by John Jakes
“There’s no practical way,” Judith said. “Your daughter spent two nights with him in Savannah.”
“Madeline’s to blame.”
“No one’s to blame. Young people fall in love.”
“Not my only child, not with carpetbagging carrion.” Saying that he’d spend the night in his office at the shipping company, he stormed out.
About one in the morning, a knock woke Judith. She found Cooper on the stoop. Two acquaintances had brought him home from the Mills House saloon bar, where he’d drunk bourbon whiskey most of the evening. He had then made insulting remarks to an Army major and probably would have attacked him if all the whiskey hadn’t come heaving up suddenly.
The apologetic gentlemen carried Judith’s limp and reeking husband upstairs. She followed with the lamp. She saw the gentlemen out, then undressed and washed Cooper, and sat by him until he woke, about half past two. His first words, after a few groans, stunned her:
“Let her lie in that dirty bed she’s made with the Yankee. I’ll not open the doors to this house to her, ever again.”
She burst out crying, angry tears. “Cooper, this is too much. You’re carrying your stupid partisanship to ridiculous lengths. I refuse to be separated from my own child. I’ll see her whenever I wish.”
“Not here,” he yelled. “I’ll give orders to the servants, and you’d better not defy them. I no longer have a daughter.”
He flung the cover off and skidded across the polished floor to be sick in a basin. Judith bent her head in misery.
54
HE SAT IN THE CHAIR at the rear of the third box, stage right. He chose the seat to avoid the spill of the stage lights. He didn’t want her to see him until the moment he chose.
She lay on a divan upstage. The pillow used to smother her had fallen on the floor. Once he detected an unprofessional flicker of her eyelids. Her silver-blond hair, full to her shoulders, shone with the lovely luster he remembered. He felt no affection for her. His left hand, palm down, worked along his left thigh, as if the motion somehow could restore the severed muscle that had left him unable to leap nimbly in stage duels or perform romantic roles convincingly.
“Then you must speak of one that lov’d not wisely but too well—”
Trump’s blackamoor make-up ran from the heat of the stage. It ran in distinct streaks, so that his face resembled zebra skin. Though he ranted to excess, the observer thought he did a generally creditable job. In fact, for a provincial effort, the production was quite good. Good, that is, in every respect but the performance of Trump’s Desdemona. She was clearly having an off night.
The man in the box found himself unexpectedly entertaining the thought that Trump’s Othello might be a passable importation for a three-week slot still open at the New Knickerbocker. With a new leading lady—Mrs. Parker would be in no shape to perform, ever again. He slipped his hand into his left pocket and reassuringly felt what New York toughs called a dock rat’s drinking jewelry. Horseshoe nails, bent into finger rings.
“I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog, and smote him—thus.”
Sam Trump impaled himself on the prop dagger, staggering this way, then the other, his hand clenched aloft to indicate mortal pain. Mr. Trueblood, playing Lodovico, cheated down in order to regain the stage and cried, “O bloody period!”
Almost over; four speeches more. Then the important part of the evening’s drama would commence.
“… no way but this,” Sam cried, and fell on Willa with unusual vigor. It knocked the breath out of her, hurt her ribs, and almost made her eyes fly open. She shifted under his sweaty weight, hissing through closed lips:
“Sam, your knee—”
“Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.” His head and torso rose and slumped a second time. Sam did love to prolong his stage deaths.
She heard Lodovico corner the Spartan dog, Iago, and threaten him with torture for his plotting. “… Myself will straight abroad, and, to the state, this heavy act with heavy heart relate.”
The interval before the curtain thumped down seemed endless. Sam inadvertently kneed Willa’s stomach as he struggled to his feet, the blackface dripping from his chin. “Are you ill, my dear? It was not good tonight.” He jumped away without waiting for her answer. “Places for the call. Places!”
She bowed from her spot in line, again glimpsing the house, scarcely a third full. Very poor, even for the month of January. The curtain fell. Sam looked hopefully toward the curtain puller, anticipating a second call, but the applause was already gone. The actors walked offstage without saying much to each other. Everyone knew they’d been down. Willa simply shook her head at Sam, admitting her guilt, and joined the exodus.
