The Emancipator's Wife (58 page)

Mary began to sob, barely conscious of Lizabet's comforting fingers squeezing her hand. She did not know exactly what had happened, there on the other side of the table, in Nettie Colburn's thin body. But she knew the terrible weight of loneliness eased and lifted, as if light had shone through the Veil from the Summer Land beyond.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-EIGHT

S
HE WENT BACK, AGAIN AND AGAIN, TO THE HOUSE IN
G
EORGETOWN.

She did other things in those weeks. She visited the wounded and the sick in the Washington Army hospitals.

A battle was fought at Shiloh Church on the Tennessee River, fought for two days, leaving almost 24,000 men wounded or dead on the blood-soaked field—a quarter of all the soldiers involved. Wounded poured into Washington, and Mary, like nearly every other woman in town, went to visit them, to write letters home for them, to fetch water for them in the heat of the hospital wards. To bring them fruit and keep their spirits alive in the face of exhaustion and pain.

With Lizabet Keckley's guidance she became involved in the work of the Freedmen's Relief Association. Upon occasion she rode out in the carriage with Lincoln to the Navy Yard to watch the testing of new guns, and even received a few private callers. But in truth she lived from séance to séance, and the days between were often a blur.

All of Willie's things she gave away, except his pony, Napoleon, which Tad refused to part with. She found herself unable to even look at the Taft boys, or Julia, and sent Julia a note asking her to stay away. Tad himself went into hysterics at the sight of the girl who had been his and Willie's friend. Tad's behavior worried and frightened Mary, for the boy missed his brother frantically, and his tears would trigger in her fits of uncontrollable weeping. Lincoln could deny the boy nothing, and let Tad sleep in bed with him, to still the child's nightmares. Many nights Lincoln stayed in his office until two or three in the morning, conferring with Generals or debating in agony over the military pardons of which he was the final judge of life or death. Tiptoeing down the dark hall, Mary would see the skinny, pale-faced child asleep in Lincoln's bed, waiting for him, his black hair sticking up stiffly in all directions like his father's, surrounded by a half-dozen slumbering cats.

She felt paralyzed. She knew there was something she should do, for her husband and her son, but could not bring herself to face their pain as well as her own. The spring heat advanced, and she began to suffer again from chills and fever, and from agonizing recurrences of the female infections that had plagued her since Tad's birth. There were days now when she could not get out of bed without a spoonful or two of Indian Bitters, Braithewaite's Patent Nerve-Food, or Dole's Quaker Cordial.

Lonely and confused, without even the Taft boys for company, Tad refused to proceed with his lessons, and poor young Mr. Williamson was reduced to simply keeping the boy occupied and amused for a few hours a day. Even what little Tad had learned, he seemed to have forgotten in his distress. She could see the boy retreating daily into a world peopled by his father and by animals—a Philadelphia merchant had sent him a family of white rabbits, to which had been added Nanko and Nanny, a pair of enterprising goats. Always outgoing, Tad had a lot of friends, especially among the White House military guard, but there was no one, it seemed, to whom he now gave his heart.

And piled on top of all of the grief and worry, there was the continued nightmare of the bills. They poured in without cease. Though Mary dismissed more servants, and even appointed Johnny Watt's twenty-one-year-old wife, Jane, as White House steward in return for a portion of her salary, it did not seem to help. The newspapers were relentless, running articles about how the President's wife was buying cashmere shawls and carriages for her relatives out of taxpayers' money, while soldiers starved and shivered in their camps on the Potomac.

There was a poem someone had written, about the ball she'd given in February . . . the ball during which she'd been frantic with worry over Willie lying sick upstairs.

What matter that I, poor private,

Lie here on my narrow bed,

With fever gripping my vitals

And dazing my hapless head!

What matters that nurses are callous

And rations are megre and small,

So long as the beau monde revel

At the Lady-President's ball!

The condition of the soldiers, at least, was no exaggeration. Trainloads of wounded were pulling daily into Washington—wounded men, and men who had come down sick from the diseases of the camps: typhoid, pneumonia, measles. Houses and churches all over Washington were converted into hospitals, including that of Adele Douglas on Lafayette Square. Simon Cameron's system of favoritism, contracts, and bribery was having its inevitable result in mismanagement and shortages of which the ultimate victims were the men.

Men—and boys no older than Robert—lay tossing on those narrow bunks, waiting for someone to change crusted bandages or soiled sheets; delirious, sometimes dying before anyone ever saw them. As the spring advanced and the weather turned hot, flies tormented them, and such was the dirtiness of most hospitals that sickness spread among the men like fire in old straw.

Fighting now raged up and down the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia, as Stonewall Jackson outflanked and outfought three Union armies at Cross Keys, at McDowell, at Strasburg. In addition to thousands of casualties, the rebel forces supplied themselves happily from captured Union depots.

Though Mary did no actual nursing, she was aware that merely the presence of the volunteers, and the members of the newly founded Sanitary Committee, cheered the wounded. Some of them laughed with her over Lincoln's brief foray as actual Commander-in-Chief, when he'd gone down to Fort Monroe in May. General McClellan had been “too busy” to see him, so Lincoln had looked around him and enquired if anyone had thought to take the rebel-held Navy yard at Norfolk—something that had evidently never occurred to McClellan. Lincoln had personally supervised the reconnaissance for landing-sites, and had the Navy start a bombardment. The rebels had cleared out in a matter of days.

“Service is the best cure for grief that there is,” said Lizabet, one afternoon in the full heat of spring, as they carried water in from the big water-butts in the center of the hospital camp at Mount Pleasant among the trees on Fourteenth Street. In the tent wards they, and a woman from the Sanitary Committee, dipped up water from the pail in tin cups and carried it to the men who lay on the cots, moaning softly with pain or murmuring under the influence of the opium pills the surgeon had handed out.

