Varina Read online

  Laura wakes after perhaps half an hour and looks up. Her eyes are hazel with striae dark as walnut.

  She says, Did you come to me, or did I come to you?

  Her voice vibrates with a thin hoarse crack.

  —The latter, V says.

  —Has breakfast been served?

  —Some time ago. Luncheon will be in a couple of hours.

  —Oh, good. I could nap longer.

  Laura breathes deep, one cycle through her mouth and two through her nose, and then she’s gone again. V reaches to her wrist and presses her middle finger into the tangle of bone and gristle to find a heartbeat. The girl throbs at long intervals. V tries to number the beats saying one Mississippi, two Mississippi. She gets thirty beats a minute, which doesn’t seem right. Not even possible. V worries the girl will die in her arms, and she doesn’t need another gone child.

  Laura smells like cut rye grass and ripe pears and a pillowcase needing washing. The skin of her cheeks is poreless and white as a piece of everyday china. She weighs nothing, rests against V like a goose down pillow. Laura doesn’t remind V of her own children in the least, but she does call back youth. Like holding a pale version of her own young self.

  V leans to Laura’s ear and breathes, fainter than a whisper, an arrangement of three words. Be well, get well. She says it over and over like a prayer, a chant, an old mystic rhythm that if repeated long enough works magic.

  At some point, V may have fallen asleep too. Or at least into a daze, watching the patterns of light through the window—a vertical rectangle of landscape, shades of green and blue, ridgeline and sky. The changes of light through the day happen in such slow rhythms that you have to pay strict attention to follow the melody.

  At least she doesn’t get bored, wishing she could reach ten feet to the nearest book. Each ticking minute tingles with life. Sheltering this sad girl, her shallow breaths and slow heart, abandoned by her family to the questionable authority of the self-satisfied alienists and mesmerists and semidoctors at The Retreat. Laura is lonely, alone, isolate. V keeps breathing the spell, Be well, get well.

  Laura shifts her legs a bit, and the bottoms of her feet present themselves. Ivory, amber, and coal dust. Her shanks glow tight along the shinbone, a blond shimmer of fine hair down the slack muscle of the calf. V holds this body with its reluctant spark of life inside, compassed by such a frail container of skin, all its messy fluids and mysterious greasy dark organs held within a membrane hardly more substantive than a soap bubble. Touch it gently and it pops. Gone to nothing.

  V SAYS, IT FEELS LIKE RAIN. So next week for the races?

  —Whatever you think, Mrs. Davis.

  —Could we talk to each other without missus and ma’am? We have such a short time together, and manners only slow us down.

  —What should I call you, then?

  —You be James and I’ll be Varina.

  —I don’t think I can do that.

  —Yes, you can. If we hadn’t been separated back then, what would we be calling each other now?

  —I don’t know.

  —Neither do I. But if we’d reached Havana, we might be sitting under palm trees beside the Caribbean, talking in Spanish—your pretty children calling me Abuela. So for today, let’s try James and Varina. If others come around listening in, snooping for gossip, we can go back to mister and missus for a minute. We could exaggerate the way we say it and laugh about it later. Booker T. Washington and I made all the newspapers just sitting together talking for an hour or two in a hotel lobby in New York City trying to discuss education, except people kept hovering, eavesdropping, and at some point we both started laughing.

  —All right, Varina, James says. I have a question. Is this a hotel or a hospital?

  She sweeps her hand to encompass the sun terrace and says, Look around, James. Guests fashionably dressed, nearly as fashionably as you. Nobody wearing a straitjacket. Just having drinks and food in the afternoon. Correct me if I am wrong, but it looks like a hotel.

  —Except, last week I thought I heard someone scream.

  —Words fail, V says. To live is to rant.

  She announces the idea as if she had composed it and honed it down over time and rehearsed her delivery, meaning for it to be carved directly underneath Emerson’s attempt to reconcile guilt and fear. Or perhaps she meant to scratch it with a nail on a smaller stone off to the side, a sort of marginal annotation.

