They sat and sipped and talked. It was past midnight, silent outside until a rider went by at a canter, and they stopped to listen as he took the western branch of the road into deep country.
Mary said, It’s all second- and thirdhand, but I hear the end times in Richmond fell pretty bad.
V sat awhile and finally said, Do you think the gods observe us?
—Lowercase plural, or big G singular?
—Either.
Mary said, If you mean watch over us all worried, making sure that everything happens for a reason, then I’ll say hell no. But if you mean punish us whether we deserve a beating or not, I’ll say maybe.
—I mean observe, V said. Form an audience. Judge us mostly on how amusing we are. How funny or sad or tragic or foolish. Or just to find us lacking in entertainment—a disappointment.
—More like a group of critics?
—Maybe. Because however bad we’ve all been—whether the gods jump on us with both feet or the Puritan God fries us in a red-hot skillet—all of us, we’ve made a story of our lives.
—Oh, Mary said, life is mostly just what happens. Choice or chance or fate, gods or not. Like it or not. Things happen, we do what we think is in our best interests or just convenient, and then we live with the consequences. When we finally start taking the long view back down the road we’ve traveled, maybe we repent. Or just dig in our heels and claim righteousness no matter how damning the evidence against us.
Mary stopped and said, But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? You’re thinking about him, yes? His ruin.
—Some. But also about myself and the children.
—And wherever Jeff is right now, he’s probably worrying more about how he’ll be judged by history.
—Yes.
Mary drank and thought and then raised her glass and professed, History reveals a person’s deeds—their outward character but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life rounded by a dream—unpenetrated, unguessed.
V clapped two slow claps and said, Beyond the Shakespeare, is any of that yours?
—The first part, a little.
V said, I’m fading. Coffee?
—Everyone’s gone to bed. We could make some fresh or drink the cold dregs left in the pot from dinner.
—I vote dregs. All I want is a jolt. I still aim to tuck you in.
IN THAT DEGREE of late night transforming to early morning—the oil lamp slightly haloed by the heavy, wet April air gathering outside—Mary said, Young Mister Burton Harrison? He looks worn out. But I imagine when he’s had a shave and not dead-on-his-feet exhausted, he’s probably handsome.
—Well, yes.
Mary studied V and then closed her eyes for two breaths. She said, I’m sensing a story, and we’re both too tired to make me drag it out of you when we both know you’ll spill eventually.
Very dreamy, slow and with many pauses and diversions, V remembered aloud how in the Gray House, Burton’s office was upstairs, just across a narrow hall from her little sitting and dressing room off the big master bedroom. Her room measured perhaps ten by ten. Burton’s office was even smaller, with no exterior windows. But it was an intense space, dim even in daylight, books on shelves and standing in tottering stacks, papers everywhere, desktop covered with letters in his meticulous hand. In her room—whether she had the door open and sat in the chair reading a book or had the door closed drawing up a stocking—she could hear him clear his throat. Coming and going, they often brushed against each other in the narrow hall between their lairs.
Mary Chesnut sat with her eyes closed, the stem of her glass between the first and middle fingers of her upturned hand, her palm cupping the bowl. V paused, and Mary, without opening her eyes, said, Please proceed.
So, of course, V and Burton shared a lovely, brief flirtation. He had graduated from Yale before the war and frequently made calculated glancing mentions that he was a Bonesman, as if that shed more than a glimmer of golden light south of about Delaware. V grew up around Masons, whose magical tickling handshakes and dark secrets went back to King Solomon, so a recently formed boy club hardly registered. More interesting to her was she and Burton being several years closer in age than she and Jeff. And that simple summation of years rested weightier on her mind than any secret society, no matter how extra special.
Burton would have made a poor poker player. For two weeks he moped about in love with her. He was a wise young man who didn’t hold her slight thickening in the wake of children as an exclusionary fact. Besides, the tallness that caused her to stoop self-consciously when she was fifteen helped her carry a little weight regally twenty years later. Though of course childless Mary Chesnut still enjoyed the figure of a fourteen-year-old.
—Thank you for noticing, Mary said.
When V finally realized how twisted up she had him, she enjoyed playing with Burton for a few weeks. Most of those brushings-by in the narrow hallway were her doing. Some days she laughed and flirted lightly, and others she acted even more dark and brooding than he did.
This was still early enough in the war that Richmond had not yet become flooded with beautiful young widows. By the second year, town whelmed over with them, all wearing flattering
