—Exactly, V said.
THE DRIVER RETURNED and waited at a discreet distance. Eventually Wilde rose to go. He said, I’m not sure where I’m going next. Is it far to Colorado?
He was a young man still in his twenties—an age when most of us feel we know more than anyone else, an age of pronouncements. And he was better at it than anyone. Wilde stood awkwardly, his frame angled every which way. His soft cheeks caught the moon and mirrored its roundness, and his hair drooped in the humidity. He looked sad to be leaving.
V said, Try to find time to rest on your travels. The key to wandering around constantly speaking to the public is simple. Take naps.
He said, Dear, if you prescribe it, I will doze at the slightest opportunity.
—And take time to eat breakfast every day. Preferably including pork. A firm foundation for the day ahead. And on toward dinnertime, Champagne and opiates provide much assistance.
Wilde laughed and kissed her again and said, If we lived in the same city, imagine the trouble we might cause for others and for ourselves.
—Don’t tempt me. I might pack up and move back to Marylebone.
The carriage driver fussed with the reins and Wilde wandered off into the night.
The next morning V asked Jeff why he had been so rude to their guest, and Jeff said, Because I did not like him.
Years later, reading the sad conclusion of Wilde’s life—trial and imprisonment with hard labor, and death shortly after he served his term—V was sure had Jeff lived to see those events played out luridly in the papers he would have been genuinely shocked that such vectors of desire existed in the world and that he had been exposed to them even for the brief duration of a dinner. V was not so shocked. She fell into depression at each new report where that brilliant, exhausted young man she had instantly liked was shoved deeper into the dark.
ONE MORNING, halfway into writing a letter to Mary Chesnut, V remembered with fresh shock and loss that the postal service could no longer connect them. The first bit of the letter read,
It is a frightful thing to drop out of one’s place in the world and never find it again. I try very hard to keep my memory green and thus by sympathy live anew, or if not anew, aright, which is more to the point, much more.
AFTER JEFF DIED, V wrote his memoir. Or at least completed it based on his fractional manuscript with the help of his pile of notes and old speeches and congressional records and memory. Every day she wanted to pack and leave Biloxi. She didn’t inherit Beauvoir—Winnie did. But Winnie had no more interest in living in that little gem on the beach than V. What would either of them do there in a dead town, no matter how pretty the house and view?
V worked in the cottage Jeff had used as his study. All his books and papers were already there, and walking across the lawn to write every afternoon between lunch and supper created a separation, a time and place for work. She moved the writing table near one of the tall side windows looking toward the water, and the least Gulf breeze riffled through her pages. In June, when the afternoon thunderstorms became regular, she looked forward to them. The palmetto fronds rattling in the wind, the air suddenly fresh and cool, the entire Gulf disappearing behind a wall of rain streaking down at the rate of an inch in a half hour. And then the clouds breaking, light rising into a soft evening, clouds touched with yellow and rose and the water settling to a bronze mirror in the low angle of sun. And yet, awake in the middle of the night, she wrote in a letter,
The testimonies of my youth are hidden in death. I feel like an executed person swinging in chains on a lonely road.
ONE NIGHT during that long job of writing, V woke with a clear thought immediately in her head, a belief that if there is an afterlife, the morning Jeff woke to the sunshine of the next world, he did not wonder how to fill his time waiting for V’s arrival. He spruced up, tied a puffy silk cravat around his skinny neck, and went out searching for Knoxie.
WHEN SHE FINISHED JEFF’S BOOK, exhausted and depressed, she considered her work done, a debt paid in full. She packed her leaving trunks and walked away from another houseful of furniture and moved to New York City, mainly because she could not afford London or Paris. One of those first weeks in the city, she had heart attacks every day—or at least that’s what her doctor told her. Newspapers all across the South ranted how traitorous she was. V back-talked, saying she was free, brown, and sixty-five and could live wherever she wanted. She bounced around residential hotels awhile and then found a pretty apartment near Longacre Square—West Forty-Fourth between Sixth and Seventh. What she wanted was a new life. Reconnection with people. Galleries and libraries and museums and theaters. The New York World had offered her work, and so she intended to write for part of her living.
She did, though, keep having to deal with her husband’s remains—before, after, and long after he died. As with many things in those last years, Jeff was indifferent to where he would be buried. He asked V to deal with it. The tentative entombment took place in New Orleans, a big funeral. And then a year or two later V accepted the offer from Virginia, so they hauled him out and moved him to Richmond.
Jeff made a leisurely journey through the South, lying in state in various places along the way. As the train passed, church bells tolled, people threw flowers on the tracks. She attended the second funeral, another grand ceremony. The new grave looked over
