Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  None of the servants would welcome the news, but Julia dreaded telling Jule most of all. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed to Ulys that evening after Jule dressed her for bed. “Should I tell her tomorrow, to give her time to get used to the idea and say good-bye to her friends, or should I wait until the day of her departure, so she has less time to worry?”

  “An interesting question.” Ulys sat down beside her on the edge of the bed, took her hand, and regarded her curiously. “How would you feel in her place?”

  For a moment Julia could only stare back at him, bewildered. “How would I feel in her place?”

  “Yes, Julia. How would you feel?”

  “I don’t know.” She found she could not meet his gaze. “It’s—it’s simply incomprehensible that I would ever be in her place.”

  “Try to imagine it all the same.”

  To humor him, Julia tried—but almost immediately shook her head. “I don’t know. I suppose I’d want to know ahead of time so I could prepare. Otherwise it might come as quite a shock.”

  Ulys patted her hand, rose, and resumed undressing for bed. “Very good, Julia. Very good.”

  She was not sure if he meant her decision or how she had come to it.

  She told Jule first, apart from the others, and she felt sick at heart as Jule gazed back at her, first uncomprehendingly, and then with bleak despair. “Please don’t do this, Miss Julia,” she murmured, giving her head the barest shake. “Please.”

  “It’s not my choice,” said Julia. “I would take you with me, but Papa insists that you stay, and Ulys is determined not to take any servants with us.”

  “But you need me. How you gonna to manage four children in a new house in a strange town all on your own?”

  Julia could hardly bear the pain and confusion in Jule’s face. “I know I’ll need you—believe me, I do—but they’ve made up their minds.”

  “If I can’t go with you, then can’t you just hire me out by the day, as the missus used to?” Jule reached out as if to place her hand beseechingly on Julia’s forearm, but at the last moment she held back. “That way I can still look after the old master evenings and mornings, and I won’t have to live with strangers.”

  “I’m sorry. I truly am. I’ll make it up to you.”

  Jule put her head to one side and fixed her with a gaze so penetrating that Julia flinched. “Will you, Miss Julia?” she asked, her voice hardening, though it grew no louder. “Do you promise?”

  “Yes,” Julia quickly replied, unsure exactly what sort of pact she was making, and how she would keep it. “Yes, I will. I promise.”

  On the day Jule was sent off to her interim employers—her few belongings tied up in a calico bundle, her back ramrod straight, her expression brittle yet stoic—Julia’s regret and shame infiltrated her dreams. She and Jule were children again, ginger and cream, playing in Papa’s library. Squealing and laughing, they chased each other around his great oak desk, upon which a map of the United States and its territories was spread. Pausing to catch her breath, Julia planted her dimpled hands upon the smooth, polished surface of the desktop, inadvertently touching the map. Mischief in her eyes, Jule halted on the other side and mirrored Julia’s gesture, shifting her weight from one foot to the next so that Julia would not know which way she intended to run. Suddenly Jule laughed and bolted to her right, and with a shriek Julia darted away—but their hands, sticky from sweets, clung to the fragile parchment, tearing it lengthwise. As Julia gasped in alarm, from the opposite side of the desk Jule fixed her with a solemn, steady, unflinching stare. This is your fault, her expression said as clearly as if she had spoken. You and your people did this.

  The same dream haunted Julia again their first night on the river, but her apprehension faded over the four days it took the Itasca to reach Galena. Regarding the hilly city from the deck of the steamer, Julia was reminded of sketches she had seen of Alpine villages, the quaint houses and shops clinging to the slopes on terraces, with crooked streets and steep steps binding them together.

  The steamer docked at the landing and the Grants disembarked in a stream of passengers. “Lyss,” came a familiar shout from within the crowd on the shore, followed by a fit of coughing. Julia and Ulys spotted Simpson waving as he made his way toward them, tall and lean, his face flushed, his cheeks cavernous. Shocked, Julia stole a glance at Ulys and saw that he, too, struggled to hide his dismay.

