Jessie

by Judy Alter

  Colonel Gamier, an exiled Spanish gentleman who had fought with Wellington in Spain, came by daily, and both Father and I listened to his stories. Colonel Gamier was particularly pleased that I was fluent in Spanish.

  "She must know the language of Mexico," Father said to the colonel. "Our nation's future lies that way."

  "She reminds me of my sister," answered the colonel. "That is why I call her Rosita."

  Sometimes Judge Lawless, who had fought with the French at Waterloo, would join us, and the two old soldiers would relive the battles of their youth. I'd be sent running for large maps, which were unrolled on the tables, and then the battles were fought with pins—beeswax heads for the Spanish troops, red wax for the English, and for the French, black.

  Even Mother, who often had her chaise moved onto the second-floor gallery, had callers. Some neighbors, who were French and spoke heavily accented English, would bring her fruit and flowers from their carefully cultivated gardens, and Sister Elizabeth from the hospital came almost daily. Mother always sent her back with a basket of things for the hospital—sometimes food, sometimes soap, or toilet water for the female patients. I would hear Sister Elizabeth say "Permittez, ma soeur" and Mother, in her schoolgirl-perfect French, would reply "Bonjour, ma soeur."

  It made me happy to think that we spoke French upstairs and Spanish down.

  As summers always do, this one ended too quickly, and we were back on the steamboats down the Mississippi to New Orleans, up the Ohio to Louisville and then Wheeling, and then by stage home to Washington. At the end of that trip lay the inescapable Miss English's Female Seminary. By now, at least, my hair had grown back to a respectable length.

  * * *

  That fall Father began to talk excitedly of the explorations of Joseph Nicolas Nicollet, a French explorer who had surveyed the upper Mississippi and then the upper Missouri and who was now preparing a huge map of his findings.

  Father described the mapmaking process in detail, crowing with glee because the map would show tiny details—where a cliff rose out of the earth, where a stream branched into two tributaries. "Why, even you and I could follow it to Oregon, if only the map went that far," he told me triumphantly one evening when he'd come to the school to visit.

  I wasn't sure I wanted to go to Oregon, but Father paid no attention. He was as wound up as when he gave one of his notoriously long speeches in the Senate. "They've got to go farther," he said. "They've got to map what lies between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains... and then they have to push on to the Pacific.

  America must settle those lands... and we can't settle them until we know what lies there."

  "And what does lie there?" I asked.

  "Grasslands, I'm sure of it. The high plains are grasslands, not that Great American Desert the army keeps reporting. Nicollet has a bright young assistant—chap named Frémont—and I've been talking to him. He's as excited about all this as I am. We're going to get that expedition together, one way or another."

  A flash of jealousy went through me. I wanted Father to talk to me, not some young man with a French name. "It sounds exciting, Father," was all I said.

  Liza, being in her last year of formal schooling, was allowed to spend more weekends at home than I—the irony was not lost on me that she, who loved the school, was there less often than I, who loathed it—but from both her and Father, on his regular visits to me at school, I began to hear more about this Frémont person. He apparently had become a frequent visitor at our home, and Liza was quite taken with him.

  I met him only once that fall, when Father brought him to a school concert where Liza was playing. Father introduced him with some pride as "that young explorer I told you about. He's going to map the road to Oregon."

  John Charles Frémont had two things in common with the awful Count Bodisco. He was short and he was older, though not by as many as forty years. In fact, he was eleven years older than I and not much taller. I thought him no more than sixty-four inches at best. But after that first moment I never again thought of John's height or lack of it, because he had a certain self-possession that made him loom as tall as Father in my mind. He was tanned, with the look of a man who shared Father's passion for the outdoors—he had, after all, recently returned from a topographical expedition to the West—and he had deep-blue eyes that seemed to look right through me when he took my hand and bowed gallantly over it.

  "Jessie, I've been looking forward to meeting you. Your father speaks highly of your capabilities."

  Blushing, I thanked him and told him that Father spoke equally highly of him.

  "We must be wonderful people," he said, smilmg.

  I wish I could say that something about John Charles Frémont, some romantic instinct, struck me at that first meeting, that I was forever after in love with him—stories since have woven such a romantic web about our first meeting. But it is not the truth. I thought him charming—perhaps a bit too charming—and I thought him extremely patient to flatter Father so by coming to his daughter's musicale.

  But what struck me most was that outdoors quality he possessed, the self-assurance of a man who enjoyed the outdoors and would never be confined in a parlor. I had grown up under the tutelage of a man who was convinced that the healthy outdoor life had saved him from the consumption that had killed his brothers, and I naturally looked askance at any man content to sit indoors.

  And when Frémont spoke of the lands he had seen—surely just the edge of the American West—his eyes glowed with excitement. "We saw land no white man yet has seen," he told me with fire, "not even Lewis and Clark. And there is more, much more land to be discovered. I want to find it."

  I was not my father's daughter for nothing. I admired the passion, the determination, though it was admittedly self-serving. John Charles Frémont, I sensed, did not necessarily want to discover the West for the good of the United States—-he wanted it for his own greater glory, and all the better that it served his country. Who could blame him?

