America's First Daughter

“It wasn’t the stare of an old man, a humiliated lover, or a widower resigned to bachelorhood. It was the stare of a man who contemplates damnation and salvation.” 

Patsy observes her father’s attraction to Sally. Her comment implies that this is something more than a simple dalliance, and the risks it carries are enormous. 

“‘And he knows you least of all. You’re his Amazon disguised as an angel.’” 

William makes this observation about Patsy’s true nature. It indicates not only Jefferson’s self-absorption, because he can’t see this trait in his daughter, but also Patsy’s inability to understand herself. 

“And I never would have a say, because in the world outside the convent, men did as they pleased and women were left to simply accept the consequences.” 

Patsy is expressing her frustration at male behavior and at her father’s behavior in particular. Given the sacrifices she later makes for him, she may be correct in concluding that her only chance for self-determination lies in becoming a nun. 

“Ordinarily, a man’s importance can be judged only by the passage of time. But in those years of convulsive political change, we knew we walked amongst living legends, and my father was one of them.” 

Patsy’s comment indicates the level of awe she feels toward her father. It may also explain why she has such difficulty standing up to him on her own behalf. 

“But perhaps more than any man who ever lived, my father was acutely aware of the interplay between public reputation and political power and the risks that must be taken to acquire both.” 

Jefferson is careful to preserve his reputation for the sake of his political ambitions. He enlists his daughter’s support in this effort throughout her life. 

“Yet, beyond the loss of talent and property that James’s departure would represent, was the truth that Papa hated little more than to be left behind. As Mama had done, and Lucy, and as I had nearly done.” 

This comment refers to the emancipation of Sally’s brother. Patsy isn’t blind to her father’s true motives. However, she continues to indulge his weakness rather than forcing him to overcome it.

“For his words […] had brought me to the conclusion that I must give up what I wanted for myself and do my duty, and yet all the while Papa was making deals to ensure he’d make no sacrifice at all.” 

Patsy realizes that her father’s fear of abandonment will never materialize as long as Sally remains. Patsy also understands now that Jefferson has orchestrated that arrangement, as well as the termination of Patsy’s relationship with William, for Jefferson’s own convenience. Yet, Patsy continues to support Jefferson.

“That was the way of it in Virginia; for all the things we never said aloud, there were even more we never put to paper.” 

This comment relates to the importance of reputation. Patsy devotes her later years to shielding her father’s reputation from any hint of impropriety by censoring what he has been unwise enough to commit to paper. 

“HONOR. IN VIRGINIA it wasn’t merely a matter of masculine pride—it was a matter of survival […] Men would fight and die for it. And women would lie for it.” 

Once more, Patsy stresses the importance of reputation. She also explains that honor is a matter of life and death among her people. This comment helps to explain the sacrifices she makes to protect her father’s good name. 

“But I knew there was a far easier way to keep my father from the presidency. They could, for example, send him the bullet I’d been shielding him from since I was a child.” 

This comment suggests the hypervigilance that Patsy has endured since she was a child. She has always felt responsible, not only for protecting her father’s reputation, but for guarding his very life. 

“Now I knew better. I could never, ever, lean on him or my sister or anyone else. I hadn’t chosen a life in which I might be cared for and pampered. I’d chosen a different path.” 

Patsy bitterly realizes that she is the pillar everyone else leans on. The pattern created by her parents has carried through in Patsy’s relationship with her husband and the rest of her family. 

“For they were my words, spoken after my mother’s death, when we were both still little girls. Words I hadn’t thought she remembered. Heavy words that I had pressed on her delicate shoulders and made her carry all her life.” 

Patsy feels guilt over instilling the same damaging message into her sister’s consciousness that she received as a child. They both felt the need to keep their sorrows to themselves and not burden the men in their lives. As a result, both girls open themselves up to emotional abuse in later years.

“It was as it had been at the beginning. Papa and I were forged together in sadness, and were still forged, such that no other person in this world was so dear.” 

Patsy articulates the reason for her close connection to her father. Because Tom never shared a similar tragedy with anyone else, he can’t understand Patsy’s uncommon tie to Jefferson.

“He had inside him the kind of wound that left a man staring at pistols in the night. The kind of wound that left a man without a head, lying on the ground with a gun in his hand. The kind of wound the men in my life all seemed to suffer.” 

Patsy draws a parallel between her father’s fits of despair and her husband’s. She then draws the damaging conclusion that she is responsible for both—assuming a burden of guilt that isn’t hers to carry. 

“I nursed unworthy thoughts I dared not give voice to. I’m going to lose them, as I lose everything, to the cause of this country. I’d lost my mother, my siblings, my childhood. I’d lost my first love and my financial future.” 

Patsy feels resentment as she watches her eldest son and her husband march off to war. She briefly considers that she’s sacrificed enough for the cause of liberty but quickly dismisses her reasonable self-interest as pettiness. 

“It also revealed my father’s paralysis on the matter of slavery, a paralysis brought about by his true intimacy with it. For there was one “wolf” Papa could neither safely hold nor safely let go.” 

Patsy is referring to Jefferson’s affair with Sally. His personal involvement makes the question of emancipation far from theoretical; it hits much too close to home. 

“But after thirty-four years of marriage, I now saw union between man and woman was the same as union among the states—as a series of debates and compromises that might hold it all together for a few more years, or end in a painful separation.” 

The precarious union of the 13 states is mirrored in Patsy’s own precarious marriage to Tom. Lifelong unity isn’t a foregone conclusion in either case. 

“My heart sank at the sentiment, sweet as it was. There had been sacrifice enough for duty. Ellen deserved to make the choice I hadn’t been able to.” 

Patsy sees her daughter about to make the same sacrifices for her mother that Patsy made for Jefferson. Patsy doesn’t want her daughter to follow her and forsake her own happiness. 

“I looked around me and saw everything at Monticello in disrepair. The paint flaked off the walls and railings and molding. The roof let in melting snow and rain.” 

Patsy first notices the shabby state of Monticello as her father is declining steeply into old age. As Monticello deteriorates, so does Jefferson’s health. 

“Realizing that my whole life has been, in some sense, a song that could never be sung without you. There is almost nothing I’ve ever been that I could’ve been without my dear and beloved daughter.” 

As a newlywed, Jefferson played the violin while his wife played the harpsichord. He has now transferred this musical association and life partner status inappropriately to his daughter.

“I don’t know what words of farewell she exchanged with Papa. What they’d shielded from the world all their lives they still kept, with possessive silence, to themselves.” 

Patsy describes the last encounter between Jefferson and Sally. Both secrecy and mystery shroud Jefferson and Sally’s relationship throughout the novel, and their final moments together are no different. 

“That moment, for me, was an eclipse of the sun. A blackening of the whole earth. An unfathomable grief in which I no longer knew myself, or the world, or my place in it.” 

Patsy’s choice of metaphor in this quote is telling. Throughout Patsy’s life, Jefferson is her sun, moon, and stars. It seems fitting then that his death should be compared to a solar eclipse. 

“But I’d always divined his wishes in that silence, and could hear his words echoing in it even now. And those words were: Take care of me when I’m dead.” 

Patsy and Jefferson have a tacit agreement that she will guard his reputation in death just as she guarded his person in life. They each maintain their assigned role in relation to one another—alive or dead.