The Emancipator's Wife (51 page)

Then on the twenty-fifth, the Seventh New York Regiment arrived, marching through the rain down the muddy unpaved streets. Mary ran with the boys and Lizzie to join Lincoln on the White House steps to watch them pass; afterwards she went up to her room and burst into tears of relief.

Washington became an Army town. Regiments of ninety-day volunteers, hastily organized, camped on the swampy Mall between the Capitol and the White House, and the reek of their latrine-trenches hung like a permanent miasma in the air. The Seventh New York set up shop in the House Chamber of the Capitol. Cash Clay showed up with a battalion, and strutted through the White House halls adorned with three pistols and an “Arkansas toothpick”—a bowie knife as long as Mary's forearm—and for days her younger sons tried to imitate his walk and his extravagant drawl.

Lincoln wrote to Ben Helm, Emilie's young husband, who'd come to Springfield with her on her most recent visit. Since their weeks at the Todd house on the way to Washington in 1848, she and Lincoln had regarded Emilie as a daughter, and during her stays in Springfield Lincoln had come to treat her more as a younger sister. He had confided to Mary that he planned to offer Ben a good military post.
Please, please,
Mary prayed,
let Emilie come here, be here with me.
Lizzie and Elizabeth were both talking of returning home, and the thought of being left alone in this hostile town filled her with dread.

But when the young lawyer came down the stairs and into the Red Parlor where she was having tea, she saw the sadness in his dark eyes and knew it was not to be.

“Excuse me, please,” she said to her guests—Elizabeth, the girls, Adele Douglas, and sixteen-year-old Julie Taft. Ben stepped with her into the hall: a slim man, darkly handsome as the hero of a Gothic novel.

“Your husband has just offered me the chance at a career,” he said quietly. “Paymaster in the Army, with rank of major. It's something it would take me years to get to on my own. I've told him how much I appreciate it, beyond what words can say.”

“But you won't take it.”

“I asked him to give me a few days.”

She saw the answer in his eyes. “Kentucky is still in the Union.” She spoke sadly, as if to one standing already on the deck of a departing ship.

“Your husband is an honest man, Molly,” said Ben in his soft voice. “I respect him, and you, too much to be less than honest with either of you.” He put his hands on her shoulders, and bent a little to kiss her cheek. “I'll give your love—and his—to Emilie.”

“I'd hoped to have you both here in Washington.” Tears filled her eyes—of disappointment, and something far deeper. “You know Emilie would have been the belle of the town.”

“Nobody's going to be the belle of this town more than you, Molly.” Ben smiled, and pressed her hands in his. “Good-by.”

She never saw him again.

That same day Colonel Lee—Lincoln's hoped-for choice for Commander in Chief—resigned his commission in the U.S. Second Cavalry, and crossed the river to Virginia, the land of his birth.

Washington waited for what was to happen next.

Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, reveled in the sudden influx of troops and started handing out plum contracts to all his supporters, regardless of the quality of the uniforms they were selling or the cost to Congress.

Salmon Chase met with Lincoln in frantic sessions to arrange financing for a war. Suddenly bankers—from New York, Philadelphia, and several European banking houses—became a part of Washington society.

The masses of office-seekers, which had begun at last to thin, redoubled. Good Republicans felt entitled to positions supplying the troops or selling things to the government or acting as clerks or marshals or quartermasters. Tad would trot up the stairs past them, greeting them in his almost incomprehensible lisp, on his way to finding some horrendous mischief to get into with his brother and the Taft boys.

With everything else that was going on, Mary tried desperately not to worry about Tad. From being a relatively normal seven-year-old, except for his speech, he now reverted to old, babyish behaviors, refusing to dress himself or pay the slightest attention to his beleaguered tutor. Lincoln said mildly, “He'll get over it,” and Mary did her best to believe him.

On one occasion the four boys explored the attic and found the bell-wires that connected every room in the house with the servants' quarters in the basement. Lincoln, who was curious about things like bell-wires himself, tracked them down, amid servants scurrying up and down the stairs and unimaginable chaos. John Nicolay threatened to break their necks and throw them out the window—a sentiment that was heartily seconded by several members of the Presidential Cabinet but which did nothing for the feud that was beginning to smolder between Nicolay and Mary—but Lincoln only laughed. Another expedition to the attic yielded the cardboard boxes where all the visiting-cards of everyone who had ever crossed the White House's threshold were stored: the boys played “sled on the snow” and came downstairs filthy and dropping from every cuff and seam little squares of pasteboard engraved with the names of long-departed Washington luminaries: Dolley Madison, John
Randolph, Aaron Burr.

