by Gore Vidal
During this period I saw General Washington only once at the Morris mansion. It was September 22, and I had accompanied General Putnam to a meeting of the senior officers. There was a good deal to talk about. The previous night almost a third of New York City had gone up in flames.
“Someone has done us a good turn.” Washington stood at the foot of the stairs with his plump favourite young Colonel Knox. Before General Putnam could say anything, Washington turned to me and I received for the first and only time his bleak dark-toothed smile. “I would not, Sir, have put it past you to have done this thing.”
“Only at your order, Your Excellency.”
General Putnam and Colonel Knox had no idea what we were talking about.
CHARLIE, I SHALL BURROW into my trunks and find you more of these notes—assuming that you are not too much ennuied by such old matters.
The other night as I wooed Madame on those very same stairs, I thought of Washington. For an instant I could see him, just next to Madame, with his dark smile, and the inevitable sprinkle of hair-powder on the shoulders of his buff and blue uniform.
Oh, there are ghosts among us! But then what are memories but shadows of objects gone to dust? Or in this case a smile that is no doubt preserved not only in my vivid if failing memory but actually on display somewhere, in the grisly form of a set of false teeth stained black with Madeira.
Eight
THE STORM BURSTS! Neither the Colonel nor Nelson Chase has been in the office for more than a week. Mr. Craft and I do the work as best we can. Among my recent duties was the reception yesterday of the Colonel’s partners in the Texas scheme. As I suspected there was a flaw in the land leases; and the Germans are not coming. The Colonel has lost his entire investment. The partners are irritable. I put them off. “The Colonel is out of town.” What else can I say?
Late this afternoon the great yellow coach, ominous as the chariot of the sun, came to a halt beneath my window. The coachman shouted up at me. “Madame expects you at the City Hotel.” The coach departed—without me. I am to walk.
At the foot of the horse-shoe staircase in the main hall stood Madame and Nelson Chase. Both looked as if they had been weeping. Superficially, rage and sorrow are much alike.
Madame seized my arm, as though without it she would sink to the floor. “He has sold my second carriage and the gray horses, too!”
“He has vanished.” Nelson Chase sniffed uncontrollably. Neither tears nor rage, as it turned out, but the hay fever.
Madame steered us into the Ladies Dining Room where she ordered tea which she promptly enhanced with rum from a silver flask, adorned with Napoleonic bees.
“It is unbelievable! Incroyable, Charlot!” The rum began slightly to mellow her. “On Monday he tells me he must go to Albany. He will travel by the boat. I say ‘no’—like a fool—‘take the second carriage.’ So he departs, waving his hat from the window! Ma foi! I could kill him! For a week I hear nothing until …”
Rum and tea inhaled the wrong way brought on a fit of coughing through which Nelson wheezed the remainder of the story. “Madame saw her own carriage this morning at the Bowling Green. She thought the Colonel must have just returned. She asked the coachman—a stranger—and he told her that his master, a Jennings of Newburgh, had bought the carriage a few days ago from Colonel Burr for five hundred dollars.”
“It was worth a thousand!” This came out clear.
“Where is he?” Chase looked at me as though I must know; must tell.
“He said he was going to Albany.” This was true. “But I don’t know.” Also true.
“He is not in Jersey City.” Chase looked at me significantly.
“Oh, we know about Jersey City!” Madame put a jewelled finger alongside her nose the way Italian singers do at the opera; and then she winked with a lewdness that would have shocked Mrs. Townsend as much as it did me. “Il y a une fille à Jersey City.”
“Her name is Jane McManus.” Nelson Chase was swollen and grim. “At his age, imagine!”
“His age has nothing to do with it!” Madame’s wrath, never for long settled in any one direction, was hurled like Greek fire at Nelson Chase.
“I only meant …”
“The Colonel is a man above all else! A creature of fire! A perfect balance between Apollo and Mars. Fidelity is for these wretches!” Madame grandly indicated the room of New York ladies and their swains, many of whom kept looking our way with obvious fascination. “I would not want a husband who was so lacking in puissance! Let him keep his girls in Jersey City, he is hardly old …”
I could not believe my ears. The Colonel is seventy-seven. That he is still active is miraculous; that Madame should condone such activity is beyond anything that I know of the world.
