Book of Ages (33 page)

“I take this opportunity to Send you a small Box of Crown Soap that I Recd from your Sister Who has been here On a Visit,” Williams wrote to Franklin, reporting that Jane was “in good helth & Spirits, & I belive more happy now then I ever new her.” She insisted that she lacked for nothing. “I
repeated to her that I Stood ready to advance her any money she stood in need of agreeable to your Orders her greatfull hart was effected,” Williams told Franklin. But “she told me that she hoped the Income of the house would be soficient.”
⁹

Because a single shipment of soap could easily get
lost at sea, Jane sent another box by way of
Peter Collas (“Mrs. Mecom Desired me to Acquint you the Soap was not as white as she could wish,” Collas wrote Franklin).
¹⁰
But she never liked to rely on Collas. So when John Adams sailed to France in 1779, he carried with him yet another box of soap Jane had made for her brother. She apologized that it wasn’t as good as it ought to be: “I thought I could have made a little more beter but I don’t think I have suckceded.”
¹¹
About the quality of her soap, she was most particular.
¹²

During these years, Jane spent a good deal of time not only making soap but thinking about peace. She wasn’t sure she would live to see it. “The Dismal Sound of fiveteen year from the comencment of the war Dwells on my mind which I wonce heard you say it might Last,” she wrote her brother in 1779. “If it does it is not Likely I shall Last that long.”
¹³
It didn’t drag on for fifteen years, but it did go on and on. “The Ravages of war are Horrible,” she wrote.
¹⁴

She told her brother she was far from the worst scenes of war. “I … know but litle how the world goes Except seeing a Newspaper some times which contains Enough to give Pain but litle Satisfaction while we are in Armes aganst Each other.”
¹⁵
But she saw a great deal of war. She saw armies march through cities. She saw blood on the streets. She heard the rumble of artillery and the thunder of cannons. She was witnessing the end of an empire and the birth of a republic. Despite her vantage, she rarely described any of this—the grand course of events—because, as she told her brother, “I do not pretend to say any thing about publick Affairs.”
¹⁶

Still, from Rhode Island, she begged him to write to her more of politics: “The few friends I have hear flock about me when I recve a leter & are much disapointed that they contain no Politicks, I tell them you Dare not trust a woman Politicks, & prehaps that is the truth but if there is any thing we could not posable misconstru or do mischief by knowing from you, it will Gratifie us mightly if you add a litle to yr future kind leters.”
¹⁷

This he did not do. During the war, he wrote her infrequently and circumspectly. Her letters to him seem rarely to have made their way into his hands. There were delays; one letter Franklin sent to his sister from France
took eight months to arrive.
¹⁸
Other letters were lost or intercepted. “I have heard of several of mine to you has fell in to the hands of the Enemie,” she wrote to him when he was in Paris in 1779.
¹⁹
Some of their letters miscarried.
²⁰
The more often her letters were lost, the more often she wrote. “You mention other Letters you have written, but they are not come to hand,” he told her in the spring of 1779. “Dont however be discouraged from writing as often as you can; for I am uneasy when long without hearing from you; and the Chance is greater that one Letter out of many should arrive, than one out of a few.… If you do not hear from me as often as formerly, impute it to the too much Business upon my Hands and the Miscarriage of Letters, or any thing rather than a diminution of Affection.”
²¹
The loss of their correspondence distressed her mightily. She prayed, again and again, for peace, not least because it would mean more letters: “when shall we be at peace,” she asked, “that we may at least have the comfort of Each others leters?”
²²

She was old and she was tired, but she loved living with her granddaughter, and she loved living near enough to Caty to visit her. She was, however, also overwhelmed by the number of people who stayed at Caty’s house, and when the Greenes had guests, she kept away. “When we have the Emtyest house We Send for her to Stay with us She Cant Bear Company as She used to do,” Caty reported to Franklin. Jane grew sick. Caty reported to Franklin that “our Dear Mrs Mecom” had suffered much from “her old Cough.”
²³

Her comfort, in these years, was her granddaughter and her great-grandchildren. Jenny Flagg Greene had four children in five years. Celia, born in 1777, died within a year. Sarah was born in 1779. Her next two children were born in 1780 and 1781. She named them, a boy and a girl: Franklin and Jane.

Jane loved them, her little rogues. She was more than a great-grandmother to them; she was another mother. “She is as much Enguagd in Raising the third Generation as She was the first,” Caty wrote Franklin.
²⁴
But Jane found it painful to watch her granddaughter struggle with pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing, even as she boasted about the children. “I have a grat-grand Daughter Eighteen months old that will Equill any won of yrs for understanding & prity Deverting actions at Least I think so,”
Jane boasted to Sally Bache, “& we have now a fine Lusty Fellow we have Named Franklin five weeks old who bids fair to Equill Will in bulk however it may be with His Intellects, His mother Fattns Him two fast to be very Strong her self but has been much beter this time than usal.”
²⁵
(Jane told her brother, too, about his namesake: “I do not write often my Time seemes to be filld up as the Famely I am in Increaces fast, my Grandaughter has had two children in Seventeen monthes the Eldest is a Daughter, Sally, the other a son Franklin, not because we could forgit your Name but that we love to hear it.”)
²⁶

She loved them, but it was hard, after raising her own children and then so many of her grandchildren, to spend the twilight of her life helping to raise her great-grandchildren. “As I grow older I wish for more Quiet & our Famely is more Incumbred we have had three children Born since I came & tho they give grat Pleasure in comon yet the Noise of them is some times troblesome,” she admitted.
²⁷
Or again: “I write among so much noise & confusion that if I had any thing of consequence I could not Recolect it.”
²⁸

She had more obligations, too. She began making trips to see Jane Mecom Collas, who had removed to Cambridge, where she was taken care of by Jane’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter, Jenny Mecom, one of Benjamin Mecom’s daughters. Jane found Jenny Mecom “grown a woman well & harty” and expected that she would soon be able to “writ well anouf to writ to me.”
²⁹
She was fifteen, and she could not yet write well enough to compose a letter. Benjamin Mecom’s children had not thrived.

