I Am Abraham (34 page)

Our carriage rocked under the assault of the whipping rain. I saw a building collapse—its roof spun in the air like a murderous projectile. An uprooted tree was in the middle of the road. The ground seemed to saunter like a swollen snake. The wind curled the horses’ manes. A rocking chair in the grass could have been the relic of some lost battlefield.

“Father,” Bob said, “we may have to put her away for a while.”

“Put who away?”

“Mother,” he said. “Her mind is clouded.”

I stared at this general, who was planning his line of battle.

“Bob, it’s been a great shock, and we’re not over it. We’ve both witnessed Mary’s
dry
spells.”

“But this is worse,” he said. “We may have to lock her up at St. Elizabeths.”

I was pretty much silent after that, with the rain pelting our leather carriage like live bombs. I’d visited the government asylum, a brick castle across the Navy Yard Bridge; St. Elizabeths sat on its own hill—the castle had a crenellated roof and cages in its back yard that served as a storage bin for tigers and elephants from the Smithsonian—you could hear the elephants trumpet their own sad cause from the Sixth Street docks. I took Tad and Willie to see the tigers once; their coats were covered with sores, and they had drugged eyes; they weren’t much better off than the lunatics inside . . .

M
OTHER
GOT
RID
of Willie’s toys and clothes, tossed them into a barrel—wouldn’t even offer a trinket to one of the White House’s colored boys. She couldn’t bear to look at his picture or one of his poems. The least mention of Willie would have her fly into a rage. Not even Keckly, who was mistress of her wardrobe, could escape Mother’s wrath. She’d become a Juggernaut—you were overrun if you got into her way. I wouldn’t have been bothered much if she hadn’t hurt our other boy. Tad must have reminded her too much of Willie. She cackled at him, nearly struck him, too, her fist flying out from within her welter of black crêpe and veils.

“You’re not my son. You’re some impostor who happens to live here—go away, or I’ll kill you.”

Molly couldn’t have meant that, but Elizabeth and I still had to watch over Tad.

“Paw
, is Yib my mama now?”

I didn’t know how to tell him that his mama wasn’t
right
. She hated the corridors where Willie had walked, the servants who had looked into Willie’s eyes, the very walls that had witnessed his pranks with Tad, and she must have hated herself for being alive while Willie’s bones were in a crypt. God had punished her in a furnace of afflictions.

I would catch her biting her own fist. And she would flail at me.

“
Mr. Lincoln.
You were dancing downstairs with Miss Kate while our boy had the fever. You kissed her, had both your hands inside her skirts. You brought a strumpet into this house. That’s why God has abandoned us . . . while the
beau monde
was reveling at my Lady-President’s Ball.”

You couldn’t reason with her, and I didn’t try. I let her whack at me until she got a little tired. She would withdraw into her bedroom in the crêpe of a demented queen, with Keckly as her companion and nurse—she had no other friends in the capital. Sometimes she would wail for Willie half the night, with the sounds
ripping
through the walls.

“Where’s my angel boy? Who stole him from me? Was it that
chocolatier
, Henri Maillard? I’ll smother him in his own charlotte russe.”

Bob called her a candidate for that hospital on the hill, but he had much more patience than his Pa. If she passed him in the corridor in her mountain of crêpe, he would peck his mother’s hand and survey her with his own
mountain
of pity.

He wouldn’t leave while Taddie
tossed with the typhoid
. It was Tad who kept him here, not his mother’s mourning. Tad would only take his dose of medicine from Bob’s hand, or mine. And the moment Tad’s crisis passed, Bob had to pack. His jaw was bristling with emotion. He was a boy who never cried, not even as a
little-un
. He offered to skip a semester at Harvard, stay here with us, but I wouldn’t allow it.

So I watched over Tad. He would sit perched on my shoulder at Cabinet meetings, like some obligatory owl, or would hide under my desk when I had some writing to do. Then I would carry him down the hall, with his head ducking under the chandeliers, and both of us would sleep on my narrow bed.

Still, matters got worse once we went into April; the lamps sputtered as Molly wandered around in her veils and slapped a couple of servants for bringing up Willie in her presence. So I crashed into her headquarters in my old subaltern’s shirt that I used as a dressing gown. She was sobbing with Mrs. Keckly at her side, aswim in black crêpe.

“Mother, you cannot hide Willie’s death under your veils.”

I could see her mouth sucking against all that black silk. I’d startled her. I must have looked like some crazed Cossack.

“Father,” she muttered, as if she were in a trance, “everything appears a mockery when my idolized one is not with us.”

Took her gently by the hand and led her to the window.

“Mother, do you see that large red castle on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

Molly was silent for a moment, like a general gathering the last troops she had left. Her eyes blazed—then she gave up the battle. She dug at her heart, as if she were about to stab herself with a sharpened silver spoon. And a kind of clever smile erupted on her mouth as she chanted to herself about the
beau monde
and the Lady-President’s Ball.

I
COULD
HAVE
BEEN
a sleepwalker, like my wife. Weary as I was, I put a shirt over my subaltern’s gown, decked myself in a green shawl, and walked out the Mansion well after midnight. It was no idle march. I saluted the armed guards who never questioned one of my rambles, and was nearly run down by a barouche full of drunken officers. The carriage lurched to a halt. And then an officer leapt down from the roof with the slight contempt of a cavalry man for all noncombatants, clicked his heels, and said, “It was unconscionable, Mr. President. Our coachman was blind. But I don’t blame him. I should have noticed ye, and I did not.”

