The Emancipator's Wife (48 page)

The gaiety of travel enraptured her—the reaction, when it came, was crushing. The thought of Lincoln, alone and unprotected in Springfield, had preyed on her mind through a half-sleepless night. The images of those hateful letters and pictures returned to haunt her in terrible nightmares. New York was gorgeous, glittering, sophisticated—her new friends were delightful—but she found that at times the crowds frightened her, and she would return to her hotel room nervous and weepy. Sally Orne, the wife of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant to whom Simon Cameron had introduced her, recommended Uhrquart's Pacifying Indian Bitters for her nerves, and swore by its results. It did seem to help.

“I'm quite well, thank you for asking,” Mary replied now to Mr.
Dorsheimer. “As for the Legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky, you name two of the most loyal states of the Union, sir. I think we need hardly worry about a few radicals there, whatever the people of Georgia may choose to think.”

“We'll need to worry about a few radicals in Maryland,” said Robert grimly, “if they decide Father's going to interfere with
their
property. We have to cross
through
Maryland to get to Washington. There might be trouble with those Plug-Uglies they write about.”

Mary shivered, and drew her new pink cashmere shawl from Stewart's more closely around her shoulders. Despite the two fireplaces in the
Astor House's dining-room, the morning was cold. To no one in particular she murmured, “I shall be glad to get home.”

At home, when they got there ten days later—three days late due to inclement weather, but free of charge from Buffalo to Springfield, thanks to a very friendly magnate of the State Line Railroad—the confusion was even worse. According to Lincoln, who met them at the railroad station, a tall black shadow in the falling snow, he had played host to delegation after delegation, from Indiana, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania; Cameron's supporters, Cameron's detractors, petitioners that he provide Cabinet posts for everyone from the Governor of Maryland to Cassius Clay. He looked exhausted, when he and Robert and Clark brought Mary's trunks into the house. The lines in his face had deepened, and he didn't look like he'd been sleeping well.

Or shaving....“Really, Mr. Lincoln, you haven't been meeting all those delegations that way! You look like a savage!”

His old smile returned and he rubbed his stubbly jaw. “I had a letter from a little girl named Grace Bedell,” he said. “She was of the opinion that I'd make a more impressive President if I had a beard.”

Mary's mouth dropped open in disbelieving shock.

“An opinion shared by Davis and Trumbull and the others. Not to mention,” added Lincoln in a lower voice, with a glance through the kitchen door to where Robert was exchanging mock cuffs with his two younger brothers, “it might be that on our way through Maryland to Washington, it would be better if quite so many people there weren't as able to recognize me.”

“
I
think it looks swell,” added Willie, coming into the kitchen—which was, she was relieved to note, still warm and orderly, in contrast to the shadowy glimpse of stacked boxes and half-wrapped parcels visible through the doors of dining-room and parlor. Lizzie and young Ellsworth had promised to make sure Tad and Willie stayed fed, warm, and out of trouble, and had, with the help of Lizzie's brother Lockwood, and the free colored valet whom Lincoln had recently hired, been organizing the furniture to be stored or sold. The much grander personal furnishings that she had bought in New York City were going to be shipped straight on to Washington. “He looks like a pirate!”

“Oh, thank you,” sighed Lincoln. “Just the thing to give confidence to the South.” But his eyes twinkled. “Looks like we're going to Washington the long way,” he went on, pulling off his gloves and moving the gently steaming kettle to the front of the stove, to heat up for tea. “People need to be reassured, Mother. They want to see me and they want to hear everything's going to be all right—and God knows I need to see
them.
When a man asks help of someone,” he added, “it comes better face-to-face.”

He ran a hand over his jaws and through his hair, and she wondered despairingly how she was going to get him through four—or with luck, eight—years of the Presidency without letting him appear before the Prince of Wales or the Czar of Russia with his hair like a canebrake. “I've got invitations to stop and speak in half a dozen cities already—Cleveland and Cincinnati and Harrisburg and Honolulu for all I know—and more coming in all the time. It means leaving early, the eleventh....”

“Of
February
? But I'll be in St. Louis! I've made an appointment for fittings for my dresses! That's two weeks from now! Madame Blois will never be able to have them ready....”

“You and the boys can meet me in Indianapolis. The sale of the furniture's on the ninth—I think Mel Smith's buying most of it. Then we'll be staying at the Cheney House till we go.”

“Good.” Mary liked the Springfield druggist and his wife. “That gives us time for one last reception here, before we leave.” She looked through the dining-room door and into the parlor again, seeing how dark the house was, and how cold and musty it already felt. Fido, curled up by the kitchen stove, raised his head worriedly, sensing that the world as he knew it was coming apart. Henry Rolls, whose yard backed the Lincolns', had already agreed to take the little yellow dog for the four years the Lincolns would be gone; she wondered if the boys would miss him.

