American Front (35 page)

Mr. Jacobs, being occupied rather than occupier, could see—and admit seeing—his fellow U.S. citizens. “You are all right, Widow Semphroch?” he called.

“Yes, I think so, thank you,” Nellie answered. “One more thing on top of everything else.” She bit her lip. What she wanted to say was,
I’ve been through so much. Why can’t life be easy for a change?
The answer to that one was depressingly obvious, though: her life had never been easy, so why should it start now?

“I hope it will be better soon,” the shoemaker said.

“So do I, Mr. Jacobs; so do I,” Nellie said. A good Christian, she knew, would not resent another’s honestly earned success, but she was jealous of Jacobs. His business flourished, while hers withered on the vine. Why not? Leather was easy to come by, coffee wasn’t. The Confederate soldiers in Washington went through a lot of shoes and boots. They’d gone through a lot of coffee, too, but now only a tiny bit was left.

“Widow Semphroch, is there anything I can do to help you?” Mr. Jacobs asked.

Nellie shook her head. Things had come to a pretty pass, hadn’t they, when even the shoemaker knew she was failing and pitied her? With stubborn pride, she picked up the grocery bag and went into the coffeehouse.

The little bell above the door didn’t tinkle as she went in. After surviving the Confederate bombardment at the start of the war, it had fallen off its mounting a few weeks before, and she’d never bothered replacing it. Not much point to that, not when she or Edna was almost always there—and not when customers were few and far between, too.

But Edna wasn’t behind the counter now. Frowning, Nellie set down the grocery bag. No customers were being slighted—all the tables in the front part of the shop were empty. But her daughter hadn’t told her she was going anywhere—and, if Edna had decided to go out, she should have locked the front door. Nellie started down the hall, turned the corner—and there stood Edna, kissing a cavalryman in butternut, her arms tight around him, his big, hairy hands clutching at her posterior. Nellie gasped—not in dismay, but in fury. “Stop that this instant!” she snapped.

Intent on each other and nothing more, her daughter and the cavalry officer hadn’t noticed her till she spoke. When she did, they sprang apart from each other as if they were a couple of the clever magnetic toys that had been all the go a couple of years before.

“Mother, it’s all right—” Edna began.

Nellie ignored her. “Young man, what is your name?” she demanded of the Confederate soldier.

“Nicholas Henry Kincaid, ma’am,” he answered, polite even though Nellie could still see the bulge in his trousers, the bulge he’d got from rubbing up against Edna.

“Well, Mr. Nicholas Henry Kincaid”—Nellie freighted the name with all the scorn it would bear—“your commanding officer will hear of this—this—this—” She couldn’t find the word she wanted. But Edna wouldn’t go the way she had gone. Edna
wouldn’t
. Nellie shouted, “Get out!” and pointed to the front door.

Kincaid was more than a head taller than she was. He carried a knife and a large revolver on his belt. None of that mattered. Face red, expression mortified, he retreated: Nellie had accomplished more than the entire U.S. garrison of Washington, D.C. She tried to kick him in the shins as he went, but he was too fast for her, so she missed.

Still steaming, she rounded on Edna. “As for you, young lady—”

“Oh, Ma, leave it alone, will you, please?” her daughter said in a weary voice. “How’s a girl supposed to have any fun these days, with the whole town turned into one big morgue?”

“Not like that,” Nellie Semphroch said grimly. “Not like that, because—”

“Because you let some boy pull your knickers down a long time ago, and now you’ve decided I shouldn’t.” Edna tossed her head in disdain. “I’m grown up now, and you can’t keep me from being alive myself, no matter how much you want to.”

Nellie stared in dismay. Her cheeks got hot. The worst was, her daughter’s shot was an understatement. Edna didn’t know that, thank God. As parents will, though, Nellie rallied. “As long as you are living under my roof, you will—”

But Edna interrupted again: “Some roof.” She tossed her head once more. “I could do better than this by lifting my little finger.”

“By lifting your skirt, you mean,” Nellie retorted. “No daughter of mine is going to make her way through the world by selling herself on street corners, I tell you that. I won’t just report that cavalryman’s name to the Rebel commandant, Edna—I’ll give him yours, too.”

