The Emancipator's Wife (68 page)

Her veils were the only armor she had, her only means of keeping the curious at bay. Like a black opaque cloud amid the puffs and bows, satins and silks, fashionable pale pinks and blues, Mary spoke her briefest greetings to even her old friends like Ginny Fox, Jacob Seligman, and Charles Sumner. She wished only to be gone.

Robert's bride—also named Mary—was a fair, pretty, and ethereal-looking young lady in a gown of white satin, everything a well-bred young lady should be. She smiled sweetly as Mary took her hands.

“
How
I have always wished for a daughter! My dearest child, I have
so longed
to see this day!”

Other than that she recalled little of the reception, beyond an overwhelming sense of dread that she assuaged by a couple of surreptitious sips of Indian Bitters in the cloakroom. For nearly a year after Willie's death she had found herself unable to bear large groups of people, particularly strangers or semi-strangers. After Lincoln's death, the presence of anyone other than a few well-loved and well-known friends (which had included, alas, the
perfidious
Lizabet Keckley!) had filled her with a sense of nearly unendurable alienation from the whole race of humankind. She longed for comfort, yet when Charles Sumner came over to speak with her she found herself on the verge of tears.

Few others approached her. In three years, the cast of characters had changed in Washington, and people had heard enough about her battles with Congress over a pension.

She spent much of the ensuing three weeks in Baltimore in her room at Barnum's Hotel, emerging only for carriage-rides with Tad, or to visit a medium named Gibson, whom Cranston Laurie had recommended. Mr. Lincoln was present in the room, Gibson assured her, and disavowed any knowledge of any Ann or Nan Rutledge. There was no such person there with him in the Summer Land, nor had he known anyone of that name in his life.

But he did not materialize, nor speak to her. The night before the
City of Baltimore
was to depart she dreamed of him, in the dappled sunlight of the Land that lay beyond Death's Veil—dreamed of him walking hand in hand with the red-haired girl that Herndon had so eloquently described.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-EIGHT

T
AD AND
M
ARY WERE IN
E
UROPE FOR THREE YEARS.

And if she could not be happy—and she could never be happy, she reminded herself every morning when she woke, when her Beloved One had left her here alone—at least she felt at peace.

She took a room in the Hotel Angleterre in Frankfurt, intending to stay for a week. Jacob Seligman had highly recommended Dr. Hohagen's Institute on the nearby Kettenhofstrasse, and it was here that she enrolled Tad. But from the first night, the friendly and un-curious camaraderie of the English and American expatriates who lived at the Angleterre drew her in and made her welcome. These were people who had not been raised with the rending questions of abolition, who had not gone through the horror of war firsthand; people who had the distance to be objective, and the pleasant good manners that Mary craved.

She stayed another week, and then another. After all, she could not abandon Tad. On his single day off each week they would take a carriage along the zigzag paths of the park where the city ramparts had once stood, or cross the bridge to Sachsenhausen and so to the green and peaceful countryside beyond. Sometimes they would take the train to Weimar, to see Goethe's house, or take a little excursion steamer down to the Rhine at Mainz.

And when Tad was in school, to her surprise she found the days were not as long as she'd feared they'd be. The little group of Americans in the hotel called on her and invited her to visit their rooms, and her circle of acquaintance widened to their American and British friends in other parts of the little city. They were a lively group, the ladies always willing to get up excursions or day-trips to the spas of Wiesbaden or Marienbad, or to hold afternoon teas. Even after Mary removed to the less expensive Hotel Holland she retained a number of friendships, and would go to the Angleterre's reading-room to keep up on the American papers.

This was partly to follow how her old friends and enemies were doing—Charles Sumner was still in the Senate, and Mr. Seward, recovered from the wounds he'd received on the night of Lincoln's assassination, still ruled as Secretary of State.
(What a pity it was not he who had died that Terrible Night, if one must have died and the other be spared. . . !)

And partly, to follow what was being done about her battle for her pension in Congress.

During her first summer in Frankfurt, she went for several weeks to Scotland, where she visited dear old Dr. Smith from Springfield, whom Lincoln had made a consul. On her return she encountered, of all people, Sally Orne from Philadelphia at one of Frankfurt's summer spas. It was good beyond words to talk American politics again with someone who truly knew Washington, who'd been through the War. The two women chattered non-stop for several nights—completely disturbing everyone in the hotel-rooms around them—and the upshot was that Sally, who'd been traveling in luxury with maid, valet, and daughter in tow, agreed to put pressure on all her political connections once again to have Mary's pension put through.

