The President's Daughter (18 page)

“ ‘Not anymore. Any money you get from me from now on will be charity.'

“ ‘Charity, my foot! You ordered me to expose Hamilton's love intrigue, to defame Washington and Adams, favoring me with gifts of money and praise. I have your letters, remember?'

“ ‘Damn my letters! I want them back.'

“ ‘Over my dead body.'

“Your father gave the order for the Republican party newspapers to cut Callender to pieces. They dredged up his old life in Scotland and accused him of blackmailing his old patron, Lord Gladstone. And soon a tornado of abuse was unleashed—the squallor and horror of the death of Callender's wife, his writing as filth, blasphemy, and pollution. The Republican newspaper editor Meriwether Jones realized that to hurl insults would not stop the spread of the Sally Hemings story, so he began by blaming you children on somebody else. ‘Is it strange,' Jones wrote, ‘therefore that a servant of Mr. Jefferson's, at a house where so many strangers resort, who is daily engaged in the ordinary vocations of the family, like thousands of others, should have a mulatto child? Certainly not. . . .' Certainly not since Jones himself had a black mistress whom he had moved into his house. This had so offended Callender that he moved out, refusing Jones's hospitality, which he had enjoyed for months. Then Jones accused Callender with the murder of his,
Callender's, own wife in an unspeakable way. This was all Callender needed. He printed what he knew about your mother. “If Thomas Jefferson had not violated the sanctuary of the grave (Callender's dead wife), Sally and her son Tom would still, perhaps, have slumbered in the tomb of oblivion,” he wrote.

“There was no stopping the scandal: articles, poems, insults, dirty jokes. Callender was threatened with tar and feathers, horsewhipping, and murder. Your father's Republican friends were warned that if they did not cast Jefferson overboard, like the prophet Jonah, the party would be gone forever. Many Federalist editors reprinted Callender's material, and many begged your father for evidence of his innocence. They waited in vain. His silence was seen, of course, as evidence of his guilt. When no denial came from your father, the newspapers made their own inquiries and printed the proofs of what they found. They admonished him again and again for ‘not having married some worthy woman of your own complexion,' as they put it.”

“Poor Papa,” I whispered.

“Poor Sally Hemings. And if it was James and not one of the Virginia gentry who gave Callender his information, may God have pity on his soul.”

“The ballads and the riddles were the cruelest. And my mother saw them.”

“Some of them, surely. Meriwether Jones wished Callender in hell via the James River . . . ‘Oh!' he wrote, ‘for a dose of the James River,' and that is where he ended,” sighed Petit. “Callender's body was buried in haste; the same day he drowned, without any official inquiry and without ceremony.”

Like a veil being torn away, I remembered my mother describing how this same Meriwether Jones danced a jig on the front lawn of Monticello when he heard that James Callender was dead. And I remembered the howls of grief and weeping of my mother and grandmother when news of James's death was brought by Burwell.

“Ah, Harriet,” Petit said, “don't try to understand everything at once. Especially not your mother and your father. Meanwhile, take a good look, Harriet, then forget this house where James died. This building is no longer a part of your biography.”

“I've changed my color, Petit, not my soul. . . .”

“Why do you young people always assume you are the only ones with delicate feelings, noble sentiments, and an inviolable soul? Souls are bought and sold every day, and not all of them in slavery. And there are all kinds of slavery—the slow erosion of the heart, of the mind, of the body. This you will learn as you grow old!”

But that day, I never intended to grow old. I wasn't going to be the fugitive, the criminal, the thief, and the orphan that my uncle, my father, and my mother had made me. I was going to marry Thance.

I gazed up once more at the tall, narrow, three-storied red brick house. The green-gabled roof with its twelve chimneys and the white woodwork and sashes and white marble steps suddenly seemed ominous. The bland, curtain-less windows and the lilac lacquered door seemed to hold some sinister message,
MASSON'S BOARDING HOUSE, BED AND BREAKFAST FOR SINGLE GENTLEMEN
. Or those ready to commit suicide, I thought. I recalled the description of my uncle's cynical laughter and his favorite saying. According to Adrian: “Have you ever met one white man who did not ask you for something or take something away from you?”

