The Emancipator's Wife (66 page)

“And after all that,” she sighed, “it was just Robert and Tad and I, and the two White House guards Tom and Will, who loaded up the luggage. I know she'd angered some people with her hysterics, and turned others away with how she'd go on and on. But when it came to it, I nearly cried that there were so few, to see her on her way.”

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-SIX

M
ARY,
R
OBERT,
L
IZABET
K
ECKLEY, AND
T
AD RODE TWO DAYS AND
two nights by train to Chicago, where they lived first in a downtown hotel, and then in a cheaper hotel in Hyde Park, at the end of the new streetcar line, seven miles south of the city on the shore of the lake. John Wilamet remembered Chicago in the Sixties, before the fire: wealthy neighborhoods of fine brick houses along Michigan Avenue and on the lakefront, surrounded by wide grounds and trees, interspersed with ragged shantytowns called “patches”—Conley's Patch, Goose Island,
Little Hell, and Ogden's Island—where the Hungarians, Poles, Germans, and Irish lived in rickety sheds or minuscule rooms subdivided from the upper floors of commercial buildings.

There were few blacks in the town in those days. They lived in unbelievable squalor south of Maxwell Street. He remembered the trains that would roar through the crowded neighborhoods of the poor without slowing down; remembered the stench of the river that was an open sewer for the lumber, soap, and packing plants all along its banks. Remembered rats fed so fat on slaughterhouse offal that a trap wouldn't kill them. You had to listen for the noise of the bar slamming down, then go out and finish the job with a hammer.

Remembered the tangles of alleyways where the poor kept pigs, cows, chickens in tiny yards, along with fodder, stored hay, coal oil, and kindling for stoves. No wonder the place had gone up like tinder.

It had been Hell, waiting only for the touch of the Fire.

Lincoln's estate had been put in the hands of Judge David Davis, his old friend of his circuit-riding days. While all over the country Lincoln was being apotheosized from a shrewd jokester into a saintly martyr, Congress was refusing to vote so much as a dollar toward a pension for his wife and children. This was partly because Mary had managed to personally insult and offend nearly everyone in the government, and partly because, quite simply, no Presidential widow had demanded one before.

William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor—log cabins and hard cider notwithstanding—had both been wealthy planters. Congress had paid their elderly widows the remainder of their husbands' first-year salary, and they had retired to the family plantations in ladylike dignity, surrounded by adult children and hosts of grandchildren to care for them.

The Re-United States, moreover, had been facing the debts of four years of ruinously expensive warfare running to hundreds of millions of dollars. In the midst of dealing with martial law in a conquered rebel territory—and hundreds of thousands of former slaves who had no idea where to go or how to make their livings—Congress had not wanted to listen to a middle-aged, abrasive widow demanding at the top of her lungs and in every “Letters to the Editor” column in the East, to be paid at least the balance of her husband's salary for the year 1865, and a pension on top of it.

“She was entirely justified,” remarked Douglass, as he, John, and
Lizabet walked through the cobalt twilight past the red-brick towers of the Smithsonian Castle, toward the park's edge. “It was Lincoln's election that started the War, and Lincoln was its final casualty. She was owed at least the pension that any soldier's wife would have had, for giving a husband to an enemy bullet.”

“Not that a soldier's pension was what she asked for,” mused Lizabet. “But in her mind the principle was the same. And then of course in those days both the country as a whole and every wealthy Republican in sight were showering gifts on General Grant—including two houses, horses, carriages, and everything from ornamental swords to gold-rimmed dinner service for a hundred. They could all see that he was going to be the next President, and wanted him to remember them kindly. Mrs. Lincoln was furious that she had been ‘forced' to live in a common boardinghouse. Judge Davis—and Robert, I'm sure—would point out that she had a perfectly livable house in Springfield, but she wouldn't hear of living in it . . . nor of selling it. Through all her letters to me during 1866 and '67, I don't think she ever once mentioned selling the Springfield house.”

