I Am Abraham (33 page)

The dinner lasted until three, but Mother and I hardly touched a morsel. We took turns sneaking upstairs to the sick room. Mary had a bewildered look under her black-and-white headband when she returned to the soiree, her eyes darting from guest to guest. She could have been out on the China Sea. I’d have to rein her in
.

I loped up the stairs, two at a time. Mrs. Keckly was wiping our boy’s temples with a wet rag. I clutched Willie’s hand.

“
Paw
,” he said. “Lightnin’ struck the barn. I was there,
Paw
. The smoke and fire made my Duke blind. He fell down,
Paw,
and there wasn’t a body to pick him up. I’ll never be able to gallop with him again.”

I tried to nudge Willie out of that damn dagger of a dream.

I could hear that constant roar from the dining room below. Folks had started dancing in spite of
La Reine
. The staircase rumbled, and a lone chandelier rocked and left a shadow on the wall. I wondered if Willie’s delirium about Duke’s blindness was the mark of some strange perdition.

The wailing went on and on, as if Willie’s delirium was an eternity of screams that rose above the chandeliers and hid inside the rafters. What troubled me was that his sounds could have been an erratic bugler’s call, the melodies of war. He sang of sick cows stranded on a battlefield, of soldiers with cups of blood in their caps, of worms crawling out of the water, of Parrott guns with eyes and ears. It was a revelation listening to Willie. He could have been creating his own Bible, chapter by chapter.

Yet he couldn’t seem to
heal
. He would rally for a few days, smile at Mary and Tad, converse with his
Paw,
then return to his bugler’s call, with each delirium deeper still. His songs no longer made much sense, and his fever was like a tornado ride. Mary grew morose as she watched Willie worsen. Soon Mrs. Keckly had to look after her and our boy; she had to hide the blood on his nightshirt from us. Willie’s eyes turned clear as crystal the sicker he got—it was the same pale blue that enriched the air right after a thunderstorm. I could feel the Almighty lurking in that pitiless color, as my son was
wrassling
with the angels.

Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
had lauded Mrs. Lincoln after her gala as our Republican Queen. But another paper printed up “The Lady-President’s Ball,” a poem about a dying militiaman in the capital who can
feel
the flickering glow of the White House from his hospital room.

What matter that I, poor private,

Lie here on my narrow bed,

With the fever gripping my vitals,

And dazing my hapless head!

What matter that nurses are callous,

And rations meager and small,

So long as the beau monde revel

At my Lady-President’s Ball!

I pitied that poor boy, but was disheartened by the
unfairness
of the poem.

“Mary, you’ve visited a hundred privates like him in their hospital beds. You even have a camp named after you.”

“And a polka,” she said. “The Lord is punishing me now for my pride—and my expensive frills. I’ve been remiss. Those who urged me to that
heartless
step of having a ball now ridicule me for it, and not one of them has asked about Willie.
I have had evil counselors!
And all of them will have to pay. I will lock the public rooms. We will never have another levee, or another gala.”

She took to wearing a veil, and she muttered prayers to herself, used incense she kept in a fiery silver ball—it was to scarify the Angel of Death hovering over Willie’s sick room. She wasn’t that eager to have Willie’s best friend—Bud Taft—visit the White House, but when Willie woke from his delirium, he was lonesome without Bud, and I couldn’t get that little boy to go home.

“Gosh, Mr. Lincoln,” Bud said, with God-awful red eyes, “I couldn’t abandon Willie just like that. He’ll start to cry when he wakes up and finds me gone.”

After it got late and Bud fell asleep near Willie’s bed, I picked up the boy, wrapped him in a blanket, and had my own
bodyguard
carry Bud home. Tad couldn’t visit his brother because he, too, now suffered from the same chills and high fever.

