A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

  I took special interest in what Rawdon had to tell me about the portraits of previous Stapletons that hung on the walls of Bowood, in particular his great-great-grandfather, who had been a member of the Continental Congress and a leader of the American Revolution in New Jersey. Rawdon’s favorite was a younger man, a cousin named Kemble Stapleton, who had died in a charge against an enemy fort toward the end of the Revolution. Alas, even here Rawdon found cause to criticize his father. “He was a real hero,” he said, gazing at Kemble’s thin, intense face in the portrait. “He made the charge himself. He didn’t order other men to do it for him.”

  I soon grasped that the Stapletons were as wealthy as any New York tycoon and far more powerful. But they preferred to exercise their power largely within the state of New Jersey. It was a revelation to me, the distinctiveness of an American state, when seen with an insider’s eyes. I had been in the habit of lumping them generally into the South and North, or New England and Midwest, with Tennessee, for obvious personal reasons, an anomaly.

  What brought this distinctiveness home with special force to me was Rawdon’s scrapbook of the Civil War. A month to the day after my arrival, he offered to show it to me. It was, I knew, part of his campaign to win me to his side of the quarrel with his father, but it was also an acknowledgment that I had made some progress in my efforts to become his friend.

  The scrapbook was a collection of stories and articles from the local newspapers. I was staggered to discover how violently people in New Jersey had opposed the Civil War, especially in the city of Hamilton. General Jonathan Stapleton had been repeatedly denounced for his active support of it. He was called a traitor to the Constitution and to the Democratic Party, which his family had long led. When the casualty lists lengthened, someone fastened the name “Butcher” on him.

  The scrapbook was both disturbing and pathetic. It was an attempt by a lonely, confused boy to understand the mortal struggle that was tearing his nation and his family apart. It was both a reaching out to a lost father and an indictment of him. I longed to show it to Jonathan Stapleton, but it was impossible given the disordered state of his nerves.

  For an entire month I scarcely saw him. He immured himself in his room for days at a time, never seeing anyone but little George, whom he ordered sent to him each day for an hour or so. He issued strict orders, through Jackson, to keep the two boys apart. He seemed to regard Rawdon as infected by some contagious moral disease from which he was determined to save George.

  Mrs. Stapleton continued to take George with her on her daily visits to the cemetery. At first I regarded her with pity. She was a woman who had lost her husband and two sons in the space of six horrendous years. But as I got to know her better—she returned to the dining room in spite of her declaration the night Rawdon got cider flung in his face—I began to change my mind. She was a formidable woman, with strong opinions about American politics. She detested New England abolitionists and blamed the war on them and the “gullible” in other states who followed them. This was hardly an endorsement of her older son’s politics. She did not lecture Jonathan. It was unnecessary. He was visibly suffering from the aftereffects of four years on the battlefields. Mrs. Stapleton seemed to take a morbid satisfaction in his state of mind. More to the point, she made no attempt to correct Rawdon’s opinion of his father.

  The Stapleton family’s woes were hardly therapeutic for my own personal sorrows. I found myself waking in the middle of the night to stare into the darkness, wondering if there was any hope for me. At other times I awoke from a recurring bad dream. I saw Michael’s face with the film of water on it. Sometimes he was in Lake Fergus and I could see our family farm in the distance. At other times he was in the East River. I stood at the end of the pier, with New York looming behind me.

  One night toward the end of September, when the summer’s heat had abated and nothing prevented me from sleeping but my own brooding mind, I went down to the kitchen to make myself some tea. I was pouring hot water into the pot when I heard a footstep behind me. I turned to find Jonathan Stapleton, his eyes glaring with menace. It was a glimpse of how he must have looked when he led his men against the Southern trenches.

  “Ah. It’s you, Miss Stark,” he said. “I told you—I worry about thieves. We’re a likely target.”

  “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” I said.

  “No, no. I’m awake for most of every night. A bad habit I contracted in the war.”

  My eyes traveled to his hand, which was clutching a huge black pistol. He half smiled and looked down at it. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said, no doubt thinking I had never seen a gun before. “It’s a good friend. I sleep with it beside my bed.”

  I thought I heard a hidden message in those words. I asked him if he would like some tea. He nodded. We sat down at the kitchen table, all stiff formality. I tightened my night robe about me. He did the same with his robe, an old tattered silk thing with the sleeves out at the elbows.

  “Please excuse these rags,” he said. “Moths got at most of my civilian clothes. I’ve been meaning to go to New York and outfit myself, but I can’t seem to organize myself for the trip. How is Rawdon?”

  “In good health. But he misses you. I wish you would spend more time with him.”

  “I doubt if he misses me. When he comes near me he does nothing but antagonize me.”

  “I fear Rawdon’s mind is terribly confused. I’m sure he feels great love and admiration for you. But so many of the people here in the city reviled you during the war. I had no idea such opinions were current in the North.”

  He brooded over his steaming tea for a moment. “Before it was over, I became a butcher. We were all butchers. Lincoln, Stanton, Grant, Sherman, Lee. But knowing this, and hearing it as an accusation, a condemnation, are two very different things.”

