“‘. . During the contest of opinion through which we have passed,’” says Thomas Jefferson, but his voice has grown so soft now that she wouldn’t know what he was saying had she not read his speech herself.
~ ~ ~
Thomas Jefferson cannot speak. He is in a gigantic room within the half-built Capitol Building, where barn swallows dart to and from their muddy nests on cornices and gables, copper sunbeams angle through the interstices of labyrinthine wooden scaffolds and pigeons turn in circles on dusty floorboards making their fretful whurrs. Thomas Jefferson is the newly elected president. His mouth is moving, but he cannot speak. His eyes pass from word to word—“‘the task is above my talents’”—and those same words vibrate in his throat and between his palate and tongue, but they become nothing in the open air. He knows this from the sympathetic entreaty in James Madison’s eyes, Alexander Hamilton’s happy sneer and John Marshall’s buckled brow and open mouth. He knows this from the coughs that echo in a room where his words do not, and from the rainlike rustle of scores of shifting feet, and from the creaking of at least as many chairs. “‘A rising nation spread over a wide and fruitful land…’” The words echo within Thomas Jefferson’s whirling skull, but they cannot pass his lips. His sweating fingers slick the wooden podium and warp the paper when he turns a page. He tries to raise his voice, but his throat only constricts. His voice is a duck’s voice, and he can hardly breathe. He knows that the most important words are coming soon: We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. He knows that for the first time in history, the rule of a nation has passed from enemy to enemy without bloodshed and that this is a cause both for celebration and for grave concern, because there is no guarantee that the peace will prevail. And he knows that his primary challenge will be to act according to his own principles without offending too many of those who find his principles abhorrent. The most important words are coming closer and closer. They loom and they loom. Now, here they are: “‘We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.’” But the words do not pass his lips. He knows because the rainlike rumble has grown thunderous, and the coughs are hard to distinguish from guffaws. “‘Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?’” With every word the veracity of his opening remarks — which he had thought merely ceremonial humility — only becomes more clear: Yes, it is true; his talents really are entirely inadequate to the task with which he has been charged. “‘Equal and exact justice to all men,’” he reads, and “‘freedom of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus…’” These are all mere murmurs in a room resounding with disappointment and happy mockery. He is not even halfway through his address, and he doesn’t know how he will ever make it to the end.
~ ~ ~
Only days into his presidency, Thomas Jefferson decreed that henceforth he would deliver all official addresses, including the State of the Union, only in writing, a practice that was honored by all succeeding presidents, up until Woodrow Wilson, who reestablished the tradition of orally presenting the State of the Union address in 1913. Over the remainder of his life, Thomas Jefferson would deliver only one more formal address, at his second inauguration, but this address, like its predecessor, was barely audible.
~ ~ ~
The festive strains of a handful of violins commence as a glowering, white-wigged, bulldog-mouthed man — Chief Justice John Marshall, it would seem — administers the oath of office to the young actor, whose copper-colored wig now has patches of gray at the temples. But almost instantly, the young actor’s stoic, handsome face fades into a field of yellow, which turns out to be the wall of a brilliantly lit room drifting from right to left like the hull of a ship leaving a dock. A cluster of musicians looms into view, all of them wearing trim blue frock coats and white wigs, and tilting prissy, V-shaped smiles at one another over the strings of their instruments, and then just as suddenly the musicians shrink and fall away, until it becomes clear that they occupy only one corner of an enormous room aglitter with silver, crystal, hundreds of candle flames and the jewelry of women, whose wedding-cake gowns billow and sway around their invisible legs, as they themselves are swirled around the room by yet other trim, bewigged men in blue-and-gray frock coats.
Now it is the actor in the copper-colored wig who looms into view, and he is clearly the tallest and most handsome man in the room and the only one not wearing a white wig. For a moment his face is so large and the room behind him is hurtling so dizzyingly from left to right that Thomas Jefferson feels as if he is an infant being carried in the man’s arms. But then the man’s head swings around, and he is revealed to be dancing with a very young woman, who is also very beautiful in a faintly comical way involving a towering hairstyle and a large black beauty dot stuck to her skin a little below and to the right of her perfect mouth. The beautiful woman’s eyes gleam as she whirls in the light of ever-multiplying candelabras, and her lips are pressed together in a smile unlike any that Thomas Jefferson has ever witnessed, but one that would seem to indicate her smug certainty that she will bed the widower president once the music has ended, the guests have departed and the last of the candles has been snuffed by a less-than-approving servant.
Just as Thomas Jefferson is becoming alarmed at what might happen next, the woman’s towering coiffure looms so large that it makes the whole theater go black, while the notes of a single violin rise above the rest. When, at last, the head whirls away, it turns out to be not that of the woman but of the actor in the copper-colored wig, who is coatless, in an open-necked white shirt, playing a violin — although the balletic movements of his bow are entirely unrelated to the notes resounding in the darkness.
As he shrinks and the room around him grows larger, it becomes clear that he is not dancing with his violin but is seated on a stool at an ordinary wooden table in a mud-chinked log cabin, lit by a solitary candle. Swatches of calico are nailed over the window, and a battered, long-handled frying pan hangs from a rafter.
Finally the room has loomed so large that Thomas Jefferson is able to see that the beautiful young woman with the honey-brown skin is also sitting at the table, smiling guardedly as she watches the actor in the copper-colored wig play the melody he has only just been dancing to. She has no beauty spot. Her loose hair makes a gold-tinged cloud around her face, which is a celebration of convexities and dimples. If the beauty of the woman dancing at the inaugural ball might be characterized by the odor of a very fine French perfume, this young woman’s beauty is like the smell of a forest when rain has just begun to fall.
“There you have it, Sal,” the actor in the copper-colored wig says as he lowers violin and bow to his lap. “You didn’t miss a thing.”