My voice shot across that plain of people with its own high pitch. I argued that no State upon its mere notion can lawfully get out of the Union. If it could, we would live at the edge of anarchy. The Union is unbroken, I said. I did not mention the Confederacy, could not. But I promised the people of the Southern States that a Republican administration would not rob them of their property or peace of mind.
There needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it is forced upon the national authority. Yet I was disingenuous, a little. I had the premonition of blood. Seward complained for peace. I could not.
Still, I pleaded. I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends, I said to the Southern people. The mystic chords of memory that stretched from every battlefield to every human heart would heal our wounds—restore our bonds of affection—when touched again by the better angels of our nature.
I believed in those better angels, else I would have lived with the prairie dogs, or run off to the moon, and abandoned mankind. But I was forlorn as I looked down that hill. I could smell the mud and silt of the Potomac, and I wondered if some Rebel demons were crouching on the far side of the river. I was already in a muddle. I remember the first words I ever writ—in the sand outside Pa’s Kentucky cabin. I felt the power in my fingernails to brand the earth with my own scrawl.
I am Abraham
There was a mystery in the letters of my name. A-b-r-a-h-a-m. It was beyond a little boy’s reach. I was still that same man-child, with some kind of an electric touch. I lived in words and would be buried in their fire. Who in hell was this here Lincoln, President of the United States? I didn’t know the critter. Likely I never would.
21.
The Belle of the Ball
THE SHINDIG WAS held on the night of my inauguration, not in some massive tent on the White House lawn, but in the rump of City Hall, a dank, cavernous room that reminded us folks from the frontier of a snake charmer’s paradise. My secretaries called it the White Muslin Palace of Aladdin, because it was festooned from ceiling to floor in white draperies with a blue trim—and it was a palace of sorts, bathed in a curious, flickering light from five huge gas chandeliers.
Mother had been in a fury from the moment we arrived at the White House. Not a single one of my secretaries or our servants had salaamed and called her Mrs. President. But something else was gnawing at her insides. Perhaps she didn’t feel beautiful enough, or fine enough, in her own mirror. She’d gone over the guest list and wanted to disinvite Seward and Chase, and Chase’s delicious twenty-year-old daughter, Miss Kate.
“Mother, do you want to provoke a Cabinet crisis? Both my prima donnas will resign if I lock them out of the Union Ball.”
“Good riddance,” she said. And she let out a childish laugh. “Husband, we will bargain together. You may have your pair of Judases, but not Miss Kate.”
Now that she was naughty, her rage was gone. She didn’t have much faith in my Cabinet, thought she deserved to be my Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State.
“Mary,” I muttered, “should I tell Chase that his daughter’s been disallowed?”
“Not at all. I will notify him.”
Suddenly she was satisfied with what she saw in the mirror, as if her beauty was coupled with the coils of a snake, and she had the power to bite—or mesmerize the Cave Dwellers and other old-line families of the District.
But Bob had witnessed Mary’s tantrum and he stepped in.
“Mother, if you persist in this vanity of yours, I will leave for Harvard this minute, and to hell with your Union Ball!”
Mary wouldn’t bother listening to me, but she’d never trade blows with her boy. She retired to her own room to take care of her habiliments, while Bob stood against the wall and fingered his watch.
“You were harsh with your mother,” I said. “I would have calmed Mary down.”
“Father, you spoil her,” said my Harvard prince, stroking the edge of his mustache. He stood there like some indoor hunter, with the watch fob trapped in his fist. Then he grew reckless. Bob reached up and pecked his own Pa on the beard.
“I am proud of you, sir. That was a magnificent speech on Capitol Hill.”
It was damn hard for him to admit that, to praise his own Pa. I was the backwoods lawyer who happened to be President. He must have pondered over that miracle with his classmates. Mary had visited Cambridge, supped on peach flambé, watched the Harvard regatta, and I’d never been near that citadel in my stovepipe hat.
SHE WAS THE REAL SPOILER that evening in a blue silk gown, with a magnificent blue feather in her hair. She wore the pearl necklace I’d gotten for her at Tiffany’s, that highfalutin shop in Manhattan, where all the nabobs outfitted their sweethearts, sometimes even their wives. I paid hard cash for the pearls; it was a victory present for the hard times we’d had, and for putting up with such a wanderer all these years.
