The President | Adrian Van Young

Ophelia Mundt is already awake when moonlight shines into her eyes.

It was yesterday evening’s mint juleps, she’s sure. Heavenly but bad for sleep.

She’d sipped them on her shaded terrace expressly against her daughter’s wishes, half of one or maybe two, tilting her glass to Andrew Jackson (also against her daughter’s wishes), who trained his sights across the Square and right into her bedroom window, a view no less heavenly than the mint juleps. It’s a view that the Baroness Almonaster de Pontalba—who designed the layout of the Square, including the placement of the statue—must’ve always intended Ophelia to have, one good white woman to another. A good white woman, in this case, who has totally lost her endurance for whiskey. Then, stumbling to bed with her shrimp-rice half-eaten, her mind a burning bowl of hooch, and now sits Ophelia, propped up against pillows. The moonlight clears and she sees—something. She peers even harder and sees it again.

The equestrian statue just bowed its head to her.

She goes barefoot outside the Pontalba Apartments in the city of New Orleans in 1872, the grit of the street pressing into her soles. There’s motley on the Square tonight: drunks tucked in the shadows, a few lame streetwalkers.The horrid, stinking, bearded man, twigs and leaves in his hair, his arm cuffed at the elbow, who always greets her with his good one whenever their paths intersect on the Square. “Evening, Madame. Midnight stroll?” Ophelia can tell by the way he shoots up to greet the soldiers as they pass that he most likely fought in the Great Conflagration, which ended seven years before. He sloughs back on his drunkard’s bench, protecting something sloshing in a battered, tin cup.

St. Louis’ church bell chimes at four. A flash of movement turns her head: Old Hickory himself has come down from his horse and waits to engage with her. “Bonsoir, Mr. President,” whispers Ophelia. With a flourish, he doffs his chapeau hat. The motion makes a rasping sound. She feels her arm inside his arm. It is so undeniable, bronze against flesh, that when she wakes the feeling lingers.

There are bronze pollen smears in the pit of her sheets, and her daughter bangs recklessly through the apartment. Eunice is a busybody, as Ophelia had raised her to be. Piling the snifters and plates on the counters, rudely ripping up the curtains, using her clubfoot to push clots of laundry where Ophelia has let them fall over the floor.

“Have you brought the children?” Ophelia asks, groggy, knowing full well she has not.

On those occasions when Eunice has brought her grandchildren to see her—the boy-child, Toussaint, and the girl-child . . . the girl-child, whose name she can never quite recall—Ophelia on her silken cushions seems to always say something that shortens the visit. Better, Eunice informs her, to see them “abroad,” at Audobon Park, or a café with sweets. Or the home of the octoroon man Eunice married. There, she can be tolerated. Here, she tries to hold her tongue. “They’ll miss their grandmama,” she says, her voice hoarse. “It’s four whole days till Sunday supper . . .”

“Three whole days.”

“You’re missing one.”

“Then you have been asleep for two.”

“I walked with the president last night,” she said.

Eunice seems to regard her across a vast distance. “With Ulysses S. Grant?”

“Not with that traitor, dear. The president I mean is Jackson. Yes, President Jackson and I walked the Square, my right arm, I seem to recall, in his left arm. His right one always held the hat!” She sighs at the memory. “He comported himself just as one would expect . . .”

“Walked with him,” says Eunice, “when you were a girl?” Ophelia can tell she’d been only half-listening. “When you threw flowers at him? You told us about it.”

“Not then,” says Ophelia with sharpness. “Last night.”

There are times, she concedes, when she can feel herself slipping. Hunting through the apartment for something she needs, the whalebone hairbrush on her bureau, only to pick up the kettle instead and recite the name for it: “Feather duster.”

“What’s that, mother?”

“Feather duster!” She suspects she has said it aloud more than once, Eunice doubtless presuming it more of her nonsense. And besides, she is busy with Garland Mundt’s saber, askew above the mantle, as though somebody—not Ophelia!—had tried to dislodge it before thinking better. The heirloom gives her so much trouble she wonders why she even keeps it. “Has Tibby come with you?”

She feels moved to speak to address him as “President” before the statue speaks to her. You remember, Ophelia, the last time we met?

Ophelia’s firstborn, bon vivant and constant bachelor, who loafs and swans about the Quarter, not sleeping for many nights. Eunice smiles at the question. “Perhaps he came when you were sleeping.”

“I’m sorry that he never woke me.”

