The Emancipator's Wife (23 page)

“I didn't need to travel to the North to see what's right under my eyes here, Mr. Bodley!”

“But it's no man's right to tell me what I can and can't do with my own property in my own house!”

“And not the right of the woman you'd make your wife, either, whether or not you have a concubine under your roof?” Mary lashed back.

Nate's mouth flew open with shock at hearing her say the word; for an instant he was silenced. Then he laughed harshly. “God help the man that makes
you
his wife, Mary Todd!” Turning on his heel, he strode from the room. Mary heard Betsey call out, “Mr. Bodley...” as the front door slammed.

Mary stood by the hearth, trembling, tears of anger blurring her vision and her head starting to pound as her stepmother came into the parlor. “Mary, honestly, how can you quarrel with Mr. Bodley so soon after your return? You really must strive to get the better of your temper, my dear, or you stand in grave danger of ending an old maid.”

“Oh, leave me alone!” Mary turned in a whirl of turkey-red skirts. “What woman wouldn't be better off an old maid, than living with a yellow rival beneath her husband's roof?”

“Mary!” gasped Betsey. “You didn't say such a thing to Mr. Bodley?”

“It's true!”

The older woman's lips pursed impatiently. “A good many things are true in this world, Miss, but that doesn't mean that a lady ever speaks of them. If you don't curb your temper, men will say—”

Mary screamed, “Leave me alone! I don't care what men say!” And pushing past her, she blundered into the wide hall and up the stairs. Her vision was beginning to dissolve into jagged lines of flaming wire. She wanted to curse, to beat on the walls, to shriek at them for a parcel of fools. Later, lying in her room on the big four-poster bed, she felt sick and depleted. Frightened, too, and half-nauseated with guilt. Nate would tell everyone he knew—all the young men in Lexington—that Mary had become a termagant and an abolitionist since she'd been in the North.

And Betsey...!

She remembered screaming at Betsey—who would be certain to tell her father when he came home, not to mention all her gossipy friends....

The floorboards outside the bedroom door creaked. There was a gentle knock, familiar from a lifetime of tantrums and headaches and darkened rooms, and Mary whispered, “Come in. Please come in,” without turning her face from her pillow.

She heard Mammy Sally enter, and cross at once to the windows, pulling the curtains against the light that Mary had been too angry and too sick to block out. The day was hot for September, and Mary heard the dim voices of children in the street—Sam and David and Margaret and Mattie and little Emilie all shrieking at one another like baby birds. She peered dolefully up from beneath the tangle of her disordered hair as the elderly nurse looked down at her for a moment, then sighed and shook her head, and sat on the bed at her side.

“Your head ache, child?”

Mary nodded. Even with the curtains shut the light in the room seemed blinding.

The strong hand stroked back the tumbled chestnut curls. “Nelson told me you took up for that poor yeller gal Serena, that Mr. Bodley bought last spring, and thrashed Mr. Presby over. That was good of you, child, but it wasn't any business of yours. Not to lose a beau over. And not to get yourself into trouble with Miss Betsey, so soon after you come home.”

“He wasn't my beau,” said Mary softly. “Not from the minute I saw it happen.” She sighed, and dropped her head back down to her arm, wondering that her skull didn't split. Mammy Sally reached to the bedside table, where she'd set a cup of her herbal tea. Mary managed to sit up, took it with trembling hands and sipped the sharp-tasting, nasty brew. In the day's heat the steam only made her head feel worse. “And Betsey would marry me off to the Sultan of Turkey, if she thought it would get me out of the house.”

She turned over, tangled in her petticoats and stiff with corset-bones, and Mammy Sally, instead of saying—as Betsey certainly would—that she would crumple her dress and rip a sleeve-seam by lying on the bed fully clothed, merely helped straighten the heavy volutes of fabric around her, and brought up the other pillow for her head.

“Why can't I keep my temper, Mammy?” Mary whispered. “Betsey talks like she thinks I
like
to shout and scream and feel sick the way I do. I can't help it—I don't mean to get angry like this. I know what I'm supposed to do and say, and I just...I just
can't.
”

“I know you can't, child,” the older woman said softly, reaching out a gentle, work-roughened hand to wipe the tears away. “All you can do is watch yourself, and do what you can so you'll have less to fix later. And maybe the Sultan of Turkey likes a wife with a little temper to her, to keep him from getting bored.”

