Varina

happier if she succeeded in becoming pregnant. Not the first mother to hold that opinion. But V and Jeff might also have been happier if they’d arranged something like Judah and Natalie, where they mostly corresponded and Judah visited her in Paris for a month every summer and then went away before they became tired of each other. It was a marriage that lasted decades upon decades. But V didn’t move to Paris. By her middle twenties—after the treaty between Brierfield and The Hurricane—she began having babies, and that went on for more than ten years. She stopped calling her husband Uncle Jeff and started calling him Banny, a Celtic term of endearment. Husband.

* * *

A bellboy arrives and hands V the fat book she had asked him to bring down from the desk in her room.

She opens it and reaches out to James. A passage is marked in pencil.

Read this, she says. You’re always shoving your Miss Botume at me.

He takes the book and turns it over to look at the spine. It’s a volume of her own from twenty years ago—her completion of Jeff’s memoir.

James begins reading to himself, but she stops him and says, Aloud, please. It’s about famous people I knew back when I was young. Presidents and so on. Those times in Washington we’re talking about.

James says, When these august shades rise before me whose active lives had been lived before I grew to womanhood, the responsible, serious youth that fell to my lot is not a subject of regret. The history of their day has to me a very stirring interest, and as I read the chronicles of their deeds, they stand clothed in their well-remembered personality, struggling with united minds for the whole country, holding the interests and possessions of all equally sacred, and pledged to protect these with their lives.

After a long pause he says, Lovely thoughts.

—No, V says. Words worth less than a pail of horse biscuits, which could at least fertilize a tomato plant.

—I WENT TO NEW YORK CITY last week to visit Julie’s family, and I spent two afternoons in libraries reading about you in histories and memoirs and newspapers.

—Interesting?

—Yes, it was.

—But why did you do it—go checking up on me?

—Not my intention. I want to understand as much as I can about what you’re telling me. And I came away with a question. In some of the things I read—a couple—I was described as your pet.

—Who did?

—We don’t have to get into personalities. I’m asking if there is any truth to that view.

—If you’re leveling charges and concealing your witnesses, I refuse to defend myself.

They remain quiet for half a minute, and then V says, There were plenty in Richmond who needed to make up stories to explain why at the Gray House you lived upstairs in the nursery with my children rather than downstairs. They gossiped about my race from the day I arrived. My skin, my dark eyes and hair, the shape of my mouth and nose—every tiny bit of me used as evidence as to whether I was mulatto or squaw. Their words. And then after I found you, people came up with all sorts of conspiracies about your origin. Some said you were my son with Jeff, but that my percentage of black blood came out strong in you, and we sent you away at birth. But then I couldn’t forget you and forced Jeff to bring you back and worked up a crazy story of finding you on the street to explain it. Others said you were Jeff’s son with a slave mother from Brierfield. One of those many illegitimate children he was supposed to have. Indian babies up in the northern wilderness, black babies on Mississippi plantations. Both sides claimed your arrogant nose looked like his—more evidence for their conspiracies.

James reaches up and touches thumb and forefinger to the wings of his nose and then taps the tip three times.

—Arrogant? he says.

—I always thought of it as confident.

—Some of the things I read said I was Negro. Others needed to break it down into smaller fractions—mulatto, quadroon, octoroon. Those words don’t matter to me. The word I can’t get past is pet.

V—immediate and vehement—says, I cannot believe I’m sitting here having to listen to this. Having to explain. You’re a teacher. What’s a teacher’s pet? A favorite. Usually because they’re alert and present, smart and teachable, the ones who repay your effort five times over.

—A favorite little animal. It means that too.

—I won’t be responsible for your witnesses needing to apply skin color to every personal interaction. Strange to let that outer hundredth fraction of our bodies be so important. I’m guessing your Miss Botume was one of the people calling you my pet. Which way do you think those people meant the word?

—I’ll repeat something you said two weeks ago—you don’t need me to answer that question.

After a pause to regroup and redirect, James says, Hold out your arm, please.

V reaches it toward him.

James pulls back his sleeve and parallels his forearm to hers.

—See, V says, the difference is hardly more than which of us has been in the sun lately. Plus, I’ve faded with age.

—The difference is you’re white and I’m not. I don’t know what I am, and I’m never comfortable anywhere. I can’t remember a time when people—white and black—weren’t telling me how well I talk to white people. Both directions, they offer it as a compliment. But mostly it makes me feel separate.

—If you had been scooped off the streets of Richmond and taken straight to Paris at age four, you’d be good at talking to French people.

—That’s nowhere near an accurate analogy.

—No, it’s not.

Hog Fortress1865

DOWN IN THE WASTELAND, CROSSING SHERMAN’S WAKE, the world had shut down. Loose coon dogs and bear dogs, half wild already, had started forming packs as soon as their owners scattered, leaving them to discover their own manners without interference from human opinions. V saw them hanging at the edges of dark pinewoods as