At this, Lafayette roared with sudden laughter. “Perfect knowledge! Mon Dieu, my wife kept secrets to the very end. Do not ask me to reveal them, but they confound me to this day. Just like a woman.”
I blinked, thinking that it wasn’t only women who could keep confounding secrets. And it occurred to me like a bolt from the blue that I was sitting next to the only man alive who might know the answers to any of the questions that burned through the fabric of my very soul.
Lafayette would understand.
That’s what Alexander had said to me upon the death of John Laurens. The only words he would say, in fact. The thought that the general might’ve been aware of the true nature of my husband’s relationship with Laurens made heat sear its way from the tips of my ears to my toes, leaving me in unbearable mortification.
“Are you unwell, madame?”
For a moment, I couldn’t answer, for fear of what I might say. What I might ask. What accusations I might make. None of it matters, I told myself. There was no longer any possible reason to care. The opposite of love, I thought, was not hatred, but indifference, and for my own survival, I’d made my heart indifferent to Alexander Hamilton.
There was nothing but humiliation to be gained by asking questions.
Nothing to be gained by caring at all.
“It’s only the heat,” I said by way of excuse, schooling my features into politeness as the soaring steeple of Trinity Church came into view.
*
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
THE PATRIOT OF INCORRUPTIBLE INTEGRITY.
THE SOLDIER OF APPROVED VALOUR.
THE STATESMAN OF CONSUMMATE WISDOM.
WHOSE TALENTS AND VIRTUES WILL BE ADMIRED BY GRATEFUL POSTERITY LONG AFTER THIS MARBLE WILL HAVE MOLDERED INTO DUST.
The last line inscribed on the headstone had been comforting when we buried Alexander here, but I no longer believed it.
Lafayette, however, was deeply affected.
With a quivering lower lip, the old general gently rested his gnarled hand atop the white stone and spoke to my dead husband. “At last, here I am. It is Lafayette, your old and constant friend. It is my hope that wherever you are now, you will remind me to our brother soldiers who have not forgotten their long absent comrade—and to my ancient friends all gathered about you . . .”
As it happened, it didn’t matter how firmly I had resolved to feel nothing. It simply wasn’t possible to stand at my husband’s grave and give dry-eyed witness to this sad reunion. My own lip quivered when Lafayette placed the wreath against the stone and bowed his head in silent and tearful communion.
He passed a long time like that, quiet and stooped.
And I found that my heart was not made of stone after all. For Lafayette’s emotion stirred something in me that I simply couldn’t contain. And when he raised up again, he noticed. “You will want a moment alone with him.”
“No, it’s—”
“I will wait by the gate,” Lafayette said, withdrawing. “I understand.”
He didn’t. He couldn’t. Because I didn’t understand it myself.
Now left alone at my husband’s graveside, I hugged myself tightly, trying to make sense of it. Aware that for the first time in a very long time, no one was watching me. The way the graveyard was situated, people passed gaily on the street just beyond the iron rail, laughing and going about their business without any sense of respect for the gravity of the place. And maybe I shouldn’t respect it, either.
“Integrity?” I scoffed at the engraving. “Was there integrity in deceiving me, Alexander?” Because I didn’t sense any part of him still in this world, it seemed silly to continue. But then it’d been so many years since I’d spoken to my husband that I couldn’t resist imagining that he could hear. “Valor, I admit you had, in stupid quantity. But wisdom? I spent our whole marriage keeping you from foolhardiness. And if you’d told me . . .”
I blinked back a rush of bitter tears.
“If you’d told me what you meant to do that morning at Weehawken, I would have stopped you. You’d be alive, and I more the fool, but—”
My eyes fell upon the spot where our sweet, innocent Philip was buried in the earth, and I brought my fist to my mouth to stifle my words. For I’d protected the rest of my children from this anger I felt for their father. And now, absurdly, I worried about speaking these truths in front of Philip.
I knelt at my son’s grave and pressed my hand to the cool grass.
“You’re with him, aren’t you?” I whispered, realizing that if Philip was united with the Lord, then none of this would be any secret to him. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to utter the venom at the tip of my tongue, especially not the two words that would’ve hurt Alexander the most.