But the last thing she wanted was to revisit all the physical matter of her previous life. She resented it shouldering into her dreams, disliked the way being in America made her mind turn back to regrets and losses. In London, most days, she could almost forget the past. Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.
To fight Barnum dreams, every morning V wrote three lists on separate pages of hotel stationery. A page for things in the dreams she resented and didn’t wish to see or think of ever again—things consigned to the burn pile. Another page for things she still liked but had no room for in her mind or her life. And last, a short list of precious things she missed and hoped existed somewhere in the world whether she saw them again or not. Each night before bed she burned all three pages in the fireplace.
Day by day the lists grew shorter and the dreams less detailed until V began to hope that soon all she would have to burn would be blank pages.
But the things she couldn’t stop missing and dreaming about were a few lost paintings and a half-dozen books she’d had since the days of Winchester. One tiny watercolor—a few watery brushstrokes suggesting a view across the Potomac to the raw new capital—appeared in her dreams night after night. The last time she saw it was the day she and the children fled Richmond. In the Gray House she had placed it carefully, at seated eye level, over the desk in her dressing room. She had framed it deep and thick and dark with a band of gold leaf around the opening, leaving the watercolor a bright beauty, precious inside its large box.
For three nights of dreams she passed through rooms and saw her little watercolor from before the war. In some of them it grew large enough to cover a wall. In other dreams it appeared over and over in endless replication like a wallpaper pattern.
WHEN MONEY RAN TOO LOW to keep staying at Barnum’s, she moved to the boardinghouse Mary O’Melia had opened when she made it back to Baltimore after the war. They hadn’t always gotten along perfectly back in the Gray House, but now, on more equal footing, they loved each other for remembrances that nobody else had, strange and noble and stupid things done or said by important people within the Gray House. And tiny moments with the children, such as Mary recalling how nervous Joe became when General Lee—at his most graybeard imposing—asked, What’s your name? Instead of Joseph Davis, Joe quickly said the first two consecutive words that rose into his mind, Eight Nine. Lee congratulated him on his unique name, shook his tiny hand.
Mary’s place was five bedrooms, and she ran her establishment as if a horde of inconvenient distant family had descended on her unannounced. Anyone showing up more than twenty minutes late for breakfast went hungry. The fact that they were paying guests didn’t excessively influence her behavior toward them. Mornings, V sat by the fireplace while Mary directed a pair of young housekeepers, just as she had done in Richmond. She looked so much the same except her pretty, broad face was broader, and gray threads scattered evenly in her dark hair, and she no longer even tried to moderate her judgmental direct gaze.
V sewed, mended Mary’s bed linens so as not to be idle.
—Do you remember a little watercolor in my dressing room? V said. Mostly taupe and green and blue? Very small with a large dark frame? Nearly this big?
She held up her hands and touched her forefingers and thumbs to make a rectangle.
—Not in particular, Mary O’Melia said. You kept the walls so cluttered I couldn’t say.
—I hoped you might remember that one over my desk and might know what happened to it after I left. I loved it and would never sell it, but it might be valuable now. The artist has become famous.
—I kept my eye on Lincoln when he came, so I don’t think he took it.
—He might have had too much on his mind to pilfer.
Mary said, He walked about sitting on all the furniture. Like marking his territory. Every damn chair and chaise he needed to plant his ass for a minute. Gloomy-looking fellow. Like winning the war made him sad. But also like breakfast made him sad, if you see my point.
—I never knew him, V said.
—But the Custers . . . Dear God, the way they carried on. I wouldn’t put a little looting past those two.
—Carried on?
—She barged in straight from Washington—parts of Richmond still smoking—and went straight up to your big bedroom and set up camp. Made sure I knew what an adventurer she thought she was, coming into war territory. Messengers came and went all in a rush. She told me to have a hot bath drawn. But there wasn’t anybody left. Just me and that little thin kitchen girl Edith, and she couldn’t do much but cry. So I carried up a basin of warm water and a used sliver of yellow kitchen soap and a washcloth and towel. Missus Custer looked at it like I’d opened the lid on a full chamber pot. She said, What do you expect me to do with that? I told her that it was the best I could manage under the circumstances and that many a grand lady throughout the history of the civilized world had been forced to take a whore’s bath now and then.
—No, you didn’t say that to Lizzie Custer, V said.
—I damn well did. She wasn’t paying my wages. The only reason I hadn’t
