The Emancipator's Wife (65 page)

She dreamed of the White House, its long upstairs hall utterly dark. The air felt stuffy and silent, as of a house long deserted. She saw Lincoln, asleep with the sleep of exhaustion in that small spartan bedroom. Saw his eyes snap open, saw him look around. It was dark in the room and cold, but she heard now—as he heard—the sound of someone weeping, somewhere in the house,
weeping jaggedly . . . as if he or she had been crying for hours but could not stop.

He sat up, and ran his hand through his hair. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and trousers, barefoot as if he'd lain down too tired to even completely undress. For a time he listened, then got to his feet and went to the door, listening in the darkness. Mary watched him pad soundlessly through the empty halls, looking into the rooms, first upstairs and then down. Beds empty and stripped of their sheets, his office bare in the ghostly moonlight, no papers. No charts on the long battered pine tables, only a tattered map of the Union and Confederacy still pinned to the smoke-defaced paper of the walls and that stained old picture of Jackson above the fireplace. He looked into her room, and Tad's. Both were empty and cleared out. Even the cats had gone, and little curly-haired Jip.

Downstairs the East Room was a cavern of darkness, in which candles burned like constellations of fevered stars. A huge dim shape reared in
its center, a black canopy shrouded with black curtains; every window was hung with black. Here alone were people—men, soldiers, standing around a black-draped coffin. Now and then one would shift his feet and the creak of boot-leather and the clink of a buckle were loud as cymbals in the deathly silence of the house.

Lincoln crossed the thick green carpet with its pink roses, from
Carryl's of Philadelphia. Stood for a moment looking up at the sable canopy, the coffin that it sheltered. Distantly the sound of weeping began afresh. He stepped forward to one of the guards, the soldier tired, like a picket after a long night's watching.

“What is it?” asked Lincoln softly, and looked at the coffin in the shadows. “Who is dead in the White House?”

The guard answered, “The President. He was shot by an assassin. He's dead.”

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-FIVE

Washington July 1875

“S
HE GAVE AWAY EVERYTHING HE OWNED,
”
L
IZABET
K
ECKLEY SAID
. “She told me she could not bear the memories they held.”

Late-afternoon sunlight glared on the waters of the Potomac, glimpsed through the ragged screen of trees. Closer, pools and puddles that studded the Mall's unkempt grasses flashed like silver. At the far end of the long park, closer to the Capitol, some effort was being made to transform the open land into the sort of
tapis vert
that its designers had originally envisioned, but at the moment it was pretty much as John remembered it from a decade ago: a swampy strip of ground where people grazed their cows. The granite monument to George Washington didn't look any further along than it had been when the money to build it ran out in the late 1850s.

Beside him, Frederick Douglass nodded. Though his hair was whitening he still stood tall and regal, his hard, almost frightening features relaxing into a rare expression of personal grief. “She gave me a pair of his spectacles,” he said, in his deep, beautiful voice. “And one of his canes—one that I think he actually used once or twice. People were forever presenting him with canes, and of course he had about as much use for a cane as I have for a pink silk petticoat. At fifty-five he had the body of a twenty-year-old. You have his coat, don't you, Lizabet?”

The seamstress shook her head. “I forget who she gave his coat to. She gave me his brush and his comb, because I'd often comb his hair, the last thing before they went down to a reception. I cut it, once or twice—he was always letting it get too long. I wish I had kept the cuttings.”

“We don't think,” said Douglass softly. “Not until it's too late.” He paused in his long stride as three little boys dashed across the path with their hoops. “She gave the rest of the canes—and a number of his other things, like waistcoats and gloves—away to people who she thought might pay some of her debts.”

“Was it true, that he left her in debt?” asked John.

“You know what they say, about how you find a cobbler in a village?” asked Lizabet wryly. “You look around and see which children have no shoes, and you follow them home. He'd gone bankrupt once, for trusting a feckless partner in that store he ran back in New Salem—I think he was twenty-three. The sheriff sold his surveying-tools and horse at auction. His friends clubbed together and bought them back for him, but I don't think he ever got over it. When he died his estate ran to something like eighty thousand dollars....But he left no will.”

John blinked, not understanding, and Lizabet smiled with a kind of reflective irony. Few who had been slaves had ever even thought of making wills, for what was there to leave? Legally, until January of 1863 neither John nor his mother, nor the kingly man who walked now at his side, had even owned their own bodies.

