Varina(95)

She wrote or said to Mary during the war—I live in a kind of maze. Disaster follows disaster. How I wish my husband were a dry goods clerk. Then we could dine in peace on a mutton scrag and take an airing on Sunday in a little buggy with no back, drawn by a one-eyed horse at fifty cents an hour. This dreadful living day to day depresses me more than I can say.

Then an incisive question—Is it self-government or self-immolation that we are testing?

Then a personal declaration—I am not one of those whose righteousness makes their prayer available.

And then at the end of the war—My name is a heritage of woe.


JAMES HAS STAYED THE WEEKEND with Julie’s family in Harlem, and they’ve all gotten to the place in grieving for Julie where they can laugh and find joy in her life but still tear up telling stories about her. They remind James they will always want him in their family, and they hold a place for him in their business if he ever gets tired of teaching.

On the park bench, a string of words rises uncalled in his mind. The landscape architect of this big beautiful green rectangle once wrote that slavery was an economic mistake, or something to that effect. James opens his notebook and makes a note to self. Olmsted’s exact words? Was economic the only mistake he identified? And then he writes, Every beautiful thing in the country darkens to one degree or another by theft of lives.

Then he jots a thought about V.

Her last years, she was in many ways a very modern woman—unanchored and unmoored, unconstrained by family, poverty, friends, or love of place. Making a major portion of her living from her own work and talent. So why such sense of crisis in her life near its end? Yearning for a reconciliation with the past—the country’s and her own. Her need to shape memory into history.


AFTER DARK the cortege leaves from the Majestic, the casket draped in black, two white horses pulling. There was a small, private memorial service late in the afternoon, and everything has been scheduled according to when the ferry leaves Manhattan to connect with southbound trains in New Jersey. James follows through the streets to the station. General Frederick Grant—son of V’s friend Julia and General Ulysses S.—leads a military escort of bluecoats and some old gray Confederate veterans living in the North. A brass band plays funeral dirges and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Dixie,” confusing people passing on the streets.

Afterward, James walks all the way back to Harlem, and when he gets to the point where electric streetlights change to gas, it feels like traveling in time as much as space.


HE FULLY INTENDED to take the train back to Albany, but instead James buys a ticket on a limited to Washington, where he changes trains. As he boards for Richmond, a conductor tells him to go three cars back and look for a white sign with black letters saying COLORED.

—Nobody mentioned this when I bought my ticket.

—Virginia law, the conductor says.

—What happens if I take a seat in whatever car I want?

—The railroad company enforces the law. You don’t sit where the law says and want to pitch a fit about it, they’ll stop the train and leave you in the middle of nowhere.

—I need to be in Richmond by tomorrow.

—Well, the conductor says, there’s one way to make that happen.

Until Fredericksburg James sits in the colored car alone, feeling separate as usual. Then an old man in a brown suit boards and takes a seat as far from James as possible and opens a newspaper. James writes in his notebook, What railcar would be specific enough?

It’s late when James reaches Richmond. He finds a room in Jackson Ward. It’s a town within a town, like you’d find in every city in America, whether north, south, east, or west. Black hotels, black stores, black theaters and restaurants and nightclubs, black banks. The hotel is a short walk from the Gray House, and not too far to the cemetery down by the river.


NEXT MORNING JAMES STANDS on the cobbles where Joe died. He remembers the spot clearly but not much else. The house is a little familiar—also a sort of dreamlike recognition of the neighborhood, the slope of the hill, the streets and alleyways. Joe had been his double. Same age, same size. They’d worn the same clothes. Both the same except the final layer of skin—so not the same at all, even now. Forty years on, James survives and Joe doesn’t, though James’s life keeps circling back to its beginnings. He thinks of karma, Laura’s mistaken definition of it—going round and round until you come to your senses and make yourself better and get to move on.

He remembers saying to V, Someday you’ll be forgiven for all this, yes?

—No, she said.


JAMES STANDS UP THE HILL to watch the ceremony from a distance—green grass stretching downslope to the gravesite and the brown river. Clouds build to the west. A brass band honks and a preacher repeats platitudes from a dead culture. Toward the end, volleys of rifle fire pop and then echo from across the river. He believes she would have hated that noise while enjoying the attention.

The whole thing is sad. Funerals are supposed to be, but this is particularly sad. To see the circle of graves, all the dead children huddled around the statue of their father—a very ordinary statue, a lazy or unskillful effort by the sculptor. Jeff the president of an imaginary country stands with generic determination, facing a future that no longer exists.

James wonders if the preacher doing the talking is named Minnigerode. He remembers a story—V called it a moment in time, a cupped handful of the million clock ticks she never fully understood. A soft morning in May, early in the war. The tall windows of the Gray House open wide and the sheer curtains ghosting in the slight breeze. Jeff, all solemn, knelt on a cushion. And Minnigerode, the Episcopal rector of the most important church in town, sprinkled him in baptism, no more water than the tap of a damp blossom against his brow. Jeff had suddenly become religious after years of indifference as to whether he’d been baptized as an infant or not. At the end of the ceremony, the divine Minnigerode said, I look upon you as God’s chosen instrument.