Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

All at once that inert expression comes onto her face again: her eyes looking straight ahead, focused in empty air, her lips closed, lightly but with a subtle tension. He is not sure she has even heard him.

“Does that surprise you?” he says.

There is a long silence.

“No.” Her voice is soft. She looks into his eyes, then away.

“How does it make you feel?”

“I don’t know.” She glances at him again.

“You can tell me the truth. I won’t be offended. I only want to know how you feel.”

Another silence. Then she sighs and says, “I don’t know how I feel.”

Her gaze moves toward his but then drops to the floor. She has pushed her back against the wall. He has made her afraid.

“I’m sorry, Sally. I’ve been thoughtless and a fool. Why don’t you just go now, and we can pretend that none of this happened.”

Her eyes remain on the floor. She doesn’t move or speak.

“What are you thinking?” he says.

Once again there is a long silence. Then she sighs and speaks in a voice so soft he almost can’t hear. “I still don’t know.”

He laughs and takes a step back. He wants to put her at ease. He thinks that whatever chance he might have had has passed, and, in fact, he is feeling relieved. Maybe now that he has made his feelings clear, he can finally get past them and there will be nothing more to worry about.

“You are a funny girl,” he says.

She is looking at him. “What do you mean?”

He doesn’t know why he said that, but he answers, “I just mean that you always know exactly what you want to say, so I am surprised that now you don’t.”

She smiles. “Some things are just harder to figure out.” She shrugs and smiles weakly. She is still looking into his eyes.

All at once Thomas Jefferson realizes that he has not gotten past his feelings, that he never will. Looking into her smiling face, he wants nothing but to pull her into his arms and hold her against the length of his body.

He doesn’t know what he is going to do. He doesn’t know how he will ever be able to live with her, feeling as he does.

Her smile is gone, but she is still looking into his eyes. Can she possibly understand what is happening inside him?

She doesn’t move. Neither does he.

Once again he tells her, “You should probably go.” And then he says, “But I am wondering if you might do me a favor.”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t look away. She is waiting.

His mouth has gone completely dry again. There is an airy tremble in his voice. “One way we can both find out how you feel is if… you let me kiss you.”

She lowers her eyes to the floor again and presses her head back against the wall, which has the effect of lifting her lips just slightly toward his.

“Just once,” he says. “I promise.”

Her eyes are closed now, and she doesn’t move or speak.

Her breath smells faintly of garlic and peas. Her lips are soft and warm, but he cannot tell whether she has returned his kiss — and when he finally pulls his head away, he is so overcome with desire he can hardly keep on his feet.

Her eyes are open again, startled-looking. She is still holding her candle, and some of the wax has spilled onto her hand and the floor.

“You’d better go now,” he says. “I think it best.”

He turns his back and doesn’t see her as she opens the door and slips from the room.

The eyeball is as dispassionate as the camera. Spectroscopically speaking, the colors that strike the retina are true. The pale green between the orange and the purple is pale green. It is only in the mind that the pale green becomes gray. Artists depend upon the lies the brain tells the mind to create that muted luminosity of fog out of purple and orange and black and yellow and white, or to turn that cool red, that winter zenith blue, that brown (or is it gold) into the piercing sorrow of joy displaced by loneliness. The eye, like the camera, contains everything within its field of focus, albeit inverted in each of its two dimensions. The magician tucking a card into his cuff is plainly obvious in the eye, though in the mind there is only the card’s disappearance from the magician’s hand. In the eye the bush on the edge of the campfire glow is clearly just a bush, while in the mind it is making a journey from smoke puff to hovering dove to red dwarf to bush. All too often, however, the mind fixes on the dove or the red dwarf, and that is how the bush will remain in memory for minutes, months or years until the brain goes cold and dark.

Thomas Jefferson does not see Sally Hemings until sometime after eleven the following morning when she passes in front of his study window, walking from the root cellar to the kitchen and holding a basket of parsnips and beets against her hip. It would be natural for her to glance through the window and for their eyes to meet, but she does not do that. She seems lost in thought as she walks, her eyes looking inward more than out, her pink lower lip pushed forward, as if she is about to make a statement after long deliberation. She is gone in an instant, but he continues to see her contemplative expression in his imagination: those eyes fixed on something not in this world, the urgency of her lower lip, the perfect smoothness of her cheek, undulating from temple to jaw.

A goddess in her youth , he thinks.

He can hear the tones and rhythms of her voice as she talks to Jimmy in the kitchen and then a series of pauses and mono- and bisyllabic utterances that indicate the conversation is about to end. He gets up from his desk and waits by his door, hoping to catch her eye as she steps into the corridor on her way to the servants’ staircase.

He feels an uneasy sinking in the pit of his stomach, and his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. It is utterly ridiculous that a man of his age and position should be waiting in such agitation for a mere girl, but he can’t help himself.

It seems to him that he has waited too long, that she must have gone back into the garden or out onto rue Neuve-de-Berri, but then there she is: a mere three yards down the corridor, eyes alert, looking straight at him, faint uncertainty on her brow.

“Sally,” he calls, hoping to sound surprised to see her there. And then, more softly, “Do you have a moment? I’d like a word.” As soon as she steps in his direction, the uncertainty on her brow intensifying, he backs into his study and waits in front of his desk, feeling dizzy and short of breath.

She enters the room tentatively, as if she expects to be punished. “Yes, Mr. Jefferson?”

Thomas Jefferson smiles broadly, hoping to put her at ease. “You’re looking very well this morning,” he says. “I hope you had a good night’s sleep.”

She smiles, perhaps at the patent absurdity of these remarks, shrugs and then says, almost as an afterthought, “It was all right.”

He laughs, as if she has made a joke. “Well,” he says, and then his expression grows serious and he speaks very softly so that he should not be heard by anyone who might be in the corridor. “Actually, I called you in here because I wanted to be sure I didn’t offend you last night. I felt afterward that I had been inexcusably forward.”

She doesn’t speak, only looks at him with pursed brows and a partially open mouth, seeming abjectly vulnerable.

“You are so very lovely,” he says in a low and emphatic voice.

When she blushes and smiles, he smiles, too.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She shrugs. Her smile fades.

He reaches out and takes hold of her hand by only her index and middle fingers. “Sally,” he says, barely above a whisper.

He draws her into his arms, and when she presses her face against his chest, he kisses the top of her head. He holds her in his arms for a long time, feeling that what he has just done is wrong. And when she pulls back her head, he is ready to let her go, but she doesn’t move away. She waits with her eyes closed, her lips uplifted. And when he kisses her this time, he knows his kiss is returned.