The Widow's War

The journey from Baltimore to Washington has already taken two hours longer than scheduled, and Carrie is impatient for it to end. When she was a child, she loved trains, but now the continual rocking reminds her of The Frances Scott, and The Frances Scott reminds her of Willa.

Sitting back, she closes her eyes, and surrenders herself to grief. My life is a train to nowhere, she thinks. That’s so grim a thought, it’s almost ridiculous. She forces herself to count her blessings: health, youth, wealth, a handsome, considerate husband. As she lists the good things in her life, the pain gradually recedes. After a while, she opens her eyes again, looks out the window, and notices they are approaching a muddy river crowded with barges and ships. She sees white sails, an eddy of currents, a long bridge, and then gets her first glimpse of Washington itself.

But wait. Something’s wrong. Pulling out her handkerchief, she rubs the coal dust off the windowpane and stares in disbelief. This can’t possibly be the capital of a great nation. Where are the parks, the monuments, the throngs of well-dressed people? Nettie Wiggins swore Washington was the Rio of the United States, but this appears to be no more than an overgrown town.

She leans forward to take a closer look. Small, she thinks, sleepy. Where is everyone? Most of the streets appear to be paved, but the ground looks swampy. Pulling down the window, she takes a deep breath and inhales something that tastes like warm molasses laced with mud and dust. How can you have dust and mud at the same time? Yet here the two are: the stagnant wet odor of undrained swamps, and dust—clouds of it—swirling down the avenues.

She coughs, claps her handkerchief over her nose, and feels a fine layer of federal grit joining the soot on her face. As soon as she arrives at Deacon’s father’s house, she’ll have to take a bath.

The train rolls on, spewing out cinders as it pants into the city. What is this odd-looking, truncated column? Could it possibly be the Washington Monument? Nettie said that someday it would rise over five hundred feet into the air, a gleaming obelisk of marble and granite that would be the envy of the world, but this is nothing more than a stumpy tower of blocks, several of which bear Temperance Society mottos.

George Washington would not have appreciated that sentiment. As Carrie recalls, the first thing he did after stepping down from the presidency was build a distillery at Mount Vernon.

Wadding up her kerchief, she stuffs it back into her sleeve as the train moves past the National Mall, which is supposed to rival the gardens at Versailles when finished but which at present is swampy and unkempt. Only this morning, Deacon told her that parts of the Mall had been sold off for private development. What’s left reeks.

Near the canal, the stench becomes overwhelming. Shoddily built houses, some no more than shacks, crowd up against tanning yards filled with rotting animal remains, blacksmiths’ sheds, sawmills, and a few dilapidated stores selling chicken feed and wilted vegetables.

The squalor passes by, made worse by coal dust, wood smoke, horse dung, and trash. Carrie has to admit that her first view of the capitol building is impressive, although its small, aging dome is obviously timber-framed and out of proportion to the rest of the structure. Since she cannot see the White House, she hopes there’s more to Washington than first meets the eye, but the prospects are not encouraging. Deacon has not mentioned malaria, but she would be willing to bet it lurks here somewhere along with typhoid and perhaps cholera. So much for leaving Brazil for a healthier climate.

Suddenly she spies an elegant three-story red-brick house surrounded by a wrought-iron fence that encloses a flower garden ringed by blossoming spirea bushes and showy purple and pink hydrangeas. Pulling out her handkerchief again, she rubs the last of the grime off the window, and inspects the house more closely.

The train has lurched to a temporary stop in front of the house. She can now see ladies moving in and out, all dressed in clothing more brightly colored and flamboyant than anything she has seen since she left Rio. A plump, dark-haired girl in a green dress and a tall blonde in blue emerge from the gate and begin to stroll down the street arm in arm. All at once, the dark-haired girl puts the tip of her gloved hand to her lips and blows a kiss at the train window. A tiny mole on her upper lip quivers as she purses her lips. Carrie has a sense of having seen the girl with the mole before but that, of course, is impossible.

Deacon grins and makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “If you must say such words, Carolyn, say them in Portuguese or you will shock our fellow passengers into conniption fits.”

“Yes.” Deacon grins again and takes another pull on his cigar. “But it’s a bit unfair to call her that. She’s one of Mrs. Elizabeth Springer’s girls. Mrs. Springer runs the most elegant brothel in Washington. It’s a Congressional favorite. In fact, it’s often said that Mrs. Springer’s darlings are the unacknowledged legislators of the United States of America. Her girls frequently use their considerably well-displayed assets to get laws passed through Congress.”

“Railroads, telegraph companies, merchants who provision the military—in other words, anyone and everyone who hopes to feed at the national trough. Don’t pity them. It’s quite a profitable business. If that little brunette who blew us a kiss saves her pennies, she may make enough to start her own house of ill repute. Some of Mrs. Springer’s girls retire and are rehabilitated as respectable members of society. Some even marry, although few find husbands in Congress. Their past is too much of a liability. Are you shocked?”

Five minutes later they roll into the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s Italianate terminal at New Jersey Avenue and C Street. By now their train is over two and a half hours late, but Deacon’s father is waiting for them on the platform.

Senator Presgrove is in his mid- to late fifties, tall and broad-shouldered like Deacon with the added bulk of several decades of good eating and soft living. He wears an elegant black suit and carries a heavy gold-headed walking stick. Like Deacon, he has high cheekbones and a long nose, but the senator’s nose is red-tipped and slanted to one side as if it has been broken in an accident, or perhaps, Carrie thinks, a fight, and his eyes are a bloodshot blue with whites the color of yellowed linen. Beardless and square-chinned, he wears his gray hair to his shoulders in the senatorial fashion. He might have once been a handsome man, but in old age he is as spotted as a turkey egg with the jowls of a bulldog and a voice to match.