  Then she laughs and says, James, people like to gossip about The Retreat. All it amounts to is that therapies are offered. It’s the fashion.

  She runs down possibilities. Hydrotherapy, just a fancy name for a very hot or very cold bath. Physiotherapy, nothing but relaxing massages, taking walks and carriage rides, a bowling alley in the basement, badminton on the lawn for those still able to jump around, and recent talk of converting cow pastures into golf links. Mechanotherapy, a roomful of ugly exercise machines, but always a line of ladies waiting for the vibrating Zander apparatus. Electrotherapy, though, causes her to lower her voice. She barely breathes how way back in the basement they’re playing around with a dark speculation of Benjamin Franklin’s about the possible benefits of passing strong electric shock through the human head. Franklin took a jolt hard enough to rob him of consciousness, and when he came to he felt unusually fine. He theorized amnesia relieves melancholia. Which makes complete sense, because memory is so often to blame for it. Who couldn’t use their load of time and history lightened?

  She explains how the hotel even makes putting on a short play therapeutic. Dramatotherapy. Says that she and some other guests are doing an abbreviated Hamlet soon, and a man who makes moving pictures is coming from New York to film it so that they can look at it later and laugh at themselves.

  —In Richmond during the war, V says, Mary Chesnut and I put on after-dinner comic theatricals and made famous people like Jeb Stuart—the great plumed hero straight off the battlefield—claim a role and join in. He loved it. Always demanded the silliest part and played for laughs. So did Judah Benjamin, the attorney general or secretary of state or secretary of war or whatever job he held that week in the improvised government. Jeff, of course, headed to bed or his office before the fun started. And fun—not therapy—was all we claimed for our evening entertainment. A chance to laugh.

  —I don’t remember any of that, James says.

  —Well, V says cheerfully, I’m sure you children sneaked downstairs to watch a time or two. It wasn’t all formal dress and serious music. But my main point is, we’re volunteers at The Retreat. We choose our therapies from printed lists exactly like the menus in the dining room. Most of us want to lose a few pounds or to drink less so that we don’t have to stop drinking altogether. Some want to become a little less fearful and a little more brave, less despondent and more hopeful. As for me, I want any improvement I can get, but I’ll settle for cutting back on the powders and tinctures. Not stop, just moderate. Interesting for the first time since I was thirteen to have a doctor helping me ease up on opiates instead of recommending more. But if I keep living to my eighty-fifth birthday, I plan to start taking them as freely as Mary Chesnut.

  —WHAT DO YOU WANT to get away from?

  —Saratoga isn’t the wilderness, James. I’m not running. I did plenty of that the first half of my life. I spent a day with a newspaper writer a few weeks ago. The article they published said I was old but still liked to keep up with new books, and to play cards, and go to the races. If I wanted to run away, why would I talk to a reporter?

  —I mean personally. One thing you’d put behind you forever if you could.

  —Take a wild guess.

  —The war and all the things surrounding it.

  —There. Asked and answered.

  V LEANS AND LIFTS the shaggy book from the table. She riffles pages. Bookmarks flutter.

  —I imagine you’d like to get back to this. Compare Miss Botume’s imagination against mine? Try to construct your own memory?

  —Yes. I’d like to k
now about you and Mr. Davis. Particularly him letting me stay there, living in the same big room with his children, joining them with their tutor, learning to read. Me living like that in the presidential mansion of the Confederate States of America seems . . . James pauses, searches for the words, and finally says dryly, Of a low order of probability.

  V smiles and says, You can take your tongue out of your cheek. However unlikely, it did happen. He went to the courthouse himself to get papers verifying you were free. We had photographs of all the children taken not long after you came. Maybe they still exist—I hope so. You’re in them, standing plump-cheeked wearing a little striped suit. I don’t know why he didn’t object to you being there—maybe because he didn’t have the energy to fight the war and me at the same time. To be able to live together we learned to pick our battles.

  —Really, in blunt terms, my question is simple. If I’d been darker would he have let you keep me? Would he have picked that battle?

