Jessie

by Judy Alter

  "And I, you, John," I answered, wishing I could tend to myself immediately, as though that somehow would prevent another pregnancy. But I never refused John, and I became an artful deceiver.

  John, who generally let me run the household while he was off on his travels, turned strangely stubborn just before he left. He insisted we rent a small house not three doors from Father's house.

  "John! The children and I can live with Father much more economically," I said, totally unprepared to consider this wild idea. "Susie is gone now, and Father will need me all the more."

  To our great surprise Susie had quietly married one of her suitors, a French nobleman, and they had taken up residence in India after a small wedding. "Mother's condition," Susie said, when asked if she did not want a formal ceremony. Perhaps sudden and small wedding ceremonies ran in the family.

  "I want to see my family in their own home," he said, his voice every bit as determined as mine. "We have lived off your father long enough."

  In a way, this was like making love. John, once again, had to prove himself.

  "It will just be inconvenient for me, having to run down the street to care for Mother," I said.

  "It will also give you a place of peace to which you can retreat," he countered, "and I have hired a maid so that you will not have to run the household. Jessie, I mean this as a help to you." His voice took on a certain pleading tone, as though he wanted me to applaud what he had done.

  "Thank you, John, I know that you do. And you're probably right—it will turn out for the better." As it was, it turned out much for the better, though none of us could have known that at the time.

  The house was partly furnished, so it was a simple matter to transfer our personal belongings down the street. We had carted the Oriental rugs and the inlaid furniture around the country so much that I wondered they were still intact—the damask draperies had long since gone to other uses, including a gown for me. Father was puzzled—and a little hurt—but I assured him I would spend most of my time in his house and this was just a move designed to keep the children from under his feet or from bothering their grandmother. He nodded silently, but his expression told me that he did not accept my halting excuse.

  "John thinks it best?" he asked.

  "Yes," I said, and he simply nodded again.

  John left in August, and by September I knew that I was pregnant again, but there were other things on my mind. Father, having been defeated for the legislature, set out for Missouri to repair whatever political fences he could. It worried me to see him troubled with chronic headache, and it saddened me to see a political career that had once bloomed so brightly fade as the slavery issue overtook the country. But nothing could persuade Father that he should retire from politics nor that he should change his antislavery stand, not that I would have wanted him to.

  Meantime, at home, there was Mother. "Mother, can you not take a little broth?"

  "Not now, Jessie," she whispered. Even her voice had grown weaker in recent days', and I knew—though I wouldn't admit it to myself—that the end was near. Had he been home, Father would have paced the hall outside her room and entered to stroke her hair and stare at her with a love so strong that it would break your heart. But he was gone, and I was all Mother had—my presence was slight compensation for a life lost for the sake of the man she loved. Even as I nursed her, cajoling her into eating, I wondered if I would sacrifice that much for John—and then, with a shock, I realized I probably would, for I had long let my love for John dominate my life. As a result there lay behind me a string of disasters—expeditions that failed, a court-martial, and—worst of all—two of our children, dead. Instinctively, I clutched my rounding belly.

  On the evening of September 9—how that date burns in my memory!—Mother sat up in her bed and, her voice stronger than usual, announced, "I want to go downstairs."

  With my arm to lean upon, she ventured down the stairs, into parts of the house where she had not been for months. With a strength of purpose that both frightened and amazed me, she headed for Father's library. There, throwing off my arm, she stood at his chair, stroking it as though she were stroking the head of the man who normally sat there. With great care she touched the stacks of foolscap, the penholders that lay there, an old pipe that had been tossed to one side.

  Then, weeping, she turned to me. "He is a very good man, your father. You must take care of him, Jessie. I have never been able to."

  Then, still leaning on me, she walked through the downstairs rooms of the house, pausing to stare at the matching oil portraits of her parents, running a loving hand over the high polish of the sideboard that had come from Cherry Grove, stopping to sit for a moment in the wingback chair that had by tradition been hers in years gone by, when she'd spent evenings in companionable silence with Father.

  I grew increasingly nervous, fearing that she was getting too tired, and yet reluctant to hurry her along. Finally she said, "I am ready now," and I thought she meant to go upstairs. But no sooner were the words out of her mouth than she collapsed onto the floor in a small heap, and I, my heart in my mouth, leaped to her side. She had, for all I could tell, merely fainted. I called for Mathilde and with her help was able to get Mother back up the stairs and into her bed, though all the while we struggled with her inert weight, I said prayers of appeasement to the unborn child in my womb.

  My mother died on September 10, without ever regaining consciousness. I decided she had died at peace, and that was what she meant when she said, "I am ready," though I pondered long in the following days about the meaning of her life.

  Father returned from Missouri a broken man, all thought of the next election banished from his mind. His terrible grief brought home to me in unexpected ways the importance a woman plays in her husband's life. There I had it—two examples, both of which confused me utterly. My mother had sacrificed all for my father and had seemingly done so without regret; my father, that strong, outspoken, garrulous man, was apparently so dependent on a frail, invalid wife who rarely left her room that without her presence he was reduced to helplessness. Where, I wondered, did John and I fit into such patterns?

