Varina Read online

  —I’ll miss you so much, he said.

  —Then don’t go, V said.

  —Not my choice. Just don’t forget me.

  She snorted with laughter and said, Idiotic to imagine that’s possible.

  He gripped her hand, pressed her fingers into a fist and pulled it to his pleated lips and kissed the smooth dusky skin of her handback and then kissed the row of knuckles and the pale fingernails curled against the palm, and then he opened her hand flat and kissed the cup of her palm three times, like a spell in a fairy story.

  —My dear, he said.

  —You old fool, she said.

  V JOSTLED ALONG on the wagon bench, wondering what to make of that past when her only future had become a muddy ribbon of road unspooling ahead with agonizing slowness and little ones confused and scared. All of them fugitives. Her husband—wherever he was—the chief fugitive, still pretending they weren’t defeated, crushed, broken. The letters from him that reached her before the railroads quit working were sweet and deluded, as if everything wasn’t lost and gone forever.

  She opened Northanger Abbey again and jotted: Head full of sorrows, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?

  A mile farther down the road she thought, You can mire yourself in the past, but you can’t change a damn thing in that lost world. Nothing to do but sit on the wagon bench beside Delrey and stare forward into the distance. Or go lie stunned, dozing under piles of quilts in the back of the ambulance with the children, who shape themselves and the world around them anew moment by moment and always need baths and smell musty and sweet and alive.

  * * *

  James holds the blue book out toward her, spine forward, gold letters on blue cloth. First Days Among the Contrabands.

  He says, This book, it’s the reason I’m here. Miss Botume, the author, went from Boston down to the Sea Islands off South Carolina in the middle of the war—occupied territory—to teach freed slaves. A brave act. She was young, full of ideas about making the world better. She would have been in danger if Confederates had retaken the islands. For legal reasons, the Federal government called all those people who’d been freed from slavery contraband, seized property, spoils of war. The book tells her experiences there, teaching those people reading and arithmetic and all sorts of other things previously kept secret from most of them. How to look at a clock and tell time, how to look at a coin and judge its value. She took care of me for a while. I wonder if I might read you a passage—see if it squares with your memory.

  He opens the book to one of his markers and holds it for V to read the chapter title. Jimmie. Then, fast and urgent, he reads aloud: An officer on board brought with him this small colored boy, sent by Mrs. Davis to General Saxton. She also sent a note by the boy, written with pencil on the blank leaf of a book. I quote from memory. She said:—“I send this boy to you, General Saxton, and beg you to take good care of him.” His mother was a free colored woman in Richmond. She died when he was an infant, leaving him to the care of a friend, who was cruel and neglectful of him. One day Mrs. Davis and her children went to the house and found this woman beating the little fellow, who was then only two years old. So she took him home with her, intending to find a good place for him. But he was so bright and playful, her own children were unwilling to give him up. Then she decided to keep him until he was old enough to learn a trade. “That was five years ago, and he has shared our fortunes and misfortunes until the present time. But we can do nothing more for him. I send him to you, General Saxton, as you were a friend of our earlier and better times. You will find him affectionate and tractable. I beg you to be kind to him.” This was the gist of her note.

  James looks up and waits.

  V reaches her hand. Says, Might I look directly at the page?

  She studies it and then says, Gist. It’s an old French word. Means, to lie.

  V runs her finger across several lines of text and then says, Your Miss Botume’s fabricating my statements and using quotation marks to cover her tracks. Slapping memory and supposition together decades after the fact. Inventing her own history, which we all do. But to be truthful, I don’t know exactly what I might have written in that moment. I was desperate. They were going to take you away. But I do know she has dates and times and ages all wrong. If I’d had you with me for five years, that would go back to when I lived in Washington. Also, I didn’t know your mother. I was going down the street and saw you being beaten and took you with me. And as for the future, it felt too uncertain to bother thinking about planning a trade for you or anyone else.

