DREAMS TROUBLED HER IN THE BARNUM, which never happened in previous visits. Her sleep swirled with details of her old life. Dark rooms swelled with furnishings long since sold or given away or abandoned in flight. Bookshelves crowded with spines of lost books, lapping dense as reptile scales. She could read titles and authors stamped in gold, and sometimes her vision could penetrate the binding to read penciled notes in the margins. Small sculptures and ceramic figures rendered precise down to fingernails of tiny long-fingered hands too delicate to touch. Intricate patterns of Turkish rugs and the warp and weft of upholstery and drapery fabric. Three hundred sixty degrees around the walls of the room, her lost artworks shone in brushstroke detail.
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 packed my valise and walked out the door was that the house needed caring for and because I hadn’t quite figured where else to go, since the trains to Baltimore weren’t running yet. So to get back to the point in my tale where I was interrupted, come about midnight, young Mister Custer gallops up straight from the battlefield, throws open the front door without knocking, long saber rattling in a scabbard at his side, red faced and greasy blond hair hanging down from his hatband past his collar. Had been riding for hours, and he more than sort of smelled. Didn’t say a word to me other than, Where is she? I lifted my thumb straight up, and he climbed the steps two at a time with his scabbard clashing against every baluster. He stopped at the top and shouted down to send up a few bottles of the best wine or whiskey you’ve got, immediately. The headboard banged the wall half the night. Next morning at breakfast, he looked half drunk still and his face the color of flour paste. But she came down bright-eyed and rosy, barefooted and still wearing a silk shift so thin that when she walked by a window you knew everything there was to know about her.
—Sounds like they found fun in that sad old place.
—I couldn’t take much of it. As soon as the trains started running north, I packed and left.
ONE MORNING MARY MENTIONED that Ellen was to be married in a week, out between Harpers Ferry and Shepherdstown. Mary said, It’s not so far. We might go together? Out on the train early and back late after the wedding. A long day, but the schedule works. I wrote her you were here.
—I haven’t been invited, V said.
—I’m doing that. She’s afraid to ask directly, worries you’re angry with her because of what she said after the war to a New York paper.
—What?
—The reporter asked her how you were, Mary said. You know, as a master or owner or whatever you people called it back then. He was looking for dirt, I guess. Ellen said you were fine. Nice enough. But that she much preferred not having an owner.
—Why would that make me mad? It’s generous of her. And who wouldn’t rather be free? Write her back and tell her I’ll happily come. I’ll even sew her a pretty summer dress for a wedding p
resent.
And yet, V kept thinking, Just all right? Nice enough? We were friends.
V took a guess at Ellen’s current size based on the fact that everybody seemed to have swollen some with the passage of time. Except probably Mary Chesnut. And of course Jeff, whose flesh drew year by year closer to his bones. So for Ellen’s dress, V left plenty of fabric behind the seams in the parts where it might need to be let out.
* * *
—Wait, James says.
—What?
—Even years after the war, you thought of Ellen simply as your friend?
—It felt that way.
James opens his notebook, turns pages looking for something he wrote on the train three or four weeks ago.
—Here, he says. Pemberton. You talked about the complexity of his relationship with Mr. Davis. You found it dark and ominous, a relationship twisted and falsified by ownership. Always a vast imbalance of power with the threat of violence. How did your husband and his brother put it? That the solution to the fundamental problem of capitalism was slavery, making labor and capital one and the same? He didn’t address the methods necessary to keep human beings under control to make his system work.
—Their ideology, not mine. He and Joseph were of one mind on that. Ellen and I were women raising children and keeping a complicated household going during a difficult time. Not men with power. It didn’t feel nearly as ominous as Jeff and Pemberton.
—Ominous to Ellen, though, I would think. Look at what she said very politely to the newspaper reporter about freedom. Think about it. Remember that back in the Gray House, every hold she had on her own life, any sense of security, ran straight through you.
* * *
Ellen’s wedding was a quiet, middle-aged sort of ceremony. V and Mary were the only white people. All the others were farm families making a living off of twenty acres, or else people with jobs in the nearby towns, men who worked for the railroad, women who managed households for wealthier people. Ellen’s husband was named Gabriel, a slim, balding widower with hazel eyes. They had a green farm with a big vegetable garden and cornfields and potato fields. An orchard of apple trees, a few hogs and a milk cow and a plow mule, and a yard full of chickens and ducks and turkeys and guineas. A small white house with a green roof and a big porch with red rocking chairs and a brown hound dog and Gabriel’s two young girls named Rhina and Tay that Ellen kept hugging and kissing before and after the ceremony until they squirmed and laughed and ran away and then ran right back for more.
Gabriel came to V and said, Missus Davis, welcome and thank you for coming. It means a lot to Ellen to have you here. I hope you’re comfortable.
V said, It means a lot to me to be here. Ellen and I went through difficult times together, and I’m happy to see her new life.
—Things are different now.
—Yes they are. And I’m very glad these are better times.
The weather that day was fine, so the ceremony happened at the bottom of the porch steps. Guests spread across the front yard, some standing and some sitting on quilts. For afterward, people brought ham biscuits and fried chicken and bowls of vegetables and pies. After lunch, V hugged Ellen tight, and said the first stupid thing that came to mind, Be happy.
Ellen laughed and said, Oh, I’ve been being happy almost all the time lately.
V laughed too and kissed her cheeks.
Ellen said, The thing seeing you has got me wondering about most is Jimmie. We split his mothering between us.
