The President's Daughter (49 page)

I had vowed never to resemble my mother, Sally Hemings. Yet like her not only was I still a slave, I was a slave who had taken my brother-in-law as my husband. This time my wedding gift from the State of Pennsylvania was a Supreme Court decision, which revoked Pennsylvania's Personal Liberty law which had made Fugitive Slave Kidnapping a felony and restored the Fugitive Slave Act. I was once again a runaway after all these years.

Falsehood will travel a thousand miles while Truth is still putting on its boots.

Thomas Jefferson

That day on the knoll, I stared down at the quaking sheet of paper I still clutched in my hand. There is a kind of amazement that forgets to ask questions. I felt Harriet was almost angry with me, and I rejoiced. I loved Harriet as shamelessly as one loved existence. It was a deathless, stoic, and indecipherable kind of love. It reawakened every morning in every limit of my body, as well as my soul. It seemed unbelievable that I, Thor Wellington, had lived so long with the idea of suicide. The maimed twin. The crippled half man watching as my brother, Thance, produced child after child. As I stood besides his grave, I was just as bewildered as before, but now, despite my grief, I was joyfully bewildered.

In those last weeks, I had begun somehow to believe in God, but without thinking of Him. I took on that metaphoric state of mind in which the world always seemed different to me from the way it apparently was, and for perhaps the first time since the accident, I no longer felt shut out, but lived in a radiance of utter conviction; what we were doing was right. It had become for me an interior metamorphosis. I imagined a God who opens His world like a hiding place.

“It can only do harm to imagine more than one can experience,” said the liquid, southern voice of Harriet.

“It is for you to decide such a thing ...”

When she looked up, I was disconcerted, and as her glance, still dark from emotion, crossed mine, the only thing I wanted out of life was to inspire her
confidence, her womanly rather than her sisterly love. Even as I attempted to stamp them out like a campfire, new feelings took hold of me and connected me with certain thoughts: duty to Thance, honor to his wife, protection, continuity, tranquillity, joy. The infinite cold stupor in which I had been steeped until now gave way to the warmth of blood vitally streaming back into my limbs, my sinews, my heart, and my head. I was right in my stubborn adoration, right in my divination of my twin's desire in this. I had stood over his grave and asked him what he wanted me to do, and then had proceeded to read his mind and answer my own heart.

From the corner of my eye, I could see Harriet's slightly upturned nose, the curve of her jaw, the lobe of her ear with its earring, her soft lips, and the strands of gray that mingled in the fair copper hair. There was a severity in the face that seemed not carved out of a hard material like ivory or sandstone but made out of something much softer, something which had hardened under the impact of some great secret. It was as if this supremely feminine, self-possessed face had been remolded into hard, ascetic details by an indefatigable and incommunicable will exerting itself on a softer, more internal primary material. I had spent many long hours in Africa contemplating Harriet. I was amazed that this interior sculpting had taken place over the years without my knowledge. I had long ago forbidden myself to contemplate Harriet, annihilating even the intelligence of whether she was beautiful or not. Harriet had been my brother's wife, my own sister, whose beauty I couldn't even acknowledge except as a corollary to my brother's good luck. Now I wondered how much more I didn't know about my twin's wife.

“One must never flee from chance,” I said in my confusion, polishing my spectacles, which had misted over, unaware that for Harriet, my words rose out of an interior conversation with myself, one to which she had not been privy. She was so startled by my declaration that the slits of her eyes opened and her gaze held something indefinable and feminine which was unguarded and probably not intended for my eyes.

A beautiful woman is a dangerous thing, I thought. Her person exudes as much power as a prince, a pope, or a president. Obsessions, fascinations with such a woman had brought down emperors and princes.

And their power was fickle, arbitrary, and absurd. It had no strategy and in many cases, no
raison d'être
except its own end, I thought as Harriet began speaking slowly and carefully, sometimes glancing up at me as we began to walk along side by side.

We moved away from the grave, in each other's company, out from the trees into the open space at the edge of the hills, without either of us deciding whether we would now follow one of the paths into the valley, and if so,
which. Instead, we walked along the promontory for a fair distance, talking, then turned back and passed over the same ground for the third time, as if neither of us knew where the other was going and each was trying not to interfere with the other's plans.