They glared at each other, two sides of the same coin, though neither realized it. With what looked like a distinct effort, Edna made herself stop snarling. “It’s not like that, Ma. I’ve never once prostituted myself, and I never will, neither. But I’m not going to sit cooped up in this damned shop all day long, either, watching the dust on the counter getting thicker and thicker and thicker. I’m going to be twenty-one in a couple months. Don’t I deserve a life?”

“Not that kind,” Nellie said, breathing hard. (She wished she could say everything Edna had.) “You want that kind, find yourself a man you’re going to marry.
Then
you can have it.” Only after she was done speaking did she realize how little Edna’s language, which would have been shocking before the war began, shocked her now. Everything was coarsened, cheapened, turned to trash and vileness.

“And how am I supposed to meet anybody I might want to marry if I stay here all the time?” Edna shot back. “About the only people who come in are Confederate soldiers, and if you don’t want me to have anything to do with them—”

“That man was not going to marry you,” Nellie said positively. “All he wanted was to have his way with you.” Edna did not have a snappy comeback to that, by which Nellie concluded she’d won a point. Trying to sound earnest rather than furious, Nellie went on, “You just can’t trust men, Edna. They’ll say whatever they have to to get what they want, and afterwards they’ll leave you flat, go off whistling, and never care whether they’ve left you in a family way—”

“How do you know so much about it?” Edna said.

“Ask any woman. She’ll tell you the same if you can get her to let her hair down.” Automatically, Nellie’s hand straightened the curls on her own head. She felt dizzy with anger at her daughter. Memories that hadn’t come back to her in years—memories she’d thought, she’d hoped, long forgotten—came bubbling back up to the surface of her mind, memories of the harsh taste of rotgut whiskey and the deceptively sweet clink of silver dollars and the occasional quarter-eagle on the top of a pine nightstand.

“I’m not going to die an old maid, Ma,” Edna insisted.

“I didn’t ask you to,” Nellie said. “But I—”

“Sure sounded to me like you did,” her daughter interrupted. “Don’t go out, don’t meet nobody; if you do meet somebody, don’t have any fun with him, on account of all he wants to do is lay you anyways. You maybe caught me this time, Ma, but you can’t watch me every hour of every day. I’m not gonna wear your ball and chain, and you can’t make me.”

Edna stormed past Nellie and out of the coffeehouse. As Nellie had with Nicholas Kincaid, she tried to kick her daughter. As she had then, she missed. The door slammed. Nellie burst into tears.

At last, she dug in her handbag for a cheap cotton handkerchief. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Then, slowly, her steps dragging, she went to the door, too. She opened it, stepped outside, and looked up and down the street. She didn’t see Edna. She started to cry again.

A Negro in fancy livery driving a high-ranking Confederate officer with a white mustache came down the street in a gleaming motorcar. Nellie wanted to scream the filthiest things she knew at him. After the automobile—a procession in and of itself—had passed, she crossed the street and went into Mr. Jacobs’ cobbler’s shop.

The little bell above his door worked. He looked up from the marching boot he was repairing. Behind magnifying lenses, his eyes looked enormous. The wrinkles on his round little face rearranged themselves into an expression of concern. “Widow Semphroch!” he exclaimed. “Whatever can be wrong?”

Nellie found herself telling him what was wrong. Everybody needed someone with whom to talk, and she’d known him for as long as she’d been in business across the street from his shop. He wasn’t one to spread gossip around. He wouldn’t blab of her troubles with Edna, either, or of how much she hated the Rebel soldiers and officers who kept sniffing round her daughter.

When she was finished, he pulled a handkerchief—a bright green silk—out of his trouser pocket, took off his spectacles, made a production out of polishing the lenses, and then set the glasses on the counter by his last. He studied Nellie for close to a minute without saying anything. Then, in a thoughtful tone of voice, he remarked, “You know, Widow Semphroch, I am sorry for you and for your poor daughter. I wish there were some way you could take revenge on these Confederates who have caused you so much grief.”

“Oh, good Lord, so do I!” Nellie said fervently.

The shoemaker continued to study her. “When the Rebs came into your coffeehouse, they must have had all sorts of…interesting stories to tell. Wouldn’t you say that’s so, Widow Semphroch? It is here, that I can tell you. The ones who come in to get their shoes repaired, they do run on at the mouth. And me, I just listen, I listen very carefully. You never can tell what you might hear.”

