Free Sex Wars by Marge Piercy Page A

life with his passive, placid wife and two daughters. But for the war, he might have continued so.
    The war had shattered his sense of human possibilities. A quiet abolitionist, he had enlisted early and fought hard. He had seen men slaughtered around him, their bodies soaking the mud red, their limbs smashed by cannonballs, their skulls broken like eggs. When he returned a hero, he could not fit back into his old life. He was haunted by the dead. He saw ghosts, who sometimes tormented him and sometimes seemed fiercely eager to communicate. He could no longer make love to his wife. He felt estranged from her and everyone he had known. When he fell in love with Victoria, he was ready to discard all he had ever cherished or worked at or owned—and he did. He ran off with her. Later, being a man of probity, he returned, paid off his debts, divorced his wife and gave her his earthly goods. There was a core of cold intellect in him that Victoria both respected and sometimes regretted, for it kept him from the sensual abandon she knew herself capable of. Still, they were well mated. He was not possessive, for the ideas he held of free love and free union were far more important to him than possession of her.
    “And how is Tennessee?”
    “Well and eager. She has plans for the Commodore.”
    Colonel Blood had agreed to take Tennessee in when she had fled the Claflin clan. Tennessee had been supporting the family for years and—sick of that life—longed for something better, so James had willingly taken her under his protection. He was not interested in Tennie the way men usually were. He was too much in love with Victoria, and he liked his women slenderer and brighter, but he understood Victoria would not rest until she had freed the sister she loved.
    “Did you bring me more books?” She squeezed his arm gently. His arm could pain him where he had been wounded in yet another battle. He had begun systematically educating her. In school, she had been an excellent student, but Roxanne and Buck were always pulling her out to be hired as a domestic servant, to care for the younger children, to front Buck’s traveling circus of patent medicines and wonder cures. She was sureher clan would show up on her doorstep as soon as Tennie and she had established themselves. Victoria took as given that she and Tennessee would always have to support the Claflin family. They had grown up in a state of siege with whatever neighbors they had at the time, always the respectable element gossiping about them, trying to get rid of them. So they stuck together, family first. She had grown up with neighbors pointing at her, whispering about her family, insulting her. They were pariahs. “You were able to raise some money?”
    “Sold off some stocks I still had. Where are you bivouacked?”
    “In a cheap boardinghouse. It won’t do. We need a decent address.”
    He slapped his waistcoat. “We can get set up quickly. I’ll work on it tomorrow. Find a flat or a brownstone.”
    “Tennie and I have made friends with the keeper of a high-toned brothel, Annie Wood. She knows how to furnish a place elegantly but cheaply. I’m going to visit her tomorrow late morning when she rises. We sometimes take coffee together in her conservatory.”
    “I look forward to meeting her.”
    “She’s a Southerner but don’t get your back up. She has a lot of colored girls working for her, and she treats them better than most madams treat their white whores. She takes care of her girls, and she pays off the police and the politicians handsomely—two hundred dollars monthly for the police alone—and gives them a free ride once a week, so there’s no danger of any of the girls ending up in the Tombs.”
    “The tombs? You mean, dead?”
    “That’s what they call the jailhouse here. A big ugly building that looks vaguely Egyptian. May we never see the inside of it!”
    “Why should we?”
    “You know my family.”
    He grunted assent, hailing a horse cab and