The President's Daughter (8 page)

She was the President's daughter.

The Daughter had eyes which were the perfect combination of the blue of her Father's and the yellow of her Mother's, producing a limpid emerald with tawny irises edged in gray. The preternaturally pale and milky skin hid a blush of penny copper which seemed to reflect a darker core under its translucency. Her nose was long like his, and narrow, but her mouth was just the opposite: generous, full, and wide, with an upper lip that was slightly fuller than the lower. Her high cheekbones pulled her eyes, bright with
running away, upward toward temples that were stretched taut by a lavish coil of basket plaits the color of red corn. As I said, she was almost as tall as her father, with wide shoulders and a fine bosom, a waist that was no more than a hand span, and hands that were long, narrow, and had never seen hard work. She had a densely luminous, astoundingly compelling smile that seduced both men and women indiscriminately. But what was strange was an inexplicable and hypnotic charisma that hovered about her, wholly different from that of an ordinary young girl; it was an aura that surrounded the rich, famous, or notorious. It was as if Harriet, having been born at the height of the national scandal over her mother and father's liaison, had absorbed with her mother's milk all the sexual innuendos, lewd vibrations, and obscene accusations of that maelstrom of controversy. She exuded the faint perfume of transgressions that she had never committed and that had nothing to do with her, which, in the face of her innocence, gave her a provocativeness and an unnerving sexual duality that might have been explained away if she had been black, but she was white. Like demons the epithets of those awful days that had engulfed her mother and father, and us all, seemed to cling to her:
Black Asparia, Lower- World Nymph, Dusky Sally, Blackamoor, Monticellian Sally, Negro Wench, Sooty Sal, False Ethiop.
This innocent and sequestered girl trailed the shreds of secondhand celebrity like shrapnel clinging to a magnet.

Yet Harriet seemed completely unconscious of the effect this produced on men.

The President had stood framed by the low window out of which I could see the shady lawns of Monticello and, in the distance, his Blue Ridge Mountains, which the soft promise of summer had turned a deep mauve. The stillness in the room had seemed to echo the silence of the landscape before everything suddenly darkened with the rush of swift clouds passing across the sky. I heard a cough and then the palsied hand lifted as if in benediction as the good one shot out so abruptly that it was all I could do to restrain myself from falling to my knees in the old-fashioned obeisance of the ancien régime. He shook my hand.

His Excellency had changed. But hadn't we all? Thirty years was, after all, a long time. Thirty-five if one went back to the Paris of '87. My former master was now nearly eighty, his presidency fourteen years behind him, his ambassadorship more than thirty. Burrowed into the thin ascetic face were the lines of his uncommon destiny, blunted by the passage of time into an expression of benevolent sovereignty and self-entitlement. But I was not
duped. No man is a hero to his valet, after all. The fifteen years that I had served the President in that capacity had made me an expert in discerning the rage and despondency that had brought on the pain he was trying to hide. He was angry with the woman standing beside her daughter outside in the hallway: the Mother who had stopped me outside the door and who had not changed from the first time I saw her in the drawing room of the Adamses' London home thirty-five years ago. It was as if every line on the President's face had, at the same time, been spared from her own, leaving only a patinated oval of burnished ivory, impassive as a moon, yet thrillingly omnipresent. And it was clear her imponderable power over the man standing before me was still intact after all these years.

I continued evaluating the President, noticing the new glaze of encroaching cataracts in his eyes, remembered how the mane of snow white hair, which now rose in tendrils like a field of corn silk standing on end, had once been the wild, burnished vermilion of the young girl standing just outside the door beside the Mother.

I smoothed my own shiny cranium in honest envy. Once, in the old days before the Revolution, it had been covered with unruly dark curls. Now I compensated for my baldness by cultivating luxuriant sideburns which I combed forward toward my eyebrows and which gave me the distinct allure of an extremely handsome chimpanzee. I was short, not even five feet eight, and slender almost to gauntness. I had the blue-tinged chin of a twice-a-day shaver, and the livid complexion of a man whose profession is good food and wine. Since leaving the President's service some twenty years ago, I had made a fortune in Washington as a caterer to the political elite of that city. My great success was based on my French accent, which I used as a prop for my impersonation of an aristocrat swept from fortune and power by the famous events of 1789.

