America's First Daughter: A Novel (57 page)

A
NN STAGGERED INTO
M
ONTICELLO
clutching a threadbare shawl too small to cover her swollen stomach. She’d been badly beaten—her eye half-shut with swelling, bleeding scrapes on her elbows and knees. Ann wasn’t very heavy, even with her rounded pregnant belly; she was nothing but shivering skin and bones. “I can’t stay with Charles,” she said, weeping, as if we were in any doubt. And when we got her in front of a fire, she said, “He’ll kill me. I fear he’s already killed the baby in my womb. Please don’t tell Jeff I’m here. He’ll convince Grandpapa to turn me out, and I’d deserve it. I’d
deserve
it.”

“Never,” I said, rocking her as if she were still a small child. “Jeff’s in Richmond on your grandfather’s business, but even if he were here, he wouldn’t turn you out. Nor would your Grandpapa ever hear of it. You’re safe here, my precious Ann.”

“How will I face my sisters? The last time Cornelia saw me, she nearly turned me to stone with those gorgon eyes.”

“Your sisters will be as delighted to see you as I am.” And if they weren’t, I’d make them pretend. Because Ann had never been taught to do anything but honor and obey a husband, and none of this was her fault.

Ann was too weak to go up the steep stairs to the family bedrooms, so we put her into the same bed Jeff had used to recover from his stabbing. And for the same reason. Both my children were victims of that vile wretch Charles Bankhead!

Would he come after her? Would he dare? My husband had abandoned us, my father was frail, and none of the slaves, or even the overseers, were brave enough to confront Bankhead with the force required. So I made my own plans to defend us.

My sons James, Ben, and Lewis were all young men now, between the ages of sixteen and twenty. While closing every paneled shutter over the windows of the house, I told them to arm themselves—not with a horsewhip or a fire iron, but with pistols. Because if the moment came, I didn’t want them to injure Bankhead, but to see him to his grave.

Instead, we saw Ann to hers.

In scream-inducing pain, she gave birth to a little boy. Seeing the bruises on her body and the bleeding that wouldn’t stop, the physician dosed her heavily with laudanum. Ann didn’t want it, and I protested the physician’s prescription. But the doctor said my daughter had internal wounds that couldn’t be repaired. Then he gave her a dose that left her speechless and insensible.

Slipping into much the same condition, I lingered with Ann, holding her hand. Such was the state of my own distress that, for a moment, I saw not only my beloved daughter dying in childbed, but also my dear, sweet sister, who’d lost her life in childbed. I’d blink at Ann’s brown hair, and for a moment see my sister, then my mother, then my daughter again.

I was so lost in time and place, I scarcely heard the words of the doctor, who finally said, “Mrs. Bankhead is past hope.”

I suppose I heard these words. They were simply too shattering to accept. Inside my head, I screamed a glass-shattering scream, but in truth I made not a sound. I sat there with my dying child—the grief swirling like fury in my skull—blind and deaf to the whole world.

I couldn’t rise until afternoon, after Ann breathed her last. Even then, it was only because, like a sudden dam that must be built to fend off the flood of anguish, I was frantic to do for my child the very last thing that I could do for her in this world.

I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t swoon away. I couldn’t lock myself in my room and pace the floor howling and smashing and breaking things. I couldn’t ride through the woods in madness, though I wanted to. How desperately I wanted to!

Instead, I went to my father and said, “We must arrange for her burial.”

“Our poor, dear Ann.” My father wept. “My little garden fairy. I’ll never see flowers again but with her in heaven. Though now, heaven seems to be overwhelming us with every form of misfortune, and I expect the next will give me the coup de grâce.”

I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t accept how frail and dispirited and heartbroken my father was, because I needed him now as I’d perhaps never needed him before. “Send for Bankhead.”

My father cried, indignant, “Charles
?
”

“Yes.” My mind was quite made up. “Send for Bankhead and ask him to bring the children and Ann’s best dress.”

