‘Please, would you mind very much not talking about it?’
‘I like facing up to things. I don’t know why, perhaps it’s because nobody else in my family does.’
‘Look, I really think we ought to be getting back,’ I said.
The sun was just beginning to flick the tops of the mountains and the golden light of the desert was turning to a dusty mauve. The rest of the wedding party was standing in the narrow slice of empty foyer before the endless ranks of slots began. Jonty was unfazed by our being late. So were the rest of them, as it turned out, because they had something else on their minds.
‘You’ll never guess.’
‘Not in a million years, my dear,’ said Wizz.
I guessed instantly. Admittedly Polly and Franco holding hands was a clue. I knew enough, though, to let them make their own announcement.
‘It’s going to be a double wedding. Polly and I are following Jane and Jonty’s lead. They don’t seem to mind us horning in on their party.’
‘No!’ I said.
‘It is rather sudden, I suppose,’ Polly said. Her severity had melted away. In the glow of the foyer she seemed abstracted, almost dreamy.
‘At our age, who wants to wait?’ Franco said. ‘Anyway, I have a sabbatical in London coming up and I need some place to stay.’
‘Insensitive English prof from wrong side of tracks seeks capable Brit female, must have GSOH and spare room and share love of minor eighteenth-century women writers.’
‘Oh, I don’t think we share anything except a past,’ said Polly.
‘And me,’ Jane chirruped.
‘You’re part of our past, darling.’
‘Look, we’d better hurry up to the chapel if we’re going to squeeze two weddings into the same slot.’
‘You have to take the Skyride elevator. The others don’t go to thirty-eight.’
We squeezed into the transparent hexagonal capsule and began to glide upwards on the outside of the building, very slowly like a fly across a window-pane. Soon the turquoise glimmer of the floodlit pools and the green twirls of the palm trees began to look dwarfish and unreal like an architect’s model and Gilligan City seemed no more than a forlorn oasis in the endless desert. The mountains were changing colour again, from mauve to a dull umber as the light slunk away behind them.
‘God, it makes you feel dizzy.’
‘And so exposed.’
‘As though it might break away any minute.’
‘Like in The Towering Inferno.’
The minister was waiting for us. It was a shock to see him dressed in black with a white surplice like at a normal wedding.
‘Welcome to the Little Chapel in the Moonlight, Jane and Jonathan and the rest of you good folks.’
‘Reverend, I know this is rather short notice, but could you possibly fit us in too? We’re Jane’s parents, but we never got around to, you know, tying the knot.’ Even Franco came as near as he was capable of to blushing as he delivered this abbreviated version of events.
‘Why, this is wonderful news, sir. You would like to share your vows with your daughter and her young man?’
‘Yes, if that’s possible.’
‘Nothing would give more pleasure to the good Lord and to all of us here at the Little Chapel in the Moonlight. We pride ourselves on maximising customer satisfaction. There is, however, one small problem which I have to share with you. Your daughter and Jonathan here have given the forty-eight-hour notice required by state law, but so far as I am aware, you yourselves—’
‘Oh dear, can’t we—’
‘But there is one exception to this rule. His honour the mayor has authority to conduct a marriage in an emergency twenty-four seven, no notice required.’
‘Would he, do you think—’
‘I am sure he would be just tickled pink by your predicament, sir.’
‘So how do we get hold of him?’
‘Why, we only have to call his penthouse and he’ll be here in two shakes if he isn’t otherwise occupied.’
‘He actually lives here?’
‘He surely does. Why wouldn’t he? It’s his hotel.’
‘You mean, he …’
‘Why, yes, Mr Gilligan has been mayor of the city ever since we got incorporated. I’ll go call him right away.’
We sat on little purple benches in the waiting room. Jane and Jonty were solemn and silent, but Polly and Franco were giggling together, her pale face nestled into his shoulder. The place reminded me of a hospital. We might have been waiting for news of a difficult operation. Well, I suppose we were.
