V barely suppressed her laughter, a stage gesture meant to be readable from the upper balcony. Meant to provoke. She said, The Confederacy was not the Roman Empire—just four apocalyptic years. A blink of the eye with a horrible cost. Walk around Richmond or Lexington or Biloxi and count empty sleeves and pant legs and face masks.
Jefferson seemed not to hear, maybe listening exclusively to the tide.
SUPPER READY, they moved to the dining room. Sara said, I hope our simple food here on the Gulf suits you. The boats didn’t come in with good fish today, so we’re having oysters and shrimp, potatoes browned in bacon grease, and greens from the garden sautéed in the same pan. For a salad, sliced red and yellow tomatoes with oil and vinegar. And for dessert, fruit. We’re casual here. Fanny does the cooking and puts it on the table family-style and we serve ourselves.
Afterward they sat together on the gallery and watched the light fade over the water, shades of blue and yellow and gray. A breeze sometimes rattled the palmetto fronds. Sara and Jeff had tiny glasses of Chartreuse, which she said they habitually took as a digestif, a ritual of the evening—an abstemious, medicinal, astringent toast to strength for the coming day’s work.
V had glasses of white wine with dinner and a few more on the gallery instead of the Chartreuse. She began talking about Karlsruhe, her trip across France to visit Winnie in school and consult with a doctor, a specialist in her sorts of distress. She described how well the dry air had agreed with her. Or she with it.
Jeff said, The soft, damp air here is delicious.
At that point V rose and without a word walked carefully down the long stairs to the lawn and then dashed, or sort of bustled, around the side of the house and then stopped to decide which direction to flee. Jeff walked to the end of the gallery and looked down at her, but with his eyes so dim he would have seen little but a darker shape against the grass. He said, Oh my.
Sara said, Please stay here. Do not follow.
—Yes? he said.
V rushed toward the dark woodline of big live oaks and palmettos and pines.
Sara followed down the steps and across the lawn as V struggled through the trees toward the alligator swamp. A trail of footprints and broken twigs.
V stopped a hundred yards in, at the muddy edge of black water. She sat on a log, her skirt wet at the hem and winding around her legs, shoes and stockings muddy past the ankles. She cried out of anger and fear and shame and exhaustion. Weariness of wandering.
She looked up at Sara and said, You?
—This isn’t the kind of thing he does well, Sara said.
V raised her hands in surrender. Said, How the mighty have fallen, yes?
And then she began laughing.
Sara laughed too and said, Carpe diem? Remember our Latin tutor?
—No. That’s not what it means, V said. Never your best subject.
—Wait. I do remember something. Where be the roses gone, which sweetened so our eyes?
—Yes, V said. Back then a line like that meant nothing, but it’s what we’re searching for now. The snows of yesteryear.
Sara sat down beside her on the log.
—I don’t know what you imagine or pretend to think, she said. And to a degree, I don’t care, except when you try to use it to gain an upper hand. I’m not hiding anything.
Sara told how Jeff arrived in Biloxi—sick and worn down and out of money. She had help to give, and she gave it—a refuge free of encumbrances, whether money or anything else. A refuge to write his story.
—You’ve always been welcome here, Sara said. God knows this is no elderly love nest, and if you stop and think for even a minute you’ll know it as well. Unlike you, I’ve never had a taste for old men. He lives in the cottage, and I live in the house. I send over a tray with breakfast and lunch so that he can work on his book undisturbed. He takes dinner with me. I ask how the great work has gone today, and he always gives the same answer—Incremental advancements. Which I tell him is the most any writer ought to expect.
—I love objectivity, V said. It’s so entertaining to hear others try it.
—Correct me if I am wrong, but we didn’t much like each other in school, did we?
—Not in the least.
—I had been there two years when you arrived, tall and slim with huge dark judgmental eyes. Strangely so, since we veterans thought we did all the judging. Your skin so smooth and without blemish across those high cheekbones.
—But also a shade darker than everybody else, which you all used to your advantage, V said.
—Of course we did, and I’m sorry. But think about it, throw out all the stupid little belles and even stupider banking and railroad princesses, and who would have been left except the two of us? We’re too old to keep acting like girls.
Sara went on to tell how Jeff arrived at Beauvoir beaten down, near broken, slim as a crane. Looking to see what had become of that little piece of land on the Gulf he bought twenty years before for V and the children but got too busy and rich and powerful and responsible to worry about. Twelve acres of beach and scrub, the last thing he held clear title to in the world. Past the tideline and the sand burrs and sea grass, nothing but woods so thick he had to thrash his way to the back property line at the swamp. He sat at her table that night pretty beaten, claiming he’d hardly spent a month sleeping in the same bed for most of a decade except for two years of Yankee prison where they kept him awake with light in his cell all
