Jefferson (31 page)

From far-off college days I remember a Greek myth about a
man whom the gods cursed by placing a glass window over his heart: Through it anyone could see at a glance what he was feeling;
he had no secrets
. But Jefferson—why else am I writing these memoirs, if not because Jefferson put up a stone wall instead of a window around his feelings? He was unfailingly courteous; courtesy is opaque, courtesy is not emotion.

An additional fact: Jane Jefferson had been born in England, the meddling, arrogant, imperious country Jefferson absolutely hated; all her life, even in the backwoods of Virginia, she kept a London accent. When Peter Jefferson died, did she become (as mothers sometimes do) a kind of benevolent tyrant over the gawky, fatherless boy? Jefferson never liked authoritative, domineering women. For years after his return to America he used to privately denounce poor Marie-Antoinette as inflexible of will and stupidly obstinate; the real, disastrous power behind the French throne. Had there been no queen, he used to say, there would have been no French Revolution.

Martha Wayles Jefferson, no tyrant at all, was a widow when Jefferson first met her. Some five years earlier, at age eighteen, she had married Bathurst Skelton, a college friend of Jefferson, and given birth in due course to a son, John; but Skelton died unexpectedly one August afternoon, as men do in the dying time in Virginia, and nineteen-year-old Martha had moved back with her child to the vast Williamsburg plantation of her father, John Wayles, a barrel-chested, big-tempered man of fifty, who had already outlived three wives and settled finally (as all the countryside knew) on a black concubine named Betty Hemings.

I met Mrs. Jefferson once. Unlike her father, she was petite, an odd but charming sight next to the six-foot-plus Jefferson; auburn hair, much deeper red than Jefferson’s sandy color; pale, nearly translucent skin that showed the endless dark veins in her arms and neck, as if she were made of blue twigs under white silk skin. Fragile body, soft, yielding manners—the very opposite, one guesses, of the English-born mother he fled as soon as he was able. Martha Wayles Skelton was known for her skill at the harpsichord; she sang beautifully, she wrote music. She was much courted, as a rich young widow would be. I have heard James
Madison tell more than once how two
other
suitors rode up to Martha’s house one afternoon and were shown by a servant into the parlor. From the next room they heard the sound of a harpsichord. They looked at each other. Then behind the door two voices rose in harmony, her’s and Jefferson’s. The suitors looked at each other again, picked up their hats, and left.

Marriage was Jefferson’s object from the start. He has the female instinct, if one may say it, always to be building his nest, pulling together his family under his wing. Almost the first thing he designed at Monticello—right after the site of the house itself—was the family cemetery, where (ghoulishly) he had his favorite sister Jane’s exhumed remains brought and reburied. Dabney Carr, his best friend in the world, married Jefferson’s sister Martha and then, like so many other Virginians, went down two summers later before the great harvesting fever. Jefferson chose the burying place himself, on the hillside at Monticello, under an oak. He hired two laborers to dig the grave, and when they had finished he neatly calculated in his journal that one man digging at that steady rate could grub an acre in four days. (Look into
that
window.)

Now if you set out to make the hundred-mile journey from Williamsburg to Monticello in the summer, an easy day and a half on horseback will do it. If you set out in winter, as the newlywed Jeffersons did in January 1772, married on the first day of the new year, you must usually battle mud and snow and figure at least three days of hard travel. For their wedding trip Martha and Thomas Jefferson left little John Skelton with his grandfather and rode in a phaeton as far as Tuckahoe, eight miles from Charlottesville. There they visited Colonel Carter, and then—in the aftermath of a blinding snowstorm—pointed their horses toward Monticello, where all that existed yet was the little graveyard down the hill and a one-room brick house somewhat apart from the cleared spot on which Jefferson meant to build. Foolishly enough, they had lingered till sunset and so climbed steadily up a winding mountain track, not even a road, in darkness and whirling snow almost two feet deep. They arrived very late, soaking wet. The fires were all out, and the servants had retired to their own shacks near the garden. In the one-room house itself, as Martha shook the snow out of her hair and clothes, Jefferson
reached gleefully behind a shelf of books (he had books and graves before anything else) and pulled out a bottle of wine he had hidden. They sat down to drink, to startle the black, cold Virginia night with songs, and to begin what Jefferson called, with typical mathematical precision, his “ten years of uncheckered happiness.”

As always, of course, he exaggerated. Little John Skelton joined them in April, died suddenly in June. Patsy was born in September; survived. Another daughter, Jane Randolph, died in 1775. Mary survived; an unnamed son died in 1777. Martha failed slowly, under shock after shock of birth and death. Jefferson rose to great heights, fell from his mountain.…

A decade earlier he had begun his garden book, a little blank volume in which he first took up his obsessive habit of recording the temperature and weather each day and the dates that flowers bloomed and died. He carried it all the way to Paris with him, where I used to file it with his other records, and sometimes sneak a curious look. I can still remember by heart the strangely poignant entries on the first page: March 20, 1776,
“Purple hyacinth begins to bloom.”
April 6,
“Narcissus and Puckoon open.”
April 13, Jefferson’s thirty-third birthday,
“Puckoon flowers fallen.”
Every week in the book a new flower bloomed, another started to fade. Jefferson recorded them all. Monticello, Paris, Philadelphia. As President, in the White House, he would send a servant out to the Georgetown flower market to note the arrival of flowers or plants he didn’t see himself.

