Winnie’s Notebook

JULY 25, 1898

In the dream, the junction could be a mural or a mirage. The sky is an improbable larkspur blue; the station house resembles a cuckoo clock that I had as a child and believed was haunted. Bystanders appear inanimate until a turbaned woman the color of a fine piano glides toward me with a basket of peaches. Murmuring in the rich timbre of her race, she places a piece of her fruit in my hand; I feel as though I have received a blessing. Now she’s some distance away, standing guard over a long wooden box, and I am lying on the ground with my eyes sealed shut. Above me, in the patois of the deeply rural South, a dialogue commences:

“Lord a mercy, poor thing just folded like a fan.”

“She’s no poor thing. This is Winnie Davis, the Daughter of the Confederacy. She’s also the daughter of the man who was responsible for our troubles.”

“Shouldn’t heap all the blame on Jefferson Davis. Some say if not for him, we’d have lost the War sooner than we did—”

“—in which case there would have been less bloodshed and poverty. Looks like she’s still breathing. Maybe a little slap will bring her around—”

The slap opens my eyes and gets me to a sitting position. I am relieved to find the scratchy bombazine skirt has not risen higher than my ankles.

The conductor asks these two, whose dough-colored faces are almost hidden by sunbonnet brims, to escort me back to the car. The more contentious one asks which side I’m on. “There are no sides to a circle,” I say as I give each of them a small paste-board rectangle imprinted with my name and “The Daughter of the Confederacy” beneath my half-faced likeness. They stare suspiciously at the photographs, as though I am trying to deceive them. … They’re left behind, but their magpie thoughts follow me onto the train: The South lays claim to Winnie Davis, yet she has chosen to live in the North. … People bow and scrape to her, but her face is overrun with sadness. … She ought to thank her lucky stars she doesn’t have to hoe and plow.

The rocky red terrain gives way to a grass-covered slope beside a glistening river. At the forefront of a group of mourners, my swooning mother, draped in black chiffon like the mirrors in a house of death, is flanked by Maggie and Kate, both in severe but stylish mourning garb. Fred stands apart from everyone else. As a breeze becomes my hand and ruffles his hair, he looks as though he sees an apparition. Now they are in the past, and I am being hurtled alone, to God knows where. …

The tall, thin conductor stoops to admonish me in a stern, stentorian voice: “Miss Davis, you’ve a long way to go, and we’re not out of Georgia yet. I can’t be watching every time we pause at a whistle-stop to make sure you’re not left behind.”

I give him my word I will not get off again until we arrive at my destination. Or maybe I say “my destiny.” When next I see the man, I am fully conscious, and he is shorter, more solid, and less formidable than his Doppelgänger. The train shakes as though it will fly apart at any second, but it is reassuring to know we are on the right track, headed North (in the South, the East is called the North), and moving along at a steady clip.

I have almost drifted off again when he coughs to get my attention. “Ma’am, I noticed you declined to go to the dining car earlier, yet you devoured a peach back there as though your life depended on it. Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes. Thank you for your concern.” I’m aware of a film of dried nectar on my mouth and chin. “I can’t recall whether I paid for that peach. Did you happen to notice—?”

“I heard the woman say it was a gift. She also said the time has come for you to forgive anybody you need to, including yourself.” His forehead creases with the burden of wondering why he felt obliged to relay a message gleaned from eavesdropping on someone else’s dream. As he plods on along the narrow, quivering aisle, shaking his head as though to wake himself, I find crumpled in my fist a packet that had contained a hundred cartes de visite of my face in profile. Two were left when the convention ended; now there are none.

It has been my experience that premonition loses its force when the imagery fades. But in this instance, where the content of a dream has merged with reality, the portent is as clear as a mountain spring: On my next journey, I won’t be traveling upright.

JULY 27

In the ivory glow of morning, the room’s impersonality is gentled by familiar details—Varina’s spectacles marking her place in an open book, a vase of feathers from Jeff’s peafowl, and on an étagère across from this bed, two winged paperweights that stand apart from furnished bric-a-brac and each other: a Confederate eagle, one of the emblems of four years that have branded my family for going on four decades; the alabaster angel, a souvenir of love I fell into with no thought of consequence. The defining elements are intact, but the last three days have sizeable gaps.

The spell came on in Atlanta with a flash of yellow like spilled paint before my eyes and a jabbing pain behind them. I had just been assigned to a vehicle for the Peachtree Street Parade, and I didn’t have with me the flacon of diluted arsenic my mother had provided for throbbing headache. In the congestion of queuedup buggies and brigades, returning to the hotel was not an option, so I tried to forestall the pain with mental effort, which was working to some extent. Then in what seemed divine rebuke for putting my own will on a level with the Almighty’s, an unexpected shower descended on the open carriage. Although I arrived at Exposition Hall in garments that clung like seaweed, my black silk jacket and skirt were nearly dry—the auditorium was hot enough to cook a turkey—by the time an honor guard escorted me to the stage where local beauties in white dresses, each banded by a sash imprinted with the name of a military camp or division, were arrayed like scenery. On both sides of the aisle, men in butternutdyed garments that reeked of battlefields and musty trunks murmured as I passed—Yessir, that’s Jeff’s girl all right, she looks just like him; I saw them together at the New Orleans reunion, must have been close to ten years ago. … Bless you, Miss Winnie, we loved your papa, God rest his soul. As I approached the podium, applause swelled to a drum-like roll, the girls’ demeanors shifted from demure awareness of their celebrity—their pictures had been on display for a month in the Confederate Veterans’ Magazine—to bold come-hitherness, and a wave of euphoria such as lovers experience spread through the assembly. That phenomenon of inexplicable, heart-pounding rapture always occurs as some point during these gatherings, and sometimes more than once.

At first, men who had not lost their confidence when they lost the War (or even in its punitive aftermath) and who still went by General or Colonel or Major although their fighting force had long been dissolved, would introduce me, then speak for me. The phrases varied, but the message was always proudly defiant: Our chieftain’s daughter would have you know there is no dishonor in having fought for the South’s great cause. She urges you to take heart, and take pride in your heritage. Never apologize for having defended your homes and principles against the Northern aggressors. …

When I began to compose and deliver my own discourses, they took on a more conciliatory manner: Once again, a grateful South salutes you, its stoic heroes; your sacrifices will not be forgotten as our reunited nation continues to heal and becomes stronger with each passing year. … Not that much of it sinks in. What they really come for is the camaraderie—the whiskey drinking, reminiscing, and renewing of old bonds.