I shivered and clutched Petit's arm even tighter.

“God stand up for bastards,” I whispered.

The Almighty has never made known to anybody at what time he created it, nor will he tell anybody when he will put an end to it, if he ever means to do it. As to preparations for that event, the best way is for you always to be prepared for it. Our Maker has given us all this faithful internal monitor, and if you always obey it, you will always be prepared for the end of the world; as for a much more certain event, which is death. This must happen to all; it puts an end to the world as to us.

Thomas Jefferson

Charlotte had been right about the ring—it was a magnificent sapphire set in antique gold. I willed myself not to think as Thance slipped it on my finger.

“It is rather exceptional,” I said, “that your best friend tells you about your engagement instead of the other way around.”

Thance threw back his head and laughed. The black cowlick rose, then fell in place across his forehead.

“Your lips said no that day, but those beautiful emerald eyes of yours said yes.”

“Did they really?”

“Oh, yes.”

Thance drew me in and bent to kiss me. His eyes were calm and happy. His hands slipped under my armpits and along the curve of my bosom. This evoked a strange sensation. My breath came sharply and my eyes narrowed. He stepped back.

“Harriet, Harriet,” he whispered hoarsely.

“I got a second invitation from your mother today. This time with my guardian,” I said, pulling us both back from desire's edge.

“You don't mind?”

“No. I realize it's a scary thing for her—another woman in her son's life.”

“Then ... you have no more doubts? No reticence? You will marry me?”

I smiled without answering, my heart accelerating. What was I going to do?

“Thor will be returning in time for the wedding. I've written to him. I couldn't get married without him. You do want a wedding, don't you, Harriet?”

My eyes turned as dark and hard as flint.

“I want to be married in a church. I want to walk down the aisle. ...” My throat felt dry and raspy.

“Then it's settled?” Thance insisted.

“I don't know. I don't . . . it's much harder than you think.”

“I don't understand you, Harriet.”

“Thance, you don't have to. Just love me, and forgive me.” Suddenly I knew I must escape from this lie.

From the beginning, I had tried not to fabricate myself for Thance. The childhood I recounted was the one I had eavesdropped on, lurking in the shadows of the big house, watching Ellen, Cornelia, and Jeff bask in the affection of Thomas Jefferson. For Thance's benefit I grafted the life of my white cousins onto my own.

“My father went away the year I was born,” I told Thance, “and I hardly saw anything of him except in summer until he returned home in retirement. I was eight years old by then.

“On the winter evenings, when it grew too dark to read, in the half hour which passed before candles came in, we all sat round the fire as he played with us, teaching us childish games. I remember ‘cross-question' and ‘I love my love with an
A. ' ”

“I love my love with an
A, “
Thance whispered, fingering a fold in my skirt.

“When the candles arrived we became quiet. He would take up his book to read, and we would not speak above a whisper lest we disturb him. Generally we too took a book. Often I watched him raise his eyes from his own book and gaze around the little circle of readers and smile. . . .”

I faltered as I told Thance, for even now I felt the burning pain of the
jealousy I had felt so often. “And when the snow fell, we would go out with shovels as soon as it stopped, to clear it off the terraces so that he might have his usual walk without treading snow. You see, he was quite old. He was fifty-eight when I was born.

“I remember his giving us the novel
Tristram Shandy.
He who drew the longest straw could read the book first; the next longest straw entitled the reader to the second reading; the shortest straw was the last who got to read the book.”

I turned away from Thance, deep in memory.

How Beverly and Eston had lusted after those books, I thought. The books rarely came down to us except in tattered fragments. During the building of the university, wagonloads of books would arrive and Beverly would go down to the storage depot and hang around them as if they were Saturday-night prostitutes.

Thance waited expectantly.

