I Am Abraham (13 page)

I was a bit startled when Mrs. Elizabeth called me into one of her husband’s closets on Quality Hill. She’d never spoken to me in private before. She poured coffee from a silver pot. We had little cream cakes. This was serious business. I was wondering when she would skin me alive.

“Lincoln,” she said with a lilt in her voice, “you’re not getting any younger, you know.” And I figured I was in mortal danger, or she wouldn’t have squandered all that music on me.

“You must be forty!”

I wasn’t a day older than thirty, but I wouldn’t contradict Mrs. Elizabeth when she was in one of her moods. She must have caught the deep blush on my leather face. I’d never had a pretty lady, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with one.

“It’s time you were married,” she said. “You won’t get far without a good wife.”

“I’m not sure I’m the marrying kind.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “Mr. Edwards and I have picked a bride for you.”

I had to keep my mouth from twitching. That’s how mortified I was. But I wouldn’t turn my back on Mrs. Elizabeth and climb down Quality Hill.

“Dear Lincoln,” she said, “I do believe our Miss Angelina Snell is a perfect matrimonial fit for you.”

Angelina Snell was one of the family’s poor Lexington relations. And Mrs. Elizabeth had appropriated her as a glorified servant and secretary. Miss Angelina took part in the cotillions, but then she disappeared and had to supervise the other servants in the back rooms of the mansion. She was a walleyed maiden of twenty-nine or so and had the flattest chest in Illinois. I wouldn’t have married her if Mrs. Elizabeth had given me all the gold her husband had and offered me my own mansion on Quality Hill.

“I appreciate your concern, ma’am, but I reckon I’ll remain a bachelor for the time being.”

I didn’t realize the cunning behind that proposal until another few months passed. Mrs. Elizabeth’s own sister, Mary Todd, arrived from Lexington to stay with her and Ninian. Miss Todd I discovered was escaping her stepmother, who had her own brood of children now—nine or ten, I believe—and didn’t need such a constant reminder of her husband’s first marriage. Elizabeth had also fled the same household and married Ninian when she was sixteen. And Mary Todd, already twenty-one, was considered just about
ripe
for a Kentucky gal. She wasn’t walleyed, like Miss Angelina, nor was she a mouse. She had a whopping temper and liked to talk politics. I saw her throw a book at one of the maids and cuss a man out for uttering an unkind remark about her hero, Henry Clay. She flirted with every young lion, and with some of the older ones. She had six or seven marriage proposals a month after she arrived in Springfield, some folks said. All these swains began to tire her, and soon she had an altogether different crop. She tired of them, too. She wasn’t very tall—she stood a touch under five feet—and had handsome shoulders, light brown hair, and blue eyes that seemed to have an oceanic pull.

I wouldn’t have called her beautiful; she had a tiny, turned-up nose, a broad forehead, and wide jaws, but she liked to wear gowns with a low neckline that revealed the startling curve of her bodice. And her intelligence was as fierce as any lion on the Hill, though she had all the wiles and flirtatious charm of a Lexington lioness.

Now it was perfectly clear why Mrs. Elizabeth was so eager to capture a bride for me. A matchmaker of her stripe couldn’t afford a major catastrophe—a Todd like Miss Mary, who had studied French at the finest schools and had had her own body servant, had to be kept away from a rough boy who had never outgrown the forest and a dirt floor.

It’s diabolical how Elizabeth’s own disregard dragged me toward her sister—Little Miss Todd. I kept dreaming of what lay under all that fine silk, and couldn’t get her fat little tail out of my mind, even while I was addressing a jury. I ought to have been locked up, an officer of the court who was so damn lascivious. I’d imagine her dancing without a stitch, and pull on my root half the night. Still, I was the shiest of suitors, and if Mrs. Elizabeth hadn’t been so spiteful with her tricks, I might have waited a while before I approached Mary Todd. But at the very first cotillion, I edged in front of all her other suitors, and said, “Miss Todd, I want to dance with you in the worst way.”

