The Emancipator's Wife (5 page)

Mary flinched, recalling as if through clouds of gauze the desperate obsession that had possessed her all through that grilling summer. Mr. Lincoln
had
told her, she thought. Had whispered it in her ear, when the candles' light lengthened in her darkened parlor. She would die when she reached the age that he had been when he died.
I will see you on the sixth of September,
he'd said, and her heart had leaped with joy.

She had been alone, and frantically lonely that summer. Her mind had turned and turned again to that date, with a nervous terror and readiness that would not let her sit still....

She'd been afraid—not of death, but of dying. How could she not be, when she remembered with such clarity the horror of his face, like old ivory in the candlelight of that crowded little bedroom, the immense black-red bruise around his right eye where the bullet lodged? When she woke up in the night hearing at the edge of her consciousness the ragged, painful gasps of his failing breath? When she remembered poor Tad, trying to breathe, remembered how Willie had cried and twisted with the fever that ate him like a monster on those stormy icy nights...

And then nothing had happened. The sixth of September came and went. She didn't know why. For weeks she had stayed in her room at the Grand Pacific, with the curtains drawn, nursing her headaches and her anxiety—her disappointment—with Godfrey's Cordial and Nervine.

“At Mr. Robert Lincoln's request I called upon his mother again on the eighth of May 1875, ten days ago, at her room in the Grand Pacific Hotel,” Danforth droned on. “She spoke of her stay in Florida, of the scenery and the pleasant time she had had there, of the manners and customs of the Southern people. She appeared at the time to be in excellent health, and her former hallucinations appeared to have passed away. She said that her reason for returning from Florida was that she was not well.”

“And no mention was made of her fears for her son's health?” asked the lawyer Ayer. “Nor of the telegrams she had sent begging him to ‘hold on' until she could reach his side?”

“No, none. I was somewhat startled when she told me that an attempt had been made to poison her on her journey back. She said she was very thirsty, and at a way-station not far from Jacksonville she took a cup of coffee in which she discovered poison. She said she drank it, and took a second cup, that the overdose might cause her to vomit....”

Mary felt her whole face and body grow hot at the bald relation of her story. She remembered vomiting at that station, after two cups of coffee, and remembered wondering if the coffee had been poisoned. But for the life of her could not remember why she'd spoken of it to Danforth, of all people. During his visit she'd felt on the edge of one of her spells, she recalled, and her recollection was hazy, like watching someone else. Like so many things she said, that she wished later with all her heart she hadn't said....

“I could see no traces of her having taken poison, and on general topics her conversation was rational.”

“But you are of the opinion that Mrs. Lincoln is insane?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Danforth. “I am of the opinion that Mrs. Lincoln
is insane.”

“Your witness,” said Mr. Ayer, bowing to Arnold as he walked back to his seat.

“No questions,” said Mr. Arnold.

Mary was so breathless with shock and outrage
—No questions after that?—
that she could not speak, could not take it in, could think of nothing to do or say.

“On April first of this year I encountered Mrs. Lincoln in the third-floor hallway of the hotel at ten o'clock in the evening,” said Mr. Turner, the manager of the Grand Pacific Hotel. “She was very carelessly dressed, with a shawl over her head....”

Of course I was carelessly dressed. I was probably on my way to the toilet down the hall!
Mary made the trip sometimes seven or eight times a night, to her aching humiliation. All her life she had been one of those people who needed the toilet frequently, especially at night. One could use a chamber pot in the room only so many times. Then those awful, agonizing minutes of listening and surreptitious watching for the corridor to be vacant, the hasty sneaking down the hall....

One of her greatest grievances in the stinginess of Congress in the matter of her husband's pension—one of her deepest resentments at Robert and that fat oily moneybag Judge Davis, who'd probated her husband's estate—had been that their combined machinations had prevented her from having enough money to own her own house and dispense with such humiliating nighttime expeditions.

But that, too, was something she could not say to anyone. The newspapers had mocked her so viciously at the time—“So much for womanly gentleness and obedience,” one had commented—that she dreaded even to think about bringing the matter up again.

