The Emancipator's Wife (75 page)

Lawyer,
thought John immediately. Though Myra Bradwell was barred from practice herself—no woman being legally able to enter into independent contracts—after their first meeting he had found and read copies of the
Chicago Review of Law,
which she edited and published. She undoubtedly had at her beck and call a score of hopeful newcomers to the profession.

If not a lawyer, a tame doctor.

“I'll be waiting,” he promised her.

When she returned a few hours later—from the train-station, presumably—he guessed the brisk young man in the tobacco-colored suit who accompanied her was a lawyer, rather than a doctor. He was far too flashy to engender confidence in a patient. She introduced him as Mr. Wilkie, and John guided them around the house to the small door of the family wing, then checked to make certain Mrs. Patterson was nowhere in sight before letting them in with his key.

Wilkie and Myra left together at about four. After seeing them to the end of the drive, John returned to Mary's room, and found her still sitting by the window, the curtains half-open, as if she had watched them pass across the yellow-gold triangle of visible gravel.

“Do you feel all right?”

When she glanced up at him her face answered his question. It was calmer and more relaxed than he had seen it, he thought, since her arrival three months ago. Her eyes had a perpetually bruised look, from sleeplessness and weeping, but within the puffy flesh it pleased him to see that they were alert, as they usually were these days.

“I am,” she said, in her small, sweet voice. “Thank you for asking, John. You seem to be the only one these days who's genuinely concerned about what my answer to that question might be. You and Myra, and Myra—well, once she sees a solution to a problem she goes at it like a bull at a gate, and doesn't ask what one feels about it, so long as it gets done.”

On the corner of her dressing-table he saw the pages of Mrs.
Edwards's letter from Springfield, and a half-dozen sheets, scribbled and crossed out, in Mary's erratic hand.

“You'd best not let Gretchen find those in your room and tell Mrs. Patterson that you have pen and ink,” he warned. “I'll keep them in my room for you, if you'd like.” And seeing her mouth pucker with weary anger at being always observed, always forbidden, like a schoolgirl, he added, “Or I'll help you pry up a floorboard under the bed, like prisoners do. You can wait till Amanda goes down the hall to the toilet, then whip out your pen and write a few lines....”

And her puffy face broke into its sidelong smile. Leaning close, she whispered, “Amanda
never
goes to the toilet. Nights when I lie awake, I can hear every sound....I believe the woman is made of iron. Or is solid all the way through, like a carrot....Dear God, what it is, to laugh again!” she added, as John gathered up the scribbled sheets, corked the ink-bottle securely, and slipped it into his pocket. “I don't think I've had a laugh since . . . since my friend Sally Orne came to stay with me at that
dreadful
little hostelry in Germany, and we kept every other traveler on our floor awake all night with our giggling and carrying-on!”

“I take it the interview with Mr. Wilkie went well?”

Mary hesitated, the joy wiped from her face, her tired eyes filling with tears once more. “Do you know, I dare not even think about it? That
equal poise of hope and fear
that Milton speaks of . . . it all seems so . . . so hopeless. And yet I cannot give up hope. I
will
not give up hope. I will
banish squint suspicion. . . .
” She fished in her drawer for a clean handkerchief. Every one had black borders an inch deep.

“Will you walk with me a little in the garden, Mr. Wilamet? It has been a long and tiring day.”

I
T WAS ALMOST A WEEK BEFORE
M
ARY WROTE BACK TO
E
LIZABETH.
During the scorching, humid August days, as John assisted Dr. Patterson or Young Doc with Mrs. Wheeler's hydrotherapy or in force-feeding Miss Judd, he overheard the comments of Mrs. Patterson: comments that sounded less and less like the observation of symptoms and more and more like backstairs tale-telling.

Mrs. Lincoln ordered cornbread again for breakfast and then refused to eat it. Mrs. Lincoln asked for the carriage to be brought around and then delayed for three hours, ultimately deciding to spend the day in her room. Mrs. Lincoln had her room changed back to the first floor and then complained about having a different set of bedsprings, even though the new ones were of the same pattern as the old....

When he saw her during those days, to walk in the gardens or to talk in the parlor, he read the nervousness that lay behind her capriciousness, the tension that brought on headaches, the recurring waves of hope and fear.

