American Front (81 page)

Being a rich and prominent South Carolinian herself, Anne Colleton knew a good many of the people there. Being younger, more attractive, and more female than most of them, she had as much company as she wanted, and perhaps rather more. She saw a couple of wives whose husbands had abandoned them to talk to her sending imperfectly friendly looks in her direction. She sent back the same sort of carnivorous smiles she’d given the fool in the Ford.

They pride themselves on being useless
, she thought.
They don’t know anything, and they don’t want to know anything. If you asked one of them to drive a motorcar, she’d tell you how unladylike it was, and how she had a chauffeur to take her everywhere she wanted to go. Old-fashioned, boring frumps
. She wondered what they would have made of the exhibition of modern art she’d organized. Her lips pulled back in even more contempt. As if any of them could have brought off a show like that!

The women’s stares turned even more poisonous when, after opening the doors, the attendants began escorting people to their seats. Not only was she placed at the president’s table, but right across from him. “We were told to put you here, ma’am,” her Negro guide said, “to make amends for Mr. Wilson taking your room away from you.” He pulled out her chair so she could sit down.

Woodrow Wilson strode in, long and lean, at exactly eight o’clock. Everyone stood to honor him. He had something less than the almost demoniac energy of Theodore Roosevelt; you could not imagine him leading a charge across no-man’s-land, as you would with the Yankee Kaiser. His appeal was more to the intellect, and he gave the impression of having that and to spare.

Which was not to say he could not be charming in his own way. Smiling across the table at Anne, he said, “I do hope you will forgive me for so rudely dispossessing you this afternoon, Miss Colleton.”

“Quite all right. I feel I’m doing my patriotic duty by moving, Your Excellency,” Anne answered. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw she was getting more looks from people who didn’t know exactly who she was. Down deep where it didn’t show, she grinned. President Wilson had known who she was long before he’d taken the suite away from her. He’d visited Marshlands, after all. And Anne would have been astonished if more than half a dozen men in the banquet hall had contributed more money to Wilson’s election campaign back in 1909 than she had. Her brothers had laughed at her then, but she thought the investment had paid off well.

No sooner had the thought of Tom and Jacob crossed her mind than Wilson said, “I understand one of your gallant brothers was wounded this summer in a U.S. attack.”

“He was gassed, yes,” Anne said shortly. Having Jacob back at Marshlands in such a state would have been hard enough. Having him back at Marshlands in such a state and drugged on morphia and drunk when he wasn’t drugged (and sometimes when he was) and fornicating his way through the colored wenches was ten times worse. That Cherry was getting so stuck up, it was as if she thought herself the rightful mistress of Marshlands.

At her anger, Wilson’s narrow, deeply lined face hardened. “It is because the United States, like the Huns across the sea with whom they are allied, employ such vile and unrestrained means of waging war that they and their arrogant pretensions must be checked.”

Down the table, a plump man with a red face that had grown redder with each glass of wine he’d poured down said loudly, “The damnyankees need whipping on account of they’re damnyankees. Once you’ve gone and said that, what more needs saying?”

Anne nodded emphatic agreement. But Woodrow Wilson shook his head. “I would share this continent with them if I could,” he said, “If tomorrow they would agree to a peace based on the
status quo ante bellum
with us and our brave Canadian comrades, I would accept on the instant. Then this half of the world would be at peace, and we could work toward peace as well between our allies on the one hand and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other.”

“They won’t agree to any such thing, though,” Anne said. “They tried to keep us from becoming a nation in the first place and they still think we belong to them by rights. If they can snuff us out, they will. We can’t let them.”

“Unfortunately, Miss Colleton, I fear you are correct,” the president said sadly. “And so we have no choice but to continue the struggle, confident that God and justice are on our side. I came down to South Carolina to celebrate our production of another tool toward our ultimate triumph.” He still seemed unhappy about such duty, and paused, shifting from the political to the personal: “But you undoubtedly know why I am here. What brings
you
to Charleston? Business or pleasure?”

He did not say that slightingly, as many a man might have: he knew she was a businesswoman in her own right. “Pleasure,” she answered. It was, at the moment, pleasure she was forgoing for the sake of the dinner, but President Wilson did not need to know about that.