I had finished my address to the United Confederate Veterans’ Reunion in Atlanta and braced for a barrage of cane-and-crutch tapping when I felt a bloom of fever rash begin to creep over my flesh like a poison vine. One of the efficient women in charge fetched me a cup of lemonade and a folded, camphor-soaked handkerchief to sniff. It was obvious, by the proud tilt of her head and the way she wore her years, that she numbered herself among the empowered females who, when their sweethearts, husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers went off to the War, stepped up and filled the gap. They ran the plantations and farms; kept the books better than the men had; fended off marauders and rapists; tended children, livestock, wounded soldiers, and the elderly. Some of them stood up all day at desks, cutting sheets of newly printed Confederate notes apart. In recent years—since Reconstruction ended and the insurgents packed up their carpetbags and went back to where they came from—the women have banded together to raise money to build monuments to the Confederate dead and beautify the cemeteries where they are buried. They also help put on these lavish, large-scale gatherings that perpetuate the memory of the South’s gallant stand without casting aspersion on the Republic. In the decorated halls where the events are held, the national Stars and Stripes is companionably displayed with the battle flag of the Confederacy—the former as a symbol of the reunited nation, the latter as a memorial. As the Richmond Examiner editor Edward Pollard observed in The Lost Cause, which he published the year after the War ended, the South acknowledges the restoration of the Union and the ending of slavery, but the epic conflict “did not decide the right of a people to show dignity in misfortune, and to maintain self-respect in the face of adversity. And these are things the Southern people will cling to, still claim, and still assert in their rights and views.”

The public part of the celebration ended on Saturday in sunshine bright as a new coin, with a brass band playing the rallying song as hundreds, maybe thousands—they were clumped like birds on sidewalks, patches of ground, the lower limbs of trees, and balconies—clapped and sang with exuberance. The enigmatic phrase “Look-away, Dixie Land” was still reverberating in my head two hours later, as I dressed for the Grand Ball.

Invigorated by a bath and two packets of pharmaceutical headache remedy (I never found the arsenic), I covered the rash on my face and neck with perle powder and buttoned myself into a near-weightless gown of ivory chiffon, a hand-me-down from Kate that exuded her unique essence of generosity, extravagance, and Parisian perfume. Then came blankness darker than the night it obliterated. I awoke to the cacophony of a city in early morning: the cymbalic clang of trolley bells, the amorous murmur of doves on a window ledge, and the singsong hawking of newspaper boys on a steaming sidewalk three floors below. My undergarments were puddled on the carpet, although I was still more or less encased in Kate’s frock, which had a transparent ruby-colored stain on its ruched bodice. Apparently, I had attended the gala in the Kimball House ballroom long enough to spill the contents of a wine glass, but I have no recollection of that festivity or of returning to my room in the same hotel, and little of the journey back to Rhode Island until it ended with a squealing halt at the gaslit terminal where Varina (my mother, companion, colleague) and Mr. Burns, proprietor of our summer lodgings, awaited me. Viewed through a soot-streaked window, Varina’s moonlike face reflected an even blend of optimism and anxiety. I could imagine the telegraph she’d received: Miss Davis was taken ill yesterday, and despite our urging that she postpone her return, has insisted on departing as scheduled.

As a physician summoned by Mr. Burns examined me with his eyes half-closed, I kept mine open, so I would not be tempted to imagine his hands were someone else’s. He pronounced my heart and lungs strong, then deferred to my mother’s practical diagnosis: “Winnie inherited a susceptibility to slow fevers from her father. She won’t require special nursing, and can recuperate here.” Here being this compact suite in the Rockingham Hotel at Narragansett Pier, where palatial summer residences rival those of Newport, across the bay.

Varina has spent the night, what part of it she wasn’t ministering to me, on a cot she had brought in. At the sound of a cough I could not hold back, she jerks to consciousness, shifts her bulk to the edge of this mattress, touches my forehead with the back of her hand, and says briskly, “You’re definitely better. Not as flushed, and cooler.” Then in her melodic company voice, as though there are others besides me to hear, “Darling, I wish I could take you home to convalesce.”

The word home pines like a distant cowbell. “Where would that be?”

“Where indeed.” My mother sighs and shakes her head, as though the notion that I might be bound by sentiment to a piece of geography, as most people are, is ridiculous. For her, there would be choices: Home could bring to mind the valentine house of her childhood on a river bluff near Natchez, or the cotton plantation near Vicksburg where she spent the honeyed early years of her marriage, or the stately, borrowed mansion in Richmond, where for four tempestuous years she was chatelaine for a renegade nation.

Varina’s owlish eyes, which for a moment seemed to reflect my thoughts, rove restlessly from windows to the door as she comes up with an excuse to leave the sickroom. “It’s not yet eight o’clock. Lie still and rest while I see about breakfast.”

As though I could be still and rest without thinking or dreaming.

In addition to the borrowed mansion (where I was born, and which we left before my first birthday), I have lived in a military fortress, a foreign academy, boarding and rental houses, the residences of friends and sympathetic strangers, hotels (as a young child, I had the run of the Peabody in Memphis; currently, our main address is the Gerard, in New York), and a somewhat ramshackle, seaside house near Biloxi, Mississippi. From my perspective, the last named would be the logical answer to the question my mother has sidestepped. But not from hers.

Varina Howell Davis’s antagonism toward Beauvoir began before she ever saw it. Twelve years after the North defeated the South in the War Between the States, her husband Jefferson Davis returned from a trip to Europe convinced the latest business venture with which he had become associated—an ambitious scheme to promote international trade via the Port of New Orleans—was not likely to succeed. Then almost seventy, Jeff had decided to give up on the world of commerce and look for a tranquil place where he could write his manifesto about the War. The search bore fruit almost immediately: A longtime friend invited him to take up residence at her secluded estate on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I can imagine that proud man’s relief as he inclined his head in gratitude that contained no hint of humility.

My mother, who was still abroad, learned of this development in a newspaper article. She had asked her husband not to settle in that mosquito-plagued region; however, she was used to having her wishes ignored when they didn’t coincide with his. What bothered her most was how the public would regard the arrangement. Long aware of Jeff’s penchant for forming close bonds with women in their political, social, and family circles, V. had tried to regard such attachments as harmless diversion for a heavily burdened man—but the widow who had issued that invitation was a force to be reckoned with. Except for the fact that she was wealthy and my mother was not, the two women had much in common. Both had been reared in the exclusive cotton-capital society of the lower Mississippi River region. At the age of forty-eight (Varina was then fifty-one), vivacious though not a beauty (as V. was often described), possessed of a brilliant, cultivated mind (attributes Varina also was known for), Sarah Ellis Dorsey appropriated the former President of the Confederate States of America with that offer of haven in a setting he would come to regard as being as near to Paradise as one could find on earth. Jeff thought, or would claim to have thought, that his wife would be thrilled over the opportunity to renew a friendship she had enjoyed as a girl.

He assured her everything was within the realm of propriety. He was a paying guest and did not live in the main house; their oldest son, twenty-year-old Jeff Davis Jr., was a frequent visitor; Mrs. Dorsey’s companion cousin, a Mrs. Cochran, and Major Walthall, who was assisting with my father’s literary project, were also on the premises. But Varina adamantly refused to join the ménage. She continued to visit her recently married sister in Liverpool and other expatriates from the American South who had migrated to England and France. Briefly, until her presence became a problem, my mother occupied a guest room at the austere institution in Germany where I was then a student. When she’d worn out her welcomes on that side of the ocean, she made her way to Memphis and the home of my sister Maggie and Maggie’s kind, genial husband, Addison Hayes. Jeff had been at Beauvoir for almost two years when Varina haughtily accepted Sarah Dorsey’s long-standing invitation, not because she feared she might lose her husband—Maggie says she never acknowledged that possibility—but because she had nowhere else to go. By the time I came to live there, Mrs. Dorsey had died of cancer and bequeathed the property to my father, and my mother was very much in residence.

