Country of the Bad Wolfes Page 7

  In the years ahead he would from time to time and with feigned casualness ask her if there had really been a Sisters of Fortuna sorority. And she would each time respond with no more than her smile of secret amusement.

  Through the rest of the summer they saw each other every day. They went for walks along the river. They went rowing. They went riding—and yes, she rode astraddle. They went swimming with Jimmy and his latest sweetheart, a girl named Madeline Groom, whose father was a federal judge. Even in her woolen neck-to-ankle bathing outfit Elizabeth Anne easily outdistanced John Roger in a race. “Told you so,” Jimmy said. Out of earshot of the others, Elizabeth Anne said to John Roger, “How mush faster I could swim if I took off this foolish costume. Just imagine it.” He imagined it—and she smiled at the look on his face.

  It came as no surprise to him that she was a fine sailor, as he learned at the Rockport estate when they went out on the Hecuba. Or that she was an ace pistolshot, having learned to shoot from Jimmy when she was thirteen. At her suggestion, the three of them spent an afternoon firing the family caplocks at a variety of small targets set upon a fence rail. When she demolished a potato from forty paces, a shot John Roger had just missed, she smiled and blew the powdersmoke from the muzzle as she’d seen trickshooters do at county fairs, then slipped the pistol into the belt of her skirt and stood with hands on hips, grinning at him.

  “Humiliating, isn’t it?” Jimmy said. “Bad enough she can outswim us, but outshoot? It’s more than shameful. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to you about it till she beat you too. It’s the same with the Colt. She needs both hands just to aim that monster and still shoots it better than me. I tell you, chum, there’s something supernatural about this wench.”

  She affected a ghostly apparition, wriggling the fingers of her raised hands and saying, “Woooooooo.”

  They passed the evenings on the Bartlett’s porch glider, holding hands and conversing in low voice, and the next day John Roger would have poor recollection of what they had talked about, so distracted had he been by the nearness of her—and even more so by the kisses they shared at every opportunity. The first time she eased her tongue into his mouth he nearly flinched in his astonishment before going lightheaded with the thrill of it and responding in kind. When they broke for breath, she said she had never kissed anyone that way before but had heard talk of it among some of the Sisters of Fortuna. It was said to be a French innovation. Some of the Sisters had thought the idea vile but most were curious about it. Elizabeth Anne said she herself had been intrigued by it and had made a secret vow to try it sometime.

  “Now that you’ve tried it,” he said, “what do you think of it?”

  “What do you think I think of it?”

  And they did it again. And found it was possible to smile, even giggle, while they were at it. But he was in such a state of arousal—and would be in every instance of such kissing—that he was reluctant to uncross his legs for fear that even in the dim light of the porch she might notice his condition and be repulsed by his baseness.

  He proposed to her in early October, during a Bartlett dinner party on an Indian-summer evening. They went out along the moonlit riverbank and he got down on one knee. His heart heaving as much in terror that she would refuse him as with the bedazzling possibility of her acceptance. He stammered on the word “marry” and she covered her smile with her hand. Then lowered the hand to his hair and said, “Of course I will, my beloved.”

  He jumped up and they kissed for a time and then rushed hand in hand up the sloping yard and into the house to make the announcement—both of them breathless, Elizabeth Anne radiant, John Roger happy and red-faced and oblivious of her lip paint on his mouth and the mud caked on his knee. The Bartletts were jubilant at the news, so too their guests. Mrs Bartlett wept as she hugged her daughter and John Roger in turn. Elizabeth Anne later joked to him that she suspected her mother’s tears were as much of relief that her errant daughter had managed to attract any husband at all as they were of joy that she had acquired such a prize as John Roger. Sebastian Bartlett pumped John Roger’s hand and welcomed him to the family. Jimmy clapped him on the shoulder and wished him luck, saying that with his sister he would surely need it, and then laughed at Elizabeth Anne’s slap to his arm. The dinner party became a celebration that lasted until dawn.

