Jessie

by Judy Alter

  John, of course, had never stated any preference for a son. I had merely attributed that longing to him, projecting Father's longings and the values of the world in which I'd been raised. John was, as a matter of fact, pleased with his daughter.

  "She is like you, Jessie," he said softly. "She is beautiful."

  "No," I answered wearily, "she is like you. She has your coloring. She is... I had hoped..." With tears streaming down my face I struggled for the words. Then, taking a deep breath, I said clearly, "I wanted to give you a son. All along I thought the baby was John Charles Frémont the second."

  He looked startled. "Jessie!" was all he could say.

  "Well," I said practically, having recovered my composure somewhat, "girls can't go on expeditions, they can't be explorers, they can't go to West Point... they can't do all the things that are important to you."

  "Ah," he replied, "but may she grow up with her mother's spirit. You are important to me."

  I loved him immensely at that moment, and I felt equally loved.

  "Wait," he said. "I will be right back." And with a mysterious sense of importance John rushed from the room.

  With in minutes he returned carrying a tattered and wind-whipped American flag. "This," he said, "is the flag I planted at the summit of the highest peak in the Rocky Mountains... Frémont Peak. I brought the flag for you... I just wasn't sure when to give it to you. Now seems the right time." And with that he spread the flag over me.

  Tears running down my face, I stroked the torn fabric, my fingers catching at loose threads and poking through holes. "It is... I...I have never been so proud of anything," I told him. "I will treasure it always."

  "And I," he replied, "will treasure you—and our daughter—always."

  "I want to wrap it around her," I told him, and so he went to Mathilde with the flag and instructed her to wrap it around our child. She did so, protesting all the while about its dirty state.

  And so our daughter went to sleep her first night on earth wrapped in a torn and dirty flag of her country. She knew little of it, but I knew, and it was more important to me almost than life itself. John had brought me a piece—indeed, the major piece—of his adventure, and we had welcomed our daughter with it.

  "Le bon temps viendra," John said, echoing what I had always told him. I smiled in agreement and was asleep within seconds.

  We called our daughter Elizabeth Benton Frémont, after my mother, but within days her name was Lily. I was only eighteen years old, but I had already lived more than many women of my age.

  Chapter 6

  "John! Another nosebleed?"

  He sat at the desk that had been set up for him in the sitting room of our private chambers, a large white handkerchief, now stained with bright-red splotches, pressed to his nose. Before him were his notes from the expedition, a penholder, and several pen points, next to a stack of blank foolscap. I saw only the blood. Squeamish about blood ever since Mother's bleedings, I was thoroughly alarmed.

  "It's nothing," he said, waving his hand in the air as though to dismiss me. "It will stop shortly."

  "Press hard on your nose," I said helpfully. "Perhaps you should lie down... maybe on the floor?"

  It was John's fifth nosebleed in as many days, and I was sorely tempted to call Dr. Thurston without John's permission. The episodes had begun the day that he announced he must begin work on his report of the expedition. It seemed that whenever he sat down to write, his nose began to bleed. Once he had complained of a headache so severe that he had to retire to bed, and I, still so conscious of Mother, had hovered over him more nervous than I ever was over tiny Lily.

  Now John paced the floor, a bloodied white linen pressed to his nose with one hand. Waving the other hand impatiently, he said, "The expedition... being outdoors, living my life on horseback... it has not fitted me to sit at a desk and write a report. I cannot do it!"

  I bit my tongue to keep from quoting Father's wisdom about the folly of saying "I can't..."

  "I need a secretary," John expostulated, "someone who could write while I dictate."

  "There is no money for a secretary," I demurred, knowing that the funds for the expedition were already spent. Tactfully I bypassed the opportunity to point out that part of the condition of his receiving those funds was the presentation of a written report. He had agreed to provide such when he accepted the funds. Neither did I point out to him that Father had never had a secretary—save me, poor substitute that I was.

  Suddenly it dawned on me. That was the answer! As I had been Father's secretary, so I could do the same for John. But though the temptation to rush toward this solution was strong, I knew John well enough to know that tact was important—crucial, in fact.

  "John... I know it's less than ideal, but perhaps I could... well, I could make an attempt... to be your secretary."

  He was aghast. "You? Jessie, what do you know about the West?"

  More than you think, I wanted to reply, but I merely shrugged and said softly, "I have written some reports for Father."

  That stopped him. He looked startled. "Of course you have. I... well, I had forgotten. But Jessie, what of Lily? You have your hands full in caring for her."

  In truth Lily took little of my time. I visited her three times daily in the nursery on the third floor of the house—the room where Sarah and Susie had been raised in turn. There I rocked her and sang to her and cooed about how lovely she was, but her day-to-day care rested in the hands of Sophie, a freed Negro that Mathilde had immediately found upon my daughter's birth and who now served as wet nurse. Sophie exhibited a patience with the infant that I never would have been able to show, and the arrangement was working well for all of us—except that I had not much to occupy my time. I had finished translating the Conquista de la Nueva Espana before my confinement, and Father had refrained from giving me any more assignments.

  Serving as John's secretary would be the perfect solution to more than one dilemma.

