The Emancipator's Wife (19 page)

“Get yourself something to eat first.”

“Save me some.” Though with the youngest nine children home and the three grown women—and Lionel coming in God knew when from Griffe's—whatever would be left by the time John located his mother wouldn't be much. “I'll be back when I can, baby,” he whispered to Clarice, cupping the side of her face for one more kiss, the anger and weariness of going through all this yet again tight in his chest.

Then he set out on his search.

If Phoebe were a simple drunk, he reflected, taking a quick look through the door at Griffe's—where as he suspected Lionel was having a couple with his friends from the stockyard—the matter would be an easy one. Even the drunks in the neighborhood knew enough not to stray across Kramer Street, and that was a piece of wisdom just about impervious to liquor.

But for Phoebe, liquor was only an adjunct to whatever dark things inhabited her skull. When her voices started talking to her, there was no telling where they would lure her, or what would appear to her to be a good idea at the time.

So he worked his way south and east, making for the dives and flophouses and tawdry saloons of the levee. This was the way his mother had gone last time she'd wandered away, when she'd been picked up, with a blacked eye and a bloodied lip, naked in an alley behind the Eagle of the Republic saloon on Grove Street and telling the cops at the Twenty-second Precinct House about the revelation God had given her—John winced at the memory. For weeks at a time she'd be more or less the woman who had raised him, who had fled with her children from Blue Hill, with her wry sense of humor and her bitter, sardonically funny observations, telling amazing tales to the children of princesses and warriors and the serial adventures of the Hebrew Children in the wilderness that had nothing to do with any Bible story John had ever read....

And then she'd be gone. Even when she was there, she was gone. Abusive, angry, shouting, or simply silent, staring at the wall. For the past four years he'd been keeping a log of her moods, and knew she was getting worse, much worse.

He didn't know what to do about that.

He hunted for her until nearly midnight, through steamy dark streets illumined only by the smoky glare of the barroom doors. A one-legged white beggar in the shabby remains of a blue Union uniform claimed he'd seen her, on the plank sidewalk outside Dapper Dan's on Judd Street. The man, though drunk himself, was good enough to go into the saloon to ask after her and thus prevent John from getting his head broken by the men inside. Dapper Dan's was one of those places where the “regulars” were all white. Through the door John saw him pause long enough to pull off his wooden leg, untie his real leg from among his rags, park prosthesis and crutches in a locker, and ask the other plug-uglies in the place about her—he came back out, said she'd been seen and thrown out.

From there John asked for her at the shabby dives along the levee, where merchant sailors were incapacitated with chloral hydrate and relieved of their pay, their shoes, and frequently their lives; at the catacombs that doled out needled beer and murder. He went to the lakefront bagnios where the clap was probably the mildest and most benign thing that would happen to you....His sister Lucy, John knew, had died in one of the places along here.

One of the waterfront gangs shoved him up against a wall, drunk and looking for sport: “Christ, you mean that nigger bitch who went on about the river of flamin' locusts pourin' down out of the moon?” marveled the bulldog Irishman who led them.

“She's my mother,” said John, keeping his voice steady with an effort. The man who pinned him against the wall had on brass knuckles and there were blackjacks, sticks, and chains dimly visible in the gang's shadowy hands. John knew if you showed fear you were dog's meat.

“Let 'im go, boys. He got trouble enough.”

The men passed on, bawling with laughter.

In time John found her, where the tracks of the Illinois Central ran into the lakefront yards. It was a nightmare world of darkness and lights, like a shooting-gallery of trains switching back and forth, engines clattering, bells hammering, all night long without cease. The night was still hot and the occasional chuff of breeze off the lake like smelly glue, mosquitoes roared and swarmed around the railroad lanterns that hung before the doors of dark little dens where crooked games, camphor-laced wood-alcohol, and whores too far gone to work even the levee beckoned to those with nowhere else to go. John heard Phoebe's voice singing, cracked and beautiful and silvery, the skipping, almost childlike march the Union soldiers had sung, with words that always raised the hair on his nape:

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. . . .”

