Varina

  ONE NIGHT during that long job of writing, V woke with a clear thought immediately in her head, a belief that if there is an afterlife, the morning Jeff woke to the sunshine of the next world, he did not wonder how to fill his time waiting for V’s arrival. He spruced up, tied a puffy silk cravat around his skinny neck, and went out searching for Knoxie.

  WHEN SHE FINISHED JEFF’S BOOK, exhausted and depressed, she considered her work done, a debt paid in full. She packed her leaving trunks and walked away from another houseful of furniture and moved to New York City, mainly because she could not afford London or Paris. One of those first weeks in the city, she had heart attacks every day—or at least that’s what her doctor told her. Newspapers all across the South ranted how traitorous she was. V back-talked, saying she was free, brown, and sixty-five and could live wherever she wanted. She bounced around residential hotels awhile and then found a pretty apartment near Longacre Square—West Forty-Fourth between Sixth and Seventh. What she wanted was a new life. Reconnection with people. Galleries and libraries and museums and theaters. The New York World had offered her work, and so she intended to write for part of her living.

  She did, though, keep having to deal with her husband’s remains—before, after, and long after he died. As with many things in those last years, Jeff was indifferent to where he would be buried. He asked V to deal with it. The tentative entombment took place in New Orleans, a big funeral. And then a year or two later V accepted the offer from Virginia, so they hauled him out and moved him to Richmond.

  Jeff made a leisurely journey through the South, lying in state in various places along the way. As the train passed, church bells tolled, people threw flowers on the tracks. She attended the second funeral, another grand ceremony. The new grave looked over the river, and the dead children had been moved from their scattered graves to surround him there in Hollywood Cemetery.

  Winnie died in 1898, and V considered her the last casualty of the Civil War because she had gone down to Atlanta to appear at a reunion of Confederate veterans and fell sick after being drenched during a parade. She joined V at Narragansett Pier where they had spent the summer. Winnie became worse day by day through August, and by mid-September she joined the others in Richmond and was buried with full military honors on the hill above the James River. For V nothing remained, and no new revelations concerning grief were delivered. She wanted to die but had learned long ago—all the way back to Samuel—great loss wasn’t that simple. You couldn’t just wish yourself out of it. You had to go through it all the way, had to let grief roll over you like Mississippi River floodwater until it decided to let you rise to the surface and keep going, more beaten and broken than before.

  The next spring, when V reentered the world, she realized that though she’d never wanted to own Beauvoir, Winnie’s death meant she had inherited it. When she went down to Mississippi to deal with the last of her things there, she couldn’t even cry over Winnie’s guitar and a baby doll. And then she remembered the doll was hollow and had been used for smuggling morphine. She moved the left arm just right and the secret compartment opened—empty. She wondered, though, when she might have found it necessary to smuggle morphine. Maybe it was during the war. Everything happened during the war. She kept almost nothing from the house and sold Beauvoir for much less than its value so that it could become an old soldiers home and so that she would never have to go there again.

  * * *

  A cool September afternoon—days already shorter and the lobby emptier after the end of the racing season. A man walks through the room turning switches, and large glowing filaments loop petal-shaped inside the clear bulbs. Three big checked logs glow red in the hearth.

  Laura is leaving in two days and sits close by V on the settle. She’s bundled to the chin in a blue-and-gold brocade wrap, and she says, I’m so anxious about going home that I start trembling every time I try to pack. But I’m sure I’ll be back next year, because my mother has gotten interested in that thing they do back in the basement with the helmets. She thinks it might be the cure for me.

  V says, Well, I’ll be here next summer too—I’m already booked—and you will not be doing that thing with the helmets. You’re an adult woman, and I will stand beside you when you say no. And if we have to, we’ll pull out my little suicide pistol and shoot our way out of here.

  Laura kisses her cheek and says, I’d be so scared of you if you were aimed in my direction.

  —And you remember, V says, anytime this winter your mother causes trouble, you pack a bag and come to New York and stay with me as long as you want. I’ll arrange for a piano in my apartment, and the city will give you energy. It has for me.

  James says, Laura, maybe I’ll see you there. You can play me your latest version of “Sunflower Slow Drag.”

  —I keep count of the times I play it. I think when I get to a thousand I’ll have it.

  —Where are you now? James asks.

  —Seven hundred and three.

  Laura stands and wanders out into the late afternoon, trailing her pretty wrap on the ground.

  V turns to James and asks, When will you be coming to see me in New York?

  —I certainly will come, but with the greater distance and school having started for the year I won’t make it so often.

  —Goes without saying. But come at least once a month instead of once a week, yes? And we need to have a plan because if we don’t, other things will get in the way. So two or three weeks after I’m settled in the new place—Hotel Majestic—I’ll write and we will set a date. You’ll like it—Central Park is the front lawn, and the view from my apartment is across the treetops. Carriage rides right from the door, and they’ve promised me unlimited use of the library for interviews with writers and meetings with visiting dignitaries.

  —I wonder which category I fall into, James says, smiling.

