Consider me thy friend dear Eva.
Anna would sit in the parlor while her
mother dozed and pretend she was the first
of these women, and if she tired of that,
she would sometimes dare to pretend she
was the second, but most often she liked
to imagine herself the third.
Flirtations were common and serious, and
the women in Washington worked hard at
them. A war in the distance always
provides a rich context of desperation,
while at the same time granting women a
bit of extra freedom. They might quite
enjoy it, if the price they paid were
anything but their sons.
The new men had hardly touched their food,
cutting away the fatty parts of the meat
and leaving them in a glistening greasy
wasteful pile. Theyвd finished the
whiskey, but made faces while they drank.
Anna had resented the compliment of their
eyes and, paradoxically, now resented the
insult of their plates. Her mother set a
good table.
In fact, Anna did not like them and hoped
they would not be staying. She had often
seen men outside the Surratt boarding
house lately, men who busied themselves in
unpersuasive activities when she passed
them. She connected these new men to
those, and she was perspicacious enough to
blame their boarder Louis Wiechman for the
lot of them, without ever knowing the
extent to which she was right. She had
lived for the past year in a Confederate
household in the heart of Washington.
Everyone around her had secrets. She had
grown quite used to this.
Wiechman was a permanent guest at the
Surratt boarding house. He was a fat,
friendly man who worked in the office of
the Commissary General of Prisons and
shared John Surrattвs bedroom. Secrets
were what Wiechman traded in. He provided