“Yes, a pity he didn’t bring breakfast,” says Eunice.

The unfetching smugness returns to her face while shaking out a damask curtain. Ophelia’s children have been conspiring against her, trying to get her to live “somewhere else” where they tell her that she can be “properly cared for,” though she has stood her ground thus far. For herself and her family, but also for this: she cannot leave Pontalba. This place is her home.

Eunice draws aside her covers, sees the pollen in her sheets. “Oh, mother,” says Eunice, head tilted. “Oh mother . . .”

“No,” Ophelia insists, burning deep in her shame, “no, Eunice, it’s not that at all . . .”

But already Eunice is forcing her up and stripping the bedclothes into a foul mass. It breaks Ophelia’s racing heart the way she brings them to the hamper, holding the mass out at arm’s length before her, her head still tilted to the side.

“No, this can’t continue,” she hears Eunice whisper, “this can’t go on a moment more.”

There are presents beneath the Christmas tree when Andrew Jackson routs the British, and Ophelia tosses and turns in her nightgown, her bedroom window limned in orange. Cannons roll along the river like the coming of a summer storm. She is sure she’ll be buried, her presents unopened, her dolly pressed into her startling new breasts when soldiers pull her from the rubble. But on Christmas morning her parents’ house stands, as Jackson, their savior, deals slap after slap to Packenham’s forces advancing upriver, and she plays with her new gifts in full natural daylight, the curtains drawn up for the first time in days.

It is 1815. She is fifteen years old. Already the century feels like hers. The Square, not even named Jackson Square, is still known by its Francophone name, Place D’Arms. The president is still a general. Her parents give her little choice in the matter of meeting the triumphal march of Jackson and his ragtag army across the chilly Place D’Arms to thank them for saving New Orleans from ruin. But young Ophelia doesn’t mind. Without General Jackson, her parents have told her, they would find themselves jewels in the crown of King George, no worse fate for a Creole family.

So Ophelia and the other girls are outfitted in white lace dresses with transparent veils that gust over their faces and silver stars cut from a shimmery cloth affixed to their foreheads with glue made from curds. Fifteen girls for fifteen states (Louisiana is the youngest), each of them with a flag to wave as the general’s forces ride among them; Ophelia is given Massachusetts, an alien place with a spitting, rough name. The girls flank the approach to St. Louis cathedral, and when Jackson himself rides abreast of Ophelia, with his long, kindly face and his shock of white hair, a man who is older than even her father astride of his bullet-and-saber-scarred horse in his blue general’s coat with its gold epaulets, his every smile line buckling outward when he sees Ophelia there waving her flag, she feels a buzzing in her belly that when he goes by her drops into her hips, like she sometimes feels when she wakes from a nap in the fug of her room in the heat of midday.

The Tennessean rogues come next, a wretched fly-bitten and blood-crusted lot.

“Well, ain’t Massachusetts a fine piece of quim,” one of them says, staring obscenely. She’d heard they were an awful sort, but in Jackson’s wake they seem almost subhuman. She is never gladder to be wearing the veil so they can’t see the shame burning bright at her cheeks.

The night after Eunice shows up to berate her, she is back on the balcony sipping her juleps.

Though she knows that she shouldn’t, that Eunice is right, the whiskey works upon her harder; she wants to create the same conditions for getting to walk with the president again: one cocktail at twilight surveying the Square then, before she realizes she’s finished, another. Her ice cubes bottom in her glass, St. Louis’s shadow grows long in the dusk. She watches it spreading like a stain through the plaza where once stood the president’s archway, but where now only vagabonds hunch at the gates, across the ascent to the region of palms and the benches placed under the wide limbs of oaks, the church’s spires coming slantwise and sharp as a trident, cutting over the shrubbery hugging the base, the pedestal, the rearing horse, and the soldier atop with his hat in the air before meeting the shadows of duskier hue that crackle and creep from the banks of the river—

Ophelia hears the call: awake. She is chilly in only her nightdress and shawl with her mint gone to sludge in the base of her glass. For some time, she just lies there, then peers past the railing.

