The Emancipator's Wife (47 page)

To whom would custodianship pass?

She understood now, exactly, why John Wilamet and his family had fled from Virginia, why Lizabet Keckley had humbled herself before her white friends, had begged and worked and borrowed money to obtain a freedom which offered her no guarantee of anything except more hard work.

She hadn't thought of Lizabet in a long time. Now she remembered the dressmaker's melodious alto voice saying, “I find helping others eases my grief.”

Helping others,
thought Mary.
Not “resting,” as Dr. Patterson calls it.

Without John there to talk to it was hard sometimes to remember why she shouldn't simply call for medicine. The thought
He'll never know, after all
crossed her mind with a frequency that horrified her.

But the memory of the time when she had been well enough, and free enough, to help others let her lie down on her bed in all her clothing, and close her eyes. To take her mind off the nagging ache in her heart and in her flesh, she counted up the addresses she knew—doctors, Congressmen, any man in power who might possibly owe her a favor from her days of success.

But if all of them had deserted her then, what made her think any of them would be of help to her now?

In her dream she was in the Cook County Courthouse in Chicago again, the heat so thick that she feared she would die. Her head pounded, her heart felt sick, her flesh itched like fire, and her mind reeled woozily. In a half-daze she looked from face to sweating face of those respectable citizens on the jury. “I am of the opinion that Mrs. Lincoln is insane,” said Dr. Danforth on the witness stand, and beside her, her lawyer Isaac Arnold said, “No questions.”

“On one occasion she spent $600 on lace curtains; on another, $450 on three watches which she gave to me, for which I had no use....” Robert's mouth moved under his mustache, his eyes fixed at some spot on the cornice-molding above her head.

“No questions,” Arnold said, and in her dream she leaped to her feet, screamed at them, “Cowards, blackguards and cowards!” They took no notice of her. Robert went on spouting prices and dates and opinions of her sanity. The jury—which included Dr. Patterson, now, and Young Doc, and President Grant and Nate Bodley—all nodded their heads wisely.

A firm hand took her elbow and drew her down into the chair. Turning her head she saw Lincoln beside her, dressed in the rather shabby black suit he wore on the circuit courts, his black hair rumpled and hanging in his eyes. He had a couple of legal briefs in front of him and his
saddlebags lay on the floor beside his chair. “Do something!” she hissed. Lincoln was the best lawyer in the state. He'd argue rings around Ayers and Swett.

Lincoln listened to Robert for a few minutes more—“She spent $700 on jewelry last month, $200 on soaps and perfumes, though she has no home in which to hang curtains, trunks full of dresses which she never wears. . . .”

He leaned close and whispered, “I think you're going to have to get another lawyer, Molly.”

“Why?” she demanded. “Who?”

But before he could reply there was the crack of a gunshot, hideously loud in the enclosed heat of the courtroom, and his arm jerked convulsively, wrenching away from her hand. Mary caught him as he slumped, smelled the gunpowder and the horrible hot smell of blood. . . .

S
HE JERKED AWAKE, GASPING, HER WHOLE BODY TREMBLING.
T
HE
smell of blood lingered in her nostrils, on the shoulder of her dress. She could swear the smell of gunpowder gritted in the air. Her whole body ached for the comfort of the medicine, the comfort of darkness.

You're going to have to get another lawyer.

She knew exactly who he meant.

Someone whom she would not even have met, save for the long
Calvary that followed the election of 1860: the Calvary that ended in nightmare.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-EIGHT

Springfield January 1861

T
HE PICTURE WAS CRUDELY DRAWN, AND SO VICIOUS THAT IT
TOOK
Mary a moment to realize what it was.

It was her husband's nude body, hanging by the neck from a dead tree. His flesh was splotched with tar and feathers and his features were drawn so as to be almost Negroid, but there was a sign around his neck saying
Old Abe,
in case there was any question of identity. Under it was scrawled in brownish fluid that had powdered away in the paper's creases,
SAY YOUR PRAYERS NIGGER-LOVER.

Mary recoiled in shock. Beneath that folded paper, on Lincoln's small desk beside his bedroom window, there were others, some of them drawings, some of them letters. She glimpsed only a word or two, but the hatred seemed to rise off the paper like a stench.
“Nigger-lover.” “You are bound for Hell and we will send you there.” “Liar.” “Ignorant ape.” “You will never live to reach Washington.” “Word has reached us that there is an organization forming in New Orleans for the express purpose of your murder.” “Say your prayers.”

“Molly.”

She turned, breathless, to see Lincoln framed in the doorway of the hall, one of Sheba's new kittens in his huge hand. Her terrified face told him at once what she'd seen. He set the kitten on the bed in passing, strode to her side.

“It's all right,” he said.

“All right?
All right?
Those—those
things . . .
that
filth . . .”
She stared up into his face. His battered trunk from his Congressional days stood open beside his dresser—he still owned little besides a few shirts and his books. He could almost have moved to Washington with his saddlebags, the way he'd come to Springfield twenty-five years ago. The new suit he'd purchased to go to New York in lay spread out on the bed, already acquiring a faint speckling of cat-hair. A dozen newspapers strewed the carpet.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I didn't think you needed to know.”