  All V finds indisputable is the last bit of the passage: Jefferson Davis was captured at Irwinville, Georgia, May 10, 1865. He had with him his family, his Postmaster General Reagan, his Private Secretary Harrison.

  With angry resentment V points out Miss Botume’s omission of the bare fact that long before Jefferson and his worn-down gang of hard-shell Rebels caught up with them, V and the children—including Jimmie—had made it almost to the Georgia-Florida line.

  —It was a long and dangerous journey, she says, and we survived day by day, and I’m proud of that. Jeff arrived just in time—a few hours—to get everybody captured by the Federals. I will always maintain that if he had left us on our own, we could have made it to Havana—mainly because I wanted to escape and he didn’t.

  V raises a forefinger to signal a pause and then looks toward a bank of tall windows and studies the view of valleys and ridges. James sits within himself and waits. He mostly looks at the cold fireplace and the Emerson. Her face is pale, and she begins taking deep, deliberate breaths.

  When she resumes talking she finds a different voice, windless and quiet and gentle. She starts at the beginning of what she knows. How midway in the war, she found him on the streets of Richmond, a skinny, tiny boy taking a hard beating from a big drunk woman swinging a stick of kindling. The woman putting her shoulder into it, practically knocking him down with every blow. But he kept trying to stand up and bear it. V thought the woman was his mother, but when V stepped out of the carriage and went to stop her, the woman said he was a stray, hanging around too long begging food she didn’t have to spare. He was filthy, and V lifted him by the armpits into the carriage and took him home. The only name he would say was Jimmie. The boys recognized him from the Hill Cats Gang but didn’t know his full name, or wouldn’t say it. Down his back he had cuts and bruises, some fresh, some scabbed, some scarred. He was double-jointed, and when he was nervous and uncertain he folded one hand backward and then the other. So Maggie started calling him Jimmie Limber, and soon the other children and V and Ellen did too.

  —But on Sundays, V says, when you dressed up for church, you wanted to be called James Brooks. Maybe that was your real name or maybe you made it up. At the end of the war, when they parted you from us, that’s the name I wrote when I begged General Saxton to take care of you.

  —I always wondered whether my name is real or if I made it up. I guess that question will never be answered. But my real question is simple. Why did you pick me up? James asks.

  —I don’t know. I just did it. You were so small.

  —It must have been more complicated than that.

  —Maybe so, but I can’t explain it.

  —YOU MENTIONED the Hill Cats Gang? James says.

  —Little boys roaming streets and alleys and backyards of downtown Richmond. Women in the big houses criticized me for letting my children run wild, but it was good for you. And those women from the old Virginia families had little else to do but gossip and judge. The Hill Cats were enemies of the Butcher Cats from down toward Shockoe Bottom. Sometimes the older boys actually fought each other, but you little ones just threw pebbles and crab apples and yelled high-pitched threats. Police picked up a couple of Hill Cats once and hauled them into the Mayor’s Court charged with throwing rocks at the Spotswood Hotel, but they argued innocence, since it was pieces of coal they threw, not rocks—and they
won their case. Things got bad enough after a battle the papers said involved as many as a hundred boys—which probably meant thirty—that Jeff walked down the hill one day to make peace between the gangs. He argued to the Butcher Cats that both gangs were neighbors, separated by only a few blocks, and that they had much in common and should get to know each other, should play together whether it was down in the Bottom or up on the Hill. He explained that it was in everyone’s best interests to stop fighting and like each other. When he was done talking, the leader of the Butcher Cats—probably a boy of ten—told Jeff what a fine gentleman he was, but said that it was impossible that they would ever like the Hill Cats. And equally impossible they would ever stop fighting.

  When Jeff came puffing back up the hill and told V of his failure, she said it felt like 1860 all over again.

  —BUT COULD WE GO BACK to the simplest parts of Miss Botume’s memoir? James asks. Was I bright and playful, affectionate and tractable?

