—Wonderful that you’ve both returned, he said.
He kissed V’s damp cheek and then kissed Sara’s.
The Gulf lay flat, almost a mirror, only a breathy hiss of tide. Sea grass, sand, water, sky—everything a shade of slate.
They all three sat up until after midnight talking, laughing, drinking more wine. Sara and V remembered schoolmates in Philadelphia and how explosive and frightening Madame X could be when angry. Jeff told a story about the northern wilderness when he was a young officer—a hairy, raging monster people called the Windigo.
When they grew sleepy and began aiming toward bed, V said, I wonder what people talk about who’ve destroyed their lives with addictions other than books and politics and money and war?
After the Deluge1879–1893
SARA DORSEY DIED OF CANCER—SORT OF WILLING BEAUVOIR to Jeff and sort of selling it to him. Afterward V and Jeff lived in Sara’s beautiful haunted house on the Gulf for their longest stretch of years together. Add up the time in Washington before the war, four years in Richmond during the war, and their decade or so at Beauvoir after the deluge, and they were together little more than half of a forty-five-year marriage.
At Beauvoir they gardened, read, walked on the beach in good weather, corresponded with wide-cast acquaintances. With increasing frequency they received telegrams announcing deaths of friends and important figures from Washington or the war. She helped Jeff write and revise his articles for the North American Review and other journals. Winnie, off in school as usual, dropped by for a month or two now and then. Maggie married and went west with her husband, and Jeffy—last of the boys—died of yellow fever in Memphis. He was twenty-one and had been the least Davis of her children—never responsible enough to suit his father, prone to impulsiveness, easily bored. He shared some of V’s gift or curse of dreams that presaged the future. She and Jeff had gotten word he was sick, and yet neither of them went up to see him and to take care of him. She still can’t explain why. It was a long trip, and they were old. Though to be precise, she was not even fifty-five at the time. Maybe it was certainty that he would recover or overwhelming dread that he would not. Either way it was a weakness, a bad decision for which she would always carry guilt.
FOR YEARS, mostly a quiet life on the beach after decades of clash, disaster, loss, failure. As Jeff neared his eightieth birthday, V often had to remind herself how much younger she was. Some days felt like a competition to determine who had become more attenuated. Like many old men who had been always ready to fight, to plunge into rage, Jeff eased down in his eighties. He became dependent on V and almost sweet.
Long afternoons he sat on the porch looking at the water or on a bench in the garden when flowers bloomed. She asked him what he thought about for those silent stretches of time, and he said, The longer I’m here, the more I seem to remember. Every day, the past flowing in.
SHE STILL CONSIDERED TIME with smart people to be the honing steel to her dull blade, but life on the Gulf passed mostly solitary. Now and then, friends from long ago livened a few days and then went away leaving a lonely, quiet void. All of them graying, time-draggled, still recognizable but looking as if they wore costumes and makeup for playing a role. Burton Harrison, ever faithful, came by a couple of times a year when business brought him down from New York to New Orleans. He and his wife, Connie, had succeeded among the Yankees. Burton was busy and wealthy with many clients in the railway business, and Connie had begun publishing novels and having her plays produced.
A few times a year Mary Chesnut sent brilliant, scattershot letters, often on scraps of mismatched paper like war shortages still applied. She always said her book was almost done—except it needed to be overhauled one more time—and that so many of her old acquaintances—but not V—would hate her after it was published. And then, without warning, Mary Chesnut died after only two days of illness and distress in breathing alleviated by heavy morphine. The letter V received from one of Mary’s nieces said she was buried in a cold November rain. You don’t get to choose who you outlive, so V ripped the letter to shreds and shaped in her mind an alternate funeral for her friend, a bluebird spring day and Mary a hundred and ten years old instead of sixty-three, the last bright repository of all their dead memories.
During her days of mourning for Mary, V kept remembering one of the dark times in the middle of the war, having regular breakfasts, receptions, and matinee musicales at the Gray House for a small group of friends like Mary and Buck Preston, who made her laugh. Society ladies not invited kept asking Mary Chesnut what they did at their gatherings. Mary grew weary of the questions—the constant pumping for gossip—and said they danced on tightropes. V said, Better not tell them that. And Mary said, They swallow everything whole. This time next year they’ll all claim to know the lengths of our petticoats and the patterns of spangles sprinkled on them.
ON ONE OF HIS FAMOUS BOOK TOURS, Oscar Wilde came for dinner. He had been in New Orleans being scandalous and lionized and wanted to come meet the great Rebel, Jefferson Davis. Afterward, an editorialist for the Boonville Pleader, a paper from up the river, wrote that the evening must have been like a butterfly making a formal visit to an eagle.
V thought the simile ought to be an old weary badger ruminating in his den uninterested in the value of fluttering quickness and flashing color.
Wilde arrived bearing flowers, several bottles of wine, and a signed photograph of himself. V greeted him in the foyer, holding
