Libbie

by Judy Alter

  "I'm sure you were, Autie," I said, moving away from his open arms. But I said nothing about Monahsetah. To have mentioned her new baby would have been to admit to eavesdropping... and besides, I had no idea what to say. How did I tell my husband that I knew he had dallied with an Indian woman? And if I told him, what did I do next? What would life without Autie be like?

  An

  Interlude

  Chapter 15

  I found out soon enough what life without Autie would be like. We returned to Leavenworth in October, and by November he was in Chicago visiting Phil Sheridan, who was then quite ill. "The general," he wrote, "is improving but requires 'setters-up' with him at night." Phil, weak as he was, sent kindest regards, which recalled to my mind Autie's terrible jealousy, leading him once to imply that even Little Phil was sweet on me. Now, with campaigns in his mind, Autie was only too glad to sit up at night with Phil, with apparently no jealousy. Autie, no one could ever accuse you of being consistent!

  I had never told Autie what I knew about Monahsetah... what I had long suspected and now knew for the truth. Instead of confronting him, I simply withdrew, as though into my own little shell. Oh, I had withdrawn before, after he'd beaten James Coker and after I'd first realized that Autie had cheated on me, but this was different... and he knew it. At first Autie was puzzled and overcareful of me, always trying to please in a way that was unlike a man who generally wanted things to go his way. But I was curiously unaffected by his eagerness, neither scorning his advances nor accepting them.

  "Libbie," he said one night, "we have not been man and wife for some time now."

  "That's true, Autie," I said.

  "Why? I... I miss you. You know I love you."

  "I love you, too, Autie." It was true. I did love him. I was not even angry with him. I was just... distanced.

  "Is it... because we've not had children?" He looked away, as though the subject were painful. "I thought we'd decided..."

  "Decided what, Autie? That we are fortunate? You decided that... but I always thought you were convincing yourself."

  "No," he said a trifle too quickly, "I really mean it. It's much more important to me to have you with me."

  "That's not the thing, anyway," I said, wearying of the discussion. "I just need time.. '"

  "Time away from me?"

  "Perhaps."

  Autie's puzzlement turned to anger later. He paced the floor and talked loudly about the naturalness of marital relationships, the unnaturalness of abstinence. And finally he resorted to threats. "There are always women interested in me," he said haughtily. "I've never... never even considered another woman, but by God, Libbie, you force a man too far...."

  Oh, Autie, why did you lie to me? I thought back on my own temptations... mostly James Coker... and how seriously I took the marriage vow. And I knew that Autie had never taken the vow as seriously. To know that meant that I lived in a house built on shifting sand—what else would suddenly give way and leave me facing a yawning abyss? In odd moments I longed for my father—he who had opposed my marriage to Autie and who was, I now saw, the one person on earth who would protect me no matter what.

  Life without Autie? It was like looking through a glass darkly. I could not see a future without Autie, but neither could I see a return to our happier days. And I knew we couldn't go on as we were for the rest of our lives.

  * * *

  After visiting Phil Sheridan in Chicago, Autie went on to see Evans, the politician whom I despised. I thought Autie would have no more to do with him after he carelessly shot Maida, but Autie protested, "It was an accident, Libbie, just an accident. And he might do me some good politically." Autie grew proportionately more calculating as his army career grew more threatened.

  He reported a grand reception at Evans's private club in Detroit, where he played euchre and met "some very influential men." Next it was Washington, where he testified in hearings about the reorganization of the army.

  All the while I was at Leavenworth, keeping company with the ladies of the post during the day, fretting in loneliness at night, remembering the happy summer we'd just spent, and trying to puzzle out our future. Ah, Autie, I could have done without you... if you'd not been such grand company and made such a lark of life.

  Autie wrote of his festive travels as if there were no rift between us. From Chicago: "We had seen a performance of Lydia Thompson's Blondes at the Opera House, and the Times—a bitter, copperhead sheet—informed the public that I was pursuing blondes instead of the dusky maidens of the Prairies." In his self-absorption, Autie was so blind to the cause of the rift between us that he could make untimely jokes that were not funny at all.

