Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (52 page)

Yet knowing that Mrs. Lincoln had returned to the United States rekindled Elizabeth’s hopes, spurring her to unearth the abandoned quilt and resume working on it in earnest. Though Mrs. Lincoln was hundreds of miles away, she had not been so close in years, and if she returned to the capital—and was it not likely that eventually some official business would summon her there?—Elizabeth wanted the quilt to be ready.

But to her shock, the next news Elizabeth read of Mrs. Lincoln was not of an impending visit to Washington, but of the death of her son Tad.

Tears ran down Elizabeth’s face as she read the grim report. As mother and son had sailed to America from England, where eighteen-year-old Tad had been enrolled in boarding school, the young man’s weak lungs had suffered in the storms and damp. Upon his arrival in Manhattan, he was diagnosed with a serious chest ailment and put on bed rest at a hotel until he regained enough strength to continue on to Chicago by train. Eventually Tad’s doctors pronounced him fit enough to travel, and after a long train ride that Elizabeth could well imagine from her own experience of it, they reached Chicago and settled into Robert Lincoln’s new home, which he shared with his wife and daughter. Mrs. Lincoln and Tad soon moved into Clifton House, where Mrs. Lincoln could better nurse him, but her tender efforts were all in vain. On July 15, Tad Lincoln died from a dropsy of the chest.

Elizabeth sent condolences but neither expected nor received a reply. Elizabeth prayed for Mrs. Lincoln and for Robert, and worried about them both, but especially Mrs. Lincoln. She could not count how many times in the years since President Lincoln’s assassination the despondent
widow had declared that if not for Tad, she would gladly join her husband in the grave. By her own admission, only Tad and her responsibility for him had kept her from taking her own life.

What would Mrs. Lincoln live for now?

Elizabeth kept her beloved, familiar rooms in the Walker Lewis boardinghouse for a while longer, but eventually her financial troubles obliged her to move elsewhere. For the next few years she boarded with one family and then another, always within the capital. Later, after her dear friend Virginia passed on, she moved back into the Lewis boardinghouse to help Walker care for their youngest daughters, still at home—pretty Alberta, her goddaughter, and sweet Elizabeth, born after the war. Sewing work still came in sporadically, but fashions had changed with the times, and other dressmakers, including Emma, now married with a son and daughter, were more eagerly sought after by the Washington elite. In her success Emma had never forgotten who had trained her and launched her career, and she frequently sent work Elizabeth’s way. Elizabeth was grateful for the assistance and very proud of her most accomplished apprentice.

From the little she gleaned from the press, her own troubles were nothing compared to Mrs. Lincoln’s, whose erratic behavior had only worsened in the wake of Tad’s death. In May 1875, after a shocking trial, every sordid detail of which was breathlessly recounted in the papers, Robert Lincoln had his mother declared insane and committed to an asylum in Batavia, Illinois, about forty miles west of Chicago. Powerless to help or to comfort her former friend, Elizabeth followed the heartbreaking story in the newspapers, stunned by reports that Mrs. Lincoln had tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum the day before the verdict was delivered. The attempt had been thwarted by a wary druggist, who had recognized her and had substituted a solution of burnt sugar and water for the medicine she demanded.

For weeks afterward, Elizabeth was haunted by visions of Mrs. Lincoln languishing in a cold, ominous institution, devoid of all warmth
and comfort. She imagined her keening endlessly as she had when Willie died, weeping and shrieking as she had after Mr. Lincoln had been killed. Elizabeth had been her most faithful companion in those dark days, but she had been unable to offer Mrs. Lincoln any solace when Tad passed away, nor could she do anything for her now.

Then she remembered the quilt, and she worked upon it feverishly. She finished the Grandmother’s Flower Garden borders, and then added one final border, ivory silk with four more proud eagles, one on each side echoing the dark eagle bearing a flag in the center, but made of gold silk, stuffed and embroidered, with more intricate floral embroidering all along the sides. As it neared completion, she wrote to Dr. Richard J. Patterson at Bellevue Place and asked if she might be permitted to visit Mrs. Lincoln. “I have made her a precious gift, which I hope she will accept as a token of my enduring sympathy and friendship,” she wrote. “It is my great hope that this quilt, with its pieces reminiscent of happier days of years gone by, will offer her diversion, comfort, beauty, and solace in her confinement.”

She had grown so accustomed to sending letters to Illinois only to receive no reply that she was almost startled when Dr. Patterson responded within a fortnight. He offered her his compliments and said that he was “most gratified to know that Mrs. Abraham Lincoln was not forgotten by her Washington friends,” but that he must discourage Elizabeth from attempting to call on Mrs. Lincoln, especially since she would be obliged to travel hundreds of miles to do so. Often Mrs. Lincoln was unfit to receive callers, he explained, and when she was, she almost always refused to see anyone.

Remembering how Mrs. Lincoln had turned away many kindhearted visitors during the early days of her widowhood in Hyde Park, Elizabeth was disappointed but not surprised.