She’d been cross ever since arriving at the theater. Bad temper was an inevitable failing of hers on those rare occasions when illness struck. For three days she’d been suffering from a stomach complaint. She’d felt a chill all evening and a dull ache in her middle; it robbed her performance of energy and conviction.
Sam wiped his embroidered sleeve across his face and chased after her. “Willa, my dearest, we simply must inject more life into—”
“Tomorrow,” she broke in, slumping in a dejected way. “I promise, Sam. I know I was bad tonight. I’m sorry. I want to go straight to the hotel. I still feel terrible. Good night.”
The burly man with the spongy bulbous nose left the box, turning up the sealskin collar of his overcoat to help hide his face. Not that he knew any of these loud, rude provincials in the audience. Or anyone in the company except the person he’d come to find.
He walked unhurriedly down the stairs and paused for a moment by the gaslit board in the lobby. Photographs of the artists were tacked to it. He studied the one identified as Mrs. Parker. The name had reached him in New York, as a rumor, and he’d next seen it on a crumpled Trump’s Playhouse handbill brought back at his request by a traveling acquaintance. He had taken a long rail journey to investigate. His effort had been rewarded.
He slipped away from the lighted lobby, turned the corner, and crossed the street. The severed muscle had left him permanently lamed. It showed in an awkward side-to-side list as he walked.
In a patch of shadow opposite the stage entrance, he settled down to wait. Street lamps paled and their light diffused in a mist rising from the river. A foghorn blared. Chilled, he drew on a pair of yellow-dyed gloves. Then he took a thin silver flask from an inner pocket and drank some brandy. The flask flashed, reflecting a street lamp. The light revealed large initials engraved in the metal: C. W. Claudius Wood.
Willa tied her cape as she hurried out the door to Olive Street. She felt grimy and uncomfortable; she wanted to bathe and sleep. She tucked her hands into her fur muff and turned right, her heels tapping loudly on the planks, like staccato blows of a carpenter’s hammer. Usually she waited for one of the actors to escort her. Tonight she was impatient. It had been a truly miserable performance, and a miserable Christmas season as well. Of course she’d joined in the caroling and gift-giving and the company’s Yule feast, held on the stage. But whenever she smiled or chatted, she was acting; acting every minute.
President Andrew Johnson’s Christmas gift to the nation had been unconditional amnesty for any Confederate still unpardoned. It was a landmark event, second only to the surrender, perhaps, but it had little meaning for her. There was no longer anyone close to her who was touched by the amnesty. Indeed, because it was such a potent reminder of Charles, the only emotion it generated was a bitter sadness.
At the first corner she stopped, having a distinct sense of some—some presence nearby. She turned and scanned the shadows across the way. Nothing.
She heard male and female voices as the troupe came out of the Playhouse a block behind her. If she lingered, Sam might catch her and lecture her again. So she hurried on, her breath trailing in a cool misty plume. She was feeling so low, she didn’t want to see or speak to another human being.
Wood pursued her steadily, without noise, f
rom a safe distance. When they reached the hotel block, Willa paused and glanced over her shoulder again. Wood held still beside the black rectangle of a bakery window.
As soon as she went on, he moved. He bobbed sideways at every step, a cripple robbed of the agility and panache a leading man needed. Well, the culprit, the thief, would soon be caught and subjected to a fitting justice. In his pocket, through the thin glove leather, the pads of his fingertips indented under the sharp pressure of the filed heads of the horseshoe nails bent into rings.
Warmth, light, the familiar smells of dusty plush and spittoons. Willa was so tired she almost staggered. She crossed the lobby to the marble staircase. A sleepy clerk with an oily forelock like a question mark roused himself. He held up a finger. “Mrs. Parker, there’s a gentleman—” Her skirt disappeared around the first landing. Her heels rang sharply on the marble. “—waiting,” he finished in the silence.