  I was no more encouraged by the report from New York, where he had stopped on his way to Washington: "In New York I went with Mrs. Cram to see Jefferson in Rip Van Winkle. The acting surpassed anything I have ever seen.... When the daughter, grown to a young lady, recognizes in the decrepit, tattered old man her lost father, there was not one person not affected by it.... I never saw the play before, nor, so deep an impression has it made on me, do I desire ever to see it again." Indifferently, I wondered who Mrs. Cram was but could not place her and was thus left with my imagination to fill in the possibilities. I truly doubted that she was eighty years old, blind, and fat. My mind recalled only too well Autie's 1866 adventures in New York City, when he'd dined at Delmonico's, attended theater and opera with beautiful women on his arm, mingled with wealthy capitalists, and then came home to Monroe to tell me all about it, leaving me wondering how much of the story I was not hearing.

  By mid-December, Autie was in Monroe, where he decided to stay for the holidays... which left me alone at Leavenworth, sunk in self-pity over my second Christmas alone. Autie returned in February, ostensibly to settle down to writing those memoirs he always talked of but did little to accomplish. Now, fidgety and uncertain, he would insist I take my usual position at his right elbow to watch while he scribbled furiously on sheets of foolscap for five, perhaps ten, minutes. Then he would bound up.

  "Prospects for the Seventh are not good, Libbie, not good at all," he would declaim, as though I'd not heard this speech ten times already. "A regiment from the Pacific Coast department wants to take our place. I've made application for a position at West Point." Nothing came either of the West Point position or the Pacific Coast troops, and we stayed, uneasily, at Leavenworth. The rift between us did not heal, and we were edgily polite with each other. Abroad in the post, we were happy and gay, laughing together, me always clinging to Autie's arm. Inside our private quarters, we were strangers.

  A new rumor stirred his anxieties. "The Seventh will be broken up," he said. "I've made an application to accompany its headquarters to whatever post it is assigned, but I don't know...."

  By April Autie could stand it no longer and was off to New York on extended leave, taking me as far as Monroe.

  "Autie, I'll go with you," I said at the last minute, pushing aside my indifference because I hated the thought of being left alone again in Monroe. Mama, unable to care for the house on Monroe Street, again lived in a nearby town with a distant relative, and I would be truly alone except for Autie's parents. "I've got to see about a position that will bring us some money," he answered earnestly. "You'd be bored to tears, darling girl."

  "Autie," I asked directly, "what are you going to do?"

  He'd been packing—usually my chore—because throwing gloves and socks into a suitcase kept him from looking directly at me. Now he almost mumbled as he lost himself in the closet, supposedly gathering clothes. "You know," he said, hallway over his shoulder, "that silver mine."

  The Stevens silver mine, near Georgetown, Colorado, was a wild hare of an idea that he'd become involved with the previous year, along with Tom and that infamous Mr. Evans. Autie saw it as the route to fortune for us. "Can it be," he wrote earlier that year when we were apart, "that my little Standby and I who have long wished to possess a fortune are about to have our hopes realized?"

>   "Astor's for it," he now said loftily, referring to none other than John Jacob Astor, one of the wealthiest men I'd ever heard of. "So's Levi Morton, and Jay Gould... you watch, Libbie, the list will grow."

  "Autie," I said, "there are no miracles, there is no instant wealth. You can't pin our hopes on this wild scheme."

  "I've subscribed $35,000 to the mines," he said indignantly. "I know this is a worthwhile project."

  Now, any other wife would have been alarmed by the sum Autie named, but I simply stood and laughed aloud.

  "What are you laughing about?" That old Custer blush, which he never could hide when embarrassed, began to creep upon him, and I watched, fascinated, as his face turned red.

  "You don't have $35,000."

  "No," he admitted, "but my name's worth something."

  So that was it. Autie had sold his name to attract other investors... men like Astor and Gould. It was rather like Judas and the thirty pieces of silver. I wanted to cry that a war hero, a man who'd led troops so loyal they'd have died for him in an instant, could have sunk to selling shares in a questionable silver mine. But hating myself, I said nothing, and Autie left for New York.

