The first pull was the worst, the air squeezed out of the lungs, the ribs bent inward into the chest, the second yank buckling the stomach, and woe to the foolish girl who dared eat anything in advance. When Jane had finally finished tying closed the corset, Libbie stood for a few moments trying to regain her breath, which wouldn’t fully come again until the stays had been loosened hours later after the tea. She would remain light-headed the entire afternoon, but when she glanced into the looking glass her form inspired her—she resembled exactly a fluted vase of flowers, the nipped twenty-and-a-half-inch waist, the flare of bosom above and hips below.
Jane helped her step into the collapsed hoops—steel blades held together with tapes that when extended fully resembled nothing so much as metal birdcages—then lifted the contraption up to her waist and belted it. Libbie wore her fancy extra-wide one for the holiday, the one that she had just ordered from New York. Her father and stepmother indulged her to an alarming degree. Once the hoops were attached she positively pushed her way through the room like a sailboat. Next came the petticoat, then finally the yellow silk dress, one consisting of nothing but ruffles and flounces, the fabric imported from France. She wore her late mother’s amber bobs and necklace, and her brown hair was coiled up with small yellow silk roses tucked in. She resembled the most delicious confection, waiting in the baker’s window for a passerby to purchase her.
Jane would help her get through her father’s front doorway, down the steps, and into the carriage—the logistics of the larger crinoline were more difficult than Libbie was used to. Of course she could have changed at her friend’s house but the intention was to make a grand appearance. That was the goal—all the artifice must look effortless and unstudied. What would these young men do when the women they were so enamored by were sprung free from their restraints?
When at last she arrived in her friend’s parlor for the Thanksgiving Day party, Libbie looked around the room at the other women similarly tethered and immobilized. They appeared like a garden of full-blown roses, the men bees circulating among them, bringing them sustenance in the form of dainty china cups of tea and small plates of cake. Had the crinoline been invented as an aid to virtue, it being near impossible for a man to get close enough for a kiss?
On arrival already she was bored.
It would be hours until she got back home, was undressed and untied, and Jane served her bread and jam as reward for her suffering. She’d gratefully lie abed and read her books the rest of the evening.
* * *
BUT THE AFTERNOON loomed long ahead. Libbie stood in the middle of the too-warm parlor, breathless, hungry, her legs already tired from standing, her feet pinched into low-heeled slippers that she must be careful not to catch in her bottom hoop else the whole meringue-like edifice topple. She dared not risk even sitting down. Although she had heard of fine ladies in New York performing the balletic maneuver of flipping the back of the hoop up onto a chair with a flick of their foot and then reversing onto the seat, Libbie was too unskilled with hoops to attempt it. There were too many cruel stories of girls tipping their skirts up and showing off their pantaloons to mixed company.
Even navigating around the food table was fraught. They had all heard of ladies squeezing past a tight corner and their dresses catching fire from burning candles or oil lamps. One girl in a town fifty miles away had actually burned to death in her parlor when unbeknown to her an ember caught in her dress flounce, and in panic she was unable to untie the hoops in time to run out the door.
Libbie laughed and flirted with the men as was expected of her but found it hard to concentrate. Her mind instead was fixated on her discomfort, her enraged, crushed interior. The dresses, however beautiful, were a torture. At that moment nothing would have pleased her so much as a stout pair of trousers.
Not only could the women in their splendid exile not approach men due to their steel boundaries, they could not even get close enough to each other to pass whispered information—which men were up for promotion, which had a stern mother, which had short-lived fidelity—so both their bodies and minds remained drifting and isolate. It was their destiny and their job to be husbanded, so the girls had no alternative but to compete for manly attentions.
* * *
LIBBIE BACON, LIBBIE BACON, LIBBIE BACON—she loved the sound of her own name, perfectly compact, self-contained. The thought of adding a third, a cumbersome, awkward appendage to Libbie Bacon [_______] didn’t seem necessary or desirable. She’d devoured the books of Fanny Fern and Grace Greenwood as a young girl, even toyed with the idea of becoming a lady author herself, and had decided that spinsterhood had many things to recommend it. She wished she could confide in someone that she just didn’t see the point in being married.
