Sally Heming (18 page)

"Yes, Master."

Away. I hadn't counted on that. More waiting.

"Don't look so sad, my Sally. It is only for a little
while."

"Yes, Master."

"Your friend John Trumbull recommends the journey
highly." The tall somber image of Master Trumbull distracted my thoughts
for a moment.

"When I leave, you will stay with Madame Dupre, near
the convent on rue de Seine. You can visit Polly and Patsy, and I have arranged
that you may spend Sundays at the convent. Mr. Perrault will come to give you
your lessons during the week."

"Yes, Master."

"I'm giving all the staff a holiday. It is not proper
that you stay here ... alone."

"Yes, Master."

"I shall miss you, Sally."

"Yes, Master."

"Sally, is that all you have to say?"

"Yes, Master."

"Sally, I shall miss you. I promise..."

"Promise me!"

The words burst out of me, more a sob than an exclamation.
I could bear the waiting no longer. I drew my head up and looked long into his
eyes. Deep in the centers was a dark pinprick. My own reflection.

Yes, I thought, the time has come.

A thousand times a day fear would overwhelm me. Blood would
rush to my head, and often I would clutch a velvet hanging or the back of a
silk-covered
fauteuil.
I stopped seeing Polly and Patsy. I dared not leave the house lest he
send for me. At night I fell asleep sitting upright on the side of my bed. My
body would be turned away from the door, but my head and shoulders would be
turned toward it. There was no lock, and I would not have dared turn the key
had there been one. I would not face the door lest I invite its opening, yet I
could not turn completely away. Thus I sat watch through the night.

Lord keep me from sinking down.

Lord keep me from sinking down.

Lord keep me from sinking down.

I would repeat to myself. In the early hours of the
morning, exhausted, I would sleep. The night before his departure, he sent for
me, but he did not appear. I fell asleep in his room, and when I awoke an
immense shadow blocked my vision.

I had no idea how long he had been standing there. Now that
he had come, I felt no fear, only an overwhelming tenderness. His presence for
me was command enough; I took control of him. I bent forward and pressed a kiss
on the trembling hands that encompassed mine, and the contact of my lips with
his flesh was so violent that I lost all memory of what came afterward. I felt
around me an exploding flower, not just of passion, but of long deprivation, a
hunger for things forbidden, for darkness and unreason, the passion of rage
against the death of the other I so resembled. For in this moment I became one
with her, and it was not my name that sprang from him but that of my half
sister.

At once he left me, surveying me from above with the eyes
of a man afraid of heights scanning a valley from a tower. Then his body tensed
and rushed toward me as if he had found a way to break his fall.

Thus did Thomas Jefferson give himself into my keeping.

When I awoke the bed was empty beside me. I slipped from
the abandoned bed and stared at the gray rectangles of light from the tall
windows barred by the shadows of the balconies. In the strange, majestic room,
I gathered my clothes from the four corners where they had been flung in the
violence of the night. I stared at the sheet and then quickly, without
thinking, covered the bed with its counterpane. The feeble groping for James's
dream had been erased by the force of a man's body and a man's will.

I washed and dressed, and quickly left the house by the
front door. The morning was cool, but the day would be fair. Frost was still on
the trees and bushes of the garden, but tiny sparks of green had begun to
appear.

I started to walk slowly toward the Pont de Neuilly. I had
taken my brother's heavy cloak, yet I trembled uncontrollably either from shock
or cold, I don't remember. To my surprise, I recognized ahead of me his
solitary figure breaking pane after pane of silvery light. Even at this dawn
hour, and for every dawn to come, Thomas Jefferson had risen before me and had
chosen the cold bitter morning to walk abroad.

I was filled with confusion. Should I turn back? Hurry to
greet him? Stay as I was now, fifty paces behind him? Call out to him? I
followed for a long moment, dreading that he would, for some reason, turn
around and see me, but he kept his eyes ahead. I fell farther and farther
behind as his long legs strode through the Elysian fields spread out before
him. The bottom of James's cloak, wet with dew, dragged behind me. I was seized
with a terrible yearning. I thought of my mother and her mother before her.
Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing would ever free me of him.
Nothing would erase those strange words of love which I had to believe in my
weakness.
"Je t'aime,"he
had said.

In his terror, he had used that most potent of weapons, the
ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless. And I had answered, without any
other words passing between us.

"Merci, monsieur."

CHAPTER 14

SPRING
1788

J
ames discovered
the concubinage of his sister that morning when he turned
back the counterpane of his master's bed. He had waited, first outside the door
of the bedroom and then in the gray shadows of the arc made by the curved
marble stairway of the Hotel de Langeac in the early dawn. He had seen Thomas
Jefferson descend the grand staircase and carefully unlatch the front door and
step out into the courtyard of the mansion. For one moment, the rosy light
loomed against the blackness of the arch. Then the door had slammed shut. James
had waited for a length of time he could not measure when Sally Hemings came
down the same stairs. She had turned, almost facing him and wearing his heavy
black cloak and had gone out the front door.