I had studied photographs and memorized the description in Jeff’s letters, but seeing Beauvoir for the first time was an epiphany. I assumed the simultaneous feeling of relief and a sense of having been there before was a universal reaction to homecoming. The sentiment was also rooted in Jeff’s instructions to Maggie, Jeff Jr., and me to think of Mississippi as our native land, although none of his and Varina’s six children except the first, Samuel, who died in his second year, had been born there.

Surrounded by cedar, magnolia, and moss-infested live oak trees, the main house projected hospitality like a confident hostess’s smile. The single-story, raised-cottage design was practical and aesthetically appealing: Tall, down-to-the-floor windows and high ceilings encouraged ventilation; understated elements of Greek Revival architecture provided an aura of refinement without ostentation. Jeff had turned the cottage he originally inhabited—one of a pair of enclosed pavilions with pagoda-style roofs—into an office and library. The other was for guests, among whom were circuit-riding preachers of the Methodist Church. (My parents attended an Episcopal chapel, where I would soon be pressed into service as organist, but Varina is more gregarious than religious, and on the sleepy Gulf Coast in the early 1880s, Methodist tent revivals were popular social events.) Beyond the building complex, several acres of scuppernong vineyards and a grove of orange trees provided a misleading ambience of prosperity and industry.

V. had taken as her special project a circular rose garden, divided with crosswalks and surrounded by fruit trees, which extended from the dogtrot kitchen and servants’ quarters to Oyster Bayou, a freshwater stream that crosses the wooded back portion of the property. During my first weeks at Beauvoir, I had nightly forebodings that these reassuring trappings of domesticity would disappear while I slept. My sister, who is nine years older than I, had told me how servants at the Executive Mansion in Richmond began to leave during the last months of the War. Some slipped away in the night, without saying good-bye. Each time she realized she would never see a familiar dark face again, Maggie wept as hard as she had at little brother Joe’s funeral the year before. “God gave you to us, in Joe’s place,” she said. “Not that I had prayed for a baby sister.”

When I was half a world away at school, a letter from my father would elicit an olfactory memory of cigars, pipe tobacco, cloves, liniment, and toilet soap. As he embraced me for the first time after that long separation, I realized this hodgepodge of scents was a disparate combination of rugged masculinity and near-dandified fastidiousness. He was not as robust as I recalled or imagined, and I’d forgotten his left eye was shrouded with a cloud of white, as though it had died before the rest of him. In addition to partial blindness, facial neuralgia, and occasional bronchial problems, he contended with rheumatism, which his wife blamed on a wound he’d received thirty-four years before, in the Mexican War he had promised her he would not go to. Jeff attributed his infirmities to God’s will and did not complain.

I called him Father while he was alive. Now I find it easier to think of him with the nickname he was known by to most people, whether friend or foe. These references to my mother with her first name and its initial, which are also mine, are not meant as disrespectful; she took to signing herself “V. Jefferson-Davis” almost nine years ago, after her husband died.

When I was eleven, Jeff decided I would attend a Protestant boarding school in Germany. He had overruled Varina’s suggestion of Paris, where Maggie had attended a school run by nuns, as he had come to believe that city was utterly lascivious, therefore inappropriate for a young girl whose parents would be on another continent. The Friedlander Institute in Karlsruhe was at the edge of a royal park surrounding the Baroque palace built by Margrave Karl Wilhelm, the city’s founder, in the previous century. The starkly beautiful setting reminded me of the scariest fairy tales. Over much of the ground, a carpet of moss in a garish shade of green—like the eyeshades worn by railway agents—reflected the sparse sunlight that trickled through dense stands of fir and pine. For weeks after I arrived, I slept with my large leather Bible and pretended it was my mother’s warm flesh.

Five years later, when my parents came to Europe to retrieve me, my father was surprised to see I was almost as tall as Varina, who stood within an inch of the top of his head.

“It’s fashionable now for young women to be statuesque,” she told him. “And fortunately, Winnie takes after you in facial features. Her eyes and mouth are strikingly similar to yours, dearest.”

Jeff murmured, “Poor child,” and flushed with pleasure. I knew at that instant I would never again be jealous when someone remarked on Maggie’s striking resemblance to our dark-haired, dark-eyed mother. I was seventeen, a year younger than Varina had been when she married a widower twice her age. Jeff’s eldest brother, Joseph Davis, had brought the two together and encouraged the match. The qualities these men initially found appealing in Varina Howell—her vivacious curiosity, quick wit, and confident free-spiritedness—did not bode well in her new status as the wife of one of them. Like most of the ante-bellum, Southern planter hierarchy, the Davis brothers were authoritarian and paternalistic toward their spouses. Urged on by Joseph, Jeff set out to modify his bride’s temperament. The process vacillated from firm persuasion to didactic command and had to be repeated every so often. She would make a genuine effort to be the submissive helpmate her husband required, but what my sister called our mother’s cussed streak of independence would not be exorcised altogether. By the time I was five, I no longer flinched when she hurled a plate against a wall or spouted a tirade of rhetoric. I had assumed it was natural for a grown woman to throw a tantrum or speak out on any subject she chose to, until Maggie explained that was not so. Women were supposed to promote decorum, not disrupt it, and most of them did—it was just our mother who was out of step. Even so, Maggie defended her: “She’s obliged by her nature to let off steam occasionally, otherwise she might explode.”

“What does explode mean?” Before I learned to read, Maggie was my dictionary and encyclopedia.

“Like in the War, when the cannons blasted outside Richmond. The sound carried for miles, and you could see it light up the sky.” She added, with a sigh of exaggerated condescension, “Oh, I keep forgetting—you can’t remember back then.”

After I returned to this country from Germany, I knew very little about the War that was three-fourths over when I was born. As I began to amass a store of fact and hearsay on the subject, I analyzed it from my own perspective. For instance, my conception in September 1863 had occurred at a time when my father was elated over the Confederate Army of Tennessee’s victory in the Battle of Chickamauga. Then the tide turned: As my mother began to wear loose clothing to accommodate the bulge of pregnancy, Union President Abraham Lincoln made headlines around the world with his eloquent address at Gettysburg, and Union General Ulysses S. Grant avenged their loss at Chickamauga with the capture of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Near the time of Varina’s confinement, General Grant advanced toward Richmond to take on General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and General Sherman fought his way toward the Confederate stronghold of Atlanta. Two weeks before I came into the world on June 27, 1864, the tide turned again, as Union forces bungled a chance to capture Petersburg, Virginia, and cut off the Confederate rail lines. The only person I explained to was Fred: “Those validating circumstances proved I was more than an inconvenient accident.”

He replied, in his cheerful, soothing voice, “Try not to see yourself as a product of that tragic era, Winnie. That was their time; this is ours: yours and mine.”

By then—it was his second or third visit to Beauvoir—Fred was comfortable with my parents. That night over dinner, during an amiable discussion of the current political climate, he volunteered the information that his late father, a Democrat, had been appointed assistant revenue commissioner for their district of New York by the Republican president Abraham Lincoln. Varina’s fork paused in midair for a second and the candles on the table sputtered. My father said equably, “Mr. Lincoln was extremely level-headed and used astute judgment.”

