Her Hesitant Heart

chapter Thirteen



Susanna Hopkins woke up early. There was that moment of panic when she wondered where she was—whether Frederick was drunk, sober, demanding, compliant, suddenly sad or bent on mischief. Once the moment passed, she lay there and made a raft of decisions.

The first one was the most important, because she knew it affected all the others: on that morning in a place where she never thought her life would take her, Susanna decided to forgive her cousin Emily Reese for being stupid. She decided to overlook the enormous lie that Emily had concocted to make her divorced cousin somehow more palatable to censorious people who knew too much about each other. Emily was too stupid to think of consequences, and she had probably meant well.

“I can live with that,” Susanna mouthed more than whispered, not wanting to wake anyone. Of course, the only people awake were the O’Learys through the wall. She smiled and listened to the baby’s tiny wail, and then silence, followed by two parents talking softly to each other. The voices were indistinct, but they were a mother and father sharing a moment with Mary Rose O’Leary, the army’s newest dependent.

Susanna lay there and reminded herself that for a time, she and Frederick had done that after Tommy was born. She reminded herself that those had been wonderful, drowsy moments, shared with a baby she was getting acquainted with, created with a husband she loved. Matters may have gone terribly wrong five years later, when business concerns started to collapse and rye whiskey became an enticing substitute for reality, but they hadn’t always been bad.

“I can live with that,” she murmured again. “We had good times.” She soothed herself with the fact that she never would have married a man she hadn’t loved. There was a time when Frederick Hopkins would have made any woman look twice. She knew, even now, that if he had not pushed her face into the mantelpiece, and blind instinct hadn’t made her flee for her own safety, she would be there still, protecting Tommy, as if nothing was the matter. She suspected there were many women in precisely her position.

“I can live with that, too, even though it is unfair to women,” she whispered. She had heard stories about women crusading against “Demon Rum,” and been aghast at such unladylike behavior. Didn’t those rabble-rousing women know that a woman’s sphere was the home? She understood that kind of courage now. Liquor had probably destroyed more homes and hopes than marital infidelity, and wives often suffered in silence. Bravo to the brave crusaders, she thought.

Time passed and both duplexes were silent now, Mary Rose back to sleep, maybe slumbering between her parents. On her side of the wall, Susanna heard Daniel Reese snoring, the sound more comforting than grating. She decided to forgive him for being light-headed, too. He loved his son and wife, and was probably a pretty good commander of a company of infantry, out here in the wilds of Wyoming Territory.

She took her thoughts to another level, right down into her own hesitant heart. She had begun her journey from Pennsylvania with hope and the promise of a useful life. Events had taken a terrible turn, but she was still alive, her brain was agile and she was beginning to suspect that she was a resourceful woman. She had a skill people needed. There were six young children in a commissary warehouse, sitting at packing crate desks, who needed her. There was a private teaching a school for fifty cents extra duty pay a day, and in over his head, who needed her. There was a post surgeon with sorrows at least as great as hers, perhaps greater, who was determined she would not give up on his watch. And there was Maeve Rattigan, denied the one thing she wanted most, who cared to read and write.

“I can live with this, because I have work to do,” she murmured, and closed her eyes, content. When she woke later to the sound of reveille, Susanna Hopkins made a conscious decision to live well. Maybe Major Randolph was right; maybe living well was the best revenge. Or maybe it was the right thing to do.

It was not so hard to make small talk that morning with her cousin, who only wanted to forget her disastrous part in Susanna’s ruin. She told Emily her plans for the garrison school, and her night school for women. “I came here to teach.” She said it firmly and not defensively, and in the saying, believed it.

Emily found her an empty lard bucket and made her laugh by drawing a flower on the tin lid. “To make it more genteel,” Emily said, with a grin that Susanna remembered from years ago, when they had been much younger. Bread and butter, dried apples and the everlasting raisins that made them look at each other and giggle went into the bucket, along with a cloth napkin and two small pieces of chocolate from Dan Reese’s secret stash.

“Thanks, Emily,” Susanna said after guard mount, which they watched together, Stanley between them, from the warmth of the parlor window. She put on her coat, wound her muffler tight and went out to slay dragons.

The task was made much simpler, because Nick Martin escorted her to the warehouse complex south of the parade ground.

“Major Randolph told me to make sure you got there and that’s all,” he confided. “I’d like to learn, too, but he needs me to sweep out the ward.”

We all need to be needed, she thought, touched. “I understand, Nick.” She looked at him more closely. “It is Nick, isn’t it? I expect Saint Paul is busy on those missionary journeys.”

