Varina(54)

Mostly during V’s famous dinners Jeff was not at all funny. He sat absorbing the wit of others for long stretches of conversation, and then he issued some piercing comment, dry and oblique, benefiting from long, silent reflection—sometimes just a half-dozen words, perfectly chosen. And everyone would erupt in laughter as he looked down at his place setting. Probably a lovely pattern of Wedgwood and Murano crystal that V would sell for pennies on the dollar when the next earthquake in their lives shook everything to the ground.


THOSE EVENINGS were when they became close to Judah Benjamin, then a new senator from Louisiana who enjoyed boasting that he was the first Jew to honor that body. Judah was the only Confederate leader whose memoir V wanted to read, except he never got around to writing one—too busy after the war with success in London, eventually becoming a Queen’s Counsel. In New Orleans, Judah had married a beautiful, wealthy French Creole girl named Natalie, and they very quickly—uncomfortably so—had a daughter. And then Natalie took the little girl and moved to Paris. After he was elected to the Senate, Judah spent a fortune buying and furnishing a grand house in Washington, hoping to lure her back. She stayed a couple of months in that raw, young city and then fled back to France. Theirs became a marriage by post. V remembers Judah getting a big laugh at one of her dinners by sharing a note he had just received from Natalie. He held up the paper, her big looping hand. It read, Speak not to me of economy. It is so fatiguing.

V’s mother—back during the conflict over the will—had said bluntly that V’s marriage would be happier if she succeeded in becoming pregnant. Not the first mother to hold that opinion. But V and Jeff might also have been happier if they’d arranged something like Judah and Natalie, where they mostly corresponded and Judah visited her in Paris for a month every summer and then went away before they became tired of each other. It was a marriage that lasted decades upon decades. But V didn’t move to Paris. By her middle twenties—after the treaty between Brierfield and The Hurricane—she began having babies, and that went on for more than ten years. She stopped calling her husband Uncle Jeff and started calling him Banny, a Celtic term of endearment. Husband.

*

A bellboy arrives and hands V the fat book she had asked him to bring down from the desk in her room.

She opens it and reaches out to James. A passage is marked in pencil.

Read this, she says. You’re always shoving your Miss Botume at me.

He takes the book and turns it over to look at the spine. It’s a volume of her own from twenty years ago—her completion of Jeff’s memoir.

James begins reading to himself, but she stops him and says, Aloud, please. It’s about famous people I knew back when I was young. Presidents and so on. Those times in Washington we’re talking about.

James says, When these august shades rise before me whose active lives had been lived before I grew to womanhood, the responsible, serious youth that fell to my lot is not a subject of regret. The history of their day has to me a very stirring interest, and as I read the chronicles of their deeds, they stand clothed in their well-remembered personality, struggling with united minds for the whole country, holding the interests and possessions of all equally sacred, and pledged to protect these with their lives.

After a long pause he says, Lovely thoughts.

—No, V says. Words worth less than a pail of horse biscuits, which could at least fertilize a tomato plant.


—I WENT TO NEW YORK CITY last week to visit Julie’s family, and I spent two afternoons in libraries reading about you in histories and memoirs and newspapers.

—Interesting?

—Yes, it was.

—But why did you do it—go checking up on me?

—Not my intention. I want to understand as much as I can about what you’re telling me. And I came away with a question. In some of the things I read—a couple—I was described as your pet.

—Who did?

—We don’t have to get into personalities. I’m asking if there is any truth to that view.

—If you’re leveling charges and concealing your witnesses, I refuse to defend myself.

They remain quiet for half a minute, and then V says, There were plenty in Richmond who needed to make up stories to explain why at the Gray House you lived upstairs in the nursery with my children rather than downstairs. They gossiped about my race from the day I arrived. My skin, my dark eyes and hair, the shape of my mouth and nose—every tiny bit of me used as evidence as to whether I was mulatto or squaw. Their words. And then after I found you, people came up with all sorts of conspiracies about your origin. Some said you were my son with Jeff, but that my percentage of black blood came out strong in you, and we sent you away at birth. But then I couldn’t forget you and forced Jeff to bring you back and worked up a crazy story of finding you on the street to explain it. Others said you were Jeff’s son with a slave mother from Brierfield. One of those many illegitimate children he was supposed to have. Indian babies up in the northern wilderness, black babies on Mississippi plantations. Both sides claimed your arrogant nose looked like his—more evidence for their conspiracies.

James reaches up and touches thumb and forefinger to the wings of his nose and then taps the tip three times.

—Arrogant? he says.

—I always thought of it as confident.

—Some of the things I read said I was Negro. Others needed to break it down into smaller fractions—mulatto, quadroon, octoroon. Those words don’t matter to me. The word I can’t get past is pet.