I, too, had been not much more than a slave for the first eighteen years of my life. Set to work at seven or eight (I never knew which, for I never knew my exact birthdate), I had been sent by my parents to the Château de Landry, where I learned the menial duties of the lowest lackey, coal boy, and even bed warmer. By nine I had been buggered by the master, his son, and the head groom. By twelve I had bedded the scullery maid and the master's illegitimate daughter. My monies, if they could be called that, were sent directly to my father, and so I stole in order to have pocket money of my own. Being attractive to both sexes, I rose in the servant hierarchy of the château to second butler, and it was then I decided to try my luck in a Paris kitchen, only to be told that I had been sold by my prince and could not leave the boundaries of the estate on pain of whipping, prison, or death. I was the
merchandise which carried itself, so I promptly stole myself, changed my name, and escaped to Paris. I was taken into the service of Prince Kontousky, who eventually recommended me to the new American ambassador. I quickly made myself indispensable in his service and gained his esteem. I must say I loved my new master and did everything I could to make his life more amenable. His way with servants was new to me, based as it was on the plantation system, and I marveled at our imagined intimacy. He actually conversed with me, even to asking my opinion in certain matters. This quaint American custom soon went to my head, and I vowed undying devotion to such an egalitarian.

The familiar room at Monticello served as both bedroom and study for the man who finally signaled me to sit down. The walls were upholstered in red, and red draperies trimmed with gold tassels hung at the windows and enclosed the bed, which was built inside an alcove in the middle of the room that separated it into a distinct bedroom on one hand and a study on the other. Built into the alcove was a door which opened onto a miniature staircase leading to an entresol over the President's bed, which led to the second-floor corridor. Three bull's-eye windows in the passageway looked down upon the scene below. For years, this was how the Mother had left and entered the President's chambers without being seen by the prying eyes of hordes of servants and visitors. The staircase, which had been invented for her and built in her image, was so minuscule that the President's wide shoulders would not fit into its width, and so cleverly disguised, it seemed a portrait of the woman herself. It, like she, took up no space at all, and if one did not know for a fact of its existence, it would be the easiest thing in the world to dismiss it as a figment of one's imagination.

I knew the room itself by heart. Disorderly piles of letters overflowed the large writing table, and columns of stacked books lined the walls along which were artifacts, maps, and marble portraits of Franklin, Lafayette, and Washington. The bust of the President that the French sculptor Houdon had carved in Paris thirty-seven years earlier stood in mild reproach to lost youth, fierce intelligence, and the suppressed sensuality of his forty-second year. The handsome features were lost under a layer of dust, the hooded eyes fixed on dreaming some impossible dream. There were unopened crates marked
WINE,
or stamped with the addresses of Boston and Philadelphia publishing houses. The worn Persian rugs glowed in the half-light, the lemon-scented French furniture gleamed, the Italian paintings winked from the walls, and the expensive, polished brass scientific instruments glowered uselessly from a forgotten corner. To my highly educated nose the atmosphere reeked, like its occupant, of ink, horseflesh, and mildew while a Franklin stove blazed in the
center of the room despite the balminess of a May day.

“Can you believe, Petit, that this year alone I've received one thousand sixty-seven letters—not counting, of course, dunning letters from all my creditors? I spend all my time answering other people's questions. I often wonder if this is life. At best it is the life of a mill horse who sees no end to his circle except in death.”

The President's high-pitched, youthful voice had reverted to the easy familiarity of our former master-servant relationship.