“Surely a servant—”

“We must send for
Bankhead,
” I insisted again, speaking to my father with a commanding tone I’d never employed before, and scarcely recognized within myself. “We must welcome him home to bury his wife. We must offer hope at reconciliation after so many bitter years. We must elicit from him a warm glow of gratitude in his grief and guilt. And in the moment he’s most vulnerable, we must ask him to leave the children with us.”

I said this with perfect clarity of mind and terrible resolve. I wouldn’t lose Ann’s children as I’d lost Polly’s. And not to a man like Charles. I believed, sincerely and utterly, that even if we were fated to abject poverty, my grandchildren would still be better off with me than at the mercy of that drunk, violent monster.

I’d swallow down any poison to wrest Ann’s babies from her murderer. And so I felt no compunction in demanding cooperation from the family. “The natural consequence of our having the children will be a reconciliation with their father. When Bankhead arrives, there’ll be no accusations, no recriminations, no coolness to him in any respect. We’ll smile at him and make up our quarrel—even you, Jeff.”

Something in my voice, something in my dry eyes, seemed to frighten the family into perfect obedience. And when the slaves shoveled dirt over my daughter’s grave, Charles sank to his knees by Ann’s grave, trembling, and retching in guilt and grief. There was no hope for Ann and there was no hope for him. The only hope was that my grandchildren might be saved, so I did the most difficult thing I’d ever had to do in my life.

I forced myself to put a hand upon Bankhead’s accursed shoulder and offered him the solace and forgiveness that would bend him to my will. Then I whispered sweetly in the ear of my daughter’s murderer how her babies would be best left with me . . .

. . . until, at length, he agreed.

And I am not sorry for it to this day.

Monticello, 17 February 1826

From Thomas Jefferson to James Madison

If a lottery is permitted, my lands will pay everything. If refused I must sell every thing here and move with my family where I have not even a log-hut to put my head into. The friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been sources of constant happiness. To myself you have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when I’m dead and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.

I
LEARNED THAT MY FATHER
had concocted a lottery scheme from the newspaper. When I confronted him, holding Ann’s orphaned infant in my arms, Papa explained that one night, awake with painful thoughts, a solution to our financial problems came to him like an inspiration from the realms of bliss. “If the state legislature approves the plan, we’ll sell tickets all across the country for a chance to win some of my lands—the most beautiful and valuable property in Virginia. And the profits will save Monticello.”

My father was optimistic that the legislature would approve the scheme. The people had voted Lafayette a pension, he reasoned—they wouldn’t possibly deny a former
president
the chance to live out his days in comfort.

“Why, there’s every chance that in patriotic fervor, the government will burn all the tickets and simply make a gift to me of Monticello.”

I was too encouraged by my father’s revived spirits to tell him that his faith in his fellow citizens was misplaced. There’d be no bonfire of lottery tickets to honor my father’s service. Virginians would genuflect before my father the
monument,
but they wouldn’t pay one penny in taxes to support the
man
. It was against their creed, and so were lotteries. Now, more than ever, the state legislature was filled with ranters and evangelists who thought games of chance were a sin. And even if they approved a lottery, the one thing no one needed in Virginia was land.

We could hope patriots in other parts of the nation were hungrier for it, but I was afraid to hope. My life had become such a tissue of privations and disappointments that it was impossible to believe any of my wishes would be gratified, or if they were, not to fear some hidden mischief flowing from their success.

And on the day Jeff delivered the news we hoped would be our salvation, he was as ashen as the day Bankhead stabbed him. He came in from the drizzly cold, tracking mud on the floor from his riding boots, and we went together to knock on my father’s door. Where Sally was, I couldn’t guess, but Burwell let us in, leading us to Papa, seated at his desk, his legs raised up to keep the blood in them, squinting through his spectacles as he tried to write with his own withered hand.

Jeff cleared his throat. “The lottery has been approved with a condition that Monticello must be the prize.”

Papa went white from his snowy white hair to the tips of his fingers. So white I feared he’d become a statue before my eyes. His lottery scheme had been meant to save our home, but might prove to be no better than if we’d auctioned it off. When Papa finally spoke, he asked, “That’s the only way?”