They crossed Constitution Avenue, walked along Seventeenth Street where it bordered the President's Park. Through the trees, lights could be seen, though John couldn't imagine President Grant and his family were still in residence at this grisly time of year. Without the War, and in the deeps of summertime, Washington had subsided into what it had been all along: a hot, sticky little Southern city floating on a marsh.

Was Mary Lincoln sitting this evening in her window back at Bellevue tonight, he wondered, as he so often saw her, looking out at the gathering dark? Was she keeping consumption of opium down in his absence? Or would they have to go through the whole heartbreaking process of illness, depression, restlessness, pain again?

His heart ached for her, as it ached in spite of himself when his mother would sit weeping on the rear porch of the house, rocking like a child for hours with her arms around her knees.

Give them shots of morphine every few hours. Why not?

He shook his head, his mind returning to Lizabet's words, and to Mary's account of her Washington years. “She was still in debt, wasn't she?” he asked. “The debt that she'd never told Lincoln about?”

Lizabet's lips drew tight.

“You have to understand,” she said, after a time of silence, “that for Mrs. Lincoln, spending money was a sickness. Shopping was how she spent her days, how she got out of herself . . . how she rested. Many were the days she'd spend hours, showing me all she'd got. She hoarded up treasures like a drunkard drinks, almost without thinking. And she couldn't stop.”

In March of 1867 (Lizabet said), she received a letter from Mary Lincoln, pleading—in her usual imperious fashion—with her to meet her in New York between August and September of that year, to assist her in selling up her wardrobe.
I cannot live on $1,700 a year,
she wrote, and would be forced to give up the house that she had so recently bought—the house that she had hoped to make her permanent home—and return to living in a boardinghouse.

December would see the opening of Congress and by October the local Washington hostesses would be putting in orders for new gowns . . . but Lizabet went.

“I'd heard from her twice, maybe three times after I left them in Chicago,” said the seamstress, as they left the gaslights of Pennsylvania Avenue, entered the darker and shabbier precincts beyond. “I'd read in the newspapers about the subscriptions to raise money to pay her debts. She claimed Judge Davis was undermining these efforts by telling everyone she'd be perfectly able to pay her own debts once he got done probating Lincoln's estate. I don't know what the truth was, but Washington is worse than a girls' school, for gossip. But Mrs. Lincoln was my friend, and she needed me. So I went.”

Mary's original plan was that Lizabet should go to New York first and procure rooms for them at the St. Denis Hotel, a plan conveyed in a letter written after Mary must have left Chicago, so there was no chance for Lizabet to write back suggesting any other scheme. Annoyed and filled with trepidation—Mary had a habit of proposing schemes that were abandoned at the last minute—Lizabet closed up her business.

She found Mary, however, at the shabby-genteel establishment near Union Square, as directed, and after an argument with the manager over the hotel's policy of not renting rooms to people of color—something Mary hadn't even thought of—they were given adjoining triangular chambers on the fifth floor, barely larger than cupboards.

“How provoking!” Mary sat down on Lizabet's bed, panting a little from the climb. “I declare, I never saw such unaccommodating people. I shall give them a good going-over in the morning.”

The next morning, however, Mary knocked on Lizabet's door at six and urged her to come with her out to breakfast—since the St. Denis refused to serve persons of color in the dining-room, and it hadn't occurred to Mary to send for dinner in their rooms the night before—and to sit in the park and discuss the situation.

“That fat blackguard Judge Davis, who I daresay wants to keep the interest for himself, still hasn't made a distribution of my Sainted Husband's estate.” Mary's face was pink with anger in the black frame of her turned-back veils. “I have written and written to those ungrateful Republican politicians whom my husband helped to positions of power, begging them—and
threatening
! For they are
all
scoundrels—to contribute
something
of what they owe to His memory, to my support. That young Mr. Williamson, that was Tad and Willie's tutor, has
supposedly
been acting for me in this, but he is a most
dilatory
young man!”

