Upset, he struggled up on his elbow. "No, no," she said. "It's ail right, Charles. You need to talk about it. There's something I need to talk about, too. Tomorrow," she murmured, drawing his back against her bare breasts, reaching over to close and softly stroke his eyes.
In the early morning hours, for the sake of propriety, he dressed and left the hotel. He walked boldly, even noisily, from the staircase to the lobby doors. The clerk, leaning on his palm, opened one eye. Because Charles acted as though he had nothing to hide, the clerk immediately went back to dozing.
Charles took a room at a cheaper hotel and next morning called for Willa with a rented buggy. She'd packed a lunch hamper. They drove into the country upriver, settling down to picnic in a pretty grove of elms and sycamores, many with wild bittersweet twined around their trunks. The grove smelled of the mint growing there. In the sunlit field just to the north, wild asters and bloodroot and jack-in-the-pulpit grew amid stands of nettle and poison ivy.
"An embarrassing question," Charles said as he helped unpack the hamper: thick summer sausage rounds between pumpernickel fresh from one of the local German bakeries, a corked jug of foamy ginger beer. "Last night, was my beard —? That is —"
"Yes, rough as those nettles over there," she said, teasing. "Notice all this extra face powder? You left indelible evidence of our scandalous behavior."
She leaned close, kissed him lightly. "Which I thoroughly enjoyed and do not in the least regret. Now —" She spread a checked cloth in the shade. The buggy horse switched his tail to drive off flies. A stately stern wheeler appeared in the north, bound for St. Louis. "I want to tell you something, so that we have no secrets. I didn't come to Sam's theater entirely by choice, though now I'm very glad that I did. I was running away from a man named Claudius Wood."
She told the story of New York, the Macbeth dagger, Edwin Booth's kindness. It put him sufficiently at ease so that he could tell her about Augusta Barclay, that they were lovers but never married. He did hedge the ending a bit, merely saying the war separated them before she died. He didn't reveal that he'd initiated the separation, to spare her loss and emotional pain if he were killed. Ironically, he was the one left grieving, and wary of another involvement.
And yet here he was —
While they finished their picnic the sun's angle changed. The Mississippi flowed quietly again, the stern wheeler's wake completely gone. The grove grew warm. Sweat ran down the neck of Charles's open shirt.
Willa invited him to put his head in her lap and rest. He asked her permission to smoke a cigar, lit it, then said, "Tell me who you really are, Willa. Tell me what you like and what you don't."
She thought a bit, gently caressing his beard. "I like early mornings. I like the way my face feels after I scrub it. I like the sight of children sleeping, and I like the taste of wild berries. I like Edgar Poe's verse and Shakespeare's comedians. Parades. The sea. And I'm shamelessly in love with standing on a stage while people applaud." She bent to kiss his brow. "I've just discovered I like sleeping with my arms around a man, though not just any man. As for things I don't like — well, stupidity. Needless unkindness in a world already hard enough. Pomposity. People with money who think that money alone makes a person worthy. But most of all" — another soft kiss — "I like you. I think I love you. There, I've let down the mask Pa taught me to keep in place so there'd be fewer wounds from life. I think I loved you the moment I saw you."
His eyes on the river, he said nothing. He felt as if he teetered on the edge of a vast abyss, about to fall.
They kissed, murmured things, fondled one another, till her sweet breath grew warm as the brilliant summer day. "Love me, Charles," she said, mouth on his ear. "This place, this moment."
"Willa, once is fairly safe, but — what if I got you with child?"
"What a strange man you are. So many wouldn't even worry. There are far worse things. I'd not trap you with a baby." She saw his reaction. "That bothers you."
"Scares me. I couldn't stand to lose someone else I cared about. Once was enough."
"So better not to care?"
"I didn't say that."
"Well, no guilt feelings. Whatever happens, happens just for the moment." Again she kissed him.
Even as he bore her gently backward to the soft mat of browned grass and fallen sycamore leaves, he knew that they had gone too far for either of them to escape without hurt.
Except when she was rehearsing or performing, they spent every hour of the next four days together.
He related his experiences with the Jackson Trading Company; what he'd learned of the ways of the Southern Cheyennes; how he'd grown to respect them, and to admire leaders such as Black Kettle. She was pleased he'd moved away from the typical white man's truculence, an attitude born of greed, mistrust and, she suspected, general ignorance of the Indians and their concerns.
"We always fear what we don't understand," she said.
They found a photographer's gallery and sat for a portrait. Willa giggled when the fussy man tightened her head clamp behind the velvet settee. "Look pleasant — pleasant!" the man cried from underneath the black camera drape. Standing at her side, Charles rested his hand on her shoulder and adopted a severe expression. Willa kept giggling, from nervousness and joy, and the photographer waited ten minutes until she calmed down.
She wanted to know what sort of man he was, what he liked. Lying in bed with her after the Saturday night performance of Richard III, he thought a while and said:
"I like horses, good cigars, sunset with a glass of whiskey. The blue of the sky in South Carolina — no painter ever put such a blue on canvas. I like the clear air in Texas after a hard rain. In fact I like all of the West that I've seen.
"I like the strength you find in most black people. They're survivors, fighters. Yankees wouldn't believe a Southerner saying that.
"I love my family. I love my son. I love my best friend, Billy, who's gone to California with his wife, my cousin.
"I hated the last two years of the war and what they did to people, me included. I hate the politicians and the parlor patriots who thumped the tub until the fighting started. They never had to live through days and nights of battle — the grimmest, most draining work I've ever done. They never had to advance through an open meadow toward enemy entrenchments, watching their friends fall around them, and pissing their pants with fear — excuse me," he said, his voice all at once low and harsh.
She kissed the corner of his mouth. "It's all right. I'd like to meet your son. Would you let me visit Fort Leavenworth? I could come on a Missouri steamer, perhaps in August. August is a theater's worst month. I'm sure Sam would let an understudy replace me."
Fearing the entanglement, he still said, "I'd like that."
The day after, he hugged and kissed her at the stage door, and then mounted Satan. America's Ace of Players appeared suddenly, shooing Willa inside so he could speak privately.
Trump stepped close to the frisky piebald. "What I have to say is quite simple, sir. You may have the idea that because I am a play actor, I am an effete weakling. To the contrary. I am but fifty, in my prime, and strong."
He raised his fist and forearm at a right angle. Charles might have laughed but for the severity of the actor's expression. Trump grasped Satan's headstall and jutted his jaw.
"Willa fancies you, Mr. Main. A marble statue could see that. Well and good. She's a splendid girl — and like my own daughter. So if you trifle with her — if you should in any way hurt her — as God is my witness" — he exhibited his fist again — "I will grind you down, sir. I will find you and grind you down."