“When a man doesn't leave a will,” Lizabet explained, “it means his wife and his children can't touch a penny of his money till the estate has been probated. Sometimes that takes years. Mr. Lincoln knew better. He was a lawyer—he'd spent twenty years cleaning up the affairs of men who hadn't left wills. And it wasn't that he didn't know his life was in danger, from the moment he was elected to office. People turn strange, when they think about death.” Her eyes strayed toward the dazzling river again, and John saw in his mind the burned-down candles, the fresh flowers, before the picture of her nearly white son.

“I think it might have been a blind spot for him, the way money was for her,” she said. “Or maybe he was just more frightened than he ever let on.”

“So what happens,” asked John—who had never encountered or much thought about this aspect of the lives of the white and rich, “—while the courts are probating a man's estate? What do his wife and children live on?”

Lizabet and Douglass exchanged a glance, then Douglass said, “Nothing. I don't know how the ancient Hebrews arranged such matters, but when Jesus of Nazareth urged charity to widows and orphans, he was
not
talking in generalities. Mostly they go live with their families . . . only Mrs. Lincoln had managed to have a fight with two of her sisters and wasn't speaking to them, and the rest had been on the wrong side of the War. When Lincoln died, Mrs. Lincoln had managed to personally insult most of
her
family and
his
Cabinet—I think at one point about two weeks after the assassination she called Secretary of War Stanton to the White House and accused Andrew Johnson of being part of Booth's gang. Then over the next few weeks she made a clean sweep of it and alienated everyone else she'd formerly missed.”

John saw in his mind Cassy and Clarice haul Phoebe back from physically assaulting Lionel—Phoebe spitting at their big, good-natured housemate, screaming insults and threats and lashing out with her nails. . . . He lived in daily dread of hearing that the whole family had been evicted from their half of the broken-down dwelling because his mother had attacked the rent-collector again.

Mrs. Lincoln accusing her husband's successor of having compassed his murder—he could just picture her leaning forward in her creaking corset, could hear her high, sweet voice breathlessly gasping the words behind the crape screen of her veil—seemed laughably mild.

Through the whole of the afternoon, until late-falling summer darkness cloaked the park and mosquitoes drove the three former slaves back to the omnibus and Mrs. Keckley's stifling room at the Lewises' again, John listened to his friend's recollection of the black nightfall of Mary Lincoln's life. And while Lizabet would speak calmly of those weeks of sitting in the darkened guest-room in the White House—for Mary could not bear to enter even her own room there, much less sleep in the big carved bed in which she had on rare but treasured occasions lain with the husband she'd adored—he could feel the suffocating gloom of that curtained chamber, and hear the woman's keening, like an animal howling in a trap.

Mary had been brought back to the White House that wet morning of Holy Saturday by Secretary Welles's wife, Mary Jane, and by her fellow Spiritualist Elizabeth Dixon, the only friends who could be located at short notice. Throughout Easter Sunday, she had been forced to listen to workmen building the towering black catafalque in the East Room to enthrone his coffin. Lizabet had arrived late Saturday morning and sat beside her, holding her hands when Mary would let her.

“She wept until she was ill.” Lizabet shook her head, as if across the dark river of years she could still look straight into that cramped little room with its closed curtains, could still hear the hammering downstairs. “I've never seen a woman in such grief. She said, many times, that she wanted to die, that she'd rather Booth had shot her as well. We were all of us worried—Dr. Henry who'd been in town from Oregon, Mrs. Welles, Mrs. Lee that was one of the Blair family and sister to Ginny Fox, Mr. French that had helped her out with her debts, Senator Sumner. . . . Those were the only ones she'd see. Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, was running the country, since the same night Mr. Lincoln was killed his Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, was attacked by another of Booth's gang, and stabbed so badly that his life was despaired of. That's something almost no one seems to remember about the assassination.”

“They would have got Johnson, too,” said Douglass in his velvety bass. “Only Booth's man turned coward at the last minute and went and got drunk instead.”

John reflected privately that it was astonishing the would-be killer hadn't encountered the Vice-President in the tavern to which he'd fled.

“Mrs. Lincoln never stirred from that room for six weeks,” said
Lizabet softly. “Sometimes sleeping—she slept a great deal. Sometimes only sitting and staring. Sometimes screaming and wailing, like a woman in an opera or a play. We all made sure she was never alone. I must have heard her recount that last evening, detail by detail, three hundred times in that month and a half, sometimes twice and three times in the space of a few hours, until I was ready to scream myself. Even Dr. Henry, who was the most patient of men, said to me once in the hall, ‘Isn't she aware that the rest of us have lost a dear friend, too?'”