“Often,” I continued, “my father discovered, we knew not how, some cherished object of our desires, and the first intimation we had of his knowing the wish would be its unexpected gratification. I had, for the longest time, a great desire to have a guitar. One morning, on serving—I mean, being served —breakfast, I saw the guitar, which belonged to a lady in the neighborhood who was moving west, but she had asked such a high price for it that I never, in my dreams, aspired to its possession. My father told me if I promised to learn to play it, it was mine. I shall never forget my ecstasies. I was sixteen. I had had a terrible accident.”

“The time Charlotte said you caught your foot in the squirrel trap?” said Thance gently.

“Yes. And as a consolation I got a guitar—not a new one, of course, but mine,” I lied.

“Oh, my darling Harriet, how I wish to be that old guitar, to be the first wish of your heart.”

Sadly, I turned his long, square hand over in mine.

Throughout the winter, I continued my tales about my imaginary life with my father at Monticello, inventing solitary walks and intimate conversations, birthday presents and Christmas celebrations. I invented wild horseback rides across Monticellian fields and excursions to Richmond for shopping. Everything seemed to flow so easily from the observations and dreams of the first twenty-one years of my life. I so forgot the lie that it was summer when the recognition of what I was doing began to consume my courage.

I was staying with Charlotte's family on Cape Cod, and Thance, Amos, and Dennis would come up to visit us.

The days were full of pale liquid sunshine. The whole summer had been the most serene, the happiest I had ever known. Life itself, which had always seemed so precarious to me, had taken on the sheen of safety and contentment. I felt myself loved, and at last I loved in return. I wanted to marry Thance Wellington and for a brief time, I saw nothing to hinder me. I looked back at Thance, riding slightly behind, lazily, his dark head flashing like jet in the soft coastal lights of August.

Even from a distance, his silhouette as we rode together was as familiar as it was dear: the smallish head with its thatch of black hair, the thick neck and shoulders of a rower, the straight back and long, muscular legs encased in dark green riding britches and boots. Moreover, if I closed my eyes, I could imagine the long, square hands, the flecks of yellow deep in the black eyes, the perfect white teeth in the beautiful mouth, the clipped chin, the pale shadow of beard, the perfect shells of his ears, the eyebrows, in their shape of the “fs” of a violin, that almost grew together over the bridge of his nose. I had seen him working bare-chested in the Waverly potato field one day with Dennis and Amos, and so I knew there was soft, dark down on his chest and lower arms and the amazingly smooth muscles of a strong field hand.

I urged my mount to a trot, throwing Thance a conspiratorial wave, and he saw it and followed me into the stand of woodlands just beyond. We drew together, and the two horses were so close they rubbed flanks as we moved forward and kissed like two passionate equestrian statues thrown together off their respective pedestals, unable to touch anywhere except on the lips. The woods closed in on us, forming a cocoon of green shell shot through with dappled light that made a low canopy over our heads and caught us and held us in a dream beyond the world's touch.

I was shocked when he drew away from me and the walls of my cloister dissolved and I found myself once again prey to the touch of air, to sound and color, to the rustlings of Charlotte's mount approaching. In those brief moments before brother and sister crashed through the woods, I had time to savor my victory: I had achieved the impossible dream I had pursued ever since I could remember.

“If you were nothing more than the sound of your voice, I would love you,” said Thance.

A vagrant beam of light fell across the clearing and lay briefly on the glistening, papery birchbark, illuminating the peeling strips as if the trees were on fire. I forgot the secret between us. I forgot everything except the happiness that was mine and the twin ardors of love and ambition Thance stood for. The world seemed filled with plenty and as much promise as the season itself.

“Meet me tonight. My room. Midnight . . .”

Charlotte and Amos broke into our sanctuary, laughing. We rode back together along the coast, the sea to our right, passing the scythed meadows edged with sloping hills and the sepia of fields. They exuded the stale sunburned sweetness of wheat stubble, the salt of low tide and marshes, the faint smell of surf. Summer and happiness had reached their apogee. Charlotte's back receded in the hail and glitter of rolling surf, following her unbelievably raucous laughter. Once I had captured a future by speaking on one hand and holding my tongue on the other.