Varina(83)

She told Richter about Samuel and Joe, their very different personalities. She guessed Samuel would have been a Howell had he lived. After Joe was born, she fell into a deep depression because he looked like a Davis, and as if that hadn’t been bad enough, Jeff wanted to name him after his brother Joseph, who had been cruel to V from the time she was seventeen until middle age. They argued and Jeff would not relent about the name. All V could do was pray little Joe would not share all the Davis traits and might outgrow looking like one, though whether her prayers were answered remained unclear at the time he fell off the balcony.

Jeffy was the most Howell of all, probably too much so. Nothing interested him more than jokes and having a good time. If he couldn’t find trouble to get into, he created some. He was still finding his way in life after trying out a number of schools and colleges. Billy, though, had a personality totally his own, and Jefferson thought he would be their great success, except he died at ten of diphtheria. Those hopeful messages in bottles she had sent out during the dark times before the war—so many washed back.

Some days Richter wanted to talk about Jeff. The sources of their attraction, the sources of their disaffection. V told him about Florida’s Big Bear Theory, about her own romantic sense of marriage at seventeen—the woodcutter and the plump heir. She said, Jeff seemed like all of those things back then. And it wasn’t his fault she saw her choices so simply.

One day Richter floated fourteen syllables out to her during one of their sessions.

Mania = Fury

Melancholy = Fear

He recited the words, his voice rising in pitch, tentative and with a hint of a question mark at the end.

—It’s like a poem, V said.

—What I’d like is for you to think about the equations, and if seeing them as a poem helps, then fine.


AT THE END OF HER TIME IN KARLSRUHE, Doctor Richter announced his diagnosis like he was Newton under the apple tree.

—You suffer from misplaced malaise, he said.

V said, Well, malaise of course.

But even leaving the war out of it—looking back at the loss of children, marital challenges, lack of a home for a decade, financial ruin, recognition of fundamental moral failure—how exactly was her malaise misplaced? Which horror had she emphasized too much or too little? She certainly hadn’t lost track of it like a house cat that wandered off.

Richter got fussy and prideful at her question, her challenge. He didn’t want to debate. He prescribed walks in fresh air, a diet heavy on bread made from Graham flour, doses of valerian and laudanum alternating every eight hours.

She told him that since the age of thirteen, under doctors’ orders, she had taken every amount of opiates from feather-light to locomotive-heavy, sourced from dirty traveling-show tinctures to white pharmaceutical purity. And yet malaise persisted, impervious, and right in its usual place. With two fingers she tapped the center of her chest three times.


V NEVER WANTED TO SEE THE SOUTH AGAIN. But she had run her string near its frayed end. She and Jeff always got along best apart, even back when she was young and he was middle-aged. When geography separated them, their letters became sweet. Months passed, a year, and time bleached them clean of resentment. He sometimes sent her pressed flowers from special places. Harebell growing near Sir Walter Scott’s grave, jewelweed blossoms growing along a path at The Greenbrier, accompanied also by Mary Chesnut’s love and the good wishes from so many old friends summering at that beautiful Virginia resort, all of them suffering together in the depths of their poverty. On her side of the correspondence, V mostly documented her worry about his eyes and his diet. One time, when she was in London, he came across the Atlantic to see her, but when he got to Liverpool he decided on a spur-of-the-moment tour of Scotland and some of the northern European countries alone. Another time, she agreed to join him on a ship back to America but changed her mind after a rough crossing of the Irish Sea and kissed him good-bye in Dublin and went back to London for her health. All that time of wandering, he traveled Europe as a man with no country, no papers, just his own recognizance to get him across borders. V mostly enjoyed his letters and believed she and Jeff could live happily married for decades caring deeply for each other by post, eventually receiving death notices by telegram. But the surviving children didn’t work that way. At some point it was go back or be forgotten.


BALTIMORE. HOTEL BARNUM. Dickens’s favorite American hotel and V’s too. Also meeting place for Harpers Ferry conspirators and Booth’s gang of assassination plotters. V stayed as long as she could afford, which amounted to only a week.

As soon as she registered, V learned what a mess she had sailed into. Waiting for her were numerous letters from friends welcoming her back to America and informing her that Jeff currently lived in Biloxi with a woman, Sara Dorsey. The widow Mrs. Dorsey. Great glee in sharing the news.

V had been in school with Sara for those few months at Madame X’s in Philadelphia. All she remembered of Sara was her membership in a huddle of malicious thirteen-year-old girls who entertained themselves by commenting on V’s shade of skin, her unnecessary height, her pride and precision in translating Greek and Latin.

Halfway through the stack of letters, V opened one from Jeff informing her of what she already knew, that he no longer called the Peabody Hotel home and had also changed plans on renting a house in Memphis. He was enjoying the hospitality of their mutual friend Mrs. Dorsey. V should plan on joining him at her home, Beauvoir, on the Gulf near Biloxi. He reminded her that she had once loved Biloxi’s beaches. As she was surely aware, Mrs. Dorsey was a novelist of some reputation and offered considerable help to Jeff in composing his memoir.