The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (46 page)

I tried to imagine him thirty years ago, with glossy dark hair, an unlined face, a steady hand—the Vice-President on an errand of honour. But I could not associate this tiny old man with that figure of legend.

“Love-letters to me were all discreetly filed, with instructions to be burned, to be returned to owners, to be read at my grave—whatever was fitting. My principal emotion that morning was relief. Everything was arranged. Everything was well-finished.”

“Did you think you might be killed?”

The Colonel shook his head. “When I woke up on the sofa, saw dawn, I knew that I would live to see the sun set, that Hamilton would not.” A sudden frown as he turned out of the bright sun; the face went into shadow. “You see, Hamilton
deserved
to die and at my hands.”

I then asked the question I have wanted to ask since yesterday but Burr only shook his head. “I have no intention of repeating, ever, what it was that Hamilton said of me.”

In silence, we watched the steamboat from Albany make its way down the centre channel of the river. On the decks women in bright summer finery twirl parasols; over the water their voices echo the gulls that follow in the ship’s wake, waiting for food.

Apparently the Weehawk Heights “look just the same now as they did then.” The Colonel skipped easily onto the rocky shore. While I helped our sailor drag his boat onto the beach, the Colonel walked briskly up a narrow footpath to a wooded ledge.

“Ideal for its purpose,” Burr said when I joined him.

The ledge is about six feet wide and perhaps thirty or forty feet long with a steep cliff above and below it. At either end a green tangle of brush partly screens the view of the river.

The Colonel indicates the spires of New York City visible through the green foliage. “That is the last sight many a gentleman saw.”

I notice that he is whispering; he notices, too, and laughs. “From habit. When duellists came here they were always very quiet for fear they’d wake an old man who lived in a hut near by. He was called the Captain and he hated duelling. If he heard you, he would rush onto the scene and thrust himself between the duellists and refuse to budge. Often to everyone’s great relief.”

Burr crosses to the marble obelisk at the centre of the ledge. “I have not seen this before.” The monument is dedicated to the memory of Alexander Hamilton. Parts have been chipped away while the rest is scribbled over with lovers’ names. The Colonel makes no comment.

Then he crosses slowly to a large cedar tree, pushing aside weeds, kicking pebbles from his path. At the base of the tree he stops and takes off his black jacket. He stares down at the river. I grow uneasy; cannot think why. I tell myself that there are no ghosts.

When Burr finally speaks his voice is matter-of-fact. “Just before seven o’clock Hamilton and his second Pendleton and the good Dr. Hosack—Hamilton was always fearful for his health—arrive. Just down there.” Burr points. I look, half-expecting to see the dead disembark. But there is only river below us.

“Pendleton carries an umbrella. So does Van Ness. Which looks most peculiar on a summer morning but the umbrellas are to disguise our features. We are now about to break the law.”

Burr leaves his post at the cedar tree, walks to the end of the ledge. “Now General Hamilton arrives, with his second.”

For an instant I almost see
the rust-coloured hair of Hamilton, shining in summer sun. I have the sense of being trapped in someone else’s dream, caught in a constant circular unceasing present. It is a horrible sensation.

Burr bows. “Good morning, General. Mr. Pendleton, good morning.” Burr turns and walks toward me. “Billy.” I swear he now thinks me Van Ness. “You and Pendleton draw lots to see who has choice of position, and who will give the word to fire.”

With blind eyes, the Colonel indicates for me to cross to the upper end of the ledge.

“Your principal has won both choices, Mr. Pendleton.” A pause. “He wants to stand
there
?”
A slight note of surprise in Burr’s voice.

I realize suddenly that I am now standing where Hamilton stood. The sun is in my eyes; through green leaves water reflects brightness.

Burr has now taken up his position ten full paces opposite me. I think I am going to faint. Burr has the best position, facing the heights. I know that I am going to die. I want to scream, but dare not.

“I am ready.” The Colonel seems to hold in his hand a heavy pistol. “What?” He looks at me, lowers the pistol. “You require your glasses? Of course, General. I shall wait.”

“Is General Hamilton satisfied?” Burr then asks. “Good, I am ready, too.”

I stand transfixed with terror as Burr takes aim, and shouts “Present!”

And I am killed
.