“...insisted that the whole South Side of Chicago was in flames. She asked me to accompany her back to her room, and complained that a man was communicating with her through the wall of her room.”

Mary stared at him, shocked. She dreamed often of voices speaking to her through the walls and the floor, but could remember nothing of actually telling Turner this.
He's making it up,
she thought.
He has to be making it up....

“She said that she had a note from a Mr. Shoemaker in room 137, asking her to visit him. Although there is no room 137 in the hotel, she insisted that we seek him: we went to rooms 127, 107, and 27. Then she asked me if she could be allowed to stay in some other lady's room, as she feared that the hotel was going to burn down....”

It's a lie!
Mary screamed within her mind, baffled and aghast.
I never said such things.

Dreamed them, yes, sometimes...Shoemaker was the name of that sad-eyed graying gentleman who had been at the Spiritualist gatherings in St. Catherine's, in Canada, the summer before last. She remembered him quite well, for he, like her, had lost his wife and all but one of his children. He, like her, had been seeking, desperately, for years, to hear them speak, to know they remembered him beyond the grave....

“So great was Mrs. Lincoln's conviction that the city was on fire that she ordered me to dispatch her trunks to the shipping-office in Milwaukee to be safe.”

The Fire,
thought Mary, shivering as fear rolled over her again in a blinding wave. The memory of running through the night streets, blind with smoke. Of shrieking voices, and the crash of shop windows breaking. Of men staggering from empty houses with bedsheets bulging with silver and jewelry. Of a man hurling a glass of liquor at a girl whose hair was on fire. Of a corpse in the gutter with his head smashed in, staring up at her with accusing eyes.

“Your witness,” said Mr. Ayer.

“No questions.”

Another surge of sick terror washed through Mary, as she stared disbelievingly at Arnold. He didn't even look at her. Nor did Robert, staring resolutely ahead of him, his hands folded and his mouth set.
They're not going to ask any questions,
Mary realized.
Robert hired Arnold the way he hired Swett and Ayer—to make it look like a trial. Arnold thinks I'm as mad as the others do.

She felt as if the chair—slightly too tall for her short legs, as all chairs were—swayed under her with the force of this shock. She couldn't imagine what she could do in this situation. For a moment the hilarious irony of it struck her.
All my life I've been surrounded by lawyers—all Mr. Lincoln's friends were lawyers....Why can't I get a lawyer when I need one?

A man she'd never seen before was on the stand. She hadn't caught his name, but he was relating how the symptoms described to him by Robert two days previously in Robert's office were definitely the symptoms of madness. Her extravagant spending not only bordered on mania, it was a
symptom
of mania....

Then go arrest John D. Rockefeller for lunacy! Or John Jacob Astor! Put Potter Palmer the millionaire on trial, with his purchase of all those paintings and statues!

Her uncontrollable rages, long attested in the public press, her uncontrollable grief...tragic, yes...

Tragic? You have the brains blown out of the one you most love on earth, his shattered head falling bloody to your shoulder, and see what it does to your nerves, sir!

Other doctors followed one another to the stand. The symptoms Robert had described to them undoubtedly pointed to madness. The crazed alternation between parsimony and extravagance, the attempt—which all in the court would clearly remember—to sell off the used and soiled gowns she'd worn as First Lady, and the scandal that had followed in the newspapers. Her monomania about trying to contact the spirits of her husband and sons.
(And Robert's embarrassment—let's not forget that!)
“The false sensuous impressions of the mediums force too much blood to the brain, predisposing Spiritualists to lunacy. And it is well known that the female system is by its very nature more prone to nervous debility than the male, being far more intimately connected with the organs of generation....”

The heat in the courtroom was like an oven. Even the men on the jury—stern-faced respectable-looking men in heavy frock-coats and tight cravats—were sweating, and under her layers of black mourning crape and whalebone corsetry, Mary's body was consumed with itches and pain.

