Jessie

by Judy Alter

  "Look at the fires," Liza said, her breath half held in amazement as our carriage approached the house high on a hill.

  I was as awed as she. Beacons of light flared from either side of the doorway, and in an open square in front of the house great bonfires burned, as though to ward off the cold winter night. Inside the house was a fairyland of lights and flowers and refreshments, the likes of which Liza and I had never seen, living as we did with a father who believed the plain and good life—open windows at night, high-top shoes, and lots of vegetables—led to health.

  Tables were covered with toys, games, picture books, and stacks of little satin bags with "bonbons" in gilt letters—the bags were for us to take home. And there were dolls, and dainty fans, and bolts of pretty ribbons—everything a child could dream of.

  The count greeted each of us... and therein lay a future shock. At that well-remembered Christmas party I thought no more of him than that he was a funny little old man, short, with a wrinkled face and great wispy sideburns and beard. He looked to me sort of like a miniature version of Father Time. He was then so remote from my life that I thought no more about his appearance, which was, truth be told, ugly.

  But when it was announced that he would marry Harriet, I became more immediately concerned. And I was then, of course, some ten or more years older and much better, I thought, able to judge his rightness as a potential husband.

  From my point of view he failed utterly. He was well over sixty—and Harriet barely sixteen—and he was short and ugly. No matter that he was rich, drove fine horses, and lived in a house so grand it was almost a castle. He was ugly.

  "Jessie," Mother said one evening when I went in to visit her, "you have been asked to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of a certain Harriet Wilson to Count Bodisco. Do you know this Harriet?"

  Mother had been kept in ignorance of the May Queen fiasco because, as Father said, it would just upset her. She would have seen it as another of my causes.

  "Yes, Mother, I know Harriet. She was at Miss English's." Then I blurted out, "Why would a girl my age marry old Count Bodisco? He's ugly."

  Mother gave me a reproving look. "He is a very wealthy man and, I presume, a very generous one," she said as though that settled it. "You must have several new gowns for all the festivities—surely a silk or two. It will mean a lot of work." She sounded tired, but her eyes gleamed. Mother liked the idea of fancy clothes... and so, I must confess, did I. At fifteen I was still wearing the muslin and chintz considered proper for young girls and had never yet had a silk dress. The possibility of silk almost made it all right that Harriet was marrying an ugly old man.

  I didn't tell Mother that Harriet's father was a government clerk and that the family had too little money and too many children. It would have somehow demeaned Harriet in my mind to give voice to that. But I was sure Mother had caught the heart of the matter—Harriet was marrying an ugly old man so that she, and perhaps even her family, would no longer be poor. For days I walked around with that bit of conjectured knowledge, and it did little for my state of happiness. Poor Harriet, was all I could think.

  It was to be a proper wedding in every detail—fine gowns for the young bridesmaids, lavish cakes and wine, flowers everywhere, and, of course, protocol.

  I was happily at work in Father's library one cold Saturday afternoon in January when Count Bodisco called on him. On weekends Father often let Liza and me come home from school, and when I was home, I was privileged to continue my earlier habit of writing down his speeches as he paced the room, composing them as he walked. He would later take my copy and laboriously add details here and there, rewriting a hundred times, before returning it to me for a finished product.

  Father had long been in the habit of allowing me to stay when he had visitors—his reasoning was that I learned from listening. So I made no move to leave when the count was ushered in.

  "Ah, Jessie, one of my darling girl's bridesmaids," the count said, and I had the feeling that he was frowning at the heavy wool skirt and plain white shirtwaist I wore. No doubt he wanted me dressed fancier for his wedding parties.

  "Good afternoon, sir," I said, rising just slightly and giving him my hand.

  "Sir," he said, turning to my father, "I'm much concerned over doing things right at this wedding. The groomsmen... well, that's troubling me. I've asked Henry Fox and James Buchanan to be of the party, but which one should be given the place of honor?"