  They married in the First Congregational Church in Concord on a bright but chilly March morning, then were conveyed to the station by landau and boarded a coach for Boston, where they would spend a week’s honeymoon in a fine hotel overlooking the Charles. The other passengers smiled on the happy newlyweds and wished them well.

  Underlying John Roger’s happiness, however, was a mounting apprehension as the wedding night drew near. He’d had no sexual mating other than his initiation by the tattooed whore in Portsmouth, and he was afraid he would prove a maladroit lover to his bride. Throughout their college days Jimmy Bartlett had favored occasional sprees in Portland’s infamous brothels, and during the first year of their friendship he never failed to ask John Roger to go along. But he each time begged off with some excuse until Jimmy finally shrugged and said, “So be it, chum. Every man to his own foibles.”

  The truth was that throughout his college years John Roger had an ardent crave of sexual pleasure. But he had never wholly recovered from the wrenching dread of infection that had haunted him for weeks after his lark with the Blue Mermaid whore. Not only had he never again patronized a brothel, he had even shied from his opportunities with women who were neither whores nor models of virtue. He believed his sexual phobia was absurd but he had not been able to overcome it. Until the advent of Elizabeth Anne, he had feared he was doomed to a lonely and masturbatory bachelorhood. But while his desire for her was rooted in love and free of all fear of disease, he had begun to fret more and more that his lack of experience would render him inadequate in the marriage bed.

  On their wedding night, as he lay abed in their room while she finished with her bath, his apprehension grew overwhelming and he was certain of impotence. She emerged with her face rosy from the bath and the heat of her own excitement, her hair a lustrous spill on the shoulders of her white gown. But as she approached the bed she sensed his tension and in the low candlelight saw the alarm in his eyes. An instinct she hadn’t known she possessed prompted her to kiss a fingertip and put it to his lips, and then she stepped back and turned about and unbelted her gown and let it cascade to her feet. He gaped at her pale nakedness in the lampglow, the shadowed groove of spine and cleft of buttocks. She hummed a tune he did not recognize and slowly turned to face him, smiling her secret smile in the low light, one arm partially covering her breasts, her other hand over her sex. His anxiety gave way to a rush of desire. She flung her arms wide in a presentation of her stark nakedness, breasts upraised and nipples puckered and lean belly sloping to a rubric delta—then swooped down to kiss him, her tongue slicking into his mouth, her breasts pressing to his chest. He broke the kiss with a gasp and pulled her onto the bed and rolled up over her and clumsily positioned himself as her hand went under his nightshirt and found him ready and guided him into her. They cried out together and almost at once, he in the convulsive onset of his climax and she in a momentary twinge and ensuing flash of pleasure. He collapsed on her and rolled onto his side, breathless as one who’s been saved from drowning.

  After a time he raised up on an elbow to look at her. “Are you . . . all right?” And saw that she was smiling.

  And then they were kissing and making bold explorations with their hands as their breath and eager blood quickened yet again. He broke for a moment to fling off his nightshirt and they joined once more. And this time were longer about it.

  They did not fall asleep until nearly dawn, John Roger spooned against her from behind, his face in her hair. Not an hour later he woke to find her turned toward him and studying his face. “What?” he said. “This.” She kissed him. Closed her hand on him. And they coupled again.

  Such conc
upiscence on a wedding night is of course hardly uncommon—the wonder would be that their carnal appetite for one another would not abate over the years. Hugging him close in the early light of their first day as Mr and Mrs John Roger Wolfe, she told him she had not believed she would ever find a mate with whom she could be her true self. He said he never believed he would cease to envy other men for their amorous adventures. She kissed his ear and her smile was sly as she asked, “And now?” Now, he said, he knew that she was the quintessential amorous adventure. They laughed in their happiness at making believers of each other.

