I Am Abraham (30 page)

We managed to put on a good show in front of Mary and Bob’s little brothers, who idolized him. Tad ran through the corridors like an Injun.

“Bobbie’s back, Bobbie’s back.”

He sat with Mary, held her hand. Her eyes began to wander. She wasn’t fooled by Bob’s civility. She could feel his absence, and she had to fight her own hysteria.

“Robert, do tell us about the Cambridge societies, and all the fun you’ve had. I still recollect that soufflé we shared at one of the Harvard clubs.”

“Mother,” he said, “there’s little to tell.”

He knew how to cut her to the bone. He wasn’t cruel, just remote. And when he saw her tears, he relented and allowed his mother to stroke his hair.

“I’m popular,” he blurted out. “Oh, the other fellers are so curious about you and Father.”

Mary perked up. “Curious about me? I declare, that’s a
curious
curiosity. What ever do they ask?”

“About Camp Mary.”

Mary ruffled her nose. “That little thing? I was visiting a field of tents, handing out bonbons and handkerchiefs, and a colonel with a goatee cracked a bottle of champagne over a carriage wheel—it was a regular explosion. And he bowed to me, this colonel with the goatee, and said, ‘Madame President, I christen these grounds as
Camp Mary
, in honor of your war work.’ That’s all it was.”

Bob wasn’t even listening. He kissed Mary on the forehead and promenaded out of the family parlor. I found him in the corridor.

“Father,” he said, “I want to go to war. The other fellers are joining up, and I can’t. I feel like a piece of crystal—
the President’s
boy
—too precious to run off with some regiment. It isn’t fair.”

I should have encouraged him to run off, but the news would have killed his Ma. The mere sound of a fizzle-stick or the boom of some carriage could set her mind to fly away with assassination plots. She was fearful whenever I left the Mansion, fearful that some disgruntled office seeker might rip me apart in our own public rooms. She assigned Willie and Tad as my bodyguards, and then worried that the boys might get hurt
bodyguarding
me. Her eyes were in a constant glaze. I had to reassure her half the time that Bob was safe at Harvard.

“I’m glad, Son, but it would break your mother’s heart.”

Bob’s eyes went cold. He bowed to me, like one of my own ambassadors. Then he hurried down the hall. I couldn’t get near him after that—Bob was like a coyote in a gentleman’s jacket. He pulled away from all of us, though he did play Christmas games with his brothers on the White House lawn, utilizing leather pouches as bowling balls.

And he would watch them ride their ponies.

The White House stables had multiplied with the war. Little Mac housed some of his own horses with us, and the boys’ ponies were now government horses, too. Half the cavalry used our barn. Little Mac could have usurped our stables for his cavalry, but he didn’t. He shared the premises with us. And until he caught typhoid fever, he rode through the President’s Park with his usual fury.

It was Christmas Eve, and some drunken soldier must have dropped a lantern, and soon the whole barn was ablaze. We didn’t lose one horse, not even the ponies. The stable hands slapped their rumps and led them out of that conflagration with rifle shots. But nothing could control them away from the barn, no matter how hard the soldiers
hee-hawed
and waved their wet blankets. We had a stampede—a hundred riderless horses raced across the capital’s streets, overturning carriages, ripping off the signs of hotels with their flanks. One horse bit a man—chewed half his coat as he was coming out of a saloon. You could hear the horses’ neighing for hours, and it was a bloodcurdling call.

The snow fell right in the middle of that stampede—as if nature was conspiring with McClellan’s horses. The flakes rode the wind, like a crystal cloud that followed the horses’ tracks. Tad and Willie were worried about their ponies. I had to put Mother to bed.

“Mr. Lincoln, you won’t let our boys loose—like the ponies.”

“No, Mother.”

“And why is Robert so distant all of a sudden?”

“That’s the habit of a Harvard man,” I explained.