  “It’s wonderful to see you,” Simpson declared, smiling as he shook hands with Ulys, kissed Julia on the cheek, and greeted his niece and nephews with pats on the head and tickles under the chin.

  “How have you been, Simp?” Ulys asked as the porter loaded the luggage onto a rented carriage and Julia helped the children inside.

  “Oh, better, much better—” Simpson covered his mouth with a handkerchief as his words were cut off by another fit of coughing. “Don’t let this cough fool you. The air here is very healthful, much better than in Covington. I’ve gained five pounds since moving here.”

  Sick at heart, Julia wondered how much weight he had lost before the move North if five new pounds of flesh hung so invisibly upon his narrow frame.

  Orvil and his pretty young wife, Mary, would see them that evening at supper, Simpson explained as they drove along the river and up a hill to his home, where the newcomers would stay until Ulys found them a suitable residence. Within a few days, Ulys secured, at a fairly reasonable rent of one hundred twenty-five dollars a year, a two-story, seven-room brick cottage on Hill Street, high on a bluff in a fine neighborhood on the west side of town. One day Ulys stayed home from the leather goods shop to help Julia unpack trunks and place furniture, but upon opening a box of cherished treasures, she was terribly upset to discover that an old mirror that had belonged to Papa for more than fifty years had broken to pieces.

  Ulys came hurrying down to the parlor at the sound of her cries and heaved a sigh of relief when he saw that she had not cut herself on the shards of glass. “Julia, calm yourself,” he said, drawing her into his arms. “It’s just a mirror. It’s broken, and tears won’t mend it.”

  Julia pulled away from him to dab at her eyes with her handkerchief. “It’s a sign that someone in the house will die before the year is over.”

  “You don’t really believe that breaking a mirror will cause misfortune, do you?”

  “Of course it doesn’t cause misfortune. It merely foretells it.”

  “Julia, darling, listen.” Ulys placed his hands on her shoulders and met her gaze with reassuring certainty. “No one in this house is going to die anytime soon. This broken mirror isn’t a sign of anything except that we didn’t pack carefully enough.”

  Later that afternoon, when Julia was tired and perspiring and wondering what she would put on the table for supper, she was startled from her weary reverie by a series of thuds followed by an ominous silence.

  “Mamma,” Nellie suddenly shrieked. “Jesse’s hurt!”

  With a gasp, Julia darted into the foyer, her heart constricting at the sight of Nellie sitting on the floor beside Jesse’s crumpled, motionless figure, one of Ulys’s boots on his little leg, the other lying at the foot of the staircase. As Julia flew to gather him in her arms, she realized at once what had happened—Jesse had woken from his nap, stolen quietly from bed, put on his father’s boots, and tried to descend the stairs.

  “Jesse, darling,” she said, kissing his cheek and forehead, rocking him back and forth. “Jesse, darling, wake up.”

  His long eyelashes fluttered and he let out a sob. Suddenly Ulys was there, swiftly examining Jesse for broken bones while Julia stroked his soft curls and murmured that he was fine, he was a great, strong boy, and he was going to be all right. Ulys soon determined that he had not broken his neck, thank God, but when Jesse opened his mouth to howl out his misery and fright, they saw that his four front teeth had been broken squarely off.

/>   “Look at that,” exclaimed Fred, crowding closer. “His teeth are just little stubs!”

  “Never mind,” said Julia briskly. “Those are baby teeth. New ones will grow in by the time he’s a big boy.”

  She watched Jesse vigilantly throughout the day, and by bedtime he seemed restored to his usual happy self. “You’re remarkable,” Ulys told her as they, too, retired for the night. “You sobbed like one bereaved over a broken mirror, but you kept perfectly calm when Jesse had a terrible accident.”

  “I may have seemed perfectly calm,” Julia said as she snuggled up beside him, “but I felt quite otherwise.”

