The President's Daughter (15 page)

“Har . . . Harry!” he said, laughing. “Come,” he continued as he seized me by the arm. “I've been reading some incredible articles on a new criminal science called digital fingerprinting. You take an imprint in ink of the fingertips of each hand of any person. Each individual can be identified precisely and scientifically in one hundred percent of cases, for no two people's fingerprints are the same . . . isn't that incredible? The lines of your fingertips have never been duplicated in another human being in a million years—not once, and they never will! They are more personal, more exact than . . . your intimate soul . . . and they are scientific.”

“You mean,” I said slowly, wrapped in my own dilemma, “that no one can ever really change the identity they were born with?”

“Identity is not a matter of change or chance. It is a fixed particularity given at birth to every human being. And it is inimitable. Let me show you.”

Thance led me toward a pile of books and papers on a desk illuminated even in broad daylight by a beaconlike gas lamp. Gently he took my index finger and brought it down upon an ink pad and then pressed it upon a piece of white paper. The minuscule swirls and lines of the tip of my finger were reproduced on the paper. I stared in astonishment. Then he did the same with the remaining fingers of my left hand.

“The ancient Chinese and Egyptians both knew about fingerprints as a means of identification, but they never connected it with differentiating each man from all the rest of the human species, never saw it extended far beyond anything human imagination had invented up until then. Now I have just received a copy of the thesis of the scientist Johannes Purkinje, a professor of physiology at Breslau University in Austria who has just published a fantastic paper on this incredible phenomenon of nature. He has demonstrated that fingerprints can establish the identity of a person at different stages of his life from babyhood to old age and for some time after his death.

“Look, Harriet. These are my fingerprints, and I asked my brother Thor to send me his. They are not identical even though we are twins! We can be different morally, intellectually, and biologically. By nature of our fingerprints, we are as distinct as if one of us was black and the other one white.”

“You mean you and your brother are identical in every way, except for your fingerprints?”

“Fingerprints have the unique merit of retaining all their particularities throughout life, and so afford a more infallible criterion of identity than any other bodily feature. My twin could try to impersonate me, and he could in many ways, but his fingerprints would betray him.

“These,” he said, holding up my hand, “are your fixed human personality, given to you at birth, an individuality that can be depended upon with
absolute
certainty. You can only be you! Lasting, unchangeable, always recognizable, and easily proven. This autograph cannot be counterfeited or disguised or hidden away; it never fades, becomes illegible, or changes shape or form by the passage of time—incredible.”

Thance pressed my hand against his cheek, perhaps in affection, perhaps forgetting the ink remaining on my fingers, resulting in my leaving five black marks on his cheek. I looked up in horror, and Thance, realizing what he had done but never dreaming of what he had really done, began to laugh. Then he raised my hand to my own face and left upon it the same black marks.

“There,” he said, “now we are truly and scientifically one—even after death—for we carry the same fingerprints.”

A chill ran up my spine as I turned and looked into the laboratory mirror. Could those marks prove I was a black fugitive slave instead of a free white
Virginian? Almost reading my thoughts, Thance went on, “Great expectations were raised and then dashed, namely that fingerprints could indicate race and temperament.”

“You mean Nature invented this inviolable differentiation, but not according to race?”

“Exactly.” Thance looked surprised.

“You can't tell if a man is black or white ... or Chinese?”

“No.”

“And yet it is the only true identity fixed by God?”

“Nature,” said Thance, confused yet moved.

“God has created us separate, with a separate, unique destiny, and then given us proof of it—given us proof of our own uniqueness of soul, our own God-given peculiarity, right here in our hands.”

“Why, Harriet, that's beautiful.”

“It's proof of God's infinite variety—of the infinite possibilities given to man for discovery . . . like music . . . like mathematics.”

I turned away as fear stole my breath and turned my forehead dewy.

And I had thought I could hide. . . .

Slowly I took out my handkerchief and methodically, without rushing, removed the black spots from Thance's face, then from my own, and lastly from my fingers. As I replaced my handkerchief, my hand touched my dagger. No man on earth would ever know I was the President's daughter.

“Marry me, Harriet.”

I looked full at him. He had not sensed my terrible panic.

“Thance, no.” I looked at my smudged fingerprints. They were proof— proof of my dishonesty and fraud. They couldn't prove I was black, but they proved I was a bastard for all times. ... an uncontrollable desire to scream or to laugh engulfed me.

“Please don't laugh at me.”

“It is I who doesn't want to be laughed at,” I whispered.

“Do you love me?”

Defiantly I lifted my mouth. Thance's lips were soft, deep, and delicate. He waited a few minutes, lost in the kiss. Then I felt a shade of sadness come over him.

“I shouldn't even be with you in public without a chaperon, let alone kissing you in the middle of the University of Pennsylvania,” he said. “My God! I've just kissed a man!”

We both began to laugh.

At the same moment, a grimace of mocking irony at my own charade tore at my mouth.

Which disguise, I wondered, was the funniest? White or male? I smiled enigmatically. Thance grinned happily, filling me with contagious delight because that was how a baby smiled.

“Thance, oh, Thance,” I laughed helplessly.

I pulled his head down and kissed him into bewilderment. Dressed like a man, free from encompassing corsets and heavy skirts, my body molded itself along the length of his, and I felt his own contours blend into mine. I was more like some powerful, fitful sigh than a woman, my muscles elastic, my body mindless, my spirit soulless, fitting into Thance in one perfect forceful line. How strange, I thought, this breathless awful freedom. Not far away somebody was singing in a voice that resembled his.

And so, being young and dipt in folly

I fell in love with melancholy.

My heart to joy at the same tone.

And all I loved—lov'd alone

“He is asking you! He's bought the ring! A magnificent ruby!”