Miss Kate snubbed the Union Ball, as it turned out. She had twisted her ankle, she claimed, and was a virtual prisoner at the Willard. “I am in such despair,” she scribbled in a note to my wife. “I was so much looking forward to your quaint little palace.”
With Miss Kate out of commission, none of the demoiselles could outshine Mary that first night of her reign as Mrs. President. She had a radiance no other woman possessed in Aladdin’s White Muslin Palace. Scintillatin’ is the word. Mary scintillated. She curtsied and smiled while I shook hands with every sucker in the Palace. She chatted with the Premier, as my secretaries called Mr. Seward—and Seward was in her thrall. There were one or two Cave Dwellers nosing around, spies from the District’s posh inner circle. They were hardly indifferent to Mother’s Lexington manners and musical voice. They had a certain foreboding about their limited life in the capital. The Cave Dwellers had a formidable foe in the White House.
Mary entered the ballroom arm in arm with Senator Douglas, while I had the mayor of Washington as my partner, the Hon. James Gabriel Beret, and the Marine Band played Hail Columbia, happy land! Mary danced the mazurka with her old flame, while the gaslights flickered and their shadows crept along the white draperies on the walls. Every little Washington lord wanted to dance with my wife. But Mary seemed to dance only with Dug—polkas and waltzes and whatnot. It was obvious to everybody that Dug was a sick man. The election had broken him—riding the rails like some demon Democrat, while Southerners mocked the Little Giant and pissed in the wind wherever he went. Now Dug coughed into a handkerchief. He couldn’t contain or control that muscular glide of Mary’s feet. So he had to sit in Mayor Beret’s velvet chair, as a new partner revealed himself—and Mary’s eyes were shot with wonder.
It was Bob who went with her through the different hops of a mazurka, Harvard style. It petrified me just to look. They were such a gorgeous couple. Luckily Bob didn’t have my outlandish height or my naked shins. Had to crucify my feelings, or admit that I feared my own boy—feared his manhood and his moodiness, as if I had let some strange critter slip into the house. I left the ballroom near midnight, all pinched out from watching them strut. The last glimpse I had was of Mary doing some foreign fandango with Bob and a company of other ladies and gents. She had all the grace of a princess who had wandered into Aladdin’s den and overwhelmed every cavalier at the ball.
My marine bodyguards, ablaze in fancy, red-lined cloaks, were dancing with their sweethearts, and I didn’t have the heart to pull them out of that shindig. So I slipped away from the Muslin Palace and walked back to the White House alone in the dark; wasn’t a lantern lit. Soldiers at the gate barely recognized the new Commander-in-Chief in his stovepipe hat. The moon was down to a sliver, and the Mansion with all its porticos looked like a wall of hollowed-out eyes.
22.
Mother & the Mantua-Maker
MY FIRST MORNING as Commander-in-Chief I found a despatch on my desk from Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumpter—or Sumter, as everyone else seemed fond of calling that embattled sandbar at the mouth of Charleston harbor. It was the Union�
�s last little island in South Carolina. Anderson said the fort was running low, and unless we could refurbish him, he’d have to surrender in six or seven weeks. Seward was very hot on having us abandon the fort. If we mounted an expedition to aid Anderson, he said, Virginia and the border States would bolt from the Union. I’d have abandoned the White House—lived in a shack—to hold on to Virginia, but I didn’t really trust Seward as a peacemaker. There wasn’t much peace to be made.