  John wrote impassioned letters of condolence from California, regretting more than I could know that he was not in Washington to support me when I needed him. Even as I replied, assuring him I felt his support across the continent, a glimmer of thought raced through my brain that this crisis was more easily gotten through without John. And then I banished the thought as disloyal.

  And so we passed another holiday season, this time in mourning, John gone as usual, the house deadly quiet. Father could not be drawn into a celebration, so what festivity there was occurred at my little house. "John," I whispered aloud late one night, "how wise you were to put us in this little house." Lily and Charley sat around the evergreen tree on Christmas morning and opened modest gifts that brought joyous gasps far out of proportion to the contents. But they were happy, and I was gleeful to see them so.

  Father came for dinner and, despite his best efforts, put a pall on things. Late that night as I tucked the covers up around her, Lily asked, "Will Grandfather ever be himself again?"

  "I don't know," I sighed, "I really don't know." But deep in my heart I did know, and that was a burden to be borne. My father had lost his strength. I nearly had to run from Lily's room to hide my tears. Once I was safely closeted in my own chambers, the tears came in unchecked torrents as I cried for all that Father had lost, for the great things he had accomplished and the even greater things that he had been prevented from doing, for a political career in ruins and a man heartbroken. I cried, too, for myself, for the reflected glory I had lost. Raised as Senator Benton's daughter, I had been used to privilege, and it had come to me gradually over recent years that my heritage no longer brought the privilege it once had. Oh, I was still Senator Benton's daughter, but it was a tarnished crown I wore.

  If privilege in our nation's capital mattered to me—and I wasn't sure if it did or not—then I
looked to John to provide. And he was off in California, running from the center of power as though it had burned him. And perhaps it had.

  * * *

  In February another tragedy blotted out all other thought.

  "Mama, Mama, Grandfather's house..." Lily came running in the front door, screaming in a way unlike that usually placid child.

  "Lily!" I had been about to scold her when her words penetrated my thinking. "What about Grandfather's house?" I asked. It's burning!" she cried. I was out the door and into the cold air without a wrap or a thought, running the short distance between the two houses. But even as I sprinted down the steps of my own house, I saw smoke rising in the sky high above, and flames pouring from the windows of the first floor of Father's house—my house, the home I had grown up in, the place that had always been my refuge.

  Gasping from terror, I clasped my hand over my mouth and stood in the street, the horror of the San Francisco fire flooding over me again. Now, even before my very eyes, the flames grew bolder, reaching up to dart out of second-story windows, consuming the roof in great sections.

  Mathilde and Sophie soon joined us, having come from the back of the house. They stood in silent horror, staring at the house.

  "How?" I asked.

  Mathilde shook her head. "Don't suppose we'll ever know. That Joe Mr. Benton done hired a while back, he come runnin' into the kitchen shoutin' 'Fire!' I didn't believe him, till I pushed the swinging door into the dining room and seen the flames eatin' up the whole front of the house." She paused a minute. "It started in the senator's library, Miss Jessie."

  Father's library! All the books and maps and the records of a lifetime. He had some time ago finished the first volume of his memoirs—Thirty Years' View—and had started the second volume. All his papers, I knew, were in that study.

  "Probably the chimney," Mathilde muttered. "Must not've been built right."

  But it worked all these years, I wanted to shout!

  The fire company had arrived, amid clanging bells and much shouting, with their horse-drawn wagon and the hand pump it carried. It took two men to work the thing, and they pumped furiously, but the supply of water in that small wagon was soon exhausted. I saw one man holding a great, tall ladder and staring at the house, as though baffled as to what he should do. His duty, I supposed, was to put it up to the second floor and rescue people, but there could be no one inside that inferno now. Then he laid the ladder down and joined the bucket brigade, men throwing ineffectual buckets of water from the cistern. They reminded me of gnats fighting an elephant.

  A great anguished cry escaped my throat, and I staggered drunkenly. Lily, by my side, grabbed my arm and said, "Mama, it's all right."

  I wrapped my arms about her and held tight. "Your grandfather," I said, "I don't know where he is...."

  "There," Lily said, pointing down the street, where Father came half running along in that awkward gait that an elderly man takes on when trying to hurry.

  Even as I rushed toward him, he waved me away, as though he wanted to witness this tragedy in solitude. He stood, feet planted apart, thumbs hooked in his belt, watching the destruction of all that he had held dear.

  "All of Elizabeth's things," Father said under his breath.

  "Your memoirs!" I shouted, as though I thought I had to remind him that they were more important than Mother's possessions.

  Father just shook his head hopelessly, and together we watched the final destruction of the house on C Street. Within minutes there was nothing left except a blackened shell of bricks and a fireplace chimney extending crookedly beyond a roof that was no longer there. One wall had fallen partway in, but the bricks mostly stood firm, a sort of grim reminder of the shape of the house. The fire had taken all record of us as a family... and much of the record of Father as a legislator.

  That night we sat late and silent before a small but warming fire in my parlor. The children were in bed, and Father and I sat together without talking. Finally I ventured, "I had not thought I would want to see flames again so soon." I nodded at the fire.