As for her gift, Dr. Patterson wrote, “It is with great admiration for your generosity that I must respectfully urge you not to send this quilt—which sounds truly extraordinary, a masterpiece of the form—until Mrs. Lincoln is better able to appreciate it. At this time she abhors all tokens of the past. Objects, places, and anniversaries that evoke
memories a sane person would find pleasantly diverting, are an anathema to her. I regret that as finely made as your quilt surely is, Mrs. Lincoln would find no comfort in it. I encourage you to keep the quilt safe, and to deliver it to her after she has been restored to reason, at which time I am sure she will thank you for it.”

She wouldn’t, Elizabeth realized. She never would. It was not a symptom of Mrs. Lincoln’s insanity that she could not bear souvenirs of the past. She had always shunned them. She had quickly, almost frantically, given away Willie’s toys and books after his death. She had readily parted with Mr. Lincoln’s relics in the weeks following his assassination, not only to express gratitude and respect for his dearest friends, but also to get them away from her, far away, where she would never have to look upon them again.

Blinking back tears, Elizabeth packed up the quilt, certain that this time would be the last. What a fool she had been to think Mrs. Lincoln would ever want to look upon scraps of the dresses she had worn at the height of her power as First Lady, dresses she had tried to part with in what turned out to be the most humiliating scandal in a life that had known too many.

What a fool Elizabeth had been to assume that Mrs. Lincoln would want anything from her.

From time to time, brief news reports would address Mrs. Lincoln’s incarceration. One journalist from the
Chicago Post and Mail
who had come to view the sanatorium’s grounds was inexplicably granted an interview with the ailing widow, and when Elizabeth read that he found her clad in a shabby dress with her hair gone completely white, her heart sank. When the reporter noted that she rambled in conversation, and that if left alone in her room she spoke to imaginary companions, Elizabeth felt so heartsick for her that she could not finish reading the article. Expecting Mrs. Lincoln’s decline to continue inexorably, Elizabeth was delighted to read little more than a month later that she had been pronounced well enough to leave the asylum and visit her sister, Mrs.
Elizabeth Edwards, in Springfield. “It is not likely that she will return to Bellevue Asylum,” the paper’s Chicago correspondent reported. “She is decidedly better, sleeps and eats well, and shows no tendency to any mania; but whether the cure is permanent or not the test of active life and time will prove.”

Elizabeth rejoiced at this good news, and again when, in June 1876, headlines declared that Mrs. Lincoln had officially been declared restored to reason. She resided with her sister Elizabeth in Springfield, their old estrangement apparently forgotten. Elizabeth’s faint hope that Mrs. Lincoln might find it within her heart to forgive her too diminished yet again when she learned that Mrs. Lincoln had sailed for France on October 1 and would likely spend many years abroad.

Mrs. Lincoln did not return to the United States until the autumn of 1880, and only then because, at sixty-two years of age, she was too ill to live alone. She returned to her sister Elizabeth’s home and care, and Elizabeth knew then that Mrs. Lincoln would never again visit Washington.

On July 2, 1881, Robert Lincoln was walking with the newly elected president James Garfield through a Washington railway station when a disgruntled office seeker shot the president twice in the chest. Mr. Garfield survived the attack, but as the summer waned, infection set in and he declined, suffering eighty days until death finally claimed him on September 19. As shocked and horrified as the rest of the nation, Elizabeth found herself unable to sleep, worrying about Mrs. Lincoln, who was surely in anguish as the new tragedy forced her to relive her own husband’s assassination.

Elizabeth was tempted to write to her again—to offer sympathies, to assure Mrs. Lincoln she had at least one friend thinking about her in those troubled times—but she sat at her desk staring off into the distance, waiting for words that would not come. Eventually she abandoned the letter as a futile effort, having never once touched pen to paper.

Elizabeth read about Mrs. Lincoln twice more in the national papers. The first occasion came in November of that year, shortly after Congress granted the newly widowed Mrs. Garfield an annual pension of five
thousand dollars, two thousand dollars greater than Mrs. Lincoln’s. Her campaign to get Congress to increase her own pension to match put Mrs. Lincoln in the headlines once again. In January of 1882, Congress agreed, and with unexpected generosity also voted to grant her back pay as well as a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus. Elizabeth privately cheered the decision, glad to know that Mrs. Lincoln would surely at last be released from the financial worries that had plagued her for years.

But Mrs. Lincoln did not have long to enjoy her triumph.

The next time Elizabeth discovered her name in the Washington papers was the day after she died in Springfield on July 16, 1882.

With all hopes of reconciliation forever lost, Elizabeth no longer had any reason to finish the medallion quilt, but while the nation mourned and remembered and eulogized the former First Lady, she found herself compelled to take the unfinished top from the trunk. At first she considered adding a wide band of black silk all around the outer edges to signify mourning, but just as she was about to put shears to fabric, she decided against it. Mrs. Lincoln had spent nearly two decades in mourning, and although Elizabeth knew it was a strange notion, she could not bear to consign the quilt to the same unhappy end. Instead she trimmed the quilt in long red fringe, which reminded her of the glamour and patriotism of Mrs. Lincoln’s best days in the White House. Then, in recognition of Mrs. Lincoln’s passing, Elizabeth added four red tassels, one in each corner, because they reminded her of the tassels that had hung from the black silk drape on Mr. Lincoln’s catafalque. That was the single note of mourning Elizabeth allowed in the quilt, although she knew it was unlikely anyone else gazing upon the quilt would recognize it for what it was.