John always wondered what that woman had actually seen, the one who had written that song. What the glory of the coming of the Lord had looked like, in the deep of the night.

Phoebe was staggering along the tracks in the middle of what looked like a river of ties and steel. Her black hair hung down her back to her hips and her pink dress lay torn and ragged over her shoulders and she sang full-out as if she were in a choir.

“I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps,

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps—

His day is marching on.”

The groaning shriek of pistons and wheels drowned her voice and a train clanked by between them, medium fast. Steam blasted John in the face. He stopped on the tracks, aware that if another engine bore down on him the noise was so great all around that he wouldn't hear it; he kept looking over his shoulders, left and right. There was an engine there, lamp burning, but unmoving as of yet—at least he could perceive no movement, in the shifting shadows and dark. Two cars went by, tramps dimly perceived in their open doors, and the lights beyond framed Phoebe's body and caught like dark fire in the ends of her hair. She was walking toward another moving engine, her arms outspread as if welcoming a lover.

“I have read a fiery gospel writ in lines of burnished steel,

As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal,

Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel,

While God comes marching on. . . .”

With one panicky look over each shoulder—and yes, there was another train coming, though not fast—John darted over the tracks. His eye was caught by the rats swarming between the ties, by the dark slumped form of a drunk asleep or dead on the ground with a bottle glistening under his hand.

“Get your hand off me!” ordered Phoebe, when John caught her, pulled her from the track. “I don't got to go with you! I don't got to go anywhere with
you
!” Her breath smelled of oil of turpentine, a favorite tipple at the rough joints along the tracks.

“It's me, Mama, it's John.”

“No it ain't. John wouldn't come look for me. John too good to go out lookin' for his own mama. John thinks he's too
good
to speak to her, when he see her on the street.”

“Ain't you got no place to take her?” One of the train-men emerged from the dark at the edge of the switch-yard. “State asylum or someplace? She sure crazy.”

The way the man looked at her—the familiar way he helped her over the last couple of ties and over the filth-swimming ditch into Water Street—John suspected the man had had her, in the shadows of one of the alleyways. Maybe six or eight of his friends as well. He always suspected that was how she'd ended up bearing Sharon, Ritchie, and her last baby, who had died.

John said shortly, “State asylum don't take colored.”

“Oh.” The man nodded vaguely. “Damn shame.”

Yes,
thought John, escorting his mother back through the now-quiet streets.
It certainly is a damn shame.

About halfway home Phoebe abruptly decided that he was who he said he was after all, and commenced on a rambling account of why she'd had to go looking for medicine for her back and her belly and to shut up the ants running through her brain. John murmured, “Yes, Mama,” and “No, Mama,” as she spoke of the things she'd done.

At home he found Clarice had saved out some supper for him, but Phoebe announced, “I'm hungry,” and took the pot from her. When John tried to get a share she shouted at him so loudly that, mindful of
Lionel and Lulu and the older kids asleep in the next room—or out on the porch, draped in makeshift tents of sheeting against the mosquitoes—he let her have it. As she gorged down all that remained of the beans and rice, Clarice took him quietly aside and showed him what she'd found under the house beneath the corner of the room where his mother's bed was: twelve patent medicine bottles, all of them new and all empty.

“How much pain is she in, to need that much medicine?” asked his wife worriedly. John sniffed the necks of one bottle and then another, and glanced back through the door at his mother in the single candle's quavering light. All her favorites, Godfrey's Cordial and Nervine and Pritchard's Female Elixir. Two definitely had the bitter smell of laudanum and two more the pong of alcohol beneath the mingling sweetness of herbal tonic. “You think if you ask your Dr. Patterson about her, to have a look at her...?”

“That's all I'd need,” sighed John. “To tell the man I work for that my mother's crazy? That anytime she might take it into her head to come out to Batavia and look for me?” All the way out to the levee, and all the way back, the anger had been building in him, anger and grief and shame that he'd hold her craziness against her. Shame even that he'd hold her drunkenness against her, for it clearly was no fault of hers.

He knew those ants had been running through her brain long before she'd started trying to shut them up with alcohol.

