Washington City
August 24, 1814
“I sometimes wonder what I would have been, had John not died.” Dolley raised her head from her half-written letter as Sophie came back into the parlor, a trio of silver compote-bowls in her hands. From the dining-room next door the muted rustle of tablecloths, the tiny chink of porcelain being set in its place, made a whispered through-line to the dim counterpoint of cannon and the jangle of fleeing wagons and running feet.
Dolley’s heart was beating hard, but oddly, remembering John’s death gave her a sense of calm.
After John had died, she had gone into the kitchen, stripped out of her fouled dress, washed her face, put on something else that her mother brought her—to this day she couldn’t remember what it was—and went out, first to comfort the howling, terrified Payne, then to wash her husband’s body.
A few hours after that, just before sunset, Willie died.
She understood then that even the worst days contained only twenty-four hours. One did what one had to do to get through them, and afterwards, one slept.
“I venture to guess, a respectable Philadelphia matron and a—” Sophie visibly stopped herself from adding something. Probably, Dolley guessed, the queen of the Quakers for miles around. Even after all these years, that was the single regret that stung. “A doting grandmother—and in fairly short order, knowing Payne,” Sophie finished, with a wry twist to her mouth. Dolley rolled her eyes. Jemmy had already been obliged to get Payne out of several scrapes with girls.
“John could have kept Payne on the straight and narrow road, if any could,” she agreed after a moment. “That he hath sometimes strayed is not Jemmy’s failing, but my own. And I hear he doth well, in Ghent with Mr. Adams’s son.” This wasn’t entirely true, but if Sophie had heard rumor of the swathe Payne was cutting through Dutch diplomatic society—and the gambling-hells of Amsterdam—she didn’t show it.
As she returned to her letter, Dolley wondered: Would Payne have been different, had she done as her mother had urged her to do? If she had limited herself to being the wife John had wanted her to be, even after his death?
Instead of being herself?
Philadelphia, 1794
Winter and Spring
The hard cold of November ended the yellow fever in Philadelphia. The winter was a bitter one. The river froze, further crippling sea-commerce already disrupted by the summer’s riots and plague. The whole city seemed to be in mourning, numbed by grief and shock.
“Everyone I know hath lost members of their families,” Dolley said to Lady Washington, when she and her mother called at the Morris mansion to thank the older woman for her note of condolence. “Going to Meeting for the first time, ’twas hard not to weep, seeing so many clothed in black. So many empty seats.”
Lady Washington set down her cup, and leaned across to take Dolley’s hands. She, too, wore the sable of mourning.
“Doth Master Lincoln well, in New Hampshire with his granny?” Dolley asked.
And the plump little lady smiled. “Yes. Mary Lear and I have been writing all the summer, and have concluded that we must actually be sisters, our thoughts are so much akin. She is of the opinion—as am I—that it would do the city of Philadelphia much good, if instead of keeping all the theaters and assembly-rooms closed, some kind of public amusements could be available. I don’t mean Roman orgies or revel-routs through the streets, of course—”
“I should give a great deal to see Alexander Hamilton in a toga,” remarked Dolley thoughtfully, at which her mother looked shocked.
Lady Washington suppressed a delighted giggle with the greatest of difficulty. “My dear, so would he. But it would be a good thing, I think, for people to get out of their homes a bit.” She cocked a bright brown eye up at Dolley and added, “And that means you, dear, when you’re feeling up to it. Will you be removing back to Walnut Street?”
“I think so, yes.” The thought of reentering the big brick house on Fourth and Walnut felt strange to her. The thought of sleeping in the big bed alone, without John.
On the other side of the drawing-room, beside the hearth’s cheerful blaze, her mother and her sister Lucy—a startlingly stylish Lucy in a rose-pink polonaise dress and a Norwich silk shawl that had to have cost several pounds—were chatting with the Custis girls about the sale of the boardinghouse and the removal of Molly Payne and her two youngest children to Steptoe Washington’s plantation.
