Authors: Thomas Mallon
“Goodness,” cried Mrs. Lincoln, delighted by the little crowd. She straightened her brooch and put on a grander air. “It reminds me of the night we all first met. Do you remember the mob outside the Delavan House? Do you, Clara? Do you, Henry? Father?”
The President took her hand. “Your memory is a formidable thing, Mother. That was four long years ago.” The coach came to a stop. Clara was sure she could recall that night even more vividly than Mrs. Lincoln: the terrible commotion; the struggle to get through the crowd; her first sight of Mr. Lincoln’s long, kindly face, so much less ravaged than it was tonight.
The spectators outside the theatre were clapping for the President, who stepped down from the carriage and tipped his hat with a trace of embarrassment. Charles Forbes extended his arm up to the First Lady. Once she had alighted, Henry helped Clara down, lifting a flounce of her gown away from the gutter. The ushers cleared a path through the lobby. The President shook hands and murmured apologies for their lateness. Clara could feel herself and Henry being stared at by people who thought they might be the Grants. Once these people realized their mistake, their eyes quickly shifted to the Lincolns, but one woman,
convinced that Henry was commander of all the Union’s forces, whispered to her companion, “He’s so young!”
A man handed them programs while they mounted the stairs at the theatre’s south end. Walking the length of a narrow aisle toward the room leading to the state box, Clara could hear the sounds of the play through the wall. It was curiously quiet when they entered the box. Mrs. Lincoln made a whispery fuss of arranging them all: the President in a rocker, herself beside him, Clara on a chair to her right, and Henry on a small sofa behind his fiancée. “Will you be able to see?” Clara asked him. Everything, she noted, was red: the floral wallpaper, the carpet, the damask of Henry’s couch. The balcony seemed a toy world, like the doll’s house her father had given her years ago in Albany, the Christmas just after her own mother died.
The President leaned over to show himself to the audience, which applauded and cheered just long enough to stop the action onstage. The play resumed so quickly that Clara was disappointed. She had hoped for a longer demonstration and the chance for them all to stand. The little orchestra might have played “Hail to the Chief,” but it didn’t. She reached over the balcony’s railing to touch the red-white-and-blue bunting and finger the lace curtain that hung along the indentation separating her and Mrs. Lincoln. They were so close to the stage that they might almost be on it. As it was, their box seemed better decorated: the sets, Clara could see, were threadbare. She looked across the theatre to the opposite box. It was empty, she was sorry to discover. She was in a mood to be watched tonight, and she wondered how she would be able to sit through the rest of this silly play until the moment came when she and Henry could descend, with the Lincolns, into the envious, excited crowd.
The performance didn’t seem to be going over. There had been scarcely a laugh since they took their seats, and the actors were shouting their lines in sweaty near desperation. Miss Keene looked like a fool, all the paint and powder adding years instead of subtracting them. She was affecting the gaiety of a girl, and the results were grotesque. Mrs. Lincoln might be too old for what
she
was wearing tonight (Henry had given Clara an amused
nudge about the low cut of the First Lady’s gown), but at least her childlike animation was something that bubbled up from her own complicated nature, not something pinned on like one of Miss Keene’s curls.
Clara leaned back and glanced at the President. It would be a pleasure to see him laugh tonight, after all his trials of the past four years, from the rivers of blood he had been forced to navigate, to the inveiglings of her own dear prolix papa — not to mention the frights and tantrums of his wife. Even here he wasn’t safe from bother. A few minutes after they sat down, Clara heard a man out in the hallway telling Mr. Forbes about a dispatch the President must see.
“Yes,” Harry Hawk shouted from the stage, making one more joke about Lord Dundreary’s dyed red whiskers. “About the ends they’re as black as a nigger’s in billing time, and near the roots they’re all speckled and streaked.” She turned back toward Henry, whose fire-colored mustache had always been the subject of family jokes and her own twirlings. He smiled at her, though she was sure he hadn’t caught the line, or much of anything else. She knew where he was, could tell from his expression: back in Virginia, awash in blood and screams and flying bones at the battle of the Crater. Had he noticed that General Burnside was in the house tonight, down there in the front row, having arrived even later than the four of them?