  Mr. Fox was the English ambassador, while Mr. Buchanan had been our ambassador to Russia. I knew that in the count's view it was a question of recognizing not just the men but their countries. Would he give precedence to England or America?

  The two men stood by the window, staring out at the cold gray day as they pondered the diplomatic problem. I stared at the contrast between them. Father not only towered over the short count, but he outdid him in bulk. The count was one of those men thick about the middle but with spindly legs—at present they were stuck into heavy black Wellington boots, giving the appearance of huge feet tacked on to the little legs. He had removed a felt hat when he came in, leaving his hair going in rather wild directions. It was thin hair, lank and lying limply on his head, with sideburns that met to become a straggling mustache above teeth that stuck out rather far. His face was wrinkled, and his eyes seemed to water a bit as they sometimes do in people of a certain age. He was uglier than I remembered.

  Beside him, Father, with his firm mouth and direct way of looking at you with a clear eye, seemed to represent safety and security.

  I knew little about what were delicately called "marriage relations." Mother would never have brought herself to talk about such things with me, and Father's idea of a progressive education did not extend that far. But I knew how our barn cats reproduced, and I knew, from gossip at Miss English's if nothing else, that some kind of similar physical closeness was involved in marriage between men and women. Sitting there that afternoon, looking at the count, it dawned on me that Harriet would have "marriage relations" with this man. If I ever thought about such relations for myself—and what girl didn't fantasize?—my love was tall, dark, handsome, and, of course, young—just enough older than myself, as I took it as true that husbands should be slightly older than their wives. But not over forty years! The whole idea was repulsive to me, and I blushed furiously, grateful that their heads were still turned to the outside.

  "I think you can arrange the matter," Father was saying. "Instead of having the bridesmaids on one side and the groomsmen on the other, why not mix them? A maid and a man next to the bride, and another pair next to the groom."

  Trust Father to come up with an innovative solution. The count was effusive in his thanks, grateful to be rescued from a diplomatic dilemma. And so it was decided that I would stand with Mr. James Buchanan next to the bride. Mr. Fox, with Harriet's sister, would stand next to the count.

  * * *

  Finally the great day came, after much preparation. I had spent hours standing for an imported English dressmaker—"Try not to wiggle, Miss Benton," and "Please, Miss Benton, the shoulders straighter"—while she built my dress of white figured satin with blond lace about the neck and sleeves. The skirt was plaited all around, with long points in the front and the back cutting the fullness away to a slim waist. The sleeves were full, with the lace falling over the elbows and flowing from the modestly cut neckline. With this stately dress we wore wreaths of soft white roses, carried fans of ivory and white feathers, and bouquets of white camellias. I felt deliciously sophisticated and adult.

  "Harriet, get away from the window! You must not let the guests see you before the wedding." Her mother, a small woman obviously overwhelmed by the opulence, pulled nervously at Harriet's sleeves.

  "Bother," Harriet said, laughing. "They can't see me, and I'm curious about the people." She was dressed like a Russian bride, in heavy satin with silver lace and a red coronet, studded with diamonds, on her head. A full-length train of silver lace fell from the coronet, sparkling like dro
ps of water caught in the early-morning light.

  "You'll meet them soon enough," I warned her. "All Washington is curious about you, and they'll come calling the day after the wedding."

  "Really?" she said. "What fun! Look at that grand carriage—why, it's President Van Buren. Just think, the President of the United States at my wedding."

  "He's not at your wedding," her mother said, suddenly showing an unexpected spark of wit. "He's at the count's wedding."

  Blissfully happy, from all appearances, Harriet took everything as humorous and laughed aloud at her mother's comment. Then she was back to peeking out the window, commenting on this grand carriage and that as they rolled up the long driveway to the house where the wedding was to be held. If I was still worried about her "marriage relations"—and I was—nothing seemed to faze Harriet.