Same one-armed veteran on his bench. Same extortionist gamblers and sidewalk rune-tellers. Same ladies of evening retreated to benches for the rutting that must make it painful to stand and, scanning the lattice of oak trees, she sees him at the base of the tree under her balustrade, which the city was supposed to trim monthly, but didn’t, so she had had to hire someone to have the damn thing trimmed herself for the way that it mangled her view of the president—

Tonight, though, he has come for her—

Again, he doffs his bronze chapeau, just the edge of its crown falling out of the dark and resting in a pool of moonlight. Another promenade, my dove—

Her naked soles slap down the stairs of Pontalba and press on the grit of the New Orleans street—

At the French Opera House, she’d once seen Don Giovanni, Mozart’s rendition of Don Juan. She remembers the scene in the graveyard at night when the Commendatore’s graven bust interrupts Don Giovanni with threatening words on the trifling, dissolute life he has led. Instead of being terrified, Don Giovanni invites the grave statue to dinner—

They make a circuit of the Square together, her arm within the arm of bronze. There’s a strange, grinding sound in his hips as he walks, one boot-spur inexorably crossing the other. Their footsteps crunch across the shells mixed in with sand to make the walkways; the president’s are colossal, a god on the march. When they come from underneath the oaks and onto the footpath that laps the cathedral, Ophelia’s gait hitches with pain from the shell bits that make up the pathways. Something sharp has cut her heel, her blood blackly streaking. Behold now the president under the moon: his pupil-less, stony, and blind-seeming eyes, the grimace of his soldier’s mouth. His hair is a virile and deep-contoured marvel—three times the head of poor, dead Garland. She feels moved to speak to address him as “president” before the statue speaks to her. You remember, Ophelia, the last time we met?

“Of course, Mr. President. How could I not?” She feels the sudden impulse to press her head against his shoulder, just below the epaulets, and President Jackson permits the gesture; the bronze is chilly on her cheek. “So grand and stunning on your horse.”

How can you remember that day, says the president in a hollow, long voice like wind through a tunnel, and not the names for things around you? He points to the spires of St. Louis cathedral. Like this, for instance . . .

“Spinning top.”

Or this . . . He points off at the river.

“Beef stew. “

This, says the president and points at the spikes that top the gate around the Square, a design common across the city to protect inner courtyards and low-lying windows from amorous boys scrambling over the top.

“Lambskins?” She nods ardently. “No—bauble snatchers.”

Spires, says the president, and points at the church spires.

River, he says—the Mississippi.

Romeo catchers, he says of the gate-tops. Can’t you see you are losing your mind, my dear woman?

“Things escape me,” says Ophelia, crumpling into the president’s shoulder. He has been such a patient teacher! She finds she badly wants to please him, as all these years he has pleased her. “I never once forgot your name.”

Old Hickory . . . King Andrew . . . Sharp Knife . . . he murmurs.

“I call you The President. That’s what you are! And I’ve never stopped watching you.”

I’ve never stopped watching you back, says the president.

At that, she cannot help but blush. “Since the day I first saw you, so grand on your horse—so much has changed in the Square. In the world! Sometimes I barely recognize it.”

Though the president doesn’t answer her, he doesn’t seem to disagree. How can you remember that day, he continues in his long, hollow voice that is almost a groan, and forget to wear shoes in this place? You are bloodied.

She looks down at her foot, treading blood on the path. “Strange,” she says. “I barely feel it.”

They round the west side of the Square with the president’s riderless horse on their right and the moon, nearly full, in ascension above, bathing the statue’s proud face in its glow. As the drunks and streetwalkers scatter before them, the gypsies and cardsharps collecting their blankets to flee this righteous, cleansing terror resurrected in bronze, she has never felt warmer, more amply protected, or sure of herself in so long, on his arm. Now there’s only companionable silence between them. Yet again in a life that for so many years has erected itself as a sluice towards death, she can hold her head high. She is fallen no more. She remembers the weight of her name in this world: Ophelia Mundt—erstwhile of Garland—daughter of Richard and Adeline Heck—mother of Thibault and Eunice Mundt/Thompson—grandmother to Toussaint and . . . ??? Mundt—

They stop at the pedestal under the horse. And just like that, so long and sweet, the president bends down to her level, the chill of his lips finding hers in the dark as his knee comes up between her thighs, and she strains to wrap her arms around him, saber and epaulettes, coattails and—

“Madame?” A hand on her shoulder, insistent. “Hey, madame?”

Stinking, hot breath on her cheek, in her ear. She’s already awake when she opens her eyes to the face of the bearded wretch she calls the veteran. Above the filthy, matted nest that extend past his cheeks and gullet, habitation for birds and the things that birds eat, his eyes are wide with frantic worry. Beyond his head the dawn light creeps. For a moment she remembers nothing: not the place, not the season. Not even her name. The cluelessness is almost freeing, as though she’s been snipped like a thread from the world.