“It is not the girls I mind, Charlot. It is his God-damned incompetence with money! To sell my new coach and horses for half of what they are worth! He will ruin me!”
“He has already lost the money you gave him from the sale of the Connecticut shares.” For reasons of his own Nelson Chase is now undoing the marriage he helped bring about.
“He is incorrigible! He has spent a hundred fortunes in his time. Well, he won’t spend mine! Tell him that. Tell him if he does not pay me the thousand dollars he owes me for the carriage and horses, I shall divorce him.”
“We have sufficient evidence.” Nelson Chase was happy.
I assured them that whenever I saw the Colonel again I would tell him what Madame had said. Then I escorted them to the stairs that lead down to the internal carriage way. Face rosy with rum, Madame was now in a good mood.
“Tell him, Charlot, I wait for him eagerly.”
“With the one thousand dollars,” said Nelson Chase.
“With all my heart!” Lurching slightly, Madame made her descent, Nelson Chase at her side.
I went back to the main hall, passing the dining-room which was almost filled. For a moment I put my head inside the spacious, comfortable room that always smells so wonderfully of vinegar and roast meat. Sometimes the Colonel eats here, alone, in a corner. But not today.
I felt a tug at my jacket. I looked down and saw the ancient Dr. Bogart. He had recognised me through his veils of cataract.
“My boy! Sit down! I always eat at this hour. Sunrise and sundown. So should you.” I sat next to him as he ate—gummed—boiled potatoes.
“I’ve not seen our friend the Colonel since the great day.” Dr. Bogart chuckled horribly. “Everything as happy as can be?”
“Oh, yes, Sir.”
“A pretty couple. But then it’s the least that girl could do for Aaron. I mean one good turn deserves another.”
“What good turn did he do her?”
But Dr. Bogart was on a different tangent. “The other wedding was different, let me tell you.”
I did not actually let him tell me but of course he did. “A very plain woman, the first Mrs. Burr. Poor Theodosia. Ten years older than Aaron she was, with this terrible scar on her forehead. And sickly from the cancer even then. And five children by her first husband. And not a penny to her name. But Aaron adored her. So did we all. My people lived near by in Paramus.”
“Where did he meet her?” Since I was to be told, I preferred an orderly presentation.
“The war.” Dr. Bogart looked vague; mashed a potato with his spoon; gradually retrieved the past. “Colonel Burr was in the neighbourhood, at Orange County on the Ramapo River. I remember all this because, you see, I was there, too.” Old eyes looked at mine; eyes that had seen not only battle but the young Burr who was “the handsomest boy you ever laid eyes on. Slender and wiry. Hard as a hickory limb. And, oh, the mind! The mind! In those days there was hardly a girl who was not a little in love with Aaron Burr.”
It was lucky for them, I thought, that he returned their interest so fully.
“Theodosia Prevost she was. She lived at the Hermitage. Across the way from Bogart Farm. Her husband was a British colonel, serving in the West Indies. By rights she should’v
e been moved out as a Tory but since she was born American, since she was a friend to George Washington and to Jemmy Madison, she was allowed to stay on, and all our officers used to visit her. Even Washington came to call one day. Then the young Colonel Burr—the youngest in our army he was—started his night raids against the British. Everyone still talks of him down home. That is, those of us left who can still remember the night raids and our young days …” Dr. Bogart lost his train of thought. Stared vacantly at his plate.
“Colonel Burr,” I prompted him. “Theodosia Prevost.”
Dr. Bogart was recalled from whatever limbo it is that draws the ageing mind. “Her husband died, the war ended, and she married the Colonel at Paramus. What days those were!” And at some length Dr. Bogart spoke of a period in which skies were bluer, water purer, potatoes better-grained than now. I know the speech. It is the tirade of the old.
I asked about Burr’s exploits in the Revolution.