People felt pity for the maiden aunts and spinsters in town, Miss Townsend, for example, who taught piano, or Miss Girard, who assisted her brother in the dry goods store, but Libbie detected a fire in the eyes of these women, a straightness to their backs that the married women, burdened with the cares of husband, children, and household, distinctly lacked. Libbie had extravagant fantasies of waking up and spending her mornings drinking coffee and reading books in bed. People gossiped that her independent streak came from the early loss of her mother.
Brown-eyed and dimpled, by age eighteen she was not embarrassed to say she had more than her fair share of beaux. While not a great beauty, she was not unpleasant to look at either. Her strength was in putting people at ease. She always tried to be straightforward and pleasant, never to put on airs like some of the other girls. The best way to describe her life up to that point was that it was gloriously ordinary. She longed for that to change.
A recent graduate of the nearby ladies’ seminary, her activities at that time consisted of an unending round of teas, dinners, and socials whose sole aim was matrimony. Libbie enjoyed her feminine powers over men, and pretended she did not understand the ultimate reason for these gatherings. She herself reveled in the chase. A young male teacher at her school was so tormented by her rejection of his suit that he quit his job and moved away. At hops, she danced till the last instrument was packed up to go home, never wanting the night to end. It was the magic of youth that despite evidence to the contrary she believed it could go on forever. Her admirers made the natural mistake of thinking her enthusiasm was stirred by them.
One by one the young women succumbed to one or another beau and announced engagements. Her father doted on Libbie far too much to openly state the fact that she was expected to come to a similar conclusion. Already she had turned down a fair number of proposals, claiming to her father that none of them were at all satisfactory.
Growing up in a small town, it did not escape her that matrimony was a kind of gilded cage, as restricting and unwieldy as her dress, that after a couple of years those same gay girls that had eagerly married became so weighed down with domestic work and childrearing that they turned into different people entirely.
Already one or two girls with whom she had been friendly in school pleaded that they no longer had time to do something as frivolous as read books. They looked at her knowingly as if she were a child who would soon be initiated into the adult female world. Well, if that was the way it would be, she would stay a child!
All the married ladies wanted to do was recall their days of courtship, culminating with their wedding day, as a kind of high point in their lives. Remember the orange blossoms in my bouquet? Did you ever taste such a buttercream wedding cake? They urged Libbie to settle on a life of the same before it was too late. The Council of Matrons, she called them behind their backs.
Perhaps it was the lack of maternal influence that allowed Libbie such a cool, unsentimental eye. She would soon be nineteen but was in no hurry. She loved her life at home, coddled by her father and stepmother, so that she wouldn’t have minded becoming the newest spinster in town, the kind of lady everyone pitied but who Libbie suspected didn’t feel nearly as sorry for herself. Would the most eligible girl in town be allowed to refuse marriage?
She was too ignorant to know that what she longed for was freedom, a freedom not on offer to pampered girls like herself.
* * *
POOR LIBBIE BACON, judge’s daughter. Two baby sisters taken to heaven so quickly she hardly knew them. An only child with the loss of her brother, Edward, who had been the pride of his parents. Three years older than her, always getting into boyish trouble, yet he was as kind and gentle to his baby sister as could be. It scared her when he became bedridden. He had hurt his spine falling through a stair. Libbie nursed him in her childish way, spending long days sitting on his bed, inventing games. Often while reading him endless stories from her books, she fell asleep and had to be carried to her own room.
Edward had only just recovered from his back injury when he came down with a fatal disease. Quickly her parents sent her away to stay with relatives, worried she would sicken also. Every afternoon at her relatives’ house there were intense thunderstorms, and since there was no one to comfort her she hid under the bed. Each night she prayed for Edward’s recovery, but the sum total of her efforts was that when she was allowed to return home at last, he was already in the ground. To her six-year-old mind it was a punishment. As far as she understood he’d moved to a different house, and whenever she went outside she still looked for him. His loss devastated their little family.
