Nothing was the same after Abby died.
Sam went about his business much the same as he always had, working more hours than he should, straining to keep up with the orders flooding in for the Carver carbine from every branch of the service. But it wasn’t the same. Every time a door opened he looked up, expecting it to be her coming into the room. Every time someone knocked, he would think, She’s home. While the busy day’s work surrounded him, Sam managed to be much the same as he had always been. But night and the empty bed that awaited him in the house on Clover Hill were more than he could face without help. By the time his son Henry brought his wife-to-be, Ann Beecher, to New York, in the week before Christmas of 1864, Sam was getting through a quart of whiskey a day. It didn’t take the pain away, but it dulled it a little, and it made sleep possible.
The change in Sam, however, was as nothing to the change in Louise. The more he sought solace in liquor, the further apart from her he grew. It was as if Abby’s death or the way that Travis had stormed out of their lives had thrown a switch in her, changing the direction of her life. Louise had adopted a widowhood every bit as real as if her husband had actually died and been buried in the family graveyard in Virginia. Instead of grief, she plunged into religion and out of the religion came utter disapproval of every mortal sin.
Sam tried to remain loving. She rejected his affection as she might have rejected the pawing of a drunken brute.
She put the children in the hands of a qualified nursemaid and set about rendering herself indispensable to the firm of Carver & Strong. The more indispensable she became, the less there was for Sam to do. The less he did, the more he drank. Sometimes he arrived at the factory at eleven or later in the morning and she could smell the reek of the saloon on his clothes.
‘Well, lovely lady,’ he would say expansively. ‘And what excitements have we today?’
‘The usual,’ she would snap, angry at him for being the way he was, angry at herself for exacerbating his condition, helpless somehow to prevent either.
She wore black. No other color. She neither drank nor smoked, and her obvious displeasure if someone did either in her presence dissuaded all but the most hardy souls from risking the edge of her tongue.
‘A custom loathsome to the eye,’ she would icily recite, in the words of James 1st of England. “Harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless!”.’
Or, ‘Mr. Emerson, sir, says: “Drink is the only vulgarity.”. I, sir, say it is the vilest one!’
Sam worked six days a week; he did not relish temperance lectures throughout the seventh and so he absented himself more and more from the house on Clover Hill. More and more it became not the house of Sam and Abby Strong, in which the one-time prostitute Louise Gray Strong had come to live, but the house of the highly moral and much-respected Mrs. Strong, to which the well-meaning, blunderingly drunken Sam was permitted grudging entrance.
Look at them, he thought, trading homilies like anglers trading worms. Ann Beecher, plain, slightly plump and watery-eyed, as pious as a bishop and four times duller. His son, Henry, endowed with all Sam’s shortcomings and none of his strengths, was as portly, if not more so than his father, with a doughy face and thick-lensed spectacles that made his eyes look almost oriental.
Henry had once written to Abby that he would never set foot in this house while Louise lived in it. Look at him now, fawning over her! Louise had taken care of all the arrangements for Abby’s funeral and had written to Henry breaking the news of his mother’s death. Sam did not know what had passed between them, but whatever it was, it was clear they had formed some kind of bond. It was as if Louise had a hold over Henry, which was a ridiculous thought.
‘You read from the Scriptures so beautifully, Louise,’ Ann Beecher said in her lowing voice. ‘I find myself very moved by it.’
“‘My soul doth magnify the Lord”,’ Louise said. “‘For He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden”.’
‘Amen, amen,’ Henry muttered, in the voice of someone anxious to please. ‘Will you not read something else, sister-in-law?’
‘Gladly, dear Henry, but perhaps a little later,’ Louise said. ‘First, I think, we should devote a little time to discussing the matter of your marriage to dearest Ann.’ She laid a hand on Ann Beecher’s bony knuckles. ‘I cannot tell you, my dear, how happy I am that Henry has found someone whose heart is full of love of the Lord our God. Does it not say in the Bible that a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband?’
‘Proverbs,’ Henry said, beaming at Louise like a bright pupil with a favorite teacher.
A man hath no better thing under the sun, Sam thought biliously, than to eat and to drink and to be merry. Also Proverbs. That was the trouble with Bible-bangers. They omitted to mention any of the bits that contradicted their theory that God was on the side of the people with thin lips, tight purses and closed minds. ‘Have you fixed a date yet?’ he said, hoping to get the conversation started and therefore finished sooner., If he didn’t get a damned drink soon, he was going to howl at the ceiling like a hunting wolf.
‘We had thought perhaps in April,’ Ann said.
