Jefferson by Max Byrd Read Free Book Online Page B

and rubbed his face with one hand, suddenly, obviously tired. “Politics in Europe is the systematic organization of hatreds. It should never come to that in America.”
    He stood up and seemed to sag for a moment.
    “You’ve tired yourself out,” Short said, rising quickly.
    “I’m fine, I’m well.” Jefferson turned and walked in his rather shambling, loose-limbed way to the door. He rested one hand on the handle. “I have an invitation for you from Patsy,” he said, “by the way.”
    “Ah.” Short clicked his heels. Patsy was Martha, Jefferson’s twelve-year-old daughter, fashionably immured in Panthemont, the Catholic convent school across the Seine, a tall, rangy, big-footed girl with sandy red hair—Jefferson’s daughter!—and Short made a game of treating her with mock-French gallantry.
    “She reports,” Jefferson said with something like renewed energy, “that the drawing master is less severe than the one in Virginia, she does
not
like reading Livy, and the other girls call her ‘Jeff.’ ”
    Short grinned, Jefferson smiled. Jefferson had once told him that domestic happiness was the highest good in life. Without a wife, he now lavished all his affection on the three girls; Lucy and Mary in Virginia, Patsy in Paris. Patsy most of all. To Short, given to erotic rather than domestic reverie, it was wonderful to see how the mention of any one of the girls could brighten Jefferson’s face.
    “Tomorrow morning,” Jefferson said, “we are to assemble early at Panthemont to witness a ceremony—two French girls take the veil: they call it ‘dying to life.’ ”
    Short’s grin faded. Jefferson appeared not to notice. Humming, he pulled at the brass handle of the door and opened it. At the endof the hallway his black servant James could be seen, backlit by the candles in their scalloped holders along the stairs. He carried a small flat tray with Jefferson’s glass and crystal water bottle.
    “I may send for Castile soap after all,” Jefferson said, a gravelly weariness coming back to his voice. In an uncharacteristic gesture—Short remembered it afterward as a premonition—he touched the younger man’s arm for an instant before turning away.

“ ‘ F rance alters everybody,’ ” Miss Adams said with Adams decision and an Adams lift of her chin. “That is Dr. Franklin’s favorite saying. But I think it has metamorphosed our family most in their
heads
.”
    Involuntarily Short glanced ahead to young eighteen-year-old John Quincy Adams, marching resolutely if unsteadily beside his mother Abigail, with his left foot on the street and his right foot on the curb. For the honor of the ceremony at Panthemont, Johnny’s dark brown hair had been “frizzled” (Abigail’s impatient term) into a state of unnatural, even luminous, curliness.
    “Not
hair
,” said Miss Adams, showing the unnerving family ability to read thoughts. “I meant our
thinking
. But it is certainly true that everyone’s hair is metamorphosed here.”
    “Not your mother’s.”
    “No.” Miss Adams shook her own very slightly frizzled head in agreement. Abigail Adams was notorious for insisting that she could not be seen in public without her head covered—she had mysteriously lost four of her five caps on the ocean voyage over and replaced them only with enormous difficulty in Paris. In the fashionable company proceeding now along the street, her tall white mobcap bounced up and down like a runaway cake.
    “Mama permitted Esther and John to go to the hairdresser last week—the other servants were ridiculing them for being un-powdered, but Esther wept because it took so long and her hair looked so strange afterward. Now,” Miss Adams added with her father’s tartness, “she seems happy as a lark.”
    Short touched the edges of his own immaculately curled and powdered hair and squinted to see where the party was turning. Rue de Grenelle was new territory for him, so narrow and clogged with carriages and