She didn’t decline my invitation. She scrutinized me with her own fierce eyes that shimmered a lot and were flecked with gold. I was the tall one—that giant out of New Salem—and she was the Lexington mite. Had to stoop and stoop again to hold on to Mary. And with her little pink hands caught in the cage of my white gloves, we whirled about the polished floor to the rhythm of a Viennese waltz, while I prayed that my prick wouldn’t brush against her gown. I couldn’t help myself and my own horse’s pole inside my pantaloons. Mary wasn’t embarrassed none. She was wearing velvet ballroom slippers that seemed to glide along. And I had to knock about in my boots, careful not to lunge too far and become the spectacle of Quality Hill. Mrs. Elizabeth would have harrumphed like hell if I had landed on my ass. But I went right to the end of that Viennese, while Mary put one of her little hands behind my ear and caressed the flap with a tenderness that touched me to the quick and ate into my own raw hide. Here I had been dreaming of cocks and hair pie, drowning in my own jelly, when she showed me a kindness I didn’t deserve. I was enraptured by that little Lexington lady, caught in the spell of her Parisian perfume, as I climbed down Quality Hill.

W
E
WERE
NEVER
ALONE
. There were horse rides into the woods, garden parties, cotillions, lectures at the Second Presbyterian Church, but I couldn’t fondle her, even hold her hand. There was always Mrs. Elizabeth looking down my shirt, and sending Mary off on some picnic with one of her other beaux. Even if our lovemaking was mostly chatter, we still discovered things in common, like Henry Clay. Mary had known him ever since she was a child, had visited his manor house in Lexington, had even gone for rides on the great man’s pony.

She called him Uncle Henry, and I felt a kind of ravenous rage. I envied nothing but the time she’d spent with Clay of Kentucky.

“Why, Mr. Lincoln,” she said in that lovely voice of Lexington’s gentle class, “I might as well have been his niece—I was at Ashland
all
the time.”

And once, Mary said with just a little bit of swagger, she had happened upon the Senator during a dinner party, and she was invited to join the table. “If I’m ever elected President,” he said, “I’ll be damned if Miss Mary Todd isn’t my first guest.”

She answered him like some actress in a minstrel show. “Senator, I would
adore
living at the White House.” And she couldn’t have been more than thirteen at the time.

She’d turn quiet while twisting a flower into her hair—she liked to decorate herself with flowers. And then she’d grow volatile, as if a wild wind had visited her. “Mr. Lincoln, don’t you hate
your
stepmama!”

I didn’t hate Sarah Bush Johnston, who was a genuine mother to me after Ma died. Pa had brought her to our cabin with her quilts, her spinning wheel, and her own three children. But she never once favored them. And she shielded me from Pa and his blind wrath. Sometimes I’d read to her at night—about Sinbad the Sailor or one of Æsop’s dishonest foxes. She loved tales of villainy.

Mary Todd was also fond of villains. She couldn’t have survived without Shakespeare’s villains, she said. Richard III had comforted her while she
boarded
with her Pa and his new family.

“Lord alive, what I wouldn’t have given to lock them in a tower!”

She was like a quake of raw energy and some kind of sun goddess, and I was
quickened
whenever I was in her orbit. Sometimes I’d hold her hand, and I could feel an electric spurt. Mary herself said that the two of us had “lover’s eyes.” I still felt ungainly around her, like some gigantic frog with warts on his face.

I was called into the parlor again by that provost marshal, Mrs. Elizabeth, with her eagle’s gaze. She would have ruined me forever if she had a hatchet in her hand. I never saw so much hate and bile in a body.

“Lincoln,” she said, “this will not do. I forbid it. My sister has come from Lexington to find a
husband
, not to mingle with some tramp without a penny in his pocket.”

I was in her husband’s house, and it would have been ungracious if I went and whipped his wife. So I had to crucify my feelings in front of Mrs. Elizabeth.

“The two of you have
nothing
in common. She speaks much better French than a Parisian. Why, she has read Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper, even Victor Hugo, and one day she’ll probably dine in the White House. Lincoln, you will not come here again—or go riding with my sister.”

“Ma’am, are you banning me from Quality Hill?”

