The Deserter

by Jane Langton

  One afternoon she was glad to board a car of the Washington Horse Railroad Company on Seventh Street, although she wasn’t sure where it was going. The only sign on the car was not helpful:

  COLORED PERSONS

  MAY RIDE IN THIS CAR

  But the horse was plodding in the right direction. On the Avenue, Ida descended and walked over to Tenth Street to try the last of the theaters on Mrs. Broad’s list. At the first three, Grover’s National and the two music halls, the Varieties and the Canterbury, no one had heard of Lily LeBeau.

  In front of the fourth theater, there was a crowd on the street. They were all staring up at a man stepping carefully along a tightrope stretched between two buildings. Ida watched too, holding her breath until he reached the other side. Then she turned to the gaping man beside her and asked her question about Lily LeBeau.

  At once he turned with a theatrical gesture, swept off his feathered hat and said, “Dear madam, come with me.”

  Ida followed him gratefully through the darkened theater into a maze of dark passages. At the end of a narrow corridor he nodded at a closed door and said, “In there, dear lady,” and vanished.

  Ida knocked. A woman’s voice called out, “Un momento.” Then the door was flung open by a white marble statue.

  Ida gasped, but the statue laughed and pulled her inside. “Oh, dearie, it’s just The Marble Heart. You must have heard of it? Well, here I am in person, a marble goddess come to life.” She struck a statuesque pose, dropped into a chair, then jumped up again and pulled out another chair for Ida. “Here, dearie, sit down. What can I do for a sweet mother-to-be?”

  Ida opened her mouth to ask for Lily LeBeau, but the loquacious living statue kept right on talking, crossing her white legs and lighting a cigar. “Oh Jesus, you can’t imagine what it’s like. I have to stand on that pedestal without moving a muscle for twenty blessed minutes before I come to life at last, and then I’m stiff all over. But fortunately, my dear, guess what? The new writer, he’s changed the lines, so when I wake up, I get to stretch and yawn and say, ‘Three long years of marble servitude!’” The living statue jumped up, stretched, yawned, then plumped herself down again. “And then I’ve got another line that really brings down the house.” The actress raised a limp white arm to her white forehead and closed her eyes in anguish, “‘I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse.’”

  Ida smiled and the actress laughed and slapped her knee, but at once she stopped laughing and said, “Well, I don’t know how long the big boss will let us go on being silly like that. When he gets back from Boston, we’ll be all la-di-da again. ‘Gold cannot buy genius!’ What twaddle.”

  There was a rustle of skirts in the doorway and a squeal. “Ida! Oh my God, it’s not Ida?” Ida stood up awkwardly and smiled at Lily, who held out her hands and cried, “Oh, Ida, what on this earth are you doing here?”

  Ida didn’t know how to soften the truth. “Oh, Lily, I followed you. I saw you board the train in Baltimore and I figured you must be coming after Seth.”

  “Oh mother of God.” Lily was wrapped in filmy layers of lavender gauze. Her face was heavily made up, but her dismay showed through the pink powder and the patches of sweat. She dropped Ida’s hands and said faintly, “But my dear, it’s not so.”

  “You’ve got to tell me, Lily,” said Ida, determined to have the truth at last. “Is Seth here?”

  Lily looked around desperately for an excuse to get away. “Wait, dear, wait for me, because it’s just not so, what you said. Dearest girl, wait.” With a flutter of gauzy veils, she was gone.

  “So when are you due, sweetie?” said the marble statue, leaning back in her chair and getting down to business.

  “Oh, not for ages yet,” lied Ida, sitting down again in confusion.

  “Well, I must say, you look ready to pop. My sister, you should’ve seen her. We thought she must surely have three on the inside, but it turned out to be only one, and, unfortunately it died. Then she died too.”

  “I’m sorry,” murmured Ida, but the statue was off on another fascinating discourse, this time on the subject of disastrous labors she had herself personally witnessed, accompanied by advice on the care of the newborn. Ida was instructed to give her infant lots of titty.

  “Oh, Ida, I’m sorry.” Lily bustled in again. “Now, my dear, let me tell you what actually happened.”

