“Thank you, my darling,” he said, rolling away. “I think we’d best get downstairs. They’ll be wondering.”
Willie arrived late on Christmas eve. They were trimming the tree when he walked in, carrying a gunnysack of pecans. A Georgia boy had given it to him in exchange for a chaw of Maryland tobacco. Ella, overcome, broke down and cried. Babette, not to be outdone, sobbed too, wetting Willie’s tunic with copious tears.
“Oh, Willie,” she moaned. “Oh, Willie . .
John Harper, clearly embarrassed by the lachrymose women, rubbed his hands together. “Come now, it’s Christmas. Ladies, ladies, it’s time to be jolly!”
A late meal was fixed for Willie, and while he ate the family sat around and watched. Willie and Thaddeus exchanged information and anecdotes and answered questions put to them by the older men.
Willie had seen fighting at Ball’s Bluff, where Federal forces crossing the Potomac were repulsed by the Confederates. In hot pursuit the Confederates were then stopped at Edward’s Ferry. It was an indeterminate skirmish—not quite a battle—with nothing really decided except that the rebel troops felt they had superior marksmanship and spirit. The Union’s losses had been nine to the Confederate’s one.
Babette, uninterested in the war, didn’t much care who won it as long as it was over soon, releasing Willie alive and whole. She would feel terrible if he were killed but worse if he came back maimed. The sight of old veterans of the Mexican War, one legged, one armed or blinded turned her stomach. She knew she could never accept Willie stumping about on a crutch or having one empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder no matter how many medals dangled on his chest. She wanted him complete, just as he was at this minute.
The night grew late while the men continued to talk. One by one the women drifted upstairs. Amélie, finding little Charles fretful, sat for a long time rocking him in a chair by the window until they both dropped off to sleep. She awoke some time later to the sound of voices still droning down below. Rising carefully so as not to rouse the child, she placed him in his wooden cradle, then undressed and got into bed. She lay there waiting for Thaddeus’s step on the stair, alert at each creak, each groan of contracting wood in the old house. But the voices went on. Amélie brought her lips together tightly, telling herself she wasn’t disappointed, she wasn’t irked or angry. Thaddeus had every right to remain all night with the men and talk about the war. She wasn’t going to be mean or selfish or carping, but, oh, she had hoped for something different. Thaddeus hadn’t made love to her, real love, since the morning he had come home. It was true she had slept in his arms each night, his body folded about hers, but it wasn’t the same as being caressed, as feeling the excitement, the wonder of sensation piled upon sensation, the closeness, the oneness only a man and woman making love could feel.
Babette had been promised a Christmas wedding, and now that Willie was on leave for ten days she saw no reason why it shouldn’t take place.
Willie was agreeable, but Ella was not. “Babette, dear, we all assumed the war would be over by now,” she said, using a sweet, reasonable tone that was as false to Babette’s ears as the ring of a brass coin. “I don’t think it wise to marry in these troubled times.”
Babette, keeping a firm grip on her temper, replied in the same saccharine vein. “But, Cousin Ella, darlin’, girls are getting married in droves everyday. I was promised, we were promised. ...” She looked over at Willie who sat lounging in a chair.
He gave her a half-hearted smile. “Mother is of the opinion we ought to wait.”
“I’d be willing to wait, Willie dear, if there was a good reason. But I don’t see any.” Babette wanted to hit him with a sofa pillow. Why didn’t he stand up for her? Why did he have to be such a mama’s boy?
“The reason is simple,” Ella said patiently. “We don’t want Willie going off into battle worried about us at home, do we?”
“If he loves me—us—he would worry in any case.”
Ella smiled indulgently. “Babette dear, supposing something happened to Willie? You would be a widow, perhaps with a child. And remember, widows wear black for three years. Their lot is not a happy one.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to Willie,” she said morosely.