“Naturally, I do not imagine one can show anyone else what to do,” I said. “But life is never simple. It becomes unmanageably confused only when we think of ourselves. The moment one doesn't think of oneself, but asks how one can help someone else, it becomes very simple. And there is the child to think of.” Harriet was silent and I rambled on, afraid.

Could it be that Harriet acquiesced only to protect Thance's unborn child? Harriet was rich. She didn't need my fraternal or paternal protection. It was I who needed her.

Her arm seemed to twitch, but then something stiffened in her; one army of thoughts seemed to engage another in battle.

I continued, looking away from her, “We attach so much importance to whatever is personal. We speak of living our lives to the fullest ... accepting life on its own terms, seizing destiny. For what is it that is supposed to be accepted or seized? How can we know the reason we were born, or the way we will die? Is everything acceptable in every way, in whatever confusion?”

At last she asked, “The mind or the instincts, Thor? Morality or character? Selfishness or love, Thor? I have lived selfishly, immorally, and by instinct all my life.”

“If our higher nature is to be lived to the fullest, our lower instincts must learn remuneration and obedience,” I answered, recalling a confession she tried to make so long ago.

“It's always simpler to look after others than after oneself,” she said, turning her lighthouse gaze upon me.

“Harriet, I believe you to be one of those far from egotistical people who, though they may believe they are always thinking about themselves, do not look after their own interests at all. And this is what I want to do for you —what I've always wanted, since I first laid eyes on you. And this is far removed from ordinary selfishness, which is always looking out for its own advantage.”

“You've formed a picture of me which is not necessarily true.” Harriet smiled. “Don't confuse what I am with what you want, Thor. I'm a free woman”—she sighed—“but I do love you.” Her head bowed in submission, yet I wasn't duped. There was nothing subdued or submissive about Harriet.

“Believe me, Harriet, what makes one truly free and what deprives one of his freedom, what gives us true bliss and what destroys it is something that
every honest human being knows in his heart of hearts, if only he will listen to it!”

“I'm listening,” she said quietly.

“To Thance or to me?” I replied just as quietly.

“To you. I know the difference between you and Thance. You look at me with Thance's eyes, you speak to me with Thance's voice, but I know the difference.” She gave me a look full of curiosity. “The question is, do you know the difference between me . . . and me? Can you tell the difference between black and white?”

We were walking along the knoll which gave us a vast view of the deep valley hollowed out below and the sweeping grasslands, with their flocks of flamingos like encrustations of coral under the majestic African light. Harriet stopped and, with the straw hat, which she had been swinging in her hand, drew a line through our conversation.

But my mind had already been put to rest. She had accepted. My head burst with an intensity of feeling that nearly knocked me over.

Though I stood there solidly planted on the ridge, overlooking the African steppes and badlands fringed with dark forests and hazy mountains, I felt myself being drawn out of myself and through her, as though I had been given a second body.

“Why are you so different, Harriet?” I said, pausing as an eagle swept the sky above us like a bullwhip. And like a flick of that whip, she turned, her face ghostly white.

“Because I am the best dancer and the ballet master,” she said, her sad eyes the transparent reflection of the verdant African landscape that framed her. Then she held out her palms to me. “This is what I am.”

I seized the pale fingertips, enclosing them in my own, not daring to do more than kiss each. I knew it would be a long time before we would embrace.

I, William John Theodore Wellington, aged forty-six, born the tenth of March 1800, white American male, chemist and apothecary, did on the third of November 1844, in the city of Philadelphia, marry the widow Harriet Petit Wellington, my sister-in-law, in the presence of her family and mine, her sons, Sinclair, Beverly, Madison, and James Wellington, and their sisters, Jane and Ellen,
and my sisters Lividia and Tabitha. I did at this time also legally adopt my brother's last child, Maria Elizabeth Wayles Wellington, born after his death, the third of October 1843, as my legal heir and daughter.