“It's a disgrace—an absolute disgrace!” Sally cried, looking around the dreary fifth-floor chamber of the Holland, carpetless and crammed nearly to the ceiling with trunks and packages. “Your husband gave his life for his country, as surely as any of those poor soldiers did! You deserve no less than they!”

In point of fact—as the American newspapers shortly pointed out in a succession of blistering satires on Mrs. Lincoln's requests for her pension bill to be passed by Congress—the average widow's pension was about twelve dollars a month, and Mary was asking for three thousand a year. “My case is entirely different!” she insisted to Sally, when that lady and her entourage were preparing to continue on their journey to Italy. “Those young men, though I say not a word in their disparagement, at least had respite and sleep at night—which my poor husband
never
had, in four years of war. And moreover I was very much his partner in his task of governing, for which I deserve at least some credit!”

Between shopping for Robert's Mary—Young Mary, she called her—and for Baby Mamie, who was born in the fall of 1869—and writing streams of letters to Congressmen, Mary felt herself revive.

The American consul, Mr. Murphy, called now and then with his son
(To keep an eye on me for that traitor Seward, I'll wager).
There were several American and British gentlemen—not to mention several more of the Seligman banking clan—who would squire her for Sunday drives. Her special friends from her days at the Angleterre, the Mason family, still included her in their circle as if she were an aunt. Two British ladies from the
Angleterre—Mrs. Culver and Mrs. Blaine—were Spiritualists, and it was a relief to Mary to be able to talk of matters concerning those who had passed over the Veil. Twice they held séances, and though no spirits materialized or spoke on those occasions, she left them filled with a deep sense of calm.

More than anything else, she wished Lincoln could be here with her, to see the cathedral in its old-fashioned square, to pass the dark rocks where the Rhine maidens were said to guard their hidden gold.

“But he is here, don't you see?” asked Mrs. Culver, setting her teacup down—Mary had invited her up to her room at the Holland to take tea and look at the needlework vests, the blue- and white-silk wrapper, that she'd bought for Robert's bride. “When a soul passes to the Other Side, they can come and go here as they please, like the angels of God. When you walk down the Zeil looking into shop windows, be sure that he's there at your side. When you stand in the cathedral and look at the arches and tombs and stained glass, you are sharing that moment with him, as you would have in life had God so willed.”

“Of course,” responded Mary instantly, “of course. But knowing that somehow, sometimes . . . just isn't the same.”

But it was close to that, when she was with Tad.

At Dr. Hohagen's, her son seemed to recover some of his old mischievousness, tempered now by European manners and the school's firm discipline. As the weeks and months floated by she was amazed and delighted at Tad's growth from boy to young man. He was beginning to read on his own, and talk to her like a man, and not a child, about the things he read. He took the lead in their excursions, escorting her to places his friends at school had said were
wunderbar
! From speaking only a few halting words in German—inculcated with enormous labor by his teachers in Chicago—Tad rapidly became far more fluent than Mary.

He was a comfort to her, too, when the American newspapers published indignant criticisms of her campaign for a pension. “They don't know you, Mama,” he soothed, when she met him in front of the school brandishing the latest, a sarcastic account of how a fictitious German count was courting her in the hopes of getting hold of Old Abe's pension. “They're politicians. They'll say anything—they have to.”

A later article pointed out that $27,000,000—nearly ten percent of the nation's budget—went to pensions already, and the widows of officers were content with $600 a year, not $3000: “poor needy widows who do not already have fifty or sixty thousand dollars.” Another excoriated her for taking Lincoln's “brilliant boy” to be educated away from “American institutions.” “They must have been talking to Robert,” fumed Mary. As 1869 wore into 1870, the debates—duly sent on to her by Sally Orne—became more vicious, dredging up yet again the old rumors of her extravagance, her Confederate sympathies, and speculation of improper conduct with, of all people, the charming Commissioner Wood who had escorted her on her first buying-trip to New York.

Her headaches worsened. She wrote reams of angry letters to Sally, to her Spiritualist friend Ella Slapater in Pennsylvania, to Robert and his wife. Her neuralgia grew more frequent and painful as well, tightening the damaged muscles of neck and back and starting yet another round of sleepless nights, Godfrey's Cordial, Indian Bitters, and as many visits to spas as she could afford. Now fifty-two, she began to have night sweats, and her copious monthlies became erratic, until she never knew when they'd begin or how long they'd last. Sometimes it felt to her, looking back on those days, that she was angry all the time.