When we left Paris on that twelve-day crossing in late November 1881, I was apprehensive about the country to which I was returning. What I recalled most of my first eleven years was a precarious feeling of insecurity, due to the groundlessness of not being settled and the skittish up-and-down moods of my parents. The two of them appeared to be in good spirits on this voyage. One of the conversations I heard through the thin partition that separated their stateroom from mine concerned my marriageability.

“Winnie seems more comfortable speaking German than English,” Jeff said. “I doubt young men will find that guttural accent attractive.”

“It will cease when there’s no one around to converse with her in that language,” Varina replied airily. “The main obstacle is the lack of a dowry.”

“That lack did not stop me from proposing to you.”

“Thank God. Oh my dear, I cannot imagine my life without you in it.” The depth of her feeling underscored the dramatic force of those words.

I held my breath, hoping Jeff would respond in kind, but he ignored his wife’s declaration of love and stuck to the subject: “My most fervent desire is to be able to provide our last child with a comfortable endowment for her future welfare and happiness.”

“Her future welfare and happiness will depend on the match she makes,” my mother said. They seemed to be in agreement that my best prospects for marrying well would be in New Orleans, where they had many connections—none of whom, Varina reminded her husband, had offered Jeff employment after he was released from the Federal prison. My father murmured, his voice so low I could scarcely make out the words, “I hope Winnie will be with us for a good while yet.” Varina’s reply—“Oh, yes, so do I”—surprised me. It wasn’t until after Jeff died that she explained she had not wanted me to follow her own example and marry “too young, and to a man who had given the best of his love to a first wife who would forever be in his heart the age she was when he lost her.” She doesn’t cotton to the idea of being second-best in anything.

“It’s not as though he chose Knox Taylor over you. You were barely born when they married,” I reminded her, when the subject came up again recently.

“The fact remains that I did not ever have all his love, as she did.”

That’s the kind of thing I always give her the last word on.

Maggie and her family were frequent visitors to Beauvoir, but Jeff Jr., the handsome, good-natured big brother who used to carry me piggyback around whatever domain we happened to be occupying, had perished during a malaria epidemic in Memphis during the last year I was in Karlsruhe. I was deprived of the comfort of grieving for him simultaneously with the rest of the family, because I did not learn of the tragedy until several weeks later. When it finally came, the poignant letter from my mother began, “I am sorry, darling, that I cannot hold you as I give you this sad news. …” A few paragraphs later, she confided, matter-of-factly, “You may recall how superstitious your brother was. A few days before he became ill, he accidentally broke a looking glass. From that moment on, Jeff Jr. was convinced his fortune would change for the worse—and I found myself worrying that he might be right.”

According to Varina, only very special people, such as her husband and their favorite son, have intimations of their own mortality. She was not surprised in the least to hear that President Lincoln had a dream of his assassination. I believe everyone may have that prophetic dream of the end of his or her life, but most are fortunate enough not to recognize the vision for what it is.

Previously, I had been appended to my mother or Maggie. On my return, it seemed natural, ordained even, that I would become the close companion of my father. Jeff and I took daily walks around the grounds of Beauvoir House (Varina had added the “House” for her personal stationery, thereby putting her own imprimatur on the title provided by Sarah Dorsey), accompanied by a procession of dogs—in the lead, his favorites, a Newfoundland and a collie—and a strutty, wing-dragging old peacock. In sturdy, high-back oak rockers Jeff had built in his workshop, we spent late afternoons on the wide porch that wrapped around three sides of the house while I read aloud to him from novels by Sir Walter Scott and he recited, from his prodigious bank of memory, the poetry of Robert Burns and Lord Byron.

On cool days, we rode horses on the beach and through a forest that seethed with such tension I once asked if a battle had been fought there. “Not that I’m aware of,” he replied. “You may have picked up on something that took place here long ago. There’s an old Indian saying that trees retain what they’ve witnessed.” Whenever he spoke of Indian lore, his eyes, even the clouded one, would brighten. He also told me stories of his boyhood in Woodville, Kentucky, and his schooling at Transylvania Academy and the military academy at West Point. Once, when he seemed particularly mellow, I asked what he would do differently if he had his life to live over again. My father answered as though he’d been waiting for the question: “I would be a cavalry officer, and break squares.”

On his first visit, Fred Wilkinson and I explored that secretive wooded area and each other on a mat of pine needles beneath the tall trees that had shed them. We had spread the picnic cloth beside a stream banked with wild azalea, which in full bloom looked like flocks of yellow butterflies. In the hamper the cook provided was a carafe of scuppernong wine. When it was empty, we unfastened garments as though in a contest, hardly daring to breathe lest we break the spell. At the moment when I thought we might rise into the hot, silken air like the jays that had made off with crusts and crumbs from our picnic, the trees around us seemed to close in, as if to keep us grounded there. … I like to think the magic of that afternoon is stored in the trunks and branches of those silent, observant sentinels, that it wasn’t all destroyed.

It is oddly comforting to know that Fred will outlive me: The dream has promised I can run my fingers through his hair, in passing.

My mother had aged more pronouncedly than my father. An accomplished equestrienne in her youth, Varina had given up riding when her heaviness made her more cautious. She who has never been fearful of crossing the ocean on a ship refused to accompany Jeff and me on boat rides in the calm crannies of the sound or even on strolls along the shore. She would stand in the tree shade and watch our backs as we continued, arm in arm, to the end of the narrow pier. That she was too far away to hear the rhythmic pulsing of water against the pilings afforded me some unaccountable satisfaction.

As a welcoming surprise to Beauvoir, my father had designated as mine a small room adjacent to his office and fitted it out with easel, palette, paint box, a small desk, and bookshelves. The door between our ateliers was seldom closed. When I was immersed in writing or painting, the sound of his chair scraping the floor, or a whiff of his pipe or cigar, would reassure me he was close by.

My mother’s presence could stir up all the energy in a room, and at her exodus, a feeling of stability would reassert itself. When my father was away, his personality flowed through the house like a gentle, departed spirit, returned to love again… I could feel his approving, affectionate gaze on me whenever we were in the same room, and sometimes when we were not. In the evenings after dinner, at his request, I played Chopin preludes and popular music on the Knabe piano, which had a robust, European tone, although the keys tended to stick because of the humid climate.

Varina, her hands and eyes occupied with needlework, would sing or hum with the music, unless she was in a contrary mood. Once, when Jeff requested I play the ballad “Lilly Dale,” she stood abruptly, and let the embroidery hoop slide from her lap to the floor. “I despise that maudlin song,” she said, and flounced from the room. My father cleared his throat with consternation, but made no comment. The many thoughtful things his wife did to please him could be negated in an instant when her bad temper manifested.

“Romantic airs are usually maudlin,” I said. “What does she have against that one?”

“I have no idea,” Jeff said wearily. “She knows it’s been one of my favorites since Jennie Clay used to sing it at Washington soirees.”

