But when it came to the state legislature, a presence was expected. Candidates were to go to the town square to press flesh and charm country voters over barrels of whiskey. When Tom ought to have been putting on his finery and practicing speeches and witty barbs, he decided upon another course altogether.
“There’s a doctor in Charlottesville who will be administrating smallpox inoculations,” Tom said. “I’m taking the children to have it done.”
It always moved me that he was so intent on the welfare of our children, but smallpox also struck terror in my heart. “But they’re so young.”
“Best to do it while they’re young,” Tom said.
That had been my father’s thinking, too. Unfortunately, a mother’s heart is, of all things in nature, the least subject to reason. The idea of exposing my children to such a disorder made me perfectly miserable. Polly and I and our dearly departed little Lucy had made it through. Sally, too. But sometimes the treatment killed the patient, and knowing that made me clutch my babies tight against my skirts. “It takes some time—we can’t leave them without a nurse to tend them. I’ll have to go with you.”
“I need you here at Varina,” Tom insisted. “Someone’s got to look after the girls.”
His little sisters, he meant, including little Jenny, who was still with us now, as if she’d been our daughter to start with. His father hadn’t left him the estate, but Tom had still taken on the responsibility of the family.
“I can look after everything,” Polly broke in. “I’m eighteen now, Patsy. You can go watch over your children and I’ll play mistress of Varina for a time.”
Tom and I looked at my delicate little sister where she was indolently reclining upon a sofa in nothing but a slip of a gown, with all her chores undone. And the decision was made in one glance. Tom would take the children, and I’d stay behind.
On the appointed day that first week of April, my eyes filled with tears at the thought that when I said good-bye to my little angels, it might be for the last time. I consoled myself with the certain knowledge that Tom would be a tender and attentive nurse; he could be gruff with Jeff, but he was always sweetness itself with Ann. What I didn’t expect was that he would tarry there with the doctor, studying the science of the thing, sitting at the bedside of his children on election day itself.
Tom never showed up in the town square.
Never slapped any backs. Never cracked open a barrel of whiskey. Never gave a speech. Never thanked his supporters—not even the local militiamen who came out to rally in my father’s name. By the time I realized it—when a neighbor came riding up to the house in a cloud of dust to ask if something terrible had befallen my husband—Tom had already lost the election and looked like a sore, brooding loser to boot.
Not knowing what else to do, I hurriedly sat down at the table to scribble a letter to be read out to interested parties, explaining that my husband was tending to sick children. But it arrived too late to do any good, and the humiliating rumors spread like wild fire, such that they reached even my father in the capital, who was obliged to apologize on my husband’s behalf.
When I finally heard Tom’s wagon roll up that warm day, I grabbed up my skirts and raced out into the yard to scoop up my children, kissing them all over their faces in relief to see them alive. But Ann pressed shyly against my bodice, whispering, “My papa isn’t well.”
Tom was drunk. It was the middle of the day and he was drunk—so red-faced and staggering I wondered how he’d driven the horses. “Go,” he barked at the children. “Get on in the house.”
When they ran off, my husband put his finger in my face and drew near enough that I could smell whiskey on his breath. “You think you’re so much above me, don’t you, Patsy? All that convent learning . . .” Scarcely knowing what I’d done to anger him, I was struck by his sudden resemblance to his father. And while I stood there in bewilderment, winding my hands in my apron, he shouted, “Don’t you ever apologize for me.”
So he’d seen the letter I’d written to excuse his absence on election day. “I only thought—”
“Who are you to apologize for me? You’re Mrs. Thomas Mann Randolph. That’s who you are. You’re the wife of a man who has been erased by a younger brother, rejected by the voters of Virginia, and can do nothing whatsoever right. You’re that man’s wife and that’s all you are.”
With that he shoved past me, leaving me to stare off in the horizon, where I, too, fancied I could see the shadow of Colonel Randolph. But I decided then and there that old tyrant could only haunt my husband.
Not me.
I wasn’t just Mrs. Thomas Mann Randolph. I was first, foremost, and above all, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. So while Tom slept off his hangover, I packed up my sister and my children, and returned to Monticello.
Philadelphia, 8 June 1797