Jessie

by Judy Alter

  "This article." He spread the paper out on the table where I sat, a writing pad before me.

  "Oh, John, it's just a little piece I did when the editor—you know, Robert Bonner—asked me if I wouldn't write something. I've done several of those sketches... about famous people I've known."

  "Famous people," he said with some irony. The sketch was of Starr King. Then, "Why must you do that and reveal to the world how desperate our circumstances are?"

  None of this came as a surprise to me. If I'd thought he would respond differently, I would have told him about the articles when I agreed to write them—or, as truth would have it, when I asked Robert Bonner if the interest he had shown some years earlier still held. He had said it did, and he agreed to pay me one $100 a sketch for a series on the distinguished persons I had known. So within two weeks I'd earned $400 by writing about Starr, Kit Carson, Andrew Jackson, and Hans Christian Andersen. I wondered if it would be too obvious if I next wrote about Thomas Hart Benton.

  Lily and Frank had been in on the secret. When their father was hidden in the small closet he now had for a library—John always had to have his private place!—I had read my sketches aloud to them and had been gratified by their approving response. Lily had been almost effusive.

  "You've pictured Mr. King just right," she told me. "Mother, you're really a great writer."

  Lily's praise, which gave me no end of pleasure, was followed by the thrill of seeing my work in print, with my name above it. Always before—except The Story of the Guard—I had written so that first Father, and then John, might have the credit. I'd done it gladly, and would again, but it gave me no end of happiness to write in my own name.

  But I knew that John would be unhappy... no, "embarrassed" was the right word. And I remembered my words to Elizabeth Cady Stanton some time earlier: "Women always get slapped when they move out of their sphere." I had moved out of mine.

  Now I had to defend myself. "John, no one thinks that is why I wrote that piece, least of all me. I need to pass the time these days. You are always busy in your study, and I no longer have the entertaining and charity work that I did at Pocaho. What am I to do all day, every day? Writing is a pastime for me, nothing more." I took a deep breath and added, "There are three more sketches, and there may be others."

  "Jessie, you cannot do this!" His words were firmer than his voice.

  "I am paid $100 for each one," I said, hastily adding, "though that is not why I write."

  "That," he said, "makes it worse." And he turned and left me sitting at the table. All my pride, all my happiness, could have crumbled before his disapproval... but I knew I had to stiffen my spine. I could no longer give in to John, though I could still worry about his frailty. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and tell him to stop worrying about what others thought—now in his old age, and in our unhappiness, he ought to rest on the glory of all he'd done in his life. But the gulf between us widened—and I dared say no such thing to John Charles Frémont.

  John never again mentioned my writing, though I longed for his praise. After the Ledger pieces were well received, the editors of Harper's Weekly approached me, and I did a series of pieces on the gold rush in California, even describing those early frightening trips across the Isthmus of Panama. As I wrote, I could feel my skills improving, my writing getting better. Each bit of improvement, each new assignment only spurred me to work harder, and I spent long days at my table while Lily kept the house running. By 1878 I had collected enough related pieces to be published, and my first book came out—I never did count the one about Zagonyi as my own. This one was called A Year of American Travel.

  I was asked from time to time by reporters about my husband and the tragedy—their word, not mine—that had befallen us, and my response was always that General Frémont had long dedicated his talents and his fortune to the good of his country. He had, I hinted, perhaps been too trusting, as it was the nature of a good and decent man to assume all other men are honorable, and as a result he had been the victim of unscrupulous businessmen. Too, he had the courage to take a strong antislavery stand when such was not popular, and he should now, I always said, be recognized for his bravery.

  When quotes from my standard response appeared in print, John was unfailingly grateful, thanking me for my support.

  John, I wanted to cry out, don't you understand that I love you? Don't you know that I would suffer again all that we have suffered just for your sake? I knew him as a man who had experienced failure after failure, but that did not change the fact that I loved him. The only difference now was that I had to be the strong one; all pretense that John was the leader had to go by the boards.

  We remained cool and polite to each other, distant strangers living together in a tiny house with two grown children. It broke my heart, and I cried myself to sleep more nights than not.

  When I dreamed aloud with Lily of bringing back the good times, she listened indulgently, but once she said to me, "Mother, your geese are always swans!" Perhaps I was indeed the eternal optimist.

  * * *

  When Rutherford B. Hayes took the office of President in 1878, we had a friend in power. Hayes, as a young lawyer, had been a strong supporter of John's candidacy for President, and I thought him the perfect person to remind of the government's long-forgotten promise to John of another appointment.

  "I hesitate to bring this to your attention," I wrote, without John's knowledge, "but it seems a waste to me that a man of General Frémont's tremendous knowledge and proven capabilities is not serving his country actively, when nothing would please him better than to be of service....I must ask that you keep this letter in confidence, as General Frémont's natural modesty would be offended by my having written. Yet I think it is the right thing to do."

  President Hayes responded by offering John the governorship of the Idaho Territory—which John promptly refused.

  "You were offered it and you refused?" I asked incredulously.

  "Yes," he said carelessly, "they will also need a governor in Arizona, and I am interested in some silver mines there. I'll hold out for that."

