The Deserter

by Jane Langton

  In the National Republican and the Evening Star, there were theatrical notices, and everywhere on the street small boys hawked playbills:

  LAURA KEENE’S VARIETIES!!

  CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN AS LADY MACBETH!!

  Ida reached for the playbills and studied them eagerly. Lily’s name appeared on the playbill for The Marble Heart, but Seth was not listed anywhere.

  But perhaps, thought Ida, doing her best to imagine his strange new career, he had taken a stage name. If so, then the playbills were not enough. She had to see the players with her own eyes.

  Therefore, nearly every evening she made her way to one of the theaters—Graver’s National, the new Ford’s or the Washington Theater. But when none of the players turned out to be Seth she would stand up, brush past the whisky-smelling men, step carefully over the puddles of tobacco juice, and make her way home to Mrs. Broad’s.

  The plays did not interest her. They all seemed posturing and melodramatic, although occasionally there was a spark of wit that made her laugh.

  But it wasn’t the dramatic productions themselves that made playgoing so disagreeable, nor even the tobacco juice. It was the necessity of showing herself among the queenly women who came to the theater in carriages, resplendent in their coronets of flowers and voluminous skirts of white silk.

  Often the magnificent women were escorted by officers who rivaled them in splendor. The full-dress uniforms of colonels and major generals were adorned with sashes and fringed epaulets, and the swashbuckling cavalry officers swaggered in short jackets and buccaneering boots.

  Ida could not help comparing their sparkling regalia with the ragged coats of the miserable deserters on the street or the bloodstained bandages of the men who lay in those endless perspectives of suffering white cots. How strange that the theatergoers seemed so happy and carefree, as though Washington were not a city of hospitals, as though the war were not grinding on and on, as though battle would not forever follow battle.

  And no matter how accustomed Ida had become to inquisitive stares, it was hard to bear the looks of shocked disgust on the faces of the women in the glorious gowns whenever she stepped into the lobby of a theater. And then, after heaving herself up the stairs to the furnace heat of the topmost balcony and finding a seat among the boldly staring men and looking down at the women as they flowed into the boxes and removed their shawls and bared their white arms, she could almost hear them whispering, A woman in a family way alone on the street at night, imagine!

  The hurried walk back to Mrs. Broad’s was troublesome too. In the neighborhood of the National Theater Ida had to run the gauntlet of Rum Row. Sometimes she made a wide circuit to Harvey’s cheerful Oyster Salon on C Street or to the glittering magnificence of Willard’s Hotel. Of course she never ventured far south of Pennsylvania Avenue, because Mrs. Broad had warned her about the dreadful things that went on down there in “Hooker’s Division,” things that she, Mrs. Broad, would not stoop to mention.

  But all the hard walking and humiliation would be worth it if only Ida might find Seth’s name on a printed program or see him appear when the curtain rose, estranged from her and playing a part, but alive and well.

  The days went by. Ida saw Macbeth and Othello and The French Spy and The Apostate. Some of the performances were fine, and some perfectly inane, like the posturing of the actors in The Marble Heart.

  From her high balcony Ida watched as Lily LeBeau warbled her slave girl’s song. Another young actor had a farcical speech: “Naturally, Diogenes, gold cannot buy genius, at least not that much gold. How about coughing up a little more?”

  In the sweltering gloom near the ceiling, Ida peered at the damp program in her hand to see who was playing the part so absurdly. At once, she was startled to see that the funny fellow was one Adolfo Sethius O’Morgan. Dizzily she dropped the paper and leaned forward to stare, then sat back, limp with disappointment.

  The actor was nothing like Seth. He was heavier for one thing, and surely Seth would never have spoiled his good looks with side whiskers and a drooping mustache.

  She had seen enough. Gathering her strength, Ida rose and excused herself to her neighbor, then edged along the row of seats while Lily, the singing slave girl, wrung her hands and informed Adolfo Sethius O’Morgan that slaves, alas, had no right to love.