If they would miss this house, as she would.

The reception was a splendid one, and lasted far into the night. Lizzie, Mary, and her two older sisters all turned the house upside-down, cleaning and sweeping and scrubbing. Elizabeth lent her Eppy and Lina, and came over to take charge of the baking herself. Then all the Todd girls turned out in their finest, to bid an official good-by.

Everyone in town put in an appearance—Merce and Jamie, the
Reverend Smith, who'd spoken so kindly at Eddie's funeral; the ladies of the Episcopal Sewing Guild; Cousin John Stuart and Cousin Stephen Logan; the Gurleys and the Wheelocks and Mrs. Dall, whose infant Mary had nursed right after Tad's birth. . . . The house was crammed from parlors to attics and there was barely room for Eppy, William the new valet, and Maria Francesca to move about the kitchen. Robert, stiff and shy in his natty Eastern tailoring, stood with his parents, shaking hands and making sure to speak to everyone who filed in. Lizzie as usual tried to keep track of Tad and Willie and as usual succeeded only about two-thirds of the time.

To Mary's intense relief, Lizzie—who was accompanying her brother Lockwood, Elizabeth, the young Julie (now Baker), and Young Bess (as everyone called Julie's sister) to Washington City for the Inauguration—had promised to remain for a time as a guest in the White House and keep an eye on the boys until Mary found her feet. Harrison Grimsley shook his head over the plan and warned Lincoln, “I promise you, if my wife stays on with yours, you're going to have your hands full with the pair of them.”

Lincoln grinned and ducked his head. “The boys'll keep 'em busy.” He'd just returned from three days in Coles County. In all the time she'd known him—even when his Cousin Hetty was living in her sewing-room—she had seldom heard Lincoln speak of his family, though she was aware of the steady stream of ill-spelled and whining letters he'd received over the years, mostly asking for money. She remembered how he'd rushed down to Coles County when his stepbrother had written him that his father was dying: which had turned out to be a false alarm, but while he was there, could he loan them twenty dollars?

He had declined to rush down, the next time his stepbrother wrote. His father had died.

He had come back from this most recent visit to his stepmother sad and thoughtful: “They don't treat her well,” he'd told Mary. “Like she was nothing, because she's of no use to them anymore.”

She guessed, since they would be in Washington four years—if not, as she already hoped, eight—that Lincoln and old Mother Sarah would not meet again.

The reception was scheduled to last until midnight, but it was closer to two in the morning before the last guests finally left. Many of them were office-seekers, who had wangled their way into the party to speak to
Lincoln. Towards the end of the evening, Robert, Ellsworth, and John Hay—like boisterous young Musketeers—were acting as discreet chuckers-out. Lincoln spent the next morning at the State House, but returned, exhausted, in the afternoon; she heard him lie down as she moved quietly about her own room, packing up the last of her things. In addition to Elizabeth, her daughters, and Lizzie, Dr. Wallace was going to be part of the Lincoln party—Frances was no longer healthy enough to undertake so long a journey—and her half-sisters Margaret and Mattie would be meeting them in Washington, to see her triumph
(and request government jobs for their husbands,
she reflected) as well.

Downstairs she could hear the boys
—too loud,
she thought,
they'll wake their father—
and Ellsworth's light, free laugh. But the house seemed strange, half-empty in the gray winter light.

From the next room she heard Lincoln call out, “Molly?” and there was fear in his voice.

She thought,
Nightmare,
and hurried to open the connecting door.
And no wonder . . .

He was sitting up on the edge of his bed in his shirtsleeves, hair all tousled on his head, staring across the room at his shaving-mirror on the wall. “Look in that mirror,” he said. “Do you see one reflection in it, or two?”

She angled her head, for the mirror was set high. “One.” It looked, in fact, pretty much as it always had. “Are you all right?” His unshaven face looked waxen with shock.

“Yes. I guess.” He shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. “It must have been a dream—one of those dreams when you dream you wake up.”

“And you saw two reflections?” Her voice wavered a little—she knew from Mammy Sally the evil of seeing one's own face in a mirror in a dream.

Lincoln nodded. “One looked pretty normal—'cept for the beard, that is. But the other, the one behind it, was white, like a ghost's face. Like a dead man's. And it come to me—almost like hearin' someone say it—that was because I'd be elected twice.”

She whispered, her heart like ice in her breast, “Elected twice—but you won't live through your second term.”

