Lincoln (15 page)

Hay nodded, pleased that Sal had kept his secret. If the girl knew who he was she would not have asked. “I’m going to be at the Treasury. As a clerk,” Hay enjoyed lying to strangers, inventing a new personality, complete with such eccentric details as: “My mother came to live here while I was up north at school. She was an opera singer until she broke her hip in Paris. Now she’s in a wheelchair, in O Street in Georgetown. She gives singing lessons.” During this inspired, Hay thought, aria, he had slipped his arm around Marie-Jeanne, and pulled her back onto the divan. With a smile, she undressed him, to his pleased surprise; usually, he fell upon such girls with a lion’s roar and tore their garments, but now, out of respect for his invalid mother—should he give “Mother” a glass eye? No, that was too much—he
was passive as she stripped away his clothes. Then, lowering the gas lamp to a mysterious harvest moon glow, she, too, undressed. The body was as marvelous as he had ever experienced, even in Chicago during the recent convention, much less Providence, Rhode Island.

As they lay, side by side, on the bed, he now pleasantly exhausted and she smiling and attentive, he thought that this was just what a poet should do, preferably several times a day. Hay caressed her pale-brown skin, and wondered if anything so beautiful had ever come Poe’s way. Actually, if what his poetess friend who had known Poe said was true, Marie-Jeanne was a bit old for the lover of Annabel Lee.

To Hay’s astonishment, Marie-Jeanne was thinking along the same lines. As she ran her hand across his smooth chest, she said, “You’re younger than I am.”

“Oh?” Hay looked down at himself. For some time, he had thought of himself as a nicely finished mature male in excellent working order. Now he wondered if, perhaps, he still looked too boyish. Should he be covered with more hair? or grow a moustache?

Marie-Jeanne quickly soothed him; and dark limbs entwined with white. “That’s what I like,” she whispered in his ear. She smelled faintly of sandalwood. He wondered whether or not that was her own natural smell. Certainly, she looked as if she ought to smell of some exotic wood or jungle flower or … Hay stopped thinking, as again she took control of him. He could not know that what she had said she had really meant; had, in fact, two years earlier, whispered something very like it into the ear of the seventeen-year-old David Herold.

T
HE DAY
after the Inaugural Ball spirits were low at Sixth and E. Chase had not gone to the Senate that morning. Instead he had continued to arrange and rearrange the books in his study while Kate worked with an upholsterer in the front parlor. Servants came and went. Out of such confusion, Chase had said, darkly, at breakfast, there can come no order.

The arrival of Charles Sumner did not improve Chase’s mood. The two men were so much as one on so many of the great issues that they never had much of any interest to talk about; or, rather, the eloquent Sumner never ceased to declaim, while Chase, from time to time, would add a choric note to the great actor’s surging threnodies.

Sumner’s blue frock coat was ablaze with gilt buttons, which made him look slightly absurd to Chase, who preferred sober black. Sumner gave his outer coat to the manservant; kissed Kate’s hand without affectation—to Chase’s mild envy. But then he had not come to know Europe even better than he knew the United States; nor had he mingled with the most famous men and elegant ladies on both sides of the Atlantic. The famous men most intrigued Chase, whose hobby it was to collect the autographs of celebrated people. When Sumner once, casually, read him a note from Longfellow, Chase could not help but ask, humbly, if he might have, if not the letter, plainly no business of his, the signature at the bottom? Sumner had been amused; and generous. Chase got the entire letter. He was delighted; yet filled with self-disdain, the inevitable result, he told himself, echoing Bishop Philander Chase, of an unbridled passion: in this case, for the calligraphy of the great. “Remind me,” Sumner had said—this was two years earlier—“and I’ll give you a Tennyson letter.” Twice, Chase had discreetly reminded Sumner of his promise, but no autograph was forthcoming.

After ten years in the Senate, Sumner was now that body’s most brilliant figure; yet three of those ten years had been spent away from Washington, as an invalid. A Southern congressman had attacked Sumner with a stick while he was seated at his Senate desk. A powerful man, Sumner had been able to rise to his full height, wrenching the desk from the floor to which it was nailed. Then he collapsed, with a concussion. After years of painful cures, Sumner had returned to the Senate.

As Sumner entered Chase’s study, he looked at the newly installed books, and took down a volume of John Bright’s speeches. “The most eloquent man in the British parliament.”

“Did you—do you know him?”

