by Gore Vidal
Chase laughed; and Sumner laughed with him, but more out of politeness, Chase thought, than from any true purchase on the lady’s wit.
“You must let me take you to your new home,” said Sumner after a pause, during which he had been checking the title and author of nearly every book in the study.
“Oh, I think I had better stay here today—like Achilles in my tent.” Chase attempted lightness; and failed.
“The thing is still not decided.”
“I’m afraid it is. But why do I say afraid? To be senator from Ohio, the way that you are senator from Massachusetts, is a far greater thing than to be in any president’s Cabinet.”
“True,” said Sumner: then he added with exquisite lack of tact, “but since you dearly want to be President and I don’t, the Treasury is the better place for you to be. And”—Sumner may have lacked tact but he did not lack manners—“that is where I want you to be for the good of the country.”
Kate entered with a tray containing all the necessaries for tea. Sumner was on his feet, to help. If Chase had not known Sumner’s misogyny, he would have thought that that noble figure found Kate interesting. Although Chase had no idea what would ever happen to him if Kate were to marry—the thought of a fourth Mrs. Chase made him feel like Bluebeard—he could think of no husband finer than Charles Sumner, who, he noticed, was, like himself, cleanshaven. Since Lincoln had grown his beard, all sorts of odd excrescences had begun to blossom on political faces.
Kate poured tea; Sumner assisted. “I did not see you at the ball last night. I looked, Miss Kate, truly I did.”
“You looked in vain. I was not there. Father?” she offered Chase tea, which he took, filling the cup with sugar.
“Surely you are not a secret secessionist?”
“No, Mr. Sumner. Quite the opposite. I am a true abolitionist.” Kate’s smile was mischievous. “Unlike so many of our men of state.”
“Oh,” said Sumner, frowning. “Oh, I say, that is a hard blow to the head.”
Considering Sumner’s recent history, Chase thought that references to blows to the head might not be in order; but Sumner was so entirely conscious of himself as to be, in no usual way, self-conscious. “You have a point, Miss Kate. Yesterday when Mr. Lincoln quoted the Constitution’s word and not its spirit, my heart sank. But as he is weak, why, all the more reason that we rally round him.”
“To support him in his support of slavery?” Kate was sharp. She would have made an extraordinary lawyer, Chase thought. Certainly, she had a better legal mind than he but then Chase had seen to it that her education had been finer than his. It thrilled him to hear her speak as intellectually the equal to Sumner, who was not known to suffer gladly even the brilliant if they were less brilliant than he.
“To guide him. To counterbalance Mr. Seward, the prime minister …”
Chase nodded agreement. “Seward is the administration of this country now.”
“There is no one to counterbalance him in the Cabinet,” Sumner began.
“Except Mr. Chase,” Kate concluded.
“But I am not there,” said Chase.
“But Seward is,” said Kate.
Sumner looked bemused. “I have been told that Mr. Seward dreams of some sort of war between us and all of Europe to distract our attention from the matter of slavery. He spoke to me in the most alarming way of Spain’s influence in South America and of France’s in Mexico.” Sumner groaned. “He thinks we should invoke the Monroe Doctrine and drive them out of the Western hemisphere, with the support of the Southern states, who would then, presumably, extend slavery over the entire southern half of our hemisphere.”
“Thank Heaven,” said Chase, “that you are the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
“Curious how Seward has changed.” Sumner was thoughtful. “He gave the greatest speech, as a lawyer, in defense of a black man …”
“The Freeman Case.” Chase nodded.
“William Gladstone wrote me that that speech was the finest forensic effort in the English language.”
“Gladstone writes you often?” Inadvertently, Chase shivered with pleasure.
The manservant entered the study; he murmured something to Kate. “Who?” she asked.
“Mr. John Hay, he says his name is …”
“Oh, Father!” Kate sprang to her feet. “I’ll bring him in. You stay right there. Both of you.” She hurried from the room.
Sumner nodded gravely. “It is the call, Mr. Chase.”
“I do not count on it.”
In the vestibule, Kate was astonished to see a handsome young man only a year or two older than herself. “Miss Chase?”
“Yes, sir. And you’re Mr. Hay? The President’s secretary?”