But there was no budging Ella, and it was useless to appeal to John Harper: Willie wasn’t his son. Babette’s parents felt it unbecoming to press for a wedding when the bridegroom’s mother was against it. The bridegroom himself did not seem all that much in a hurry. The truth was that since he was already sleeping with Babette he felt no urgent need to make it legal.
Babette, who had sworn to her sister that she would not give in again to Willie unless she had a wedding ring on her finger, surrendered at his first kiss, snatched behind the Chinese screen in the drawing room. The feel of Willie’s hungry mouth, of his gilt buttons pressed against her breasts sent her vows flying. She couldn’t do without a man, without strong arms and desperate lips and a commanding virility. Other women might pretend, might even be indifferent or repelled, but not her.
“The attic,” Willie whispered after the first stolen kiss. “I’ll follow in ten minutes.”
Bancroft, a Georgian manor of red brick, was smaller than Arbormalle. But it had three stories, the top one consisting of several dormer rooms under a sloping roof. It was one of these Willie had in mind. Not the most romantic of trysting places, the room held a discarded mattress, a wooden table, a huge porcelain urn, chipped and spider webbed, lying on its side in a dark corner, and several broken chairs. But it was far removed from the rest of the house, providing them with the privacy they needed. Moaning under Willie’s nakedness, begging him to hurry if he slowed or paused as he worked himself in and out, Babette lost herself in sensual rapture all the more exhilarating because it was illicit. Sometimes Willie would double up his greatcoat and put it under her rounded buttocks, raising them so he could get at her more easily. Kneeling between her raised legs, his head thrown back, perspiration dampening his brow, his breath hissing between his teeth, Willie would thrust and thrust again in accelerating momentum until his body shuddered into climax, dropping down into Babette’s arms to smother her scream of ecstasy.
Still she did not lose her head completely. When she went to their rendezvous for the third time she tried, once more, to persuade Willie to marry her.
“We could run away, darlin’. Elope.”
“No, Babette. It wouldn’t be right. My mother—”
“Your mother!” she broke in angrily. “You care more for your mother than you do for me.”
“Now, Babette, I love you; you know that. But I can’t go against her wishes. She’s been too good to me. After my father died, she—”
“Oh, I don’t want to hear about it! I don’t want to hear about the sacrifices she made, what you owe her. I’m sick of it. Go to your mama,” she said, snatching her hand away from his. “The engagement is off!”
But by the next afternoon, as he stripped the stockings from her legs, kissing her knees, the insides of her trembling thighs, the engagement was on again.
All too soon the furlough came to an end, and Thaddeus and Willie prepared to leave. The family awakened at three in the morning to see them off. While cold sleet beat against the windows and the wind howled down the chimneys, the women, dry eyed and trying to be brave, spoke softly in hesitant tones.
“I—I hate you going out in this weather,” Amélie said to Thaddeus, echoing his mother’s sentiments.
“I must, sweetheart. Please try not to worry.” He kissed her and for a moment she clung to him, tears of pride and love burning her eyes.
After they were gone the house seemed desolate. The tree they had decorated so happily ten days earlier and caroled around on Christmas day drooped under its burden of ornaments and spent candles. Amélie’s relationship with her father had not changed. He was planning to return to Waxwing, scuttling back to his hidey-hole, as she secretly termed it, and it was difficult for her to be civil to him.
; If someone had asked Amélie why she could be so unrelenting toward her father but not toward Babette her answer would have been prompt and truthful. Babette’s lapses, her disregard for morality or honor, had always been there, flaws in her character she made little attempt to hide. These were weaknesses Amélie felt she would outgrow. But her father was an adult she had always looked up to, and he had turned out to be two-faced and to have feet of clay.
It was Babette who, by using little Charles’s need for medical care as an excuse, had persuaded Garvin to permit her and Amélie to lease a house in Baltimore. At first he had refused, saying they ought to stay with the Harpers. But Babette had argued that though the Harpers were too kind to mention it, the baby’s peevishness and nocturnal awakenings disturbed the household. “It would be selfish, Papa,” Babette said, “to go on taking advantage of their hospitality.” Relenting, Garvin had given the girls a generous allowance. Amélie felt like a hypocrite in accepting, yet she was glad to have a place of her own. As for Babette, she couldn’t wait to be removed from Ella’s sharp, watchful eye.