Sumner nodded; dusted off a chair from which a stack of books had just been moved; arranged his frock coat with some fastidiousness, as he sat, very straight, and intoned, “ ‘The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land.’ ”

Chase nodded; and recited the next line of the famed speech against the Crimean War, “ ‘You may almost hear the beating of his wings.’ But you couldn’t have
heard
that speech. He gave it only six years ago.”

“No. But I read and learn his speeches, as do you, I see. I met Mr. Bright
at the time of the repeal of the Com Laws. He always dressed as a Quaker. I suppose he still does. We correspond occasionally.”

Chase’s heart beat more swiftly. “You would not happen to have … Oh, perhaps, a
tiny
scrap of paper with his name on it? A card is all, really.” Chase, who would not ask Lincoln for a post in the Cabinet, was on his knees to Sumner for an autograph.

“Of course. I’ll find you one.” Sumner looked vaguely at the portraits of two ladies. They hung side by side over the small fireplace.

“My first wife,” said Chase. “And my third. The second, Kate’s mother, hangs in the front parlor. Three times a widower,” Chase added, more with wonder than self-pity.

“As I am thricefold a bachelor,” said Sumner, which struck Chase as a somewhat heartless response to his own tragic fate.

“Have you never been tempted?” asked Chase.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I don’t think I really notice women, unless we have a subject in common. I’ll tell you what a Boston lady once said to me.” Sumner almost smiled; since he had no sense of humor at all, no one ever knew just what his smile might mean. “She asked me some gossipy question about an acquaintance, and I said, ‘I fear that I no longer have any interest in people, as such,’ and she said, ‘Why, Senator, not even God has gone as far as that.’ ”

Chase laughed; and Sumner laughed with him, but more out of politeness, Chase thought, than from any true purchase on the lady’s wit.

“You must let me take you to your new home,” said Sumner after a pause, during which he had been checking the title and author of nearly every book in the study.

“Oh, I think I had better stay here today—like Achilles in my tent.” Chase attempted lightness; and failed.

“The thing is still not decided.”

“I’m afraid it is. But why do I say afraid? To be senator from Ohio, the way that you are senator from Massachusetts, is a far greater thing than to be in any president’s Cabinet.”

“True,” said Sumner: then he added with exquisite lack of tact, “but since you dearly want to be President and I don’t, the Treasury is the better place for you to be. And”—Sumner may have lacked tact but he did not lack manners—“that is where
I
want you to be for the good of the country.”

Kate entered with a tray containing all the necessaries for tea. Sumner was on his feet, to help. If Chase had not known Sumner’s misogyny, he would have thought that that noble figure found Kate interesting. Although Chase had no idea what would ever happen to him if Kate were
to marry—the thought of a
fourth
Mrs. Chase made him feel like Bluebeard—he could think of no husband finer than Charles Sumner, who, he noticed, was, like himself, cleanshaven. Since Lincoln had grown his beard, all sorts of odd excrescences had begun to blossom on political faces.

Kate poured tea; Sumner assisted. “I did not see you at the ball last night. I looked, Miss Kate, truly I did.”

“You looked in vain. I was not there. Father?” she offered Chase tea, which he took, filling the cup with sugar.

“Surely you are not a secret secessionist?”

“No, Mr. Sumner. Quite the opposite. I am a
true
abolitionist.” Kate’s smile was mischievous. “Unlike so many of our men of state.”

“Oh,” said Sumner, frowning. “Oh, I say, that
is
a hard blow to the head.”

Considering Sumner’s recent history, Chase thought that references to blows to the head might not be in order; but Sumner was so entirely conscious of himself as to be, in no usual way, self-conscious. “You have a point, Miss Kate. Yesterday when Mr. Lincoln quoted the Constitution’s word and not its spirit, my heart sank. But as he is weak, why, all the more reason that we rally round him.”

“To support him in his support of slavery?” Kate was sharp. She would have made an extraordinary lawyer, Chase thought. Certainly, she had a better legal mind than he but then Chase had seen to it that her education had been finer than his. It thrilled him to hear her speak as intellectually the equal to Sumner, who was not known to suffer gladly even the brilliant if they were less brilliant than he.

“To guide him. To counterbalance Mr. Seward, the prime minister …”

Chase nodded agreement. “Seward
is
the administration of this country now.”

“There is no one to counterbalance him in the Cabinet,” Sumner began.