  The journey back in the dark was grueling. Slowly and heavily, Ida put one foot in front of another. At the house on G Street she found Mrs. Broad waiting up for her, a candle in her hand. “Oh, dear girl, I’ve had such qualms.”

  Ida was almost fainting. For the last quarter mile she had lumbered along, trying to run, aware that two burly men were moving up behind her. Now Mrs. Broad caught at her arm, pulled her into the house and helped her into the kitchen. “Sit down, my honey,” she said tenderly, pouring sherry into a teacup. “Another letter’s come from your poor mother.”

  Ida sipped the sherry and leaned back and closed her eyes. “I know what it will say.”

  “Dear child, don’t you think it’s time? Shouldn’t I send Annie for Mrs. McCool?”

  “You sound just like Mother.” Ida smiled and sat up. “No, no, dear Mrs. Broad. I’m finished with the theater, and there’s only one more hospital I mean to see. If I don’t find my husband in the Patent Office, I’ll start for home, I promise.” She pushed down on the table with both hands and struggled to her feet. “I’ll be fine, Mrs. Broad. I won’t need Mrs. McCool.”

  But Ida was aware that under the mounded bulk of her skirt someone was urgently knocking.

  PART XVII

  INVITED BACK

  TOO FANTASTIC

  Homer Kelly had taken to the written word at infancy, chewing Peter Rabbit in his crib, licking the cookbooks and sniffing the bottles of CINNAMON and NUTMEG, gaping at fluffy words in the sky and running his small fingers over letters carved on the trunks of trees. At last, when the Hardy Boys came Homer’s way—blond-haired Joe and dark-haired Frank—he had never looked back.

  Therefore by now, as an aging professor dreading retirement, Homer could squeeze a book like a lemon, mash it like a potato, press it like a clove of garlic and extract all the good stuff in a hurry. He worried about the fact that his brain was losing thirty-thousand molecules of gray matter every day, or maybe thirty million, but the technical know-how of an experienced scholar was still alive in his head. His fingers could twiddle swiftly through a card catalogue, and he had at last abandoned his rage at the computer reorganization of Widener Library. His wife had taken him by the hand and led him through it like a little child, and now Homer preened himself on his magisterial command of Hollis, the computerized catalogue of all the libraries in the university.

  He also continued to receive bolts of revelation from on high, or wherever bolts of revelation come from—music, dreams, snatches of conversation, birdsong, rainbows in the twirling spray of lawn sprinklers, glimpses of young women with golden hair. Homer’s inspirations were sometimes wrong, but often they came straight from the horse’s mouth.

  These days, while patching together a set of lectures for the coming semester, Homer took time out to ponder the Otis Pike/Seth Morgan connection and the mysterious relation between the Hasty Pudding Club of 1860 at Harvard College and the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in the Battle of Gettysburg.

  There were books, any number of books, whole libraries full of books about that single three-day battle. Homer had discovered the remote corner of the Widener stacks where they could be found. Every moment of those three terrible days in July of 1863 had been recorded, and all the separate actions on every part of the field had been documented, from the exact placing of General Henry Hunt’s two hundred pieces of Union artillery to the position of every regiment in the seven corps of the Army of the Potomac, from Culp’s Hill on the north to the Round Tops on the south.

  Like Mary, Homer was moved by the fact that Mudge and Robeson, Pike and Morgan had all been revelers in the comical productions of Hasty Pudding before finding themsel
ves members of the same regiment in the Union army. But it was only Mudge, Robeson and Morgan who had risen in rank—Charles Redington Mudge becoming a lieutenant colonel, Thomas Rodman Robeson a captain and Seth Morgan a first lieutenant. Poor old Otis Pike, who had been recruited into the regiment as a special favor after a serious scrape in civilian life, had remained a private.

  And then at Gettysburg, Robeson and Mudge had fallen on the morning of the third day. And so had the often-absent Otis Pike, if his regimental history was to be believed.

  So what about First Lieutenant Seth Morgan, Mary’s great-great-grandfather, who had been cited for bravery before Gettysburg, who had been mentioned in dispatches? In a history of the regiment written by its chaplain, Homer found Seth’s name and an account of the part he had taken in the Battles of Cedar Mountain, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. His story began well but came to an abrupt end—

  Missing; dropped from the rolls at Gettysburg, 4 July, 1863.