Virginia Clay and her statesman husband, Clement Clay of Alabama, had been among the group of captured Confederates on the steamer that transported Jeff to prison at Fortress Monroe, in Norfolk, Virginia. Varina was aboard also, with her four children plus Jim, the mulatto orphan she had taken in some months before. Jeff had made application in the city courts to adopt the boy. Varina explained the situation to a Union Army captain who took the howling child away with him when he left the ship. Maggie heard the Yankee say, “That colored boy will have a better home up North than he would with any Rebs, especially now that most all their houses have been burned.” The soldiers snipped buttons off my baby smocks as souvenirs for their wives and cruelly teased Jeff Jr. and Willie; the boys hated it when their captors taunted them by singing “We’ll Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple Tree.”

Unencumbered with children, Mrs. Clay felt free to speak contemptuously to the guards, and got by with it. “Just imagine how that must have chafed our mother,” Maggie said, and I certainly could. I believe I knew then that my sister needed to talk about those times, to get it out of her system. She would relate these happenings to me as though she were full-grown instead of fourteen years old, and I tried to stretch my five years into the comprehension level of at least ten, so she would continue to use me as her sounding board.

Jeff sighed as if he’d been privy to that recollection. After a moment, he said, “Jennie Clay was beautiful, talented, and greatly admired. She still is.”

“Is she the lady in the ambrotype portrait on your desk?” It wasn’t really a question. According to Maggie, Father was sweet on Mrs. Clay when they were all living in Richmond, and perhaps before that, in Washington. I had come across a quip attributed to a famous Mississippian: “The wives of Clay and Davis, on opposite sides of the parlor, were like two men-of-war firing at each other.”

Jeff said, “She gave me the picture when I was at Fortress Monroe. Gazing at that image helped me keep my sanity then. I shall forever cherish Mrs. Clay’s thoughtfulness and my recollections of pleasurable hours spent in her company.”

That was the only time in my presence he made any reference to his incarceration. The rush of sympathy it elicited was offset by appall that he would attribute any part of his survival of that ordeal to a woman other than his wife. I closed the sheet music and pulled the lid over the keyboard.

He was surprised. “Aren’t we going to have our song?”

“Not tonight. I’m tired.” I placed my mother’s sampler, its inked aphorism more than half worked in precise cross-stitches, on the seat of the Victorian lady’s chair she had vacated. Then I left the room without bending over the gentleman’s chair to press my lips to his forehead or feel the pressure of his graceful hands on my back or hear him whisper, “Sweet dreams, my angel”—and willed myself not to will him to follow me.

More sensory recall of the last evening in Atlanta: whiffs of pomaded hair, masculine perspiration, and pepperminted breath as a firm hand propels me away from the lights and the music and along a shadowy corridor; a softly drawled avowal to renew “our special friendship” next summer, at the Charleston convention. … Then the curtain rings down again. V. has taken a trio of amber glass bottles from my vanity case, held them to the window light, and noted with obvious satisfaction that all are empty. As usual, she sent me off with an arsenal of homeopathic remedies, patent medicines, and her own concoctions. I usually pour the contents out and bring the empty bottles back with me, or leave the bottles unopened on a hotel dresser, in which case she complains that glass does not grow on trees. Since I don’t recall emptying or abandoning this latest group, perhaps I imbibed all the contents. Before the ball, or after?

I have made my way on wobbly legs to the bathroom. Jeff’s shaving mug is on a shelf above the lavatory, where Varina placed it on the luminously pastel day in early June when we arrived here. A yellow chamois riding glove, still slightly puffed from the imprint of his right hand, accompanied me to and from Atlanta. In such bits and pieces, we keep him with us.

After I returned to this country, I continued to pursue musical disciplines and paint, but my ambition had crystallized into a single focus: I would be a writer. I counted on Beauvoir to nurture that calling in me as it had in my parents and before them, in our benefactress, Mrs. Dorsey. Her novels had been published under a pseudonym, “Filia,” which V. said sounded like the name of a frisky mare. Had we known each other, Sarah Dorsey might have become my literary mentor, which would have given my mother another reason to dislike her.

V. would interject here that she herself has done well by me in that role. She provided the supposedly true story on which my novel The Veiled Doctor was based and suggested that I make the next one’s setting less provincial, with the heroine more like me. I took the first part of that advice, but not the second.

Early last week, she read a brief newspaper item about my forthcoming book aloud to me at breakfast: “Miss Varina Anne Davis, also known as Winnie Davis, has penned a new novel, which according to Harper & Brothers Publishers will be available soon in bookstores and libraries. A Romance of Summer Seas takes place on a ship in the China Seas. The unusual love story unfolds in sophisticated prose, through the very credible voice of a wise, observant gentleman.”

My mother tossed the paper aside. “I hope the real reviews will be as kind. But someone’s bound to point out that it was a risky choice for a female writing under her own name to compose romantic fiction from a male perspective.” Normally, she would applaud me for making a risky choice, as long as it didn’t have to do with marriage. She was miffed because I had declined to discuss the work with her while it was in progress and had not let her read the manuscript before it was typeset.

I picked up the newspaper and scanned the article. “I wish the piece had included some mention of the two principals.”

V. pounced as though the remark were a ball of yarn and she a cat. “Frankly, dear, I didn’t find either of that pair as interesting as your observant gentleman narrator. I appreciate your high-mindedness in not modeling characters on people you know, but you should reconsider that premise. Your former fiancé would be the ideal paradigm for a miscast lover.”

“I think we’ve done him enough damage.”

“‘We’?”

“Actually, you. But since I allowed it, he has good cause to despise both of us.” It is difficult for me to speak of Fred Wilkinson. His name rolls around the perimeter of my heart but not off my tongue.

“Your father would never allow such rudeness.”

“Not from me, perhaps, but he tolerated much worse from you.”

She began to sob in great heaves, as though she might come apart like an overstuffed pillow from its seams.

After she’d quieted down, I said, “Send a wire to Maggie. Tell her I’m too difficult to live with, and ask her to come and rescue you. Maybe you’ll be in Colorado by the time I return from the convention.”

“Please let’s not have this unpleasantness,” she whispered. Her face was as gray as her hair.

By way of apology, I fetched my mother the smelling salts and a tin of fudge she thought she had hidden.

Three mostly silent days later, on July 20, I set out for Atlanta. On the train headed South, back to what before my time was the prosperous, slaveholding Land of Cotton, I felt the distance widen anew between my former love and me. Watching the countryside slide by, I saw Fred’s reproachful face in the clouds over Virginia and the Carolinas. … Now, in my fevered state, I am recalling the only time he ever saw me in the throes of a real spell. He had tried to understand, and he did not give up on me—until we forced him to.

Another elusive piece of the weekend has risen to the surface. In Atlanta, as often happens at these commemorations, I was aware of an undercurrent of animosity toward my mother from those who have never forgiven her for moving us, after Jeff’s death, from Mississippi to New York. At the time, the protest had ranged from strong disapproval to outrage. In reference to a New York paper’s report that Mrs. Jefferson Davis had paid a call on Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, an Alabama journalist ranted, “Our fiery leader must be thrashing in his grave at the idea of his consort’s sipping tea with the widow of a man whose face was etched on the bottoms of our chamberpots.” Varina likes the limelight and she is aware that publicity, even when it’s not flattering, helps to keep her there. What she cannot bear is for Jefferson Davis to be ridiculed, criticized, or lied about in print. After reading that clipping, which arrived anonymously, she smiled and said, “Well, it’s unusual for Jeff to be described as fiery, but indeed he could be, when the occasion called for it.”

