by Judy Alter
But it was not working. After nearly a year I was miserable—wanting John's love and earning only distance, wanting to trust him and unable to.
"John, I think I'll go back to New York." We were at the dinner table, the three of us—John, Lily, and myself, Frank having gone off to attend the Army War College. Lily's eyes widened, but she said nothing.
"I'm sure," John said, "that you are lonely for the city... and your friends."
Was there a barb there? Was he referring to my editors?
"But," he continued, "I'm surprised you would risk that awful trip to Yuma and back, just for a change of scenery and people."
"I... had not intended coming back. I thought to stay in New York." I could have added "for my writing," but prudence silenced my tongue. I put down my fork and folded my hands in my lap, twisting them anxiously under the tablecloth where no one could see.
"Not coming back?" His voice rose in amazement, the most reaction I'd gotten from him in some time. "What would my constituents think if you left me?" His knife clattered out of his hand onto the table, and Lily tactfully reached over to place it on his plate.
"I am not leaving you," I said. "You will return to New York eventually, and I will simply wait for you there. You can tell people that I've gone east to look after your business interests."
He scoffed. "You look after my business interests? Likely they'd all fall to ruin if I listened to your advice, Jessie." Then he added more kindly, "Not that I haven't always valued your advice... I just think the world of finance and investment is for men, not women."
My appetite for dinner gone, I took a sip of the claret in my glass and found it like vinegar.
Besides," he continued, "I intend to keep this post for a long time. It... ah... it allows me to develop new investment interests while drawing a government salary."
And, I thought, drawing popular criticism for not paying enough attention to your government duties because you're so interested in your own business.
Lily spoke up now. She had been silently watching us, her head turning each time one of us spoke, her face almost expressionless, though I knew this talk must raise deep conflicts in her. "We can simply tell people that the climate here has been too hard on you, and you are returning to New York for your health."
Had I taught her to dissemble so? "If you wish," I said, "though I've truly never felt better or stronger."
"What shall I do?" she asked, her voice showing just a hint of her bewilderment.
"You," I said firmly, "will stay and take care of your father."
I left Prescott two days later. John and Lily saw me off in the ambulance, with much hugging and loud good wishes. But I think John was secretly relieved that I was going... and I knew that I was.
Epilogue
My life began again in 1879 when I returned to New York City. It was, I decided, my third existence: I had been Senator Benton's daughter, and then General Frémont's wife, and now I was Jessie Frémont, author, an identity I took on with joy.
I found a small house in the city and fitted it to my tastes, never once mourning for the fine furnishings I had once known. Silk scarves and swatches of paisley were now my decorating materials, and serviceable plain furniture was sparsely scattered about the house. I needed little more than a table and chairs and a bed.
But my desk sat squarely in the middle of the parlor, dominating the house, just as my writing dominated my life. I arose early each morning and was at my desk within an hour to spend the day working on this article and that. Assignments came from several magazines, and I wrote about life in California, a set of tales set in France and Nassau, more sketches of famous people I had known, recollections of my childhood and my travels. The income was not great, but I supported myself and occasionally sent a small amount to Lily, who wrote uncomplaining from Arizona that her father expected to "be rich again any moment... meanwhile I am darning his socks and patching my own petticoats!"
Mine was a solitary existence—I rarely went out and seldom invited visitors in, for my writing absorbed all my time and energy. Once or twice Liza came up from Washington—she had divorced William Carey for his drunkenness—and we had a good visit, reliving old times—times that we both knew, without regret, were gone forever. Susie wrote bitterly from France, where her husband was still in jail, and I replied as kindly as I could—but I had no help to offer and little sympathy to give, even to my favorite sister. I had lost contact with Sarah totally and assumed she was deep in the bosom of the southern branch of the family, where they preferred to act as though I had died during the war. Charley and Frank, both now married, came for quick visits when they could get leave. They were strong and honorable young men, and I was proud of them, overjoyed to see them arrive and always a little relieved to see them leave.