  By the time we were allowed to descend for the ceremony, the house and piazzas were overflowing with people—men in full-dress uniforms of the army and navy, women in fancy silks. When the doors to the parlor were rolled back to reveal the wedding party—each of us placed by Bodisco exactly where he wanted us to stand—the crowd let out a collective murmur of appreciation. The ceremony went off without a hitch, though I suppose all were as nervous as I was.

  After the ceremony the wedding party descended into carriages to travel to the count's home for breakfast. The wedding carriage, the count's glittering barouche with matched black horses, was so grandly decorated with silk rosettes that Harriet later confessed to me she felt like a Russian princess, not the daughter of a clerk in the American government.

  I said nothing, for all this grandeur had not erased from my mind the thought that she was paying too high a price for wealth. I wanted to demand, "Do you love him?" Then I remembered her words way back at Miss English's: "I will make myself love a rich man... but never a poor one."

  Breakfast was followed by dinner, with an enforced rest for the bridesmaids in between. Exhausted, we slept on sofas and tried not to muss our finery.

  State dinners were nothing new to me—hadn't I served as Father's hostess for more than a year now, and wasn't I a frequent guest at the White House? Yet this was the first dinner where I was a major participant, so to speak, acting independently as myself instead of as Father's daughter. Sitting opposite the wedding couple, next to Mr. Buchanan, I caught Father's eye from far across the room, and his nod told me that I was acquitting myself well. But the dinner was as long as it was stately, and I was glad when the day of festivities ended.

  At home I fell exhausted into my bed, my only thought that I would never marry a foreigner who demanded such pageantry of a wedding. I was through with society and the roles it forced women to play.

  Chapter 2

  "There," I said triumphantly, "now I look more like Randolph, more like the son you wanted me to be."

  I shall never forget the look of horror on my father's face as he turned and saw me standing in the door of his library, scissors still in my hand, my hair cut to shoulder length. Indeed, save that his was gray, our haircuts were remarkably similar.

  The famous Thomas Benton was momentarily speechless. When he again could find his voice, he demanded, "Jessie! What have you done?"

  "Cut my hair," I said calmly, "so that I won't have to go back to Miss English's." I had not looked in a mirror after attacking myself with the scissors, so I wasn't sure how bad I looked. From the expression on Father's face, it must have been pretty bad.

  But that was not what bothered Father. "The son I wanted?" he asked.

  "Even Mother says you hoped I would be a boy," I said, "and you've raised me like a son, taught me the things a son would know, even taken me quail hunting. But now you're trying to change me suddenly by sending me to Miss English's. I don't even know who I am."

  "Who you are?" he echoed.

  I had loosed the tirade and my confusion came pelting out. "Who am I? Your assistant? A gossipy seminary student? Somebody's future wife?" With that last question I gave away the real cause behind my bizarre hair-cutting act and my terrible, deep unhappiness.

  Harriet Wilson's marriage had rocked all my understanding of the life that lay ahead of me, planting the undeniable suspicion that I would be expected to make a proper marriage in which love—whatever that was—had no part. Granted, I didn't believe Father would ever make me marry someone as old and ugly as Count Bodisco, although James Buchanan had become a frequent caller at our house and often wanted to talk politics with me instead of Father. But what I wanted in life was to be Father's assistant, to go on as I had before this awful seminary business and before Harriet's wedding.

  Senator Thomas Benton missed the point entirely. "Jessie," he said sternly, "you must quiet that rebellious nature of yours. It is unbecoming in a woman."

  But all right in a man? I wanted to ask. For once prudence kept my mouth shut.

  "You will return to Miss English's tomorrow," he decreed, and I knew there would be no reprieve.

  Mother was distraught over my hair, which only made Father angrier than ever at me. It was one of those rare nights when Mother felt well enough to come to the dinner table. Father always suspended his dinnertime intellectual exercises when Mother was present. To us children it meant that we would not be quizzed on Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of gravity or the significance of the Lewis and Clark journey, the latter being a particularly favorite topic of his.