There was no banter, no joking in this ward. Most of the men didn't even know who she was.

This was the ward of men newly brought in, where their field dressings would be cut off and from which they would be taken for surgery in their turn. Mary shivered at the smell of blood and dirt, at the smell of gangrene. Minié balls did savage damage, literally disintegrating the bone within the flesh; these men would return home minus an arm or a leg, if they returned at all.

Yet strangely, these days she did not often find herself thinking,
Not Robert . . .
as she moved from bed to bed with her dripping cup. In the bearded—or pitifully beardless—faces, she saw other women's husbands, brothers, sons, men who had thrown themselves into battle for those things that Lincoln himself would have fought for: for the Union, and the right of the government to say to the individual states,
I don't care if it's what the majority of your citizens find most profitable, some things are simply
WRONG.

When she visited the hospitals—and, more and more now in Lizabet's company, the growing number of contraband camps—she found sometimes even her dread and terror of the mounting bills in her secretaire didn't torment her. There were now days when she was even able to put her grief aside.

“You're right about that, Madame.” The woman from the Sanitary Committee looked up from the letter she was writing for a scared-looking young soldier: a tall, stout, fair-haired woman with a hooked nose and a decided chin. She, too, wore the deep black of mourning, her sleeves turned back over stout forearms. She laid one broad, soft hand comfortingly on the wrist of the man in the bed, and said to Mary, “If we cannot ask why those we love were taken from us, at least we can demonstrate our trust in God's goodness by doing His work. And goodness knows,” she added, with a quick flash of humor in her hazel-gray eyes, “with the amount there is to do around here, one is simply too tired to grieve.”

She rose from her stool beside the cot: “We've met before, I think, haven't we, Mrs. Lincoln? In Chicago, during the convention? My name is Myra Bradwell. I'm one of the organizers of the Sanitary Committee.”

Mary remembered her, a schoolteacher, she'd thought, and probably a proponent of women's rights. But the black of her clothing touched Mary's heart and she said, “Bless you for what you're doing—especially in the face of your own loss.”

The look of briskness—of running her life and everyone else's with maximum efficiency—faltered for a moment in the taller woman's eyes. “Thank you,” said Myra softly. “I was so sorry to read about your son. Your brother, too, wasn't it?” And Mary nodded, surprised that the woman would have read newspapers so closely to have picked up that small an item.

“Sam was my half-brother,” she said. “We weren't close....” Her throat closed hard, thinking about the fair-haired child at the breakfast-table in Kentucky, all those years ago. Thinking about the other brothers who
were
close—Alec and David, and Emilie's husband Ben, all of them somewhere being shot at by these broken and bloodstained soldiers in blue. Angrily, she added, “I suppose that was one of those articles that said I was sending him—or one of my other brothers—secret papers that I'm stealing out of my husband's desk?”

“Considering the number of people in Washington who
are
sending information across the river to the Confederates,” remarked Myra, “I can only wonder that they'd think you were sending anything General Lee didn't already know about. But from the time of Jezebel on, men will point fingers at a foreign woman married to their chief. It's a good way of proving how patriotic and vigilant you are without actually putting yourself in danger.”

Mary laughed, surprised at the sound of her own laughter, and instantly guilty. She
thought,
Willie . . .
she had not, she thought, laughed since he'd fallen ill.

She gave Myra Bradwell a card, and invited her to call. The Blue Room salons were less glamorous without the presence of the Chevalier, and Mary still felt humiliated over the way Lincoln had ejected him, without so much as an inquiry, and in the presence of all of her friends. Sometimes Watt—whom Mary had talked her fellow-Spiritualist Jesse Newton into giving a job as special agent in the Department of the Interior—would send her up a message that Wikoff wanted to meet her, and would let the Chevalier into the conservatory, to which he still kept a copy of the key. Both Wikoff and Watt lent Mary money, not once but several times, never asking a thing in return.

Wikoff may have been a bit of a rogue, thought Mary resentfully, but at least he treated her like a beautiful woman. At least he talked to her, instead of retreating into her husband's guarded silences. At least he asked her opinions, instead of—silently but firmly—relegating her to receptions, to ordering books for the White House library, to bearing gifts of flowers and fruit to the hospitals which they both visited.

It's because my health isn't good,
Mary told herself, when he'd gently change the subject away from war plans or politics, when he'd put off her questions with a story that made her laugh.
He keeps me out of important decisions because I so often don't feel well.

But in her heart, she suspected that this was not true, and the suspicion was like powdered glass in her clothing, inflaming her at every move.

All those things were her daylight life. Mostly, she lived for the darkness of Cranston Laurie's parlor, and the soft voices singing hymns in the candlelit gloom.

There was a medium named Colchester, the illegitimate son of an English Duke, through whom Willie spoke to her as well. Colchester's séances had a stronger emotional charge than Nettie Colburn's, for under his mental summons the dead would actually take ectoplasmic form. Often, in the darkness, she heard voices murmuring behind her and in the corners of the room, and felt the brush of unseen hands on her shoulders, hair, and face. When the blurred shapes of drifting light formed up in the darkness, Colchester described their faces and clothing. On several occasions the glowing shapes walked around the table, while the distant music of horns and tambourines breathed in the shadows.

It was at one of Colchester's séances that Mary, a little to her surprise, encountered Myra Bradwell. “I only want to know that my girl is happy,” whispered Myra, startlingly different from the bustling woman she had encountered at the hospital camp. “She was only seven when she was taken away last year. It's cold comfort, being told by some minister that it's the Will of God. And why should we not speak to them, if God allows it?”