  UNCLE REDBEARD

  Although they made love almost nightly, Elizabeth Anne did not conceive in the first year of their marriage. Nor in the second. Nor the third. They concluded she was barren or his seed was lacking, and their disappointment ran deep. But they felt no less fortunate in their shared life. They sought no social entertainment outside of each other and rarely attended parties other than those of her parents. They lived in a lakeside bungalow off Rumford Street, a short walk from the offices of Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. He undertook the study of maritime law and international port regulations and became so expert with them that the firm gained a number of new contracts with major shippers out of Boston. Sebastian Bartlett assured him of a full partnership within three years, which would make him the youngest partner in the firm. Jimmy wasn’t jealous. “You’re better at this game than everybody in the place except Father, so why shouldn’t you be rewarded for it?” he said.

  During the third Christmastide of their marriage, Richard Davison came to visit at the Bartlett home. He was the youngest of Alexandra Davison Bartlett’s three brothers, and the family’s black sheep, but he and Alexandra had always been each other’s favorite. While his brothers pursued careers in New York state politics, Richard left home and roamed widely, mostly in the Southland, and tried his hand at different occupations, but he rarely let three months pass without a letter to his sister. He had been a canal boatman, a stagecoach driver, a town marshal, a river port manager. There were rumors, however, of darker undertakings. Of manhunting for bounty in the Carolinas. Of a fatal street fight in Savannah. Of making off with a man’s wife in Mississippi. Of partnership in a Cincinnati bawdy house. Mrs Bartlett’s veneration of her brother withstood all such gossip, and she would brook no aspersions toward him in her house. Six years earlier in Boston, Richard Davison had formed the Trade Wind Company to import commodities from Mexico and the Caribbean, and Mrs Bartlett took great satisfaction in informing her family of the firm’s growing success. He had visited Concord only once before, in the summer when Elizabeth Anne was six years old, but she had not forgotten his fierce red beard and bright blue eyes, his stubby remnant of a ring finger which he told her had been bitten off by a mermaid. She called him Uncle Redbeard. He had carried her piggyback along the riverbank and made her laugh with his funny stories and vernacular mode of speech that contrasted so bluntly with the formal idiom of the Bartletts.

  Alexandra Bartlett had not seen her brother since a Boston trip she’d made some years before, and she was overjoyed to have him under her roof, if for only three days. He was of medium height and sinewy build, his red beard closecropped and shot with gray, his eyes in permanent pinch from years in the sun. His handshake felt to John Roger like a clasp of dry leather. Though Richard’s pleasure in his sister’s company was apparent, he was reserved with the Bartlett men at the supper table, who in turn were tentative toward him. But he doted on Elizabeth Anne and took an easy liking to John Roger.

  That evening, after the others retired, John Roger and Elizabeth Anne continued chatting with Richard over glasses of port in the parlor, seated before a blazing fireplace as moonlit snowfall drifted past the windows. Entreated by his niece to tell of his adventures, Richard recounted comical anecdotes relating to his sundry occupations, one tale after another, and John and Lizzie struggled to muffle their laughter in deference to those abed. So it went, until the hearth fire was reduced to red embers and the clock softly chimed midnight. By which time the conversation had taken various turns and Richard had learned of John Roger’s fluency in Spanish and mastery of accounting.

  “Bedamn, Johnny,” he said, “if you might not be the very man I’m looking for.”

  He told John Roger that he had opened a branch office in New Orleans, where he was headed from here and where he now received all imports. He could cut his intermediary expenses even more if he had a company office in Mexico, from where he imported coffee and tobacco, his most profitable goods. If he had his own trusted man to run things down there he would no longer have to rely on the local Mexican broker who for almost six years had been working on commission as his middleman with the plantations. “Haciendas, the Mexies call them,” Richard said. “They’re like the plantations we got down South, only a far sight bigger and fancier, or so I’ve heard. And just like down South, the owners—hacendados, they’re called—they live like kings and got the power of God over the slaves, except in Mexico the slaves are Indians and half-breeds on account of they aint got hardly any niggers. Slavery’s supposed to be against their constitution—and who woulda thought they even had such a thing?—but they got slaves just the same, mostly by way of debt to hacienda stores and such. Curious folk, the Mexies. Call us gringos and Yankees and I can understand that, but when they call us North Americans I have to wonder what continent they think they’re a part of. Anyhow, the point is, I got a hunch the Mexie broker’s been cheating me from the start. Sends me a report every year of the coffee that gets stole from the warehouse before shipment, coffee I already paid for, you see. But for all I know he’s the one stealing it.”

