The first sound of a culture collapsing from its highest steeples starts as a whisper, a sigh. The rattle of windows in their frames. Nobody listens until it thunders, when its structure—all the massive weight held in air as by a magician’s trick depending on sleight of hand, misdirection of attention—collapses to its foundational sins. And after the steeples have fallen, warred-over landscapes lie burned and salted as thoroughly as Troy after the Greeks sailed home. Nothing left but frail and temporary and untrustworthy memory to image what stood before. Even near the end, many in the capital and elsewhere remained unsure whether they were engaged in a grand experiment or a pathetically inept confidence game, projecting boundaries of a new and uncertain country onto the landscape. North and South like grotesque reflections of one another in a carnival mirror.
SAD AND STUPID. And yet . . . what?
That London evening, sitting in the armchair with the stain where many heads had rested, V felt not at all happy, but calmer. Irresistible gravity settling her into place. How lovely to live alone without the constant pull against attention, the strong outgoing tide dragging concentration away. Husband an ocean away and the children happy in school—the boys in America and the girls across the Channel learning French.
V began writing a letter. She first thought to spill out pages of recollections and resentments, tracing how their lives had year by year ramified beyond prediction or even the prophecy of nightmare, moving like a river in reverse, flowing from the mainstream out into so many branches that not a drop made it down to the sea. How they had lived rootless, homeless as fugitives until they became actual fugitives with an entire nation in pursuit. But instead she wrote:
Dearest Jeff,
Of course I live to serve you & children. All loved & missed beyond excess—goes without saying. But still, to be alone in this beautiful dirty old city after the calamity of the past years, and feeling nothing but a lift from letting go the faded glories. Letting go youth & desire & hope. Yet to sense a possible future rather than only a lurking ending—that thing with the weight of a great black riverboat and its stern-wheel beating like a scythe & the added force of a booming Mississippi current that bore down on us for years and finally swept us under. So, right now, I wish you every day a happy day & good appetite, warm feet, good friends & everything but forgetfulness. I do not think I would have longed for, or used, the water of Lethe. Memory is truly possession sometimes. Stay away from me until autumn & then see if we may feel we have a future together.
Devotedly, your wife,
V
* * *
V scans a pair of pages in James’s blue book and says, My name in print always arrests my eye. Listen to this: A little mulatto boy had been sent to General Saxton by Mrs. Jefferson Davis, and now the question came up, what was the best thing to do with him. He was about seven years old, but small for his age; was a very light mulatto, with brown curly hair, thin lips, and a defiant nose. When brought before us he looked around suspiciously and fearlessly. When Mrs. Saxton called him he walked calmly up to her; but when I held out my hand to him he folded his arms and stood still, straight as an arrow, with his head thrown back, without meeting my friendly advances. It was comical to see the cool indifference of this tiny scrap of humanity.
V stops and says, Scrap of humanity? Where did she come up with that? Dragged it out of nowhere. You were an intense little boy and more than covered the ground you stood on. And you were not small for your age, and you were not seven. And also, I didn’t send you away. I did the best I could in a horrible moment. I’d kept you with me all the way from Richmond, every mile. We were being held on board the William P. Clyde at Hilton Head, prisoners not knowing which prison awaited us.
She describes to James the Tuscarora lying alongside the Clyde with big guns aimed to blow them out of the water in case the prisoners commandeered the ship. The prisoners included V and the children and sick, skeletal Jeff and Vice President Stephens, who weighed ninety pounds and looked like a mummified child and was called the Pale Star of Georgia by some of the papers. Also Clement and Virginia Clay. Clement had been both a U.S. senator and a Confederate senator. Late in the war Jeff sent him on a spy mission to Canada. He came back looking like a hollow-cheeked killer, face like an axe blade and greasy hair to his shoulders, not at all like his plump, young face on the one-dollar bill. And of course Burton Harrison was a prisoner, Jeff’s private secretary through most of the war and V’s friend, companion, ally.
They’d mostly taken different paths from Richmond to being prisoners on the Clyde. Jeff had stayed in Richmond until hours before the city burned, and then he escaped by railway with