He wanted to hold the first Lincoln Levee at his mansion on Lafayette Square. Seward was like a manor lord with his fine Arabian mares, while Mary and I were strangers in the District. But Mary insisted that the Lincoln Levee be held at the Lincoln White House. She had her own mulatto mantua-maker now, Elizabeth Keckly, a former slave with fiercely lit dark eyes, a full figure, and hands that moved with the melody of a swan when she sewed one of Mrs. Lincoln’s gowns; she wore five thimbles—five—and they glittered like pieces of silver while her fingers fluttered in the somber light. She had once worked for Mrs. Jeff Davis, who would have ransomed her own skin to keep her, but Elizabeth wouldn’t move down to Montgomery with Mrs. Jeff, no matter how kind she was. It would have made her too sad to live around the Secesh, she told my wife. And Mother “kidnapped” Keckly from all the Cave Dwellers in the District, stole her right out of their hands. She got along exceedingly well with her mulatto seamstress. They spoke a curious kind of patois—like friends from some long forgotten past. Elizabeth had her own shop in the capital, but she created a second shop in Mary’s bedroom.
I happened to come in while Elizabeth was dressing her. They were haggling about the price of this or that. I sat down and fiddled with my gloves.
“Lizabeth, I can’t afford to pay big prices. We’re just from the West, and we are poor. I believe my husband will concur.”
The two of ’em must have sensed my blue unholies, seen my hollow face. I kept thinking of Major Anderson having to starve all his men at Sumpter, and I had to blot it from my mind. And so I preempted my wife’s call to poverty.
“I guess we can afford Mrs. Keckly, for a little while.”
My wife wasn’t pleased; her mouth went bitter all of a sudden; her eyes blinked. I’d interfered in her bartering. She’d bartered all through our marriage—with butchers, grocers, Irish maids—and the White House was no different. She had that look of a battalion commander in her eye.
“Oh, Mr. Lincoln, you are a child in matters of money. We’d be in the poorhouse if I listened to you reckoning.”
I could see how uncomfortable Keckly was, and so I sashayed onto another subject.
“Mother, you look charming in that dress.”
“Flatterer,” she said, but her eyes had stopped blinking, and she purred like a prize cat. Mary did look like an apparition at the first Lincoln Levee in magenta watered silk, as Keckly called it, with a wreath of red and white roses in her hair. Folks gawked at her. I shook so many hands, my fingers numbed up. And when Seward wanted to host our first State dinner at his mansion, considering how dark and forlorn the White House was, Mother bristled at him.
“Madame, it’s a hapless hotel for Presidents. It has no charm.”
Miss Hallie must have rifled the place, ripped it raw, taken some of her uncle’s furniture back to Wheatland, because the White House did look like a barn with chandeliers. That didn’t stop Mother. She had an upholsterer come in, borrowed whatever she could from Keckly’s clients, and shoved Seward aside. But Mary hadn’t calculated on Miss Kate.
She sat like a beautiful bird of prey, swiveled her long white neck as she eyed the chips in the silverware and the markings on the walls. Miss Kate didn’t even bother to hide her contempt—my wife was an insignificant article to her. She deserved to occupy the White House with her Pa, Secretary Chase, and not a yokel from Illinois and his upstart wife. And when she spoke in that melodious whisper of hers, the whole damn dining room was wrapped up in Miss Kate.
“The pheasant is scrumptious, Mrs. Lincoln. My father and I might have to steal the White House staff for one of our own dinners.”
“Goodness,” said my wife, fondling a twisted rose in her hair. “You can have our major domo. He isn’t worth the salt on your plate. But he is a kind fellow.”
That huntress peered into Mary’s blue eyes. “It’s not the major domo who interests me. I must compliment you on your couturière. Mrs. Keckly says she has no time for mere mortals. She has much more pressing concerns at the White House.”
That’s what stuck in Mother’s craw. The majestic tone of Miss Kate, that air of invincibility about her, as if nothing or no one could ever cut her down. She was twenty-one years old, and tycoons from every town were crawling to kiss her hand. But Mary had her own strong wind, her own fizzle-sticks, even if she was much stouter than Miss Kate, and loved to lie about her age.
“Ah, but I will recommend Lizabeth to you—as a personal favor from me and my husband. And you must come again, Miss Kate.”
Kate rose up with that swanlike neck of hers. “My dear Mrs. Lincoln, I shall be delighted to have you call on me, with your major domo at our dinner table!”
