Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-three
Monticello, 1829
From Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ellen Randolph Coolidge
We are at present engaged in a business that precludes work, writing and reading of every kind but the one: revising and correcting the copies of the manuscripts.
T HIS IS THE LAST LETTER I’ll write from Monticello.
It’s now a house of ghosts, dark and dilapidated with age and neglect. Bare trees loom like skeletal fingers in the yard, all pointing toward the heavens, where my father and his angels surely now reside. The hall, once filled with statues and natural curiosities, is empty but for a single bust of my father. Bare walls once covered with paintings and a defaced floor no longer polished to a high sheen open into the once gay and splendid drawing room, now comfortless.
And yet, Monticello is still an attraction for tourists. A vulgar herd of strangers has stomped over the gardens, taking away my choicest flower roots, my yellow jasmines, fig bushes, grapevines, and everything and anything they fancy.
I feel like a spirit of the place that has survived the death of its body, now deprived of even its purpose in going on because my father’s papers are ready to publish.
On the day the work is done, I somehow rouse myself from a cold bed to watch the last wagonload of books and papers packed into crates to be shipped away for sale. There will be no groundbreaking, no bugles blowing, no commemoration dinners for this patriotic monument. But I perceive in it an achievement.
More than an achievement. A triumph. A secret triumph.
For years now—sometimes for eight to ten hours a day—I’ve scoured every letter, every record book, every receipt and scrap of paper in my father’s possession. I’ve burned some. In other instances, I took a razor to cut words away, just as my father once cut away what he believed to be untrue in the Bible. Eventually I entrusted the political letters to my daughters, whose eyes were better suited to such work, and kept the personal letters for myself. In the end, the collection will bear my son’s name as editor, but the work is mine.
And I feel both gratified and damned by it.
I must leave Monticello now, and I feel an unbearable sadness, such that I might be better off to lie down and die. After all, I cannot feel at home or happy anywhere else. And when I think of what might be done with the place—that it might be transformed into an inn or a boardinghouse—it seems like profaning a temple. I’d rather the weeds and wild animals that are fast taking possession of the grounds should grow and live in the house itself than see my father’s home turned into a tavern.
Indeed, there’s a part of me that might be gladdened by the sight of the house wrapped in flames, every vestige of it swept from the top of the mountain.
I’m there on the terrace, watching the men load up the wagon, wondering where I might get a torch to set Monticello ablaze, when I hear the jingle of a carriage coming up the road. More marauders, no doubt, come to chip off a piece of red brick from the house or snatch away a broken rail as a keepsake.
I don’t turn to greet them. My eyes are for the men who lift each crate of my father’s papers, as I warn them with crossed arms and an unfeminine scowl that their cargo is precious.
“Patsy, you’re going to catch your death, standing here in the cold.”
The voice pulls me from my dark thoughts. I know it intimately. And I turn to see a face at once familiar, beloved, and impossible. “ William? ”
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” He tucks a top hat under his arm, taking in a deep breath of cold mountain air. “Did you really think you’d never see me again?”
In truth, I was sure I’d never see him again, and now I half wonder if he is only the conjuring of a mind bent with secrets and sadness.
“You’re shivering.” He removes his long dark coat with its high shawl collar and wraps it around my shoulders. The warm brush of his hands against my neck nearly convinces me he’s here.
“I—I cannot invite you in to sit, Mr. Short, for there are no chairs. We close up today. Why have you come all the way from Philadelphia?” He cannot want a memento, though I’d find something to give him if he does, for he has as much right to a token of Thomas Jefferson as any man alive. “You cannot still have business in the area.”
“Urgent business,” he says, with a meaningful stare. “I’m told there’s an effort afoot to purchase Monticello for you, Patsy.”
After all our struggles, there’s some chance to keep Monticello? I’m afraid to believe it. There’ve been too many false hopes. “But who—”
“It isn’t important who. What’s important is that I’ve come to put a stop to it.”
I can make no sense of this whatsoever. It’s hard enough to credit that I have an anonymous benefactor, but nearly impossible to believe William would stand in the way of anyone helping me. Have I finally turned him so thoroughly against me?
