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Show Page 99 48 or will believe it." However, Orson's relationship with Sarah probably began to deteriorate with these incidents. The tone of his subsequent communications to her, the peculiar intercourse they held from then on, combine to suggest that the young couple never again lived together on the basis of trust and mutual affection. It is apparent that he suspected the worst of her, and that she resented his convictions, particularly when his long absences seemed to add up to neglect. Their connection became, with the years, more and more contractual and impersonal, marked even by episodes of stinging bitterness over the "plurality principle," until a final break came twenty years later. Another legacy of this complex, emotional affair of excommunication would be the problem of Orson's standing in the Twelve. In later years, when seniority in that quorum determined the choice of those who would preside in the Mormon Church, a knotty problem of precedence would arise over this miserable difficulty in Orson's past - to his great embarrassment and chagrin. Orson's emotional life was deeply and subtly buried, his defenses the tools of logic and argumentation; he had no equipment to counter the pain of this seamy conflict, but learned a certain bloodless acquiescence. He had passed the ultimate test, at least indirectly, and it transformed him into a different sort of disciple - one who had been forced to choose between his deepest convictions and the woman who, with her distracted notions, was still his wife. He was, for the time being, permitted both. Otherwise, the tempest died with his re-baptism in the ice of the Mississippi. Stories continued to circulate in the press that he was the rival and secret enemy of Joseph Smith - such distortions made good, lurid copy. His own journal summarizes the troubled year of 1842 without comment: "I remained inTmuvoo about one year...I had the charge of a mathematical school. 49 |