Eagle's Cry

by David Nevin

  Everyone talked about it on the street and they said the brightest man in the Constitutional Convention was the smallest and the quietist with ideas that thundered but a voice that could hardly be heard. His name was James Madison and he was a fellow Virginian. She saw him one day, pale, wizened, looked old, forty or so, and my goodness, you could just see he was smart. She watched him, wondering if he would look up and see her and look at her the way everyone else did, but he walked along with hands clasped behind him, head down, probably thinking great thoughts right before her eyes!

  Gossip said the delegates fought like dogs but by summer’s end when blessed fall swept away the miasmic heat they had created a new government. Pa said the Constitution they’d written was a magnificent document that would last into the ages and though it had been threatened a few times it was holding right to this day. This was about the time Pa lost his business and the Quakers read him out of the Society for debt. He went to bed and turned his face to the wall till he died while Ma took in boarders. That was how Aaron Burr came into her life, he a congressman and then senator from New York and a boarder at Ma’s house when Congress was in session. Even as a girl she’d recognized what an elegant fellow he was. Handsome, smooth, courteous, usually smiling, he seemed to say that this was how life should be led among men of power. In time she wondered if her own sense of elegance, ribbons and all, had been modeled on the image he presented.

  They held elections and of course General Washington took the presidency and she knew everything would be all right. Electing anyone else would have been unimaginable then, though in later years there were plenty of harsh attacks on the grand old man. Everyone said this thoughtless brutality had broken his heart, though he was never one to show pain—maybe to Aunt Martha, but not to the world.

  Not that she was calling the president’s wife Auntie in those long ago days or, indeed, anything at all. She was far removed then, jostling on the sidewalks with everyone else to see the parades. John Adams of Massachusetts who’d been a great patriot for as long as she could remember became vice president. Secretary of State was Thomas Jefferson whom she’d heard Pa denounce often enough when Jefferson was governor of Virginia. Little Mr. Madison was in Congress and everyone said he was the General’s righthand man. But none of this really touched her. What mattered was the Quaker elders after her again for those ribbons and the glow in her eyes and the way her figure was developing now that she was in her twenties. That surely wasn’t her fault—what should she do, hide in her bedroom?

  So when a handsome Quaker lawyer named John Todd asked for her hand she married, had two beautiful babies and was prepared to be a Quaker matron, biting her tongue and going easy on the ribbons. But when she was twenty-five the great yellow fever epidemic of 1793 spared her and little Payne but took her husband and new baby along with seven thousand others, one out of ten Philadelphians. She’d never forgotten the malevolent horror of that terrible summer, no one knowing where the disease came from or how to treat it, who would be stricken and who spared—and what a ghastly way to die, black vomit spewing, black water bursting from bowels. One matured overnight.

  The grief-torn days that followed seemed blurred later; she seemed hardly aware of day turning to night and night to day. And in that terrible period, it was her mother’s boarder, Aaron Burr, who came to her rescue. The New Yorker had turned something called Tammany Hall into a political force and was said to be a power in New York City. He took her quietly in hand in the midst of her grief, gentle sympathy mingling with easy practicality. He saw to her business problems, liquidated her husband’s law practice and invested the results, saw to funerals and estates and probate matters. She even drafted a will naming him guardian of her child should the terror sweep them again. But even then, she recognized that it wasn’t so much what he did as the way he did it. He was smooth and patient and looking back it seemed that somehow it was his steadfast presence that brought her through those dark days. She owed him a great deal. But she was strong too, possessed of a deep inner resiliency, and gradually her sparkle returned. In time she found herself pondering what life might hold for her next. And Aaron reassured her then in a different way that told her he knew the ways of men and women and of the world: she was a most eligible widow, he said, beauty making up for lack of fortune.

  Aaron’s elegance, his dress so beautiful, his manner so graceful, to say nothing of that certain quickening in his eyes produced an equal quickening in a great many women, so the talk went. She well understood the feeling; it wasn’t that he was so handsome, though he was, or that his charm was beyond resisting, but all together he produced an undeniable pull. She was grateful that in her vulnerable period he had seized no advantages. Later, as she recovered, she was grateful that in due time he did advance himself, suggesting a willingness to service other needs that absent a husband she might now feel. A bit of nirvana, he said. Somehow, it pronounced her ready to meet the world.

  Oh, Aaron … she was so fond of him and so definitely not in love with him and held such a clear vision that yielding to the temptation he offered—and temptation probably was the right word—would be to throw away her future that she laughed out loud.

  “What,” he cried, laughing with her, recognition of failure bright in his eyes, perhaps somehow liking her better for her refusal, “dost thou cast nirvana to the swine?”

  “You darling man,” she said, “you are a caution.” She kissed his cheek and told him to sit in the chair in the opposite corner, and it was then that he told her that his good friend, Mr. Madison of Virginia, had asked to be presented. Presented … that had a serious sound.

