Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

But Addie was too excited not to go.

By the time they arrived, the roof of the Mills House was already crowded with cheering spectators. It was a starless evening; over the harbor, a faint mist lay; the sudden flash of arcing shells pulsed in it like sheet lightning in summer clouds, lighting the bay like a false dawn. From James Island, Morris, Sullivans, Mt. Pleasant, over forty cannon opened simultaneously, rattling the windows of the buildings south of Calhoun Street, shaking the very cobbles in the streets. Addie later heard it said that Edmund Ruffin, that strange and terrible old man, yanked the lanyard of the columbiad at Cummings Point, after his fellow Virginian, Roger Pryor, offered the honor, could not bring himself to fire the first shot of the war. When dawn broke and the Stars and Stripes still flew over Sumter, the young Confederate gunners mounted the parapets, gave three cheers, and threw their hats for Major Anderson and the Union boys, who showed such pluck under fire. Flushed with fatigue and drink, his eyes glassy, strangely deep, Harlan chose that moment to propose, and Addie, swept up in an emotion she believed her own, said yes. Harlan sent the carriage on and they walked home through a town transformed. At every corner, church bells rang. On the battery, crowds of happy, drunken people strolled arm in arm in their best clothes; the harbor filled with the white sails of pleasure boats. The equal of the scene, they say, has not been witnessed since Paris in the Revolution of ’48.

She looks at him and smiles, and he smiles back. “These were my mother’s.” Harlan touches the handle of a sterling brush, part of a lady’s set reflected in the dressing table mirror. “I thought you might like them.”

“Thank you, yes, I would.” Addie is subdued after the scene downstairs.

A silence falls that neither quite knows how to fill.

“I expect you’d like to see to your toilet,” he says.

“Thank you, yes.”

He smiles. “You have no idea how I’ve looked forward to this evening, Addie.”

Her face, gazing up at his, is grave but forthright. “I hope it will be…” Several possibilities suggest themselves. “…satisfactory, dear,” she chooses. “As you wish.”

“I have no doubt it will. And as you wish it, too, my dear. I expect you have anxieties, Addie. But I want to put you at your ease. The bedroom, dear, should be a place of frankness and freedom. And I want, above all…But I’ve made my speeches for the evening. Another isn’t what the occasion warrants, is it?”

And this, in its own way, is charming, and Addie, as he withdraws into the bath, focuses her attention on it, wanting to be charmed. Frankness and freedom seem, abstractly, to the good, though what they mean, in the specific context, she can only imagine. “As you wish it, too, my dear.” And how does Addie wish it? Strange to say, she has no wish, no fantasy, no tingle of anticipation, not even—as Percival alleged—any fear. Her imagination is disengaged, deader than a stone, and she, in truth, prefers it so. And why is this? Why is stoic resignation what she mainly feels?

Upon consideration, Addie doesn’t like the bedroom, which is painted the old color known as bittersweet, a yellow like crumbling Tuscan walls. It’s dominated by a tester bed, its reeded posts topped by urns that are severe and somewhat funerary, or strike her so. And when she picks up the brush, Addie is repelled to see a hair, a single long black hair, winding like a serpent through the bristles.

But how can she believe it? Addie can’t. She won’t! To believe it would be to entertain a grave doubt of his character and would therefore represent, from her, a grave disloyalty to him. And even were it true, clearly it is something in the past. Clearly. Their anger says as much. Didn’t Harlan say he’d like nothing better than to put her and Paloma on the first boat back to Cuba? And he would hardly be the first man Addie knows to fall prey to that particular weakness, to demonstrate that particular penchant. (Like Percival, she thinks—like father, like son!) Addie’s pacing back and forth before the window now. And perhaps it is his mother’s hair, left all these years…. Yet they’d have cleaned it, wouldn’t they? But who knew, after all, what sort of housekeeping these Cuban women practiced!

And if I were she, Addie thinks, if I were Clarisse and I believed that Harlan thought about me almost as a sister, if I spent weeks preparing a wedding party, and then discovered he was actually ashamed of me…might my eyes not burn and simmer as I looked at his bride, as hers burned and simmered when she looked at me? Addie has stopped before the window now. She’s gazing out, yet her stare is caught up in her own reflection, floating, ghostlike, on the pane and fails to penetrate the dark. “That’s all it is,” Addie tells herself aloud, decisively. “Surely, that is all it is.”

Perhaps it’s the absence of her maid, but as Addie sets about her preparations—as she releases her corset, as she feels the familiar dropping down, the return of fuller breath, as she changes into the peignoir she chose so carefully, so specifically for this one night, as she sits before the mirror and contemplates her face—Addie feels more like a guest at someone’s country house than a new bride, a mistress and a wife. As she brushes out her hair, her thoughts turn to the argument downstairs….

Harlan’s comportment, it’s true, left something to be desired. (All that bellowing and pacing, all the waving of the hands, the mopping of the brow—and such perspiration! She’s never seen the like, yet it’s a meanness to think less of him for a physical affliction—a medical condition, possibly—that’s beyond his power to control.) What matters is a man’s character, his intellect and heart, and isn’t there, in point