She spoke to him many times about Springfield: about having been sent there by her stepmother, “in the hopes I'd land a husband and wouldn't be on her hands for the rest of my life, God forbid!” About what the town had been like in the 1830s and '40s, with muddy streets and a hog-wallow the size of a small lake occupying one corner of the State House grounds, and the green prairies blanketed with flowers, two blocks' walk from the little brown house on the corner of Eighth Street and Jackson. About buggy-rides in the countryside with one or another of her many beaux, and picnics in the shade along the Sangamon River; about political-speakings in the State House square and the crying of crickets in the long blue twilights, when she'd sit on the porch with Merce Levering or Julia Jayne and chat about friends or fashion or politics when politics was still a game....

“I never thought I would have to go back to living under Ninian's roof.”

On Wednesday John took the train to Chicago, melting and stinking and scorching on the shores of the lake. Most of Cassy's customers had gone out of town, leaving the family broke but with a little breathing-room. By dint of burying small sums of money under the floor the way they used to as children in the quarters at Blue Hill, Cassy had saved enough for a family picnic on the lakeshore, and for once everything went well.

His mother was feeling well, and when washed and dressed and with her hair put up was still the wildly beautiful woman he had worshiped as a child. She talked and laughed and made jokes that had the children whooping with delight, and joined them in their hunt for fireflies in the bushes of Lincoln Park as the sun went down. He watched them from the bench where he sat with his arm around Clarice, loving the touch of his wife, the scent of her flesh and her hair, glad to be alive.

When times were bad they were bad, he reflected, smiling at Selina as she sat with baby Cora on her blanket, weaving a chain of daisies from the grass. But when times were good, there was nothing sweeter than these long summer twilights, other loving couples walking along the path in the park, the tall bronze shape of Lincoln's statue standing against the luminous cobalt sky.

Robert Lincoln came to Bellevue Friday morning, rigid with outrage. Though John was fully occupied with Mrs. Wheeler—who had spent the night screaming and pounding on the walls of her room, and had had to be sedated and, in the morning, forcibly gotten up and walked in the gardens to restore her “vital system”—he caught snatches of the lawyer's furious voice through the open windows:

“. . . the woman is a pest and a nuisance, the queen of a gang of Spiritualists, whatever you might say! I've warned Aunt Elizabeth against her—and against whatever henchmen she may choose to employ in this self-serving campaign to give you back control of your money!”

And later, as John guided the still-groggy and weeping Mrs. Wheeler through the hall to her own room again,

“Mother, I've gone to considerable trouble to find you a place where you will be safe, happy, and well taken care of! Now, thanks to your table-tapping friend, Dr. Patterson is in a panic, terrified of what bad publicity will do to this entire establishment . . . !”

“Well, God forbid that the jail where I have been locked in by my own child—where other women are locked up as well!—should have
bad publicity
! Oh, get me my smelling salts lest I faint with chagrin!” Mary's voice was shrill with sarcasm.

And when John emerged from Mrs. Wheeler's room after turning her over to Gretchen, Zeus passed him in the hallway and whispered, “Mr. Lincoln's gone to talk to Dr. Patterson. He don't look like a happy man.”

Robert Lincoln was just coming out of Patterson's office when John came down the stairs to the parlor—Mrs. Lincoln was nowhere in sight. Through clenched teeth, Robert said, “I quite understand your position, Dr. Patterson, but please consider mine. In spite of appearances my mother is
not
competent to live on her own, at my Aunt Elizabeth's house or anywhere else! You can have no idea how difficult it is, to deal with someone who is insane in one area and appears normal in other respects....”

“I can,” replied Patterson drily, “and believe me, Mr. Lincoln, I do. I have been in touch with the Bradwell woman this week, too—all these Spiritualist harpies are alike!—but I am in an extremely difficult position, both financially and, to be frank, legally. Laymen who have no understanding of the workings of the deranged mind and the feminine nervous system are more a nuisance than anything else, for all they see are the rights of the sane and the normal. But those, unfortunately, are the laws that bind us!”

“Please,” begged Robert. “Please do not do anything until you hear from me. This matter will be straightened out—it
must
be straightened out. The thought of my mother rambling about at large with the whole of her fortune stuffed into pockets in her petticoats—going off to California or God knows where to get into God knows what kind of scandal . . . ! Though trying to convince any of the Bradwell woman's gang of Spiritualists of anything may well be beyond any
man's
abilities. But I will try.”