  Ulys came home from the Grant leather goods store for lunch every day at noon, and in the evenings, the older children would meet him at the top of the two hundred stairs from Main Street and escort him home. Usually Jesse challenged Ulys to a wrestling match the moment he crossed the threshold, and as he removed his hat and boots, Ulys would warn him with mock solemnity, “I’m a man of peace, Jesse, but I can’t stand being hectored like this by a man of your size.” In reply, Jesse would gleefully strike him on the knees with his dimpled little fists, whereupon Ulys would roll on the floor with Jesse in his arms, pretend to struggle for a bit, then roll onto his back with a groan, set Jesse astride his chest, and protest, “It’s not fair to strike a man when he’s down.” He would endure a dozen or so more punches, and then declare, “I give up! You have my unconditional surrender.”

  As summer waned and the autumn elections approached, presidential politics drowned out every other topic of discussion. Two sons of Illinois were among the contenders for the highest office in the land, and Galena had divided into two camps—those who supported Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas, the “Little Giant” who had promoted the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and those who preferred Mr. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican lawyer and former one-term congressman from Springfield.

  Julia, who considered herself a staunch Democrat, like Papa, supported Mr. Douglas, but Ulys, who had not lived in Illinois long enough to be permitted to vote anyway, preferred Mr. Lincoln. In his letters from White Haven, Papa sang the praises of a third candidate, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, a former congressman from Kentucky who emphatically opposed any restrictions upon slavery but also rejected secession as a solution to the nation’s crises. “Mr. Breckinridge is the man to put things right,” Papa wrote to Julia a week before the election. “Mr. Lincoln’s election would be an utter calamity, and Mr. Douglas’s a catastrophe of only slightly lesser proportions.”

  In early November, Papa’s worst fears were realized when Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. On the night after the election, Mr. Lincoln’s supporters organized a triumphant torchlight parade through Galena, and although Julia mourned Mr. Douglas’s defeat, at twilight she took the children high up on a bluff overlooking the town to view the spectacle. The children were enchanted by the sight, but to Julia the long stream of blazing torches filling the winding streets below resembled a great, fiery serpent strangling Galena in its coils, just as Mr. Lincoln and his followers intended to crush the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Douglas, and her beloved papa.

  In the aftermath of Mr. Lincoln’s election, warnings of secession appeared with increasing frequency in the Southern press—and yet the citizens of Galena were shocked when, on December 20 at a state convention at St. Andrew’s Hall in Charleston, the delegates of South Carolina voted unanimously to secede from the Union.

  On the night of December 26, Union major Robert Anderson moved his troops from their vulnerable position at Fort Moultrie on the mainland to the more defensible Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The next day, South Carolina militia seized Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney and demanded Major Anderson’s surrender. In response, Major Anderson ordered his men to reinforce their position.

  Whenever the people of Galena discovered that Ulys had been a captain in the regular army and had served in the Mexican War, men would engage him in earnest discussions about Fort Sumter and what new calamities might await the fragmenting nation. In the first week of January, The Galena Daily Courier reported that a steamship called the Star of the West had set out from New York en route for Charleston with supplies and troops to relieve Major Anderson’s men. The Galena Daily Advertiser soon confirmed the story, noting where and when the merchant vessel had been spotted as it journeyed south along the coast. “The insurgents in Charleston can get news from the eastern papers as easily as we can,” Ulys said. “They’ll be ready and waiting when the Star of the West arrives. If any blood is shed on board that ship, those reporters will be to blame.”

  A few days later, the newspapers reported that on January 9, the Star of the West sailed into Charleston Harbor and was fired upon by militia and young military cadets. Struck in the mast but not seriously damaged, the steamer nonetheless was forced back into the channel and out to the open sea. On that same day, far to the south, delegates in Mississippi voted in favor of secession. The next day, Florida seceded from the Union, and the next, Alabama, followed by Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas by the first day of February.

