Varina(60)

*

In Richmond, people attacked V on the grounds that her greatest ambition had been to become First Lady of the United States of America—which she couldn’t deny. She wanted to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for eight years and throw fine dinners for the smartest and most entertaining people in the world. And having that dream come real was right at the tips of her fingers. When your lowly congressman husband becomes a great, wounded American war hero in Mexico, widely known for his genius battlefield strategy and personal risk and sacrifice, and then he becomes a U.S. senator and secretary of war—well, living in the real White House someday is hardly a delusional aspiration.

Though, at the time Jeff became secretary of war for the United States, one of his old teachers at West Point wrote,

Neither Davis nor my opinion of him have changed since I knew him as a cadet. If I am not deceived, he intends to leave his mark in the Army & also at West Point & a black mark it will be I fear. He is a recreant and unnatural son, would have pleasure in giving his Alma Mater a kick & would disclaim her, if he could.


THOSE DAYS IN WASHINGTON, she dreamed nothing but black doom. She saw the end from the beginning—all the loss and devastation, our beautiful country full of ghosts haunting cornfields and cow pastures and night woods for centuries to come. She told Mary Chesnut that the way it would all play out was that the Southern states would secede and cobble together a breakaway country and would make Jeff its president and it would all fail disastrously.

For a stretch of weeks in 1855, she dreamed in detail about being First Lady. But the White House was all wrong. She’d been all over it during the past fifteen years—not just the public rooms, but also every hallway and bedroom upstairs. In her dream, though, she wandered lost, looking for an exit. Whatever path she took—through hallways, up and down stairways—she always wound around to find herself in a dim downstairs kitchen with the servants. Eventually she did live as First Lady, but in a White House reflected in a grotesque carnival mirror, though downstairs she recognized the kitchen, that dead end her dream kept leading her toward.


SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTIES—when government failed to do anything but shove the country into convulsion and apocalypse, Jeff’s health declined. His malaria kept recurring and his bad eye dimmed slowly almost to blindness. V spent much of that time having children. Messages in bottles floated out into a terrifying future. Samuel was the first, a fat and happy baby. Everything struck him as funny. V’s First Lady friend Jane Pierce—the madwoman allegedly confined in the attic of the White House—loved taking Samuel on long carriage rides all around town and out in the country. She loved his company, his entertainment, his belly laugh that seemed far too big to come from such a small package.

Samuel fell ill and died when he was still three, and for months afterward V closed herself up in their big rented house. Jeff kept working, going to the Capitol every morning, but he couldn’t sleep and sometimes wandered the streets of Washington late at night. Friends and family offered brief sympathy, but infant death rates stood so high that many people didn’t really think of them as fully human those first few years. Case in point, V’s father. Samuel had been gone only a month or six weeks when WB sent her a breezy note barely acknowledging her loss. He might have mentioned hearing she was under the weather. She tossed it in the fire and wrote back that she would let him know when she recovered from her grief, but until then his mercantile messages weren’t welcome. She used the word a lot around that time—mercantile—to mean without emotion, businesslike. Jeff finally had to request that for the good of their marriage she stop using that word in regard to his family.


MAGGIE AND JEFFY AND JOE AND BILLY arrived at roughly two-year intervals, little bursts of life during dark days for the country when the arguments over slavery turned fatal for hundreds of thousands. She was pregnant with Billy when things fell apart completely, those frightening and chaotic days as state after state seceded and the Southern legislators resigned and packed up and went home to improvise a rebel country.

Toward the end, an English journalist reporting on the Senate described Jeff as having the face of a corpse, the form of a skeleton.

Jeff held on, the last of the last, hoping newly elected Lincoln and the Yankee Congress would take a deep breath and try to find a way to avoid war. But that didn’t happen. Lincoln came to town refusing to talk to anybody who disagreed with him. Jeff stayed on, hoping to be imprisoned, since the North had vowed to arrest for treason any member of the House or Senate from secessionist states who tried to leave. All the others, even Judah, eased out of town. But Jeff always wanted a trial, to wrap himself in the Constitution and defend himself in front of the Supreme Court. Either win or go down a martyr. Wife and children be damned.

Except the Federals weren’t really enthusiastic about charging anyone with treason, given that the Constitution wasn’t clear about what to do if members of the club of states wanted to resign—whether to let them go or try to kill them. So Jeff and V went home to Brierfield, a dreary trip because V sensed the tidal wave rising to break over them. Jeff became more silent than usual, brooding over the unwelcome likelihood that he would become president, at least until an election could be organized. Neither of them felt surprised, therefore, when one afternoon a man came riding up at Brierfield, his horse in a lather, and gave Jeff the message—he had been appointed president of a country that didn’t exist. Nevertheless, they both read the letter with faces grim, as if it were a death notice. Nor was V surprised when the attack on Sumter soon began brewing. Their friend Robert Toombs, until recently a U.S. senator from Washington, Georgia, sent Jeff a letter of warning against being pulled into battle. Toombs wrote,