“Anna will be staying with me, to help look after Payne,” Dolley told Lady Washington. “And as we have finally gotten my father-in-law’s estate probated, I am able now to hire a cook and a maid-of-all-work.” While Dolley was still in the first shock of bereavement in Gray’s Ferry, John’s brother James had gone into Philadelphia and collected all the papers and receipt-books, not only from the house of Todd senior, but from John’s office in the Walnut Street house as well. To Dolley’s repeated requests for the papers—since she knew very well that under her father-in-law’s will she stood to inherit some six hundred pounds, plus whatever John had left her—James sent a little housekeeping money and the suggestion that she apply to the Meeting for support.
“I trust all things have worked out well?”
“Well, there is much yet to be done—” Like making James hand over John’s papers, thought Dolley, though she couldn’t say so at tea. “But Mr. Wilkins, a friend of my husband’s in the Congregation and a lawyer himself, hath offered me his services.”
“Will that answer?” Nelly Custis joined them from where she and Mary had been feeding bits of plum-cake to Payne. Like her grandmother, Nelly wore the muted grays and blacks of half-mourning for young Pollie, who had been so integral a member of their household; a sharp contrast to the dramatically funereal garb affected by her older sister Eliza. “For a member of the Congregation to handle the affairs of another in the Congregation, who might have to collect from still others in the Congregation?”
Lady Washington frowned at this talk of business, but Dolley replied cheerfully, “There are those in the Congregation, of course, who might find it inappropriate.” And who might side with James and frown on even the suggestion of a lawsuit. “But Colonel Burr—who as thou knowst was one of my mother’s boarders last year—hath also offered his assistance. So I do not think there shall be any difficulty.”
“Not with legal matters, at least,” agreed Lady Washington darkly. She glanced across at Lucy, as if Burr had seduced her himself instead of playing Cupid for her nephew Steptoe.
“When I see how happy Lucy is, ma’am, I cannot find it in my heart to hold the Colonel’s role in their romance against him.” Dolley smiled.
“Well, no.” Lady Washington sounded unwilling even to credit the New York Senator with inadvertent good. “But you watch out for Colonel Burr, Dolley—if I may call thee Dolley? Oh, dear, now you’ve got me saying ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’ He is a rake, and a man who knows how to make himself fatally attractive to women.”
“I don’t imagine a man could be a rake—at least not a very successful one—who did not,” pointed out Dolley, and squeezed Lady Washington’s plump, black-mitted hand again. “Do not trouble thyself, ma’am. I know Colonel Burr too well to be taken in by his ways. And indeed, it seems to me now that it will be enough, for me to look after my Payne and Anna, and to…to live in quiet. I do not think I shall marry again.”
“Oh, you will, my dear,” predicted Martha wisely. “You will.”
Dolley wasn’t so sure of that. It was, of course, expected that every widow would remarry, if for nothing else than to provide a guardian to her children, though from remarks Nelly Custis let drop about her mother’s morose and reclusive second husband, some guardians were more effective than others.
The truth was that she enjoyed being a widow.
She missed John. In those first few weeks of December, back in their home on Walnut Street, there were days when she could only sit beside her bedroom fire, gazing out the window at the falling snow. But the daze
d, uprooted confusion she saw in the eyes of Lady Washington’s dear friend Mrs. Powel—widowed also by the fever—was strange to her, and a little frightening.
“No, Elizabeth has taken her husband’s death very hard, poor darling,” Lady Washington agreed, when, after another of Martha’s “at-home mornings” Dolley remained to help her and Nelly wash up the good china. “When my Daniel died—Mr. Custis…” Her brown eyes lost a little of their bright focus, gazing back across the gap of years. “I was…I was shocked, of course, and devastated—I had nearly lost our son Jacky to fever, only weeks before—But I never felt that the world itself had ended.”
She glanced up at Dolley—who stood nearly a head taller than she—and in her face Dolley saw the shadow of the future. “I don’t think…” she began, and hesitated to even speak of it. In a tiny voice very unlike her own usual briskness, she said, “I am not sure that I could survive losing the General.”
