Free The Bride of Texas by Josef Škvorecký Page B

it. Oh, God! It must have been worse for him than I realized. This handsome, honourable, sensitive mountain of a man — how did he ever end up a soldier, anyway?
    Should he have remained a tailor?
    “You know, Miss Lorraine, I’m not very smart,” he said sadly. “But unlike a lot of other fools, I’m smart enough to know that I don’t have a whole lot up here,” and he tapped his forehead.
    “That’s not true!” I exclaimed, but I was interrupted by the shriek of the locomotive braking. He bent down and picked up his valise. “You’re intelligent and sensitive,” I insisted. “Any girl would be proud to — but I —” How do you explain the inexplicable, when it’s as clear as a slap in the face?
    “They’re going to publish your novel,” he said sadly.
    “That’s not the point,” I said. The stationmaster was calling all aboard. “It’s just that I don’t really want to get married! I want to be independent! I want to write novels and work for —”
    Ambrose had mounted the steps to his car when he said something unexpected. “You’d be wasted on me. I’d be no good for you. I’m not up to it.”
    The train started to pull out.
    “That’s not the reason, Ambrose, believe me!” I called after him.
    He waved.
    “Forgive me, Ambrose! Ambro-o-o-ose!” I was screaming like a hysterical female. I could hear Andromeda neigh uneasily from the railing.
    The train and Ambrose vanished, and that was the last I saw of him until thirteen years later, in Cincinnati, when he was named commander of the Department of the Ohio. By then he had his only real military success of the war, the capture of Roanoke Island, under his belt. And he’d been through Fredericksburg, probably the worst military catastrophe ever endured by a Union general. I had been married to Professor Tracy for years, had two children, Jimmy and Loretta, and under the pseudonym Laura Lee I was the country’s most popular author of novels for young girls. I wove into these novels my mildlysubversive messages about young men who were invariably described as “handsome”. That was all that remained of my dream of being a great champion of women’s emancipation. I was now a lady, the wife of a college president and professor of philosophy at the Academy in Cincinnati.
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    My curiosity about the impact of time on his beautiful side-whiskers moved me to send him my calling card when he arrived in Cincinnati. I was somewhat nervous about it, but I believe that time is a sieve that allows the bad things to pass through and retains only the good ones. I also knew that he had married not long after the disaster in Liberty, that he was a model husband, and that his marriage was a happy one and as solid as the rock of ages. In the meantime, side-whiskers had become all the rage, both in the army and outside it. People had taken to calling them “sideburns”, a word they’d coined by twisting Ambrose’s surname, thus ensuring him a place in history long after everyone but the historians had forgotten that he’d botched the job at Fredericksburg, or at least earned the reputation of having done so.
    Actually, when you stretch the chain of cause and effect to the limits, the catastrophe at Fredericksburg was Lincoln’s fault.
    “As long as he was merely offering me the supreme command,” Ambrose admitted in a weak moment, while he was trying to sort out the conundrum of Vallandigham, the traitor in his eyes, and
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— which he finally resolved like Antigone, correctly, so my husband says. “As long as he was merely asking me to take it, I kept saying I wasn’t worthy of the honour. But Lorraine, the president had little choice — and then there was Roanoke and the retreat at Bull Run. Iwas only in command of a division there, that’s something I’m up to — but the president didn’t consider that. He probably said to himself, ‘If he can do that well with a division, he won’t be likely to do much worse