I Am Abraham (32 page)

I had tried to visit Adèle once before, out of respect for Dug. I’d gone to his mansion with my Secretary of State, but Adèle wouldn’t even honor Mr. Seward’s calling card. I was more determined now. I skipped out the servants’ entrance, with my bodyguard asleep on a bench, and hightailed it out of there while folks gawked at the Titan. I didn’t have a penny in my pocket—Tad carried all my cash. I climbed onto a horsecar but couldn’t pay the fare. The conductor didn’t question my right to travel on the cars. I
chawed
with a few of the passengers, signed autograph books with a butcher’s pencil, and almost missed my stop. But I climbed down on Jersey Avenue, near the old munitions dump, with its sunken sheds and abandoned privies, and footed it to “Eye” Street.

The Little Giant had once held levees with a thousand guests snaking right onto the street. The mansion still looked like a run-down morgue with shuttered windows and a slanted roof. I rang the bell. I nearly startled the maid’s eyes out of her head.

“Could you announce me? I
jest
want to holler hello to Mrs. Adèle.”

I stood in the vestibule while Adèle’s maid scampered upstairs in her muslin skirt. I didn’t have to stand around very long. The widow arrived in a black gown with a crucifix near her neck and a liquid rhythm in each of her steps. I was struck by that singular beauty of hers, even with her long neck. Adèle had been Dug’s secret hammer during our seven debates. Her quiet presence, the way she twirled her parasol and smiled at all those querulous folks, had blunted my attack. Adèle didn’t seem bothered at all to find me at her mansion-morgue.

“How kind of you to call, Mr. President. I haven’t had many callers ever since Dug died. People tend to cut a widow when they can’t wheedle a whole lot of favors out of her.”

“That’s a misappropriation, Mrs. Adèle. My wife has invited you to every one of her shindigs.”

“Oh, I did not mean the Lady President. She has sent me flowers from the White House conservatory on more than one occasion. How is Mrs. Lincoln?”

“Tolerable well.”

There was no point involving the widow in my scrape with Mary, though I would have liked to confide in someone other than a phantom secret agent—I couldn’t reveal my distemper to Adèle.

So we sat in the parlor, with dust all over the place. The mansion had its own ballroom; but I didn’t see a hair of it in those windy rooms. And the divans and tables were covered in ghostly white cloth.

“You ought to know, Mr. Lincoln, that my husband really admired you. You’re one of the few honest politicians he ever met. He called you the rarest of rare birds. And he suffered over some of the things he said during the debates—I suffered too. I couldn’t sleep at night over his remarks about the colored race. That wasn’t Dug. It was the monstrosity of politics.”

“But he won the canvass, ma’am. I did not.”

Now her eyes went pale, as if she were absent and present at the same time. Adèle had withdrawn so deep after Dug’s death that it was hard to hold her in one place.

“Did he really win? He crucified himself, I should think. And he was so fond of your wife. Wasn’t he one of her first beaux?”

I didn’t know how to answer Adèle. It wasn’t clear how much of a beau Dug had really been. He was a young politician on the rise, and may not have wanted a plump little wife from Lexington, and Mary may not have wanted him. I like to think she had her sights on another man—a rawboned lawyer out of New Salem without Dug’s deep voice and oratorical skills. It
seemed
important to Adèle that the four of us were connected somehow, and it also comforted her that Dug had been Mary’s beau. Perhaps it fired up her fancy and kept a particle of him alive . . .

“The very first,” I told her.

Her eyes lit in that somber room. “There!” she said. “That makes us cousins, of a sort.”

Cousins
. The Little Giant would have hatcheted me if I’d given him half the chance. I barely escaped Illinois with my own skin, but he was the loyalest adversary I ever had once I became President Elect. Dug and Mary never lost their bond of affection. I remember how they danced at the Union Ball, how much of a couple they were, though I could sense that fatal fatigue in him, as if he were on the verge of vanishing in the middle of that dance. He’d
imagined
himself as President and savior of the Republic, but when the country spiraled in its own direction, without him and his dreams, Dug couldn’t save himself—or Adèle, and I wanted to bring his widow into our entourage.