Money, I thought as my eyebrows rose in distress. When a man spoke of creditors and death in the same sentence, he was getting ready to ask for a loan. I had heard through the Washington grapevine that the old man was in dire straits. The President had mortgaged his plantations and had sold Monticellian slaves to his son-in-law. He had bankrupted himself to build his new university in Richmond. A note of twenty thousand dollars he had endorsed out of friendship for the governor of Virginia had fallen due on the eve of the governor's death, which had left him obligated for the entire sum. Moreover, I knew how costly the President's life-style (not counting his slaves) was. His sumptuous and openhanded hospitality was legendary. The plantation of Monticello was run as the equivalent of a London club and a Paris hotel. I, who had risen from valet to caterer in Washington City, whose first industry was eating in restaurants and sleeping in hotels, calculated that if I were paying for my own services, my former employer's household expenses would be enough to break my catering business in less than a year.

I immigrated to the United States thirty-one years ago, in 1791, at his invitation, to serve as his majordomo at his seat at Monticello, just as I had served him between '84 and '89, at the American embassy in Paris. Then I followed him to Philadelphia, then to Washington when he was elected President, and served him at the White House. After the President left office I remained in Washington and made a fortune speculating in real estate, thanks to the tips of the political figures I catered to. And, if the truth were known, I was at this moment a great deal richer than my former master. But the President continued as if money was not at all the subject of discussion.

“Consider this letter,” he said as he held up a sheet of paper covered with algebraic equations. “A curious northerner named Francis Gray wrote me and asked me what constituted a mulatto in our country, or more simply when black becomes white. I have written Mr. Gray that three crossings with white clears the issue of Negro blood.”

My eyes blinked and I almost rose from the shock of having guessed correctly. So it was the girl, the Daughter, and the promise made in Paris so long ago! My eyes drifted toward the staircase and then back to the President.

“Which brings us to our problem, Petit. You see, Petit, she is white enough to pass for white.”

“Who?” I asked, as if I didn't know. But I knew.

“This . . . member of my family. ... I promised . . . another member of my family in Paris ... if you remember, that is .. . That is that all of my ... of her family, would be allowed to ‘stroll,' as we call it in Virginia ... at the age of twenty-one as free white persons. And tomorrow is . . . her birthday. Two of her brothers have already left. . . . Since she is white enough to pass for white, I say let her go.”

The violence in the old man's voice had been like an odor in the room. I half rose, sniffing in alarm. The President's twilight eyes were steadfast as evening stars, blinking in the dusky, gray silence. The great mass of silver hair was backlit with mauve and stood on end, while the tumultuous voice rose and fell hypnotically. All I could think of was a cartoon I had seen recently in the
London Observer
of a wild-haired, raving alchemist stirring a bubbling tub of magic potions, searching for the equation of the elixir of life. The only difference was that this was the President of the United States searching for a way out of the crime of miscegenation.

“I remember you held her in your arms right here at Monticello. You know her mother and loved her uncle James. Because you know ... all the parties involved, I am asking this service of you, Petit. Escort her to a free state where she can disappear into the white population. Find her a home or a school and take care of her until she finds a husband who can offer her protection in your stead. I ask this in the name of her mother, who has always had a place, I believe, in your affections. I have made out the necessary papers for Burwell and Fossett. If you want to take the phaeton, it will be cheaper and safer than a public stage, and you will not have to stop until you cross the Mason-Dixon line. I have made out a letter of credit for fifty dollars, which is as much as I can afford at this time of great financial difficulty. I beg you, Adrian, accommodate me in this. Please.”

I did rise then, as if my movements were a lighted match in a room full of explosives. With horror I realized I was to escort the daughter out of slavery just as in Paris I had escorted the mother out of slavery thirty-five years before.

“Where shall she go, Your Excellency?”

“To Philadelphia.”

The name was like a knife in my heart.

The old man stared bleakly at me without further words. The President, who had never once said please to me in his whole life, was begging. His bastard children were leaving him one by one. His legitimate ones, Maria,
Lucy I and Lucy II, Jane, and his unnamed son, were all dead. His grandchildren, Francis, Thomas, and Meriwether, were at loggerheads with one another. His only living legitimate daughter, Martha, was unhappy in marriage, living apart from a brutal, half-crazed husband, the drunken ex-governor of Virginia. Thomas Mann Randolph refused to live under his father-in-law's roof. The whole refuge of family life that my former master had so carefully nurtured had crumbled down around him.