Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (42 page)

When Elizabeth completed her errand and departed, which she did as quickly as she could, she fervently hoped that she had crossed the threshold for the last time.

Elizabeth had promised Mrs. Douglas that she would create her long-overdue spring trousseau as soon as she returned from Chicago, so after setting Emma to the task of delivering notes to her favorite patrons to inform them she was back in business, she called on Mrs. Douglas to meet their engagement. Mrs. Douglas looked very pleased to see her, but also quite surprised. “Why, Mrs. Keckley,” she exclaimed, “can it really be you? I did not know you were coming back so soon. It was reported that you would remain with Mrs. Lincoln all summer.”

Elizabeth acknowledged that she had expected to stay longer too. “Mrs. Lincoln would have been glad to have kept me with her had she been able.”

“Able?” Mrs. Douglas echoed. “What do you mean by that?”

“Only that she is already laboring under pecuniary embarrassment, and was only able to pay my expenses, and allow nothing for my time.”

“You surprise me. I thought she was left in good circumstances.”

“So many think, it appears,” said Elizabeth ruefully. “I assure you, Mrs. Lincoln is now practicing the closest economy.” She went on to tell her of Mrs. Lincoln’s fruitless efforts to obtain a widow’s pension from
the government and the withholding of her inheritance due to the delays sorting out her husband’s estate.

In the days and weeks to come, Elizabeth would share the tale of Mrs. Lincoln’s woes to mutual acquaintances and sympathetic patrons—Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Welles, anyone kind enough to listen and perhaps to advocate her cause to their influential husbands and friends. If the truth about Mrs. Lincoln’s circumstances came to light, perhaps Congress would be compelled to make a provision for her.

With Mrs. Douglas’s spring trousseau at last under way, Elizabeth gathered her assistants, polished her sign, and, to her great relief, soon had her business going along at a steady pace. As word of her return to Washington spread, orders soon began to come in faster than Elizabeth could fill them. One day in late June, the girl attending the door found Elizabeth in the cutting room, where she was hard at work on a lovely rose silk gown. “Mrs. Keckley,” the youngest of her assistants said, “there is a lady below who wants to see you.”

Caught in the middle of a difficult section, Elizabeth finished cutting before she answered. “Who is she?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t learn her name.”

Elizabeth did not want to interrupt her work at that moment, but she also didn’t wish to offend an important patron. “Is her face familiar? Does she look like a regular customer?”

The girl shook her head. “No, she is a stranger. I don’t think she was ever here before. She came in an open carriage, with a colored woman for an attendant.”

“It might be the wife of one of Johnson’s new secretaries,” Emma mused.

“Do go down, Mrs. Keckley,” urged another assistant.

Their curiosity had fanned the flames of her own, so she set down the shears, brushed loose threads from her skirt, and went below. When she entered the parlor, a tall, brown-haired, plainly dressed woman rose and asked, “Is this the dressmaker, Mrs. Keckley?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth replied. “I am she.”

“Mrs. Lincoln’s former dressmaker, were you not?”

“Yes, I worked for Mrs. Lincoln.”

The woman smiled. “And are you very busy now?”

Elizabeth spread her hands and laughed, indicating the workroom just beyond, where the sounds of her industrious assistants hard at work could not be mistaken. “Very, indeed.”

“Can you do anything for me?”

“That depends what is to be done, and when it is to be done.”

The woman tapped her chin with her forefinger, thinking. “Well, say one dress now, and several others a few weeks later.”

Elizabeth quickly ran through her mental list of work she had already accepted. “I can make one dress for you now, but no more,” she said with a hint of polite regret. “I cannot finish the one for you in less than three weeks.”

“That will answer,” the woman said, her manner cheerfully decisive. “I am Mrs. Patterson, the daughter of President Johnson. I expect my sister, Mrs. Stover, here in three weeks, and the dress is for her. We are both the same size, and you can fit the dress to me.”

