Libbie Read online

  "You have used Fanny to make me jealous!" I accused, stamping my foot.

  "No," he said wearily, "I have used Fanny to keep me company."

  I searched his face, looking for a sign of love and seeing instead stubborn determination. "I will speak to Papa," I said.

  He looked at me sternly, and there was still no laughter in his eyes. "I thought that was a man's prerogative. Will you wear the pants once we are married?"

  I blushed furiously. "I... I just thought that... I might make Papa understand...."

  "I will not shirk my responsibilities... nor let it be said that I let a woman do my duty." He stood, arms folded in front of him, a picture of determination.

  "You still want to marry me?" I asked, feeling almost that I must throw my voice across the great gulf that separated us.

  "Yes," he said firmly, though it later occurred to me that he never asked if my mind was still set on marriage. He just assumed that, having once said I loved him, I would always love him.

  "Do I have your agreement that I should approach your father?"

  "Yes," I said miserably, for I could not imagine any outcome of this but the worst. Papa would forbid the marriage and would scorn me for having disobeyed him, while Armstrong, rejected, would return to Fanny Fifeld. I would be left with much less than I had started.

  "Good," Armstrong said. And then he kissed me, tenderly, on the forehead, and we went back to the hotel, but I had the strange sensation that what for me was misery was for him high excitement. He welcomed the challenge just given him, as though he were in battle, albeit on a different battlefield. He intended to win as decisively as he had at Gettysburg.

  Papa, much to my distress, left town the next day. He had business, he said, in northern New York, where we had family ties. "I am sorry to leave you just now, with you looking so pale," he said to me as we stood at the railroad station, "but your mother will be of great comfort to you." It was the closest he had ever come to mentioning my obvious distress.

  All around us were people we knew, waiting to board the train or to meet someone arriving, and it was no time to stamp my foot and say, "But Papa, Armstrong wants to talk to you."

  "We'll be just fine," Mama said, pushing a strand of hair back under her bonnet and smiling reassuringly at Papa. I wondered if she ever disagreed with him about anything.

  With great belching of steam and a roaring whistle, the train came into the station, sending cinders flying. Papa pushed us almost roughly out of the way, and then said, "Good-bye to you both. I will hope to return in two weeks." He took Mama's hand formally, and she replied, "Good day, Mr. Bacon. I do hope you have a pleasant trip," as though she were bidding good-bye to a casual acquaintance. Armstrong and I would never be that casual, I vowed.

  Mama and I walked from the train station to Monroe Street, through the downtown business district. We passed the small shop of Mrs. Morrison, the dressmaker, and I remembered a day shortly after I'd met Armstrong. I'd been headed to Mrs. Morrison's with a coat that needed to be altered. I rang her bell and then chanced to turn around and look at the street—and there he was, watching me! It made my heart jump.

  Armstrong didn't appear this day, though. There was a cool October breeze off the lake, and Mama and I pulled our shawls tighter around us and walked in silence. As we passed the newspaper office, I heard a newsboy yelling, "South wins another battle!" and my heart sank. Armstrong had now been home over two weeks, and if the South had won another battle, all the more reason he would have to return to duty quickly. By the time Papa returned to Monroe, Armstrong would have left... and I would be no closer to being a bride.

  Things happened just as I predicted. Armstrong left a full week before Papa returned. "I cannot write you," I told him at our last meeting, another clandestine affair arranged by Nettie. Sometimes I wonder what course my life would have taken if Nettie Humphrey had not been so interested in the drama of a forbidden romance. Perhaps she, even more than I, was drawn into the theatricality of the situation.

  "I would not have you disobey your father," he said firmly. "I shall continue to write Nettie and hope to hear from you through her. And I shall write your father." Clearly, he was displeased that he'd missed his chance to talk to Papa. Someone else was dictating the terms of his battle.

  "I will miss you," I said tremulously. "I always fear that a Rebel mini ball will get you."

  He laughed confidently. "It won't. Remember Custer's Luck. We will be together for a lifetime."