“I expect he is,” Nick said. “I’ll ask him someday.”

Susanna thought about that. She nodded and looked back at Officers Row. The major in question stood on his own porch. He lifted his coffee mug to her and she waved.

Before she married Frederick and left the teaching profession, Susanna had taught at a private school in Carlisle. Her classroom had come with brocaded draperies, a carpet on the floor and hand-turned desks bordering on elegant. She discovered that day in her warehouse school that packing-crate desks had a certain utility, and the fragrance of dried apples and raisins, stacked in kegs next to coffee beans, reminded her of favorite kitchens.

With all her heart and mind, she concentrated on her six pupils, finding out what they knew, and creating a term full of lesson plans in her head. At first, she knew Private Benedict was conscious of her quiet presence in the back of his classroom. By mess call, he had turned all his attention to his older students, and looked up with surprise when he heard the bugle.

“Compositions and recitations this afternoon,” he called after his pupils as they hurried home for lunch. He took his own back to her corner after she had ushered out her little ones and sat down again with her lunch. “I have permission to eat here, instead of in the mess hall,” he explained. “Sometimes there are children who stay.”

They spent the hour eating and discussing the morning’s work. Private Benedict had a few questions she answered, and he liked her suggestion that they teach together in the afternoon occasionally.

“I noticed in my … my first school how well-tuned to the local flora and fauna these children are,” she said. “Let’s have them tell us what they know, and build some lessons around it.”

Private Benedict looked at her with an expression she recognized: that of an educator with an idea. “We could spend a day or two outlining interesting topics such as buffalo, wolves and Indians, and have our students compose letters on these subjects to their friends in the States.”

“Bravo, Private Benedict,” she said. “That’s certainly more interesting than a mere composition! My pupils will draw and we can put together a letter of our own.”

She observed him then, investing more than just her mind in what he had said. Something in his face drew her attention, and there was no sense in hanging back, now that she had decided to live. “Private Benedict, something tells me you already send letters like that home to …”

“Connecticut,” he said, and there was no overlooking the blush that rose from his neck. “There’s a young lady in Hartford who gets letters like that.”

Susanna nodded. “I thought so. I hope she saves all of them. Think what a wonderful look at the West you are providing.”

“She sends them to the newspaper.” He stopped, his face fiery-red now. “Well, at least part of them. It’s become a regular column—Life and Times on the Frontier.”

“Bravo again!” Susanna said, delighted. “Tell me, is she a teacher, too?”

The look he gave her nearly took her breath away. There was everything in it of pride and gratitude. “So you really think I am a teacher?”

“I know you are,” she said quietly.

He drew a deep breath, and there was no overlooking that Private Benedict was a man in love and a man with a plan. “Yes, she’s a teacher. My enlistment is up at the end of summer. I’m going to attend the normal school in Hartford, after I marry her this fall.”

Susanna clapped her hands, then handed him one of Captain Reese’s prized chocolates and popped the other one in her mouth. She smiled at him in perfect charity and something else: for the first time in a long time, she was happy.

The post surgeon knew he should probably apologize to Hippocrates for his morning’s inattention. At least he had not splinted the wrong leg on a streetwalker, as one of his unfortunate fellow medical students had done at the University of Maryland. Joe still remembered the look of astonishment on the poor woman’s face as she swore a round oath worthy of a sailor and raised her hands in an appeal to the Almighty to protect her from malpractice. Joe’s malpractice that morning had amounted to no more than prescribing a purgative to the patient in bed three with the runs. Luckily, raised eyebrows from his hospital steward had rectified that wrong. Joe had been big enough to apologize to his steward later, and thank the gods of medicine that his steward had been good enough to follow him after Appomattox to Reconstruction duty in Louisiana, then exile to Outer Darkness in the Department of the Platte.

No doubt Joe had been woolgathering. Nick had told him earlier that Mrs. Hopkins had walked across the parade ground that morning with a certain spring in her stride. “She’s a short one, but I had to hurry to keep up with her” was how Nick had put it.

Nick hadn’t been aware, but Joe had watched her, too, standing on his porch, a mug of his awful coffee in hand. He had admired at a distance Susanna’s pleasant sway and the purpose with which she moved. This wasn’t the frightened woman in the Shy-Dead depot; it wasn’t even the woman of yesterday with no hope in her eyes. This was a woman with a plan.

