The Emancipator's Wife (15 page)

And just as well,
thought Mary, stroking her friend's icy hand. She didn't think she could have seen Cash without screaming at him, “How can you do this to Mary Jane?”

Four years had changed her view of what it was for a man to defend his honor. It was no longer a case of the romantic agony of a bride widowed upon her wedding-night, trading bridal white for somber veils of woe. Cash's death would leave Mary Jane a widow and his unborn child an orphan, to be raised by the gloomily triumphant Mrs. Warfield and whatever new husband Mary Jane might eventually find. Their suffering was the price Cash would cheerfully pay, thought Mary, for his precious honor.

Yet no one—not even Mary Jane—seemed to share Mary's awareness. When she spoke her thought to Frances in the carriage on the way out to White Hall, Frances stared at her and said, “For God's sake, Mary, keep your mouth shut! Don't you think Mary Jane is suffering enough?” As if Cash had come down with cholera, and had not chosen to make his wife suffer rather than let some other man call him “nigger-lover” unpunished.

And Mary, sitting mute beside Frances as the team pulled the vehicle up one of the long steep hills by the river, had the queer, sudden sensation of kinship with Mr. Presby. She felt a stranger in an alien land, wanting to shout things in a language that nobody there understood.

That night, at her father's house, after the exhausting afternoon comforting Mary Jane, Mary had dreamed of Cash and the other man both firing into the dirt at their feet. In the dream it was the earth that bled, as if in justification of the Indian name of Kentucky, “The Dark and Bloody Ground.” On her way down to breakfast a few hours later Nelson caught her with the news that both Cash and his opponent had shot deliberately wide, and Mr. Presby subjected everyone at the breakfast-table to a scathing sermon on the evils of dueling, a practice never engaged in in the North. (“Except by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr,” remarked Mary, shaking out her napkin, which earned her a bespectacled glare from the tutor.)

But every man Mary knew—including her father and both her uncles—carried weapons when he left his front door. In the glass showcases of half the shops, braces of pistols were displayed along with silk scarves and necklets of pearls. Men showed off their knives to one another, which they carried sheathed beneath their superfine swallow-tailed coats, and spoke with pride of the swords concealed within the hollow shafts of their canes. During the election of 1836 feelings ran high, and there were shouting-matches at political-speakings, the hot tempers fueled by Kentucky bourbon. The ladies mostly kept clear of these—as ladies must—but unlike most ladies of her acquaintance, Mary could not pretend she didn't see what she saw: red faces, mouths stretched by shouted oaths, the vicious blaze of violence in men's eyes.

Men spoke admiringly of the “code duello” of the South, but there was little of that punctilious tradition in the brawling that broke out at Court Days. On one occasion Mary saw Cash holding back the crowd while his friend Jim Rollins kicked and lashed a Louisville Democrat who'd sung a song insulting Henry Clay:
“In spite of his running he never arrived. . . .”

Dust stinging her eyes and the smell of blood in her nostrils, Mary thought,
I can't live like this. I can't.

She turned her face aside and found herself looking down a quiet street near the Courthouse, in time to see her neighbor Mrs. Turner being helped by her coachman into a carriage. There was a slave boy with them, carrying two small parcels his mistress had bought from the peddlers in front of the Courthouse. At the sound of the ruckus around the fight the boy checked his steps and craned his neck, and without word or admonition Mrs. Turner took the coachman's light whip from beside the dashboard and caught the youth a savage lick across the backs of his legs that dropped him to his knees. The parcels went tumbling into the dust. Mrs. Turner lashed the boy a second time, this time across the face, and stood quiet as a schoolmistress in her walking-dress of lavender-gray while the boy picked up the parcels and staggered to his feet, blood running down his face.

Then she handed the whip back to her coachman, and got into her carriage, the boy handing in her packages and scrambling up behind.

Where will I be in five years?

That year, Frances went to Springfield, Illinois, to visit Elizabeth and Ninian.

“I daresay it won't be long till Elizabeth finds a husband for her,” remarked Betsey in a tone of deep satisfaction, when Frances's first letter reached them in Lexington, speaking of her warm welcome to Ninian's big house on the hill, and the cheerful entertainments planned by the best of Springfield society. Like Lexington, Springfield was a new town, rough and raw on the bluffs above the Sangamon River, but growing fast. Like Lexington, it was a hotbed of state and local politics, with money to be earned and money to be grabbed in land-dealing and political patronage.