Patterson saw him to the door and paused, turning back, as he glimpsed John passing through the parlor. “John,” he said, “I want a word with you.” And to Robert, holding the door, “If they threaten to publish, there is not much that I can do.”

“What you can do,” replied Robert, “is get anything—anything at all—to support a diagnosis of continued insanity in my mother. We both know she is insane. What more do we need? It is, after all, for her own good.”

And he strode down the brick steps, to where his cab stood in the graveled circle of the drive.

Patterson turned back, and stood for a moment, regarding John with tired and angry eyes.

Without a word being spoken, John felt his heart sink and turn cold.

“Mrs. Patterson informs me, John, that you were the one who admitted Mrs. Bradwell's friend Mr. Wilkie to the house last week, in my absence, to visit Mrs. Lincoln.”

“Yes, sir.” He wondered who Mrs. Patterson had heard it from.

“Did you inquire who Mr. Wilkie was?”

“No, sir. Mrs. Bradwell said he was a friend of Mrs. Lincoln's.”

“She was lying,” said Patterson quietly. “Something she does rather readily.” In his mind John heard Mary's voice:
Myra . . . Well, once she sees a solution to a problem she goes at it like a bull at a gate, and doesn't ask what one feels about it, so long as it gets done.

And Myra's voice, as she handed him the newspaper on the train:
You leave Dr. Patterson to me.

No,
he thought, seeing what was coming.

No.

It was as if he stood in a burning house, looking up and watching the ceiling collapsing down upon him in an avalanche of flaming debris.

“Mr. Franc Wilkie is a reporter for the Chicago
Times,
” said Patterson. He drew a deep breath. “I know you and I haven't agreed on the diagnosis of Mrs. Lincoln, John. And I have made countless allowances for your lesser experience and for the flaws in your education, as well as, perhaps, your prejudice concerning the widow of the Great Emancipator. But I did trust that you would be professional enough to consult with me, rather than taking matters into your own hands. I am very sorry that I am going to have to dismiss you.”

C
HAPTER
S
IXTY-SIX

Chicago August 1875

A
LL THE WAY BACK TO
C
HICAGO,
J
OHN KEPT THINKING:
W
HAT
AM
I doing going back so soon? I just rode this train....

He felt numb with shock, as if he'd offered his hand to help a child who'd fallen on the street, and the helpless tot had produced an ax and chopped off his arm.

Not just the pain of betrayal—the question of how he was going to get through life missing an arm.

He'd have to tell Clarice.

He'd have to tell Cassy.

He could just hear his sister's scathing voice:
You lost your job over helping a white woman? A crazy woman? If you gonna lose your job helping a crazy woman, how come you don't help Mama?

The fact that Mary Todd Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln's widow wouldn't cut any ice with Cassy. And in fact, John had not helped Mrs. Lincoln with any thought in mind that assisting her toward liberty was in any sense a payment for his own freedom.

She was eccentric, and in need of help, which he had given her as far as he was able. But once she ceased being delusional—and had apparently learned to control the cause of her delusions, at least for the time being—she did not deserve to be locked up simply so that Robert Lincoln would not be embarrassed.

John leaned his head sideways against the jolting wooden wall of the “colored” car, and stared out at the yellow wheat-fields streaming by under black-floored mountains of gathering clouds.

Would he have helped Mary Lincoln if he'd known that assistance was going to cost him, not only the job that supported his family, but the career toward which he'd striven the whole of his adult life?

He didn't know.

Myra Bradwell.

He closed his eyes, and felt the anger rise through him, like pain coming on as the numbness passed away.

A reporter. The man she'd brought in was a Goddamned reporter. And it had never even occurred to her to ask John what the repercussions of that would be.

Even in his fury and despair, he had to admire the cleverness of the maneuver. It completely circumvented the issue of whether Robert
Lincoln would give permission for his mother's release or not. Dr.
Patterson couldn't afford bad publicity—he was in financial trouble already. When the “Mary Lincoln Is a Prisoner” article came out—and it would undoubtedly contain the words
habeas corpus
somewhere in its text—all those other families who were keeping their female relatives in Bellevue would begin to pull
them
out, too. Sooner than see that, Patterson would shove Mary Lincoln out the door, and at that point Robert would dare not put
her elsewhere . . . not unless he wanted to learn the
real
meaning of public embarrassment.