  At once the living statue jumped up, said, “Ta-ta,” bounded into the corridor and slammed the door behind her.

  “Ida, dear,” said Lily, “I wasn’t following Seth. We had already broken up. The whole company was coming to Washington for this engagement, so of course I came too.”

  “Then Seth isn’t sick?” Ida leaned forward, her heart in her mouth. “He was never sick in the country?”

  “He was never what?” Lily had forgotten her earlier story. “Oh, sick in the country. Yes, dear, he was, but then he got better. I heard he was here, but it’s not true that I followed him, no indeed. And then I heard that his old wound was troubling him.”

  “Oh, Lily.” Ida reached out and caught at her hands. “What wound? Tell me. Please tell me.”

  Lily had forgotten that Ida’s precious husband was supposed to have been wounded in the neck. Impulsively, she gave him a new affliction. “Jaundice,” she said wildly. Whatever that might be.

  “Jaundice!”

  Well, no, on second thought, perhaps jaundice was not just the thing. Lily changed her mind. “I think that’s what they said.” She dithered around the room, snatching up a heap of tumbled curls and adding them to the torrent pouring down her back. “Maybe it was pneumonia.”

  “Oh, Lily, Lily, where is he?”

  It was another impossible question. Lily caught up a mirror and twirled to see the toss of her curls and the sway of her gossamer gown. “Oh, in some hospital or other. There are so many in this horrid city.” Then Lily put down the mirror and stopped lying. Looking Ida in the face, she said, “My dear, how can you bear to be away from home when your time is so near? Honestly, Ida, you look ready to burst.”

  Fiercely Ida said, “I’m all right,” and then the thought of her suffering husband was so compelling and terrible that she could no longer sit still. Heaving herself to her feet, she said passionately, “Oh, Lily, don’t you see? I’ve got to find him.”

  “Oh, my dear girl.” Lily lifted protesting hands, but Ida turned and lumbered into the corridor, striding away from the frightening distortions and artful half-truths of poor foolish Lily LeBeau.

  Poor foolish Lily dropped her hands and watched Seth’s unhappy wife fade clumsily down the hall. The poor child was almost running.

  Lily felt put-upon. What else could she have said? She had been as good as gold, she had done everything a mortal soul could do on this earth to guard the safety of that skedaddling scamp Seth Morgan. His poor little wife would soon give birth, come hell or high water, whether she was still adrift in the city of Washington or at home way up north where she ought to be. Either way, a screaming baby might put some sense into her head, and then at last she’d forget about her heartbreaking struggle to find a husband who had no intention whatever of being found. A husband for whom she, poor bullied and self-sacrificing Lily LeBeau, had been forced to humiliate herself time and again.

  Lily felt more and more aggrieved. This hateful pretense had been forced on her entirely against her will. In order to prevent the entire force of the law from pouncing on Seth and hanging him from a sour-apple tree, she’d been forced to tell terrible fibs to his wife, poor sweet little Ida, because Seth kept saying that somebody had it in for him, the snooping bloodhounds of the War Department and somebody else who was even worse. So it had been entirely on his behalf that Lily had been forced to tell all these awful lies. It had been extremely painful and difficult, and she was thoroughly ashamed of herself.

  So when Otis looked in the door and raised questioning eyebrows and said, “How did it go?” she screamed at him and threw the mirror at his head.

&nbs
p; IDA’S DRAWERS

  We now give some new patterns in linen, which have been sent out to us from Paris. As everybody is talking of economy, many ladies, who have heretofore put out their linen work, will now make it up for themselves. In this way every subscriber for “Peterson” will be able to save three, four, five, or even ten times the price of subscription.

  —Peterson’s Magazine, November 1861

  When Ida had jumped impulsively on the train in Baltimore, she had brought nothing with her but her shawl, the money belt sewn tightly around her rib cage and the tasseled bag attached to the high waistband of her dress. She had crocheted the “Lady’s Work-Bag” herself, but it was small, holding only a purse, a comb, a handkerchief, and a powder box with a swansdown puff. Thus she had nothing to wear in the city of Washington but the clothes on her back.

  They were not enough. She must certainly have a change of underwear. Ida had discarded her stays long ago, but she surely needed another chemise and an extra pair of drawers.

