Watchfires Page 6

  "What makes you think Annie can't carry her own weight?"

  "Annie needs a strong man," she repeated stubbornly. "A very strong man. One who might beat her occasionally. Or at least threaten to."

  "Rosalie! You, who call yourself a modern woman!"

  "Ah, but Annie's not."

  "I consider Annie quite as modern as you."

  Rosalie sniffed. "She doesn't think in those terms."

  But events were soon beyond Rosalie's, or even Dexter's control. Charley and Annie were seeing each other regularly, and people were beginning to say that an engagement would shortly be announced. What match could be more suitable? The only surprising thing was that two such eligible and attractive members of society should have remained single as long as they each had. Dexter, to whom Charley confided the rapid course of his courtship, blessed them in his prayers at night and tried to convince himself that he loved Charley next in line after only Rosalie, his sons, his mother and Rosalie's father. Having guided Charley to the right bride would be, he promised himself, one of the triumphs of his life.

  On Christmas Eve, at Mr. Handy's, the first party in his new house on now fashionable Fifth Avenue, Annie took Dexter to a corner away from the noisy crowd of relatives.

  "Darling Dexter, you're the tower of sense in the family. I want you to tell me if I should marry Charley."

  He looked with astonishment at those unfathomable eyes. Was she still laughing at him? "Annie," he said in anguish, "doesn't your own heart give you the answer?"

  "No. Maybe I don't really have one. Is that my fault? Do I have to be an old maid because Jehovah, stingy old Jew that he is, cheated me in the heart department? How much of a heart does Charley have?"

  "Well, whatever he has, it's all yours."

  "Will it be enough for two?"

  "If it grows. And why shouldn't it grow? You must feel something for Charley, or why would you think of marrying him at all?"

  "Oh, I feel a great deal for Charley! I find Charley a very attractive man. How nice of you to wince, dear Dexter. Thank you! It's lucky for you that you've not eligible. Isn't marriage the only life for us girls? How else can we get out from under the paternal roof?"

  Dexter's throat became thick. "Be serious, Annie."

  "I am serious! I'm always serious. Haven't you learned that yet?"

  "If you find Charley so attractive..." He paused.

  "Yes. Go on."

  "And if, as you suggest, you want to be married to get out from under the paternal roof..."

  "I do."

  "And if you think you can do your duty to Charley as a good wife..."

  Annie laughed in delight. "I was waiting for you to come to my duty! I was about to look at my watch. You're almost a minute late! But, yes, I think I can be a good wife. As good as any of my sisters, anyhow."

  Dexter decided to ignore the implied criticism of Lily and Rosalie. "Well, then, I see no reason you shouldn't marry Charley. I see no necessity for you to put your heart under a microscope. I'm sure, despite what you say, that you have as good a one as anyone else."

  "That has sometimes occurred to me. I am simply more truthful, do you mean? Or perhaps simply more aware?"

  "Well ... there you are."

  "So you advise me to take the great step? Think now, Dexter. Be sure of what you say! I have confidence in you. Only in you. I shall do just as you advise!"

  The room around him seemed to darken as he looked into those smiling eyes. What did she mean? Could she be laughing at him now? He heard Mr. Handy announcing that he would read Mr. Moore's poem to the children in the parlor. "Yes, I advise the step," Dexter heard himself say.

  He joined Rosalie's group in the new conservatory. In spite of the season they were discussing the slavery question with some acrimony. Rosalie in the past year had been devoting more and more energy to it. He wondered gloomily if she would find her "cause" in abolition and reflected, envious of Charley, that Annie had no need of such exaltations. She had enough of her own.

  6

  AT BREAKFAST in Union Square, the morning after Dexter's talk with Annie about Jules Bleeker, Rosalie was wearing the same pink robe, and Fred and Selby were engaged in their usual dispute.

  "Grandpa Handy says that Mr. Buchanan is one of our great presidents. That he's saved the union."

  "But at what a cost, Fred," his mother remonstrated.

  "You think Grandpa is wrong?"