  "Within an hour," he wrote from that city, "I had received more invitations than I can accept.... A friend has taken a box at the Academy of Music for ten nights. He has invited me to occupy a seat in it whenever I choose. Miss Kellogg also expects me behind the scenes." Miss Kellogg, the actress, loomed large in Autie's letters: "Tonight I am to sit with Miss Kellogg in her box at the Academy of Music—she does not sing. At her request I am sending you a paper with an account of her, with her compliments." How kind of her, I thought. And then, "This morning I took a walk with Miss Kellogg on Broadway.... To show you how careful Miss Kellogg is in her conduct with gentlemen, she told me she has never ridden with a gentleman alone but twice in New York." Did Autie run along behind the carriage? I wondered, though I never put the question in my letters. Later he wrote, "The old Irish servant who takes care of my rooms looks at me with suspicion when I return, sometimes not till morning, the bed not having been touched. I think she believes I do not pass my nights in the most reputable manner. In fact, circumstances, as she sees them, are against me." And how, Autie dear, were you passing your nights?

  Autie wrote of fashions—pongee parasols were the style, but chignons unpopular; and of investments—the Morton and Bliss firm of lawyers took $10,000 of mining stock, $60,000 was now disposed of; but never what I wanted to hear: that he was coming home.

  Autie was like a bad habit. I did not expect to fall into his arms when he returned, but I was used to having him with me, and without him I felt anchorless. That long period in Monroe—taking Sunday supper with his ailing mother, laughing at Father Custer's jokes, strolling about town and nodding to all those people I'd known all my life—gave me a new perspective on my relationship with Autie. I might never—would never—trust him again nor feel as passionately in love as I once had, but I missed him. I missed the excitement, the vitality he brought to his own life and to mine. I longed for Autie... and the frontier, in spite of Indians, rattlesnakes, floods, and storms. Could I, I wondered, have all that again without renewing our passion? Perhaps I knew that if I once let Autie touch me, all that longing would come flooding back and I would succumb, Monahsetah or not. Ah, how naive we can be sometimes.

  In September he wrote unhappily, "I presume you have seen the announcements of the War Department in the papers. Personally I should have preferred the plains, but for your sake. Duty in the South has somewhat of a political aspect, which I always seek to avoid." The Seventh had been scattered among several small posts in the South, and Autie was assigned command of a two-company contingent at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, near Louisville. His silver mine had collapsed in thin air, and Autie was once more a penniless soldier on active duty.

  * * *

  "Well," Autie demanded, "how do you like it?"

  I turned to look out the long parlor window. Below me lay Elizabethtown—Betsytown, as Autie was already calling it. Even at midday the streets were nearly empty. Before me stretched one main road, with wooden buildings sadly in need of paint, their disrepair not hidden by the lush green trees that lined the road. At a distance I saw a church spire and the courthouse—on closer inspection I would find both needed repair. But Autie had located a fine house, one completely furnished with four bedrooms, a good well, a stable for the horses, and a view.

  "The house is fine, Autie," I said, "but the town is dull, dull as dishwater." At his look of dismay I protested, "You can't tell me you wouldn't rather be at Leavenworth!"

  "Yes," he admitted, "I would. But I thought... well, I hoped... oh, Libbie, I thought we could concentrate on each other here."

  I looked long and hard at him. "Perhaps we can, Autie." And I knew that I was giving in again, that I was captured by the force of his personality. To change the mood, I asked lightly, "When can we have a ball? All the time I was in Monroe, I longed to dance until my feet fell off."

  "And dance you shall," he said happily, sweeping me into an impromptu waltz for which he whistled the accompaniment. It was comfortable to have Autie's arms about me again, and I smiled at him. "Libbie, Libbie," he said hoarsely, wrapping me in his arms.

  * * *

  Response is a puzzling thing, and totally without logic or reason. As he kissed me gently, I found myself responding with a passion that I thought I'd conquered. We hurried back to the hotel, brushing aside curious questions from Tom—"Did you like the house, old lady?"—to retire to the privacy of our room.

  We were neither tentative nor shy in our reunion, the old longing rising to sweep us away as though there had been no distance between us.