  When Mother was present, we talked of the weather, our accomplishments, the food, and, often, Cherry Grove. Tonight, unfortunately, the topic was my disgrace.

  "Your lovely hair," she moaned. "It had those red highlights that reminded me of your father when he was young." She looked at Father, who merely smiled at her and laughed.

  "You told me," he recalled, "that you would never marry a redheaded man... or a Democrat."

  "I almost waited until you were gray," she said serenely—Father had courted her for six or seven long years before she agreed to marry him—"and I couldn't do anything about the other. But now I am partial to red hair... and, I suppose, to Democrats."

  "I still have a good bit of hair," I pointed out rather petulantly, "and it's still the same color."

  She turned her head away, as though she could not bear to look at me. "You look like a boy," she said.

  "I think Jessie looks pretty," Sarah said loyally, only to be shushed by a look from Father. I had pulled my hair back to the nape of my neck and secured it with a false hairpiece, so that I had a semblance of propriety, but great wisps of hair, now too short to be caught up, kept pulling loose and dangling about my face, giving me an untidy look, at best.

  Dinner was so uncomfortable that Mother fled to her room before the sweets were served, and even Miss English's began to look the better choice to me.

  The girls at school were not kind. The episode of the senna tea had made me an outsider, considered slightly unusual, and my haircut only confirmed it. My moment of social glory in Harriet's wedding, which had given me great prestige among students and faculty alike, was forgotten in light of my newest departure from social acceptability.

  I was miserable. Fortunately, the term was soon over and I had a summer reprieve.

  The summer of 1840 was a St. Louis summer. Father had to campaign, for he would stand for reelection in the fall, and even Mother was going to undertake the two-week trip to St. Louis, though Father worried constantly that it would be too hard on her. He of necessity had to make the trip to see the people who had voted him into office for nearly thirty years now.

  Though Liza pouted and would have asked, if she'd not been so timid, to be sent to Cherry Grove instead of St. Louis, I was in a state of high excitement about the trip. I loved Washington, and it was my heart's home, but St. Louis, with its sense of adventure and frontier, was a close second. Even as a little child, my anticipation would rise on the stage trip across the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River. We took steamboats to Louisville, where we dutifully stopped to visit relatives, while I dance
d in impatience to be on. Then it was New Orleans, and back up the muddy Mississippi to St. Louis.

  I loved the steamboats, though Mother was always exhausted and hated the trip. Father spent all of his time in the gentlemen's club, which was filled with smoke and spittoons. Still, Father found there the men he needed to talk to. Mother could have spent the days in the ladies' cabin visiting with other ladies whose husbands were with Father, but she generally preferred the privacy of her stateroom. I myself liked the dining room, where the tables were laid with heavy white linen and we were waited on by white-coated Negro men whose only aim in life, it seemed to me, was to bring me one sweet delicacy after another. Meals began with two kinds of soup and were followed with fish, roast, all manner of cold dishes, and more desserts than my mind could conjure. By the time we arrived in St. Louis, I was always thoroughly spoiled and imperious, used to giving orders, and it took Father a day or so to "beat that attitude out of me," as he liked to say.

  St. Louis was home to me, almost as much as Washington. This year I was particularly glad to be there, for no one in St. Louis would give an instant's thought to my shorn locks.

  The house Father had built long before he married Mother was of two stories, with long galleries running its length on both floors and screened from the public by locust trees. Father set up his office on the lower gallery, preferring always to be outdoors. Visitors would begin to come by early in the day to talk of politics and government, of Indians and westward expansion.

  Gradually, Father and I mended the rift caused by my haircutting. There was no open reconciliation, but he began to allow me to sit quietly on the gallery when General Clark came by to discuss Indian affairs—he was in charge of them for the entire region, and I was awestruck to actually meet and listen to the famous explorer from the Lewis and Clark expedition—or when old Mr. Dent came to recall perilous times he and Father had shared—he used to get mixed up and call me "Mrs. Benton," and I never had the heart to correct him.