Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  Involuntarily Short glanced ahead to young eighteen-year-old John Quincy Adams, marching resolutely if unsteadily beside his mother Abigail, with his left foot on the street and his right foot on the curb. For the honor of the ceremony at Panthemont, Johnny’s dark brown hair had been “frizzled” (Abigail’s impatient term) into a state of unnatural, even luminous, curliness.

  “Not hair,” said Miss Adams, showing the unnerving family ability to read thoughts. “I meant our thinking. But it is certainly true that everyone’s hair is metamorphosed here.”

  “Not your mother’s.”

  “No.” Miss Adams shook her own very slightly frizzled head in agreement. Abigail Adams was notorious for insisting that she could not be seen in public without her head covered—she had mysteriously lost four of her five caps on the ocean voyage over and replaced them only with enormous difficulty in Paris. In the fashionable company proceeding now along the street, her tall white mobcap bounced up and down like a runaway cake.

  “Mama permitted Esther and John to go to the hairdresser last week—the other servants were ridiculing them for being un-powdered, but Esther wept because it took so long and her hair looked so strange afterward. Now,” Miss Adams added with her father’s tartness, “she seems happy as a lark.”

  Short touched the edges of his own immaculately curled and powdered hair and squinted to see where the party was turning. Rue de Grenelle was new territory for him, so narrow and clogged with carriages and people this morning that they had all gotten out two hundred yards from the convent entrance and started to walk.

  “Mother says—” Miss Adams began. They came to a halt at the end of the line filing into the convent. Thirty, forty people or more had now converged—Abigail and Johnny were lost in a sea of wigs and billowing skirts. An elderly French couple smelling of gallons of rosewater pushed ahead of them. Short cupped his hands and blew into them for warmth and then fumbled for his ticket of admission. “Mother says,” Miss Adams resumed, “that to be out of fashion is more criminal in Paris than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse.”

  She darted a glance at Short, conscious perhaps that she had gone rather far.

  Short smiled and led her forward. “Mr. Jefferson,” he said, quoting authority back to her, “says it’s all show and parade.”

  “I know. He told Papa that since he didn’t expect to live more than a dozen years, he was loath to give up one of them to the hairdresser.”

  “Mr. Jefferson,” Short said, holding up his ticket—

  “—is greatly given to hyperbole.” With a snap of her own ticket, Miss Adams stepped through the wicket and grinned back at him.

  The wicket opened into a cobblestone alley that ran between two tall buildings. They hurried along with the crowd, turned right through another small black door, another, a final turn to the left, and entered the chapel. So crowded was this room that they were ushered along with dozens of other guests up to the very altar platform itself and there shown to seats. Not certain what to do as he took his chair, Short made a vague gesture of pious respect toward the altar—Miss Adams looked at him sharply—and tried to locate Jefferson.

  “The convent,” she whispered. She pointed to an iron grille on the far side of the altar, open to a courtyard and a brown January garden. To their right the main floor was covered with a great elegant carpet like the one in John Adams’s house; on it, in rows of stiff, slender wooden chairs, nuns were murmuring prayers and chants. Behind them, like a wall of wine—or blood, Short thought—hung two curtains of rich crimson velvet, fringed with gold.

  “I’ve found your parents.” On the other side of the altar Short could just make out, behind an Alpine range of wigs, John Adams’s apple-round face, Abigail’s pristine cap, Jefferson’s powdered red hair. “But not Patsy.”

  “The boarders and students come in together,” Miss Adams informed him. Their shoulders touched. “Watch the curtains.”

  At the moment she spoke the velvet curtains parted, and a procession of nuns began to file two by two down the center aisle. Each nun held a candle and a missal; the young girls following them, all dressed in a school ensemble of crimson and white, clutched gilt-edged prayer books or sheets of music, and scrambled whispering to benches set up behind the chairs. Short shifted his legs, inhaled perfume, pomade, rosewater, incense, a thousand alien smells. In Virginia he had sat for a lifetime of Sundays in a dusty wood-frame Anglican church at the crossroads of the Staunton highway, where the windows were clear glass—the congregation looked out on sloping pine forests, not Parisian courtyards—and the minister judged impromptu horse races after the service. To Jefferson’s left sat an elderly Frenchman with a gaunt face and sunken, unhealthy eyes. The younger woman next to him wore a dark gauze veil from her hat to her throat, impenetrable. She looked directly at Short.

