Varina

When her mother finally lets her go, she says, Well, at least that’s a pretty dress. Usually you look like a Gypsy in an opera. But your hair is still a mess. And you should get that boil looked at. We’re paying the hotel enough that they can surely get the house doctor to treat an infection gratis.

  The mother’s every word leaves her mouth as a blaring pronouncement. The boil is a faint blemish below Laura’s right cheekbone, slighter than an adolescent pimple.

  The brother stands and shakes V’s hand and says, Blount Scott. Head of our company’s accounting.

  Unlike Laura her brother is dark-haired, and it hangs lank and greasy. He talks in a sort of huffy barking voice rising from a chest constricted by phlegm and resentment.

  After they sit, Laura scoots her chair closer to V, leans in, and—not quite whispering—says, A warning, we’re all liars at heart.

  Her mother says, Imagine living twenty years with someone who thinks that’s ever an appropriate comment.

  —My older sister isn’t here, Laura says. We’ve never gotten along. She’s angry all the time and holds it against me that I’m prettier.

  Mrs. Scott says, You’ve never understood that when your sister was a girl, the Negro servants were so mean to her.

  —Really? V says. Mean?

  —Awful. It damaged her forever.

  —Physical attacks?

  —Verbal.

  —This was when? V asks. During the great Negro revolt of 1885?

  Laura stifles a laugh and then coughs.

  —It’s not funny, Mrs. Scott says. Laura’s sister is very sensitive, and they were so sarcastic toward her.

  —I see, V says. People can be so cruel.

  Lunch arrives. Mrs. Scott talks while she eats, and the cavity of her mouth as she works her food makes sounds like a rubber plunger opening a sink drain. Chicken salad and lettuce at various stages of liquidation make repeat appearances between lips and teeth. She holds her fork as if her finger joints hardly articulate, a limp reluctance, as if other people’s hands usually do that job for her. She talks without letup, complaining of Laura’s expenses. The brother breaks in and goes over the figures exact to the dollar, to the extent that V worries she’ll dream of nothing during the night but murmuring voices rising out of a dark fog saying numbers over and over. One thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, hundreds of thousands. Mumbles of millions rolling over and over like a rising tide until dawn.

  Mrs. Scott obliquely suggests that Laura has derailed her life by developing inconveniently strong attractions to men she hardly knows.

  —I suppose I should have been a harsher disciplinarian, Mrs. Scott says.

  —You housebroke me by tying me to the potty and whipping me, Laura says.

  —She’s so dramatic, Blount says. I was seven or eight and remember how it was. Mother only striped her legs with a willow switch when she was willful. And if she’d just complied, Mother wouldn’t have tied her.

  The longer she stays among them, the more V believes Laura’s family would gladly commission a hole to be drilled through her forehead and a long red-hot needle plunged into her brain if it would put her under their control.

  —Are you taking care to see that she doesn’t run off with some boy? Mrs. Scott asks V.

  —Laura’s a woman, so I’d advise her against a boy. I’d been married nearly three years at her age. Anyway, I’m her friend, not her caretaker. And I’m certainly not applying for the position of mother.

  Mrs. Scott plows ahead and says, I worry about this little play you all are putting on. She’ll fall in love with Hamlet if he’s younger than sixty.

  —He is, and maybe she will, V says. But I can guarantee he won’t fall in love with her. His interests lie elsewhere.

  —Another girl?

  —He’s a confirmed bachelor. Very resolute.

  Mrs. Scott shakes her head all weary, like the world has gone too far wrong to comment.

  Laura endures the conversation by pretending to occupy a whole other scene. She picks through her salad and eats the pecan halves and raisins and crescent moons of celery, leaving behind a plate of lettuce and tomatoes and croutons.

  —At any rate, I plan to attend the rehearsal this afternoon, Mrs. Scott declares.

  —Little to see today, V says. Only the boring parts—figuring out who stands where. And besides, the rehearsal isn’t until late afternoon, almost dinner.

