Jefferson (6 page)

The worst moments, the slough of despondence so to speak, came when Jefferson finally put down his pen and returned with his wife and daughters to Monticello. There he received first the news of the inquiry into his conduct (his supposed cowardice) and a few months afterward the notice of his election once again to the state Assembly at Richmond.

He refused to serve.

He wrote a letter of resignation. He raged in his house. He exchanged decrepitude for a chill, bitter, month-long anger, and when poor young James Monroe came to Monticello to urge him to serve (James Madison was more perceptive, as always, and simply kept his distance), Jefferson told him bluntly that no man was obliged to “everlasting servitude” for the sake of the public. “In thirteen years of service I have sought nothing except the affection of my countrymen,” he told Monroe—they were pacing back and forth (Monroe remembers) on the lush green lawn of the west portico, looking toward Carter’s Mountain. Jefferson would reach the end of the grass, stare at the mountain, and turn abruptly, like the lash of a tail. “I have stood arraigned in my own country for incompetence and cowardice,” he said (Monroe wrote down every word later), “for treason of the heart. With this investigation the Commonwealth has inflicted on me an injury that will be cured only by the all-healing grave.”

The reference to the grave must have shocked the twenty-four-year-old Monroe far more than Jefferson’s anger. Anyone who came to Monticello in the spring of 1782 could see that Mrs. Jefferson was about to deliver again, this about one year after the death of the little girl that had plunged her into such depression, and her features were gaunt to the point of exhaustion. She was always a small, frail woman—odd to see next to the tall, indefatigable Jefferson—and she ought not to have been having children at all (Monroe thought, daringly), let alone seven of them. The grave indeed. A fine and private place. Jefferson’s thoughts were clearly running to his wife’s health and the ordeal she was about to undergo. But as he paced back and forth with Monroe, he justified his refusal solely on legal grounds. With cold eloquence he cited cases where other men had been elected to office and declined to serve. He invoked English common law. He weighed at length the duties of public service against the duties of home and the cost of
neglecting his farm. But he made no reference or mention of his wife’s condition. And it was not merely (Monroe thought) that in Virginia a gentleman doesn’t speak of such things in public. It was (stiff, unimaginative Monroe attempted a rare flight of image) as if, with all his marvelous power of language, the former governor were building a fence of precedents and theory to keep out a wolf.

“They may take this in Richmond,” Jefferson said ironically, turning on his heel and citing his own ultimate precedent, “as
my
declaration of independence.”

On May 8, two days after Monroe’s visit to Monticello, Mrs. Jefferson gave birth to another daughter, whom they named Lucy Elizabeth, the same name as that of the child who had died the year before, a common Virginia custom. Now there were three daughters in the household, plus the six children of Jefferson’s widowed sister: plenty of life for a man in search of affection.

But summer came relentlessly on, as Virginia summers do. And in Albemarle County the summer of 1782 was long and hot and parching dry. The new baby, Lucy Elizabeth, thrived. She had red hair like her father and her sister Patsy and fierce good lungs that she put to use in the service of an early colic; a delightful child, likely to live. But Martha Wayles Jefferson saw little of her baby, or any of the other children. Through the whole long miserable season she was too weak to nurse and too weak to rise. She simply stayed in the narrow bed where she had given birth, her eyes growing larger and larger as her face wasted. Two women attended her constantly—Jefferson’s sister Martha Carr and Martha Jefferson’s own sister—but it was Jefferson himself who gave the sick woman her medicine, poured her the water, pressed the wet handkerchiefs to her temple. A few days after the birth he wrote to Monroe, repeating almost word for word what he had said in defense of his resignation—the reaction in Richmond was scornful, he was taking a sulky “revenge” out of spite—but thereafter he wrote no letters at all, none to anybody. For four full months he was never out of her calling. And yet just as at Poplar Forest, when he wasn’t directly at his wife’s side he was writing constantly—he had a small room that opened directly at the head of her bed. Writing what? More fences against the wolf?

For the wolf had come clear, teeth, claws, and all. One day late
in August, Martha Wayles Jefferson sat up in bed, supported by bolsters and cushions, and penned a few lines:

Her hand faltered and stopped. The passage was from Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
, a novel that Jefferson had read over and over; read aloud to her often in the days of their courtship. He took the pen from her hand and finished the quotation:

In Virginia, with its swampy malarial climate, they call late summer and early fall “the dying time.” By the first day of September, Martha had begun to weep uncontrollably when she saw her children. The servants remember that on the fourth Jefferson stood by the bed, holding her frail hand in his, while she asked him to promise that he would never marry again, never, never bring a stepmother in over her children. On the morning of the sixth, Dr. Gilmer, who would accept no payment except the loan of some salt, called all the family and servants in. They stood in silent rows around the bed. A moment before the final scene, Jefferson, unable to stand or sit, was led from the room by his sister Mrs. Carr. She took him to his library, where he fainted and collapsed on the bare floor and remained insensible so long that they feared he would never revive.