Chase and his daughter had moved out of their apartments at the Willard and into a brick mansion on E Street. An invite to one of her dinners had become the most precious ticket in town. Old Washington, with all its Cave Dwellers, flocked to her soirees. The only one who remained loyal to my wife was Mrs. Keckly. And when I felt the unholies coming on after one of our Cabinet meetings, I would cross the hall to Mary’s headquarters and listen in. I couldn’t save the Union flag in Charleston harbor without putting our men in the middle of a firestorm. So I crossed the hall and listened to some creole. It wasn’t hard to catch. They were talking about what Mrs. Jeff had told Elizabeth before she vanished with her furniture and her hatboxes and her husband’s prize horses. Lizzie, I would rather remain in Washington and be kicked out, than go to Alabama and be Mrs. President. But as soon as we go South, we will raise an army and march to Washington, and then I shall live in the White House.
The two Mrs. Presidents had never met, and they were still involved in a war over the White House. Elizabeth seemed to brood as she sat on Mary’s divan, while I could imagine the Rebels sneaking up from Alabama and bivouacking in Lafayette Park. I lit out of there—I had to be alone. The White House was packed with office seekers. I rushed out the rear door and wandered into the wild lands beside the Potomac.
I wasn’t alone very long. The twigs crackled—a man crept up to me with a gun in his hand. I figured he was stalking Presidents. I couldn’t holler my way out of this scrape. Then I recognized his derby and that trim beard of his—it was the railroad detective, Allan Pinkerton. Mary must have voiced her fears to General Scott, and the General had asked Pinkerton to guard the grounds as a special favor. I was wrong about the little detective. Pinkerton was carrying that gun for his own protection. He wanted to consult with me in private.
“Mr. President, that modiste who belongs to your wife . . .”
He meant Mrs. Keckly, but he had a damn detective’s way of declaring it.
“She’s invaluable, sir. We’d like to borrow her from your wife and send her to Montgomery on a special train.”
But Mary had chased Pinkerton out of her boudoir, called him a rascal for even suggesting that her mantua-maker spy on Mr. and Mrs. Jeff. That little tale cured my unholies, as I imagined Mother ripping into the railroad detective. And I left him there, in the wild lands, with his silver-handled Colt.
23.
A Mountain of Dust
I WATCHED THEIR WHITE tents bloom like malignant blossoms as I climbed up to the roof of the White House—as if we were the interlopers, and they were the real owners of the District, gathering their Parrott rifles and other ten-pounders and biding their time. They wore ragged homespun coats dyed deep yellow or butternut, and they looked like circus trainers with hatchets and long knives rather than soldiers of some identifiable army; and this randomness only added to the general gloom, bec
ause there would be no reason to their attack; they would come at us like savages in their piebald coats, that butternut color bleeding in the sun.
And that afternoon was the first time I heard the banshee cry of these wild men—their Rebel yell. It could crack your bones right where you stood, and make a man piss blood. They whooped and yawped with an unnatural glee that had nothing to do with the sounds of war. There were several Comanche among them who wore the same ragged butternut coats. They didn’t do most of the howling. I espied several dwarfs. They stood on other men’s shoulders with their red signal flags and kept signaling into the wind. I’m not sure the flags made much sense, but out of what cave or hill or perverse apple orchard did these dwarfs and Comanche and butternut warriors come from, with their hatchets and howls? Some of them had servants who lathered their beards, or carried ammunition belts and poured red wine from dented silver flasks, and howled along with the rest.
I had my own armed guards—Willie and Tad. They’d built a little fort on the roof, with a few broken rifles and blocks of wood, but we had no Comanche in our ranks, no dwarfs with red flags.
“Paw,” Tad said, shivering in the sun; the Rebs must have scared him in the right way, because his own little song wasn’t imperiled by his lisp. “Ye think they were born in hell? They’re like bloodhounds with boots and tents.”
I imagined those Rebel demons capturing the Long Bridge, crossing the Potomac, and massacring children on the White House lawn.
I shook myself out of my own disaster dream and scrutinized the Potomac with my telescope. I couldn’t see any signs of a rescue mission, no transports or barges filled with troops. “Where are they?” I muttered, collapsing the telescope and trying not to alarm Willie and Tad.
I Am Abraham Page 18