Watchfires (21 page)

At family breakfast the next morning in Union Square, Fred and Selby were in a great state of excitement. They wanted every detail from their father about the disaster at Bull Run. Dexter, before their mother's glacial silence, was obviously embarrassed.

"Was it really a rout, Dad?" Selby asked. "Would you call it a stampede?"

"Close to it, I'm afraid."

"Are the Rebs really that much better fighters than we are?"

"Let's put it that they were last Sunday."

"What I can't see," Fred contributed, "is why old Scott didn't send relief from Washington."

"He didn't want to lose the capital!"

"Well, I think it's an outrage. Their running away like that! I hope it won't be over before I have a chance to get in. I'd like to see how
my
friends behave. They couldn't do much worse, I guess."

"Oh, Fred, darling, don't say that!" Rosalie cried in dismay. "You couldn't possibly get in before you're eighteen. Can anyone imagine the war lasting that long?"

"Not at this rate," Fred retorted. "Jeff Davis should be sleeping in the White House in a few weeks' time!"

"Did you see many people getting killed, Dad? I mean, actual corpses?"

"I really don't want to talk about it, Selby. It's a national tragedy. Let us mourn it in silence."

Rosalie decided that she could not let this pass. "It's all very well for you to say that, Dexter. But you were there and saw it all. It's only natural for the boys to ask questions. Even if it was, as you say, a national tragedy."

But Dexter disarmed her with immediate capitulation. "You're quite right, my dear. Boys, ask me anything you want."

Both, however, were embarrassed by the sudden passage between their parents, and in two more minutes they were off to school.

Rosalie contemplated her husband over her newspaper. If she were going to speak, she would have to do it now. He was folding his newspaper. In another minute he would raise his almost empty coffee cup for a final sip. Then he would cough, rise and carefully brush any bread crumbs from his waistcoat and say, "I'll be off now, dear." She spoke up quickly.

"Dexter, wait. You remember our talk about the hospital ship? I've told them I'll go!"

He stared down the table, his lips parted, the perpendicular line of his frown bisecting his smooth forehead. "Are you telling me that you're going to leave me?"

"Leave you? Don't be melodramatic. It's only for a tour of duty. Dexter! Don't look at me that way."

"I'm sorry. I suppose I'm hopelessly old-fashioned. I thought a wife's and mother's place was in her home."

"Normally it is. But there's too much at stake now. You were perfectly willing to join up and sacrifice your own life, if necessary, until Father persuaded you it was your duty to help him with the regiments. If you can give a life, surely you can loan a wife. For a few months, anyway."

"Is that what it will be? A few months?"

"Of course, it's hard to say. I'd be going back and forth. I'd be in New York some of the time. And naturally, if you or the boys were ill, or anything like that, I could always get leave. Or even quit, if necessary. I wouldn't be enlisting, after all."

"The boys need more than a nurse. They need a mother."

"But it isn't as if I were never going to see them! And they're in school all day, anyway. Actually, they're very keen about the idea. They think it would be wonderful to have a member of the family where the fighting is."

"A fighting mother," he said bitterly. "While their father stays home. What sort of position do you think that puts me in?"

"Oh, Dexter, don't take it like that!"

"How else can I take it? I'd much better sign up right away. Even if it's too late for me to get a commission."

"Please, dear, don't be self-pitying. You're a million times more important to the Union than a silly old nurse. The boys know that. Everyone knows that!"

"
I
don't know it. The job with your father is about done, anyway."

"But there'll be any number of others! You're going to be needed here desperately. And I've arranged to have that nice Mrs. Lindley—the one you liked so much when I was sick two years ago—live in and keep house for you and the boys. You'll be perfectly comfortable." But she saw by his deepening frown that this was not the position to take. It would be better to emphasize his sacrifice and inconvenience. "Oh, I know it will be difficult for you. But we all have to give up something to win this war. I expect you to be generous enough to let me do my tiny bit while you do your big one."

"War is a man's job."

"It's everyone's! Didn't Bull Run convince you of that?"

