The Emancipator's Wife (67 page)

As a rider, one or two journals brought up again the gossip of wartime Washington, the accusations of spying or bringing in relatives to spy in the White House, the tales of financial chicanery and cutting up the Presidential sheets for drawers. They spoke of her “good Republican” friend Simeon Draper, whom she'd recommended for the highly lucrative post of customs collector for the port of New York after he'd paid $20,000 of her debts.

One newspaper spoke of her as “a termagant with arms akimbo, shaking her clenched fist at the country, and . . . demanding gold as the price of silence and pay that is her due because she was the wife of a President.” Another spoke of “conduct throughout the administration of her husband . . . mortifying to all who respected him . . .”

People had stared—people had whispered—but few bought.

“A
T THE SAME TIME AS ALL THIS WAS GOING ON,
”
SAID
D
OUGLASS,
from the faded brocade sofa, “Lizabet was making the rounds among the free colored of New York like the hero she is, trying to get up a lecture series whose proceeds would go to Mrs. Lincoln. I agreed to lecture. So did the Reverend Henry Garnet, and other men of color who had led in the abolitionist movement before Emancipation. But Mrs. Lincoln declined . . . for reasons best known to herself.”

It had been years ago, thought John, but the bitterness of the rebuff still tinged Douglass's voice.

“And all that time,” the flame-glow of the lamp warmed Lizabet's features as she measured out tea from a slender stock, “she wrote me, urging me to keep after Brady and Keyes—as if a pair of white diamond-merchants would pay the slightest attention to anything a woman of color said—and to remain in New York to look after her interests. I had to go back to sewing just to pay my rent. Naturally I'd abandoned the Union Place Hotel the moment Mrs. Lincoln was gone, and was boarding with a private family. When a Mr. Carleton contacted me about writing a memoir, I should have suspected something. Maybe I was too angry to care.”

From the street below, musical with distance, rose the voices of children playing, and the sing-song cry of the candy-seller making a final round.

“I'd just heard, through a mutual Spiritualist friend, that she'd finally got the distribution of Mr. Lincoln's estate, and was fairly well-off. She never offered to send me so much as a dollar. Mr. Carleton's people interviewed me, and published the book under my name. But they'd re-written it, to make her look foolish—not that she wasn't completely capable of making herself look foolish when she tried. The chapter about the sale of the clothes was . . . nastier than it needed to be.” She hesitated, then sighed again. “And I sold them the letters she'd sent to me. They promised they'd only use a few excerpts. I can't imagine why I was stupid enough to believe them. Of course they published them in full. She never forgave me for that.”

“While you forgave
her,
” Douglass pointed out gently, “for stranding you in New York, for causing you to lose your very profitable business in Washington, for treating you like a servant, while she went back to where she had friends, a house on whose rental she could live, and a pile of government bonds?”

Lizabet shook her head. “It wasn't an easy time for her either,” she said. “That was just after Mr. Lincoln's old law partner, Mr. Herndon, began lecturing about Mr. Lincoln's life—claiming that Mr. Lincoln had only married Mrs. Lincoln in the wake of losing the single, great, true, and
only
love of his life . . . a New Salem girl named Ann Rutledge.”

“Was that true?” John had read Herndon's biography a few years before, and had found it a welcome relief from the mawkish torrent of
hagiographical idealization of Lincoln that had deluged the country immediately after the assassination. He couldn't imagine what the real Mr. Lincoln would have said of those awful paintings of George Washington welcoming Lincoln to Heaven while Liberty herself held a halo of stars over the Emancipator's neatly brushed hair.

On the other hand, he reflected, Mary Todd Lincoln would have bought every print of those she could get her hands on.

“That he loved Ann Rutledge?” Lizabet gazed for a moment into her tea, as if the truth might be divined in its slow-settling leaves. “I think he did. That she was the only woman he ever loved with the whole of his heart? No. Did you ever see them together? Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln?”

John nodded, remembering again those two disparate figures, silhouetted in the twilight.

