by Gore Vidal
“Mrs. Lincoln, I talked to Mr. Wood about … our project. He thinks it will be all right.
“Good, sir.” Mary had seen to it that one William S. Wood whom the government had assigned to them as escort on the trip to Washington from Springfield would be Commissioner of Public Buildings, and so in charge of the President’s House. Although Mr. Wood was a friend of Mr. Seward—never a recommendation—Mary thought that she could trust him to help put into effect her secret plan to make the President’s House the most magnificent residence in the nation if not the world. Mary herself had not seen much of the world, but her teachers, the Mentelles, had been at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and Mary had grown up with tales of Versailles and the Tuileries that were now as much a part of her childhood memories as Harry of the West himself. Mary also delighted in the company of the Chevalier Wikoff, a man of perfect taste who had been presented at most of the courts of Europe; and remembered, in detail, every drapery, every ornament.
Although it was not yet five o’clock, Lincoln was in the upstairs sitting room, playing with Tad and Willie. As the children rushed to greet mother and aunt, Lincoln sat up in his chair. “I’m taking a holiday from that grinding mill down the corridor.”
“I wish you’d take more.” Mary indicated the basket of fresh-cut flowers. “Little Sister’s making us a floral arrangement.”
“I better begin before they wilt.” Emilie left the room, escorted by two nephews, with news of an attractive pet goat named Nanda. Mary sat in a sofa; she felt odd, unsteady, disoriented.
“What does she say?” asked Lincoln.
Mary let the back of her head rest on the cool horsehair. “She will go where he goes. What does he say?”
“Nothing. I gave him the commission this morning.”
“And Ben said nothing?”
Lincoln shook his head.
“I’d better speak to that boy …”
“Better not. Let him make up his own mind.” Lincoln smiled. “Anyway, we have good news.”
“Mr. Davis is dead!”
“Not that good—or bad, as the case may be. No, Ben Butler’s occupied the city of Baltimore, and the legislature doesn’t think that, all in all, secession is such a good idea, and so the governor now says he’ll send us the four regiments I asked him for.”
“Father!” Mary looked with delight at her husband; then with less delight at the frayed green curtain just back of him. “I would’ve sworn an oath, were it ladylike to swear—”
“First Lady-like,” he proposed.
“First Lady-like, that we would lose Maryland. Now you’ve held the state to us. You and you alone. Mr. Seward must be gnashing his teeth.” Mary frowned. “What about Kentucky?”
“We’ll hold the state, by a whisker.”
“That means that all those crazy brothers and brothers-in-law of mine will have to go South.” A group of gnats gathered about Mary’s head; she dismissed them, vigorously, with her fan. “I cannot think what demon possesses those men.”
“The same as possesses us, I suppose.” Lincoln slumped farther down on his spine. “They have convinced themselves that I will free all their slaves and make them poor, when all I want is …” He stopped; as if weary of the repetition of a theme that no one chose ever to hear. “North Carolina will go next week. It is now certain.”
“That makes … ten states?”
Lincoln nodded. “And Tennessee will go as well, if I don’t do something, though what I can do is not much.”
“You can strike at Richmond!” Mary sat up very straight. “If you can take Richmond, Virginia is ours again and that will be the end of the rebellion, once and for all.”
Lincoln laughed. “I agree, Mother. Only I’m not ready for such a large undertaking. But I do have something smaller in view.”
“What?”
“If I tell you, you’ll repeat it.”
“If you tell me, you’ve repeated it.”
“That’s true. So, if I can’t keep a secret, why should you? Anyway, we’ve hung on to Missouri, thanks to Frank Blair and a few others, though the fighting in St. Louis was fierce …”
Emilie returned with her husband, Ben Helm, a tall, lanky young man whose resemblance to Henry Clay had been remarked upon all his life. Emilie’s vase of flowers was duly admired by Mary, while Lincoln turned to Helm and said, “Did you talk to General Scott?”
