Varina(88)

V decided to arrive twenty-four hours earlier than Jeff’s and Mrs. Dorsey’s careful plans, just to be able to take a breath and collect her thoughts. Reconnoiter. She had her trunks held at the station and stayed at a two-dollar hotel in Biloxi, a town she knew from before the war. It had been nice enough then, broad beaches, tourists in the warm months. Now the town huddled barren at the edge of the Gulf, ragged and brown as a scab. The railroad station, three hotels, three general stores, and a few dozen houses—some grand before the war—stood unpainted and in poor repair because now you had to pay people actual money to get such jobs done rather than just buying the people and owning their labor forever. Lumberyards and docks for fishing boats mostly appeared idle. She read a local paper and found that Biloxi had become the kind of town that gets awfully excited about prospects for a new fish cannery. On the streets, so many men were broken apart from the war. A crutch in place of a leg, a pinned-up empty sleeve, scarred faces lacking noses, eyes, ears they tried to hide in the shade of a low hat brim. The worst of them wore bandannas or frightening leather masks across half their faces, leaving the horror underneath to the imagination. All the way from Baltimore to Memphis she had seen the same.

Taking the grand scheme—leaving the mal works of humanity out—Biloxi was only a wee ugly interruption of luminous Gulf and dense pine and palmetto scrub forest, a place scoured periodically by hurricanes, plagued by malarial mosquitoes, fat snakes, and thick bull alligators submerged to the nostrils in black swamp water, dreaming of an epoch before man. Nighttime, the air ripped with their bellowing.

She walked along the beach remembering long ago, when the children were tiny, spending five beautiful months in a rented beach house west of town. Give the children buckets and spades and they could occupy themselves for hours at the shoreline while V sat in a sling chair under an umbrella and read. Jeff came once or twice to visit for a few days when he had politics or business in New Orleans. She had been so happy she stayed past the summer and halfway through November. All the tourists went away and the days drew short and almost cool. Humidity drained from the air, leaving the sky pure deep blue. Most days, after supper, she and the children went back to the beach and stayed until the moon and stars appeared. She had wanted to own a house there. Nothing elaborate—a place where little sandy feet and smears of jam sandwiches on the furniture would be welcome. So Jeff bought a dozen acres stretching from the water back into alligator marsh. But they never built the house. Events got in the way. Now, all the children she planned to build it for had died or grown up.


AT FIVE THE NEXT AFTERNOON, pretending she’d just arrived, V met the carriage at the station and was carried down the sand road from Biloxi to Beauvoir. When they turned off the road to the house, the broad beach and Gulf stretched on one side and lawn on the other. Beauvoir was not grand, but it was pretty, with big windows and deep galleries. The main floor sat at the top of tall steps so that hurricane tides might surge underneath with minimum damage. Jeff’s cottage was a miniature of the main house, a small square with porches around three sides, a parlor across the front half with tall windows on three sides, and two tiny bedrooms across the back.

Quarter past seven, V and Jeff walked across the lawn from the cottage to the house. No flirting, no holding of hands. They walked as if wearing armor. Inside the front door, Sara and V hugged, kissed cheeks. It went as intended, polished and utterly empty. V had done it a thousand times in Washington and Richmond with people she loved and people she hated. She could hardly remember what Sara looked like decades before at Madame X’s. A short blondish girl, maybe. Now Sara looked very middle-aged and graying and very comfortable in her home.

They sat in the parlor for half an hour and drank Sazeracs heavy on the absinthe. V set it aside, too much like sucking a licorice stick.

—How was your trip from Baltimore? Sara said.

—It was travel. Annoyances and delights. I took my time getting from London to here. How many months has it been?

—Well, whatever. I’m so happy you’ve finally arrived. Jeff’s work is moving forward at a steady pace and I’m sure your presence will only speed it along.

V sat and looked at them both, watching for a flicker. A particular gradation of intimacy.

Sara said, It is a difficult story he’s trying to tell. Just the truth of it is hard enough, much less making sense of it. Never mind all that business of interpretation and reinvention.

V said, I read things now about the South back when we were young, and it’s like they’re describing Arcadia and believe it really existed.

Jeff sat with his eyes away from the light. Five tall triple-hung windows looked out to the Gulf, and he aimed his head just to the side, like trying to see a faint star. With his dim eyes, his view might have been nothing but beautiful rectangles—horizontal bands of gray water and blue sky—set in a cream-colored wall. He tipped his head as if listening to the rhythm of low waves breaking and drawing back against sand, over and over, a black mesmeric hiss.

—Jefferson makes daily progress on his book, Sara said. Some days good and others less so. But pages accumulate.

—Don’t look at your feet. Look far down the road, V said.

Jeff entered the conversation, saying, By that you mean, what?

—Where you want to be rather than where you are. A wagon driver said it to me somewhere in the northern part of Georgia.

—Well, Sara said, you’re right about the long view. Poets can burn themselves in the sun for a single poem, a page. A book, though, calls for shade and time. That applies even to the entertainments I’ve written, and much more so to the history of a nation, its rise and fall.