I let them clatter around until her Cabinet intruded upon mine. She would come to me with her “womanly intuition,” inspired by the Chevalier and his little circle, who loved to play politics. Perhaps the Chevalier wanted to become my new Secretary of State. I ain’t certain, but it seemed like that.
She was shrewd enough not to mention Wikoff, but I could figure out which cabal had been coaching her. I was stretched out on my rattan sofa, reading the New York Times, which hadn’t left off crucifying me and my Cabinet, when Mary sauntered in, wearing one of Keckly’s creations, a silk gown that blossomed on her like the plumage of some rare bird. She was all breathless in her gown of feathers. She started with an attack on my Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Chase, who’d been caring for wounded soldiers in his E Street mansion. Miss Kate had converted his parlor and study into a sanitarium after Bull Run; there were no more midnight suppers on E Street.
“Father,” she said, without a bit of rancor in her voice, “I do wish you would inquire into the motives of Mr. Chase. He belittles you behind your back.”
Mary had pushed right up against my spleen. “Is that the Chevalier’s opinion?”
Her face went white as the powder on Willie and Tad’s chalkboard.
“What Chevalier? Father, you must be delirious!”
And she gathered up her silken feathers and the wondrous folds of her gown and marched out of my office. That wasn’t the end of it. She mounted another campaign within a week. Mary wanted me to rescue a militiaman named William Scott. He was a Vermonter who had fallen asleep while on picket duty and was about to be executed for dereliction. Mary gathered her own little army in her behalf—Tad. He came to me in the middle of a Cabinet meeting, but it wasn’t to slip onto my lap.
“Paw,” he said in his vernacular lisp, “if it was your own little boy who was just tired after fightin’, and marchin’ all day, that he could not keep awake, much as he tried to—would you have him shot to pieces like some buzzard, would you, Paw?”
I had to retreat. I couldn’t fight so eloquent an advocate, even if I didn’t enjoy interfering in McClellan’s military matters. After I was done with the Cabinet, I raced downstairs. The Chevalier was dozing on a divan. I couldn’t drag him along the Potomac on a rail. It would have damaged Mary’s pride—Wikoff was her confidant and her protégé.
I scrambled over to Little Mac’s headquarters. As usual, he was much too busy to meet with the President. I walked right past his phalanx of aides and went into McClellan’s private office. His blue-gray eyes seemed to startle out of his head. The little general had never seen me in such a shivering rage.
“General,” I said, without a particle of politeness, “I’m the one urgency you have—not Richmond, not the Rebels, but Abraham Lincoln. And I’m a man who does not relish barking at his generals.”
He was still kind of stunned.
“I’d like you to issue a Pardon for Private William Scott of K Company, the Third Vermont Infantry.”
Finally he spoke, but in a subdued voice. “On what grounds, Excellency?”
“Any damn grounds you want. But you could give as a reason that it was by request of the Lady President.”
He pondered that. The Lady President. One Lincoln had been quite enough. And now he had to contend with the Chief Executive’s wife. He’d misjudged Mary’s worth, never bothered to notice her intelligence or her stubborn streak.
While he was pondering, I left him there with his books and his maps. I saw a red streak of railroad lines, around Manassas Junction, and a bunch of poker chips—white and blue—that could have marked out Rebel formations and munitions depots on one of his maps. He must have spent half the day shoving those chips around, when he wasn’t riding his horse from camp to camp, or peering down at us from his gondola in the sky.
28.
Flub Dubs
SHE’D BEEN FINAGLING with that White House gardener, John Watt. They moved around funds they didn’t really have. I should have shaken her like a petulant child. Things were complicated in the middle of an insurrection. Members of the White House staff had to have some kind of military appointment or they couldn’t be paid. Mary conspired with my Secretary of War to have her gardener appointed to the cavalry and stationed at the Mansion. I was powerless. I wouldn’t block one of the Lady President’s own commissions. I was glad she hadn’t assigned the Chevalier as Captain of the White House Watch—he was near the Crimson Room often enough to command some kind of post.