  He took a swallow of his hot tea, ignoring the pain it must have caused him. “You can imagine how I felt when I came home and found my own son believed this. I heard him telling it to little George. I—I almost went berserk. I beat Rawdon with my belt. I told him he was a traitor to his country. I said stupid foolish things.”

  At last he was telling me the whole truth. “Could you not apologize—or at least try to make it up with him? Show him you no longer feel that way?”

  “No,” he said, his voice going cold in the way that had chilled me on the train. “I begin to think that there’s something seriously deranged in his character. I suspect he uses his dislike of me as a subterfuge to hide his laziness. His teachers all say he’s bright but indolent. Deplorably indolent. Whether he likes me or not is irrelevant. He must learn to like responsibility.”

  This was the general in him speaking, the man who had steeled himself to bear hatred and suppress compassion. I should have seen this, but I didn’t know him well enough then. I tried to alter his mind by direct argument. I told him about Rawdon’s scrapbook and tried to explain the meaning I saw in it.

  He dismissed my sentiment with a curt wave. “Where is it?” he said. “I’ll put it in the fire, tonight.”

  “I don’t know where it is,” I said, “but if you search it out and tell him how you learned of it, I’ll resign instantly and go my way.”

  Fury gathered on his haunted face. “I’m giving you an order, woman,” he said.

  “You may order till doomsday,” I said. “I won’t obey it. I promised Rawdon the secret of his scrapbook was safe with me. I regret telling you even this much.”

  We sat there glaring at each other. The nerve twitched in his cheek. “A woman of honor,” he said.

  “You don’t think a woman is capable of honor?”

  Anger faltered on his face and retreated to sadness. “They allow other concerns to overcome it.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But once a woman sees the disastrous results of such a weakness, she may become more devoted to honor than a man.”

  “You’re one of those?” He was openly skeptical.

  “You’re trying to make m
e ludicrous,” I said. “We’re talking about a very small piece of honor, here.”

  “It’s all one thing. A seamless garment, my grandfather used to call it. If you could teach that to Rawdon—”

  “You must. No one but you can do it.”

  He shook his head. Sad, slow shakes. “You’re looking at a man who miscalculated his strength, misjudged himself, his country. I’m an anachronism, Miss Stark. A leftover from another age. I begin to think there’s only one solution for such a creature.”

  His eyes went to the gun, which he had put on a cabinet a few feet away. I saw with horror where his wounded spirit was veering.

  I also saw his isolation, his need to explain himself to someone, even a person as trivial as I was to him then. Like an invisible thread, my sympathy led me into the labyrinth of regret and guilt in which he was thrashing himself to death.

  “When we met on the train,” I said, “you promised you’d tell me a true history of the war.”

  “I decided it would be a waste of time. You’re too much a stranger. A foreigner. Even though I said the opposite when we met. My mind veers between choices these days. I find it hard to decide anything.”

  “Tell me now. We have the rest of the night. I sleep no better than you.”

  He began a rambling, spasmodic discourse. Its central theme was his conviction that the secession of the South was an act of madness and folly that could not be permitted. He narrated his father’s role in the numerous compromises that the politicians had constructed in the decades before the war to heal or at least to prevent the breach from widening. He quoted letters and speeches his father had made apostrophizing the federal union as the source of America’s greatness and strength and denouncing the extremists, the abolitionists, and the defenders of slavery who were undermining it.

  There was a heavy irony in the story. His father had convinced his sons, especially his oldest son, Jonathan, that the Union was a sacred cause. But when the moment of decision came, and the South left the union, the son was ready to fight to preserve it, while the father could not bring himself to shed blood in its name. What had been the shadow world of theater, sentiment, to the older man was living flesh, reality, to the son.

  The son had a hidden source of strength. As a boy he had revered the memory of his great-grandfather the Congressman, the leader of the Revolution. He had imbibed from him a vision of America as a colossus, a continental nation in which freedom and honor flourished equally with power. The son had struck down the father in the name of that vision. “I saw the future of the nation hang in the balance in this house, Miss Stark. If I hadn’t silenced my father—yes, silenced him—he would have spoken for secession, when the North chose war. My mother urged him to speak. His voice would have carried New Jersey with him. The mayor of New York, that despicable opportunist Fernando Wood, was preaching secession there—”

  He poured himself more tea and gulped it scalding hot, as if he welcomed the pain. “It wasn’t an easy thing to do. I loved my father. But he’d lived too long. He’d made too many compromises. Of every kind—moral, political. But he was right in his warning that the war would last a long time—and demoralize the winners and the losers. To think I almost laughed at him. I was sure it would be over in three months. And now—”

  He was scarcely talking to me. He was facing the ghosts of his dead brothers, the ghostly ranks of his dead soldiers. Listening, I felt my sympathy flower into a kind of love, a nostalgic thing but also new and exalting. I saw in him the purity of purpose, the nobility and courage, that I had seen in my brother and had dreamt of finding in the Fenian cause. More important, for the first time I met a man who believed in America, who saw it not as a place to make his fortune, to win power or fame, but as a purpose, a faith, which he was committed to guard.