For a brief, disquieting moment, Elizabeth wished she had asked the woman for her name before agreeing to sew for her, but they soon arranged satisfactory terms. After Elizabeth measured Mrs. Patterson, she bade her good morning, entered her carriage, and drove away.

When Elizabeth returned to the workroom, her assistants were naturally eager to learn who her visitor had been. “It was Mrs. Patterson,” she replied. “The daughter of President Johnson.”

“What?” exclaimed one of the girls. “The daughter of our good Moses. Are you going to work for her?”

When Elizabeth spoke, it felt like an admission of guilt. “I have taken her order.”

“I fear that Johnson will prove a poor Moses,” said Emma, frowning, “and I would not work for any of the family.”

Several of the young women murmured agreement. It was not until that moment that Elizabeth realized how little they liked Mr. Lincoln’s successor. That Mrs. Lincoln disliked him, Elizabeth knew, and that he
had made a bad impression when he had arrived drunk for his own inauguration, all of Washington was well aware. But since Mr. Johnson had taken office, Elizabeth had been either sequestered with the grieving First Widow in her White House chambers or hundreds of miles away in Hyde Park. She knew very little about any policies he might have enacted or speeches he had made in the past few weeks, but clearly, he had not won over the women in that room.

Elizabeth wondered if Mr. Johnson would turn out to be as poor a leader as Emma predicted, or if her assistants were merely biased against him because he was not Mr. Lincoln, the Great Emancipator they had all admired and respected. That, Elizabeth thought, with the first pang of empathy she had felt for him, was not his fault, and he should not be condemned for it.

Before long she finished the first dress for Mrs. Patterson—or rather, her sister—and was pleased when it was received with great satisfaction. She agreed to make additional dresses for the sisters, and as the summer passed, she discovered that both Mrs. Patterson and Mrs. Stover were kind, plain, unassuming women, making no pretensions to elegance. One day when she called at the White House, she found Mrs. Patterson busily at work with a sewing machine. The novelty of the sight struck her, because although Mrs. Lincoln knew how to sew and had owned a lovely sewing machine in a solid redwood full case, silver plated and adorned with inlaid pearl and enamel, Elizabeth had never seen her use it, nor could she recall having ever seen Mrs. Lincoln with a needle in her hand.

But as pleasant as the sisters were, and as kindly as they treated her, Elizabeth was never entirely happy in their employ. She rarely glimpsed Mr. Johnson, so he was not the problem, although she could not forget how he had slighted Mrs. Lincoln by neglecting to offer his condolences after Mr. Lincoln’s death. She could not cross the threshold of the White House without remembering the pleasant hours she had once spent there or the kind familiarity Mr. Lincoln had always shown her. She missed collaborating with Mrs. Lincoln on a stunning new gown, as the sisters took little interest in fashion and preferred simple, long-sleeved
garments with high necklines and collars and scant ornamentation. She missed hearing Mr. Lincoln address her as “Madam Elizabeth” and “combing down his bristles” before he escorted his wife to a levee. She even missed his silly, rambunctious goats. The White House held so many vivid associations for her that every step she took, every direction she turned, evoked a memory from a past more satisfying than the present. It pained her to be in the White House when Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln no longer could be.

In August, Elizabeth had recently finished two light summer linen dresses, one for each sister, when Mrs. Patterson sent her a note requesting her to come to the White House to cut and fit another, warmer dress for her in anticipation of autumn. Some strange mood possessed Elizabeth in that moment, and she curtly wrote back that she never cut and fitted work outside of her workrooms. This brought her business relations with the president’s daughters to an abrupt end.

Emma regarded Elizabeth curiously when she explained why they would not be sewing anything else for the White House hostesses. “You told them you never cut and fitted dresses except within your workrooms, but you used to do so for Mrs. Lincoln.”

“Yes, on occasion, but Mrs. Lincoln never objected to coming here. In fact, I think she enjoyed it—perhaps even preferred it.”

“I remember.” Emma regarded her from beneath raised brows. “I also recall that you used to say that you never approved of ladies attached to the presidential household coming to your rooms. You said it was more consistent with their dignity to send for you, and have you go to them.”

