The President's Daughter (32 page)

My heart stopped. Asking me to describe Monticello was like asking an escaped convict to describe his penitentiary. Yet it all came back to me in a flood of longing, the west lawn, the shade trees, the dome, the winding serpent wall, the sad corridors, the yellow curtains, Mulberry Row . . .

“My father's mansion stands on a little hill as you have drawn it. Its form is based on the Pantheon in Rome, or the Marché des Halles in Paris, which I have seen. There is a facade divided into three sections, left and right wings, a central hallway, and a porch designed in the Greek manner, held by six columns. The roof is domed and rises several feet above the line of the facade. He was very much influenced, as he must have told you, by Palladio. The proportions of the house are small. There is no main staircase. My father hated staircases, so he almost forgot to put even a small one in. The house is built of red brick with white trim. The columns are painted wood, as is the frieze of the facade. The glazed windows are sashes and are not the French doors one would ordinarily expect in a house of this design.

“The university, on the other hand, is much more grandiose. It is built on the plan of an academic village, using diversified architectural forms rather than one massive building. But the main building is again built on the principle of your Pantheon, a rotunda, but of half its diameter and height only. It has a central atrium covered by a dome, and the facade is Palladian Greek revival with a frieze porch of six columns and an exterior stairway leading up to the entranceway. Here too the facade is divided into three, the right and left wings being lower than the central hall. The building is only two stories high, and the dome about three.”

“Thank you,” said Maria Cosway, all the time sketching as I spoke.

“The university hall is also surrounded by shade trees and gardens, in the Italian manner. In the distance are the Blue Ridge Mountains. I hope this helps you,” I said, my voice trembling. “Monticello is one of the most beautiful places in America. My father spent his whole life building it, and with what was left of his fortune, he built his University of Virginia. My uncles did all the ironwork, all the carpentry and nail work; the glazing of the windows was done by my cousin Burwell. The roof and gardens, floors and stairways were all done with my family's labor.”

“You must tell me more while we have supper. I cannot let you go back to Florence hungry.”

In the unfinished room, strewn with scaffolding and golden light, we sat
down to supper opposite one another. There was macaroni soup; frittata of liver, brains, and courgettes; boiled beef; sausage. A fine bouquet of flowers in a china vase was placed on the table. A dish of veal with truffles,
merenda
of peaches, roast turkey, custard pudding, roast veal, and rice patties. There were delicious wines and fruits, cheese, and a fine dish of ice cream as hard as the Alps. Not a meal I would have expected of someone who had given up worldly pleasures.

Afterwards we withdrew to still another room, her
cabinet,
filled with prints and books, drawings and curios. It gave onto a wide balcony which looked out over the landscape and the bridge of Lodi, where a famous battle had been fought. Like my father, the Baroness Cosway had built herself a fortress of beauty and solitude where nothing it seemed in the world could ever touch her—just like my father. Everything was curiously Italianate and spoke of music, beauty, luxury, sensuality. This was not a convent for the poor, but, like Panthémont, for the rich, the well born, and the privileged.

“I would love to draw you, Harriet. Here, let me make a small sketch before you leave.” My host's small, blue-veined hand reached out and touched my chin lightly, tilting my head slightly to the left.

I sat in the lengthening shadows as Maria Cosway took up pad and pencil and began to draw. Faintly, in the distance, I heard a girls' choir chant a Te Deum. The music rose and was lifted out of the retreat and into the gardens amongst the alcoves of vines, the fruit and olive trees, the flower gardens and statuary.

“Your father wrote me in 1822, it must have been just after you left Monticello, that he had been here in Lodi in 1786 with the Count del Verme of Milan and passed a whole day here from sunrise to sunset, in a dairy, watching them make Parmesan cheese . . . strange to think of your father actually being here . . . before I chose his place as mine. ... Do you believe in fate, Harriet?”

“I believe in chance.”

