Jessie

by Judy Alter

  "I love this child!" I defended myself hotly.

  "I don't doubt but what you do, Miss Jessie, but she hasn't been given any show of that love."

  Briefly, I was indignant that Mathilde would talk thus to me, and the thought even flitted through my mind that Father got what he deserved by hiring freed Negroes—insolent servants. But I knew that was unworthy and that I resented what Mathilde told me only because I knew it to be true.

  "I will have breakfast with my daughter," I said, though I knew I sounded stiff. "Sophie can feed Mother."

  And so I began to spend the mornings with Lily. At just over a year, she was enchantingly happy most of the time, walking tentatively from place to place but still not sure enough on her feet to run or climb, and only beginning to make intelligible sounds—which she and Sophie seemed to understand, though I only rarely did. When Sophie responded immediately, I was slightly jealous and had the feeling of a foreigner intruding upon someone's privacy. They spoke a language I did not understand.

  Still, Lily and I began to develop our own routines, and I found them satisfying. Breakfast was followed by a session of storytelling—I told her stories about all the presidents and senators I had known, and she, not knowing any better, was fascinated, less by the story than by the sound of my voice. And then sometimes I spun tales of what her father was doing. "He has been to Oregon," I repeated over and over, "and now he's coming home to us." Wanting to believe it was the truth, I spoke with such enthusiasm that Lily usually clapped her hands and giggled in delight.

  Mother's health, meanwhile, began to improve again, and I thought the world was looking rosy. John would be home in a little more than a month.

  In November, my peace suffered a severe setback. Eleven men returned from John's expedition. "Wasn't enough provisions for all the men," Basil Lajeunesse told me—he who had taken my desperate message to John. "My wife," he said, "she is still poorly, else I would be with Lieutenant Frémont."

  It worried me that John was without Basil. "Did... did Mr. Frémont send me any letters?" I was alarmed at the mere mention that provisions had run low. It was beyond comprehension to me that John should suffer while in the wilderness. Innocent that I was, I pictured him always well fed and warmly clothed and housed.

  "Yes, ma'am, he did." He pushed a moth-eaten fur cap back and forth on his head with a dirty gloved hand and avoided looking at me. Finally, when I was about to explode with impatience, he said reluctantly, "Lost 'em swimmin' a river. Sure sorry, Mrs. Frémont. But I can tell you, the lieutenant... he's fine."

  To Mrs. Talbot I wrote, "They had perfect success in all of their undertakings, and by the middle of October Mr. Frémont would have been making his way home. They may be somewhat delayed over our first bright expectations, but they should arrive here in St. Louis early in January."

  Christmas was a glum holiday, though I expended every effort to make it bright for Lily's sake.

  "She's too young to remember, anyway," Mother said from the chair where she sat wrapped in a shawl.

  I wanted to suggest that she could do more to add to the Christmas spirit herself, but I forbore.

  We ate duck and dressing, rice pudding and turnips, and spice cake for Christmas dinner, but I had had brighter meals when John and I lived in the boardinghouse. I was relieved that the holiday was behind us.

  By the New Year I began to expect John at any moment, in spite of my caution to Mrs. Talbot. I awoke each morning thinking that he might have arrived at night, and I went to bed sure that he would arrive before I awoke again. During the day if I had occasion to leave the house—which I did but rarely, only to go to church or the like—I hurried home to see if he had come while I was gone. Every time I opened the door, I expected to see him seated in the kitchen, with Mathilde feeding him a long-overdue meal.

  "Miss Jessie, why're you putting out that meat pie and cheese on that table?" Mathilde stood in the doorway of my room, her hands on her hips and her head cocked inquisitively.

  "Mr. Frémont will be hungry when he arrives," I said with as much dignity as I could muster, "and I wouldn't want to wake you."

  "That be all right," she said. "Besides, do we know he's coming tonight? Or last night, when you put out roast and spoon bread?"

  "He will come some night soon," I said, willing it to be so, "and I shall have this light burning for him."

