Varina(29)
—I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT SOMETHING YOU SAID. That I should write a book.
—I believe I more noted how everybody’s doing it, V says. If Virginia Clay can write a book, anybody can. The main qualification appears to be an ability to sit at a desk for many hours a day. When I wrote Jeff’s memoir, it felt like solitary confinement inside his head. The last day’s work seemed so much like a jailbreak that I set my little pistol on the desk in case I had to shoot my way out. After that, I thought I was going to write my own life, but I haven’t. I’ve written all kinds of things to earn my living. For a while I even did a silly etiquette column for the New York World.
Pleasant days back then, she tells James. She had a pretty apartment with a big bay window in the Gerard Hotel—West Forty-Fourth between Sixth and Seventh. Winnie lived there too when she was in town, though she traveled a lot with the Pulitzers, who appreciated her command of several languages and knowledge of art and history. She came in once from spending the worst of winter in Naples and began immediately working every day on a romance set in the South Pacific that she had started on the ship back.
As for V’s writing, giving advice on etiquette was easy. You opened envelopes and considered burning questions readers desperately needed answered—topics such as when and how to wear a high hat, dinner table manners, and how to deal with rude in-laws. V remembers one profound question in particular: How should one use one’s handkerchief in public and not be vulgar? Her answer was: Never—even under the greatest burden of curiosity—open it afterwards and inspect the contents. Another young woman asked how she might respond to a gentleman friend’s request for a lock of hair. V answered in print, That is simply too disgusting for reply. Brides especially required many wise words in regard to every phase of engagement and wedding planning—so much anxiety over correctness. V always tried to advise them to calm down, worry less about trivialities.
Writing of that kind was work, a job. You did it, and a check eventually came, and the rent got paid. That money and a scant income from a couple of inherited farming properties she leased out were her living. Census of 1900, when the man came knocking on her door asking questions, she gave her occupation as Writer and Landlord. In 1880, when Jeff answered the same question for her, he said, Keeps House.
Other pieces of writing, though, she would have done gratis. One such piece of free advice went to a friend whose daughter was about to jump into marriage with a wealthy older widower. The girl’s name was Belle, and V had known her since childhood. In a letter to the mother, V spilled her heart—writing:
I am not pleased with the widower prospect. It is offering a burnt out vessel to a fresh young girl like Belle. This suitor steps up long after a successful love he had identified as his eternal soul life, and then she was removed by death. I gave the best & all of my life to a girdled tree, it was live oak and good for any purpose except for blossom & fruit, and I am not willing for Belle to be content with anything less than the whole of a man’s heart.
V would have offered her thoughts on the dedication of Grant’s Tomb for free as well, but the World insisted on paying her, and she was in no position to turn down a check. She attended the ceremony at the invitation of her friend Julia, Grant’s widow. The papers—north and south—found the friendship between V and Julia odd and exciting, and wrote about it as if the two women ought to have nothing in common when, in fact, they had a great deal. V and Julia took regular carriage rides in Central Park, and lunched at prominent restaurants. They wanted to be seen together, wanted their friendship to be noted and commented on in the papers, even if they both faced criticism by hard-shelled Confederates and Federals for it. They wanted to show that reconciliation was possible. For several summers before Julia’s death, she and V spent vacations together—adjacent cottages at modest Adirondack lodges. So many evenings sitting in uncomfortable wooden chairs watching the sun set behind lakes and mountains, talking about everything except that horrible war.
—Write about that, V says to James. I’m rather proud of Julia and myself for our friendship.
—So if I decide to write a book, I have your blessing? James says. Your help?
—No. Let’s keep calling it visiting and talking. Come again next Sunday. Then write what you want. Or not. Doesn’t matter to me. For so long I thought everything I cared about was lost, never to be returned. Seeing one of my boys still in the world is plenty for me. Seeing you going and doing.
—The visits mean a lot to me too, and I want them to continue. But if I jotted notes now and then . . . ?
—No. Let’s not get professional. Unreliable memory is all we have. You ask, and I’ll try to answer the best I can remember, and then you patch my forty-year-old memories onto your photographic flashes and the blue book.
—All right, then. Your wedding and after?
*
Knoxie’s death had been a deep and slowly killing wound and had weakened their marriage from the start. Her ghost haunted even their wedding. They’d had a big ceremony planned at Davis Bend, but that got canceled last-minute for reasons V has never discussed. They didn’t much communicate for a while, and then all of a sudden the wedding was back on, at The Briers this time, with no Davis other than Jeff attending. Oddly, on the boat down to Natchez before the improvised wedding, Jeff ran into Knoxie’s father, General Zachary Taylor—eventually to become President Taylor—for the first time since the elopement long ago. What a sweet moment for their reconciliation. About that same time Eliza thought it useful to write V a letter describing how Jeff had been going through an old trunk and found a pair of Knoxie’s slippers and fainted from excess emotion. Then, after the wedding, on the way downriver to New Orleans for their honeymoon, Jeff insisted on stopping to visit Knoxie’s grave.