Jeff nodded, scarcely able to meet his grandfather’s eyes. “You’d be able to live here until your death, and my mother until hers. But after that, Monticello will pass out of the family. I need to know what answer to carry back to Richmond.”

My father swallowed. Removed his spectacles. Set down his pen.

“I need some time to think and consult with your mother,” he said.

Jeff pulled a chair for me then found one for himself.

My father stopped him. “Only your mother.”

There was a moment—a heartbeat of confusion—before Jeff nodded, and went out. Then Papa and I were alone together. We sat together in silence for a time.

Papa finally said, “I never believed it could come to this.”

It’
s only a house,
I wanted to say. But I knew better. “We’ll manage somehow—”

He stopped me midthought, bringing my hand to his lips. “I’ve been in agony watching you sink every day under the suffering you endure, literally dying before my eyes. Do you remember, Patsy, when we first started playing music together?”

I smiled a bittersweet smile, remembering Paris, where I had learned to play the harpsichord. Where we’d made music together. And where I played for him when he could no longer play, due to his enfeebled hand. “Oh, yes. I remember all our duets.”

“I have been hearing them, lately. In my sleep. Realizing that my whole life has been, in some sense, a song that could never be sung without you. There is almost nothing I’ve ever been that I could’ve been without my dear and beloved daughter, the cherished companion of my early life, and nurse of my old age. And your children as dear to me as if my own from having lived with me from their cradle . . . that’s why I leave it all to you.”

Unless the lottery wildly surpassed our expectations, there’d be nothing to leave, I thought. And worse, anything he gave to me would be taken by Tom’s creditors. “Papa, Tom’s debt’s—”

“I’ll settle the remains of my estate upon Jeff to hold in trust for your sole and separate use, until your husband’s death, in which case the property should go to you as if you were a
femme sole
.”

This would shield everything from Tom’s creditors, but was also an acknowledgment, at long last, that I needed no man to rule over me. And as if to underline his trust, he said, “I’ll need you to look after Sally.”

“Dear God, Papa.” I brushed back welling tears.

He took both my hands. “Burwell, Joe Fosset, and Johnny Hemings . . . I intend to free them with a stipend and tools and a log house for each of them. And the boys, Madison and Eston—they’ll go free on their twenty-first birthdays. I’ll petition the legislature for them to be allowed to remain in the state as if it were a favor to Johnny Hemings, naming them as his apprentices so that he can start a carpentry business.”

It was, I supposed, the only option. My father couldn’t do for Sally’s younger boys what he’d done with Beverly and Harriet without depriving their mother of all her children. But I believed anyone might be able to see right through emancipation of Madison and Eston unless . . .

The ruse, of course, depended upon Sally’s enslavement. Papa wouldn’t free her,
couldn’t
free her without exposing everything. Which is why he was leaving it to me.

In the end he left everything—all of it—to me.

“T
ELL THEM TO MAKE MY COFFIN NOW,”
Papa said from the confines of his sickbed, where I fanned the flies away from him in the still heat of summer.

He’d come home from some business in Charlottesville, slumped in the saddle, scarcely able to hold the reins in his crippled hands. Old Eagle clopped slowly along, careful and somber, as if he knew just how feeble Papa was. And once we got Papa down from the horse, it became manifest that his powers were failing him.

His plan was to fight old age off by never admitting the approach of helplessness. Not even in the approach of his death, which he intended to arrange to his satisfaction.

My father used his life, his talent, and his fortune to secure the rights of men to control their own destinies, and he still intended to command his. He’d decided to die, and nothing could discourage him, not even my cry of pure anguish when he ordered his coffin be made.

After that, my whole world reduced to the intervals of wakefulness and consciousness between my father’s slumber. I shuddered when he said, “Take heart, Patsy. Jeff has promised to never abandon you. And when I’m gone, you’ll find within that drawer,” he said, spending his precious strength to point to it, “a little casket of gifts for you.”