  —I’ll just say this, and you need to know it, Mrs. Scott says, leaning forward toward V. Laura never took blame for anything. That is the source of her difficulty. Failure of personal responsibility.

  After delivering her mighty revelation, Mrs. Scott sits back justified and sanctified, stuffed sausage-tight inside her charcoal dress.

  Laura says, Family trait.

  THE DISHES HAVE ALREADY been taken away and they’re drinking coffee when James arrives. He carries the blue book under his arm and V’s note in his hand like a traveler at a border crossing holding a passport ready to present.

  —Oh, James, V says. I’d like to introduce my friend here at the hotel, Laura. And her mother, Mrs. Scott, and her brother, Mr. Scott.

  To the table she says, This is Mr. Blake. We’ve recently reunited. Long ago he was a son to me.

  James says all the correct formulas of words.

  Laura says, So, the mysterious Mr. Blake I’ve heard V talk about so much.

  She holds out her hand for a touch of greeting.

  Mrs. Scott looks at James and then at V. She stays quiet. Blount doesn’t stand to shake hands.

  V looks at James with a slight eye roll, and says, Mrs. Scott and young Blount are shy folks and sometimes find themselves at a loss for words in polite society. But I’m sure they’re pleased to meet you too.

  Laura laughs aloud.

  James looks a question at V and she nods toward the empty chair. He takes his seat and says to Laura, You were playing the piano a couple of Sundays ago. “Sunflower Slow Drag.”

  —I can’t play Joplin fast enough.

  —The title of the song has the word slow in it, but people always play it too fast, showing off. Your version was beautiful.

  Mrs. Scott lifts her hand a couple of inches off the table and levels her forefinger at V. She whispers, You keep them away from each other. I mean it. One time, she ran off for a week with a middle-aged saxophone player.

  V looks directly at the finger—not a trace of smile on her face—until Mrs. Scott withdraws it.

  ON THE TERRACE, V and James regard the long blue and green view stretching hazy to the west. Between them on a low table, a silver tea tray, and a smaller tray with a dozen tiny triangular sandwiches, and the blue book.

  —Was that awkward? James says.

  —Not for me it wasn’t. I like Laura very much, and care about her well-being. I tried to distract her family, a feint at the flank to entice them to aim their artillery my direction, since I’m well fortified.

  —And toward me too? James asks.

  —A little. And only because I knew you could stand it because you’re fortified too—even when you were tiny you were. Laura isn’t at all, and her mother and brother are predators and will eat her alive if they can.

  V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion. On the old side, you’re left with wrinkled age and whatever fractured, end-of-the-line knowledge might have accrued. Wisdom as exhaustion. And on the other side—which V still remembers with molecular vividness—youth and yearning and urgency for something not yet fully defined. Undiluted hope and desire. But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises—grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger. br />
  —I’ll assume you’re right, James says. But I wouldn’t know much about long family relationships. When I was fifteen, I probably imagined they were all either perfectly happy or ended in gunfire.

  V laughs and then sips tea. James takes two tiny sandwiches for his lunch. It is a warm day, and V pushes her three-quarter sleeves to the elbows and fans herself with one hand. She suggests James feel free to remove his jacket, but he declines.

  James asks, What are you most afraid to lose?

  —Now?

  —Yes.

  —Nothing, of course, V says.

  James recasts his question.

  He asks, What do you want to maintain?

  —Memory, even if it’s sometimes false.

  —Well then, what I’m curious about right now is Washington.