  There were many more shelves to ransack in the Widener stacks, but today Homer was staying at home. He had a horrible cold. And in the slight mental imbalance that accompanies a cold, it occurred to him that war itself was something like a cold, an occasional affliction on the body of the human race. A poor wretch with a cold inhales a few shuddering breaths, waits a few seconds in fearful anticipation, and explodes in a violent convulsion. Perhaps the eruption of war was like that, a sort of global sneeze.

  In Homer’s abnormal state it seemed perfectly plausible. And then another weird notion occurred to him.

  He explained it to Mary. “You know what we said before, how fishy it was. Well, now it looks fishier still. How could a man like Seth Morgan change character like that, from a tried-and-true soldier to a deserter? And how could a totally irresponsible runaway like Otis Pike die at the very front of the battlefield?”

  “Well,” said Mary doubtfully, “maybe he had a change of heart, like the soldier in The Red Badge of Courage. Remember, Homer? He ran away at first and then in the next attack he was filled with reckless daring. Maybe it happened that way with Otis Pike.”

  Homer brushed away The Red Badge of Courage. “Listen to this. I’ve got a theory. Instead of being inflamed with suicidal courage, Pike ran away again from the fight at Culp’s Hill on the morning of the third day. Remember, this time it was his fourth desertion, and the punishment for that was death. Especially at Gettysburg, because General Meade had issued an order to that effect. So Otis took off—wait a sec. I made a map. Look, here’s Culp’s Hill where the battle was, and right nearby, this is the Baltimore Pike. One of the books says deserters ran away down the Baltimore Pike.”

  “Mmm,” said Mary, looking at the map.

  “Okay, so here comes Otis, trotting away along the pike, scared to death of being caught as a deserter and shot, when he comes upon the body of First Lieutenant Morgan, your Grampaw Seth, killed during the rebel bombardment. Terrible shame, his good old classmate lying there, all shot up.”

  “You’re dreaming, Homer. You can’t possibly know that.”

  “So,” continued Homer, paying no attention, “what does he do? He exchanges identity tags with Seth. Coats too. In a bloody coat he’ll look like a wounded man, not a deserter.”

  “But Homer, Pike died on the field at Culp’s Hill. If the body was Seth’s and not Otis’s, how did it get back on the field of battle?”

  “It’s part of my theory,” babbled Homer. “Not only does Otis intend to get away from the battle without being shot, he means to be declared a hero too. In the dead of night he drags the body onto the battlefield and leaves it there way up front, the mortal remains of gallant Private Otis Pike, his promising young life sacrificed to the glorious Union cause.”

  Mary shook her head sadly. “Don’t you think, Homer, his old friends in the regiment would have recognized the body? They would have known it was Morgan, not Pike.”

  Homer rose to this challenge too. “Face blown off. Pike obliterated Seth Morgan’s face. How about that?”

  Mary winced. “Oh, Homer, you’re making it all up.”

  “Of course I am. But if it’s true, then your ancestor is exonerated. The shame of desertion would be attached to Otis Pike, not Seth Morgan, your heroic great-great-grandfather.”

  “I’d like to believe it, Homer, but it’s just too fantastic.”

  THE SMASHED GLASS

  Of course it was too fantastic, but while Homer followed his will-o’-the-wisp theory, Mary tried to make sense of the articles in hand. They were solid objects with nothing wispy about them.

  So while poor Homer was seized by fits of sneezing in the bedroom, Mary took the two little photograph cases out of her desk drawer, set them on the mantel side by side, and folded her arms on the mantelpiece to study them once again.

  They looked back at her gravely, Ida all alone in the left-hand case, Ida with one of her husbands in the case on the right. Was it husband number one, Seth Morgan, or husband number two, Alexander Clock?

  The smashed glass looked terrible, and it occurred to Mary that the sharp splinters might scratch the precious pictures. Impulsively she picked up the little case, fastened it shut with its tiny hook and slid it into her bag.

