Because Amy had failed to stick to fair rules, I didn’t care so much for her that day, and I suppose because she dimly felt that she’d failed, she avoided me; so, after lunch, I asked aunt if I might go walking. She said yes, if I was careful not to get lost, adding that she would rather not have me leave the immediate neighbourhood. I said I wouldn’t, and then I started out. I put on the tam again because it sticks and doesn’t have to have pins. And then Mr. Kempwood said it was becoming. I will acknowledge that that influenced me a little.
After I’d walked around several blocks and seen nothing but the same sort of houses and pavements and babies, all with nurses, I turned toward the Jumel Mansion. And again the people who take care of it were kind to me, and I enjoyed my visit.
And I learned some more about the place. It seemed the French merchant, Stephen Jumel, did not build it, but Roger Morris, then loyal servant of the King, built it for his wife, seven years after they were married. Before she became Mrs. Morris she was Mary Philipse, nicknamed “The Charming Polly.” He built it well and strongly, which was fortunate, since it was to have so many inmates and so much wear. When you think of it, a house that was put up in 1765 and 1766 would have to be splendidly made to stand the years.
“The Charming Polly” must have been indeed charming, for her descendants say that Washington, who was, just before her marriage, a man of twenty-five, offered her his hand and name, but from the look of things it would not seem so. For a friend of Washington’s, Joseph Chew, wrote him that Captain Roger Morris, who was a “lady’s man, always something to say,” was breakfasting often with Mistress Philipse, and that the “town talk’t of it as a sure & settled affair,” and he added an urgent appeal for Washington to return, as he was sure Charming Mistress Polly must prefer Washington to all others. . . . But perhaps Washington had found another “Charming” somebody, for the letter of July brought no visit from Washington until late one winter’s eve, when, the descendants of Mary Philipse say, he “arrived post haste, and demanded an interview immediate, notwithstanding that the hour was late. . . .”
However, whether or not it was more than a flirtation or a light admiration, it does seem strange, does it not, that Washington should direct his army from the house that his rival built for the much-admired and talked-of Mistress Polly Philipse?
Mary Philipse and Captain Morris were married in 1758. They had four children, two boys and two girls, if I recall correctly what I was told; and when General Washington took command at Cambridge, they had been married for seventeen years.
Now, to me there is something unsatisfactory about a man who doesn’t take sides, and Captain Morris didn’t. In fact, the builder of that lovely house evaded siding with either the British or the United States, at the time of the Revolution, and one day while the mails were being taken aboard The Harriet Packet he quietly slipped aboard with John Watts, who, with Roger Morris, was a member of His Majesty’s Council for this province. Together they sailed for England, and Captain Morris remained abroad for almost two years. And unhappy years they were too, for he was homesick for the big white house, his lovely wife and children. (And I can understand the first, although no one who hadn’t lived in it would think that Uncle Frank’s house was lovely.)
Rumour states that Captain Roger Morris took rooms in “London Town,” so to be nearer the mails of the ships, that his wife’s letters would come to him without delay. . . . And can you see him waiting for those, wanting them, and looking for the crosses that his girls and boys wrote at the bottom of the letter? . . . I am sure they were there. . . . Perhaps his littlest girl wrote, “For my dearest father, whom I do so greatly love. . . . Dear kisses,” and, of course, one of every doubled s was written like an f, for that is the way they did it in that time.
Can you see it? The little girl in quaint, long frock, painfully writing out a message, while her mother looked on and wondered whether the “dearest father” would ever reach home? . . . The letters he wrote her were lovely, but I didn’t see those that day. Mr. Kempwood showed me those after he began to teach me to SEE history. For history, he says, is not a dead thing although it is about dead people. . . . All you have to do is to remember that they LIVED, just as we do, and to shut your eyes, not to think dates most important, and to remember those people as living. And he taught me to do that. But that comes later.
Well, after I’d learned quite a little bit about the Morrises and had felt ever so glad that he did get back, the man who had so kindly told me these things had to leave me, and I was alone. I wandered over to stand before Madam Jumel’s portrait. . . . And here, I leaned forward and whispered to her, and I said: “Won’t you please return it? . . . My mother wore it. Won’t you, please?”