  * * *

  In 1849 after the peace treaty between Brierfield and The Hurricane was signed, V finally returned to Washington. She was still in her early twenties and wife of a war hero, a senator, soon to be a U.S. secretary of war. Little did V know that for the next thirty years she would never live anyplace for more than a year or so at a time. A Gypsy fortune-teller with her caravan—red and yellow and blue—knew more definition of home than V would. Over those years she bought and sold several households of furniture. Some man in a brown suit, shiny at the elbows and knees—maybe a touch of lunch on his shirtfront—arrives. He goes room to room looking over your carefully chosen things like they’re trash, makes an insulting offer, which you accept. Then you move on, leaving behind a ribbon of acquisitions like bright-colored snakeskin shed to turn pale as a fingernail and dissolve in the weather. You carry forward into the next future only a few trunks of clothes and extra-special books and paintings—a Gypsy caravan load at most.

  THAT SECOND TIME IN WASHINGTON differed extremely from the first. They lived in a mansion a few blocks from the White House. It was beautiful, but she missed the vibrating energy of Brown’s Hotel, which had been like living in a dormitory or attending a house party that stretched on for months.

  However, the upper reaches of government existed on a grander scale than mere congressmen. At that time a memorable dinner party among senators and cabinet members and their wives sometimes involved slaves hunkering above the ceiling to drop fresh pink rose petals as if by magic through grates onto the diners to announce the first course—which she found showy and a bit crude. Those days, some people called her Queen Varina for her dinners—even without petals—and maybe sometimes for her manner. Dumbards usually selected out after one invitation, overwhelmed by the knowledge and wit around her table.

  Uncle Jeff sat at the head, striking and graceful and stately behind his famous cheekbones and raptor-beak nose, looking out from ash-colored eyes that gave nothing away. Candle flame always flattered him, but even in broad daylight people walking down the street turned to stare at his handsomeness. Because of his health—recent battle wounds and lingering malaria—Jeff remained slim, even during the years when men thicken in the middle and their bellies declare themselves. He was especially slim if he had recently passed through one of his long sick twilights when malaria shivered him to the marrow or when his eyesight burned and ripped with pain at every beam of sunlight. This before the left eye clouded and he only allowed photographs in profile. Even healthy, his body coiled tight, gripped against itself, squeezing and quivering with a force some saw as nothing but raw, red anger and ambition. Most mornings, on his way out the door, V reminded him that every moment didn’t need to be lived on a battlefield.

  Mostly during V’s famous dinners Jeff was not at all funny. He sat absorbing the wit of others for long stretches of conversation, and then he issued some piercing comment, dry and oblique, benefiting from long, silent reflection—sometimes just a half-dozen words, perfectly chosen. And everyone would erupt in laughter as he looked down at his place setting. Probably a lovely pattern of Wedgwood and Murano crystal that V would sell for pennies on the dollar when the next earthquake in their lives shook everything to the ground.

  THOSE EVENINGS were when they became close to Judah Benjamin, then a new senator from Louisiana who enjoyed boasting that he was the first Jew to honor that body. Judah was the only Confederate leader whose memoir V wanted to read, except he never got around to writing one—too busy after the war with success in London, eventually becoming a Queen’s Counsel. In New Orleans, Judah had married a beautiful, wealthy French Creole girl named Natalie, and they very quickly—uncomfortably so—had a daughter. And then Natalie took the little girl and moved to Paris. After he was elected to the Senate, Judah spent a fortune buying and furnishing a grand house in Washington, hoping to lure her back. She stayed a couple of months in that raw, young city and then fled back to France. Theirs became a marriage by post. V remembers Judah getting a big laugh at one of her dinners by sharing a note he had just received from Natalie. He held up the paper, her big looping hand. It read, Speak not to me of economy. It is so fatiguing.

  V’s mother—back during the conflict over the will—had said bluntly that V’s marriage would be happier if she succeeded in becoming pregnant. Not the first mother to hold that opinion. But V and Jeff might also have been happier if they’d arranged something like Judah and Natalie, where they mostly corresponded and Judah visited her in Paris for a month every summer and then went away before they became tired of each other. It was a marriage that lasted decades upon decades. But V didn’t move to Paris. By her middle twenties—after the treaty between Brierfield and The Hurricane—she began having babies, and that went on for more than ten years. She stopped calling her husband Uncle Jeff and started calling him Banny, a Celtic term of endearment. Husband.

