A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (24 page)

She turned her attention to Lincoln again, who had stood there waiting patiently for the hilarity to die down before resuming his speech. He was enjoying himself a great deal, and the enjoyment was contagious. As soon as he opened his mouth, the audience laughed again, this time not over something he had said, but from anticipation of what he would come out with next. From where Cage was standing he looked almost normal, taller than most men, scrawnier than most, but reasonably well turned out in a good broadcloth coat with a velvet collar and sleeves that some decent tailor had finally cut to the right length. He had inevitably lost weight on his legal and campaigning travels and as a result his eyes looked darker and more penetrating, his jawline sharp as a plow. But his ready smile and obvious comfort in standing in front of thousands of people undercut anything stern or forbidding in his appearance.

He himself, he told the audience, was a former flatboatman and rail-splitter who wouldn't know a ruffled shirt from a rattlesnake. He carried no gold-plated cane, but he did have a blue streak around his leg where you could still see the mark where the buckskin breeches he had worn as a boy had almost cut off the circulation, due to the fact that his family could not replace them as he grew. In fact, he was glad he was through growing and had a good pair of trousers because the endless war the Democrats were waging against the Bank of the United States probably meant that he and the rest of the good people of Illinois would soon have nothing but the clothes they were wearing. Meanwhile all the free Negroes that Mr. Van Buren said ought to have the vote—yes, he said it, right there at that convention in New York!—would be wearing kid gloves and gold watch chains.

The crowd booed and bellowed at the preposterous idea of Negroes voting. At Cage's side, Mary Todd was calling out “No! No!” with the others and grinning in delight at the apocalyptic abolitionist scenario Lincoln had so deftly presented.

“Why do you have that odd little smile on your face?” she said to Cage.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“A scowl, I think. What are you scowling about?”

“Well, if I'm scowling it's because he's painting Van Buren as an abolitionist, which Van Buren certainly is not. And maybe I'm scowling because Lincoln is happy to say anything if it will win an election.”

“What would you like him to say? That Negroes
should
be able to vote? He'd have to leave Illinois. I suppose you can say such a thing in a poem if you like but you can't say it in front of people you're asking to vote for you.”

She turned away from him to listen for a while to Lincoln, who was talking now about how Democratic policies had driven men from their farms, families into hopeless debt, while Van Buren and his speculating friends were ever more prosperous. Then she abruptly turned back to Cage and leaned close and spoke into his ear so that no one could overhear.

“Are you an abolitionist, Cage? Are you that extreme?”

She was smiling at him, a fond smile but a challenging one. He saw that she liked pinning people to the wall.

“I suppose I am.” He gestured toward Lincoln, whose long arms were now theatrically spread. “Unlike our friend.”

“Oh, yes,” she mused. “He's the farthest thing from an abolitionist. As am I, of course. But I like the idea that you are one.”

She turned her eyes back toward Lincoln, thoughts of abolition and abolitionists evaporating as she returned to the theme of her own situation.

“I suppose I'll have to get him to write to me myself.”

T
HE DAY AFTER THE GREAT
Whig barbecue and speechifying spectacle, Lincoln stopped Cage on the street.

“I'm going to Florville's to get a haircut. So are you. Your hair's so shaggy you could be mistaken for a poet instead of a respectable man of business.”

It was mid-afternoon on an airless June day. The log cabin replicas and tables and floats and banners had not yet been taken down, and as he stared out at these forlorn artifacts a few minutes later from the window of Florville's barbershop Cage felt a mild twinge of despair, as if history had come and gone, and would come and go again, and the world would still be tediously the same. The barbershop smells of cologne water and lavender soap and pomatum only added to the sense of time itself being trapped and pickled in a specimen jar.

William Florville was the best barber in town and until recently had been the only one. His shop was usually crowded but on this lazy afternoon Lincoln and Cage were the only two customers.

“Didn't I tell you your money would be well spent?” Lincoln had gone first and was sitting in the barbering chair, his head poking out from the cloth tied around his neck. “Ned Baker thinks there were even more people there than the
Journal
said.”

“So in your calculations the more of my money was spent the better spent it was?”

“Exactly.”

Billy Florville laughed as he scooped Lincoln's black hair into a top knot and started snipping away. He was a black man, a Creole from Haiti who had fled the troubles there as a boy, ending up somehow in Springfield working as a servant for a local merchant, who had helped set him up in his barbering business. A free man, not enslaved, not indentured, he was a savvy entrepreneur who also owned a laundry and was calmly and methodically making himself wealthy. Somehow he had created his own world, a world that was parallel to the one that the other black people of Springfield inhabited.

