The Emancipator's Wife (6 page)

As if anyone could get along with that sneaking, cold-blooded hussy!

“She refused and took a room instead at the Grand Pacific Hotel, much against my wishes. Mr. Turner was so good as to give me the room next to hers, where I remained until early in April. I observed many times my mother wandering about the halls in a very disordered state....”

I was on my way to the toilet, you ignorant blockhead! Doesn't that precious wife of yours ever piss?

“On the night of the first of April I stopped her when she would have gone down into the lobby in such a state, and she screamed at me, ‘You are going to murder me.'”

“Oh, that is a lie!” gasped Mary, though in fact she had only the dimmest recollections of wandering in the halls. So often she dreamed of such searchings—such fears...

“I told her that if she continued such proceedings that I would leave the hotel; and so at length I did. However, since I knew that my mother habitually went about with at least $10,000 in bonds concealed in a purse sewn into her petticoats—”

And how did you know I still did that, unless you were paying the hotel servants to spy on me?

“—I hired detectives of the Pinkerton Agency to follow her and make sure that she came to no harm.”

I knew it!
Through the hammering of the heat, through the blinding pain and the sick waves of anxiety and shock, betrayal was only beginning now to penetrate to her inner thoughts.
I knew I was being followed, being watched!

You spy on me and then you call me crazy for believing that I am being spied on!

She looked around her, wondering if any of the men on the jury—those cold-featured respectable men who hadn't the imagination to realize that there were worlds of spirit beyond what could be bought and sold, those grim-hearted brokers and bankers who thought that a woman was insane if she believed that love endured beyond death—understood what had just been said. They were too far off for her to read their faces clearly, but one or two of them were nodding wisely, approving of this evidence of Robert's care for her.

Or his care for her $10,000 in bonds, which would be subtracted from his inheritance if she were to be robbed.

“Any implication that I might be seeking to obtain control of my mother's affairs is unreasonable, because I already manage her affairs. In fact, I telegraphed her the money that enabled her return from Florida.”

Another lie!
She shook her head angrily.

“I have no doubt my mother is insane. She has long been a source of great anxiety to me. She has no home and no reason to make these
purchases.”

Always money,
she thought. Robert's mind always returned to money. His, hers, what Mr. Lincoln had left to them—which Robert had held on to as long as he possibly could, Robert and Robert's obese and crafty mentor Judge Davis. Was that because his first memories must be of those earliest days of her marriage to Mr. Lincoln, when they lived in a single rented room in the Globe Tavern in Springfield and she was in constant fear of further destitution, in constant shame when she saw her former friends rattle by in carriages?

Money, and the fact that she would not do as he wanted her to.

“Your witness, Mr. Arnold.”

Mary turned in fury to her attorney—now separated from her only by Robert's vacated chair—but Arnold wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Robert, meeting his eyes across the small space of the front of the courtroom that separated them.

“No questions,” he said.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

T
HE JURY DELIBERATED FOR BARELY TEN MINUTES.
W
HEN
R
OBERT
stepped down from the stand and returned to his seat beside her he held out his hands to her; Mary turned her face from him. His face was pale and streaked with tears—Robert had always, she reflected, been able to talk himself into feeling whatever emotion was most appropriate for the situation.

Of course a man who's been forced to hold his mother up to the scorn and ridicule of the entire city of Chicago—the entire nation, thanks to the press—would shed tears on the witness stand. How else could he make himself the victim, instead of me?

She could imagine—as Robert undoubtedly could, too—what the newspapers would say of a son who
didn't
shed tears on the witness stand as he asked the Court to lock his mother up.

“To think that my son would do this to me,” she said.

The courtroom was like a slow oven. Beneath layers of wool crape and black veiling Mary felt her flesh sticky, and burning as if dipped in acid. As the gentle effect of the medicine subsided the pain in her head mounted, confusing her. She couldn't bear the thought of asking Arnold
—traitor, Judas, hypocrite!—
if she might seek out the toilets....Would they have a Pinkerton agent follow her there?

Just get back to my room,
she thought desperately.
Just get away, out of the light, into the comforting dimness....
The frantic anxiety she had felt in the street that morning returned, the aching need for medicine, the terror of more pain to come.
Back to my room...

And she startled in shock.
What if I can't go back?

What if they find me insane?

Until this moment it had never truly occurred to her that this hideous ordeal, this hotbox redolent of the stinks of sweaty wool suiting and cheap pomade, was anything more than a single awful afternoon....

What if they lock me up? Put me in a cell like a prisoner, chained to the walls like the people in pictures I've seen? Hide me and forget me, like Mr. Rochester's wife in
Jane Eyre
?