“You didn't think I needed to know?” she screamed, her terror flaring into rage. “Someone threatens to murder my husband, calls him—”

“Mother!” He stepped close again, and she slapped his hands aside. “Mother, not so loud.”

Sturdy footsteps shook the stairs. “Who's going to murder Pa?” Willie came tearing into the room, snow flecking his dark hair. Lincoln immediately scooped up the letters and slipped them into the drawer of his little writing-table. “Seceshes?”

On Willie's tenth birthday, four days before Christmas, news had reached Springfield that the State of South Carolina had voted to take itself out of the Union. Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama were all reported to be on the verge of secession as well, and President Buchanan—an elderly diplomat whose election four years ago had owed a great deal to the fact that he'd been in England during most of the sectional squabbling of the Fifties—had responded only by setting up various Congressional committees to look into compromise.

Lincoln grinned, and ruffled his son's hair. “They'll have to catch me first.”

“Oh, my God,” Mary whispered, as Willie went to the narrow bed to gather up the kitten. “I can't leave you at a time like this....”

Her own six trunks were already packed in her room, preparatory for departure for New York. For weeks—between visits from Congressmen and Senators, men whom Lincoln hoped to forge into a Cabinet—Mary had been trying to organize which of their furniture and possessions were to be sold, and which put in storage in the attic box-room for four years, until their return. When Philadelphia political boss Simon Cameron—to whom David Davis had promised a Cabinet position in return for Pennsylvania's votes, to Lincoln's outraged disgust—came to Springfield, he had spoken to her over dinner about the White House furnishings. Some things, like dishes, belonged to the house, but Presidents brought their own linens, bedside lamps, “everyday” dishes, small furnishings for the personal parlors upstairs.

A quick review of most of the contents of the house at Jackson and Eighth had convinced her that a shopping-trip to New York was in order. Since Ann's husband, the jolly and diffident Mr. Smith, was about to embark on a buying-trip to New York for his store here in town, he'd offered to escort her and her sister. Mary still recalled, from their passing visit in '49, all those beautiful shops in New York, places she had barely glimpsed.

She recalled, too, with vivid envy, the hostesses of Washington: the glittering Mrs. Corcoran, the haughty Mrs. Clay of Alabama, the vivacious Varina Davis—the way those stylish uncrowned queens had looked down on the outdated ruffles of a Western Congressman's wife. She would not give anyone the opportunity to do so again. (“Definitely Stewart's,” Cameron had purred, to her question. “I shall send a letter telling him you're coming....And look in at Laurent DeVries's as well. Laurent's silks tend to be more à la mode, though
never
tell Alec Stewart I said so.”)

But if anything should happen to Lincoln while she was gone...

“I'll be all right, Mother. You know you want to go and I think the change'll be good for you. Besides, Bob is expecting you to come back here with him. I'll be in a little more danger without your protection—” He dodged aside as she slapped at him. “—but I'll manage.”

“We'll protect Pa.” Willie's face was radiant at the prospect of standing guard. “Me and Tad and Fido.” To demonstrate his readiness to die in his master's defense, Fido half-woke from his doze in the corner, sat up, and yawned.

Mary left two days later, nagged by the thought of what other threats her husband might be hiding from her, but elated to be gone. Since the election she had seen almost nothing of Lincoln, except when he came home, preoccupied and exhausted, from his makeshift office in the governor's room of the State House. Every few days he would have someone to the house, and Mary and Maria Francesca would put together a dinner to entertain them.

After reading about them for years in the newspapers, Mary felt she knew them all, even those who hadn't been pointed out to her in Chicago. Supporters like square-built Norman Judd, or men like myopic former Governor Chase of Ohio who had vied with Lincoln for the nomination. Lincoln spoke to Chase about a Cabinet post, which Mary thought a mistake: how could a rival be trusted? Simon Cameron thought—and had broadly hinted—that he would like to be made Secretary of the Treasury, despite the fact that his Philadelphia political machine was corrupt from top to bottom and he himself couldn't be trusted with twenty-five cents.

And elegant little William Seward, whom Lincoln wanted as Secretary of State, clearly envisioned himself as ruling the country with Lincoln as a mere figurehead.

Lincoln conferred with them all, patiently, keeping his thoughts to himself so well that none of them seemed to realize that he
had
thoughts. Which suited Lincoln just fine.

If Mary had thought the reporters were bad before the election, now they flocked like vampires in some Gothic novel. What would Old Abe do if President Buchanan surrendered the U.S. military installations in Charleston Harbor to the new South Carolina government?
(Do you think the secessionists don't read your newspaper, sir?)
Is the Rail-Splitter going to free the slaves?
(I suggest you review his speeches over the past fifteen years. . . .)
Mary would exert herself to be polite and gracious when she really wanted to chase them out of the house with a broom, and they'd smile and tip their hats and then go back to their home cities and print the most horrifying misquotations, misrepresentations, and outright lies.