  I believed him and managed to behave with some decorum in the crowd that gathered at the railroad station the next day to see him off.

  "Will your stepmother suspect your being here?" Nettie asked.

  "Why?" I replied airily. "He's a hero and one of our friends to boot. It's only natural that I join the crowd seeing him off." I'd had on a dark heavy skirt and short gown with a wool shawl, but a bright red scarf at my throat was worn specifically for Armstrong, to echo his own red scarf—as well as to help him spot me in the crowd, for more than fifty people had gathered at the station, and there were cries of "Hurrah for Custer!"

  "Look!" Nettie poked me and slanted her head to one side. I looked beyond her and saw Fanny Fifeld making her way through the crowd. If I behaved with decorum, she knew no such. Her blond hair was in tight curls that bounced unbecomingly as she walked, and she wore a fancy silk "Sunday dress," totally inappropriate for the railroad station.

  "Armstrong!" she called loudly, as though she had no manners.

  Startled, he turned, one foot on the step of the railroad car, and saw her approaching. Hesitantly, he smiled.

  "I wanted you to have this," she said, waving a fine lace handkerchief. "For luck."

  The crowd stared and Armstrong grinned at Fanny, enjoying the attention. "I have Custer's Luck," he said.

  "Now you have Fanny's luck, too." She smiled.

  Armstrong Custer, before my very eyes, leaned down and planted a quick kiss on Fanny's nose. Then he straightened, smiling, waved at the crowd, with a glance in my direction and a slight grin, and disappeared into the railroad car.

  I was seething. Without a word to Nettie, I turned and made my way past the crowd, saying, "Excuse me, please" so brusquely that Conway Noble looked startled and asked if I was feeling well.

  "Fine," I said sharply, and continued on. It took Nettie the better part of a block to catch up with me. When she did, I let loose with the temper that I'd never known I'd had but was only recently discovering. "How could he?" I demanded. "How could he disgrace me like that?"

  "He didn't disgrace you," she said with her usual calm. "No one in that crowd except you, me, and him knows of the agreement between you, so no one would know that his kiss to Fanny had any meaning for you."

  "He knew!"

  "Ah, that's another story. Yes, he knew. But I doubt he did it deliberately, especially not to upset you."

  "Why, then?"

  "On the spur of the moment. Because Armstrong loves being the center of the crowd, loves the dramatic gesture. And it surely was that."

  Her answer did little to lessen my rage. "That's easy for you to say," I said.

  "Yes," she agreed, "it is. It's not my beau who kissed Fanny."

  Nettie, too, had an admirer these days, though Jacob Greene lacked the fire and strength of Armstrong, at least in my eyes. Jacob was tall and blond, like Nettie, with a sort of uneasy grace in his stride and an ever-present grin on his good-natured face. A follower, not a leader, he was a local boy we'd known all our lives who'd joined the Seventh and was serving under Armstrong. On his last leave home, some months earlier, he and Nettie had struck a spark, and now she had two soldiers to correspond with. She shared Armstrong's letters but never those from Jacob, though as far as I knew, their correspondence had not progressed beyond friendship.

  * * *

  Armstrong never mentioned the kiss to Fanny in his letters to Nettie, and she finally convinced me that it was because he thought so little of the incident, he didn't thi
nk it merited comment, let alone apology. His letters to Nettie resumed regularly as soon as he returned to the battlefield, and again my heart was in my mouth when I read them. Each letter tossed me between fears for his life and thrills at the glory of his heroism in battle.

  In October, the Seventh was forced to retreat after days of hard fighting, some of it hand-to-hand. Armstrong wrote to Nettie from Gainesville, Virginia, that he had taken my ambrotype from his pocket just before the charge and looked at it for what he knew might be the last time. His message to me was that he thought of me often and always looked at my picture just before going into battle—how my heart thrilled with fear to read those words! And how I shuddered to read of the death of his orderly, a young man with a wife and small child. "It made me realize," Armstrong wrote, "how close death is to us each and every moment." Of the defeat he said, "My consolation is that I was not responsible, but I cannot but regret the loss of so many brave men." I was innocently pleased that he felt free of responsibility and was sure other officers had blocked what would have been a brilliant victory on his part. In my mind George Armstrong Custer loomed larger than life as both a soldier and a future husband.

