Varina(14)

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?