  "Yes, ma'am," she said with a shake of her head.

  In January a visit from one of John's loyal St. Louis backers convinced me he would be home in mid-February. Robert Campbell, a merchant who had provided many of the provisions for John's departure the previous May—it seemed ten years earlier!—brought the maps he had studied over and over, trying for his own satisfaction to approximate the route John would take. I wrote to Mrs. Talbot the good news that by March I her son would be back at her fireside and assured her that had his health failed again, we would have heard.

  By the first of February I was in bed with a sick headache. Visions of my mother and her ailments danced through my pounding head, and as Mathilde brought me cool cloths and warm tea, I wondered if I was doomed to be an invalid like her.

  "You're too young to be sick, Jessie," Mother said without much sympathy. "It's worry over that husband of yours, off traipsing around the West when he should be home with you and his child."

  He has a name, I wanted to shout—and might have except that it would hurt my head. "He has a greater calling than tending to me," I managed to mutter. It would have been unfair to point out that her husband worried over her a lot but did little in the way of companionship. And I couldn't bring myself to tell her that my vision of John's glory had faded a little. I could no longer see his triumphal return quite as clearly.

  By March, with headaches still confining me to my room more often than not, I was forced to write to Mrs. Talbot that it would be April before we saw the expedition return. Word had come in a circuitous way that John's pack animals had not been up to winter travel, and the party had made a safe camp rather than venture across the plains, exposing themselves to blizzards and starvation.

  In mid-March my father became the focus of all our concern and worry over John took a second place in everyone's heart but my own. Word came that the warship Princeton had suffered an explosion during a demonstration of a cannon nicknamed The Peacemaker. President Tyler had arranged this "show" for his guests on a Sunday trip down the Potomac. Among the guests was Mrs. Dolley Madison, who was fortunately uninjured. Others, however, were not so lucky. Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer and Secretary of State Abel Upshur, with whom Father had been talking only minutes before, were killed immediately, along with several others. Many more were injured, including Father, who was knocked unconscious by a piece of the boiler that struck him in the side of the head.

  "There was a period of time," he wrote us, "for which I cannot account, but I am on the mend now. Still, I have no hearing in that one ear, and the doctors tell me it may never return."

  Mother was determined to fly to Father's side, though her flight by steamboat and coach would be slow. "You must come with me, Jessie," she said, anxiety giving her an imperious tone that was quite unlike the quavering voice of her illness.

  "No, Mother. Lily and I must wait here for John."

  "John, John!" she said. "Your father has been injured, and we must go to him."

  "My husband," I replied, "has been gone far too long on an expedition that was to take only eight months, and I will wait here for him, where I told him I would be. Father is recovering... he has said so himself... and you are not up to the trip."

  She would not hear of it and departed the next day, taking Mathilde with her. Sophie and I were left to run the St. Louis house, care for Lily, and, as always, wait for John.

  In April a trading party returned to St. Louis from Fort Laramie with the news that they knew nothing of John's party. "Their arrival shows the country to be in traveling order," I wrote Mrs. Talbot, "and the wise in such matters tell me that Mr.
Frémont has either camped immediately at the foot of the mountains on this side, or that very probably he did not cross at all but wintered in Oregon....He will not be here until the middle of May."

  In June—John had now been gone over a year—the most I could write to Mrs. Talbot was that a Mr. Glasgow, who had just returned from California, had seen John in November and learned that he planned to winter at Fort Hall, a British trading post on the Snake River. "Our loved ones will have every comfort that fire, food, and shelter can give," I wrote, "and you need be under no apprehension. Mr. Glasgow returned by the southern route, so of course he arrived sooner than our party returning by the Yellowstone. But we know the snows are breaking up in the high regions...."I wished I had more faith in my own comforting words.

