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.When the veterans gave some tatteredbattle flags to Jefferson, he buried his face in one and wept.Thewomen also embraced the flags, and one of them in some news sto-ries it was Winnie, in others, Varina kissed a flag.When the familyreturned to Beauvoir, Jefferson was sick, and as usual Varina tookcare of him.She told Joseph Pulitzer that it had been  gratifying tosee the affection of the veterans who  nearly broke my heart. 22As she had done in the past, Varina handled the correspondencethat rained in upon them.Typically she wrote the letters and hesigned them: fan letters, historical queries, and family missives.Allthis writing Varina considered her duty, and unlike the wives of otherfamous men Vera Nabokov comes to mind she rarely complained.She dealt with the  constant influx of company, and because theDavises still had no telephone they were at the mercy of all visitors.Some were welcome, such as William and Lizzie Waller, the widowerand daughter of her sister Jane, or one of the Davis kinsmen, Hugh,with whom Varina liked to play backgammon, but many were strang-ers, including a party of three hundred people who came by train tomeet Mr.Davis.Varina told her granddaughter,  I dread them, butshe put palmettos and flowers around the house to dress it up a bitfor the occasion.She performed the role of hostess, practiced for255the girdled treeyears now, with consummate skill.A reporter described her as both domestic and  cultivated and one of the best conversationalists hehad ever met.Usually attired in black, she wore her white hair in acoil at the nape of her neck, and she was  gone to smash grownvery fleshy, as she described herself to a friend.23CDin the late 1880s, Jefferson Davis finally had to relinquish what-ever hopes he had for Virginia Clay.They had exchanged a few letterssince the 1870s, but after Clement Clay died in 1882, Jefferson con-tacted her in Huntsville, Alabama, because he wanted to talk aboutthe past,  so much of which belongs exclusively to us two. In herbusinesslike reply she discussed her plans to write a book on her hus-band, so Jefferson sent her some material and added,  I greatly desireto see you. Then he wrote again, recollecting the talks he had withthe Clays around the fireplace at their home, and he asked her towrite, sending his  devotion to whatever will promote your happi-ness. In another letter, marked  strictly private, he told his  belovedGinie that he longed to see her and  hear so many things. She repliedthat she would value his contributions toward the book.He tried topersuade her to come to Beauvoir, warning that he had aged sincethey had seen each other last.But he hoped for a visit or at least aletter.24Thus the correspondence with Virginia Clay unfolded, proper let-ters Varina wrote at Jefferson s dictation in her robust script inter-leaved with longing letters he wrote himself in his small tight hand-writing.In the dictated letters, Jefferson provided leads for Clay sresearch, drawing upon Varina s knowledge of the press, and he of-fered to write a chapter of Virginia s book, which was in fact nevercompleted.In another letter, dictated to Varina, he feebly joked thatVirginia would enjoy a trip to England more if his wife accompaniedher, since she knew the country well and loved Europe.What Mrs.Davis felt as she penned these words, no one can know.In a letter hewrote himself, Jefferson told Virginia that their lives had taken a succession of tangents and wondered why their paths had not been256the girdled tree concurrent instead.He then asked  Dearest Ginie if she had forgot-ten him.He saw her briefly in 1886 in Montgomery, where she satnext to him at a public ceremony, but her letters to him were breezyand polite, that is all.She sent her best wishes and congratulated himon Winnie s growing fame.25Five years after this tortured correspondence began, Jefferson Da-vis learned that Virginia Clay was engaged to David Clopton, a wid-ower from Georgia who had been her childhood sweetheart.Cloptonhad served in the U.S.Congress, then the Confederate Congress, andafter the war he became a judge in Alabama [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]