Burr starts toward me, arms out-stretched. I feel my legs give way; feel the sting, the burning of the bullet in my belly; feel myself begin to die. Just in time Burr stops. He becomes his usual self, and so do I.

“Hamilton fired first. I fired an instant later. Hamilton’s bullet broke a branch from this tree.” Burr indicated the tall cedar. “My bullet pierced his liver and spine. He drew himself up on his toes. Like this.” Burr rose like a dancer. “Then fell to a half-sitting position. Pendleton propped him up. ‘I am a dead man,’ Hamilton said. I started toward him but Van Ness stopped me. Dr. Hosack was coming. So we left.

“But ... but I would’ve stayed and gone to you had it not been for what I saw in your face.” Again the blind look in Burr’s eyes. Again he sees me as Hamilton. And again I start to die, the bullet burns.

“I saw terror in your face, terror at the evil you had done me. And that is why I could not come to you or give you any comfort. Why I could do nothing but what I did. Aim to kill, and kill.”

He sat down at the edge of the monument. Rubbed his eyes. The vision—or whatever this lunacy was—passed. In a quiet voice, he continued, “As usual with me, the world saw fit to believe a different story. The night before our meeting Hamilton wrote a letter to posterity; it was on the order of a penitent monk’s last confession. He would reserve his first fire, he declared, and perhaps his second because,
morally
,
he disapproved of duelling. Then of course he fired first. As for his disapproval of duelling, he had issued at least three challenges that I know of. But Hamilton realized better than anyone that the world—our American world at least—loves a canting hypocrite.”

Burr got to his feet. Started toward the path. I followed dumbly.

“Hamilton lived for a day and a half. He was in character to the very last. He told Bishop Moore that he felt no ill-will toward me. That he had met me with a fixed resolution to do me no harm. What a contemptible thing to say!”

Burr started down the path. I staggered after him. At the river’s edge he paused and looked across the slow water toward the flowery rise of Staten Island. “I had forgot how lovely this place was, if I had ever noticed.”

We got into the boat. “You know, I made Hamilton a giant by killing him. If he had lived, he would have continued his decline. He would have been quite forgotten by now. Like me.” This was said without emotion. “While that might have been
my
monument up there, all scribbled over.”

I TOOK SAM SWARTWOUT at his word and went to him for help. He received me at the Tontine Coffee House where he holds court every afternoon. With him was Mordecai Noah, recently his aide at the Port of New York.

Noah recalled me pleasantly. Spoke at length of the Indians who are, he maintains, a lost tribe of Israel.

“Why else would I—of all people—have joined Tammany?” On this fantastical note, he departed.

“Well, how do you like poking about in our old cupboards?” Swartwout drinks Spanish wine by the hour; and is not always coherent. Worse luck for me.

“He’s a great man, the Colonel is. And his life has been the greatest waste. You ought to hear General Jackson on the subject. ‘By the Eternal, the ablest man in all our political life!’ ”

“Then why doesn’t the President pay the Colonel the money owed him from the Revolution?”

“He don’t dare. Don’t dare do anything for the Colonel. Told him so quite frankly when he came through town last year.”

“They met?”
The Colonel has never so much as hinted at a meeting with the President.

“I was in the room.” Swartwout winked. Called for more wine. “You see, Old Hickory—like me—is by way of being a protégé of the Colonel.”

“Out west?”

“Out west. And before. Ever since Tennessee came into the union, thanks to the Colonel who was in the Senate then. Old Hickory was the first congressman from the state and the first call he made when he got to Philadelphia was on Senator Burr.”

Is this true? I don’t know. I am simply taking it all down.

I asked what the Colonel’s intentions were in Mexico but all that Swartwout would say was, “They arrested me. Did you know that? I was dragged around in chains for months. Massa Tom wanted to prove us all traitors. But if there was any traitor it was him not us.” Swartwout’s reminiscences then became somewhat disconnected. Finally, I asked him if we might meet some
morning
,
and he said that he would be delighted. “Anything to be useful—to the Colonel, that is.”

Before I left, I asked, “What was it that General Hamilton said of Colonel Burr that was so ‘despicable’? That made him fight the duel?”

Swartwout gave me a long look from bloodshot eyes. “Don’t you know?”

“No. And the Colonel won’t tell me.”