“You want to watch your boys, goin' up to the attic that way,” warned Johnny Watt, the smooth-faced Irishman who was head groundskeeper. “The house is riddled with rats, you know. Big ones, some of 'em, and worse now the Army camps are so near. We got one big tycoon up there I swear has been in office since Jackson's day, and Miss Lane not holdin' with cats.” He shook his head, watching Mary with bright blue eyes.

Though Tad was the youngest of the four boys he was usually the ringleader in their enterprises. Alexander Williamson, the young Scotsman who came in every morning to tutor the boys, said that Tad's wild misbehavior and sudden, flaring rages might stem simply from frustration that no one understood his combination of mumble and lisp. Willie and Tad were the only two people in the house—perhaps in all of
Washington—who weren't afraid constantly during that tense, waiting month of April 1861.

“Pa won't let anything happen to us,” Willie said to Mary, one afternoon when anxiety and sleeplessness had driven her back to bed with an excruciating headache. He took her hand—it was another of those days when she had slept late and slept poorly, and so had missed seeing Lincoln even at breakfast. The constant murmur and grumble of men's voices from beyond the glass doors at the end of the corridor was a reminder that she probably wouldn't see him until late that night, if then.

“Ee'a bead-a sececheth,” added Tad. “Ooo thee.”

Mary sat up in bed, though the movement brought nausea and a dreamlike tickling sensation in her mind, as if she were about to start speaking in tongues as people did in the Bible. She hugged the boys close to her, praying they were right.

At the end of the month, when no one had yet attacked Washington and Federal troops had occupied Maryland to protect the railroad north, she came to the conclusion that a trip to New York could not be put off longer. The occupation by Federal troops of the East Room had ended, but it had reduced the already shabby carpet and draperies to mud-crusted and tobacco-stained rags.

And with the onset of hot weather, Mary found herself prey to
“Potomac malaria,” bouts of chills and fever that plagued many in the low-lying capital marshes.

What really spurred her on, however, was an editorial in the
Charleston Mercury:

If Washington was offered to us for nothing, the offer should be rejected. With a new Republic we should have a new Capital, erected in the heart of the South. Let Washington remain, with its magnificent buildings crumbling into ruin, a striking monument to future ages of the folly and wickedness of the people of the North. It would teach a lesson, in its silence and desolation, all the nations of the earth should learn and understand.

Fuming, she showed the paper to Lizzie, and that evening to Lincoln, when for the first time in days he put in an appearance at the family dinner-table rather than simply foraging around at midnight in the kitchen.

“We cannot let it be said,
anywhere,
that the Union suffers
any
diminution of its state or power,” she pointed out, thrusting the paper into his hands. “On the ninth, as you know, there is to be a reception for the officers stationed here in the capital and their families. Though the servants have done wonders cleaning up the East Room I
cringe
to think of anyone going in there.”

Least of all—as she didn't say—Kate Chase.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-TWO

T
HE THOUGHT OF LEAVING
L
INCOLN AND THE BOYS IN A PLACE
OF
danger—the nightmare of reading in some newspaper that Beauregard had attacked unexpectedly after all, that the city was in flames and the President hanged—tormented her, but the recollection was stronger still of the way Kate Chase had surveyed the Red Room curtains and run her gloved fingers along the top of the mantle when she thought Mary wasn't looking.

Or perhaps when she thought she was.

By this time Adele Douglas and Mary Jane Welles—the kindly wife of the bushy-bearded Secretary of the Navy—had relayed to Mary some of the things the elegant Miss Chase had said about the President's wife at
her
at-homes.

A special session of Congress had been called for the first of July, and Mary knew that would entail a good deal of entertaining. There was the winter season to be thought of, too; truncated perhaps (as longtime Washington hostess Mrs. Eames pointedly lamented when she compared present-day Washington to the brilliance of that city under Buchanan and Pierce—“But of course you weren't here then, were you, Mrs.
Lincoln?”), but critical.

After two more fittings with Mrs. Keckley, Mary, Elizabeth and her daughters, Lockwood Todd, and Lizzie—escorted by the very charming Federal Commissioner of Public Buildings William Wood—left by train for Philadelphia. Mary was ashamed of the relief she felt. Relief to be away from Washington. Relief to be on a journey again, under the different rules that applied to journeys. Relief not to be constantly terrified.

She was ashamed that she was
not
constantly terrified. She had, after all, left her husband and two of her sons in a city that (the
Charleston
Mercury
notwithstanding) might be sacked and burned at any moment. But she loved traveling, and once they had bypassed Baltimore she found herself feeling better, and sleeping more soundly, even without the assistance of Atkinson's Cordial.

And New York City in the springtime was so lovely.