“...unnatural fear of fire gives great cause for concern, for the insane will frequently leap from windows in a delusional attempt to escape...”

“No questions.”

Unnatural fear? Were none of you driven out of your homes by the Fire? Didn't any of you have to flee to the lakeside, to be crushed and shoved by those screaming crowds as they waded out into the black stinking water?

Am I the only one who remembers that?

“Mrs. Lincoln's closet is piled full of packages, which she has never opened, but are just as they came from the store....”

“Mrs. Lincoln goes out shopping once a day and sometimes twice, and her closet and her room are filled with packages which she never opens. Yes, on the nights when she has me sleep in her room she says that she hears voices coming through the walls, and she's scared to go to sleep. When she goes to the washroom she says people watch her through a tiny little window there....No, sir, there's no window in that washroom....”

“...called me to Mrs. Lincoln's room, and she asked me to take her down and show her the tallest man in the dining-room....”

“On the twelfth of March of this year”—this was Mr. Edward Isham, Robert's law partner—“I received a frantic telegram from Mrs. Lincoln, who was then in Florida. The telegram stated her belief that her son was ill and dying, and that she would start for Chicago at once. Of course Mr. Lincoln was nothing of the kind, and though the telegraphers and superintendent at the Western Union office in Jacksonville attempted to dissuade Mrs. Lincoln, she and her nurse boarded a train to return to this city.”

Face crimson with shame, Mary stole a glance at Robert. That obsession, like the desperate belief that she would die last year, seemed so strange to her now. Yet she remembered the intensity of her conviction, the frantic fear that Robert—the only one she had left—would leave her. Someone had warned her in a dream....

I only did it from fear that you would leave me, too!

That you would leave me the way everyone has left me....

Last of all, Robert Todd Lincoln took the stand.

“For a long time I have suspected that my mother is not sane. She has shown signs of hysteria and nervous disability for as long as I
can remember....”

He looked very pale but extremely composed, and spoke absolutely without the hesitations, the nervous interpolations of “um” and “you see” that so many of the other witnesses had used. It was the professional fluency of a lawyer, of a man supremely used to public speaking—of a man who has planned out in advance his every word and his every pause. Mary remembered Abraham Lincoln speaking before juries, every word honed and ready and without the slightest impression of being prepared in advance—speaking the way everyone wished they could speak in an argument.

“On one occasion she spent $600 on lace curtains; on another, $450 on three watches which she gave to me, for which I had no use. She spent $700 on jewelry last month, $200 on soaps and perfumes, though she has no home in which to hang curtains, trunks full of dresses which she never wears, and she has not worn jewelry since my father's death, ten years ago.”

And while we're on the subject of money,
thought Mary,
why don't you
mention the nearly $10,000 in real estate that I've given you? The $6,000 in bonds from Tad's inheritance from his father? The $5,000 for your law library? Why don't you mention the interest-free loans I've made to you for your real-estate speculations?

Surely I can buy curtains for a house that I don't yet own?

Not that it's any of your business, or anyone's, what I spend my money on....

Her eyes burned with tears. Robert's image blurred and only his voice remained, the voice of the chilly, reasonable boy who had seemed so apart from his younger brothers, who had spoken to her even as a child with such formality.

The boy who had begged to be allowed to go into the Army, because so many others at Harvard had gone. Because people looked at him, and whispered:
Lincoln started this war and yet he keeps his son back where it's safe.

How could I let him go into the Army to die?

The boy whose whole life she had shaped, with that single lie that she would give anything not to have told.

The heat in the courtroom was so intense she felt she would die. Her head pounded, and rising through the pain the anxiety and depression that always followed on one of her dreamy spells; the frantic desire to hide in darkness, to be alone, to quaff one more spoonful of medicine to take the edge off her pain and her grief.

“Certainly I was in excellent health on the twenty-fifth of March and remain so. I met my mother's train and urged her to stay with me at my home on Wabash Avenue, at least while my wife was away, for admittedly my wife and my mother do not get along.”