For three weeks he kept to this room, walking incessantly day and night, lying down only when he was completely exhausted, and then only in the thin little straw pallet that had been brought in when he fainted. The
violence
of his emotion was what everyone remarked on—his neighbor Colonel Randolph, who was a hard, violent man himself, but violent in another direction, wrote Madison contemptuously that even a month after his wife’s death,
Jefferson still swooned like a woman whenever he saw their three children. Madison wrote back with precise indignation that his story was “incredible.”

Somehow Jefferson managed to write in his account book for September 6:
“My dear wife died this day at 11:45. a.m.”
Then in an act of extreme—not violence but privacy, he gathered all her letters, all the notes and letters that had ever passed between them, every slip, and burned the whole mass in the fireplace. He ordered an inscription in Greek for her tombstone. Five days after her death, he picked up his pen again for the first time and wrote in his garden book (I have seen it and checked the dates):

A fence indeed. Who could get past
that
? Was he thinking of his wife’s body and its inevitable dissolution in the grave? Or was it an example—spectacular—of that precise, objective scientific curiosity that his enemies claim made him so cool? Or is this really a recipe for preserving something beautiful and dead that you cannot bring yourself even to
name
? Virginians are strange. In the five years I lived with him in Paris, I never once heard Jefferson refer to his wife.

Abigail Adams, energetic as a hurricane, sent over by messenger that evening a prescription to cure Jefferson’s “seasoning” once and for all.

“I made the mistake last night,” Jefferson explained, lifting his head and smiling at Short, “of describing my symptoms to her.”

“You mentioned the dreaded grippe?” Short asked. They had each taken a chair near the coal fire in the library, the tea table spread between them, Jefferson in his mildest, most expansive mood. Short thought they were like two English dukes stretching their legs in their manor.

“I gave it full credit, the grippe, the headaches, the fever—all of them
ad seriatim
. I was the ideal dinner guest, presenting a new and fascinating symptom for each course. It was a shameful appeal for sympathy. I only neglected to expire completely when dessert was served. Now. She writes, ‘Dear Sir, I once found great benefit in treating the same disorders by taking an ounce of Castile soap and a pint of Bristol beer, dividing it into three portions, and taking it three mornings in a row, fasting.’ ”

Short groaned. Jefferson smiled again and folded the note away.

“You won’t take it,” Short said firmly.

“She’s a wonderful woman.” Jefferson placed his teacup on the silver tray. “John Adams’s greatest asset. But no, this is only the New England way of making certain they drink beer somehow or other, and at the same time making sure they suffer a little for the pleasure. Franklin once told me he never drank so much beer as in Puritan Boston. ‘Conscience,’ he said, ‘makes you thirsty.’ ”

“You seem well in any case, almost cured.”

Jefferson stood—unfolded himself in stages—and began to walk in front of his shelves of books, humming snatches of an Italian song. He was forty-one years old, Short reminded himself—forty-two in less than three months, on April thirteenth—and in fact he did not look well at all, not cured at all.

“You show great self-control.” Jefferson broke off his song and looked back with an expression still mild and ironic. “I had assumed that you would be filled with questions about Franklin’s departure—what it means, why he does it, what the future of the delegation is to be. But you seem content to analyze la grippe.”

“Dr. Franklin is an old man,” Short said tentatively.

“Dr. Franklin wants to go home to die,” Jefferson replied. “He has a horror of dying in a foreign country. He keeps young Temple
Franklin with him, he says, because he wants to know that a blood relation is on hand to close his eyes and bury him.”

Short stirred uncomfortably. There was altogether too much dying in this conversation.

“And of course—” Jefferson moved farther along the shelves, humming, running his hands across the spines of his books. A born sensualist, Short thought, the hands of a great painter, a great artist. He strokes the bindings of his books (an unworthy simile) the way another man would stroke a woman. And a sensualist is sensitive, will collapse when coarser men are unbothered. Jefferson had the frame and body of a Virginia mountaineer, he should have effortlessly knocked aside Paris’s effete headaches and grippes—John Adams had, Humphreys had, Short himself—instead Jefferson looked pale and fragile. With his red hair and feverish skin he looked like a burning stick.

“Of course,” Jefferson said. He looked at a title, frowned, pushed the book back. Then he crossed and sat down in another chair farther from the fire. “Of course, there is no business for our delegation. That discourages Franklin and makes him willing to leave. That discourages everyone. No country will negotiate with us—”

“They think our government is unstable.”

“They think our Articles of Confederation leave us without a central power, and they may be right. The Comte de Vergennes insists that he sees thirteen separate governments, not one United States. He frankly doubts we can make commercial treaties that will
bind
.”