The President's Daughter (45 page)

A flood of British anti-American, antislavery travel books were printed or republished. Edward S. Abdy's
Journal of a Resident and Tour in the United States
took to task the hypocritical North as well as the slave-owning South. He took my father to task for being guilty of miscegenation. The rumors of my father's slave children were commonly reported, and I found myself more than once reading of myself as the President's daughter. I read
Men and Manners in America,
by Thomas Hamilton. He accused my father of railing about liberty and equality and the degrading curse of slavery, yet bringing his own children to the hammer. My father's epitaph, he concluded, should read: “He who dreamt of freedom in a slave's embrace. …”

I stared at the ugly words and then closed the book softly. I looked over at eleven-year-old Sinclair, who was reading, slouched over his lessons at my writing table under which Madison and James were playing. The girls and Beverly were in the nursery from which the widow Wellington had just descended. As she entered the room, I looked up with real pleasure: it was one of her many visits from Anamacora, usually at the beginning or end of her monthly business meetings in Philadelphia. Thor was home. This meant a lot of activity at the laboratory, the depot, and the apothecary. We now had our own warehouse from which issued new railroad tracks. And we owned a clipper ship that sailed between the Cape and the city, bringing home tons of medicinal plants, cocoa, and coffee. But again my personal world seemed to be closing in on me. Petit wrote to me that he had read in the
Royal Gazette
that Maria Cosway had died in Lodi the fifth of January 1838 and was buried beneath the nun's chapel in her convent.

Then, at the end of the winter, Rachel Wellington sat down on the bed beside me, her eyes red from weeping. We had lived peacefully together as mother and daughter for twelve years. Now we struggled with the eternal question of mortality. The odor of morphine and the indescribable advance of mortal illness now hung about her still robust and undiminished body.

“I'm dying,” was all she said that day, as she buried her face on my shoulder and clung to me, her tears soaking into the collar of my dress, revealing what she had known for some months.

“Don't tell the twins,” she said. “Not yet, because it's going to take a long time.”

Like my grandmother, Elizabeth, my mother-in-law died hard. But instead of a rough slave cabin, suffocating under a Virginia August sun, my mother-in-law
died in a white canopied featherbed, her children and grandchildren gathered around. Her suffering no longer dulled by morphine or opium, she complained, just as my grandmother had done, that her heart wouldn't stop beating. And like my mother before me, I pressed hard on the emaciated chest, willing her release as my mother had willed that of Elizabeth Hemings. But Rachel Wellington refused to give up the ghost. It took cholera to kill her, and on the morning of August 1, 1839, she finally expired, in the midst of a full-scale epidemic, which had broken out in the working-class slums of Philadelphia.

Like dominoes, all the women who had dominated my life had fallen one after the other, all at the same age, as if each, like a badge of honor, had been allotted the same number of breaths. Rachel Wellington left the flourishing Wellington Drug Company and a personal fortune, which she divided equally into five parts, willing the fifth to me as if I had been her natural daughter.

I had become a woman of independent means, as well as the only Mrs. Wellington.

The year that had begun in ice and ended in cholera drew to an end. Winter had commenced the fifteenth of November and continued until the fifteenth of May. Sleighs went dashing up and down the streets, their bells clear and sweet; ladies, looking rosy and warm, and gentlemen, carefully wrapped, skated on the Delaware where ice stretched out over the waves. The children learned hockey and made ice palaces, and the poor begged wood and food in the streets. Then the weather changed and a great thaw broke up the masses of ice on the Delaware. The river shuddered and was lifted from its bed, causing great flooding of its tributaries and inundating the western part of the city with water. Then suddenly it was summer without any spring, and the fetid back alleys of pristine Philadelphia began to throw off the effluent that caused sudden and horrible death: cholera. Whoever had brought it to Anamacora, and we believed it to be the iceman, had done my mother-in-law a favor.