Alexander Stewart, white-haired and regal, met them himself at the train station and escorted them in his own carriage to the Metropolitan Hotel. For six days, Commissioner Wood conducted Mary and her relations through the shops and warehouses of New York, examining wallpapers, carpeting, furniture, crystal and dishes, dress silks and trim. The terror and stench of Washington seemed mercifully far away, as if the United States and the Confederacy (though Mary loyally refrained from referring to the rebel states as a separate nation) were two mythical lands about to do battle in a legend, like Greece and Troy.

The hurry and crowds of the New York streets had little to do with soldiers, artillery, preparations for invasion and death. Well-dressed businessmen strode along the paved flagways, coat-skirts flapping in the breeze from the river. Rough laborers in soft caps and corduroy jackets shouted to one another in Gaelic or German; well-dressed boys rolled hoops in the grassy lawns of Washington and Union Squares.

Reporters crowded about her every time she passed through the
Metropolitan's lobby, tipped their hats to her, laughed at her imitations of Cameron and Seward. Commissioner Wood winked and flirted with her, and Mary flirted right back, despite Elizabeth's sharply whispered admonitions.

For the first time since her marriage—other than the months spent in Lexington—Mary felt truly young.

After all those years of counting pennies, of worrying what Mr.
Lincoln's income might be, of wincing at the cheap lampshades and cheap upholstery and the patches on Robert's breeches that screamed failure to her and to anyone of decent breeding (like Elizabeth) who entered her house, Mary was finally able to relax and enjoy the exhilarating peace of knowing that she was buying the best. She conscientiously bought only American-made goods, even when she was purchasing for herself—except of course when there were no good American products, as with silk. She dickered endlessly with the merchants to make sure she was getting the best prices, and felt a warm surge of triumph each time she scored a victory.

So she reveled in her happy duty, weighing the relative merits of Wilton and Axminster carpeting (Sally Orne in Philadelphia gave her good advice there), or deciding whether pristine white china with a gold rim would be more impressive than rich-toned solferino, and picking which of several grades of fancy straw matting would be best for the halls. The White House, when she was finished with it, would be truly the handsomest house in America, a palace that would proclaim the Union's confident strength to the British and the French.

And would, incidentally, put paid once and for all to those accusations of uncouthness and vulgarity that were still circulating in Washington and—via the
Herald
and its fellows—throughout the country.

The days were wonderful, the evenings exciting, as Commissioner Wood escorted her to the theater and restaurants. Men made much of her, and gave her presents, with the understanding that she'd “put in a good word” for them with her husband. Aside from the welcome sensation of being young and attractive again, this soothed the hurt of being shut out of the planning and politics she so enjoyed. She did, indeed, have a place as a shaper of policy—at least, these men seemed to think so.

Only at night would her fears return, the agitation and headaches and, twice, those strange spells of disorientation, as if she were in danger of becoming detached from her body and forced to watch herself doing and saying alien things. She telegraphed Lincoln daily at the War Department, shaking her head over the memory of how long it had taken for letters to pass between Columbia, Missouri, and all those small Illinois towns, once upon a long-ago time.

At the end of the week Elizabeth and her daughters took the train for Springfield under Lockwood Todd's escort, and Lizzie, Mary, and Commissioner Wood went on first to Boston, then to Cambridge to visit Robert, a very grown-up Robert with a new fuzz of pale mustache and much talk about “the men” of his hall and year. “There's a troop of them forming, if more volunteers are called up,” he said, as he walked across the commons with Mary in the humid twilight after supper in the Hall.

She flinched, and put out her hand quickly to take Robert's. She had to force her voice into what she hoped was a semblance of normalcy. “Oh, darling, I'm sure that won't be necessary.”

“It won't be necessary for my country to fight when it has been fired upon by an enemy?” Robert stopped, and looked gravely down at her. “Or it won't be necessary for
me
to fight for my country?”

“Let's not talk about it now, dearest.” In her heart she saw young Ben Helm, walking out of the White House's marble-floored vestibule and down the steps in the sunlight. That night, in the cozy little Cambridge hotel, she dreamed of the White House, with black crape wreathed on its doors and all its windows darkened; dreamed of seeing it afloat in poisonous greenish mists that flowed up out of the ground.

All the way back to Washington two days later she struggled with a rising sense of dread, that she would return to find some terrible event had taken place. She chatted mechanically with Lizzie and Mr. Wood to take her mind from her fear, but every time the train slowed, her mind filled with confused visions of it stopping, of an officer in the blue uniform of the Army coming down the aisle to her: “I'm sorry, Mrs. Lincoln, the train can't go any farther. Washington has been taken....”