WILLIAM JOHN THEODORE WELLINGTON

• The Coldest Winter •

• A Reunion in the Conservatory •

• Movable Property •

• John Brown ' s Hanging •

• Godey ‘ s Lady's Book •

• The Outbreak of War •

• Adieu • • Contrabands •

• Sanitary Commission •

• Antietam •

• The President's Affidavit •

• The Considerate Judgment of Mankind •

• Robert E. Lee •

If something is not done, we shall be the murderers of our children.

Thomas Jefferson

It was the coldest winter in memory. The whole city groaned under a yoke of cruel Arctic frost that swept down from Canada, freezing the lakes, rivers, and even the harbor in ice so thick that even hundreds of skaters and Dutch sleighs propelled by blown sails couldn't crack the surface. The new suspension bridge which spanned the Schuylkill River was covered with gargoyles of icicles and ghostly veils of frost, under which it groaned, shuddered, and glistened like Carborundum in the bluish northern light above the thirty-sixth parallel, the line which divided the United States into North and South, slave and free. The
Rachel
was prisoner in Philadelphia harbor, a chilled, immobile hulk, covered with crystal, her gold letters dripping with icy needles, her rails, planks, and ropes sculpted in congealed salt scum.

I sat facing the black panes of glass that separated me from the darkening world beyond, filled, it seemed, with scurrying, moving forces, like tiny pieces of metal sucked up onto the
U
of a magnet. Blindly they crossed onto its arms, breaking and re-forming like a marching army. The windows, on which I hadn't pulled the drapes, were frosted in delicate swirling designs, and the kerosene lamps sent a lighthouse beacon which filtered onto the court-yard. The beam bounced skyward, piercing the wall of evil coldness like a lance. The conservatory, which had been built onto the back of the house, was warm and cozy, heated by a Swedish coal-fired stove of painted blue-and-white porcelain. The delicate tiles gave off a radiance that duped the ferns and rubber plants and palms into believing they lived not in ten-degree-below-zero weather, but that they had regained the Equator and were somewhere
loose on the thirtieth parallel in the wild, solitary landscape where we had left Thance and Abraham thirteen years ago.

I spread out my sheets of music, a transcription by Franz Liszt of Bellini's Italian opera
Norma,
and my blank fingertips came down on the smooth ivory keys of the Pleyel pianoforte, my most cherished possession. The notes exploded through the room as the bars of music echoed and elevated Norma's conflict between her duties as a high priestess and her emotions as a woman in the opera's closing scales. My fingers flew over the keys, the discriminate, painful strains of
Pui lento
in B sharp leapt out, precise and unbending, swallowing the plaintive top of the oscillating melodic grains which threaded in and out of the sober base
of Padre tu piagi,
“Father, you are crying,” then resurfaced in the plaintive cry of
Guerra, guerra.
I spoke and sang to the piano, cajoling it, tempting and seducing it, trailing Liszt's magnificent virtuoso notations, humming the notes or singing them, speaking under my breath, following the black soldiers that marched across the score page in formation, discriminate, uncompromising, inalienable. I closed my eyes for a moment, my hand moving now lightly and softly over the reprise of the fantasy's climax,
Padre tu piagi.
“Father, you're crying,” I sang under my breath as the last notes of the closing sequence drew to an end, the tendons and muscles of my neck and shoulders loosening, shifting, and flowing. The roots of my hair curled; my eyes gleamed behind my gold-rimmed spectacles. It was too hot in the room; the sheen on my nose and forehead became liquid. My hands on the keyboard were no longer those of a young girl, but were freckled with age marks and blue-veined, the skin rough despite all my creams and ointments. But the strength was still there, the fingers still long and straight. On my left hand, my two wedding bands gleamed in the warm gassy illumination.

Beauty's daughter, Independence IV, stirred by my feet as I leaned away from the piano, then let the final
presto con furia
chords come crashing down. I let my hands rest on the surface of the ebbing music, trying to gather in the last strands of happiness the music offered me. It was a brilliant virtuoso piece of fifteen minutes, which I would never dare play in front of any public except my family, but whose B-flat
Pui lénto
was the most sublime piano passage I knew of.
Guerra.
War.