Laura smells like cut rye grass and ripe pears and a pillowcase needing washing. The skin of her cheeks is poreless and white as a piece of everyday china. She weighs nothing, rests against V like a goose down pillow. Laura doesn’t remind V of her own children in the least, but she does call back youth. Like holding a pale version of her own young self.
V leans to Laura’s ear and breathes, fainter than a whisper, an arrangement of three words. Be well, get well. She says it over and over like a prayer, a chant, an old mystic rhythm that if repeated long enough works magic.
At some point, V may have fallen asleep too. Or at least into a daze, watching the patterns of light through the window—a vertical rectangle of landscape, shades of green and blue, ridgeline and sky. The changes of light through the day happen in such slow rhythms that you have to pay strict attention to follow the melody.
At least she doesn’t get bored, wishing she could reach ten feet to the nearest book. Each ticking minute tingles with life. Sheltering this sad girl, her shallow breaths and slow heart, abandoned by her family to the questionable authority of the self-satisfied alienists and mesmerists and semidoctors at The Retreat. Laura is lonely, alone, isolate. V keeps breathing the spell, Be well, get well.
Laura shifts her legs a bit, and the bottoms of her feet present themselves. Ivory, amber, and coal dust. Her shanks glow tight along the shinbone, a blond shimmer of fine hair down the slack muscle of the calf. V holds this body with its reluctant spark of life inside, compassed by such a frail container of skin, all its messy fluids and mysterious greasy dark organs held within a membrane hardly more substantive than a soap bubble. Touch it gently and it pops. Gone to nothing.
V SAYS, IT FEELS LIKE RAIN. So next week for the races?
—Whatever you think, Mrs. Davis.
—Could we talk to each other without missus and ma’am? We have such a short time together, and manners only slow us down.
—What should I call you, then?
—You be James and I’ll be Varina.
—I don’t think I can do that.
—Yes, you can. If we hadn’t been separated back then, what would we be calling each other now?
—I don’t know.
—Neither do I. But if we’d reached Havana, we might be sitting under palm trees beside the Caribbean, talking in Spanish—your pretty children calling me Abuela. So for today, let’s try James and Varina. If others come around listening in, snooping for gossip, we can go back to mister and missus for a minute. We could exaggerate the way we say it and laugh about it later. Booker T. Washington and I made all the newspapers just sitting together talking for an hour or two in a hotel lobby in New York City trying to discuss education, except people kept hovering, eavesdropping, and at some point we both started laughing.
—All right, Varina, James says. I have a question. Is this a hotel or a hospital?
She sweeps her hand to encompass the sun terrace and says, Look around, James. Guests fashionably dressed, nearly as fashionably as you. Nobody wearing a straitjacket. Just having drinks and food in the afternoon. Correct me if I am wrong, but it looks like a hotel.
—Except, last week I thought I heard someone scream.
—Words fail, V says. To live is to rant.
She announces the idea as if she had composed it and honed it down over time and rehearsed her delivery, meaning for it to be carved directly underneath Emerson’s attempt to reconcile guilt and fear. Or perhaps she meant to scratch it with a nail on a smaller stone off to the side, a sort of marginal annotation.
Then she laughs and says, James, people like to gossip about The Retreat. All it amounts to is that therapies are offered. It’s the fashion.
She runs down possibilities. Hydrotherapy, just a fancy name for a very hot or very cold bath. Physiotherapy, nothing but relaxing massages, taking walks and carriage rides, a bowling alley in the basement, badminton on the lawn for those still able to jump around, and recent talk of converting cow pastures into golf links. Mechanotherapy, a roomful of ugly exercise machines, but always a line of ladies waiting for the vibrating Zander apparatus. Electrotherapy, though, causes her to lower her voice. She barely breathes how way back in the basement they’re playing around with a dark speculation of Benjamin Franklin’s about the possible benefits of passing strong electric shock through the human head. Franklin took a jolt hard enough to rob him of consciousness, and when he came to he felt unusually fine. He theorized amnesia relieves melancholia. Which makes complete sense, because memory is so often to blame for it. Who couldn’t use their load of time and history lightened?
She explains how the hotel even makes putting on a short play therapeutic. Dramatotherapy. Says that she and some other guests are doing an abbreviated Hamlet soon, and a man who makes moving pictures is coming from New York to film it so that they can look at it later and laugh at themselves.
—In Richmond during the war, V says, Mary Chesnut and I put on after-dinner comic theatricals and made famous people like Jeb Stuart—the great plumed hero straight off the battlefield—claim a role and join in. He loved it. Always demanded the silliest part and played for laughs. So did Judah Benjamin, the attorney general or secretary of state or secretary of war or whatever job he held that week in the