‘That’ll be just fine. Mr Gilligan is quite thrilled. He’ll only take a few minutes to get dressed. He likes to do things properly.’
This time the wait seemed so long that I was dozing off and gave a jump as the lift door opened and a wheelchair appeared with a little old man sitting very upright in it. He was dressed in a black coat and black striped trousers and a winged collar, and he was being pushed by a big strawberry blonde half his age wearing a strapless gold lamé dress.
‘May I have the honour to present Mayor George G. Gilligan and Mrs Gilligan.’
‘Hi,’ said the mayor. He had a rugged old face, which had once been ruddy, and a thatch of white hair. ‘Great you all could make it, it’s always a pleasure to greet folks from Great Britain. I took my wife on honeymoon to London last fall, though I can’t say we saw too much of the city.’
‘Oh George,’ Mrs Gilligan said.
‘So you’re only just married yourself, sir,’ said Franco.
‘Sixth time of asking, sir, just beginning to get the hang of the business,’ said the mayor. ‘There was a time, it was in my thirties I guess, when I was up and down that aisle like a whore’s drawers. But I’m sure you folks don’t want to wait around all night listening to my marital career, so let’s get the show on the road.’
He rapped the arm of the wheelchair and Mrs Gilligan pushed him through the pair of automatic doors at the end of the waiting room. As the doors opened, a hidden organ began to play Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March’. The air inside the chapel was heavy with the fragrance of white flowers and shimmering with the light of candles. The brightly painted statues standing well forward of their Gothic niches looked less like ornamental saints than members of a built-in congregation, installed perhaps because so many weddings here must be on impulse (as indeed one of these was) and might otherwise seem friendless occasions.
‘Do you have any special vows prepared?’ the mayor said, as he began hunting up his place in a handsome scarlet book with gilt toolings all over it.
‘Special vows?’
‘Well, you know, some folks these days like to customise their vows. As a matter of fact, we have a Rent-a-Troth facility right here at the hotel. But if you’re happy, I’ll just give you my own take on the service. I call it the Gilligan Authorised Version.’
‘I’m sure that’ll be fine by us.’
They shuffled into position in front of the altar, the two couples ranged side by side before the mayor in his wheelchair, with Mrs Gilligan standing behind him and the priest behind her, not unlike the three persons of the Trinity in a medieval painting.
The mayor looked up from his book. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘it is just the two weddings, isn’t it? You sure you two guys don’t want to make it a threesome, because our great state would be quite comfortable with that scenario.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘No, thank you,’ Wizz said.
‘Just kidding,’ said the mayor with an impish grin. ‘OK, Charlie, let’s take it from the top.’
My mind drifted from the scarlet book the mayor was holding in his freckled old hands to the scarlet birds flitting through the cottonwoods by the creek. So I paid little attention to the minister’s easy drone as he took us through the preliminaries. Now and then familiar phrases floated past me: honourable estate … brute beasts that have no understanding … if any man can show any just cause …
‘R
ight, Charlie, hold it there, this is where I come in.’
The minister moved to one side and allowed the mayor to wheel himself up to the two couples.
‘Will you – that’s both of you – have these women to live together according to the laws of this state for as long as your love shall last, will you remain sexually active with her unless ordered otherwise by a qualified physician, and if your time together shall come to an end will you depart from one another in peace and charity, and be content to abide by the judgment of the court?’
‘I will,’ said Franco, barely audible. ‘I will,’ said Jonty, rather louder.
When it came to the turn of the brides, Jane could scarcely utter, but Polly sounded quite composed.
I was not sure whether to laugh or to cry, but then I am often in that kind of perplexity these days, which surprises me because I thought you became clearer about things as you got older.
After he had pronounced them man and wife, the mayor kissed the brides and the minister pronounced the blessing. We were turning to go.
‘Hold it, folks,’ the mayor said, ‘this ain’t quite the end of the show.’
He clicked his fingers and the unseen organ began to play with an unseen backing group humming along.