How strange that they should all be sitting here. How extraordinary, too, that she and Mrs. Lincoln had managed to stay friends — even after the night Papa had asked why Robert wasn’t in the army. But the First Lady’s nature was more forgiving than it was ferocious; Clara had seen that again and again, on all the occasions when she and others had unaccountably displeased her.
Poor Mr. Lincoln was cold. He’d looked around for his coat and was awkwardly putting it on. The gesture reminded Clara of the only one of his wife’s séances she’d attended. (If her Baptist papa ever found out!) The spiritualist hired to conjure up the presence of Willie kept asking them if they didn’t feel the sudden rise or fall in the room’s temperature — observations
that had the ladies tearing off or reaching for their shawls. It was hard to tell whether Mrs. Lincoln’s imagination brought her more comfort or pain on that occasion, but right now there was no disputing the blessing it was to her, supplying the evening with all the little touches of glory Clara thought it missing. The First Lady was delighted with the play, fizzing with joy, unable to sit still or keep herself from talking. The President had taken her hand a few minutes ago, and now Clara could hear her playing the coquette, asking him, “What will Miss Harris think of me?”
“Why, she will think nothing about it,” he replied.
She will think nothing about it
. He was only trying to quiet her, of course. Surely he wasn’t thinking,
How can she think anything about it? After all, she’s about to marry a man who’s virtually her own brother
. No, it was foolish to worry about that. She was too sensitive on this point. But after just one month of being openly engaged to Henry, she was tired of having to explain to people who’d just met them, and were confused, that there was no blood between them.
She would not start thinking about that now. She would force herself to be interested in this play, which alas had no intermission. “People sometimes look a great way off for that which is near at hand,” said the fortune-hunting Mrs. Mountchessington to Asa Trenchard. Mrs. Lincoln laughed, and Clara smiled. Perhaps there was a little life in this old chestnut; Mr. Lincoln showed signs of dozing, but the audience seemed to be warming up. Mrs. Mountchessington was certainly a perfect stage version of Pauline: “I am aware, Mr. Trenchard, you are not used to the manners of good society, and that, alone, will excuse the impertinence of which you have been guilty.” The tone and the bearing were comically approximate. Did Henry see the resemblance too, and should she risk trying to share the joke with her mother-worshiping fiancé? She turned around to him, but he wasn’t even looking at the stage. He was gazing intently at the door to the box, as if imagining the moment they could all get up and go.
“Don’t know the manners of good society, eh?” bellowed
Harry Hawk, so loudly that Clara immediately resumed looking down at the stage. “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap.”
Clara felt the muscles of her arms jump inside their puffed sleeves. A trap door must have been sprung onstage, a play on “man-trap.” The loud crack was some bit of stage business, like this burst of blue smoke she could see and smell. But that had to be wrong, she realized, turning left in her seat: the smoke was behind her. The box was filled with it, and before she could turn far enough to see Henry, she realized that he was on his feet, along with another man who was now in the box, whose face she couldn’t see behind the smoke. There was a gleam, which she suddenly recognized as the long silver blade of a knife. The faceless man was plunging it into Henry.
She felt herself trying to scream, but she couldn’t; the only voice she heard belonged to the unknown man. He had just hissed the word “freedom.” He was coming at her now, his bloody knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, but he wanted only to get past her. He was trying to climb over the edge of the box, to find a grip amidst the bunting. Henry had come after him and was reaching for his coat, just barely touching it, when she felt a hot liquid spraying her face. It was in her mouth and tasted of metal. Her dress was wet.
The man got over the railing, but she never heard him land on the stage because by now Mrs. Lincoln was screaming. Clara moved toward her, colliding with Henry, who was leaning over the balcony.
“Stop that man!” he shouted.
For a second there was no sound but Mrs. Lincoln’s wail, like a train whistle in the dark. Clara saw the audience rising to their feet; here and there drawn pistols glinted like stars.
“Oh, my husband’s blood! My husband’s blood!” screamed Mrs. Lincoln. She was pointing at Clara, who now realized that her dress and face and mouth were covered with blood, but blood that could only be Henry’s, since the President was still sitting, undisturbed, in his rocker.
“Water!” Clara heard herself screaming, as if the balcony
really were part of the stage and she had finally come to her lines. “Water!”
