The Emancipator's Wife (41 page)

“Never,” Lincoln assured her, with amusement deep in his eyes. “But at least now I see you come by it honestly—or
would
come by it honestly, if you ever was to do so.”

“Well, I—Eddie, now, leave that lady alone . . . !” She sprang to her feet, to recapture her roving offspring.

Winter had settled in on Springfield when they returned. Iron-cold winds slashed across the gray prairies, bringing first rain, then snow.
Lincoln returned to a stack of accumulated mail saved for him by Billy Herndon, a depressing agglomeration of criticism for his speech against the Mexican War, newspaper articles misquoting and misrepresenting everything he'd said, and the accumulating evidence that his recommendations for positions were being steadily ignored in Washington. Eddie, who had seemed to perk up in Lexington's warmth, came down sick again early in December. Mary and Lincoln moved his little cot back into their room, and took turns through the nights applying poultices and giving him the saline draughts and spikenard teas prescribed by Dr. Henry and Dr. Wallace. In the mornings Lincoln would walk to the law office in the dreary darkness on only a few hours of sleep, and Mary would return to the closed-up, stuffy room with mustard compresses for the boy's chest, or boiling water to make steam for him to breathe.

Bobby would sit with his little brother after school, reading stories from his primer or playing games. Now and then Mary would hear
Eddie's thin voice speak to his brother in barely a whisper.

On the thirtieth of January, a letter reached Mary from Emilie telling her that Granny Parker had died. She was so exhausted from looking after Eddie, and so frightened by the child's worn-out weakness, that she could only retreat to the parlor, where she sat weeping by the fireplace while Ruth moved quietly about the kitchen, preparing dinner for Bobby. When Lincoln came home he listened to her news, read Emilie's letter, and said softly, “She was a fine lady, Mother, and had lived a good long life. You lie here on the sofa, and rest a little. You look done in.”

He looked done in himself, but Mary leaned back and he went into the kitchen to get her a cup of what Mammy Sally had always called “headache tea.” Her eyes closed, she heard him speak to Bobby, asking the boy about his day, and how his brother did. Bobby had grown very silent through that tense and worried Christmas as his brother grew no better. Then Mary heard Lincoln go quietly into the bedroom where Eddie lay. He moved with that catlike soft-footedness that was always so astonishing in so tall and loose-jointed a man.

Hours later—she never knew how many—she woke chilled, her neck cricked and aching from falling asleep in her corsets. It was nearly pitch dark, and only the tiniest glow of embers writhed on the unbanked hearth. The house was profoundly silent. Someone had laid a quilt over her, and she gathered it around her shoulders as she limped, stiffly, through the parlor door and across the hall to the bedroom. She opened the bedroom door carefully, so as not to introduce a chill or draft.

The single candle's flame had not been snuffed or trimmed and was smoking badly. By its juddering light she could just make out her husband, sitting on the edge of the bed with one hand pressed over his mouth, the other closed around the tiny clawlike fingers of their child. Eddie's breathing was a horrible, pain-wracked rasp, and beneath the little boy's lashes Mary could glimpse the wet glimmer of half-open eyes. Lincoln's eyes were closed. She could see his shirtsleeved shoulders tremble, and realized he hadn't been able to force himself to get up and fetch her.

Or he hadn't dared to leave his son's bedside.

She crossed the room silently and knelt beside him, put her hand on top of his and Eddie's.

About an hour later Eddie died.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-TWO

Bellevue June 1875

“L
OOKING BACK,
I
REALIZE
I
BARELY EVEN THOUGHT AT THE TIME
how terrible Eddie's death was for my husband.” Mrs. Lincoln raised her forehead from her hand, turned to regard John Wilamet with tired eyes in the close gloom of her room. “I knew he grieved—sometimes in the night I would wake and hear him weeping. But he was always a man who would retreat with his griefs, like an injured animal. And I was . . . not much able to help.”

