George couldn't tolerate it. He hid himself in the library. He'd been there about twenty minutes when the doors rolled back and Virgilia and Madeline came in.
"Are you all right?" Virgilia asked, hurrying to him. Madeline closed the doors, then fiddled with a black handkerchief tucked into her sleeve. His cravat undone, George sat staring at the women.
"I don't know, Jilly," he said. Virgilia was startled; he hadn't called her by that childish nickname since they were very small. Suddenly, he got to his feet. "What happened to her defies all reason. My God, it defies sanity."
Virgilia sighed. She looked matronly, and neat and well groomed in contrast to Madeline's obvious poverty. She said, "So does the world. Every day of our lives, I've discovered, we live with stupid mischance and clumsy melodrama, cupidity, greed, unnecessary suffering. We forget it, we mask it, we try to order it with our arts and philosophies, numb ourselves to it with diversions — or with drink, like poor Stanley. We try to explain and compensate for it with our religions. But it's always there, very close, like some poor deformed beast hiding behind the thinnest of curtains. Once in a while the curtain is torn down and we're forced to look. You know that. You went to war."
"Twice. I thought I'd seen my share"
"But life's not so logical as that, George. Some never see the beast at all. Some see it again and again, and there seems no sense to any of it. But when we look, something happens. It happened to me with Grady, and it took me years to understand it. What happens is that childhood comes to an end. Parents call it growing up, and they use the phrase much too casually. Growing up is looking at the beast and knowing it's immortal and you are not. It's dealing with that."
Head down, George stood by the library table. Near the fragment of star iron and a sprig of mountain laurel sat a soiled old beaver hat. It had been found on the lawn below the dormer Bent had entered. George's hand swept out, knocking the hat off the table and, inadvertently, the laurel. He put his foot on the laurel and crushed it.
"I can't deal with that, Jilly. I can't do it."
Madeline's heart broke. She wanted to take him in her arms, draw him close, comfort him. She was surprised and a little embarrassed by the strength of her feeling for the man who was her late husband's best friend. Color in her cheeks gave her away, but the others didn't notice. She quickly brought the emotion under control by turning away and putting her handkerchief to her eyes.
"Jilly —" He was calmer now. "Would you or Madeline please ask Christopher Wotherspoon to step in? I'd like to start on the arrangements for my trip."
Virgilia couldn't believe it. "This afternoon?"
"Why not this afternoon? You don't think I'm going out there and drink and crack jokes, do you?"
"George, these people are your friends. They're behaving in a perfectly appropriate way for a wake."
"Damn it, don't lecture." The brief communion, begun when he first called her Jilly, was over. "Wotherspoon has a lot to do to oversee Hazard's in my absence. He and Jupe Smith must also start up the Pittsburgh plant."
"I hadn't heard you were going away," Madeline said.
A listless nod. "I have business in Washington. After that — well, I'm not sure. I'll go to Europe, perhaps."
"What about the children?"
"They can finish the school year and join me."
"Where?" Virgilia asked.
"Wherever I happen to be."
Madeline and Virgilia exchanged anxious looks while George picked up the broken sprig of laurel. Contemptuously, he flung it in the cold hearth.
That night, very late, George woke. He felt like a child, frightened and angry. "Why did you do this to me, Constance?" he said in the dark. "Why did you leave me alone?"
He struck the pillow and kept striking it until he started to cry. He felt ashamed; ashamed and lost. He put his head down on the pillow. From the heavy starched cloth crept a scent, her scent, the imprint of someone who had shared the bed and the pillow for years. She was gone but she lingered. He tried to stop crying and couldn't. He cried until the gray light broke.
Every sheriff and metropolitan detective in Pennsylvania searched for Elkanah Bent. When he wasn't found by New Year's Day, George suspected he would not be found soon, if at all.
On the second day of the new year, 1868, George called on Jupe Smith and instructed him to put the new rail car up for sale. He then packed one valise and bid the servants and Patricia and young William goodbye. The children felt cast adrift. Could this cold, empty-eyed man be their father? William put his arm around his sister. In a moment, he felt years older.
George boarded the noon train to Philadelphia, speaking to no one.
At the War Department, a captain named Malcolm went through the ritual of sympathy. He asked, "There's no sign of this madman?"
"None. He's disappeared. I'd have caught him if the goddamn train hadn't been late —"
George stopped. He tried to relax the hand gripping the chair arm in Malcolm's office. Color returned slowly to his fingers and wrist. He wished he could tear the barbed ifs from his mind. It was impossible. He wished he could be man enough to do what Virgilia talked about: grow up; look at the beast. He'd looked, but it was destroying him.
Captain Malcolm saw his visitor's state and remained silent. Malcolm himself was under great strain, along with every other staff officer unlucky enough to be posted to Washington. The whole department had been in turmoil for months, following Johnson's suspension of Stanton as Secretary of War last August. Since a suspension was expressly prohibited by the Tenure of Office Act, Mr. Stanton, both, a Radical and a clever lawyer, denied the validity of the suspension. Grant, nevertheless, was rather reluctantly serving as interim secretary.
The President had suspended Stanton to test the Tenure Act and defy the Radicals, and they were after him for it. Early in December they had introduced an impeachment bill in the House. It had failed, but Malcom was assured the question would not be dropped. He understood the Senate was preparing to formalize its rejection of the suspension, and that might well provoke another attempt to oust Stanton. All of this made life difficult; Malcolm didn't know which of his departmental colleagues could be trusted with any remark beyond a pleasantry. At least this tragic man seated on the other side of the desk was not a part of the conflict.
Presently George said, "I've hired the Pinkerton agency. I want to give them all available information."
"I have a man searching the Adjutant General's personnel records now. Let me see how he's coming."
Malcolm was gone twenty minutes. He returned with a slim file, which he laid on the cluttered desk. "There isn't much, I'm afraid. Bent was charged with cowardice at Shiloh while temporarily commanding a unit other than his own. Lacking conclusive evidence in the matter, General Sherman nevertheless ordered a notation in his record and exiled him to New Orleans. He remained there until the end of General Butler's tenure."
"Anything else?"
Malcolm went through it. "Created a disturbance at a sporting house owned by one Madam Conti. Apprehended stealing a painting that was her property. Before Bent could again be brought up on charges, he deserted.
"There is one final entry, a year later. A man answering Bent's description worked briefly for Colonel Baker's detective unit."
George knew the work of Colonel Lafayette Baker. He recalled newspaper editors thrown into Old Capitol Prison for dissent about the war or criticism of Lincoln's policies and cabinet officers. "You're referring to the secret police employed by Mr. Stanton."