John Harper found them a brownstone on Cathedral Street, a modest place when compared to the Harpers’. Narrow, two stories tall, it had three bedrooms upstairs, a parlor, dining room, and kitchen downstairs, and a cellar beneath. The owner, a widow who had gone to stay with a daughter in Delaware, had rented it out completely furnished. The house was filled with rococo furniture, scrolled sofas, and chairs carved with fruit and acanthus leaves. And the bric-a-brac! Little teacups and statuettes, flowers under glass, gilt bookends and seashells cluttered the ornate tables and crowded the mantels and china cabinets. It was not a bright house. But Amélie was pleased to have it, and Babette was ecstatic.
It snowed in January, the drifts piling up at the door. John Harper sent his servant over, an old Negro with a grizzled head, who did odd jobs about his own place, and he shoveled a path to the door. The black’s grandniece, Sadie, had been hired by Amélie and she came each morning at six, performing her duties with a bumbling cheerfulness. John had also lent Amélie a buggy and horse, both stabled at nearby Church’s Livery. Amélie used it seldom, but Babette, resuming her friendships, drove out almost daily. At one point Amélie thought she might be seeing a man. Babette had that peculiar attractive bloom to her cheeks that spoke of male attention, but she denied it.
“I'm seeing no one but Holly and Mary Sue,” she maintained. “And all we do is play whist and gossip.”
Babette had always bared herself to Amélie with a candor that was sometimes embarrassing if not painful, as when she had given a graphic description of Damon Fowler’s lovemaking. But ever since the baby’s birth their nightly bedtime chats had been suspended. It distressed Amélie to think that she and her sister might be drifting apart. For all her sister’s faults, she loved Babette and understood her better than anyone. But little Charles came first. All of Amélie’s energy and love were directed toward the child. She was constantly at his beck and call, picking him up whenever he whimpered, feeding, changing, and washing him with maternal pleasure. She trusted no one else to care for her baby. His first tentative, wispy smile thrilled her to laughter and tears. She would sit by the hour rocking the child, singing to him, his warm, little body nestled at her breast, looking down affectionately at his downy brown hair, the crescent-shaped lashes, the delicate brows.
He was babbling in the early mornings now and to Amélie it was a sweet sound. He had become an individual with a personality. She had fantasies about him, saw him growing into a toddler, a boy, a young man. She began to plan for his future, visualizing him at school, wondering if his early years should be spent at home with a tutor.
Despite her preoccupation with the child, Amélie’s passion for a Southern victory had not abated. Now more than ever she wanted the Confederacy to beat back the invader so that Charles could grow up free of Northern tyranny. News of the Federal assault on Port Royal in South Carolina was particularly disturbing. When it fell to Union gunboats it meant that an important port had been closed to the Confederate blockaders. Navy ships patrolling the coast all the way to Georgia had other strategic harbors under surveillance and the South, which had to trade its cotton in Europe for desperately needed supplies, suffered accordingly. However, Amélie refused to view these defeats as anything but temporary. Her faith in Southern invincibility, in the certainty of ultimate triumph, was still strong.
In early February Charles fell ill. What Amélie thought was a case of croup became acute. Charles, his skin flushed and feverish, lay in his cradle with a hacking cough that shook his small body.
Amélie, alarmed, sent Babette for Dr. Tanner. While she waited she fixed a poultice, telling herself that babies frequently had spells of croup, that it was nothing to worry about. Taking the infant in her arms, she placed the warm poultice over the child’s heaving breast, speaking to him in low, caressing tones. For a few minutes it seemed to ease him, but then he began to cough and gasp again, his labored breath making a hoarse, whistling sound. She had Sadie boil pans of water, hoping the steam would relieve his harsh rasping. But it had not the slightest effect. He continued to strain and cough, waving his little arms, his eyes bulging. Amélie rocked him, shifting his weight from shoulder to shoulder, her own lungs constricting painfully at each convulsive, wheezing cough. At times she, too, felt as though she were choking. Oh, if she could only give him the air he fought for!