For the fourth day in a row she had kept to her room, requesting the carriage only to feel too ill and depressed to take it. Every time John came in to check on her she clutched at his sleeve, talking, sometimes for hours, as if words could cleanse her mind of the shadows accumulated there.

He'd told Dr. Patterson that he was encouraging Mrs. Lincoln to put aside her delusions and to resign herself to a quieter life. She seemed to trust him, he said tactfully, because they'd known one another years ago.

Patterson had agreed, after a wise little lecture on the inadvisability of telling patients about the composition of their medicine: “I've never met one who didn't believe she knew more than a trained doctor, about what was best for her.”

But in fact John only listened.

Sometimes he wondered what his mother would have said, if ever she spoke of her life instead of simply absorbing patent medicines in an effort to hide from its injustices.

But he couldn't imagine to whom his mother would speak.

The curtains were closed against the summer sunlight. Outside, the air was redolent of cut grass, of roses and warmed earth. This room, where Mrs. Lincoln sometimes lay all day in bed—though she had risen and had Amanda dress her both yesterday and today—was stiflingly warm, dim and enclosed as a womb. It could have been any room, in any year: bed, chairs, table, armoire. Nothing to tell whether it was 1875 or 1855 or 1835, except the tired lines in Mrs. Lincoln's face.

“I was . . . shattered,” she went on softly. “I never knew such grief was possible. Coming on top of my father's death, and Granny Parker's . . . For months I caught myself wondering, in unguarded moments, why my father didn't write to me anymore. Wondering if he was angry or just busy . . . I'd look out the window and see Bobby playing and I'd panic, thinking Eddie was lost....And he was.” She shook her head sadly, wonderingly still, after all those years, that the too-thin child she'd chased down the aisles of so many train cars was not in the world anymore. “He was.”

She folded her hands, plump soft hands that looked as if they'd never quite become accustomed to housework. The gold band placed there long ago by a diffident backwoods lawyer glinted through the somber lace of her house-mitt.

“So deep was my grief that it never crossed my mind what his death did to Mr. Lincoln. How it broke him. Changed him.” Mrs. Lincoln's voice was calm, as if she looked on the events now from a great distance, from some shaded place of safety. “He never spoke of what moved him—of what hurt him, or what mattered most deeply to him. I think maybe when he was a child growing up there was no one to listen, the way Mammy Sally would always listen to me. And of course that winter—Eddie's death—followed hard on that terrible debacle in Washington. But for—I don't know, four years? five years?—he seemed to lose much of his interest in politics, and holding office, and the ambition that had all his life driven him. As if, like me, for a little while he simply couldn't see a reason to go on.”

O
N A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS IT WASN
'
T AS PROFOUND OR DRAMATIC AS
that, of course. Lincoln continued to argue cases in court, to write up bills in chancery for clients, to send patient letters recommending political supporters for government jobs that seldom materialized. While Mary lay in bed for days, so sick with weeping that she could not even emerge for her four-year-old son's funeral, Lincoln managed the house as well as he could. He took Bobby to the office with him—a silent, withdrawn seven-year-old who seemed not so much dazed by his brother's death as simply puzzled. Dr. Wallace, and the ever-faithful Dr. Henry and his wife, made sure that someone dropped in on Mary several times a day, and there were many nights that Bessie Francis came over to cook supper for Lincoln and Bobby, and to make sure there was food in the house for breakfast.

The Reverend Dr. Dresser came too, and spoke of God's inscrutable mercy and of the joys of Heaven. But the words were like the food the fairy-folk were said to serve travelers who wandered into their realms: shining and aromatic, but providing no more nourishment to Mary's weeping heart than handfuls of twigs and leaves. She knew Lincoln had gone to speak to Dr. James Smith, of the Presbyterian Church, who had conducted Eddie's funeral, and found some comfort in the little Scot's simple faith. Sometimes, when she lay alone in the dimness, she heard Dr. Smith's voice in the parlor, and Lincoln's hesitant replies.