Once he was gone, the isolation that had appealed to her husband became intolerable to Varina, and she resented his having left Beauvoir to me. I reminded her that Mrs. Dorsey had specified I would have a reversionary interest in her estate, which she left in its entirety to “my most honored and esteemed friend, Jefferson Davis.” I had committed to memory the summation sentence of Sarah Dorsey’s last will and testament, but knew better than to recite it to my mother: “I do not intend to share in the ingratitude of my country towards the man, who is in my eyes, the highest and noblest in existence.”

Jeff was carrying out the wishes of the previous owner, but also, he would have envisioned his bequest as an incentive that might persuade my fiancé to take up residence in Mississippi. Or perhaps my father realized Fred and I would not marry, and hoped Beauvoir would be my consolation for the loss of a dream, as it had been for him.

Still, Varina’s reasons for leaving were valid. Other than an undependable harvest of citrus fruit, Beauvoir had never been an income-producing plantation; the soil was mostly sand and decayed vegetation. It became even lonelier in the off-season, when our neighbors closed their coastal houses and returned to primary residences in New Orleans. Under the guise of seeking advice from close friends, my mother elaborated on what they already knew: We could not afford to keep up that leisurely way of life. Even before Jeff died, our plight was obvious enough that baskets of food were left on the porch.

During a trip to New York to confer with publishers about her biography of her late husband, Varina accepted an offer of employment from Joseph Pulitzer for the two of us to be special writers for his newspaper. The annual salaries of $1,500 each would enable us to live moderately well in an apartment hotel in that city and pay a caretaker for Beauvoir until such time as an acceptable buyer—one who would not desecrate the property—could be found. Varina told friends and cousins we were moving because, as they were well aware, her health was undermined by the South’s oppressive climate. They also knew that nothing keeps her down for long; she has remarkable recuperative powers.

I hope to purchase a cottage at Bar Harbor if the new novel does well, but a more practical goal would be to buy a carriage, so Varina will not have to hire hacks to take her to the theatre. In a panic over money after Jeff died, she sold the large vehicle at Beauvoir for forty dollars. Then she referred dismissively to our only remaining conveyance as “that rickety, backless buggy.” In her younger years, V. had a fondness for whatever provided efficient transportation: fine saddle horses, ocean-crossing ships, river-plying steamers, fast passenger trains, sturdy carriages with a well-matched pair of horses. Soon after her husband was elected to head the Southern Secession, she placed an order with a New Orleans firm for an elegant phaeton with silver fittings. It had not been delivered when the new government was moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia. Jeff and his staff left for the new post immediately; Varina stayed in Montgomery to pack up their belongings. At the end of a four-day journey, she, the children, and her sister Margaret Howell were met at the depot by Jeff and an impressive equipage, provided by the city of Richmond, for the first family of the Confederacy to ride in style to their temporary living quarters in the Spotswood Hotel. The interior of that carriage was upholstered in yellow satin. I never saw it, yet at this moment, I feel that sensuous fabric swirl over my hot skin like the sea. … Then the fever breaks in a release of moisture, and I am lying on mangled, sour-smelling bedsheets.

Although Varina bristles whenever I’m referred to as a spinster, at thirty-four, I am comfortable with the designation. The title I have never been at ease with, “The Daughter of the Confederacy,” was bestowed at a Lost Cause rally in late April 1886, two months before my twenty-second birthday. The harsh years of Reconstruction and the reign of the Northern carpetbaggers had ended; the South was starting to emerge from poverty, or at least to be optimistic that it could, and my father had become a sought-after speaker at agrarian fairs and Confederate veterans’ reunions. I was accompanying him on a tour of commemorative events in Alabama and Georgia. (My mother and sister had to back out at the last minute, when Maggie’s young son came down with scarlet fever.) As we arrived in Montgomery for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his inauguration there, a set piece of fireworks flashed the words “Welcome, Our Hero” in flaming letters. Our rooms at the Exchange Hotel were filled with roses—not only in vases and standing sprays, but in loose batches on the floor and furniture, as though they’d been flung from heaven. I had gathered up a few stems when I felt the sharp pricks of thorns. Jeff pressed his handkerchief on the drops of blood. “They look like rubies,” he said. Then, his voice suffused with sadness, “The blood shed then would have made a river.”

We were driven in a decorated carriage to the domed state house where, a quarter of a century earlier, he had taken the oath of office as Provisional President of the Confederate States of America. As requested, we had brought a cache of family trinkets and books to place in the cornerstone of a monument to be erected in memory of Alabamians who died in the War.

A local dignitary described the proposed structure, which would emanate from a base shaped like a Greek cross. Each arm of the cross would support a life-sized statue representing a branch of military service; from the center, a single round column would rise seventy feet to a Corinthian cap, on which would stand a ten-foot-tall bronze sculpture of a feminine figure representing Patriotism. When a member of the Ladies’ Memorial Association, the major fund-raisers for the project, questioned the decision to have a female as the central, largest feature of a monument intended to honor men who had given their lives on battlefields, the New York sculptor explained that a male figure would not be architecturally or symbolically appropriate for that spot.

Jeff and I were seated close together on the front row of the platform, his arm draped possessively around my shoulder. His beard brushed my cheek like feathers as he whispered, “Well, then, my beautiful girl should be the model for that figure.” They couldn’t have heard, but the spectators on the wide front lawn of the Alabama State House smiled indulgently at their hero and the daughter who, they might have deduced from that display of affectionate, bantering closeness, lived to please him. I silently rationalized: Being in Montgomery, Alabama, where he was still held in high esteem, had triggered a rush of his former confidence and vigor; he had a need to flaunt these qualities to someone of the opposite sex, and I was handily available. My face was aflame with embarrassment. Yet when my father left my side to go to the podium a few feet away (he spoke that day with unusual animation and jollity), I felt his absence as keenly as though he had galloped off on his horse.

His burst of energy during the Montgomery celebration was short-lived. When the train made its scheduled stop at West Point, Georgia, Jeff did not feel up to greeting the assembly at the station. I was asked by our official escort, General Gordon, to accompany him in my father’s stead to the rear of the train. As the crowd moved forward like a lumbering beast toward the railing of the caboose, the general announced, “Our chieftain is not able to greet you today, but it is my pleasure to introduce to you President Davis’s youngest child, who was born toward the end of our great stand. Ladies and Gentlemen, here is Miss Winnie Davis, his and our daughter of the Confederacy.”

It was ominously clear that the first letter of the word “daughter” was intended to be capitalized from then on. Biscuit-shaped caps the color of thunderclouds were hurled into the air as a great unison roar of the animalistic Rebel Yell caused my ears to ring and the small platform beneath me to shake alarmingly.

At that moment, what I previously had not allowed myself to comprehend struck me full-force: Jefferson Davis was the embedded anchor of the failed Secession. He had not been in favor of the nation’s disintegration, but he had never wavered from his belief in the Constitutional rights of the States. In his words, “The government has no inherent power; all it possesses was delegated by the States”; therefore, since the Federal body had encroached upon these rights, the division into two separate nations was legal.

