Varina(37)
V tells him about a dinner party, sitting with a secretary of the treasury, a vice president, and a few other old powerful men and talking about literature—Dante and Virgil, Byron and Wordsworth. They thought it was surprising and delightful that a girl had read so much and held strong opinions. They talked to her a little like fishing in shallow water, but they kept talking. She says, I wore a flower in my hair that night—that was the year of japonicas, whether they were heaped in table bouquets at the White House or pinned singly in the hair of young ladies.
She remembers that one of those important fishermen was an elderly scientist, and he invited her to his studio for a tour. A few days later she visited, and she recalls a roomful of telescopes and theodolites and microscopes, bent and corroded orreries, dusty geodes and staurolites, many framed maps on the wall, and an enormous faded brown globe in a corner, its geographic boundaries and names representing an obsolete world. She remembers telling the old scientist that she could hardly hold herself back from smacking a palm to the equator and giving it a spin. He said, Do it, dear girl—and she set the globe whirling.
*
Dull days, wandering the Capitol never failed to entertain. She could happily spend a morning in the steep seats above the House floor listening to speeches—the rube rhetoric, the various accents, the wisdom and foolishness of lawmakers. On the Senate side, Sam Houston roamed the halls flirting with every young woman he met. He wore a cougar hide vest and left his coat open to display it, hoping to be asked what the material was. He introduced himself to V the same as to all the young ladies, with a set of moves like a fencing exercise. He lunged an aggressive step forward—pushing up much too close—then bowed low, and in a deep voice said, Lady, I salute you. Then he stood and took a snakeskin pouch from the pocket of his cougar vest and plucked out a little carved wooden heart. He spent his days on the Senate floor whittling dozens of them. He reached it out and said, Let me give you my heart.
MOSTLY DURING THAT FIRST TIME in Washington, like any young person intent on charming everyone in earshot, V chattered on about books she had read or a piece of music currently stuck in her head. She and Mary Chesnut vied to be considered Washington’s most well-read ladies still in their teens. Mary once told grand old Senator Benton—a man they both revered—that V was particularly knowledgeable in regard to Icelandic literature and mythology. After which, for several days, she buried herself in the Library of Congress reading translations of Snorri Sturluson just in case Benton asked her about his work.
Other days, V drooped under the load of her strong dreams. Mostly they crowded with intense physical details that left her disoriented at dawn until she adjusted herself to the waking world. She had not yet become known for the frequent truth of her dreams, visited like some Cassandra by prophetic and terrifying night visions. She gave one of the most powerful of them a title—The Execution of Jefferson Davis, Traitor and Assassin. It began as an outdoor performance, a huge audience standing in a misty rain watching black-hat, frock-coat men climb stairs to the high stage. At the top they hesitate and mill about deciding where to stand. All of them—dignitaries, representatives of law and justice, deep believers in the paradigm of the passing moment—are intent on a simple performance of a simple role. Among them but not of them, Jeff climbs the risers imperially slim in black suit and white shirt. His eyes are sunken behind defiant cheekbones, equitation-perfect posture even though his hands have been tied behind his back in a fat wrap of fresh yellow hemp. He’s hatless, since a hat would be inconvenient when it comes time to fit the noose, and his still-voluminous salt-and-pepper hair sweeps back dramatically like that of an aging hero leaning against the wind. He climbs like he’s going somewhere he desperately wants to be, as if at the top of the stairs his true essence will finally reveal itself to the world and to himself.
The hangman waits onstage, occupying his mark. This is not a beheading needing a hulk in a black hood to slam a silver axe blade clean through a gristly neck into a wood block. He is a little man—brown suit, hair combed over a bald patch, narrow shoulders. His task at the moment is only the pulling of a lever a few degrees of arc against the light resistance of a simple mechanism—gears and pulleys—to trip the release of the deadly square of stage opening onto another world. Two fingers would do it. His real job is already done—solving a schoolboy arithmetic problem, a matter of acceleration per foot per second, a calculation of weight and force and the fragility of the human body. A foot of rope either way can make the difference between success and bright red faces for the dignitaries. Hard to remain dignified when a man hangs for long minutes bucking and choking ten feet below your boot soles while the audience gasps.
V woke from the dream feeling whispered to by snakes in her sleep, a taste of somebody else’s spit in her mouth.
IN ALL ITS MUDDY, SMELLY GLORY, Washington pulsed with endless excitement and entertainment until all of a sudden the party ended. War with Mexico had been brewing, sold to the public as a simple and stupid issue of border enforcement, though Texas had only been a state for a short while, and its southern boundary was still disputed and vaporous. The real issue involved a complicated, contentious grab of land that included Texas and the entire Pacific Coast up to Vancouver Island. And with it, an attempt to draw a line east to west across the continent, below which slavery would extend Atlantic to Pacific for ever and ever.
As war fever grew hot during the winter of 1846, V extracted a promise from Jeff that he would not volunteer to fight that utterly stupid fight. And she wasn’t entirely being a new, young wife not wanting her new husband to leave her. The Whigs—party of her raising, party of Winchester—saw the war for what it was and opposed it, and decades later Ulysses S. Grant in his memoir said we intentionally provoked the war to grab territory.