  I wanted to scream... or throttle him, I wasn't sure which. With my knowledge of our financial situation I was convinced he should have taken whatever was offered him. But I dared not speak.

  The gods had not always looked favorably on John, but they did this time. Hayes did indeed offer him Arizona, and he accepted. The salary would be only $2,000 a year, but that was certainly more than he was earning at the time. And despite myself I felt my hopes rising: once again John had a last chance to prove himself, and with every fiber of my being I willed him to do it.

  "Jessie," he said formally one day as I sat sharing a morning cup of coffee with Lily, "we shall have to pack."

  "How soon do we leave?" I was in my appropriate wifely role as a helpmate, determined to see him succeed.

  "Only a few days," he said. "We depart by train for California, then to Yuma, and finally by ambulance to Prescott. It will be a wearying journey." He paused and looked at me. "You are up to it?"

  Did he want me to remain behind? No, that was unthinkable. "We are all up to it, John, and we shall make you proud." He nodded and left the room.

  * * *

  In late summer we went by Union Pacific to California, the first time an "iron horse" had taken us cross-country. The seven-day trip was one of celebration. John's new appointment was publicly known and so was his travel schedule. At cities across the nation—Chicago, Omaha, and others—he was honored with receptions when the train stopped, hailed as the man who had opened the West. "You had the vision of a transcontinental railroad," said one speaker, "and it is only fit that you ride that railroad to your new post."

  It would, I thought to myself with some bitterness, have been more fit if he owned the railroad.

  As the train labored westward, the man in the seat behind John, a New York banker, complained mightily of the discomforts of the trip, the long time it took.

  Final
ly John turned to me and said loudly enough for the man to hear, "It required a great deal more than seven days to make this trip in my time, and a great part of it was made on foot. There were also a few discomforts along the line of March—hunger, for instance, and cold!"

  I smiled and reached for his hand. For an instant there my old John was back.

  The fast and luxurious train took us to San Francisco, where the Pioneer Association of California held a dinner in John's honor, and then we took the Southern Pacific to Los Angeles, where another enthusiastic crowd greeted him. John stood visibly straighter, and his step became more confident at each reception. In California, he was still a hero. But we were not to stay in California, and I viewed Arizona with some measure of uncertainty.

  We went by train to Yuma, but that was the last of civilization we saw. From there we traveled for seven days in army ambulances, each pulled by six good mules. Just out of Yuma, we crossed the bottom lands of the Gila River, a monotonous landscape broken only by tall cactus plants.

  At the Castle Dime Mine, eighteen miles beyond the Colorado River, we were welcomed into the home of the supervisor—an adobe structure with an earthen floor and a roof of cactus. I eyed it askance—would we live in similar quarters? But there were irresistible touches of civilization in that small home—a pair of opera glasses hung on a nail, and a delicate woman's slipper served as a watch pocket.

  "I would not bring the owner here—not until better quarters are prepared," the supervisor said when questioned about the slipper.

  When we camped at night, I slept in an ambulance—a privilege I jokingly demanded because of my age, leaving out my fear of snakes and scorpions and other creatures. Lily slept in the tent prepared for both of us, and John and Frank slept on the ground with the men.

  We crossed dry beds of stony creeks, where bits of blooming jimsonweed provided only a faint bit of color. The landscape and the almost unbearable heat gave me further uncertainty about the land we were going to. I conjured up visions of the beautiful view from any room at Black Point and the lush greenness of Pocaho, trying to tell myself that I had lived in some of the world's most wonderful spots and I could surely endure one not so beautiful.

  But then we met a Captain Woodruff, headed the other way from Prescott, and he called out cheerily, "New York for two years!" His joy was so great that I nearly called after him to wait for me.

  John and Frank, meanwhile, saw it all as a great adventure. Frank caught a jackrabbit, and John lectured to any who would listen—and some who would not—about rock formations and geography and the importance of a transcontinental railroad—all topics he somehow related to the land we were crossing. Lily and I exchanged looks but said nothing. We had no need—we could read each other's minds.

  The desert offered us only one boon—the most glorious sunsets I had ever seen, eclipsing even those of Black Point. Here intense purples faded into blues, and then the whole was enveloped in crimson, and while we sat about a fire waiting, the sky turned black and was punctuated by thousands of the brightest stars I'd ever seen. Nights in Arizona were definitely better than days.

  Gradually we passed into mountains, their sides covered with flowers of pale blue and scarlet, and then through beautiful grass country. We were nearing civilization, for we began to see here and there a farm and the house that went with it, often a house so primitive that I wondered that people could live there.

  "This is Skull Valley," John said to me, waving his arm at the farmland we were passing.

  I shuddered. "It's an awful name."

  "Awful story, too," he said. "There was a battle here, and the white men who died were just left on the field—you know, Indians always carry away their dead and wounded. Well, several years after the battle the Indians came back and piled up the skulls of the white men, as though they were rubbing in their victory."

  "Maybe they were," I said, "but who would fight them for this land?"

  "A lot of people, Jessie, a lot of people. Including me."

