My father and I seldom spoke in open disagreement, only circling about subjects of contention without touching them directly. Yet, this time, I felt as if he allowed me no avenue of retreat. And for once, I said just what I believed. “I’m old enough now to judge my own happiness.”
My father took a long drink before returning his glass to the table beside his stuffed chair. He squinted, lines of hurt etching his face. “How can you think to be happy separated by an ocean from your sister and me?”
I’d expected him to be angry; instead, he was wounded. Yet, I bristled, defensively. “I could ask the same of you. Don’t you intend to leave us in Virginia and return to France?”
His brows knitted together, as if he’d never considered I might object. “My commission won’t keep me in Paris forever. Five years I’ve served in France, while my own country formed a new government in my absence. I’ll stay only as long as duty requires. Very soon I’ll retire from public life to Monticello. I’ve always looked to you to render the evening of my life serene and contented, never realizing you loved me so little.”
Guilt formed a lump in my throat that nearly prevented me from speech. Then my words tumbled out all at once. “That isn’t true, Papa! Of course I love you. And it isn’t that I want to be without you—”
“Then why would you wish to take the veil?” Papa liked to have an iron discipline over himself. He never raised his voice, seldom let emotions rule. But now, to my horror, that self-control cracked and all traces of the seasoned diplomat, the dispassionate philosopher, the objective scientist fell away. Tears sprang to his eyes as he beseeched me. “Have I failed you so utterly as a father?”
My heart beat a fast and painful cadence. He had failed me. But that wasn’t the whole of the story, or even the largest part of it. And at the sight of his anguish, tears welled in my eyes, too. “My dearest Papa, please believe that I’d never leave you, or my country, except for God.”
But I did not tell him of my faith.
Instead, breathlessly, I told him of my bargain.
When I finished, he said, “Oh, Patsy. It’d be more pardonable to believe in no god at all than in one who bargains like a pirate for the life of a little girl. That god would be a demon. You mustn’t feel bound by such a promise. Not when it would make me so unbearably unhappy.” Leaning forward, he grasped my fingers, and it was his gnarled and injured hand that trembled, not mine. “Patsy, I rely on you for the evening of my life, because you know, as no one knows, that the morning of my life was clouded by loss after loss. I have nothing left but you.”
The beseeching tone of his words stole my response, but my thoughts raced.
What of Polly?
The question swam silently on the tip of my tongue as he sank to his knees before me, like a penitent, holding my face in his hands. Overwhelming me with his emotion. “My dear girl, nobody in this world can make me happy or miserable as you. You’ve been my constant companion in my darkest hours. I’d be lost without you. Lost.”
His supplication at my feet melted the edges of my anger and left only a desperate need to mend what I’d broken. “I’d never wish to grieve you so, Papa. I only wish to serve God’s demand.”
Then we were both sobbing, my father’s forehead pressed to mine, our tears mingling. “Patsy, a just God would never demand this of you. I know what it is to be truly bound by a vow, for I made one to your mother.”
He stopped to pull from his coat pocket the engraved gold watch key in which he’d preserved my mother’s hair beneath clear glass. “I swear again, here and now, that I’ll never take another wife. I’ll always be alone. So if I’m obliged to leave you here, shut up in a convent . . . it would be as much a grief to me as shoveling dirt over your grave. And I’d pray for someone to soon shovel dirt over mine.”
I was truly shaken. I’d not seen my father in such a state since the night he stared down his pistols. I remembered our solitary rides. Those days he lay prostrate after my mother’s death. Here in Paris, he stood so much taller, a giant amongst men.
I hadn’t realized—or perhaps I had forgotten—that he needed me, just as my mother said he would. And hadn’t I made a vow to her before I made one to God?
Papa’s misery put me in doubt of my decision. Had I been seduced? Seduced by my own sadness and heartbreak? Perhaps I did need more time to think. More time to decide.
My father had been, for so long, everything to me. My sun, my moon, my stars. No other being—not even William Short—had ever exerted such force in my universe as my father. So it’s true that Papa never forbade me from my vocation as a nun, but it is equally true that he didn’t think he needed to. Though I remained unsure, Papa clearly considered the matter decided, and the very next day he rode up to the convent gates in a carriage and told Polly and me to gather all our belongings. Then my father paid our tuition in full, closing our account. And we rode away from the Panthemont in silence.