I returned to the sick room and found Mrs. Keckly standing by the bed. She was taking care of all the Lincolns now and practically lived at the White House. My wife couldn’t have borne the burden of two sick boys without Elizabeth. Mother would keep vigil all the time, wandering from Willie’s room to Tad’s, like a sleepwalker with a wet rag. She kept wiping her hands, wiping her hands, and wouldn’t stop. Elizabeth had to tug at Mary to get that rag out of her hand.

Now she tugged at me. “Rest up, Mr. Lincoln. I’ll mind the boy.”

“But he might call for me, Madame Elizabeth.”

And the sliver of a smile broke through her sorrow.

“I’ll know where to find you, sir, even in this big house.”

The stewards were very quiet, not wishing to disturb our boys. The maids curtsied and kissed my hand. Bob had come down from Harvard to be with us during our double affliction—two boys with bilious fever. He helped Elizabeth with her chores and was the only one who could calm my wife. She listened to Bob, like his own child.

“Mother, go to bed!”

For once, he wasn’t even wearing Harvard’s crimson cravat, nor did he say a word about gallivanting off to the army with Little Mac. He seemed to summon a strength none of us had. I sat with him in the sick room, while he held Willie’s hand. Little Mac’s own surgeon arrived to look after our boy—a major in McClellan’s medical corps. He had blood on his tunic from the operating table, and he was so damn tired, the color had bled from his eyes, like a salmon trout on a silver hook. He listened to Willie’s heart with the twisted tubes of a stethoscope, then took Bob aside, talked to him near the window, and vanished with his medical kit and the sour perfume of blood.

“Bob,” I whispered, “what did that damn sawbones say about Willie?”

“He’ll survive the crisis. The Doc gave his guarantee.”

Guarantee
. Our boy had had five or six surgeons, with their fancy syrups and hacksaws sticking out of their pockets, but Willie never stopped coughing strings of blood. He drank and drank, yet his mouth was all blistered. His eyes wandered from Bob to my beard, from my beard to the wall, as if he could suck meaning from every single glance.

And then his hand went soft and the wandering stopped. His throat made one tiny rattle and a couple of chirps, each one faint as the last. The wind went out of him—and Willie was gone. My oldest boy wiped Willie’s eyes and took charge. He summoned Elizabeth and had her wash and comb his dead brother.

I watched Yib undress my blue-eyed boy, pluck off his nightshirt, and I was terrified—not of the dying, that I understood, but of his swollen belly and the pale shine of his skin. He had no flesh on his arms, no flesh at all.

Bob recalled what had happened when Little Eddie died twelve years ago, and his mother had surrendered to her nervous fits. He’d been around her while I was out on the circuit, his classmates poking fun of Cockeyed Bob—the two of us still had that lazy eye.

He combed her hair with loving strides of the brush and sang to her, kept her out of the sickroom, so she wouldn’t see Willie’s pale mouth and ravished body. He was gentle to his mother, even gentler with me. I should have been the one to console him. I couldn’t.

“Father, it was the typhoid. Nothing would have helped.”

My stranger-son took me in his arms and stopped my shivering.

“And if the same thing should happen to Tad?” I moaned, utterly unmanned.

“I’ll watch over him—I will.”

I let my boy go about his
bidness
. I was hampering him, like some melancholy aide. I wandered into the sickroom—a death room now—and watched Elizabeth wash and dress my blue-eyed Willie. She was bent over, moving with a marvelous, mournful rhythm, as if her hands could drum a little life into him.

I looked at my dead boy—his crystal eyes shut now, his shoulders as narrow as pins.

I covered my own face with my hands.

“It’s hard, hard to have him die.”

T
HE
EMBALMER
WAS
a little man with a derby and a general’s goatee; he had the delicate fingers and musical gait of a dancing master; his apprentice, who couldn’t have been older than Willie and had
some
of Willie’s blond hair, carried all his embalming fluids and other tricks of the trade in a satchel that dragged at his feet—the boy could have been lugging cannonballs around, and nearly stubbed my toe.