Sally Hemings' brother now stood in his master's empty room
under the painted ceiling of "Night." He was twenty-three years old.
Of those twenty-three years, fourteen had been spent serving, loving, and
tending Thomas Jefferson. Like some demigod who descended from the heavens to
mingle with mortals, he would ascend, leaving that which had to be cleaned up
to his servants. His master had left Paris.

He was in throes of some powerful emotion, yet he couldn't
sort out which emotion it was. James Hemings was a virgin. His master and his
sister had gone beyond the pale of his existence. He gathered the stained
sheets in his arms. The complexity of his new feelings paralyzed him. Violence,
like an ague, shook him. What should he do? How should he conduct himself as a
free man? Kill?

"Help me," whispered James. "God, help
me."

He didn't—would never—have the courage to kill Thomas
Jefferson.

From that day on, James dreamed of those spots of blood.
The whole bed would turn red as he touched it, staining his own hands as if he
had plunged them into the entrails of a living creature. He would struggle to
take the sheets off the bed, but they would heave and swirl, and sickening
sounds would come from them. Terrified, he would back away, but the sheets
would pursue him, leaping at his throat like a wild animal, enveloping him in a
slimy embrace. In the ensuing struggle, he would be hurled into the fire
burning in the room's hearth. His hands and feet, still swaddled in the sticky
sheets, would begin to burn. Then his arms and legs. Then his private parts.
Finally, only his torso would remain with a blackened and charred head, the
mouth opened in a horrible but soundless scream. The head would begin to spin
itself in agony until it literally spun itself off the burning body and lay in
the ashes which filled its mouth and eyes and nostrils, strangling and
suffocating him.

That same dream would come back time and again, and would
remain with him until the day he died. The first time he had awakened to find
himself being shaken by a pale Petit, terrified by his screams.

"Jim-mi. There is nothing to be afraid of.
Reveille-toi, mon garcon.
It's only a
nightmare. Wake up, son."

"No, not like that! Glide. GLIDE! You're not supposed
to lift your feet from the floor!"

"I'm
not
lifting my feet from the floor!"

"You are too. You walk like a duck! Look at Sally. She
does it perfectly; better than either of us."

"That's because I've watched the
frotteur
do it every day for a year now! Just
think of waxing floors with your feet like he does and you'll have it."

"Waxing floors! Will you just imagine the queen of
France waxing floors!"

"I'd never thought of it! Marie-Antoinette,
'La Frotteuse.'"
The three girls
dressed in their undergarments and perspiring, collapsed into loud laughter,
falling onto the deep featherbed in Sally Hemings' room at Madame Dupre's
boardinghouse.

Martha and Maria had doffed their crimson convent uniforms,
which lay in a heap on the polished floors. Sally Hemings had been in her
chemise, being fitted for a new dress, when the girls arrived. Martha and Maria
had begun to visit their maid regularly in her comfortable and cozy rooms.
There was absolutely no privacy for the girls in the convent, the fifty
pensioners slept in two immense rooms without curtains, the other rooms being
reserved for drawing rooms and classrooms. Sally Hemings was overjoyed and
welcomed the company of her two playmates. Released from the oppressive Hotel
de Langeac, from the smoldering power of Jefferson's sensuality, and the
bitterness of her brother James, she had found relief, joy, and affection in
the adolescent company of Marie and Martha. Her initiation into womanhood
forgotten, she basked in her temporary return to childhood.

Often she would leave her rooming house and walk the
several blocks to the Abbaye de Panthemont, entering through the chapel on the
rue de Grenelle and stepping into the courtyard filled with crimson-uniformed
ladies of the gentry. As this was not only a school for girls, but a retreat
for spinsters, abandoned wives, and ladies of the court in temporary seclusion,
the ways and gossip of Versailles and the court found their way here with
rapidity, and girls were playing a game now popular at the school: attempting
to imitate the famous walk of the queen, Marie-Antoinette, the "most
beautiful walk in France."

With the voluminous hoop skirts in fashion called
robes a paniers,
which completely
hid the bottom half of a lady's body, the desired effect of moving oneself from
one place to the other was that of floating disembodied along the galleries and
antechambers of palaces like ships on water, rather than humans on legs and
feet. The effect was obtained by never lifting the feet from the floor, but by
gliding them forward and slightly outward along the surface of the floor in a
skating movement, and keeping the tightly corseted upper part of the body erect
and rigidly immobile. The walk was practiced by both the ladies and gentlemen
at the court of Versailles, but no one in the kingdom achieved the desired
effect with greater success than the stately, full-bosomed queen herself.

"One of the ladies at Panthemont said that she had
never seen such a sight as the queen sailing along the gallery of mirrors. One
could see nothing in the throng of courtiers but a forest of waving plumes a
foot and a half taller than her ladies' heads," Martha said. She turned to
Sally Hemings.

"Can you imagine such a thing, Sally? Oh, how I would
love to see it just once, the court of Versailles. Papa has promised to take me
to the public galleries when he returns. Anyone may enter, you know, and the
gardens as well are public, and you may come across the queen herself walking
with her ladies. Of course, we shall have an
entree
in the person of the Comtesse de
Tesse, who is a lady in waiting to the queen. I will find her gliding like a
swan among the pools and fountains of Versailles, and I will drop my best
curtsy, and Papa will kiss her hand and... Can you imagine!"