Jessie

by Judy Alter

  "Your husband is so... so charming," said one lady, looking at me through a lorgnette. "I had expected..." Her voice trailed off.

  "Expected a ruffian?" I wanted to ask, but I forbore. Everywhere I found that the English people were surprised by John, his preference for the refined, his appreciation of classical knowledge. He had been preceded by his reputation as a fearless explorer who had endured terrible physical hardships, and I suspect the British thought anyone who could survive such ordeals must necessarily be uncultured and uncouth. But then there was John, always properly dressed, more willing to talk of Milton and Shakespeare than cross-continental railroad routes and the ever-present slavery question. The British were very interested in our opinions on slavery, and we were never hesitant to declare ourselves.

  But the most breathtaking, unforgettable moment of our English stay came when I was presented to Queen Victoria. Being considered a diplomat of some standing—due, I'm sure to my father's influence and not the rank of my husband—I was presented at the Easter drawing room and, more significantly, invited to remain in the throne room during all the presentations. I wore a pink silk with a pink moire train, with artful roses of all hues appliqued onto it, so that I was, I told Lily, a harmony of roses. It surprised me to see that Queen Victoria was not a great deal older than myself.

  I stood in line with the ladies of the diplomatic corps and watched the stately procession of English noblemen. There was Mr. Gladstone, the chancellor of the exchequer, in gown and wig... and there the Duke of Wellington....That I stood in close proximity to such men thrilled me more than I was later able to tell, though I sat and wrote a long letter to Father, knowing he of all people would understand my emotion. I felt that day that I was among the fortunate people who lived on the Fortunate Island. John pronounced the whole affair rather like a wedding.

  "A wedding?" I asked curiously.

  "Yes," he replied solemnly. "The men were of no importance at all."

  Our visit to England was a miniature of the pattern of our lives—it started high and ended low, very low. On April 7 John was arrested just as we entered a carriage for a night out. Not one, but four policemen came forward to seize him.

  "Wait a minute, men! Take your hands off me!" he declared indignantly, while I screamed aloud, thinking we were beset by thugs.

  "Police, sir. You best come quietly with us." They were indistinguishable, and I could not tell which one had spoken.

  "Police?" I echoed.

  "You're under arrest, Mr. Frémont, for debt."

  Debt? The Mariposas had paid our debts and put us up in the Clarendon—how could this be? "John?"

  "Blasted if I know." He shrugged. "I'll just go gently with these fellows"—he nodded at the four—"and you see what you can do to get me out quickly."

  Knowing when to give up was not something my father had taught me—had he not tilted at windmills for so many years that he lost his Senate seat?—and yet I sensed now that I could do nothing more than raise a useless scene. And that would embarrass both John and me. I simply nodded at him, and the four bobbies removed him before I could even reach out for a last grasp of the hand.

  It was as though the first expedition had started all over again. Once more my husband had to trust me—and I had to live up to that trust. I had to find the money to free him.

  I went immediately to the home of his London agent, Mr. David Hoffman.

  At first I feared no one was at home, for the house was dark, and my repeated rings of the bell brought no answer. At long last, when I was nearly livid with impatience, a servant came to the door.

  "Mr. Hoffman," he informed me, when he'd heard the nature of my visit, "is in bed—ill."

  "I don't care if he has the black plague," I said distinctly, "I want to see him now."

  The man looked alarmed but finally managed to mutter, "Very well, madam. Wait here."

  At length—long length—Hoffman shuffled in, wearing bed slippers and a brocade smoking jacket. When I immediately lashed out with the nature of my visit and my immediate need—$4,000 for bail—he began to backpedal.

  "I have no such sum," he said, and then added shrewdly, "and I doubt I should give it to you if I did. Mr. Frémont and I have not seen eye to eye on the management of Las Mariposas lately."

  "It is his to manage, and yours to finance," I said hotly. But then, quickly, I realized that temper would get me nowhere, and that this man did not intend to help me.