I bit my lip. “Charlotte, it's not true.”

“Oh, but it is. There's nothing like Philadelphia Unitarians to keep a secret. Of course, you'll be the last to know. But if you don't choose me as your best maid, I'll kill you.”

“Charlotte!”

“My mother says that of course everything must be discussed, the marriage contract, the engagement. But the widow Wellington was most comprehensive and most generous. She realizes these are modern times and one can no longer choose one's children's spouses.”

“But she hardly knows me.”

“It seems you made a great impression on her, and she thinks you are a fine musician and very beautiful. But she's frankly weary of what she calls southern belles, spoiled, indolent, useless creatures that they are.” Charlotte giggled at this, and I let out a snort that rocked her back on her heels.

“A southern belle ...”

“A poor southern belle—it seems they are the worst . . .”

“Who has died,
I thought,
who has married, who has hanged himself because they cannot marry ...”

“Well, his mother is under the impression he did ask and that you have said yes—that day in the laboratory.”

“Charlotte, I said no.” I turned away from her to try to get my bearings.

“Well, if you did, nobody heard you. And you're not serious! You wouldn't turn down Thance. A boy like that—”

“Charlotte, I can't . . .”

“Oh, it's so exciting!” she rattled on. “The only missing element is what the mysterious, reclusive Thor will think.”

“I understand he is abroad.”

“In Africa. He joined an expedition to the Natal to gather medicinal plants. It seems there are more specimens in the Natal than anywhere else in the world. The Sutos and the Zulus are famous for their pharmacopoeia.”

“Africa . . .”

“He's been gone for almost three years.”

“Is he really Thance's double?”

“Oh yes, although he's older by twenty minutes.”

“What's he like? Thance never speaks of him.”

Charlotte lowered her voice.

“Thance blames himself, but it wasn't his fault.”

“What wasn't his fault?”

“The accident.”

“What accident?”

“We were adolescents of fourteen or fifteen. Thance and Thor had been playing in the barn of the family farm at Anamacora, and their play had turned a little rough. Half quarreling, Thance pushed Thor off the hayloft and he fell quite a distance. Under normal circumstances it would have been a harmless fall for a strong boy, but hidden under the hay was a pitchfork that had been forgotten or abandoned by someone. Thor fell on it—it punctured one of his testicles. It was a terrible wound. He almost bled to death. According to the doctors, it has rendered him sterile. Thance feels he castrated his twin and murdered his progeny. It has tormented him. The accident came not more than a year after their father had died of typhoid while treating American sailors in the naval squadron patrolling the Barbary Coast.”

I stared at Charlotte and thought how much the accident sounded like some sorrowful tale of slavery.

I asked Charlotte how she had found out such details, which should have been kept hidden from a young girl of her age and station.

“Thance talked to me as a sister when he was trying to come to grips with his own remorse.”

“And Thor?”

“We know Thor is a survivor. In many ways he prevailed. He finished school and signed on for his first scientific expedition. He's been gone more or less ever since. He recognized Thance as the head of the family. No one really knows what he's like. I do remember that the twins had telepathy between them. They could communicate with each other without uttering a word. I know Thor will like you, but never let him know that you know, or that I told you, about the accident. He hates to be pitied.”

So do I, I thought.

“Of course not. I thank you for telling me. It ... it explains many things about Thance,” I said, but what I thought was that Thor's wound was one of those unyielding, incomprehensible sorrows that only a slave woman had the power and the knowledge and the will to assuage—one of those slaverylike mutilations that never healed, never ceased, to throb unendingly in unfathomable grief.

I gazed at Charlotte with new respect.

“You're right,” I said, “about being sheltered and spoiled, of thinking the world owes you happiness.”

I took Charlotte's hand and drew it against my breast. I listened to my own heart and the stillness around us.

The parlor of the Wellingtons' house, which stood on the waterfront near Bainbridge Street, was ostentatiously simple. Every object in the large, airy rooms had its place and enough space to set it off. The Wellingtons were people of good circumstances. The druggist Wellington had left his widow a large, flourishing pharmacy and laboratory and several pharmaceutical patents and licenses. His twin sons had followed in their father's footsteps. He had two daughters—one married, one unmarried—and his youngest son had entered the medical profession. The widow Wellington resembled no one if not my father. It was as if I were staring at a female Thomas Jefferson. Her hair was dead-white flax, and she wore it crimped into a pompadour in front and swept back into a net behind. She had sea blue eyes like him, except they bordered on violet instead of aquamarine, and she had a low, melodious voice shorn of the familiar harshness I had come to recognize as upper-class Philadelphian. She sat in a large, cherry-colored, covered armchair, and the reflections from the harbor stroked her face with gold and green. She was not old, perhaps fifty-three or -four, but her body must have settled early into stoutness and middle age. She had rosy cheeks and was dressed all in black, with a cameo pinned at her throat. As I remembered her, she had none of the energy or vibrancy of my mother, or even my grandmother. Why I thought
of Elizabeth Hemings at that moment I will never know, but my grandmother's face came back to me and her voice resounded in the quiet room.

Get that freedom for your children.

Of course, I had not for one moment thought about my children—never considered their status in this deception. The one-sixteenth of black blood which constituted the one drop that condemned them to the condition of their mother.

“You are not a Catholic.”

It was not a question but a statement.

“No, Mrs. Wellington, I grew up without a formal religion.”

“I don't believe in mixed marriages.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“In marriages between Roman Catholics and Protestants or Jews. I thought because of your Creole blood you might be Catholic.”

“Thance told me that as a scientist, he was attached to no religion.”

“Exactly, Harriet. I may call you Harriet? His father believed the same. They are both deists.”

“So was mine. But I am not opposed to converting if this would make you happy. The Unitarian faith is, I feel, the religion of the future.”