Hay nodded. “One of two, Miss Chase.” Hay had been prepared for Kate’s youth but not for her beauty—or level gaze. There was nothing at all feminine in the way that she looked at him, as if she wanted to open up his forehead and discover what he knew. For all Kate’s dark-golden hair, slender waist, luminous skin, she was just another shrewd politician—as opposite to last night’s Marie-Jeanne as dawn to dusk, he thought, in an ecstasy of what might have been poetry. Oh, he was smack-dab in the middle of life at last!
“Might I see Senator Chase?”
“Of course.” But Kate did not move. She looked up at him: hazel eyes met hazel eyes. Hay was still energized by Marie-Jeanne—or electricized, to use the word made popular by the electric-shock machines that had recently become fashionable for sluggish men and neurasthenic ladies. Hay saw no reason not to turn upon this enchanting-looking if not entirely enchanting girl his newly electricized charm. As he looked straight into her eyes, he let himself revert to the mood of the night before. Suddenly, as if an electrical shock had been transmitted, Kate gave a little cry, and turned pale. “Oh, come in. Come in.” She was a virgin, Hay decided, with the sharp intuitiveness of a man who knows, at a glance, all that there is to know about women.
Hay was not entirely surprised to see Senator Sumner in Senator Chase’s study. Both statesmen rose, very slowly, at the young man’s entrance. Kate stayed in the doorway, not part of the meeting but not apart from it either.
“Gentlemen.” Hay shook hands all round.
“You were at … Brown,” said Sumner, to Hay’s surprise. He had not thought the great man would remember.
“Yes, sir. I heard you speak there.”
Chase cleared his throat. He was now at the crucial moment of his career. He was aware that the tremor that sometimes appeared in his left hand had begun. He shoved the hand into his coat, like the first Napoleon. “Mr. Hay …” he began.
“Mr. Chase,” the young man broke in. “I have come from the President, who wishes me to inform you that he has, this morning, sent your name to the Senate for confirmation in the office of Secretary of the Treasury.”
“Bravo!” Sumner clapped his hands. Hay heard a sigh from Kate behind him; he was an expert now at women’s sighs.
Chase was very pale. “You must tell the President that it is customary to inquire in advance if the one nominated to an office chooses to accept that nomination.”
“But, sir”—Hay had been prepared for this—“the President assumed in the light of his conversation with you at Springfield that you would be pleased to accept the office.”
“That was some months ago.” Chase was furious; and he could not think why. He wanted very much the office. But he did not want to accept it from Lincoln. The fact that he was the man’s superior morally and intellectually did not matter so much. After all, he fully expected to succeed him at the next election. But to be so used—that was the word!—by an inferior, to be kept dangling like this until the last possible moment; all this was unbearable. “I have now,” Chase heard himself say, as if from a far distance, “taken my oath as a United States senator, and I look forward to serving with men of the utmost morality and honor like Senator Sumner …”
“Now, Mr. Chase.” Sumner gave his col
league a warning look. “Mr. Lincoln has been torn this way and that since he arrived from Springfield. But I do know that he told me that he knew of no one more suited for the Treasury …”
Kate intervened. “Mr. Hay, I think the President should give my father a day or two to decide where his highest loyalty lies. To the people of Ohio, or to the people of the entire Union.”
Hay bowed to Chase and Sumner; then Kate led him to the vestibule, where the manservant waited to let him out. “Tell the President that this is all a bit abrupt.”
“I will tell him that.” Again Hay felt the electrical impulse between them. But this time he realized that it was all on his side. Although he was still a young male, she had ceased to be a desirable young female and had become a hard political manager, with a long-range presidential campaign to administer.
“Thank you, Mr. Hay. Good-day, sir.”
When Hay was gone, Kate hurried back to the study and while Hay took the horsecars back to the White House, contemplating in an ecstatic blur the dark and the light of feminine bodies, Kate joined Sumner not so much in changing Chase’s mind as in finding a way for this proud, stubborn man to accept the office that he wanted so desperately from the hands of a man he so deeply despised.
“He’ll accept in a day or two,” said Hay to Nicolay. “My God, she’s a looker, that daughter of his.”
“So they say. Congratulations, by the way. You are now a clerk in the Pension Office of the Department of the Interior.”
“I’m what?” Hay was stunned.