  Two miles outside Prescott we were met by the outgoing governor, a man named Hoyt, and a welcoming party, which included Mrs. Hoyt. I was immediately given over to her companionship, but not before I noticed John openly staring at a beautiful woman who wore a leghorn hat trimmed with dark-red silk and bunches of poppies.

  "I hope," I heard him say to Governor Hoyt, "that all the women of Prescott are as beautiful." The governor laughed appreciatively, and I for a moment—dusty and dirty, old and tired—hated John for bringing me here, hated him for eyeing another woman, just plain hated him. But it was a passing moment, and I turned my attention to Mrs. Hoyt, who was telling me how much I would enjoy the sociability of Prescott.

  "I'm sure," I murmured.

  In Prescott there was no house immediately available, and we had to make do by borrowing a home from a lawyer whose family obligingly moved into his office. But then one of the leading merchants announced that he was "going inside"—their term for going to California—and would lease his house for ninety dollars a month.

  "John! We cannot afford that!" We were already paying forty dollars a month for a Chinese cook and servant that one of John's friends insisted we must take with us, and John's annual salary of $2,000 would not stretch much further.

  "We cannot afford not to take it," John said. "Would you rather live in a tent?"

  The house, situated on a hilltop, had bare plank walls covered with sheeting and a heavy infestation of household pests. The sheeting had to be removed and the planks repeatedly scrubbed with boiling lye before we could live there. I wondered about the merchant and his family.

  I was a housewife again, and I did my best to brighten our new home—small it was, too—with curtains and drapings. I found my mind going back to earlier days at the California White House when I'd been a housewife—no campaigns, no reports, nothing about the world of power to distract me. Then we had to make do with what we could get. This was the same, though I had less energy for it—and even less money. Life in Arizona was expensive: twenty-five cents for a can of tomatoes, thirty cents for a pound of sugar, nearly ten dollars for a cord of wood for the cookstove. Beef and game were plentiful, but, as I wrote to Liza, we were "four days' travel from a lemon."

  John was busy from first light until well past dark, but I knew little or nothing of his business. Sometimes he dropped hints about gold and silver mines along the Colorado River, and he seemed to be forever riding out to inspect this mine and that, but he never shared his business with me. I heard rumors—mostly from Lily—that he was particularly interested in the Silver Prince Mine and was seeking financing for it, and that he also was promoting the Sonora Cattle Ranch... and then there was a railroad from Tucson to the Gulf of California that needed congressional support. For once poverty was a blessing—we had no money for John to invest in these schemes and therefore no money to lose. But I was always aware, with a terrible mixture of relief and pain, that he did not talk to me about his latest wild dreams. Shut out, I would have been bitter... except that when he was away I let the housekeeping go and kept to my desk, writing furiously. Among other things, I had begun a project I called "Great Events in the Life of General John Charles Frémont and Jessie Benton Frémont." I intended to write about the conquest of California, the Republican nomination for the presidency, the Civil War, and the governorship of Arizona.

  "I hear you are teaching," he said to me one day. "For pay?"

  Indignantly I replied, "Of course not for pay, John! I am teaching the history of this country because I know much more about it than the schoolteacher, and the students like to hear me talk about people I've known. Some of the townspeople come to listen too."

  "I suppose," he said bitterly, "that you'll turn it all into articles and sell them."

  I fell silent and did not rise to his bait, but he was not far off the mark. I talked at the school once a week and was absolutely amazed to find myself a celebrity. "You mean you really knew Andrew Jackson?"

  "What
can you tell us about President Lincoln?"

  "What was Queen Victoria like?" In answering those questions I made history and its figures come alive for my listeners, but I was also, as John suspected, sharpening the material of my sketches.

  "Jessie, you'll have to abandon your writing for a bit," he said one night when he'd just returned from a two-week absence—surveying the mining prospects of the state, he said.

  John knew I was writing, but we had an unspoken agreement to ignore it. Now, needing my help, he brought my work out in the open, using it, I thought, as a tool with which to manipulate me.

  "What do you need, John?" There was no sense debating the writing issue with him, and I would willingly help him.

  "Your help," he answered. "I have a territorial report due next week, and I've been so busy... away so much... I haven't had time to work on it."

  "Of course, let's start now." I gathered foolscap and pens and arranged the table so that we had room to work. "Tell me what you want to say."

  So I found myself writing about all the things that were John's causes—mining recommendations and railroad routes and irrigation reservoirs (John believed that the Colorado River could be used to flood the southern region of the state, the Salton Sink, and thereby improve the climate and vegetation of America). Once again we were in harness. The report went in on time and was well written, if I do say so.

  But once the report was finished, the distance between us opened again. John sensed my doubts, no matter how I tried to hide them. And the harder I tried to be warm and loving, to put our relationship back on its old footing, the more he withdrew—to his library when he was home, but more often by simply leaving Prescott "on business."

  Oh, Prescott society thought we were a fine couple, for we made our way together through dinners and dances, opera performances and recitals. It was a busy place, with citizens who were well educated (and much more comfortable financially than we) so that there was always refined entertainment of some sort. In some ways it put me in mind of the Washington of my youth, and I enjoyed the life. I liked being "Mrs. Governor," a big fish in a small pond.