Varina(86)

Ellen laughed and said, Oh, I’ve been being happy almost all the time lately.

V laughed too and kissed her cheeks.

Ellen said, The thing seeing you has got me wondering about most is Jimmie. We split his mothering between us.

—The truth is, you were with all of them more than I was those years in Richmond. I can’t tell you much. I wrote to General Saxton while Jefferson was still in prison, but the general already passed Jimmie on to someone else, a teacher so he could continue getting an education. Not knowing his real name, that’s as far as I could get.

—I didn’t know it either. But he was a smart little boy, and I like to think he’s still out there in the world somewhere.

—I do too, V said. My boys keep fading away.

—Jeffy the last one left? Ellen said.

—Yes.

Ellen just shook her head.

Later, as V and Mary were leaving to catch their train, a man walked by and said something as he passed. He didn’t look at V, just spoke and kept walking. She wasn’t sure what he said, but she was pretty sure. Thief of lives.

In the railcar V sat quiet trying to think of other words—three syllables—that would sound similar. But nothing matched.

Halfway back to Baltimore she said to Mary, I’m glad to see you both settled. To have a place in the world.

Mary turned her head and looked closely at V. She said, You’re not becoming the kind of woman who weeps at weddings, are you?

—I’m just glad.

—Question arises, though, do you have a place in the world?


SHE KEPT FINDING WAYS to drag her feet on the way from Baltimore to her reunion with Jeff in Mississippi. She had written two letters to him saying she had no intention of crowding in on his cozy situation at Sara Dorsey’s beach house. Maybe she would find a room in Gulfport or Pass Christian and he could stop by for visits now and then. Talk about the children, try to remember past happy moments, swap favorite current books.

She counted her money and calculated the time it would last. For lack of other destination, she decided to go to Richmond and spend a few days looking in the used shops for the lovely things she had not been able to eliminate from her dream lists. On the way down, she reckoned anyone from the war years she cared to see again had either died or fled. The remainders were people she wished to avoid. At the hotel desk she signed the register as Mrs. Howell.

V told herself she would not do it, but she did. The first morning, she walked by the Gray House to stand at the place on the sidewalk where Joe fell from the balcony and died. Nothing remained. No bloodstains, of course, but not even a feeling. No faint trace of that bright little boy hovering nearby waiting for her to reappear and apologize for letting him slip away. Same thing out at Hollywood Cemetery standing by his marker in the green grass, nothing but absence, a hole in her life that would never fill. Her dead boys lay all scattered—Sam in Washington, Joe there in Richmond, Billy in Memphis.


V OPENED THE DOOR and a spring-loaded bell jangled its warning. One more in a string of shops she had visited looking for remnants of her past. Not exactly an antique shop, just a dim used furniture and dinnerware and decorations shop on a back street. Brown light fell through the storefront window, and the ancient melancholy smell of dust and lost lives breathed out through the open door. Once inside V looked back as if to identify her route of escape. The name of the store’s proprietor lettered backward on the glass, black against the light—SAMOHT MW.

At the front desk a skinny man read a book without looking up. Black suit with great notched lapels spreading to the bony points of his narrow shoulders, the collar of the jacket standing three inches out from his shirt collar. When he finished displaying his superior ennui and apparently reached a good stopping point, he marked his page and looked up and studied the newcomer.

V could see the change in him when he recognized her. That quick bright spark, and then the immediate suppression of it.

—Yes? he said.

Finally, a long deep breath later, he added, Ma’am.

V knew it would be the carefully measured pause and the irony in his tone that would represent a point scored and would comfort him all through his days, proof of his precious individuality and refusal to bow to past fame and present notoriety.

—Just looking, V said.

—For what?

—I’ll know if I see. Don’t let me interrupt your reading.

But he climbed down off his stool and followed her through the store, either afraid she might slip something up a sleeve or probably just wanting to observe her for recounting details of her visit later—how she scavenged for bargains on secondhand crystal and once-fine tablecloths.

V found a few shards of her old life. Scraps, nothing more. Random pieces of Limoges, Sèvres, Spode. A favorite gravy boat with its lid broken and poorly glued, two dinner plates, six teacups and two saucers, three place settings of her silver pattern engraved with the swirling D of their monogram, five Murano wineglasses—beautiful with slight variations from stem to stem—that came from nine or ten dozen she once owned. She didn’t touch anything, hardly looked.

She walked all the way through the store to a back window with a vista down toward Shockoe Bottom and the railroad and river. A large crow or small raven passed across the scene, a black presence coasting on spread wings. But not really oracular, just nature commenting on recent history in a pretty obvious manner. A swelling black thundercloud full of lightning would have served equally well.