Varina(6)
His pretext for the visit had been to ask about her health. A rumor ran around town that she had fallen fatally bronchial. Which was totally untrue, and he knew it. But he was lonely and wanted to sit by a friendly fire for an hour and have a few more drinks and talk to people who liked him and had read all the same books he had read plus plenty more.
That president and his wife—just before making the trip from New Hampshire to Washington for the inaugural ceremony—had been broken irreparably by witnessing their young boy, their last living child, run down beneath the engine of a train. The bloody horror of that violent meeting between massive mechanical steam-powered force and a small biologic body—a thin bag of skin over meat and organs and nerves and brittle bones—required no embellishment. They rushed to the boy, who lay like he was asleep, and then they took his cap off, and the top of his head was unspeakable. That instant left its image of loss stamped on their faces and on their souls forever, and not even the highest office in the land could erase or even partially reimburse them.
As Pierce waded haltingly into the swamp of absolute politics that slavery created, his wife, Jane, chose to stay upstairs in the White House, trying to learn the skill of invisibility. People—meaning the press up and down the country and all those newspaper readers who believe everything they see in print—entertained themselves spreading gossip that she was insane, a crazy woman holed up in the attic. Famous women wild in their minds—even very quietly and privately—sell newspapers.
And of course the gossip was completely untrue in regard to Jane’s insanity. During a state dinner or a party or a dance—whatever they called it that night—V ventured upstairs sleuthing. And what she found was a smart, sad woman, deeply sane, tiny inside her big dress, face the color of a bleached bedsheet except around the eyes and cheekbones where it yellowed to old ivory. V discovered that Jane stayed upstairs because she had more serious and encompassing thoughts and emotions than could be contained in a White House gathering. She sat in a parlor surrounded by books, reading fairly desperately for pertinent helpful passages that might make sense of her broken life. She coughed sometimes into a handkerchief and, not looking at it, carefully folded the cloth without revealing what V later knew would have been a bright smear of lung blood. They talked about books, of course. V recommended a couple of her favorite Greeks, and Jane asked for justification, the basis of her recommendation. V said that in her opinion, when the old Greek writers committed to cutting, they drove bone-deep with the first stroke. She suggested translations other than the current popular ones. Subtle matters like how they handled onomatopoeia, which the Greeks spewed all over the page.
Thereafter when V called at the White House, Jane never sent down a servant with a polite excuse. Sometimes they sat by the fire and had tea and talked between long intervals of silence. V learned that if she needed to fill the air with the sound of her own voice, she would never know what Jane thought about anything. Ask a question and then wait a quarter of a minute for an answer, an interval filled with thought. When Jane asked difficult questions in regard to Sophocles, V tried to answer with substance, having the advantage of reading the texts in their original language with help from a lexicon, though at the time she lacked sufficient experience of loss to understand them fully.
On days when Jane looked especially drained, eyes puffy, V’s attempts to rouse her failed—just the chatter a young woman imagines to be engaging for a woman whose children had all died. On those visits, V looked Jane in the eyes and kissed her on both cheeks and said, See you soon.
Every visit—last thing, V’s hand on the doorknob—Jane always said, Thank you, dear girl, for remembering me. Much later, after the deaths of her own children, V believed she went just as far away from life as Jane, except that all of her didn’t stay gone forever.
Then in four years came the inevitable next election. The wonderful drunk president didn’t exactly lose the vote, because he was not even renominated by his own party. So, shortly, a new president was elected. And the thing about becoming president is that you don’t just get your predecessor’s job, you also get his house. V went to the White House to see if she could help pack or do anything whatsoever helpful. Jane kissed her and held her hand as they walked around, trying to make moving decisions. Jane looked at the sitting room upstairs and said, It is all beyond my knowledge.
The next president entered office in deep mourning too. In his case every day marked the loss of . . . what? A roommate? An old friend? The friend’s name was King. Back when he and Buchanan were both members of the House they had lived together ten years in Brown’s Hotel as roommates. Under unusual circumstances King became vice president to Pierce for a few weeks and swore his oath of office in Havana and then died almost immediately afterward.
Back in the Brown’s Hotel days—before King was vice president and long before Buchanan was president—Andrew Jackson—a brutal piece of work even if you were trying to be complimentary—liked to call the pair Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy. Every piece of correspondence between Buchanan and King was burned after King’s death.
Buchanan never married. A pretty and very shrewd and sharp-eyed niece—who didn’t particularly approve of V—served as hostess, arranging state dinners and gracefully whispering in her uncle’s ear the names of people in the receiving line he might have misremembered. She was expert at diverting the attention of unwelcome or tiring guests, as if she were dealing with a parade of fussy toddlers. Some newspaper writer, not knowing what to call her, since she wasn’t the president’s wife, made up the term First Lady, and it stuck.