She was now crazed with fright and could think only of getting the blood off her face and out of her mouth. But the blood was everywhere, an ocean of it. Below her the crowd roared, and some of its members leapt onto the stage. She heard a furious pounding, a hail of fists on the door to the box, and she looked toward it, crying “No!” She was sure a gang of men were about to come in and kill them all. “No!” she screamed again as she saw Henry struggling to open the door and let them in.
A square of light revealed several blue army uniforms. One of the men — a colonel, Clara could tell — hurriedly spoke with Henry. A very young soldier, a doctor, was rushed toward Mr. Lincoln, whom he touched gently, like a large animal he was afraid to wake. His hands hovered over him, searching for something. He asked the others who were filling up the box to help him lay the President on the floor so he might cut away his clothing. Another doctor, just as young, assisted; the two of them felt for a pulse, and they blew breath into Mr. Lincoln’s mouth and nostrils.
“I am bleeding to death.” It was Henry’s voice, near the door of the balcony, but the small space was now so packed with people, even Miss Keene, that Clara couldn’t get to him. A soldier had moved her and Mrs. Lincoln onto the sofa from which Henry had watched the play. It was soaked with blood, but Mrs. Lincoln had ceased screaming; she now held out her arms mutely, grasping at nothing.
Clara began to weep. With all the men in the balcony, she thought, someone must be attending to Henry, but she couldn’t see him clearly, and her attention was distracted by all the loud voices arguing over whether the President was to be kept here, or taken home, or moved somewhere else.
After a minute of this, during which Mrs. Lincoln resumed screaming, the colonel took charge, and suddenly everyone was on his feet and filing out, deliberately, as if a train had just arrived for boarding and Mr. Lincoln’s limp form, preceding
them, were a trunk that had to be carried on first. A tailor’s house, across the street from the theatre, the colonel explained, was being prepared to receive the President.
They left the theatre the same way they had come in, through the narrow corridor and down the stairs to the lobby. As they walked, a great roar grew ever closer. It came from the street, which was so full of torches that the late hour seemed more like a brilliant twilight. Police and soldiers were everywhere, pushing back the crowd, keeping the torches away from the theatre, and cuffing those who clamored for it to be burned to the ground. People desperate to get close to Mr. Lincoln screamed the question “Is he dead?” over and over. They were answered by shouts of “He’s dead!” or “He’s alive!” from onlookers too far away from the limp form to tell. In the shoving and chaos, the President’s gold spectacles fell into the mud of Tenth Street.
Halfway across the gutter, Clara at last reached Henry’s left side, gasping when she saw the knife wound that ran almost the length of his upper arm. A strip of pink flesh hung like a ribbon through the rip in his sleeve. His face, pale and shocked, stared straight ahead as he moved like a phantom, steadied by an army major and propelled by the crowd.
Now Mrs. Lincoln was calling for Clara, pushing her way toward her. She saw Henry’s tall form and immediately grasped his forearm with both her hands, pulling on it, as if imploring him, oblivious of his wound. “Oh, why did they let him do it?” she wailed. The pain of her touch sent his eyeballs up into their sockets, and even with the other major’s assistance, he looked ready to faint. Clara begged, through tears, “Ma’am, please,
please
let go of him,” prying the First Lady away, pushing her the last few steps to the tailor’s house.
“Where is my husband?” Mrs. Lincoln shouted when they reached its threshold.
Inside, soldiers were lighting candles and clearing a path to a room at the back. The army major assisting Henry told Clara his name was Potter. He was joined by another man in uniform. They took Henry into the hallway, where he sat down on the floor and at last passed out.
“Please do something for him,” cried Clara, one more urgent plea in a house that was ringing with them. Only now did she understand how gravely Henry was injured; for the first time she was seized by the idea that both he and Mr. Lincoln might die here. “Please take him home,” she begged the second soldier as Major Potter tried to bandage the arm. “Please take him to my father’s house,” she said, aware of some strange courtesy making her say “my” father instead of “his,” as if she were paying a respectful gesture to the dead. She feared that the soldier going for a carriage would never secure one in the infernal street. From outside, the screams for vengeance and the shrieks toward heaven came through the open windows of the parlor, where other soldiers were trying to get Mrs. Lincoln to sit down on one of the black horsehair chairs. Alternating between wails and silent supplication, she begged to be brought to the back room where the President had been laid on a bed — diagonally, according to a soldier who came out muttering with awe at the size of the wounded man.