John Nicolay met them at the station with the news that Virginia had officially become a part of the Confederacy, not merely an ally. Union troops had crossed the two bridges to the little town of Alexandria and had established bridgeheads there. The President, he told them, had been closeted with his Cabinet pretty steadily since the news had arrived on Tuesday.

Mary said, “Thank you,” and settled her enormous, spreading crinoline over the carriage seats. It was Adele Douglas's carriage, on loan to the Lincolns. Mary could hardly wait to tell Lincoln of the beautiful open barouche she'd chosen, for which the businessmen of New York had agreed to pay! Nicolay asked politely after the journey, then dropped into conversation with Commissioner Wood, for which she was glad, for she had begun to see how deceived she had been in the thin young journalist with his faint German accent. Her blossoming dislike had flared into furious resentment when she'd been told that Nicolay, not she, would be in charge of social arrangements at the White House.

“It'll be more for consistency than for anything else,” Lincoln had told her, when she'd gone storming into the parlor at Willard's—this had been a few days before the Inauguration—to demand why the State Department's point-by-point description of etiquette had been delivered to the young secretary instead of to herself. “You know how your headaches lay you out, Mother, and you've told me yourself there's never any knowing when you'll be struck by one. You wouldn't want, nor could we afford, for the purely mechanical arrangements of diplomacy to be put off by your illness.”

“You think I can't be trusted?” she had demanded. “Is that it?” And, having no real argument against Lincoln's reasoning, had raged at him in a fury of tears fuelled by the exhaustion of that interminable journey from Springfield. The memory still rankled, against Nicolay, whom she suspected of putting himself forward with the argument and the suggestion, and against Lincoln himself, though her grudge had been mostly submerged in the tensions of the past few months. Riding back to the White House now through the streets of town, already thick with rising clouds of dust, she reflected that her husband probably wouldn't even take the time to separate himself from his precious Cabinet to greet her. And the boys would be off somewhere with the Taft children....

Tears of weary self-pity stung her eyes, and she took Lizzie's hand for comfort. Even in the twelve days she'd been gone, Washington had grown noticeably hotter, and the stench was incredible. Rows of tents covered the open Mall that stretched from the Capitol to the river. The reek of the latrine-pits vied with that of the horse-lines and the victual-ers' pens of cattle and swine.

More herds blocked the streets, en route to their destinies, and there seemed to be teamsters and wagons everywhere. Men in uniforms swarmed, no two companies arrayed alike. Blue, gray, young Ellsworth's gaudy scarlet-trousered Zouaves . . . country boys in twos and threes gawking about them as if Washington were a real city instead of the provincial Southern town that she knew it was. Bowery toughs from New York swaggered and cursed at the free blacks of the town, the first blacks that many of them had ever seen. In New York and Philadelphia Mary had seen for herself what she'd read of in the papers for years: the virulence of the hatred white working-men bore against the free blacks.

They would fight to preserve the Union, but newspapers, street-corner orators, broadsides all vociferously proclaimed that they would not fight to flood the Northern cities with men more impoverished—and willing to work for lower wages—than themselves.

And among the ninety-day militia soldiers, strode warriors of that secondary army that had followed on the first since the Greeks sat down
before the walls of Troy: teamsters, sutlers, victualers, laundrywomen, harlots, bunco-artists, thieves. All coated with Washington's impenetrable dust, all waiting for the fighting to begin.

Two members of the Cassius Clay Battalion stood by the gate off Pennsylvania Avenue. The carriage-wheels crunched on the gravel of the circular drive. She glimpsed wizened Mr. McManus in the doorway, and the next moment the tall thin shape of her husband emerged from the dark hall behind him.

At least, she thought with relief, he wasn't in his shirtsleeves. Gladness swept her. Tad and Willie shoved past him and ran down the steps, followed almost at once by young Ellsworth, handsome in his Zouave uniform, ready to escort her up the steps. Bud and Holly, and young Julia in her white dress, grouped around Lincoln like a second family; Julia held a bouquet of welcoming flowers.

Home,
Mary thought.

But the house itself, looming up behind them, even in the hot spring sunlight seemed to her to be shadowed, like the terrible house of mourning in her dream.
It's only because it's so shabby,
she thought, as Commissioner Wood helped her from the carriage.
And only because I'm tired.
Her head throbbed and she thought with longing of a few quiet hours in her room.
When the new furniture arrives, and we get a new coat of paint on it, it will be the finest in the city, in the nation. . . .

Yet as she walked toward the steps, her sons romping around her like puppies
—Tad couldn't possibly have grown taller in less than two weeks!—
she shivered at the sight of it, as if, like the house in her dream, it was filled, not with the bustle of business and the noise of life, but with poison, and darkness, and the stench of death.