Nellie started to answer Mr. Jacobs, then suddenly stopped before she’d said anything. Now she looked sharply at him. He’d just told her something, without ever once coming right out and saying it. If she hadn’t been paying attention, she wouldn’t have noticed—which, no doubt, was what he’d intended.

She said, “If I hear anything like that, Mr. Jacobs, maybe you’d like me to let you know about it. If you think that would be interesting, of course.”

“It might,” he answered. “Yes, it might.” They nodded, having made a bargain neither of them had mentioned.

When she was in New Orleans, Anne Colleton had thought she would be glad to get home to South Carolina. Now that she was back in her beloved Marshlands, she often wished she’d stayed in Louisiana.

Even the trend-setting exhibition of modern art she’d arranged, the trend-setting artists who’d crossed the Atlantic to exhibit their works, now seemed more albatross than triumph. She set hands on hips and spoke to Marcel Duchamp in irritable, almost accent-free French: “
Monsieur
, you are not the only one who regrets that the outbreak of war has left you here rather than in Paris, where you would rather be, I agree: it is a great pity. But it is not something over which I have any say. Do you understand this?”

Before replying, Duchamp took a long drag at the skinny cigarillo in his hand; he used smoking as a sort of punctuation to his speech. He made everything he did, no matter how trivial, as dramatic as he could. Exhaling a long, thin plume of smoke the February sunlight—tolerably warm here—illuminated, he spoke in mournful tones: “I am confined here. Is that what you do not understand,
Mademoiselle
Colleton? This is the only word I can use—trapped like a beast in jaws of steel. Soon I shall have to gnaw off a limb to escape.” He made as if to bite at his own wrist.

I haven’t got the time to deal with this now
, Anne thought. Aloud, she said, “You did not sound this way when you accepted my invitation—and my money—to come to the Confederate States last summer.”

“I had not thought I would be here an eternity!” Duchamp burst out. “What is bearable—forgive me: what is pleasant—for a time in the end becomes unpleasant, imprisoning.”

“Ships sail for England and France from Charleston every week,
Monsieur
Duchamp,” Anne said in frigid tones. “You are not held here without bond, as if you were a Negro criminal. You have but to use the return fare I gave you when you came here. I would not have you stay where you feel unwelcome.”

Duchamp paced back and forth, so swiftly that he almost appeared to be many places at once, as if he were the inspiration for his own
Nude Descending a Staircase
. Anne Colleton judged that much of his agitation was real. “Yes,” he said. “Ships do sail. You have reason there. But it is also true that they reach their intended ports far less often than a prudent man would wish.”

“Even prudence is not always prudent,” Anne replied. “What did Danton say before the Legislative Assembly?
L’audace, encore l’audace, toujours l’audace
. If you wish so much to be gone, you will find the audacity to go.”

The artist looked most unhappy. Anne smiled without moving her lips. He hadn’t expected her to throw a quotation from the French Revolution in his face. Instead of answering her, he bowed and walked off, thin and dark and straight as his cigarillo.

Anne did smile then, but only for a moment. Duchamp would start being difficult again in another few days—unless, of course, he seduced a new serving wench, in which case he would imagine himself in love. But even if he did that, it wouldn’t last long, either. The one constant about Marcel Duchamp was mutability.

In the Confederate States of America, mutability was not well thought of. The CSA tried to hold change to a minimum. If you shut your eyes just a little, the thought went, you could believe everything was as it had been before the War of Secession.

“We need to be reminded that isn’t so,” Anne murmured. “It just isn’t.” That was one of the reasons she’d arranged her exhibition: to make more people see what the twentieth century really meant. It was also one of the reasons the exhibition had been so deliciously scandalous.

But change had come to Marshlands in other ways, too, ways she didn’t like so well. How was she supposed to raise a decent crop of cotton if her colored hands kept leaving the plantation to work in factories in Columbia and Spartanburg and even down in Charleston?
It’s the war
. She’d heard that excuse so many times, she was sick of it.

And not even all her power, all her wealth, all her connections, had let her pull all her hands back to the fields. She’d had to raise what she paid to keep the drain from being worse than it was. That cut into her profits. And pay in the factories was going up, too. She scowled. She wasn’t used to being in the position of wanting the good old days back again.