“He knew what he wanted from the day he joined General Washington at Cambridge. Illegally, I might say, because he was not of age. His guardian was furious—you know, Aaron was orphaned from the age of two. So the guardian, an Edwards, sent him a messenger with a letter ordering him to come straight home on the ground that he was not only a minor but, according to the family’s doctor, of too weak a physical disposition to survive any war.”
Dr. Bogart’s thin blue lips made a thin blue smile: he too has outlived many a doctor. “Well, Aaron told the messenger that if he tried to take him from the camp, he would have him hanged. And so the man gave him a second letter from the guardian—who knew his ward, you might say—and that letter was milder, and there was a bit of money in it, too. So Aaron went to war, and was one of our first heroes. After Quebec everyone knew his name.”
Dr. Bogart was about to tell me more when William de la Touche Clancey sat down next to me with an insolent crash (do I resemble a country youth because I am small?), and I made a quick farewell to Dr. Bogart.
Clancey gave me a hard look. I think he recognised me from the Five Points.
This afternoon I had the inner office to myself. Like a thief I tried for the second time to open the trunk beneath the baize-covered table. I succeeded. The Colonel had only half-turned the key and the tongue of the lock was not secure in its place.
The contents were pretty much what I expected. Packets of letters. Newspaper cuttings. Toys for the grandson who died shortly after the Colonel’s return from Europe in 1812. I note that he refers to the boy and himself, interchangeably, as “Gamp.”
I looked in vain for any reference to Van Buren. But then it would take a month to study all the letters and papers not to mention the thousand-page journal the Colonel wrote while he was in Europe, to be presented to his daughter Theodosia on his return. Presentation was never made, of course. After the death of her child, Theodosia set sail for New York. The ship was lost at sea and so the journal rests in the trunk, presumably unread by anyone. For the Colonel’s sake, I wonder if it ought to be read.
With startling candour the Colonel reports his poverty in London and Paris; his attempts to get an interview with Napoleon, to borrow money, to obtain a passport from an American consul who detests him and will not grant him what is any citizen’s due. I was most struck by the way in which the Colonel describes each of his sexual encounters, using French words which I don’t always understand as well as a private language shared by him and his daughter.
SAMPLE PAGES for May 2, 1811, at Paris.
I FORGOT TO TELL YOU last evening again the vigils until the watchman called two o’clock. The tea at dinner was too strong and I too weak not to drink. Took my leisure in bed, and did not go out until three, after eating potatoes. Boiled.
Went to the Tuileries to look at beautiful women, and saw only one in a carriage. Une duchesse au moins. The above part most comforting, and full like Mrs. X at Hartford, remember?
Then to the Palais Royal to observe the filles (the word used here for public women).
Beautiful day. The arcades of the Palais Royal a-twitter with filles. A wide range like the Battery on a similar day in spring. But unlike the Battery a small price will gain you the world, and no talk of marriage.
Much attracted by a dark creature, the image of Beau Ned Livingston’s Creole wife, with a mole at the corner of her full mouth. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle.” I was most courtly. Gave a deep bow. She gave me a majestic stare. I practised French. She practised mathematics. In a matter of minutes we were en route to her atelier, a single room on the fourth floor of a ricketty building back of the Palais Royal and from the sounds and sights (and smells!) much frequented by the filles and their amis.
Fairly clean (this is France). Linen passable. Spirit brio. We did first the Camel. Then an attempt at la Tonnerre which failed due to pique and false entry. Most pleasing, all in all. She is from Dijon in Burgundy. Her brother is a clerk in the foreign ministry (she says). I take Vanderlyn’s advice based on the latest medical theory (departement de Venise) and after the splendeurs de l’amour appropriate the vase de nuit and take a hearty piss.
WHAT SORT OF MAN is the Colonel? What sort of daughter was Theodosia? When I read his letters to her, and hers to him, it is like an exchange between Lord Chesterfield and his son (had the son been the father’s equal, for Theodosia’s style is learned and brilliant), but then when I read this journal and realize the way they spoke privately to one another I am mystified.
I wonder what will happen to the journal. I suppose Mr. Davis will destroy it. He ought to, if he wants to make a case for the Colonel.
