[Concluding chapter fourteen]
It would have easier to return to the hotel, wake General Magruder, tell him the whole story, and hope to be arrested for dereliction of duty. Because it would have been easier, Stewart instead forced himself to keep walking past Canal, uptown toward the Swamp and Pauline’s rooms. With Patton on his way west, Thomas headed north to what he believed to be freedom, and Menard gone to some papist vision of heaven, there was no one to comfort or even distract him as he walked.
It didn’t matter, he decided, whether Wilson had been telling the truth about Pauline or not. That the accusation had been made was damage enough. What does it say about me? he wondered. What does it make me, that I would kill a man for saying that? And that I want her anyway?
He felt light-headed and sick to his stomach, and knew that this wasn’t just because he hadn’t eaten all day.
Pauline and Cleburne were seated on the front porch of her building, and both stood as they recognized him. Pauline—who had, thank God, changed out of her costume and cleaned off her make-up—flew from the porch into his arms. She was crying.
“You were magnificent,” he murmured into her hair, feeling disconnected even as he said the words. Pauline was insubstantial in his hands, and he realized that he did not know how to ask her if what Wilson had said was true.
“Patton is all right?” Cleburne asked.
“Patton was never in any danger,” Stewart said. He tried to sound enthusiastic as he described Patton’s departure on what he described as a grand adventure. He didn’t tell them the young idiot had thrown away his army career. He didn’t want Cleburne to think poorly of Patton—at least not just yet.
Cleburne’s eyes seemed to light up as Stewart explained about the Texas filibuster. This was what he wanted; after giving Cleburne a few moments to absorb the story, Stewart said, “You were saying earlier that you thought your life here had got a bit routine.”
Cleburne nodded, suddenly cautious again. “I have you to thank for that,” he said. “You’ve been a bad influence, Captain Stewart.”
“I’m hoping to be an even worse influence. You know what sort of fellow Patton is.”
“Impulsive to a fault.”
“Exactly. I feel a bit of an obligation to look after him, but I can’t”—won’t—”go to Texas. I have more important duties to attend to, back in the Confederacy.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with Thomas, does it?” Cleburne watched him carefully, and Stewart felt Pauline stiffen against him—and now knew why she’d been so nervous around any mention of Thomas.
“No, it doesn’t,” Stewart said, suddenly tired of Thomas and everything he represented. “It’s a military matter, and for obvious reasons I’m not going to tell you more.”
Cleburne brightened up. “In that case, Stewart, the answer to the question you haven’t got around to asking yet is Yes. I’ve heard good things about Texas—so many good things, in fact, as to make me doubt that even a tenth of them can be true.”
“Well, you’ll learn no more from me,” Stewart said. “I know nothing at all of Texas. You’ll have to write and tell me.”
“Consider the first letter already under way,” Cleburne said, clapping a hand onto the shoulder that Pauline wasn’t leaning against. Stewart flinched, though the pain wasn’t nearly as sharp as he’d expected. He’d have a good bruise tomorrow, courtesy of Wilson’s huge hand, but no more. “Tell me which way young Patton is going, and I’ll be off at first light after him.”
* * * *
Stewart and Pauline watched from the porch as Cleburne disappeared in the direction of Canal Street and his small apothecary shop—a shop that would be bearing a “for let” sign by morning.
“I used to think that I understood soldiers,” Pauline said. “But I do not understand how you could laugh and joke with Mr. Cleburne just now, after having come so close to dying tonight.” She shuddered against him. “Or perhaps it’s men in general I thought I knew, and don’t.”
“Oh, I was terrified enough, if that’s what you were wondering. The laughing and the clowning around is because I was frightened. I needed some way of letting loose all of that emotion.”
“I could suggest another way,” she said, and her voice had that low throatiness that had never failed to reach him at his very center.
It would have been easier to simply let her lead him inside. But I’m not doing the easy things tonight. “Pauline,” he said. Something in the way he said it made her turn and look up at him. “I killed that man tonight because of something he said about you.”
She stiffened, and her face seemed to become someone else’s, some stranger’s, so totally did the emotion that defined her to him drain away. “About me? You killed a man because of me?”
“I think I may already have known,” he said carefully. “I think that you tried to tell me yourself. I was remembering, walking over here, about those tiny, neat houses along Ramparts Street and the way you described them to me.”
For a moment he saw hatred in her eyes. Then, her shoulders jerking, she looked up at him. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you thought I grew up in one of those houses?” Now her expression was totally unreadable. “You thought I was a plaçée, or my mother was?”
