Varina(9)

Blake tips his right foot at an angle to get a profile view as if he hasn’t noticed what handsome gusseted chisel-toe boots he wears. They shine like a mirror reflecting the night sky.

He says, I get a discount. My wife’s family owns clothes stores, a good business. In New York they’ve just moved from San Juan Hill to Harlem, and in Philadelphia they’ve been on South Street for twenty years.

—I’d like to meet her.

—Julie died almost two years ago. Consumption. But she was lucky, I guess. That translucent stage some people pass through lasted a long time for her, and when it faded she finished quickly without the worst of the hemorrhaging. Being close with her family has helped me through it, and maybe I’ve helped them some. They were generous before, and they’re still generous now and keep telling me I’m part of the family forever. They want me to join the business.

—I’m very sorry for your loss, V says.

She pauses and says, Maybe you should listen to them.

—Teaching is what I do best, not manage a store or keep books or write advertising copy. I’m grateful to them, but I think I’m going to keep doing my job.

—Do you have children?

—No, ma’am.

—So you’re totally free to move forward in life unencumbered, without needing to compound with your pride for the material interests of your family.

—I don’t follow.

—I don’t either. Never have, no matter how I parse the diction and grammar—whether compound is noun or verb—I’m still puzzled. After the war, Jeff wrote it in a letter, I have compounded with my pride for the material interest of my family, and am ready to go on to the end as may best promote their happiness. He’s of course trying to blame me and the children for his fall. Guilt and pride nearly burnt our marriage down to the foundation.

V tells James that Jeff’s letter arrived at her dingy apartment in London during a long separation after the war, much of the time with the entire width of the Atlantic between them. Those oddly constructed words and clauses and phrases were how he informed V he had taken a job beneath him in order to support his family. His great sacrifice was to lower himself and become president of an insurance company after being president of a country—or a failed rebellion or whatever label would be correct. The company covered the Southeast, Baltimore to Houston. Many of his former generals—also broke—tried to make money writing memoirs, struggled to make themselves sit alone at a desk every day and conjure their version of history constructed from the weightless tools of words and uncertain memory. And with a very uncertain payday at the end of the job. So they were eager to earn a steady salary in a more direct and concrete way as insurance salesmen and regional managers and that sort of thing. Go back to giving orders. V believes that General Hood was one of Jeff’s insurance salesmen. Hood lost the use of an arm at Gettysburg, and afterward it just drooped there at his side. And then a leg got taken off at Chickamauga, four inches below the hip. The doctor who did the sawing—as they hauled Hood away—put the leg alongside him in the ambulance, assuming he would die and would want it in the casket. But Hood didn’t die. He came to Richmond and healed. He was barely over thirty, a tall, slim martyr with a long sad face made longer by his tangled beard. Mary Chesnut always said he looked like Don Quixote or a crazed Crusader fighting for crown and cross. He was shy with women, but battle lit him up wild as a Viking. Young Richmond ladies found him irresistible. But ever since the early days of the war, he had been under the spell of Mary Chesnut’s good friend Buck Preston, who was beautiful and a genius at inflicting love. Hood gave a blockade-runner leaving for Europe a brief shopping list for Paris. Two cork legs, best quality. One diamond ring. When he presented the ring to Buck Preston, she declined his proposal. People accused her of being so shallow that she wouldn’t marry him because he had one leg. Buck fired back that she wouldn’t marry Hood if he had six legs. After the war he found a woman other than Buck to marry, and in ten years they had eleven children, quite a few of which were twins. Then the yellow fever that killed half of New Orleans killed Hood and his wife the same day, leaving those orphans behind.

—All that happened? James says. None of it? Some of it?

—All. But I got distracted from what I wanted to say to Jeff about compounding with his pride. I wrote back and told him that bad choices lead to bad consequences, like discussing misbehavior with a child. But he never accepted being wrong and never apologized for taking down our family. Or eleven states full of families. He and his older brother Joseph were alike in that. A shared trait. Never apologize for anything. Plow ahead always believing you’re in the right.

—Go back, James says. You lived in London?





London


March 1874


THE SHORT STACK OF CHINA STOOD ONLY FIVE DINNER plates tall, each one chipped at the edges and crazed on the pink floral faces. Three soup bowls, five teacups, but only two saucers. Glassware—just four stems—cloudy as an old man’s eye. Bed and table linens and towels worn by time to an indeterminate color, like a teaspoon of coal dust in a pint of heavy cream—the color of dirty soles and also the color of the plaster walls. The tiny fireplace might have been adequate for roasting a single sparrow over a fistful of twigs.

V pulled open a cupboard drawer and found a sprinkling of mouse droppings. The oblong black nubs moved like suddenly magnetized iron filings or swirled tea leaves until they settled and found their pattern on the drawer bottom. Prophetic, but not subtly so. Just another message from the gods about diminishing expectations.