Jefferson (7 page)

“So they stall and wait to see how stable we prove.”

Jefferson made a tall steeple of his fingers. He wore no rings, no jewelry of any kind. According to the old Virginia custom he had only one first name—
Thomas
Jefferson—while the northerners liked to have two at least (John Quincy Adams, Short thought, remembering the Adams son), and the French positively rioted in them: Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Moher de Lafayette. When he spoke again, Jefferson’s voice took on the rich visionary energy it always did if he spoke of the future.

“Whale oil, tobacco, timber.” He ticked them off on his long fingers. “Rice, fish, lumber, fur—the wealth of our United States, the potential wealth is astonishing. If the barriers of trade would
go down
here
, our ships and farms could feed—Europe!” He cocked his head and smiled wryly, as if conscious of the criticism his political enemies always made, that Mr. Jefferson was greatly addicted to hyperbole. “When Lafayette returns next week, we mean to make an all-out assault on the tobacco monopoly here at least.”

“I think,” Short said, venturing an opinion that he had overheard John Adams give, “that the French resent our continuing trade with England. We still trade three-fourths of our goods with our former enemy.”

Jefferson nodded absently and rubbed his face with one hand, suddenly, obviously tired. “Politics in Europe is the systematic organization of hatreds. It should never come to that in America.”

He stood up and seemed to sag for a moment.

“You’ve tired yourself out,” Short said, rising quickly.

“I’m fine, I’m well.” Jefferson turned and walked in his rather shambling, loose-limbed way to the door. He rested one hand on the handle. “I have an invitation for you from Patsy,” he said, “by the way.”

“Ah.” Short clicked his heels. Patsy was Martha, Jefferson’s twelve-year-old daughter, fashionably immured in Panthemont, the Catholic convent school across the Seine, a tall, rangy, big-footed girl with sandy red hair—Jefferson’s daughter!—and Short made a game of treating her with mock-French gallantry.

“She reports,” Jefferson said with something like renewed energy, “that the drawing master is less severe than the one in Virginia, she does
not
like reading Livy, and the other girls call her ‘Jeff.’ ”

Short grinned, Jefferson smiled. Jefferson had once told him that domestic happiness was the highest good in life. Without a wife, he now lavished all his affection on the three girls; Lucy and Mary in Virginia, Patsy in Paris. Patsy most of all. To Short, given to erotic rather than domestic reverie, it was wonderful to see how the mention of any one of the girls could brighten Jefferson’s face.

“Tomorrow morning,” Jefferson said, “we are to assemble early at Panthemont to witness a ceremony—two French girls take the veil: they call it ‘dying to life.’ ”

Short’s grin faded. Jefferson appeared not to notice. Humming, he pulled at the brass handle of the door and opened it. At the end
of the hallway his black servant James could be seen, backlit by the candles in their scalloped holders along the stairs. He carried a small flat tray with Jefferson’s glass and crystal water bottle.

“I may send for Castile soap after all,” Jefferson said, a gravelly weariness coming back to his voice. In an uncharacteristic gesture—Short remembered it afterward as a premonition—he touched the younger man’s arm for an instant before turning away.

“ ‘
F
rance alters everybody,’ ” Miss Adams said with Adams decision and an Adams lift of her chin. “That is Dr. Franklin’s favorite saying. But I think it has metamorphosed our family most in their
heads
.”

Involuntarily Short glanced ahead to young eighteen-year-old John Quincy Adams, marching resolutely if unsteadily beside his mother Abigail, with his left foot on the street and his right foot on the curb. For the honor of the ceremony at Panthemont, Johnny’s dark brown hair had been “frizzled” (Abigail’s impatient term) into a state of unnatural, even luminous, curliness.

“Not
hair
,” said Miss Adams, showing the unnerving family ability to read thoughts. “I meant our
thinking
. But it is certainly true that everyone’s hair is metamorphosed here.”

“Not your mother’s.”

“No.” Miss Adams shook her own very slightly frizzled head in agreement. Abigail Adams was notorious for insisting that she could not be seen in public without her head covered—she had mysteriously lost four of her five caps on the ocean voyage over and replaced them only with enormous difficulty in Paris. In the fashionable company proceeding now along the street, her tall white mobcap bounced up and down like a runaway cake.

“Mama permitted Esther and John to go to the hairdresser last week—the other servants were ridiculing them for being un-powdered, but Esther wept because it took so long and her hair looked so strange afterward. Now,” Miss Adams added with her father’s tartness, “she seems happy as a lark.”

Short touched the edges of his own immaculately curled and powdered hair and squinted to see where the party was turning. Rue de Grenelle was new territory for him, so narrow and clogged with carriages and people this morning that they had all gotten out two hundred yards from the convent entrance and started to walk.

“Mother says—” Miss Adams began. They came to a halt at the end of the line filing into the convent. Thirty, forty people or more had now converged—Abigail and Johnny were lost in a sea of wigs and billowing skirts. An elderly French couple smelling of gallons of rosewater pushed ahead of them. Short cupped his hands and blew into them for warmth and then fumbled for his ticket of admission. “Mother says,” Miss Adams resumed, “that to be out of fashion is more criminal in Paris than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse.”

She darted a glance at Short, conscious perhaps that she had gone rather far.

Short smiled and led her forward. “Mr. Jefferson,” he said, quoting authority back to her, “says it’s all show and parade.”

