The Emancipator's Wife (71 page)

Flame was all around them. She screamed “Abraham!” hoping against hope—against all logic and sense—that he'd come striding out of the smoke and the blaze of this hell, that he'd take care of her, lead her to safety....

They reached the lake, hundreds, thousands crowding into Lake Park, running across the rails of the Illinois Central line to the water's edge. Fire towered in the blackened sky, north and west of them; ash and cinders rained down. Children screamed in terror and pain; women slapped wildly at their burning hair. The heat was infernal, as if the fire reached out to devour them, and Mary, stumbling with hundreds of others into the waters of the lake, thought desperately,
What if the fire comes to the lakeshore? What if the trees in the park, the grass that's been drying to tinder all these weeks, catch fire as well? What then? Will we all be driven deeper into the water, to drown?

The world shook again with explosions. She saw fragments of masonry hurled high into the sooty maelstrom overhead.

Her wet skirt dragged on her, her wet nightgown sodden on her uncorseted breasts. Men and women shoved against her, pushing further into the water as they were pushed by terrified newcomers. The weeping voices, the frantic cries rose on all sides as women tried to find their husbands or children, as men shouted for their families. The sounds were like the lamentations of Hell.

Someone fell against her—a boy of nine or ten, carrying a baby. Mary caught him as he stumbled. Without her grasp, he and the sobbing infant would have simply slipped below the surface, for his soot-black face was blank with shock. The lake-water that came up to her hips came nearly to his shoulders and others were thrusting them both out deeper. She took the baby from his arms, cradled it against her breast with one arm, and steadied him with the other.

“Are you all right?” she asked, and the boy stared up at her with uncomprehending eyes.
“Bist du verletzen?”
she asked, guessing from his fair hair he might be one of the immigrant children from the filthy patches back of the stockyards, and he clung to her skirt and sobbed,
“Wo ist Mutti?”

Where's Mama?

Mary tightened her arm around the boy, for it was a question she'd asked all her life, and had never gotten a satisfactory answer.

For hours they stood there in the water, the crowds pushing tighter and tighter around them. Mary felt that she would faint, but knew that to faint was to drown. No one would catch her, no one would hold her up. Through the jostling rank of shoulders between herself and the shore, she could catch glimpses now and then of the park and the trees in the sickly glow of daylight.

The trees were yellow and limp, but still unburned. The lawns swarmed with huddled shapes.

Beyond them, the first houses—the handsome houses of the lakeshore—stood deserted but intact. Now and then gangs of looters pulled carts up to them, helped themselves to rugs, clothing, jewelry in full view of the onlookers, and went unhurriedly on their way.

Gradually, the red wall of flame diminished. Smoke continued to pour skyward, but Mary heard—like the tramp of the New York regiment down Washington's silent streets—the voices of men, the clatter of fire-wagons. They, too, were soldiers. It wasn't just her memory. She saw flashes of Union blue coats. Northward the flames still scraped the sky.

Feeling she could stand no longer, she began slowly, stumblingly, to push her way ashore. The crowding in the water wasn't so bad now. Others were creeping out of the lake, falling to their knees on the wet cinders between the railroad and the park's edge. The baby in her arms began to cry again, weakly, and she felt a surge of joy—at least the poor little thing wasn't dead—and the boy beside her helped her to kneel on the land. She could still see nothing but a wilderness of knees, a sodden wilderness of slumped shapes under the hellish yellow glare of smoke-stained day, but someone said the fire was burning itself out at the Rock Island and Chicago tracks.

She held the whimpering infant in her arms and relayed the information to the child's brother in German. “My mother is lost,” said the boy in the same language, and she said reassuringly,

“The Army will find her for you, once they get the fire out.”

He put his head on her thigh and slept.

They remained there, through the whole of a hellish day. Exhausted, starving, and thirsty, Mary dozed sometimes, and in her dreams she wandered through the contraband camps around Washington during the War, where shattered men and women huddled, who had left their old lives behind. Now and then explosions sounded across the city, and the sullen clouds rained burning cinders.

