—I don’t remember any of that, James says.
—Well, V says cheerfully, I’m sure you children sneaked downstairs to watch a time or two. It wasn’t all formal dress and serious music. But my main point is, we’re volunteers at The Retreat. We choose our therapies from printed lists exactly like the menus in the dining room. Most of us want to lose a few pounds or to drink less so that we don’t have to stop drinking altogether. Some want to become a little less fearful and a little more brave, less despondent and more hopeful. As for me, I want any improvement I can get, but I’ll settle for cutting back on the powders and tinctures. Not stop, just moderate. Interesting for the first time since I was thirteen to have a doctor helping me ease up on opiates instead of recommending more. But if I keep living to my eighty-fifth birthday, I plan to start taking them as freely as Mary Chesnut.
—WHAT DO YOU WANT to get away from?
—Saratoga isn’t the wilderness, James. I’m not running. I did plenty of that the first half of my life. I spent a day with a newspaper writer a few weeks ago. The article they published said I was old but still liked to keep up with new books, and to play cards, and go to the races. If I wanted to run away, why would I talk to a reporter?
—I mean personally. One thing you’d put behind you forever if you could.
—Take a wild guess.
—The war and all the things surrounding it.
—There. Asked and answered.
V LEANS AND LIFTS the shaggy book from the table. She riffles pages. Bookmarks flutter.
—I imagine you’d like to get back to this. Compare Miss Botume’s imagination against mine? Try to construct your own memory?
—Yes. I’d like to know about you and Mr. Davis. Particularly him letting me stay there, living in the same big room with his children, joining them with their tutor, learning to read. Me living like that in the presidential mansion of the Confederate States of America seems . . . James pauses, searches for the words, and finally says dryly, Of a low order of probability.
V smiles and says, You can take your tongue out of your cheek. However unlikely, it did happen. He went to the courthouse himself to get papers verifying you were free. We had photographs of all the children taken not long after you came. Maybe they still exist—I hope so. You’re in them, standing plump-cheeked wearing a little striped suit. I don’t know why he didn’t object to you being there—maybe because he didn’t have the energy to fight the war and me at the same time. To be able to live together we learned to pick our battles.
—Really, in blunt terms, my question is simple. If I’d been darker would he have let you keep me? Would he have picked that battle?
—Again, I don’t think you need me to answer that question.
—What about you? Would you have stopped my beating and taken me home? Included me in the family pictures? Taken me with you fleeing Richmond?
—Fleeing America, to be precise.
—Would you have done it?
—Truth?
James nods.
—I don’t know, V says. I hope so.
—Did we leave Richmond on a train? The other day I thought I remembered sleeping on a wood bench in a passenger car.
—Not bare wood, but a bad trip from the start, V says. At least I had my little suicide pistol to comfort me.
Falling ApartMarch 1865
AT THE STATION A STUB OF TRAIN WAITED—A LOCOMOTIVE with a wood car, baggage car, and one old unpainted passenger car fitted with red velvet upholstery worn silvery bald in patches. V and Ellen and the children settled in. The Trenholm girls—beautiful daughters of the secretary of the treasury, one of the richest men in America before the war—arrived like they were embarking on a pleasure cruise. The only men were Burton Harrison, Jefferson’s secretary, and James Morgan, an officer—both in their twenties. Morgan had been yanked out of the trenches of Petersburg for this mission because Jefferson—still sometimes a romantic—knew love brewed between Morgan and one of the Trenholm girls and didn’t want him to be among the last to die. Burton had accompanied V on all her emergency flights from Richmond—as protector, assistant, substitute husband—and they had long since become tight friends.
For the children V and Ellen made pallets of quilts on the floor between the rows of seats. Maggie and Billy and Jeffy and Jimmie lay down and pulled covers to their eyebrows. Jefferson came aboard and kissed cheeks and made assurances. Wished Morgan and the Trenholm girls bon voyage. He took Burton with him onto the platform, and they talked pretty urgently.
V sat next to Ellen and took her hand and said, You don’t have to go with me. If it’s better for you to stay here, then stay.
Ellen sat a long time looking down at the floor before saying, There’s not anything here for me. And you can’t handle all the children by yourself.
—Coming with me could get very bad.
—Bad here too with no money and food scarce till crops start growing. And besides, if it does get bad the children will need us both.
Somewhere in the night, only an hour or two below Petersburg, the locomotive broke down. No explosion of steam or clash of metal. They coasted quietly to a stop in dark woods and then sat through dawn and sunset and another dawn before finally rolling again. Four days in all to cover fewer than three hundred miles to Charlotte, during which time the provisional nation crumbled and many people died. Sherman’s army still raged north after the burning of Columbia and no one knew what civilian target they would destroy next.
Word of V’s arrival in Charlotte preceded them, and an angry, howling mob waited