And in spite of her pain, and the sickness rising in her stomach, Mary laughed, and hugged the old woman.

It was truly good to be home.

N
ATE
B
ODLEY BECAME ENGAGED TO
A
RABELLA
R
ICHARDSON THE
following week. For the next year, in between teaching French and listening to the smaller girls at Ward's read their lessons in the chill of early dawn, Mary periodically suffered the spectacle of the radiant Bella shopping for her trousseau, or comparing notes about it with the other unmarried girls of the town.

Mary had not been the only girl whom Nate had squired to picnics, Court Days, and danceables, and Nate had been far from Mary's only beau. Still, when young gentlemen who were slaveholders or the sons of planters asked Mary to dance, or came to sit beside her beneath the trees of Trotter's Grove, there was a note in their voices, a difference in the way they disposed their legs and arms and bodies, that told her—and every other girl in town as clearly as an announcement taken out in the newspaper—that they no longer considered her marriage material.

She was a good friend from childhood, and would of course go on being a good friend. She was Robert Todd's daughter, cousin or second cousin or kin to most of them, and there was no question of cutting her: people were entitled to be abolitionists if they wanted to, they supposed. It was a free country, wasn't it?

But none of them danced more than one dance with her, and only after the younger girls' dance-cards were full.

And because—of course—nobody would speak of the scene between her and Nate, she never had the opportunity to explain to anyone whether she was actually an abolitionist or not.

Gentlemen who believed, with her father, that the slaves should be one day freed—when they'd been sufficiently educated and prepared for freedom, or when they could be relocated to some other country suitable for them—continued to court her. The older students at Transylvania University were joined by some of the younger professors. If Mary had to suffer the spectacle of Bella Richardson hanging possessively on Nate Bodley's arm, at least—for a time—she could contemplate it from within a circle of her own admirers.

For two years she was happy at Ward's, happier than she had been at any time since she'd left Madame Mentelle's in 1837. She loved her pupils, who ranged in ages from seven to eleven—girls and boys both, for the Reverend believed that if the two sexes mingled in the backyards, nursery wings, and parties of the town, there was no reason they shouldn't do so in the classroom. She loved, too, having her own room, having access to all the books she wanted—being able to travel, in thought at least, to those places where she longed to visit: Venice, Constantinople, Paris, Scotland. When Elizabeth wrote the following summer inviting her back to Springfield, Mary passed it by in favor of a visit with the family to Crab Orchard Springs, as they had done in her girlhood.

There were good times even with her family, helping to look after the littler children when baby Alex was born, in '39, almost two years after her return. She would sit in the kitchen as she used to, watching the stir and bustle of the big house. Elizabeth's Eppy had taught her some cookery in Springfield—Chaney began to instruct her in more.

Yet during those two years Mary found herself lying awake more and more, either in her small pretty room in Mr. Ward's house or at her father's house—with her father gone to the Legislature in Frankfort yet again—wondering if this was what she wanted. If this was all there was. All there was going to be. Sometimes she'd take out her casket of jewels, as she'd done at Mentelle's, and turn over the earbobs, the gold chains, the sapphire pendant in her fingers, as if the sight of them were reassurance that though she didn't live in her family's house, still she was loved.

Sometimes this worked.

Sometimes it didn't.

She was perfectly aware of it, when people first started treating her as a spinster.

That was at Christmas of 1838, shortly after she turned twenty-one. Nellie Clay—who had been one of her senior pupils at Ward's when first Mary returned from Springfield—got married then, in a huge party held at Ashland, Nellie being a twice-removed cousin of Mr. Henry Clay's. Mary had coaxed a new dress of pink and green silk from her father for the occasion, and her curls, threaded with dark-green velvet ribbon, shone like copper in the light of the candles in the octagonal central hall as the bride descended the stair. And it gave her a sense of pride, almost as if Nellie were a daughter she had raised, when Nellie ran to hug her after the ceremony—girls wed young in Kentucky, and Nellie was seventeen.

Yet at the reception afterwards, hearing the babble of voices and seeing so many familiar faces—Mr. Clay a bit grayer than he'd been at
Elizabeth and Ninian's second-day party, Nate already getting thick under the chin—Mary felt a sudden stricken, shaken fear, as if the ground beneath her feet had been rocked by an earthquake.

