Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  The old man bared his teeth in a smile or a bark.

  In the garden where he retreated, removing his mask, blinking up at the genuine stars above him, Short listened to the distant sound of the music as he walked. He could hear much better than he could see, he decided, closing his eyes; individual notes, violins, harpsichord, oboe—

  Jefferson’s mild voice broke into his thoughts. “I wrote Mrs. Bingham a letter before I left, deploring the empty bustle of Paris.” He fell in beside Short on the dark gravel path. “But I had forgotten the music, how wonderful the music is.”

  Short made a little motion with his hands, uncertain for the second time in five minutes what to say.

  “Polly has arrived safely,” Jefferson said, “you will be pleased to know. When I had worked my way to the bottom of the letters you had so carefully filed for me, I found two on the same day from Mrs. Adams, announcing my daughter’s arrival—she is there, in London.”

  “Then you will be going at once to bring her here?”

  Jefferson guided them to a halt before a low stone bench, flanked on either side by marble cupids. In the moonlit background, larger (blurred) statues peeped from trees or bushes like marmoreal spies. For an instant Short’s mind stepped back to Abigail Adams’s garden in Auteuil, where mythological statues had guarded John Adams’s precious piles of sublime manure.

  “In fact,” Jefferson was saying, “I plan to send Petit to bring her back.”

  “Petit?” Short was more than surprised—a girl of nine, a strange servant, the dangerous Channel crossing.

  Now it was Jefferson’s turn to make a motion with his hands. “So much business has accumulated—the death of Vergennes, you know, the appointment of de Brienne to replace him. Our old friend Malesherbes has joined the king’s council, from which I take heart.”

  Short listened to the roll call of names, the mild voice analyzing and describing the politics of each one. A cynic, Clérisseau liked to tell him, always attributes the worst motive to any action. Either Jefferson knew from his letters that Maria Cosway was arriving in Paris at any moment—hence his reluctance to leave for London—or else he was unwilling to go to London because once there he would have to call on her, and on her husband, and in the company of his daughter. Under the stern Puritanical eye of Abigail Adams.

  Jefferson had fairly launched into his subject now. “There is promise of reform on both sides,” he said. “The Court promises to reduce its expenditures, the ministry promises to establish provincial assemblies to discuss taxation. I would hardly be true to my own principles if I didn’t approve of such a move toward representation. But what is chiefly needed is a revolution in public opinion—”

  “Sir.”

  They had strolled a dozen yards from the bench, near a stone wall above which rose, half a mile away, the starlit yellow-gold dome of the Invalides. Ca-ca dauphin. The phrase “public opinion” was one Short had never before heard in his life—what did it mean? Another brilliant Jeffersonian invention? Or a political cliché? But he put the idea to one side. He had begun with an utterly different thought.

  “Sir, about my future. You referred earlier to my future?”

  Jefferson too had removed his mask. The music had stopped. Couples were beginning to stroll after them into the garden. Ahead of the guests, servants carrying lanterns were now lighting torches set in tall iron holders.

  “Yes.” Jefferson had halted this time before a statue of Laocoön and his sons, who writhed in marble agony, choked by four huge coiling serpents. Short stepped forward instinctively to adjust the focus of his eyes: white marble, streaks of torchlight, black concave background of stone. For a heartbeat he felt as if he were inside his own skull, observing a nightmare.

  “You are twenty-eight now, I believe,” Jefferson said. “One of the finest minds and characters I have ever known; along with Madison one of the best educated, most serious.”

  “Sir—”

  “But at twenty-eight the world expects that such a mind should have more to show for its training than—” He gestured dismissively toward the crowd of masqueraders spilling into the garden. “Our country needs men like you, educated like you. As much as it would pain me to lose you, William, I want to recommend, as a friend, that you consider returning to Virginia and taking up your place there.”

  “In the law, you mean?”

  “In the law certainly. At the bar of the general court for a short time, then to the bench perhaps; to the Assembly, to Congress. I know that you have no real affection for the law—”

  “I have an insuperable aversion to the law.” As soon as he had spoken, Short cursed the stupidly defiant tone of his voice. But Jefferson was never offended by defiance. He laughed and stretched his thin, crippled right wrist to stroke the marble serpent that appeared to be squeezing the very life from Laocoön’s throat.