Bob and I went down to the stables in our winter boots. The cinders were still flying, and we had to cover our faces. Bob’s coat suddenly caught fire, and I had to slap at him with my sleeves until the flames relented a little—and then I hurled him to the ground like a potato sack and dug him into a pile of snow. He looked up at me with the flakes in his eyes—a porous mask, pocked with jewels.

I wasn’t pondering the war, not even the soldiers in their huts. I was thinking of my son—how he was vanishing into his own wilderness, and I couldn’t catch him. Bob looked like a creature created in a curtain of fire and snow.

We heard a gentle noise, like a child whimpering. And Little Mac stepped right through that curtain of snow without his britches. He was wearing cap and boots, with his field jacket over his nightshirt, and clutching the reins of two spotted ponies.

He tipped his cap and handed both pair of reins to Bob. Then he saluted me.

“Good night, Excellency. I still have the fever—I’m going back to bed.”

He was another snowman, flushed with wind and fire.

“Wait,” I said, in a panic. “You haven’t been properly introduced to my boy.”

He smiled, stroked his chin beard, as grand as any general in a nightshirt, grander even, with his spurs on.

“Oh, I’ve met with Bob before,” said my General-in-Chief. “While I was riding in your park—we talked artillery.”

Bob knew more about Parrott rifles than his own artillery captains, according to Little Mac. I was stupefied. Bob had never talked artillery with his own
Paw.

Parrott rifles
,
Parrott rifles
rang in my ear like some military tune. I heard a heartless pounding in my ear—like thunder in the snow. And then the whinnying of animals, wild yet familiar, like a mournful wail. McClellan stood there—didn’t move a muscle. And those delinquent horses, two or three at a time, suddenly appeared like children with wet manes, bumped their noses against Little Mac and made no other sign. Bob and I might as well have been invisible as the riderless horses returned. McClellan whistled once, and a dozen horse soldiers arrived with blankets.

He went from horse to horse with a blanket, whispered, “Whoa, Rider, whoa, Tom,” and walked into the snow with his little troop of cavalry horses; some had bruised eyes and bloody ears, others limped on broken hooves. I’d misjudged the man and his hauteur; he wanted a world of soldiers, where he and the
Secesh
could meet, general to general, battle in the sun and then smoke a cigar with some lost brother from West Point—civilians didn’t count, only horses, his men and boys, his encampments, reconnaissance balloons, and artillery trains. I wasn’t sure where he’d stable his hundred horses tonight; perhaps in some other cavalry barn, or at his own headquarters, where he’d croon Christmas carols in his nightshirt, this singular man, who was part magician, part fraud . . .

Mary and the boys were already asleep when I returned to the Mansion with Bob. We walked through the ceremonial rooms like a pair of stragglers in the semidarkness; one chandelier blazed above our heads, and the halls could have been some vast echo chamber. The night watchman was snoring in a gilded chair. I could tell that Bob’s mind was on those wild horses that only Little Mac could tame, like some circus master. I didn’t have that talent. But I didn’t want to lose my boy to this circus master. I squinted hard into the last glimmers of light and could see that Bob’s lazy eye was trembling.

“Goodnight, Son,” I said.

He trod upstairs on Mother’s Manhattan carpets. The watchman’s stentorian snores sounded like the thunder of horses’ hooves.

“Goodnight, Father,” Bob replied from the top of the stairs, his voice wafting above the watchman’s rumble, like some sweet serenade, while I stood there, a President with black snow on his boots.

30.

The White House & Vinegar Hill

A
BLACK
MAN
WAS
found frozen in his tracks on Vinegar Hill that January, like a hunter who had nothing to hunt—took half a day to dig his legs out of the ice. Folks trudged all the way from the Willard to have a look at the frozen man. It was the bitterest January in years, and Tad’s spotted pony had to wear leggings and a winter hood in a barn that still smoldered. Vinegar Hill had been a haven for free blacks until Army engineers pilfered their land to put up Fort Massachusetts, but McClellan’s engineers didn’t have to bust up little farms and let these farmers freeze to death.