Her parents predictably became fearful and overly protective of their only daughter. When Libbie disobeyed and went to play with the neighborhood children that her mother considered too “rough,” she was dragged home and locked in a closet as if she were a piece of fine porcelain in danger of breaking. Libbie remembered the close darkness, the smell of leather shoes and talc, the stale perfume on her mother’s clothes. Often she fell asleep listening to her mother on the other side of the door praying for her salvation. Even at that young age she sympathized with her traumatized parents while at the same time having no intention of obeying them.
The tragedy of her young life was still to come—her melancholic mother passed when Libbie was twelve. Her father and she remained alone until he remarried years later. Everyone said loss at a young age affected one, and she came to blame that for her moods. Regularly her father would find her shut inside her closet, sleeping. Sometimes she dreamed she still heard her mother’s prayers through the door.
Her favorite way to escape the cloistering of her family was to walk the fields outside Monroe, although her father had strictly forbidden it. What if an Indian attacked her? There hadn’t been an Indian around Monroe in quite a while, she answered.
One day she was sitting on a tree stump, crying, when a boy her own age rode up on a rough-looking nag.
“You okay?”
Libbie wiped her face, not pleased at having a witness to her anguish. In public she always aimed at a determined cheerfulness to mask the sorrow everyone expected. She recognized the boy from his blond hair and thin, long face as one of the Custer clan.
“Leave me be. I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem it.”
Libbie sighed. “That’s not polite to say to a lady.”
“You’re a girl, even if you are a pretty one.”
The Custers lived on the other side of town. Although she recognized this boy from school, which he attended sporadically, the two families did not move in the same social circles or go to the same church. The uncharitable judgment was that the family had too little money and too many children to support.
“Want to ride my horse?”
“No.”
“You should. When I’m blue it makes me feel better. No place as good as on top of a horse.”
She surprised herself when she said yes. Its main lure was that it was forbidden. She knew there would be the devil to pay if her father found out, but her mother had been gone only a year, and he was lenient about her transgressions so far.
“I’m George Armstrong, in case you wanted to know, but my family call me Autie.”
“What kind of name is that?”
He didn’t answer right away, and when he did she could hear the hurt in his voice.
“Mine.”
His face had turned pink, and she regretted being so unkind.
They were the same height, both slight of build, and could almost have passed for brother and sister. He had the feel of a runt. When he laced his hands together to form a stirrup for her to step up on, though, she was surprised by his strength, easily boosting her onto the horse. She was surprised, too, how her leather boot felt small and dainty in his hands.
Although she took riding lessons and was mastering sidesaddle, there was no way to attempt it while bareback so she lifted her skirts and sat the horse astride. Autie’s eyes flicked over the glimpse of petticoat offered. Girls hinted that riding in this posture might ruin one’s marriage prospects as well as being unladylike, but Libbie didn’t give a fig. She enjoyed the feel of warm horseflesh against her legs.
When Autie lifted himself up in front of her on the horse, she began to protest but realized how ridiculous it would be to make him walk all the way home. She’d make him dismount when they came close to her house. At first she tried to lean back so that there would be no direct contact between them, which was equally impossible. Soon she was resting herself along his back, her legs against his. The horse moved in a drowsy gait that almost lulled her to sleep, her head on Autie’s shoulder, then he reined the horse hard to the right, unbalancing her and making her put both arms around his waist.
“I ride out here when I’m sad. It helps,” he said.
“Are you sad now?”
“Not anymore. Not when I have company. I hate to be alone.”
She smiled and was pleased he could not see her face, the unexpected flush of pleasure his words gave her. She rocked forward and let the manhorse heat touch every part of her body.
“My name is Libbie.”
“I know that.”
She blushed a deeper pink. He smelled of hay and sunshine and horse, a perfectly pleasing combination to her. It crossed her mind briefly that his riding by might not have been purely accident, that she was an object of his admiration. Too bad he was a Custer.
