The Emancipator's Wife (33 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FOUR

Springfield 1843

T
HEY LIVED IN A SINGLE RENTED ROOM IN THE
G
LOBE
T
AVERN, AT A
cost of four dollars a week.

It took Jerry two trips in the carriage to bring five of Mary's trunks, plus hatboxes, valises, and books, to the plain two-story wooden boardinghouse on Adams Street. She spent the rest of the week going back and forth to Elizabeth's house, packing up what remained. Though Lincoln had left his room at William Butler's on his wedding morning without the slightest idea that he'd be moving in with a bride within twenty-four hours, he was able to walk over from Butler's the following morning with all his possessions crammed into two saddlebags and a cardboard box.

“Growin' up the way I did, I never did need much,” he said, almost apologetically, as Mary, laughing, looked around the small room for places to put everything. The books—her novels, his law-books, and her volumes of Shakespeare and Burns—they stacked on top of the single bureau. There was no bookcase. “I see those big houses—your brother-in-law's among 'em—and they look so fine, an' I always end up wonderin',
what the blazes do them fill 'em up with
?”

“They fill them up,” smiled Mary, turning back to her tall husband, “with the amenities of fine living. With the wherewithal to make music—for one's friends and for one's own peace of mind. With the space to entertain and give parties, for the pleasure of the friends one already has and to meet one's business and political acquaintances. With a healthy and happy environment in which to raise one's children.”

Lincoln hesitated fractionally before putting his big hands on her shoulders. His grin was rueful. “And dear knows what our poor little codger's gettin' himself into, arrivin' early this way,” he said, and bent to kiss her. His black hair hung down in his eyes—never, to the end of their days together, did Mary see it brushed back for more than five minutes at a time.
If he's to go anywhere in politics,
she thought,
we're going to have to invest in a little pomade.
“But we'll deal with that as best we can, Molly, and I reckon we'll brush by somehow.”

He kissed her again, and then—Jerry having departed—folded her in his arms and carried her to the bed.

He left the next day for Taylorville, for a one-day session of Christian County Court. Mrs. Beck, who owned the Globe, found planks that could be put together to form a rough bookcase: Mary and Lincoln had already formed the habit of reading to one another in the evenings, Mary in this case reading
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
and translating as she went. (“Lord, that Valmont's a scoundrel!” exclaimed Lincoln, as if the whole thing were happening in Springfield instead of the Paris of the
ancien régime.)
Mrs. Beck was less than pleased when Mary complained about the curtains—which were faded and limp—and responded to Mary's suggestion that they be at least starched and ironed with a tart, “Well, my lady, I'll certainly send one of the slaves to take care of it right away!”

Mary flushed bright red, but Mrs. Beck had already turned on her heel and strode off down the stairs; Mary spent the rest of the rainy day with the six additional trunks of dresses, shoes, underwear, and books that Elizabeth had sent over, trying to arrange them in such a fashion that two people could at least get from the door to the bed without turning sideways. Julia arrived with Mary's cousins Lizzie and Francy, to sweep her off for tea at Uncle John Todd's, but that first night alone Mary lay for a long time awake, listening to the clamor of men's voices in the common-room downstairs, to the clang of the bell that announced the arrival of the stages, to old Professor Kittridge's drunken harangues in the yard, and to the Bledsoe family arguing over money in the room next door.

Wondering how she, Mary Todd of Lexington, who could have been the wife of any planter in Kentucky and several states around, had come to be alone in this dreary place.

And trying to push from her mind the shame at her lie and the dread of what Lincoln would say if he ever found out.

He won't,
she told herself frantically.
I can tell him I miscarried. . . .
She'd heard Mammy Sally speak of slave women who'd done so.
Or is it different for darkies than for whites?
Who could she ask?

The thought of him finding out—of standing revealed in his eyes as a liar and a cheat—was more than she could bear.

“You really must talk to that woman,” said Mary, when Lincoln returned late Wednesday afternoon. “She's insufferable, and a slovenly housekeeper. I had to starch and iron the curtains myself, and I had a headache all the rest of the day. And her cooking leaves much to be desired as well. If we were to move to the American House . . .”

“It would cost us half again as much,” said Lincoln gently, drawing Mary to his side where he sat on the bed. “And that we cannot afford.”

“Oh.” Mary looked down at her hands, filled with shame that she hadn't thought of that before getting into a quarrel with their landlady.

“I told you, didn't I, that you'd be marrying a poor man—”

“As if that mattered a whit to me!”

“Well, if it's true I'm grateful for it. And if it's not quite as true on closer examination as you thought it was when you said it, I'm glad you're still willin' to stand by it.”

Mary opened her mouth to protest, then saw the twinkle in his eye and retorted, in mock primness, “You're not the only person in this household who stands by his word, Mr. Lincoln. I can be patient in a good cause.”

“That's my Molly.” He tightened his big hand on her shoulder, and bent to kiss the top of her head. “As for Mrs. Beck, I heard all about your hoo-rah from her on my way across the yard, an' I smoothed her feathers a trifle. You got to remember, she runs this place with just the two servant girls, when she can
get
a servant girl, and most of the work she does herself. Of course she'll get cross, when somebody tells her to do more. One day I'll be clear of the National Debt that landed on me when I took over my partner's half of that wretched grocery in New Salem, and then we'll be able to live . . . well, if not like Brother Ninian and Sister
Elizabeth, at least as well as common folks. You think you got enough flub-dubs in them trunks to last you till then?”

Mary put on a considering expression as she studied the trunks, then glanced at him, smiling. “If you're not too long about it.”

When the times were sweet, they were very sweet.