Wood crossed the lobby with an air of confidence, holding the key to his own room in another hotel so it was visible to the clerk leaning on the marble counter. The clerk studied him, tried to place him, couldn’t. A guest who’d signed the ledger before he came on duty? Certainly that must be it. He wouldn’t forget a man with such a pronounced limp.
The clerk turned the book so that he could examine the page of flowery signatures. By that time Wood was on the empty stairs. Just above the landing, out of sight of the lobby, he began to climb two steps at a time, pulling himself along by grasping the rail. His limp didn’t slow him; it was the engine that powered his rapid ascent through the half-dark.
She turned left down the gaslit corridor, fumbling for her key. She reached her door, inserted the key, and was startled to discover that it didn’t turn.
She touched the door. Her blue eyes flew wide. Unlocked?
He slipped the horseshoe-nail rings over the index, middle, and ring fingers of his gloved right hand and adjusted them so the filed heads of the nails were outward. He remembered that he must rake and slash, not punch, because the heads could cut through the dyed leather as easily as they could shred her face.
He stepped from the landing, saw her at the door. Walking rapidly, he said, “Willa.”
Willa turned and saw the man limping toward her through widely spaced pools of light cast by the hall fixtures, trimmed low in their frosted mantles. She recognized him, though he was different—heavier, and there was more scarlet in his spongy nose. He bobbed from side-to side like some child’s toy, something wrong with one leg.
Then it came in a rush. The New Knickerbocker. The Macbeth dagger. She hadn’t put enough distance between them, and she’d given him a potent motive for hunting her: that limp, ruinous for a leading player. What stunned her most, knotting her aching stomach as he rushed at her with alarming speed, were his eyes. They were pitiless.
“Well,” Wood said, stopping. “My dear Mrs. Parker. My dear Desdemona.”
“Were you in the audience?”
He nodded, licking his lips. “You were wretched, you know. I do fear it’s your last leading role. When I finish with you, you’ll be fit for nothing but rouged character women. Hags.”
She smelled the brandy on him. Her impulse was to bolt. It was the way she usually dealt with unpleasantness. But Wood’s mass and height intimidated her. If she moved, he’d be on her instantly. She searched the corridor.
“Go on,” Wood said, amused. He raised his yellow glove. He wore what appeared to be rings made of bent nails, the blued heads outward. “Run, yell. Before any of the guests wake and reach us, I’ll have your face in tatters. Which is the way I intend to leave it.” His left hand started for her throat, there at the door to her room. “The lovely Miss Parker. Lovely no more.”
Willa flung herself back against the door. It opened, and she sprawled on the floor in the dark room smelling of furniture too long undusted. A sad little fir tree, totally brown, stood, in a corner, its needles and tinsel strewn through the oblong of light cast from the hallway.
Wood swung his fisted right hand, and the sharp nailheads, down toward her face. Some intruder, some stranger who’d been hiding over in the dark window alcove, swept by above her. She saw light reflect from an eye, saw a multicolored cape swirl. Was it possible? Smelling the staleness of a smoked cigar, she knew it was.
“I heard you blustering outside,” he said. “What do you want with this young lady?”
“There’s a gentleman—” The clerk had tried to tell her. A gentleman waiting. He must have talked or bribed his way in with a passkey. “We’re old friends. She won’t mind.”
“Stay out of this,” Woods blustered, even though the man in the patchwork robe, a man with a ruffian’s long beard in which the scab of a healed cut showed, now had him backed all the way across the corridor, to the wall.
“Charles,” she called from the room, “that’s Claudius Wood.”
He turned his head, startled. “The man in New York?”
Wood’s damp eyes bulged. Everything had reversed in a moment. He was wild to get away. Struggling up, Willa said, “Yes. He found me somehow and—watch out.”
Wood drove his fisted right hand at the stranger’s face. Though the bearded man looked worn out, he was agile and strong. He sidestepped the punch, grabbed Wood’s extended arm, and pulled it back across the hall full speed. The clenched fist struck hard on the frame of Willa’s door. The sharpened nailheads sliced yellow leather, sliced fingers like sausages. Blood spurted. Charles pulled Wood by the front of his overcoat to position him, then punched him once. Wood caromed off the wall and sat down, finished just that quickly.
