Varina(18)
THIS IS ALL BY WAY OF PROLOGUE to the betrothal. Except, how to keep memory from rolling back to the months before that several-way transaction was struck between the Davises and the Howells that V fell into naive as Candide, with nothing but love and ambition burning in her young heart? Back before she realized everybody was racing for money and fame and power.
These days, she tries to be gentle with her young self. Her thinking must have been jangled and chaotic as a handful of steel ball bearings thrown onto the skin of a timpani in the middle of a performance. She keeps wanting to double back and re-dream the big river of her youth. Standing late at night barefoot in the damp lawn looking down on the campfires of the flatboats, the windows of little farms on the far bank glowing like pinpoints of yellow light for an hour or two after dark and then one by one going black. Re-dream the grand houses and parties in Natchez before her father’s fall. Awkward fourteen-year-olds dancing on a Saturday night to a ragged quartet of piano, violin, cornet, and violoncello. Middle-size boys with overlapping front teeth and blemishes sweeping winglike from nose bridge across both cheeks almost to the ears. Black men in white jackets carrying silver trays of canapés—oysters and Gulf shrimp, terrapin minced with cucumber—everything perched on a crouton with a fat red pearl of pepper sauce at the center. The younger boys wiped out those big trays of food like a storm of locust. The fifteen-year-old boys carried flat pewter flasks of whiskey in their breast pockets and made a great show of sipping surreptitiously.
Memory filters all that sort of material through a slight haze of morphine, which back in her youth her doctors said V needed only a few days monthly and before important dances. So in memory all the pastel dresses and the boys’ dark suits and white shirts trail smears of color behind them as they move about the dance floor, a watercolor blurred across wet paper by dragging a wide brush. A yellow parquet floor’s jagged pattern vibrates in her mind. Many of the other girls lived a similar reality, their doctors believing the same orthodoxy in regard to the magical properties of opiates in managing females.
During a waltz an earnest young man—sweaty face and gloveless palms—pressed his urgent right hand so low on the small of her back that back isn’t the precise word. And after the waltz drifted to a close and the couples parted, a girlfriend stepped up to whisper in V’s ear that a dark replica of the boy’s damp hand printed itself onto the peach silk of her dress in an indelicate place. Knowing that on a muggy May night in Natchez—air so wet catfish could survive in it—a sweat mark would never dry, like being stamped with the Puritan red letter except comic.
V remembers the details of that night to the extent that she could still hum most of the tunes the band played, inhale the scent of lavender and sweat from the whispering girlfriend, the musty pomade of the urgent dance partner. She loves every instant of it. Sometimes, after a long series of nightmares, at bedtime she breathes deep and twists the lamp wick and tells herself to shut out the doom dreams that roar like hurricane winds and instead dream that night of awkward youth and dancing, when an ardent palm print on her bottom was her greatest imaginable problem.
THE GREAT DIVIDE—rivers change direction and you’re stuck following one flow or the other from then on. That was the trip to Davis Bend. Out of The Briers, into The Hurricane.
In early fall of the year, at the dinner table, V’s father announced that a very attractive and generous invitation had arrived for her. She would be traveling upriver to the plantation of Joseph Davis, a lawyer and planter and former partner of WB’s in a rare successful investment. The Hurricane occupied a several-thousand-acre hunk of land in a big C-shaped meander of the Mississippi that people had started calling Davis Bend. She was to go up at the beginning of December and stay through Christmas and into the New Year, two months at least. Maybe more. Home by Valentine’s Day at the latest. Her tutor, Winchester, would escort her there and then return to Natchez, leaving her in the care of the Davis women, a wife and some indeterminate number of daughters. At which point, her relationship with Winchester—at least as student and teacher—would end. WB suggested V should look upon the trip as a holiday—new places, new people. Important for her to make an impression. Also Joseph had a younger brother who was developing an adjoining plantation called Brierfield, and she would certainly meet him during the visit. Etc., etc. WB even raised his glass in a toast, as if something happy were being celebrated.
V raised her glass right back and said, How welcome. A worthy substitute for the debutante ball next spring, for which I won’t be tapped. So, let’s all drink to wonderful new opportunities no longer available in Natchez or Vicksburg or New Orleans. Here’s to my new life among a band of wilderness strangers.
She delivered her lines with every grain of mighty sarcasm an unhappy teen can summon.
WINCHESTER GRADUATED from Princeton, which swung weight even in Mississippi. But it swung the other way too. He had passed the bar and started a struggling law practice but also knew all about Greek and Latin literature and philosophy and history, which some of WB’s more suspect business friends felt served a similar function to sprinkling colored sugar on cake icing.
People became more indulgent after Winchester’s inheritance. He suddenly owned better than two thousand very fine acres fronting on the Mississippi over on the Louisiana side. Except, immediately upon possession, Winchester began letting most of the fields return to their previous junglous state. He kept only a couple hundred in cotton—figuring that was all the cash he needed to live on—plus another ten in food crops.