Oh, oops, we happened to squish a Negro in the process, but at least Mrs.
Lincoln is free! Hip hip hooray!

Sorry about your job, and your career, and all. . . .

Even a white attendant guilty of that kind of betrayal couldn't hope to find another position of trust, much less a patron willing to teach him. But a white man would at least have the option of seeking a post as a guard—if he really wanted to go on working with the insane—or of going west and looking for work in California or Oregon, far away from the close-knit circles of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane.

A white man could usually get another white man to at least listen to him when he said, “I didn't know. I'll never do it again....”

His salary of sixty dollars a month, joined to what Lionel made in the stockyards and the income from Cassy's laundry business, was barely enough to make the rent on the house, buy firewood and soap for the laundry, and feed the dozen-plus members of the household. He knew a white man would be paid far more—a railroad porter would make more—but he had looked on the work as the road to better things.

And now there was nothing.

He debarked from the local train at the Twelfth Street station and for a time simply stood on the platform, the hot reek of the city beating on him, crushing him. For two years now the knowledge that he could go back to the green quiet of Batavia had sustained him every time he walked east toward the hellhole streets between tracks and packing-yards.

Now he could not face the thought.

For the first time since he'd left the Army he thought,
I really need a drink.

Walking into the wrong neighborhood grog-shop, of course, could get you killed, if you were Irish or black or Hungarian or whatever the local regulars were not. But he knew there were saloons all along State Street near the levee and the yards where they didn't care if you were black or white, male or female, human or a pig escaped from the stock-pens, provided you had money to pay for your liquor, and one of these was Flossie's.

Flossie's was a three-story brick building rammed in between two other three-story brick buildings in the block called Coon Hollow. Flossie herself, a blowzy harridan who'd run a parlor-house in New Orleans during the War and a string of brothels in Mobile immediately afterwards, kept a bordello on the upper floors and, according to Lionel, owned the panel-house next door where the customers were robbed systematically rather than intermittently. Flossie's barroom was long, dark, and nearly empty at this time of the day—four in the afternoon—furnished with rough tables and chairs at which gamblers plied their trade in the evenings.

He bought a whiskey from the slatternly waiter-girl behind the bar and then another, and retreated to the dimness to think about what he was going to say to Clarice.

What he was going to say to Cassy.

At this time of the day, it was mostly the sneak-thieves and pickpockets of the levee, the strong-arm men who made their living selling “protection” to local shopkeepers, the whores from upstairs jolting down preliminary drinks to get them through their first few johns of the evening. A man came in with two girls—the man dark-skinned but with the features of an Italian or a Spaniard, the girls white and barely pubescent—and the waiter-girl behind the bar said, “You better vamoose, Dago; you know better than to bring those little chickabiddies in here.”

“You jealous they'll take your customers?” sneered the pimp. “Wouldn't be hard. Give us a couple toots of shock for the girls, and a whiskey for me, and I mean
all
whiskey, not that camphor shit you dole out to the niggers.”

John settled back against the wall—after a preliminary check to make sure there wasn't anything walking up it just then—and cradled the faintly camphor-smelling whiskey between his palms. He knew what they cut liquor with in places like this and didn't much care. Griffe Moissant's booze would be the same, closer to home, and there'd be the chance of walking into Lionel there or, God forbid, Phoebe.

He closed his eyes, listening to the voices. So many of them with the smoky inflection of the South: Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana. So many men, like himself, like Lionel, who'd come north looking for something other than sharecropping the land they'd once worked on as slaves, and more coming in every day.

And finding nothing. Since the banks had collapsed two years ago a man was lucky to have a job sweeping blood off the killing-floors into drains. And those jobs, he knew, went to those who knew people in the yards already. As the voices drifted to him in the saloon's gloom he heard those of men coming in after hunting work, or laboring a few hours stacking lumber or slapping pork in cans amid clouds of steam and pounding machines that could take off a hand or a finger if you blinked....

More men, who hadn't even found that.

“I hear Mushmouth lookin' for a couple boys to help him knock off a big place out by Douglas Park.” John glanced up as the voices passed his table, a couple of laborers listening to a dapper weaselly man whom Cassy had pointed out to him once as an enforcer for one of the protection bosses. “You boys lookin' for a few dollars?”