She was more interested in the gardener now—John Watt. She had his wife appointed as White House steward. Most of Madame Watt’s salary went to pay Mary’s creditors, I imagine. I’d catch her huddling with a Washington upholsterer, or a minor prince from a dry goods palace, who was always accompanied by mysterious men with hats over their eyes. A dozen footstools appeared one day, and were gone the next. Draperies arrived, and were never installed. The East Room was like one of Little Mac’s encampments, where a whole battery of furniture kept shifting around—nothing was safe, not even the spittoons. I couldn’t rest my eye on a single marker; Mary suffered from some terrible affliction, like a madwoman bartering in her sleep. In less than nine months Mother had swallowed up that twenty-thousand-dollar fund Congress had given her to refurbish the White House with carpets and all the other flub dubs that were dear to my wife. And she still owed another six or seven thousand dollars.
I wasn’t blind to her predicament. Mother had to drive the rats out of that maze of rooms in the cellar before the whole Mansion was infested. She had to buy new china and Parisian wallpaper. She couldn’t have a Crimson Room without crimson carpets. I’d catch her in the middle of the night with a hammer in her hand. She had to nail down some carpet, or fix the leg of a favorite chair. She’d gone to Manhattan with that gardener of hers and spent six thousand dollars on curtains, sofas, and hassocks. I hadn’t been President more than a couple of seasons, and still Mother worried about my prospects. The little sultans who let her borrow to the hilt would demand payment in full once I had to vacate the White House. I learned all this from Nicolay & Hay, who were like my own detective bureau.
While they spied on the Hell-Cat, as they called her, she angled to get them fired. And she almost did. In the end, with no more means to hide her misconduct, Mary came to me. I was glad she didn’t bring my boys into the fracas and have Willie or Tad sing about the high cost of chalk in their classroom. She wore a simple black gown with long sleeves and only a single feather—kind of a mourner’s costume—without a particle of decoration in her hair. She’d been crying. But she wasn’t crying now, and she didn’t aggrandize herself, tempt me with the ghost of Dolley Madison.
“Father, I overspent.”
“We’ll manage,” I said. “But, Mother, it would stink in the land to have it whispered that the money for furnishing this house was tossed into the wind by the President when soldiers are freezing and don’t have proper blankets and shoes.”
Mary blinked at me. “Wind,” she said. “I didn’t . . .”
“I’ll never approve the bills for flub dubs for this damn old house.”
Her shoulders shivered under that mourner’s costume. There was a wall of frozen pain on the side of her face, like a momentary paralysis. Her mouth twitched. She had a worse stutter and lisp than Tad—and a terrible pout. Her temples throbbed. I knew what she was trying to pronounce. So I pronounced it for her.
“Flub dubs.”
And her old flare of anger came back. She no longer had a lisp.
“Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “I’m not in the habit of buying flub dubs. Mr. Buchanan and his niece turned the White House into a wilderness. Miss Hallie tinkered with the East Room and left our own quarters uninhabitable. I will not have my boys live in a field of rats. I spent more than I had the means to spend. But the task was prodigious.”
I meant to kiss Molly and hold on to that sweet musk of hers, but I couldn’t. Was I jealous of the Chevalier and his lust for literature? Did I want to tear down
the Crimson Room with its Parisian wallpaper? But she shouldn’t have been that foolish, to turn a gardener into a finagling cavalry man, and fill the Mansion with some sultan’s carpets while I had to hold the Union together with the flat of my hand.
I let her wander away, the skirts of her gown gliding against the oilcloth with a strange whish while I stayed there, in the dumps. Tad’s kitten leapt onto my lap. Tabby commenced to tear at my sleeve, and pretty soon it had a tiny batch of thread in its paw—I could feel that little cat unravel me. I stuffed him in my pocket, while I was raveling out somewhere on some private moon.
29.
