Love, Come to Me(50)

Lucy shot up from her chair. “You don’t even have any friends,” she said vehemently. “Except for whoever it is you visit in Boston, whoever it is that fascinates you so much—”

“What are you talking about?”

“And you don’t want me to have any friends either. Well, I will! Nothing you do will stop me from seeing Betta and the rest of them!”

“So be it,” he said, the softness of his voice making her shiver. He turned and strode out of the room while she called after him in impotent rage.

“And you can’t ever make me leave here! You’d have to drag me away kicking and screaming, and then I’ll leave you and come back!”

She heard his heavy footsteps as he went up to his bedroom. A few seconds later she was weak and tired, staring at the dirty dishes on the table, pondering the question of how her life, which had once been so good, had been ruined so completely. Was it her fault—had she done something so terribly wrong that she had deserved to have Daniel taken away from her and a hateful stranger put in his place?

Maybe Heath will leave me, she thought dully. Neither of them could last much longer like this. Maybe he would decide that he’d had enough and that he wanted to go back South where he belonged. It was ironic that that thought brought a terrible emptiness inside instead of comfort.

Why didn’t she understand anything anymore?

The Country and the Collapse. She had bought a copy of the book that Heath had written, and she had sneaked it home as guiltily as if she had been doing something forbidden. Thick and well-bound, the book made barely a crackle as she opened it. Alone in the parlor, Lucy turned each page as if seeking some elusive clue to the man she had married. The book outlined the story of a regiment from Virginia during the war, written in a clean, stripped style. Sometimes the writing was as casual as that of an unedited journal, while at other points it took the form of clear and precise prose.

Slowly the book caught her interest as she recognized bits and pieces of her husband winding through the pages with increasing frequency. There were odd notes of humor and descriptions that were sometimes moving, sometimes grotesque. There were stories set off by themselves without preface or conclusion, so cryptic and personal that she was embarrassed and startled by their frankness. The more she read of his book, the more hopeless a task it seemed to come to an understanding of him. The men she had known—Daniel and David Fraser, the boys she had gone to school with, the shy and polite men she had met at dances—had all seemed like such uncomplicated creatures. They liked to flirt with pretty women. They liked to talk among themselves about war and strike manly postures. They were so easy to flatter and cajole. Most of them couldn’t stand a woman’s tears, and none of them could bear a woman’s frosty silence when they had displeased her.

But Heath was different from all of them. He only laughed when she was mad at him, or did his best to provoke her even more. Her silences didn’t bother him a bit. And even when he looked relaxed and lazy, underneath the surface lurked the most biting sarcasm that she had ever been exposed to. Surely there was some key to him, something that would give her the ability to know what to say to him. She would dearly love to know how to make him wince uncomfortably as he could make her wince. She would give her left arm to know how to win an argument over him. But trying to see into his heart was like trying to see through a stone wall.

Something in this book, perhaps—there must be something here that would help her find the answers. Staring at the pages intently, Lucy found that she didn’t have the objectivity necessary to see things clearly. All she understood was that as chapter followed chapter, his scruples seemed fewer and farther between, and his feelings more shadowy. He wrote about the heroic deeds of his comrades in a way that made them seem like vainglorious fools. Somewhere in the middle of the book a chapter ended in the middle of the description of a battle. The next chapter was headed with the words Written at Governor’s Island . . .

“Prison camp,” she whispered, feeling a chill of shock at the revelation. Heath had never mentioned anything about having been kept in such a place. On both sides, North and South, the prison camps had been known as the most disgusting, unsanitary, and dangerous places on earth. Hundreds of men had been crushed together without adequate shelter, forced to survive on tiny quantities of unfit food. Disease had swept through the camps unmercifully, unrelieved by medicine. A few words jumped out of the next few pages: . . . captured in summer clothes . . . so cold here . . . men dying of typhoid . . . new outbreak of measles . . . exchange, exchange—the rumors lead to the highest hopes and the worst depressions . . . no water fit to drink . . .

Lucy closed the book with fumbling hands, curiously upset. She didn’t want to know what Heath had gone through during the war, how long he had been in prison camp or how he had gotten released.

You’d be surprised about the amount of things you don’t know about men and their integrity . . .

Did he ever think about the prison camp or had he buried it deeply in his mind? What had he done to survive? Why hadn’t he ever told her about it?

She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to feel sympathy for him. She didn’t want to know this insistent urge to take him in her arms and offer comfort for things that had happened so long ago. It was all in the past, she reminded herself. He didn’t need comfort or sympathy now, and he certainly didn’t need any silly attempts of her to approach him.