Dark fell, and a few hours later real rain began. Those few who had
remained—Mary couldn't imagine how—standing in the lake-water throughout the eternity of that hideous day finally waded ashore and collapsed on the mud and cinders. Someone took the baby from her arms—she didn't know who, or whether the little German boy ever found his Mutti. Men and women started coming through the darkness of the park bearing lanterns. Some of the men wore the blue uniforms of Union soldiers, and the women were of that indefatigable breed who had throughout the War made up the Sanitary Committees and the Volunteer Nurses associations.

By that time she was too shattered to be much aware of what was going on around her, staring before her in exhausted shock, numb with fatigue and the horror of the things she had seen. But she heard a familiar voice cry, “Mary!” and looking up, saw Myra Bradwell standing a few feet away, a lantern and a sack of blankets over her shoulder. By the shock in her eyes it was clear she'd barely recognized her, wet, disheveled, covered with mud and soot and ash. “Good God
—Mary
!”

And Mary held out her arms to her friend, and burst into tears like a child.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTY-ONE

Bellevue July 1875

M
YRA
B
RADWELL.

Mary didn't think she'd ever been more grateful to see anyone in her life—not even Mr. Lincoln when he'd met her again after eighteen months in Bessie Francis's parlor—as she was to see that tall, sturdy figure stride to her through the smoke-black sodden limbo on Lake Michigan's edge.

Lincoln—though it was years since Mary had admitted this, even to herself—was just as likely to forget he was supposed to fetch the boys from school, or that he'd said he'd get fish from the market on his way home, or that Frances and Dr. Wallace were coming to supper (though, she had noticed, he never forgot appointments with his political cronies—that was just how his mind worked).

Myra, however, was like a rock.

From the window of her bedroom at Bellevue Mary watched the driveway under the sharp summer sunlight, praying that Myra would come.

R
OBERT,
M
YRA HAD TOLD HER, THAT RAINY
M
ONDAY NIGHT AS
SHE
guided Mary back to the little house on Wabash Avenue, had heard at about daybreak Monday morning that the fire had jumped the river, and was moving south swiftly through downtown. Without waking his mother, he had set out on foot up Wabash Avenue for his office on Lake Street—no horse could be induced to go in the direction of the fire. The roof of the Crosby Opera House, in which he had his office, was already in flames when he reached the place. Opening his office safe, he'd piled his father's papers into a tablecloth, and with this tied up on his back had strode out of the burning building and through the inferno of looting, flames, and dynamited firebreaks for home.

Once out of the region of the fire he had encountered the dapper John Hay, who was also living in Chicago these days. The two men had stopped for breakfast at the Terrace Row house of Charles Scammon, Robert's law partner. Robert had advised Scammon's family against evacuating their home and clearing out its furniture and treasures. It might, he warned, affect later insurance claims, and in any case he thought the fire was slowing down.

After Robert and Hay left, the Scammons cleared out their possessions anyway and by noon the house was smoking rubble.

Robert was, of course, furious with Mary for leaving the house: “You were perfectly safe the whole time!” The fire had been stopped three blocks away by General Sheridan, Mary's erstwhile traveling companion on the
Russia,
who had ordered his men to blow up every building in its path. Every tree and bush in Robert's garden had been withered by the heat.

Later she learned that her dream had been accurate. Not only Chicago had burned that night. Baked tinder-dry by the same rainless autumn and fanned by the same scorching prairie winds, the town of Peshtigo,
Wisconsin, across the lake—the depot for the whole of the Chicago timber trade that funneled building-wood from the northwest to the woodless Great Plains—had burned, too. Its destruction, unlike Chicago's, was complete.

L
EANING HER ARM ON THE BARRED WINDOWSILL OF HER ASYLUM
ROOM
, Mary closed her eyes, saw again the red infinities of fire, the black curtains of smoke. Heard the noise it made—good God, that sound! Like the bellowing of an all-devouring monster. Saw a blonde girl run screaming past her with her flaming hair . . . saw the drunkard hurl his glass of liquor . . .

Nightly, for years, those scenes would replay against the lids of her shut eyes, and she would wake crying, thinking,
The city is on fire . . . !

The city is on fire, and Bobby is gone, and I am alone. . . .

