Lincoln (16 page)

“Now, Mr. Chase.” Sumner gave his colleague a warning look. “Mr. Lincoln has been torn this way and that since he arrived from Springfield. But I do know that he told me that he knew of no one more suited for the Treasury …”

Kate intervened. “Mr. Hay, I think the President should give my father a day or two to decide where his highest loyalty lies. To the people of Ohio, or to the people of the entire Union.”

Hay bowed to Chase and Sumner; then Kate led him to the vestibule, where the manservant waited to let him out. “Tell the President that this is all a bit abrupt.”

“I will tell him that.” Again Hay felt the electrical impulse between them. But this time he realized that it was all on his side. Although he was still a young male, she had ceased to be a desirable young female and had become a hard political manager, with a long-range presidential campaign to administer.

“Thank you, Mr. Hay. Good-day, sir.”

When Hay was gone, Kate hurried back to the study and while Hay took the horsecars back to the White House, contemplating in an ecstatic blur the dark and the light of feminine bodies, Kate joined Sumner not so much in changing Chase’s mind as in finding a way for this proud, stubborn man to accept the office that he wanted so desperately from the hands of a man he so deeply despised.

“He’ll accept in a day or two,” said Hay to Nicolay. “My God, she’s a looker, that daughter of his.”

“So they say. Congratulations, by the way. You are now a clerk in the Pension Office of the Department of the Interior.”

“I’m
what?
” Hay was stunned.

Nicolay laughed. “Congress won’t let the President have two secretaries, so we’ve got you on the payroll at Interior. Sixteen hundred a year.”

“A fortune,” said Hay; and meant it.

They were in Nicolay’s office with its view of Lafayette Square and the rampant statue of Andrew Jackson atop his horse, the worst piece of equestrian sculpture in the world, according to Senator Sumner, who always made newcomers to Washington swear to him, solemnly, that they would never actually look at the statue no matter how close they might be to it.

Hay’s office was no more than a cubbyhole off Nicolay’s spacious room but with the adjoining door open, Hay felt less confined; also, since their duties overlapped, each was constantly in and out of the other’s office. The center of their activity was a huge secretaire brought up from the basement. Here, in dozens of drawers, they did their best to file some eighteen thousand applications for government jobs. On a large table in front of the window, the nation’s press was arranged each day, including newspapers from the South. It was Hay’s task to make a daily précis for the President of what might interest him, which was surprisingly little.

Outside Nicolay’s office the waiting room was full from nine in the morning until six at night. The clerk behind the railing took down each name before allowing the supplicants into the waiting room, while, downstairs, the doorman Old Edward screened everyone at the main door. Old Edward was adept, usually, at separating the plain mad from those simply crazed for office. The would-be appointees would then make their way
up the stairs to the waiting room and, in the process, they would fill up the dark corridor that led from the President’s quarters to the offices. Mary had already made one scene that morning when a half-dozen would-be postmasters burst into the oval sitting room of the living quarters where she and her lady relatives were sitting about in their morning robes.

“McManus, I will not endure this, do you hear me!” She had shouted at Old Edward, as he led the shaken postmasters-that-might-have-been from her presence. Old Edward had then returned with a full-time guard, “Who’ll shoot to kill, ma’am, should anyone try to break in on you.”

By then Mary’s humor was somewhat recovered. “Ladies do not like to be seen by strangers in the morning,” she said. Old Edward said that he understood.

Mary laughed when the door closed behind him. The relatives laughed, too. None of the women was properly assembled for the day. The crinolines and the vast hoopskirts had been put away, and although each enjoyed showing off her morning robe to the other ladies, strange men were forbidden to gaze on these feminine mysteries.

Mary wore a rose-colored cashmere wrapper, with quilting down the front; and her hair was done up in a red turban like Dolley Madison—or, said Cousin Lizzie, “Like a Zouave.”

Since breakfast, the ladies had been analyzing the previous night’s ball. Mary’s full sister, Mrs. Edwards, taller than Mary but not quite as plump, took a hard line against the ladies of Washington. “They are so ill-mannered,” she said, pouring coffee from a dented silver urn that Cousin Lizzie swore had been thrown out by Martha Washington.