‘A Saturday,’ Henry added. He looked at Ann and she nodded. He nodded too. By God, they don’t look afire to get at each other, Sam thought, remembering Abby. And how he’d carried her to his bed that first time and taken her, blinded by lust, and afterwards, she chuckled softly and slid her hand down his belly and said ‘I’ll bet you couldn’t do that again.’ Well, she lost her bet. Somehow he found it very hard indeed to imagine these two naked in a bed together, much less enjoying it. Probably stop every few minutes to ask God to forgive them, he thought, watching them hunting through the Almanac.
‘Well, the first of the month is a Saturday,’ Henry said. ‘I don’t think, dearest, that I would like to be married on All Fool’s Day,’ Ann Beecher said. ‘That is, of course, unless you feel—’
‘No, no, of course not, my dear,’ Henry assented. ‘I quite agree with you. It is not a day for so solemn an occasion as the taking of marital vows.’
Why the Hell can’t he just say getting married, like everyone else does? Sam wondered. Fancy phrases; all that damned high-flown painting and reading, all they did was turn a man pompous.
‘The following weekend is Easter,’ Louise said. ‘Would that not be the perfect choice of days?’
‘It would, indeed,’ Ann said. ‘But I must be at home with Father at that time. It is one of the busiest of the ecclesiastical seasons, you know. Papa relies heavily on me, since Mama …’ She let the matter of what was wrong with her mother remain unspoken. Whatever it was, Louise and Henry obviously knew, for both readily agreed that, of course, dear Ann could not think of being away from Cincinnati at such a time.
‘Then it shall be the weekend following Easter!’ Louise said, ‘April fifteenth?’ She clasped her hands together, eyes shining, and waited as Henry and Ann looked at each other. He nodded; she nodded. They turned to Louise and nodded in unison.
‘So be it,’ said Louise. ‘Now, there will be a thousand things to do! The invitations, the flowers, the church. My goodness, we shall have little enough time to prepare for such an auspicious occasion!’
‘Where you planning to have the wedding, Henry?’ Sam asked, feeling he could do with one solid fact in this babble of gallimaufry. ‘Cincinnati? Or perhaps here in New York?’
‘No!’ Henry said, a shade too quickly and too sharply. ‘Not in New York!’ Ann frowned slightly, obviously as puzzled by Henry’s vehemence as was Sam. Louise, however, seemed to understand it perfectly.
‘Of course, dear Henry,’ she cooed. ‘Whatever you wish. ‘
‘I’d thought … perhaps in Culpeper,’ Henry said slowly. ‘At Washington Farm.’
‘But the farm’s been gutted!’ Sam said. ‘Andrew wrote that everything had been looted and smashed up.’
‘But he said he was going to rebuild, didn’t he?’
‘I doubt he’ll have done much,’ Sam said. ‘He’s still down there at Petersburg with Grant, far as I know.’
‘Even if it isn’t,’ Henry said. ‘I think it would be the right place for us to be married.’ What he did not say was that he was frightened to marry in either New York or Cincinnati. Too many people in both cities, who knew about his ‘other’ life, would read about the wedding in the papers. Henry had always taken the most stringent precautions to keep his identity secret from the hateful creatures with whom he debauched himself. Let ‘Kitty Cambric’ or ‘Pretty Harriet’ or ‘Black-eyed Leonora’ learn his name and rank in life and he would spend the rest of it paying blackmail to filthy little coal merchants’ clerks and butchers’ errand-boys and shoe salesmen. Culpeper was as far from their prying, knowing eyes as the moon. Yes, Culpeper it should be.
‘Very well, then!’ Louise said. ‘I shall “Write to dear Andrew tonight and ask. his blessing. Now, we must make a list of guests, my dears.’
‘It’s all settled, then?’ Sam said. ‘April fifteenth, at Culpeper.’
‘That’s right,’ Henry said, his expression showing he was surprised that Sam had spoken. ‘If God spares us all.’
‘Can’t think why the Hell he shouldn’t,’ Sam said, getting up, adding automatically, ‘Sorry, Louise!’
‘And where are you going?’ she asked icily.
‘Just going to take a turn around the block,’ Sam said. ‘Walk off my supper.’
‘Hmph!’ Louise said. She folded her arms across her chesty her mien and her stance rigid with disapproval. ‘Bound for a saloon, more likely! Well, don’t you come back to this house reeking of whiskey on the Lord’s day, Sam Strong!’
‘Of course I won’t,’ Sam said. It was like a ritual. She said what she was supposed to say and he said what he was supposed to say. Then he went and did it anyway, and when he came back, she said the same things she always said when he came back with a skinful, and he said the same contrite things and made the same promises he always made. And so the world went round.
He walked down Clover Hill and looked at the lights of Manhattan glittering in the brittle chill of the December night. Silent night, holy night, he thought, with a sour look back at the lighted windows of his house. Well, I suppose what you do is just be thankful for the good times you’ve had, and when the bad times come, hold on. He went into the saloon like a man who had just discovered a waterhole in the desert.