  "You, sir," I said in my sweeping departure, "are a scoundrel, and I shall tell my husband of your behavior."

  "You do that," he muttered at my retreating back.

  John was released the next day, thanks to the intervention—and money—of an American speculator. But he was bitter and angry at being detained.

  "This is not about Las Mariposas, is it?" I asked.

  "No!" he said angrily. "These are vouchers that I signed for provisions for the California Battalion. The United States government should have made good on them long ago. And there's no reason I should be a scapegoat."

  There was no reason, either, that we should stay in a country where he was liable to be arrested again and again for the same debt. It was a monstrous sum we could not begin to pay, and our government showed no signs of interest in the matter. After John's arrest it became clear the matter was deadly serious. It was William Gwin who finally forced the government to settle the debts. "I should have thought," John said, "that your father would be my spokesman."

  "So should I," I said shortly, but I knew what John did not realize—the two men in my life were growing apart politically. What neither of us realized was that Father had been pulled into personal grief that no doubt kept him from worrying about our affairs in England, even when he heard belatedly about them. And worse than that, my father was losing his political power.

  Just before we left for Paris came word that my only brother, Randolph, had died suddenly of a fever the very day we landed in England. It pained me more than I can yet repeat to realize that I had been writing blithely happy letters back to a family who were grieving. Though their minds would understand that I could not have known, their hearts must have found me insensitive.

  I had not been close to Randolph for years. Indeed, I had been angry at him, for he was a continual concern to Father. The infamous confrontation in President Polk's office was but one of many—Randolph had kept Father continually on the alert with episodes of drunkenness, rumors of womanizing, all manner of debauchery. It puzzled me to understand how the boy I remembered as a sweet child could turn so sour... and how a son of Father's could grow up so profligate. I, who held Father's example supreme, supposed that his only son should also have felt that way, and so I tended to blame Randolph for his own problems. But I knew that both my parents would be hard hit by his death, and I grieved for them, if not for Randolph.

  England had turned bitter for us, and we fled—literally—to Paris. With the help of an acquaintance we located a charming small house—a hotel, the French called it—on the Champs-Elysees, from which we could look down that long avenue one way to the Arc de Triomphe and the other to the Tuileries. Behind our house was a small garden, where the ground fell away toward the Seine. The courtyard walls were covered with ivy, and at the edge of the property stood a cedar of Lebanon, so magnificent that John became obsessed with its green layered boughs and wanted always to sleep under the tree, though he did so but once or twice.

  Inside, the house was even more exquisite than out. It belonged to an Englishwoman who had worried herself into illness over a debt—I could truly understand that after our experience in England—but who had left it furnished as it was for her own use. So we surrounded ourselves with silk hangings, fine China, and many servants. Soon pregnant, I sank into the laziest period of my life and relished it. With each passing day my ambition seemed to disappear and my contentment to grow.

  We had a year of rest, rest so complete that it was six months before we even presented our cards at the variou
s legations. The children had a governess, and John took up long-abandoned interests such as mineralogical and astronomical research. He took fencing lessons, went for long horseback rides, and sometimes went for walks in the rain to prove to himself that he was not growing soft. Occasionally, he went to England on business for Las Mariposas—though I never inquired as to the outcome—and we all went on short trips to the galleries at Versailles and other nearby attractions. Once we prepared for a longer jaunt to Italy and Switzerland, then abandoned our plans suddenly when the trip seemed too troublesome.

  Anne Beverly—named for John's mother—was born on February 1, 1853, a charming baby in seeming good health who looked to me as though she were part French. Perhaps it was because I thought her part coquette. Her brother and sister adored her, and I, still lost in indolence, thought myself the luckiest woman alive with a complete and very happy family.

  "Jessie, I must get back to the States."