“I don't think anyone ever knew the whole of Mr. Lincoln's heart,” said Lizabet slowly. “I never met Mr. Herndon, but Mrs. Lincoln loathed the man—in the whole time he was Lincoln's law partner she'd never have him in her house. It isn't surprising he couldn't imagine that his friend would or could really love her. But whatever Mr. Lincoln felt about Miss Rutledge when he was twenty-five, he loved Mary. For all her faults, he told a visitor once—I forget who—that ‘my wife is as handsome as when she was a girl and I a poor nobody.' He fell in love with her then, he said, and had never fallen out.”

“Did you ever see her again,” asked John, “after that trip to New York? After your book came out?”

Lizabet set her tea down, and folded her hands. Older and grayer, thought John, but still with that rock-strong calm that had struck him first in the provision tent at Fort Barker, all those years ago. That same patient affection for her volatile friend. “After I read the book—my book, I mean—and saw what they'd done with my story, I wrote her asking forgiveness. I don't know if she ever got my letter. She may have been taken up with Robert's preparations for marriage—I'm pleased to say his young Miss Harlan, the daughter of the Senator from Iowa, stayed faithful to him even when he ceased to be the President's son and became just a law clerk in Chicago. And after that, of course, Mrs. Lincoln left the country. I never saw her again.”

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-SEVEN

Bellevue July 1875

“W
E
'
VE BEEN ALL OVER THIS BEFORE,
M
OTHER.
”
U
NDER HIS HEAVY
fair mustache, Robert's mouth was starting to pinch up. “Dr. Patterson says that you need rest, and you certainly wouldn't get rest living with Aunt Elizabeth.”

Mary immediately lowered her shoulders and cast down her eyes, an old trick of her belle days that she'd remembered. She couldn't think when she'd stopped doing it, but knew she hadn't done it in years. “Of course you're right, Robert,” she made herself say, in a tone of contrition she was far from feeling. Betsey would have been proud of her. “It's been many years since your aunt and I have seen eye-to-eye, if we ever did. But Elizabeth still is my sister. And time heals many wounds. It would be a blessing and a comfort if I could at least write to her.”

She tucked her chin and raised her eyes to his, hoping she looked as timid and hopeful as she had when she'd been trying to wheedle a new gown out of her father. Much as it scorched her with humiliation to realize it, she had to admit that John Wilamet was probably right about the medicine. Since she'd cut herself down to two watered spoonfuls a day—come headaches, hell, or high water—she'd found that in between feeling anxiety and depression, she was thinking much more clearly. The memories of her younger days were bringing not only pain and regret, but the awareness of how she'd manipulated gentlemen to get what she wanted.

Like permission to write letters.

She could just hear Mammy Sally's voice,
Now, child, you know you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. . . .

“Very well.” Mollified, Robert reached across the space between her sofa and his chair, to take her hands. “I know what a comfort it is to you, to write to
responsible
friends who have your best interests at heart—who know not to excite you with trifles. I'll speak to Dr. Patterson before I leave.”

But Mary made sure to follow Robert to the carriage, and, when he simply started out the door, ducked her head into Dr. Patterson's office to call out gaily, “Oh, Doctor, my dearest,
dearest
son has said that I might now write to my sister!” She threw all the gladness of which she was capable into her voice, and Robert, instead of looking annoyed, merely smiled indulgently. “Whoever had a more thoughtful and generous son?”

You treacherous, unnatural blackguard, I will thwart you if I can.

“My mother seems to be so well recovered, I don't see the harm in it for her to write to her sister Elizabeth Edwards in Springfield,” said Robert. “And to . . . Who else would you like to write to, Mother? Perhaps Mrs. Conkling? Or Mrs. Wheelock?”

She nodded with an expression of joy, though she had had no contact with either of her former Springfield friends since the bitter quarrel over the Lincoln Monument and didn't want any. The things those wicked traitors had said! But one didn't waste possible opportunities that might be needed later.

After two months in Bellevue she knew better than to suggest permission to write to any of the Spiritualist friends who'd given her such understanding support.