All the belles, in their rustling skirts of ivory or rose or pale-blue silk, were now decidedly younger than she, some by nearly five years. The young men crowded around them, offering cups of punch and slices of cake; eyelids were fluttered, blushes half-concealed behind blond lace fans. The young matrons—Mary Jane Clay, and Margaret Preston, who had been Meg Wickliffe when she'd shared a room with Mary at Rose Hill—were gathered in the rear parlor, watching with the satisfied air of soldiers whose battle has already been won as the fiddles struck up a dance-tune. Madame Mentelle glanced around from conversation with Mr. Clay and M'sieu Giron, and beckoned Mary to join them, but halfway there Mary was intercepted by Nate Bodley.

“Will you dance with me, Mary?” he asked. “For old times' sake?”

Nellie, in the arms of her bridegroom—a planter from Louisville—was smiling dewily at her, gratified, Mary realized with a flare of alarm, that anyone was dancing with her teacher at all.

It was then she realized she was becoming someone that other people had to look after socially.

She danced with Nate, but she talked to him as if she were talking with a stranger, asking after his horses, his plantation, his wife—all the polite small-talk that rose so easily to her lips. He replied in kind, perfectly happily, as if he'd never taken her in his arms in the orchards behind Rose Hill, or chased her through the green-and-golden woods. She wondered if he still had the quadroon girl in his household, or if he'd sold her off.

It was something a lady wasn't supposed to ask, or even think about.

In May Elizabeth wrote to her again, announcing Frances's wedding to Dr. Wallace and asking if Mary would like to come back to Springfield when the Legislature finally opened there in the fall.

Mary wrote back, saying that she would be delighted to come.

Even then she knew that, books or no books, theater or no theater, thunderstorms or no thunderstorms, she would never live in
Lexington again.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

Springfield 1839

S
PRINGFIELD HAD GROWN IN TWO YEARS.
T
HE
S
TATE
H
OUSE WAS
nearly finished, though the earth around it was the same hog-wallow of mud, torn-up rubble, and trampled gravel—scummed now with ice—that it had been, and the Legislature would be meeting in shop-fronts all over town because none of the building's rooms were finished inside. The State Supreme Court had been given quarters in a commercial building across the street. But the town swarmed with lawyers, clerks, minor officials eager to get government jobs or government patronage. Ninian's house was always full of men, eager to do favors or to buy small gifts—flowers for his wife and sisters-in-law, a stick-pin or a pair of gloves—to curry his good opinion. Political wives were now bringing their daughters to husband-hunt in the man-heavy town.

Springfield's atmosphere had changed, from bucolic sleepiness to the aggressive sparkle of power. It went to Mary's head like drink.

Mr. Douglas called on Mary's first afternoon in Elizabeth's house, to bespeak a waltz at the upcoming cotillion to be held for the legislators at the new American House Hotel. He wore a well-tailored tobacco-colored coat and a yellow silk waistcoat, and looked like a man who was going places in the world.

“He's still a Democrat,” remarked Ninian, and Mary laughed.

Elizabeth had spoken of holding a ball to celebrate Mary's return, but since her arrival was so soon before the American House cotillion, they settled on a festive supper for all their friends before going
en masse
to the more general fête. “Somehow it doesn't surprise me,” remarked Dr. Wallace, helping Frances and Mary into the carriage after supper, “that Mary would manage to get the entire Legislature to welcome her to town.”

In the long, lamp-lit common room of the American House, Mary, clothed in a ruffled gown of fawn and rose silk—her father's parting gift—was again the center of a court of gentlemen, laughing behind her fan and teasing them as they vied to bring her up-to-date on all that had happened in the town in the two years since her departure. Since she'd had Ninian send her both the
Sangamo Journal
and the
Illinois Republican,
there was
little she didn't already know about the wild mudslinging that had gone on between the
Journal
's claque of “Young Whigs” and the
Republican
's “Young Democrats” over every conceivable subject from the State Bank to the digging of local canals. Legislators and would-be government employees from Chicago to Cairo clustered around her, and nobody even asked what her opinions on slavery were or how old she was.

She danced two waltzes with Mr. Douglas, who was her height to an inch, so that their steps matched beautifully. He was a wonderful dancer, light on his feet and firm in his lead—“Of course that's how he'd dance,” she giggled to Frances later, over a cup of punch. “That's what his politics are like, too—leading you right along and making you like it.”

“I don't know, Mary,” teased Frances. “If you really want to marry the President of the United States, maybe you'd better think about changing your politics.” But she laughed when she said it, knowing—as all of them knew—that Mary took her politics far more seriously than she took Mr. Douglas.