  Ida confided her problem to Mrs. Broad. At once that kind woman bundled a couple of old sheets out of a cupboard. “They’ve been side-to-middled already,” she said, “so they’re no use to me anymore.”

  Ida accepted them gratefully, and begged the loan of scissors and pincushion, needle and thread. In a single long night she turned the sheets into a chemise, an enormous pair of drawers and a nightdress.

  Next morning she heated a kettle on the stove and got to work in the backyard, using Annie’s scrubbing board and her cake of brown soap, then cranking everything between the rollers of the mangle. She washed out her bodice too, and her lace collar. Then, instead of pegging everything up on the line, she spread them out in her bedroom to dry. She didn’t want to take up space in the drying yard, because it was always like a ship in full sail. That night she went to sleep in her new nightdress, her wet things cooling the warm air.

  When Mrs. Broad appeared at her door next morning with a length of upholsterer’s fringe, Ida laughed, because she knew what it was for. At once she reached for her purse and insisted on paying a few pennies, because Mrs. Broad had bought it from the ragman.

  The fringe matched Ida’s skirt exactly, and she looped it twice around the lower edge to hide the muddy hem. The effect was perfectly in the mode, because the magazines were full of fashionable ladies in wide-spreading gowns trimmed at the bottom in the same way.

  “Well now, ain’t you smart,” said Mrs. Tossit. “Just like a fashion plate.”

  Of course it wasn’t true, but even in her swollen skirt, Ida felt almost elegant as she began her new quest. “There’s hospitals all over this town,” Mrs. Broad had said. So all over town Ida would go. She would visit them all, even though she had little faith in any of Lily’s lame stories. Hope was all she had left, the slim hope that she might find Seth somewhere, no matter what he was suffering from—a wound received in battle, a feverish inflammation of the lungs or an attack of yellow jaundice.

  THE HOSPITALS

  Here in Washington, when these army hospitals are all filled … they contain a population more numerous in itself than the whole of Washington of ten or fifteen years ago. Within sight of the Capitol, as I write, are some thirty or forty such collections, at times holding from fifty to seventy thousand men … amid the confusion of this great army of sick, it is almost impossible for a stranger to find any friend or relative ….

  —WALT WHITMAN

  Seventy-five by forty, my barn was,” said Mr. Tossit as he buttoned his frock coat before stepping out the door for another frustrating day in the office of the quartermaster general.

  “How dreadful,” said Ida. “Surely they owe you compensation.”

  “Not to mention the cornfield,” said Mr. Tossit, clapping on his bowler hat. “A whole forty-acre field of growing corn.” Mr. Tossit’s face was red and weathered. Ida could almost see a hay fork in his hand. “It wasn’t my fault they had a fight on my farm.”

  “My poor William,” said Mrs. Tossit when he had gone. “He’s beginning to lose hope.” But she sat calmly on the sofa, toeing and heeling a sock.

  It was old Mrs. Starkey who told Ida where to look for her wounded husband. “If I were you, dear, I’d begin with Harewood Hospital. It’s the biggest.” Mrs. Starkey spent her days in the Treasury, counting ragged bills before they were sent to the furnace. She had been at Mrs. Broad’s for over a year. “It was even worse last year, my dear, all the wagons and ambulances coming up from the wharves. Oh, it was dreadful. At first, I couldn’t help crying, but now I’m ashamed to say I’m used to it.”

  “They’re talking about closing the hospital in the Rotunda,” said Miss Whitley, who baked bread in the basement of the Capitol.

  Ida was astonished. “There’s a hospital in the Capitol?”

  “Oh, yes, and for a while the Rotunda wouldn’t hold enough of the wounded, so they set up cots in the halls.”

  “They’ve put up lots of new hospitals,” said Mrs. Starkey. “There’s Armory Square and Campbell. Oh, my dear girl, I hope you find your husband soon. You shouldn’t be running around alone, not now, my dear, not now.”

  It was the usual advice. Ida smiled and set off stoutly every day, her tasseled bag stuffed with cakes and apples pressed on her by Mrs. Broad. Whenever the street railway went in the right direction, she climbed on board. Otherwise she walked.