I could have gone to Vinegar Hill with the War Department, but I decided to visit on my own, without a White House detective on my tail. I climbed on Old Tom and rode along the Seventh Street Pike, with rifle pits everywhere I looked. Hotels were boarded up near this part of the pike—it was meant for military traffic. And I realized for the first time that most of Vinegar Hill was gone. It was swallowed up by rifle pits, an ammunitions dump, a blockhouse, and Fort Massachusetts, built right out of the bones and timber and orchards of the old farms. The farmers were still around; they lived in the ruins near the fort—many of them were women who had nowhere else to park their feet. They wore rags in winter, and leggings cut from strips of paper. I met a farmer lady, who had an infant in her arms. Called herself Aunt Bertha, and she had every right to cuss at me. My troopers had destroyed her farmhouse and driven her off her land. I told her she could stay in the fort with her child whenever the wind was riding hard.

She ignored my summons and offered me a hunk of johnnycake. Her teeth were chattering, her lips had turned blue. I rounded up all the farmers I could find and stood under the ramparts of the fort with them.

The engineers must have forgotten to build a gate; you had to climb the ramparts if you wanted to get in. “We’re coming up,” I had to holler into the wind.

The commandant called down to me from the ramparts, wrapped in a cape that covered half his mouth. “You can’t bring in the niggers, Mr. President. Those are orders from the General-in-Chief.”

“Son,” I had to shout, “Mr. McClellan works for me.”

I climbed up to the ramparts with these colored pilgrims. I could see clear to the White House in the wind. The District had become one huge military camp, alive with a metal gleam that looked like a labyrinth of rifle pits and Parrott guns mounted on little silver trucks.

The commandant was a young captain who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I told him to feed the farmers and their children and to house them best he could, and if there was the least bit of bellicosity from Mr. McClellan, the captain was to remind the general that this fort was part of the President’s own domain.

I bid goodbye to Aunt Bertha and went back to the White House, where I got into a scrape with my new Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton, an irascible sort of feller, with the long unruly beard of a prophet. He commenced to tear into me at a Cabinet meeting.

“Sir, the Lady President can do what she likes with her own clique, but I will not sign up unqualified men. Are you fond of this Wikoff?”

Mary must have tried to palm off the Chevalier on Mr. Stanton. “Mr. President, why is he always
here
? I keep running into him on my way to our meetings.”

“Well, he’s kind of Mary’s major domo.”

He was also a rogue reporter sent by the
New York Herald
to spy on the White House. The
Herald
had the largest circulation in the world, according to its editor, Gordon Bennett, who idolized Little Mac, and wanted to see this general in my chair. Bennett would have used his considerable power to ruin me, and he must have pulled Wikoff out of some old shoebox. The Chevalier was a relic
before
he came to Washington. He advertised himself as Louis Napoleon’s friend and Queen Isabella’s confidant, but Isabella couldn’t keep him out of jail in Italy or Spain. He must have visited every bordello in the District, but that wasn’t why he was here.

Suddenly I started to see peculiar tidbits in the
Herald
—my own private words and whispers. If I’d been a lady and not some sucker with long elbows and a beard, I would have gambled that Wikoff had crept right into my boudoir. I’d been working on my annual address to Congress, and the notes were locked away in a drawer, but whole paragraphs had been ripped out of that address and appeared in the
Herald
.

Congress decided to look into those damn leaks, and Mary was furious when the Chevalier was
invited
to appear before the Judiciary Committee. She put her hot little hands over her eyes and said Congress was picking on her protégé. Should have scolded her like a child, even if she was the Lady President . . .

Wikoff appeared before the committee next morning and said it was Major Watt, the White House gardener, who had rifled my drawer. I knew it was a lie. No one but Mary could read my scrawl. So I climbed up to the Capitol and met with the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee in one of their private chambers—it was laden with spittoons and hissing lamps. I had to squint through a miasma of cigar smoke to make out each member of the committee. They were flabbergasted to see me in their headquarters—the Capitol was far from a President’s haunts.