“Well, no. I didn’t. I just went looking at the sights instead.” The soft Southern voice did not go at all with the cold, gray hunter’s eyes that seemed a Kentucky characteristic, shared by Lincoln, too, though his hunter’s eyes were often masked—smoky-looking was how Mary thought of them on those occasions when he was present in the flesh but, in spirit, withdrawn from the company.
Mary rose to help Emilie place the flowers on a console of the Oval Room, at whose center, in a straight chair, Ben Helm sat just opposite Lincoln, who said, “Well, I’m sure that once you’ve seen all the sights, you’ll go and look at Winfield Scott, who’s just about the largest sight we have in the town.”
“He actually knew Thomas Jefferson,” said Mary, returning to her sofa, “but did not think him sound. He preferred Mr. Madison, and then Mr. Jackson and now—Mr. Lincoln!”
“I suspect, Mother, he’s just being polite in my case. But it’s true he has a partiality for war presidents. Fortunately, I’m not really one, just yet.” The gray eyes that now searched out Helm’s eyes were those of a hunter, too. Mary gave an involuntary shudder: When two hunters stare at each other, it is the women who will weep at the end.
“I have thought about this, Brother Lincoln.” Helm’s voice was soft. “I thought and thought about it before we came. But I must tell you that I only really came up here for Emilie’s sake because she wanted me to, and because she wanted to see Sister Mary one more time …”
“One more time!” Mary’s cry sounded in the room. Yet she was not aware that she had even spoken; she was aware only that she had been harshly struck.
Emilie put her arm about Mary’s shoulders. “Oh, Sister, I know it is hard.”
Mary stared up at Emilie; but saw her not at all through the tears that now filled her eyes.
Lincoln rose and paced the room. “I had hoped, Ben,” he said, “that you and I could reason together. Because the matter is now sorting itself out back home, and that Kentucky will stay in the Union is now about as certain as anything on this earth.”
“I guess you have seen to that, Brother Lincoln.” In the gentle voice there was an edge of menace that made Mary recoil; made Emilie hold her all the tighter.
“I see to nothing. Events see to me. I am acted upon, no more. You have a great career ahead of you. You’ll be governor of Kentucky like your grandfather; and maybe more. Who knows? Who would’ve dreamt that I’d be here, for all my sins, as it is now proving?”
“Oh, Ben!” said Mary. “We are so isolated in this place. Father needs you. I need Little Sister. We are without friends; and we are possessed of altogether too many enemies in this rebel city …” Mary stopped; she had said the forbidden word; she could not recall it.
“They are not rebels to us, Sister Mary,” said Emilie. “They only want to be let go in peace, like us.”
“We cannot let go that which has no place to go because it is where it is and it is what it is, a part forever of this Union.” Lincoln appealed directly to Emilie. “As for peace, we only defend what is ours.”
“Brother Lincoln, our lives are not your lives and our property is not your property and if we wish to have a new country, who can stop us?”
Lincoln turned up the palms of both hands; to show that he had no more to say. Mary could no longer see the room for the tears that had begun to flow. But she could still feel Emilie’s arm about her shoulders. Blindly, she looked up at the girl. “You will not stay here with me?”
“I must go with my husband.”
“I have been offered a commission in the Confederate Army, Brother Lincoln.” T
he voice was soft and inexorable as the south wind that always brought the rains to Lexington.
“You will accept that commission.” There was now no real question in Lincoln’s voice.
“Yes, Brother. That is my intention.”
“You will break my heart,” said Mary; and so her youth came to an end, once and for all.
SIXTEEN
DAVID was helping Mr. Thompson to shut up shop when Annie Surratt appeared at the door. Since this was the first time that she had come to see him at Thompson’s, David asked her to come in, but she shook her head. She seemed nervous; and flushed. “It’s your mother, Davie. She’s been taken ill.”
“What’s wrong with Mrs. Herold?” asked Mr. Thompson, coming from the back of the shop where the woman-of-all-work was doing no work at all. “Oh, it’s you, Miss Surratt. How is your father?” Mr. Thompson knew just about everyone in the town; and most of their illnesses, as well.
