Whether you pick well or poorly, the act of choosing carries grief. Leaves you wondering, years later, what life might have been had you chosen differently. You’re living happy and comfortable as can be, mother of the placid heir’s dull children, but still wondering about the higher pitch of romance that beautiful woodcutter offered. Or even wishing you’d simply paused, taken a long, deep breath. Not allowed the personal moment and the pattern of your family and your stupid culture to shove you two-handed from behind, forcing you to stumble unbalanced into the future.
Many years later, now that choices matter less, V has finally learned that sitting calm within herself and waiting is often the best choice. And even when it’s not, those around you become uncomfortable because they think you are wise.
THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH of V and Jeff on their honeymoon. They pose in a photographer’s New Orleans studio after stopping along the way downriver from Natchez to visit the grave of his first wife—what a lovely spot to be buried, pastel light filtering through live oaks drooping Spanish moss, prickly palmettos and cypress, and a stretch of opaque brown alligator swamp. In the photo the newlyweds look chilly and weary and very much separate, almost as if two different photographs had been grafted together. He avoids the camera. His eye-line slants stage left, an off-putting sense of evasion when frozen in time. His right eye shows white all around the iris. He poses stiff, impatient, his thin face an arrangement of angles, his right hand resting on his hip with the arm cocked strangely. A pale cravat grips his thin neck tight as a noose drawn up to his chin. The photograph magnifies the difference in their ages. He looks ancient beside her, grim and bloodless and predatory, caved cheeks and raptor nose. A few years later—in a political speech concerning the Wilmot Proviso—Jeff used the simile of a vampire lulling the victim he will soon destroy. Except in the flash of the photographer’s ignited powder, V does not look lulled. She stares directly into the lens and appears angry and tired and more than a little smug.
THIS IS ALL BY WAY OF PROLOGUE to the betrothal. Except, how to keep memory from rolling back to the months before that several-way transaction was struck between the Davises and the Howells that V fell into naive as Candide, with nothing but love and ambition burning in her young heart? Back before she realized everybody was racing for money and fame and power.
These days, she tries to be gentle with her young self. Her thinking must have been jangled and chaotic as a handful of steel ball bearings thrown onto the skin of a timpani in the middle of a performance. She keeps wanting to double back and re-dream the big river of her youth. Standing late at night barefoot in the damp lawn looking down on the campfires of the flatboats, the windows of little farms on the far bank glowing like pinpoints of yellow light for an hour or two after dark and then one by one going black. Re-dream the grand houses and parties in Natchez before her father’s fall. Awkward fourteen-year-olds dancing on a Saturday night to a ragged quartet of piano, violin, cornet, and violoncello. Middle-size boys with overlapping front teeth and blemishes sweeping winglike from nose bridge across both cheeks almost to the ears. Black men in white jackets carrying silver trays of canapés—oysters and Gulf shrimp, terrapin minced with cucumber—everything perched on a crouton with a fat red pearl of pepper sauce at the center. The younger boys wiped out those big trays of food like a storm of locust. The fifteen-year-old boys carried flat pewter flasks of whiskey in their breast pockets and made a great show of sipping surreptitiously.
Memory filters all that sort of material through a slight haze of morphine, which back in her youth her doctors said V needed only a few days monthly and before important dances. So in memory all the pastel dresses and the boys’ dark suits and white shirts trail smears of color behind them as they move about the dance floor, a watercolor blurred across wet paper by dragging a wide brush. A yellow parquet floor’s jagged pattern vibrates in her mind. Many of the other girls lived a similar reality, their doctors believing the same orthodoxy in regard to the magical properties of opiates in managing females.
During a waltz an earnest young man—sweaty face and gloveless palms—pressed his urgent right hand so low on the small of her back that back isn’t the precise word. And after the waltz drifted to a close and the couples parted, a girlfriend stepped up to whisper in V’s ear that a dark replica of the boy’s damp hand printed itself onto the peach silk of her dress in an indelicate place. Knowing that on a muggy May night in Natchez—air so wet catfish could survive in it—a sweat mark would never dry, like being stamped with the Puritan red letter except comic.
V remembers the details of that night to the extent that she could still hum most of the tunes the band played, inhale the scent of lavender and sweat from the whispering girlfriend, the musty pomade of the urgent dance partner. She loves every instant of it. Sometimes, after