“The few that were there,” said Mary, frowning; all morning she had felt as if she might, at any moment, be struck by The Headache, which she feared more than death. When the clamp of fire went round her head, she could not see for the pain and, often, she would end up flat on the floor, vomiting from the pain. The Headache, as she always thought of it, to differentiate it from ordinary headaches, had begun some years earlier. She knew that many thought that she was shamming but her husband was not one of them. Whenever he could, he would stay with her, no matter how terrible her behavior and it could be, she knew, or, rather, had been told, like that of a mad woman. But if The Headache was near, it was not yet ready to strike her down; if it did, she was surrounded by relatives and friends, women who understood the problem.

Meanwhile, the behavior of the Washington ladies was meticulously discussed by the Springfield-Lexington contingent. “They seem to think,” said one of the nieces, “that we are log-cabin women, never before out of the woods.”

“Well,” said Lizzie, “Cousin Lincoln can take full credit for that. All that nonsense about being born in a log cabin when that’s all there was to be born in in those days in that part of Kentucky. But during the campaign was there ever a picture of Cousin Lincoln’s Springfield mansion in the press?”

“Well, I don’t think Mr. Lincoln would have thought that appropriate,” said Mary. She had had that argument with her husband; and lost. “Anyway, the local ladies hereabouts strike me as provincial in a way that Springfield and certainly Lexington ladies are not. If nothing else, we have better manners. Did you see the story in the paper, criticizing the way that I address gentlemen always as ‘Sir’? That is hardly provincial.”

“But, maybe, a bit old-fashioned,” said Lizzie.

“Well, it’s definitely Southern and sounds right to me,” said the half-sister from Alabama. “Anyway, Sister Mary, we’re kin to the only two high-and-mighty families hereabouts, the Blairs and the Breckinridges, and that’s more that these tacky shopkeepers’ wives can ever claim!”

The ladies applauded this celebration of their family. “It is strange,” said Mary, “that
everyone
was at Lexington when I was a child, except Mr. Lincoln, who was nearby in Indiana. We had Mr. Clay at his estate, Ashland.” She smiled in memory. “Harry of the West; everyone in the world called him that. As if he was our country’s king, which he was, or should’ve been. Then there was this little boy with the pale eyes, who is now … who
was
until now, Vice-President Breckinridge. And I can remember a handsome young man at Transylvania University, very pale and very elegant he was, who gave an address on graduation day called ‘Friendship,’ just before he went off to West Point.”

“Who on earth was that?” asked Lizzie, who knew but the younger women did not.

“Jefferson Davis,” said Mary, just as one of the housemaids opened the door from the bedroom adjacent to the oval sitting room, and said, “Mrs. Lincoln, the mantua-maker is here.”

Mary excused herself and went into the bedroom, where she found a well-dressed mulatto woman, who gave a little curtsey. “I am Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln. I heard that you needed someone to make you a dress, and so I offer myself. I am well recommended.” She opened her reticule and gave Mary a number of letters. Mary took them; but she did not glance at them. She studied the woman’s face carefully; and liked what she saw. The face was strong and not at all negroid. The nose was large and aquiline; the mouth straight. She appeared to be in early middle life.

“Now I cannot afford to be extravagant,” said Mary. “As you know—and
as everyone says—we are from the outlandish West, and very, very poor. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, Mrs. Lincoln.” Keckley smiled.

“Good. We begin to understand each other. Now every Friday we are obliged to give a reception in the evening. That is expected of us.” Without thinking, Mary began to make the bed; and Keckley helped her. The room was currently inhabited by two of the Springfield ladies; and their previous evening’s finery was everywhere; and in disorder. “I shall need a dress …”

“That’s only three days from now,” said Keckley, taking over entirely the making of the bed.

“I know it is short notice. But I was told that you were not only good but quick.” Mary was at the window. She glanced at the letters in her hand.

“You have the material?”

“Yes, and the pattern. The stuff is rose-colored moiré-antique and …” Mary had found a familiar hand. “You worked for Mrs. Jefferson Davis. How strange! I was just speaking of Mr. Davis.”

“Yes, I worked for Mrs. Davis.” The bed was now made. “I was very fond of Mrs. Davis.”

“Then why didn’t you go South with her?”

“Well … Look at me.” Keckley gestured.

“I
am
looking at you.”

“I am colored.”

“But free.”