  —Tractable? My God, no. You were spirited and independent. And of course careful and wary when you were uncertain. You had to have been to survive living stray during the shortages of the war. When you felt safe you were certainly affectionate, but you didn’t give it away. It had to be earned. And that’s what first made me love you. But in writing to my old friend General Saxton begging him to take care of you, I wasn’t about to get into nuances. After all, he and my husband were on different sides. And as for whether you were bright, look at yourself now. My question is, what have you done with your brightness over the decades?

  —I’ve been a teacher, James says. I’ve taught hundreds of children and adults reading and writing and arithmetic. Back when I started, a lot of my students were former slaves. It seemed like so many of them learned written language and understood the fundamental relationships of numbers almost overnight. They inhaled it like they’d been drowning and suddenly lifted their heads into the air. All they wanted was more.

  —When you began classes with our tutor, you learned to read in a month, maybe less. You raced along, impatient to get to the next word, to the next line of text. Forward was your direction. So teaching must be a satisfying profession for you.

  —It is. But the difference between a little boy learning to read in the president’s mansion and a woman of fifty who’d been denied it by law for much of her lifetime is large.

  —Yes, you’re right. And teaching is truly a noble profession. Little money in it, though. I say that noticing your expensive footwear in particular.

  Blake tips his right foot at an angle to get a profile view as if he hasn’t noticed what handsome gusseted chisel-toe boots he wears. They shine like a mirror reflecting the night sky.

  He says, I get a discount. My wife’s family owns clothes stores, a good business. In New York they’ve just moved from San Juan Hill to Harlem, and in Philadelphia they’ve been on South Street for twenty years.

  —I’d like to meet her.

  —Julie died almost two years ago. Consumption. But she was lucky, I guess. That translucent stage some people pass through lasted a long time for her, and when it faded she finished quickly without the worst of the hemorrhaging. Being close with her family has helped me through it, and maybe I’ve helped them some. They were generous before, and they’re still generous now and keep telling me I’m part of the family forever. They want me to join the business.

  —I’m very sorry for your loss, V says.

  She pauses and says, Maybe you should listen to them.

  —Teaching is what I do best, not manage a store or keep books or write advertising copy. I’m grateful to them, but I think I’m going to keep doing my job.

  —Do you have children?

  —No, ma’am.

  —So you’re totally free to move forward in life unencumbered, without needing to compound with your pride for the material interests of your family.

  —I don’t follow.

  —I don’t either. Never have, no matter how I parse the diction and grammar—whether compound is noun or verb—I’m still puzzled. After the war, Jeff wrote it in a letter, I have compounded with my pride for the material interest of my family, and am ready to go on to the end as may best promote their happiness. He’s of course trying to blame me and the children for his fall. Guilt and pride nearly burnt our marriage down to the foundation.

  V tells James that Jeff’s letter arrived at her dingy apartment in London during a long separation after the war, much of the time with the entire width of the Atlantic between them. Those oddly constructed words and clauses and phrases were how he informed V he had taken a job beneath him in order to support his family. His great sacrifice was to lower himself and become president of an insurance company after being president of a country—or a failed rebellion or whatever label would be correct. The company covered the Southeast, Baltimore to Houston. Many of his former generals—also broke—tried to make money writing memoirs, struggled to make themselves sit alone at a desk every day and conjure their version of history constructed from the weightless tools of words and uncertain memory. And with a very uncertain payday at the end of the job. So they were eager to earn a steady salary in a more direct and concrete way as insurance salesmen and regional managers and that sort of thing. Go back to giving orders. V believes that General Hood was one of Jeff’s insurance salesmen. Hood lost the use of an arm at Gettysburg, and afterward it just drooped there at his side. And then a leg got taken off at Chickamauga, four inches below the hip. The doctor who did the sawing—as they hauled Hood away—put the leg alongside him in the ambulance, assuming he would die and would want it in the casket. But Hood didn’t die. He came to Richmond and healed. He was barely over thirty, a tall, slim martyr with a long sad face made longer by his tangled beard. Mary Chesnut always said he looked like Don Quixote or a crazed Crusader fighting for crown and cross. He was shy with women, but battle lit him up wild as a Viking. Young Richmond ladies found him irresistible. But ever since the early days of the war, he had been under the spell of Mary Chesnut’s good friend Buck Preston, who was beautiful and a genius at inflicting love. Hood gave a blockade-runner leaving for Europe a brief shopping list for Paris. Two cork legs, best quality. One diamond ring. When he presented the ring to Buck Preston, she declined his proposal. People accused her of being so shallow that she wouldn’t marry him because he had one leg. Buck fired back that she wouldn’t marry Hood if he had six legs. After the war he found a woman other than Buck to marry, and in ten years they had eleven children, quite a few of which were twins. Then the yellow fever that killed half of New Orleans killed Hood and his wife the same day, leaving those orphans behind.