“Sick, too. He never leaves his bed. Davie, your mother’s had a fall. The doctor’s with her now. They’re not sure what she’s broken. But she’s asking for you.”
“Which doctor?” asked Mr. Thompson, who sat in constant judgment upon the entire profession.
“I don’t know, Mr. Thompson. It was Davie’s sister who saw me in the street and said, ‘Fetch Davie, Mother’s asking for him.’ So I came straight away.”
David looked at Mr. Thompson, who nodded, benignly. “We’re finished for the day. You go on now. If she needs special medicine, let me know. I’ll make a discount for her.” This, David knew, would be five percent off the hundred-and-fifty-percent profit that Mr. Thompson made on each sale. If the life was not so dull and confining, David knew that he could do a lot worse than setting up shop as a druggist. He pulled on his linen hot-weather jacket and hurried after Annie.
At Fifteenth Street they were obliged to wait ten minutes while an artillery battery moved slowly down the middle of the street and guards kept the pedestrians to the sidewalk. As David suspected, there was nothing wrong with his mother. “It’s Father wants to see you. Something urgent, he said.”
“How is he?”
“Oh, the same. He still goes across the river from time to time but it’s wearing him out fast. I think he wants you to go across.”
That was exactly what Mr. Surratt wanted. David sat in a flimsy straight chair beside the old man’s bed. Mr. Surratt was paler than usual; and, as always, the cough came and went according to its own mysterious series. The room smelled of medicine; and dying flesh. Over Mr. Surratt’s bed hung a blue-tinted picture of the Virgin; beneath the picture was a large crucifix. As usual in the Surratt household, David wondered how anyone could change from real religion to Irish mummery. “I should go, Davie; but I can’t. It’s short notice: too short for me. I’m not strong. So you’ll have to move fast as you can. Cross the Long Bridge before nightfall; make contact with our friend at the tavern.”
“What do I give him?”
“You don’t give him nothing but a spoken message.”
“So what do I … speak?”
“Lucifer, the son of morning, and Satan.”
“That’s easy enough. What does it mean?”
“He’ll know. It’s better that you don’t. Now get moving, quick as you can.”
“Yes, sir.”
Annie was at the piano in the front parlor; but she did not play. She looked up at him, anxiously. “You’re going to the other side?”
David nodded; he felt, suddenly, not only entirely grown-up but of supreme importance in the scheme of things. He had, also, recently, begun a moustache. He smoothed its dark silkiness. “What do you think?”
“I think something’s about to happen. I think the Yankee troops—”
“I meant about my moustaches.”
“Oh, they look nice. You look … older.”
“That’s good?”
“Yes. That’s good. I’ll walk you as far as the river.”
Arm in arm, like any young man in a linen jacket, with a moustache, and a pretty girl on his arm, David strolled along the dusty streets. Washington was a city where if you did not choke on the dust you got stuck in the mud. Today the heat had been considerable; but now a cool dusty breeze dried the trickle of sweat at David’s temples.
Troops were everywhere. Somewhat nervously, David and Annie tried to look like young lovers, or the way that David thought that young lovers should look on an early evening late in May, with the evening star not yet visible in a violet sky over the Potomac Heights.
In the President’s Park, troops were bivouacked. Rows of tents had been pitched; and the stoves for cooking had all been lit. A group of soldiers was singing sad songs. A cow was being milked. An officer shaved himself in a mirror hanging from a tree. As they turned into Ohio Avenue, which led to the nearest bridge across the canal, they could see even more troops encamped among the white stone blocks at the base of what was to be, one day, Washington’s monument. Nearby, an aged black man sat fishing for catfish in the stagnant canal. The smell was appalling—like rotted flesh.
“There must be fifty thousand Yankees in the town,” said Annie. “I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen them, practically all of them, I’d say, with my own eyes since I got back from Surrattsville. They’re in the Capitol, sleeping on the floor. They’re in the Patent Office. They’re …”
“They say we’ve got fifty thousand men across the river, all set to take the city.”