It’s been years since, in tearful confessions of love and longing, we said our good-byes. But now he’s here again, to witness my violent parting from this place. Has he come to take some pleasure in it?
No, I cannot think it of him. “But you were behind the donations from Philadelphia,” I murmur, remembering the receipts I found in my father’s papers. “Money in your own name and more than that, too.”
His eyes fall to his feet. “Not enough, it would seem.”
“Much more than was expected of you . . . or Philadelphia for that matter. I’m sometimes left to wonder why my father’s own Virginia, which has most benefited by his talents and virtues, has given him a grave, and left others to give bread to his children. And now all he built here will crumble to dust.”
“So what if it does?” William asks.
I startle, thinking I’ve misheard. But the grim line of his mouth tells me that I haven’t. And I’m appalled. “You cannot mean that. I cannot believe that you, of all people—”
“This house isn’t your father’s greatest work. This is a plantation . And it ought to be abandoned, for it was, even at its height of beauty, built on ugliness—”
“How dare you,” I say, wanting to slap him.
Am I fated to have the men I’ve loved torment me in my weakest moments? Tears sting the corners of my eyes, my heart hammering painfully beneath my breast. Much as it did all those years ago when he confronted my father in the woods.
And William is no less relentless now.
His words run over mine. “This is a place impractical and cruel—”
“And you, who were a guest here and enjoyed its benefits!”
He doesn’t dignify my accusation with an answer.
“He isn’t here, Patsy,” William says, taking my arms.
“How can you say that?” Emotion nearly strangles me. “He’s here, all around, his hand in everything—”
“He’s gone. This isn’t his home anymore. And it’s not your home, either. It’s a set of chains.”
His words reach me in places I have never let anyone reach. In places inside me that I don’t even let myself touch. They recall to me a vivid memory of my childhood and a rider who came up this mountain to warn: Leave Monticello now or find yourself in chains.
And William was there. He was there from the start. And so was I.
I want to strike him, pound my fists upon his chest. And I do raise my fists to strike him, but my agony of spirit leaves me only the strength to lay them on his chest as I howl with anguish. And for the first time since my father’s death, or perhaps even longer than that, I fall to pieces. In truth, I fall forward, into William’s arms, crying tears I dared not shed until the day I finished editing my father’s letters.
And now that I’ve done it, I have not even duty to hold me up.
Lowering me to the stairs before I collapse, William whispers, “Abandon this place. I beg of you.”
My tears burst forth like a broken dam, first a trickle, then a pouring, and I scarcely recognize the sounds that come from me. I weep for the loss of my husband. For my children. For my sister and her babies. For Sally’s children, too. And I finally weep for my mother, whom I was too frightened to cry for when she died.
I cry the unshed tears of a lifetime until I am quaking and limp and so frail I don’t think I can rise ever again.
“Let me take you from here,” William whispers, his forehead pressed to mine. “It will be better for you. I promise you, it will be better for you to get free of it. It’s the only way you can be happy.”
Be happy. That’s what I want for you.
My mother spoke those words to me when she asked me to watch over my father. But somehow I forgot them. That command was swallowed up in the enormity of my dedication to my father. But now Papa is gone and my vow has been discharged . . . all except for that.
Be happy.
Remembering my mother’s words, the ache somehow eases, in the contemplation of leaving Monticello. “Where will I go?”
“Anywhere you please.”
I don’t know where I would go. I don’t know what would please me . . . because I’ve never before asked. This is the first time I can, the first time I’ve ever allowed myself to even consider it. And I can’t help but marvel at embracing my father’s beloved ideal of self-determination for the first time . . . at the age of fifty-six.
And as a woman at that.
For now, all I know is that I wish to leave with William Short. Somehow I find within myself the strength to rise. We walk together from the terrace. At first, my steps are bent and painful. But the farther I walk, the less I feel the pull. Mindful of the cold muck on my feet, I straighten like the Amazon William always said I was.
Like the Amazon I am.
William hooks his little finger into mine, guiding me toward his carriage—but I pass it by. I look back once, then not again. I want to walk from this place.
I want to run.