The notion nourished him all morning. Thanks again to his steward, the hospital ran like a top. After his early blunder, Joe had repented with a good save in what he always considered his specialty, debriding a nasty burn from Company A’s mess kitchen. At least, the look his steward gave him—the man hated debridement—had redemption written large upon it. Joe could retire to his office redeemed and at liberty to woolgather, when he should have been finalizing the list of pharmacopoeia for Omaha.

Other than that moment watching the poetry of a woman’s hips, Joe’s morning had two more gems in it. The first one came from Sergeant Rattigan, who returned his copy of George Drysdale’s article. The sergeant actually made himself at home in the office, less formal than usual. Well, the topic du jour was certainly not government issue; why be formal?

“I read the article to Maeve last night,” the sergeant said. “I didn’t know a lot of those words, but the meaning was clear—” he gave a self-conscious chuckle “—as Maeve so kindly pointed out to me. She’s a shrewd one!”

“We always knew that,” Joe said. “She’ll keep you on your toes, once Mrs. Hopkins teaches her to read. And?”

“We’ll do it, sir. We … we need each other, but I’d do anything to spare my darling Maeve one more heartache.”

The sergeant said it simply, but Joe heard every syllable of love. “I thought you would,” he told the man.

The sergeant smiled, stood up and snapped off one of his usual salutes, more precise than nearly anyone ever executed at Fort Laramie. He stopped at the door. “If you see Mrs. Hopkins today, tell her we’re expecting her for class in my parlor tonight, and we’d be pleased to serve her supper, too.”

“Include me in that invitation, and I’ll tell her,” Joe said.

“You’re included, sir, although I’ve been told by herself to vacate the premises for the evening. See you tonight, Major.”

The next gem of the day might have been called a milestone, if Joe had felt so inclined. After a satisfying hour standing around mostly idle while the capable wife of an Arikara scout presented the army with its newest Indian dependent, Joe had walked back to the hospital in that pleasant sort of euphoria that a successful birth always provided. It carried him into his office, where he loosened his collar and wrote a letter to the lycée in Paris where Louis Pasteur taught.

He had written such a letter once or twice in his head, and then on paper three times in the same number of years, only to scrap it. This time he wrote the entire letter, describing his medical training, his subsequent career, the war years and his own interest in microbiology. He had concluded with the hope that Pasteur might allow him entrance into the lycée in the autumn. He signed his name with a flourish, addressed an envelope and hurried the letter to the post office in the post trader’s complex before he lost his courage.

He had his first attack of nerves when John Collins, postmaster along with his post trader duties, raised his eyebrows at “Paris, France” on the envelope.

“Long way from here.” Collins tapped the letter. “Making some plans, sir?”

Joe had never known the post trader to pry, but he supposed it wasn’t every day that a letter to Paris crossed his desk. “I believe I am,” he said.

There was a small argument with Nick Martin after recall from fatigue, when the quiet man announced his intention of escorting Mrs. Hopkins back across the parade ground. Joe’s hospital steward intervened, claiming Nick for his own, which allowed the post surgeon to head for the commissary warehouse by himself.

He arrived just as the door opened to allow a flood of escaping students. A smile on his face, Joe watched as Susanna knelt by her little charges, making sure each one was buttoned, mittened and scarved against the omnipresent wind. He couldn’t help observing the smooth line of her hip and leg and then the pencil stuck at random in the bun of her untidy hair. Teaching took its toll on coiffure, obviously. Hardly mattered; blondes had a certain indefinable something.

As he stood in the door, letting in all that cold air, she looked at him, and took his breath away with the width of her smile.

“Close the door, Major,” she said in her teacher’s voice that allowed no argument. He closed the door, then helped her up. Her hand was warm and he wanted to hold it forever.

He didn’t, of course, but he noted with something approaching glee that she hadn’t been in a hurry to release his, either.

As he waited, she spent a few minutes in conversation with Private Benedict. Joe helped her into her coat when she joined him, relishing the feel of tendrils of her escaping hair on his hand.

“A good day, Susanna?” he asked as they faced into the wind toward Suds Row.

“A very good one,” she assured him. “Tomorrow we will take some time during luncheon to construct lesson plans.”

“Sounds like you are teaching the teacher.”

“I am, but he has a fine natural instinct for the profession.”

It was harmless, innocuous conversation and it took them across the footbridge. He yearned to tell her of the letter he had written that day, and finally blurted it out as they approached the sergeant’s quarters. The result was most gratifying. Susanna turned her beautiful brown eyes full on him and touched his sleeve. She didn’t say anything, but the pleasure on her face made words unnecessary. Her obvious approval made him realize how much he had missed sharing the details of his life with a woman.

