The President's Daughter (14 page)

“Please don't laugh at me, Miss Petit.”

“I'm not laughing, Mr. Wellington.”

“There's something so final about this,” he said mysteriously. His magnificent voice was low and tentative, as if he were transmitting a precious secret.

“I know,” I replied just as mysteriously, although I was thinking, with utter tenderness, this was a final resting place. “How long have you been following me?” I asked.

“Oh, months—ever since that day at the conservatory.”

I see.

“No, you don't. This, this kind of thing ... is not an ordinary occurrence ... at least not for me. It blasts one's soul. The piece of membrane and gristle we call the brain. The organ which separates us from other primates because it recognizes death, this”—he tapped his head—“has gone as charred as coal because of you.” Mr. Wellington looked around the teahouse dramatically.

“Of course, I wouldn't change anything,” he said, smiling. A magnificent row of even white teeth appeared in the brown face.

Ah, my dearest, I thought, but I would. I would. But not you. Not you, Mr. Wellington.

“I know this is most irregular, but I hope you'll allow me to call upon you, now that I've frightened you half to death. I've got tickets for the last concert of the season at the Music Fund Hall. I've seen the program. I know you'll like it. Leon Bukovsky is conducting for the first time in Philadelphia. I know your tastes in music ... please say you'll go with me....” His hand trembled. It was a beautiful hand, long and squarish, with veins that stood on the surface and inspired a well of tenderness in me.

“I'll have to ask my guardian.”

“Of course. I would like permission to write to you formally.”

“Yes. I should show it to Uncle Adrian.”

“Of course.”

A shadow passed. Whether it was overhead in the sky or in the interior of my soul, I don't know.

“You won't change your mind, Miss Petit?”

“I won't change my mind, Mr. Wellington.”

An hour passed. As we sat amongst the other couples, sipping our tea, I was grateful for Charlotte's coaching in the ways and formalities of the Philadelphia gentry. School had taught me manners, comportment, and polite conversation. Reading and being with Charlotte these last two years had polished my pretensions into something resembling the white girl I was impersonating. There would be, I knew, no major mistake, no untoward
behavior. Harriet Hemings of Monticello was only a fleeting image that I caught in the mirror from time to time in a gesture or a thought, but firmly relegated to the past. Not only had I forgotten myself, I had forgotten my mother, my father; I played the orphan perfectly. I realized everyone was pretending about one thing or another. And everyone had secrets. Not necessarily something to hide, as I did, but thoughts, events, and disappointments that they would just as soon not tell the world. The simplicity of Virginian life now held a bemused charm as I realized how intricate, dangerous, and full of subterfuge the North was.

Moreover, being the first city north of the Mason-Dixon line, Philadelphia had its southern sympathies. Many southern families vacationed and shopped here. And as merchants and shipbuilders, Philadelphians did a great deal of their business with the southern states. I fretted over the slight chance that a Tidewater family with sharp eyes and a good memory might unmask me. Or was I being melodramatic? Whom could I possibly meet? And where?

“You're a cousin of Charlotte's, Mr. Wellington?” I asked him.

“Yes indeed.”

“She's my best friend. I have no relatives.”

“No family at all?”

“No family since a yellow fever epidemic in the Tidewater several years ago. My entire family was wiped out. My uncle Adrian is not really my uncle, but he's the closest kin I have left. In this world there are few so alone as I,” I said with sincere feeling.

“Oh, my dear . . . Miss Harriet.”

Words were no longer needed. A lassitude took hold of me as if I had swum a great distance or climbed a huge mountain, or drunk a great deal of Madeira. Perhaps it was only the intoxicating smell of Beck's China, India, and Orient Emporium, with its thousands of spices and hundreds of teas, amalgamated with an overwhelming, worldless odor of mystery, distance, and dreams. Perhaps it was Thance Wellington.

After that first invitation, the Music Fund Hall became one of the few places Thance and I were allowed to go alone. Petit and Mrs. Latouche considered it cultured enough and public enough not to create a problem of propriety for a modern couple, for that is what we had quickly formed. If older men, Charlotte's brother Amos, colleagues from the conservatory had harbored ideas about Harriet Petit, Thance Wellington quickly put them straight. Miss Petit was his girl.