The embalmer cuffed him on the ear. “Careful, careful. That’s the President’s foot.”

The boy seemed so harassed that I wanted to rescue him from the embalming business. The embalmer dove into his satchel and plucked out a portrait of Willie with blond hair and blue eyes painted in.

“Mr. Lincoln, is that the likeness you and the Lady President are looking for?”

The question troubled me; I didn’t know what to say to this ghoul, who was about to manhandle my own little boy and suck the juices out of him. Bob had to rescue his
Paw
.

“Sir, we do not want my mother to be shocked by what she sees. That is the sole purpose of your visit.”

The embalmer smiled; he was much more comfortable around my older boy.

“I understand perfectly, Mr. Robert.”

He tipped his derby, grabbed his satchel in one hand and his apprentice in the other, and disappeared inside the Green Room. I heard the lock click; the embalmer had bolted himself inside. He worked for six solid hours and communicated with no one. Then the lock clicked again, and he emerged from the Green Room with his apprentice, their own faces embalmed with a waxen look, as he bowed and ushered us in like a ballet master.

I was scared to look. All I could remember was that pale skeleton with sunken cheeks—but the skeleton was gone. Willie had the sweetest smile. That embalmer must have engineered flesh with his balls of wax. Willie’s fingers were polished; his cheekbones weren’t sharp as knives; the apprentice had washed and combed Willie’s hair. And now I understood the embalmer’s art. He used a live boy to groom a dead one.

I got them out of the Mansion as quick I could. While Willie lay there in his silver casket, Bob summoned his mother; she descended in her black veils and didn’t want to enter the Green Room. Bob had to entice her, lure her in, and get Mary to look inside the silver casket.

“That’s not my Willie,” she said. “It’s a wax boy. His cheeks are all rouged.”

Bob kept her in the Green Room, and we had our own private service—there were no prayers. Mother was decked out in her widow’s weeds—layer upon layer—until most of her was obscured under her veils, but the little I could see of her mouth was white as chalk. We couldn’t control her wailing—no one could, not even Bob—but he kept her afloat with his quiet power.

She couldn’t bear to face other mourners, she said, and wouldn’t attend the funeral. “I won’t parade in public with my Willie gone.” So Bob delivered her back upstairs while the casket was shut tight with its silver screws.

The services were held in the East Room, where my wife had presided over the Lady-President’s Ball. I remember how the caterers had arrived from Manhattan two whole afternoons before the ball—Monsieur Maillard with a platoon of chefs. We all stared at pastry guns that could sculpt nougat mountains and spin sugar into beehives or revenue cutters and mermaids leaping out of waterfalls composed of charlotte russe, while Mother babbled with Monsieur Henri in French. She waved her arm like a magic wand and yet another piece of confection appeared. Both our boys had a candy mountain named after them, even if they were too ill to feed on their mountain, and Mother herself would become the first
fatality
of her own ball . . .

The Capitol had shut down for the day in remembrance of Willie. Willard’s canceled its afternoon tea. The bordellos of Marble Alley wouldn’t accept a single client. Little Mac arrived at the White House in his brocaded uniform and embraced Bob—he looked like a popinjay in his yellow sash. He’d come with his wife, Nell, who didn’t have his hauteur in her hazel eyes. She was, in fact, much
prettier
than McClellan in a black cloak without a warrior’s ribbons. She clutched my hand and didn’t have to say a word.

The roof rattled like a lumbering barn and the chandeliers shivered—a terrific storm seemed to rip right through our attic just as the general’s aides filed into the funeral with all the majesty of their polished chevrons. They might have smirked if they hadn’t promised Miss Nell to be on their best behavior. Their loyalty was to the General-in-Chief and his bride. A window shattered somewhere in the house. Mary’s own preacher talked about Providence. I didn’t listen to a word—I found myself in a carriage pulled by two black horses with silver bells on their bridles, and Bob right beside me. We were riding to a chapel vault in Georgetown.