He stood, and took her hands in one of his. “We don't know that.” And his grip tightened a little when she tried to pull away. “It's only a dream, when all's said.”

But he didn't believe it. She could hear that in his voice. And neither did she.

S
HE DREAMED OF HIM HERSELF, A FEW NIGHTS LATER, WHEN SHE
LAY
asleep in the Wide Missouri Hotel in St. Louis after a day of fittings and shopping and chatter with Lizzie and with Madame Blois. Dreamed first of herself, burning her old papers the day before yesterday, her last day in Springfield. All those old letters, those quick-scribbled notes he'd sent her while on the circuit or in Washington.
Just cleaning house,
part of her said casually, and part of her admitted her fear that some journalist would get hold of them, and use them for God knew what. His views had changed over the years—in his letters he had not always been discreet.

In her dream she turned her head, to see Lincoln standing in the back door of the house, watching her as Mr. Smith the druggist and his men moved the last of their furniture away. Fido sat next to his boots, raised a worried paw to scratch his knee
—Will everything be all right?

Then she dreamed of the bedroom at the Cheney House—the elegant bridal suite, the best in the hotel, where Tad and Willie had shared the trundle-bed and Robert had slept on the couch. Saw in her dream Lincoln there alone, roping up his single small trunk by himself: books, papers, a few shirts, and his new suit. Robert was already gone
—down to the station?
Robert was fanatically punctual and lived in terror of missing a train.

Outside the windows, the sky was bleakly dark, just staining with morning gray. Lincoln took one of the hotel's cards to the little marble-topped desk, wrote on the back, A
.
L
INCOLN
—W
HITE
H
OUSE
—
W
ASHINGTON,
and stuck it in the leather label-holder on the trunk. He carried the trunk downstairs himself, a tall man alone in the cold stillness of the morning, to join Robert and Ellsworth, Nicolay and Hay and the others waiting in the lobby. To go to the train station and start for Washington, not knowing when, or whether, he would return.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-NINE

Philadelphia February 1861

“M
R.
L
INCOLN?
”
A
BOVE THE HUBBUB IN THE BALLROOM OF THE
Continental Hotel in Philadelphia, Mary wasn't sure how she heard Norman Judd's murmur, but she did. She turned her head to see the railroad magnate touch Lincoln's sleeve, and the look on Judd's face was the iron look of a man who has received the worst kind of news.

Lincoln saw it, too, and knew it for what it was. He'd been shaking hands since eight-thirty with the cream of Philadelphia society, telling funny stories, remembering the names of everyone who was introduced to him and remembering too whatever contributions they'd made to Whig politics back twenty years. He bowed a little to a banker and his wife, with whom he'd been chatting under the chilly white glimmer of the gasoliers, and said, “If you good folks will excuse me, I think there's another crisis brewing.” He kept his voice droll, so that the stout banker and his stouter wife both laughed. Mary, delightedly renewing her acquaintance with the vivacious Sally Orne, saw his tall black form edge away through the crowd toward the gilt-trimmed ballroom doors.

“Excuse me,” she said, and began to thrust her way through the crowd after him.

There were times, during the ten days since they'd begun their journey to Washington, that she wondered if they were ever going to reach the capital at all. Every city they passed through, it seemed, had invited Lincoln to stop, to speak, to receive the local dignitaries—dignitaries whose support would be desperately needed, if the seceded Southern states should refuse to compromise or to return to the Union. Needed still more, if loyal and powerful Virginia, or worse yet, Maryland, should decide to join them.

Since meeting the Springfield party in Indianapolis, there had been days when she had barely spoken to her husband at all. Certainly she had not spoken to him alone. As if to remind the new Chief Executive of his obligations to Illinois Central, Norman Judd had provided them with a special Presidential car, decorated like a plush hotel suite with crimson curtains and gold tassels. Even in its privacy Lincoln was always surrounded by his supporters and advisors, that group of handlers she was coming to hate. It was as if the group around the stove at Speed's had taken over his life, leaving only crumbs of him for her. When he talked politics, he talked now with them. Judd was always there, and fat David Davis, the gigantic Ward Lamon, and crafty Orville Browning. Hay, Nicolay, and young Ellsworth added some lightness to the party, rushing about like squires to the political champions.

More than ever she was grateful for the company of Elizabeth and her daughters, and of Lizzie, and Lizzie's brother Lockwood. The atmosphere of alternating tension and elation, wearing enough on her, had turned her younger sons—never the quietest of souls to begin with—into frantic little dynamos. Frustrated at being shut out of the men's councils, Mary would slap the boys or shriek at them, something she knew did not help the situation but which she could not seem to keep herself from doing. What a blessing to have Elizabeth or Julie Baker, or Lizzie, scoop Tad up and say, “Your Mama's tired now, Taddie . . . ,” and bear him screaming into another part of the car.