Those who knew me before—in those other lives—wondered that I could be content living so quietly, out of the public eye—indeed, my neighbors thought me just another widow woman, and I did not correct them. Had I been dependent still on John and Lily for companionship or charitable works to give my life meaning, I could not have borne it. But I had my writing. It was almost like having another child.
John and Lily stayed another year in Prescott and then, for reasons I never understood, moved to Tucson, where they spent yet one more year. But by 1881 Hayes had been replaced as President by Chester Arthur, who was not a supporter of John's and was under pressure to replace him because he paid so little attention to his duties as governor. There was no secret about it, no inner knowledge given me by friendly politicians—the charges were published in the newspapers. Under pressure John resigned as governor in October 1881. It was his last great event, and it too had ended in failure.
I welcomed them with open arms, made a place in my small house for John to work at his everlasting projects, and life went on. I had lost my solitude, but not the sense of myself that the period of aloneness had brought. Now, with John and Lily about me, I continued to write, ignoring John's frowns and displeasure. Lily tended the house, while John went back and forth to Washington, seeking a military pension, demanding recompense for Black Point, trying to raise congressional support for a railroad from Tucson to the Gulf of California or financial backing for the Silver Prince Mine, always looking for the miracle that would restore us to the wealth and power we had known.
In 1887, because of John's poor health—he was now seventy-four years old—we moved to California, but he still spent much of his time on the East Coast. He was in New York in July 1890 when he was taken ill—ptomaine poisoning, the doctor said—and died within three days.
Charley reached John's bedside in time to be with him at the end and then to send me a telegram, which said simply, "Father is dead." Devastated by grief, poor Charley failed to realize that I had no warning, no preparation for such shattering news.
I was alone in the parlor when I read the telegram, and I simply sat in stunned silence. I could not imagine a world without John. No matter our differences and our disappointments, he was a part of—no, he was central to—my world. All that I had done in my adult life had been for John—or, of late, in reaction to him. With him gone I was adrift, a ship without an anchor.
At first I was too shocked, too surprised, for tears. When Lily found me staring into space, she asked in concern, "Mother?" And then, only then, did I burst into sobs. Unable to speak, I could only hold out the telegram in a shaking hand.
Lily, ever the stoic, read in silence and then sat with her arm around my heaving shoulders for more than an hour, until I had calmed some.
It grieved me even more that John was alone when he died. It was good that Charley had been there, but it was not the same. I should have been with him, and I was torn with guilt and grief.
As the days passed, I began to feel a great sense of relief. And that plagued me as much as the grief and the guilt. The great events were really over—the power and the glory gone, but gone also the wild financial schemes, the poverty, the accusation
s and innuendos from friend and foe. John was at last at peace... and so was I.
Publicly I always laid his failures at the door of unscrupulous business partners, unfortunate circumstances, and bad luck. I breathed to no one, not even Lily, my own conviction that John had brought about his own luck, that his vision had exceeded his grasp, that perhaps Mr. Lincoln was right when he said the person who introduces a reform is not necessarily the best one to see it brought to fruition. If John could only be remembered for all his greatness—but I feared the failures would live longer.
I tried to write John's biography—ghostwrite his autobiography, really—but Memoirs of My Life—A Retrospect of Fifty Years was a commercial failure. My heart was not in it. I, who had been his most passionate defender all those years, now saw the real man behind the facade all too clearly. Someone else would have to write the biography that would take John's name into history.
Still, there is this manuscript—my own memoir. Lily says I should burn it, but I will leave it guarded with instructions it is not to be published for seventy-five years after my death. By then no one will care about John's failures and triumphs—or mine. But I want to leave a record of a life well lived. If I had it all to do over again, I would change nothing. And I would elope with John Charles Frémont again.
The End
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Page forward for a Special Note from the Author
followed by an excerpt from
LIBBIE
Real Women of the American West
Book One
Author's Note
Jessie Benton Frémont is the subject of the novel Immortal Wife, by Irving Stone (1944), while her husband, John Charles Frémont, is at the center of the long novel Dream West, by David Nevin (1983). Having read both long before I began work on this novel, I deliberately avoided rereading them as part of my research. Each novelist must bring an individual approach to the facts of history.