“It’s well and good, but I have no way of knowing if Monsieur Pasteur will even consider me as a student,” he said. “My French is barely workable.”

“Perhaps I should teach you this spring, Joe. I know a little.”

She knocked on the Rattigans’ door because he seemed to have forgotten. The mention of his name on her lips had sent him into a schoolboy sort of euphoria.

Supper was over too quickly. Sergeant Rattigan kissed his wife’s check and ushered Joe out the door.

“Maeve is so excited,” the man confided as they crossed the footbridge, Rattigan to return to his company’s barracks and continue his own school of instruction for the coming winter campaign to his lads. After a quick check on Mary Rose O’Leary, who was already putting on weight, Joe returned to his quarters to pace the floor for an hour and a half before returning to the Rattigans to escort Susanna home.

He was accompanied this time by Nick Martin. Susanna’s school may have changed venue, but the man seemed determined that his mandate to assist in every way possible would continue. It gratified Joe to watch the enigmatic fellow show his own loyalty to a lady others had been only too willing to cast off.

They went first to Company A barrack to collect Sergeant Rattigan, who had been sitting there, a palpable presence requiring good order. Joe knew that many of the married sergeants did just that in January and February, when restless privates grew more tired of each other, and fights were common. Joe appreciated the effort, since it relieved him of patching up men who had nothing better to do in winter than plague each other.

“Sir, something is different about Mrs. Hopkins today,” the sergeant began as they walked toward the footbridge, Nick trailing along behind. “At least, that’s what I think I noticed over supper.”

“I, too, Sergeant. Perhaps she is just glad to be teaching where she is appreciated.”

Whatever had happened to spark Susanna Hopkins must have continued during her first teaching session, Joe decided, after a few minutes of polite chat with the Rattigans, and then their own retreat to the other side of Fort Laramie. Susanna’s exhaustion was stamped all over her face, but something more remained.

“Tired?” he asked her, hoping she would hear the professional tone, and nothing more.

“I am worn-out, but, Joe, you should have seen the ladies! They are so eager to learn.”

“Then you’re not tired at all,” he said, offering her his arm, which she took.

“It’s all I ever wanted to do here,” she said simply. She looked over her shoulder at Nick, who trailed along. “Nick, Private Benedict told me that you are welcome to sit in the back of the classroom, if you’d like to learn.”

“Maybe, if the surgeon doesn’t need me.”

“Come when you can.” Susanna increased the pressure of her hand on Joe’s arm. He even thought she leaned into his shoulder a little. “Joe, I did a wise thing this morning. I decided to forgive my cousin for being stupid.”

He couldn’t help a chuckle, even though what she said touched him. “You’re a lady of considerable forbearance! I’m not sure I could do that.”

“Then it’s a good thing the matter didn’t fall to you,” she said. “Seriously, I decided I could live with what happened. People like my former husband have a way of muddying their nests. I don’t know when, but eventually the whole matter will come out. I am a patient woman.”

He heard the hesitation in her voice, amazing himself how aware he was of every nuance from Susanna Hopkins, almost as if he studied her. The idea charmed him. “What more?” he asked, raising his voice a little because the wind was strong. Never mind; he knew Nick Martin would tell no tales.

“A few nights ago, I told the O’Learys everything and asked their forgiveness for the lie,” she said.

No need for her to know that Jim O’Leary had already told him, not when the subject was so frank and terrible. “I’m certain they assured you that you had nothing to ask forgiveness for.”

“They did. How kind they are,” Susanna told him, almost as if it still amazed her. “After the ladies left tonight, I … I told Maeve, too.” She sighed. “She just hugged me.”

“What else, Susanna?” he asked, some instinct telling him there was more.

“I decided there is only one thing I cannot live without, and see no solution at present.” She took a deep breath. “My son. He should be with me.”

Joe had nothing to say to that. They walked in silence to Emily Reese’s front door, where he said good-night.

He doubted she would say more, suspecting her thoughts were of Tommy Hopkins. She surprised him. He had released her arm, but she took his hand and looked him in the eye. He knew how much that cost her, since she was a reticent woman.

“Joe, I am glad you sent that letter to Monsieur Pasteur,” she said. “And I meant it about French. I brought my textbook with me, thinking perhaps there would be a pupil advanced enough to learn a little. Maybe it will be you?”

“Oui, madame,” he replied, and raised her mittened hand to his lips. The result was a laugh.

“We can learn more than that, monsieur,” she said. “Name a night and I will bring my textbook to the hospital.”

Joe was a long time getting to sleep that night.