“Fact is I’ve had my eye on you.”
“Is that so?”
“Since first grade. You used to swing on your front gate when I walked back from school.”
“Didn’t see you.”
“You always shouted, ‘Hello, you Custer boy!’”
Libbie of course remembered but would not admit to what a brat she’d been.
“We should ride regularly. You seem to enjoy it.”
Her face burned. She adjusted her weight away from him.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you are the son of a farmer.”
* * *
SIX YEARS LATER, on the cold, dark afternoon of a Thanksgiving party, Libbie was being bored to tears by the conversation of the man in front of her when Autie burst through the door. Of course she was aware of his enormous change in fortune. The whole town talked of nothing else than their newly minted war hero. She wanted to say that when their eyes met this time it was love at first sight, that in a lightning flash she could see her life joined to his, but that would be untrue. She was a practical girl, not prone to exaggeration. No, it was more the novelty of him, the stir he caused due to his recent successes in the War.
How could she explain this? He had always been around town, but then suddenly there he was! A war hero! It was like knowing a gawky neighbor girl who after a period of absence returns transformed into a graceful young woman. A swan. Well, Autie was a swan if there ever was one, and for a small-town girl it didn’t get more exciting than that.
He was the most intoxicating mixture of familiar and strange. Physically he was still the same young man of ordinary height, on the slight side, with pale skin easily prone to burn, and those famous golden locks that the newspapers crowed over so much: the Golden Boy General. Some people could not reconcile his newfound fame with the unremarkableness of his presentation, but Libbie saw his extraordinary confidence. He was electric, with a vitality that charged a gathering. Everyone wanted to bask in that glow as if he were the sun that they orbited. But when he looked at you with those cool, appraising eyes you felt his danger. It was perfectly believable that he’d killed men. He expected the world to live up to his expectations, and it had obliged so far. Libbie understood why men followed him into battle, to death if need be. Rumors were that women followed him into bed.
What she cared for less was that every other girl in the room, unmarried and married, young and old, was also trying to catch his eye, and he played this up for all its worth. The center of attention, he basked in it. At this provincial fete, he had the air of a cosmopolitan, the fairy dust of the larger world clinging to his shoulders. Ladies jostled all around him, bumping his legs with their skirts. The men were not jealous but just as eager to approach him. What really irked, though, was how totally he ignored Libbie, as if he had forgotten her altogether.
Not for her his type, that was certain. Full of himself.
She was at the buffet table later, serving a gentleman and herself slices of cake, when she felt a burning on her neck and turned to find Autie standing behind her, staring.
“Libbie Bacon.”
Standing beside him, she noticed he was now considerably taller than her. His shoulders were broad, his body muscled, and his golden hair was handsome beyond words.
“Autie.”
“You have certainly filled out in the most pleasing of ways.”
She flushed.
“So have you.”
“We’ve both grown up.”
He laughed out loud and clapped his hands as if this were some bit of genius on their part. His gesture was so ridiculous she laughed too. She knew then without a doubt that he had staged his behavior that whole evening for her benefit, to build to that moment.
“Can I bring you a glass of punch?” he asked.
“She already has punch,” the gentleman at her side said, but neither of them paid him the slightest attention.
“I’d love some,” she said.
Her companion angrily crammed great forkfuls of cake into his mouth as they stood awaiting Autie’s return.
With great ceremony he carried a dainty glass of punch across the room, catching his finger in the delicate ring handle and spilling some on the floor in front of her. A man who had killed Rebels at the point end of a bayonet now blushed at his clumsiness. Drops of red punch had splashed up on her pale dress, and he kneeled, mortified, holding the hem in his hands, looking distressed out of all proportion to the offense. She kneeled down, too, collapsing her skirt, drowning in a pool of wilted silk. She forgave Autie, as she would forgive him over and over again through the years, for ever greater offenses.
That evening they danced and laughed, and there was no hope left for her.