The pain in her eyes, the dread of a grief greater than she knew herself able to bear, and the aching love, caught Dolley’s throat, so that she put her arm around her friend’s shoulders, wet hand and all, and declared, “And I am very sure he could not survive the loss of thee, ma’am. Which presents a terrible conundrum, doth it not? So thou must take care to predecease him, and steel thyself to look down from Heaven and see him falling prey to the wiles of Kitty Burke, or Georgina Morris—” She named two of the most intently marriage-minded belles in Philadelphia society, and Martha, surprised into laughter, gave her a schoolgirl shove and went back to drying cups.
But Dolley understood. With John’s death, she had no feeling that the world had ended. She only felt deeply confused, and for many nights the old dream returned to her, of having taken the wrong road and being unable to find her way back.
“For Heaven’s sake, Mrs. Todd, rearrange the furniture,” Aaron Burr advised, when he came in February to help her draft yet another demand that James surrender John’s papers to her for probate. “Every widow I’ve ever met says it’s the quickest way to lay ghosts. Paint the rooms, if you can spare the time—in a month you won’t have an unscheduled week to do it in—and buy yourself new dishes.”
He’d been holding Payne on his knee while the boy examined his watch and fob, but when the servant-girl came in with the tea things, Payne leaped down—watch in hand—to show it off to her, and Dolley met Burr’s eyes. “Thinkst thus I will forget him?” she asked softly.
“Nothing of the kind.” The dark eyes looking across into her own were kindly, their perpetual ironic amusement muted by the recollection of griefs of his own. “My Theodosia says—” And his voice, beautiful as cut black velvet, hesitated over the name of the wife he never ceased, despite his many infidelities, to adore. “Theodosia says, and I believe her to be correct, that while one doesn’t always remember, one never forgets.”
Privately, Dolley wondered how much remembrance Theodosia Burr gave to her first husband, a British officer during the Revolution, whom she had enthusiastically betrayed with Burr for some time before his death. Then she shook herself inwardly for the judgment. Theodosia Burr was ill—dying, Dolley suspected, though Burr remained at least outwardly optimistic. The poor woman would no doubt be remembering the first husband whom she was so shortly to meet.
And rather to her surprise, Dolley found that rearranging the furniture, and having the tea-room painted a sprightly yellow, did in fact dispel a degree of her grief. What her mother would have said about it, she wasn’t sure: It occurred to her that perhaps in selling the boardinghouse, and taking Lucy’s invitation to return with her to Harewood to live, her mother had been dispelling the brooding ghost she had lived with for two years.
In any event, Dolley bought new dishes, too, and began to entertain her friends in the tea-room: not simply the ladies of the Meeting, but more and more frequently the ladies whom she met at Lady Washington’s.
Even with young Wash away at school, Lady Washington had her hands full, and often asked Dolley to assist her at her “at-home mornings” between eleven and twelve. Eliza and Pattie Custis were still in residence, having a “season” in Philadelphia, but they, like their younger sister Nelly, were as often as not on an outing with their friends, as life slowly stirred back into the city. Moreover, Dolley guessed that the older two girls were less than completely useful socially. Shy Pattie was aglow with her first serious courtship. Eliza—who as the older of the two considered it her right to be married first—consequently swung from tragic airs to petulant rages.
So Dolley stepped in to assist, and found herself in the company of women whom she had only previously glimpsed from afar: the brilliant Ann Bingham and her remarkable sisters; the elegant Maria Morris; sweet-tempered Betsey Hamilton, and the fascinating Harriet Manigault. Though few of the members of Congress brought their wives to Philadelphia—particularly not after the yellow fever—Lady Washington’s callers also included émigré ladies from France, the wives and daughters of exiles in flight from the Terror, who brought with them fearful stories of events in Paris, and the news of the execution of the French Queen, the beautiful and doomed Marie Antoinette.
“I’ve always been sorry I never met her,” Martha confided once. “She sent me a present, I’m told—which of course those dreadful British intercepted and sold…Still, it was a kind thought. Mr. Jefferson despised her, and said she brought all her troubles down on herself, but no one deserves such a fate.”
