Arc D'X (5 page)

"Yes," Thomas answered.

"Why did you bring her here?" Patsy's face was still buried in his handkerchief.

Thomas gestured to Sally and said gently to his daughter, "This isn't her fault. She doesn't deserve your fury, your fury's with me."

He took Patsy by the arm and they began to walk around the border of the church. In her pew Sally watched them circle in silence. For a long time they just walked, not talking at all, as though in the early-morning carriage ride from Paris Thomas had no luck trying to figure out what he would say at this moment. In the empty resonance of the church the buzz of their voices finally reached Sally, but it wasn't until their third time around she made out the words. "Do you know," she heard Patsy plead, "the way they say your name here? In the street the common people say it when they need to fill their hearts with hope. I never believed,"

she said bitterly, "that my father was just another fine Virginia aristocrat, having relations with his slavewomen."

Thomas led Patsy to a pew, where they sat down. He continued STEVE ERICKSON • 33

to hold her hand. "There are things," he said, "a man can explain least of all to those whom he most owes explanations. Something happened to me after your mother died. Something happened to me after Maria left." The abbess watched intently from the altar.

"I'm not here to make you promises," Thomas said to Patsy. "I'm here to try and dissuade you from a decision I believe you're making not because it's what you want but because you're angry with me. I want to dissuade you from this decision because it will hurt you more than me, because you're only using your own life to reproach me."

"I've heard that Grandfather Wayles had many slavewomen,"

Patsy said.

"Yes."

"I've heard—" She looked at Sally.

"I believe," Thomas said, "that Sally is Grandfather Wayles'

daughter."

"Then she and Mother were sisters?" Patsy said angrily. "Then she's my aunt?" Patsy asked in disbelief, pointing at Sally. "Will she next be my mother?"

The abbess hurried over from the altar now. "It's most irregular, monsieur," she announced in French, hovering at their side. "It's time for the girl to return to her chores and duties."

Thomas stood up from the pew. He looked down at Patsy and sighed. "I'm taking you home. You're still of an age that I can make these decisions for you."

"You should think of the child," the abbess protested.

"Of course."

"It's unfortunate," said the abbess, "that your own hatred of God blinds you to—"

"I can appreciate that she's politically valuable to you," Thomas said to the abbess in English. "She is after all the daughter of someone your church fears and despises. But I'm taking her back, for as long as I have something to say about it, as her father. Later Patsy may decide for herself."

"For your daughter's sake, let's pray she never comes to share your contempt for God and his works."

I have nothing but reverence for God and his works," Thomas answered. He was already walking toward the door with Patsy under his arm and Sally behind them. "It's the base machinations A R C D'X • 34

of power conducted in the name of God for wnicn i nave contempt." Outside, the carriage was waiting where Thomas and Sally had left it. With his daughter and lover, Thomas stepped into the carriage while the abbess seethed in the doorway. "I'll send someone in a few days for her things," he said.

Outside Paris they stopped at an inn to have breakfast. While Thomas and Patsy ate in the guest room by the fire, Sally sat in the servants' quarters in back. Through the window of the kitchen she could see the snow of the winter and through the door of the kitchen she could hear Thomas' and Patsy's laughter. In her fine Parisian dress she quietly picked at her meal while the other servants watched; the wine-red gloves lay on the bench beside her.

The servants offered cheese and bread with jam. After a while they turned their attention from Sally to discuss kings and repub-licans.

By the time Thomas and Patsy and Sally returned to Paris it was a gray wintry noon. Bedlam rose from the city like a swarm. The boulevard St-Germain was raucous, enraged people stopping coaches in the streets and rocking them back and forth to overturn them while the passengers frantically hurled money out the windows. Throngs made the bridges impassable. From her window Sally could see approaching on the horizon of the Seine an angry black-and-red current. The revolution was trickling in by river, a rebel navy of flaming boats advancing to seize the docks and block the king's commerce; one by one the boats beached on the quays.

Sailors stormed ashore with torches burning beneath the black winter sky.

