~ ~ ~
Not hours before Martha dies, her voice hardly above a whisper, she draws Thomas Jefferson’s attention to a strange beetle with a tiger-striped cowl that is crawling across her bedclothes. “Look, Tom. I’ve lived all this time, and yet every day I see an insect unlike any I’ve ever seen before.” He tells her that as soon as he has a moment, he will find its name in a cyclopedia of insects that he has recently acquired. That moment never comes. Not long after Thomas Jefferson has taken the beetle between his thumb and forefinger and deposits it on the window ledge, Martha closes her eyes and her soap-white skin goes ash gray. Soon her breathing becomes irregular, with the gaps between breaths growing longer and longer, until finally, just before noon, she takes three enormous breaths, each followed by an impossibly long silence, the last of which never ends.
~ ~ ~
The flame stretches, and its tip flaps into a rippling wisp of smoke as an elderly white servant lowers a lamp chimney into place. The atmosphere inside the yellow room, already dense with the sausage-and-tobacco odor of ceaselessly yammering men, is cut by the thin acridity of whale oil. It is nearly eight on an evening in June 1775, and Thomas Jefferson is thirty-two. Although he washed his face on arrival in Philadelphia, his fingertips detect finely granulated road dust along his jaw in front of his ear. He has been standing against the back wall for nearly half an hour, clutching his right elbow with his left hand, and keeping his right hand aristocratically poised against his cheek in an attempt to look contemplative and at ease, but thus far he has spoken to no one. He is perhaps the youngest of the thirty or so men present and feels something of an interloper, given that he is at this meeting — the Second Continental Congress — only as a replacement for his cousin Peyton Randolph.
When Thomas Jefferson first arrived, a small man in spectacles with an almost feminine voice was saying that he would not be able to take a position on the resolution — a funding matter as far as Thomas Jefferson could tell — until he had consulted with the people back in Carlisle who had elected him.
“Good God, man!” shouted another delegate (from New York, Thomas Jefferson thought). “Don’t you have your own mind? Do you think the good people of Carlisle sent you here to be a stuffed pillow?”
The original speaker replied mildly, seeming nauseated with disdain, “I thought this body was meant to be a democratic assembly of representatives, not a parliament of petty monarchs.” With that, he left the lectern and took a seat at one of the tables, where a neighbor gave him a pat on the back. The New York delegate flung both hands in the air and said something that Thomas Jefferson couldn’t hear but that inspired a round of hoots and guffaws at his table.
After that, a bemused-looking man of about forty walked to within an arm’s length of the lectern and spoke in a voice that reminded Thomas Jefferson of the jingling of sleigh bells. “The committee will be making its report momentarily. Please don’t leave!” This announcement was met with groans, but the words were heeded. No one left. Servants were summoned. Bottles of cider and wine were brought to the tables. Pipes were lit. And very soon the urgent matters this meeting had been convened to discuss were entirely abandoned in favor of tales about the catastrophes and feats of athleticism known to have occurred in and around bordellos.
At present, the only people who truly seem to be considering matters of war and independence are seated at the table in the corner to which the bemused-looking man retired. Thomas Jefferson would like to eavesdrop on their conversation, but, having suffered his whole life from a morbid shyness in large groups, he doesn’t dare go anywhere near. At the mere thought, a trembling comes into his fingertips and he is taken by an irresistible restlessness.
He lowers his hand from his cheek, sticks his thumbs into the waist of his breeches and begins to pace along the wall, keeping his head lowered and his brow furrowed, in the hope that anyone observing him might think he is deep in cogitation. Each time he stops and reverses direction, he cannot help but glance toward the corner table, and on one such occasion notices the bemused man scrutinizing him. Feeling that he has been unmasked as a charlatan, a twist of dizziness comes into his skull and his whole body breaks into a hot sweat. He has to leave the room.
A door at the end of the hallway leads into the dark garden behind the State House. No sooner is he standing in the moist coolness of the deepening evening than his head begins to clear. Already he hates Philadelphia. He wonders if he shouldn’t just have Jupiter and Bob Hemings pack his carriage in the morning and take him back to Virginia.
The sky is a metallic navy blue directly overhead and lightening toward a deep teal in the west. Thomas Jefferson can make out the silhouette of the roofs of the buildings across the street and of the trees and bushes in this very yard — which is surrounded by a high brick wall, faintly visible in the gloaming. He hears the mumble-grunt of two men talking to his right and a splattering of urine on bare earth. He cannot make out a word either is saying, but he also feels the need to urinate, so he walks toward the opposite wall, where he waits, legs spread, his penis in the evening air, until the two men have gone back inside. Once his own urine begins to flow, the relief is so great that he groans aloud.
As he rebuttons his breeches, he contemplates walking right through the building and back out onto the street, where he might perhaps find a hospitable tavern. He is now distinctly hungry. But instead he returns to the yellow room.
He is not even through the door when the bemused man — no longer seeming remotely bemused — is eyeing him again. As Thomas Jefferson makes his way back to the spot against the wall that he occupied for most of his time in the room, he wishes he knew someone well enough to ask for a glass of wine.
He reinserts his thumbs beneath the waist of his breeches and prepares to resume his contemplative pacing. But now the man who has been watching him has gotten to his feet. As the man starts across the room, the bemused expression comes back onto his face. Thomas Jefferson looks away, his entire body simultaneously heating and chilling with sweat. The man is smiling as he walks, though perhaps there is a faint perturbation on his brow. Attempting a smile of his own, Thomas Jefferson wipes his palms against his waistcoat and takes a step in the direction of the advancing man.
“Pardon me,” says the man. “You wouldn’t by any chance be Peyton Randolph’s nephew?”
“Cousin,” says Thomas Jefferson, having to force himself to speak above a whisper.
The man wrinkles his brow and leans his head closer. “Pardon?”
“Randolph’s cousin,” Thomas Jefferson says more loudly. “I’m his cousin.”
“Ah!” says the man. “But you’re Jefferson, are you not?”
Thomas Jefferson nods. “Yes.”
The man’s eyes squeeze into arcs of delight, and his small mouth forms a distinctly U-shaped smile between his heavy cheeks. “Welcome! Welcome! I am so happy to meet you!” He shakes Thomas Jefferson’s hand vigorously with both of his. “I’m Adams. John Adams.”