Buchanan never married. A pretty and very shrewd and sharp-eyed niece—who didn’t particularly approve of V—served as hostess, arranging state dinners and gracefully whispering in her uncle’s ear the names of people in the receiving line he might have misremembered. She was expert at diverting the attention of unwelcome or tiring guests, as if she were dealing with a parade of fussy toddlers. Some newspaper writer, not knowing what to call her, since she wasn’t the president’s wife, made up the term First Lady, and it stuck.
Old Buchanan and V eventually became true friends without reference to her husband—then a senator. Or to her age—still shy of thirty. They were the kind of friends who gave each other bedroom slippers for Christmas. The sharper her tongue, the more he delighted in it. He was a lovely, lonely old bachelor, and V was so often at her best with older men. When he lay dying he sent for her, and she sat on the edge of his bed to say good-bye. His hair sprung greasy from his temples, white peaks and gray valleys. He held her hand and patted its smooth back with his old crepey palm and tried to console her.
—I’ll miss you so much, he said.
—Then don’t go, V said.
—Not my choice. Just don’t forget me.
She snorted with laughter and said, Idiotic to imagine that’s possible.
He gripped her hand, pressed her fingers into a fist and pulled it to his pleated lips and kissed the smooth dusky skin of her handback and then kissed the row of knuckles and the pale fingernails curled against the palm, and then he opened her hand flat and kissed the cup of her palm three times, like a spell in a fairy story.
—My dear, he said.
—You old fool, she said.
V JOSTLED ALONG on the wagon bench, wondering what to make of that past when her only future had become a muddy ribbon of road unspooling ahead with agonizing slowness and little ones confused and scared. All of them fugitives. Her husband—wherever he was—the chief fugitive, still pretending they weren’t defeated, crushed, broken. The letters from him that reached her before the railroads quit working were sweet and deluded, as if everything wasn’t lost and gone forever.
She opened Northanger Abbey again and jotted: Head full of sorrows, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?
A mile farther down the road she thought, You can mire yourself in the past, but you can’t change a damn thing in that lost world. Nothing to do but sit on the wagon bench beside Delrey and stare forward into the distance. Or go lie stunned, dozing under piles of quilts in the back of the ambulance with the children, who shape themselves and the world around them anew moment by moment and always need baths and smell musty and sweet and alive.
* * *
James holds the blue book out toward her, spine forward, gold letters on blue cloth. First Days Among the Contrabands.
He says, This book, it’s the reason I’m here. Miss Botume, the author, went from Boston down to the Sea Islands off South Carolina in the middle of the war—occupied territory—to teach freed slaves. A brave act. She was young, full of ideas about making the world better. She would have been in danger if Confederates had retaken the islands. For legal reasons, the Federal government called all those people who’d been freed from slavery contraband, seized property, spoils of war. The book tells her experiences there, teaching those people reading and arithmetic and all sorts of other things previously kept secret from most of them. How to look at a clock and tell time, how to look at a coin and judge its value. She took care of me for a while. I wonder if I might read you a passage—see if it squares with your memory.
He opens the book to one of his markers and holds it for V to read the chapter title. Jimmie. Then, fast and urgent, he reads aloud: An officer on board brought with him this small colored boy, sent by Mrs. Davis to General Saxton. She also sent a note by the boy, written with pencil on the blank leaf of a book. I quote from memory. She said:—“I send this boy to you, General Saxton, and beg you to take good care of him.” His mother was a free colored woman in Richmond. She died when he was an infant, leaving him to the care of a friend, who was cruel and neglectful of him. One day Mrs. Davis and her children went to the house and found this woman beating the little fellow, who was then only two years old. So she took him home with her, intending to find a good place for him. But he was so bright and playful, her own children were unwilling to give him up. Then she decided to keep him until he was old enough to learn a trade. “That was five years ago, and he has shared our fortunes and misfortunes until the present time. But we can do nothing more for him. I send him to you, General Saxton, as you were a friend of our earlier and better times. You will find him affectionate and tractable. I beg you to be kind to him.” This was the gist of her note.
James looks up and waits.
V reaches her hand. Says, Might I look directly at the page?
She studies it and then says, Gist. It’s an old French word. Means, to lie.
V runs her finger across several lines of text and then says, Your Miss Botume’s fabricating my statements and using quotation marks to cover her tracks. Slapping memory and supposition together
