The Wages of Fame

by Thomas Fleming

  “No! We don’t fight their kind of war,” George said.

  “That must be Santa Anna’s tent!”

  George led a surge toward a huge white tent with an elaborate silk-curtained marquee. Inside they found a hot breakfast of tortillas and tamales on gold-rimmed plates. The table service was solid silver. Coffee bubbled in a beautifully engraved silver pot. In a large trunk were a half dozen uniforms, heavy with gold braid. Beside it was one of Santa Anna’s wooden legs. He had lost the real leg to a French cannonball, when Paris, irked with Mexico’s long-running refusal to pay its bills, sent a fleet to shell Vera Cruz in 1838.

  “General, could you come here a moment?” Captain Lee said as the volunteers began stuffing Santa Anna’s possessions into their knapsacks.

  Outside the tent, George found a remarkably beautiful young Mexican woman standing beside the road, sobbing pathetically. She was wearing little more than a nightgown, her shoulders and arms bare. Her lustrous black hair streamed down both sides of her lovely oval face. “I’m afraid this lady will be abused if we don’t offer her some protection,” Lee said.

  In his seven months in northern Mexico, George had learned enough Spanish to carry on a conversation. “What is your name, madam?” he said.

  “Senora Maria Pena de Vega. My husband commanded the heights of Cerro Gordo. I fear he may be among the dead. Excuse my appearance. I fled my tent when shells began exploding near it.”

  “I’ll do my best to find out your husband’s fate. In the meantime consider yourself under my protection.”

  “A thousand thanks, sir. I am happy to learn not all Americans are barbarians.”

  George seized the first two privates within reach. They were Kentuckians, both in their teens. “Escort this woman back to her tent. If you insult her in any way, I’ll have you shot!”

  “Yes, sir, General,” they said, their eyes wide.

  George went back into Santa Anna’s tent and commandeered a crimson cloak that a corporal had just pulled out of the dictator’s trunk. Outside, George draped it around Maria de Vega’s naked shoulders. While the privates escorted her to her tent, George mounted the steep slope of Cerro Gordo. On the summit he found a grisly scene. The shells of the guns on La Atalaya had wreaked havoc on the Mexicans, and the storming parties of infantrymen had only added to the carnage. Dead men lay everywhere. Intermingled with them were a startling number of women. The Mexicans brought their women to war and apparently thought the Americans were going to give them time to depart to the rear before they attacked.

  A huddle of surviving Mexicans were being guarded by two husky Irish regulars. Half the men in the regular army regiments were Irish or German born. “Where is General de Vega?” George asked in Spanish.

  “You’ll find his corpse in the number two battery,” said a thick-bodied, swarthy lieutenant.

  “Take me to him.”

  In the wreckage of a three-gun battery, George found a young, hawk-nosed man slumped between two dismounted guns. The front of his gray uniform was soaked with blood. “There is General de Vega,” the Mexican lieutenant said. “He was killed by the first of your shells. Without him the men were like so many decapitated chickens.”

  “His wife asked me to discover his fate.”

  The lieutenant grimaced. “God never stops smiling on Americans. She’s very beautiful.”

  At the foot of Cerro Gordo, George had no trouble locating Madame de Vega’s tent, guarded by his two Kentucky privates. By now she was wearing a pleated, dark red dress, which still left her lovely shoulders bare. “I’m afraid your fears have proven true,” George said. “Your husband is dead. Do you want to take charge of his body?”

  She shook her head. “Bury him with his men. That’s what he would want,” she said. Her eyes were red-rimmed but tearless. “It’s a fate he foresaw from the day this war began. It would be our punishment.”

  “Why?”

  “We were secret lovers for a year before my father discovered us and put me in a convent. The general stormed the place with his men and carried me away to Yucatan. My father put a curse on us.”

  “Where is your home?”

  “Once it was Mexico City. Since I married it was with General de Vega—with the army. I thought he was the hope of Mexico. Now I begin to think Mexico has no hope.”

  “You have no relatives in Vera Cruz—anywhere I could send you?”

  “None that would risk my father’s wrath.”