Lincoln had grown up in a man's world, and for years had associated mostly with men. With his agonizing shyness around women went a curiosity about them that few men had—as he was curious about all things, and all people. In the same spirit that he'd listened to the Speed slaves telling stories in the quarters, he would listen with a slow grin, cracking his knuckles, when Mary spoke of the intricacies of the Southern family feuds that had carried from Virginia to Kentucky and on into Illinois, and the inflexible rules about who left cards on whom, and why. He hadn't been joking when he'd said a woman should have the same right to sexual freedom as a man—he was also inclined to let women have the vote. “But God help you if you say so in this state.”

For her part Mary had never known a man like him. Her experience had for the most part been with men of her own class, townsmen who saw the world in terms of making a living, and connecting with other men—and peripherally with their families—who would further their own careers.

Lincoln's countrified earthiness, that had so repelled Elizabeth, drew Mary. She felt that she was dealing with a man from a different age of history, a woodsman at heart who saw the world in terms of simpler survival, and who thus saw through the persiflage of town life and town ambitions to the bone and bedrock of politics and law.

At night they would read to one another from her books or from the half-dozen newspapers that were the party organs of Democrats, Whigs, Locofoco Democrats, “the conscience Whigs,” anti-Tyler Whigs, and all phases of opinion in between. Or they would simply talk until the bedroom candle burned out. Shortly after they were married, as she brushed her hair before bed, he asked her shyly, “May I do that?” and she smiled at him sidelong:

“You heard the minister, Mr. Lincoln, and you know the laws of the state. It is now
your
hair, and you may do with it what you wish.”

But the sweetness of those times didn't make up for her constant dread of being found out in her lie, and the galling humiliation of being truly poor. And Mary quickly found how right Elizabeth had been. From the first she hated poverty—hated it and all that it meant.

During that freezing winter, when she would struggle through the mud of Adams Street on foot and see Elizabeth pass in Ninian's carriage, she didn't even have the consolation of sympathy. She knew what Springfield gossip was. She had proclaimed, again and again, to every one of her friends that Lincoln's poverty and debt mattered nothing to her. She knew how Elizabeth would look down her nose, if word reached her that Mary did not actually like to be cold in their little boardinghouse room (Mrs. Beck charged extra to keep fires burning during the day), or disliked the appalling sameness of Mrs. Beck's uninspired cooking. She could almost hear Elizabeth say it:
You have no one to blame but yourself.

To be poor was to be branded wrong in the eyes of the entire town.

When, in years past, Mary had pictured herself as married, she had always assumed she would have a home—perhaps not as elegant as that of Elizabeth and Ninian, but at least a place of comfort, like that of Bessie and Simeon Francis. A place in which to be “at home” when friends came calling, a place where she could give dinners and put up preserves. But even with the little money from her mother's will that came to her on her marriage, Lincoln insisted that they had not the money for a house. So they remained at the Globe, where the noisy talk of the men in the common-room, the clang of the stagecoach bell, and the arguments of the Bledsoes next door kept Mary awake far into the nights.

What Lincoln had imagined marriage would be like, he did not say. Sometimes she wondered if he had ever pictured himself as being married at all. Or had he, she wondered, simply assumed that he would continue his bachelor existence of boardinghouses and courtrooms, arguing politics and swapping yarns with his male friends?

Whatever he'd been expecting—or not expecting—Mary found that Frances had been right in observing that at thirty-four, Lincoln was deeply set in his ways. She tried to remember this, when he'd stay out late at the law office, or the State-House library, or wherever it was he stayed until long after dark, leaving her to sit at the boardinghouse dinner-table with two dozen teamsters, laborers, clerks, and transients alone. Harriet Bledsoe and her six-year-old daughter Sophie were often the only other females at the table, and though some of the men were careful about their language, others weren't, and what Mary didn't learn about disgusting table-manners in that first winter could have been written on the back of a very small visiting-card.

Mary's resentment took the form of fits of rage; Lincoln's, of silence and absence, from which he'd return to apologies, embraces, and long sweet nights of lovemaking and talk. During the day when he was gone Mary would sometimes go calling on Julia or Bessie or Merce Conkling, but she found herself embarrassed, for they were now wealthier than she. They generally asked her to stay to luncheon or dinner (“Darling, everyone in town has heard about Mrs. Beck's cooking!”) but she dreaded the thought that she was being looked upon as a cadger.

When she stayed at the Globe, she ran the risk of the equally idle
Harriet Bledsoe knocking at her door, “for a chat.” Harriet's husband was a new-fledged lawyer, just entering partnership with Lincoln's English friend Ed Baker, but Harriet herself read little but the Bible and had no conversation beyond her family back in New England and how much she missed the way things were done there. Mary's delight in dresses and jewelry she regarded as sinful; her newspaper-reading and interest in the question of Federal lands she considered simply bizarre. She'd bring Sophie to do her samplers in quiet beside the little fire—Mary sometimes suspected that Harriet was in the habit of letting the fire go out there, and brought her daughter over to Mary's room only so that the two of them could stay warm—at the Lincolns' extra expense.

“It seems like I saw more of you before we were married than I do now,” Mary complained late one evening, when Lincoln finally came up the narrow wooden stair. It didn't help that she'd heard his voice downstairs in the common-room for a good hour already, talking to drunken Professor Kittridge and Billy Herndon. His high laughter was distinctive, and could pierce walls. She had waited, trying to read by the single candle that was all they could afford that week, with growing impatience—did the man have no concept of time?

Apparently not, because Lincoln looked mildly startled and said, “I'm only making hay while the sun shines, Molly. Mr. Logan's taken on more cases, with the Supreme Court sitting....”