Annapolis, page 8
It was finally, officially over. The treaties had been signed. The last British troops had left. And George Washington was coming to Stafford’s Fine Folly for the grandest party that house would ever see.
Sara had invited a hundred of their closest friends and all the members of the new Congress, which was currently sitting at Annapolis. She had planned a buffet of cold pheasant, Chesapeake oysters, two huge hams, six kinds of cheese, exotic fruits from the West Indies, a hot Christmas punch that filled the house with the aroma of cloves, and champagne. There would be dancing in the great room, whist and loo in the upstairs parlor, candles illuminating every window.… A night to remember after so many to forget.
Governor Paca planned an even grander party for the next night, in the State House itself, when all of Annapolis would greet Washington. The following day, Washington would surrender his commission to Congress and head for Mount Vernon as a private citizen.
Sara looked in the mirror and straightened her French-made wig, which rose almost a foot above her head. Then she stood sideways to check her waist, which was held nicely by a jeweled stomacher.
“As slim as a girl, ma’am,” said Henrietta, her slave.
Sara gave a sad little smile. “Would that it would swell again.… Oh, never mind. There’s much yet to do.” Sara took a pair of white gloves from the buffet and pulled them on. “Starting with my inspection.”
And she went fingering her way about, examining mantels and picture frames for dust, looking for her reflection in silverware and brass door handles, searching for cobwebs behind doors, in corners.
“Shipshape and Bristol fashion” was the phrase Big Tom had always used. And in many ways, Stafford’s Fine Folly was like a ship.
It was as tall as a mast—three full stories, with twelve-foot ceilings. The keel was the center hallway that divided the house from the front entrance to the French doors. Balanced around it, like cabins on a berthing deck, were the dining room opposite the front parlor, the double-sized great room opposite drawing room and library; and at the stern was the staircase, rising on either side of the French doors to the second-floor parlor and the canopied beds.
Little wallpaper had been used, and for all the fine mahogany furnishings the floors were rough and unwaxed, as was the custom. But the painted colors were as vibrant as those on the sides of some ships—Prussian blue offsetting white woodwork in the dining room and front parlor, glittering sunshine yellow in the great room, an earthy magenta for the second-floor woodwork.
Sara came into the bedroom just as Black Jed finished powdering his hair.
“Let other men wear wigs,” she said. “You and General Washington will dominate the scene with no more than a little talc.”
“He doesn’t even need talc anymore. The war turned him gray.”
“Oh, Jed”—she threw her arms around him—“the war took so much.”
“But the new government will make good on that paper money. We’ll build more ships, have more children. We owe it to them who died.”
“We owe it to each other.”
ABOUT AN HOUR after the party had begun, an uninvited guest made her way through the streets of America’s provisional capital.
She did not go past her old house. She had no stomach for that.
And when she stood before the Fine Folly, she tried not to think of the joy that Black Jed and Sara Stafford had known there on nights like this, with the snow falling gently and the music playing, or on summer evenings when they rocked in each other’s arms. Such joys had not been ordained for Rebecca Parrish.
She’d had her life at Parrish Manor, assisting at the births of her brother’s children, sucking bitter juice from the tobacco in her mouth, and planning this night.
She did not go up the front stairs. Instead, she walked around to the back and up to the French doors. She could see people milling about in the hallway—merchants, planters, their wives, members of Congress. The laughter was loud, the music well played. And she could almost feel the heat generated by the dancers.
She removed her cloak and left it on the railing. She spit her tobacco into the snow and straightened the feathered headdress that she hoped was still in style. Then she stepped into the house.
Two gentlemen in white wigs—Congressmen, perhaps—looked at her oddly.
“A breath of air, gentlemen, so that I may dance all the more.” Before either of them could insinuate himself with her, she went into the great room, where the minuet was moving at its studied pace. Washington was dancing with Sara Stafford and looked surprisingly supple. Black Jed was dancing with the wife of Samuel Chase and looked surprisingly gay.
Rebecca snatched a glass of champagne from a tray and gulped half of it.
There was gentle applause when the music ended, polite conversation among the dancers, a small conference among the musicians as to their next piece. And Rebecca Parrish stalked through the gathering, straight for the spinet.
By the time she reached it, she had been recognized by half of the people in the room, including Black Jed and Sara. She leaned over the spinet player’s shoulder and attacked the keyboard, pounding out what she could of a piece by Mozart, pouring herself into it, building her fury. And then she stopped abruptly.
Two people actually applauded.
“I do not play for your approval,” she snapped. “Merely for your attention.”
“It’s been a long time, Rebecca.” Black Jed worked his way toward her.
“Because I have no home in Annapolis, thanks to you and your confiscators.”
Washington instinctively stepped into the controversy. “Is this Rebecca Parrish of the Loyalist Parrishes?”
“Rebecca Parrish who remained in the countryside, with her neutral brother, asking those who might have been her in-laws to save her house,” she answered.
“I saw to it that you received a third of the proceeds,” said Black Jed.
“And saw to it that you received a share yourself.”
“As payment for credit extended to the state of Maryland.”