  “An allegory of your feelings toward the law, perhaps,” Jefferson said. “As one who retired early from it myself, I can say little in its favor, as a career. I used to wish old Coke and Blackstone to the devil. But for government it is indispensable.”

  “I am a terrible speaker as well,” Short said abruptly. “At the bar, before a jury; in public.”

  Jefferson had straightened to look at him, as far as Short could tell in the flickering combination of torchlight and starlight, with genuine surprise. “You speak very well, very well. When I was ill and you presented Lafayette’s bust to the city, many people told me afterward how handsomely you had spoken out.”

  “In French, yes,” Short said (he feared) sardonically. “En français I am a better and a finer person.” Jefferson folded his arms. “But I mean as someone who speaks to persuade, to argue a cause before a judge. My mind goes white, a tabula rasa, I cannot proceed.”

  “The habit of pleading to a court would soon enable you to possess yourself of argument, William. You would see the strong sides, the weak sides—habit creates its own strength.”

  Short was aware of the irony of his excuse. How to put it? I resemble you in this, who never speak in public if you can avoid it. They were in fact, in truth as different, as unalike as … father and son.

  “You speak far more easily than I do,” Jefferson said, seemed about to say more; stopped.

  Some of the masqueraders had almost reached them on the gravel path. Short spotted the bulk if not the features of the German shepherdess.

  “Polly is not alone, by the way,” Jefferson said, suddenly returning to the subject of his daughter. “She is accompanied by a servant girl. James Hemings’s younger sister Sally.”

  Voices, masks bore down on them.

  “Is there some deficiency,” Short said softly, “in my conduct, that you should wish to see me depart?”

  Jefferson turned much too quickly to face him. “By no means, William. By no means. The last thing I wish, from my point of view, is to lose your company. What I say is for your interest, not my own. And I insist on nothing—stay as long as you will, as long as you can. I only observe that the sooner the race is begun, the sooner the prize will be obtained. And I say it with a bleeding heart, for nothing will be more dreary than my situation when you and my daughters all have left me.”

  “Monsieur Jefferson!” called the shepherdess, waving her crook. Behind her a flock of glittering yellow and white. “Now your mask is off, come talk to us about the famous Insurgents.”

  Jefferson smiled at her and bowed. To Short he said, in the careless tone of an afterthought, moving away, “But if one forms too fixed an attachment in Europe, all freedom is gone.” He stopped to brush his sleeve and bow again to the shepherdess. “And if an attachment of a certain sort, perhaps all reputation as well.”

  In the starlight, in the overturned bowl of his consciousness, Short realized, with deep shock, that Jefferson meant the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, just as he had known by a kind of mesmeric telepathy about the Ace of Spades.

  “Short, come and join us,” Lafayette ordered, raising a torch.r />
  Or—Short took a mechanical step—did he mean by some wild Jeffersonian indirection to accuse himself instead? To refer to Maria Cosway? Or even to both of them, father and son, adulterers in tandem?

  At the edge of the path Jefferson was waiting for him. “I haven’t seen Sally Hemings,” he said, as if to change the subject, “since the day she was born.”

  Sally Hemings had grown to be five feet six inches tall, straight as a stick. She wore a faded calico dress, pinned her brown hair up in a braid with a ribbon, plantation-style, and spoke not a single word of French.

  “You pick up the tray,” James told her in a tone of impatient fraternal disgust. “All right? You don’t have to day nothing. You carry it into the room and stop in front of each one of them and wait to see what they take.”

  “Polly too?

  James made a noise she couldn’t understand—French. James spoke French like a native. Sally had made fun of him the first day because he talked French so fast and pushed his lips in and out when he did it, in and out, like a fish in a bowl or a pig that wanted to kiss you—wee, wee, wee, this little pig. But his temper was awful, he’d shouted like a sailor. Now he simply turned his back on her and started to shake something out of a cloth bag over his tray of pastry. Sally stepped to one side, ignoring the stare of the old French lady cook, and peered at whatever he was sprinkling.

  “Sucre,” the old lady said. “Sucre en poudre.”