“Cage here is upset with me, as usual,” Lincoln explained to Florville. “He thinks I was too eager to embrace the prejudices of the electorate in my speech. I put a fling on Van Buren, you see, for saying he wanted free Negroes to vote.”

“I heard your speech, Mr. Lincoln,” Florville said in his Caribbean-inflected accent. “And in my thinking, Negroes would sooner get suffrage if Harrison got elected than if Van Buren did.”

“That's my thinking too, Billy. Our minds run on the same track.”

If Florville objected to this illusion, he did not say so out loud. He was a cautious man of business who strived for a neutral complacency and kept his thoughts hidden deep. Meanwhile Lincoln smiled at Cage as if he had just proved to him that emancipating slaves and then giving them the vote was his first order of business as a public man, even though there was scant evidence that his principles ran very far in that direction. But there was no point in pressing Lincoln into an argument. He might not be the first person you would turn to in the cause of ending slavery, but at least he had a tender conscience and an awareness that human suffering was generally a bad thing.

“What did she think of the speech?” Lincoln asked Cage.

“Who?”

“Miss Todd, of course. I saw you standing with her out in the audience.”

“I would say Miss Todd received your remarks in a generous and uncritical spirit.”

“I never did write her.”

“She told me that.”

The sound of Florville's scissors occupied the room as Lincoln fell into a pondering silence.

“I guess I'd better go see her. Will you come with me? I'm afraid of what I'll say if I'm alone with her. I might push the case too far.”

“The case?”

“Will you go with me?”

“If you want to see Miss Todd,” Florville said, “you'd better go soon. Her brother-in-law Mr. Edwards was in the chair this morning and said she was going away for the rest of the summer.”

“What? When is she leaving?”

“Very shortly. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Well, then we have to go see her right away. Sorry, Cage. I'm afraid you don't have time for a haircut after all.”

Yes, Mary confirmed as she sat in the parlor of the Edwards home with Lincoln and Cage, she was on her way to Columbia, Missouri, to spend a few months with her uncle David and his family. She didn't mind going in the least. The cotillion season in Springfield was winding down, it was getting hot, and she was getting bored because so many interesting people were out of town on the eternal canvass.

“You and Mr. Douglas, for instance,” she said to Lincoln. “You've been going at it like ancient gladiators all over Illinois, I hear.”

“We meet in the arena from time to time, though he's so short it's often hard to spot him.”

She smiled thinly, uncharacteristic for someone with such a robust sense of fun. Cage thought Mary had a naturally shrewd understanding of human behavior but that she was too accustomed to being at the center of attention herself to put that understanding to much use. And just now she seemed as confused as Lincoln was by his intentions in calling on her. She sat upright on a black horsehair couch, her two gentlemen callers facing her formally from across the room, aware of their reflections in the glass-fronted bookcase behind her. A young Negro woman came in to serve them lemonade. Mary paid her no notice except for a perfunctory nod that might have been a gesture of thanks, or of dismissal. She had obviously grown up being waited on by slaves. Since Mary's sister and her husband lived in the free state of Illinois, this girl in their home was not technically a slave, but thanks to various creative laws she was employed on a “contract” that probably paid her nothing but her board and the clothes she was wearing.

Mary took a sip from her glass and fingered the little pocket watch she wore on a chain around her neck. She was wearing a light silk day dress the same pale color as her lemonade. Her legs were crossed beneath her skirts and one delicate foot bobbed up and down in expectation. She waited for Lincoln to make some momentous announcement.

But no momentous announcement came. The conversation slid into campaign banalities, then into poetry, with Mary reciting a Shakespeare sonnet and Lincoln reciting Burns and Cage wondering what he was doing here in the first place. When Mary turned to him for a verse, he started out with the opening lines of “Tintern Abbey”—“Five years have past; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!”—but had not gotten very deep into the poem when tears started pouring out of her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “But there's something about the way Wordsworth makes things sound
,
just in those few words—‘Five years have past.' It's as if you can hear time itself rushing by. You can hear your youth disappearing. It's so silly of me to cry.”

“Wordsworth would like it that you do,” Cage said.

“Do you think so, as a poet yourself?”

