Varina(53)

—I can’t play Joplin fast enough.

—The title of the song has the word slow in it, but people always play it too fast, showing off. Your version was beautiful.

Mrs. Scott lifts her hand a couple of inches off the table and levels her forefinger at V. She whispers, You keep them away from each other. I mean it. One time, she ran off for a week with a middle-aged saxophone player.

V looks directly at the finger—not a trace of smile on her face—until Mrs. Scott withdraws it.


ON THE TERRACE, V and James regard the long blue and green view stretching hazy to the west. Between them on a low table, a silver tea tray, and a smaller tray with a dozen tiny triangular sandwiches, and the blue book.

—Was that awkward? James says.

—Not for me it wasn’t. I like Laura very much, and care about her well-being. I tried to distract her family, a feint at the flank to entice them to aim their artillery my direction, since I’m well fortified.

—And toward me too? James asks.

—A little. And only because I knew you could stand it because you’re fortified too—even when you were tiny you were. Laura isn’t at all, and her mother and brother are predators and will eat her alive if they can.

V drifts into talking about generations. How grandparents and grandchildren so often get along very well. Remove one generation—twenty-five years at least—and the anger in both directions dissipates. All the failed expectations and betrayals become cleansed by an intervention of time. Resentment and bitter need for retribution fall away. Love becomes the operative emotion. On the old side, you’re left with wrinkled age and whatever fractured, end-of-the-line knowledge might have accrued. Wisdom as exhaustion. And on the other side—which V still remembers with molecular vividness—youth and yearning and urgency for something not yet fully defined. Undiluted hope and desire. But by fusing the best of both sides, a kind of intertwining consciousness arises—grandmother and granddaughter wisdom emerging from shared hope, relieved of emotions tainted by control and guilt and anger.

—I’ll assume you’re right, James says. But I wouldn’t know much about long family relationships. When I was fifteen, I probably imagined they were all either perfectly happy or ended in gunfire.

V laughs and then sips tea. James takes two tiny sandwiches for his lunch. It is a warm day, and V pushes her three-quarter sleeves to the elbows and fans herself with one hand. She suggests James feel free to remove his jacket, but he declines.

James asks, What are you most afraid to lose?

—Now?

—Yes.

—Nothing, of course, V says.

James recasts his question.

He asks, What do you want to maintain?

—Memory, even if it’s sometimes false.

—Well then, what I’m curious about right now is Washington.

*

In 1849 after the peace treaty between Brierfield and The Hurricane was signed, V finally returned to Washington. She was still in her early twenties and wife of a war hero, a senator, soon to be a U.S. secretary of war. Little did V know that for the next thirty years she would never live anyplace for more than a year or so at a time. A Gypsy fortune-teller with her caravan—red and yellow and blue—knew more definition of home than V would. Over those years she bought and sold several households of furniture. Some man in a brown suit, shiny at the elbows and knees—maybe a touch of lunch on his shirtfront—arrives. He goes room to room looking over your carefully chosen things like they’re trash, makes an insulting offer, which you accept. Then you move on, leaving behind a ribbon of acquisitions like bright-colored snakeskin shed to turn pale as a fingernail and dissolve in the weather. You carry forward into the next future only a few trunks of clothes and extra-special books and paintings—a Gypsy caravan load at most.


THAT SECOND TIME IN WASHINGTON differed extremely from the first. They lived in a mansion a few blocks from the White House. It was beautiful, but she missed the vibrating energy of Brown’s Hotel, which had been like living in a dormitory or attending a house party that stretched on for months.

However, the upper reaches of government existed on a grander scale than mere congressmen. At that time a memorable dinner party among senators and cabinet members and their wives sometimes involved slaves hunkering above the ceiling to drop fresh pink rose petals as if by magic through grates onto the diners to announce the first course—which she found showy and a bit crude. Those days, some people called her Queen Varina for her dinners—even without petals—and maybe sometimes for her manner. Dumbards usually selected out after one invitation, overwhelmed by the knowledge and wit around her table.

Uncle Jeff sat at the head, striking and graceful and stately behind his famous cheekbones and raptor-beak nose, looking out from ash-colored eyes that gave nothing away. Candle flame always flattered him, but even in broad daylight people walking down the street turned to stare at his handsomeness. Because of his health—recent battle wounds and lingering malaria—Jeff remained slim, even during the years when men thicken in the middle and their bellies declare themselves. He was especially slim if he had recently passed through one of his long sick twilights when malaria shivered him to the marrow or when his eyesight burned and ripped with pain at every beam of sunlight. This before the left eye clouded and he only allowed photographs in profile. Even healthy, his body coiled tight, gripped against itself, squeezing and quivering with a force some saw as nothing but raw, red anger and ambition. Most mornings, on his way out the door, V reminded him that every moment didn’t need to be lived on a battlefield.