Varina(87)

The skinny man hovered behind her until she moved along toward the front door. But along the way she noticed a familiar frame on the wall and walked to it. Her tiny Whistler.

A small tag hanging from twine showed a penciled price, just a number without a crass dollar sign—5.

V turned to the man and said, I’ll give you three dollars.

—The frame itself is worth at least five.

—I see scratches. And I’ll have to find something to fit it. It’s an odd size.

—If three’s all you have . . .

—Have is not the point. Three dollars is what I’m willing to pay.

—I’ll wrap it, and it will be ready tomorrow afternoon.

—Wrap it, and I’ll take it with me, V said.


THAT NIGHT SHE PROPPED THE WHISTLER on a table and looked at it a long time—a little faded but still so beautiful.

She had bought it—just the little rectangle of thick paper—one day while Jeff was secretary of war. He walked her through the offices and workplaces of the department. In a large room with tall windows, young men worked at drafting tables drawing maps. As Jeff explained what they were doing—the process and the importance of mapmaking for the nation’s defense—V noticed a slim almost-boy with long curly hair hunched over a large paper. He would have been pretty but for the nose. She walked over and said, Excuse me.

He looked up at her and then saw Jeff standing across the room and quickly stood and nodded his head and said, Ma’am.

V admired his map in progress and then noticed on his table a rectangle hardly larger than a postcard, fewer than two dozen wet watercolor brushstrokes muted and pale. Nevertheless, V recognized the view from Arlington across the Potomac after sunset with the raw capital city hazy and hopeful in the distance. She bought so many paintings then.

She said, I like that very much and would like to have it.

He said, Please take it. It would be my pleasure for you to enjoy it.

V said, No, this is too beautiful not to pay.

She gave him twenty dollars—a flashing double eagle fresh from the mint—and wrapped the thick paper in her handkerchief and eased it into her beaded reticule.

As they walked away, Jeff said, What was that about?

—A watercolor.

—Yes?

—I gave him twenty dollars.

—My God. He’s recently been booted from West Point. You could have gotten it for fifty cents.

—He wanted to give it to me, V said.

—Why didn’t you accept?

—Because I wanted to pay.

She had met Whistler again at an exhibition in London. He had become famous. The press variously made him out to be either a grand fop, a fraud, or a genius, as if those were mutually exclusive. Either way, prices on his paintings had become mind-numbing. He didn’t remember V until she mentioned the little watercolor and the shiny twenty-dollar gold piece, at which he rushed to kiss her cheeks and said, loud enough for the whole room to hear, You never forget your first sale.

V said to him, I’ve always wondered about something—probably because my husband barely escaped it himself—why did you have to leave West Point?

—Misbehaviors and misdemeanors, Whistler said. But it was the last and worst in a series of unsuccessful chemistry exams that finished me off. I was asked to discuss the subject of silicon. My essay was so lovely. The first sentence was brilliant. It read Silicon is a gas. And if silicon had been a gas, I’d be a general today.


FROM RICHMOND V ZAGGED over to The Greenbrier hoping to find Mary Chesnut or at least a few other people who might welcome seeing her, but the guests were nothing but rank strangers. After a week she moved on to Lexington—the one in Kentucky—and then down to Nashville. All along the way she and Jeff traded letters, always very politely exchanging suspicion, jealousy, resentment, blame, shared history, love of the children.

In one exchange he wrote that all he had left to plead was poverty. If she objected to him accepting Mrs. Dorsey’s hospitality, where else would she have him go? He was writing his eyes blind every day trying to dig them out of their hole. She wrote back reminding him of an old saying about being in a hole. Quit digging and start building a ladder. She told him she had drawn her money down low, and then Jeff’s return letter claimed he had almost none left to send her. So she asked, where would he have her go?

She spent six weeks of dwindling dollars in a shabby boardinghouse near the river in Memphis. Every evening supper was the same colorless mess—bowl of boiled potatoes and another of stewed chicken. She bought carrots at the market and gnawed them raw in her room just for the color.

She wrote Jeff a birthday letter:

This is your birthday, and I write, not to remind you, but to show that I have not entirely forgotten the day. How very sad anniversaries become. They are for the young and hopeful and for the very old and hopeless. A spark of expectation reveals the gloomy, weary waste.

A few days later she counted her dollars and then gave up and bought a ticket to the Gulf.


BEFORE THE LAST LEG OF HER JOURNEY V kept thinking about schedules. Jeff had sent a note saying Sara Dorsey planned a dinner for the three of them, about seven or seven-thirty the evening of her arrival. V’s train was to reach Biloxi at five. A carriage would pick her up at the station and deliver her to Beauvoir.

Leaving an hour or so at the cottage to, what? V wondered. Unpack? Greet? How do husband and wife behave after a year or so apart? She imagined a couple in their twenties, their first evening after only a few weeks. Oh, my. Then imagine this couple. V in the latter days of her forties and Jeff sailing headlong against the shoals of seventy. What then? Complaints of aching joints? Grudging liniment rubs? Attempts to renegotiate grievances three decades old? Refight every battle long since lost?