The President's Daughter (31 page)

The gardens were laid out Italian-style, alternating fruit, vegetables, and flowers in rigid geometric patterns of colored greenery transversed by long alleys and vistas which ended in statuary or marble fountains. We passed orange and olive groves, lemon trees clipped in topiary, and fruit trees standing in squares of lavender and rosemary. Jasmine and morning glory climbed over stone walls, some crumbling, which divided the gardens from the fields in which I could see workers moving. The scents of basil and magnolia mingled with a dozen other fragrances in a riot of odors that climbed the walls like roses, settling on the sun-baked walls like mist. Through the opening I could see the vineyards in the distance on the surrounding hills, their slopes pierced with serpentine rivers, which flowed amongst the cornfields and rice paddies, dotted with cypress and evergreens.

I stopped for a second and slowly raised my veil and took off my straw hat in order to feel the sun on my bare head. I closed my eyes against the magnificence that existed in the same world with injustice and misery. Could I belong here, I reasoned, rather than in a country that despised me, where a single drop of blood that recalled my origins was enough to raise a barrier of disgust and revulsion that I could never transcend?

I followed the nun, whose name was Sarah, into a rectangular interior court lined with mosaic-encrusted pillars supporting high arched arcades that provided shade and portals for the nuns' cells that gave onto it. Each cell had a window and a wooden hatch for food. The pavement was of thick white stone
and slabs of terra-cotta, and terra-cotta pots held flourishing oleander trees in blue, white, and magenta.

We had arrived at the chapel of the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie and the abbess's loggia. Would I care to refresh myself, asked Sarah, before my interview with the baroness? I accepted and was shown to one of the rooms giving onto the court, which proved to be a large, airy, and simple room of red and yellow brick with a white marble floor, furnished with heavy northern Italian furniture. There was a bedstead draped with a white muslin mosquito net, a table with a simple chair, and an armchair. To one side was a high, deep cupboard and a small carved stool. There was an oil lamp, and on the walls hung the white porcelain plates of Lodi and a blue-and-white porcelain crucifix.

I laid my hat on the bed and removed my gloves. I washed my face and hands in the blue porcelain basin beside the bed. I smoothed my hair by rote, as there was no mirror, although I could see my reflection in the washbasin. I looked very severely Philadelphian and extremely American. I heard the door latch lift behind me and another English voice say, “La madre superiore will see you now.”

What did I expect to learn from this strange, eccentric courtesan-painter about my father's past? Did I want only to verify that she had actually existed, had seen him, touched him, loved him? What did any of this have to do with my mother's choice of slavery over freedom?

The abbess rose as I entered the room. I did not know what my greeting to her would be; there was no need, for she greeted me first.

“But you are American . . . Patsy! Is that you? . . . but no, you cannot be; you must be her . . . daughter. You are one of Martha Randolph's daughters? Surely you are a member of Thomas's family?”

The abbess stopped, confused, almost angry. She couldn't tell me who I was. Then she smiled at me.

“I'm not Patsy's daughter,” I said. “I'm her half sister, Harriet of Mon-ticello. The President's natural daughter ...”

I flung the words defiantly into the stunned, expectant silence. What could be worse than trying to explain oneself? But the smile remained.

“A natural daughter of Mr. Jefferson? Patsy's half sister?” said Maria Cosway.

“Yes.”

“And your father sent you to me?”

I looked down at my hands. I wished it were true. Should I lie?

“No,” I replied. “He doesn't know I'm here. Or even that I know of your existence. I don't know why I came, except ... no, my father has not sent
me away in the way you think ... as a recognized bastard ... in the English manner. For we are many children at Monticello, in truth slaves since we are our mother's children, but allowed to run away when we are twenty-one and pass for white.”

“Pass ... for white?”

“Yes.”

“Aren't you white?”

“A slave can't be white ... at least in America.”

“Ah ... I see.”

“You mistook me for my half sister.”

“Indeed. And your mother's still alive?”

“Yes.”

“And you are the youngest?”

“No, I have two younger brothers.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four—you look much younger,” she said pensively. “Imagine, a letter to your father is on my desk. We have corresponded as friends for all these years without our ever having seen each other since Paris. Once, long ago, I had thought to visit him in America, but I never did.”

I stared at the abbess. She was everything I hated. I hated her because she was white. I hated her because my father had loved her once. I hated her because perhaps he still loved her. I hated her because she had shared more of my father's life through his letters, living three thousand miles away and absent for over thirty years, than I ever had sleeping twenty-one years in his house.

“Please, sit down, Harriet, before you fall down.”

Maria Cosway was as beautiful as my mother, and like my mother, her adventurous life seemed to have left no trace on her face. Her body was so wrapped in white linen that there was little to see of it. Her habit was a medieval one of layers of starched linen caught high under the breast and hanging in a bell to the floor. It was covered by a starched apron in front, and behind by a wide, capelike train attached at the shoulders by two gold pins between which was suspended a heavy gold chain carrying a large, jeweled, magnificent crucifix. Her coif was triangular and hung to her shoulders. The stiff linen was held by a pale blue cotton crown made from galloon ribbon, which formed a cross over her skull and fitted tight across her brow. It was held in place by a chin strap, so that only a small portion of her face was visible. To the ribbon of her crown was attached a monocle which she had pulled down over her left eye, enlarging it to twice the size of the other.
The great blue cyclopean depth swam with unasked questions.

As she leaned forward, the long sleeves of her habit swept forward onto the table that separated us. The lens glinted in the late-afternoon sun and sent a kaleidoscopic pattern of light onto the wall. I noticed she was ample, almost fat. As she rose, an iron rosary and a ring of keys clashed at her waist, reminding me of my grandmother.

“You are incognito, then?”

“It is rather an extravagant name for what I am, but yes—one could say that I am incognito.”

