unsteadily upon matters of seemingly voluntary choice.”
Seemingly
because of his Presbyterian fatalism, that saw all glimmering moments caught in an inflexible web of divine predestination? The Colemans were of the Episcopal church, removed from Papism and Puritan gloom both. “And when shall we arrive at this blessed established state?” Ann asked, her own voice tense and rising. “We are not young; you were all of twenty-eight this April, and next month I will be twenty-three. The girl-friends of my childhood are already all wed. The strictest propriety does not ask that we wait longer than a season or two more.”
“The season cannot be this fall,” he stated, suddenly firm,with that impenetrable bluntness lawyers can muster. “This Columbia Bridge Company tangle, added to other concerns of my practice, will take all but a few of my hours; the financial distress Monroe and his Yankee Richelieu, Quincy Adams, have allowed to fall upon the nation has made work for lawyers if no one else.”
“Oh”—an exclamation of disappointment escaped her lips. “Must I spend another winter as a spinster?” She felt her heart sink at the prospect of gray wet weeks and months still closeted with her parents, while her five brothers and four sisters, the living remainder of fourteen births, haunted the house, coming and going, George with death already in his jaundiced and skeletal face, Edward arrogant and sardonic in his smoldering fury of unhealth, Thomas more playful in his authority over the sister just beneath him in the chain of births, all with their prating wives, women as complacent as dough, while her silly sister Sarah, the fourteenth child, wide-eyed and giddy at the onset of womanhood, professed to be in love with what she fancied to call God. All of these kin, it seemed to Ann, implied, in their tactful avoidances as well as in open teasing and quarrel, disapproval of her marital choice, and through their coughs and courtesies and heavy family odor they sifted upon her head a drizzle of foreboding, an unspoken opinion that this tall smooth speaker of many politic words was not what he gaudily seemed, in his russet tailcoat and impeccably tied cravat, but was instead treacherous, a finagler, a twister in pursuit of her fortune and the Coleman connection, and less than a man.
He’s not a man
. He was some other kind of creature, a half-man, a chimera bred of these changing modern times, a pretender, so that her betrothal had a doomed flavor, a taste of mistakenness that tightened her throat and at idle moments of the day threatened to pinchtears from her eyes, sharpened her words with ill temper, and bade her imagine pity and concern in the faces of those in the house who loved her, including the servants and the children of her older siblings. Her imagination was steeped for long idle hours in the hectic substances of books—romances and rhymed effusions quickly printed in Philadelphia and Baltimore from English texts hurried like contraband to these artless shores—and imaginings flared within her in strange heated waves, so that after an afternoon dreaming another’s dream in the upstairs parlor she distrusted her thoughts and even the reports of her senses, which without actual distortion came to her overlaid by a cold dim quality, like moonlight, of illusion.Even now, in this outdoor moment, underneath the many green trembling leaves and beside the iron fence cast in a pattern of circles and spears, the man beside her, leaning down in expectance of her response to his blunt demand for delay, appeared to loom with an illusionary thinness, like a large occluding emblem of painted tin, of less thickness than King Street’s signboards and the tombstones of slate in the burying ground. They represented people, these stone silhouettes, once as alive as she, Ann thought, and many younger than she—her sister Harriet had been younger—and now dead in their coffins, rotting into bits like those starved lambs
Seemingly
because of his Presbyterian fatalism, that saw all glimmering moments caught in an inflexible web of divine predestination? The Colemans were of the Episcopal church, removed from Papism and Puritan gloom both. “And when shall we arrive at this blessed established state?” Ann asked, her own voice tense and rising. “We are not young; you were all of twenty-eight this April, and next month I will be twenty-three. The girl-friends of my childhood are already all wed. The strictest propriety does not ask that we wait longer than a season or two more.”
“The season cannot be this fall,” he stated, suddenly firm,with that impenetrable bluntness lawyers can muster. “This Columbia Bridge Company tangle, added to other concerns of my practice, will take all but a few of my hours; the financial distress Monroe and his Yankee Richelieu, Quincy Adams, have allowed to fall upon the nation has made work for lawyers if no one else.”
“Oh”—an exclamation of disappointment escaped her lips. “Must I spend another winter as a spinster?” She felt her heart sink at the prospect of gray wet weeks and months still closeted with her parents, while her five brothers and four sisters, the living remainder of fourteen births, haunted the house, coming and going, George with death already in his jaundiced and skeletal face, Edward arrogant and sardonic in his smoldering fury of unhealth, Thomas more playful in his authority over the sister just beneath him in the chain of births, all with their prating wives, women as complacent as dough, while her silly sister Sarah, the fourteenth child, wide-eyed and giddy at the onset of womanhood, professed to be in love with what she fancied to call God. All of these kin, it seemed to Ann, implied, in their tactful avoidances as well as in open teasing and quarrel, disapproval of her marital choice, and through their coughs and courtesies and heavy family odor they sifted upon her head a drizzle of foreboding, an unspoken opinion that this tall smooth speaker of many politic words was not what he gaudily seemed, in his russet tailcoat and impeccably tied cravat, but was instead treacherous, a finagler, a twister in pursuit of her fortune and the Coleman connection, and less than a man.
He’s not a man
. He was some other kind of creature, a half-man, a chimera bred of these changing modern times, a pretender, so that her betrothal had a doomed flavor, a taste of mistakenness that tightened her throat and at idle moments of the day threatened to pinchtears from her eyes, sharpened her words with ill temper, and bade her imagine pity and concern in the faces of those in the house who loved her, including the servants and the children of her older siblings. Her imagination was steeped for long idle hours in the hectic substances of books—romances and rhymed effusions quickly printed in Philadelphia and Baltimore from English texts hurried like contraband to these artless shores—and imaginings flared within her in strange heated waves, so that after an afternoon dreaming another’s dream in the upstairs parlor she distrusted her thoughts and even the reports of her senses, which without actual distortion came to her overlaid by a cold dim quality, like moonlight, of illusion.Even now, in this outdoor moment, underneath the many green trembling leaves and beside the iron fence cast in a pattern of circles and spears, the man beside her, leaning down in expectance of her response to his blunt demand for delay, appeared to loom with an illusionary thinness, like a large occluding emblem of painted tin, of less thickness than King Street’s signboards and the tombstones of slate in the burying ground. They represented people, these stone silhouettes, once as alive as she, Ann thought, and many younger than she—her sister Harriet had been younger—and now dead in their coffins, rotting into bits like those starved lambs
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