  The audience rose, then sat. The two girls who were to take their vows came through the crimson curtains, escorted by two pensioners of the convent, one at each side. They were pale blond and English in feature, beautifully dressed in full-length gowns of yellow and blue, glittering with jewels on their hands, their hair, their scooped bodices. Representing, Short thought an instant before Miss Adams whispered it, the vanities of the world.

  At the altar the abbess waited with a priest. When the girls knelt and dropped their hoods, the crowd made a little gasp. Their heads had been completely shaved. (Beside him it was Miss Adams’s turn to touch her hair.)

  Before the crowd’s murmur could subside, the abbess had moved briskly forward and the Vanities had lifted their skirts to climb the platform. The priest stepped between them, swished his own black robe, and began to deliver a sermon in the slow, incantatory rhythm (like a sad Kentucky mule, Jefferson said) that Short had come to expect whenever a Frenchman spoke in public. In a low voice, he translated for Miss Adams: the king was good, the French people, every class of them from throne to footstool, were good; the great city outside these walls held pleasures, beauty, opportunity for virtue. The world itself was good to live in; when God had finished His work of Creation, He looked upon it and saw that it was good. It was wrong therefore to quit this beautiful world and live apart from it. (In Jefferson’s row the veiled woman had lowered her head.)

  “He wants them to change their minds,” Miss Adams whispered. “He’s warning them.”

  But the priest had abruptly changed his logic. The truth was, he continued, this beautiful world was now losing its excellence; a false spirit of self-interest guided everything, they were right to turn their backs on such greed and pride. And yet their decision brought many difficulties. They would be confined in this place year after year, season after season, till the last day of their lives. Their actions would be misconstrued. If they should be gay, their superiors would say they had not really quit the world. If they should be grave, others would say they were unhappy and repented their vows. Holding both hands high over his head, he chanted a psalm in Latin, and from the back of the chapel eight pensioners approached in a double line, carrying spread out between them a huge black pall, like the flag of a ship, crossed with brilliant white.

  “This is the dying to life,” Miss Adams told him as the pensioners spread the black cloth over the two girls, now prostrate before the altar. “When they lift it off again, the girls are resurrected as nuns.”

  To his amazement, Short found that his eyes had filled with tears. The candles, the chants, the dark quivering air of the ancient chapel all worked on him like charms. His heart went out in a rush to the young girls lying on the cold floor, covered by the pall—eighteen, nineteen: near enough to his own age. His mind seemed to roll and rise with the sheer idea of it, of dying to life, sacrifice, a church, a city, a lineage that went back in time toward a dim Gothic dawn. A show and a parade, but utterly, utterly moving. When he turned to Miss Adams, he found her weeping quietly. Around them the French spectators sobbed or stood in attitudes of deep affliction. The girls’ parents had come almost to
the edge of the platform. At their feet the pensioners lowered the pall until it completely covered the two still forms. Short listened to the anthems, sung in a beautiful sweeping Latin, and felt a deep sense of—what? How had Europe metamorphosed him? He watched Jefferson rising with the rest of the audience. As the girls’ soft voices sang and the candles drifted around them in the scented darkness, he let his eyes move to the veiled woman.

  “For Wednesday next, mercredi demain,” Jefferson said in answer to a question that Short had missed. A scarlet carriage clattered by, drowning the next few words as well, then Jefferson bowed, made a little salute with one hand, and turned back. “I never know what I say or what I agree to in French.” He tucked his hat under his arm, smiling wryly. “At my age any new language is Greek. Can you ride back with me in John Adams’s carriage? The ladies will shift around and go to Auteuil together, and we can talk.”