“You would be, and I would be . . . I hope,” said John. “But Mrs.
Lincoln isn't like that.”

“No.” A wry and reminiscent expression tugged the corner of
Lizabet's mouth. “No, she isn't.”

Certainly no one is like that,
he added mentally,
who's had four or eight tablespoons of Battley's Cordial or Indian Bitters, three or four times a day for years.

And who would deny a woman so bereft the comfort of medicine for her pain?

Lizabet went on, “She felt that it was somehow her fault, as she did when Willie died. She was always one to see misfortune as God punishing
her,
for something she had done. She kept trying to see what could have been done differently, as if she could go back and take another path, so that he could live. Poor Mr. Johnson stayed in his boardinghouse—with a pack of children and grandchildren and his poor sickly wife—and Secretary Stanton ran the country. I think Mrs. Lincoln couldn't face the thought of coming out of that room. Of emerging into a world that she wouldn't share with him.”

In his mind he saw again that lanky silhouette against the evening sky of Virginia, taking off his hat and bending down to kiss the plump little figure at his side.

“Where did she go when she did come out?” he asked. “Back to Springfield?”

Lizabet shook her head. “It wasn't that easy.”

And John thought,
No. Nothing was ever that easy with Mary Lincoln.

Give her a difficult situation, and she was bound to make it worse.

In between paroxysms of grief, Mary had managed to quarrel with every single friend and neighbor in her adopted hometown of Springfield over the resting-place of her husband's body. (
What else?
thought John with an inner sigh.) She could not bring herself to attend the funeral, but when Robert returned from Springfield with the news that its town fathers had lovingly formed a Lincoln Monument Association, and spent $5,300 on property for a magnificent tomb at the center of town, she had flown into blind rage that the tomb would not include a family crypt.

“I don't know whether it was because she truly couldn't endure the thought of eternity not spent at his side,” said Lizabet, “or because she wanted, once and for all, to be recognized as the wife of the martyred hero, the way she'd always wanted to have everyone know she was the President's wife. Probably both,” she added, with a touch of sad affection for her friend. “Probably both.”

“After all the mud that had been flung at her in the papers for four years,” mused John, “who can blame her for wanting to claim her place?”

“She wrote back to Mr. Conkling—who was the husband of her best friend in the old days—that Mr. Lincoln had expressly wished to be buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, in a family vault,” said Douglass. “I gather from something she said to me later that he'd only said once that he wanted to be buried in someplace ‘green and quiet'—not a description of downtown Springfield, whichever way you look at it. For all that he became a lawyer, and a politician, and the servant of his intelligence and his destiny, I think he was always a bit of a backwoodsman in his heart.”

When first he'd come to the cities of the East, wondered John, had Abraham Lincoln found them as confusing and noisy as he himself had found Washington, that first autumn of his freedom? Did he dream of the woods, as John dreamed of them, over and over in the stinking South Side slums?

“So of course she couldn't go back to Springfield.”

Douglass raised his eyebrows. “Not after threatening to have her husband's body buried in Washington if the Monument Association didn't do things her way, she couldn't.”

Lizabet chimed in, “She claimed also that Lincoln had intended to move the entire family to Chicago after the end of his second term, because, she said, he couldn't face returning to the house where his beloved Willie had lived.”

“Hadn't they lost another child already in that house?” asked John, remembering Mary's rambling account of her life.

“Of course,” said Lizabet. “And in my hearing he spoke a number of times, about when they would be able to go back to Springfield. It was she who couldn't face it. Her friend Myra Bradwell and her husband lived in Chicago—still live there, in fact—and Mrs. Bradwell was part of the community of Spiritualism there. I know Robert wanted to return to Springfield, where they owned the house at least and he could be apprenticed to practice law. But Mrs. Lincoln . . . had her way.”

Of course she did,
thought John, recalling his own mother's wild rages and arbitrary demands.
Of course she did.

“It was nearly summer by the time they left the White House,” said Mrs. Keckley softly. “The day they left was the day before the Army of the Potomac was to return to town, after the final surrender of the last Confederate troops, and the capture of Jefferson Davis. Carpenters were building a reviewing-stand in front of the White House for General Grant and President Johnson—hammering filled the halls, as it had when they were building the canopy for Mr. Lincoln's coffin. The place looked as bad as it did when Mr. Lincoln and Mary had first moved in, because after the funeral sightseers went through the lower floor and helped themselves to nearly everything. Silverware and dishes were showing up just weeks afterwards in pawnshops from Washington to Boston, and of course the papers all said she'd made off with them, in all these trunks.