Jefferson (9 page)

“You’re not daunted, William,” Jefferson asked a little mischievously, “by the prospect of writing a brief on whale oil?”

Short had never encountered a subject that didn’t interest Jefferson. “I will master the whale,” he declared.

“We will shake the poetry from him.”

“Whale—hail!”

But Jefferson’s moment of playfulness was over. As they ascended the six stone steps to the door, he rubbed his face again wearily. James Hemings pulled the door open and took his hat, and in a matter of moments Short stood alone in the hallway, listening to his vanishing footsteps.

The next day was Sunday, ordinarily the most festive day of the Parisian week, when cartloads of shut-in city dwellers flocked to the Bois de Boulogne. But the rain had returned, there was a bleak hint of January snow. Jefferson kept to his room, and the others passed quietly through a gray tunnel of twenty-four hours.

On Monday Lafayette arrived from Philadelphia, as expected, and went directly to Auteuil for conferences with Franklin and Adams. At midday, still in rain, he stopped for half an hour at the rue Taitbout. (Short glimpsed the extraordinary gilded carriage from his third-floor window, the swift pineapplish top of the marquis’s head.) He spoke privately with Jefferson, presented a great leather pouch of mail, and left with a flourish. When one of the
manservants came rapping wildly on the door, Short had just opened the first of his letters.

“Le maître—venez-le-voir! Le maître est mort!”

Short ran down the stairs two at a time, shouting for Humphreys. At the study door he collided with James Hemings, shoved him aside, and bolted through.

Jefferson sat, legs akimbo, sprawled backward in a chair by the fire. As Short reached him he struggled upward and started to stand, then simply held out a sheaf of letters and fell back.

“Lucy,” he said.

“Sir?”

His face had lost every tint of color. Short seemed to peer straight through it, a transparent shadow. He caught Jefferson’s wrist; the older man shook him away. Then Humphreys was beside him speaking loudly and going to his knees on the floor. Servants darted behind the chair and hurried forward with linen and bowls of water, but Jefferson motioned them all toward the door, as if an impassable zone surrounded him.

Humphreys thrust the sheaf of letters at Short. The first was from Francis Eppes, Jefferson’s brother-in-law in Richmond. Short scanned it, seeing the names of Jefferson’s two younger daughters, the words
illness—Hooping Cough—fears
. The second was from Dr. James Currie:

Short glanced at the date—October 14, 1784. Three months ago. The last letter was from Jefferson’s sister:

When Short looked up again, Jefferson was on his feet, swaying, supported by Humphreys’s strong arms. We are all in our shirt-sleeves, Short thought irrelevantly.

“My daughter,” Jefferson said with a ghastly smile, “is dead to life.”

T
ea first, pastry second, brought crisp out of a “slow” oven while the tea cooled. James Hemings knew the prescribed order the way he knew everything else about Jefferson’s habits, automatically, completely, precisely, a great rock of fact that sat perpetually in the center of his brain.

He bent, placed the silver teapot on the table, and stood back. To his right, Jefferson. To his left, Mr. Short, Mr. Adams, his wife, and the daughter they called Nabby. Behind Adams, none too effectively warming the room, the coal fire that one of the other servants had let fall dangerously low. Jefferson hated to be cold.

“Thank you,” Short said to him, reaching for the teapot. Always polite. Always natural. The only person in Jefferson’s house, James believed, who really noticed he was there.

“The pastry now,” Jefferson said.

James nodded but walked to the fireplace first, where he tossed in a little brass shovel-load of coal. In the kitchen, Marc, the foultongued maître d’hôtel, sat by the oven door drinking Jefferson’s red wine straight from a bottle.

“Monsieur le Noir,” Marc said.

James knelt and slid the macaroons out of the oven. You get the proper heat for baking pastry, Jefferson had instructed him—he had written it out on one of his slips for James to keep—by holding a bit of white paper in the oven. If it burns, it will scorch your macaroons; if it just browns the paper it is exact.

“Black man,” Marc repeated in slurred French, then waved the bottle. “But you’ve not black, you’re
mulâtre
. Mu-lat-to. So who was the black man’s papa?”

When James returned to the study Patsy was perched on a stool at her father’s side, her nose buried in a teacup. Two weeks after his letters from Virginia, Jefferson still had the stiff, dried-out face—the
mask
, James thought—of a man in grief, but Patsy, Patsy was the Jefferson this time who could hardly speak or move. Her sister’s death seemed to have turned the girl to stone. Mrs. Adams had been trying to make conversation while the men debated their business, and now she looked up at James first with relief, then anxiety. Like most northern ladies, Abigail Adams always tried to think of something to say to him and invariably struck the wrong note.

“You must write down this recipe for me, James. Or …”

James handed a plate of warm macaroons to Patsy.

“James can write,” Patsy said.

“Well. Well, of course. I was just thinking—I’ve heard he was very sick.”

Short turned around in his chair and stabbed at a macaroon. “It’s true. James had a violent seasoning, just like his master.”

“Well. I have a remedy. You need to take some Castile soap, James—”

“Oh, he’s been fine for weeks,” Short said quickly. “He’s back in school, aren’t you, James, studying French cuisine?”

“Yes, sir.”

Patsy leaned forward with the same awkward long-boned motion her father had. She was twelve years old and already five and a half feet tall. “Is Marc drunk again, James?” She cocked her head at Abigail Adams. “Daddy has got to dismiss Marc,
I
think. He steals and he drinks.”