  Short glanced quickly over his shoulder. In the crowd still pouring out into the sunlit rue de Grenelle, the elderly Frenchman and his veiled wife—companion? mistress? daughter?—had returned Jefferson’s bow and already vanished behind the bustling line of voitures. “That was—” he began hopefully, but Jefferson had absorbed the French habit of never introducing. He took Short’s arm for support and guided them both along the edge of the kennel, through a trail of horses’ rumps, cobblestones, curbs, debris, skirts, curses—the normal French chaos that made every excursion into streets a festival of flying bodies. Belatedly, Short registered Jefferson’s words: talk about what? At the end of the carriages the black figure of John Adams could just be seen, round and squat as a tree stump.

  “Horror, abomination, blasphemy!” Adams growled as they burst through a ring of liveried footmen and reached him. They clambered into his carriage, and he barked an order through the window in appalling French and continued his catalogue: “Paganism, sorcery, witchcraft—take the whole caste of priests and line them up against the walls and shoot their livers out. Do I err by way of caution, brother Jefferson?”

  Jefferson was laughing and holding the strap on the side of the carriage, Short was bouncing forward and back, trying to avoid Adams’s bony knees.

  “No, you have three daughters, Jefferson—we turn left, gauche, there at the rue du Bac, idiot—three daughters. You couldn’t stand to see them in such a masked ball and pantomime, I know it.”

  The carriage rattled into another narrow street, crisscrossed by swinging signboards, and plunged abruptly toward the river like a stone down a hill. “My Patsy tells me that the nuns leave all the Protestant girls to their own beliefs, and very few of the French girls ever take orders. All the same—”

  “All the same,” Adams grumbled, “you agree with me. You worry. I know you do.” Adams leaned toward Short with a confidential scowl. “My wife claims she never saw a more motherly father than Mr. Jefferson, by which she means a great compliment. You must have seen in Virginia how he dotes on his daughters?”

  But before Short could answer, Adams had changed the subject. “He says you’re a wonderful writer.”

  “No, sir.” Short felt his face warming to a blush.

  “Yes, sir. He tells me he gives you work to do in a private capacity and you do it beautifully. He says you’re always writing.”

  For the first time Jefferson spoke. “Mr. Short is also gifted in languages. At William and Mary he founded a new scholarly society called Phi Beta Kappa. George Wythe says he was a superb student of Greek and Latin.”

  “And he speaks French,” Adams said, nodding. “My daughter Nabby believes you have perfect pitch.” Adams cocked his head and confided to Jefferson, “She speaks it well herself, if a father says so—but you and I, sir, are too old to make much progress. And Franklin … Franklin mumbles some private mixture of tongues never heard before, the Ambassador of Babel.”

  No one, Short thought, was ever so sensitive to atmosphere as Jefferson. Seeming to agree, saying, in fact, nothing concrete, he leaned gently forward and steered them out of the shoals of Franklin. “Mr. Adams and I have had many other chances to speak of writing.”

  Adams laughed and sat back in the jolting carriage. “Your friend here,” he said to Short, “will have told you about writing the Declaration.”

  “No, sir.”

  Adams spread his fingers across his waistcoat, thumb to thumb. “In Philadelphia,” he said. The carriage swerved; through a space between buildings Short could see one of the round towers of the Church of Saint-Sulpice, like municipal inkwells, bright in the sunshine, and for a dizzy instant he felt himself on the wrong stage, with the wrong backdrop. “In Philadelphia in ’76 our learned friend was made chairman of the committee instructed to write a declaration of separation,” Adams told him. “Franklin was on it too”—Jefferson leaned forward again—“but Franklin declined to draft anything, he only writes in almanacs. I told Jefferson he should write the draft and we would sign it. He demurred. He said I should write it, being senior to him. I said, ‘No, I have reasons enough not to write.’

  “ ‘What reasons?’

  “ ‘Reason first: You’re a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. Reason third: You can write ten times better than I can!’ ”

  Before their laughter had died away, Adams was peering through his window at the traffic of wagons and carriages come to a dead halt on the rue de l’Université. A hundred yards ahead of them the Pont Royal began its white arch across the Seine.