The night clerk summoned two members of the St. Louis foot police. The police shouted at the guests milling in the corridor, silencing their complaints, ignoring their questions. The younger policeman handcuffed Wood, and Willa led the other into her parlor.
The bearded man gave his name as Charles Main. No local address as yet. He’d ridden in from the west tonight.
“And you’re Mrs. Parker. The wife and I, we enjoyed you as Desdemona very much. It’s gratifying to have culture in St. Louis,” the older of the two policemen said, flustered in the presence of a celebrity. With her statement about Wood’s attack and motive, and Charles as a witness, it took but ten minutes for the policemen to satisfy themselves about Wood’s guilt. In the hall, Wood alternately mumbled obscenities and raged like an incoherent child, further convincing the policemen that the young woman and her bearded friend were telling the truth.
“You’ll have to sign a deposition, Mrs. Parker,” the policeman said. “You, too, sir. But I doubt you’ll be going anywhere tonight, will you?”
“And no further than the theater tomorrow,” she said.
“Present yourselves at the station as soon as convenient. We’ll charge the assailant, and lock him up until then.”
And so the threat of Wood came to nothing. The policemen hauled him off, his fine overcoat smeared with his own blood, and left Charles and Willa standing in the dusty parlor amid the tinsel and litter of brown needles. Willa was so stunned and so happy to see him, she wanted to cry.
“Oh, Charles,” was all she could say as she went to his arms.
She had a little Christmas whiskey left and poured a glass to warm him. She took a little bit herself; it soothed away some of the pain in her stomach. She curled up on a settee and got him talking, because he had a strange, harried look. “Where have you been? What have you been doing?”
“Something that proved you were right and I was wrong.”
“I don’t understand. Is your son—?”
“Gus is fine. Hardly knows me, I must say. I saw him at Leavenworth for three days, then came to find you.” He took her hand. “I went to the Indian Territory, scouting for Custer. I need to tell you about it.”
She listened for an hour. It began to rain, the slanting downpour dispelling the mist. Charles had an odd, cold aura, she thought. An aura of the far plains, of deep winter, enhanced by a faintly rank smell that even his
malodorous cigars didn’t mask.
He needed a bath, and he certainly needed scissors taken to his beard; it was thick as overgrown underbrush.
The whiskey warmed both of them. He interrupted his story at the point where Custer and his men discovered Indians on the bluffs after they took the village. He said he wanted to make love to her.
Reddening, she said of course, but he caught the slight hesitation, and frowned. She told him she’d been ill for the last few days, and wasn’t over it. Then love-making could wait, he said. But he was very cold. She led him to the bedroom. He undressed while she put on her flannel gown. They climbed under the covers and he put his arm around her and went on talking.
“I was wrong to chase after the Cheyennes, trying to cancel one death with another. Look what it got me.” He held up the tarnished metal cross hanging around his neck on a thong. “The revenge of killing a boy of fourteen or fifteen. Isn’t that a fine accomplishment?”
She brushed his lined forehead with her palm. “So you left—”
“For good.”
“To go where?”
“I told you, to find my son. Find you.”
“And what now?”
“Willa, I don’t know. When I crossed the Washita that last time, I said to myself, there isn’t a place for me anymore. I can’t think of one.”
“I’ll find one.” She leaned close, rubbing her palm on the raw brush of his side-whiskers. “I’ll find one for both of us if you’ll let me. Will you?”
“I love you, Willa. I want to be with you and my boy. That’s all I want. I’m just not sure—” His bleak eyes showed the terrible doubt. “I’m not sure even you can find a place. I don’t know if there’s any place on this earth that I belong.”
55
TWO DAYS LATER, AT Fort Leavenworth, Maureen cut biscuit dough with a tin cutter in the kitchen alcove of the brigadier’s quarters. During the night the direction of the wind had changed, clearing the clouds and bathing the post in a flow of warm southerly air. The sun sparkled in pools of melted snow in the garden patch below the window. Maureen had propped the door open with her flatiron to let the breeze clean out some of the stale smells of winter.