“Madame,” the veteran says, “you all right?” His hand palpates Ophelia’s shoulder.

Everything comes flooding back: she remembers the president under the oaks. Remembers the promenade, her arm in his.

She tries to rise, but the weight of exhaustion is dragging her down. She is sore in her shoulders and neck, in her hips, in her knees and her feet, everywhere sore and pummeled. “Give me a moment,” she says to the veteran, pushing herself up by locking her elbows.

She finds she’s still beneath the statue, at the base of the pedestal, clad in her nightgown.

“Mother?” a voice says. “Oh, Mother—oh god . . .”

Tibby stands in the pathway directly before her. Don Giovanni she thought was an opera—but this? She can barely meet her firstborn’s eyes. She claws at the veteran’s bird’s nest backhanded, feeling her nails digging into his cheek. “I was only just trying to help you, you old—”

“This man is assaulting me, Tibby! Please help.”

But Tibby only stares aghast. Now the veteran’s newly made scratches are bleeding, his face a mask of aggrievement and shock. “The nerve of the thing! You assaulted me, lady.”

Fiercely, she tries to calm her voice. “A defensive maneuver,” she explains to her son.

“That’s folly and codswallop!” rages the veteran. “You was lying out here, I could swore you was dead . . .”

“Tibby?” she repeats with pique, and the edge to her voice sends her son into action.

“Thank you, sir,” Tibby says too politely, she thinks, before clearing his throat, “but you’re no longer needed.” Gratuitously, he reaches back to hand the scowling man a coin.

The veteran grunts, trudging back to its bench.

“Are you able to stand?” Tibby asks.

“I think, yes. But if there’s no need, I would rather stay sitting.”

He seems half-irritated, half wild with concern. “Just what are you doing out here, Mother?”

“I suppose I went out for a walk.”

“Sleepwalking?” says Tibby.

“Awake-walking,” she hisses.

Everything comes flooding back: she remembers the president under the oaks. Remembers the promenade, her arm in his. Remembers the kiss at the base of the pedestal with the riderless mare rearing blind in the night. She is sore everywhere, and she feels so alive.

“You’ve bruised yourself,” Tibby informs her, cradling her knee fearfully in his palm: the purple-gray discoloration that begins just inside, in the pale, tender hollow, and continues to spread past the hem of her gown.

She pushes Tibby’s hand away. “I must’ve banged it, here,” she says, indicating the pedestal’s sharp-looking edge.

Tibby’s not that much better turned out than the veteran—now staring at her with reproach from his bench, tipping his cup back and forth in the air as though to manifest more liquor. Like him, Tibby’s features are pouchy and pale; like him, he smells of fermentation. He is dressed in a cello-shaped burgundy waistcoat, with a gold-tassel trim framing out the lapels, a costume fit for Mardi Gras that lends his face a touch of color—until she sees, no, not the waistcoat at all: there’s kohl smudged underneath his eyes, two clown-spots of rouge blended into his cheeks.

With a forbearing smile, Tibby swipes at his face. “Yes, all of us a bit banged up.”

Tibby goes with her to Eunice’s house that afternoon for Sunday dinner. Of course, it is the girl who answers, as though conjured by the fates to reproach Ophelia. “Ah, there—good evening, little chicken.”

“Good evening, grandmother.”

The girl is so formal. And with her complexion of café au lait, so dubious-looking and unlike a child. Ophelia can still not remember her name.

“Sweet Lise!” comes Tibby to her rescue. Lise breaks into giggles as Tibby’s hands flitter above the foreign mass of curls before pulling a lolly from behind Lise’s ear.

Ophelia’s face grows numb from smiling, melancholy and jealous in spite of herself. “Wait!” she says a little loudly, more like a command than a prelude to joy, and she rummages in her cluttered handbag for a candy, anything to show Lise that she thinks fondly of her. But all that emerges is a hatpin. At least it’s embroidered.

The girl takes it stiffly.

“Do well to say thank you for that,” adds Ophelia.

“Well, I think it’s wonderful,” Tibby announces, with flushed magnanimity, slicing his chicken. “A negro as governor. I think it’s progress.”

“Not the first,” Eunice counters with self-satisfaction. God forbid Tibby should ever be right.

“Not the first?” Tibby says, rigidly smiling, making way through his third or fourth glass of chianti.