  —Both and neither. We’ll have so much fun this winter on our days together—talking and going to museums and concerts and matinees. All of that. Bookstores, I have a half-dozen favorites I want to show you.

  Then V hands James a book—Mary Chesnut’s journals, finally in print.

  —Read it and we’ll talk in New York, she says. You’ll see why I loved her. It’s been chopped to pieces, abbreviated and smoothed out. There’s no plot and her mind flits from thing to thing, but Mary shines through on every page—a true record of consciousness.

  Seventh Sunday

  New York City

  October 1906

  JAMES BLAKE WALKS THROUGH CENTRAL PARK UNTIL THE Dakota’s gables rise over the trees and the square towers of Hotel Majestic stand alongside. Leaves have turned colors, reds and yellows rich in the angled light before sunset. Hollow sounds of horses’ hooves—almost pastoral. V moved to the Majestic partly because her previously near-worthless land in Louisiana and Mississippi had started producing more income, and partly because the din and glare from the new theaters on West Forty-Fourth drove her away. She’d complained that her bay window buzzed with light and sound into early morning.

  IT’S TRUE—that thing she said about biographies all ending the same.

  She wrote James a note three weeks ago, inviting him to visit at the end of October. Said Maggie had offered to come from Colorado and help supervise her move, but V had answered that she was perfectly capable of handling things herself.

  But then, according to the papers, V came down with a bad cold during the move, and within ten days pneumonia took her away. She died in her new apartment, and Maggie had made it from Colorado in time to be with her at the end.

  Tonight a cortege will pass through the city to the Pennsylvania ferry, and then—feetfirst in a box—she will return to Richmond for a military funeral. James tries to find the word for the feeling he has—a truncation, compression, concussion. She was in and out of his life so fast. Again.

  JAMES SITS ON A BENCH, waiting to follow the cortege. He thumbs through Mary Chesnut’s newly published journals. Torn scraps of newspaper mar
k passages related to V.

  She wrote or said to Mary during the war—I live in a kind of maze. Disaster follows disaster. How I wish my husband were a dry goods clerk. Then we could dine in peace on a mutton scrag and take an airing on Sunday in a little buggy with no back, drawn by a one-eyed horse at fifty cents an hour. This dreadful living day to day depresses me more than I can say.

  Then an incisive question—Is it self-government or self-immolation that we are testing?

  Then a personal declaration—I am not one of those whose righteousness makes their prayer available.

  And then at the end of the war—My name is a heritage of woe.

  JAMES HAS STAYED THE WEEKEND with Julie’s family in Harlem, and they’ve all gotten to the place in grieving for Julie where they can laugh and find joy in her life but still tear up telling stories about her. They remind James they will always want him in their family, and they hold a place for him in their business if he ever gets tired of teaching.

  On the park bench, a string of words rises uncalled in his mind. The landscape architect of this big beautiful green rectangle once wrote that slavery was an economic mistake, or something to that effect. James opens his notebook and makes a note to self. Olmsted’s exact words? Was economic the only mistake he identified? And then he writes, Every beautiful thing in the country darkens to one degree or another by theft of lives.

  Then he jots a thought about V.

  Her last years, she was in many ways a very modern woman—unanchored and unmoored, unconstrained by family, poverty, friends, or love of place. Making a major portion of her living from her own work and talent. So why such sense of crisis in her life near its end? Yearning for a reconciliation with the past—the country’s and her own. Her need to shape memory into history.

  AFTER DARK the cortege leaves from the Majestic, the casket draped in black, two white horses pulling. There was a small, private memorial service late in the afternoon, and everything has been scheduled according to when the ferry leaves Manhattan to connect with southbound trains in New Jersey. James follows through the streets to the station. General Frederick Grant—son of V’s friend Julia and General Ulysses S.—leads a military escort of bluecoats and some old gray Confederate veterans living in the North. A brass band plays funeral dirges and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Dixie,” confusing people passing on the streets.

  Afterward, James walks all the way back to Harlem, and when he gets to the point where electric streetlights change to gas, it feels like traveling in time as much as space.

  HE FULLY INTENDED to take the train back to Albany, but instead James buys a ticket on a limited to Washington, where he changes trains. As he boards for Richmond, a conductor tells him to go three cars back and look for a white sign with black letters saying COLORED.

  —Nobody mentioned this when I bought my ticket.

  —Virginia law, the conductor says.

  —What happens if I take a seat in whatever car I want?

  —The railroad company enforces the law. You don’t sit where the law says and want to pitch a fit about it, they’ll stop the train and leave you in the middle of nowhere.

  —I need to be in Richmond by tomorrow.

  —Well, the conductor says, there’s one way to make that happen.

  Until Fredericksburg James sits in the colored car alone, feeling separate as usual. Then an old man in a brown suit boards and takes a seat as far from James as possible and opens a newspaper. James writes in his notebook, What railcar would be specific enough?

