Varina(92)

At some point in the evening V said, Dear boy, please draw a slow deep breath. Now count three and release it. Now another. Rest easy in the fact that since I was seventeen, I’ve known few unknowns.


DINNER WAS SIMPLE STUFF out of the garden and off the daily boat. It started with half-shell oysters, a sprinkle of minced country ham and cornmeal on top, browned for a few minutes in a very hot woodstove—three precise drops of Tabasco on top. And then a clear soup of little pink shrimp and yellow corn and the beautiful green-and-white geometry of sliced okra, beads of butter around the circumference of the small, white bowls. Then fish of some kind with a sauce, and vegetables, green and yellow and red. Probably just fresh fruit afterward. V lost interest in food if the talk around the table burned bright, and that evening it did. At least the talk across the table, since Jeff sat at the head and hardly spoke.

It reminded her of the past—decades deep when she was barely twenty—holding her own several nights a week against the smartest and wittiest and most powerful people in the country. Now, in exile with just this lanky boy at the table, tired from his endless lecture tour but doing his best to entertain—even though it meant dredging up every witty remark he had made since his college years—she felt like an old fire-horse hearing the jangling bell and surging forward against the traces.

Even before dessert and coffee, Jeff arose from his chair and gave a slight head-nod and retired without a word.

Wilde looked at V.

She smiled and said, You’ll find that as you grow old, you stop bothering to hide the self you’ve been all along.

—I aspire to that every day.

—Let’s schedule a conversation on the topic thirty years from now. I’d like to hear your thoughts.


JEFF ABED, they moved to the porch rockers to enjoy the light of a three-quarter moon on the water, the Gulf a metallic silver-green sheen extending to the limits of sight in the thick air, and to continue the evening with Champagne and opiates.

Wilde said, I sometimes begin the day with Champagne. I’m somewhat less experienced with opium.

—It’s a fascinating substance, V said. Doctors have been shoving it at me since I was thirteen for everything from monthly melancholy to childbirth. Also fatigue and excitement, sore throat, heartbreak, and boredom. They see it as the cure-all for excitable women. But I’ve learned the real key to opium is never allowing yourself to cross the line from amateur to professional. A bit tonight because it is pleasurable and because we’re having a lovely evening is amateur. Taking it tomorrow because I’m sad you’ve gone borders on professional. And if you move to the professional category you give up the simple amateur pleasures, which I never want to do.

—I’ll make a note of it.

—And remember, cheap laudanum is mostly grain spirits. Avoid it.

—That sounds like a professional judgment.

—No. It’s discriminating. Taking whatever waste matter comes to hand because you can’t do without it is professional.


WILDE SAID, I hoped he could offer advice on ways Ireland might free itself. He has been the greatest revolutionary of the past century.

—He was never a rebel. He was a businessman and a politician who believed the Constitution protected the capital of his class and culture above everything else. And he may have been right on the legal front, given that the federal government held him in prison for years under the charge of treason and then lacked confidence to try him. What a disaster if they had lost the case on Constitutional grounds. They would have won a disastrous war for nothing. All the dead and all the living with empty sleeves and eye sockets, all the widows. Half a generation wiped away. Still, a part of Jeff deflated when the government dropped the treason charge and set him free. He very much looked forward to a trial, the chance to argue his case. And if he lost, he welcomed climbing the stairway to the scaffold that would make him a martyr. All that was much more important than how his wife and children would survive, how we would go through life shadowed by his execution.

—You said capital?

—Yes. The most cold-blooded view is that the war was a violent argument over the forms it could take. One form was people. My husband argued that the slave economy was more humane than the child labor mills of Yankee capitalism. His argument was that with slavery, labor and capital were one and the same. The owner had a strong stake in the welfare of his workers because they were a great portion of his capital. Whereas the mill owner up north can work his people to death and it costs him nothing. Another boatload from Ireland or Italy will solve his problem.

—But the differences between gold and a person?

—His theory recognized none at all. And his ideas on war were equally abstract. He said, War is an affair of lines—a problem of geometry.

—Except pencil marks drawn on paper with a straightedge and a protractor don’t bleed.

—Exactly, V said.


THE DRIVER RETURNED and waited at a discreet distance. Eventually Wilde rose to go. He said, I’m not sure where I’m going next. Is it far to Colorado?

He was a young man still in his twenties—an age when most of us feel we know more than anyone else, an age of pronouncements. And he was better at it than anyone. Wilde stood awkwardly, his frame angled every which way. His soft cheeks caught the moon and mirrored its roundness, and his hair drooped in the humidity. He looked sad to be leaving.