Book of Ages (32 page)

Jane fled Philadelphia once again at the end of September 1777, just before the British attacked and occupied the city. By October, she had
made her way to Rhode Island. “I pity my poor old Sister, to be so harass’d & driven about by the Enemy,” Franklin wrote.
¹⁷
By the time Jane reached Warwick, at the end of 1777, Jenny Flagg Greene already had a baby. Jane found
Elihu Greene a sober, sensible, and kindly man, “a very Good sort of man of plain Sense & sound Judgment whose conversation is a greable when he talks,” as she wrote her brother. “My child makes Him a frugal Industrious & discreet wife & they are very happy.”
¹⁸

Instead of seeking out the Greenes in Rhode Island, Jane might have gone to live with her daughter Jane Mecom Collas in Massachusetts, but this she had no desire to do. Collas had no home of her own. She was married to an unpleasant man. She was sickly and needy; even worse, in her mother’s mind, was her affectation. Jane wrote to her, “Your aspiring so much to gentility, without means to support it, must appear as ridiculous in every prudent person’s eye as it does in mine, tho’ it does not concern them to let you know it.” Collas expected her mother to take care of her, and this Jane had no wish to do; she didn’t enjoy her company one bit. “My natural temper is none of the patientest, and tho’ by age and experience I am brought in some measure to check the appearance of resentment,” Jane wrote to her daughter, “I don’t know but I am as much inwardly galled as ever, therefore think it prudent to avoid such occasions as much as may be.”
¹⁹

Collas visited her mother in Rhode Island to press her to come and live with her, not least because she could not support herself. Her husband, a ship’s captain, was unreliable and untrustworthy and, in war, unfortunate; he was taken
prisoner three times. Jane began to relent. “If my Daughters husband shuld still meet with bad suckses I beleve I must try to go in to some busnes with her,” Jane wrote her brother, wearily, in 1778. “She is a wery Inferm woman was sick all the first winter after you left us. She is very desirous of haveing me with her.”
²⁰
A bit desperately, Jane urged her daughter to keep herself constantly employed, urging, “I find I cannot live without it.” She could do better than spin; she could stitch: “You can not only do plain work, but make
bonnets, cloaks, caps and any thing.”
²¹

Jane was happy to knit a pair of socks for her brother, at Caty’s request. And she was forever urging her daughter to make and sell bonnets. But she was not at all interested in a
sewing scheme of
Sally Franklin Bache’s. During the war, Bache made clothes for soldiers through what became
the Ladies Association of Philadelphia. But when she wrote to her aunt, requesting her help in raising money, Jane balked: “I have as you Sopose heard of yr Ladies Noble & generous Subscription for the Army and honour them for it & if a harty good will in me would Effect it we would follow your Example but I fear what my Infleuence would procure would be so Deminuitive we should be ashamed to offer it, I live in an obscure place have but Litle Acquaintance & those not very Rich.”
²²

While Franklin was in France, he wrote his sister precious few letters, to her considerable consternation. For this, Jane blamed
Peter Collas, who was supposed to have delivered some of her letters to her brother but who failed. “I do not wonder if you are discuridged from writing to me,” Jane wrote Franklin, “for I Fear you have never recved any of my leters but the won you mention that was to have gone by my son Collas & I think I have sent seven, I all-ways sent them threw the hands of Mr Beach, or Mr Williams, but two of them happened to go by my son Collas & we sopose he is Taken again he has had nothing but misfourtun.”
²³

Meanwhile, Jane worried about her mad son Peter. “My own Perticular Famely has been as was comon to me all my life mostly distressing,” Jane reported to her brother, “but what now distresses me much now is that the woman that keeps my son peter in the Country Demands five Dolars a week for takeing care of him to commence Sepr 1777 or she would send him to boston.” Peter Franklin Mecom had been locked up, in a house in the country, since 1763, with rent from the Douse house paying for his care. If he were to be sent to Boston, Jane would have no place to put him. As she told her brother, “I wrot to Mr Williams to git Him Put in to the Alms house there but he says there is no provision for such persons there I have sent a second Leter to Urge it but have had no Ansure.” It must have been appalling to have to beg this favor of her brother, on the other side of the ocean, but she didn’t know what else to do. “I write this with grat Reluctance but as you desiered me to Inform you of my circumstances as well as helth & situation it will not be confideing in you as Such a Friend as you have all ways been to me.” Panicking, she promised him that she had taken what care she could of what money she had. “I bye as litle as posable I also wrot you that what mony I had a mounting to four hundrid Dolars I had put to Intrest only reserving for nesesary Use that I Live comfortable with my Grand children & have my Helth but no Income but what that litle mony Produces which however I should do very well with were it not for
this dredfull affair of Peter which you see will take the most I have if I am forced to pay it & if Mr williams cant git Him in to the Alms House God only knows what I shall do with him.” And then she added a postscript, having remembered about the house in Boston that her brother owned—the house where their sister Elizabeth Douse had lived for so many years. “Prehaps Mr williams may prevail with the overseers to take in poor Peter paying the Rent of the House you used to alow me which I know you will have no objection to I had forgot to mention that to Him but shall now.”
²⁴