“A gentleman would know when he’s not welcome.” She was twitching now, and it was hard for me to stare down all that hate. “Sister is keeping company with Mr. Douglas. I expect to announce their engagement in a week or so.”

I saw him climb Quality Hill, Douglas with his dancing step and deep baritone voice. He wasn’t a vagabond like me. Stephen Douglas had the finest cut of clothes and was a mite taller than Mary Todd. I noticed Mary flirt with him, how her eyes flared in his presence, how he’d capture her hands in his.

So I avoided Quality Hill. I rode out on the circuit with a gaggle of lawyers and the district judge. The circuit court was like a sideshow. There was always a hullabaloo when our little court arrived in some hamlet or tiny town. Often a menagerie accompanied us for most of the circuit, with their own minstrels in black paint. I laughed at the buffoonery, but it grew wearisome after a while—the same exaggerated gestures and wild eyes.

I couldn’t stop thinking of that Lexington lioness up on her Hill, the aroma of red hair, the dampness of her body through all that silk. I avoided the Quality people. I still had holes in my pockets, with pantaloons that couldn’t even cover up my winter underwear, but I was the only lawyer in town who could fill the gallery. I still had the taste of tin in my mouth. So I wandered up to Quality Hill for the last soiree of the year, in my white gloves and coattails with some maverick thread hanging down to my heels. I discovered Mary Todd with a new crop of swains that clung to every word, though I didn’t see Douglas in his perfumed cuffs, like a Mississippi gambler.

I wouldn’t scribble my name all over Mary’s dance card. I sat in Mrs. Elizabeth’s ballroom, under the magnificent candlelight that left swirling shadows on the far wall. It was Mary who glided over to my chair in her slippers and ruffled gown.

“Mr. Lincoln,” she said with a quiver over one eye, “you are the rudest man in Springfield. You’ve ignored me for two solid months.”

It wasn’t the words alone that cut me. The melody was gone from her voice.

“I meant ye no harm, Miss Todd.”

She hissed at me like a plump snake. “My friends call me Molly. And you have earned that privilege.”

“But where’s Mr. Douglas?”

That ripe attack had gone out of Mary Todd. I must have startled her.

“And what on earth does Mr. Douglas have to do with me?”

“Your guardian told me that you intended to marry him. And if I dared pursue you, I wasn’t welcome in this house.”

She lost her voluptuous look. The flesh had gone out of her, and she could have been some eerie creature from the wild. She rocked on her heels like someone caught in a macabre dance.

“What guardian?” she asked. “I have none.”

“But Mrs. Elizabeth said . . .”

And that’s when I saw her explode for the first time. The gown tilted on her shoulders at a crazy angle. Her luscious arms flailed about. She ripped up her dance card in front of my eyes and raced over to Mrs. Elizabeth with her all fury. The two sisters flew from the ballroom together. And when they returned, Mary Todd was composed as a cat, but her married sister was shaking.

Mrs. Elizabeth walked over to me like someone in a trance; all the color had fled her face. She could have wandered out of her own coffin.

“You must forgive me, Mr. Lincoln. I had no right to speak for my sister. Molly has never, never been my ward.”

I had small pleasure wounding her. She was protecting her little sister from a vagabond with a lawyer’s license.

I stooped and kissed her hand. Her eyes floated in her head as she feigned civility. She would have liked to pluck my eyes out, I reckon, but she couldn’t do that with her little sister around. Yet the signals were all there—the brutal pull of her upper lip, the crooked smile, the crazed look. She wanted me to know that Molly could kiss me into tomorrow, and I’d never be welcome on Quality Hill.

I wanted Molly, and I wasn’t gonna let her witch of a sister win. So I tucked in my coattails and poured on my own civility, but Mrs. Elizabeth could see that hard little horn between my eyes.

“I’m delighted, ma’am. I’ll cherish the day when I can call you
Sister
.”

She was white as a ghost, whiter even. She was used to getting her own way, to plucking bachelors out of her own favorite pile, and rolling all the others right down the Hill. And she hadn’t expected me to make war like a Comanche among her own little coven of aristocrats. But I should have been more careful. She was a Comanche, too.