But in a curious way the anger made her feel alive. She was fighting, she told herself, for Tad's future—fighting, too, to be recognized for who she was: Abraham Lincoln's widow. The wife of the Great Emancipator. The woman who had stood by him through the terrible years of the War, the woman he had married—and loved, no matter what Billy Herndon said.

Just as she had been the legal keeper of his body, in the fight with the Monument Association, so now she was the keeper of his memory, and his son. She still lived for him, though he had gone on to the Summer Land; still managed his affairs in this world.

They could not deny her without denying him.

In July of 1870, President Grant signed the bill giving her a pension of $3,000 a year. This more than doubled her income, added to the $2,500 interest from the bonds Lincoln had left her and the rent from the Chicago and Springfield houses. She celebrated by buying pillowcases, a watch, and an evening dress for Young Mary, and several tiny bracelets for little Mamie, and by taking Tad, who was on summer holiday, to Austria.

In Austria, word reached them that France and Germany had gone to war. On their return to Frankfurt, the consul, Mr. Murphy, called on Mary at the Hotel Holland and warned her to leave—the French troops were advancing on Frankfurt, which controlled Germany's railroads as Atlanta had the South's. While she was still trying to organize her trunks and luggage—really, it was
astonishing
how much she'd accumulated in her travels!—one of the generals she'd met in Washington, little Phil Sheridan, who stood shorter even than she did—called to reiterate the warning.

“I didn't flee from Washington in the face of the rebels, sir, and I will not flee from here like a scared rabbit,” she retorted. “The French were always America's allies. Surely they will offer us no harm.” And she pulled Tad, who'd come that day to help her pack and label, closer to her side.

“No, ma'am,” replied Sheridan, who Mary had always thought looked like a schoolboy dressed up in a false mustache. “But they may shell the town. And if there's a siege, I wouldn't like to see the pair of you caught up in it.”

Tad's gray eyes brightened, and he said, “It wouldn't be our first.” He was, Mary guessed, within an ace of asking Sheridan if he could go along with him and observe the upcoming battle, so she caught his hand and said crisply,

“We shall be quite all right, General. Thank you for your concern.”

As it was, before she managed to arrange transport for all of her many trunks and crates, the battle was fought and over, and the German forces under Von Moltke—with Sheridan along as an advisor—were besieging Paris. Still, the pleasant little city of Frankfurt had become an army town, as Washington had been in the War. Too many soldiers, too many horses, skyrocketing prices of food and very few of her friends remaining. She would wake in the night hearing marching men in the street, and for an agonized moment she would be back in Washington, with torchlight flaring on the ceiling of her bedroom, and Lincoln's steps padding restlessly down the hall to confer in his nightshirt with Generals on the landing.

It was time to go home.

T
HEY LEFT
F
RANKFURT IN THE FALL OF 1870, FOR
E
NGLAND,
intending to remain there—as Mary had intended to stay at the Hotel Angleterre—only a few weeks. But the journey, and the tensions of travel, were hard on Mary. Her headaches multiplied and she broke her journey at Leamington, which like Marienbad and Baden-Baden was a hydrotherapy spa. The solicitousness of the doctors there, and the friendliness of the English, soothed her. Though Tad was wild to return to America, she lingered in Leamington until nearly Christmas, then moved up to London—again, for a short time only, she said—to visit her Hotel Angleterre friend Mrs. Culver.

She and Tad remained in London for another three months, at a boardinghouse in Woburn Square. With Mrs. Culver, she attended a number of séances among the Bloomsbury Spiritualists, but winter in London depressed her and brought on migraines and back pain again, accompanied now by the agonizing hot flushes of the change of life. The doctors—she could afford the best, these days—suggested a warmer
climate for the remainder of the winter. Tad offered to take ship for America after Christmas, and she could follow after a few months of recuperation in Italy. But the idea of the young man facing the dangers of winter travel on the Atlantic brought her nightmares.

“I could not bear it, if anything were to happen to you, my darling!” she sobbed. “I could not bear it! Oh, do not do this to your mother!”

That said, she paid Tad's board in Woburn Square for the next few months, engaged a tutor for him, hired a nurse-companion for herself, and went to Italy. For two months she dreamed in the sun, marveled at the
David
in Florence and the multi-towered Cathedral in Milan. It was in many ways a dream come true. Growing up in that overcrowded house in Lexington, she had longed to see these things, to walk in the glittering
Italian sunlight where Byron, Shelley, and Napoleon had walked.