  "Libbie," Autie panted, spent at last, "why have we been apart so long?"

  "It was time, Autie," I said, "it was time." And I never mentioned Monahsetah, banishing her at that moment from my memory—or so I thought.

  "And what," I asked laughingly at supper, as our pleasure in each other seemed to radiate around us, "will the Seventh do to earn its pay in Elizabethtown? There are no Indians here."

  He smiled and put a finger to his lips, as though telling a great secret. "There's the Ku Klux Klan... and there are bootleggers who make moonshine in the hills. I thought you'd like the peace."

  "Oh," I sighed, "I do. But I miss Kansas... this is really dull, Autie."

  "I'll keep it from being dull for you," he said, his eyes twinkling.

  "Autie," I whispered in protest, "we cannot spend two years in the bedroom."

  "No, but we can spend a good portion of it there," he answered, his knee moving against mine under the table. We sat in the dining room of the Hill House hotel where we were staying until we could move into our own house.

  Later we took coffee on the veranda with Tom and their sister, Maggie, who had recently married Lieutenant James Calhoun of the Seventh. Jimmi, we called him. We'd been together no more than ten minutes when Jimmi began to yawn and stretch. "Guess we'll turn in," he said, turning to his wife. "Maggie?"

  "Of course," she answered, though I thought in the darkness I was conscious of a little nervous gesture, as though she were embarrassed at her groom's haste to retire.

  "That's the trouble with you newlyweds," Tom drawled. "You always tire out so quick and have to go to bed."

  "Tom Custer!" Maggie's tone became that of an older sister, disciplining a wayward younger sibling.

  "Well," he complained, "it's true."

  I could see Autie tugging at Tom's sleeve—out of Maggie's line of vision. As soon as the newlyweds left us, Autie began to whisper to Tom, though they refused my pleas to be let in on the secret.

  "Lovely night, isn't it, old lady?" Tom asked innocently, while Autie replied, "I bet she misses the plains and those nights where the stars closed down all around us."

  "Yes, but not the rustle in the grass that I always thought was Indians, nor the lightning that I always thought meant a flood," I replied. "Now, what ar
e you two whispering about?"

  "Nothing," Autie replied. "Old lady, it's been a long day. Don't you think you'd best retire?"

  Suspicious, I asked, "Aren't you coming, too?"

  "I'll be up directly."

  Knowing that I was foolhardy in trusting them, I went to our room in the hotel. I made my toilette, wrapped myself in a gown, brushed my hair a hundred strokes and more, and still wondered where Autie could be. Peering out the window, I saw nothing but darkness—only an occasional gas street lamp—and heard nothing except crickets.

  Suddenly that quiet was broken by a wild commotion. Men shouted, horses neighed, someone banged a metal spoon against a heavy pot, and someone else broke into an unharmonious melody on the Jew's harp. The melee slowly developed into a long chant, "Maggie and Jimmi, Maggie and Jimmi!"

  Were I dressed, I'd have been on the veranda in a minute to be part of the commotion, but now I felt trapped by my own nightgown. I peered out the window and could see a mob of men below me, some carrying torches. Throwing propriety to the winds, I donned a wrapper and rushed into the hallway, only to meet Maggie and Jimmi in the hall. He was struggling to pull up a pair of suspenders, while she clutched a wrapper about herself.

  "Jimmi's going down to quiet them," she said, as he bolted down the stairs.

  "Quiet there. A man can't get any sleep!" came a quavery voice from a room down the hall.

  "That's that old man from the dinner table," she whispered, "the one who had his eye on you."

  "He could hardly see with either eye," I said. "I thought he was ninety-five!" I'd been so indignant that this old man had ogled me that I had made a great show of my attachment to Autie. "Come on, Maggie, we might as well join the fun."

  "Oh, Libbie, you wouldn't!"

  "Yes, I would, and so will you," I said, grabbing her hand.

  We reached the front door in time to see Jimmi being pulled around the circle of men in a wheelbarrow, a nightcap set on his head. Every time he tried to rise, rough hands pushed him back into his inelegant seat, amid much laughter and shouting.