By now all conversation in the house had ceased and the doorways to the great room were crowded with people.
“Black Jed Stafford did his country an invaluable service in the late war, madam,” said Washington. “He deserved compensation.”
“And what about me? My father died. My brother was driven to England. My hand was ruined. Then they took the Annapolis house where you yourself dined.”
“You have our sympathies.” Washington gave her a slight bow.
“I would prefer to have my Annapolis house back. But now it’s a hotel.”
“You may have your Annapolis life back,” said Washington. “From what I know of your neighbors, they’ll welcome you. And I’ll welcome you to our grand ceremony the day after tomorrow.”
This brought polite applause for the magnanimity of the general.
“As my Annapolis house is lost, how can I enjoy my Annapolis life?”
“We all lost in this war,” Sara said angrily.
“We both lost the companionship of my brother,” added Black Jed.
“Who promised that he would not allow my house to be confiscated,” answered Rebecca.
“He had no power to fulfill that promise,” said Black Jed.
“But you did,” she said, “and you failed. You are not a man of your word.”
This brought a gasp.
Washington strode toward her, extending his arm. “You speak too harshly, madam. A dance will dispose you more favorably toward—”
“You don’t impress me, George Washington. You couldn’t play a hand of whist if your life depended on it. It’s an everlasting wonder to me that you could dupe the British for eight years.”
Another gasp, and Washington’s face reddened. He stood for a moment like a statue, his arm extended, as if still expecting her to take it.
Instead, she stalked toward the door, haughty and triumphant. There was only one more thing to say as she went past Sara. “Lay lightly on your Annapolis pillow, dear. Someday, I’ll snatch it from under your head.”
And she was gone.
After a moment Black Jed thought of something to rescue the moment. With a flourish, he pointed toward the door and announced, “There goes the woman who said we’d all be hanged for burning the Peggy Stewart.”
And even Washington laughed out loud.
CHAPTER TWO
Stafford’s Fine Folly
October 8
Washington still looked terrific.
Every hair in place, uniform perfectly pressed, nice glow to his complexion, arm slightly raised, almost as if he were still expecting Rebecca Parrish to take it and dance. But he was only wax, standing forever in the Old Senate Chamber of the Maryland State House.
To learn about the Staffords’ town, Susan was taking a tour, along with two grandmothers from Philadelphia and a family with their Academy-bound son.
The tour began at the waterfront, where Kunta Kinte, of Roots fame, first set foot in America, along with thousands of other slaves not immortalized in hardcover or miniseries. It moved on to the little house on Cornhill Street where portraitist Charles Willson Peale, who gave the eighteenth century a face, began his work as a saddlemaker. Then to the Old Senate Chamber.
Susan’s guide was a thirty-five-year-old housewife with the bright-eyed enthusiasm of a true believer and the clothes of an eighteenth-century tavern wench. The costume made sense, she said, because the years between the French and Indian War and the Revolution were known as the Golden Age of Annapolis, and from what Susan had seen, the eighteenth century was still alive and well, despite the tourist trappings.
Black Jed Stafford would have had no trouble finding his way around. Annapolis boasted of more pre-Revolutionary brick buildings than any other city in America, and most of them had been restored. The original baroque layout of the streets still remained, and fortunately, the Naval Academy had been built on the northern edge of this red-brick world, along the riverbank and the landfill beyond.
“After two nights of partying,” the guide explained, “Washington came before Congress. He could have made himself dictator. He had the army. He had the loyalty of the people. Instead, he surrendered his commission and passed power back to civil authority. It’s one of the most important moments in American history.”
Susan wondered if Rebecca Parrish was welcomed at the ceremony, as Washington had promised. Did she ever make good on her threat to Sara? In every big story, there were many small ones.
And from what Susan had so far read of The Stafford Story, she couldn’t figure out what had the admiral so worried.
The tour went from State Circle to the neat little campus of Saint John’s where the Annapolis Liberty Tree still stood, looking venerable and worried over, perhaps because it was the only Liberty Tree still alive in America. And a sequence took shape in Susan’s mind—shot at dusk, steadicam swirling among the torches, tree backlit and looming… the night they burned the Peggy Stewart.
As the tour headed toward the waterfront again, the names of the fine houses came tripping off the guide’s tongue: The Hammond-Harwood House, and across Maryland Avenue, the Chase-Lloyd House, and down Prince George Street, the house they still called Stafford’s Fine Folly.
But what was behind it? Susan had expected a garden. Instead, there was a flat-roofed three-story building, almost as high as the house itself, looking about as out of place as an incinerator.
“Two nights before he handed in his commission,” said the guide, “Washington danced here.”
“Not in that thing in the back,” said Susan.
“Oh, no. That came in 1907, a hotel. But by 1956, business had gone so bad that they turned it into a nursing home. Now it’s on the market.”
“Who owns it?” asked Susan.
“Owned it. Their names were the Shank sisters, from Brunswick, Maine, of all places. Somehow the house passed to them after moving back and forth between two old Annapolis families, the Staffords and the Parrishes, several times. The Shanks kept the nursing home running until they were ready for a home themselves. Their heirs are scattered all over, and none of them wants to pay to upgrade the old place, so—”
“It sure is nice,” said one of the grandmothers. “I hope nobody tears it down.”
