Jefferson (36 page)

Overhead in Petit’s office the floorboards creaked. James fingered a bit of raw meat from the cutting board and chewed it. When the old woman slid farther along the grate, he flicked another bit of meat to the dog. Crazy dog. Sat all day on its dirty blanket till the cook gave the command, then it walked and walked and turned the treadmill that in turn rotated the spit and cooked the meat over the fire. Half a side of good dripping beef close enough to grab and run with, if the dumb black dog ever had the courage. Call the dog James.

He licked his fingers and thought of yesterday’s dying steer.

He wanted more coffee. He wanted to sit outside on the steps with his cup of coffee and hold his aching head in his hands and figure out how you roasted meat and made cold ice cream both in the same red-hot kitchen.

“Fait chaud, chaud, chaud.” Petit came into the kitchen suddenly, sniffing the air, wiping sweat from his face.

“Dans une heure fait chaud,” James said, just to contradict him.

“Hot, hot,” Petit said, stopping in front of him. “You were late last night, mon chat.”

“I’m here this morning.”

“Monsieur will dine at three.” Petit pretended to consult his notebook but in fact stared over it at James’s sullen face. “Six guests. Madame Cosway. Short. De Corny, three others. Dessert you know about.”

The brandy had made him quarrelsome. James stretched to his full height, giving him a head’s advantage over the Frenchman, and began to object; it was too hot to make ice cream
and
cook beef. He would make pastry instead, the hell with the guests. They could eat macaroons, or else brandied peaches and cake; he would go ask Jefferson for permission to alter the menu.

Petit only shrugged and turned a page in his notebook. Jefferson was out, he said, walking with Madame Cosway, but not very far away; they had set out for the Cours la Reine ten minutes ago. Spoken sardonically: James was a privileged person. James the black could do as he liked.

James could. Muttering to himself, he stamped up the stairs, slammed a door, and emerged by the wall on the rue de Berri. For half an instant the sharp, hot wind made him think about turning around and going back; then, still muttering, head throbbing, he set off down the Champs-Élysées.

On the map of Paris he kept pinned to his wall, the public gardens of the Cours la Reine stretched along the river from the Tuileries almost to the Grille de Chaillot, but in fact, with their mania for building, the Parisians had started to erect rows of houses at the western end, in sight of Jefferson’s door. James pushed between two slow-moving wagons and crossed the dusty road.

Closer to the city you had to pay to enter the Cours—you had to pay to enter
anything
in Paris—but by the customs wall and the Grille, for no good reason that he knew, there were still a few unmanned gates and turnstiles. He bent his head against the wind and followed the first gravel path down through a series of blowing hedges and onto a bare terrace.

He spotted them practically at once, off to the right, by a circular bed of red and white flowers. He squinted and guessed: a quarter of a mile away, but he’d have to take a zigzag path twice as long to reach them, just like a maze.

He rubbed his eyes and thought. Jefferson, of course, would know exactly, down to the inch, how far away they were. On Judgment Day Jefferson would be writing down the temperature of fire and brimstone, counting the number of steps it took to walk up to the Judgment Throne, down to Hell.

Virginia was Hell, James thought.

Jefferson and the woman disappeared behind a bush and came out by a series of waist-high wooden fences. Even at this distance—whatever it was—James could see the pink ribbons on the woman’s bonnet blowing back behind her. Jefferson carried a rolled-up parasol in front of him like a stick.

Foutre
, James thought, using the foulest French word he knew. He would go back and make the fucking ice cream. Why walk all that way and whine?

But he stood for a moment longer. Jefferson’s way of moving today, his way of walking, was like a boy’s. At this distance, with her bonnet and curls, and Jefferson with his red hair and lively step, they looked like a young couple. They looked like Jefferson ten years ago and his wife Martha.

At the first fence Jefferson evidently said something. The lady shook her head. Jefferson took a step, extended his right arm toward the fence rail, leaned into the wind, and jumped.

Even where he stood James could hear the knock of his shoe against the wood, then an instant later the snap of Jefferson’s wrist as the bone broke and he fell.

James had already run fifty yards down the path toward them before he remembered the exact same sound of the steer’s skull hitting the ground.

It sounded, Short thought, as if the man were drunk.

“You get the
other
surgeon too,” he said furiously, “and you get him
now
, before I slap you sober!”

Short spun on his heel and opened the door to Jefferson’s bedroom. His cheeks still burned with anger. One part of his mind told him that if you spoke to James that way, you guaranteed he would slouch and sulk and do the job nigger-speed if at all; but Jefferson was in actual, visible pain, and his wrist had already swollen the size of a melon, and the idiot French doctor standing by the bed was smiling and scratching his wig and doing
nothing
.

