsome as William.

Carrie agrees and tells him so, and he laughs. “You’re an honest woman,” he said. “I like that, Carrie.” By now, they are calling each other by their first names, which seems reasonable since Deacon is, after all, a relative of sorts. And if he ever feels jealous when Carrie talks about William, he never shows it.

Carrie is never sure exactly how it happens, but gradually she comes to believe marrying him might not be a bad idea. Sometimes after he leaves, she feels agitated and filled with desire. Deacon may not be as good-looking as William, but he is a handsome man with a way of sitting and talking and moving that reminds her of a caged tiger. There is a passion in him that is hard for him to conceal and hard for her to overlook, and often when they are talking about ordinary things, she senses it and responds. Sometimes she even feels as if he has reached out and stroked her when all he has really done is pass her a plate of tea cakes or made a remark about the weather.

She finds this confusing and does not know what, if anything, she should do about it. Is she responding to Deacon because he looks like William or is she attracted to him in his own right? Should she tell him or does he already know? Is she feeling lust, loneliness, or something more real? In the end, she gives up trying to decide. Her emotions are so tangled during this period, she cannot sort out one kind of longing from another.

She may not be sure how she feels about Deacon, but she has no doubt how he feels toward her. Those green eyes of his stare at her in a way that is hard to ignore, and although he is polite, discreet, and gentlemanly almost to a fault, she would have to be blind not to see how much he desires her. As the days pass, this becomes increasingly important since she knows she could never consider marrying a man who was only interested in talking to her, and by now she is beginning to seriously consider his proposal. Then, too, she is flattered. How could she not be? When a man sits in your parlor speaking to you with the utmost respect and looking at you as if you are the most desirable woman he has ever met, you are not likely to feel he is making a mistake.

In December, he proposes again, and again she refuses him. She is only twenty-three and not inclined to spend the rest of her life as a nun, but even though he has become a good friend, she does not love him.

That night after he leaves, she goes upstairs and looks in the mirror and sees the lines grief is putting on her face. She still loves William, only William, but at that moment she knows that if she keeps on loving him and refuses all offers of marriage, she will end up a bitter, unhappy old woman. She will have the child, of course, but the child will grow up as all children do and leave her, and then what will she do with her life? Devote herself to good works? Take in stray cats? Become a pillar of the church? Bake cookies for the neighbors’ children?

She thinks of all the years that lay ahead of her, all the hours she will spend sleeping alone, all the nights she will wake up longing for an embrace; the solitary meals she will eat; the poverty of a life lived in the past instead of the present. Staring at her own reflection, she realizes she is on the verge of turning her love for William into a religion.
No matter how much I love him
, she thinks,
I can’t go on worshipping his memory
.
William was a man of flesh and blood, not an idol, and he would not have wanted me to stop living just because he did.

As if he senses she is thinking of accepting his proposal, Deacon becomes more intimate. He does not try to kiss her, but the look of desire in his eyes becomes more intense, and gradually he begins to confide in her. One afternoon when she is talking about how hard it has been to lose both William and her father in such a brief space of time, she notices he is not responding as usual. Instead he sits silently, looking at her with intense sadness.

She stops talking and lets the silence gather. At last, he sighs and says: “I also lost two people I loved within a few weeks of each other: my mother and a young lady I was very fond of. My mother had shown me nothing but kindness, and I loved her dearly.”

“And the young lady?”

“A friend of my sister’s. I loved her and thought to marry her someday, but it was not to be.” He gives Carrie a sad smile. “She looked nothing like you, but she was pretty in her own way: small and full-figured with dark hair and a little mole right there.” He reaches out as if to touch Carrie’s upper lip, coming so close that she can feel the heat of his finger, then draws back and lets his hand fall into his lap.

“How did you lose her?” Carrie asks. The question feels awkward, but Deacon does not seem to mind.

“Consumption.”

“And do you still love her?”

“No. I will always treasure her memory, of course. She was a sweet, gentle girl, but my heart is elsewhere now.”

Later Carrie plays back this conversation and sees what she should have seen at the time: how unlikely it was that a young woman dying of consumption would be “full-figured.” But on that Saturday afternoon, all she feels is sympathy for Deacon and a sense of comradeship in loss.

Two days after he tells her about his late fiancée, Deacon proposes again, and again she refuses him. This time, she does not go upstairs afterwards and look in the mirror because she knows what she will see. Instead, she goes to her writing desk, takes out the piece of paper that contains William’s hair, drops it into a saucer, strikes a match, and sets it on fire. As the paper burns, she says a final good-bye to him.