  “Powdered sugar.” James glanced sideways at Petit, who stood by the cutting table with his arms crossed disapprovingly over his vest. He handed Sally the tray and pointed one sugary white hand—white on brown—toward the stairs. “You go to the top. Big room on the right, ceiling got a sun painted on it, doors to the garden. Some of them might be in the garden, so you walk around, just like home.”

  Sally also looked at Petit, then tossed her head with a flounce. “Not a thing like home,” she said.

  As she disappeared up the narrow stairs, balancing the tray on her shoulder, the old lady returned to her stool and gave the coals a kick. “She’s not very black,” she told James in a guttural French right out of the Fauborg Saint-Marcel. “Both of you look almost white, you look like two big cups of café crème.”

  James banged a second tray down in front of his oven.

  “Quel âge a-t-elle?” the old woman asked.

  He squatted beside the oven and frowned. At the top of the stairs Sally’s long legs had reappeared for a moment while she turned to push the door with her back. Thin feet, shapely ankles.

  “Quinze ans,” he said. “Fifteen years old. She’s only a child.”

  The old woman followed his eyes and grinned at Petit. Then she snorted in disbelief. “Ha!”

  “Only a child,” Maria Cosway repeated. She took care to speak in French so the girl wouldn’t understand. Even so, they looked steadily at each other across the tray of hot pastries until Maria shook her golden head again and smiled and the girl backed away. “How old, in fact, is she?”

  “Fourteen, fifteen perhaps.” Jefferson sat down beside her on the sofa; a smell of soap, leather—she leaned instinctively toward him; then, remembering that she had come to Paris as a new woman, a woman of independence, Maria drew deliberately back to the arm of the couch. “She’s the sister of my black servant,” Jefferson added, remaining where he was, “the one who cooks the pastries—and Mrs. Adams used your very words about her: ‘quite a child,’ she wrote me, ‘so useless as a maid you had better send her back with the captain.’ My sister in Philadelphia chose her.”

  They watched Sally cross the room. She offered the tray awkwardly to Short and Clérisseau, nearest members of a group of six or seven other guests—there were nearly twenty altogether—standing in a half-circle beneath the famous sun painting.

  “Well,” Maria said. Storklike, Sally was now rubbing the back of her leg with her foot. “Child or not, you’d better buy her new clothes, and do something about her hair. Will we be late?”

  As she knew he would, Jefferson pulled out his newest watch and studied the dial. Last year he had briefly carried two new custom-made watches—one he claimed to be testing for his friend Madison—and a pedometer to measure how far he walked.

  “We have hours before it closes,” he said, and, as she also knew he would, reached his left hand toward her fingers in a gesture friendly and possessive at the same time. In the corner of her eye she saw the white hook of his right wrist—so stiff, withered, and clawlike that she turned away instantly and started to rise.

  “Polly isn’t here?” she said at random. With her fan she waved toward Madame de Corny, who had come to London last season for a month and never called on her, who (not caring perhaps for women of independence) had barely spoken to her today.

  Madame de Corny was too close to avoid replying. “The most charming little girl, Polly,” she exclaimed. “And you haven’t seen her? Our tall friend here most cleverly arranged for Patsy to stay at home the first week and take her to the convent school to play every afternoon. By the end of the week, she wanted to go by herself.”

  “Monsieur Clever,” Clérisseau said, coming up and bowing. “Madame de Tessé’s pet name for him,” he told Maria. “I believe we should go, yes? The wine and pastries are finished.” And bending down toward her, popeyed and wrinkled as a frog, he asked loudly, “I don’t see Mr. Cosway yet, no?”

  Always a rescuer, Jefferson placed his left hand through her arm. “Mr. Cosway stayed in London, alas,” he told Clérisseau. “Even the opening of the Salon couldn’t draw him.”

  Clérisseau’s eyes were huge, his nose was like a snout. “Then, my dear lady, you are staying where?”

  “With Princess Lubomirska,” Jefferson answered. “Beyond the Boulevards.”