“Couldn’t we invite you to one of our levees?”

Her mood turned dark again.

“Oh, Cousin Abraham—I mean Mr. President—I never leave this house any more.”

We had coffee from an unpolished urn, and cake as hard as a soldier’s biscuit.

I shouldn’t have waited this long to visit Cousin Adèle. I should have
courted
her, a little, seduced her out of that solitude, come by with Tad and his pony, but I hadn’t come soon enough. Her eyes started to wander. She mumbled to herself. The maid covered her shoulders with a shawl. I kissed her on the forehead—like some forgotten suitor—and left that morgue on “Eye” Street.

I
SAT
IN
MY
OFFICE
, slicing up an apple with my jackknife, when I heard the rustle of silk. It was midnight, and Mother had arrived in her nightgown like a somnambulist, with that rope of ribbon in her hair. I skipped all the niceties and preambles.

“He wanted to sell your
love letters
to Richmond.”

She went meek, like a lost child. It was as if I had slashed her with a razor—from ear to ear—and she was all bled out, like a butchered hog, but with her own pale beauty.

Her tongue was as twisted as Tad’s. She couldn’t even pronounce
love letters
.

“They—they were the smallest souvenirs,” she said. “They meant nothing. The Chevalier flirted with me. He was a member of my court.”

“
Souvenirs
. Can you imagine one of your letters in the
Charleston Mercury
? We’d all have to run for the hills. Mrs. Jeff Davis could move right back to the District. The Rebels have always considered our capital as their own. We’re sittin’ in their seats.”

And a rage built up in her like a burning eye.

“It wouldn’t have happened—if you hadn’t locked me out. You trust that little hyena, Seward, more than you ever trusted me. You should have married him. You’re at his mansion every night—I imagine he would make an excellent bride.”

I pulled that ribbon out of her hair, twisted it in my hand.

“Molly, please listen. Seward does not give my secrets away. He does not peddle his influence—for a pair of ponies.”

“I did not . . .”

She’d once been the queen of my campaigns. She’d read all my speeches, helped me recite them in front of a mirror, but I locked her out, as she said, didn’t even seek her counsel. And it rubbed her raw. I couldn’t have survived for a moment with Mary as my general. The damn country would have crucified me. She had a lust to be the Lady President,
almost
like McClellan. She was the prisoner of protocol, a queen without claws. She wasn’t meant for conservatories and sewing circles. Mary wanted to intrigue, like all the men around her. But as Lady President, she was banished to the little country of her own quarters, and all she had left was to intrigue with scoundrels like the Chevalier. I’d abandoned her to this big white barn near the Potomac, my child-wife. So she went on mad sprees with Major Watt, bought enough hassocks to outfit an apple orchard, and the dark veins deepened above her eye, as if some permanent crease had entered her life. I couldn’t bargain with her. I had to woo her away from that glut of buying.

“Puss, I saw Adèle.”

She ruffled her nose, as if some sudden attack had come from another quarter.

“Which Adèle?”

“Dug’s
Widder
.”

“But I am stunned—Mrs. Adèle sees no one.”

“Well, she saw me. And she said how we were cousins and all, on account of Dug being your first suitor.”

Now my Puss began to purr.

“Good gracious, he wasn’t the first. I had so many suitors, my feet nearly fell off from sashaying on such hard floors.”

So much of the bile had bled out of me. I put that hunk of velvet back in her hair, but I couldn’t hold her very long. The vein was beating over her eye, with bits of blue thunder. “Why,” she said, like a creature who had walked out of the forest in a feather dress and had learned human manners in a day, “I never did dance with Mr. Wikoff. I haven’t replied to one of his letters, one of his pleas. I suspect the Chevalier is stranded in Baltimore without a pinch of currency to pay his hotel bill. And I wouldn’t dream of inviting him here.”

Then she stroked my arm like some Secretary of State. “We ought to sell the Mansion to Mrs. Jeff. She’d have to pay a pretty price. We could move into the Willard with Willie and Tad. Mr. Lincoln, it would be much simpler to talk peace if President Davis lived across the lawn.”