“I suppose he would not. An ugly story, and it was typical of Hamilton to spread it about.”

“What did Hamilton say of the Colonel?”

“Why, he said that Aaron Burr was the lover of his own daughter, Theodosia.”

Not until I was half-way home did I begin to wonder whether or not what Hamilton had said might, after all, be true.

“He loved no one else!”
Madame’s voice was shrill in my memory.

YESTERDAY AFTERNOON MR. CRAFT and I were sent for by Mrs. McManus, “as I am most worried,” she wrote. “The Colonel has had the stroke, and cannot move.”

We took the ferry across to Jersey City. The day was cloudy, windy, prematurely equinoctial.

“He has a strong frame,” observed Mr. Craft.

“But he is seventy-eight,” I said.

I stared at the gulls. Mr. Craft stared at a group of Irish workmen. Though it was not eight o’clock in the morning, they were passing round bottles of whiskey. I wish I could regard them with the same long view the Colonel does. One day we were standing outside the court-house with a group of lawyers who were arguing a constitutional point. Finally, a lawyer appealed to Colonel Burr who was watching with his usual delight a near-by building site swarming with Irish workmen. The Colonel gave his opinion.

The lawyer disagreed. “Your view, Sir, is not that of the current expounders of our constitution ...”

“My dear Sir,” and the Colonel pointed at the Irish, “
they
are the current expounders of our constitution.”

One of
them
,
Jane McManus, opened the door of a small frame-house not far from the Jersey City landing. She was plump with a good-humoured face soiled by recent weeping.

“Oh, gentlemen, I thought he was good as dead, I did, when I came in with some tea for him and he was lying on the floor with his eyes wide open and not breathing. Well, then I called for our doctor, and he wasn’t to be found. Are they ever? Then at sundown the Colonel opens his eyes—he’s on the sofa now where the new maid and I put him—and he opens his eyes suddenly and he says, ‘Am I dead?’ and I says, ‘No, Colonel, you are alive and with me here in Jersey,’ and he says, ‘my native shore’ or something like that, always that little smile of his and then he tells me he can’t move ... can’t
move
!”

She wept for a time and Mr. Craft looked at her sternly until she stopped. I looked at an engraving of—yes, George Washington and his mother! Could the Colonel have bought it to remind himself of the conversation with Hamilton? Or does he perhaps spin his web of memory from the sights about him?

Done with her sobbing, Jane McManus showed us into the parlour where the Colonel reclined on a horsehair sofa, a blanket drawn up to his chin. He seemed cold despite the heat of a Franklin stove. On the table beside him was a stuffed bird beneath a dirty glass bell (a mocking-bird?). I grow suspicious.

“Gentlemen.” The voice was weak. “It seems that I am paralyzed below the waist.”

“But in good health, Colonel!” boomed Mr. Craft.

Burr winced—with pain? or simply at the idiocy of Mr. Craft. “Yes, Mr. Craft, I am in tip-top shape, saving the fact that I cannot walk.”

“But, Colonel, you will, you will! Remember last time?”

“It’s different this time,” said Miss McManus. “The doctor said he’s had a proper stroke. And he’s not our usual doctor but one from across town who I found at the chemist’s by chance.”

“Most lucky,” murmured the Colonel. “A natural healer who told me that at my age and with my medical history I should have been translated to a higher sphere at the first sign of headache.”

“What was it like?” I fear that this was my first response. At least it amused him.

“Ever the alert biographer! Well, Charlie, it was like nothing at all. I was reading. I had a mild headache. Nothing unusual. Then I suddenly felt dizzy. Got to my feet—apparently for the last time ...”

“Colonel, don’t say that!” cried Jane McManus.

“Then I found myself falling comfortably through the air. Such a pleasant sensation, I thought to myself, as slowly the carpet rose to gather me to its cheerful Persian bosom. I go out just like a light, I thought. And so went out. Now I’ve been turned on again, at half-flame.”

“What shall we do?” Miss McManus appealed to us as if the Colonel was not there.

“I shall tell Mrs. Burr ...” Mr. Craft began.

“You will do no such thing!” The old voice was firm. “What you
will
do is find me lodging in New York. Near the office. I intend to go on as before.”

“Yes, Colonel. And we have a lot of work to do.” That was my tonic for him; it had a good effect.