“Even so, I could never live in a slave state. I am an abolitionist. In fact, I must warn you, Mrs. Lincoln, I am very political.”

“Oh, so am I!” Mary was delighted. “But, of course, I must be careful in what I say. The vampire press is always ready to spring at me.” Mary had begun to pace the floor in front of the window, with its view of the incomplete monument to Washington. “It is so comical. They say that I am pro-Southern and pro-slavery and that I try to influence Mr. Lincoln, who is really, they say, a secret abolitionist. Well, it is nearly the reverse. Mr. Lincoln knows nothing of slavery, except what he has heard from me and my family in Lexington. Yes, we had … and we have slaves. But we did not traffic in them, and they governed our lives and not the other way around. Nelson was the butler. He made the finest mint juleps in Kentucky, so everyone said, while Mammy Sally brought us all up and gave us the most thorough spankings you could ever imagine! I see her yet …” Mary paused; then frowned. “We lived on Main Street. One of my first memories is that of the slaves, chained together, being marched
to the auction block which was in a corner of the main square of Lexington, the courthouse square, while in the other corner there was the whipping-post, some ten feet high, black locust wood, made even blacker because of the blood. Oh, I can hear the screams yet.” Mary shut her eyes; and remembered. “We had a mark on our house, a secret mark that meant that runaway slaves would be fed by Mammy Sally. She tried to keep me from seeing them but, of course, I had to. And I talked to them. Saw their scars. Heard how families had been broken up. Oh, and then there was Judge Turner!”

Mary swung away from the window; the Potomac shone silver in the distance. “They were neighbors. Mrs. Turner came from Boston. She was a large, showy, violent woman. She beat to death seven slaves that we know of. She threw out the window a six-year-old boy, and broke his back. My father was furious—he was a considerable political force in Kentucky. So he was able to insist that a jury inquire into Mrs. Turner’s sanity. But while the jury was being impanelled, Judge Turner sent his wife to the lunatic asylum. So by the time the jury was ready to act, the asylum had let her go, saying she was perfectly sane. Which, no doubt, she was, as monsters so often are. When Judge Turner died, he left his slaves to his children. But he put it in his will that none should go to his wife—Caroline her name was—because if they did, she would torture them to death. But she overturned the will and got the slaves, including a handsome, bright-yellow boy, brighter than you, named Richard, who was her coachman. Richard could read and write and would, no doubt, be free by now. This was seventeen years ago. But one morning she chained him up and started to beat him—to beat him to death. He was in such pain that he pulled out of the wall the hook to which his chains were attached, and then he seized the monster by the throat, and choked her to death, then and there.”

“A happy ending,” said Keckley, grimly.

“A
righteous
ending for her but not for Richard. He was arrested by the sheriff, one of Mr. Lincoln’s cousins, curiously enough, and tried for murder, and hanged.”

“There is no justice on earth.”

“There will be some, when Mr. Lincoln is finished with his work on earth.”

Keckley smiled, “You make him sound like the Lord.”

“Do I?” Mary laughed. “Well, if he is the Lord, he is not a Christian one. When Mr. Lincoln was elected to Congress, his opponent was a Methodist preacher who kept accusing Mr. Lincoln of being an infidel. One night during the campaign the preacher was giving one of his hellfire
sermons in a church when Mr. Lincoln walked in, and sat in the back. The preacher decided to trap Mr. Lincoln. So he shouted, ‘Those of you who expect to go to Heaven, rise!’ Well, Mr. Lincoln did not stir. The preacher then pointed his finger at Mr. Lincoln so that everybody would know that he was there. ‘Those of you who expect to go to hell, rise!’ Mr. Lincoln did not stir. So the preacher said to the congregation, ‘All those who think they are going to Heaven and all those who think they are going to hell have risen to their feet but Mr. Lincoln has not moved. So where, Mr. Lincoln, do you think that
you
are going?’ At that, Mr. Lincoln got up and said, ‘Well, I
expect
to go to Congress,’ and left the church.”

The two women laughed together. Then Mary said, “Ask the housekeeper for the material. And remember, no matter what you hear, that I am the one who wants slavery destroyed once and for all, and it is Mr. Lincoln who thinks it’s a bad thing but nothing to make any fuss about if a fuss can be avoided.”