I didn’t even try to dissuade her. She’d forget about Mrs. Jeff in another hour, find another strategy, meet with Major Watt. I’d have had him guillotined if he couldn’t smooth Mother’s feathers from time to time. She marched across the hall to her headquarters, her mind swollen with secrets.

32.

The Dead Prince & the Demented Queen

M
ARY
DID
HAVE
one male accomplice at the White House—Willie. With his brownish-blond hair and blue eyes, Willie had attained a certain stature at eleven. He’d become the Young Prince President, as Keckly and others called him. He wasn’t a wild Injun, like Tad. He didn’t steal pillows and pens, or add to the general mischief. He often went on some ride with his mother and Mrs. Keckly to the finest hat and cloak salons in town. Mary would remain in the carriage with the Young Prince President, while her seamstress negotiated with the shop girls; these girls would bring the shop’s goods out to the carriage, and the Lady President would try on different hats and cloaks, with Willie holding up a mirror in front of her eyes.

“Mother, that’s the one!”

He had a habit of dressing in her clothes. Mother didn’t seem to mind; she encouraged Willie. He must have served as her private mirror. When the boys created their own circus up on the roof, charging a penny or two—Tad wore my spectacles and pretended to be a tyrant, which he often was, and Willie wore one of his mother’s lilac gowns, very low at the neck. I forked over two cents, like some of the other suckers at the spectacle, heard Tad sing, “Old Abe Lincoln came out of the wilderness,” while Willie danced in his boots and gown.

I wasn’t the only one under his spell—he could crush you with all that blue ice in his eyes. The prime minister of Morocco visited our Mansion and presented the Young Prince President with a new pony, and that damn gift was far more legitimate than the spotted ponies Mother had picked up in Manhattan from some banker or dry goods baron. Willie pranced around, giving rides to all the servants’ boys at the White House who’d never been on a horse’s back. He went riding in the mudflats near the Potomac and caught a chill—that chill turned into bilious fever. He shouldn’t have gone out where all the dead cats were buried. He’d suffered through a bout of scarlet fever two years before and still had a weak constitution.

Mother had to put her prince to bed while his fever climbed. He vomited and had the runs, and ofttimes he was delirious, screaming for his pony. I would have rid
Duke
up the stairs of the White House and right into Willie’s sickroom if that would have cured him of the fever. Mary was going to annul the grand gala she had planned for the fifth of February—an evening ball where you couldn’t get in without a ticket—but Willie’s condition improved, and the very best doctor in the District said our boy would be fine. Mary still stayed with him most days and nights, slept beside him. Keckly or I would relieve her for a spell, and I was feeling chipper after Willie opened his blue eyes and said, “
Paw
, are you taking care of Duke?”

“Rubbing him with my own hands,” I said. I liked walking down to the stables after Cabinet meetings—it cleared the mind of fluff. And I could be certain that Duke didn’t have any saddle sores . . .

I sauntered into Mary’s boudoir a few hours before the big soiree. Mrs. Keckly was doing the final touches on Mary’s gown. My wife was wearing white satin, with lace twisted into little black flowers that were part of a very long satin trail.

It was Mrs. Keckly who minded our sick boy while we went downstairs to a ball whose tail had been cut short—
La Reine
, as my secretaries sometimes called Mrs. Lincoln, had outlawed dancing for the night. Mother feared that all the chomping around in the East Room might disturb her Willie, but the Marine Band still played “The Mary Lincoln Polka” while our guests arrived.

Folks were flabbergasted; they’d never seen such vittles in all their lives—neither had I. Mary’s gala had been fixed up by Maillard’s of Manhattan, the finest caterer in the land. And folks could feast their eyes on silver tubs of partridge, quail, duck, foie gras, oysters, and beef, accompanied by a
battlefield
of champagne glasses, and a spun-sugar gateau in the shape of Fort Sumpter, while I pictured wounded soldiers in their ambulances without a bite to eat.