Almost as soon as the courtship began so did the problems.
Autie had known only a bounty of familial happiness in his youth, and it gave him an unshakable optimism that all remarked upon. Libbie, on the other hand, was always waiting for the next stroke of misfortune that was surely just around the corner.
Her father, although a fan of the local hero, still did not see Autie as suitable for his daughter. Rumors of various women and drunkenness abounded. Judge Bacon didn’t want his brilliant girl to live the straitened life of an army wife so he forbade Autie to even visit the house. Their meeting elsewhere was strictly banned.
Libbie Bacon Custer
Libbie had her own doubts. Autie was a terrible flirt. During his leaves, her girlfriends reported sightings of him at parties all over town in the company of other women. There was one especially, Fanny, whom Libbie considered vulgar and of loose character. In fact Fanny was quite pretty and outgoing; she came from an affluent family. Libbie was simply eaten up by jealousy. She sat alone in her house brooding on the nights she suspected them together. Her father was right—she would do best by forgetting him.
But then she would receive a barrage of notes begging for her to meet him at a mutual friend’s house. She went, fully intending to give him her mind and break off their flirtation. People wondered at Autie’s quick rise through the ranks during the Rebellion, but Libbie understood it. Unlike regular army, cavalry commanders were successful to the extent that they could react quickly, instinctively—a trait Autie had on the battlefield as well as in the parlor. His was a charm offensive.
So magnetic was he that everywhere he went in the world, he made fast friends. He was a singular burning flame, as if destiny had put her finger on him and nobody else would satisfy. It was the unfairness in his good fortune that would eventually earn him a number of detractors, but that was in the future. During those first months Autie laid siege to win her heart.
Angry at his latest indiscretions with Fanny, Libbie would sit next to him at a party and look away. He brought her flowers. A chain of paper cutout hearts. When she allowed him to hold her hand, he quite forgot himself and kissed her fingertips. What to make of such a man?
Once when he was escorting her home, they came to a mud puddle. Instead of walking around it, which they could have done easily, he insisted on taking off his jacket. Waiting for a nearby group of revelers to notice, he laid it with a flourish in the mud so she could step across and not dirty her skirts.
“No, Autie!”
The revelers stopped what they were doing and came to watch. A few clapped.
“Allow me. It gives me pleasure,” he said.
“It’s not necessary!”
“The jacket will be precious to me forever.”
After they were married, she saw his brother Tom wearing said jacket, and realized it had been borrowed and had been his all along. But it was more than these courtship antics that had won her over.
How could she explain? They extinguished each other’s loneliness simply by being together. Except for her father, she lacked family, and he filled that need for her. What did he see in her? He came from a large, boisterously loving tribe. The Custers’ copious tears and kisses at every reunion, however brief the absence, never ceased to astonish and faintly repulse her. His mother would need be put to bed, so overwrought with grief was she at his departures to the War. For his part, he fled the house with his own face bathed in tears. He needed someone to understand him and cheer him on, and this Libbie was perfectly willing to do.
One afternoon on the street, Judge Bacon and Libbie passed an obviously inebriated Autie staggering along with friends, his arms over their shoulders, belting out a bar ditty. Her father gave a deep frown, and she was furious with the knowledge that now he would never allow Autie to step foot in the front door, much less permit courtship or marriage. Fanny would win him by default. Libbie gave Autie an ultimatum to give up alcohol as she could not abide such behavior, and he surprised her by vowing never again to touch a drop.
Although her father forbade their correspondence, Autie, undeterred, sent her heady letters through her best friend, Nettie, detailing battles and victories that would be in the newspapers. His ardor was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in her life. Autie was in the grip of an important fate. They never talked of it, but she knew he felt it. It was what led to his moods later when that good fortune deserted him. The youngest brigadier general in the Union army, then after his part in the Battle of Gettysburg he became a national hero. And he loved her.
All was not perfect. Even though he was supposed to be head over heels about Libbie during their courtship, he still kept up a relationship with Fanny, sending them an equal number of letters while away. It goaded Libbie into despair. After all she had been through she needed someone for her very own. She forgave him when he promised to court only her while at the same time she stopped believing his excuses. She had to endure Fanny bragging all over town of his proclamations of love. That summer Fanny even hinted that there was an understanding they would be engaged in the fall.
If Libbie really was decided on him, this would be her first battle.
She had an expensive ambrotype taken of herself and sent it to him, only to find out later that he was so pleased with it he showed it off to Fanny. He also shared Libbie’s letters, which infuriated her. Nothing was private between them. But the indiscretion went both ways. He told her that Fanny had attended a drunken party and actually sat in his lap, kissing him.
“She is a girl who Does Everything,” Autie said, smiling when Libbie confronted him.
Libbie blanched. “Really?”
“Everything. And that’s exactly why I love only you.”
“I’m sure I don’t understand what you mean.”
But of course she did. Libbie sat alone in her house playing out a strategy no different than that of a general on a battlefield, calculating her behavior to win the moniker of Mrs. General Custer.
When Autie left to return to the War, her merry handful of suitors took their old place, joined by yet new ones. Perhaps she would do better to forget Autie, but it was as if she had been gifted with the Sight. Instead of enjoying the suitors’ glances, their compliments, instead of reveling in their attentions as she had formerly, she understood that these were simply the opening feints in a war. They aimed to win her, to carry her away in her white lace dress to a life of drudgery and homemaking.
She caught glimpses of possible futures. One night at supper she regaled the table with a story about Nettie and herself on an adventure.
“Then we returned by a dirt path. It looked like the one we had come on, but then—”
“Pass the rolls, Libbie,” one of her beaux said, clearly not having heard a word of her story.
“Excuse me?”
“The bread. And butter.”
Her father coughed into his napkin.
For the first time Libbie noticed her admirer’s small eyes, his wide, dull forehead, the ungenerous mouth that did not promise passionate kisses.
He looked up at her, puzzled that she had not done what he asked.
“The rolls, Libbie, please! For my gravy before it gets cold.”
One could only imagine such a marriage, such a fate.
Only one man could give her the extraordinary life she craved. She read his letters as if they were nourishment.
… I am longing and anxiously hoping for the time to come when I can be with my darling little one again. I bury my nose in your scented handkerchief that you gave your Bo on leaving. Ah, how it brings back sweet memories of snuggles. Prepare for being attacked with tickles once we are together again …
Autie, for all his philandering, his endless lies about no longer corresponding with Fanny, hung on Libbie’s every word. He would retell something she had said months before, treasuring it as if it were the wisest, most learned thing he had ever heard on the matter. Words from her, Libbie Bacon, girl from Monroe.
Their courtship was conducted through absences and letters, much as their marriage would end up being lived. Although it was an agony to live through, she admitted it created an unusually bright flame of passion between them. She was always realistic about herself—she was nothing particularly special except for Autie’s love for her. She was determined to win him.