Varina by Charles Frazier
First Sunday
The Blue Book
Saratoga Springs, 1906
IF HE IS THE BOY IN THE BLUE BOOK, WHERE TO START? HE can’t expect to recognize her after four decades, and he certainly doesn’t expect her to recognize him. The last time they saw each other he would have been no more than six.
Firm memory of childhood eludes him until about eight years old, and before that it’s mostly whispers of sound and images flashing like photographs. A dead boy lying on the ground, a grand house, a tall woman with black hair and a soothing voice.
A year ago, walking down a street in Albany, he heard a dozen syllables of someone singing “Alouette” through an open second-story window. The song twitched a strong nerve of memory from the deep past—a ribbon of road stretching forward, a swath of starry sky visible between tops of pine trees, a thin paring of moon, a brown-eyed mother hugging him close and pointing out the patterns of constellations, telling their names and stories. Entrained with those hazy memories came a surging feeling something like love.
FIRST SUNDAY OF AUGUST, early afternoon, James Blake walks through the heavy front doors of The Retreat carrying a marbled journal and a book bound in dark blue nubby cloth, bristling with torn newspaper place-marks. He wears his best gray suit, a club-collar shirt bleached perfect white, a striped black-and-gray waistcoat, a coral silk tie knotted loose. Three steps inside the door he removes his hat—a new boater—and walks purposefully to the front desk like he belongs there. The desk clerk looks him over and then pauses long enough to make sure Blake becomes aware that his shade of skin has been noted. The clerk—maybe fifty, thinning hair combed straight back, teeth marks intact—finally says, May I help?
Blake hands him a small envelope. Says, Could you deliver this to a guest? Mrs. Davis.
The clerk pats the envelope down onto his desktop without taking his eyes off Blake. He turns his palms up and says, She’s expecting you?
—I doubt it.
—You’re not here to interview her for some publication?
—No.
The clerk rings for a bellboy and then says, You might be more comfortable waiting outside. Turn left and there are benches. We’ll notify you if Mrs. Davis is available.
—Here in front of the fireplace will be better. So I’ll see her when she arrives.
THE LOBBY OF THE RETREAT matches every detail of public rooms in tasteful modern resort hotels designed in the Arts & Crafts style—Limbert furniture, Voysey rugs, Roycroft lighting. Except, faint and far down one of the long corridors, James thinks he hears someone scream.
He shifts uncomfortably in the strict angles of an oak and leather settle facing the massive stone hearth. Broad windows and French doors look out across a green and blue landscape—fields, woods, valleys, hills. A few people scattered around the great room read books and flap papers from Boston and New York and Philadelphia. In a corner, a tousled young blond woman sits bowed in concentration at the piano trying to play “Sunflower Slow Drag.” It keeps getting away from her until she gives up and plays it half-speed.
Over the big hearth, a sentiment cuts deep into the massive keystone, lettered like a Gothic forgery on a famous man’s grave marker. It reads WHAT LIES BEHIND US AND WHAT LIES BEFORE US ARE TINY MATTERS COMPARED TO WHAT LIES WITHIN US. ~ EMERSON.
James stands and traces each letter with his forefinger, as if writing the sentence for the first time. It works to establish balance—like perfectly equal pinches of sand in each cup of a set of scales—and then he draws a deep breath and blows it all away. He touches each junction of that grand E and tries to reckon what state of guilt and dread about time past and time future Emerson proposed to comfort.
James sits again and thumbs through his blue book until he comes to a chapter toward the end that he has read and reread and underscored in pencil to the point that every line appears profound. Margins congest with question marks and checks and exclamations. If he’s right and the boy described in the book is him, this is all he knows of his origin. No living relatives, recently a widower, no links to the past until six months ago when a title on a bookstore shelf drew him—First Days Among the Contrabands. He had reached for it thinking it would be a mystery.
AN ELDERLY WOMAN enters the great room from one of the corridors. She resembles later photographs of Queen Victoria—much taller, but with similar gravity and tiredness dragging from behind. Same hairstyle. Her dress a sheen of eggplant. She walks by the piano player and palms the small of her back to correct her posture.
James doesn’t recognize the woman, but he makes an assumption and stands.
At the chair beside the settle, V stops and says, Mister Blake? I don’t recollect your name, but I’m curious.
—Yes, ma’am. Thank you for seeing me. I’ll be brief. What I wanted to speak to you about concerns the war.
She had started to sit, but now remains standing.
—Please. I’m long since exhausted with that insane war and don’t need to re-dream a nightmare.
V turns to walk away but then turns back, angry. She tells him how uninterested she is in the past, except people keep trying to clench its fist around her throat. Whatever old story he needs to tell, she’s heard a thousand of them—all the tales of waste and loss. And heaps of guilt too, for failing to find a bloodless way to end ownership of people—choosing a bloodbath instead. Since then, South and North have been busy constructing new memories and new histories, fictions fighting to become facts.