  I rose from the fainting couch on which I rested—so typical of my approach to life in those days. "Why?" I could not immediately fathom any burning issue, save perhaps the health of my parents, that would pull us from Paris back into the quagmire of politics and financial troubles that awaited us in the United States. And I knew my parents' health had not worsened considerably.

  "There are to be expeditions sent west by the government... railroad surveys, looking for the best place to cross the Rockies."

  "Father mentioned that," I said vaguely.

  "Jessie! You've become lazy here! The old Jessie would have already been scheming to secure one of those expeditions for her husband."

  His words cut through me as a knife cleaves meat from the bone. I sat straight up. "I shall write Father...."

  "No need," he said dryly. "I have this communique from your father"—he waved it in the air—"and he says that I am to head one of the expeditions. I must be there yesterday."

  "I can be ready to go... in a week." I thought that remarkably heroic of me, with three children and a household to consider.

  "Jessie," he said quietly, "I sail tomorrow. You and the children will have to follow."

  I was angry—furious!—that all this had been decided without consulting me, and I wanted badly to remind John that when he needed me—when he was, for instance, arrested in England—he expected me to solve his problems. In such instances I was an equal partner. But when things arranged themselves to his satisfaction, without his having to worry much or do much manipulating, I was consigned to the role of wife and mother. Not that I hadn't confined myself to those roles in recent months, but, still...

  When I calmed down—after John had left—and made myself think about the turn our lives had taken, I knew that John saw this as one more chance to redeem himself, to regain that glory we'd known briefly when John was a senator. The court-martial, his defeat for reelection, and more recently, his arrest, could not be glossed over by a life of astronomical study and fencing lessons. The restless streak in John's spirit demanded justification, and the railroad surveys offered an unparalleled opportunity.

  As quickly as possible I packed up our household, dismissed the governess and the servants, and with my children—Lily now old enough to be a good help and companion, but Charley still a toddler and Anne an infant in arms—I sailed home.

  On that long voyage one thought kept recurring to me: I mistakenly had thought we were through with expeditions, through with the dangers of starvation and frostbite and Indian trouble. John, it seemed to me, had proved himself in those arenas and could now become... well, an elder statesman. The trouble was, John had not proved himself to himself.

  When at last I reached Washington in late June, it was only to be greeted by bad news.

  "I was not given one of the expeditions." His chin was high in the air, and his voice vibrated with defiance.

  "It's that Davis, our new secretary of war," Father fumed. "He is determined to push a southern route, in the interests of the cotton growers."

  "And you," I said wearily to John, "have made it plain that you favor the route through Santa Fe."

  "Of course," he said indignantly. "I'll not change my judgment just to placate a martinet."

  It was no use saying to him that he might have placated that particular martinet in order to secure the expedition and then gone ahead and proved what he wanted.

  John and Father, it turned out, had already raised the money to fund an expedition privately, and John would leave in August. The expedition would cross the Rockies in the dead of winter.

  Why, I wanted to shout, must you tempt the fates again? Why go in winter? But I knew the answer: if John could not make it through in winter, neither could a locomotive.

  Washington was muggy and hot that summer, more so than usual, and I worried greatly about Mother, who continued to grow weaker and more frail. My worry, it seemed, was misplaced, for suddenly one day little Anne became ill with fever and had difficulty breathing. All the cool cloths I could find and the gentle care I could give accomplished nothing, as I watched her grow weaker and weaker before my eyes.

  "Bring her to Silver Spring," came a terse message, sent by courier, from Francis Blair at his Virginia estate. "The air is cooler and fresher, and she will revive." Francis's daughter, Lizzie, a childhood friend, was there, and I would be grateful for the companionship of a woman.

  Like a robot, blindly believing, I bundled up my child and departed for Silver Spring, leaving behind two other terrified children and a husband who busied himself in plans for the expedition in order not to have to think about his child's illness.