Moreover, she knew there were things she wasn't being told. Telegrams reached them at all stations, and Lincoln would go into conference with the men again, leaving her like a child shut out of her father's study.

She had heard of it, however, when Lamon came in from the train platform in Westfield, New York, with the news that Senator Jefferson Davis—hero of the Mexican War and fixture of Washington society and politics—had been sworn into office as President of the Confederate States of America. “Looks like they mean business,” Browning had said, and Lincoln had only looked grim and sad.

Mary reached the door Lincoln had just passed through, to one of the smaller anterooms of the Continental's ballroom. John Hay stood beside it, smart-looking in new evening-clothes. The New York newspapers had had such a field day describing Lincoln as a hick, a bumpkin, an uneducated baboon who would make the United States ludicrous in the eyes of the world, that everyone, Lincoln included, was being very careful to be absolutely correct in all things.

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Lincoln,” Hay said. Though he'd read law in Lincoln's office for over a year, he'd been officially taken on only days ago as John Nicolay's assistant. “Mr. Lincoln asked that he not be disturbed by anyone.”

“What is it?” she demanded. “What's happened?”

Hay's dark eyes shifted. “It's nothing serious.”

“Tell me!”

“Mother . . .” Robert appeared at her side, gently took her arm. “It's nothing serious. Everything's fine.”

He was lying. They both were lying.

Trembling, she went back to the reception. She wanted to scream at them, to weep, to force them to let her into their secret councils. But she knew that with Lincoln out of the ballroom it was up to her to smile and greet all those Biddles and Mifflins and Rittenhouses. Elizabeth glanced over at her with warning disapproval for even inquiring about masculine business: Mary raised her chin defiantly and stared back. But when she finally returned to their suite and Lizzie unlaced her from the exquisite gown of lilac silk, she had a pounding headache and was so nervous she was ready to scream.

In Harrisburg the next day Lincoln went to the State House to address the Legislature. Mary was reading to Tad and Willie in the hotel parlor when she heard them return. Outside the door she heard Judd's deep voice, “Do you think it's wise?” and Lincoln's, “She'll wonder where I am, and there'll be no quieting her unless she knows what's going on.”

The words went through her with a sickening jolt. She felt just as she did when thunder began to growl in the distance. She shut the book and got to her feet as the door opened. They were all around him: Judd and Davis, Browning and Robert and Ward Lamon, looking as grim as Judd had the night before. There was another man with them whom she vaguely recognized as Mr. Pinkerton, a solid little man like a knot of hardwood, with watchful dark eyes that never relaxed. Lincoln said, “It looks like there's definitely a plan to ambush me in Baltimore, Molly, while the railroad car's being hauled from one depot to the other to get on the Washington line. Fred Seward brought word last night that the local Plug-Uglies plan to rush the car, and Mr. Pinkerton here—he's Mr. Judd's railroad detective—says he's got proof.”

The hate-letters flooded back to her mind: the vile drawing, the writing that had looked so much like blood. She put out her hand to steady herself on the chair and Willie stood up, protectively, at her side.

“Mr. Pinkerton,” Lincoln went on, “says he's got it worked out for me to go into Washington by another train, alone, without fuss....”

“Without fuss?” She felt panic rising in her. “What do you mean, without fuss? Alone? Without a guard?”

“If nobody knows it's me, nobody's going to attack me.”

“And what if someone guesses?” She looked from one to the other of them—Judd, Pinkerton, Robert, Davis, fools, all of them, who were going to get her husband killed! She began to tremble, thoughts surging into her mind of rushing at them, striking them with her fists, with a broom, with a whip. . . . “It's all very well for you to grow that stupid beard, Mr. Lincoln, but you've been seen with it by thousands and thousands of people in every city along our way. What if someone's overheard your precious plan?”

“Molly—”

“Don't you ‘Molly' me!” She jerked her hand from his touch. “What if you're murdered? What will happen to me, to our boys? What if
we're
murdered? Or doesn't that matter to your precious committee? What if we're caught and held for ransom?”

“I have to get to Washington,” answered Lincoln quietly, “to be inaugurated as President....”

“Don't leave me!”

“Molly . . .”

“Don't leave me!”
She felt as if she would suffocate with terror. “Don't be a fool! You're protected here, with an escort—they're not really going to attack with Mr. Buchanan's soldiers on this train....”