“You are not . . . wanted by the police?”

“No.”

“You think I am a part of your father's life that's been hidden from you?”

“All of my father's life has been hidden from me.”

“You . . . look so much like Thomas Jefferson, one can hardly deny your kinship.”

“I came with a delegate to the antislavery conference in London.”

“How fitting.” She laughed. “Your father had a very bizarre attitude toward freedom. He wanted it for some and slavery for others.”

“The attitude of a Virginian.”

“So I'm told.”

“His letters are about Monticello's beauty and freedom. America is a place I should like to visit ... to paint.”

“You ... still paint?” I asked despite myself, my eyes following her as she walked from behind the table to my side. I had to turn my head and look up at her, my hands folded in my lap.

“No. I have abandoned art for the glory of God,” replied Maria Cosway, turning away from me and beginning to pace. “Do you believe in God, or are you of the persuasion of your father?

“I'm a Unitarian.”

“He wrote to me that he's quite taken with Unitarianism. That it is the religion of the future—a kind of modern deism. Did you know that?”

“No.”

She turned toward me, her back to the window, and lifted her monocle.

“You came here for a reason, my child. What is it? You are very beautiful, and obviously your education hasn't been neglected.
Someone
has taken care of you. If not your father, then who? Who has raised you?”

“Adrian Petit,” I whispered.

“Adrian! The majordomo of the Hôtel de Langeac!
Plus ça change . . . ,
And he's the one who told you about me,
n'est-ce pas?”

“Yes.”

“And he told you everything, I suppose.”

“Everything that he knew.”

“Petit knew everything.”

“And I believe he thought that you, who also have lived a double life, might have the answer to my own dilemma.”

“Ah, so you're in love . . . with a man who doesn't know who you are.”

“How did you guess?”

“Hardly difficult for one who has led, as you say, a double — nay, a triple, nay, a quadruple — life, my dear. But why, since you are not
my
daughter, should I care what you do with your life? It is not ... this habit which makes me infallible. On the contrary—”

“Because you are an artist.”

“I thought I was once. But what do you think art has to do with life?”

“An artist invents his life.”

“Ah, Harriet, when I was your age, I thought I was doing that. I thought all things were possible.” She held out her arms, and the sleeves of her habit caught the slight breeze coming from the open window like sails. The keys at her waistband struck a flat, musical chord. “Now I know there is no such thing as a double life—or a single identity. I have come to believe here in Lodi in a heresy . . . We are only grains of sand in God's hand. It is obnoxious and ostentatious to believe we have a
life,
a free will, a destiny other than that which God has already, in his wisdom, given us—predestined forces, preordained for us. Of all of God's creatures, artists are the most insubordinate, the most infidel, the most pretentious, and therefore the most sinful. Not only do I consider my life a heresy, I consider my painting a sacrilege.”

“And music?”

“The same, of course. Why? Are you a musician?”

“I aspire to be.”

“As bad as, if not worse than, painting.”

“But Bach, Haydn, Schubert! All to God's glory, surely these are not abominations!”

“They are not reality, either.”

“Then nothing is real?”

“Nothing.” Her mouth turned down in contempt. “So you see, Harriet, since nothing is real, nothing is deception. Or rather, everything is illusion: me, your father, your mother, your color, your sex, your race. Freedom is illusion—so is death. Does this help you? Is this what you wanted to hear?”

“I don't know—”

“Don't lie, Harriet. You want my permission to live a life of illusion, as
a nonexistent color, for love. Isn't that it? Your lover—your fiancé, perhaps —is white and you want to be that, too. For him and to spite your father. But as a painter I must tell you that color only exists in relation to another color, that the edges of one color touching another is what produces not only both colors, but a
third
color that lies between the two and which defines the first two. You are that third color, neither the one nor the other, but which invents both. What would your mother be without your father? But what would your father be without your mother? If there were no black people, white people would have to invent them.”

“Did you love my father?”

“You mean is your father lovable, don't you? Is it possible for you to love him after everything he's done to you? Your father is a genius, Harriet, and people, especially women, must make great concessions to genius.”

Yes, I thought, my mother, frozen in time in the depths of her tobacco fields, had made great concessions. How Maria Cosway, frozen in time in the frame of her convent window, resembled her! Were they different, one from the other? One buried in servitude to my father at Monticello, the other buried in servitude to God at
her
monticello? And my father
being
the God. They were like twins, this abbess and that recluse, bitter and unforgiving sides of the same coin. Yes, this eccentric, bohemian abbess had lived a life of such willful egotism and fantasy and deception that my idea of her being my mother's twin was absurd. Nothing was more different from my father's and mother's life than that of
la maestra.

Yet, that afternoon, she gave me the courage to invent myself as my mother had not done. I couldn't say I liked Maria Cosway, but I couldn't say I hated her either. She just
was,
like an act of nature, a totally amoral creature —a cat, a tree, a rock. A part of the complicated and mysterious man who had sequestered my mother for thirty years. She urged me to suppress the slave in me, to suppress the fugitive in me, to suppress the daughter in me. To reach out boldly and seize life as well as love. To take what I wanted without totting up the price. And what would be left of Harriet Hemings? I asked. Her answer was, “Names are the purest of all accidents.”

She had lied in the beginning by claiming she had given up painting for the glory of God. Maria Cosway painted still, and supremely well. She herself had executed the frescoes on the walls of the private apartments in which we now stood. The fireplace was sculpted as a cavern cut out of the rock, and opposite it a sculpted fountain played. The salon walls were painted with views representing the four quarters of the globe.

“This,” said Maria Cosway, pointing to one corner, “is the hill where I intended to paint Monticello and your father's university, but your father never got around to sending me a description. Perhaps you could describe them to me so that I may finish my room.” She smiled.