  —All that happened? James says. None of it? Some of it?

  —All. But I got distracted from what I wanted to say to Jeff about compounding with his pride. I wrote back and told him that bad choices lead to bad consequences, like discussing misbehavior with a child. But he never accepted being wrong and never apologized for taking down our family. Or eleven states full of families. He and his older brother Joseph were alike in that. A shared trait. Never apologize for anything. Plow ahead always believing you’re in the right.

  —Go back, James says. You lived in London?

  London

  March 1874

  THE SHORT STACK OF CHINA STOOD ONLY FIVE DINNER plates tall, each one chipped at the edges and crazed on the pink floral faces. Three soup bowls, five teacups, but only two saucers. Glassware—just four stems—cloudy as an old man’s eye. Bed and table linens and towels worn by time to an indeterminate color, like a teaspoon of coal dust in a pint of heavy cream—the color of dirty soles and also the color of the plaster walls. The tiny fireplace might have been adequate for roasting a single sparrow over a fistful of twigs.

  V pulled open a cupboard drawer and found a sprinkling of mouse droppings. The oblong black nubs moved like suddenly magnetized iron filings or swirled tea leaves until they settled and found their pattern on the drawer bottom. Prophetic, but not subtly so. Just a
nother message from the gods about diminishing expectations.

  The landlady—blade slim, and a nose so long and sharp she had to angle her head to see around it like a pelican—noted the drawer contents and rather than being apologetic or embarrassed or making a joke, she swelled with antagonism. Ready to start flapping with both long bony hands if V objected.

  V walked to one of the parlor windows and looked up to the gray March sky and down into a narrow cobbled street. Good indirect light for reading. The three flights of stairs would improve her health. If she leaned at just the right angle, she could see a thin slice of St. Paul’s dome. All in all not completely squalorous, but leaning toward.

  V said, I’ll take it.

  She moved in the next afternoon. Her things—all her holdings—fit in two travel-scarred steamer trunks with arched lids. She wiped out the mousey cupboard drawers and placed her books in stacks of five around the sitting room and bumped the comfortable chair a few feet nearer the window. Then she walked down the street. Within four blocks she found shops to buy books and periodicals and bread and cheese and fruit and wine and glassine packets of morphine and small brown bottles of laudanum. She came back loaded with purchases and filled one of the clouded glasses with cheap Bordeaux and a few drops of tincture. She looked out the window, tracking the gradations of gray that marked sunset.

  Well past forty, fortunes lost, alone in London. She still received a few invitations to posh parties but always declined because she no longer owned the correct clothes. The last time she accepted had been nearly a year before, a luncheon with the rebel princess Louise at Kensington Palace, though the minute V stepped out of the carriage she felt too shabby to be there and vowed to stop pretending, to accept that lives rarely have plots, but sometimes they find shape. And that hers fell and rose and fell so often that she imagined drawing its graph and ending up with a crosscut saw blade.