“I’ll take them with me into the city during the week,” Alexander said. “I’ll stay with them while you and Ana and the littlest ones remain here so that none of them will ever be without one parent or another.”
It would be a terrible sacrifice to be apart from my husband half the week. But I, too, feared for any of them to be alone.
Alexander was with the children every day, sometimes even leading them in prayer. He’d never expressed any liturgical curiosity, but now he sought out the friendship of Reverend Mason, the Federalist pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church near our rented house on Cedar Street. And my husband prayed, before sleep and upon rising, scribbling notes into the margins of the Bible. So I was not surprised to hear him say, “Someday, I will build a chapel for the children. Right here, in our very own grove.”
For him to come more fully to God had always been my hope. But there seemed to me something sinister in it now, as if, despairing of this world, he pined for another. And I remembered another time when my husband had cared for me while hiding that he himself was falling to pieces.
What I wanted now was for us to take care of one another.
I didn’t feel as if I could ever be compensated for the loss of my son, but with another babe at the breast, I felt powerfully reminded of the sacred obligations Alexander and I had undertaken in starting a family. Our children deserved from us a celebration of life. And so I said simply, “You must forgive yourself.”
My husband took a breath, as if my words had cut him, then glanced off at some fixed spot on the horizon. “Philip needed me. And yet, I failed him as surely as my own father failed me.”
“No. You were his hero.”
“A hero?” Alexander laughed bitterly, pressing his back against the trunk of a tree, lost in a hell of self-recrimination. “I once fancied myself powerful. What has become of my arrogance now? How humble, how helpless, how contemptible I am. A vile worm. A presumptuous fool to offend God, whose nod alone was sufficient to crush us into pieces.”
So he believed Philip’s death to be some manner of divine punishment. “No man or woman is righteous, Alexander. Not even one. A merciful God forgives. He doesn’t visit the sins of the father upon the son.”
Alexander straightened up from the tree and walked for the fence, as if he meant to escape me, his torment, or both. “Our boy died defending my name.”
Yes, he did. And I knew that at Philip’s age, if I could have, I’d have done the same. I’d have dueled for my father’s honor, too. Semper Fidelis. It was in our Schuyler blood. And it was the first, most important lesson I ever taught him. “You gave him a name worth defending. A name in which to take pride and solace and the shape of his character,” I said, reaching for my husband. “You gave him that. You gave him what you never had. And you gave me your name, too. If Philip died for a name, it was for our name—”
“Eliza,” Alexander interrupted, as if to fend me off, one hand to his eyes to shield me from seeing the tears gathering there.
But I would not be fended off. “You were alone as a child, but Philip never was. Not a moment of his entire life did he feel abandoned or unloved. That’s why he loved to laugh—”
“He died because of me.”
“He died because a Jacobin murdered him,” I replied, with complete conviction. My son hadn’t been the only one to quarrel with George Eacker, after all. One of Philip’s friends had also been caught up in the same incident. Captain Eacker let that other boy—the son of nobody in particular—go unharmed.
But he shot the son of Alexander Hamilton. He shot Philip dead.
He would never face justice for it. In Jefferson’s America, he’d be applauded. We had long feared the blade of a guillotine, but a bullet had done the job just as well.
“I need you,” I said, and Alexander came at once to my embrace.
“Then you shall have me. Wife, children, and hobby are the only things upon which I permit my thoughts to run. Because I need you as well, my dear Eliza. More than you shall ever understand.”
We stood there, holding one another in love and mutual comfort until our hearts beat in time. And I wish I could say that was the end of it. That, with those words, with that embrace, with that understanding, we healed each other’s wounds.
But any parent who has lost a child will tell you that grief is a monster less vanquished than held at bay. That, like love, survival is a choice to be made anew every morning, and sometimes one must pretend at being healed just to get through the day.