—The truth is, you were with all of them more than I was those years in Richmond. I can’t tell you much. I wrote to General Saxton while Jefferson was still in prison, but the general already passed Jimmie on to someone else, a teacher so he could continue getting an education. Not knowing his real name, that’s as far as I could get.
—I didn’t know it either. But he was a smart little boy, and I like to think he’s still out there in the world somewhere.
—I do too, V said. My boys keep fading away.
—Jeffy the last one left? Ellen said.
—Yes.
Ellen just shook her head.
Later, as V and Mary were leaving to catch their train, a man walked by and said something as he passed. He didn’t look at V, just spoke and kept walking. She wasn’t sure what he said, but she was pretty sure. Thief of lives.
In the railcar V sat quiet trying to think of other words—three syllables—that would sound similar. But nothing matched.
Halfway back to Baltimore she said to Mary, I’m glad to see you both settled. To have a place in the world.
Mary turned her head and looked closely at V. She said, You’re not becoming the kind of woman who weeps at weddings, are you?
—I’m just glad.
—Question arises, though, do you have a place in the world?
SHE KEPT FINDING WAYS to drag her feet on the way from Baltimore to her reunion with Jeff in Mississippi. She had written two letters to him saying she had no intention of crowding in on his cozy situation at Sara Dorsey’s beach house. Maybe she would find a room in Gulfport or Pass Christian and he could stop by for visits now and then. Talk about the children, try to remember past happy moments, swap favorite current books.
She counted her money and calculated the time it would last. For lack of other destination, she decided to go to Richmond and spend a few days looking in the used shops for the lovely things she had not been able to eliminate from her dream lists. On the way down, she reckoned anyone from the war years she cared to see again had either died or fled. The remainders were people she wished to avoid. At the hotel desk she signed the register as Mrs. Howell.
V told herself she would not do it, but she did. The first morning, she walked by the Gray House to stand at the place on the sidewalk where Joe fell from the balcony and died. Nothing remained. No bloodstains, of course, but not even a feeling. No faint trace of that bright little boy hovering nearby waiting for her to reappear and apologize for letting him slip away. Same thing out at Hollywood Cemetery standing by his marker in the green grass, nothing but absence, a hole in her life that would never fill. Her dead boys lay all scattered—Sam in Washington, Joe there in Richmond, Billy in Memphis.
V OPENED THE DOOR and a spring-loaded bell jangled its warning. One more in a string of shops she had visited looking for remnants of her past. Not exactly an antique shop, just a dim used furniture and dinnerware and decorations shop on a back street. Brown light fell through the storefront window, and the ancient melancholy smell of dust and lost lives breathed out through the open door. Once inside V looked back as if to identify her route of escape. The name of the store’s proprietor lettered backward on the glass, black against the light—SAMOHT MW.
At the front desk a skinny man read a book without looking up. Black suit with great notched lapels spreading to the bony points of his narrow shoulders, the collar of the jacket standing three inches out from his shirt collar. When he finished displaying his superior ennui and apparently reached a good stopping point, he marked his page and looked up and studied the newcomer.
V could see the change in him when he recognized her. That quick bright spark, and then the immediate suppression of it.
—Yes? he said.
Finally, a long deep breath later, he added, Ma’am.
V knew it would be the carefully measured pause and the irony in his tone that would represent a point scored and would comfort him all through his days, proof of his precious individuality and refusal to bow to past fame and present notoriety.
—Just looking, V said.
—For what?
—I’ll know if I see. Don’t let me interrupt your reading.
But he climbed down off his stool and followed her through the store, either afraid she might slip something up a sleeve or probably just wanting to observe her for recounting details of her visit later—how she scavenged for bargains on secondhand crystal and once-fine tablecloths.
V found a few shards of her old life. Scraps
, nothing more. Random pieces of Limoges, Sèvres, Spode. A favorite gravy boat with its lid broken and poorly glued, two dinner plates, six teacups and two saucers, three place settings of her silver pattern engraved with the swirling D of their monogram, five Murano wineglasses—beautiful with slight variations from stem to stem—that came from nine or ten dozen she once owned. She didn’t touch anything, hardly looked.
She walked all the way through the store to a back window with a vista down toward Shockoe Bottom and the railroad and river. A large crow or small raven passed across the scene, a black presence coasting on spread wings. But not really oracular, just nature commenting on recent history in a pretty obvious manner. A swelling black thundercloud full of lightning would have served equally well.
The skinny man hovered behind her until she moved along toward the front door. But along the way she noticed a familiar frame on the wall and walked to it. Her tiny Whistler.
A small tag hanging from twine showed a penciled price, just a number without a crass dollar sign—5.
V turned to the man and said, I’ll give you three dollars.
—The frame itself is worth at least five.
—I see scratches. And I’ll have to find something to fit it. It’s an odd size.
—If three’s all you have . . .
—Have is not the point. Three dollars is what I’m willing to pay.
—I’ll wrap it, and it will be ready tomorrow afternoon.
—Wrap it, and I’ll take it with me, V said.
THAT NIGHT SHE PROPPED THE WHISTLER on a table and looked at it a long time—a little faded but still so beautiful.
She had bought it—just the little rectangle of thick paper—one day while Jeff was secretary of war. He walked her through the offices and workplaces of the department. In a large room with tall windows, young men worked at drafting tables drawing maps. As Jeff explained what they were doing—the process and the importance of mapmaking for the nation’s defense—V noticed a slim almost-boy with long curly hair hunched over a large paper. He would have been pretty but for the nose. She walked over and said, Excuse me.