“French servants,” Mrs. Adams said, pleased with the topic. “I have seven in our house and two more, Esther and John, that came with us from Braintree, and none of the French will do any
work that’s out of their station—the
coiffeuse
won’t sew, the
femme de chambre
won’t wash.
Nothing
gets cleaned.”

On the other side of the room John Adams was pacing, declaiming, while Jefferson slouched with his long knees higher than his shoulders. When he bit into a macaroon, Adams bobbed his head up and down and made a gratified jack-o’-lantern smile.

“James, you’re a genius.”

“He’s started with pâtisserie.” Jefferson straightened to take his own plate from James’s hands. Six feet two-and-a-half inches tall, James thought, and whenever he sits in a chair, he folds up in sections like a carpenter’s rule.

“From pâtisserie,” Jefferson said, who loved any kind of system, “his school progresses to sauces—six months on sauces—then soups, game, meat. Fish they reserve for very late in the training.”

“I’d give anything for some Massachusetts cod,” Adams said, his mouth full. “Tell James to fix you some cod.”

In the hallway James looked at the coin Adams had given him—on every visit Adams slipped him something—hitched his shoulders, and went down the hall, down the grooved stone steps, into the glowing red kitchen. Now two of the French servants had joined Marc by the oven (but only Marc dared to drink Jefferson’s wine), warming their hands.

“Terminé?” the taller one asked with a jerk of his head toward the door. The kitchen was small and crowded and hot, and his long French face was nearly as red as his coat.

“Une demi-heure,” James said. “Faut préparer.”

“Merde.” Marc rolled the bottle neck between his fat palms; lurched to his feet; spat on the floor. The tall footman simply stretched his shoe over the place and rubbed. In Paris, James thought, stacking the plates from his tray, they all spit wherever they want, even the well-bred lords and ladies with their wigs and ruffles and little gold swords. He had seen a diamond-covered duchesse at Dr. Franklin’s house put one hand to her throat, make a loud hawking sound like a Virginia field hand, and spit right on Franklin’s polished parquet floor. Her husband had done just what the footman did—while Franklin kept on talking—and rubbed the spot out with his soft leather shoe.
Nobody
ever spat on the floor at Monticello.

“You wait, and I show you some sights tonight,” Marc said, squeezing past, squeezing his arm. “French girls adore
les noirs
.”

By the oven the footmen were chattering in French and waving their hands one last time over the charcoal. In another two minutes they would have to lead the horses and carriage around to the street and wait in the freezing cold until the Adamses finished their tea. Then Jefferson would go upstairs, Patsy would sulk to her lessons, and Short … James thought that Short had fallen in love with a girl in Saint-Germain and would be calling for his horse as soon as they left.

“They love a black man’s hair.” Marc squeezed past in the other direction now and ran his hand across James’s head. James bared his teeth and shoved it away. “Curly as a cunt,” Marc whispered, staggering drunkenly.

James reached for the heavy sheepskin coat he kept on a peg, bought with the money Jefferson paid him. On the street outside, where the footmen were struggling with the horses, he paused to look up at the stars—
French
stars—then started to walk as fast as he could toward the lights that glowed on the horizon, just above the Boulevard.

Rue Taitbout, the Boulevard, rue de Grammont—he could go left at that point and wind his way up to the Café Montpelier, where all the English-speaking visitors gathered nightly. Or he could push straight ahead from the rue de Grammont and down toward the Palais Royal, which turned into an open brothel at sundown. He could go, he thought, and suddenly grinned at the stars like a wolf,
anywhere
.

James Hemings was nineteen years old, or possibly twenty—nobody knew for sure—and “bright” in the peculiar Virginia sense of the word, meaning a Negro who was extremely light-skinned, nearly white. He was also quick-tempered, intelligent, and after four months, completely at home in Paris. He came by his brightness on the male side. His father, as all of eastern Virginia knew, having been the planter John Wayles, Martha Wayles Jefferson’s own father, Jefferson’s father-in-law. By the laws of descent, that made him Martha’s half-brother, but by the laws of Virginia, because his mother was a slave (and his grandmother too), James Hemings was Jefferson’s servant.

Servant.

In
Paris
he was a man with money in his pocket, hair powdered and scented, a warm coat in the latest fashion.

He turned left, decisively, along the Boulevard. This was the road to Clichy and Saint-Denis, his favorite stretch in the whole city when the mood he called the “trembles” seized him. For nearly two miles you walked past rich men’s glowing
hôtels
, the enormous new Opéra building with its hundreds of candle boxes and canopies and colored placards,
cafés turcs
, where turbaned waiters served sweet coffee, Swiss theaters,
jeux de paume
, red and green Chinese bathing houses—a wild boiling soup of Parisians, foreigners, horses—prostitutes, beggars, milords; blacks. At the Théâtre des Italiens the speeding carriages, trapped in the masses of playgoers, wheeled and turned like bugs.

He dug his chin into his collar and slowed to watch an egg-and-rope man do his trick on the narrow sidewalk of the theater’s colonnade, inches away from a roaring bonfire somebody had started in the gutter. A little Parisian
fille
in a fur bonnet bumped sideways out of the crowd, smiled, and ran her fingers down his leg, and James, inhaling perfume, smoke, the icy edges of a February night, pushed her away. While he patted his pocket with one hand, the whore laughed and called him a name in French. On Sunday night they were wilder than ever, he thought, grinning. He touched himself on the leg where the girl had touched him and shoved off into the crowd again, a black boat bobbing in the current.