  After an extensive correspondence with a Mexican realty firm, he had negotiated a lease for a port office and warehouse, but he hadn’t yet found the right man to put in charge of it. “I need somebody with a head on his shoulders and who can talk good Mexican, and you surely fit the bill, Johnny. But the man I’m looking for has got to have the sand to live down there. I won’t lie to you, son, it’s rough country. Aint been there myself and don’t intend ever to go—it’s the good ole U S of A for me and I aim to stay put—but I know lots who been there and they all tell me it’s rough country, even where you’d be.”

  “And where is that?” John Roger said.

  “Main port on the gulf. Place called Veracruz. Now, I’ll tell you just two more things and I’m done selling. First, you’d have full authority to negotiate for the company down there, and I mean with everybody from the hacendados to the overland transporters to the shippers to the warehouse cleaners. It’d take forever to get anything done if you had to get my OK first on every decision. If after a year you’re doing a bad job of it, I’ll fire you without discussion. If you’re doing a good one, I’ll show my appreciation and you can count on that. The other thing is this. Whatever these legal bigwigs are paying you, I’ll top it by thirty percent. And in case you don’t know it, a Yankee dollar weighs even more down in Mexico. All right, then. What do you say, Johnny? Yay or nay?”

  Except for his own brother, John Roger had never met a man less given to beating about the bush. And not until the moment Richard Davison presented him with this prospect did he realize that, even while he excelled as a New England lawyer and was content with the profession, he was not fully satisfied. He yearned for. . . he couldn’t say what, exactly. . . . Something Other. A sally into the larger world. An Adventure. The realization was itself no less stunning than the possibility that he had been feeling this way for some time without even knowing it. He hadn’t given Mexico a passing thought in years. But now the idea of going there was intoxicating. He turned to Elizabeth Anne to ask if she were amenable to at least discussing the subject, wondering how he might try to sway her. And saw that she was smiling, eyes bright.

  “Oh Johnny,” she said. “Do say yay.”

  Next morning when they told her family, Sebastian Bartlett was aghast. He said it was beyond folly for John Roger to resign a secure and hi
ghly valued position for the sake of a whim. “Odds are you’ll not be long in comprehending your error and wanting to return to the firm,” Mr Bartlett said. “But I cannot promise that the partners will be willing to welcome you back into their employ, not in light of this irresponsible leave of it. And even if they should take you back, your bright prospect for a partnership will undoubtedly have dimmed, if not altogether expired.”

  John Roger said he understood the chance he was taking and thanked Mr Bartlett for his concerned advice.

  Mrs Bartlett’s concern was entirely with her daughter’s well-being. Mexico was so far away. Everyone knew it was a place of political chaos, of disease and poverty and ignorance. Every veteran of the war down there described the people as half-caste brutes given to casual murder. Except for its capital city and a handful of colonial towns, the country was nothing but primitive villages dispersed over every sort of wilderness. How could Elizabeth even think of going there to live?

  Elizabeth Anne took her mother’s hands in her own and said, “Dearest Mother. I love you too. Very much. But I’m going.”

  Jimmy drew John Roger aside and wished him well and said he respected his pluck. “I sometimes think of giving up this easeful life and going off to some wild place to try my manly fortune and tomorrow be damned.” He grinned. “But then I always sober up.” He said he knew John Roger would take good care of Lizzie. “She’s a pest, of course, but, just between us, I am somewhat fond of her.” John Roger said he’d always had that suspicion. Later that evening, in the privacy of his room, Jimmy presented Elizabeth Anne with the Colt Dragoon as a parting gift. “For protection from those half-caste brutes that so worry Mother,” he said.