Worse than any of these pests were the candidates for government jobs, great and small. “I voted for you and got all my friends to vote for you, now you make me assistant secretary of Nevada Territory....”

It was her dream of patronage and power transformed to nightmare by sheer volume. It seemed as if everyone in the United States were making a pilgrimage to Springfield to talk to Lincoln, as if, with other states threatening to pull out of the Union, he had no more important things to deal with. And during all this, Tad and Willie ran wild with excitement, trying to make their own shrill voices heard by their distracted parents and refusing to be fobbed off with Aunt Lizzie or Lincoln's young clerk Mr. Ellsworth.

Mary felt intensely disloyal about the relief that filled her as the train pulled away for New York. For the time being, she could be away from the aggravation of the situation, and could revel in her dream of the future. Her dressmaker in St. Louis—Madame Blois to whom she'd begun going when Lincoln started working for the railroads—had been ecstatic when she'd heard, as she'd written to Mary: so much to prepare for, such a great office to fill.

True, Mary reflected, but though she'd have to start with several gowns appropriate to the wife of the President, she wasn't entirely certain that Madame Blois was up to the very latest styles. She'd have to see who the really elegant ladies of Washington—Mrs. Corcoran, and Mrs. Clay, and General Davis's wife—went to. Her luggage included an envelope of swatches: it was a certainty she'd never find jewelry appropriate to her new station anywhere but in New York.

She closed her eyes. Journeys were a world of their own, in which everyday care didn't exist. In the first-class car, with its plush seats and gold-trimmed hardware, she felt bathed in the old wild excitement of her girlhood. Her brother-in-law Clark was a bore, of course, and she couldn't imagine how she'd get through two days on a train with Ann without pulling every lock of her hair out, fistful by fistful, but...

“Mary!”

She looked up as Clark returned along the swaying aisle, a newspaper in his hand.

Wordlessly he held it out. Ann snatched it. “Good God,” she cried.
“Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida have seceded!” And she glanced at Mary in sisterly malice as Mary seized the paper back. “It looks like you won't be First Lady of the land after all, dear, but only First Lady of the North.”

R
UMORS SEETHED IN THE AIR OF
N
EW
Y
ORK.
F
OR THREE DAYS
Clark—and Mr. Dorsheimer, the Treasurer of the State of New York—squired Mary from shop to shop, where, as Mr. Cameron had promised, even the great merchant prince Mr. Stewart bowed as they showed her silks, shawls, earbobs, trim, shoes of the very latest styles. In the evenings reporters came calling on her at the Astor House, and if it had occurred to any of them that she wasn't the wife of a “complete” President, nobody said anything.

Though in her heart Mary never forgave Ann for that “First Lady of the North” remark—and vowed to un-invite her from the Inauguration on the strength of it—she still felt pleased that Ann was there to witness this triumph. Everyone deferred to her—everyone asked questions and listened closely to her answers. Slick-haired young gentlemen from the
Times
and the
Tribune
and the
Herald—
even the London
Times—
leaped to their feet when she entered the lobby, and laughed heartily at her wit. It was like being the belle of Lexington again, without Betsey around to spoil her enjoyment.

“For the Lord's sake, Mary,” said her brother-in-law, when she came down to breakfast in the hotel's handsome dining-room on their last morning in town, “did you have to go tell them Old Abe appointed
Seward Secretary of State?”

“Nobody informed me that it was a state secret.” Mary spread out her enormous skirts—twelve yards around the hem and rustling deliciously with taffeta—to take a seat at the small table that Mr. Astor himself had set aside for her and her party. Robert, across from her, looked uncomfortable. He'd come in last night, while she was still talking with the journalists, and they'd hailed him boisterously as “The Prince of Rails,” a nickname by which he was known everywhere now and which he loathed quite as much as Lincoln hated “Old Abe.”

He'd grown, in his eighteen months in the East. At seventeen and a half he was nearly six feet tall, his thick shoulders rendered less overpowering by the immaculately cut tweed of his suit and the subdued elegance of his collar and cravat. There was no trace of mis-alignment in his eyes, except a slight immobility when he was tired. He looked like he'd lived in Boston the whole of his life. He would be, she thought, an impressive man.

“Seward's an abolitionist,” complained Clark peevishly, shaking out his napkin. “What are the Legislatures of Georgia and Virginia and Kentucky going to think, except that Old Abe means to abolish slavery after all?”

“Now, I'm sure if the legislators of those states read Mrs. Lincoln's remarks,” soothed Mr. Drosheimer, “they'll also read the President's statements that he's only against the
extension
of slavery, that he won't touch it where it already exists. Are you feeling quite well, Mrs. Lincoln? It will be a long journey today.” Throughout the journey—in fact since the day of the election—Mary had felt in jaggedly unequal spirits, torn between elation and anxiety without the steadying balance-wheel of home, neighbors, family.