  Father turned evasive in his letters, too, almost nonchalant about John's protracted absence and yet more concerned than ever about my headaches, Lily's health, and our general well-being. "You must be brave," he wrote, leading me to wonder if he was warning me that disaster lay in wait. Did he know something I did not? I dismissed the idea as paranoia, but still... perhaps Father knew that John had tried to reach California, and wasn't telling me the whole truth.

  By August I was nearly overtaken with illness—caused by my worry, as even I recognized. Panic, and the headaches that resulted, had become like a fog over which I had no control as it enveloped my very being, giving me no option but to bend before it. Perhaps it was a sign of fading hope that I no longer put out a supper for John nor left a light in the window.

  * * *

  One morning Gabriel, the coachman, claimed to have seen John in the middle of the night, lurking about the house. "Wearing his uniform, Miss Jessie, but thin as a rail he was. He looked up to your room, but it was all dark. And then he jus' walked around the house, outside, two or three times. Then, when I was about to call to him, he vanished... just disappeared into thin air."

  "Why didn't you call to him immediately?" I asked sharply when the story was reported to me the next morning. I doubted Gabriel's tale, for the poor man was known to take a drink more than occasionally, and I could not fathom that John would have returned and yet not come into the house. Still, it was unsettling.

  Sophie made it all the more unsettling. "He's dead!" she wailed. "Master Frémont is dead, and Gabriel seen his ghost!"

  It took every ounce of my control to silence her. I warned her that Lily was listening fearfully and that I would not have the child alarmed. Indeed, I wished I could order myself not to be alarmed, but try as I might to dismiss Gabriel's vision, I was on edge as Lily and I went about our morning routine.

  We were sitting on the veranda, hoping to catch whatever small breeze stirred while I told Lily stories—the same she'd heard over and over again about her father. And then, almost magically, he stood before us—thin and brown, hardened by his experiences, but nonetheless my John. I flew down the steps to his waiting arms, all thought gone from my mind except that he had returned to me.

  Behind me Lily wailed in fear.

  John may have looked thin, but he had lost none of his strength, for he whirled me around once, kissed me heartily, and then hoisted me into his arms.

  "Is your father at home?" he asked.

  "No," I told him, "Mother and Father are both in Washington. Lily and I are your welcoming committee."

  "Good."

  By now Gabriel and Sophie and several others had gathered on the veranda, alerted by my scream of joy. With me still in his arms, John mounted the steps, smiled heartily at them, and said, "See to the child, please." Lily stood alone on the sidewalk, still wailing.

  Then he carried me upstairs to our bedroom and slammed the door behind us. We spent the rest of the day in bed.

  John's lovemaking was at first rough, demanding, as though I were another territory to be conquered. He was, I told myself as I struggled to match his urgency, still full of the energy of the expedition. But when he lay satisfied and exhausted next to me, he panted, "I showed them, I really showed them, didn't I?"

  Lovingly, I murmured an assent, but it alarmed me a little to wonder who "they" were. Somehow I knew he was thinking of the childhood taunts he had suffered, about bastardy. I had thought, perhaps foolishly, that when he confessed that great worry to me, it was obliterated from his consciousness. I saw now—at the advanced age of nineteen—that I was young and foolish to think that such problems are so easily banished. I shivered, partly in foreboding, partly in uncertainty.

  He took the shiver as one of pleasure and began to plant gentle nibbling kisses on my neck. "It was all for you, Jessie, all for you. Especially California," he whispered in my ear.

  "California? You went to California?" Astonishment brought me bolt upright in bed, regardless of his teasing kisses.

  "You knew I would," he said dryly, sitting up next to me and covering himself with the bedclothes. "How could you have doubted it? I had to show them."

  I stared at him, his face open and honest and his eyes intent. He really believed that he had to justify, even vindicate, himself, and it came to me that conquering the American West would be John's way of overcoming the stigma of his birth. That was why his destiny lay to the West, why he was the perfect son-in-law for Father, whose vision lay in the same direction. Their needs were totally different, but their goal identical.