  "I don't know, Jessie....What will people say?"

  "Fiddle with what people will say," I cried. "We have to get that report written. You do want to go on your second expedition, don't you?"

  He was dismayed for just a moment, and then, when he saw the smile on my face, he pulled me to my feet and began to whirl me about the room in a dance of wild abandonment.

  "Jessie, Jessie, you are always smarter than I am, always one step ahead of me."

  Alarm shot through me. "No," I protested, "I am not at all. You are the one who will do great things. My only hope is to be able to help you."

  "Ah, Jessie," he said, "you do, every day, in more ways than you can know."

  And so I became John's amanuensis. Father heartily approved the arrangement, removing one lingering doubt from my mind.

  "I have no pressing jobs for you now, Jessie," he said. "But, of course, I don't want to give up my rights to your assistance forever."

  John spoke up quickly. "I would never rob you of your assistant, sir."

  "I know that," Father said, "but we must get this report written. It's... it's more important than I can tell you."

  But John and I both knew how important it was.

  Almost immediately we fell into a working pattern. We worked in the mornings, as I had done with Father, beginning at nine o'clock and working through until Mathilde summoned us for the midday meal about one. To keep up with John, I wrote almost continuously during those four hours, as fast and furious as I could, and often at the end of a session my hand was cramped and sore. While I sat at the desk, scratching with my pen, John paced the room, notes in hand, describing things as though simply talking to me.

  "Jessie," he said, "there is no way to make people understand the grandeur of a mammoth herd of buffalo. They simply surpass describing. When we first came upon them, we heard a dull and confused sound from a distance, like a murmuring, but when we came upon that dark mass of living things, not a one of us was unaffected. My heart pounded with the excitement of it. Oh! I wish you c
ould have seen it, Jessie.

  "It was early morning, and the herd was feeding. Everywhere they were in motion—here an old bull might be rolling in the dirt, there a pair of young bulls in an obstinate fight sent clouds of dust rising in the air. Indians and buffalo, Jessie, are the poetry and life of the plains."

  I wrote it almost exactly as he told it to me.

  John had a wonderful sense for the color of the land, and his telling was full of it—the gold of the sunflowers on the Kansas prairie, the red sandstone cliffs of the Platte River, the look of a mountain bathed in fog below and crowned above by the silver of the first rays of morning sunlight.

  All of this I wove into his report. When he first looked at a draft, John was startled.

  "Should you say that, Jessie? About the silver and gold of the sunlight? In an official report? I thought you would... you know... stick to the facts."

  "There's no reason," I told him, "that facts have to be dull. Your report has plenty of information in it."

  And that it did. The report was rich with detail about the fur trade, and traders of the American Fur Company, who, for stacks of buffalo hides, gave the Indians blankets, calico, guns, ammunition, tobacco, and liquor. "It's awful, Jessie. Most Indians would trade their furs, their wives, their lodges, even their horses, for a keg of drink. We have brought ruin to them."

  That, too, went into the report. "It must move beyond the location of geographic sites," I told him, "to describe the people of that land—how they live, how they will be affected by westward expansion."

  "Badly," he said with a shake of the head.

  Sometimes we strayed from the topic at hand. One day, which stands memorable in my mind forever, John was describing the thrill he felt at the summit of Frémont's Peak, when he suddenly stopped and looked at me.

  "You know, Jessie, it is because of you that I got to climb a mountain and plant a flag there and have it named for me."

  I laughed gently. "Because of me?"

  "Because I am married to you," he said honestly. "I was a good aide to Papa Joe, and perhaps I could have gradually climbed whatever ladder of success governs explorers... but it would have been years before I was sent on an expedition like this one."

  "And what," I asked skeptically, "do I have to do with it?"

  "You... and your father. Because I married you—Senator Thomas Benton's daughter—I was suddenly... how should I say it?...prominent in the public eye, in the eye of the senators who approve and finance such expeditions. I owe it all to you."

  It was my turn to be solemn. "And is that," I asked, "why you married me?"

  He was on his knees in an instant. "Jessie! Don't ever even in jest say that to me. You know it was not! Tell me you know that!"

  Lightheartedly, I laughed. "Of course I know, John. I... I just wanted to hear what you would say. Any woman would be that vain."

  "You are not vain, Jessie, never vain." He held my hands tightly in his and, still on his knees, looked up at me. "Oh, Jessie, I love you more than you can know."

  "And I, you," I replied, bending my lips to meet his open, inviting mouth.

  There was little more accomplished on the report that morning.

  The Senate was debating the Oregon issue when John filed his final report. Father's colleague, Senator Linn, had introduced a bill proposing that a series of forts be built along the route to the Rockies and Oregon, that every adult settler should be given 640 acres of land, and that the United States system of justice should apply to our settlers in the Oregon Territory—the British could deal with their own. The bill, directly opposed by President Polk, who favored setting the north limit of the country at the Columbia River, passed the Senate but not the House.

  "It's all right, Jessie," Father told me. "We've made our point. They know there are a good number of senators in favor of colonizing Oregon. Someday we'll have thirty or forty thousand rifles beyond the Rockies as our negotiators in that land... meantime, John must go there next."