“Except Mr. Chase,” Kate concluded.

“But I am not there,” said Chase.

“But Seward is,” said Kate.

Sumner looked bemused. “I have been told that Mr. Seward dreams of some sort of war between us and all of Europe to distract our attention from the matter of slavery. He spoke to me in the most alarming way of Spain’s influence in South America and of France’s in Mexico.” Sumner groaned. “He thinks we should invoke the Monroe Doctrine and drive them out of the Western hemisphere,
with
the support of the Southern states, who would then, presumably, extend slavery over the entire southern half of our hemisphere.”

“Thank Heaven,” said Chase, “that you are the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.”

“Curious how Seward has changed.” Sumner was thoughtful. “He gave the greatest speech, as a lawyer, in defense of a black man …”

“The Freeman Case.” Chase nodded.

“William Gladstone wrote me that that speech was the finest forensic effort in the English language.”

“Gladstone
writes
you often?” Inadvertently, Chase shivered with pleasure.

The manservant entered the study; he murmured something to Kate. “Who?” she asked.

“Mr. John Hay, he says his name is …”

“Oh, Father!” Kate sprang to her feet. “I’ll bring him in. You stay right there. Both of you.” She hurried from the room.

Sumner nodded gravely. “It is the call, Mr. Chase.”

“I do not count on it.”

In the vestibule, Kate was astonished to see a handsome young man only a year or two older than herself. “Miss Chase?”

“Yes, sir. And you’re Mr. Hay? The President’s secretary?”

Hay nodded. “One of two, Miss Chase.” Hay had been prepared for Kate’s youth but not for her beauty—or level gaze. There was nothing at all feminine in the way that she looked at him, as if she wanted to open up his forehead and discover what he knew. For all Kate’s dark-golden hair, slender waist, luminous skin, she was just another shrewd politician—as opposite to last night’s Marie-Jeanne as dawn to dusk, he thought, in an ecstasy of what might have been poetry. Oh, he was smack-dab in the middle of life at last!

“Might I see Senator Chase?”

“Of course.” But Kate did not move. She looked up at him: hazel eyes met hazel eyes. Hay was still energized by Marie-Jeanne—or electricized, to use the word made popular by the electric-shock machines that had recently become fashionable for sluggish men and neurasthenic ladies. Hay saw no reason not to turn upon this enchanting-looking if not entirely enchanting girl his newly electricized charm. As he looked straight into her eyes, he let himself revert to the mood of the night before. Suddenly, as if an electrical shock had been transmitted, Kate gave a little cry, and turned pale. “Oh, come in. Come in.” She was a virgin, Hay decided, with the sharp intuitiveness of a man who knows, at a glance, all that there is to know about women.

Hay was not entirely surprised to see Senator Sumner in Senator Chase’s study. Both statesmen rose, very slowly, at the young man’s
entrance. Kate stayed in the doorway, not part of the meeting but not apart from it either.

“Gentlemen.” Hay shook hands all round.

“You were at … Brown,” said Sumner, to Hay’s surprise. He had not thought the great man would remember.

“Yes, sir. I heard you speak there.”

Chase cleared his throat. He was now at the crucial moment of his career. He was aware that the tremor that sometimes appeared in his left hand had begun. He shoved the hand into his coat, like the first Napoleon. “Mr. Hay …” he began.

“Mr. Chase,” the young man broke in. “I have come from the President, who wishes me to inform you that he has, this morning, sent your name to the Senate for confirmation in the office of Secretary of the Treasury.”

“Bravo!” Sumner clapped his hands. Hay heard a sigh from Kate behind him; he was an expert now at women’s sighs.

Chase was very pale. “You must tell the President that it is customary to inquire
in advance
if the one nominated to an office chooses to accept that nomination.”

“But, sir”—Hay had been prepared for this—“the President assumed in the light of his conversation with you at Springfield that you would be pleased to accept the office.”

“That was some months ago.” Chase was furious; and he could not think why. He wanted very much the office. But he did not want to accept it from Lincoln. The fact that he was the man’s superior morally and intellectually did not matter so much. After all, he fully expected to succeed him at the next election. But to be so
used
—that was the word!—by an inferior, to be kept dangling like this until the last possible moment; all this was unbearable. “I have now,” Chase heard himself say, as if from a far distance, “taken my oath as a United States senator, and I look forward to serving with men of the utmost morality and honor like Senator Sumner …”