“You say you play, Harriet? The choir is rehearsing for our next concert. Perhaps you would care to remain here and play for us.”

I closed my eyes and imagined remaining in the convent. Safe, in Lodi.

“Why don't you stay?” Maria Cosway said suddenly, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “I would like you to stay. I think you need a rest from your double life, and you can tell me anything. Any secret. This is, after all, a convent.”

I hesitated, surprised. There was touch of genuine concern in her voice, which was also tinged with a loneliness I knew well.

“Sometimes one must rest from inventing oneself,” she continued. “It is a great comfort to remain in the company of someone with whom you don't have to pretend. Your father knew this and often said it.”

I found myself speaking to Maria Cosway, and she to me, with a fervent intimacy that in one part of my mind astonished me even as I spoke. I revealed feelings long buried within me: my shame at my illegitimacy, the confession about my color, the deceit of my father's silence, the bitterness of my mother's abandonment, my disgust at my betrayal of Thance on the one hand and my contempt for his innocent trust on the other, my loneliness, my inability to see the true meaning of my mother's renunciation, the fear of my double identity, of its being discovered, my repugnance at being forced into the role of an adventuress.

“There are worse things than being an adventuress. Any woman who makes a life of her own will be accused of being one.”

“I'll never be like other young ladies,” I cried. “How can one pass suddenly from childhood to maidenhood?” I said to her. “How does it happen? Little by little? In a single day? Perhaps it only comes about through misfortune or love. If I were trying to be funny, I should say the two were synonymous, but I won't say it because I think love is the most beautiful thing in this world.”

“Then you have the soul of an adventuress,” said the abbess.

“No,” I said, “I could compare myself to a sheet of water which is frozen below and only agitated on the surface, for nothing interests or amuses me at
bottom. ...”

“Well, I'm forty years older than you, and I'm still at an age when there is intoxication even in death itself. It seems to me no one loves everything as I do—I often spoke to your father about it—the fine arts, music, books, society, dress, luxury, excitement, calm, laughter, tears, love, melancholy, humbug, the snow, the sunshine, all the seasons, all atmospheric effects, the silent plains of Russia, the mountains around Naples, the frost in winter, autumn rains, spring with its caprices in Paris, the Bois de Boulogne. I remember Marly before the Revolution . . . quiet summer days, beautiful nights bright with stars. I admire, I adore it all—just as your father did. We are born sensualists. We can get drunk off of thinking, off of books or a scientific treatise as easily as off of champagne or Madeira—even easier. Everything appears to me sublime. I would like to encompass all: God, eternity, love, pleasure. My sin is both pride and gluttony: I always wanted to see, possess, embrace it all, be absorbed in it and die. Since I must in two years or twenty die, let it be in an ecstasy, not of the flesh anymore, but of
the mind, of faith—in quest of this final mystery.

“You seem appalled, Harriet. Didn't you know your father was like that, too? Exactly like that?”

Every evening I felt sore and discouraged, having spent my strength in fury and despair thinking about
what to do?
Go back to London? Go to Rome? Stay here? Return to Philadelphia? Get married? Confess? As a young girl I wasted all this time in excesses of romance and silly eccentricities. If I was destined to be nothing, I thought, then why these dreams of glory ever since I could remember anything? Because of my father?

One evening as we sat in the corner of the world Maria Cosway had painted as Monticello, I finally told her about my fears of Thance—not just my lie, but my submission, even as a white woman.

“How can one ever be too particular in the choice of a husband? Even in your case! I have even felt indignant at the condition of women. I am not so crazy as to claim equality, as you Americans are demanding, which is a Utopian idea—besides being very bad form—for there can be no equality between two creatures so different as man and woman. Really, I don't demand anything, for women already possess all that they ought to have, but I grumble at being a woman because there is nothing of the woman about me except the envelope.”

“You've renounced being a woman?”