I was gone during the years he worked on his detailed, defensive treatise, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Reading the two-volume opus after I returned from Germany, I felt distanced from his premise and those cataclysmic events almost as though they were ancient history—yet I was painfully aware, whenever I turned a page, that this man had been far more vilified than any other leader of the vanquished South. I made a silent vow to stay close to him in public and extend my hand for clasping to spare his. By the time that itinerary, which included Atlanta and Savannah, was completed, my right hand was too swollen to fit into a glove. Wherever the festooned train made stops, children tossed white flowers onto the tracks, women kissed him and threw their arms around him (some fainted at the sight of him), and strong men wept. Usually reserved, during these demonstrations that were balm to his wounded spirit, Jeff was warmly outgoing and approachable. I did not try to emulate his example. I was learning to mentally separate from my new persona and the misdirected devotion it attracted.

According to the Atlanta Constitution, that city had never had such a “host within her borders, who came from a score of states, including those of the far North, to do honor to the revered President.” As we boarded the special car (with silver baskets of flowers suspended from the ceiling, and a Pullman berth for my father to rest on) for the trip to Savannah, I wished my mother or Maggie had been there to take my place on those stages. Either of them would have greeted the crowds with aplomb, while I was like a wooden marionette without strings.

A few months later, while staying with Connie and Burton Harrison in New York, I was invited by other friends of my parents to be their houseguest in Syracuse. I accepted because I had in mind submitting an article to the excellent North American Review at Cornell University, which I thought (erroneously, as it turned out) was located in that city. The possibility that I might fall in love there never occurred to me. That was supposed to happen in New Orleans.

When the first rumbles of disapproval about my romance with Fred Wilkinson reached us—what Varina called whispers behind the fans—Jeff said we should ignore them. But Jeff had died before the furor gathered steam. Some months ago, a reporter at the World handed me a clipping he had come across in another publication, which began: “Ask any Southerner of fifty or older, and he or she will state unequivocally that Winnie Davis, the favorite child of the late president of the Confederacy, willingly sacrificed her personal happiness rather than dishonor the Lost Cause by wedding the grandson of a notorious Abolitionist. …” After I read that far, I returned the clipping to him without comment.

My colleague said, “You must have seen a lot of testimonials on this subject.”

“There are no testimonials, only gossip and speculation.”

“We could set the record straight about you and your Yankee boy friend. Even make it up, if you’d rather not tell it like it was. What do you say we collaborate on a story that will satisfy them and—”

“I say no. Please respect my wishes, and do not bring up the subject to me again.”

“Well, aren’t you the princess,” he muttered.

Varina’s Memoir of her husband, which she wrote in an impassioned frenzy after he died, is more readable than his own. Critics have claimed that she had dates and facts wrong and that she was too blindly devoted to the man to see his shortcomings. They were wrong in the latter assumption. More than anyone else, his wife was acutely aware of Jeff’s faults, not the least of which were his innate stubbornness and inability to compromise—but she was, and still is, determined to present him in the best possible light. My fear is that, should I die before my mother, she will write my life’s story or anoint another to do so under her direction, and that her clever, glib manipulation of that particular topic, my thwarted happiness, will reflect her and me in a better light than either of us deserves.

In letters, travel logs, and diaries I kept as a young girl, I would write as though my mother were looking over my shoulder. I do not want her to know of, much less read, this collection of personal reminiscence and speculative analysis that I began a few months ago, after I returned from Egypt. The prudent part of me wants the outpouring destroyed before I leave this earth, yet another part of me does not concur. I keep the notebook hidden in the New York apartment and in this suite, in places too low for her to reach. I almost took it with me to Atlanta, and am glad I didn’t, as V. would have found it when she unpacked my suitcase. Fortunately, Kate has just been here and done my bidding without asking questions. Her calming, cheerful presence in this room over the last hour or so (although some of that time I was asleep) has reinvigorated me.

V. had coaxed a spoonful of the doctor’s medicine and one of her own nostrums (celery juice, for nerves) down my throat, brushed my unruly mop of hair, damp-sponged and powdered my body, which in sickness cowers like a dog not allowed in the house, dabbed my temples with her favorite rosewater cologne, which is more acerbic than floral, and exchanged my crumpled, perspiration-soaked nightgown for a fresh one. Then she went to her room to make herself presentable for callers. She thrives on being with people if they’re not antagonistic to her. The Marlborough Hotel, where we lived when we first came to New York, made a parlor available for her Sunday salons, which gathered actors, artists, writers, and politicians. After we moved to the Gerard, that management offered the same privilege. Had it not, she would have found a hotel that did. Varina has a gift for bargaining.

Although here the routine is quite informal, the social custom of paying calls is observed. As word gets about that one of us is ailing, Varina’s wide-ranging circle of acquaintances among the summer colony at Narragansett Pier will bring flowers, fruit, tins of confections and special teas, and morally uplifting books and tracts.

Raising my body to a sitting position is not difficult. What is, is convincing it not to continue rising. During the night just past, I awoke with a sensation of levitation, as an apparition of a young woman with hair as black as a starling’s wing, an unusually wide forehead, and eyes like a spaniel’s floated alongside me. I recognized Sarah Knox Taylor from the only portrait Jeff had of his first wife, whose father had been his commanding officer at Fort Crawford. Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Taylor had not approved of the courtship between his daughter and the handsome young dragoon; he wanted his delicate, beautiful child to have a gentler life than military encampments provided. I have also read that the colonel objected to Jefferson Davis’s reputation for engaging in occasional wild exploits. But Jeff was determined; eventually, he resigned from the army, married Knox, and became a planter. Less than three months later, on a visit to his sister’s Louisiana plantation, they both fell ill with malaria. Jeff survived, but Knox died and was buried there. When Jeff was elected to the United States Senate from Mississippi, his former father-in-law was President of the United States. The two men became close friends in Washington; so close, in fact, that President Zachary Taylor let it be known he regarded Jeff as a member of his family.

The phantom Knox dissolved when V. placed a folded, damp cloth on my brow and said, “Try not to thrash about, Winnie. Conserve your strength. We will ride this out.”

In the sporadic intervals when my sister and I lived under the same roof, she entertained me with stories about the fortnightly socials our mother had held in the Richmond White House. The guest lists included officials of the separatist government and their wives, men from the nearby military camps, and prominent citizens of the Virginia city. Maggie and the boys watched from a curving staircase as the adults played charades and danced to the music of a fiddle and piano. After a sumptuous dinner—beef-steak pie and baked oysters were among her specialties—she would play matchmaker by herding bachelors and unmarried ladies into a parlor together. Later, when General Grant’s forces were closing in on the Confederate capital, she would greet her guests with defiant aplomb in a taffeta gown that rustled like fire despite its patches, at “starvation parties,” where there was little or no refreshment other than water. Robert Brown, their long-time servant, recalled that, near the end, his mistress bartered some of her jewelry for a scrawny turkey and a basket of near-rotten potatoes and carrots, which she stretched into a fricassee to feed fifty. The rustling-taffeta vision of Varina is among the clearest of my borrowed visions.

