“And they let you cross the battlefield to your lines when it was over?”
“As for the field of battle, the less said about it the better. The temperature that night dipped below freezing and my breath came out from between my chattering teeth in great white plumes as I negotiated its pitfalls. I ripped the square of strawboard off my back and started toward the flames I could see burning in Fredericksburg, tripping over the bloated bodies of horses and men, stumbling onto limbless corpses entangled at the bottom of shell craters. Even in the cold of winter there were horseflies drawn to the blood oozing from wounds. The maimed Federals who were still alive dragged the dead into heaps and burrowed under the corpses to keep warm. To my everlasting regret I could do nothing for them. I stopped to cradle a dying soldier who had a slip of paper with his name and address pinned to the back of his blouse. He shivered and murmured Sarah, dearest and expired in my arms. I took the paper, meaning to send it to his next of kin but somehow lost it in the confusion of the night. Riderless horses pawed at the frozen ground looking for fodder, but the only fodder at Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862 was cannon fodder.”
“You reached the town—”
“Fredericksburg resembled Sodom. Buildings had been set ablaze by the retreating Federals, the emporium lay gutted, its furniture and wares littering the planks of the sidewalk and the dirt in the street. What was left of silken gowns that had been cut up for handkerchiefs and towels hung limply from placards projecting over the entrances to stores. Mad women from the asylum, in sooty shifts and bare footed, picked through the debris, collecting pocket mirrors and colored ribbons and fine ladies hats imported from Paris France, which they pulled over their matted hair. Two of them were struggling to carry off a Regulator clock. I was surely one of the last to cross the bridge because the engineers began to unfasten the pontoons behind me. On the other side I wandered from campfire to campfire, past dispirited troops dozing on the ground, past pickets sleeping on their feet. I must have become feverish because much of what happened to me subsequent to the retreat across the pontoon bridge is disjointed and fuzzy in my head. I seem to remember great lines of woebegone soldiers trudging back toward Washington, the wounded piled three and four deep in open carts drawn by mules, the dead buried in shallow graves where they succumbed. When I came awake, I don’t know how many days later, I found myself on a cot stained with dried blood in a field hospital. Doctors decided I was suffering from hypochondria, what your fancy doctors call depression nowadays. A gentleman with a kindly face and a soiled white shirt open at the throat was sponging my chest and neck with vinegar to bring down the fever. We got to talking. He told me his name was Walter. Only later did I discover him to be the celebrated Brooklyn poet Whitman, scouring the field hospitals for his brother George, who’d been listed as wounded in the battle. Luck would have it, he’d found him in the same tent as me. One morning, when I felt stronger, Walter put his arm around my waist and helped me out of the tent into the sunlight. We sat, only the two of us, with our backs to a stack of fresh pine coffins. I remember Walter staring at the heap of amputated limbs behind the tent and opining, Fredericksburg is the most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever yet known in the earth’s wars. After some while orderlies appeared from the tent carrying three stretchers with corpses on them and set them on the ground to attend burial. The dead men were covered with blankets, with the toes of their stockings sticking out and pinned together. Pushing himself to his feet, Walter walked over to the bodies and, squatting, lifted aside the blanket from one and looked for a long, long time at the boy’s dead face. When he sat back down next to me, he pulled a notebook from a pocket inside his jacket and, licking the stub of a pencil, began to write in it. When he finished I asked him what he’d written and he read it off and the words stuck with me all these years.” Lincoln shut his eyes—to keep back tears (so it seemed to Dr. Treffler)—as he dredged up Walter Whitman’s lines. Sight at daybreak,—in camp in front of the hospital tent on a stretcher (three dead men lying,) each with a blanket spread over him—I lift up one and look at the young man’s face, calm and yellow,—’tis strange! (Young man: I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!).
Lincoln, drained of arrogance, looked at Dr. Treffler as he recited in a sing-song whisper, “A woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat ’em—I can’t recall the rest.”
“I believe you, Lincoln. I can see that you really were at Fredericksburg.” When he just sat there, his chin on his chest, breathing unevenly, she said, “Shalimar.”
“What?”
“That’s the name of the perfume I’m wearing. Shalimar.”
1994: BERNICE TREFFLER LOSES A PATIENT
DR. TREFFLER TURNED AROUND THE STATUE OF NATHAN HALE outside the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, studying the expression on the face of the young colonial spy from various angles, trying to imagine what might have been going through his mind as he was being led to execution. It occurred to her that nothing had been going through his mind; perhaps he had been too distracted by the lump in his throat, which is called fear, to think clearly. She couldn’t remember if Nathan had seen the elephant (though the term probably didn’t come into use until the Civil War) before he set off on his mission behind British lines in Manhattan Island. She wondered if the British executioners wore striped shirts; wondered, too, if they had wedged a cigarette between his lips before they hanged him on the Post Road, what today is Third Avenue in Manhattan. It is a matter of tradition, Lincoln Dittmann had remembered the executioner saying. A man condemned to death is entitled to a last cigarette.
A whey-faced young man with a laminated card pinned to the breast pocket of his three-piece suit approached. “He was the first in a long line of Americans who died spying for our country,” he noted, looking up at Nathan’s wrists bound behind his back. “You must be Bernice Treffler.” When she said In the flesh he asked to see her hospital identity card and driver’s license and carefully matched the photos against her face. She peeled off her sunglasses to make it easier for him. Apparently satisfied, he returned the cards. “I’m Karl Tripp, Mrs. Quest’s executive assistant, which is a fancy name for her cat’s-paw. I’m sorry if we’ve kept you waiting. If you’ll come with me …”