American Front (11 page)

Now, though, all Carsten could do was stare out to sea and wait for his turn. It bothered him less than he’d thought it would. Out there were the transports with the soldiers and Marines. If they all landed safely, the Sandwich Islands would fly the Stars and Stripes. The odds looked good.

“Hell of a start,” he muttered.

The dandy up from Charleston studied the painting with a curious and critical eye. His pose was so languid and exquisite, Anne Colleton thought, that he should have been wearing knee breeches and frock coat and sneezing after a pinch of snuff, not in a dinner jacket and smoking a fragrant Habana. His Low Country drawl only strengthened the impression of aristocratic effeteness: “Upon my word, Miss Colleton, we surely have here an extraordinary series of contrasts, do we not?”

She brushed back a lock of pale gold hair that was tickling her cheek. “I can think of several,” she said.
Starting with, why are you here at Marshlands while both my brothers have gone to serve their country?
But to say that out loud would have been impolite and, however often she flouted the code of a Confederate gentlewoman, she still adhered to some of it. And so, not a hint of worry showed in her voice as she went on, “Which ones cross your mind, Mr. Forbes?”

Alfred Forbes pointed to the canvas he had been examining. “First and foremost, hanging that sense-stretching cubist portrait and all these other pieces from Picasso and Duchamp and Gauguin and Braque and the other moderns here in this hall strikes me as making contrast enough all by itself.” He examined the painting once more, then grinned impishly. “Are you sure it’s right side up?”

“Quite sure,” Anne replied, with less frost in her voice than she would have liked. Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase
had been upside down for a day before anyone noticed. It hadn’t been the fault of her Negro servants, either; a curator who’d accompanied the exhibition from Paris had made the mistake. They couldn’t even ship him home in disgrace, not with Yankee and German warships prowling the Atlantic. She went on, “I’ll have you know Marshlands was avant-garde in its day, too.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” Forbes said, Now his smile was somewhere between speculative and predatory. “But even should I have been so ungallant as to doubt, I could point out that yesterday’s avant-garde is tomorrow’s—” He checked himself.

“Yes?” Anne Colleton said sweetly. “You were about to say?”

“Tomorrow’s treasured tradition, I was about to say,” he replied. He’d probably been about to say something like
tomorrow’s crashing bore
, but he’d managed to find something better. His blue eyes were so wide and innocent, Anne smiled in spite of herself.

She said, “Supposing that to be a contrast”—it was one that had amused her ever since she’d arranged to bring the sampler of the best of modern painting from Paris to the Confederacy—“what other odd juxtapositions do you find?”

“That you chose to hold the show
here
, among others,” Alfred Forbes answered. “Worthy though St. Matthews is, it hardly ranks with Richmond or Charleston or New Orleans or even Columbia”—that, a Low Country man’s dig at the decidedly Up Country capital of South Carolina—“as a center of cultural advancement.”

“It does now,” Anne said. “These works would never have been seen in the Confederate States if I hadn’t made the effort”—
and spent the money
, she thought, although saying that would have been vulgar—“to bring them here. This is my home, sir. Where would you have me exhibit them? The New York Armory, perhaps?”

Forbes laughed out loud, showing off even white teeth. “Not likely! The next progressive Yankee I know of will be the first. When the USA ships in art from abroad, it’s fat German singers in brass unmentionables bellowing about the Rhine while the orchestra does its level best to drown them out—presumably not in the said river.”

Anne smiled again. “They deserve each other, the Yankees and the Germans.” The smile slipped. “But we don’t deserve either of them, and we have the Yankees on our border and the Germans helping to harry the coast.”

“Which brings me to yet another contrast,” Forbes said: “how long the exhibition was supposed to stay on these shores and how long it may actually be here. Wouldn’t want these paintings sunk.”

“No, though a Yankee ship captain would likely boast of having rid the world of them.” Anne Colleton dismissed the USA with that sentence and a curl of her lip. But the USA was not so easily dismissed. “A pity the Royal Navy took such a beating in the Sandwich Islands last week.”