After the last concert of the season, which ended on July 4, most families
moved from the sweltering confines of the city to the outlying counties, Germantown, Cape May, Lemon Hill, Anamacora. I had been invited to Charlotte's family's house in Cape May for the summer. On the way to the concert, Charlotte had warned me, with some amusement on her part, what to expect.

“My mother thinks she ought to have a heart-to-heart talk with you at the Cape, since you are practically engaged. Since you have no womenfolk of your own, she's elected to explain ... sex to you.”

“But Mrs. Latouche has decided to explain sex to me.”

“She doesn't like Mrs. Latouche, the caterer's wife.”

Charlotte turned in her seat and left me to contemplate the idea of Mrs. Rupert Waverly telling me anything about the opposite sex. My lips twitched. I had my hands full trying to control Thance's passion and my more stubborn doubts. Charlotte scrutinized my face and screwed hers up prettily.

“To tell you the truth, I believe I shall never be seriously in love. I always discover something comical in a man, and then it is all over. If he doesn't seem ridiculous, he is awkward, or stupid, or tiresome. In short, there is always something that discovers the ass beneath the lion's skin ... I shall not let myself be caught by any charm. Thank heaven the mania I have of finding out people's faults will prevent my falling in love with one and all of the Adonises on earth.”

At the concert a certain abstracted calm took hold of me as I sat as close to Thance as I dared. I reveled in the voluptuous knowledge that I held him in such thrall that he would never renounce me, never substitute another for me, and never leave me. I thought less of my own yearning than of the torture I could inflict.

“You've never told me you love me,” he whispered, as the orchestra began.

I felt Thance's panic as I withdrew myself, as I always did when he mentioned love. It was not a physical withdrawal, but a mental one, a sudden, slavish renegation of hope. It would come on me suddenly and without warning and could blind me like a bursting shell and cut my breath like a blizzard wind. I stared at the flickering stage lights. Tonight was one of those nights. Love with the joy drawn out of it: loneliness.

I turned away and concentrated on the stage. My middle finger touched every hairpin on my head as if each were a note of music. The gaslights lit the edges of my hair and made the fine edges burn like a bush. I looked at the score in my lap. The pristine notes on the white-ruled paper stared back
mockingly. How could I love him and keep lying to him? Why was his suffering my joy and my shame?

The stage lights intensified and ghostly shadows spread like Chinese lacquer onto the singers, who floated on the music, pale as milk. I put my hand out and touched his knee gently.

“Don't be angry with me.”

“I'm not angry with you; I'm in love with you.”

“So you say.”

Thance grasped my arm, encompassing it in his one hand, leaning forward. “Damn you,” he said, holding me prisoner.

I shook my head and glanced at the silhouettes of Charlotte, Daniel, and Luivicia that stirred with the flickering light. Then I studied Thance's profile outlined by the stage lights. I knew at least one of his secrets. Thance suffered badly. He had injured his twin in a terrible accident as a child and felt himself apart, marked like Cain.

“Kiss me before the lights come up.” His voice came softly out of the shadow by my left shoulder, as if he had moved away from me.

“Why?” I exclaimed in surprise.

“Why?” he echoed sardonically.

I turned and looked at him fixedly, despairingly, for some moments. Then I leaned sideways and kissed him slowly. He pulled back, shocked, while I sat transfixed by the fire he had ignited in my joints. We couldn't touch, but my voice caressed him.

“Now what's wrong?” I drawled.

“There's a space between us,” he said in a low, unconscious voice, as if he were speaking despite himself.

“But I'm very near,” I whispered, gaily raising the tonality of my voice to pure chromatic sweetness, like a singer. For once, I felt really happy. I smoothed the score on my lap.

“You're distant. Always distant,” he said, sulking.

“Well, we can't very well change that now,” I said triumphantly, having him completely at my mercy. I could discern his face in the darkness as he leaned back in his chair. I found him beautiful in his stillness. His masculinity surrounded him like perfume, emanating from the dense, molded contours of his evening clothes, and I loved looking at him. I imagined the music circulating through his veins like blood. My hands slumbered on my open score.