Several of our laboratory workers who had been in the city came down with the sickness but were saved. In other parts of Philadelphia, the wide gap between the fragrant green city of the well-to-do and the slums of the poor was unbreachable. Extremes of filth and misery and loathsome disease met the eye everywhere: horrid heaps of manure from hog and cow pens; putrefying garbage; carcasses in decomposition; filthy rooms and children; damp, dirty cellars and tenements; full and foul privies in ill-ventilated, crowded alleys,
which gave off noxious gases. Many of the localities where the epidemic raged were jammed one upon another, filthy and poor, without ventilation or drainage, plumbing or a water supply.

When the epidemic began, Thor's brilliance and Thance's labor had made the Wellington Drug Company one of the most prosperous drug companies on the East Coast, famous for its research and patent medicines. While I held my breath and gathered the children around me at Anamacora, Thor and Thance begged, pleaded, and cajoled the city administration for sanitary measures rather than prayer to fight the epidemic—to no avail.

Philadelphia had long been the center of medical education in the United States, and every year a thousand medical students, many from the South and particularly Virginia, flooded the city. Yet for over fifty years, medical science had been at a standstill in meeting the needs of a rising population, impoverished immigrants, and the poor sanitary conditions and rising mortality rate of the working class. This was the Jacksonian era of democracy, public education, and respect for the common man, but public health care, as well as the great pharmaceutical inventions, were still several decades away. Yet the twins strove to overcome all these things; Abraham Boss and Thenia, too, worked ceaselessly in their own neighborhood. And when at last the tide turned at two thousand three hundred cholera cases, both Thor and Thance were recognized by the City Council for their work and were awarded, along with thirteen physicians who had been in charge of the hospitals, a silver pitcher in gratitude for their services. It was the first time pharmacists had been so honored.

Philadelphia now was probably the cleanest city in America. The sidewalks were washed constantly, the marble steps were spotlessly clean, the population stood at one hundred thousand, and the center of the city had moved west to Seventh Street, since half the population now lived west of that line. An omnibus service had started hourly runs between the Merchant Coffee House on Second Street and the Schuylkill. And another mode of conveyance appeared—the cab, abbreviated from the French
cabriolet.
The cab carried two passengers inside and a driver outside on a box to the rear.

Row upon row of handsome brick houses, three or four stories high, with baths and water closets, were being built. Spectacular public buildings like the Merchant's Exchange, the United States Bank, and the United States Mint rose. Streets were now lit by gaslight, which everyone agreed was the most dazzling, clean light that they had ever seen and which made Philadelphia, expanding in three different directions, the best lit city in the world, with the exception of Paris.
Charlotte and I were sitting in a cab on our way to lunch at Brown's Hotel, as had been our habit for years. She had picked me up at home, and when I got in, three-quarters of the space was already taken up by her considerable girth. Charlotte, like Philadelphia, had expanded with time, wealth, and promiscuity. Even the displacement of her firm but corpulent body created a small turbulence of air, beautifully perfumed by Guerlain. Within this whirlwind of scent, she was perpetually short-winded.

“I think my husband is having me followed,” she announced when I'd closed the door.

“What! Don't be foolish, Charlotte. Why would he do that? You're the one who put a detective agency on
his
tail.”

“I'm no woman's-rights female, but I am against women being
forever anathema masanatha
in society for the
same offense
which a man gets away with
every
time.
This
is a
very, very
great injustice.”

Charlotte's husband Andrew had turned out to be a petty reprobate who, little by little, had become a notorious philanderer, for which, one day, Charlotte had decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. She had taken a lover, a charming southern gentleman named Nash Courtney, who visited Philadelphia and the Drake Hotel once a month. Charlotte's husband had found out and had threatened to call the Virginian out in a duel—even though dueling had been against the law for decades in Pennsylvania. Being a southerner, Charlotte's paramour had readily accepted. “Dueling is still tolerated in New Jersey. Let's go.”

Charlotte was now afraid she'd be a rather young widow with three very beautiful children, rather than the emancipated free-love advocate she had planned. She was terrified.