  "I think Grandpa is getting to be an old gentleman. He has the ideas of his time. No doubt they were good ideas for then. I am sure he would think differently if he had seen the things I have seen."

  "That you've seen, Ma?"

  "Well, you know I used to visit my aunt Bella in Charleston. She could never convince herself that her husband's views were the right ones. She remained a Northerner at heart till the day she died. And she showed me some terrible things."

  "But that was before we were born, Ma!"

  Dexter remained hidden behind his newspaper, but alert to their talk. It struck him that it was not like Rosalie to support her arguments with evidence so stale. Was it possible that the "things" she had seen had been seen more recently? And how could that be unless she was engaged in some activity of which she had not told him? Abolitionism? It occurred to him suddenly that this might explain why she seemed to have spent so little money of late, insisting that her old dresses would last another year and that she did not need new curtains for the parlor. Was everything going to Boston? He gripped the paper nervously. Well, why not, why not? How could he expect anything else if he could not make her happy?

  Selby seemed to have read his mind. "Mummy, would you help a slave to escape to Canada? If one came to the house at night and knocked at the door and begged you to take him in? Would you hide him?"

  "Yes, Selby, I would."

  "You see, Fred!" Selby cried in triumph. "I told you she would!"

  "You'd be breaking the law, Ma."

  "I'd be breaking a bad law, dear. And I'd do it willingly and cheerfully!"

  "Would you be ready to go to jail?"

  "If I had to." She glanced defiantly at Dexter as he now lowered his newspaper. "I'm glad to have the boys know that, Dexter. I'm sorry if it pains you."

  "Your noble instincts could hardly pain me, my dear. I admire your courage and the strength of your convictions. But you must try to forgive a husband who cares, like your own father, about saving our poor old union."

  "At any price? Would you save it at the cost of making New York a slave state?"

  "My dear, you're being fantastical!"

  "Am I? Mr. Lincoln, of Illinois, has said that the nation is bound to become either all slave or all free."

  "Must I agree with a backwoodsman?"

  "Don't be a snob, Dexter. There are plenty of Southerners who are insisting on the extension of slavery as the price of their remaining in the union. The Scott case gave them the territories, and that has only whetted their appetites."

  "Very well, dear, I'll try to answer your question. No, I would not save the union at the price of making New York a slave state. I'll go even further. I wouldn't save it at the price of a single free state!"

  Rosalie and both boys looked up at him with mild surprise.

  "Sometimes I find your positions very hard to understand," Rosalie said with a sigh. "You sound almost with us this morning."

  Dexter retired again behind his newspaper to read a summary of Southern editorials on the execution of John Brown. Their violence was shocking even in the violent atmosphere that had been created. Brown was epitomized as the incarnation of the Yankee spirit; his rebellion as a symptom of the murderous and cowardly Yankee mind; his punishment as the sign of what the North could expect if it continued its course of madness and folly. Dexter felt a sudden surge of hate so strong as to make him actually giddy. The yearning to join a crusade to free the slaves was now inflamed by a vision of Northern soldiers lashing overseers with their own whips, burning pillared mansions over the heads of whit
e-bearded planters, marching to bugles across a liberated land. He had to make himself swallow with an effort, to cough, to sit up straight, in order to dispel the absurd and exhausting fantasy. The union, the union! Remember the union!

  "Why, Dexter, are you all right?"

  "Quite all right, my dear. I must have swallowed something the wrong way. Boys, isn't it time you went to school?"

  When they were gone, he told Rosalie that Charley was stopping in on his way to the office and that he was expecting Jules Bleeker at nine.

  "Would you like me to stay and see Charles with you?" she asked.

  "Do you mind very much if I say no? I hate to have the mother of my sons mixed up in a thing like this."

  Rosalie laughed as she rose to leave the table. "See Charley alone, by all means. I don't even want to join you after that piece of sentiment!"

  Ten minutes later he was sitting with Charley at the same table. The latter was very glum and drank his coffee thirstily.

  "Bleeker should be here any minute," Dexter warned him, glancing at the clock. "I plan to give him one chance. If he will agree not to see Annie again—privately, of course—we shall take no further action against him."