  At Vanderhoof’s Hardware, they would know what to do. Those good people were old hands at repairing broken windowpanes. They would replace the smashed glass in a jiffy. And then Ida and Seth/Alexander would be safe and sound. They would gaze serenely out of their little case at every succeeding generation of the family from now to the end of time.

  But before driving off to the hardware store on the Milldam, she put her head in the bedroom door and said, “Oh, my poor dear.”

  Homer was convinced that his cold was the fault of a student who had come to a conference wheezing and blowing his nose. He had handed the idiot boy a box of tissues, but by then, of course, it was too late. The powerful explosions had already sprayed their hooked germs isotropically in all directions, and they had landed on walls, ceiling and floor and attached themselves to Homer from head to foot.

  “Can I get you anything while I’m out?”

  “More tissues,” groaned Homer, mopping his nose. “Oh, God, I’m going to flunk that kid, I swear I am.”

  Vanderhoof’s Hardware had occupied the same premises on the Milldam for as long as Mary could remember. As a child she had reached up to the tall cupboards with their drawers of latches and screen hooks while her father bought a hacksaw or a bag of tenpenny nails from Grandfather Vanderhoof. Emersons had still been living on Lexington Road when Great-Grandfather Vanderhoof had come from Holland to found the family business.

  Now it was his great-grandson who sold tenpenny nails at the same old store, along with electric fans and lawn mowers, coffeemakers and paring knives, outdoor grills and lawn chairs, hammers, paint and turpentine, who cut keys and repaired window screens and handled a glass cutter with nimble precision.

  “I’m glad you guys are still here,” said Mary, taking the little case from her bag. “The town has changed so much. I mean, except for you people, it’s all boutiques and gift shops now.”

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” said the young proprietor. “The only reason we’re still here is, we own the building. All those other people are paying fantastic rents. Well, what have we got here?” He took the case from Mary and looked at the faces under the broken glass. “No problem. Want to wait? It’ll take me five minutes.”

  Mary watched as he got to work, gently prying the gilded frames loose with the narrow blade of a screwdriver. “Funny,” he said. “This one doesn’t fit very well. This man here, his side sort of sticks up.”

  “So it does,” said Mary, leaning over to look.

  “There now, you see why? There’s another guy underneath.” He showed her the buried photograph. “You want me to put them back the same way?”

  Seth

  A stranger’s face looked out at Mary, but in the space below his likeness, someone had written a single word.

  “Oh
, no.” Mary pulled off her scarf and wrapped it around the second photograph. “Just put the top one back.”

  “Well, okay, if you say so. It’ll fit better anyway”

  Mary watched him cut two new squares of glass and fit them over the faces of Ida and Alexander Clock. In her bag, tucked away securely in its deepest recess, lay the secret photograph.

  As a loyal wife, Ida had displayed to public view the likeness of her second husband, but she had not wanted to forget her first. Whatever shame had been attached to First Lieutenant Seth Morgan of the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, his wife had not abandoned him.

  Climbing back in the car, Mary had a crazy notion. She opened her bag, unwrapped Seth’s picture and turned it over. The other side was smeared with faint brown streaks.

  At home she found Homer fast asleep. She closed his door softly and went to her study to look for the photocopies she had brought home from the Harvard Archives library. She found the pictures of Mills and Mudge and, with them, the nearly blank page bearing only Seth’s name and his regiment at the bottom—plus a few random streaks of paste.

  If they matched the streaks on the back of the long-buried picture, it would mean that Seth’s photograph had not been removed by his classmates in disgust; it had been taken—perhaps stolen?—by his devoted wife.

  Mary put the photocopy and the photograph on the table and compared the two sets of streaks. They were the same in reverse.

  There were stirrings in the bedroom, mutterings and soft whistles. Mary found Homer sitting up in bed. He was obviously feeling better. He was amusing himself with the old-fashioned stereoscope they had bought from Bart in Gettysburg, fitting one card after another into the wire holder.