After Robert got into the Patterson carriage to be taken to the train-station, Mary went to gather a handful of stationery, an inkwell, and an envelope from the desk in the parlor: “I want to write my sister a nice
long
letter,” she explained, beaming at Mrs. Patterson as the doctor's wife came in from the garden. “We have so much to catch up on! It's true we've been estranged for many years, but Elizabeth raised me, you know, and in so many ways stood as a mother to me. I hope and pray that she will at least let bygones be bygones, and be my friend again.”

Her heart was pounding as she sat in the gloomy parlor, conscious of every person passing through the room. When John Wilamet—just returned from his trip to New York—came in and asked if she were well, she nearly jumped out of her chair with guilt. But she folded her hands in a most natural way over the letter, and asked after his trip: “Did you speak to the nerve-doctor that you said you wished to consult there? Was the result as you hoped?”

The minute the young man's back was turned she slipped two more envelopes from the desk into her skirt pocket.

And, the next time the parlor was empty, two more.

She folded the five written sheets, in her jagged, closely crossed handwriting, sealed them in an envelope, and addressed it to Elizabeth. “Could you ride with me to the post-office?” she asked Mrs. Patterson, when that lady returned to the parlor. “It's such a lovely afternoon, now that it's growing cooler. Perhaps Blanche would like to bear us company?”

Gratified, Mrs. Patterson fetched Miss Blanche from her room. The simpleminded girl's face was bright with pleasure at the prospect of a drive into town. And indeed, though Mary's heart hammered as if she were back at Rose Hill hiding copies of
The
Liberator
under her mattress again, she found the sultry evening air pleasantly sweet.

Mrs. Patterson—as Mary had hoped—remained in the carriage with Blanche. Mary tripped up the Post Office steps, and once inside that gloomy little lobby pulled the four stolen envelopes from her pocket and broke the seal on Elizabeth's letter.

She left only one sheet—the one actually to Elizabeth—in that envelope. Working fast, she addressed three others to the most politically prominent men whose addresses she could remember, and the fourth to Myra Bradwell. It took most of her little money to post them....

“Dear, they must test those postal clerks for slowness,” she laughed, as she hurried, panting a little, down the steps to the carriage.
“What, she sold a single stamp in under five minutes?”
Her voice flexed to mock an imaginary inspector's outrage.
“No job for her!”

And Blanche crowed with laughter.

In the carriage riding back to Bellevue, Mary was hard put to keep from trembling, had to fight the waves of agitation that welled almost sickeningly behind her sternum.
I'll never get to sleep tonight,
she thought.
Surely this justifies another little teaspoonful. . . .

She thrust the thought from her mind, barricading the mental door with the image of the self-satisfied expression on Robert's face.

One of them has to come,
she thought desperately.
One of them has to help me; has to bring a real doctor here to testify to my sanity.

And when he, she, or they did, Mary realized, the game would be up, as the children would say. Patterson would be furious. This was “will to insanity” with a vengeance. He might lock her up in earnest—he would certainly consult with Robert. What legal rights, exactly,
did
Robert have over her? As a convicted lunatic, Mary knew that she no longer had any rights at all.
The madwoman's family may do with her as they think best. . . .

And anger flooded her, almost swamping, for a moment, her terror. Rage at the Pattersons—despite her gay chuckles at Mrs. Patterson's tale of some petty victory over the laundress—blind fury at Robert.

At her father.

At God, for ripping Lincoln from her and leaving her to face all this alone.

She took a deep breath, and looked away, over the side of the carriage, at the pleasant white-painted shops, the blue shade of elm-trees, that made up Batavia's small downtown along Union Street.
I can't let her see me tremble. I can't let her see my tears.

Tears of bitterness and rage.

One of them has to answer.
The men—General Farnsworth and the others—she put no trust in. She never had known a man who hadn't betrayed her. She realized the next moment that that statement included Lincoln, but didn't change it in her mind. She knew it was illogical, but she could no longer pretend that she didn't feel it: deep anger at him, that he was gone.

But Myra would come.

Myra who had come to her in the most terrible hour—save only for the nightmare of Ford's Theater—in her life.