“Mah dear girl!” he roars upon catching sight of Carrie. “Welcome! welcome!” Striding toward her, he envelops her in an embrace redolent of cigar smoke and brandy. Crushed into the starched linen of his shirtfront, Carrie has the momentary sensation of being taken prisoner by a bear. No wonder the senator has been such a success in Congress. Even she, who disagrees with everything he stands for, is impressed. He is a natural force like a hurricane or an earthquake. Who could resist him?

Senator Presgrove releases her, stands back, and holds her at arm’s length. “I have always wanted a daughter,” he says in a Southern accent much stronger than Deacon’s, “and at last I have one. Frankly, I never thought Deacon was going to settle down. The cards and ponies always called to him more than the ladies—”

“Daddy,” Deacon pleads, “please put me down.” Carrie is amused. She has never heard Deacon beg before. Senator Presgrove deposits his son on the platform and steps back.

“You have to shave off that moustache, son. It may do well enough in that godforsaken country you’ve been living in, but lip hairs aren’t worn in Washington, at least not by respectable men. Great Gawd, what were you thinkin’? You look like a pirate. If your mama were still alive, I’d have to take you to a barber before I could bring you home.”

“You do that, son.” Having dispensed with Deacon’s moustache, the senator turns back to Carrie. “I hear you are recently bereaved.” For an instant Carrie thinks Deacon has broken his promise and told his father about Willa, but then the senator continues. “The loss of a parent is a grievous thing.”

The senator stares at her as if trying to pick something out of her brain with a sharp needle. “Does your choice to eschew black spring from religious convictions or lack of sentiment? Frankly, honey, I don’t know which would be worse. Although you’re as pretty a little thing as has ever entered this city of windbags and tobacco chewers, I’m not pleased by the thought that my only son has married a girl who belongs to some cant-ridden, abolitionist sect. And the very idea that a child doesn’t love her father enough to mourn him, particularly when that father left the girl with a nice fat pile of Double Eagles, so to speak, well I—”

Another sharp cough from Deacon interrupts this line of conversation, which is fortunate because Carrie is starting to take a strong dislike to her father-in-law. Resisting an urge to tell him just how much she loved her own father and how poorly he stacks up in comparison, she forces herself to give him a polite reply.

“My father was opposed to the wearing of mourning,” she says. “He would not have wanted me to dress in black on my honeymoon. Besides, he always said that only Englishmen, fools, and madmen wear dark clothes in tropical heat, and . . .” The desire to be polite passes. On less than three minutes’ acquaintance he has just made a nasty crack about abolitionists and insulted her family.

“Now as far as I can tell, Senator, the difference between Washington and Rio isn’t worth spit when it comes to heat. The day is sultry, sir. I see that you have on a black suit. You’re certainly not an Englishman, so . . .”

Senator Presgrove gives Carrie a surprised look, then throws back his head and laughs so loudly heads turn. “Why aren’t you the spunky one! Deacon, you are gonna have to keep this pretty little wife of yours on a short leash. In fact, I’m not sure you’re man enough to handle her.”

“Please!” Deacon begs. Carrie suddenly remembers the pains Deacon has taken to get along with his father. Swallowing her anger, she turns the conversation to more neutral subjects—the voyage, the weather, the food on the train—and within a few minutes she is no longer the center of Senator Presgrove’s attention. In fact, it would be fair to say Deacon and his father forget about her entirely; or at least if they don’t, they appear to.

Senator Presgrove summons porters who carry their trunks and boxes to his carriage. As they roll north on Pennsylvania Avenue toward Georgetown, Carrie finally sees elegant shops and fashionably dressed women. She is just wondering if the haughty lady in brown silk is the wife of a senator when she becomes aware that Deacon and his father are discussing politics. Their conversation is not what she expects, and the more she hears of it, the more alarmed she becomes.

The Missouri Compromise, which has outlawed slavery north of thirty-six degrees latitude for more than thirty years, is apparently on the verge of being overturned. It seems that in January, Senator Presgrove’s old friend and colleague Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced a bill that would allow settlers in the western territories to vote to decide whether or not they want to permit slavery. In other words, the plebiscite act Deacon warned her about is on the verge of becoming a law.

“The Senate went for it right away,” Senator Presgrove says, “but the House has been draggin’ its feet all spring, squabbling like a pack of coonhounds fightin’ over a squirrel. Then, mirabile dictu!, last Monday the House finally voted. Result: thirty-five yeah, thirteen nay. A Joint Committee of Congress approved the whole kit and caboodle on Friday, and if Pierce can sober up enough to hold a pen, he’ll probably sign it sometime this week.”

Carrie is not surprised by the news, but she is astonished by Deacon’s reaction to it. Deacon and his father are supposed to have argued bitterly over slavery. If territories above thirty-six degrees latitude are allowed to enter the Union as slave states, slave owners will soon be able to seize control of Congress. In no time at all, slavery could be legal from Canada to the Mexican border. Deacon should be outraged, but instead he’s sitting there smiling and nodding as if this is the best news he’s heard in months. How can he laugh, accept a cigar from his father, and talk to him in level tones while the whole future of the country is hanging on the pen stroke of a President who claimed in his inaugural address that the Constitution supported slavery?

Suddenly Deacon looks up and sees Carrie staring at him. Something in her face must convey her shock and dismay, because he abruptly shifts from politics to horses. To be fair, he warned her in advance that he would need to humor his father by pretending to agree with him, but this . . .

Carrie stares grimly out the window. She had no idea her husband had such a talent for acting. If this is what it is going to take to get along with her father-in-law, perhaps they should return to the station and board the next train to Boston.