I could tell from his swagger that he must have served with McClellan. And there was no getting free of him now. He insisted that I ride with him and his fellow officers, who had none of his flair. I wouldn’t get into his military car. I hung from the coachman’s handle, like some silver wraith with hair on his chin.

“The Patent Office,” I said, and we flew into the wind, up past Willard’s and onto F Street. It was the first moment of delight I’d had since Willie’s death. I was unencumbered, unshackled, clutching that handle on the outside of a car. And then the Patent Office rose out of the fog, like some benign monstrosity that covered an entire block—half the town could have lived inside its marble pillars. My Secretary of War had moved all the Patent Office examiners to a back stairway, and converted the building into a barracks and a morgue—and a military hospital in three compartments under the ornate ceiling of the second floor. I had no trouble gaining entry, even in my unusual garb. The male nurses and chief surgeon saluted me. The chief’s name was Mallory. He’d suffered a nervous collapse during Shiloh, after presiding over the amputation tables for thirty-six hours, until his gown was one great smear of blood, his face a grim mask, and his fingers nearly ruined from the mark of his own scalpel and hacksaw—and still he cut, until his aides had to subdue him, and he returned from Shiloh with a slight tremor and half his thumb gone. And now he was stationed here, a chief surgeon who no longer amputated limbs, but could guide the hacksaws of younger surgeons like a maestro and rally nurses who’d been on the wards without a moment of rest. He wore carpet slippers, like the President of the United States. He was the gentlest sort of man, and I could imagine what all the hacking had done to his constitution.

He still wore his surgeon’s cap, like some great thinker out of the Bible.

“Mr. President, I’m so sorry about your loss. We worshiped the young prince.”

I couldn’t talk about Willie, couldn’t even thank the chief surgeon for his remembrance of my little boy.

“I hope I’m not intruding. I’d like to stroll the wards, even if the boys are asleep.”

“Ah, they’ll be in rare form, sir. It’ll liven up their spirit to see the Commander-in-Chief.”

So we went out upon these curious wards, which consisted of a narrow passage between two mountainous glass cases packed with miniature models of inventions
patented
at the Patent Office. No one human mind could have absorbed the sheer variety, taken all these inventions in; fire trucks with ladders that reached some unimaginable sky; silk balloons with tentacles rather than a single tether; muskets with three rifled bores, like a man born with multiple thumbs; a saber that doubled as a harpoon; a pocket pistol with a lamp imbedded in the grip; metal fingers that could replace a severed hand, &c., &c. I couldn’t walk among these cases without sensing some new and defiant wonder, but I hadn’t come here for that.

The chief surgeon had a bottle of rich red wine poking out of his pocket, and I reckoned he’d become a tippler after his collapse. I was prepared to prop him up if he did his own curious dance on the wards, but it wasn’t wine. He was carrying a bottle of blackberry syrup for all the sick soldiers, who lay in a double row of cots along a gallery as deep as a cornfield. There were water pails near every cot and scraps of muslin for boys who were coughing up blood and phlegm. The groans grew quiet when these boys on the ward noticed their new guest. They sat up straight as they could, even those swathed in bandages. Several of the boys cried as the chief surgeon mixed the blackberry syrup with sweet water and handed out his
brew
in tiny tin cups. They couldn’t swallow the syrup for a couple of moments.

“We mourned the young prince, Mr. President. Chief Mallory had us light a candle on the day he passed. We were preparing to writ you a letter, sir. But Nurse ran out of paper and ink.”

Not a single boy would talk about his wounds, or his suffering, and the bloody rags piled near his bed. I was caught in my own well of emotion, but I wouldn’t break down in front of these boys. They kept asking about Mother and Bob and Tad and how I was holding up.

“Tolerable,” I said.

The surgeon didn’t have to look at the little tags strung to the cots; he knew the name and rank of every single soldier.

“Jonesy, do ye have anything to ask Mr. Lincoln now he’s here? You may not get another chance.”

Private Jones of the 5
^th
Massachusetts couldn’t sip the blackberry solution from his tin cup; he’d been wounded in the neck and shoulder, and was all wrapped up in muslin; so he had to suck in the syrup through a glass tube. “That’s scrumptious, Chief.”

He coughed up syrup and blood; and suddenly I couldn’t find one darn nurse on the ward, not even a volunteer, so I patted the boy’s mouth with a strip of muslin. He’d been a clerk at a dry goods store in Newton and never even owned a saddle, but the first question he asked was about a horse.

“The Young Prince President, sir, what was the name of his pony?”

Duke.

The memory of that little palomino cut under the skin like a scalpel. If Willie hadn’t gone with Duke near the mudflats, he might never have died of the fever. But that hospital ward was like a telegraph service, and the palomino’s name traveled from cot to cot on its own magnificent wire. And before we arrived at the middle of that deep corridor, Duke was the most celebrated palomino in creation—at the Patent Office.

Then a murmur broke through the silence of the ward—not the tick of a telegraph, or the flutter of wings, but that peculiar honey of the human voice when it didn’t rise up in anger. And I realized where all the lady nurses had gone; they hadn’t abandoned the hospital clinic. They stood at the end of the ward in their gray and green garb, with hymn books in their hands; accompanying them was another nurse with an accordion, and a little choral of convalescent soldiers who’d climbed out of their sickbeds to sing with the nurses.