And later—how much later he wasn't sure—he overheard someone say, “Three dollars a day, they askin'! Three dollars to stay on that corner, without them runnin' me off . . . Some days I don't shine three dollars' worth o' shoes!” The man who was speaking looked at least seventy years old. John wondered how much he had to pay for rent on top of that three dollars, and if he had a family to support.

Get used to it,
he thought, his eyes going to the men crowding around the bar as their shift ended at the yards, or slumped morosely on the benches around the room. Three card-games were in progress, run by slick-looking men in flashy suits with diamonds on their stickpins and fingers. In the back room, the click of billiard-balls could be heard, and men's voices, loud with anger and drink.

This is your world now, the only world you're going to have. Luck gave you a single open door, and you let that chance slip away.

Because you pitied a woman who treated you like a human being when no one else did—and because you trusted her friend.

Despair brought the taste of bile to his mouth, and the metallic nastiness of whatever the waiter-girl had given him.

This place, and the house, with Cassy and Mama and all the children, and the stench at the back of the yards. These would be the limits of his experience. And of Cora's, too, when she grew up.

He knew he was getting very drunk, but couldn't remember why he should care. Like Mrs. Lincoln, he had nowhere that day to go. He could smell the stockyards from here, and hear the constant, clanging roar of the trains as they rolled through not three blocks away.

Already it seemed to him that everything he'd gone through and worked for since the War's end was dissolving like a coat of cheap whitewash in the pouring rain of reality.

This was the world into which he had been freed.

The world in which he'd believed that it was possible to make a life for himself.

I was the insane one,
he thought.

Dago the Pimp was back, with another girl this time. She couldn't have been as old as Selina, and her round, scared, pretty face reminded him heartrendingly of his sister Lucy—before Lucy had taken to drinking and whoring. One of Flossie's strong-arm men went over to talk to Dago, shoving him. The girl clung close to him, staring around her in desperation, and one of the yard-men went over to her in his shirt and pants all gummed with dirt and dried blood, and pinched her shallow breasts as he talked to her.

It was as if John watched someone else lurch to his feet. One of Flossie's girls intercepted him: “Ain't seen you 'round here before, Handsome.” She was “bright,” as the white men said. Her hair had been straightened with lye and dyed vivid red and her dress was cut away nearly to the nipples. She was fleshy, like a light-brown satin pillow.

“Excuse me,” he said politely, and stepped around her. He caught the blood-caked slaughterer by the wrist and heard himself say, “You old enough to be that poor little girl's daddy. You should be ashamed.”

The man turned around, baring broken teeth at him. Dago broke off his argument with the house strong-arm and said, “Now, my friend, that little girl knows more about pleasin' a man than any ten other nymphs of the pavement, and she'll be more than happy to prove it to the both of you.” He seized her arm so that his fingers dug into the tender skin. “Won't you, sugar?”

“You get the fuck out of here, Dago, and take your whore with you!” screamed the red-haired girl who'd followed John from his table. “Or I'll tell Flossie!”

“You can stick Flossie up your—”

The red-haired whore snatched a bottle off the bar, smashed it on the bar's edge, and slashed at Dago. Dago's little nymph screamed, and the next second, it seemed, the barroom erupted into violence. Someone—John was never sure who—grabbed him and hurled him back against the bar, the edge gouged his back. The young girl screamed again and John lunged to drag her out of the sudden morass of struggling limbs and slashing glass and steel that had churned into life in the cavelike semidarkness.

Something struck him and he fell, rolling, his old instincts kicking in. He tucked to protect his belly and face as a boot smashed into his ribs, and another caught him glancing on the side of the head. He smelled fresh blood and spilled beer and someone tripped over him, even in the corner against the bar into which he'd rolled. There was shouting and a man bellowed, “Oh my God, oh my God . . . !” the way he'd heard men shriek when they brought them into the hospital tents with their intestines dangling. Then shock caught up with him and he felt himself sinking, colder and colder, down into the earth, to come out chilled to the bone, and aching all over into sudden quiet, near-darkness, and the stink of blood.

John started to sit up and, as it had in the tent at Camp Barker years before, nausea seized him and he rolled over fast, choking as vomit spewed from his lips. A thick Irish voice said, “What d'we got here, Sleepin' Beauty?” and men laughed.