  Next? I didn't want to think of John going on another expedition, once again absent from me for months. In working together on the report, we had become soul mates—a trite term I hesitate to use, but there is no other description for our spiritual and emotional bond. The reason, John often told me, that we could write the report so well was that we thought as one. I liked that idea.

  Physically, we had also melded ourselves into one after I had recovered from Lily's birth. We often retired to our rooms early, right after Lily's night feeding, on the pretext that John had reports and maps to study and I had reading to do. Sometimes, as we made our excuses, I saw Father watching us with an inscrutable look. I cannot yet tell if it was amusement or envy or pleasure for us, though I doubt it was the latter.

  True to our word, each night we settled ourselves at our respective tasks. But a sideways look from one, a smile of invitation, even a slight gesture would send us running for the bed, nearly stumbling over each other in our haste to be shed of our clothes.

  Perhaps it was Cecilia who had taught John everything he knew, but I never resented her. John was a considerate and passionate lover. I have no basis of comparison, having never known another man in all my life, but I have heard talk, and I know that John was one among thousands simply because he thought of me when he made love. He never grabbed for his own pleasure, leaving me to survive as I would. Instead his hands, his tongue, his voice, urged me on to greater heights, and only when I cried out in satisfaction did he take his own pleasure. Then, exhausted and almost beyond ourselves with joy, we lay together and murmured secrets—the fame his next expedition would bring, the home we would someday have in the West, our wishes for Lily's future. Sometimes, giggling, we talked of such mundane things as what we wanted for breakfast the next morning.

  "Shall I rouse Mathilde and tell her you request hotcakes?" I asked, laughing.

  "Yes, and do tell her why you look the way you do. Your hair, my dear Jessie, is all over everywhere."

  Instinctively, I reached to smooth it.

  "Don't. I like it that way. I like knowing why it looks that way."

  Poor Lily suffered in those days, though I comfort myself that she was too young to recognize our lack of attention. Though I visited her regularly, John saw her only once a day, and then he was little more than an observer. I once accused him of commenting on her behavior in the same way he might have judged a horse racing around the track. He shrugged and said he knew nothing about babies.

  * * *

  When John's report was presented to the Senate, Senator Linn immediately proposed that it be printed for the Congress, with an extra thousand copies made for general distribution to the public. Newspapers across the country printed excerpts, and soon the name of John Charles Frémont was on every tongue.

  "Mr. Frémont's book," I told Maria Crittendon, trying to be modest, "is a success beyond our dreams. I hear that young men throughout the East are talking of going west, inspired by what John has written. He is very pleased."

  "And so should you be," Maria said, stirring the tea I had given her. "Even John admits that you wrote it, that it is your book."

  "Nonsense. I simply took his dictation."

  "And turned it into a literary creation," Maria said. "Jessie, it wouldn't be wrong of you to take credit for your part in this."

  I know I must have looked startled. "Maria, you know I cannot and will not do that. It is a wife's place to advance her husband in every way, but not to take credit for herself." As I said this, I firmly believed the rightness of my words.

  Maria simply gave me a long look and then asked if I'd heard the latest news about James Buchanan. Someone was always trying to link that poor bachelor with this widow or that. I shuddered to think that I, playing a role like that of Harriet Bodisco, might have been a candidate for such a linkage. Briefly, the thought flashed through my mind that with James Buchanan I would never have known the kind of love—and passion—that I knew with John.

  "Why are you blushing, Jess
ie?" Maria asked.

  "I'm not blushing," I said indignantly. "It's very warm in here. The fire is too high."

  * * *

  John was going to Oregon. As his second expedition moved inexorably closer to us, the prospect filled him with such excitement that he never noticed that my own spirits lagged. Of course, most of the time I pretended enthusiasm as great as his own, and in some ways I did share that optimism.

  The settlement of the Oregon valley had long been Father's special dream—in his mind's eye he saw it peopled with American settlers busily occupied in agriculture and the fur trade, and he saw a safe and passable overland trail for these settlers to reach this promised land. In the face of those of narrow vision, who insisted the land beyond the Missouri River was unfit for settlement and the Oregon Territory was not worth the cost of a single exploratory expedition, Father persisted.

  But there was no passable trail. Immigrants had so far made their way to Oregon by a tortuous route up the Platte and Sweetwater rivers to the South Pass, then on through the Green Valley to Fort Bridger and a series of other forts. But beyond the South Pass their trail was marked too frequently by gravestones, skeletons of oxen and mules, even furniture discarded in desperation by those who had attempted the journey before. Those on the overland trail suffered from thirst, hunger, burning sun, heavy dust, and the constant terror of Indians. They died of exhaustion and illness, their dreams of a bright new land fading before their dimming eyes.

  John had been to the South Pass on his first expedition. Now he was to explore and map the trail beyond it, going clear to the Pacific Ocean. It would be a glorious adventure, and I knew it. Still, sometimes I gave vent to my doubts and fears about this expedition.

  "You can't make it any better for those people," I said passionately one night. "You are only exposing yourself to the same dangers that have defeated them."