  —Again, I don’t think you need me to answer that question.

  —What about you? Would you have stopped my beating and taken me home? Included me in the family pictures? Taken me with you fleeing Richmond?

  —Fleeing America, to be precise.

  —Would you have done it?

  —Truth?

  James nods.

  —I don’t know, V says. I hope so.

  —Did we leave Richmond on a train? The other day I thought I remembered sleeping on a wood bench in a passenger car.

  —Not bare wood, but a bad trip from the start, V says. At least I had my little suicide pistol to comfort me.

  Falling Apart

  March 1865

  AT THE STATION A STUB OF TRAIN WAITED—A LOCOMOTIVE with a wood car, baggage car, and one old unpainted passenger car fitted with red velvet upholstery worn silvery bald in patches. V and Ellen and the children settled in. The Trenholm girls—beautiful daughters of the secretary of the treasury, one of the richest men in America before the war—arrived like they were embarking on a pleasure cruise. The only men were Burton Harrison, Jefferson’s secretary, and James Morgan, an officer—both in their twenties. Morgan had been yanked out of the trenches of Petersburg for this mission because Jefferson—still sometimes a romantic—knew love brewed between Morgan and one of the Trenholm girls and didn’t want him to be among the last to die. Burton had accompanied V on all her emergency flights from Richmond—as protector, assistant, substitute husband—and they had long since become tight friends.

  For the children V and Ellen made pallets of quilts on the floor between the rows of seats. Maggie and Billy and Jeffy and Jimmie lay down and pulled covers to their eyebrows. Jefferson came aboard and kissed cheeks and made assurances. Wished Morgan and the Trenholm girls bon voyage. He took Burton with him onto the platform, and they talked pretty urgently.

  V sat next to Ellen and took her hand and said, You don’t have to go with me. If it’s better for you to stay here, then stay.

  Ellen sat a long time looking down at the floor before saying, There’s not anything here for me. And you can’t handle all the children by yourself.

  —Coming with me could get very bad.

  —Bad here too with no money and food scarce till crops start growing. And besides, if it does get bad the children will need us both.

  Somewhere in the night, only an hour or two below Petersburg, the locomotive broke down. No explosion of steam or clash of metal. They coasted quietly to a stop in dark woods and then sat through dawn and sunset and another dawn before finally rolling again. Four days in all to cover fewer than three hundred miles to Charlotte, during which time the provisional nation crumbled and many people died. Sherman’s army still raged north after the burning of Columbia and no one knew what civilian target they would destroy next.

  Word of V’s arrival in Charlotte preceded them, and an angry, howling mob waited at the station—people already beaten in war and now standing at a cliff edge with nowhere to go but down. Among them, deserters and draftees and relatives of the pointlessly dead. Manners collapsed into rage. They saw V through the car window and began reviling. They shouted curses largely aimed at her husband, but since he wasn’t present to absorb them, she would have to do. Burton convinced V and Ellen and the children to move away from the windows and huddle with the Trenholm girls in a corner, where they kept their courage up by making exaggerated shocked expressions at each angry vulgarity. V pulled her little weapon out and then realized the ammunition was packed away in a trunk, since she hadn’t anticipated needing to kill herself in Charlotte.

  Burton and Morgan had just a pistol and a sword between them. They stood inside the door to the car, and when a few brave mobsters climbed the steps, Burton showed his pistol and said, No.

  If ten men had decided to board the car and do whatever their rage told them to do once inside, they could have stormed the door and succeeded, losing only two or three men. But no one wanted to go first. They backed off and shouted a few minutes more about killing Jeff Davis and the whole bunch of rich slave owners their friends and family had died for. Soon they lost interest and drifted away.

  Burton went door-to-door through Charlotte looking for lodging at hotels and private homes, but everyone feared retribution, whether from their own angry people or from Sherman if he swept through killing and burning—the same people would have treated V like the queen of England twelve months before. Burton finally found a man named Weil who said he would be glad to offer shelter. The Trenholm girls and Morgan were moving on, the train set to take them as far down the line as it could toward their house in upstate South Carolina, the Charleston house being out of the question because of Sherman. One of the girls said, Come join us. We’ll have a house party till they burn us out. Drink all the best wine to keep the Yankees from getting it.