He was still watching her with that steady, thoughtful gaze of his. He had hardly moved a muscle since she had told him her news. "You'll never forgive me that little episode, will you?"

"You must think me very petty."

"You haven't forgiven me Annie, anyway."

"Oh, forgiven. What does it really mean? I've put it aside. It doesn't exist for me anymore."

"But I find it hard to believe that you'd be doing what you're going to do if I'd never been unfaithful."

"How do we know? Let's not go back into the past. Maybe some day, if this terrible war is ever over, we'll sit down and hash it all out. What I'm trying to tell you now, darling, is that I need your help. To do the things I know I ought to be doing!"

She was instantly ashamed of her "darling." It had been meant to have the appearance of falling without premeditation from her lips; it was the purest guile. Dexter's eyes cross-examined her. But his tongue did not. What he said was mild enough.

"You're right about other jobs turning up. They want me on your Sanitary Commission."

She hit the table with her palm in surprise and delight. "Oh, Dexter, how wonderful! It's just the kind of work you'll be best at. Pulling order out of chaos. You'll be the most important man in the whole business of health care! And here was I, thinking I was so grand with my silly old boat!"

"I haven't decided about it yet. But let me tell you what I've been thinking. The army wasn't the only thing that took a licking at Bull Run. Your husband did. I've felt such an ass ever since, Rosalie! I've seen the scorn in your eyes and known it was wholly deserved!"

She was startled at his sudden change of tone. "But that was all just foolishness. You mustn't dwell on it. You..."

"Oh, but I must!" he insisted. "It's the only way to redeem myself. If I can be clear in your eyes, I'll be on the right track. So tell me one thing—in all honesty. If I take the Sanitary Commission job and make a go of it, and if I look after the boys while you're gone, have I a chance of regaining your respect? I don't ask for your love. That would be too much, in view of all that's happened. But if you can respect me, I think I can live with myself."

"But I've always respected you!" she almost wailed.

"I'm sorry, dear. That is simply not so."

Oh, he still had his old power of turning the tables on her! She, who had yearned for the high seriousness of a role of her own in the war, basing the shedding of domestic duties on the seemingly solid ground of his inconsequence, was now faced with a situation where the sacrifice was all on his part and her mission turned into a kind of joy ride.

"I shall most certainly respect you as a commissioner," she said in a low voice from which she attempted to strip the bitterness. "You shall have all the respect at my disposal. All the respect and admiration."

"Then that is settled. Well tell the boys tonight. But, no, you've already told them of your plans. Is that right?"

"I'm afraid so."

"Then I suggest you get in touch with Mrs. Lindley today, so that she may learn her new job as soon as possible." He rose at last. "And one other thing, my dear. I suggest you take Joanna with you. She's pining to serve."

"And Father? What about Father?"

"Oh, I'll manage to keep an eye on him. Never fear."

When he had gone, she simply burst into tears. Was it conceivable that his gallantry had been cruelly intended? But no, she was not even to have that comfort. He had meant every word of it. The only thing to do now was her duty. She would go to sea. What did it matter if it was not going to give her all the satisfaction she had so foolishly anticipated?

R
OSALIE
thought of the voyages of the
Franklin Pierce
to the South and to the North as a preparation and an actuality. Preparation was in the sailing from New York to the Chesapeake on the big, throbbing paddle-wheeler, cleaned and scrubbed and sometimes even freshly painted, with its huge saloon full of neatly made empty camp beds and its decks bare except for the few sailors on duty and the doctors and male nurses lounging in the long chairs, watching the blue Atlantic and the whitecaps and the wheeling gulls. Preparation was efficient, even cheerful: counting stores, filing records, with time to pace the deck, facing the exhilarating breeze. She thought of it as somehow akin to her own protected girlhood, neat, compartmental, guarded snugly by the ship's sides and bottom from monsters of the deep and by the sea itself from the ravening shores with their forests and beasts and wild men. Even after she knew what to expect on their arrival at Virginia shores, Rosalie still loved the voyage out.