Like Lexington, too, Springfield seethed with Todd cousins and Todd connections. Half of southern Illinois was populated by Kentuckians who had crossed the river rather than compete, in industry or agriculture, with the slaves the Virginians brought in. Mary's uncle John Todd was a physician in town; another uncle there was a judge. Her handsome cousin John Stuart was a lawyer there, as was her cousin Stephen Logan from the other side of the Parker family: both were active in the Legislature in Vandalia, and there were female cousins as well, Lizzie and Francy and Annie. In her letters Frances sounded very much at home.

“And high time,” Betsey added, folding up the letter and glancing along the table at Mary. Margaret, Sammy, David, and Martha had been joined in Mammy Sally's care by beautifully dimpled little Emilie, and Mary suspected her stepmother was increasing yet again. Robert Todd was as usual in Frankfort at the Legislature. “A girl who isn't married by the time she's nineteen just isn't trying.” Mary would be nineteen in December. “I don't know what she's waiting for.”

“Maybe to fall in love?” Mary dusted sugar over the dish of mulberries and cream that Pendleton had handed her. She didn't look up, but felt her stepmother's glare.

“Girls fall in love every other week—most girls do, that is. I hope your sister isn't too high in the instep for the Springfield boys.”

“And in any case,” added Mr. Presby disapprovingly, “the whole idea of young females ‘falling in love' and marrying willfully whoever takes their fancy is, I believe, responsible for a great deal of heartache and unhappy matches.” He spooned a frugal pinch of salt onto the oatmeal he'd requested Betsey have Chaney make for him—everyone else in the household ate cornbread or grits. “The writers of romantic novels have a great deal to answer for.”

“Surely you aren't advocating the selection of husbands by professional matchmakers, as they do in China, Mr. Presby?” Mary fluttered her eyelashes. “Or perhaps by the lawyers of the young ladies' families?”

Mr. Presby's upper lip seemed to lengthen with disapproval. Over the years their relations had not improved—once they had nearly come to a screaming-match over molasses. “It is to be hoped that Mrs. Edwards, with a certain amount of experience in the world, will be able to guide Miss Frances's choices and make sure that she marries a gentleman, and a man of means sufficient to support her in the comfort to which she is accustomed. I am sure that otherwise there is no happiness to be expected.”

She would miss him, Mary thought, when he returned to New England to take up a parsonage in one of those gray little towns where no one seemed to have any fun.

Already she missed Frances. Ann—now fifteen and finished with whatever the Reverend Ward could teach her—she had never liked, bearing her an obscure grudge from the days when she'd learned that her own name would be shortened from Mary Ann to simply Mary...as if Ann had willfully stolen half her name. Ann was a tale-bearer, a crybaby, and had a temper almost as bad as Mary's—without Eliza to keep the peace between them, they had come to hair-pulling more than once.

Eliza finished her schooling and had returned to Frankfort. Mary wrote to her weekly, as she wrote to Frances and Elizabeth and Meg in Philadelphia, but it wasn't the same. One by one the friends Mary had made at Ward's school had married, or were engaged. When she went to the dances at Giron's, the talk among them was all of servants and babies, or the latest of them to be engaged. There were new young belles “coming out”—including Ann—girls four and five years younger than Mary. Though Mary laughed and flirted, she felt increasingly alone.

It was her last year at Rose Hill. She was the oldest girl in all the classes, and helped Madame Mentelle with the younger ones. She still had the room she'd shared with Meg, at the end of the narrow courtyard on the family side of the house, but she now occupied it alone. More than once Madame had said to her, “You are like a daughter to me.” Her own daughters were married, Marie to the son of Henry Clay (“A drunkard who'll break his father's heart,” predicted Betsey, with gloomy satisfaction).

“It is a shame and a disgrace that there is no possibility for a young woman to attend college the way a young man does,” declared Cash, when he encountered Mary at a Court Day in the spring of 1837. “You're a perfectly intelligent person—God knows more intelligent than half the men of my acquaintance. You're well read, well informed, politically astute.” He frowned, his black brows plunging down over the slight hook of his nose. “Yet this country can find no better use for you than to marry you off to a bucolic ignoramus like Nate Bodley.”