People were reaching inside Thomas' carriage. They grabbed at Thomas and Patsy and at Sally in her fine Parisian clothes. Someone yanked one of the gloves off her hand and, when she reached to seize it back, she was almost pulled from the coach. The turmoil became uncontrollable. The carriage was about to be pitched over the side of the bridge into the river when someone shouted, "Mais c'est Jefferson!" and then there was a hush, and the recurring murmur, "Jefferson," over and over. A roar rose from one end of the mob to the other. "Jefferson," men and women cried, "the people's champion!"

The crowd grew larger, cheering his name, people dashing from shops and looking from windows. Those around the carriage now STEVE ERICKSON • 35

reached in not to grab Thomas but simply to touch him; soon it became clear he would have to say something to them before they'd stop. He opened the carriage door and stood on the step of the coach and the crowd shouted at the sight of him, the giant with his hair of light and his old worn disheveled clothes. For a long time this wild demonstration continued. He kept trying to talk but no one could hear him amid the furor. "My dear friends," he said in his halting French, once the mob finally became quiet; his voice was so soft that inside the coach Sally could barely make it out. No one in the rapt crowd was so rude as to call for him to speak up.

"My dear friends," he started once more, fumbling his hands,

"please forgive the poor French of an American savage," and people laughed and the cheering began all over again.

When it faded, he went on. "My friends in this country," he said, still stumbling and nearly inaudible, "which I've come to love as though it were my own . . . what can I say to you that wouldn't be presumptuous? What can I say that won't be a . . . small whisper against the bold shout of your streets. The witness I bear here humbles me, and I'm not worthy of it—" and someone in the crowd began to protest but Thomas continued, "—I'm not worthy of it, but I'm grateful to see it."

He stopped. Behind him the revolution continued upriver. In the cold of the winter his words left tiny clouds before his face. "I'm a poor champion," he finally said after a moment. No one spoke.

"I'm only as bright as the whitest light in any man can be, tempered as it is in every man by whatever black impulse he can't ignore. At my best I have only been the slave of a great idea. It's an idea which no man holds but which rather holds him. It's to no man's credit that he has such an idea, it's merely his good fortune that such an idea possesses him with such force and clarity that he can't help but serve it. What you do here stirs the slaves of the world to life. What you do here leaves the world's sleeping tyrants with no dreams but the endless counting of the few remaining days left to them. You should remember," and now Sally almost thought she could hear his voice break, "that whenever a poor champion fails a great idea, it's not the failure of the idea itself. The idea is as great as it ever was. It survives its poor champion and goes on and on. You should remember that when the final reckoning comes with God in his heaven, when the final battle of old prophecies is A R C D'X • 36

fought here on this sphere, it will be between those noble enough to have been slaves, and those arrogant enough to presume themselves masters. Let no one doubt on whose side God will be."

It seemed to Sally, there in the carriage, like a very long time before the crowd responded. When they did it was with a clamor like she'd never heard before. "Jefferson, Jefferson!" they screamed and, overwhelmed by the violence of the adoration, Thomas swung himself back into the carriage as though to cower from it. He was pale. The crowd escorted the carriage on its passage across the bridge; all the way across the city back to the Hotel Langeac people ran alongside, shouting and announcing to others on every new street that it was Thomas who was in the coach. At one point he summoned just enough nerve to look to the seat across from him where Sally sat, and then he looked away, out the window to the adoring people. When he couldn't stand to look at them, he stared down at his hands that had held Sally captive in the dark. When he couldn't stand to look at his hands, he looked somewhere else, until he ran out of places on which he could set his gaze, and closed his eyes.

By the end of winter he'd taken her to his own bedroom. By the middle of spring she slept all her nights there. Before everyone she openly called him Thomas. Sleeping in his room she couldn't hide the carving knife beneath her pillow anymore, so she kept it wrapped in the one glove she still had from the day on the bridge when she'd lost its mate to the crowd. At night after sex, when she was still awake, it seemed to her that she felt the bed beneath her flutter as though it were alive with wings, waiting to take flight.