Sometimes Lincoln would read to her in the evenings from Smith's book,
The Christian's Defense.
The words helped a little, mostly while he was reading them—while he was there to speak to her of his own groping, painful thoughts concerning destiny and death. But always the darkness would return.

She would wake in the night, thinking she heard Eddie's gasping breath. She would hear Lincoln's footsteps on the steep attic stair as he went up to comfort Bobby—Bobby who never wept during the day. When Lincoln returned to bed she would grasp him frantically in the black hollow of the darkness, sometimes making love with a fierce desperation, as if the joining of their flesh would somehow negate the shadow of inevitable loss.

By March she was with child.

The newcomer was a Christmas baby and they named him William Wallace, after Fanny's husband. From the moment she knew she had conceived, Mary began to feel better, and Lincoln, too, seemed much more himself. But all that year, and in the years that followed, it seemed to her that Lincoln's heart was less in politics, and far more deeply involved in the raising and the care of his sons.

Maybe he understood, she thought—as her own father never had—that the time given to one had to be stolen from the other.

He was still gone for weeks and sometimes months at a time, six months out of the year. He was still maddeningly absentminded when he was present, retreating into that unreachable fortress of his thoughts to the exclusion of chores that needed doing, kindling that needed splitting, children who had fallen out of a toy wagon that he might continue to haul, oblivious, down Eighth Street.

But he was undeniably home more, and could not get enough of holding his new baby son, singing to him (if you could call the noise he made singing), changing his diapers and shirts. From the moment of his birth Willie was a sunny child, rosy, healthy, laughing and looking around him alertly. It was as if, Mary thought, God had relented at last, and given her a perfect infant to love.

Lincoln spent long hours at the office on the State House square. He would leave early in the morning, in his rusty black suit with a big gray shawl draped around his shoulders if the day was chill, and sometimes not return until late in the evening, having stopped to yarn with his cronies down at Dillard's store. On such occasions Mary—stranded at home with baby Willie and trying as usual to keep the house clean, the meals cooked, everyone's clothes washed and ironed, and the hired girl (if they had one that month) up to her work—frequently lost her temper with him, giving vent to her frustration in shrill vituperation that she barely recalled later. Afterwards, when he took Bobby with him to eat at a café downtown, or simply wrapped his old shawl around his shoulders and vanished into the night, she felt sick with remorse.

But she didn't know how to stop herself. Literally didn't know how to do it. And he would say, when she came to him weeping with apologies, “Everyone does the best they can, Mother.” And he'd tell her some absurd story to make her laugh.

Part of her anger came simply from exhaustion. The small sum that finally came to her from her father's estate meant they were able to keep a hired girl more steadily—Ruth remained with them for some years. And after Willie's birth, when Lincoln devoted the whole of his time and attention to his law practice, money came a little easier. But Mary, for all her willingness to make a good home, had not been raised to housework, and never really got used to the endless physical labor involved. For many years she actively resented her sister Elizabeth, with her servants and her big house, her wealth and her tea-parties, her modern stove and her carriage which was so much finer than the dilapidated Lincoln buggy. Even Ann, who'd married one of the town's wealthiest storekeepers, had a finer house and did only the lighter housework.

Mary would sometimes see one or another of her sisters as she came and went to the market, afoot and sometimes with Bobby at her heels. She'd note the velvet bands on Elizabeth's wide bishop sleeves, or the vast extent of Ann's crinolines, or even Julia Trumbull's stylish rice-straw bonnet, and look back wonderingly on her days with the gay Coterie of the House on the Hill and the warm endless security of peaceful
Lexington. Though her own dresses were neat and pretty, there was no denying their housewifey cotton fabric. No denying either that she made them herself, rather than paying a sewing-woman to do it.

