Varina(10)
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.
V sat very still, soaking in the coal smoke, fog, rattle and thump of carriage wheels and horses’ hooves, the shuffle of feet and murmur of talk below the windows. Why would she ever want to go home? Home had ceased to be. She had acquired and shed four or five houses filled with fine furniture, paintings, decor in Mississippi, Washington, and Richmond. But now those names represented only the vast category of things that come and go. Impermanence.
RICHMOND NEVER RESEMBLED HOME. During the war years, living in the president’s mansion, which V preferred to call the Gray House, every day brought its own crisis—life lived to the sounds of blaring bugles and alarm bells. From a cold, gray ocean away, that past blurred. V remembered clear days, observation balloons of the Northern army hovering to the east of the city like great malignant bulbs hanging high in the sky out of reach of the guns. At night the multitudes of Northern campfires lit undersides of clouds hazy amber. During periods of fighting, the sound of artillery rattled windows, even in the Capitol itself. One such day the senators spent most of their time debating how many newspapers should be delivered to their desks, how often spittoons ought to be emptied. The war—sold to the people as a collective fantasy—became daily reality, a constant condition of life—death and strange days stretching from the present instant to the farthest horizon you could imagine or even dream until at some point of weariness, war rests quiet in the mind.
SOMETIMES, LOOKING BACK, she wanted to claim—as Euripides and Stesichorus did of Helen—that she had nothing to do with the destruction and tragedy of war, that an eidolon took her place. Their radical variant of history proposed that the true Helen sat out the brutal messy years of the Trojan War in Egypt. V would have preferred London. Let her phantom deal with Richmond, its fall and the desperate flight south, let its blank mind deal with prison and the guilt of the war and the waste and cost and loss for everyone. One late night or early morning toward the end of the war she said as much to Mary Chesnut. Mary held her stem carefully between thumb and forefinger and lifted her glass to the ribbon of yellow-and-blue lamp flame. She studied and adjusted the dark liquid, establishing plumb and level. Mary sipped and said, The Trojan War wasn’t fought over a woman. Or are you still as romantic as ever?
BEING ON THE WRONG SIDE of history carries consequences. V lives that truth every day. If you’ve done terrible things, lived a terrible way, profited from pain in the face of history’s power to judge, then guilt and loss accrue. Redemption becomes an abstract idea receding before you. Even if your sin—like dirt farmers in Sherman’s path—had been simply to live in the wrong place, you suffered. Didn’t matter whether you owned slaves or which way you voted or how good your intentions had been. Or how bad. You might suffer as much as the family of a great plantation, which was maybe not completely just. But if you were the family with a great plantation, you had it coming. Those were times that required choosing a side—and then, sooner or later, history asks, which side were you on?
The first sound of a culture collapsing from its highest steeples starts as a whisper, a sigh. The rattle of windows in their frames. Nobody listens until it thunders, when its structure—all the massive weight held in air as by a magician’s trick depending on sleight of hand, misdirection of attention—collapses to its foundational sins. And after the steeples have fallen, warred-over landscapes lie burned and salted as thoroughly as Troy after the Greeks sailed home. Nothing left but frail and temporary and untrustworthy memory to image what stood before. Even near the end, many in the capital and elsewhere remained unsure whether they were engaged in a grand experiment or a pathetically inept confidence game, projecting boundaries of a new and uncertain country onto the landscape. North and South like grotesque reflections of one another in a carnival mirror.