  It’s late when James reaches Richmond. He finds a room in Jackson Ward. It’s a town within a town, like you’d find in every city in America, whether north, south, east, or west. Black hotels, black stores, black theaters and restaurants and nightclubs, black banks. The hotel is a short walk from the Gray House, and not too far to the cemetery down by the river.

  NEXT MORNING JAMES STANDS on the cobbles where Joe died. He remembers the spot clearly but not much else. The house is a little familiar—also a sort of dreamlike recognition of the neighborhood, the slope of the hill, the streets and alleyways. Joe had been his double. Same age, same size. They’d worn the same clothes. Both the same except the final layer of skin—so not the same at all, even now. Forty years on, James survives and Joe doesn’t, though James’s life keeps circling back to its beginnings. He thinks of karma, Laura’s mistaken definition of it—going round and round until you come to your senses and make yourself better and get to move on.

  He remembers saying to V, Someday you’ll be forgiven for all this, yes?

  —No, she said.

  JAMES STANDS UP THE HILL to watch the ceremony from a distance—green grass stretching downslope to the gravesite and the brown river. Clouds build to the west. A brass band honks and a preacher repeats platitudes from a dead culture. Toward the end, volleys of rifle fire pop and then echo from across the river. He believes she would have hated that noise while enjoying the attention.

  The whole thing is sad. Funerals are supposed to be, but this is particularly sad. To see the circle of graves, all the dead children huddled around the statue of their father—a very ordinary statue, a lazy or unskillful effort by the sculptor. Jeff the president of an imaginary country stands with generic determination, facing a future that no longer exists.

  James wonders if the preacher doing the talking is named Minnigerode. He remembers a story—V called it a moment in time, a cupped handful of the million clock ticks she never fully understood. A soft morning in May, early in the war. The tall windows of the Gray House open wide and the sheer curtains ghosting in the slight breeze. Jeff, all solemn, knelt on a cushion. And Minnigerode, the Episcopal rector of the most important church in town, sprinkled him in baptism, no more water than the tap of a damp blossom against his brow. Jeff had suddenly become religious after years of indifference as to whether he’d been baptized as an infant or not. At the end of the ceremony, the divine Minnigerode said, I look upon you as God’s chosen instrument.

  James wonders if that endorsement more than fulfilled all Jeff wanted out of the ceremony, given that the most powerful and political families in town went to St. Paul’s every Sunday. Or maybe all the Bible Jeff and the preacher needed was the one passage from Luke, the slave beaten with many stripes.

  Maybe even that early in the war Jeff knew he was betting everything on a losing idea. And all it was was an idea—airy, theoretical, abstract—backed up by human souls equally airy. But somewhere down below all the thinking, the digging into the entrails of the Holy Constitution for prophecy and justification, very real human bodies suffered the pain of theory gone bad.

  AFTER THE SERVICE ENDS and most people leave, James walks down the hill to the graves. V doesn’t have her own marker, just a plaque on the side of Jeff’s monument. Maggie, the only surviving Davis, chose a dreadful compliant-wife passage from the Bible to be V’s last testament. James starts to write it in his notebook but stops after three words because it doesn’t apply to the person he’s known.

  He wonders how it is possible to love someone and still want to throw down every remnant of the order they lived by. He thinks, I don’t want to be a mirror too perfect in imaging flaws—gratitude and resentment, that’s what I have.

  NEXT MORNING ON THE TRAIN NORTH, James reads a newspaper claiming that V’s last words to Maggie were, Don’t you wear black. It is bad for your health, and will depress your husband. But what he wants to remember and writes in his notebook is something she said to him one Sunday:

  When the time is remote enough nobody amounts to much.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to express my appreciation and thanks to Katherine Frazier, Kyle Crandell, and Annie Crandell for their patience, advice, support, and daily effort to maintain a clear space for me to work. Annie Crandell provided more kinds of astute and meticulous assistance, insight, and advice than I have room to enumerate. Also, my thanks to Betty Frazier and Dora Beal, both avid readers, for their encourag
ement over the years.

  I wish to thank K. B. Carle for her insightful reading and perceptive comments.

  My gratitude to Amanda Urban and Dan Halpern and everyone at Ecco.

  Thanks to Kit Swaggert for many years of friendship and support and for the mandala of this book’s world, drawn from the lid of Varina’s inkpot. And to Chan Gordon for finding Varina’s pen and inkpot and James Blake’s blue book.

  Varina is a novel. For those interested in the history behind the fiction, I would point first toward the following:

  Cashin, Joan E. First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2006.

  Cooper, William J., Jr. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Vintage, 2001.

  Ross, Ishbel. First Lady of the South: The Life of Mrs. Jefferson Davis. New York: Harper, 1958.

  Strode, Hudson. Jefferson Davis, Private Letters. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966.

  Woodward, C. Vann. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

  About the Author

  CHARLES FRAZIER is the author of Cold Mountain, an international bestseller that won the National Book Award and was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film by Anthony Minghella. Frazier is also the author of the bestselling novels Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Charles Frazier

  Nightwoods

  Thirteen Moons

  Cold Mountain

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.