Clarice asked softly, “What are we going to do?” She too raised her head, looked back through the doorway at the packing-box in which Cora slept. At Cassy curled in a tight ball on her mattress with Miranda and Ritchie. Though Cassy kept a hand on her money-box and slept with it under her pillow at night, still Phoebe had managed to raid it two or three times in the past few years, spending the rent-money inexplicably on toys for all the children, or games of keno. “You know this can't go on.”

“I know.”

By the time they got Phoebe to bed—after an endless argument during which she refused to lower her voice—it was nearly dawn. John could do no more than lie on the mattress with Clarice in his arms, trembling with anger and frustration, listening to the clanging of the switch-yards in the dark.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

S
LANTING SUNLIGHT DAPPLED THROUGH THE DOGWOOD TREES ALONG
Pennsylvania Avenue; the horse of one of the Union Light Guard shied at a passing dog and snorted, tossing its head. Mary glanced over her shoulder at the sudden clatter of hooves, then back at Lincoln in the carriage beside her: “A lot of use they'll be if a rebel assassin shoots at you from the trees.”

Lincoln leaned back against the leather of the carriage-seat: “The only way they could prevent a rebel assassin from shooting from the trees is to surround us like a wall. And even then they couldn't stop a man from flying overhead in a balloon and dropping a brick on my head.” And he looked up, shading his eyes as if to search for such a craft.

“
Will
you be serious?”

“No.” Lincoln smiled, and put his arm around Mary's shoulders. “I have been serious all morning and I am mighty weary of it.”

Deep in her dream, feeling as if she were trapped in quicksand, Mary thought,
No . . . Let me out. Let me wake up.

I know what's coming and I don't want to see it. Not again.

But she couldn't wake—couldn't put from her the happiness of each relived second in his company, even if she knew that each one was a knife in her heart.

“...I want a carriage-ride with the woman I love, not a military
parade....”

Sometimes—tonight was one of those times—Mary caught fragments of other events in her dreams: hurrying downstairs to the carriage in her silver-gray dress, her tippet of black and ermine wrapped around her shoulders. Hearing Lincoln in the hall behind her knock at Robert's door. “We are going to the theater, Bob; don't you want to go?”

She didn't hear Robert's reply, but in the carriage, on the way to Fifteenth Street to pick up young Major Rathbone and Miss Harris,
Lincoln shook his head and said, “I can't blame him, the poor boy hasn't slept in a bed in two weeks. I told him to do just what he felt most like.”

And then they were in the theater. Mary was conscious of the damp cold of Lincoln's coat-sleeve as he escorted her up the dark little stair, of the scent of Major Rathbone's hair-pomade and of Miss Harris's lavender sachet. Her heart was crying
No! Let me out!
but she tightened her grip on the sinewy arm, still strong enough, after all these years, to pick up an ax by the last inch of its handle and hold it out straight before him....

Strong enough to swoop her up in his arms as easily as he'd swoop Tad.

The Pinkerton guard John Parker, burly and disheveled and smelling faintly of liquor, rising hastily from the wooden chair beside the door of the box to salute; Lincoln stopping for a moment to say something to him as Major Rathbone opened the door and bowed Mary and Miss Harris through. The box itself, dark and a trifle stuffy, with its drapery of red, white, and blue, and the glow of the stage lights beyond it outlining the rocking chair the management always brought in for Lincoln. The band breaking into “Hail to the Chief,” and Lincoln moving the draperies aside a little to bow to the audience.

Laughter and cheering gusted up from below, warming Mary with a glowing satisfaction—a sense of deep vindication—that she felt even through her rising panic, her desperate struggle to get out of the dream before the end. Six months previously every newspaper in the country had been calling him “that giraffe from Illinois” and claiming that re-electing him would damage “the cause of human liberty and the dignity and honor of the nation.” “There was never a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of ‘Gorilla.'”