Nicolay laughed. “Congress won’t let the President have two secretaries, so we’ve got you on the payroll at Interior. Sixteen hundred a year.”
“A fortune,” said Hay; and meant it.
They were in Nicolay’s office with its view of Lafayette Square and the rampant statue of Andrew Jackson atop his horse, the worst piece of equestrian sculpture in the world, according to Senator Sumner, who always made newcomers to Washington swear to him, solemnly, that they would never actually look at the statue no matter how close they might be to it.
Hay’s office was no more than a cubbyhole off Nicolay’s spacious room but with the adjoining door open, Hay felt less confined; also, since their duties overlapped, each was constantly in and out of the other’s office. The center of their activity was a huge secretaire brought up from the basement. Here, in dozens of drawers, they did their best to file some eighteen thousand applications for government jobs. On a large table in front of the window, the nation’s press was arranged each day, including newspapers from the South. It was Hay’s task to make a daily précis for the President of what might interest him, which was surprisingly little.
Outside Nicolay’s office the waiting room was full from nine in the morning until six at night. The clerk behind the railing took down each name before allowing the supplicants into the waiting room, while, downstairs, the doorman Old Edward screened everyone at the main door. Old Edward was adept, usually, at separating the plain mad from those simply crazed for office. The would-be appointees would then make their way up the stairs to the waiting room and, in the process, they would fill up the dark corridor that led from the President’s quarters to the offices. Mary had already made one scene that morning when a half-dozen would-be postmasters burst into the oval sitting room of the living quarters where she and her lady relatives were sitting about in their morning robes.
“McManus, I will not endure this, do you hear me!” She had shouted at Old Edward, as he led the shaken postmasters-that-might-have-been from her presence. Old Edward had then returned with a full-time guard, “Who’ll shoot to kill, ma’am, should anyone try to break in on you.”
By then Mary’s humor was somewhat recovered. “Ladies do not like to be seen by strangers in the morning,” she said. Old Edward said that he understood.
Mary laughed when the door closed behind him. The relatives laughed, too. None of the women was properly assembled for the day. The crinolines and the vast hoopskirts had been put away, and although each enjoyed showing off her morning robe to the other ladies, strange men were forbidden to gaze on these feminine mysteries.
Mary wore a rose-colored cashmere wrapper, with quilting down the front; and her hair was done up in a red turban like Dolley Madison—or, said Cousin Lizzie, “Like a Zouave.”
Since breakfast, the ladies had been analyzing the previous night’s ball. Mary’s full sister, Mrs. Edwards, taller than Mary but not quite as plump, took a hard line against the ladies of Washington. “They are so ill-mannered,” she said, pouring coffee from a dented silver urn that Cousin Lizzie swore had been thrown out by Martha Washington.
“The few that were there,” said Mary, frowning; all morning she had felt as if she might, at any moment, be struck by The Headache, which she feared more than death. When the clamp of fire went round her head, she could not see for the pain and, often, she would end up flat on the floor, vomiting from the pain. The Headache, as she always thought of it, to differentiate it from ordinary headaches, had begun some years earlier. She knew that many thought that she was shamming but her husband was not one of them. Whenever he could, he would stay with her, no matter how terrible her behavior and it could be, she knew, or, rather, had been told, like that of a mad woman. But if The Headache was near, it was not yet ready to strike her down; if it did, she was surrounded by relatives and friends, women who understood the problem.
Meanwhile, the behavior of the Washington ladies was meticulously discussed by the Springfield-Lexington contingent. “They seem to think,” said one of the nieces, “that we are log-cabin women, never before out of the woods.”
“Well,” said Lizzie, “Cousin Lincoln can take full credit for that. All that nonsense about being born in a log cabin when that’s all there was to be born in in those days in that part of Kentucky. But during the campaign was there ever a picture of Cousin Lincoln’s Springfield mansion in the press?”
“Well, I don’t think Mr. Lincoln would have thought that appropriate,” said Mary. She had had that argument with her husband; and lost. “Anyway, the local ladies hereabouts strike me as provincial in a way that Springfield and certainly Lexington ladies are not. If nothing else, we have better manners. Did you see the story in the paper, criticizing the way that I address gentlemen always as ‘Sir’? That is hardly provincial.”
“But, maybe, a bit old-fashioned,” said Lizzie.