‘Oh, I love to hear her whisper in the chapel in the moonlight,’ the mayor sang in a peculiar rusty voice, melodious in a way but also with an undertone of menace as though prophesying trouble. He insisted we join in the reprise and as we bawled out the dying notes ‘the love-light in her eyes’, I thought we sounded like a shipwrecked crew whose voices had grown hoarse with dehydration and yelling for help.
After we had said goodbye to the mayor, Jane and Jonty went off to play roulette. They did not lose all the money Jane had won, but they certainly did not come away with enough for the deposit. That did not matter much, because Jonty made a packet when his ISP support business was sold.
Franco did not stay in London when his sabbatical came to an end, but he and Polly are still on good terms, and he often goes to visit Jane and Jonty in the house they have bought in Florida (his old bones crave the warmth).
Wizz died only a few weeks later. A surprise heart attack spared him any long decline. His ashes were mingled with Glen’s in Glen’s family plot out in Rochester, New York. I was surprised that he had not insisted on being buried with the Shorts or the Stilwells. I did not get to the funeral because by then I had gone home.
Afterthoughts
Sally and Thomas and William
On 1 September 1802 there appeared in the Richmond Recorder a piece signed by James Callender, a former political employee of Thomas Jefferson’s who had become his vicious enemy. ‘It is well known,’ the article began,
that the man whom it delighted the people to honor keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every portion of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies … By this wench Sally, our President has had several children … The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.
So began the media history of the Sally Hemings saga. Two hundred years later it is still running hot and strong, having already inspired a shelf-ful of biographies, essays, reviews, historical novels, not to mention a feature film. For years there was little or no actual evidence for any liaison between Sally and Jefferson beyond the rumour and scandal fomented by Jefferson’s enemies in the robust style of the times.
Then in 1873 Sally’s son Madison Hemings (1805–77) told his local paper in Ohio, the Pike County Republican (13 March), that
Maria [Polly Jefferson] was left at home, but was afterwards ordered to accompany him to France. She was three years or so younger than Martha [Patsy]. My mother accompanied her as her body servant … Their stay (my mother’s and Maria’s) was about eighteen months. But during that time my mother became Mr Jefferson’s concubine and when he was called home she was ‘enciente’ [sic] by him … Soon after their arrival she gave birth to a child of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but a short time. She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them.
This essentially is the testimony that has persuaded not a few of Jefferson’s modern biographers that he fathered some or all of Sally’s children over a period of twenty years. Those who were already savagely critical of Jefferson’s ambivalent attitude towards the abolition of slavery have found in this supposed clandestine spawning the most damning condemnation of his racism, humbug and exploitation. Garry Wills, for example, while pouring scorn on the ‘hint-and-run’ method of Fawn Brodie’s Intimate History of Jefferson, goes along with the thesis of more respectable historians such as Winthrop Jordan and Richard B. Morris that Jefferson did sire most or all of Sally’s children but that he was in no way in love with her, regarding her as little more than ‘a healthy and obliging prostitute’ (‘Uncle Thomas’ Cabin’, New York Review of Books, 18 April 1974). Conor Cruise O’Brien in The Long Affair (1996), his extended philippic against Jefferson’s fanatical support of the French Revolution, argues (p. 22) that Jefferson felt no horror at the idea of miscegenation between white masters and black female slaves. If his brother-in-law John Wayles had sired Sally with his slave Betty Hemings, as was widely rumoured at the time, why should he himself not do the same and sleep with Sally? In an appendix (pp. 326–9), O’Brien accepts Madison’s story and expresses the hope that genetics may soon be able to prove through comparison of DNA specimens whether or not Thomas was the father of Madison.
Only two years later, just such an experiment was made and its results reported in Nature (5 November 1998, p. 27). Since Jefferson had no legitimate male descendants, the results were obtained by comparing the DNA of the male descendants of his father’s brother, Field Jefferson, with the DNA of the male descendants of Sally’s three sons. This immediately ruled out the dark-skinned Madison himself because his male-line descendants did not survive the Civil War. But the other two, Thomas Woodson (1790–1879) and Eston Hemings Jefferson (1808–52), did have male-line descendants.