He had suffered—not from those slurs, but from the grinding toll of the War itself. She could see it in his face, in the shadowy glow of the gas-lights. The deep lines, the sadness in his eyes, made her want to weep. The cheers from the audience were a balm, to her and, she thought, to him. At least there was the lightness in his movement that he'd had during their carriage-ride, the relaxation, as he sat beside her, that she hadn't seen in him in months. Major Rathbone and Miss Harris settled in the other two seats, hand in hand, heads together: the young soldier's mother had married Miss Harris's father, an irascible and sharp-tongued Senator from New York, and now it looked like the children of their separate first unions would themselves unite. Mary's hand stole into Lincoln's, and down onstage the sprightly Florence tried to tell a joke to Lord
Dundreary, with predictably sparse results.

Florence: “Why does a dog wag its tail?”

Lord Dundreary: “Good heavens, I have no idea.”

Florence: “Because the tail can't wag the dog.”

“There's Charlie Taft,” murmured Lincoln, looking down into the audience below them, and Mary hid a smile; in any crowd, Lincoln was always looking for people he knew. And the other Mary, the Mary who lay locked in the dream of these minutes, felt the minutes passing as if she heard the ticking of a clock....

Ten more minutes to go. Nine. As if she walked with him down the road to a ferry, dreading the sight of every tree, every path-side stone that told her it was getting closer, and there was nothing she could do to stop the approach of the crossing-over point, when he was with her one moment, and the next....

Maybe if I scream I can wake myself. . . .

“Don't know the manner of good society, eh?” sniffed the bumpkin Asa Trenchard, down on the stage. “Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out—you sockdologizing old mantrap!”

Lincoln leaned down, to make some wiseacre remark in Mary's ear; she felt the brush of his beard against her temple.

NOOOO . . . !!!

The gunshot was like the cracking boom of thunder, like the lightning that had always so terrified her. Lincoln's arm jerked convulsively in her grip, and Mary caught him as he slumped sideways in the rocking chair. Gunpowder stink filled her nostrils, gunpowder and the horrible hot smell of blood.

Someone was shouting, rushing forward through the smoke. Major Rathbone tried to seize him, struggling in the reflected glow from the stage, and a knife flashed in the gaslight gleam. Miss Harris fell back against the box rail, screaming, and on Mary's shoulder Lincoln's weight grew heavier and heavier as he sagged against her. She saw the blood in his hair and began to scream too, screaming as all that she had feared for four years came rushing to catch her, to sweep her into the darkness that lay on the other side of that dividing-line of her life....

T
HERE MUST BE SOMETHING
I
COULD HAVE DONE.

Mary looked back on the dream—like looking back into a room, through a window from the outside—as she sat beneath the elm-trees of Bellevue's parklike grounds the following morning. Beside her on the bench sat Mrs. Olivia Hill, black-clothed like herself, a widow like herself, who had come up to her last Friday, after she'd run away from John Wilamet in the rose garden: “Is there anything I can do, my dear?” she had asked.

There wasn't, of course, and both of them knew there wasn't. But it was good at least to know that someone in this place actually cared. Like John...Imagine meeting John here, after all those years! Olivia had sought her out again after breakfast this morning, and offered to walk with her, the gray-clad form of Amanda trailing inconspicuously behind. “They don't like to see us in conversation, you know,” whispered Mrs. Hill, and widened her enormous blue eyes at Mary. “Especially not those of us who were put here for our beliefs.”

Mary turned her head sharply, met that gentle gaze. There was something in Mrs. Hill's voice that told her exactly what “beliefs” her family had considered marked her as insane, and she lowered her voice before she asked, “Do you think it might be possible to speak to our loved ones here?”

Olivia glanced back at Amanda, then at Mary again.

“Have you ever tried it?” Mary persisted. “Since you've been here, I mean?”

Olivia's thin, intent face grew troubled in its frame of black veiling. “The problem is the daylight,” she explained, and Mary nodded. Every medium she'd ever spoken to had emphasized that the yellow vibrations of sunlight were absolutely inimical to the materialization of ectoplasm. “You notice how careful the good doctor is, to keep us separated once it grows dark.”