“A date which will live in infamy for the British fleet,” Forbes agreed sadly.

The butler approached with a silver tray. He wore white tie but, as if his dark brown skin were not enough to mark his status, his vest had stripes and the buttons on his cutaway were shiny brass, just as they would have been in London. “Something to drink, madam, sir?” he asked, his voice the bass pipe of an organ.

“Thank you, Scipio,” Anne said, and took a crystal champagne flute.

Forbes took one, too. Scipio headed into the drawing room to serve some of the other art aficionados. “He’s well spoken,” Forbes remarked. “Can’t say that for most of the niggers hereabouts—I can scarcely fathom their jargon.”

“We had him specially trained in elocution,” Anne said. “A butler, after all, reflects the standards of the house.”

“Very true.” Alfred Forbes raised his glass. “And here’s to culture on the Congaree! Let New York keep the rancid Rhine; the wave of the future is here!”

Anne drank to that, quite happily. Forbes hung around and tried to draw her out, tried to make her interested in his admittedly handsome, well-groomed person. She could all but read his thoughts—
a woman who is a patroness of cubist art is surely a woman with other modern ideas, and a woman with modern ideas is surely a loose woman
. She pretended not to notice his hints. When he stepped forward to try to set his hand on her arm, she moved to one side: not in any offensive way, for he had not been offensive, but not permitting the contact, either. After a while, he gave up and went off to look at other paintings.

A couple in their fifties came up to scrutinize the Picasso. “Isn’t it exciting?” the woman said. “You can see her back and her, er, bosom both together there. It’s a whole new way of looking at the world.”

“Maybe it takes special eyesight,” the man replied with a dubious chuckle. The left sleeve of his jacket hung limp. Anne wondered whether he’d lost the arm during the Second Mexican War or, less romantically, in a railroading accident.

“Oh, Joseph, you are such a philistine,” his wife—the wedding band sparkled on her ring finger—said in mock despair. They both laughed, comfortable as old shoes together, and, with a nod to Anne, went on to the next painting.

The salt of the earth
, she thought with mingled admiration and scorn. Joseph and his wife, obviously, would never do anything scandalous, but they’d never do anything interesting, either.

Life should be interesting
, she thought.
If it’s not, what point to living it?
She felt like Eleanor of Aquitaine, free beyond the common limits of the world in which she lived. Royal birth had given Eleanor that freedom. Modern times were simpler: money did the job for Anne Colleton. The useless swamp along the Congaree aside, most of the land between St. Matthews and Columbia was Colleton cotton country.

She tapped a finger against the gleaming mahogany banister. Brains hadn’t hurt Eleanor of Aquitaine, and they didn’t hurt her, either. She’d doubled profits from the land in the five years since her father died, and they hadn’t been low before. After a couple of protests more for form’s sake than because they really wanted the job, her brothers had let her run the plantation as suited her. Why not? She let them have allowance enough to get into all the mischief they liked, and they liked quite a lot.

She’d grown used to patronizing Tom and Jacob in her mind. What they were getting into these days was worse than mischief. The casualty lists in the newspapers were hideously long, and the battles not going so well as everyone had been sure they would.
Too many damnyankees
, she thought bitterly.

And who would remember the Marshlands Exhibition of Modern Art now, except as the show that was going on when war raced around the world? She knew to the penny what the show had cost to set up and publicize. She’d made that back—she couldn’t remember the last investment where she’d failed to turn a profit—and the artists had sold a good many works, but much of the fame that should have come to both the Marshlands mansion and to herself was gone forever now, lost in the cannon’s roar.
One more reason to hate the United States
.

But, even if not quite so notorious as she’d hoped (in this modern age, what difference between notoriety and fame?), she was still free, and still reveling in that freedom. As she sometimes had before, she wondered how best to enjoy it.