Jeff Jr.’s dramatic accounts of little Joe’s fall to his death from the Executive Mansion’s piazza seven weeks before I was born and of the family’s exodus through the Carolinas into the Georgia woods have spawned images that are now so familiar they are no longer the stuff of nightmares. Maggie admonished me: “When Joe died, our parents were in deep grief over the loss of another boy. Having you brought some sunshine back to their faces, Pie. You must try never to disappoint them.” At the time, we were on an ocean liner headed for England, where our father would look into an opportunity to make a living. A few weeks before, on my fourth birthday, he was carrying me when he fell down a flight of stairs in a hotel in Lennoxville, Quebec. Jeff suffered a concussion and two broken ribs, but he had managed to deposit me on a landing. “It’s a damned miracle you weren’t hurt, too,” said thirteen-year-old Maggie, who had learned to swear on the streets of Richmond.

After our father was captured, Varina dispatched Maggie, Jeff Jr., and Willie to Canada in the care of her mother and sister, both named Margaret Howell, and Robert Brown. V. kept me with her in Savannah, where we lived under Federal guard in a hotel. Having used an anonymous gift of money to send the others out of the country, she had to pay for our lodging from her limited purse. Determined to save her husband, Varina wrote letters to influential Northerners who were sympathetic toward the plight of the leader of the Confederacy. Among those who volunteered to offer money for his release were industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, and the outspoken Abolitionist Gerrit Smith. As a military prisoner, Jeff was deemed ineligible for bail. The accusation that the President of the Confederacy had been involved in the plot to murder President Lincoln had not held up; the charge that remained, treason, was a civil offense; therefore, the Virginia authorities could have demanded he be turned over to them. Presumably, this did not happen because security was stronger at the military prison than it would be in a state facility.

President Andrew Johnson had issued amnesties for almost all of the men who had fought for the South, and all could apply for pardons (which my father refused to do; he could not recant his convictions). None of the South’s military leaders were still incarcerated; the former Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, had been freed; and the only two cabinet members still in custody had been scheduled for pardon. Public sentiment noted this scapegoating of one particular man, and even the Union Army’s most ferocious general, William Tecumseh Sherman, is said to have conceded, “It would have been far better for everyone if Jefferson Davis had escaped.”

The humanitarian effort initiated on my father’s behalf would have allowed his children to visit him at Fort Monroe. He had given his consent for Varina to bring me with her, but not the others, because “they are old enough to form impressions. I could not bear for my boys to harbor, for the rest of their lives, a memory of seeing their father in chains, and behind bars.”

After the losses of two young sons, he would not have guessed the lives of the remaining two would be snuffed out long before his own. Nor would my father have realized that I would absorb what I witnessed through infantile eyes and, as a young child, heard about that time when hatred and defamation mantled the defeated South—and that during my lonely exile in Germany, numbed by homesickness his affectionate letters brought on and were the antidote to, I would call forth these images to keep me company.

When I told Maggie our brother Joe used to come through a wall to visit me in Karlsruhe, not solid but with a bloom of life about him, she said I must never let on to our mother that her favorite of the six children she had given birth to was an earth-bound ghost; it would kill her for sure. But it wouldn’t have. Varina is amazingly resilient.

The morning’s earliest replay: The doctor and Mr. and Mrs. Burns are here. A maid is leaving with a tray on which I see but do not hear dishes rattling. There is a taste of soft-boiled egg in my mouth. The scene—my view is from near the ceiling—appears as pantomime: The doctor’s pink-and-white head moves from side to side and up and down; his hands wave as if he is conducting a chamber orchestra. The next time I open my eyes, everyone’s gone but V., who is unpacking my larger suitcase and examining—sniffing, even—the contents to decide what should go into the laundry hamper. She sighs when she gets to the ruined gown. A curlicued porcelain clock on the bedside table ticks importantly, as if to remind me of an appointment or that my allotment of time on earth is ebbing.

It is now my favorite time of day. On this golden, New England afternoon in Narragansett Pier, the sun will be benevolent, the clear-as-a-jewel water cold and bracing. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the sun would be full-tilt ablaze, the pigeon-colored surf as warm and enticing as an embrace. “I want to go bathing,” I say tentatively, knowing from experience that infirmity negates free will. The table is turned when V. suffers with angina, palpitations, or pleurisy. Then I am in charge, and should I choose, can deny her sherry and chocolates. She seems to enjoy the occasional relinquishment of control, which may remind her of the way her marriage was conducted. In spite of the man’s difficult, controlling disposition, she loved her husband above all else, and does so still. That kind of love would wear out some women, but she draws strength from it. I wonder if he’s youthful in her dreams, as he often is in mine.

V. informs me briskly: “The doctor has ordered complete bed rest for the rest of the week, with frequent ingestion of beef tea.”

“That’s a glum prospect. I’ll slosh like a bucket.”

“Here’s one that should cheer you. I’ve sent a message to Kate that you’re indisposed, so it’s quite likely she will be stopping by.” As she lifts my head to plump a pillow, pain slithers like a snake from my forehead to the base of my skull. V. irritatingly tells me what I had informed her of before I went to Atlanta, “The Pulitzers have leased a marble-floored mansion on Ocean Road.”

“You shouldn’t have bothered her.”

“For heaven’s sake, Winnie. Kate regards doing for us as her pleasure. She and Joseph are proud of her blood relationship with our family.” V. has a remarkable sense of entitlement. She only pretends to scoff at being called Queen Varina. She seizes any opportunity to tell someone that babies, animals, ships, and a prison camp have been named for her. Mispronunciation of her name, so that it rhymes with vagina, infuriates her. “It’s Va-REE-na,” she corrects icily.

As to the blood relationship, I respond, “If such exists.” Kate Pulitzer, whose maiden name is Davis, has never been specific as to how her line intersects with ours. I add, because I cannot resist, “Davis is one of the more common surnames.”

“One thing that puts you off-kilter is your need to analyze.”

While I’m deciding not to analyze that remark, she adds, “I’ll be in my room, attending to correspondence. Ring the bell if you need me.” Varina takes her letter writing seriously. Recipients who have known her long and well—Connie and Burton Harrison, who was Jeff’s aide during the War and traveled with the family in those crucial days at the end; our Mississippi neighbors, Major Morgan and Judge and Mrs. Kimbrough; and when they were alive, the brilliant statesman Judah P. Benjamin, General Jubal Early, and V.’s clever, witty friend Mary Chesnut of South Carolina—have understood she expects these missives to be saved for posterity, even those that have scrawled across the envelopes “Private; please burn when read.”

Granddaughter of a governor of New Jersey, daughter of a ne’er-do-well Natchez gentleman, wife of a former United States Senator and Secretary of War who gave up a Washington political career to head a band of rogue states, Varina Howell Davis is used to being snubbed and criticized in both North and South. Yet she has always held her head high. After the War, in the capitals of Europe, she shrugged off the mantle of defeat and defection and was welcomed as though she were royalty.

She can be difficult, but she’s fiercely loyal. The hollow whisper grazes my cheek like a soft, trimmed beard. Like my father’s kiss.