today?'
'One and a half million dead men, Colonel, and I'd think even you should notice them,' Lieutenant Colonel Abell answered with a certain somber relish. 'One and a half million dead men, or a few more than that-all the reasons why there's no stomach in the USA for another war against the Confederate States.'
Morrell winced. His smile faded. John Abell was a snob. That didn't mean he was a fool-anything but. 'Don't you believe most people would rather fight a small war now if the Confederates don't back down-which I think they would-than fight a big one ten or twenty years down the road?'
'Some people would. A few people would. But most?' Abell shook his head. 'No, sir. Most people don't want to fight any war at all, and they'll do almost anything to keep from fighting. Meaning no offense, sir, but I think you've just cooked your own goose.'
With a shrug, Morrell said, 'Well, even if I have, I won't mind getting back in the field again.' Lieutenant Colonel Abell looked at him as if he'd spoken in Hindustani, or maybe Choctaw. Like Colonel Donaldson, Abell was a creature of the General Staff, and didn't care to contemplate life outside it. Morrell did, which gave him a certain moral advantage. And how much good will that do you in Lethbridge when the blizzards come? he wondered, and wished he hadn't.
T om Colleton held out a package too well wrapped for him to have done it himself. 'Happy birthday, Sis!' he told Anne.
'Oh, for heaven's sake,' she said in fond exasperation. 'You shouldn't have.' She kissed him on the cheek, but at least half of her meant every word of that. The birthday in question was her thirty-ninth, and the only one she would have felt less like celebrating was her fortieth.
'Well, whether I should have or not, I damn well did,' her younger brother answered. Tom still had a few years to go before facing middle age-and forty meant less to a man than it did to a woman, anyhow. From forty, a woman could see all too well the approaching end of too many things, beauty among them. From thirty-nine, too, Anne thought gloomily. But Tom was grinning at her. 'Go on-open it.'
'I will,' she said, and she did, tearing into the wrapping paper as she would have liked to tear into Father Time. 'What on earth have you got here?'
'I found it the last time I was in Columbia,' he said. 'There. Now you've got it. See? It's-'
'A book of photographs of Marcel Duchamp's paintings!' Anne exclaimed.
'Seeing as he exhibited at Marshlands, I thought you'd like it,' her brother said. 'And take a look at page one seventy-three.'
'Why? What's he done there?' Anne asked suspiciously. Tom's grin only got wider and more annoying. She flipped through the book till she got to page 173. The painting, especially in a black-and-white reproduction, resembled nothing so much as an explosion in a prism factory. That didn't surprise Anne. When Duchamp displayed his Nude Descending a Staircase at Marshlands just before the Great War broke out, the work had hung upside down for several days before anyone, including the artist, noticed. But here…
Tom looked over her shoulder to make sure she'd got to the right page. 'You see?' he said. 'You see?' He pointed to the title below the photograph.
' 'Mademoiselle Anne Colleton of North Carolina, Confederate States of America,' ' Anne read. She said something most unladylike, and then, 'For God's sake, he doesn't even remember what state he was in! I'm not surprised, I suppose-all he cared about while he was here was getting drunk and laying the nigger serving girls.'
'What do you think of the likeness?' her brother asked.
Before the war, Anne had been a champion of everything modern. Life was harder now. She had little time for such fripperies. And I'm older than I was then, she thought bleakly. It's harder to stay up to date, and to stay excited about being up to date.
She took a longer look at 'Mlle. Anne Colleton.' It still seemed made up of squares and triangles and rectangles flying in all directions. But lurking among them, cunningly hidden, were features that might have been her own. Slowly, she said, 'It's not as bad as you make it out to be.'
'No, it's worse,' Tom said. 'When I was in the trenches, I saw men who got hit by shells and didn't look this bad afterwards.' He brought his experience to the abstract painting, just as Anne brought hers. That was bound to be what Marcel Duchamp had had in mind. Anne might have cared more if he hadn't made such a nuisance of himself while at Marshlands, and if he hadn't been such a coward about recrossing the Atlantic after the war began and both sides' submersibles started prowling.
As things were, she only shrugged and said, 'It is a compliment of sorts. Whatever he thought of me, he didn't forget me once he got back to France.'
'Nobody ever forgets you, Sis,' Tom Colleton said. Then he added something he never would have dared say before the war. Going into the Army had made a man of him; he'd been a boy, a comfortable boy, till then. He asked, 'How come you never married any of the fellows who sniffed around after you? There were always enough of 'em.'
Had he presumed to ask such a question before the Great War, she would have slapped him down, hard. Now, though she didn't like it, she gave it a serious answer: 'Some of them wanted to run me and to run my money. Nobody runs me, and I run the money better than most men could. I've said that before. And the others, the ones who didn't care so much about the money…' She laughed a hard and bitter laugh. 'They were sons of bitches, just about all of them. I recognize the breed. I'd better-takes one to know one, people say.'
Almost fondly, she remembered Roger Kimball. The submarine officer had been a thoroughgoing son of a bitch. He'd also been far and away the best lover she ever had. She didn't know what that said. (Actually, she did know, but she didn't care to dwell on it.) But, in the end, Kimball had chosen the Freedom Party over her. And he was dead now, shot by the widow of a U.S. seaman whose destroyer he'd sunk after the CSA had asked for and been granted an armistice.
She waited for Tom to give her a lecture. But he only asked another question: 'Can you go on by yourself for the rest of your days?'
'I don't know,' Anne admitted. To keep from having to think about it, she tried to change the subject: 'What about you, Tom? You're as single as I am.'
'Yeah, I know,' he said with a calm that surprised her. 'But there are a couple of differences between us. For one thing, I'm a few years younger than you are. For another, I'm starting to look hard, and you're not.'
'Are you?' she said, surprised. 'You didn't tell me anything about that.'
Tom nodded, almost defiantly. 'Well, I am, and yes, I know I haven't told you anything. No offense, Sis, but you like running people's lives so much, you don't like it when they try and run their own.' That held enough truth to make Anne give him a wry nod in return. He dipped his head, acknowledging it, and continued, 'There's one more thing, no offense. A lot of ways, when a man gets married matters a lot less than when a woman does.'
And that was all too true, as well. In a fair, just world it wouldn't have been, but Anne had never been naive enough to imagine the world either fair or just. Looks weren't what kept a man, but they were what lured him. She'd used her own blond beauty to advantage more times than she could count. Again, turning thirty-nine reminded her she wouldn't be able to do that forever. If she wanted to have a baby or two, she wouldn't be able to do that forever, either.
She sighed. 'Well, Tom, when you're right, you're right, and you're right, dammit. I'm going to have to do something about it.'
Her brother blinked. He'd probably been expecting a shouting match, not agreement. 'Just like that?' he asked.
Anne nodded briskly. 'Yes, just like that, or as close to just like that as I can make it. Or don't you think I can do what I set my mind to doing?' If he said he didn't, he would have a shouting match on his hands.
But he only laughed. 'Anybody who thinks that about you is a damn fool, Sis. Now, I may be a damn fool- plenty of people have called me one, and they've had their reasons-but I'm not that particular kind of a damn fool, thank you kindly.'
Although Anne laughed, too, she also gave him another nod. 'Good. You'd better not be.'
She meant what she said. As if to prove it, she drove up to Columbia a couple of days later. She knew the eligible bachelors in little St. Matthews, South Carolina, much too well to have the slightest interest in marrying any of them. He was too old; he was too dull; he was too grouchy; he couldn't count to twenty-one without dropping his pants. The pickings had to be better, or at least wider, in the state capital.