Work for the vote for women?
That thought had crossed her mind before, too. As she had when it last did, she shook her head. For one thing, advocates of suffrage were earnest to the point of boredom, and she did not want to be bored: life was too short for that. The cause, while worthy, reeked of bourgeois respectability. And, for another, South Carolina had only recently come to grant the vote to all white men, and its districts were so arranged that half of those white men or more might as well not have had it. Making headway against such resolute conservatism struck her as a long, slow job.

What then? She didn’t know. She had time to find something. She was only twenty-eight, with the whole world stretched out before her.

That thought had hardly passed her mind when some sort of commotion broke out at the front of the mansion. She hurried forward to see what was going on. Looking out the window, she spied a new automobile near the mansion: a dusty Manassas, probably hired in St. Matthews. But getting out of it was…

She threw open the door and hurried forward, stopping to curtsy as her grandmother might have done before the War of Secession. “Mr. President!” she exclaimed. “I had no idea you would honor me with a visit here.” Part of that was,
Why didn’t you telegraph ahead, dammit?
But another part, a gloating part, said,
Now people
will
remember this exhibition, by God!

Woodrow Wilson tipped his hat to her. “This is entirely impromptu, Miss Colleton. I’m due in Charleston tomorrow to christen a new submersible as she goes off the shipway there. When I remembered your showing was on the way down from Richmond, or at least not too far out of the way, I decided to stop and see the paintings that have the world so intrigued.” His smile soured. “Frankly, this is more congenial to me than blessing another instrument of war.”

“You are very welcome,” Anne told him.

“I am glad to hear you say it,” Wilson replied. “Your support for the Whig Party has been generous, and I certainly hope it may continue.”

“I don’t think you need to worry on that score,” Anne said with a slow, thoughtful nod. She wondered just how impromptu the president’s visit really was. Maybe Wilson himself didn’t know. Politicians, in her experience, inevitably and inextricably mixed politics with every other facet of their lives—and her support for the Whigs had always been anything but ungenerous. She went on, “Please come in, Your Excellency. Don’t stand there in the sun. If you had a heatstroke, they’d probably shoot me for treason.”

Wilson smiled back. From everything she’d heard, he’d never been averse to smiling at a pretty woman. Anne knew her own good looks were about as useful to her as her money. Fanning himself with his straw hat, Wilson said, “I’m delighted to accept that invitation. Your climate here makes Richmond feel temperate by comparison, something many people would reckon impossible.”

Servants—all save Scipio, who remained gravely impassive—gaped as the president of the Confederate States came into the Marshlands mansion, Anne Colleton on his arm. He let her guide him through the exhibition. He also let her shield him from people who might have pestered him. This time, she smiled inside, where it didn’t show. Wilson knew who was important and who wasn’t—and she was.

After gravely studying several of the paintings, the president turned to her and said, “This is why we fight, you know. To me, it is even more important than ties of blood and sentiment. Nothing so…so progressive as these works could possibly come into being in the United States or the German Empire. We truly are preserving civilization.”

“Not just preserving it,” Anne said. “Helping it grow.”

“Of course.” He accepted the correction with good grace, accepted it and took it as his own. But then the creases in his long, thin face got deeper. “The price, though, the price is dreadfully high. You have a brother in the service, don’t you?”

“Two brothers,” she answered proudly. The worry she couldn’t help feeling she kept to herself.

“I hope, I pray, they will come through safely,” Wilson said. “I do the same for every man in the Army and Navy. Too often—far too often already—my prayers have gone unanswered.”

Before Anne could decide how to answer that, Scipio came back with his silver tray. “Would you like a glass of champagne, Your Excellency?” she asked the president.

“Thank you,” Wilson said, and took one. So did Anne. He lifted his crystal flute to her. “To civilization, to victory, and to the safe return of your brothers.”

“I’ll gladly drink to that,” Anne said, and did. She turned to Scipio. “You may go.”

“Yes, madam.” He bowed and went on his way, back straight, wide shoulders braced almost as if he were on parade.

“A fine-looking fellow,” Wilson remarked. “Well-mannered, too.”

“Yes, I’m lucky to have him here.” Anne watched Scipio go. He did make an impressive servant, no two ways about it.