They married in the First Congregational Church in Concord on a bright but chilly March morning, then were conveyed to the station by landau and boarded a coach for Boston, where they would spend a week’s honeymoon in a fine hotel overlooking the Charles. The other passengers smiled on the happy newlyweds and wished them well.
Underlying John Roger’s happiness, however, was a mounting apprehension as the wedding night drew near. He’d had no sexual mating other than his initiation by the tattooed whore in Portsmouth, and he was afraid he would prove a maladroit lover to his bride. Throughout their college days Jimmy Bartlett had favored occasional sprees in Portland’s infamous brothels, and during the first year of their friendship he never failed to ask John Roger to go along. But he each time begged off with some excuse until Jimmy finally shrugged and said, “So be it, chum. Every man to his own foibles.”
The truth was that throughout his college years John Roger had an ardent crave of sexual pleasure. But he had never wholly recovered from the wrenching dread of infection that had haunted him for weeks after his lark with the Blue Mermaid whore. Not only had he never again patronized a brothel, he had even shied from his opportunities with women who were neither whores nor models of virtue. He believed his sexual phobia was absurd but he had not been able to overcome it. Until the advent of Elizabeth Anne, he had feared he was doomed to a lonely and masturbatory bachelorhood. But while his desire for her was rooted in love and free of all fear of disease, he had begun to fret more and more that his lack of experience would render him inadequate in the marriage bed.
On their wedding night, as he lay abed in their room while she finished with her bath, his apprehension grew overwhelming and he was certain of impotence. She emerged with her face rosy from the bath and the heat of her own excitement, her hair a lustrous spill on the shoulders of her white gown. But as she approached the bed she sensed his tension and in the low candlelight saw the alarm in his eyes. An instinct she hadn’t known she possessed prompted her to kiss a fingertip and put it to his lips, and then she stepped back and turned about and unbelted her gown and let it cascade to her feet. He gaped at her pale nakedness in the lampglow, the shadowed groove of spine and cleft of buttocks. She hummed a tune he did not recognize and slowly turned to face him, smiling her secret smile in the low light, one arm partially covering her breasts, her other hand over her sex. His anxiety gave way to a rush of desire. She flung her arms wide in a presentation of her stark nakedness, breasts upraised and nipples puckered and lean belly sloping to a rubric delta—then swooped down to kiss him, her tongue slicking into his mouth, her breasts pressing to his chest. He broke the kiss with a gasp and pulled her onto the bed and rolled up over her and clumsily positioned himself as her hand went under his nightshirt and found him ready and guided him into her. They cried out together and almost at once, he in the convulsive onset of his climax and she in a momentary twinge and ensuing flash of pleasure. He collapsed on her and rolled onto his side, breathless as one who’s been saved from drowning.
After a time he raised up on an elbow to look at her. “Are you . . . all right?” And saw that she was smiling.
And then they were kissing and making bold explorations with their hands as their breath and eager blood quickened yet again. He broke for a moment to fling off his nightshirt and they joined once more. And this time were longer about it.
They did not fall asleep until nearly dawn, John Roger spooned against her from behind, his face in her hair. Not an hour later he woke to find her turned toward him and studying his face. “What?” he said. “This.” She kissed him. Closed her hand on him. And they coupled again.
Such concupiscence on a wedding night is of course hardly uncommon—the wonder would be that their carnal appetite for one another would not abate over the years. Hugging him close in the early light of their first day as Mr and Mrs John Roger Wolfe, she told him she had not believed she would ever find a mate with whom she could be her true self. He said he never believed he would cease to envy other men for their amorous adventures. She kissed his ear and her smile was sly as she asked, “And now?” Now, he said, he knew that she was the quintessential amorous adventure. They laughed in their happiness at making believers of each other.
UNCLE REDBEARD
Although they made love almost nightly, Elizabeth Anne did not conceive in the first year of their marriage. Nor in the second. Nor the third. They concluded she was barren or his seed was lacking, and their disappointment ran deep. But they felt no less fortunate in their shared life. They sought no social entertainment outside of each other and rarely attended parties other than those of her parents. They lived in a lakeside bungalow off Rumford Street, a short walk from the offices of Fletcher, McIntosh & Bartlett. He undertook the study of maritime law and international port regulations and became so expert with them that the firm gained a number of new contracts with major shippers out of Boston. Sebastian Bartlett assured him of a full partnership within three years, which would make him the youngest partner in the firm. Jimmy wasn’t jealous. “You’re better at this game than everybody in the place except Father, so why shouldn’t you be rewarded for it?” he said.
During the third Christmastide of their marriage, Richard Davison came to visit at the Bartlett home. He was the youngest of Alexandra Davison Bartlett’s three brothers, and the family’s black sheep, but he and Alexandra had always been each other’s favorite. While his brothers pursued careers in New York state politics, Richard left home and roamed widely, mostly in the Southland, and tried his hand at different occupations, but he rarely let three months pass without a letter to his sister. He had been a canal boatman, a stagecoach driver, a town marshal, a river port manager. There were rumors, however, of darker undertakings. Of manhunting for bounty in the Carolinas. Of a fatal street fight in Savannah. Of making off with a man’s wife in Mississippi. Of partnership in a Cincinnati bawdy house. Mrs Bartlett’s veneration of her brother withstood all such gossip, and she would brook no aspersions toward him in her house. Six years earlier in Boston, Richard Davison had formed the Trade Wind Company to import commodities from Mexico and the Caribbean, and Mrs Bartlett took great satisfaction in informing her family of the firm’s growing success. He had visited Concord only once before, in the summer when Elizabeth Anne was six years old, but she had not forgotten his fierce red beard and bright blue eyes, his stubby remnant of a ring finger which he told her had been bitten off by a mermaid. She called him Uncle Redbeard. He had carried her piggyback along the riverbank and made her laugh with his funny stories and vernacular mode of speech that contrasted so bluntly with the formal idiom of the Bartletts.
Alexandra Bartlett had not seen her brother since a Boston trip she’d made some years before, and she was overjoyed to have him under her roof, if for only three days. He was of medium height and sinewy build, his red beard closecropped and shot with gray, his eyes in permanent pinch from years in the sun. His handshake felt to John Roger like a clasp of dry leather. Though Richard’s pleasure in his sister’s company was apparent, he was reserved with the Bartlett men at the supper table, who in turn were tentative toward him. But he doted on Elizabeth Anne and took an easy liking to John Roger.