Dolley, since girlhood an avid reader of newspapers, was quick to flesh out her knowledge of world events by listening. Always good with faces and details, she slipped easily into the role of conversation-starter. And because she was genuinely interested in people, she found herself receiving cards of invitation to houses where, as merely the wife of a Quaker lawyer, she would never have had cause to visit: the astonishing Bingham mansion with its curving staircase and its wallpapers of brilliant red, yellow, and blue; the Chew mansion, graceful with age.
This meant new clothes, and under the Presidentress’s careful eye she passed quickly into the grays and silvers of second mourning, touched up with enough black that she did not look dull. Fourteen-year-old Anna, who always accompanied her, wore the pale pinks and gauzy whites of a young lady in her first season, and rather to Dolley’s amusement began to be seriously flirted with by the younger attachés of the various legations, and by occasional diplomats, bankers, and unmarried Congressmen.
There was a great deal to talk about, as winter passed into spring.
Repercussions of the Proclamation of Neutrality still shook the country and the world. England declared that it would enforce its blockade against France by confiscating French cargoes even when they were carried by American ships, and hundreds of vessels were seized in the West Indies, which were America’s largest customers for corn and wheat. And since the cargoes were sold to the profit of the Crown, very few of them were judged to be not French. As long as they were stopping American ships anyway, the British captains generally helped themselves to whatever crew-members they thought they could get away with, claiming the men were “British deserters.”
Technically, Dolley supposed they were right. Any American had, in 1776, “deserted” the British Crown.
And without a Navy—or sufficient money to build one—there wasn’t a solitary thing America could do about the situation.
Nor, implied a good many merchants, should the solution involve naval power. France was the enemy, not England. The bulk of American trade was with England, and the French had lost whatever rights they had to American aid when they’d turned themselves into a howling mob of bloodthirsty atheists. At this point in any discussion, Dolley usually sallied in to shift the conversation either to provable facts like how the fighting in Europe was actually going, or to a less volatile aspect of the situation such as where the émigrés were settling and how they were making their livings, or, with luck, to a complete change of topic. She found she could distract almost any Virginian by a well-placed query about either ho
rses or land speculation in the Ohio Valley. Even this last was tricky, with the British garrisons still occupying forts on the Great Lakes. These garrisons deliberately exacerbated Indian grievances against American settlers, playing hob with speculators’ efforts to get people to buy Western lands.
But between winter and spring of 1794, Dolley estimated she learned the bloodlines of every horse south of the Potomac and at least fifty percent of the mules.
And the pain of remembering John lessened. It would return sharply sometimes, after she had kissed Anna good-night and sung a little to Payne, as the child drifted to sleep holding her hand. Sometimes when she would pass the stairway that led to John’s office, she would glance down, looking for the smudge of lamplight there, fully knowing there would be only darkness. When she lay in bed, she would call to mind what it had been like, to feel John’s warm bulk beside her, to smell the scent of his flesh and his hair and his clean-laundered nightshirt. What it had been like to know that if she put out her hand, she’d feel the round firm curve of his back.
It was Payne who brought him back to her, mostly. For months, when Payne was unhappy or uncomfortable or when his will was crossed, her son would strike at her and shriek, “Papa! Want Papa!” and then turn away in floods of tears, as if he saw again his last terrible vision of Papa, thrashing out his life on the floor of that stone cottage at Gray’s Ferry. At times like that, there was nothing Dolley would refuse him.
In time, these tantrums grew fewer. In time, Payne slept the night through, and he swiftly learned that his ready charm would win him attention and praise from his mother’s new friends. Payne especially adored Aaron Burr, who on his legal visits was never too busy or too preoccupied to listen to the boy’s concerns, to answer his questions or tell him a story. Burr was the only person, besides Dolley, who “did Limberjack right.”
But the light of Payne’s life had somehow been extinguished. He clung to Dolley in a passion of disoriented grief, but Dolley was aware that he was always looking past her, always hoping that that dirty, yellow-faced man who had sunk down limp in his mama’s arms hadn’t really been Papa.
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