Three tours per hour, thirty people per tour, eight hours a day, five days a week: she testifies to her love for the man to 180,000 people per year, face to face.
She tells them right up front that he was a genius. “He loved to build clocks,” she says. “His mind was like a clock. Here we see a Swiss clock that Mr. Jefferson designed and built by his own hand,” she says, gesturing to an immense contraption resting directly above the entranceway like a gargoyle or some instrument of torture: huge and iron-laden enough to take flight, like some primitive flying machine.
Various chains and pulleys hang from it in all directions, with iron balls of varying sizes weighting each chain with just the right tension so as to perfectly pull all the cogs and gears in the precise manner necessary to keep perfect time. “It hasn’t missed a minute in over two hundred years,” the guide says proudly. As if she had been around during the building of it and might have somehow participated.
“The clock was designed so that it would inform one not only of the hour of the day, but of the day of the week. However, the balls on the lowermost chains, which drove Saturday and Sunday, ran out of room and got tangled on the floor, so Mr. Jefferson cut a hole in the floor through which the chains could pass into the basement.” A sweep of her hand toward the saw notch in the corner, which indeed does swallow the ball and chains. A tiny, chaste smile. Her waist is pinched tight, and she wears an elegant long velour dress. Her eyes are bright, damp. Eighteen minutes to go. She moves like a metronome, aware of where she stands each second of her time remaining, the audience’s time remaining. The time remaining in the story itself.
She ushers the group into the next room, the library. She walks backwards as she speaks, keeping the narrative running; she pirouettes in just the right place to fold herself into a little cleft to allow the others to flow into the small curved room. Some part of her beholds them as the lion tamer with his whip and chair might behold the lion: somewhat frightened of, but also attracted to, their hunger.
“Here are his boots,” she says, pointing, as if he might have pulled them off only last night. “Here is his writing table,” she says, “where he stood by this window and composed music. As you can see by the height of the table,” she says, “he was a tall man—six foot two and a quarter. Very elegant, very graceful, even into old age.” The faintest touch of a smile.
Another flourish, quarter turn, and sweep to the left: dancing with his ghost as if at some grand cotillion, chin held high, her eyes sparkling now. A gesture to the wall of olden books in the library. (Has she read them all? Doubtless, and by candlelight—her fingertips resting lightly on the pages upon which his hands, too, had rested. The flames flickering, and roughly the same thoughts and images passing from those pages into her mind as passed into his, until she is so close to him—almost there—that it seems surely he will come around the corner at any moment; that he has simply been gone for a while and will be coming home soon, with the evening late, and weary from so long a journey.)
“Books were very rare, very expensive, in Mr. Jefferson’s day,” she tells them. “As you can see, however, he valued them highly, felt them to be the highest form of democracy—free speech coupled with the rational, considered, crafted expression of intellect. He was a prodigious reader, almost insatiable.” Her lips glisten slightly at this last word, and she begins to warm to her audience, sharing her man with them, relaxing visibly as she feels them growing into his admirers as well.
“Knew seven foreign languages fluently. Taught himself Spanish in twenty days, en route to that country in 1791. Departed the shores of this country on his voyage not knowing a word of it, and landed in Spain speaking it like a native.
“He was a connoisseur of fine wines, and as prodigious a correspondent as he was a reader.” A sidelong, almost sultry slipping into his study, which adjoins his bedroom. “He scribed over twenty thousand letters in his lifetime, writing to friends and family and statesmen around the world.
“Notice the contraption perched above his desk,” she instructs them—another elegant arrangement of chains and pulleys, leverage and manipulation. A blank writing tablet on the other side of the desk, and an iron claw gripping a fountain pen at that tablet, so that as Mr. Jefferson sat at his desk and wrote, the iron claw of the ghost-grip seated at the table across from him would mirror his movements, reproducing his letter in duplicate, complete with every little nuance of script.
“Thus are his records preserved,” says Mr. Jefferson’s lover. “Another of his many inventions.” A pause, as if winded. Her heart—and, she is pleased to see, those of many in her audience, now—fluttering. She might as easily at this point climb up on the desk and shout through cupped hands: “They just don’t make men like they used to!”
“Here, his bedroom,” she says simply, pausing for the briefest of moments—the bare requisite minimum—and pointedly avoiding looking at the tiny bed (which does not appear as if it could have housed a man of six foot two and one quarter), gazing instead fixedly at the fireplace. One of her hands trembles slightly, but her voice remains steady. He is far away, it is true, but it is also true he can travel no farther; the distance will get no worse than this.
