During the first years of their marriage Elizabeth had won over the women of Boston, whose envy of her self-confidence surfaced as deference, rather than resentment. She was beautiful, intelligent, and circumspect with her opinions—progressive enough to sit comfortably with the abolitionists, yet conservative enough so as not to offend the other side. There was a great deal of mystery about her, too, which was at the heart of the draw for many. One could never quite tell exactly what she was thinking, and it made you want to know. Garrett, clearly destined for the Senate even then, had a natural ability to command rooms and crowds; but she could command people. There was such a fine distinction.
Even Dovehouse—Garrett’s closest confidant since his undergraduate days at Harvard—liked her. Or at least it seemed that way. Dovehouse had originally opposed the marriage, warning Garrett that a man with an eye on politics could not risk the association with “southern skeletons.” Her family’s ties to the old Louisiana sugar plantations, Dovehouse said, would not be of small concern, especially to Garrett’s opponents. But when Dovehouse realized that Elizabeth was nothing if not a realist, his opinion changed, and he accepted her as one of his own. This woman from Philadelphia was certainly no fool, and all the better that she was ten years Garrett’s junior. Her charms—and certainly that was what Dovehouse considered them, charms—would help propel Garrett toward his political destiny.
When the baby arrived, Elizabeth lost little strength, and Garrett remembered how the speed of her recovery had astonished Boston society. Garrett was not yet in the Senate then, but he was already involved in the debates over the western territories. Publicly, he spoke out in favor of abolition and the limitation of the South’s influence as the country expanded; but in more private settings, where people aired their prejudices with less restraint, it was Elizabeth who promoted the virtues of her husband’s positions. She was, after all, someone who had relations in the South, and she could testify to the brutality she had seen there. When Garrett was elected to the Senate, he was not unaware of how instrumental his wife’s support had been.
But the baby’s death just two years after Garrett’s election had left Elizabeth disconsolate and muttering in her sleep about “punishments.” What was strange, however, was the inconsistency of her sadness. In those early years following William’s death, Garrett would often find her in a stupor, unwilling to look at him or speak; then only hours later, she would be entertaining Constance Merriwhether with all of the usual gregariousness that people had come to expect from her. He did not understand the secret thoughts his wife harbored, and the irregularity of her behavior frightened him.
By the time the war came, many years later, the legacy of that dark period had receded. There were days, of course—there would always be days—but new forms of darkness had pervaded the nation. Garrett’s attentions turned almost exclusively toward the advancement of the cause, and Elizabeth’s mission remained that of a surveyor over Boston’s drawing rooms. She continued in her role as Garrett’s domestic ambassador, but now when she spoke, she did so with noticeable reserve. She had never been a firebrand, and he had never expected her to be one, but there was something different, even indifferent, about the way she communicated during the war years. She was strong—that was one attribute of hers that had remained constant—but her passions were a mere ember of what they had once been.
Those were the war years, when everyone’s passions were uncontrolled, and when families’ differences split them apart in ways unexpected and horrendous. Had the impossible occurred, and had they grown apart? Garrett hated the idea because he knew how much he had relied on her. And sometimes he would go even further in his private thoughts, and admit that he would have been a failure without her. Such a belief was somewhat dangerous—a type of shameful surrender. Dovehouse would certainly have thought so, but then again Dovehouse knew that his friend had indeed surrendered, much to Garrett’s own benefit. If Elizabeth were retreating, there was not much Garrett could do to stop it. There had never really been a period when she adored him. She admired him, yes, but she had never adored him.
She was withdrawing—not abandoning him, never that—just withdrawing. She would do his deeds for him, support his ideas, maintain his status—and hers. But she did withdraw. The confirmation came for him that September following the end of the war, when Johnson ordered the return of all confiscated land to the plantation owners. The president’s “odious decree,” as Garrett called it, was a strong blow to the radical cause, and to Garrett in particular, since he had been arguing for years that it was the government’s responsibility to redistribute the land to the freedmen. He thundered as much about it at home as he did in Washington, until one night Elizabeth finally said: “James, you can’t give them everything.” Her coolness was shocking, and in that very moment, in hearing that mere fragment of resignation, he realized that somewhere, somehow, he had lost her. He also realized that he had been losing her for over a decade, and that their connection had slowly been … disintegrating. Of course, anyone watching from the outside would be inclined to trace her detachment back to the loss of the baby, but Garrett had come to believe—knew instinctively in his heart, rather—that it had always been more than that.
And so there they were, some years after the war, the senator and his wife, going to sit for a spirit photograph with Mr. Moody. Once partners in everything, from drawing rooms to the national stage, they had now become strangers, even as the carriage’s sway pressed them intimately against each other. The drive across town to Moody’s gallery was not a long one, but to Garrett, trapped in the narrow compartment, the ride seemed interminable. He did not entirely understand or remember how it had come to be like this. He only knew that he had agreed to accompany his wife more out of fear than understanding.