I would love my child with every breath for as long as I lived, whether it obeyed its father’s commands to be born male or no. And that gave me courage. Then, in the new year, after a whole day’s labor, my child emerged from that first breath, a culmination of all his parents’ wishes and desires, and a reflection of all that was best in each of us.
A son. A little boy with eyes like his father’s and thick, dark, unruly hair like mine. Ten fingers, ten toes, with wondrously fat little legs. Papa affectionately called him a piglet, but in my eyes, my son was perfect in every way!
And if he did inherit Alexander’s caprices, he would undoubtedly enslave the fairer sex, for he’d already captivated me. In truth, my baby stole my heart upon his first little cry.
While Mama oversaw the birth, my sisters had been attending me, Angelica on one side, and Peggy on the other, holding my hands through the screaming while Alexander paced the black and white floor downstairs, knocking back glasses of my father’s best imported wine as if he could not be sober while my sisters forbade him from the birth room. But once the baby was cleaned and swaddled and put into my arms, my sisters finally gave up their vigil, and abandoned their posts so that my husband could meet his son.
Tears sprang to Alexander’s eyes the moment I surrendered the child into his arms. I knew my husband could be tender—there was a softness in him that others might have taken for weakness. But these tears, as he stooped to kiss me and our baby, were fierce expressions of love. “We’ll call him Philip,” he decided, choosing to honor my father rather than his own.
Then he vowed that he would never abandon me, or our son. And I believed him.
*
I FELL IN love with my son that spring. In truth, I fell in love with the entire world. Because with the war nearly over, everything seemed new. And in my baby’s eyes, everything seemed possible.
Philip was as sunny a child as ever lived. One who so commanded my heart that I could refuse him nothing. And I knew my indulgence was not to be remedied by the influence of a stern father. Because in those delightfully domestic months, one might be excused for thinking that—like Ben Franklin and the lightning rod—my husband had invented fatherhood.
Fractured by our son’s every cry and transported to heaven by every gurgle and smile, Alexander doted, day and night. Staring into the cradle, he boasted, “Philip is truly a very fine young gentleman. The most agreeable baby I ever knew—intelligent and sweet of temper. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” I agreed, with a laugh. “Of course.”
Sensing condescension, Alexander turned in mock outrage. “It’s true! He’s handsome and his eyes are sprightly and expressive. And he has a method of waving his hand that announces a future orator.”
A future orator. Such grand plans he had for our boy, before he was even out of swaddling.
But having been abandoned by his own father, it made sense for my husband to draw so close to his infant son. For him to feel not only the natural bonds that draw a parent to a child, but also the desire to make up for what he’d lacked. It was as if Alexander thought to somehow tip the scales of cosmic justice by giving his son all the love he hadn’t received.
“How entirely domestic I’m growing,” Alexander later said, bouncing our little Philip on his knee at Papa’s dinner table. “I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby, and have lost all taste for the pursuits of ambition.”
Kissing our father atop his head as she slipped into her seat, Angelica gave a delicate snort. “You without ambition? Betsy, call for a doctor. Hamilton must be sicker than we knew.”
The whole family laughed, because she wasn’t wrong to doubt him. Especially when his desk in the upstairs hall was piled with leather-bound, gilt-edged law books. Tory lawyers would no longer be permitted to practice in state courts, which left an opportunity for men like my husband to step into the vacancy, and Alexander had designed an ambitious plan to condense his study of the law and start his own practice.
Though he seemed content to live in my father’s house—and Papa was very happy to have us—I knew Hamilton yearned to make his own fortune. Late one night, he returned from his duties as a tax collector, and settling into a chair next to our sleeping baby, he opened a law book and whispered, “Go on to bed, love. I will now employ myself rocking the cradle and studying the art of fleecing my neighbors.”
Tax collecting by day, studying law by night, and somehow managing, in the midst of it all, to conspire with my father to build this brave new American world.