  He rolled over and wrapped me in his arms again. This time he was the John I knew—tender, gentle, teasing, and loving. I was very glad my parents were in Washington.

  "Why," I asked sometime during the afternoon, "didn't you come in when Gabriel saw you last night?"

  He chuckled. "I didn't know he saw me. That must have given you a fright. I'm sorry. I was afraid I'd rouse the household... and that the uproar might not be good for your mother. I didn't know, of course, that she wasn't here. Believe me, I'd have pounded the door down if I had known."

  "What did you do?" I asked incredulously.

  "Went to sit in that open grass before Barnum's Hotel. I was simply going to rest on a bench and watch the day break. But a clerk from the hotel came out when he saw a man in uniform... and then he recognized me." John blushed modestly and went on, "He insisted I rest in one of their empty rooms until it was a decent hour so that I could arrive at home."

  "But it was nearly midday before you got here," I accused.

  "I fell so soundly asleep I didn't wake until then," he confessed. "I was rather tired."

  Finally, now rather tired myself, I suggested we rise and greet the household.

  "Once more," he murmured, "let me feel you against me once more. You've no idea how often I dreamed of this moment, how I ached for you." As he whispered these words in my ear, his hands moved lightly over the length of my body, and I could no more have risen than I could have denied him.

  * * *

  Lily was at her supper when we entered the kitchen. At the sight of John she puckered as though she would wail again, but I went quickly to her and gathered her in my arms. "This is your father," I said, taking her toward John.

  With her new ability to shape words, she managed something that sounded like "Ghost?" and I knew that Sophie had been talking out of turn. Throwing a severe look at the nursemaid, I said firmly, "No ghost. Your father, Lily. Come, give him a hug."

  John was as awkward as she was reticent, but the two managed a sort of a hug. Then John held her at arm's length, as though inspecting her, and managed a hearty, "Well, well..." After that he seemed uncertain what to say or do with his daughter, so I took her back.

  Gabriel served us supper later that night in Father's dining room, which often held a crowd but had, of late, been all too empty. Now the two of us seemed to fill the room, so overflowing were our spirits.

  As soon as John was rested and I could supervise the necessary housekeeping chores involved in leaving a house empty, we left—bag, baggage, servants, and Lily—for Washington.

  Father greeted John with enthusiasm and relief. "I am more relieved to see you than you can k
now," he said. "There was a time I was worried about you. Tell me about California!"

  "You knew he went there... and you knew something to worry about?" I asked. The chances that John had taken—both physical and political—still rankled me. I expected no less than censure from both official and unofficial sources for having endangered his men. Yet here was my own father, praising that foolhardy venture across the Sierras.

  Father was almost apologetic. "It was for your own good, my dear. Word came that John had gone up into the Sierras after winter closed the passes. We heard of storms and rumors of starvation... and then nothing. Reports I got were that he had disappeared into thin air."

  I looked at John, but he avoided my eyes. Then I turned on my father again. "You should have told me!"

  "Would you have been happier knowing?"

  "Happier," I said, "is not the question. I have a right to know what affects me. I will not be treated like Mother, locked away in a bedroom."

  Father's stricken look made me instantly sorry that I had spoken in such haste, and I rushed to his side. He gave me an awkward pat on the shoulder and looked over my head to John, who nodded his support to Father. I felt very much the woman controlled by husband and father, not given credit for sense or stamina... or anything.

  I nursed my anger over this particular issue for several days, but no one noticed—especially not John and Father, who were busy greeting a steady stream of well-wishers who came to welcome John home. The uncomfortable incident, once passed, was out of their minds. I wished it could leave mine as easily.

  Mother was little help, though of course I did not tell her my mean remark about being locked away in a bedroom. Still, she thought it perfectly logical that Father protected me from worry. "He loves you, Jessie," she said in a voice still thickened from her stroke, "and he doesn't want you to worry."

  "I don't see that love must mean putting one in gauze and protecting her from life," I said. But I knew that it was useless to talk to Mother.