“After Governor Warmouth left office—” starts Eunice.

“Why did Governor Warmouth leave office?” asks Tibby.

Eunice has a look of long-suffering patience. “He injured his foot.”

“Injured his foot!” For the briefest of moments, Tibby’s gaze meets Ophelia’s. “These men in the era of Yankee aggression, they’re more . . . gladiatorial, aren’t they?”

A bumping and shuffling from out of the shadows: Celestine enters with paint on his clothes, some manner of portraitist throughout the city. She feels her heart sink in her chest, hoping tonight the man might remain absent, but Celestine makes a beeline for her, with obsequious bowing, to offer his hand. “Forgive my lateness, Madame Mundt.”

The table seems to hold its breath.

“It’s all right, Celestine,” Ophelia says brightly. “In this family we like to come just as we are.”

With a grin that shows every last tooth in his mouth, her son-in-law pulls out his seat and commences devouring his chicken at once. Turning back to her own plate, Ophelia is conscious of her daughter’s eyes on her. “The gentleman’s name was Oscar Dunn. He took over for Warmouth when Warmouth was injured. But then, when Warmouth was impeached—”

“Why was Warmouth impeached?” Tibby asks studiously.

“Corruption, I suppose it was,” Celestine ventures to add between mouthfuls.

He is smiling again, his fork loaded with greens. Her son-in-law is always smiling, Ophelia reflects as wine slops down her chin. When he’s not busy smiling or painting, he watches the children run wild in the house so that Eunice may fight in her many crusades: the Temperance Union, the Universal Suffrage League. Sometimes Ophelia draws indirect pride at having raised up such a blunt force of nature, but most of the time she can’t help feeling wounded that Eunice seems to live her life in direct opposition to how she lived hers.

It’s almost as if Eunice holds her to blame—for the Mundt livelihood in the place on Red River, for the ill-fated Southern Dominion itself—which, like it or not, is the reason that Eunice now lives a charmed life in this house in New Orleans. Her father a planter, some might say a “slaver,” who fell over lifeless while lashing a field hand at the inauspicious age of fifty and never would’ve touched Ophelia had it not been to sire Tibby, then Eunice—yet Garland Mundt was still her father, Ophelia’s husband. Blood is blood.

“That’s when P. B. S. Pinchback took over for Warmouth. He’s been governor now for two weeks,” Eunice says.

“P. B. S. Pinchback is black?” Tibby says.

“Not unlike Celestine, he is light-skinned,” says Eunice. She drapes a hand over the man’s paint-flecked forearm.

“Too much cream in his coffee,” her husband says mildly.

“Or not enough,” Ophelia says.

Had she really said that? The table ignores her.

“The first black man as governor? Progress indeed,” Eunice holds forth in a schoolmarmish manner. “But the second? Well that’s vested progress. I only hope we stay the course.”

“Pinchbeck,” Ophelia repeats dreamily, never once in her life having heard of the man. Besides, next to the president, such men are cutouts. “I’ll grant you that’s a funny name . . . especially for a politician . . .”

“And why is that, Mother?”

Eunice stares at Ophelia. Emboldened, Lise stares at her too, lightly stabbing her new hatpin into the wood. What Ophelia means to do is pivot, showing them she’s at peace with progress as long as it respects tradition—but just when she has figured out the words that she is going to say, she is slammed by a vision of Eunice, a girl, perched on her bed in the place on Red River with the mangled clubfoot (how it pained her!) resting in Ophelia’s palm as she tightened the laces and buckled the straps of the shoe they had bought her to invert the foot. Eunice’s tears made her cheeks shine like apples. One strap, two straps, almost there . . .

The memory takes her breath away, marooning her mind in a painful awareness: Eunice no longer needs her, nor will she again. Eunice might well despise her. A tide of confusion overwhelms her, expressing itself as a low, strange guffaw. Her mind returns to what is safe as she goes on uncertainly, “P. B. S. Pinchbeck . . .”

“P. B. S. Pinchback,” her daughter corrects her.

“How silly that you care so much,” Ophelia tells Eunice, whose face breaks apart with the weakness of girlhood. “But Pinchback sounds like Pinchbeck, no?”

“Yes, mother, I suppose it does.” Eunice throws up her hands, leaning back in her chair. “And pinchbeck means?”

“It means fool’s gold,” her son-in-law tells them without looking up.