Mary opened her eyes just as Myra Bradwell and her tall husband climbed from a train-station hack and rang the bell at the iron gates at the end of the drive.

Her heart lurched, then triphammered with wild joy.
I knew it! I knew she'd come!

Argus opened the gates, stood for a few moments talking to the pair. Myra hadn't changed much since the last time Mary had seen her
—good God, it can't be four years!
A little stouter, maybe, and she hadn't
—thank Heaven!—
started wearing “rational costume” of Turkish pantaloons and knee-length tunic as she'd been threatening then to do. Her neat dress of navy-blue chintz was perfectly plain, and being without a bustle—something Myra had steadfastly refused to wear—now put her, almost accidentally, into the very forefront of the mode.

Not,
thought Mary, scrambling to her feet and calling for Gretchen,
that Myra would care.

Myra's husband followed her up the walk, fair and bespectacled and still very English-looking in spite of half a lifetime spent in the United States. If she had not been married to Abraham Lincoln, Mary had frequently thought, she'd have liked to be married to Judge James Bradwell.

“Gretchen!” she called frantically. “Lace me up again . . . !” That morning General Farnsworth had come, making a lot of vague promises and telling her how much more rested she looked
—Of course I'm more rested, you imbecile, I've been locked up for two and a half months!
Returning to her room, she'd had Gretchen unlace her and had eaten a little lunch, meaning to remain indoors and rest. Though most of the physical pains of withdrawal from opium had abated, she still had bouts of queasiness, and without warning the darkness of depression would rise over her in smothering clouds.

“Get me dressed,” she panted when her attendant entered, “at once, now. Someone has come to see me....”

Y
OUNG
D
R.
P
ATTERSON WAS STANDING AT THE HEAD OF THE
STAIRS
when Mary, trailed by Gretchen, came hurrying down the hall. She could hear Myra's strong, clear voice below: “Couldn't I see her, Doctor, in the presence of her attendant? My only object in coming here was to see her.”

“Not without a paper from her son.” Patterson senior's voice from the parlor had the air of one who has reiterated the statement several times. “She may be out in a few days, Madame. Then you can see her to your heart's content.”

“Is it likely that she would be,” responded Myra reasonably, “if you don't even consider her well enough to receive visitors?”

Mary attempted to step past Young Doc, who put a hand on her arm. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Lincoln,” he said softly. “No one is permitted to go down into the parlor this afternoon.”

“That's ridiculous!” she gasped. Gretchen came up on her other side, quiet but tense. Ready for trouble. “You have no right to keep me from seeing my friends!”

“As your doctor,” replied Young Doc thinly, “we have every right to keep you from doing things that will only worsen and exacerbate your condition—as you well know, Madam, in your saner moments.”

Mary opened her mouth to lash out in protest, her face hot with anger. But his last sentence stopped her, as if she'd glimpsed Robert looking at her from around a corner—looking at her and waiting for yet another fragment of evidence that she was insane.

“I understood from your letters to the public that she is allowed to see her friends,” Myra went on, in the voice of reasonable inquiry that Mary knew meant she had an unsheathed sword hidden behind her back.

“Well, Madame, she is no better”—Patterson's voice had an edge of impatience to it—“for meddlesome people come here to see her, calling themselves her friends, when in reality they come out of self-interest only, like that dreadful Mrs. Rayne from the
Chicago Post.
”

“Doctor, please don't attribute such a motive to me!” Myra sounded as if she'd never heard of a newspaper in all her life. “I assure you my visit is only out of pure kindness to Mrs. Lincoln. She is one of my oldest friends. As you are not willing to let me see her, will you allow me to leave a note for her?”

Pressing forward—Mrs. Patterson had joined Gretchen and Young Doc in the hall and there was now no chance whatsoever of getting past them without a fuss—Mary could see Dr. Patterson's back below. He glanced at his watch, a habit he shared with Robert's lawyer friend Swett, a way of signalling that his time was far more valuable than theirs....

“There is no necessity for that, Madame. It would only disturb her mind. While she is under my care, I shall not permit her to be disturbed either by visitors or letters.”

“If she is only permitted to see such persons as you choose, and is not permitted to receive letters except from such, she is virtually a prisoner, is she not?”