“Well—” Elizabeth paused, thinking, but it was no use. “You’re quite right. I have said that, and I did feel that way. I
do
feel that way. I cannot explain why I responded to Mrs. Patterson as I did.”

“
I
can explain,” said Emma, as if it were obvious. “You don’t want to work for them, but you don’t know how to refuse them.”

“I must be mad to do so,” said Elizabeth, pressing a hand to her forehead. “They’ve been perfectly agreeable patrons, and who turns down work from the president’s daughters?”

“The most popular modiste in Washington City, that’s who.” Emma swept her arm toward the busy workroom, where all of her assistants were industriously sewing, sitting up straight as she had taught them to avoid backaches and neck strain. “You’re not mad at all, nor were you impertinent. You didn’t refuse to work for Mrs. Patterson; you agreed to work for her, so long as the cutting and fitting took place here, and she declined.”

Elizabeth sighed. “I suppose that is one way of looking at it.”

“It’s the only way to look at it.” Emma smiled fondly and shook her head. “You can choose your customers, Elizabeth, and you can afford to be particular.”

Looking around the workroom, Elizabeth realized that indeed, perhaps she could.

By the end of summer, Elizabeth’s business had prospered so much that she opened a second shop in the market, but Mrs. Lincoln’s prolific correspondence revealed that she was faring far less well. She said virtually nothing about the June trial and July execution of the four conspirators condemned to die on the gallows for their part in her husband’s assassination, but she poured out her sorrow when she informed Elizabeth of the death of Dr. Anson Henry, one of the few friends from her Springfield days who had not abandoned her. “I will never forget how tenderly and solicitously he cared for me in the weeks after my beloved husband’s death,” she lamented. “To think of him lost at sea is almost more than I can bear.”

Mrs. Lincoln also felt control of her husband’s legacy slipping from her grasp. She had won an important early skirmish when she overruled the Illinois dignitaries in choosing the location of her husband’s memorial and tomb, but another battle was brewing against an opponent she had not seen coming. Her husband’s former Springfield law partner, William H. Herndon, hoped to write a revelatory book about the president’s “inner life” and had taken to poking about asking Mr. Lincoln’s friends and acquaintances to confide their memories to him. Mrs.
Lincoln was troubled by Mr. Herndon’s actions, but Robert was incensed. It was one matter to study a politician, he declared, because having his private life exposed to the public was part of the price he paid for his office. It was another thing altogether to subject his wife and children to such uninvited scrutiny, to compel them to live inside a “glass house.”

All the while, the beauties of Hyde Park continued to elude her. “I am miserable,” Mrs. Lincoln wrote later in July. “I remain sequestered in my rooms except to take an occasional walk in the park, and of course I see no one, becalmed as I am on the
far off
shores of Lake Michigan.” In August, she quit the Hyde Park Hotel and moved herself and her sons to the Clifton House, a respected residential hotel at Wabash Avenue and Monroe Street in central Chicago. Tad enrolled in a local school and was determined to catch up to his peers, and Robert apprenticed at Scammon, McCagg & Fuller, a prominent Chicago law firm. But any satisfaction she might have found in her new residence and her sons’ accomplishments was dimmed by her ongoing torment. Grief stricken and feeling abandoned, Mrs. Lincoln remained terrified of poverty and debt, and it seemed she could think of little else. Her creditors had hesitated to pester her about her overdue bills when she was First Lady, but recently they had begun threatening to sue her and to publish lists of her debts in the papers. She wrote to friends, former White House staff, and members of the House of Representatives pleading her case and asking them to use their influence to assist her, and Elizabeth could well imagine the alternately desperate, hectoring, flattering, and relentless tone of her letters. Although her husband’s frequent critic Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Tribune
, astonished Mrs. Lincoln by taking up a subscription to raise money for “the late president’s grieving widow and her fatherless sons,” her own efforts seemed all in vain.