  "And if he refuses?"

  "Then we shall simply proceed to destroy him."

  Charley flung down his napkin with an angry snort. "In a duel? Thanks for that 'we.' Perhaps you don't know that Bleeker's a first-class shot. He fires his first bullet between the wife's legs and his second between the husband's eyes. Don't you give a damn about me, Dexter?"

  Dexter asked himself with a sigh if he would ever come to the end of human vulgarity. "Of course, there'll be no duel," he retorted. "For what do you take me? Gentlemen don't duel in New York, and if they did they wouldn't duel with the likes of Bleeker. No, I mean destroy him financially and socially. I'll close every pocketbook and every front door in New York to him!"

  "How?"

  "You'll see, my boy," Dexter answered grimly, and then they heard the doorbell. He hurriedly conducted his cousin to the side door through the kitchen, to avoid a confrontation, and told Bridey to usher Mr. Bleeker into his study. When he arrived there he found the large, black-garbed figure of his detested visitor examining the Kensett seascape that Annie had admired six years before.

  Bleeker turned to present his big features and florid countenance to his host with a smile as cheerful as if they were about to "go on" to some club dinner or convivial bachelors' occasion.

  "Ah, there you are, Fairchild. I've been admiring your Kensett. Such a subtlety of coloring. It's hard to tell where the sea stops and the horizon begins. I can see why people speak of your tastes as advanced. While the rest of us are buying Italian peasant scenes and Turkish marketplaces, you're putting up your money for something as good as this. Congratulations!"

  Dexter responded in the iciest tone he could muster. "Never mind the compliments, Bleeker. May we get right down to business?"

  Bleeker nodded briskly, adapting himself at once and without the least apparent surprise to the quick change of atmosphere. "I'm at your service. I assume that you prefer to remain standing?"

  "Much."

  "Very well. Excuse me." Bleeker strode across the room to crush out his cigar in a bowl. "Let us eliminate the last traces of conviviality."

  But Dexter would not deign to notice the least attempt to place things on a humorous basis. "You are aware that your correspondence with Mrs. Charles Fairchild has been discovered?"

  "Do you imply that it was concealed?"

  "I certainly do. Your letter was delivered clandestinely."

  "It was delivered through a servant. Let me ask you something, Fairchild. Whom do you represent in this matter?"

  "The family, of course. The outraged family."

  "I see. But do you represent Annie?"

  "Do you refer to Mrs. Charles Fairchild? I do indeed. And her husband."

  "You mean you are speaking to me this morning with Mrs. Fairchild's authority?"

  "That's a bit of a shock to you, isn't it, Bleeker? Yes, I am speaking to you with her authority. I received it at her father's, just before she returned to her own house last night."

  "Where she is residing, I gather, as the virtual prisoner of her husband. He had better remember there is such a thing as habeas corpus in this country!"

  "Can it be invoked by the would-be seducers of married women?"

  Bleeker took a threatening step towards his host. "It should be invokable by any man who champions the cause of a poor woman shackled to a swine like your cousin!"

  Dexter held his ground without flinching. "I suppose we had better avoid epithets. Are you prepared to give me some assurance that you will have no further communication with Mrs. Fairchild?"

  "Does she ask that?"

  "She has placed her case in my hands."

  "Then what assurance can you give me that she will be allowed to live a life free from the constant apprehension of violent abuse and drunken threats?"

  "Do you presume to treat with me, sir?"

  "And why not? Have I not enjoyed Mrs. Fairchild's confidence? Do I not have letters from her? Do you think that you are living in Turkey, where women are put in sacks and thrown in the river if they are disobedient? Let me disillusion you. The days are past when a married woman can be incarcerated while the family lawyer lays down ridiculous terms to her friends!"

  "There is no more to be said, Mr. Bleeker. Kindly leave my house."

  When Bleeker, seizing his hat from the rack in the hall, had stamped his irate way out of the front door, Dexter looked about for some way to vent his feelings. His eye fell upon the crystal bowl in which his visitor had had the impudence to deposit the ashes of his cigar. Hurrying to the table, he seized it and dashed it to pieces in the fireplace.