The storm gathered in Paris. While winter chilled the turmoil in the streets it also raised the price of wood, further enraging the populace. One morning James found Thomas' carriage dismantled in the snow, broken to slivers and burned in stoves all over the neighborhood. By spring no one could afford bread. Bureaucrats frantically distributed stale crusts among the people while ma-STEVE E R I C K S O N • 37

rauders ambushed flour wagons and hijacked grain barges. Roving bands torched the vineyards of the aristocracy while rioters looted merchants' houses and scattered the innards up and down the avenues. An anarchy of bodily fluids flooded the city, torrents of blood and shit and vomit running in the gutters. Soldiers vacillated nervously in their alliances, from the king one moment to the people the next. Among any accumulation of citizens and soldiers there was certain to be shooting, though who would fire upon whom was never known until the shooting began, at which point soldiers might suddenly become revolutionaries. "You must remain in France," James told Sally, "you mustn't go back to America with us."

"With us?" she repeated.

"He's agreed to set me free," James stammered, "if I return to Virginia as his cook."

"In other words," she retorted, "he's agreed to set you free if you remain his slave."

"Don't twist this around, little sister," James said angrily. "It's not the same, I'm not the one he beds. He'll never free you in America. He couldn't if he wanted to, not if he wants to continue as a white man having a black woman's body."

After this conversation she hid the knife wrapped in the glove behind the headrest of Thomas' bed. Tied by the wrists she listened to the beating wings of the bed beneath her, his cock far up inside her on the night Thomas said, We're going home soon. He pulsed with the news. He throbbed with the prospect of having her on American soil, where her slavery was irrefutable and the delight of her body was his with the crack of a whip. Until she felt him throb and pulse like that she hadn't really known what her answer would be. Will you take me back slave or free? she asked, and felt him stop, desire fading before her question. Collapsed on her breasts he lay still long enough for her to believe he was unconscious until he said, I cannot take you back free.

'You've freed my brother."

"It's not the same."

"Then I'll stay in Paris," she replied, and for a long time they were this way, his head in her breasts and her wrists bound.

When she woke it was in a panic of her own. In this panic she realized for the first time she'd never see him again. If in the way A R C D'X • 38

he had debauched her she became isolated from everyone around her, then he was her only human connection, defiled though that connection was. At this moment she wanted him to drink her dry as before. She felt not only like a jilted lover but an abandoned daughter, and thus his sex became not only a master's rape but a father's incest; like the molested object of any such incest, she not only reviled but cherished it. There in the dark it was more than she could stand. It wasn't enough simply to remain in France, it wasn't enough to free herself by an act of no: only an act of yes would see her through the nightful panic. She tore her wrists apart, the frayed ribbon of his dead wife's bedroom curtains exploding in bits of blue. She seized the knife from behind the headrest of the bed and, raising it above her head, brought it down into him; she could hear the penetration.

She threw herself back from the knife and tumbled out of bed, sobbing. She picked herself up from the floor to see fly out of his body a hundred black moths which filled the room. She grabbed her dress and rushed into the hall naked; she was still pulling the dress onto her as she dashed from the Hotel Langeac out into the July night.

On the balcony above her, Thomas watched her go. He'd been standing there for some time, since rising from bed unable to sleep.

The loss of Sally was different from the loss of Maria or the loss of his wife; in them he'd lost a part of what he constantly revealed of himself to the world. In Sally he lost a part of what the world never knew, of what he had never known about himself, and now he believed he'd never know it. In the short run this was a relief. In the long run he knew that what he couldn't release between her legs would eat away his heart. He had no choice about America.

As a free black she could not sleep in his white American bed. It was the nature of American freedom that he was only free to take his pleasure in something he possessed, in the same way it would ultimately be the nature of America to define itself in terms of what was owned. So he had no choice about that. If he'd had one he would have freed her, so long as he could have her. Once, if he'd had the choice, he would have freed them all, before it became easier for him to believe it was too late for such a choice, that such a choice had already been made for him. Now he watched her run down the street and disappear into the dark. Not STEVE E R I C K S O N • 39