Senator Herndon's chinless cousin Billy—who after a number of opening shots at various careers was currently a clerk at Speed and Bell's Dry Goods—asked her to dance too, declaring that she moved as gracefully as a serpent; Mary rolled her eyes, and replied, “That's rather severe irony, sir, especially to a newcomer. Now I think I've torn a flounce, and need to go repair it.” As she retreated upstairs with Merce and Julia she added, “Remind me to wear a torn flounce next time, in case he ever asks me again.” All three of them were still laughing over this—and over Billy's newly-grown whiskers, which resembled nothing so much, in their patchy fairness, as socks hanging on a clothesline—when they returned to the dancing a few minutes later.

Merce's new sweetheart, a patrician New Yorker named Jamie
Conkling, came up and claimed Merce with a bow—“If you'll excuse me, Miss Todd, I think I need Miss Levering to keep me from dying of loneliness out on the floor....” Across the room, Dr. Wallace caught Mary's eye and started to approach, but beside her a quiet, very light voice asked, “Miss Todd?”

She turned, looked up—and up and up—and saw to her enormous surprise the tall stringy storyteller who'd rescued her from Professor
Kittridge in the Globe Tavern yard over two years before.

He wore a suit now of very ill-fitting dark wool, and a black string tie, and his black hair was firmly pomaded to his narrow, rather bird-like head. In his eyes was the look of an unarmed man about to go into single combat with a Gorgon.

“If you please...Miss Todd...That is, if you don't mind...”

Beside him Josh Speed gave him a nudge closer to her, and whispered, “Just ask her, Lincoln.”

Lincoln swallowed hard. He had an Adam's apple like a lime on a string. Mary realized this had to be Cousin John Stuart's partner. Frances certainly hadn't lied about his looks.

He blurted out, “Miss Todd, I'd sure like to dance with you in the worst way.”

Speed shook his head and groaned.

Fighting to keep from laughing, Mary held out her hand and answered, “I'd be delighted, Mr. Lincoln.”

He did, in fact, dance with her in the worst possible way. But while Mary would have been merciless about someone like Billy Herndon—who had done himself no good with his “serpent” remark—she felt oddly protective of this gangly backwoodsman, and did her best to keep her new slippers out from under the Conestoga boots that she guessed were Lincoln's only footwear.

The fact that the dance was a schottische didn't help the situation any. Halfway through Lincoln stopped abruptly, abashed, with all the other couples swirling around them. “I guess I better let you go 'fore I kill you, Miss Todd. I thank you....”

“Mr. Lincoln.” She looked up into his eyes, clear gray under the overhang of his brow, and smiled. “How dare you slight a lady's courage, sir? I'm made of hardier stuff than that.
Lay on, Macduff. . . .
”

His whole gargoyle face transformed with delight at the quote. “
And curs't be he that first cries ‘Hold, enough.'
But let's sort of get ourselves out of the main channel here, and practice a little in the shallows.”

In a corner of the common room away from the main ring of dancers Mary took him carefully through the steps: hop-hop, slide-slide, hop-skip-slide....

“Like tryin' to learn to march in the Army,” Lincoln said, gravely studying the toes of Mary's pink Morocco-leather slippers, which she made just visible with the tiniest lifting of the hem of her skirt. “Only then it was just right and left, and once I'd tied a string around my right wrist I could remember it most of the time. I guess folks would just laugh at us if I was to ask you to lead.”

“You did all right leading old Professor Kittridge across the yard the way you did.
What
did he call you? For two years now I've been dying to ask....”

Lincoln laughed, and scratched the back of his head, a habitual gesture that made rapid inroads on the pomaded neatness of his hair. His smile transformed his face, dissolving its gravity into comic mobility, and lightening it like sunlight on stones. “
The servant of the servants of Mammon.
Bad enough, he says, that humanity has enslaved itself to the Devil of Property. But lawyers who haggle over other men's property for pay are the lowest of the low. Lookin' at it that way, I reckon he's got a point.” He gingerly held out his hands to her. “Can we slow down to half-speed, till I get the blame thing figured out?”

“Of course.” Mary took his hands—the biggest hands she'd ever seen, straining at the seams of his much-mended kid gloves. “Everyone else in the room is so busy minding their own feet, they'll never notice.”