Her eyes shot to Robert—who was talking to Swett and Ayer and casting venomous glances at the reporters—and into her mind flashed a memory, the memory of those awful months after her son Willie's death. Willie had died in February: Mary had remained in bed herself for weeks, and as much as six months later the grief had still returned in blinding waves of incapacitating weeping. She remembered how after trying vainly to comfort her, her husband had led her gently to the window of the summer cottage where they were staying.

Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder?
She could still hear that high, husky voice, that could carry like a trumpet when he spoke to a crowd, soft now like a troubled lullaby. Could still conjure back the light firmness of that enormous hand on the small of her back. The new lunatic asylum was only partially visible from the windows of the Soldiers' Home—the stone cottage to which the President's family retired during the sticky horrors of Washington summers—but Mary knew what it was.

She could hear beneath the gentleness of Lincoln's voice how frightened he was, how helpless in the face of a grief whose blackness he understood himself, far too well.
You must try to control your grief, or it will drive you mad and we may have to send you there.

He never would have.
She knew that as clearly as she knew her name.

Not to an asylum. Like those hideous reports she had read of patients being doused with icy water or chained behind bars like animals, or like that dreadful story by Mr. Poe...

And I'm not mad....

At first she thought nothing of the scraping of chairs, the sudden rise of voices.
It has to be the reporters getting excited about something.

But when she saw Robert hastily return to his seat, and Arnold gathering his papers, she swung around and saw the jury filing back into their box.

But they only just left!

The horrible suspicion seized her that one of her spells had come on her again. Time telescoped during those episodes. Hours could pass in the daydream of what felt like moments. But a glance at the courtroom clock, at the hot gold angle of light high on the wall, showed her that no, in fact only ten minutes had gone by.

“Gentlemen, have you reached a verdict?” The judge didn't look at her. Mary found herself trembling all over, struggling not to scream, not to start flinging things at Robert—books, pens, Arnold's useless and untouched papers....

“We have, Your Honor. This jury finds that Mrs. Lincoln is insane—”

No.

“—and though she is neither suicidal nor homicidal—”

No!

“—she is a fit person to be confined to an asylum.”

Reporters came crowding up. Swett, Arnold, Robert, and the two Pinkerton men
—Where were you when my husband was killed?
she wanted to scream at them—formed up around her, thrust their way through them to the back of the room. Mary stumbled in that circle of male shoulders, dark frock-coats smelling of tobacco and Macassar oil, the faces around her a blur.

Robert was speaking to her. Introducing her to a grave-faced man with a splendid chestnut beard, who had testified so learnedly about the vicious effects of Spiritualism and “theomania.”
I believe Mrs. Lincoln to be insane from the account given to me by Mr. Robert Lincoln in his office....

“...Dr. Richard Patterson,” Robert was saying. “Dr. Patterson operates a private sanitarium in Batavia.”

“You mean a madhouse.” Mary's voice sounded flat in her own ears, and queerly alien, as if someone else were speaking.

Robert's eyes shifted, but Dr. Patterson said, “Bellevue Place is a pleasant house where people can rest and get better, Mrs. Lincoln. We think you'll be very comfortable there.”

She opened her mouth to snap,
And it doesn't matter what I think?

And then realized,
No, it doesn't.

You're a madwoman. You must go where they send you, and do what you're told.

Forever.

Trembling, she said, “You set this up between you, didn't you? You had a prison all ready for me before we ever walked into this courtroom.”

While her heart whispered to her,
It was my doing. my punishment. My shame. No more than my deserving...

Reporters were craning to listen. Calmly, as if she had said nothing, Robert said, “Mr. Arnold and I will escort you to Bellevue Place tomorrow, Mother. I've taken a room next to yours at the Grand Pacific for tonight. But first, Mother, I must insist that you turn over to me the bonds that you have been carrying with you—”

“The ones you bribed chambermaids to tell you about? Or did you peek through the keyholes at me yourself? That's what you wanted all along, wasn't it? To get hold of my money?”

Robert raised his voice just slightly, though he didn't even glance at the purposefully loitering members of the press. “You're talking foolishly, Mother. You know I've always had the management of your affairs. And you also know that it's dangerous to carry them on your person as you do. Of course I will write you a proper receipt....”

“Surely,” put in Swett in his silky voice, “you would wish to spare yourself the humiliation of having the sheriff take the bonds from you by force, Mrs. Lincoln?”

She rounded on him. “Robert will never have anything of mine!”

“Then perhaps you would prefer to hand them over to Mr. Arnold?”

