Jefferson by Max Byrd

people this morning that they had all gotten out two hundred yards from the convent entrance and started to walk.
    “Mother says—” Miss Adams began. They came to a halt at the end of the line filing into the convent. Thirty, forty people or more had now converged—Abigail and Johnny were lost in a sea of wigs and billowing skirts. An elderly French couple smelling of gallons of rosewater pushed ahead of them. Short cupped his hands and blew into them for warmth and then fumbled for his ticket of admission. “Mother says,” Miss Adams resumed, “that to be out of fashion is more criminal in Paris than to be seen in a state of nature, to which the Parisians are not averse.”
    She darted a glance at Short, conscious perhaps that she had gone rather far.
    Short smiled and led her forward. “Mr. Jefferson,” he said, quoting authority back to her, “says it’s all show and parade.”
    “I know. He told Papa that since he didn’t expect to live more than a dozen years, he was loath to give up one of them to the hairdresser.”
    “Mr. Jefferson,” Short said, holding up his ticket—
    “—is greatly given to hyperbole.” With a snap of her own ticket, Miss Adams stepped through the wicket and grinned back at him.
    The wicket opened into a cobblestone alley that ran between two tall buildings. They hurried along with the crowd, turned right through another small black door, another, a final turn to the left, and entered the chapel. So crowded was this room that they were ushered along with dozens of other guests up to the very altar platform itself and there shown to seats. Not certain what to do as he took his chair, Short made a vague gesture of piousrespect toward the altar—Miss Adams looked at him sharply—and tried to locate Jefferson.
    “The convent,” she whispered. She pointed to an iron grille on the far side of the altar, open to a courtyard and a brown January garden. To their right the main floor was covered with a great elegant carpet like the one in John Adams’s house; on it, in rows of stiff, slender wooden chairs, nuns were murmuring prayers and chants. Behind them, like a wall of wine—or blood, Short thought—hung two curtains of rich crimson velvet, fringed with gold.
    “I’ve found your parents.” On the other side of the altar Short could just make out, behind an Alpine range of wigs, John Adams’s apple-round face, Abigail’s pristine cap, Jefferson’s powdered red hair. “But not Patsy.”
    “The boarders and students come in together,” Miss Adams informed him. Their shoulders touched. “Watch the curtains.”
    At the moment she spoke the velvet curtains parted, and a procession of nuns began to file two by two down the center aisle. Each nun held a candle and a missal; the young girls following them, all dressed in a school ensemble of crimson and white, clutched gilt-edged prayer books or sheets of music, and scrambled whispering to benches set up behind the chairs. Short shifted his legs, inhaled perfume, pomade, rosewater, incense, a thousand alien smells. In Virginia he had sat for a lifetime of Sundays in a dusty wood-frame Anglican church at the crossroads of the Staunton highway, where the windows were clear glass—the congregation looked out on sloping pine forests, not Parisian courtyards—and the minister judged impromptu horse races after the service. To Jefferson’s left sat an elderly Frenchman with a gaunt face and sunken, unhealthy eyes. The younger woman next to him wore a dark gauze veil from her hat to her throat, impenetrable. She looked directly at Short.
    The audience rose, then sat. The two girls who were to take their vows came through the crimson curtains, escorted by two pensioners of the convent, one at each side. They were pale blond and English in feature, beautifully dressed in full-length gowns of yellow and blue, glittering with jewels on their hands, their hair, their scooped bodices. Representing, Short thought an instant before Miss