  We sat through Liza's piano playing, technically proficient but spiritually lacking. I looked at Frémont from time to time to see if he noticed but could detect no sign. He was attentive and properly polite, his eyes intent, his body perfectly still, while I had a bad case of the fidgets.

  The interminable musicale ended, and Father and Mr. Frémont stayed only long enough to be polite, flattering Liza about her performance. Then they were gone, and we were back in the schoolgirl routine.

  I thought no more about the lieutenant. He went back to his maps, and I to my endurance of school. The Christmas holidays—and the end of the term—were fast approaching, and my whole attention was focused on persuading Father that I had had enough of school.

  I pressed my campaign over the holidays. Father had moved us just recently into the three-story brick house he had built on C Street in the capital. After years of making do in a series of Washington boardinghouses—where the conversation was always brilliant, the food good, but the sense of permanence and home lacking—Father had felt settled enough in his senatorial career to build a home. It was a magnificent house—dark mahogany paneling everywhere, Mother's antique furniture, long stored elsewhere, now on proud display, the walls covered with portraits of members of Mother's McDowell ancestors. The Benton side of our family had no history illustrious enough to leave a legacy of portraits. No, the sense of tradition came from Mother's side of the family, but Father brought to this new house his own sense of energy, his library, which surely outdid that at Miss English's and was probably, I thought, as large as the newly begun Congressional Library. But most of all, Father brought his vitality to this new house, which fairly buzzed with life and purpose. I loved it from the first moment I walked through the front door, and I was more determined than ever not to be sent back to boarding school.

  "Father, I've brought your coffee." It was early in the morning—before six o'clock—the hour when I knew Father began his day. For years, as a child, I'd met him in his library at that hour,
and now I knew it was the time he would be most driven by sentiment, most susceptible to my pleas.

  He was already at work at his desk, the early-morning dark broken by the light of the candelabrum he had invented—four spermaceti candles fixed in front of a large white blotting paper, which reflected their light. Father was so intent on what he was writing that I had to knock gently before he looked up.

  "Jessie!" His face brightened with pleasure. "I do miss you when you're away. Pour me some of that fine coffee you're carrying."

  It was coffee liberally dosed with chicory, a taste he'd long ago acquired from Mother. I poured it, still steaming, into a huge cup and handed it to him.

  "You have not told me about your work for some time, Father," I said.

  The smile on his face bespoke his pleasure in sharing his work with me, though the news was almost grim. "It's a trying time for this country, Jessie. The slavery issue has not been laid to rest"—South Carolina had threatened some nine years earlier to withdraw from the Union if slavery was made an issue—"and I foresee it breaking this country apart."

  "Missouri is a slave state," I murmured. "You could own slaves yourself, if you'd a mind."

  "I've no mind for that," he said vehemently. "When we preach democracy, we must put it into action. No man should own another man."

  Amen, I silently agreed.

  "But we move ahead on other issues," he continued, "the things that Jackson and I worked for—education for everyone, the abolishment of the poll tax—all those things have come to pass. We will make this a country for all people, not just the rich."

  "And the American West?" I asked. Unbidden, Lieutenant Frémont leaped into my mind, though neither Father nor I had mentioned him. Suddenly, though, I could see that handsome, rugged explorer's face before my eyes with such clarity that it startled me.

  "We're still working on the next expedition," Father said. "Nicollet wants to lead it, though I'm not certain his health is good enough. You'll see Frémont again while you're home for the holidays. He is here often."

  Of course, I recalled that both Father and Liza had mentioned that Frémont was often at the family dinner table. Liza's interest in him was, to say the least, far removed from Father's.

  "I think," my plain sister had said hesitantly, "that he may be... well, you know...."

  "No, Liza, I don't know," I'd replied impatiently.

  "Oh, Jessie!" she said in exasperation, and never did tell me what it was that I didn't know. I guessed, of course, that she hoped Lieutenant Frémont was interested in her. Even more, I supposed, she was most interested in him. Instinctively I knew that Liza was the wrong person for this explorer—she had not the sense of daring to match his. Besides, she was much taller than he.

  Momentarily distracted with thoughts of Lieutenant Frémont, I returned my attention to Father. He was still talking about westward expansion and "Fifty-four forty or fight"—he believed the Columbia River could never be the northern boundary of the United States, that it had to be set at the fifty-fourth parallel—and I sat as patiently as I could, itching though I was to bring up the subject of my schooling.

  When at last my opportunity came, I lived up to Father's critical assessment of me as Don Quixote. Rather than working tactfully toward the moment, I leaped in with both feet, unfortunately, in my mouth.

  Father's reaction should have been no surprise to me. "Leave the school? Of course you can't. Liza will finish her work this spring, and that leaves you another year. Absolutely not!"

  Desperately I said, "Father, didn't you tell me part of the reason I had to go off to school was so that I would not entertain... ah, unsuitable suitors? Like Harriet Wilson did."