That arrangement may have been made, but if it was, it didn’t last long. Peter Mecom died in the summer of 1778.
²⁵
(“Now that aunts unhappy Son is no more that Truble is over,” Jonathan Williams Sr. wrote to Franklin, with no small relief.
²⁶
No one mourned Jane’s lunatic son. To the contrary: “It was a great satisfaction to me to learn that my Dear Sister, was relieved from that continual Distress She had so long labour’d under,” Franklin wrote Williams.
²⁷
) Jane reported the death to her brother directly: “It has now pleasd God to take poor Peter & by that has Releved me from great distress for tho I still Retained for Him the Affection of a Parent, the grat Dificulties of the times, & the Extreem Demands of the woman where he boarded contineualy Incresing, & my Inability to satisfie them, & not being able to procure him any other Place of Residence by any means, keept me in Perpetual anxiety, & you know he has been no comfort to any won nor capable of Injoying any Himself for many years.”
²⁸

In the same letter, she revealed to her brother the nature of her concern for the last of her children, Jane Mecom Collas, who had “given her self up to Dispare as she is apt to sink under troble.” It wasn’t only that her daughter was depressed; it was that depression seemed, to a mother who had watched her sons lose their minds, the beginning of something worse. She prayed, “May God preserve her from the faite of her Brothers.”
²⁹

Jonathan Williams Sr. suggested to Franklin that Jane’s
poverty was a consequence not of her lack of
industry but of family who depended on her, instead of working. “I belive aunt would have had Somthing beforehand” (that is, she would have had a profitable business, Williams told Franklin) “if all that was a burden to her were Out of the way” (that is, if these hangers-on had let her alone). “For as Long as Som people Can find assissdence they will not provid for themselves,” Williams observed. As for Jane, “my Aunt Mecom is as Worty a Woman a Live.”
³⁰

Franklin, writing to his sister from “a fine airy House upon a Hill, which
has a large Garden with fine Walks in it, about ½ an hours Drive from the City of Paris,” could say little, except to condole with her about the whole course of her life.
³¹
“I hope you will have no more Afflictions of that kind,” he wrote, “and that after so long and stormy a Day your Evening may be serene & pleasant.”
³²

CHAPTER XXX

J
ane and her brother had the idea that when he came back, if he came back, they might live together again.
¹
“O my Dear Brother,” she wrote him, “if this could be Accomplished it would give me more Joy than any thing on this side Heaven.” She missed his company. “I feel the want of suitable conversation I have but litle hear,” she wrote to him from Rhode Island. She admitted that she had been shy of him for much of her life. “I Suffered my defidence & the Awe of yr Superiority to prevent the femiliarity I might have taken with you & ought, & yr kindness to me might have convenced me would be acceptable; but it is hard over comeing a natural propensity, & Difedence is mine.” But something had changed: “I think I could Asume more freedom with you now.”
²
She wrote, too, more freely.

In the fall of 1778, Congress elected Franklin minister plenipotentiary, America’s chief diplomat. His sister liked to report to him on what was being published about him in America, much of which she found very funny. (“I have half a mind to send it to you as I think it would make you Laugh,” she once wrote, about a poem about him.)
³
When an attack in the newspaper ridiculed his airs, portraying him as an American who, having “rubbed off the mechanic rust,” had become a courtier, a seducer of French ladies, she wrote to poke fun:

She was teasing him, but on this point he was, with her, sensitive. In the debauched French court, a world away from war-strapped,
Puritan
New England, Franklin really had become something of a courtier, and he winced at her joking about it: “The Story you allude to, which was in the News Papers, mentioning ‘mechanic Rust,’ &ca is totally without Foundation,” he insisted.
⁵

She wrote back, assuring him that she didn’t take what she read about him in the newspapers seriously, adding that the story “of the mechanice Rust served only to make me Laugh.”
⁶

He boasted of his great fame.

“Perhaps few Strangers in France have had the good Fortune to be so universally popular,” he wrote her. “This Popularity has occasioned so many Paintings, Busto’s, Medals & Prints to be made of me, and distributed throughout the Kingdom, that my Face is now almost as well known as that of the Moon.”

She wrote back that the likenesses she had seen of him were so many and so different that his face must be “as changeable as the moon.”
⁷

Franklin liked, in France, to present himself as a bumpkin, with his mechanic rust and his coon hat. This was a serviceable sham. It was in this same spirit that he began giving to his fashionable French friends crumbly whitish-greenish cakes of soap made by his sister, using what she made—and what he no longer knew how to make—as a marker of his humble and obscure origins. From Passy, outside Paris, he wrote to Jane, asking her to make some soap and send it to him. “You will do me a great deal of Pleasure in sending me as You propose, some Crown Soap, the very best that can be made,” he wrote. “I shall have an Opportunity of obliging some Friends with it, who very much admire the little Specimens I have been able to give them.”
⁸
Jane, living with her granddaughter Jenny Flagg Greene and her family, dutifully rode to Caty’s house and, cobbling together what barrels and vats she could, made dozens of cakes of soap. Then she went on a visit to Boston, to see her friend Grace and to give Jonathan some soap, to ship to France—all this so that her extraordinary brother could complete his costume as an authentic, homespun American original.