  Every night Julia listened intently as Ulys read aloud from the papers the speeches for and against secession, appeasement, and war. Every night she became increasingly upset and conflicted. “I believe the states have the right to leave the Union if they wish to,” she told Ulys one evening after she had finally sorted out her feelings. “And yet I think the national government has an obligation to prevent the dismemberment of the Union, even if coercion should be necessary.”

  “You’re a little inconsistent on the subject of states’ rights,” Ulys replied, amused, “but you’re sound on the duties of the federal government.”

  “The duties of the people to the federal government are more clear to me every day.”

  On March 4, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office and became the sixteenth president of the United States. The local press glowed with pride when they reported how the two favorite sons of Illinois had shown restraint and solidarity in a remarkable display of reconciliation at the inauguration. When the time had come to address the crowd, Mr. Lincoln had risen from his chair on the platform on the east portico of the Capitol in Washington City, serene and calm as he put on his spectacles. He had removed his hat, but then he had suddenly halted, looking about for someplace to put it while he took his oath. Senator Douglas had promptly come forward to take the hat, which he had held on his lap while Mr. Lincoln addressed an enthusiastic audience of thousands.

  Julia found it a hopeful, heartening omen that two former rivals could make peace after their great contest, but events had begun that could not be restrained. On the morning of April 12, the insurgents in South Carolina attacked Fort Sumter, and after exchanging fire with Confederate guns for thirty-four hours, Major Robert Anderson was forced to surrender.

  Outraged, the people of Galena closed their shops and took to the streets, where Wide Awakes marched in their black cloaks and brass bands played stirring martial tunes. Red, white, and blue bunting hung from windows and balconies; the Stars and Stripes flew from nearly every mast and flagpole. Vanished entirely were thoughts of appeasement, of coaxing or bribing the rebellious Southern states to return to the Union.

  “They’ve proclaimed themselves aliens,” Ulys said of the Confederates. “By attacking the United States, they’ve relinquished all right they had to claim protection under the Constitution. They should expect no better treatment than any foreign power that would wage war upon an independent nation.”

  Chapter Seven

  APRIL–JULY 1861

  On April 15, President Lincoln issued a call for seventy-five thousand troops to suppress the insurrection, with a certain quota required from each state. Ulys agreed with the president that these troops, enlisted to serve for ninety days, would be sufficient to put down the rebellion.

  Galena fairly burst with patriotis
m. Town fathers scheduled public meetings and called for volunteers. Fred, Buck, and their friends played at war, marching with popguns, donning military caps, guarding crossroads and bridges, and inventing signs and countersigns. Julia stayed home with the children when Ulys, Orvil, and their neighbor John Aaron Rawlins went to the first citizens’ meeting at the court house, and after putting the youngsters to bed she stayed up to greet Ulys upon his return.

  “I thought I was done with soldiering,” Ulys told her, sitting beside her and absently taking her hand, “but as someone who’s been educated at the government’s expense for exactly this sort of emergency, I don’t see how I can stand idle if my services are needed.”

  The moment Mr. Lincoln had summoned troops, Julia had known her husband would answer the call. If the government had any sense, they would put him on horseback and make him a leader of men.

  The following evening, a second meeting was held to organize a recruitment drive. Illinois had been assigned a quota of six regiments, and Galena was expected to provide one company. On the basis of his wartime experience, Ulys was appointed chairman of the meeting. Local politicians and prominent citizens made speeches, fiery and spirited, and Ulys, too, was called upon to speak, something Julia knew he hated. Later, Orvil told her how Ulys had risen from his pine bench when the crowd called him forward, his hat slouched above his wide brow, his face flushed with embarrassment. He had spoken quietly, without any bluster or embellishment, as he told his listeners how to form a company. “I am in for the war and shall stay until this wicked rebellion is crushed at the cannon’s mouth,” he had said, but even that came in measured tones, as if he were simply stating the facts.

  Ulys, ever dutiful, wrote to his father to seek his advice and approval. “We are now in the midst of trying times when every one must be for or against his country, and show his colors too, by his every act,” he wrote. “Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a Government, and laws and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter, and I trust, the stronger party.”