W
HEN
J
UDGE
D
AVIS FINALLY DISTRIBUTED
L
INCOLN
'
S ESTATE
IN
November of 1868 —and it still rankled with Mary that Lincoln had never bothered to make a will, for in that case instead of the legal one-third she'd probably have inherited everything, enough to keep house on—she began making arrangements to go to Europe. Robert came over to the Clifton House, where she and Tad were living, and put his foot down firmly. “You will not take my brother to live like a Gypsy in a succession of cheap German watering-places. He needs a proper education and he can get no better one than here in the United States.”

“Tad is my son!” Mary put her arm around the skinny fifteen-year-old's shoulders, pulled him to her with a fierce grip. “He is all that I have left to me, since
you
have chosen to make your home apart from us!”

She almost spit the words at him, and Robert's lips tightened. The Clifton House, though respectable bordering on genteel, was, when you came right down to it, a boarding hotel, and the two rooms she had occupied there since the previous March were the cheapest and dreariest in the place. Like every boardinghouse room she had ever occupied, they were jammed with trunks, boxes, and chests of her possessions—with packages of newer purchases piled higgledy-piggledy on top—and this increased their stuffy gloom. When first they'd come to Chicago three years before, Robert, then twenty-two, had elected to get his own rooms rather than share crowded quarters with his mother and Tad.

She'd never quite forgiven him for that, either. Financially it would have made better sense for the three of them to remain together, instead of dividing the small income that Davis had paid them yearly from the estate.

“Don' worry about me, Bob.” Tad's voice was just beginning to break. It would be light, as Lincoln's had been. “Last I heard, there were schools in Europe.” And he grinned, bringing an answering smile from his older brother.

Three years in Chicago had altered Tad drastically from the restless hellion he'd been in Springfield and in Washington. At Robert's insistence, Tad had been sent to a number of elocution teachers, and as a result could speak and be understood by even those outside his immediate family. Perhaps because of this—or perhaps because of the terrible changes after his father's murder—much of Tad's wildness and anger had dissipated. He attended school regularly now, and had begun to catch up with the boys who were so far ahead of him. He had Lincoln's gray eyes, and coarse black hair. From beneath the softness of childhood, craggy familiar features were beginning to take shape.

Mary supposed that Tad would have learned more quickly still, had he been sent to boarding schools. But without her boy—without wondering when he'd be home that day, and what he'd been up to—her life was nearly unbearable, and she'd turned away from several that Robert had urged her to investigate.

Robert's mouth thinned to an ungiving line. “I forbid it.”

Mary, her face beginning to pinken with anger, retorted, “Pooh! It's my money now, and I shall do with it as I please. You only want me to stay so you can borrow my money and get in on Judge Davis's real-estate schemes.”

And Robert, stonily silent, made no reply.

The distribution of Lincoln's estate had freed Robert, too, from having to live solely on his earnings as a newly fledged attorney. That
November he was making preparations of his own, to purchase a home on Wabash Avenue—in a considerably better neighborhood than Mary's now-rented house on West Washington, she reflected resentfully—and to marry Miss Harlan. In an atmosphere of chilly tension he took the train to Washington and formally proposed: the wedding was set to take place in Washington at the end of September. Mary and Tad would depart two weeks later on the
City of Baltimore.

When Mary had left Washington, workmen were tearing down the last of the black draperies from the White House windows, left from
Lincoln's funeral.

She and Tad stayed in Baltimore. She never ventured from her hotel room. She hated this city that had plotted Lincoln's murder before he'd ever arrived in Washington, but she did not think she could bear more than a necessary few hours in the capital itself. They took the train to Washington only on the morning of the wedding, Mary heavily veiled in black and fortified with Indian Bitters and Ma-Sol-Pa Herbal Infusion and leaning on Tad's arm. “Don't leave me, Taddie,” she whispered, clinging to his elbow as they mounted the steps of James Harlan's rented town house, as she saw the moving host of beautifully dressed Cabinet members, Senators, family friends. “Stay right beside me every minute and don't leave me.” Though almost six months had passed since Lizabet Keckley's infamous book had appeared, and over a year since Herndon's lectures on Ann Rutledge, she felt every glance, every whisper, as if they were burning coals being applied to her flesh.