“I will not hand them to anyone! And I'm sure,” she added, “that since—as all the world
now
knows, thanks to
your
paid testimony, sir—I carry the bonds in my underclothing, even my son wouldn't wish me to be indelicate in the presence of all the people in the courtroom. Now I'm hot, and tired, and I wish to go back to my room—or do you propose to chain me now in a cage, and feed me through the bars?”

“Of course you will be allowed to go back to your room, Mother,” said Robert unhappily.

“Once you promise to give Mr. Arnold the bonds when we arrive there,” added Swett.

“He can have what he likes.” Mary's voice cracked and she forced it steady, forced herself not to give them even the smallest satisfaction. Hating them, and hating Robert most of all. “Take from me what he likes. Only let me go back.”

Leaving the courthouse was like those dreams she'd had as a girl, of attending her classes at Ward's Academy and discovering in the midst of recitation that she was still in her nightgown....

They used to let people tour madhouses and stare at the lunatics,
she thought, dizzily sinking into the upholstery of Swett's closed brougham, sweating in pain at every jolt of the pavement.
Do they still?
Evening was beginning to come on, though the bustle of pedestrians and vehicles on Clark Street was worse, if anything, than it had been in the heat of the afternoon. A breath of breeze from the lake brought a little freshness, but not one jot of relief.
We think you'll be comfortable there....

No. Not that.

She closed her eyes and wondered how much it would hurt to die.

With stony dignity she stepped out of her group of escorts—Swett, Arnold, the two faithful Pinkertons, and a very uncomfortable-looking Mary Gavin, whom they'd gathered up on their way through the Grand Pacific lobby—and into the ladies' toilets down the hall from her room. Blessed relief—blessed, blessed silence, stillness, privacy away from staring eyes and whispering men...

They were all waiting in the hall for her when she came out. She almost laughed at their clumsy unease.

“The bonds,” Swett reminded her as she unlocked the door of her room. He reached to take the key from her but she closed it tight in her palm.

“You shall have nothing from me, sir. My husband left me those bonds....”

“I'm sure Mr. Lincoln would not have left them to you had he known you were going to walk around Chicago with ten thousand dollars' worth pinned in your petticoats!”

Her head splitting, her stomach queasy with the aftermath of migraine and medicine, her whole body trembling with exhaustion, Mary shouted at them, raged at them, backed into a corner of the dark suffocating room with its crowded packages and high-piled trunks. But they did not leave, would not leave. They stayed, argued, insisted, and refused to listen when she begged them to leave, begged them to let her alone, to let her rest. At last, sick and dizzy and shaking, Mary retreated to a corner among the trunks and pulled up her heavy overskirt, so that Arnold could tear the bonds out of the pocket sewn to her petticoat.

Then they left, all except Mary Gavin, who settled in her usual chair, as she did all those nights when Mary could not sleep and paid the stolid Irishwoman to spend the night in her room with her.

The bonds were gone.

Her money was gone.

She was helpless. She was exactly where she had all her life feared she would one day be: penniless. And alone.

This is what it is,
she thought, frantic, exhausted, fighting with all her strength not to collapse in tears,
to be a madwoman.

It is to be a child again, without a penny, with no place to live but what they give you and no place to go but what they permit.

I am not insane!

She lay for a long time on the bed, her hands pressed to her mouth, her face turned to the wall, burningly conscious of the woman on the other side of the cluttered room.

Always watched. Never alone.

The sharp curve of her stays gouged her ribs as she drew in a breath, let it out.

She thought, with aching longing, of the medicines in the cabinet, of their promise of sweet sleep and oblivion.

But if she slept, she thought, she'd only wake in the morning with Robert and that hateful Dr. Patterson at the door, waiting to take her to the madhouse.

If she slept, she'd lose whatever time she had to act before Robert arrived to spend the night in the next room.

She took another breath, and sat up. “I'm going down the hall,” she announced.

Mary Gavin hastily screwed the top back onto the little flask she'd withdrawn from her reticule, tucked it away out of sight.

“You don't have to come with me,” added Mary, getting to her feet. “I won't be long.” She knew the maid never liked to get out of her chair once she'd settled in with her little nips of gin. Through the curtained window, light still lingered in the airshaft. It was seven o'clock. Here downtown, most shops remained open until eight, and those within the hotel itself until ten.

Her heart beat fast as she opened the door, praying the maid didn't see—black against the black of her mourning dress, in the dense dimness of the room's single gas jet—that she had her reticule with her, her reticule that had in it, now, all the money she had in the world.

She prayed it would be enough.

The Pinkerton men got to their feet and one of them hastily stashed the
Police Gazette
in his pocket. Coldly, Mary informed them, “I am going down to Squair's Pharmacy in the lobby, to get some medicine for my neuralgia. I shall be back in a few minutes.”