She rocked and rocked, praying to God, begging Him to help Charles. Prayers she had not used in a long while issued silently from her lips, Our Fathers followed by Hail Marys and Our Fathers again. The coughing and whimpering went on without respite.
By the time Dr. Tanner arrived Charles’s lips had turned blue. And still he struggled. Amélie, close to hysteria, begged the doctor to alleviate Charles’s suffering.
“There’s not much I can do, Mrs. Warner,’’ he said sadly. “Even if I take him to the hospital. Poor mite. He has an advanced case of pneumonia.’’
The diagnosis struck terror in Amélie’s heart. “But there must be something, something, Dr. Tanner.’’
He tried forcing an infusion of opium down the child’s throat but the baby vomited it up. He had another mustard plaster fixed, suggesting that Amélie hold the child upright against her shoulder.
“I have several sick calls to make,’’ he said, “but I’ll be back as soon as I can.’’
Amélie sat in the rocking chair once more with the child held against her, every wrench he made going through her body like a hammered nail. He had to get well. He had to! Why did the innocent have to endure such torture?
Babette, unable to watch this suffering any longer, went upstairs and shut herself in her room. There she did something she hadn’t done since she was twelve: She got down on her knees and, resting her elbows on the bed, prayed. She begged God to spare the child, not so much for little Charles’s sake as for Amélie's. She did not want to admit that she had been jealous of the baby, jealous of the way Amélie had turned so completely from everyone, including herself, lavishing all her love on the infant. That was selfish and she ought not to be selfish. From now on she would be good and kind and generous if only He would allow the child to live and Amélie not to suffer.
Down below Sadie cheerfully banged pots and pans, making a supper no one would eat. It grew dark outside, but Amélie did not light the lamp. She sat rocking, rocking, while the shadows gathered in pools of blackness around her. The back of her neck ached and the feebly moving bundle in her arms weighed heavily. Gradually it seemed to her that the baby’s coughing was not quite as strong. Perhaps he was getting better. Please God, she begged, make him get better.
But then he gave one last shudder and was still. She knew without looking into his face that her child, born of pain and nurtured with love, was dead.
Chapter
❖ 9 ❖
Amélie's grief was wild, a clawing agony tearing at her vitals. How could her child be dead when in her mind she could still see his do
wny crown of hair, still hear him babbling, still feel the weight of his small body in her arms? Why was he taken from her? God’s punishment? No, she couldn’t believe that. Yet Charles was gone. His little body was laid out in a small coffin, eyes closed as if in sleep.
“Charles is in God’s hands now,’’ the priest had said. “You must bear up.’’
And because she “must bear up,’’ because friends, the Harpers and the Warners who had hurried up over frozen, snow-blocked roads (her own parents could not be reached), expected her to show fortitude, she had to hide her pain. When all she wanted to do was sob, beat her head against the wall in torment, cry out, she had to sit stiffly, comforting those who couldn’t find the words to express their sympathy.
Charles should have been buried at Bancroft but a grief-stricken Amélie wanted the final rites to be held in the church where the child had been baptized. Later, she promised the Warners, when the war was over, he would be removed to the family plot.
The funeral was a terrible ordeal. Amélie resented the women who came up to her, secretly thankful their own children were spared, their fear and relief concealed under murmurings of condolence. She hated their pity and condescension. She wanted to be left alone, to retreat to a dark, silent place where she could mourn in peace.
The Warners urged her to return home with them, but Amélie stubbornly refused. She didn’t want to be under anyone’s roof but her own. She didn’t want to come down every morning to breakfast and face the grieving grandparents, summoning a bravery she did not feel, to go through each day with their sorrowful eyes following her.
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