Then when Lincoln would come home—two hours late to dry and shriveled chicken, or a week and a half later from the circuit court in Tazewell—her anger would boil over, not at him, but at the fact that she was no longer the daughter of a wealthy man, but only the wife of a poor one. Lincoln did what he could, for her and for the children, but this involved riding the entirety of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, something only the circuit court judge did—the fat and wealthy land speculator David Davis. Lincoln would come back, after three weeks or a month, with tales of cheap inns and moldering bedclothes, of sharing a bed with opposing counsel
and
the adjudicating justice—“We're lucky we didn't have the defendant and the clerk of the court in there with us”—with lawyers from half the state snoring in a pile on the other side of the room.

Mary would laugh, but those were nights she would spend alone, with insomnia or nightmares for company. Every few weeks, and sometimes oftener, she would be laid up with migraine: blinds drawn, sick with pain in semi-darkness, while Ruth whipped up meals for Bobby and Willie or took them over to the neighbors'. When the huge summer thunderstorms rolled across the prairie Mary would huddle under the sheets, sick and sweating and sobbing, pressing the pillows over her face so that Bobby wouldn't hear her scream.

Praying that Lincoln would come home.

Visions obsessed her that would not be argued away. Visions of Bobby being struck by lightning, of the house being struck and catching fire and Willie perishing in his cradle in the blaze. Of Old Buck being swept off his feet by a sudden rise while crossing some stream, and of Lincoln being swept away, drowning far from her.

Leaving her without a word of farewell.

Then her fear came out as anger, as fears often do. In her rage she would accuse Lincoln of leaving her, of not loving her, of pushing off onto her shoulders all the raising of their sons. He would disappear for a long walk or return to his office—sometimes past midnight, or in the driving rain, sometimes rubbing his forehead if she'd thrown a book at him or hit him with a piece of firewood—and be back with a joke or a story for her when she emerged, exhausted, from the spell of her rage in the morning. Often after he left she would sleep, and wake up filled with fear that he wouldn't return at all. At such times she couldn't imagine why he continued to love her, but in her heart—in the marrow of her bones—she knew he did.

There were compensations. They were sweet years.

Deep winter and early spring, and the hushed stifling heat of midsummer during the State Supreme Court session, Lincoln was hers, as much as he ever was anyone's. As often as he would spend sitting around
Dillard's with his friends talking politics—and even in those years he was never completely separated from politics—there would be evenings when she would step out the side door and see him coming down Eighth Street with half the boys in the neighborhood tagging at his heels.

Lincoln was endlessly fascinating to the boys of the town, probably because he spoke to them exactly as he spoke to adults, except—Mary hoped—he kept his jokes a little cleaner. With a frontier boy's blithe estrangement from the entire concept of clocks and time, he would stop to spin them stories, to talk about his unsuccessful attempts at Indian fighting or his trips down the Mississippi to New Orleans on a flatboat, to listen to their speculations and opinions about the way their own small worlds worked.

On Sunday afternoons he'd take Bobby—and Willie, as soon as that intrepid little soul mastered the art of walking—and upwards of a dozen local boys of all ages, and, resplendent in his old Conestoga boots and rough wool pants with one suspender, would walk with them out onto the prairies, looking for birds' nests and lizards and June bugs. On Sunday evenings he and Mary would sit on the kitchen porch in a couple of broken-down cane-bottomed chairs, while the boys dashed madly up and down the rows of the vegetable garden and the luminous miracle of the prairie sky gradually lost its brilliance, and the stars appeared overhead and despite whatever smudges Mary could concoct they both got bitten to pieces by mosquitoes. When Bobby had gone up to his little attic room and Willie fell asleep—and Willie would always drop off as if he'd been hit over the head, within seconds of murmuring “G'night, Papa, g'night, Mama”—there would be long winter evenings of lying wrapped in each other's arms, sometimes reading, sometimes cuddling, sometimes only softly talking, with anywhere from one to six cats snoozing on their feet.