  “Business,” Adams said, turning back. “Franklin is leaving for America. You must now know, Mr. Short, in total confidence, that I mean to leave too.”

  Jefferson was wedged against the padded side of the carriage, his eyes closed in fatigue, but now he opened them. He said, “In total confidence, our friend expects within a few months to become American ambassador to London.”

  “To bait John Bull,” Adams muttered.

  “And therefore—” Jefferson continued in his deliberate fashion.

  But Adams’s nature was blunt, impatient. He interrupted, “And therefore Mr. Jefferson is to be left here, in this sink of noise and pleasure, and therefore he needs an assistant.”

  “A secretary.”

  “He needs a private confidential secretary who can write well and speak French.”

  Short held his breath.

  “Colonel Humphreys has received a thousand pounds a year in that capacity.” Jefferson spoke with his eyes closed, his shoulders pressed back as the carriage jerked and rocked forward again. “Since he goes with the ambassador to London, I have written Mr. Jay to say that, if you accept the post, I expect Congress to pay you the same salary.”

  Short exhaled with a pop.

  “Not enough,” Adams said firmly. “You need twice that amount. Why, food alone—”

  Swiveling from one to the other, Short began to say yes, it was enough, more than enough, to thank them, to trip and splutter over his tongue—Virginia was gone, Paris was his; but his effusiveness was suddenly undercut by Jefferson’s low voice, at once dreamy and ironic, quickly putting his new secretary back in his youthful place. “Well, brother Adams, our friend is vigorous and handsome. Paris no doubt has its own coin to pay him with.”

  At the pont tournant, the rotating wooden footbridge that connected the Place Louis XV and the Jardin des Tuileries, Jefferson asked for the carriage to be halted so that he and Short could walk home through the garden. Adams protested briefly, but set them down. Jefferson, he told Short in a whispered aside, was still too feeble for much exertion. Watch him, guard him, his spirits more than his body had undergone seasoning. And as Short pulled away to rejoin Jefferson’s tall figure at the garden entrance, Adams motioned him back for one last word.

  “You know, he never complains or rages, as I do perpetually.” For a moment Adams looked neither choleric nor impatient but shrewd. “You polite Virginians bottle up all your anger. Dum in dubio est animus, paulo momento huc illuc impellitur
. There’s Latin for you.”

  “Terence,” Jefferson said, shaking his head, showing a quick, faint half-smile. “The greatest Roman playwright. ‘While the mind hangs in balance a straw will upset it.’ My hearing at least is still acute.”

  Short, still bouncing, emboldened by his appointment, asked the question he had held back for half an hour. “Is he right—did you think the ceremony in the church just now was all sorcery and witchcraft?”

  They had reached the riverside edge of the gardens. Over the balustrade, across the sparkling brown barge-littered river, they could discern an enormous clearing along the Quai d’Orsay and scattered piles of bricks and timbers. As always, Jefferson brightened at any sign of building. “Brother Adams puts things forcefully,” he said, waving the question away with the same half-smile.

  “In Virginia your enemies call you atheist.” Short held his breath at his own boldness. Jefferson turned with a look of mild surprise.

  “In Virginia my enemies are much given to hyperbole.” His smile faded. “You are serious. Let me be too. In my view there is nothing in life more important than a man’s religion, unless it is his marriage or family. Nothing more important—nothing more private. Every religious idea and act should be free of the state, free of coercion. John Adams wouldn’t agree—though Franklin would—but in fact it does me no injury at all for my neighbors to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

  He placed his elbows on the stone balustrade, as if to study the construction across the river, but kept his head turned toward Short. Behind them, on a gravel path between bare trees, passersby looked up curiously. Short thought that he knew Jefferson’s face well enough to paint it—the long symmetrical features, the pointed nose, the pale blue eyes that gave away nothing; thin, sensitive lips, prominent chin tilted up. Even in its present weariness a Frenchman coming by would instantly recognize the face of an aristocrat, refined, delicate, used to luxury, used to command.