“William—”

“Sir. I’ve sent for another surgeon. I think the bone is broken.” Short approached the bed and stooped to examine Jefferson’s wrist, which lay like a detached object on a white silk cushion (the surgeon’s sole useful contribution), while Jefferson himself stretched full-length on his bed.

“I must have told you,” Jefferson said softly in English, “that whenever I see two or three doctors together, I always look up in the sky for a buzzard.”

“Sir, the swelling is even worse.”

The surgeon began to rattle in French, a French so pompous and Latinate that Short couldn’t stand to hear it. He cut him off with a wave of his hand.

“Sir—”

“Mrs. Cosway is still here?” Jefferson had lifted his head.

“Downstairs.”

“You really must take her home, William. And cancel the dinner. And tell Petit to bring up my letter file. Next week, you know, Thursday—”

“Sir”—it was a measure of his anxiety that Short let himself intefrupt—“I’ll speak to her now. But Petit, the letters, all that can wait; you need to rest.”

“I’m thinking of the bust of Lafayette.” Jefferson glanced at the doctor, who still stood, thumbs hooked in his vest, studying the swollen wrist. “Does he speak English?”

“Not a word,” Short said, straightening and turning to go; and under his breath,
foutre
.

In the downstairs salon, under the painted ceiling, he found Maria Cosway holding open one of the French doors and looking into the garden. Her dress and ribbons today were pink. Her face was paler and more stricken than Jefferson’s.

“You really ought to leave,” Short said bluntly. “I’ve canceled dinner.”

“And he—?”

“The bone is broken, he’s in great, great pain.”

“He wanted, you know—” She fluttered her hands in a gesture that Short thought of as purely Italian. “There was a little fence, and too much wind. He was vaulting on one hand, jumping.”

He had been showing off like a schoolboy, Short thought, like a damned schoolboy; the least impulsive man in Paris jumping a fence to show off for a girl.

At the street he handed Maria into her carriage and bowed without another word. The new surgeon arrived at virtually the same moment, following James and Petit into the house. As he hurried after them, Short made a mental list: With a crippled right wrist, leaving aside the unthinkable questions of gangrene or permanent deformation, there would still be no playing of the violin for months, if ever; no tinkering with watches and tools, no riding on horseback—he stopped on the stairway landing, watched the surgeon go through the door, and finished the list. Without his wrist Jefferson could not write a word.

J
efferson passed the night in sleeplessness and pain. From time to time, when the swelling appeared to subside, the two surgeons probed the bones with their fingers and consulted each other (Short thought) in thick oleaginous French. Toward morning they attempted to straighten the hand and forearm with wooden splints, but they went about it so clumsily that even their stoic patient cried out in protest. By noon the next day, they had only strapped the wrist in a tight leather bandage, and Jefferson could walk, gingerly, holding his arm to one side like a broken wing.

To Short’s amazement, on the day after the accident, Maria Cosway neither came nor wrote. On the evening of the second day, as he sat at his desk in the study contemplating the bust of Lafayette that Jefferson was to present to the city in a week, a Savoyard brought him a small blue envelope tied with a feminine ribbon.

Short stood up, covered the bust with a cloth (let us have no prying eyes), and paced to the center of the carpet.

Like other diplomats, Jefferson kept a journal in which he recorded, with a brief summary of contents, every letter that he sent or received, even the most trivial inquiry or invitation. But
this … this was, by ribbon alone, no official letter. Short tapped the envelope on the side of the desk. If it were
his
letter or
his
journal, would he want it recorded?

He turned the envelope in his hand. Thought of Maria’s pale, strangely unresponsive face in the salon, her spider-legged husband. What could she possibly have to say now?

When he turned the envelope over again, he saw that the ribbon had come untied.

Short folded the letter once but held it clear of the envelope. No one had come to the house last night, late or otherwise. And obviously Cosway had scotched completely the scheme of coming to visit that morning, if the scheme had ever existed. Why should a husband carry his wife to her—? He stopped himself and glanced at the back of the letter. A final paragraph in Italian. Short frowned and translated the first few words. She wrote so badly in English, she said; she was his obliged servant,
obligatissima
, and true, true friend.

Outside the window a horse’s hooves clattered on pavement. A water carrier’s voice rose in the peculiar singsong rhythm of the streets. Short disliked Maria as he had never disliked a beautiful woman in his life. She was superficial, ignorant, self-deceiving. On the other hand—his mind flickered for an undisciplined moment
to the image of Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld—on the other hand, by living with Jefferson, he was hitching a ride on the coattails of history, he was
obligatissimo
to the facts.

With a smile not entirely unconnected to his own word
self-deceiving
, he sat down at the desk and began to copy the letter.