  Just after that battle, Armstrong wrote to my father, a long letter, parts of which Papa read me much later. He explained that he had hoped to present his suit in person and begged forgiveness for this letter, which was less than satisfactory. "I have often committed errors of judgment," he wrote, "but as I grew older, I learned the necessity of propriety. I am aware of your fear of intemperance, but surely my conduct in recent years—during which I have not violated my solemn promise, with God as my witness, never to touch alcohol—should dispel that fear.... You may have thought my conduct trifling because of gossip about me and others in Monroe, but it was to prevent gossip and protect Libbie.... I have always had a purpose in life."

  "You knew of this letter?" Papa asked solemnly.

  We were again in the library. October had passed before Armstrong's letter reached Papa, and this talk occurred on a cold and gray November day. The library was as gloomy as the outdoors, and apprehension nearly smothered me, causing me to tremble as though cold. "Yes, Papa. I knew that he would write you."

  Papa, seeing my trembling, rose to stir the embers of the fire. "And you have encouraged him?"

  "I have told him that I would marry him if I loved him, and if you gave your permission." Then I added, "And I do love him... very much." That last took great courage on my part.

  To my great relief—and surprise—Papa said nothing about my having disregarded his order not to see Custer. "If I withhold my permission," he said, speaking slowly and deliberately, his hand stroking the short beard on his chin, "it will not be to thwart your love... nor to prove that I am still your father, with authority over you."

  "Yes, Papa." I hung my head, knowing that he was about to refuse Armstrong's petition and uncertain what I would do next. I could not imagine life without my general.

  "It will take me a great deal of time to think about this," he said. "In the meantime, we will not discuss it, and I do not expect you to communicate with Custer."

  My hopes were dashed, for I had prayed that Papa would at least relent enough to let me correspond with Armstrong. Instead, I was forbidden to communicate, which meant, literally, that I could not even send word through Nettie. But since Papa did not know about Nettie, I did not feel honor bound in that direction. Strange how we can bend the rules of honorable behavior to suit our own needs.

  When Armstrong wrote anxiously to Nettie asking if Papa had received his letter and puzzling over the lack of reply, Nettie was forced to answer that Papa was thinking.

  "Thinking!" Armstrong wrote, and one could almost hear his explosion on the paper, as though the very ink itself had voice. "What in God's name takes him so long in thinking?" Then, more rationally, "Please assure Libbie that I love only her, and think of her every minute that my poor brain is not engaged in military matters."

  * * *

  My stepmother opposed my involvement with Armstrong more strongly than my father, and I sometimes wondered if she was not the one who was influencing him unduly. One day as we shared an afternoon cup of tea, I asked her point-blank why she disliked him.

  "There is a certain wildness about him," she said slowly, staring at her cup as though she could read the future in its tea leaves. "An intensity, something that concerns me. He has not the stability that your father has for a lifetime of happiness together."

  Indignantly I jumped up from my chair. "Armstrong and I will have a lifetime together," I declared passionately.

  "You may," she said thoughtfully, "live a lifetime in a short span of years, but I cannot see you growing old together. I can see your father and me twenty years hence in our rocking chairs, sharing a quiet companionship. I cannot see that with this man."

  I was overwhelmed at these words from a woman I'd always thought so plain, so dominated by Papa that she had no thought of her own. "Oh, Mama," I said, rushing to hug her, "do not say such things to me. And don't hint at them to Papa. Just wish us happiness and let us wed."

  She held me tightly. "I'm afraid it is inevitable," she said.

  Many years later that conversation would haunt me, and I would see her again, sitting in the parlor in that black-and-gray needlepoint chair, her gray dress making her almost a part of the furniture except for her face. The brightness in her eyes seemed to light the room, and her cheeks were faintly pink—with emotion, I thought.