Mary looked up at the trees overhead: elms like the clouds of a prairie thunderstorm, even in the brightness of morning casting a dense blue shade. “Surely,” she urged, “we can at least try. Is there anyone else here, who might form a circle with us? Who might lend their strength, to summoning the spirits across the Veil?”

“Oh, yes. Lucretia Bennett was put in here for exactly that reason—because, her husband says, she believes that their sons speak to her from the Land Beyond. And that, of course, must be madness.” She smiled her sweet, sardonic smile. “And little Miss Judd as well, though I'm afraid, poor child, she does have a terribly nervous constitution....She says she knew you when she was a little girl.”

Mary smiled at the recollection of that fairy-like child she'd known in Chicago, in the chaotic days of 1860 before the Republican Convention. “She did. Her father was one of my husband's great supporters....The President of the Illinois Central Railroad, you know. My husband did a great deal of work for them, in his lawyer days.
And
had to sue them to get paid, I might add.”

“Oh, well, one can understand how the
poor
Illinois Central Railroad would be so
poverty-stricken
that they wouldn't have the money to pay their lawyer....”

And both women laughed. Bellevue Place, Mary thought, looking out past her companion to the thick green lawns, the winding graveled carriage-drive that circled the grounds, did not seem so very different from the Spiritualist camps she'd attended in the green country of upstate New York. There was that same relaxed air of not having anywhere else to be, of having all arrangements for room and meals taken care of in advance....

The difference, of course, being that in those places one was treated like an adult capable of making decisions despite one's grief, and not like a willful and deluded child.

And even when she was a child, Mary didn't recall this horrible sense of being always watched, always spied upon, tattled on for the slightest deviation from what Dr. Patterson considered “normal” behavior.

It was worse than living with her sister Ann.

“I've never had success in materializing the spirits since I've been here,” went on Olivia, with a sigh of regret. “It's what one can expect, of course, in this atmosphere of concentrated skepticism—I should think the look on Mrs. Patterson's face would send any spirit fleeing. But if nothing else, we can transmit to our loved ones the assurance that
we
are thinking of
them,
even if they cannot come to us.”

“But they know that anyway,” Mary pointed out.

“Of course,” agreed Olivia, with a beatific smile. “But is it not good to receive a letter full of love and cheerful thoughts, even from one to whom you are prevented from writing?”

No,
thought Mary crossly.
Mr. Lincoln hears me speak to him every day, hears me tell him how much I love him, need him. . . . My sons hear my words of love daily, hourly. One holds séances in order to hear from THEM. In order to see their dear faces again, to hear their words, touch their beloved hands. It isn't that I don't think they hear, there in the Summer Land. But I miss them so!

“When those medical lackeys my husband hired came with their statements about conversing with the dead being proof of madness, I told them, if belief in the survival of the soul in Heaven is madness, then I claim the sisterhood of madness with Christ and all his saints.” Scorn flicked in Mrs. Hill's voice and she squared her slim shoulders. “If it is madness to believe that love survives death, and that my precious boys in Heaven still love and comfort the mother they loved on earth, then how I pity your bleak and loveless sanity!”

Mary assumed there was some kind of grapevine telegraph in operation, as soldiers exchanged from rebel prison camps during the War had assured her existed in Andersonville and Libby Prison under the very noses of the guards. She was certainly aware that every darky in Lexington had known news and information long before a single white was aware of it, apparently by telepathy. In any case, the following morning directly after breakfast, she and Olivia Hill made their way to the densest copse of elm-trees, that stood farthest from the house at a corner of the grounds, and found Minnie Judd and the white-haired Mrs. Bennett waiting for them there.

“It's
good
of you to come with us here,” said Lucretia Bennett in her oddly-inflected voice. “
Good
of you to
help
us in trying to reach out to our
loved
ones on the Other Side.”

“I don't hold much hope.” Olivia took Mary's other hand and drew her down onto the bench in the secluded shade. “We have twice attempted to hold gatherings here—mostly at this early hour, when the sunlight is not so harsh. Perhaps there were not enough of us to invoke the energies needed to build a bridge of thoughts for the souls to pass from the Summer Land to this world. We can only trust, and pray.”