  The famous Mr. Madison, a smallish man somewhat shorter than she, gazed at her like a tongue-tied ox when Aaron brought him around but she found his very hesitations endearing. They were the honest product of obvious inexperience with women. But then, she was none too experienced with men, either—or with the national affairs that presumably dominated Mr. Madison’s life, right hand man to General Washington as he was. And for all his fumbling, when he did open his mouth it was to reveal intelligence of a very high order. He said his friends called him Jimmy. She gazed at him. Jimmy … for a man so distinguished? But she didn’t voice this—she knew he would hear it as mockery. Jimmy, she said … it has a gentle sound. And he smiled. Silence overtook them and she rattled on a bit and when he rose to go she was sure that would be the end of it. Instead he asked if she would accompany him to a small dinner General Washington was giving the next evening, and to a reception the evening following. He was forty-three and had never married; Aaron had told her his heart had been broken by a callous lass eleven years before and he’d never recovered.

  The table of the President of the United States was rarified company for a Quaker miss without experience; she decided that intelligence must take experience’s place. Before they reached the main course she had come to understand that she would get just one chance at this level before she was written off. Her solution, reached as she finished the turtle soup, was to keep her mouth shut until she had something to say that she knew she could defend and then say it well. Two such occasions arose before desert; the second time the General smiled and nodded, whether to her or to Jimmy she couldn’t be sure, and Mrs. Washington gave her a conspiratorial wink that was as surprising as it was thrilling.

  That spring of ‘Ninety-four there were balls and dinners and he saw her every day, sitting in her mother’s parlor, anything but tongue-tied. Ideas poured out and she responded and he accorded her respect, agreeing or explaining disagreement. If his heart had been broken—she didn’t inquire—he seemed to have recovered. But when Mrs. Washington—Aunt Martha as she instructed the younger set to call her—asked if he had proposed yet she could only answer, no, not yet. I’ll speak to him, the great lady said.

  They were married in the fall. She was twenty-six. The Quakers expelled her for marrying outside the faith and she bought handfuls of ribbons and wore vivid sashes and startling turbans—oh,
she was bright as a parrot! And her husband’s spirits opened like a flower and he laughed and danced though he still was frozen in social groups of any size.

  By then the great schism was shredding the government and she was startled to find how bitter and personal it became.

  “I mean,” she said, faltering, “you and Mr. Hamilton, you were friends, weren’t you? Together on—”

  “Friends?” said Jimmy, as his friends did indeed call him. “I suppose. When we still saw eye to eye.”

  They had collaborated on what came to be called The Federalist, a series of cogent papers that as she understood it had pretty well put over the new federal government, gaining the nine states needed to give the new constitution effect.

  “But Alex changed,” Jimmy added, and that was how he characterized the fight. Alex was a handsome fellow fully as irresistible to women as they were to him, famous for it, in fact. She remembered an explosive evening when she had danced with him in one of those intricate quadrilles. It was at a ball the Washingtons gave when she and Jimmy had been married a year or so. The music was gaily rhythmic, the dancers dipping and swirling, and responding to Alex, she couldnt deny that he had a certain magnetic pull. But it seemed aggressive, an invasion that alarmed and then angered her. She was just sorting through these riotous feelings when he said in a low voice, “I wonder that you dare dance with me.”

  She stared at him. Her face felt hot as it did when she bent over a cooking fireplace. Had he read her mind? Her hand came up—later she realized she’d been close to hitting him—and he added smoothly, “Given that your husband finds me so detestable.”

  The music ended and his words fell loudly into the sudden silence just as Jimmy, partnered with Hannah Gallatin, stopped beside them. Of course Jimmy had heard and as Hannah gave her a conspiratorial wink he said with a smile, “I don’t detest you, Alex. I detest your ideas.” All good humored, but she saw by his expression that he wasn’t joking.

  “Because I want the economy solid and workable?”

  Jimmy hesitated; she knew this was tender ground, because the new nation had been flat broke and a country that can’t pay its bills, international or domestic, has little standing in the family of nations. But Hamilton as Treasury Secretary had put American finances on a sound footing. Jimmy said Alex was a financial genius, which was the more amazing since his only financial experience had been keeping books in a country store in Jamaica, he the bastard son of a minor Scottish nobleman. Hannah patted her arm and went off somewhere.

  “No,” Jimmy said, “because you want to feed the rich at everyone else’s expense.”

  “Oh, Jimmy,” Alex said, carefully smiling to show this was all in fun, “next you’ll be prating about the bank!”

  “Yes, I will, now that you raise it. Bank of the United States. Functions as a treasury of the nation, doesn’t it?”

  “Well—”

  “It’s where government stores its money, deposits taxes collected, disburses as necessary?”

  “Exactly—and—”

  “And three-quarters of its assets are in private hands and hence the owners of those monies are in position to manipulate public funds to their own advantage.”

  Alex’s smile was gone. “You will never understand, James. Of course our bank favors the wealthy. Their capital is power and we need them with us, not agin us.”

  “So you shape law and government and power to their interests.”

  “Of course—and the bank is a fine example,” Alex said, now looking quite self-satisfied.