Noel 1861
I COULD HEAR THE church bells clap like a melody of thunder in this first year of war—and the rumble of men returning from battle without their boots on, ambulances caught in the ruts of a road, boys with blood on their faces trying to outrun a cannon’s brutal song. I’d just come back from McClellan’s camp with Mary and the boys to offer little gifts to the soldiers in their winter huts. We couldn’t stay long—there was an epidemic of measles. But Mother and her White House sewing circle had knit socks for the soldiers. And despite the measles, Mary traveled from hut to hut, with bundles of woolen socks until she looked like some strange martyr. She asked every single soldier his name and where he was from. Mother could see how gaunt they were; she had nothing from her garden to give them in the December frost, so she dug into her bundle, and they kissed her hand as she delivered the socks.
“Bless you, Madame President.”
We could only bring a pittance for them. I was feuding with the War Department. A clever little band of foxes in Manhattan were making a fortune speculatin’ on this conflagration—the war was like a burning barn, and we were saddled with half-blind horses and pistols that shattered after the first shot. Soldiers went into the field with gimcrack guns that could make them lose a hand or an eye and might get them killed. I couldn’t even complain to Little Mac. He fell ill with typhoid fever just before Christmas. No one was permitted to see him, not even his generals.
“The bottom is out of the tub,” I told my secretaries.
Bob had come down from Harvard in his crimson cravat, and I felt impoverished in front of him with that little rope of silk around my neck. He’d run away from home as a little boy. It was Mary who found him hiding under the porch. I was out on the circuit, in one of the far counties, while Bob must have been dreaming of a far county of his own. He was an outrider, like his Pa. We had a similar streak of terrifying loneliness.
We managed to put on a good show in front of Mary and Bob’s little brothers, who idolized him. Tad ran through the corridors like an Injun.
“Bobbie’s back, Bobbie’s back.”
He sat with Mary, held her hand. Her eyes began to wander. She wasn’t fooled by Bob’s civility. She could feel his absence, and she had to fight her own hysteria.
“Robert, do tell us about the Cambridge societies, and all the fun you’ve had. I still recollect that soufflé we shared at one of the Harvard clubs.”
“Mother,” he said, “there’s little to tell.”
He knew how to cut her to the bone. He wasn’t cruel, just remote. And when he saw her tears, he relented and allowed his mother to stroke his hair.
“I’m popular,” he blurted out. “Oh, the other fellers are so curious about you and Father.”
Mary perked up. “Curious about me? I declare, that’s a curious curiosity. What ever do they ask?”
“About Camp Mary.”
Mary ruffled her nose. “That little thing? I was visiting a field of tents, handing out bonbons and handkerchiefs, and a colonel with a goatee cracked a bottle of champagne over a carriage wheel—it was a regular explosion. And he bowed to me, this colonel with the goatee, and said, ‘Madame President, I christen these grounds as Camp Mary, in honor of your war work.’ That’s all it was.”
Bob wasn’t even listening. He kissed Mary on the forehead and promenaded out of the family parlor. I found him in the corridor.
“Father,” he said, “I want to go to war. The other fellers are joining up, and I can’t. I feel like a piece of crystal—the President’s boy—too precious to run off with some regiment. It isn’t fair.”
I should have encouraged him to run off, but the news would have killed his Ma. The mere sound of a fizzle-stick or the boom of some carriage could set her mind to fly away with assassination plots. She was fearful whenever I left the Mansion, fearful that some disgruntled office seeker might rip me apart in our own public rooms. She assigned Willie and Tad as my bodyguards, and then worried that the boys might get hurt bodyguarding me. Her eyes were in a constant glaze. I had to reassure her half the time that Bob was safe at Harvard.
“I’m glad, Son, but it would break your mother’s heart.”
Bob’s eyes went cold. He bowed to me, like one of my own ambassadors. Then he hurried down the hall. I couldn’t get near him after that—Bob was like a coyote in a gentleman’s jacket. He pulled away from all of us, though he did play Christmas games with his brothers on the White House lawn, utilizing leather pouches as bowling balls.
