Varina(36)

—What we will do instead of your plan is become best of friends and allies. You will never again apologize to me. And no foolish confessions, ever. Not to anyone. We won’t even speak of this to each other. At least not for twenty-five years. At which point, if we’re both alive and lucid, this moment won’t seem tragic or comic, only a cherished shared memory that binds us even tighter. We will drink a bottle of wine or two and look back with warm nostalgia. Yes?

Burton’s face bunched around his nose, a painful contraction. So V went on talking, improvising. She said, Let’s do our anniversary near water. At the beach or on a riverboat or at a mountain lake resort. Someplace where sunset is an event. Right now let’s be quiet and drink our coffee and think our thoughts until you’re able to say something not foolish.

They sipped until eventually he said, Yes?

His voice was speculative and searching, an explorer finding his way into unmapped territory.

She sipped and looked at him without offering directions.

He said, The two of us longtime friends. Decades on. A bottle of wine together. That will be a moment to anticipate.

—Forever friends, she said. But it won’t just happen. It’s up to us to make it so. And I’ll do my share. But just as important, from this moment forward, you will become more careful with women and not allow us to twist you up with so little effort and to your disadvantage. Not all of us will let you down easy. Some keep a tally of broken hearts, and they like to break them hard enough to stay broken. You’ll be more careful. Yes? And don’t fall for some little fool who’ll become jealous of us for all the wrong reasons?

Burton nodded. Yes, he said. Absolutely yes.

—Now, V said, rising from her chair. Come kiss me again, this time on the cheek, and we’ll both meet the afternoon fresh and free. Though if I were fresh and free as you, well I won’t even begin imagining how this afternoon might have played.

He set his cup in its saucer and rose and gave her a very polite kiss, a soft trembly peck, his hands clasped behind his back to keep them out of trouble.

V said, Go and do, Burton. Go and do. The day still has legs.

Mary said, Oh my. I had no idea, and I was in and out of your house every day or two back then. That sort of thing led to so many stupid but thrilling duels back before the war. There were many who believed you and Judah had a long affair in Washington. Which I’m convinced you did not. I’d bet my house in Camden that it was no more than a brief few urgent encounters in carriages. He was so full of life and humor and of himself back then.

—That’s another story, V said.


THEY TALKED ALL NIGHT, and in the silences, V thought how much she loved Mary Chesnut. Like everybody else’s, Mary’s life collapsed around her day by day, but she sparkled in the face of it, at least in her talk. V and Mary—or, to be exact, their husbands—were about to go broke spectacularly and apocalyptically. They would all soon find themselves where her father was when he bet all he had on the hope that a shooting match might be watched over by a benevolent god.

But a good dinner and better conversation, a bottle or two of Bordeaux dating back to the young days, some generous pinches of medicine, and for a few hours it became easy to pretend that the past few years had never happened, that the only thing wrong was that people hadn’t had time recently to do as much reading as usual. Which of course didn’t keep the real world from scything you off at the knees for having made a series of choices counter to good sense or common morality or even to the movement of history under whose cold gaze the pain of your existence factors less than chimney smoke in the wind.

It wasn’t quite dawn, but close enough, when V helped Mary to bed and kissed her on the forehead and blew out the candle.


THREE MORNINGS LATER they stood on the porch, wagons loaded and waiting. V carried a small musette bag tinkly with little brown bottles.

Mary said, I’m hoping this is not the last good-bye.

The corners of her big eyes welled and spilled.

V kissed her the polite way, pecks on the cheeks. And then she gripped Mary’s tiny body, wrapped herself around the fine bones of Mary’s frame so tight that she worried she would break her.

V said, Please no.

And yet, despite deepest feelings and best intentions, that was the last good-bye. Later, they wrote letters, and Mary sent V bits of the book she had started writing in the first days of the war. But in the chaos of life and years of complicated legal and personal trials and prison and exile, they never saw each other again.

*

Sun breaks through clouds and catches V’s attention. She asks the time.

—Quarter to two.

—Still a few races to go. We could take the hotel surrey.

—Or walk on the grounds here if you’d rather, James suggests. Easier to talk. Quieter.

They take wide paths where the golf course will soon be, down toward the pond. Artfully rustic wooden benches appear every hundred yards or so, and they stop frequently for V to rest, catch her breath.

—If we go all the way around the pond, I can count this as physiotherapy, V says.

—Back to your arriving in Washington that first time—when you and Mrs. Chesnut were so young. Your husbands must have been busy in Congress. I’m wondering what you did to fill a day?

—Well, the days filled themselves. Brown’s Hotel was packed with interesting and amusing and annoying people all during the session. You could sit in the lobby and entertain yourself for as long as you wanted. And there were dinner parties and gatherings most nights of the week. Everything from staid receptions at the White House to the hops Mary and I organized at the hotel for younger people.