  Then, quite surprising herself, seeing a startled look flash over Jimmy’s face, she said, “But won’t that build an elite class, the wealthy over everyone else? They hold land, hold commerce, hold politics—they’ll have it all, won’t they?”

  She found herself holding her breath in sheer fright and let it go with a rush. Without a thought she had inserted herself into a complex argument that she was suddenly sure a wiser woman would have avoided. Alex hesitated as if arguing with a woman unsettled him and then Jimmy said in an easy voice, “She does sum it up well, doesn’t she?” She felt a flash of gratitude as he went on, “Control by the right people over the rest of us, that’s what you’re saying—and Alex, isn’t the next step logically to make control hereditary and doesn’t that suggest nobles and princes and such and doesn’t that—”

  “Damn it all, Jimmy, you can’t believe I want a king when we fought a war to free ourselves of a king!”

  “I don’t think you want a king. But I think your attitude takes us in that direction—”

  “Faugh!”

  Jimmy colored. “Faugh, my foot! I could see the reality as soon as the debt question came up.”

  She knew that was a true sore point with Jimmy. At war’s end the nation had countless small debts—soldier’s mustering out bonus, the paper given a farmer for a couple of hogs and a sack of oats, payment to gunsmiths and powder dumps and lead mines, all given on a promise of someday, if we win. Well, now someday had arrived and Alex’s plan was to float long-term bonds that would pay these debts all at once and clear the books. Debt management, he called it, and yes, it did make fiscal sense.

  But who was holding these slips of paper given across the war? Not the soldier mustered out, the farmer for his hogs and oats—no, they long since had been forced by need to sell that scrap of paper to a speculator at a dime on the dollar. Jimmy still got red in the face when he talked of this—he said that piece of paper was a sacred debt of the United States given in honor and taken in the belief that the nation would survive and prosper and honor debts.

  But when Alex prepared to pay these debts—and then, quite suddenly as one awakens from a dream, she realized that the music had not resumed and a small crowd had gathered around them. They had interrupted the whole entertainment! She saw Mrs. Washington frowning, the general striding toward the musicians—

  And Jimmy cried, voice rising, “I saw it when you rewarded the speculators and froze out the little men, the veterans, the farmers, the small debt holders who’d long since lost their paper. You paid the speculators and devil take those whose suffering had won the war!”

  The musicians were lifting their instruments and the general was coming toward them when she heard Alex snap, “Talking of the plight of veterans ill-behooves a man who sat out the war.”

  The first violinist sounded an A and the general had turned and was coming toward the disruption as she saw her husband go pale at this sally. It was his point of vulnerability. Even today his health was delicate and he was often ill. While Alex had been a dashing officer on General Washington’s staff Jimmy hadn’t been physically fit for the field. He knew that made sense but it still bothered him. As he stood ashen and silent she was moved to a mighty rage.

  “Sir,” she cried, “surely a man boasting of his war exploits is at his least attractive!”

  At which Alex’s cheeks flamed deep red and he turned away. She took her husband’s arm and turned him into the dance and in a moment the Washingtons passed. The general looked stiff and cool but Aunt Martha glanced at her and with the faintest smile inclined her head in clear-spoken approval.

  The next time she saw Alex he smiled and bowed but didnt approach her, and it was just as well. Of course he hadn’t been boasting of his exploits, but he had been positioning himself against Jimmy and that had brought up in her a willingness to fight that she found startling—and exhilarating too.

  Jimmy didn’t say much afterward. He made it clear he was pleased with her and she realized on her own that he didn’t need his wife to fight his battles. Yet things seemed different and after a period of reflection it came to her that she had somehow advanced on that day from the Quaker miss feeling her way to a woman who had legitimated her place in a new world.

  But certainly the exchange stood for the schism that was dividing the country. It was philosophical, she supposed, though she didn’t spend much time in philosophical musing. Anyway, the basic argument was pretty simp
le. Are you for entrenched power regulating life or for free people finding their own way on their strengths and instincts? That was simple enough so that left to themselves Americans would have come to satisfactory answers—but then the French Revolution upset all the balances in America.

  So it was that on a sunny day in Philadelphia a week or so later she heard someone calling her name as she strolled near the Statehouse. It was a woman’s voice, high and urgent with a little note of hysteria. She turned to see Charity Jester almost trotting toward her, wearing an expensive gown of crimson velvet, her pink parasol stabbing the brick walk like a cane. They had been girls together, sharing a reader under some dreaded schoolmaster they both preferred to forget.

  Charity seemed to be having trouble getting her breath. “Oh, do you remember that nice Mr. Fournier, Jacques Fournier, I think, he was with the French embassy or some such? Remember how he would smile and correct your French without making you feel a silly goose? He was the count of—oh, I don’t know what he was count of, but something, he was somebody, don’t you see? And Mr. Jester just learned today that they cut off his head with that terrible slicing machine in Paris. Imagine, murdering a wonderful person in the name of their democracy!”