Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [179]
So it happened that less than a month after my return to New York I sailed to Liverpool to begin my long-sought-after travels, which turned out to be so much less interesting than I had ever imagined, an endless series of castles, museums, coffee houses, taverns, and cathedrals, and here and there a synagogue or two. During this time away I suffered from bouts of loneliness and some regret (the latter arising whenever my thoughts turned to Liza, which they did more frequently than I would have desired, because they were so painful). I had plenty of company in a group of fellow New Yorkers who roamed the continent, but in my self-pitying state I often wanted only to be alone with my misery.
I returned from the Continent the next year to work with my father in the family business, marry my Miriam, and produce several children. (Jacobus, poor Carib bird, died around the time of the birth of my first son.) I can only exult in that during those years I worked hard to make a good life for all and at my father’s funeral, which came midway between that time and now, I felt a deep sadness at his demise but also a certain pride in that I had continued his good work at the business. With Halevi at my side I prayed for the strength to continue on in life. (Alas, poor Halevi himself had only about a year to live, having suffered a debilitating weakness in his chest from which he never recovered.)
I despise myself for revealing what follows, but then what is a manuscript about one’s self without honest revelation about one’s life and thoughts. While the children grew, and my father sank into a state of ill health from which he did not recover and I took more and more of a hand in the business, my mind went often to the picture of Liza, our final nights together. I sometimes imagined her somewhere in Ohio or even, God help me, in New York State, where she was living a quiet life, free at last from all servitude of any kind. But then I wondered, if she had found her freedom and must be living relatively close by, why it was she never tried to contact me. Had she given birth to our child or had it died? Why if the child had lived would she keep me from my offspring? Thus I sent myself into the kind of sulk that is all the worse because one cannot ever speak of it while life goes on around one. Had she died in that swamp? Had she been captured and reenslaved? All of such thoughts of mine became exacerbated when news of the formation of the Confederacy reached us in New York. They became further inflamed when the South fired the first shots of the war only a few miles from the shore of that self-same city of Charleston.
Miriam, no fool herself, could read it in my face the evening I came home after having joined our local Ellsworth’s Zouaves.
“What has happened, Nathaniel?” she asked me.
“We are at war with the Confederacy,” I said.
She stared at me, as only a woman who has borne your children can.
“And I have enlisted in a military outfit.”
She was unbelieving.
“Have you no sense, sir? You are a husband and father, you are the head of the family business.”
I took her by the hand—she was quite unresponsive, allowing herself to be led to the sofa in our drawing room where I sat her down, still holding her hand, and sat next to her.
“Miriam, I see this as my duty. I have volunteered to go into battle with them.”
This, for a moment, remained beyond her understanding. Certainly I understood her consternation. Without knowing how all these many years I kept Liza in my mind how could she understand the decision I had made?
Suddenly she ripped her hand from mine.
“You will go to war?”
“It is my duty,” I said.
The look in her eyes was both frightening and magnificent, the way some lion