  “Then you must stay with our army until we reach Mexico City. Surely when your father sees you face-to-face, he’ll forgive you.”

  “I doubt it. But I have no other choice—except to join my husband. A choice I may yet make.”

  “Madam, don’t say such a thing! Someone so beautiful, so fine … It would be a crime against nature!”

  “It may be the best answer to my father’s cruelty. Someone must bear witness to Mexico’s despair.”

  That night, General Stapleton joined in a boisterous celebration in General Winfield Scott’s tent. The majestic, six-foot-five-inch commander of the American army remembered George’s father, who had died under his command in that long-ago battle on the Canadian border. Scott was the total opposite of Zachary Taylor—courteous, intelligent, a thinking soldier. He had captured the heavily fortified port of Vera Cruz last month at the cost of less than a dozen lives. He had applied similar professionalism to Cerro Gordo. With the loss of little more than two hundred men, they had captured five thousand Mexicans, forty cannon, seven thousand muskets. Santa Anna was a fugitive. The Mexican army had vanished. There was nothing between them and Mexico City but another 150 miles of hard marching along a good road.

  While toasts rang out to General Scott, to General Twiggs, to General Stapleton, to Captain Lee for his daring reconnaissances, which had discovered the route around Cerro Gordo through the chaparral, George’s mind drifted to the darkened tent where Maria de Vega sat, listening to their hilarity. Was every shout of triumph, every guffaw of victory, deepening that impulse to bear witness to Mexico’s despair?

  General Stapleton found himself more and more uncomfortable with the party. Somehow, this beautiful young woman had become his responsibility. He had helped place the batteries that had killed her husband. He had encouraged James Knox Polk to invade her country to teach them a lesson in international behavior. How bizarre, how cruel, those words, that tough policy, seemed when you came face-to-face with the suffering it inflicted on individuals. How little he really knew about Mexico. Why had General de Vega been the hope of the country?

  As General Twiggs and General Scott began exchanging war stories from the days of 1812—stories to which George would ordinarily have listened with fascination—he excused himself and walked back to Madame de Vega’s tent. A single sentry was guarding it. George had arranged for around-the-clock protection.

  “It’s George Stapleton,” he said, rustling the tent flap. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” Her voice had a dusky timbre.

  “Good. I hope our celebration isn’t keeping you awake.”

  “I have no interest in sleep. I prefer my thoughts.”

  Suddenly George saw this beautiful woman in her nightgown, those sinuous arms, the sculpted shoulders. His mouth was dry with desire. It had been ten months since he touched a woman. He struggled with meaningless words. “Did my servant, Hannibal, bring you dinner?”

  “Yes. He was annoyed because I ate nothing.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Thank you—for everything, General. You have been most kind. I only fear your generosity is being wasted on a woman who no longer has any interest in this life.”

  Back in his tent, General Stapleton found sleep eluding him for a long time. He too was discovering that part of his soul lived in an underground river of desire. Like the honorable man and faithful husband he was, he rebuked himself. But the memory of Maria de Vega in her nightdress, the dusky timbre of her mournful voice, refused to vanish. It
gathered intensity until it became an almost holy image, ringed with light. Somehow, General Stapleton vowed, he would assuage her sorrow. He would right at least one of the wrongs inflicted by this miserable war.

  FIVE

  CAROLINE KEMBLE STAPLETON SAT IN the gallery of the House of Representatives, looking down on an elongated Illinois scarecrow named Abraham Lincoln, as he declaimed against Mr. Polk’s war. “I wunt tew know the eggsact spot where this here blood was spilled that started this here terrible war,” he drawled, his thumbs in the buttonholes of his coat. “I got a series of resolutions here, demandin’ that James Knox Polk show us the eggsact spot. I am confident, genlemun, that if he tole us the truth about it, he would be shown to be the wuss liar that ever inhabitated that palace on Pennsylvanee Avenoo.”

  Not a Democrat rose to answer this idiot. A temperature of ninety-six degrees may have had something to do with their torpor. But its real source was political. None of them had any stomach for defending James Knox Polk. The party had lost control of the House of Representatives in the midterm (1846) elections. This arrogant fool Lincoln was one of the Whig winners. Caroline stalked out of the stifling gallery and hurried to the Senate.