Nine
COLONEL BURR WAS in the office when I arrived this morning. His spirits soar. “I gather you have seen Madame. And know all!” He rubbed his hands together mischievously. “We are estranged. But only temporarily. For the next few days I shall be stopping with a young protégé in the Bowery. A rising silversmith, if silversmiths can be said, properly, to rise.”
“That would be Mr. Aaron Columbus Burr.” I was pleased at my own boldness. But then the Colonel’s manner is contagious.
I was rewarded with the first surprised look I have ever managed to extort from that old knowing face. Pale eyebrows arched until they touched the rims of the spectacles which, as usual, rested just below the becombed topknot. “Charlie, you interest me. You do.” He paused, wondering no doubt just how to express his interest. “You have not been following me about, have you? Like Nelson Chase?”
“No, Sir. It was a guess. Someone mentioned that you had a son who was a silversmith.”
“I suppose it can hardly be a secret. His mother saw to that by giving him my name, with the thoughtful addition of ‘Columbus’ in the hope that the child might one day imitate the original and discover not only his father but our new world—which he did when he was eighteen. Now he wants to bring his mother to New York.” The Colonel sighed. “When I first met her she was the assistant to a watch-maker in the Rue Royale. She was superb with machinery. She could fix anything from a clock to a compass. I have not the slightest desire ever to see her again. I try to dissuade Columbus from importing ‘Maman.’ ”
Burr sliced the end from a seegar. “I told him that his house is much too small as it is for himself and his wife—a charming creature from Staatsburgh—and their two bright children not to mention myself from time to time, their old Gamp.” As he lit the seegar, he looked positively tender: children, I think, mean more to him even than the company of women.
“You will meet Columbus, by and by. He is a handsome lad, who speaks English with a very bad accent. I have never had much time to give him, poor boy.” Smoke wreathed the Colonel’s head like a halo slightly askew. He changed the subject. “Our friend Nelson Chase arranged a bit of sport for me in Jersey City. That’s why I am now removed to the Bowery.”
“He is working for Madame.” I declared my allegiance, such as it is.
The Colonel nodded. “As you know, I often visit a dear girl named Jane McManus. I find her company soot
hing—as I found her grandmother’s some fifty years ago. She was also from Jersey City—obviously a place for me of enduring magic. Anyway we were surprised, Miss Jane and I, by her maid, a goggle-eyed creature in the pay of Nelson Chase. I got the whole story from the girl, with the help of a cane. Madame paid the girl to discover Miss Jane and me in a compromised state so that she might be able to testify as a witness should Madame choose one day to dissolve the sacred bonds that exist between her and me. Well, catch us the girl did. Miss Jane is still weeping at the shame of it all. And Madame now possesses her shoddy evidence.”
“I think, Sir, Madame’s objections are not to your … your …”
“Friendships?” There was an ironic glint in those youthful eyes. For once everyone is right: Aaron Burr has made an agreement with the devil. Every dark legend is true.
“It’s the money that upsets her. The money you’ve lost on the Texas land grants.”
The Colonel frowned. Whatever his arrangement with the devil, competence in money matters was not a part of the contract. Matthew Davis once told me that, right after the Revolution, the Colonel acquired the largest fortune of any lawyer in the history of New York City, and lost every penny on speculation and extravagant living.
“I admit I ought not to have sold our carriage without first telling her. That showed want of feeling. But the offer was such a good one. The money so necessary. And Jake the coachman—a capital fellow, by the way—said the grays were not much good. Anyway, it’s done.”
A sudden gust of wind caused the scarlet-leafed vine outside the window to rap three times upon the dusty glass like knuckles on a coffin lid. Why does that image occur to me? Burr is eternal. Yet, inadvertently, eternal or not, he shuddered at the sound. “We must be on our guard, Charlie.”
“Yes, Sir. Do they know where you are living?”
“Not yet. Let us keep them guessing a while longer. I am involved in a new scheme which …” The Colonel stopped. He is always discreet about divulging prematurely what he is up to. This may explain his disasters. No one is ever in a position to warn him.