  John kissed me lightly with a quick "I'm sure she will recover," but it was my father who saw us safely seated in the carriage and who reached out a hand for mine just before we left. He said only, "My thoughts will be with you," but the look on his face plainly told me that he felt himself too old to suffer any more grief. And I, I wanted to shout, am too young for this!

  Anne did not revive. She worsened steadily, in spite of the care of the physician hastily sent for. On the night of July 10, Lizzie and I sat together all night. I held my daughter and watched as her breathing grew shallower. Occasionally Lizzie and I talked—of our childhood dreams, what had happened to us, our hopes for the future—but such talk made me all the weepier, for I saw that my daughter had no future, no time for childhood hopes. Just before day broke, little Anne gave one last sigh and lay limp in my arms.

  "She is gone, Jessie," Lizzie said at length, her hand resting on the baby's forehead.

  "She is only five months old," I said irrationally. "She has had no life. She hasn't had time to know how I love her...."

  "She has been loved all her life," Lizzie said, "and I promise you she knew that."

  Once again I sat clutching my dead infant to my bosom, and this time I wondered how many times God could cause a person to suffer such unbearable grief. There seemed no answer.

  John appeared as devastated as I at the simple graveside ceremony, but afterward he was immediately back to planning his expedition, and I envied him the occupation. I, who had spent my days caring for an infant, found them now heavy on my hands.

  His leave-taking in August was once again painful.

  "Jessie, I want you to promise me something."

  "Of course," I answered, wondering.

  "If I don't come back from this expedition..."

  I put my finger to his lips, not willing to hear such talk. I could not bear the loss of anyone else close to me, let alone he who made the sun rise and shine for me.

  "No," he protested, "I must tell you this. If I don't, I want you to promise that you and your father will make the government pay the money due me for providing cattle for the Indians. I prevented an Indian war, and it is only right that they should pay. Besides, it... it is the only insurance I can leave you."

  Feeling that someone had walked across his grave, I promised.

  "You are up to this?" I asked. "Your leg?"

  He shook the offending leg. "Fi
ne, fine," he assured me. Then he laughed. "I suspect I'll have a little trouble adjusting to a wet saddle for a pillow. The last year or so has softened me. But yes, Jessie, I am up to it... and I want badly to do this."

  "It is," I said in stilted tones, "to your credit that you will take up that rough life again, after the way you have lived, and I think you do it not for personal gain but for the national advantage. I shall always make that known publicly."

  "Just collect the money from the government," he said with a wry smile, and pulled me toward him.

  The leg was not fine. The expedition set out from Westport Landing in late September. By mid-October I received a telegram saying that John was back in St. Louis, his rheumatism having flared up to a degree that it was impossible for him to continue the expedition. His leg was inflamed, and he was suffering shooting pains in his head and chest. Father's house being closed up, he was staying with my cousin, Sarah Benton Brant, widow of the late Colonel J. J. Brant.

  With mixed emotions I made a hasty departure for St. Louis, leaving my children behind, my mother ill, my father in need of my support and assistance. John, I told myself, must come first. A part of me was disloyally thankful that he had been forced to give up the expedition—I would be spared the uncertainty of another winter, the wondering if he was alive or dead, well fed or hungry, warm and cared for or lying frozen in some snowdrift. But a stronger part of my mind knew that John could not bear another defeat. Being forced to give up the expedition, even for physical reasons beyond his control, might be the final failure that would... well, I didn't know what the effect would be, but I was sure it would be disastrous for him personally, for us as a married couple, and for our children as a family. That seemed the longest, slowest train trip I ever made, though railroads, by replacing the steamboat route, had much shortened the distance between my two home cities.

  "John?" I crept into the bedroom where he slept, expecting to see an invalid. Instead, when he opened his eyes, he jumped—literally—out of bed, threw his arms around me, and said, "Jessie! You've no idea how glad I am to see you... but what about the children? Your mother?" Then, telltale, he winced as though in pain and sat rather heavily on the bed.