The notes fell like soft raindrops, mingling with the slight rustling of my skirts. I deliberately suppressed the formidable attentiveness and unyielding concentration of Thance's presence and submerged myself in the music. I felt
myself drifting into a profound sleep, the first great sleep of my life.

“It's fine for you,” Thance whispered resentfully. “You aren't in love. But this wound, this infinite opening of my soul, Harriet, this unfolding of my own self, leaving me unfinished, homeless, dissected like a piece of flesh under my own microscope, is the cruelest of events. I can't analyze it or slice it or study it. I will have to take hold of myself. I will have to keep the unfinished business of this yearning through everything you can inflict upon me, but I will never give up. I will not leave you alone, whatever you say or do. When I contemplate you, Harriet, I feel the same as when I look into my microscope and find the quenching knowledge of life's possibilities, the magic of every molecule of matter there, squirming under my eyes. You hold the key to the riddle of my own existence. You may just think I'm tearing at your heart like a little boy who pulls off flies' wings or tears open flower pods just to see what's inside.”

I looked up, barely aware of Thance's words. Why, I wondered, was an icy wind blowing through my heart?

In the close dimness that smelled faintly of whale oil and perfume, the music swelled to its climax. I read the notes off my score, my face flushed and burning, immobile in the velvet plush armchair of Charlotte's mother's box.

“It's beautiful ... beautiful,” I sang in a strange, rhapsodic voice. “There's something so final about it,” I whispered. “Like the end of myself. The final resting place. My home. Do you see what I mean, Thance? The music seems so fragile, golden, soft, heavy, yet like gossamer made only of warmth, its brightness burns the pith of my mind ... blasts my soul. Oh, Thance. You're left helpless, sightless, mindless. You don't want to be free—for anything to be different. Utterly enslaved, you suffer. Do you know what it's like to suffer when you are a woman? A silk whip tears you, and every stroke cutting into your flesh.”

“Oh God,” groaned Thance. “You sound like a victim of some magical rite, torn apart and given to the heavens!”

But I wasn't talking about the music.

“Other men have fallen in love, Wellington; you're not the first. Nor the last. Beware of southern girls, my friend.” I laughed.

The lights rose and applause broke out as if for my last line. I looked around, fingering my gloves, searching the face I so adored, proud and afraid at the same time. Perhaps I could exasperate him to death, I thought. But he simply smiled weakly, shaking his head, his tranquil, dark eyes shining with love.

I wasn't always so cruel. Thance and I had wonderful times that year. We walked Independence past Philadelphia Hall, took boat rides together at the Fairmount Waterworks, or returned to sip tea at Beck's Emporium. Charlotte, Daniel, Amos, Thance, Cornelius, Robert, Frederick, Susy, and Clyde and I ran in a pack that spring. A few weeks before graduation from Bryn Mawr in June, Thance invited me to visit his laboratory at the university.

“I've been researching something fantastic. I must show you.”

“How shall I get in?” I said. “They won't let a woman in.”

“Why don't you dress up like a boy?” Thance said without thinking. “You'd make a pretty apothecary's assistant. Haven't you ever wanted to be a boy?”

“Always. There's not a woman alive who hasn't wanted to be a man at some point in her life,” I replied without smiling.

Apothecaries and their assistants wore long, saffron-colored smocks, cut like double-breasted butchers' smocks, with huge buttons and tiny pillbox hats of the same heavy sailcloth cotton. Often they wore them over street clothes; unbuttoned, they billowed like yellow fins. They sometimes wore white cuffs on the bottoms of their sleeves to protect their wrists from various compounds and minerals, like the corrosive acids and, above all, mercury. I was entitled, as an assistant, to an indigo smock only, with a matching hat. This was how Thance and I were dressed as we raced up the steps of the Pharmacy School building at First and Sansom streets. A nonchalant concierge waved us both in, and I tried to keep a straight face as we marched down the corridor to his office, our hands clasped behind our backs, my feet pinched in Petit's two-sizes-too-small boots. Thance's reading spectacles hung around his neck, and as the light from the overhead skylights struck them from time to time, they flashed like a coded message.