Which Jefferson kept these records? Not the Rebel. Not the Roman. The cool and unforgiving son? The Father, the Husband?

Flowers die and return. Flowers are born again and again, every year. If your father dies, your children, your mother, your sister, your friend, your wife, perhaps at last you fold your arms across your chest and put up fences, just as Clérisseau said. Fences, defenses. You shift your fear away from people onto plants. You place your faith in visible forms of renewal.

I myself have never married.

“
I
n the case of General Washington,” Richard Cosway said, smirking, “everyone in Europe expects he will be king. Nobody believes for a
moment
that a so-called
democracy
will last. And of course, you know him.”

Trumbull stroked his chin solemnly and took his time before answering. “I knew him,” he said slowly. “I know him. General Washington never changes. He’s always the same. And he won’t be king.”

“Maria says you were his personal aide-de-camp.… I didn’t realize that.” Cosway bared his teeth at his wife. Maria smiled back sweetly.

“Aide-de-camp, yes; that would about describe it.” Trumbull wore a smug, self-satisfied expression, as if the term in fact came nowhere near describing him, and Maria found that she couldn’t stand to be with either of them a moment longer. Over Richard’s shoulder—Richard’s fire-red shoulder, because he had purchased two days ago a new coat of China silk the color of an exploding rocket—over the little rubbery puff of color that was her husband, she could see Jefferson and the printer, old Monsieur Hoffman, still doing something mysterious with copper plates and phials of
acid. If she ever had children, she thought, they would be born wearing silk coats and baby white wigs like their father, monkey-people. Monsieur Hoffman had a slight, dancing-master’s build, and Jefferson literally towered over him.

“They are discussing politics,” she told Jefferson, crossing the room and coming up beside him, “which you would
prefer
a lady not hear.”

Jefferson showed her a square copper plate the size of his hand. “Some subjects are not fit for a lady’s ear. Tell me what you think of our experiment so far.”

Hoffman understood bits of English, and he jumped forward with a little French hop and a bow to show her the tin plate that matched the copper one Jefferson held, both of them having been dipped in fluid and pressed together a quarter of an hour before. It had been Jefferson’s impulsive idea, as the four of them had strolled along the Boulevard des Italiens—but knowing him now, she suspected he had planned it all days before—his idea that they come upstairs to Hoffman’s shop and witness the new engraving process called polytype.

“The sentences you wrote on the copper plate, with the metal pencil”—Maria frowned (she knew) prettily—“now they’re being transferred to the tin plate?”

“Which was hot, made hot, heated,” Hoffman declared with a little pantomime of touching his finger against an imaginary plate and a snakelike hiss.

“Then you see,” Jefferson explained, “the special ink burns into the soft tin from the copper, reverses the script, and you use
that
plate to print as many copies as you need, of whatever you’ve written.”

“You
cannot
,” Hoffman declared, “tell the
original
from the
copy
.”

Maria blinked. If the original was written on a copper plate, obviously you could tell; but the Frenchman was racing on ahead of his logic. “Franklin came here, you know, just when I started, and he wrote a souvenir for me.” Behind her she felt rather than heard the approach of Trumbull and Richard. “Here.”

From the crisscrossed stacks of paper and metal on his table, Hoffman pulled a much-thumbed piece of letter-size parchment on which someone had written in a round, cheerful hand. Trumbull pushed in beside her and read aloud, one eye closed: “ ‘A
Wit’s a Feather, and a chief is a Rod; an honest Man’s the noblest work of God. Pope. Passy, April 24, 1783. B.F.’ ”

Maria shook her head, uncomprehending.

“Another quotation from Alexander Pope.” Trumbull tossed the paper back on the worktable. “You really should read more, Maria.”

“Franklin,” Cosway said, a red blossom at Jefferson’s shoulder. “You knew him too?”

“Richard has been hearing from his friends,” Trumbull said. At the worktable Hoffman had begun to insert his tin plate in a little roller copying press. “They tell him that Washington’s house has been burned down by mobs, Congress has fled Philadelphia in a panic; the whole country, in other words, one long scene of tumult and anarchy from north to south.”

“Mr. Cosway’s friends,” Jefferson said courteously, but keeping his eyes on Hoffman, “have undoubtedly been taking their news from the British papers.”

“They
lie
, you think,” Cosway said with too much emphasis. “The British press
lie
?”

“A strong word.” Jefferson now turned to look down at him, smiling diplomatically. “But assuredly they don’t tell the truth.”