“But you did, didn’t you?” Stewart felt the world beginning to fall away beneath him. “That man tonight said—”
For a moment he thought she might strike him. “You idiot!” she shouted. “One of them? I hate those people! I would burn them all if I could!”
Now she was crying, huge hysterical gulps for breath punctuated by wracking sobs. “Go away.” It emerged as a wail.
“No.”
Now she did try to hit him. “Get out!”
He grabbed her wrist, then the other when she raised that against him. “Pauline,” he said, as determined as he was confused. “I killed a man tonight because he said you were Negro. You say you’re not, and I’m glad to believe you. But why would he say that, if it weren’t true?”
For a moment she just stared at him. Then she began laughing, and some of the darkness seemed to lift from her expression. “Charles, you lovely fool,” she said. “You’re from Virginia. What else could they call me that would be more likely to upset you? The miscalculation was of what you’d do, not whether you’d believe.”
“Oh.” He felt himself collapsing, and when he came to his senses again he was sitting on the porch. Pauline was beside him. “I am sorry, Pauline. Please believe that I would never hurt you.”
“I know, Charles. I have always known.”
“Would you tell me, please, why you reacted the way you did? If you still want me to, I’ll go. But I’d like to know why I’m leaving.”
Pauline slumped, her breath escaping in a huge rush. “They ruined my life,” she said. “Those women. Well, one of them.” He took her hand in his. “My father was one of those Creoles of whom I am so scornful. His sin was not so much in the taking of a colored mistress as in his falling in love with her. He ignored my mother so completely that she eventually took a lover herself. He was German, I think, but it doesn’t matter. When my father found out, he threw my mother out of the house, sold the property and moved away with his quadroon bitch.” Pauline trembled against him, fighting against tears.
“All this happened before I was born. Near enough to my birth that my father might have been Mama’s husband—or her lover. It didn’t matter much, because the lover abandoned her too. You thought I had grown up in one of those lovely little houses, Charles? I wish I could have had a home like that.”
“Oh, Pauline,” he said. “I am so sorry. I’m ashamed of how thoroughly I’ve misjudged you.” And betrayed myself—again.
“And you, Charles—have I misjudged you?” She seemed to have regained control of herself now, but Stewart doubted he’d ever understand women enough to be sure of anything about them.
“You have not misjudged me,” he said.
“Prove it,” she said, standing and pulling him after her.
* * * *
“You understand that I can’t stay,” he said.
“What, after what we’ve just done?” Pauline stretched, raising her arms above her head. The bed-clothes fell away, and Stewart couldn’t help staring. He wondered if he would ever be able to look at a naked woman as calmly and coolly as Pauline looked at him. “I understand,” she said hurriedly, mistaking his expression. “I’ve always understood.”
“I wonder if you do,” he said. He traced the line of her jaw with a finger, drawing her head up so that she had to look up at him. “I do have to go,” he said. “But it’s only because I have an important message I must deliver. It’s not what you might think. And it never was.” Suddenly he wanted to make some grand gesture, perform some impressive and noble deed—preferably one that didn’t involve killing someone. He wanted to impress her. This doesn’t make any sense, he thought. And I just don’t care.
“You’re saying that even when you thought I was the offspring of slaves, it didn’t matter?” She seized his finger, kissed it, then wrapped her tiny hands around his as best as she could. “How can I believe that?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But it didn’t—doesn’t—matter.”
“Easy to say that now, Charles.”
“Think about it, Pauline. Last night, I believed—what that man said. I killed him for it. And then I came here, knowing that what that man had said was true. I came here because to me you represent nothing but yourself. You’re not a type. Not a ‘mulatto’, an ‘actress’, or any thing. You’re just Pauline, the woman who has bewitched me. And I don’t want to be a type, either. I just want to be who I am, the man who is with you. For as long as we have together.”
“Every time I think I am sure I know you, Charles you surprise me,” she said, settling back into his embrace. “All right: I believe that you mean what you say. But it makes no difference: we have no real future, and you have to know that.”
“My mother and father are Jeffersonians, Pauline. For all I know, they think that a Negro right off the boat from Benin is as much a man deserving of a citizen’s rights as I am. How could they not love you? How could they not see how much I love you?”
“Your mother could never accept me, Charles. And negritude has nothing to do with it.”
“If not for your ancestry, then why?”
“Your mother would never accept me, Charles, because I’m an actress.”
He stared at her for a moment, and then he saw her grin spreading and knew that it was all ridiculous, however true.
They laughed for a long time, and if Stewart sometimes heard a note of hysteria or desperation in that laughter, he found it easy enough to ignore.
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