“I know. He told Papa that since he didn’t expect to live more than a dozen years, he was loath to give up one of them to the hairdresser.”

“Mr. Jefferson,” Short said, holding up his ticket—

“—is greatly given to hyperbole.” With a snap of her own ticket, Miss Adams stepped through the wicket and grinned back at him.

The wicket opened into a cobblestone alley that ran between two tall buildings. They hurried along with the crowd, turned right through another small black door, another, a final turn to the left, and entered the chapel. So crowded was this room that they were ushered along with dozens of other guests up to the very altar platform itself and there shown to seats. Not certain what to do as he took his chair, Short made a vague gesture of pious
respect toward the altar—Miss Adams looked at him sharply—and tried to locate Jefferson.

“The convent,” she whispered. She pointed to an iron grille on the far side of the altar, open to a courtyard and a brown January garden. To their right the main floor was covered with a great elegant carpet like the one in John Adams’s house; on it, in rows of stiff, slender wooden chairs, nuns were murmuring prayers and chants. Behind them, like a wall of wine—or blood, Short thought—hung two curtains of rich crimson velvet, fringed with gold.

“I’ve found your parents.” On the other side of the altar Short could just make out, behind an Alpine range of wigs, John Adams’s apple-round face, Abigail’s pristine cap, Jefferson’s powdered red hair. “But not Patsy.”

“The boarders and students come in together,” Miss Adams informed him. Their shoulders touched. “Watch the curtains.”

At the moment she spoke the velvet curtains parted, and a procession of nuns began to file two by two down the center aisle. Each nun held a candle and a missal; the young girls following them, all dressed in a school ensemble of crimson and white, clutched gilt-edged prayer books or sheets of music, and scrambled whispering to benches set up behind the chairs. Short shifted his legs, inhaled perfume, pomade, rosewater, incense, a thousand alien smells. In Virginia he had sat for a lifetime of Sundays in a dusty wood-frame Anglican church at the crossroads of the Staunton highway, where the windows were clear glass—the congregation looked out on sloping pine forests, not Parisian courtyards—and the minister judged impromptu horse races after the service. To Jefferson’s left sat an elderly Frenchman with a gaunt face and sunken, unhealthy eyes. The younger woman next to him wore a dark gauze veil from her hat to her throat, impenetrable. She looked directly at Short.

The audience rose, then sat. The two girls who were to take their vows came through the crimson curtains, escorted by two pensioners of the convent, one at each side. They were pale blond and English in feature, beautifully dressed in full-length gowns of yellow and blue, glittering with jewels on their hands, their hair, their scooped bodices. Representing, Short thought an instant before Miss Adams whispered it, the vanities of the world.

At the altar the abbess waited with a priest. When the girls knelt and dropped their hoods, the crowd made a little gasp. Their heads had been completely shaved. (Beside him it was Miss Adams’s turn to touch her hair.)

Before the crowd’s murmur could subside, the abbess had moved briskly forward and the Vanities had lifted their skirts to climb the platform. The priest stepped between them, swished his own black robe, and began to deliver a sermon in the slow, incantatory rhythm (like a sad Kentucky mule, Jefferson said) that Short had come to expect whenever a Frenchman spoke in public. In a low voice, he translated for Miss Adams: the king was good, the French people, every class of them from throne to footstool, were good; the great city outside these walls held pleasures, beauty, opportunity for virtue. The world itself was good to live in; when God had finished His work of Creation, He looked upon it and saw that it was good. It was wrong therefore to quit this beautiful world and live apart from it. (In Jefferson’s row the veiled woman had lowered her head.)

“He wants them to change their minds,” Miss Adams whispered. “He’s warning them.”

But the priest had abruptly changed his logic. The truth was, he continued, this beautiful world was now losing its excellence; a false spirit of self-interest guided everything, they were right to turn their backs on such greed and pride. And yet their decision brought many difficulties. They would be confined in this place year after year, season after season, till the last day of their lives. Their actions would be misconstrued. If they should be gay, their superiors would say they had not really quit the world. If they should be grave, others would say they were unhappy and repented their vows. Holding both hands high over his head, he chanted a psalm in Latin, and from the back of the chapel eight pensioners approached in a double line, carrying spread out between them a huge black pall, like the flag of a ship, crossed with brilliant white.

“This is the dying to life,” Miss Adams told him as the pensioners spread the black cloth over the two girls, now prostrate before the altar. “When they lift it off again, the girls are resurrected as nuns.”

To his amazement, Short found that his eyes had filled with
tears. The candles, the chants, the dark quivering air of the ancient chapel all worked on him like charms. His heart went out in a rush to the young girls lying on the cold floor, covered by the pall—eighteen, nineteen: near enough to his own age. His mind seemed to roll and rise with the sheer idea of it, of dying to life, sacrifice, a church, a city, a lineage that went back in time toward a dim Gothic dawn. A show and a parade, but utterly, utterly moving. When he turned to Miss Adams, he found her weeping quietly. Around them the French spectators sobbed or stood in attitudes of deep affliction. The girls’ parents had come almost to the edge of the platform. At their feet the pensioners lowered the pall until it completely covered the two still forms. Short listened to the anthems, sung in a beautiful sweeping Latin, and felt a deep sense of—what? How had Europe metamorphosed
him
? He watched Jefferson rising with the rest of the audience. As the girls’ soft voices sang and the candles drifted around them in the scented darkness, he let his eyes move to the veiled woman.