He jerked his head in the direction of the planter's son, standing with half a dozen of his cronies around Bill Pullum. Pullum had a young slave woman with him, and by the sound of their voices, and the stony expression of the girl's face, there was bargaining going on. Nate's voice rose over the others: “Yeah, but will she breed, that's what I want to know.” He grabbed the front of the girl's yellow calico dress in both hands, pulled it open and down over her arms, to squeeze her breasts.

“Yet what choice does a woman have in this country—or in any country?” went on Cash, not quite rhetorically, but with his usual habit of preaching to Mary about her rights. “‘Female seminaries'...‘young ladies' academies'...Faugh! Marriage-marts by another name!”

Cash had recently expanded his interest in abolition into what he sometimes termed “the rational treatment of females”—something Mary Jane laughed gently over, because her husband still hadn't the faintest idea what it cost to run a household. “This country will remain in bondage until women as well as men free their slaves, make up their own beds, wash their own clothes, throw away their corsets....”

“Why, Cash,” purred Mary, flipping open her fan and widening her eyes at him over its lacy brim, “I never
dreamed
you wore corsets.”

Caught off-guard in mid-tirade, Cash burst into laughter, his eyes twinkling: “You, young lady, are a minx,” he said. “Now you tell me whether you don't think women should have the same rights to be educated as well as men—to hold property in their own names—even to vote!”

“I'm not sure,” said Mary in a judicious tone, “that I'd sleep well at night knowing Arabella Richardson could vote for the President of the United States,” and Cash laughed again.

“I don't sleep well knowing Nate Bodley can. You aren't going to marry him, are you, Molly?”

Mary sighed, and turned her eyes away in sick distaste from the sight of Nate and his friends clustered around Bill Pullum and the slave girl in yellow. “He's rich,” she said. “And Betsey has been trying to push us together. When he comes to the house on Saturday evenings she always finds some reason to leave us alone in the parlor, and whenever I go to the theater or the Lyceum, it's ‘Why don't you send a note to Indian Branch?' I don't...” She hesitated, looking up at the man by her side, the eagle profile, the lively sparkle of his mad green eyes.

There was a man, she thought, who was going somewhere, who was going to make something of himself.

Maybe she wouldn't end up marrying the President, she reflected. But a man who wasn't in politics at all—who only followed what all his friends proclaimed—seemed to her not wholly a man. And though she knew that other men examined female slaves in the same fashion in the open markets, she also knew it wasn't the same.

Then she tossed her head again, making the ribbons dance on her bonnet and her bronze curls bounce. “I can't imagine spending the rest of my life listening to Nate Bodley go on about his racehorses and his slaves....Not that there's anything the matter with his racehorses, of course.”

But when Cash had conducted her back to where her father and
Betsey stood on the Courthouse steps, and she asked—hesitantly—about going on with her education, her father frowned in puzzlement, and said, “Do you mean to be a schoolteacher, then?” in a voice of disappointment and disbelief.

As if, thought Mary, she had expressed an interest in becoming a nun. A Presbyterian one, presumably...

Levi and George snickered and nudged one another. George, at thirteen, had already been in half a dozen brawls at Court Days and politicalspeakings. Levi, four years older and living now in a boarding hotel, was drunk, though it was early in the afternoon.

“I think it's an excellent idea.” There was something in Betsey's tone of a woman in a shop slapping down a coin to buy the last packet of pins before a rival's hand can touch it. “The Reverend Ward was telling me only the other day what an exemplary student Mary was when she attended the Academy, and how he would have loved to have her return for further study and to teach the younger children. Although really,” she added, with a titter of laughter and a sharp look at Mary under her bonnet-brim, “now that Frances has gotten engaged up in Illinois I bet it won't be long until
you
catch a husband—”

“I didn't say I wanted to be a teacher,” Mary interrupted, feeling as if her stepmother had given her a shove toward the door of the house.

“Then what did you say?” Betsey's glance was like steel. “Honestly, Mary, I'm only trying to help you....”