  “Much too far away,” Madame de Corny said, and paused, Maria was sure, long enough to let the ambiguity of the phrase be heard. Far away from what? But Jefferson had pulled out his watch again, and the efficient, mind-reading Short was opening the doors, leading the way, and before anyone could say one more word about Richard, about her, about a married woman coming to Paris all by herself to see a Salon of paintings, before she could do anything but smile sweetly (her mask), they were all outside, underneath the golden September sun of Paris, climbing into their carriages. At the corner, as they swayed onto the Champs-Élysées, she saw Sally Hemings standing on the doorstep, still holding her tray; looking, at a distance, less and less like a child.

  The Salon, as everyone called it, took its name from the room in the Louvre, the Salon Carré, where the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture held an exhibition every other year for precisely one month. Richard had looked up, interested, when Maria first proposed the trip—David would have a new painting, of course; and Madame Vigée-Lebrun, and the silly, effeminate Roland de la Porte, who had flattered Richard so outrageously last year. But then he had simply shaken his head. No Paris. No excursions. No further talk of it, please. So that, heart pounding, pursued by her visions like a thief, she had simply gathered her—what? her courage? rebellion?—into a ball and dashed away one morning without permission, over the Channel, over the plains of Normandy, down the long worm-curl of the Seine and into the arms of Paris. Paris only.

  “Since you were here,” Jefferson said, “they’ve begun a new bridge at the Place Louis XV.”

  Maria shaded her eyes, and peered out. In her own mind, the condition of independence was this: She would travel alone, she would mix with friends; she would not cause a scandal, not yield to … the Désert de Retz.

  “Over there,” Jefferson pointed—miles inside, behind her bright smile, she shuddered at the sight of his wrist—“just beyond the king’s statue. In fact, they won’t begin construction for another year, but the surveyors are hard at work.”

  “And the other bridges?” she asked. “They were going to demolish all the charming little dolls’ houses on top of the bridges?”

  “Ah, Clérisseau is delighted, all the architects are—they�
��ve cleared every charming brick and stone from the Pont Notre-Dame and started on the Pont au Change, level right down to the pavement. The views are wonderful.”

  “They were so quaint and lively,” Maria said, falling back. The carriage was bouncing east now, along the Seine embankment. On the left, on Jefferson’s side, you could see the Tuileries Palace, which Trumbull called a “vile Gothic jumble.” “I loved the old bridges,” she said. On her side the brown river rocked back and forth, back and forth, like a living thing in a cage.

  “Our old friend Saint-James,” Jefferson was saying—did he hoard his gossip just for her, she wondered—“Do you remember him? The old gentleman who lived near the Bois? Saint-James has gone bankrupt, to everyone’s astonishment, and sold his gardens and taken refuge in the Bastille, where no one visits him. Mademoiselle Bertin’s dress shop is also closed—bankrupt.”

  “A dangerous city,” Maria murmured.

  Jefferson patted her hand.

  In the Grand Galerie of the Louvre their party regathered—the de Cornys, Short, Clérisseau, two or three abbés whose names she had missed, some American merchants in awkward three-pointed hats.

  “I appoint myself guide to charming ladies,” Clérisseau announced, swooping out of the shadows and inserting his arms, satyrlike, between Maria and Marguerite de Corny: “Virgil to all female spirits.” At the top of the stairs he bent comically toward each of them in turn. “This Salon,” he declared, “is perfectly to my taste, no criticisms therefore are to be recorded. Everything is antiquity, Roman or Greek. I require only sighs of admiration, the occasional frisson of pleasure.” He cocked his head at Madame de Corny, whose flattened breasts threatened to bulge entirely out of her dress. “We could begin with Ulysses Tempted by Circe, yes?”

  “Who transformed men into swine,” said Madame de Corny, adjusting her neckline.

  “An allegory,” Clérisseau said.

  “A redundancy,” Madame de Corny replied.

  In fact, they began with Priam Asking Achilles for Hector’s Body by Gabriel Doyen, a vast canvas (vast was the word of the day in London) in the lurid historical genre that, just as Clérisseau said, dominated every wall. Maria disengaged her arm and stepped back—the painting was truly awful—and while Clérisseau explained it point by point to Madame de Corny, she glanced around, first for Jefferson, then at the room itself. As always, the French had crowded too many paintings into one place. They ran in uneven lines, five or six rows high, twenty feet or more over the tallest spectator’s head, Jefferson’s head.