The pain that swept through me in anticipation of the end was nothing I’d ever experienced before, even for all the other losses. Nothing I thought I could survive. Even the thought of losing my father was a crushing, grinding agony of the spirit that left me not just shuddering, but quaking in its wake. “No, Papa. Not yet . . .”

“Not yet,” he agreed, taking shallow, rasping breaths upon his pillow. “I want to breathe my last on that great day, the birthday of my country.”

July the fourth, he meant. The fiftieth anniversary of our Independence. The day he became the most profound voice of his age. Of
any
age.

“Mother, let us relieve your vigil,” Jeff insisted, his comforting hand upon my shoulder. “We’ll stay with him all night. We’ll drag in pallets so that he’s never alone for a moment, if only you’ll get some rest.”

I couldn’t consent to it—especially not when Sally sat so resolutely, her spine straight upon a wooden chair nearby. I don’t know what words of farewell she exchanged with Papa.

What they’d shielded from the world all their lives they still kept, with possessive silence, to themselves. And I had to be coaxed away from my father’s sickbed like a lamed animal to water. So violent was my own pain at the expectation of him being torn from me, I had to be pried away . . . until, at long last, on the third of July, my father’s suffering seemed to demand a wish for the end.

Struggling for breath, Papa would ask, “Is it the Fourth?”

Because we couldn’t bear for him to perish with even one more disappointment, we told him it was. An expression came over his countenance that my children naively believed to mean:
just as I wished
.

But I don’t believe my father was deceived. Even after his limbs took on the clamminess of death and his pulse was so faint only the doctor could feel it, Papa stirred again to ask, “Is it the Fourth?”

This time the doctor said, “It soon shall be.”

I stared at the clock, willing the hands to move. Wishing I had my father’s indomitable will to shape the world and make the laws of the universe bend. Gladly would I give up a day of my own life, a day from the lives of everyone living, to deliver my father into the morning of his glorious Fourth.

But the physician said softly, “He has no more than fifteen minutes now. . . .”

An hour later my father was still alive and refused his laudanum. He then fell back into a disturbed sleep, and in a vivid dream, he roused himself, anxiously gesturing with his hands, as if to write upon a tablet. “The Committee of Safety ought to be warned!”

My children wondered what he could be dreaming about. I didn’t have to wonder. I knew. He was, in his final breaths, readying for the British invasion, readying to fight the war for Independence all over again.

We’d later learn that in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Adams was also on his deathbed, equally determined to see the morning of the Fourth. He’d die on the cherished day, my father’s name on his lips, but all we knew was that in Virginia, the struggle went on, and on.

My Papa’s frail chest rose and fell under the obelisk clock that ticked the interminable stretch. Mr. Short had that clock made for Papa; and in remembering that, it seemed as if William, too, was hovering over Papa in vigil. Burwell helped to arrange Papa’s head upon his pillow. Jeff swept his lips with a wet sponge, which my father sucked and appeared to relish.

Just a few more hours, I thought, until the Fourth. And I turned to see Sally, too, straining to see the hands of that same clock move.

When the clock finally struck midnight with a sweet silvery ring, sighs of relief exploded around us. And upon seeing the faint breath of my papa upon a glass held to his lips, I felt a grim satisfaction, like a commander upon a battlefield who has seen a victory.

But Papa didn’t leave this victory to chance. He soldiered on until noon when, with eyes wide in apprehension of his triumph, he ceased to breathe.

That moment, for me, was an eclipse of the sun. A blackening of the whole earth. An unfathomable grief in which I no longer knew myself, or the world, or my place in it. But my father—who had always known his place in that world—passed like the hero he was from life into legend.

O
N
M
ULBERRY
R
OW
a white sheet draped over a thornbush, flapping ghostly in a light summer breeze to signal to neighboring farms that my father was dead. In the carpentry shop, Madison and Eston helped their uncle sand the rough edges of Papa’s wooden coffin. On the western side of the mountain, slaves dug the grave.