“Let's say I've renounced men, and am a faithful worshiper of celibacy.” She continued, “Her service becomes more fascinating the longer I remain in it. An artist has no business to marry anyway. For a man, it may be well enough, but for a woman it is a moral wrong, for she must either neglect her profession or her family, becoming neither a good wife, a good mother, nor a good artist. My ambition to become a good artist made me wage an eternal feud with the consolidating knot ... to my everlasting grief.”

I listened to her, engrossed in my own grief. What was I going to do? Time was running out.

“Are you sorry you ever married Richard Cosway?”

“I was sold to Richard Cosway—by my father. The same father who had raised me, convinced me that I was an artist, as he was. That I was capable of real work. The greatest works of art do not make art greater. Art does not succeed itself, just as one is not able to transmit beautiful sentiments. Art lives and dies in the unique heart of him who carries it, just as feelings only live and expand in the souls of those who feel them. What did Voltaire say? ‘There is no history, only fictions of various degrees of plausibility.' There is no
history of art, either, Harriet. There is only the history of the artist. Your father was an artist—not of objects, but of ideas.”

“My father doesn't love me.”

“Never say that, Harriet. Your father loves you as much as he loves anything not written down on paper.”

I gazed up at the empty hill of Monticello. Where was he at this moment?

“One must understand, color dissolves form. It is a law of nature only artists remember. A black point appears smaller than a white or a yellow point, even if they are the same size. As soon as calm becomes the principal purpose of observation, the accurate, the real notion of form disappears. One might say that black is a phantom color, anointed by man. It is all colors; it is what you want it to be; it absorbs everything and renders nothing to the surface. Colored planes juxtaposed to each other have mutual influence on their different values. They lack, extend themselves, disappear one into the other, according to the laws of the marriage of colors. To see color with temperament, and to extend it on the forms moderated by logic, is to have two souls—or at least an unbalanced soul.”

I stared at the baroness in astonishment. Could her treatise on color be applied to life? At that moment, I believe I loved Maria Cosway.

Before we parted, Maria Cosway reached into her pocket and brought out a fair-sized gold locket. It caught the light as it turned on itself like a lie.

“I have something for you I no longer need.”

Inside I saw a masculine reflection of myself, with the cold blue eyes of my father. It was he. Or it was me. I looked up at the abbess, who was smiling. She had given me the portrait of my father that John Trumbull had painted for her in 1789.

“Have it,” she said. “It belongs to you. To your biography.”

“How do you know I am who I say I am?” I repeated. And this time she answered.

“Because you came here, magnificent girl.”

“Pray for me,
madre.”

“Oh, don't worry. I intend to, Harriet.”

LODI, ITALY

MAY 19, 1826

Postscriptum:

Thomas, I attach this postscriptum to this, my last letter to you, my friend, in the hope that this news will reach you before the subject herself
returns home. Your natural daughter, Harriet, found me and came to see me. I knew she was yours, for she is the spitting image of you in female beauty. For one moment, dear sir, I found myself back with you and Martha and Maria in the Paris of 1787, a part of our lives which now seems more a cautionary tale than reality. When we were surrounded by love, friends, and fame. I invited her to stay with me and she did, for two weeks.

Harriet told me what you never revealed to me: the Negress Sally is
still
by your side, though her children have all disappeared or will do so by your hand one day. What a strange way to treat offspring! There is nothing that so corrodes the soul as the loss
in any way
of a child of your flesh and blood, be it to death or to whiteness or to ill feelings or exile. Make peace with your daughter, friend. Do not die without setting her free. You are the only one who can do this; no piece of paper can. You owe her that.

You once said the sun does not shine on a being whose happiness you wished more than mine, that you wanted to bind his beams together to gild the room in which I lived and the road I traveled. Your daughter, who styles herself the President's, and who cannot dispose of her own existence without committing some kind of fraud, has inspired this affection in me. You said you would not permit yourself to believe that we are to meet no more until we meet where time and distance are nothing. But, my dearest, we
are
at this hour and have dire little time to reconcile ourselves to it.