  * * *

  Armstrong did not get leave for Christmas, and nothing brightened the holidays for me. Christmas morning Mama, Papa, and I sat in the parlor and opened our gifts—a scarf that I'd knitted for Papa and an embroidered collar that I'd handworked for Mama. She had given me the daintiest of small gold lockets, with a little note for my eyes only saying she suspected I could find a picture to go in it. From Papa there was a leather-bound volume of Mr. Longfellow's poetry, but the severity of this gift was counterbalanced by a silver-framed mirror and hairbrush for my dressing table, the silver in an ornate pattern of flowers and vines.

  "Thank you both," I said sincerely. "I shall treasure these things."

  Beyond that, I thought the holidays dull. There was a round of parties, and Conway Noble was often my patient escort, though he knew my heart lay elsewhere. When Colonel Frank Earle asked me to take a buggy ride with him, I explained that my father preferred that I not associate with military men. And when France Chandler tried to make me jealous by hovering over Fanny Fifeld, I merely smiled at him and turned away. The parties were beginning to bore me, and so were the men of Monroe.

  * * *

  In February, Armstrong was in Monroe, the first of many times that he would stand before me, unannounced, and delight in my surprise, no matter to him whether I was pleased or angry at his sudden appearance. To my complete surprise and slight alarm, he bounded up the stairs of the front porch on Monroe Street.

  I happened to answer the knock at the door, Betsy being busy in the kitchen, and when I saw Armstrong there, I was overcome with mixed emotions. But the first thing out of my mouth was almost inane. "You've cut your hair!" I cried.

  "Like Samson," he said, "I've lost my strength to a woman and so thought it only appropriate to cut my hair."

  "Balderdash." I laughed. "Why did you cut it?"

  "To be a proper bridegroom. I have a month's leave," he said, brushing the top of my head with his mouth, "enough for a fine wedding and a proper honeymoon."

  I pulled away, afraid of any show of intimacy in my own home. And just then I heard the clearing of a throat behind me. Papa had emerged from his library.

  "Mr. Bacon, sir," Armstrong said. "I've had no answer to my letter and so came to talk with you in person."

  "So I can see," Papa said evenly. "You will step into the library, please. Libbie, I suspect you'll find your mother upstairs."

  Clearly I was dismissed. They stayed closeted in the library for more than two hours, while I pace
d frantically, and Mama, intent on some handwork, clucked from time to time and offered such homilies as "You cannot change your father, dear," or "Why would he rush you into marriage?"

  At one point she grew conversational and told me that her first husband had rushed her into marriage. She'd married him within a month, instead of the year-long engagement she'd expected. "I thought by giving in," she said, "that I was giving up my rights, that I would always have to accede to his wishes whenever any decision of import came up in our lives. It didn't work that way at all."

  I had been barely listening, my ears intent for a sound, any sound, from below. But something about what she'd just said registered, and I asked, "Are you telling me you always got your way? That letting yourself be rushed into marriage is blackmail for future decisions?" I was incredulous.

  "Not exactly," she said demurely, biting off the thread with which she'd been working. "But it's not always bad."

  I confronted her. "Are you suggesting I let Armstrong rush me into a marriage?"

  "I'm not even suggesting you marry him," she said calmly, and I turned away in frustration.

  Finally, when my patience was near gone, Papa called from below. "Betsy has served tea," he said, as though it were an everyday affair.

  When Mama and I entered the parlor, we found Armstrong and Papa together, Papa looking grim, and Armstrong, while not smiling, looking content.

  "I have told General Custer that I will not prevent his marrying my daughter," Papa said very formally.

  I ran to stand next to Armstrong and reached my hand out for his. He had barely given it a reassuring squeeze when Papa continued. "I will not consent to this union, nor give it my blessing, but I will not prevent it."

  Crushed, I slumped into a chair. "Papa, will you give me away?"

  "Yes, daughter, reluctantly. But the world will not know my true feelings. You may have your church wedding. Your bridegroom"—he nodded his head toward Armstrong—"wishes to make that within the next two weeks. I have told him such haste is unseemly and impossible."