Colored waiters cleared away dishes. Wilson got up and made a brief speech, one line of which stuck in Anne’s memory: “There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or violated.” It got, she thought, less applause than it deserved.

Colored musicians began playing a sprightly waltz. Couples drifted out onto the dance floor. Anne succeeded in dismaying the old frumps once more, for President Wilson asked her for the first dance. He had been a widower for more than twenty years, but must have had a good deal of practice at affairs like this, for he was strong and sure; Anne enjoyed dancing with him. She thought he took pleasure in it, too, and wondered if he was interested in something more than dancing.

Whether he was or not, she wasn’t, despite the way she’d teased Roger Kimball. If you slept with a man of such power, he might want to go to bed with you again. Anne flattered herself that, if she slept with Woodrow Wilson, he
would
want to go to bed with her again. But if she slept with him, he would never take her seriously again. To her, that was more important.

When the music ended, she said, “Win the war, Your Excellency. Whatever it takes, win it.”

“I have done my utmost, Miss Colleton, and shall go on doing my utmost till next March,” he answered. “After that, God willing, it will be in the capable hands of Vice President Semmes.”

“God willing,” Anne agreed. She suspected Gabriel Semmes might prosecute the war with more vigor than Wilson had done. For that matter, Semmes’ principal opponent in the November elections, Doroteo Arango, would probably prosecute the war with more vigor than Wilson had done: Arango was a young fire-eater if ever there was one. But Arango, she thought, had almost no chance of winning; the Radical Liberals, who had nominated him, would sweep Sonora, Chihuahua, and Cuba, and might take Texas, too, but she doubted they’d have much luck farther north and east.

Wilson said, “Will you be at the launching tomorrow, Miss Colleton? If you would like to come, see my secretary for an invitation in the morning.”

“I may do that. Thank you, Your Excellency,” Anne said. Going down to the harbor would make meeting Roger Kimball all the more convenient.

The music started up again. Three gray-haired men with the look of financiers almost got into a football scrimmage with one another, inviting her to dance. They’d dutifully waltzed the first round with their gray-haired wives, and now, obviously, had decided they were entitled to some fun.

Anne danced with each of them in turn. She stayed on the floor till a little past eleven, then went to bed. When she checked with the front desk the next morning, she discovered Wilson’s secretary had given her an invitation to the launching ceremony even without her asking for it. She put it into her handbag, then went back to her room, telephoned Roger Kimball, and arranged to meet him at the Firemark on State Street, not far from the harbor.

The launch of the
Fort Sumter
disappointed her for a couple of reasons. For one, even with the pass, she couldn’t get close enough for a good view of President Wilson smashing a bottle of champagne against the cruiser’s bow. And, for another, Wilson, a staunch temperance man, made it plain in his speech that the champagne hadn’t really been champagne, but soda water instead. Anne heartily approved of overturning some traditions, but that wasn’t one of them.

Roger Kimball was waiting under the Firemark—a seal dating back to the seventeenth century showing that the building on which it was affixed carried fire insurance—when Anne drove up in her Vauxhall. The submariner looked avidly at her, and even more so at her motorcar. “May I drive it?” he asked.

She judged he would sulk and pout unless she indulged him, so she said yes and slid over into the passenger seat. Kimball bounded into the automobile and roared up and down the streets of Charleston with a panache that sometimes bordered on the suicidal. Anne prided herself as a bold driver, but after a few hairsbreadth escapes realized she had to yield the palm to her companion.

“Try not to put both of us through the windscreen,” she said with some asperity as Kimball screeched to a stop bare inches from a Negro fisherman selling shrimp out of a basket. The Negro jumped back from the Vauxhall, but spilled no seafood.

After a moment, he realized he wouldn’t be crushed after all. Smiling at the Navy man in his dashing whites and at his pretty companion, the fisherman held out the basket and gave forth with his sales call:

“Ro-ro swimp!

Ro-ro swimp!

Roro-ro-ro-ro swimp!

Coma and git yo’ ro-ro swimp!”

