“What’s wrong with our hunting dog?” Hamilton asked.
“She’s your dog. Ana needs something pretty to cuddle. Perhaps a ginger tomcat,” I said, playfully ruffling his hair, which was much less ginger now. “Mine did wonders for me . . .”
He gaped, as if both simultaneously offended that I should liken him to a pet, and also marveling that I could jest about such a thing.
But we’d come far enough that I could.
“I worry more for Philip,” my husband said.
“Philip?” Our eldest was the only one of our children I didn’t worry about. He’d grown from a sunny child into a charming young man of nineteen who could talk his way out of nearly anything. Just like his father.
“If he wants a career in the law, he needs to more seriously apply himself to his studies,” Alexander grumbled, like a curmudgeon. “Without the distractions of the city.” Without the young ladies of the city, I thought, and nearly laughed. But my husband added, “I don’t entirely approve of his friends. I think they’re gamblers and hooligans and mischief makers.”
“At least they’re not Republicans,” I said.
That broke the clouds over my husband’s brow as he chuckled.
In the days and weeks that followed Jefferson’s inauguration, we settled into the farmhouse at the Grange. And Alexander did take more clients. Which meant traveling, during the week, at least three hours a day to his office in lower Manhattan. Then there were the trips to court in Poughkeepsie. And I was reminded of our early marriage, when he was so often gone with the city’s gaggle of young lawyers riding in stagecoaches with circuit judges.
While packing his satchel for a journey upstate, he said, “Don’t overtax yourself with the garden or with getting cedar shingles upon the ice house.” Grabbing up his hat, then remembering his coat, he added, “Leave to Philip what you cannot accomplish yourself.”
Poor Philip. More comfortable in velvet coat, tailored trousers, and starched shirt collar turned up fashionably around his cravat than he was in a hunter’s shirt and breeches, he preferred life in the city, studying his law books, and debating politics with his friends in the taverns. But Philip understood how important it was that we embrace our new situation with good cheer, so he didn’t balk at working on the farm with his younger brothers.
I wished I could’ve said the same for Ana, who complained that the farmhouse was too dark. Too crowded. And the night she heard the howl of a wolf, she whimpered with fright as if she were a much younger child. For a wolf to cause such fright! At her age, I was more terrified of Mohawk scalping parties. Her fears kept her inside, laboring beside me in the sooty old kitchen. At least until her father came into the kitchen, satchel in hand, making ready to kiss us good-bye.
“Why must you always go away?” she cried, storming out of the room and up the stairs. The slam of her door shook the whole house.
Kissing my cheek, Alexander sighed and spoke as if he’d read my mind. “Don’t worry. She’ll adapt to the circumstances.”
I wasn’t so certain, but just then, the welfare of another member of my family weighed on my mind. “Are you sure it isn’t too much trouble to visit Peggy?” Though my younger sister insisted she was just tired, she’d been feeling poorly for months, so Alexander made a point of frequently dropping in at her manor north of Albany while he attended to his cases at the court.
He shook his head. “Of course, not. It’s on the way. And I’ll take her the basket of crabs the boys hauled out of the river.”
I walked with my husband out onto the porch, where our eldest son had the little phaeton hitched to a horse. “Seeing you will cheer Peggy, I’m sure.”
“Perhaps, then, I’ll even roast the crabs for her. Though, as a Creole, I’ve some sympathy for them.” Alexander hefted the crustaceans onto the bench seat just as little William bolted out the door and leaped off the porch, shoeless and shirtless.
As my husband swung our four-year-old ruffian into his arms, I couldn’t help but muse that Alexander being able to refer to himself as a Creole—the word for the mixed-race people who sometimes subsisted upon shellfish on the islands where he’d been raised—was what had persuaded me that my husband had somehow, finally, made peace with his dubious origins. And with our whole life now. For Alexander would never before have made such a jest.
We’d both come quite a long way together indeed.
“Can I go with you, Papa?” William asked.