Varina(75)

*

V floated downstream through Montgomery streets inside a haze of opiates. She wore a startling mourning dress—fine threads of Mexican silver shaping and repeating a wave pattern all down the snug ebony bodice and flowing skirt. The waist, though, cinched not nearly waspish as before the dead child and the living children. Black veiling blurred her face and enlarged her dark eyes.

Her father had died three whole weeks before, so by now he was no longer leaving—he was gone. V hardly thought of him. The word father rested like a distant place-marker in her mind, like finding the cast list for a forgotten play in a bureau drawer, your eye striking the name of the actor in the role of second footman. And despite her lack of feeling toward him, his passing brought on another bout of morphine nearly as strong as after Samuel’s death.

She bobbled traversing the slick cobbles. Red clay oozed between them like margins of recent wounds still weeping. Bubbles of medicine, though, levitated her, lightened her against the day, suds rising in a dirty washtub.

She felt the outside world must see her identical to the self she knew inside, unidentifiable and anonymous, disguised in a dim glow, an amber candle flame seen through seaside mist. Nevertheless, heads turned in recognition of the newish First Lady.

Fame. All it means is, people who don’t know one true thing about you get to have opinions and feel entitled to aim their screeds your way.

The war was still fresh. Some rushed up asking urgent, impossible questions. When will it end? Will we whip them good and hard? Others needed help contacting a husband or son fighting in faraway Virginia. Help finding the lonesome field where their dead might be buried. Help getting a semi-illegal letter to a relative north of the Mason-Dixon conveying important facts about recent deaths and births in the family, pleading that surely V could help, since it was rumored that she broke the law all the time writing to her own Yankee family. And also, could she pen the message, since the petitioner remained weak in writing but could talk it out to her by heart?

An ancient gray man, Scot or Irish, rhythmic and oracular in his talk, called her Magdalene and cursed her to Hades where her husband would one day achieve his highest ambition and reign supreme. The man swayed and swept his hands in complicated gestures to make his dark dream come true. His long beard and his dingy black swallowtail coat moved with the rhythm of whatever dirge slogged inside his head.

V floated on to the market. A crowd gathered, bidders and window-shoppers. A young woman up on the sale platform saw her and screamed her name. Screamed Mistress V three times like a fairy spell until her breath gave out.

V settled in her walking, a leaf caught in an eddy. She stopped and turned toward the stage.

Everybody looked at the woman there in her loose muslin shift. A slight woman, perhaps seventeen, her dark hair wild and her skin coppery. She went barefoot, her ankles and calves wiry. Her face broke wide open at the eyes and mouth. She stood exposed at an extreme of existence not ever shared by the audience.

The woman called again, Mistress V.

Not a scream this time. Tired and pleading, her arms down, palms open to V alone, making an offering of herself.

The audience turned to V. An ominous swivel of necks and shoulders and backbones to aim hundreds of eyes through the veil into her two. She believed she heard the faint mechanical sound of those thousands of vertebrae shifting, clicking, grinding as the audience pivoted her way.

The woman onstage gathered herself. She drew a long breath and held her arms straight from her shoulders, hands open and fingers spread. She screamed again.

—I know who you are. I know you. You’re a good woman. Buy me. You have a daughter. Little boys. I’ll take care of them till I die. Buy me.

The sun broke a crack in the overcast, lighting the mute colors of red dirt and dirty cotton and muddy shoes, the black suits and dirty buff linen suits of the bidders. And V stood like a shard of midnight moonlight, ebony and silver, suddenly fixed in place and exposed to the day.

A mumble rippled the crowd. Who is she?

Some of them meant the woman on the platform and some meant V.

—She’s a whore.

—She’s the goddamn president’s woman.

—They both are.

Behind the chatter of the crowd, the woman on the platform kept screaming. Her face torqued by the extremity of the moment and by a gleam of hope focused on a pretty woman in a startling black dress drifting by the stage where the enslaved woman’s life reached a pinnacle of desperation.

A man in a Panama hat too new to be dirty even at the dimples where his thumb and forefingers pinched to lift it an inch in respect said, Mrs. Davis, please pay no attention. Her mind’s not sound. Look away.

*

—What I’m beginning to believe, V says to James, is that when I first saw you, that girl was in my memory. Maybe I did what I did more for myself than for you.

—A second chance? Atonement?

—I had never thought of it that way, but it’s possible. Those chances don’t come around too often.

—Is that what the man in the Panama said, look away?

—I think so.

—The refrain from “Dixie”?

—I doubt that was in his mind.

—That line in the song, Old times there are not forgotten. I could argue that maybe they’re not worth remembering.

—I’ve never forgotten that girl, and I wouldn’t want to. Remembering doesn’t change anything—it will always have happened. But forgetting won’t erase it either.