“That can’t happen,” said the guide. “Our historic commission protects everything, and there’s always Historic Annapolis.”
“There certainly is,” said someone else. “Everything you see is historic.”
“Historic Annapolis has been on the case since the fifties, when an admiral’s daughter named St. Clair Wright realized that her backwater hometown could be, as she called it, a museum without walls.”
Susan tried to see the house through the eyes of Rebecca Parrish on the night she went there to spit on the Revolution—candles and lanterns glowing in every window, snow fluttering down. Now the October sunshine revealed paint peeling on window frames, gutters rotting, mortar crumbling between the bricks… and that thing behind the house.
“Can we go inside?” she asked.
“Oh, no. The place is a wreck. They never fixed it up… just let all those old people molder and—” The guide stopped, as though realizing she had gotten all downbeat. “Let’s go down the street and see the Paca House. It’ll show you what the Fine Folly looked like once.”
At the Paca House, Historic Annapolis had revived the eighteenth century in a glory of mahogany furniture, Prussian blue woodwork, and well-tended gardens. It all proclaimed the wonder that the golden age must have been in Annapolis, a time of grace and beauty, of intellectual curiosity and… slavery.
A little cynicism always helped to bring Susan back to earth. The ones who had slaves could afford the time for intellectual curiosity.
And for a town that cherished its history, one part of it had disappeared rather early: the Parrish house, torn down in 1870, when Conduit Street was extended across Duke of Gloucester and run through to Spa Creek. So there would be no shots of Rebecca’s grand foyer or its shaft of golden sunlight.
There would be plenty of shots of the last stop on the tour—the Naval Academy, amidst the midshipmen. Bulletheads in training—that was how Susan had described midshipmen to her daughter. It was an attitude she was going to have to get rid of, along with her cynicism about military spending and the military in general.
She had never been on a college campus that was so damned… orderly. It was those blue uniforms and white officer’s hats that did it. And the midshipmen seemed to move with an unerring sense of purpose that made them look far more mature than they probably were. No guys with earrings. No girls handing out pro-choice pamphlets. None of the messiness of life. And even though there were civilians everywhere, Susan felt distinctly out of place.
This was a world unto itself. How on earth could she get close to it? Or to the Staffords?
SHE STARTED BY trying to get into Stafford’s Fine Folly.
She went there just after lunch time, climbed the front steps, rang the bell.
No answer.
She peered through the sidelights, but there was an inner door, so she couldn’t see into the center hallway.
“What do you want?” The voice growled up behind her and nearly startled her off the steps. The caretaker was a balding black man in his early fifties, with football-pad shoulders and a blank expression that made the growling voice seem all the more disconcerting.
She flashed him a friendly smile and told him she was a PBS filmmaker planning to tell the story of the Staffords, and could she have a house tour?
“No tours. Place is fallin’ apart inside. And I ain’t got no use for Staffords.”
“Oh.” She wondered why. “Can I write to the owners?”
“They’re dead.”
“What about the trustee?”
“Don’t know no trustee.”
“So who signs your checks?”
“None of your damn business. Now, if you don’t stop hangin’ around here, I’ll call the police.”
OLIVER PARRISH, MEMBER of the bar of Maryland and Virginia, pressed the button on his speakerphone and looked out the window. The Washington lunch crowd clogged the street—the army of lawyers, lobbyists, and paper-pushers spending the taxpayers into oblivion, and the tourists swarming between Ford’s Theater, where they could see the pistol Booth used to shoot Lincoln, and the FBI, where they could see a tommy gun shoot up paper torsos. What a country.
“Someone making a film?” he asked.
“That’s what she said.” The voice of the caretaker, whose name was Simpson Church, echoed off the glass walls.
“Don’t let her in. There’s no reason to let anybody in.” Oliver Parrish rubbed his hand over the bristles of his crew cut—blond running toward gray—and flexed his shoulders like a boxer before a match.
“Whatever you say.”
“If it all works out, Simpson, I won’t forget you.”
“I don’t want no Staffords to have that house, any more ’n you do.”
Parrish clicked off, unconsciously flexed his shoulders again, and wrote “Susan Browne, PBS” on a pad, right beneath the name “Jack Stafford.” Which was right beneath “Admiral Stafford & Institute for Advanced Naval Planning.” Which was right beneath two names he had already crossed out: “Naval Academy Alumni Association” and “Historic Annapolis Foundation.”
The Naval Academy Alumni had enough space at Ogle Hall on King George Street, and Historic Annapolis didn’t have a prayer of raising the three million dollars the house was worth. He was glad they had dropped out, but not at all happy to hear about new competitors for the Fine Folly.
AT THE BED-AND-BREAKFAST, three messages were waiting for Susan: (1) Overnight mail delivery. (2) Daughter called from Boston. (3) Lieutenant Stephen Stafford can see you day after tomorrow; noon, south parking lot entrance, Pentagon.