“No more so than other patients I have under my care.” He glanced at his watch again, as if to say,
When will you take yourself out of here and stop wasting my precious instants, each more valuable than gold . . . ?

“I quite understand,” said Myra, in a cheerful voice that, Mary knew, presaged a serious skewering at some time in the future. “Doctor, it is some time until our train leaves—might my husband and I remain for a little time in your parlor, rather than sitting in the public depot?”

“Mrs. Lincoln,” said Mrs. Patterson firmly, “Dr. Patterson has asked that no one be admitted to the parlor this afternoon. Now, you had one visitor this morning already, and I think we all agree that all he did was stir you up and make you uncomfortable. If your son thinks it's appropriate, you will be able to receive a visit from your friends on another occasion.”

Mary made her face impassive, fighting not to burst into either tears or a tirade of abuse.
You smug hag, if you had a single friend in the entire world you would know what it means to be separated from them, when you have no one else!

But as she had with Robert, she lowered her shoulders and her eyes and said, “Yes, of course. I quite understand.”

And immediately Mrs. Patterson relaxed.

Down in the parlor, Myra was chatting with Dr. Patterson, inquiring about the difficulties of running a “rest home,” as she called it, and pretending deepest fascination with the methods of “coaxing troubled minds back to sanity.” All of which information, Mary was certain, was being mentally jotted down by the silent and self-effacing James. She heard Dr. Patterson say, “Mrs. Lincoln is quite a difficult case, very much troubled in her mind. As you know, she was sent here after an attempt to take her own life....”

That isn't true!

Heart pounding, Mary walked back along the hall to her room. Did Myra actually believe her to be insane? Had she come only to learn how serious her aberration actually was?

No. No, she believes me. . . .

Does she?

Panic filled her, at the recollection of that expression of specious understanding in General Farnsworth's eyes that morning. What had that one-time abolitionist politician said to Patterson, after she had returned to her room? That she was insane but seemed sane most of the time, as Robert always said of her? That she “looked rested” as a result of her incarceration, so therefore her imprisonment ought to continue?

As Mrs. Patterson, young Doc, and Gretchen stood waiting for Mary to enter her room again, she saw John Wilamet turn the corner.

“Oh, Mr. Wilamet,” purred Mary. “Perhaps before I lie down I could speak to you for a moment about . . .”
About what?
Her mind groped frantically for a convincing lie, “. . . about that poem your dear mother recommended that I read. Mr. Tennyson's ‘Lady of Shalott,' was it not?”

John faltered slightly at the mere thought of his mother reading or
recommending any sort of poem whatsoever, but Mary locked eyes with him, mutely pleading with him to understand. He nodded amiably, and replied, “It was indeed,” and paused. In the face of a discussion of poetry, both Pattersons and Gretchen went on their ways.

“You must go after Judge and Mrs. Bradwell when they leave the house—they're down in the parlor now—and tell them that I am not insane!” Mary whispered desperately. “That I attempted to commit suicide
after
I was tried and condemned to perpetual imprisonment as a madwoman, not before! Please, please, John, let them know the truth as you have seen it! Mrs. Bradwell is a lawyer—her husband is a judge! They will know how to undo the law that has made me a prisoner here!”

John looked down at her gravely for a moment.
If he tells me that I'm too excitable or shouldn't be “stirred up,” I shall kill myself indeed. . . .

But he said, “And what will you do with your freedom, if they should undo the law?”

She almost cried,
I'd live!
But instead she said quietly, “That's no more your business, John, than it would have been my business to ask that of you, before my husband signed the Proclamation which set you free.”

“Touché, Mrs. Lincoln. A palpable hit.”

And turning with a smile, he hurried down the stairs.

J
OHN WAS LOITERING WHEN
D
R.
P
ATTERSON FINISHED HIS TEA
—
AND
his lecture on Moral Treatment—and called for Zeus to harness the carriage, to take Judge and Mrs. Bradwell to the station. “I can drive them,” he said, stepping into the parlor at precisely the right moment, as Mrs. Bradwell was shaking cake-crumbs from her skirts. “I need to stop in at Beck's Pharmacy. We're low on ipecac and salts.”