  * * *

  A bellboy arrives and hands V the fat book she had asked him to bring down from the desk in her room.

  She opens it and reaches out to James. A passage is marked in pencil.

  Read this, she says. You’re always shoving your Miss Botume at me.

  He takes the book and turns it over to look at the spine. It’s a volume of her own from twenty years ago—her completion of Jeff’s memoir.

  James begins reading to himself, but she stops him and says, Aloud, please. It’s about famous people I knew back when I was young. Presidents and so on. Those times in Washington we’re talking about.

  James says, When these august shades rise before me whose active lives had been lived before I grew to womanhood, the responsible, serious youth that fell to my lot is not a subject of regret. The history of their day has to me a very stirring interest, and as I read the chronicles of their deeds, they stand clothed in their well-remembered personality, struggling with united minds for the whole country, holding the interests and possessions of all equally sacred, and pledged to protect these with their lives.

  After a long pause he says, Lovely thoughts.

  —No, V says. Words worth less than a pail of horse biscuits, which could at least fertilize a tomato plant.

  —I WENT TO NEW YORK CITY last week to visit Julie’s family, and I spent two afternoons in libraries reading about you in histories and memoirs and newspapers.

  —Interesting?

  —Yes, it was.

  —But why did you do it—go checking up on me?

  —Not my intention. I want to understand as much as I can about what you’re telling me. And I came away with a question. In some of the things I read—a couple—I was described as your pet.

  —Who did?

  —We don’t have to get into personalities. I’m asking if there is any truth to that view.

  —If you’re leveling charges and concealing your witnesses, I refuse to defend myself.

  They remain quiet for half a minute, and then V says, There were plenty in Richmond who needed to make up stories to explain why at the Gray House you lived upstairs in the nursery with my children rather than downstairs. They gossiped about my race from the day I arrived. My skin, my dark eyes and hair, the shape of my mouth and nose—every tiny bit
of me used as evidence as to whether I was mulatto or squaw. Their words. And then after I found you, people came up with all sorts of conspiracies about your origin. Some said you were my son with Jeff, but that my percentage of black blood came out strong in you, and we sent you away at birth. But then I couldn’t forget you and forced Jeff to bring you back and worked up a crazy story of finding you on the street to explain it. Others said you were Jeff’s son with a slave mother from Brierfield. One of those many illegitimate children he was supposed to have. Indian babies up in the northern wilderness, black babies on Mississippi plantations. Both sides claimed your arrogant nose looked like his—more evidence for their conspiracies.

  James reaches up and touches thumb and forefinger to the wings of his nose and then taps the tip three times.

  —Arrogant? he says.

  —I always thought of it as confident.

  —Some of the things I read said I was Negro. Others needed to break it down into smaller fractions—mulatto, quadroon, octoroon. Those words don’t matter to me. The word I can’t get past is pet.

  V—immediate and vehement—says, I cannot believe I’m sitting here having to listen to this. Having to explain. You’re a teacher. What’s a teacher’s pet? A favorite. Usually because they’re alert and present, smart and teachable, the ones who repay your effort five times over.

  —A favorite little animal. It means that too.

  —I won’t be responsible for your witnesses needing to apply skin color to every personal interaction. Strange to let that outer hundredth fraction of our bodies be so important. I’m guessing your Miss Botume was one of the people calling you my pet. Which way do you think those people meant the word?

  —I’ll repeat something you said two weeks ago—you don’t need me to answer that question.

  After a pause to regroup and redirect, James says, Hold out your arm, please.

  V reaches it toward him.

  James pulls back his sleeve and parallels his forearm to hers.

  —See, V says, the difference is hardly more than which of us has been in the sun lately. Plus, I’ve faded with age.