  Burton escorted V and Ellen and the children through the angry streets of Charlotte to Mr. Weil’s house. In the following days they stayed hidden away, though Burton went out once gathering scraps of news and rumor—the fall of Richmond, the flight of the government, Lee handing his sword to Grant at Appomattox.

  * * *

  —I still have that little pistol, V says. I keep it in my jewelry box.

  —I can’t imagine, whatever the danger, sending Julie away like that. If it was bad enough to give her a pistol to kill herself with, it would have been bad enough for me to walk away from everything else and try to take her someplace safe.

  —Our situation was more complicated, V says. Jeff being president of a rebel country.

  —Yes, but all that was over. How many days after we left Richmond did he go?

  —I don’t know. Three or four?

  —And he didn’t catch up with us for how long?

  —Going on two months. And again, it’s a point of pride that we could probably have made it to Cuba if he hadn’t caught up with us.

  James says, I told you last week about defending him against black children in South Carolina and white children in Massachusetts and both groups of them fighting me. But all I remember of him is a slim, older white man in a suit. He was much older than you, and I’ve been wondering how you came together.

  —It was briers and hurricanes right from the start, V says.

  Hurricane & Brierfield

  1842

  SHE GREW UP OUTSIDE NATCHEZ IN AN OLD-FASHIONED house called The Briers. A house, not a plantation. No fields, no cotton. It sat on a few acres of high bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The ground sloped east to a dry bayou a hundred feet deep, its sides covered with pines and live oaks, and magnolia trees. To the west, deep yellow clay bluffs caved to the river below. The proportions of the house felt right—oversize windows and broad shady galleries across the front and back—but it was largely the river that made it beautiful.

  Growing up, she witnessed every day all the dirty business of cotton and slaves, all the criminality and culture of the new country passing in miniature below her on the big brown river. Everything that floated�
��dugout canoes, and vast timber rafts, and every kind of johnboat, flatboat, keelboat, and barge, all the way to giant white paddle wheel steamboats—coasted down-current or struggled up.

  Nights when she was young, looking down from the lawn of The Briers, steamboats passed below her lit up like Christmas. They trailed faint sounds of music and the distant grinding and churning of their great paddle wheels. She stood barefoot in the damp grass and watched their unreal passage below her, as if Venus had shifted its orbit and swooped by, a luminous world of its own, here and gone in minutes, leaving the blank space of wide river even quieter and darker than before.

  AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH from twelve onward, dreams rode her nights. Prophetic, horrific, beautiful, mysterious. She never claimed they came true. Others did that, and during the Washington and Richmond years, she became famous for them. Most of them were no more important than anyone’s dreams, but her spooky dreams, the scary ones, sometimes reappeared in the real world in large and small ways.

  Twenty years before it happened, she dreamed the balcony and the cobbles and the house where little Joe fell to his death. She dreamed the whole bloody war long before it erupted. It was an epic nightmare that lasted until dawn. She was in Washington at the time, the wife of a freshman congressman, still in her teens and childless, delighted to be invited to parties at the White House and happy that Jeff’s cotton plantation down on the Mississippi provided heaps of money. But she still remembers being yanked out of sleep by the horror of the war dream and getting up and squatting over the porcelain chamber pot in the dark and going back to sleep and the dream catching right back up. All the destruction and blood and punishment. Fallen heroes, victories and defeats, great acts of courage and cowardice. Battlefields muddy with blood, cotton fields full of slaves working ankle-deep in blood, whipping posts like red fountains, and all around a hurricane tide of red waves crashing over everyone. It was biblical in the sense that the Bible is a bloody red book. Even her beloved Greeks, back in the long dizziness of time, were nearly as bad—except for Sappho and a few other outliers. Otherwise, all dripping red down the green and blue globe.