And he would watch them ride their ponies.
The White House stables had multiplied with the war. Little Mac housed some of his own horses with us, and the boys’ ponies were now government horses, too. Half the cavalry used our barn. Little Mac could have usurped our stables for his cavalry, but he didn’t. He shared the premises with us. And until he caught typhoid fever, he rode through the President’s Park with his usual fury.
It was Christmas Eve, and some drunken soldier must have dropped a lantern, and soon the whole barn was ablaze. We didn’t lose one horse, not even the ponies. The stable hands slapped their rumps and led them out of that conflagration with rifle shots. But nothing could control them away from the barn, no matter how hard the soldiers hee-hawed and waved their wet blankets. We had a stampede—a hundred riderless horses raced across the capital’s streets, overturning carriages, ripping off the signs of hotels with their flanks. One horse bit a man—chewed half his coat as he was coming out of a saloon. You could hear the horses’ neighing for hours, and it was a bloodcurdling call.
The snow fell right in the middle of that stampede—as if nature was conspiring with McClellan’s horses. The flakes rode the wind, like a crystal cloud that followed the horses’ tracks. Tad and Willie were worried about their ponies. I had to put Mother to bed.
“Mr. Lincoln, you won’t let our boys loose—like the ponies.”
“No, Mother.”
“And why is Robert so distant all of a sudden?”
“That’s the habit of a Harvard man,” I explained.
Bob and I went down to the stables in our winter boots. The cinders were still flying, and we had to cover our faces. Bob’s coat suddenly caught fire, and I had to slap at him with my sleeves until the flames relented a little—and then I hurled him to the ground like a potato sack and dug him into a pile of snow. He looked up at me with the flakes in his eyes—a porous mask, pocked with jewels.
I wasn’t pondering the war, not even the soldiers in their huts. I was thinking of my son—how he was vanishing into his own wilderness, and I couldn’t catch him. Bob looked like a creature created in a curtain of fire and snow.
We heard a gentle noise, like a child whimpering. And Little Mac stepped right through that curtain of snow without his britches. He was wearing cap and boots, with his field jacket over his nightshirt, and clutching the reins of two spotted ponies.
He tipped his cap and handed both pair of reins to Bob. Then he saluted me.
“Good night, Excellency. I still have the fever—I’m going back to bed.”
He was another snowman, flushed with wind and fire.
“Wait,” I said, in a panic. “You haven’t been properly introduced to my boy.”
He smiled, stroked his chin beard, as grand as any general in a nightshirt, grander even, with his spurs on.
“Oh, I’ve met with Bob before,”
said my General-in-Chief. “While I was riding in your park—we talked artillery.”
Bob knew more about Parrott rifles than his own artillery captains, according to Little Mac. I was stupefied. Bob had never talked artillery with his own Paw.
Parrott rifles, Parrott rifles rang in my ear like some military tune. I heard a heartless pounding in my ear—like thunder in the snow. And then the whinnying of animals, wild yet familiar, like a mournful wail. McClellan stood there—didn’t move a muscle. And those delinquent horses, two or three at a time, suddenly appeared like children with wet manes, bumped their noses against Little Mac and made no other sign. Bob and I might as well have been invisible as the riderless horses returned. McClellan whistled once, and a dozen horse soldiers arrived with blankets.
He went from horse to horse with a blanket, whispered, “Whoa, Rider, whoa, Tom,” and walked into the snow with his little troop of cavalry horses; some had bruised eyes and bloody ears, others limped on broken hooves. I’d misjudged the man and his hauteur; he wanted a world of soldiers, where he and the Secesh could meet, general to general, battle in the sun and then smoke a cigar with some lost brother from West Point—civilians didn’t count, only horses, his men and boys, his encampments, reconnaissance balloons, and artillery trains. I wasn’t sure where he’d stable his hundred horses tonight; perhaps in some other cavalry barn, or at his own headquarters, where he’d croon Christmas carols in his nightshirt, this singular man, who was part magician, part fraud . . .
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