WHEN SHE LEFT DAVIS BEND for Natchez after an intense two months of daily courtship, she and Jeff had not become fully engaged, but they had put a hold on forming other entanglements. She was so young, and her parents needed to weigh in, though Jeff felt confident that her father would not offer an impediment.
Jeff accompanied her to the dock and leaned in for a full-on good-bye kiss. But distracted by memory—its habit of looping and echoing—V thought of Winchester at that same spot. She turned her head at the final second to take a glancing blow on her cheek. She said a confused good-bye and then rushed up the stage to the riverboat.
In a letter written a day afterward, Jeff asked,
When we parted at the river, how did you happen to call me by your Father’s name? I’ve been so worried you are ill.
V wrote back.
My apologies for misspeaking. Take for granted a faint touch of blush on my cheeks. I’ll try not to make that mistake again. From now forward, I’ll simply call you Uncle Jeff, since Florida claims Cousin.
JEFF WAS RIGHT ABOUT HER FATHER, he was ready for a wedding and to wish the couple well and send them on their way. But V’s mother put up a fight. Her judgment was to let the courtship proceed, but no wedding for at least a year—certainly not before V turned eighteen. So all that spring and summer, Jeff’s love letters followed a formula. Each one started out rational and conversational in tone but then soon built to an emotional heft only the French language could bear. Most of them ended with Mon amor, mon petit pomme. He didn’t seem to consider that V’s understanding of the language was a great deal more complete than his and that she would not be impressed with his smatter of misspelled and ungrammatical West Point French. Though to be fair his limited vocabulary did contain more words for artillery pieces and the movements of troops than hers. He saw the French language as a tool, a weapon, rather than a portal into a culture and its history and literature. Eons of loss later, confronted with the reality of Paris—where some of their acquaintances from the war lived in exile—Jeff went twitchy as a squirrel looking at public statuary. V loved the city and was ready to start looking for a nice, cheap apartment with a sliver of river view, but Jeff declared that he could never live in a place where displays of human anatomy flushed themselves in his face every time he took a walk.
As for V’s half of their courtship correspondence, her letters vanished during the war, stolen by the Federal raiders who looted Brierfield and destroyed The Hurricane. Jeff had tied the stack of them with a red ribbon as he had done with Knoxie’s letters. Even the slight possibility that V’s letters survive in a Connecticut or Michigan attic still makes her wish she’d burned them when she had the chance. Most of her correspondence to friends and acquaintances over the decades concluded with a line below the signature: Private—Burn after reading. Happily, she can’t remember a word of her teen love letters to a man more than twice her age.
* * *
V tells James, I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She’s still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she’ll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made. Back then, a good marriage didn’t require love. A good marriage meant security—money and position and a man who didn’t knock you around. We all wanted both, of course—love and security—but mostly we settled for the second and manufactured an attraction to keep from acknowledging the arranged, contractual foundation of the relationship, the mercantile nature of it. All those years, I can’t remember one girl from a good family who settled for only love.
—I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT SOMETHING YOU SAID. That I should write a book.
—I believe I more noted how everybody’s doing it, V says. If Virginia Clay can write a book, anybody can. The main qualification appears to be an ability to sit at a desk for many hours a day. When I wrote Jeff’s memoir, it felt like solitary confinement inside his head. The last day’s work seemed so much like a jailbreak that I set my little pistol on the desk in case I had to shoot my way out. After that, I thought I was going to write my own life, but I haven’t. I’ve written all kinds of things to earn my living. For a while I even did a silly etiquette column for the New York World.
Pleasant days back then, she tells James. She had a pretty apartment with a big bay window in the Gerard Hotel—West Forty-Fourth between Sixth and Seventh. Winnie lived there too when she was in town, though she traveled a lot with the Pulitzers, who appreciated her command of several languages and knowledge of art and history. She came in once from spending the worst of winter in Naples and began immediately working every day on a romance set in the South Pacific that she had started on the ship back.
As for V’s writing, giving advice on etiquette was easy. You opened envelopes and considered burning questions readers desperately needed answered—topics such as when and how to wear a high hat, dinner table manners, and how to deal