“A ni—a negro that’s governor, dear . . .” Ophelia’s eyes focus only on Eunice. “Why strip away the golden paint and all you’ve got’s a lump of coal.”

Eunice’s eyes swim with hurt. “Leave this table at once.”

“Now Eunice,” Tibby hunches forward, “we can’t very well just put mother to pasture!”

“She enters our house with such filth,” Eunice says, “and yet the burden rests on me?”

Celestine lays his cutlery down and looks up. “I took no offense. Certainly, I’ve heard worse.”

But even Ophelia can see through her panic that something in his face belies it.

Eunice removes her hand from his. “Don’t say that in front of the children,” she says.

“But my darling . . .” says Celestine, turning to Eunice, but Eunice turns her face away, scraping her chair across the floor to sit turned away for a moment in silence, before at last she reaches back to pet her children’s downcast heads.

Then everything’s silent. Too silent, in fact. All this over Pinchbeck—if only they knew! Now Ophelia must cover her smile with her napkin. “He is coming—haha! He is coming, you see. I walked with him last night and every night since. I lay with him even and it was fantastic!” She swipes at her eyes, streaming wet down her cheeks. “He means to save us from ourselves. He means to make the world anew. To make it great again,” she cries, “the way it was before!”

Since the day that he opened his eyes on the Square, already he has seen so much.

A crowd of onlookers complimenting his shape as a canvas sheet falls from his face —

Legions of wastrels in navy blue serge marching under his nose in an odious clatter—

A stonecutter toiling for days in his shadow, etching words of contumely below where he sits: THE UNION MUST AND SHALL BE PRESERVED—

The lady watching at the window, pawing droplets of sweat from her breasts and her neck—

A bloodthirsty skirmish with muskets and cudgels and brickbats and sabers between two militias—

The lady watching from her bed, her hand rucked up among her skirts—

The inexorable, deafening growing of oak trees—

The chop of the water just behind him, forever so peaceful and out of sight—

The coming and going of clerks and lamplighters, of children, old women, plague doctors, dogs, and once even an alligator sauntered down from the river to bask in the sun—

The lady watching from the street, half-lidded and shoeless in her nightgown—

The lady standing just beneath him, an antique saber in her grip—

That night, beneath the pedestal, Ophelia gets to see it happen. In the statue’s left shoulder, it starts as a tremor, flowing down to the hand with the horse’s lead in it, its fingers flexing powerfully around the dangling leather strap. The arm that holds the hat comes next, creaking with strain as it falls to his waist. The benevolent, sightless eyes blink closed, then open again, looking down on Ophelia, who gasps with wonder, hand to heart. It is more wonderful than she ever imagined—

The hat coming down on the lustrous, peaked head, the president’s spine straightening in the saddle. More pollen sifts down to the ground at her feet. And just when she thinks it could be no more perfect, the horse’s flanks begin to ripple and the upraised forelegs thunder down. Dusty air blasts from the war-horse’s snout.

Backing away, Ophelia giggles. “My, my,” she whispers, “look at that—”

She never imagined the horse would come too, yet now that it does this seems totally natural, the horse the extension of the man. They stall for a moment on top of the pedestal, the horse’s black hooves clattering across the mounded dais of stone. All at once the horse leaps from the pedestal’s edge, landing heavy and noble and grim in the shrubs.

You fear to look on me, my dove.

“Mr. President, no! You’re so beautiful, I—”

You look like you have seen a god.

“I have, Mr. President. Down from Olympus.”

Ophelia, the president commands her, meet Duke.

Duke minces and snorts at the sound of his name, his eyes rolling under his terrible brow.

“I am honored—so honored.” She tries for a curtsy. She can feel her loins aching beneath her thin nightgown. “Such a beautiful animal, fit for a god.”

Duke was here too, fifty-seven years past, when we saved this city from rapine and ruin, the president tells her in his tunnel voice. I rode him against Packenham on the river, the bastard never stood a chance. I might’ve cut him down myself had my infantry’s grapeshot not found him out first.

Ophelia’s glad he can speak plainly, glad he’s finally opening up. She tries to meet his candor. “How can they abandon me like this?” she hisses. “Aren’t they even going to try?” Her visions burns and blurs with tears, her emotions much closer than she had imagined.

They never really understood you. That the world that you come from is also their world, the president says in sympathy. The lack is not your own, it’s theirs.

“Thank you, my darling,” Ophelia whispers.