  A page escorted her to one of the couches on the floor. A half dozen senators, including Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun, strolled over to pay their respects. Webster was drunk, not an unusual condition for him these days, as the White House receded irrevocably beyond his grasp. Calhoun was obviously a dying man, his chest perpetually choked with catarrh. He too realized the presidency would forever elude him. He croaked an anxious query for George’s safety.

  “He continues to lead a charmed life,” Caroline said.

  Senator Edward Hannegan of Indiana had the floor. “I ask you, gentlemen, how much more must we endure from Mexico?” he shouted. “It is a country without a government, without laws, without morality. Remove the firm hand of the United States and she will lapse into anarchy when our victorious troops march home. There is no question in my mind that the president must revise his peace terms. They are much too generous. Moreover, he has placed the negotiations in the hands of a man who is either a scoundrel or a fool. We have a man on the scene who is perfectly capable of taking charge of these negotiations: General George Stapleton. A man who has seen firsthand the treacherous amoral conduct of the Mexican army and government. Who knows what must be done to rescue this people from barbarism.”

  That was more like it. Caroline scribbled a note and handed it to a page. What a marvelous speech! Please come to my reception tonight. The senator had been one of the ultras on Oregon. He had wanted everything up to the border of Russian Alaska. It was easy to convert him into a fervent proponent of conquest in the opposite direction. Everyone in Indiana seemed to want to go elsewhere. The pioneer spirit was in their bones.

  Senator Jeremy Biddle of New Jersey rose to answer Hannegan. With a fervor worthy of a Methodist camp meeting, he denounced the idea of conquering all of Mexico. He said it would destroy America as a moral force in the modern world. We would become as venal, as corrupt, as the English and the French, and as tyrannical as the Russians. No one paid much attention to him. The demolition Caroline and her hired character assassin, John L. O’Sullivan, had wreaked on Senator Biddle during the 1844 presidential campaign had reduced him to a political cipher.

  Although a reply was superfluous, Senator Sladen of Louisiana could not resist answering his former friend. “We have now heard from a man—and from a mouse. Forgive me for departing from the traditional courtesy the Senate expects of its members. But the issue is too important to the future of our country to mince words.”

  Jeremy’s desk was only a few feet from Caroline’s couch. She felt his eyes on her as she walked past him to the door. She did not bother to notice him. Outside the Capitol, Caroline searched for her carriage. As usual, the new coachman, Judson Diggs, was nowhere to be found. He was a big-bellied lout whom George had hired at Hannibal’s recommendation. She finally located Judson shooting craps with several hackmen on the west side of the Capitol. “If I have to walk around the block to find you once more, you’re fired,” she said.

  Judson babbled apologies. He combined all the worst characteristics of the blacks—low cunning and a groveling subservience. Hannibal had recommended him because he was a churchgoer. Like his idol, Senator Stapleton, Hannibal was no judge of character.

  “The White House,” Caroline said. Waves of humidity shimmered in the blazing noon sun as the open carriage jolted down Pennsylvania Avenue. Judson Diggs continued to apologize. “Shut up,” Caroline said.

  In fifteen minutes, she was in the private dining room, telling Sarah and James Polk what she had heard in the Capitol. Sarah had the drapes drawn against the sun, trying to keep some of the night’s coolness inside the mansion. The dimness gave them both, especially the president, a spectral quality, as if they were dead and merely going through the motions of life in some sort of netherworld.

  The president became visibly agitated when she described Senator Hannegan’s attack on Nicholas P. Trist, the diplomat he had sent to Mexico to negotiate peace. “Tell me, either of you brilliant intellects, what I am supposed to do with this man? He was selected by the secretary of state as trustworthy and reliable. He’s no sooner on the boat than the New York Herald prints a full account of his secret instructions. Now I learn he’s fallen to feuding with Winfield Scott, who’s threatening to resign because of Trist’s claims to being his superior.”