Meanwhile, Jane, who so cherished letters, hadn’t heard from her brother in a very long time. Weeks had stretched into months, and months into years. There is some evidence that Franklin directed
gifts to be sent to his sister but they were never delivered. “If the Doctor desired me to ship anything for Mrs. Mecom I have shamefully forgotten it, and deserve his displeasure,” an abashed Jonathan Williams Jr. wrote to Temple Franklin in April 1781. “Pray let me know by the return of Post what the articles are & say nothing about the matter ’till I inform you of having shipped them.”
³⁰
This Jane could not have known. “Your Dear Sister is tolerable well but exceeding Desireous to have a letter from her only Brother her second Self,” Caty Greene wrote to Franklin that June.
³¹

That October, Jane went again to Cambridge, to visit her daughter and granddaughter.
³²
She also went there in search of
books. If she couldn’t read her brother’s letters, she hoped to read more of his essays. She crossed
the river to shop at bookstores. “I am this Day going to Boston in Pursuit of a coletcion of all your works which I hear is lately come from Europe,” she told her brother in a letter dated October 23, 1781. In London in 1779,
Benjamin Vaughan had edited a collection,
Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces … written by Benj. Franklin
. Jane seems to have had a good idea of which essays were included in the collection—“some of which I have been in posesion of & have lost.” She must have left them behind when fleeing from the
British Army before the siege of Boston. “You will say then I dont Deserve to have them again, but may be not if you knew all the circumstances,” she wrote Franklin. She hoped, too, that the Vaughan collection contained a few essays she had missed. “There is many things I never had and I can hardly help Envieng any won that Pleasure without my Pertakeing.”
³³

She probably also saw her name in a Boston newspaper dated October 22, in a list of people for whom letters were waiting at the post office.
³⁴
She must have hoped it was a letter from her brother; it was not. Still, she did get word from him, from Jonathan Williams Sr., who had received a parcel of goods Franklin had sent to her: “Silk for Cloaks &c. Gauze, Lace Ribbon, Linnen, & Cambrick.”
³⁵

In Boston, she visited friends and family she hadn’t seen since the war began.
³⁶
She wrote her brother again on October 29, at once thanking and scolding him: “I See you do not forgit me tho I have so Long mourned the want of a line from your own hand to convince me of it.” The day she wrote this letter, she probably also read, in the
Boston Gazette,
that Cornwallis had
surrendered at Yorktown, because she added, “The Glorious News we have now recd from the Southard makes us Flater our selves you may Return to us soon.”

She missed him, and she hadn’t been able to find that book after all: “I mentioned my being coming to Boston in Serch of a Book containing all yr Publick writings but I cannot yet find it.”
³⁷
She went back to Cambridge, very happy to have learned that the war had ended but very disappointed not to have found that book.

CHAPTER XXXI

J
enny Flagg Greene died in April 1782, “of a Short Consumption.” She was twenty-five. Jane had adored her. “I Injoyd Sweat Peace in her Pleasant conversation.”
¹

Jane had raised Jenny’s mother, Sarah, and when Sarah died, Jane had raised Jenny.
²
During her last illness, Jenny had begged her grandmother never to leave her own children: Sally was three; Franky was not yet two; the baby, Jane, was less than two months. Their great-grandmother was seventy.

“A care Devouled on me that I find my Self unequel to,” Jane wrote to Franklin in anguish, “& tho I made her no promis I find the Request to be very Powerfull.”
³

Caty was worried, writing to Franklin that his sister “injoys great health for a Person of her age But She has met with a Shock.” Jenny had declined very suddenly after giving birth, leaving Jane out of her depth in caring for her great-grandchildren. “She is So fond of the Children that I fear it will be a Disadvantage to both,” Caty worried. “She thinks She Cant leave them to Visit us Scarcely.”

Jane had not received a letter from her brother for two years. Caty begged Franklin to send his sister some words of comfort. “The Dear Lady tis So long Since She has had a line from you that She Can Scarcly Speak of you with out a tear.”
⁴
Franklin wrote her a letter, some while after, and never again left off writing her for so long.

Jane was exhausted, and overwhelmed by grief. “Something constantly Passes that keeps alive my sorrow,” she wrote, that “tho I have Plenty of all Nesesarys & the same Beautiful Prospect arownd me & all the season Blooming I so much mis her sosiety that it spreads a gloom over all.” She
resolved on a compromise.
⁵
She would spend most of the year with Sally, Franky, and baby Jenny in Rhode Island, but she would spend the winters in Cambridge, which would be quieter. She could bring Sally along with her, since she would have her granddaughter Jenny Mecom to help out.
⁶
When, that fall, Jane brought the little girl with her to Cambridge, there lived, beneath one roof, four generations: Jane Franklin Mecom, Jane Mecom Collas, Jenny Mecom, and Sally Greene.