Kimball took him at his word, jumping out of the automobile and buying a couple of pounds of them. The motorcar rested on a slight downgrade; Anne had to reach out a leg and stamp on the none-too-potent brake to keep the Vauxhall from getting the fisherman after all, and Kimball with him.

“What
are
you doing?” she demanded when the submariner, his hands full of crustaceans, got back into the motorcar.

Nothing fazed him. He dropped the shrimp, a couple of them still feebly flailing little legs, on the seat between them. “I know a little place where they’ll cook the shrimp or the fish if you bring it in. Can’t be beat.” He smacked his lips, then added, “And it’s only a couple of blocks from a hotel that never heard of house detectives.”

“And how do you know that?” she asked.

“How many girls have I brought there before you, do you mean?” he returned. “Does it matter? If we aren’t doing this for fun, why are we doing it?”

To that, she had no answer. Kimball had never claimed to offer more than amusement, or to want more than that from her. Under those circumstances, wondering about others before her was foolish. She hadn’t been a virgin there in the Pullman car on the way to New Orleans, either. She nodded and said, “Let’s go.”

The restaurant was in the far northwest of Charleston, well away from the fancy part of the city. It was, in fact, much closer to one of the Negro districts, which began only a few blocks away. The proprietor, who looked as if he might have been a quadroon passing for white, greeted Roger Kimball as an old friend. If he was used to seeing the submariner in variegated company, he gave no sign of it.

What he did with those little shrimp made the visit worthwhile. Cooked with rice and okra and chopped bacon and some spices he coyly refused to name, they made a better meal than Anne had had with President Wilson the night before. She didn’t tell him that, assuming he wouldn’t have believed her. She did give him as much praise as she thought he could accept. He bowed low when she left on Kimball’s arm. The Navy man looked bemused, remarking, “He’s never done that before.”

He handed Anne into the Vauxhall, then drove to the hotel, which was even closer to the Negro section of town than the restaurant had been. As if to impress on her that it was a tough district, he took the key out of the ignition and gave it to her, a precaution with which she seldom bothered.

As he’d predicted, the desk clerk placidly nodded when Kimball signed the registry,
Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson Davis
. A night’s rent was a night’s rent. The second-story room was small but surprisingly clean. Kimball locked the door behind him, lighted the kerosene lamp, and then turned to Anne with a grin. “What are we waiting for?”

“Not a thing.” She smiled back. From a lot of men—from most men—such brashness would have put her off, but it was what drew her to Roger Kimball. She stepped forward into his arms. He squeezed her to him, tilted her chin up, and delivered an authoritative kiss.

For him to get out of his uniform, a little later, was the work of a few moments. Once naked, he saluted her without using his hands. He took his time about undressing her, pausing to kiss and caress each new bit of flesh revealed. She sighed with relief when, after detaching her stockings from their garters and sliding them down her legs, he finally peeled her out of her steel-stiffened corset.

“You men are so lucky not to have to wear those things,” she said, “especially in weather like this.”

He set his hand on her sweaty belly, then let it stray lower. Suddenly impatient, she caught his shoulders and pulled him onto her. He rode her hard, which was just what she wanted. When they were through, he rubbed at his back. “You clawed me good there,” he said, sitting up.

“I hope it was good,” Anne answered, sated and greedy at the same time. The room had no sink, but did have a pitcher and a bowl. She used some water to wash him off, then took him in her mouth. She wanted him hard again. As soon as he was, she straddled him and rode him as ferociously as he’d taken her, until she quivered again and again and he groaned beneath her as if in pain rather than ecstasy.

Afterwards, they lay side by side on the bed, too spent to move, neither of them much wanting to get back into stifling clothes when being naked felt so much better. Roger Kimball fell asleep first. Anne was going to tease him about it, but discovered she was yawning, too. She dozed off a few minutes later.

Sometime in the middle of the night—the lamp had burned out, leaving the hotel room very dark—she woke up, needing to use the chamber pot. Her motion woke Kimball, and they made love again, lazily this time, she on her side facing away from him, barely touching save at one sweet place in the warm, muggy night.