  "That must have given you great satisfaction!" came a voice from the hall stairway.

  It was Rosalie.

  7

  DEXTER SAT ALONE with his father-in-law after dinner in the latter's library at 417 Fifth Avenue. The book shelves, behind glassed doors and beneath flat tops on which rested bronzes of stricken or striking animals—elk torn by wolves, bear fighting bear, lions crouched to spring—gleamed with the gold-tinted, backs of old folios and volumes of prints. The walls above were hung with dark Madonnas and dusky biblical scenes, relics of Mr. Handy's "grand tour" in 1817. The tables, under lace covers, were cluttered with baubles and memorabilia: lapis lazuli, intaglios and daguerreotypes of dim, dead Handys and Howlands. Dexter's eyes always sought the charming miniature by Jarvis of Rosalie's mother as a girl. Her large, haunted eyes and pale, heart-shaped face suggested the premonition of early demise.

  Charles Handy busied himself at the sideboard where a flock of decanters, with silver labels hung about their long necks, offered themselves to his choice. His roving, glinting, staring gray-blue eyes were the features that redeemed—or perhaps simply decorated, if ameliorated were too strong a term—the sternness of his aquiline nose, square chin and thin, retentive lips.

  "Joanna thinks it's hard on the ladies for the gentlemen to desert them when it's only a family dinner. But frankly, my boy, I feel the need to get away from her at times. She's been quite impossible ever since this last trip to Boston. Raving like the worst type of Yankee abolitionist! It seems she actually met Wendell Phillips. Some privilege! And when I ask her to kindly change the subject, she simply sits and stares at me with woebegone eyes."

  Dexter always liked it when the old man abused his daughters. It made him feel intimate and preferred. But that night he was disturbed by the implications.

  "Of course, she must hear some pretty dreadful stories from her friends up there."

  "Those stories lose nothing in the telling; you can be sure of that. I'm willing to wager that ninety percent of the negroes in the South are better off than they would be in the jungles they were taken from."

  "Did that justify us in bringing them over?"

  "Us? Where do you get that us'? My dear fell
ow, no Handy, and no Fairchild, I'll be bound, had anything to do with such filthy practices. I'm proud to say that no Handy ever owned a slave, even in the days when half your old New York families did. Oh, our record is pure! But that doesn't mean that I believe in telling our Southern friends and neighbors how to run their lives." Here Mr. Handy, turning to his son-in-law, drew the lid of one eye slowly down over the eyeball, like a chicken. This stately wink, against a countenance of absolute sobriety, gave a ludicrous effect, perhaps intentional, to his irony. "Particularly when they command the loyalty of most of our army and navy!"

  "The officers, I suppose you mean."

  "Well, whom else would you count on in a showdown? What are your abolitionists going to fight with, besides their own bad breath? Some way to save a union!"

  "It's another union that I want to discuss with you tonight, sir. I'm afraid there's bad blood between Annie and Charles."

  "Tell me about it."

  Mr. Handy seated himself and leaned back in his leather armchair, holding his head stiffly erect as he watched his interlocutor. He hardly twitched a muscle as Dexter related the sorry tale. Then he took a long sip of his brandy and wiped his lips carefully with a silk handkerchief.

  "Well, it doesn't surprise me. No, I can't say it does. When they were married, I looked forward to having another Fairchild in my family. I hoped that Charley might be—well, not quite what you have been, dear boy—but something not too different. Yet it was not to be. Charley is weak, and Annie is flighty. The thing has been a failure from the beginning. I suppose we could patch this up, but doesn't there come a time when you wonder if it's worth it? I am not speaking precipitately, I assure you. Hasn't the moment come for a dignified separation? Let Annie come home to me and bring little Kate. She can go out socially as her old father's dinner partner. Joanna hates parties anyway and will be only too happy to be excused. Yes, I think it might really work out very well! We'll put the blame, discreetly of course, on Charley's bibulousness. I doubt that anyone in New York will dare criticize us." Mr. Handy cleared his throat now, almost menacingly. "What do you think?"