  Jonathan Stapleton was not like William Seward or Andrew Johnson or Fernando Wood or Bill Tweed, men who had risen from the mass of the people by an unstable combination of talent and luck, whose link to the inner American faith existed in minds equally absorbed with the main chance. America beat in Jonathan Stapleton’s blood as well as in his mind. His great-grandfather had heard George Washington speak. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton had dined at Bowood’s table.

  With the special sight of one who had made a similar plunge, I saw the poignancy of his choice. I also saw its power and intensity, which leaped like a flame from earth to sky, utterly dwarfing my small spark. I saw the white fierce light of his soul, as vivid and profound as the facade of the Presbyterian church where I took Rawdon each Sunday, and wondered at the father’s absence. I understood now where his faith had gone. It had departed that original shrine to enter the vast distances of the American prairie, to surge over Niagara and pulse in the Mississippi. He was borne on the windlike memory of the founding fathers’ vision, the toil of a wilderness won, of victory over the primary imperial enemy, England, personifier of old Europe’s imperial greed. He could not let the great experiment fail! Yet what it had cost him, what it had cost them all.

  “And now.”

  I saw the sorrow on his face, I watched the pain gather in his eyes. Now the America of 1866 confronted him. America stripped of its visionary gloss by the savage revelation of war.

  America was Jonathan Stapleton’s faith, but he could not find his justification in the America of 1866. This, and not the personal losses he had suffered as the result of the war, was the real source of his agony. He asked me if I had ever been to Washington, D.C. Of course I lied and said no. He began telling me of the corruption that had raged there during the war, the millions of dollars that contractors and crooked congressmen and generals had mulcted from the government. Secretary of War Stanton had put a stop to much of it. This was why Jonathan Stapleton admired him. Stanton was one of the few honest men in Washington. But he did not have the power or the strength to eliminate other forms of corruption.

  With white-lipped fury, Jonathan Stapleton described the thousands of prostitutes and the hundreds of faro banks that flourished in the national capital while men were dying to save the Union on battlefields a few miles away. The close of the war had brought no improvement. Faro still reigned on Pennsylvania Avenue, and even the White House had succumbed to the corruption. He said that he had proof from Stanton that the president’s son Robert was selling pardons to Southerners. New York was in the grip of Tweed and his legion of corrupt Irishmen. This city, Hamilton, was not much better. The thought of dealing with these greasy disciples of greed sickened him.

  He was far beyond talking to me for Rawdon’s benefit now. Nor was I listening with the boy in mind. Perhaps it was that very night that I began my betrayal of Rawdon (I must call things by their right names; betrayal was what it became). My sympathy, my identification with Jonathan Stapleton was almost complete. How I longed to tell him the reason for it, to open my heart to him as he was opening his inner self to me (though really to himself, to his ghosts). I have come to believe that sympathy is a potent spiritual substance, which is communicated without words—at least without words that directly express it. In its root meaning, sympathy means “same-feeling,” and it was on this current that I reached out to this tormented man.

  “It seems to me,” I said, “your country needs you now more than ever. Your country, your family, your state.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t walk the streets of my own city without seeing a dozen, a hundred, faces of men and women who have lost sons, husbands, brothers, under my command.”

  “Do they blame you any more than they blame God or the South or history? None of them could foresee the future any more than you could. We all take voyages into the unknown—”

  He thought I was talking of my immigration to this country. He smiled sadly. “I fear I’m giving you a poor introduction to America,” he said. “Please don’t think the picture is as dark as I see it, for someone like yourself. There’s room, ample room, for honest men and women to prosper, to be happy. But I’m forced to think, to act,
on a different plane, and there the prospect is—sickening.”

  I said nothing. It was not necessary. He heard his own words as clearly as I heard them, and they confessed that his vision was narrowed, distorted, by his special role, his hard fate. For a moment he hesitated, and puzzlement, doubt, grew in his eyes. I could see him asking himself, Is it possible I am wrong?

  He stood up, fussing with his robe. “We must try to get some sleep,” he said. “Why do you have trouble sleeping?”

  “Homesickness, I suppose,” I said, clearing away the cups.

  “Are your parents still living?”

  “No.”

  “No brothers or sisters?”

  I shook my head.

  “So you’re alone in a new country. I can see—yes, I can see how hard that must be.”

  The mystery of sympathy flowed between us, the current now reversed. I could only sense it then, but now I understand why. He, too, was alone in a new country, the America created by the cataclysm of the Civil War.

  “Good night, Miss Stark,” he said. “Maybe we’ve—accomplished something.”

  “I think we have,” I said, a bit too dryly. He glanced sharply at me for a fraction of a moment and turned to go.

  “General,” I said. “You’re forgetting something.”

  I handed him his gun. He looked ruefully at it for a moment. “I must put this away somewhere,” he said.