In her later years Jessie Frémont attempted an autobiography, but ill health and her daughter's displeasure discouraged her from finishing the work. The unfinished manuscript is too often devoted to a biased accounting of John's affairs or secondhand descriptions of his expeditions and adventures. Occasionally, however, Jessie recorded fascinating details of specific periods in their lives—their year in California before he was elected to the U.S. Senate, their trip to Arizona when he was appointed governor. Unfortunately, she rarely recorded information about her own feelings, and the novelist is left to conjecture. This incomplete manuscript and Jessie's other papers are in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. There are, of course, numerous studies—some bad, some good, some sympathetic, others not—of John Charles Frémont, but his only "autobiography" was penned by Jessie, so we are once again unable to look to the written word for insight into his true feelings—or hers.
For this novel I relied heavily on Jessie Frémont's unpublished autobiography, along with other works by her: A Year of American Travel (1878), Souvenirs of My Time (1887), and Far West Sketches (1890). For some parts of Frémont's life the memoirs of her oldest daughter, Recollections of Elizabeth Benton Frémont (1912), were extremely valuable and offered a fresh viewpoint. Secondary sources of great help were Pamela Herr's excellent biography, Jessie Benton Frémont (1987), and the two-volume biography of John Charles Frémont by Allan Nevins (1928). Also helpful was The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, edited by Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence.
In weaving Jessie's story into fiction, I have taken small liberties with history for the sake of dramatic storytelling and also to simplify what was an unbelievably complex life. I hope, though, that I have not distorted history and that I have been true to the spirit of Jessie Frémont's life. Often caught between two strong men, she ultimately triumphed and proved herself the strongest of all.
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LIBBIE
Real Women of the American West
Book One
Excerpt from
Libbie
Real Women of the American West
Book One
by
Judy Alter
Award-winning Author
I knew that history would make a plaything of Autie, and when that happened, all my battles would be lost again. Autie rarely lost a battle—save that last big one—and his fights were always glorious, painted on a broad screen by the clamoring newsmen if not by himself. My battles were small and silent and private, but oh! they were important to me, and I had managed to hold the line. I would not see it all wiped away with the muckraking cry that Autie's overweening ambition had led him to disaster at Little Bighorn. I would make sure that the world saw the George Armstrong Custer I wanted seen. Only this private journal—to be burned upon my death—records my own wars.
Twelve years is not very long in a lifetime, yet it seemed my whole life was lived in those brief years of marriage. I had fought battles of my own, hard battles, to marry Autie, and once married, I thought myself the happiest and luckiest of women—married to the great boy-general, the hero of the Civil War. We would, I knew, grow old together, savoring the best of life, the last for which the first was made, so the poet wrote. I'm not sure when, exactly, that I knew that dream was not to be, that a love as intense as ours could not survive, that two people as willful as we could not be bound so tightly together. And yet, when all was said and done, I would not have traded those twelve years for anything on earth. Were they worth a lifetime? There is no answer, but even to think about it, I must begin earlier, back in Monroe.... I remember yet one snowy night when I was but sixteen years old.
LIBBIE
Real Women of the American West
Book One
by
Judy Alter
~
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Judy Alter retired as director of Texas Christian University Press and began a new career writing mysteries. The first, Skeleton in a Dead Space, was published in September 2011 and the second, No Neighborhood for Old Women, in April 2012. More are to come. Alter previously wrote about women of the American West and is a former president of the Western Writers of America. In 1984 her book Luke and the Van Zandt County War was named best juvenile novel of the year by the Texas Institute of Letters. In 1988 she received a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for her novel Mattie, and in 1992 a Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame for her short story, "Fool Girl." In 2005 she received the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from Western Writers of America.
Judy Alter lives with her two dogs in Fort Worth, Texas. She is the single mother of four and the grandmother of seven.
Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
A Note from the Publisher
Author's Note
Excerpt from LIBBIE (Real Women of the American West, Book 1)
Meet the Author