Actuality was the trip back, with every available square foot of deck space covered with stretchers and mattresses and cots, occupied by bearded, bandaged young men, most silent, some at times groaning, and every now and then one poor soul hideously shrieking at an amputation that could not be postponed till docking. The six matrons, including herself and Joanna, worked on watches, three at a time, four hours on and four off, doing everything that was asked of them. They stood by the doctors in operations; they assisted the male nurses in changing bandages and linen; they served food on trays; they talked to the men and helped the disabled with their correspondence; they circulated among the beds to answer queries or receive complaints.

Rosalie was surprised at how valuable the discipline of her background proved. She had anticipated just the opposite. She had feared that she might seem remote, awkward, "standoffish." But she discovered that the habit of deference enabled her to fit easily into a military hierarchy, and that it did not surprise her, as much as it did others, to find idiots in high rungs of the ladder of power. She also learned, although she had always been one to deprecate invidious class distinctions, that she had been brought up in so rooted a conviction of her family's superior position that she had no fear of "demeaning" tasks. She and Joanna would cheerfully help the black boys in the galley when the other matrons wouldn't.

But there was also a more personal preparation, afforded by her own sentimental history. She wondered if she were not at last beginning to find that elusive "life of her own" that she had so long assumed would be provided, if at all, only by a husband. She had not, God knew, been a warmonger, and she had been revolted by the cheers and grandstanding that had accompanied the war's outbreak, but was it wrong to feel elevated—even purified—by ministering to the casualties of Armageddon? Was that, too, a kind of false patriotism?

She had always speculated that, when Christ had bade his disciples to give up all—family, friends, property—to follow him, there might have been an actual relief to some in letting go the domestic packs so firmly strapped to their shoulders; that what was being given up might have provided as much motivation as what was to be striven for. Was she now in danger of that kind of backward approach to the light? How little she thought of Union Square and Fifth Avenue. How little she even thought of her own two boys! She was guilty, perhaps, of the hypocrisy of exaltation at her own sacrifice—when that sacrifice had really been a kind of cheerful bonfire.

Work was the obvious answer to such doubts and questions. They occurred only when the hospital had been emptied. When it was full, there was little time for self-evaluation. Even when she sat with the dying, with no duty but to hold a hand, she trained herself to step outside of Rosalie Fair child and be only a calm, consoling presence. She had learned that at the end men hated any show of tears or pity.

She could even be efficient now at the actual moment of death. One night she sat up till dawn with a Vermont boy—he seemed no older than Fred—who was dying of a head wound. He thought she was his mother and talked in a sibilant whisper about his plans for the farm: the purchase of a new mule team, the development of an apple orchard, the sale of timber. There was something almost unbearably pathetic about such a multitude of detailed plans on the very threshold of extinction. Yet when death came, just before dawn, she heard herself say to the doctor approaching with his lantern:

"This bed is available now, sir. Shall I move the sergeant from the stretcher on the port side? He's been very restless and uncomfortable."

Sometimes there would be a domestic note. A young man, who had had both legs amputated and who was still the most cheerful member of his compartment, asked Rosalie if Miss Handy were a member of the Newport family that lived in Oaklawn.

"Why, indeed she is!" she exclaimed in surprise. "And so am I. We're sisters. Are you from Newport?"

"I worked as an assistant gardener for your father when I was in school there. I thought it was the same Miss Handy, but she looks so different in her uniform. I think it's wonderful of you ladies to do this kind of drudgery!"

"We consider it a privilege to help boys like you."

His eyes just flickered as he promptly changed the subject. "And how is your wonderful old father?"

"Working hard. At supplying the New York regiments."

"At his age! How terrific! But it must be a great hardship for him, having two daughters away at sea. Ask your sister if she remembers Joe Brest."

"Oh, I know she will. I'll send her right over."

She left him, appalled that a man who had permanently lost the use of two young legs should pity an old one who had temporarily lost the use of two middle-aged daughters.