“Well, it’s definitely Southern and sounds right to me,” said the half-sister from Alabama. “Anyway, Sister Mary, we’re kin to the only two high-and-mighty families hereabouts, the Blairs and the Breckinridges, and that’s more that these tacky shopkeepers’ wives can ever claim!”
The ladies applauded this celebration of their family. “It is strange,” said Mary, “that everyone was at Lexington when I was a child, except Mr. Lincoln, who was nearby in Indiana. We had Mr. Clay at his estate, Ashland.” She smiled in memory. “Harry of the West; everyone in the world called him that. As if he was our country’s king, which he was, or should’ve been. Then there was this little boy with the pale eyes, who is now … who was until now, Vice-President Breckinridge. And I can remember a handsome young man at Transylvania University, very pale and very elegant he was, who gave an address on graduation day called ‘Friendship,’ just before he went off to West Point.”
“Who on earth was that?” asked Lizzie, who knew but the younger women did not.
“Jefferson Davis,” said Mary, just as one of the housemaids opened the door from the bedroom adjacent to the oval sitting room, and said, “Mrs. Lincoln, the mantua-maker is here.”
Mary excused herself and went into the bedroom, where she found a well-dressed mulatto woman, who gave a little curtsey. “I am Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln. I heard that you needed someone to make you a dress, and so I offer myself. I am well recommended.” She opened her reticule and gave Mary a number of letters. Mary took them; but she did not glance at them. She studied the woman’s face carefully; and liked what
she saw. The face was strong and not at all negroid. The nose was large and aquiline; the mouth straight. She appeared to be in early middle life.
“Now I cannot afford to be extravagant,” said Mary. “As you know—and as everyone says—we are from the outlandish West, and very, very poor. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mrs. Lincoln.” Keckley smiled.
“Good. We begin to understand each other. Now every Friday we are obliged to give a reception in the evening. That is expected of us.” Without thinking, Mary began to make the bed; and Keckley helped her. The room was currently inhabited by two of the Springfield ladies; and their previous evening’s finery was everywhere; and in disorder. “I shall need a dress …”
“That’s only three days from now,” said Keckley, taking over entirely the making of the bed.
“I know it is short notice. But I was told that you were not only good but quick.” Mary was at the window. She glanced at the letters in her hand.
“You have the material?”
“Yes, and the pattern. The stuff is rose-colored moiré-antique and …” Mary had found a familiar hand. “You worked for Mrs. Jefferson Davis. How strange! I was just speaking of Mr. Davis.”
“Yes, I worked for Mrs. Davis.” The bed was now made. “I was very fond of Mrs. Davis.”
“Then why didn’t you go South with her?”
“Well … Look at me.” Keckley gestured.
“I am looking at you.”
“I am colored.”
“But free.”
“Even so, I could never live in a slave state. I am an abolitionist. In fact, I must warn you, Mrs. Lincoln, I am very political.”
“Oh, so am I!” Mary was delighted. “But, of course, I must be careful in what I say. The vampire press is always ready to spring at me.” Mary had begun to pace the floor in front of the window, with its view of the incomplete monument to Washington. “It is so comical. They say that I am pro-Southern and pro-slavery and that I try to influence Mr. Lincoln, who is really, they say, a secret abolitionist. Well, it is nearly the reverse. Mr. Lincoln knows nothing of slavery, except what he has heard from me and my family in Lexington. Yes, we had … and we have slaves. But we did not traffic in them, and they governed our lives and not the other way around. Nelson was the butler. He made the finest mint juleps in Kentucky, so everyone said, while Mammy Sally brought us all up and gave us the most thorough spankings you could ever imagine! I see her yet …” Mary paused; then frowned. “We lived on Main Street. One of my first memories is that of the slaves, chained together, being marched to the auction block which was in a corner of the main square of Lexington, the courthouse square, while in the other corner there was the whipping-post, some ten feet high, black locust wood, made even blacker because of the blood. Oh, I can hear the screams yet.” Mary shut her eyes; and remembered. “We had a mark on our house, a secret mark that meant that runaway slaves would be fed by Mammy Sally. She tried to keep me from seeing them but, of course, I had to. And I talked to them. Saw their scars. Heard how families had been broken up. Oh, and then there was Judge Turner!”