The president’s free hand caresses Duke’s ears. You may approach him now, he says.

She flattens her hand on the horse’s left flank. Encased in bronze, the flank is cold, yet with great packs of muscle migrating beneath it, and Ophelia can feel herself slick down below—

There’s movement behind her, a voice: “What in heaven—”

The veteran wavers in the dark. The wretch had been watching her, waiting to pounce. “I’m no prize,” slurs the veteran, shaking his cup, “but you got a verily baaad disposition. Your head is cracked and leaking yolk!” She lets him continue, her face clear and calm. “So I’ll be damned to hell and back when I was only trying to help yo—Hey, lady,” he slurs at her, “why are you laughing?”

“Because,” says Ophelia, unable to stop, her voice almost pleasant between jags of laughing, “it is clear you don’t know you are absolute filth.”

“Well pardon me, lady,” says the veteran, seemingly sobered by her words, “but I ain’t filth. You’re filthy, you biddy! I fought for my country, I lost my dang arm!” He gestures at her with the hideous stump, his liquor splashing on the ground. “I fought for you, in case you noticed, and I won’t stand here—”

“Filth and offal. Chaff and blight,” Ophelia chants. “Now he has come to save the city. He has come to cleanse the earth!” As she presents the dark behind her, the veteran strains to peer over her shoulder.

“Why lady, there ain’t no one the—”

The president’s saber cuts down through the dark and buries itself in the veteran’s face, his brow cleaving around the blade with a nauseating crack and squelch. Though instantly his legs give out, still he wavers a moment, held up by the blade, inarticulate groans slipping out of his mouth before the blood comes in a trickle, then more prodigiously, splashing the ground. The veteran’s legs and arms convulse.

“Oh, yes,” says Ophelia, her hand at her breast—

In the final scene of Don Giovanni, if Ophelia Mundt is remembering right, the Commendatore offers Don Giovanni a choice: repent of all his mortal sins or go with him this night to hell. “Don Giovanni,” he calls to him, “give me your hand.” But Don Giovanni rebukes him with fear in his eyes—

“He means to save us from ourselves. He means to make the world anew. To make it great again,” she cries, “the way it was before!”

When the veteran’s corpse topples onto the ground, the president barely seems to notice. His saber is already back in its sheath, Duke bearing him regally out of the shadows and onto the path. The president lifts Ophelia with only one arm. “Charmed,” she says girlishly into his ear. She embraces the president’s form from behind. The edge of his scabbard pokes into her thigh. So high in the air she is unsteady, chilly. When she looks down, her nightgown is covered in blood. A lurch of the haunches and Duke sallies forth, his immense, cast-bronze tonnage surprisingly fluid, and she feels clinging there as a plover must feel riding high on the crest of a crocodile’s head—

They set out from the veteran’s body, due south. In spite of the hour, they’re hard to miss. Ne’er-do-wells wander way from their business—the drunks and the cardsharps, the warlocks and chiselers, the laudanum-addicts and ladies of evening, none of whom have yet seen the corpse under the oaks—to greet them as they lumber past.

Soon enough they start cheering:

“Ya batty old bitch!”

“Best watch yourself with that cutlass there, sister!”

“Thank you—oh, thank you!” Ophelia repeats, running fingers through her hair. Again, she wears her white lace dress with the silver star fixed to her forehead, seeing herself as a girl looking on, yet now the cheers are meant for her. They’ve already crossed the south side of the Square when she whispers cautiously, “Where are we going?”

To glory, says the president—

Through the hulking black gates, crossing over Decatur, where Duke’s hooves ring like blacksmith’s anvils, up over the levee and then down again, where the president stops, cocks his head to the side. Are you ready, my dove? he inquires from the saddle. He doesn’t wait to hear her answer, spurring the horse over rubbish and driftwood, over gravel and foam to the edge of the water—

She thinks of Pontalba and all its possessions. She thinks of her children asleep in their beds. Her sorrow is not she can no longer have them but that, in this moment, she wants him more—

She follows the president’s gaze past the banks: between here and Algiers snarls with rushing brown current. The warhorse wades in pasts its knees, then its haunches. The president’s riding boots go next—

The sun rises red, breaking over the water—like the cannon fire lighting her room as a girl on the night the President saved the city, like the stagecraft fire of Don Giovanni when the sinner damns himself to hell. Ophelia squints and shields her eyes—

But the president seems to accept the sun’s challenge, saluting the vanishing world with his hat.