  "The Bodisco marriage," he said loftily, "is quite a satisfactory one, I understand. Both parties are happy, and there is a blessed event expected."

  That bit of news shook me just a little, reviving my uncertainties about Harriet's marriage. Obviously, if a blessed event was expected, the marriage had been consummated. The thought gave me a momentary shudder.

  "That is beside the point," I said. "If Count Bodisco had courted me, you'd have been livid with anger."

  He nodded his head warily, knowing he could do nothing but agree with me and yet not sure what trap I was leading him into.

  "The point is, Father, he did not court me. And no one else has. I will be perfectly safe... and virtuous... here at home with you and Mother. And I do not need the studies at Miss English's."

  "And what," he asked, "makes you think you don't need them?"

  "Well, I've been correcting the French teacher all fall—oh, don't worry, I've been tactful. And once when I asked about studying the things that are important today—the issues that absorb your attention, like slavery and westward expansion—I was told that it was more fitting for us to study the ancient Greeks and Romans. Fiddle!"

  I'd been calculating when I pointed out that a classical education had little to do with what Father thought was important, and I saw him start a little when I said that, as though my arrow had hit home. I followed with the final barb.

  "I'm tired of learning to pour tea. I've known how to do that since I can remember."

  He smiled ruefully. "You can pour a fine cup of coffee, I'll speak to that."

  Boldly, I pushed my case. "And you'll speak to my leaving school?"

  He was not to be caught so easily. "No, miss, I will not. School is your mother's fondest wish for you, and her word is law with me."

  "May I tell her you will accept if she will?"

  "No," he said, his firmness returning, "you may not even go that far. Now, pick up that quill and let me dictate this speech to you. It goes better that way than if I try to write it myself." He shuffled the papers on his desk, as though frustrated by them, and I obediently took a sheet of foolscap and sat with my pen poised.

  I had not given up hope.

  Perhaps it was cheating, even outright dishonesty—the thought has long worried me since—but I caught Mother on a day when she felt too weak to argue, too weak for disagreement. Her state also made her sensible of the advantages of having me home to be Father's companion.

  "If you are insistent," she said, waving a thin arm in the air as though disassociating herself from the question.

  "May I tell Father that I have your permission?"

  "Yes, yes, you may tell him. Jessie, what is to become of you?" Then she put a hand to her head and said faintly, "I'll worry about it later. Would you bring me some tea, please?"

  "Of course, Mother." I nearly flew on wings to the kitchen to get the tea.

  Within days notice was sent to Miss English that I would not be returning and that a family servant would call for my belongings.

  "You got your way, didn't you?" Liza asked angrily.

  "You don't have to go back either," I said, "but you want to."

  "Yes," she said, "I do. And I'll make a better marriage than you because I've finished at Miss English's."

  I wanted to laugh aloud and point out to her that marriage or the prospect of it had nothing to do with my leaving the school. But Liza never understood my relationship with Father, and it was too late to try to tell her.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Frémont was at our house two or three times during the holiday, and I had several conversations with him—conversations that I thought he deliberately sought.

  "It is a pleasure to see you here, Jessie," he said, bowing once again over my hand in his courtly manner. "I'm told the house lacks a certain sparkle when you're not present."

  I hoped my laugh did not sound as self-conscious as I felt when I said, "Nonsense. Father may sometimes lack for a hostess, but..."

  "One who understands the issues of which we men talk," he said smoothly, his eyes never leaving mine.

  My gaze locked into those eyes, and I replied, "I am as interested in the progress of this nation as my father is... and as dedicated to certain causes."

  "The exploration of the West?" Was he laughing at m
e?

  "Yes, of course," I replied hastily.

  "Jessie!" Father's voice boomed out. "Don't be monopolizing Mr. Frémont's time. There are several people here tonight I want him to meet."

  Father had gathered six or eight politicians—most of them men of significant influence in the government—for an evening around the fireplace. We had given them a sumptuous meal—gallantine of turkey, creamed oysters on toast, lima beans, watermelon pickles (carried by coach all the way from Cherry Grove), and a whiskey bread pudding. Now they were enjoying after-dinner glasses of port, the entire company gathered around the fireplace in the upstairs parlor.

  Lieutenant Frémont had stopped me in the hallway outside the parlor, and it was evident that we were having a conversation tete-a-tete rather than joining the group.

  "I am sorry, Father," I said with all the brightness I could muster. "Lieutenant Frémont has been talking to me of exploration... a favorite subject of mine," I added with a droll note in my voice.

  "Of course," Father boomed, though his voice, I thought, lacked its usual heartiness.

  The conversation that evening was not on such earthshaking matters as slavery or westward expansion but revolved around the forthcoming inauguration of Mr. William Henry Harrison. "He is a farmer," said one, while another countered, "So have been many of our presidents. And this one has been in the Congress."

  "And a governor and minister to... what country was that?"

  The discussion of Mr. Harrison's qualifications rolled around my head, while I sat and—unobtrusively, I hoped—watched Lieutenant Frémont. Every few minutes I would catch him flashing me a look that hinted at some shared secret... and somehow that look went right to the bone.