—I’ll assume you’re right, James says. But I wouldn’t know much about long family relationships. When I was fifteen, I probably imagined they were all either perfectly happy or ended in gunfire.
V laughs and then sips tea. James takes two tiny sandwiches for his lunch. It is a warm day, and V pushes her three-quarter sleeves to the elbows and fans herself with one hand. She suggests James feel free to remove his jacket, but he declines.
James asks, What are you most afraid to lose?
—Now?
—Yes.
—Nothing, of course, V says.
James recasts his question.
He asks, What do you want to maintain?
—Memory, even if it’s sometimes false.
—Well then, what I’m curious about right now is Washington.
* * *
In 1849 after the peace treaty between Brierfield and The Hurricane was signed, V finally returned to Washington. She was still in her early twenties and wife of a war hero, a senator, soon to be a U.S. secretary of war. Little did V know that for the next thirty years she would never live anyplace for more than a year or so at a time. A Gypsy fortune-teller with her caravan—red and yellow and blue—knew more definition of home than V would. Over those years she bought and sold several households of furniture. Some man in a brown suit, shiny at the elbows and knees—maybe a touch of lunch on his shirtfront—arrives. He goes room to room looking over your carefully chosen things like they’re trash, makes an insulting offer, which you accept. Then you move on, leaving behind a ribbon of acquisitions like bright-colored snakeskin shed to turn pale as a fingernail and dissolve in the weather. You carry forward into the next future only a few trunks of clothes and extra-special books and paintings—a Gypsy caravan load at most.
THAT SECOND TIME IN WASHINGTON differed extremely from the first. They lived in a mansion a few blocks from the White House. It was beautiful, but she missed the vibrating energy of Brown’s Hotel, which had been like living in a dormitory or attending a house party that stretched on for months.
However, the upper reaches of government existed on a grander scale than mere congressmen. At that time a memorable dinner party among senators and cabinet members and their wives sometimes involved slaves hunkering above the ceiling to drop fresh pink rose petals as if by magic through grates onto the diners to announce the first course—which she found showy and a bit crude. Those days, some people called her Queen Varina for her dinners—even without petals—and maybe sometimes for her manner. Dumbards usually selected out after one invitation, overwhelmed by the knowledge and wit around her table.
Uncle Jeff sat at the head, striking and graceful and stately behind his famous cheekbones and raptor-beak nose, looking out from ash-colored eyes that gave nothing away. Candle flame always flattered him, but even in broad daylight people walking down the street turned to stare at his handsomeness. Because of his health—recent battle wounds and lingering malaria—Jeff remained slim, even during the years when men thicken in the middle and their bellies declare themselves. He was especially slim if he had recently passed through one of his long sick twilights when malaria shivered him to the marrow or when his eyesight burned and ripped with pain at every beam of sunlight. This before the left eye clouded and he only allowed photographs in profile. Even healthy, his body coiled tight, gripped against itself, squeezing and quivering with a force some saw as nothing but raw, red anger and ambition. Most mornings, on his way out the door, V reminded him that every moment didn’t need to be lived on a battlefield.
Mostly during V’s famous dinners Jeff was not at all funny. He sat absorbing the wit of others for long stretches of conversation, and then he issued some piercing comment, dry and oblique, benefiting from long, silent reflection—sometimes just a half-dozen words, perfectly chosen. And everyone would erupt in laughter as he looked down at his place setting. Probably a lovely pattern of Wedgwood and Murano crystal that V would sell for pennies on the dollar when the next earthquake in their lives shook everything to the ground.
THOSE EVENINGS were when they became close to Judah Benjamin, then a new senator from Louisiana who enjoyed boasting that he was the first Jew to honor that body. Judah was the only Confederate leader whose memoir V wanted to read, except he never got around to writing one—too busy after the war with success in London, eventually becoming a Queen’s Counsel. In New Orleans, Judah had married a beautiful, wealthy French Creole girl named Natalie, and they very quickly—uncomfortably so—had a daughter. And then Natalie took the little girl and moved to Paris. After he was elected to the Senate, Judah spent a fortune buying and furnishing a grand house in Washington, hoping to lure her back. She stayed a couple of months in that raw, young city and then fled back to France. Theirs became a marriage by post. V remembers Judah getting a big laugh at one of her dinners by sharing a note he had just received from Natalie. He held up the paper, her big looping hand. It read, Speak not to me of economy. It is so fatiguing.
V’s mother—back during the conflict over the will—had said bluntly that V’s marriage would be