  Harewood was a collection of immensely long one-story wooden buildings. Ida walked into a dining room where the plank tables seemed to stretch forever.

  Lunch had been spread and the men were at table, all the ones who could leave their beds. Ida walked down the center aisle, trying to keep out of the way of the men and women carrying pots of soup and setting down pitchers of water.

  As usual, her swollen shape attracted attention. Heads turned as she approached. Ida didn’t care. Mockingly she told herself again that she was the cynosure of all eyes.

  The joke brought an ache, a vision of Seth’s smiling face, wasted now perhaps and hollow with disease.

  It was only a vision. Seth’s face was not to be seen at any of the far-flung tables. Nor was he lying on a cot in any of the long wards or sitting up in a wheelchair. Ida saw only strangers among the patients, row upon row, with hospital stewards and nurses in hurried attendance. Often she saw other women—wives and sweethearts who had managed to find their men.

  Some of them nodded kindly to Ida. Others whispered behind her back. Sometimes men called out to her, but never in derision. Ida suspected they had wives at home in the same condition. One man in delirium lunged upright, reached out his arms and called out, “Rose, Rose.”

  Ida smiled and passed by, sorry not to be his Rose.

  At Campbell Hospital, the story was the same—long wards, long rows of cots and hundreds of young men suffering from battle wounds or sick with fever, coughing or tossing from side to side or lying very still. Out-of-doors a row of veterans sat in the sun, each of them missing a leg or an arm. Perhaps they felt lucky to be alive. At least they would never stand apart as pitiable oddities. For the rest of her life, Ida knew, she would see battle-scarred men on the street everywhere.

  If only Seth were one of them, honorably wounded in his country’s cause. Ida had begun to think that perhaps it was from shame that he had left his family and abandoned his wife. How terrible if he should die before she could tell him that she felt no shame at all.

  Deserters, after all, were commonplace. On Ida’s first afternoon in the city she had seen a troop of men in dirty blue uniforms tramping along the Avenue with armed guards marching beside them. She had asked a woman on the street why Union men should be under guard.

  The woman’s sneering answer had delivered a pang. “Deserters, look at ’em, it’s a wonder they’s any good men left, the way thousands skedaddle every time they have a fight.” Leaning over the curb, she spat into the gutter.

  Ida had backed away, feeling ashamed but relieved at the same time, because her husband was not the only man who had ru
n away from a battle.

  She had watched the huddled men in their filthy uniforms as they marched away. Some were shame-faced; others looked defiantly left and right, their bloodshot eyes gazing straight back at the staring people on the street. You laugh at me? I’d like to see you try it. I’d like to see you walk so smart, right up to the cannon’s mouth.

  SOMEONE KNOCKING

  Even though her hospital visits in the daytime were full of sorrow, Ida preferred them to her theatergoing in the evening.

  Of course it was bizarre to think of her dear Seth, that sober Concord citizen and classical scholar, posturing on the stage in costume. Sometimes it seemed impossible to Ida that he could have chosen an exotic career behind the footlights over the idyllic quiet life of his own family at home.

  But then she would remember his stories about the club he called the Pudding, when he and his friends had romped onstage, singing hilarious songs composed by one of their classmates. Painfully, she remembered the laughter of her young brothers and sisters whenever Seth had wrapped himself in a shawl and sang his Rosebud song—“Thou Hast the Petals, I the Thorns.”

  Perhaps by comparison, his old Concord life had not really been so idyllic.

  Uncomfortably, Ida recalled a winter evening in the parlor, with Seth sitting at the table trying to translate the Odes of Horace, while her mother sat at the piano, battling her way through “The Tic-Tac Polka,” Alice banged her fists on the keys, Josh and Sally bickered in the kitchen and Seth’s own mother sat whining in the corner.

  It would not be surprising if domestic life had failed to measure up to those happy old times when he and his classmates had been ridiculous together, performing their comic farces and singing their nonsense songs.

  So perhaps the theater was the right place to look for him after all, in spite of Lily’s sorry fables about battle wounds and a possible case of jaundice. In running away from the war, perhaps Seth had run straight toward the dazzling excitement of an actor’s life.