American Scoundrel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Wherever the seduction occurred, it signified more to Dan than any of his past liaisons, and was a world-consuming and all-encompassing event for Teresa. As for Dan, with a sudden impulse of innocence, he sought a redemptive, wholesome presence. His life was complex to the point of chaos, and he looked to a girl who was less than half his nearly thirty-three years for a limpid center. It was a task Teresa was ambitious to take on. The date of the civil wedding at City Hall before Mayor Kingsland of New York was September 27, 1852. It was rumored that both sets of parents were against the union, and that Dan had exacted Teresa from Bagioli as a price for silence about an alleged earlier, Italian marriage of Antonio’s. But there is no evidence of that, and Teresa’s demeanor from the beginning was that of a blithe and beloved bride, rather than of one bartered. Dan and Teresa livedwith the Bagioli parents at Fifteenth Street, and if there was any residual
frisson
between handsome Maria Cooke Bagioli and Dan, it was something both of them committed to the past.
    There were stories, perhaps more reliable, that Teresa was in the early stages of pregnancy. Given that the coming child’s birth was not officially recorded, that is not certain. What is certain is that her pregnancy was not the chief reason for the marriage, for Dan was not a man to be dragooned into marriage by such things, and the truth of Dan’s character is that he would have been ruthless enough to arrange his way around an unwanted pregnancy. Though he might marry ill-advisedly, he did not marry lightly. After all, marriage in the Victorian world was an institution from which only tragedy—an epidemic or the death of a mother in childbirth—could liberate a man.
    In March 1853, a church marriage took place in the house of Archbishop Hughes, the powerful Catholic prelate of New York. Teresa’s condition was visible, and one Sickles-baiting newspaper claimed the marriage before the archbishop took place only when the pregnancy could no longer be concealed from the two sets of parents. This contradicts all we know of the relationship between Dan and Teresa and their parents. 26
    The more serious issue was that whatever pieties may have attended Dan’s vows before Mayor Kingsland, and the church marriage the following March, it did not take him long to conclude that the keeping of his marriage vows was beyond him. The problem was not splendid Teresa or her pregnancy; he was simply not designed for conventional marriage and consecrated love. His appetites, whether larger than those of other men or not, were certainly never hedged in by fear of social odium.
    In the Bagiolis’ view, however, he was a generous husband, unstinting with gifts of jewelry. The Bagioli parents discounted any gossip about him and accepted his frequent absences as inevitable for a man who ran a law practice and had a frantic political life. Teresa, as she and Dan moved to their rented house a little uptown from the Bagiolis, did become aware, with some bafflement, that he was meeting other, olderwomen, and she heard occasional rumors of his not having given up Fanny White. She did not possess the meek gift of denial that got other wives through such crises of knowledge, and she questioned him about the matter more than once, along the normal wifely lines of what these other women gave him that was lacking in her. Since he was her all, and since he possessed the gift to make her feel yet again whenever he came home that she was the one lovely and sensible woman on earth, she could not understand the imperatives that drove him on to his infidelities. But the sole authority she could bring to the question was that of a bewildered adolescent. To her credit, she did not become a wronged and wounded harpy; she employed no stridency. Perhaps had she done so, Dan might have behaved marginally better.
    And as if there were rewards for acquiring such a presentable and accomplished young wife,