“Mrs. Lincoln,” intervened Pinkerton, “believe me, they are. There are only twenty soldiers, and our reports indicate that there are hundreds in this plot. And with you and the boys and this whole . . .” He gestured impatiently, as if Elizabeth and Julie, Lizzie and Lockwood and Dr.
Wallace, were all present as well. “. . . traveling road-show trailing along after him, those Baltimore secessionists are going to know exactly where to look for him.”

“So you're going to send him out away from any protection and hope that nobody's going to notice a six-foot-four-inch man pussyfooting his way through Baltimore!”

“I've got that all arranged, ma'am. He'll be on a sleeper car, in a berth, as my sick relative. Nobody'll see him on his feet—”

“Well, that's a brave way to commence your administration!” She whirled on Lincoln, hearing her own voice rise to a termagant's shrillness. Any words, anything to make him change his mind . . . “Sneaking into your own capital city in disguise because you're afraid of a rumor—”

“It's not a rumor,” snapped Judd.

“Don't you talk to me!” Mary screamed at him. “Don't you say a word to me!” Whipsawed by eleven days of travel, exhaustion, and uncertainty, she burst into frenzied tears. She struck at Lincoln's hands as he led her to the back of the parlor, tried to fight free of him, to flee. . . . Only there was nowhere to flee to. She was dimly aware of the men glancing at one another, of Robert's face wooden with embarrassment, of Willie coming up on her other side:

“It's all right, Ma. Things will be all right.”

Of Lizzie's arms around her, gently easing her away from Lincoln, to whom she perversely clung the moment he tried to draw away and go back to his precious advisors
—may they all burn in Hell for eternity. . . .

“Go back to them!” she screamed at him, shoving him suddenly away. “Go back to them and leave me! You don't care a thing about me and you never did! You'd sooner be inaugurated President than keep us safe, me and your sons!” And she flung herself, weeping, into Lizzie's arms.

Their suite at the Jones House Hotel included several bedrooms, though Governor Curtin had asked Lincoln and herself to spend the night at his house. Lizzie led her into the nearest one—assigned to Robert, Hay, and Nicolay, to judge by the leather gripsacks dumped on the beds and the scent of bay rum—and eased her into a chair. “So I won't disturb his precious advisors?” cried Mary resentfully. But it was good to be away from the men to weep, with Lizzie patting her hands and Elizabeth and the two girls hurrying back and forth with cold compresses and hartshorn. At least, she thought,
someone
cared....

But the childishness of that thought tore her, as her paroxysms of tears subsided.
I've made a fool of myself,
she thought, bitterly,
and in front of them. . . .
Trembling, she blew her nose, and got to her feet.

“No,” she said, when Lizzie tried to stop her. “I'm fine now. Let me go.”

She could hear the voices of the men still in the parlor. Talking about her, she knew. About the scene she'd just made. About how right they were to keep her out of things. Her face grew hot with shame as she stepped past Lizzie and opened the door.

They all turned, faces wary—manlike, dreading another scene.
Lincoln started toward her immediately but she said in her steadiest voice, “Mr. Lamon?”

The bearlike lawyer stood at once. Like Lincoln he was a frontiersman turned lawyer; in the plush comfort of the Presidential railroad car, he'd whiled away hours of travel playing the banjo and singing for Tad and Willie's delight.

“Please go with him, Mr. Lamon.” She turned to Mr. Pinkerton,
regarding her with suspicion in his reptilian eyes. “I understand your point, sir, about not drawing attention to my husband by a large entourage, and I apologize if I . . . if I let my feelings overcome me. But I beg you will allow at least one bodyguard, in the event of . . . of the unexpected.”

Lincoln looked down at Pinkerton, then over at Lamon. “That's not a bad idea. I allow I'd feel a little better about it myself, knowing there's two of you.”

“That's a good point, Mrs. Lincoln, and well taken.” Pinkerton sounded like the admission cost him an effort to make. “Thank you.”

“I won't leave his side, ma'am.” Lamon opened his coat, to show her the two bowie knives he habitually wore at his belt. “You can count on me, Mrs. Lincoln.”

S
HE SLEPT LITTLE THAT NIGHT.
A
FTER SUPPER WITH THE GOVERNOR
, Lincoln, Lamon, and Pinkerton took their departure. She lay awake most of the night fighting visions of the anonymous sleeping-car being stopped en route, being overswarmed by shouting men with clubs, ropes, tar and feathers; men who all had Nate Bodley's face. Then she would wake to hear the soft voices of Robert, Hay, Ellsworth, and Nicolay, continuing their endless card-game in the parlor.

Coming out to the parlor to breakfast the next morning she found Ellsworth beaming over the coffee-cups: “This came in around six, Mrs. Lincoln.” He held out a telegram, unopened—an open one lay beside Nicolay's plate.