It robbed the dance utterly of the reason that one did a schottische—the exhilaration of its flying speed—but it did give Mary enough time to get her toes clear of his boots. Now and then, when she glanced up, she could see his lips move as he counted the steps.

“Did he ever marry his lady from New Salem?” asked Mary, after
Lincoln had bowed awkward thanks, fetched her a cup of punch (at Speed's whispered reminder), and beaten a hasty retreat to join the men in the hall. The musicians—a German, a free black farmer, and Ninian's quadroon coachman Jerry—were likewise refreshing themselves before the next dance: Mary, her sisters, Merce and Julia clustered at the rear of the room, all except Elizabeth flushed and rumpled.

Elizabeth heaved a long-suffering sigh. “No. After all our urging...”

“Well, you could hardly blame him,” retorted Frances. “Apparently Miss Owens didn't trouble to watch her figure and got enormously fat.”

“
I
heard
she
was the one who called it off,” put in Julia Jayne, tossing her dark curls. “One
can
have enough of a man who falls into brown studies and can't be troubled to converse with a woman for hours on end. Not to mention leaving the poor thing to fend for herself when a group of their friends went riding and had to cross a stream on horseback....”

“Lincoln's trouble,” observed Josh Speed, who had joined them, “—other than not having a lick of sense about women—is that he's risen out of the world he was born into, and so cannot marry the kind of woman he grew up with. Yet he's still enough of a backwoodsman that he's never learned how to talk to ladies of this new world that he hopes to make his.”

“I'd say,” remarked Frances, looking over at the unruly black head rising above the jostling group in the hall, “that he's never going to learn to talk to ladies at the rate he's going. He must be thirty if he's a day.”

There were shouts of laughter from among the men:
“. . . so about the third time the top of the hogshead fell down inside the barrel, the cooper figured he'd put his son inside the barrel, to hold the top up while he fixed on the hoops. . . .”

Mary remembered Court Days at Lexington, and the backwoodsmen who'd come in from their rough cabins in the canebrakes. Most held a few acres of corn which they chiefly made into whiskey, their herds of cattle and pigs which they let rove wild in the woods. Illiterate, coarse, woodcrafty as the Indians they had supplanted, they lived from hand to mouth and from day to day, their women barefoot in faded calico with trains of tow-headed silent children.

What became of those children?
Mary wondered, comparing them with her well-mannered little pupils at Ward's, with Betsey's little ones at home. What became of the ones who yearned for something beyond the woods, who looked about them at men dying of pneumonia or accidents or sheer hardship at thirty-five or forty, when their strength gave out? The ones who thought—as she had thought
—There must be something else
?

She glanced across at Speed, and she saw the deep, amused affection in the young storekeeper's eyes as he watched his lanky friend: a servant of the servants of Mammon, in his shabby suit and rough boots and mended gloves, an ungainly interloper in the world of gentility and power. “Mr. Lincoln's come a long way,” she said softly, and Speed's gaze shifted to her.

“That he has.”

“And he'll have to go a long piece farther,” sniffed Frances, “before he's likely to come across a woman willing to put up with him.”

A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN WAS LIKE NO MAN
M
ARY HAD EVER MET.
F
RANCES
still made fun of him, but when they encountered one another at dances that winter, he would awkwardly maneuver to speak to Mary, to dance with her if he could. She was used to having beaux jockeying for her attention and trying to cut one another out for dances, but Stephen
Douglas, and the elderly widower Edwin Webb, Josh Speed, cocky little Jimmy Shields, handsome Lyman Trumbull—for whom Mary had a passing
tendre—
and the suave John Gillespie were men who knew how to play the game, with women and with one another.

Lincoln was different. He was agonizingly shy, laboring under the double burden of his very odd looks and his excruciating awareness of social backwardness. Mary guessed, from the hesitant way he spoke to her, the way he would hang back when Douglas or Shields deftly claimed her attention from under his nose, that he'd had harsh rebuffs from women before, and had no idea how to make a neat riposte. Mostly he just retreated to the world of men, a world in which he was a quite different man.

Across the room at Ninian's or the Leverings' she would watch him with Ninian, with Jamie Conkling or Ed Baker—a brisk little cock-sparrow Englishman and another of her Coterie, as their circle of friends came to be called—or others who knew him through Legislature and the courts. The shyness fell off him there like an ill-made coat, and he'd joke, and listen to other men's stories, and speak with a sharp and quiet acuteness that vanished utterly the moment one of the Springfield belles addressed him.