“Harriet, I know I've done some foolish things, and this is probably the
most
foolish, but I really can't take this whole thing seriously,” she had told me. “Two grown men! But they're dead set on going ahead. Who do you think could … intervene?”

“Your father?” I asked.

“He isn't speaking to me.”

“Robert Purvis?”

“Oh, Andrew would never accept a nigger as an intermediary,” said Charlotte.

“I thought Robert was your friend,” I said.

“He
is
my friend! That's what he
told
me when I asked him to intervene!”

“Oh, Charlotte, this is not Russia! Andrew is not Alexander Pushkin!”

“I think they're going to do it,” she repeated dreamily.

The duel took place at 5:00
A.M
. on a dusty spring morning in a potato field
on the farm of a certain Harry McMillian. Nash Courtney was seconded by a relative from Jefferson Medical College and Charlotte's husband by, ironically, the natural son of Aaron Burr, Jean Pierre Burr. Charlotte's lover was slightly wounded but died of blood poisoning several days later, thus enabling Charlotte to avoid the scandal of having her husband accused of murder.

During that year of genuine mourning, Charlotte and I were again drawn together as we had been through the years at certain difficult times in our lives. When this happened, we fell into the tender erotic bonds of our school days. Our luxurious society was intact, and our retreat into the sensuality and carnal voluptuousness of our adolescence was more a reaction to fear and the passage of time than to the deaths of Nash and Rachel Wellington. Charlotte was sure she was going to die and go to hell for what she had done. I was sure I was going to die and go to hell for other reasons. Sometimes I walked past a mirror and saw no one reflected. That frightened me more than anything. And so I indulged Charlotte's carnality. In her adoring eyes I saw the old self-deceiving Harriet, reckless, obdurate, selfish, still youthfully beautiful. The gulf between the true Harriet and the fiction I had created for all others had grown into an abyss of self-delusion. I felt I could let down my guard with no one except Thenia. So there was only Charlotte.

Sexual love between women of our class was one of our best-kept secrets. Sequestered and idle, in need of company and kept out of active business, arts, and politics, as well as our husbands' clubs, sports, and intellectual life, we turned to each other, fell in love, wrote passionate love letters, established intense friendships, and indulged in pleasures which were no longer solitary. I pleased Charlotte and kept her desirous of me even as I felt the shame of an inadvertent impostor. I imagined, as our lips touched, telling her who I was. I couldn't be sure I wouldn't be ridiculed and accused, disowned and ostracized, not for having done anything wrong but for
being
wrong.

I felt bogus according to Charlotte's criterion of worth. False according to her criterion of authenticity. Our commingling of flesh had something perverse about it. Like the kiss I had placed on my father's dying lips. I always took the male role because I had to keep her in my power. I didn't want to see Charlotte turn from intimate friend and comrade into Lorenzo Fitzgerald. I didn't want her eyes to widen in disbelief, then narrow in contempt as Lorenzo's had done. I was too afraid to test her. I loved her too much. I needed her. So I played the adoring mentor to her chagrin and her trust. I made her lose thirty pounds and renew her wardrobe twice with
glorious dresses from Perrot, Lanvin, and the new department store, Wana-maker and Company. She decided that black and indigo blue were “her” colors, as they accentuated her fair skin and blondness. She looked twenty years younger, which caused her husband to fall in love with her all over again, and he stopped womanizing and became devoted to her. They spent the next two years on an extended second honeymoon, traveling in France, Italy, and Germany. There was as much ironic justice in Charlotte's bid for female emancipation as there had been in mine.

As for Thance, the dread of losing him took possession of me each time I sought to speak, and rendered it impossible for me to do so. The belief that moral courage requires more than physical courage is not poetic fancy. I would have found it easier to face a lynch mob than tell my husband and children who I really was.

I hope in God no circumstance may ever make either seek an asylum from grief… I would pour my tears into their wounds; and if a drop of balm could be found at the top of the Cordilleras or at the remotest sources of the Missouri, I would go there myself to seek and bring it.