  He just looked at me, and then finally he said, "I have lost everything that matters to me. Everything. It makes the idea of dying so much easier, there is so much less to leave."

  My shoulders convulsed as I tried to hide my sobs, and Father—he who had been my rock—reached over to comfort me.

  At last I raised my face, trying to smile. "I'll help you rewrite the memoir."

  "We'll see, Jess, we'll see," he said wearily.

  One thing about Father: he was not easily defeated, by political enemies or natural disasters. Within a month he presented me with plans to rebuild the house and announced that work would begin the next week. And his memoirs? "I've started again," he said. "I think the manuscript will be better this time."

  At that moment I hoped and prayed that I had inherited more of Father's strength than Mother's weakness.

  * * *

  John did not return until early May, just in time for the birth of Francis Preston Blair on May 17. He was my fifth child, a special blessing, though he took a long time coming into this world and exhausted me. I was thirty-three years old—too old, I decided, for childbearing.

  John disappeared during those long hours that I labored, and sometimes, through a haze of pain, I longed for him, wanted his comforting touch, wanted the renewal that he had found in me. But he was gone, only to reappear when the baby was safely born. I would not say healthily, for the infant was weak enough to strike terror into my heart.

  John was there, though, almost immediately, holding my hand, telling me he loved me.

  "John, I want to name him after Francis Blair... Father's friend." Francis Blair was also the father of the Blair brothers, who were lawyers in St. Louis and friends to both John and me.

  "Fitting," John said, "but can we call him Frank?"

  We could and did.

  Chapter 14

  The presidency! I had not dared to think of John as presidential material. If I had thought about it, I would have said that he was too young and untried, too green and unknown. Presidents, I would have said, were my father's contemporaries—Franklin Pierce, James Polk, Zachary Taylor. There were never men of John's age.

  And yet when I first heard his name mentioned for President, I shook with a thrill so strong that for a moment it terrified me. Could I want something that badly? And if I did, why? What did the presidency mean to me? In sane moments I would say that it meant a chance for John and me to advance the causes we believed important—even crucial—to the country's future: abolition and westward expansion. Caught late at night or in an unguarded moment, I might have confessed that having grown up in Washington, the White House represented the ultimate in achievement and power to me. I wanted it badly for John—and for myself. I never denied being ambitious.

  Even before John returned from California that spring, I was hearing rumors of his possible candidacy for the presidency. The Democrats wanted to run an antislavery man.

  "Jessie, he'd be perfect," my cousin William Preston of Kentucky said. "He's antislavery, he wants to win... and we're going to win."

  "He'll not compromise on the slavery issue," I warned.

  Francis Blair, who had come with William to our meeting, just looked skeptically at me, as though he were telling me that every man had his price. Not John Charles Frémont, I wanted to tell him, but I kept my counsel. It was for John to say such things.

  What John said was that the Native American party—a southern outgrowth of the Democrats—appealed to him tremendously. He heartily agreed with their belief that we should close the borders to immigration before the New World became as overcrowded as the Old World. Advocating a twenty-year residency requirement for voting, the Native Americans believed land should be held only by those willing to take responsibility. "A dissatisfied citizen of the Old World will never become a useful citizen of the United States," John told me, echoing political sentiments he heard from supporters among the Native Am
ericans. It seemed to me all counter to the principles of our country and, certainly, to the teachings of my father. I kept my counsel, though.

  "Ah, Jessie, can't you see us in the White House?"

  Then I let myself dream a bit, doubts or no. "I've been there so often, John, and I know just what we would do differently... how we would conduct things....Oh, yes! It would be wonderful."

  John was perhaps taken aback by my enthusiasm. The look on his face suggested he wanted to remind me that the presidency was occupied by a lone man, not a man and his wife, but it mattered not to me. We were partners.

  I hoped all along that a presidential bid would come from the Democrats and not the rump Native Americans. By the time John attended a meeting of the southern Democrats in New York, it was late summer and the children and I had left the city for the quiet coolness of Nantucket. Frank was a good baby, healthier than I had at first expected, and Lily took wonderful care of Charley, walking him along the beach for hours on end, so that I was left free to rest.

  But my mind was never at rest, no matter that the world thought Mrs. Frémont was recuperating from the birth of her last child. My imagination ran to presidential balls and receptions at the White House and presidential policy and a thousand matters of state—the things on which I'd cut my teeth as my father's assistant. I waited impatiently for John.

  And yet, when he arrived, late one night, I saw defeat in the slump of his shoulders. My eyes asked the question my voice did not dare.

  "We'll talk later," he said. "Let me see the children."

  And so he spent an hour or two watching his children play on the beach. John was never good about playing with them, always remaining more of a spectator. Frank lay on a blanket at our feet, and occasionally John would waggle a finger at him. Lily from time to time came to stand by her father, and once I heard her say shyly, "I'm glad you're home." He thanked her formally, and she, after an awkward moment, went back to Charley, who played at the water's edge. Charley was, I had decided, the least inhibited of my children, frankly enjoying every minute of life with a zest that I envied.