“Well, I haven’t seen any of them. I’ve only heard tell. But I’ve seen these.” Annie held tight his arm. How many men of eighteen, with practically full moustaches, were embarked on a mission which would spell the doom of the Yankee capital? David was certain that his diabolic message had something to do with the much-predicted and much-longed-for attack on Washington. As formidable as the Yankee boys looked, they were no match for the wild boys, who lived only to fight. “Where is Isaac?” David asked, put in mind of Southern valor.
“I don’t rightly know. But I suspect that now Richmond’s capital of the whole Confederacy, he’ll be there, right next door to us.”
“Hope he’ll help try and kick the door in!” David was fierce; then he sighed. “Oh, what I’d give to go to Richmond, and work for President Davis, or something.” Actually, David had once been to Richmond, which was no more than a hundred of the crow’s miles from Washington, and he’d thought it a poor sort of city compared to Washington or even to Baltimore, a town more to his liking, in some ways, than either.
“Father says you’re better off where you are, keeping an eye on what’s going on in the White House.”
“I don’t pick up much. But I’ve noticed that when something’s up, they do have a way of just disappearing over there. They disappeared yesterday, come to think of it.”
“What do you mean, disappear?”
“Well, things get very quiet. And Mr. Lincoln sneaks across to the War Department, and everyone else acts like nothing’s going on and then something happens. I could swear the President’s been out of sight for over a day now, so something is about to happen.”
“What do you hear at Thompson’s?”
“Well, I hear that Mrs. Lincoln went up to New York City to buy things for the Mansion and that the President’s told this Mr. Wood who’s in charge of public buildings that he didn’t keep a good enough eye on her because she spent too much at the stores …”
“I saw all that in the papers. What else do you hear?”
“I heard that the President is all riled up because he thinks that Mrs. Lincoln and Mr. Wood was having this love affair together at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York City.”
Annie stopped in her tracks. Behind her the dark red Gothic fantasy of the Smithsonian Institution was turning to black in the now silver light. “Mrs. Lincoln? A woman her age, carrying on?”
“That’s what people are saying.”
“I was told that she was crazy.” Annie shook her head. “I never heard of a woman of her age—w
hat is she? forty-five?—carrying on like that, unless, of course, she is a professional like your friend Mrs. Austin.”
“Well, sometimes they do, Annie.” David was not about to tell her that he knew at firsthand that they did. There was a handsome stout widow of more than forty-five, who owned a grocery shop back of the Navy Yard. She had kept one of the wild boys in groceries until he had gone South. She had now made it plain to David that he, too, could become the owner of an occasional ham if he were to dally with her and enliven the sadness of her widowhood. Annie, David decided, did not know much about women. But then she was a nice girl; educated by nuns.
“Anyway, Mrs. Lincoln’s back now, and Mr. Wood is still around and as thick as thieves with Mr. Watt, the head groundsman, who makes a fortune every year, stealing from the Mansion, selling jobs, and filling up the Center Market with all the truck he grows on the sly in the park.” As David spoke, he was surprised at just how much Mansion gossip he had picked up without particularly meaning to. But, of course, the doings of the permanent staff at the Mansion were of great, even vital, interest to the town’s tradespeople, all of whom had to keep on Old Edward’s good side, and give him an occasional tip. Then there was Mrs. Cuthbert, the housekeeper—and a power to reckon with; also, the mulatto Elizabeth Keckley, who was close to Mrs. Lincoln but a distant woman to others, and new to the Mansion game, unlike Mr. Watt, who had made his fortune ten times over by simply charming each new Administration.
At the Long Bridge, Annie kissed David on the cheek; and whispered in his ear, “I’m playing like we’re sweethearts.”
“Ain’t we?” David nuzzled her ear; she gave a little cry; giggled; fled.
David approached the small guardhouse that had recently been erected at the Washington end of the bridge. He knew that the sergeant had been watching his performance with Annie; and he felt a lamb’s innocence as he presented his pass to the sergeant, who was new to him.