Lizabet couldn't imagine what influence a Scots schoolteacher would have on the gang of hard-line radical Republicans currently in control of Congress, but didn't get a chance to speak, which was probably just as well.

“I managed, by the most
terrible
sacrifices, to pay off some of my debts, with the niggardly
pittance
Congress gave me—only the first year's salary of my Dearest One's second term, after taking out six weeks' portion
and Federal taxes
! I was able to purchase a house in Chicago for Tad and myself, on the same street as my dearest Myra! But without money to keep it up, I have been forced to rent it out, and live once more at the Clifton House on the proceeds, a most
plebeian
atmosphere, when one considers the glory that once I knew.”

Tears filled Mary's eyes, and Lizabet put her arms around those plump shoulders. For all her pretensions, her rages, and her blithe conviction of entitlement, Mary Lincoln had a sweetness to her, a genuinely good heart whose warmth drew Lizabet in spite of what she'd learned over the years of this strayed Southern belle. In the bright morning sunlight of the park, Mary looked somewhat better than she had that hot May day when she'd left Washington. She had noticeably put on weight over the past two and a half years, and she moved as if every gesture gave her pain, but there was, at least, a little of her old sparkle to her eyes.

But it was brutally clear to Lizabet that her friend had lost the mainspring of her life. This beaten quality closed Lizabet's mouth on any remark she might have made about those who at least
had
a house, who were able to get their debts paid by others instead of having to work with thread and needle themselves. When she spoke, it was only to ask, “What did you have in mind?”

“Say what you like about Mrs. Lincoln,” sighed Lizabet, as she threw open the windows in a vain attempt to lessen the day's accumulated heat in her boardinghouse rooms, “she wasn't one to sit quietly on the sidelines waiting for events to take their course. Will you have coffee, Mr. Douglass, or tea?”

W
ILLIAM
B
RADY AND
S
AMUEL
K
EYES, DIAMOND MERCHANTS OF
609
Broadway, assured Mrs. Lincoln that the gowns she'd worn while the President's wife, the furs in which she'd wrapped herself and the jewelry that had glittered on her throat in the midst of those terrible days of war, would bring in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars. Lizabet had distrusted those two smooth-talking gentlemen, when they came to call at the St. Denis, but had held her peace. “The people will not permit the widow of Abraham Lincoln to suffer; they will come to her rescue when they know she is in want.”

For several days Lizabet walked around New York City in quest of dealers in secondhand clothing, and drove with Mary to various stores on
Seventh Avenue with the dresses worn during her four years as the Republican Queen. Afterwards, Lizabet tried to push the squalid bargaining, the polite dismissals, the barely concealed contempt, from her mind. Brady insisted that Mary write letters to him, purportedly from herself in Chicago, which he would then, he said, show to prominent politicians, forcing them to buy or be exposed as abandoning Lincoln's widow to her fate.

When these letters were roundly ignored, Mary threw up her hands, turned the whole business over to Brady and Keyes, and returned to Chicago—with the request that Lizabet remain in New York as her agent, continuing the quest and overseeing Brady's exhibit and sale of the dresses, shawls, and jewels.

“I
DON
'
T KNOW WHAT SHE THOUGHT
I
WOULD LIVE ON.
”
L
IZABET
shifted the kettle onto the single burner of the iron heating-stove, knelt to puff the coals beneath it to flame. “She'd already borrowed six hundred dollars from Mr. Brady, not a penny of which she gave to me. I was angry—and the results of Mr. Brady's ‘exhibit and sale' I think you already know.”

The newspapers had been merciless in their criticism, both of the sale itself and of the
dresses:
. . . they are jagged under the arms and at the bottom of the skirt, stains are on the lining . . . some of them are cut low-necked, a taste which some ladies attribute to Mrs. Lincoln's appreciation of her own bust. . . .