“Here's a poem that will make you cry worse,” Lincoln said. He tapped the crown of his beaver hat on his knee in rhythm as he recited another of the grave and fatalistic poems of which his memory seemed to hold an inexhaustible supply. It started out with something about tumbling out of the womb into a dark and silent grave, then marched on after several more dispiriting stanzas to conclude that “All our laughter is but pain.”

“Well,” Mary said. “I was feeling wistful a moment ago, but now I think I should go kill myself.”

The look of momentary confusion on Lincoln's face caused her to break out laughing.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “But why do you like such
sad
poems?”

Lincoln finally caught her teasing mood and laughed back. “I reckon I'm just peculiarly fond of black despair, Miss Todd.”

“Oh, shall we please drop the pretensions of miss and mister? The both of you are friends, and so the both of you should call me Mary. No, one of you could call me Molly instead. That was what my brothers and sisters called me back home in Lexington—the real brothers and sisters, I mean, not the half ones that came along after my horrid stepmother entered the scene.”

“Why should just one of us call you that?” Cage asked.

“Because that's my rule. You should continue to call me Mary, Cage, because you strike me as a man who is better off using a name with an ‘r' in it. That means Lincoln has to call me Molly.”

Lincoln agreed that he would, and Mary—or Molly—nodded her head as if some great issue had been decided. She took pleasure in keeping him unbalanced and confused about how to react to her. She wouldn't have gone to all this manipulative effort—drawing Lincoln in, pushing him out, teasing him, taunting him, making him feel the force of her capricious will—if she weren't taking his measure as a potential husband. And Lincoln must like it, Cage thought, bantering with a woman who was so sophisticated and confounding.

They stayed for another half hour, Lincoln finally standing and explaining that he had to leave and file a demurrer for a client, attend to some other legal business, and then head north to Tazewell County to campaign for Harrison.

“Then I won't expect to see you again until the fall,” Mary said. “When I'm back from Missouri. Do you think the Whigs can carry Illinois?”

“I think we can, but it'll be a hard fight, Miss—”

“Molly, remember?”

“It'll be a hard fight, Molly.”

“Good. I like a hard fight. Goodbye, Lincoln.”

He stood still for a moment, searching for something to say, a parting comment to save him from the impression he had just been dismissed. But nothing came and he just smiled awkwardly and turned to go. Cage nodded goodbye to Mary and started to go with him, until she reached out and touched his arm.

“But you don't have to file any demurrers, do you? Can't you stay for a little while? Let's read some more Wordsworth together. I'm sure my sister and Mrs. Edwards have a copy of
Lyrical Ballads
somewhere in the library.”

Cage glanced at Lincoln, who was now even more confused, and gave him an apologetic smile.

“Let's watch him from the window,” Mary said after Lincoln had left the house. They stood beside the curtains and watched as he ambled up Second Street toward his office in the center of town.

“He's too tall and his hat is too tall,” she said. “Does he have any idea of the vertical effect he makes?”

“He's not the sort of man who gives much thought to his clothes.”

She kept staring out the window, watching the vertical figure recede, down the barely perceptible slope of Aristocracy Hill.

“I thought we were supposed to be reading Wordsworth,” Cage said.

She turned her head, gave him a sly look, and then at last backed away from the window. She stood in the sunlit center of the room in her pale yellow dress, clasping her hands in front of her waist, her elbows bent to show off her slender arms to best effect. It was a fetching pose, a portrait of thoughtful female gravity. Her face was perfect, in its way: a little round, a little soft, a mouth that was straight but not stern, eyes that were clear and frank. But there was no serenity in that face—there never had been, probably. She was a woman who could strike a pose of physical stillness but could not conceal the fact that her spirit was always plotting, wanting, needing more. Just like the men she had surrounded herself with—Lincoln, Douglas, Ned Baker, Ash Merritt, Cage himself—she had a governing appetite, a need to identify opportunities and then to seize them before they were gone.

“Does he like me?”

“He's uncertain around you.”

“For heaven's sake, what does that mean?”

“He grew up very plain, Mary.”

“Of course he did. That's obvious. I like that he grew up plain. It's one of the admirable things about him. It's no doubt part of what makes his mind so fascinating. I know that he more or less schooled himself in a log cabin and I was very rigorously educated in Madame Mentelle's academy, but why should that make a difference to me? Do you think I'm such a terrible snob that I would not be interested in a man who had faced obstacles? My advantages and his disadvantages might be a perfect fit.”