Secessia (9780802191335) by Wascom Kent

Author:Wascom, Kent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 2015-05-28T16:21:22+00:00

Dr. Sabatier

Six

Inheritance

“So, is General Butler as ugly as he looks in the papers?”

His eyes make arcs of the Woolsack parlor. This afternoon Elise has already asked whether Butler does in fact collect “confiscated” silverware and Negroes, whether he means to stir insurrection in the poor, whether he really will enforce the suspension of President Davis’s proclaimed Day of Thanksgiving.

Before he can answer she catches to another bit of self-satisfied brightness and adds: “Or at least how he was in our old papers.”

The old papers, whose columns once reported the happenings of Boston or Chicago only in the snide and clipped way one might relate the doings of a former lover, are much changed. The True Delta, unrepentant to the last, is closed; the Crescent, the Picayune, the Bee, the Catholic Reporter, all have had their staffs replaced by Union men or by subtler means become convinced to print the news for Northern eyes. So we’ve come to find, battles believed won a month past are in fact lost, and those who were once heroes are made villainous in these playbills of the national stage with the ease of actors slipping back and forth from behind curtains.

The doctor runs a hand across the buckles of his portfolio, within which the will and testament of Angel Woolsack waits.

“Uglier than that, I’m afraid,” he says, placating, his capacity for small talk flagging even as Elise takes this statement as invitation to inquire after the specifics of the general’s hideous physiognomy, which he gives as best he can, occupying his mind with the London method. The crank between her thighs. And one wonders, at times like this, if women have even the barest inkling of what we really think.

Elise listens, never shifting in her maroon wingback, a triumphant drawl to her ohs and ahs. Oblivious. She’s gathered some mourning weight, a babyish bulge at the corners of her mouth. See how she attempts to mask the doubling of her chin by thrusting out her jaw so that she must look at him from downcast eyes. Blessedly, they are alone; she must have dismissed the women who have for the past weeks made up her seraglio of grief.

“A shame Joseph couldn’t be with us,” he says, instantly regretting having done so, sure that he’s flung open the trapdoor to the bottomless pit of maternal interest.

But here she winces; silk creaks with the tensing of her legs. “He’s upstairs, and won’t be coming down.”

He has the portfolio unbuckled, the will freed. A single page covered in the tight script of Edward Purcell, Atty., signed with Woolsack’s spattered scythe-blade scrawl, and witnessed by the same hand that holds the sheet.

“Nothing wrong, I hope?”

“Not at all,” she says, her mood darkening swift as an eclipse.

Likely the boy is hunched over his father’s crazed manuscript, or perhaps taking advantage of these motherless moments for more traditional boyish pursuits. The doctor grins, but then there is the image of himself, age thirteen, sweating while the priest behind the screen asks whether he takes undue knowledge of his private parts.

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