The results in both cases were emphatic. Four out of five male-line descendants of Thomas Woodson showed a haplotype (one with MSY1 variant) that was not similar to the Y chromosome of the Field Jefferson male line but one which was characteristic of Europeans. So Thomas Woodson was definitely not the son of Thomas Jefferson, though he probably did have a white father.
By contrast, the single male descendant of Eston who was tested did have the Field Jefferson haplotype, so any one of Field Jefferson’s twelve descendants living at the time or Thomas Jefferson or one of his brothers could have been Eston’s father.
This interesting verdict was seized on with view halloos by those who were out to smash the idol of American rectitude. Gore Vidal in Inventing a Nation (2003) exulted: ‘The fact that Jefferson would have six children by Sally (half-sister to his beloved wife, another Martha) has been a source of despair to many old-guard historians, but unhappily for them, recent DNA testings establish consanguinity between the Hemingses and their master, whose ambivalences about slavery (not venery) are still of central concern to us’ (p. 77). And the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation blithely claimed (26 January 2000) a ‘high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston and most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’s children’. Some time later, in 2003, troubled by the furore its hasty verdict had aroused, the Foundation revised its conclusions in a more agnostic direction, but the damage had been done.
Before we examine the DNA evidence a little more closely, let us go back to the deposition that Madison Hemings gave in old age. He says that Sally came back from Paris pregnant by Jefferso
n but that the child lived only a little while. Yet in reality Thomas lived to a ripe old age and he is the one child of Sally’s whom DNA evidence confirms was not Jefferson’s. And it was Thomas’s parentage, too, that provoked Callender’s original allegation, which sparked off the whole scandal. Madison and Eston were not yet born at the time of the article in the Recorder. Faced with this difficulty, Jefferson’s more entrenched enemies assert that Sally did not become pregnant until some time after her return to Monticello and that therefore Thomas Woodson was not her son and indeed was never at Monticello because his name does not appear in Jefferson’s carefully kept records. But Callender in 1802 specifically names Tom as Jefferson’s son, clearly insinuates that the affair began in Paris and states that Tom is still alive.
So apart from casting doubt both on Callender’s veracity and Madison’s, this latest version of the increasingly tortuous accusation makes Jefferson’s next moves rather peculiar, if we are to believe his slanderers. There he is, well into his sixties and by now President of the United States, already wrongly accused in the public prints of having fathered a bastard by his slave some twelve years earlier in Paris. What does he do? He goes and repeatedly has sex with this same slave, by now a mature woman and the target of what we would today call intense media speculation. And she bears him several more children. This is surely a strange course of behaviour for one who, as O’Brien is the first to point out, was always painfully solicitous for his public reputation and did not disdain the arts of spin to maintain the purity of his image. Yet such is the logical position of those commentators such as William Safire (and indeed Professor Eugene Foster and the other geneticists who carried out the DNA tests). For what they are saying is that Callender was wrong about Thomas Woodson but was right about the parentage of Eston who was born eighteen years after Thomas and six years after Callender’s accusation was published. I find that assertion frankly incredible.
So if Jefferson was not the father of either Thomas Woodson or Eston, who was? Well, the historians who were hastily assembled to form the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission to rebut the even hastier judgements of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation concluded (12 April 2001) that there was insufficient evidence to link Thomas Jefferson with any of Sally’s children but that the most likely candidate for Eston’s father was Thomas Jefferson’s much younger brother Randolph (1755–1815), who was notorious for hanging around with the slaves at Monticello, singing and playing the fiddle – and so why not other malarkey too? This would, among other things, explain why Jefferson himself never issued any formal public denial of the Sally stories. What would be the use if his denial only exposed Randolph as the culprit? Then as now the revelation of scandalous behaviour by a President’s brother would be an embarrassment, especially if it revealed him as belonging to a family who routinely abused their slaves.
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