  Caroline let Sarah answer the president. “I think you should get a new secretary of state. There’s the traitor in your household. Buchanan leaked those instructions. Or looked the other way while someone else leaked them.”

  “I can’t dismiss him. It would ruin us in Pennsylvania.”

  “You said that before last fall’s elections. What did he do for us in his home state? The Whigs trounced us,” Sarah said. “That’s where we lost control of the House. We knew Van Buren and his soreheads would sit on their hands in New York.”

  “Congressman Wilmot is from Pennsylvania,” Caroline said. “I don’t think it was an accident that his resolution is a first cousin to Mr. Buchanan’s ideas about seeking no territory from the war.”

  “Buchanan has assured me he had nothing to do with Wilmot’s proviso,” Polk said. “David Wilmot is just a greedy fool who wants me to give his district half the patronage in Pennsylvania. He’s one of those Democrats who doesn’t give a damn about his party.”

  Caroline averted her eyes. It was too painful to see the president clinging to men like Buchanan, who leaked contemptuous stories about him to reporters. The secretary of state was using the war to make sure Polk served only one term.

  “Unless we hold on to what we’ve got left in Pennsylvania, the Democratic Party is—”

  A fit of coughing shook the president’s frame so violently, the dishes rattled on the table. His skin had acquired a brownish hue. His eyes seemed to have receded into deep sockets of woe. He constantly moistened his dry lips with his tongue. More and more, Caroline began to feel she and Sarah were in a race with time—perhaps with time’s grim coadjutor, death. James Polk’s stomach and bowel disorders had returned to torment him as his exhaustion grew. Bouts of indigestion and diarrhea reduced him to a semi-invalid.

  Only victory in Mexico could rescue this beleaguered man, a victory of extraordinary dimensions, beyond the original vision of the war that he had inherited from Andrew Jackson. The conquest and occupation of all of Mexico would become James Knox Polk’s physical as well as his political salvation. It would restore confidence to his soul and vigor to his body. No longer would fear and doubt ravage his intestines.

  The president did not know this yet. Not with the growing certainty that held Caroline and Sarah on course. In the president’s view, the war was still tormented by evil spirits. Nothing seemed to go right. After General Taylor won his bloody and unnecessary battle at Buena Vista in February 1847, he had screamed for more men. The pres
ident rushed him thousands of troops, which he had originally intended to send to General Scott’s army.

  That towering egotist, after winning a tremendous victory at Cerro Gordo, seemed poised to conquer the rest of Mexico within a week. Then he discovered that his volunteers wanted to go home when their twelve-month enlistments expired in May. Patriotic oratory from Scott, from George Stapleton, and from other generals was ignored. They went home and left the army stranded in the heart of Mexico, with less than five thousand men. The frantic president had to persuade a carping Congress to vote money for another ten thousand men while Scott sat in Puebla, seventy-five miles from Mexico City, threatening to resign because Polk was not supporting him, a threat he was now renewing over his quarrel with Nicholas Trist.

  In spite of this turmoil, the ultimate goal was far from lost. The Democrats still controlled the Senate, where the peace treaty would be approved when the Mexicans finally surrendered. The longer they prolonged the war, the more they were arousing the same anger and grim resolve in the president that they had already stirred in George Stapleton.

  Picking up Caroline’s thoughts, a habit that had grown more frequent and uncanny over the last several months, Sarah Polk said, “The more I think of the way things are going, the more I suspect you should revise your peace terms. Mexico is so chaotic, we may find ourselves dealing with a new government, repudiating a treaty, six months after we sign it. Perhaps it might be better for both countries if we simply annexed Mexico for the next twenty or thirty years, brought order out of chaos, created a genuine republic.”

  “From everything I hear and read in the papers, the All Mexico movement is growing by leaps and bounds among the voters,” Caroline said. “It’s especially appealing to Democrats as a perfect answer to the No Territory Whigs.”

  A large percentage of the Whig Party, seeking to placate the abolitionists, had taken up this cry. They were ready to accept Texas and a boundary on the Rio Grande. But they piously declaimed that the United States should forswear all interest in California and New Mexico, to prove that the war was not being fought to extend slavery.