I Am Abraham

by Charyn, Jerome

  So long as the beau monde revel

  At my Lady-President’s Ball!

  I pitied that poor boy, but was disheartened by the unfairness of the poem.

  “Mary, you’ve visited a hundred privates like him in their hospital beds. You even have a camp named after you.”

  “And a polka,” she said. “The Lord is punishing me now for my pride—and my expensive frills. I’ve been remiss. Those who urged me to that heartless step of having a ball now ridicule me for it, and not one of them has asked about Willie. I have had evil counselors! And all of them will have to pay. I will lock the public rooms. We will never have another levee, or another gala.”

  She took to wearing a veil, and she muttered prayers to herself, used incense she kept in a fiery silver ball—it was to scarify the Angel of Death hovering over Willie’s sick room. She wasn’t that eager to have Willie’s best friend—Bud Taft—visit the White House, but when Willie woke from his delirium, he was lonesome without Bud, and I couldn’t get that little boy to go home.

  “Gosh, Mr. Lincoln,” Bud said, with God-awful red eyes, “I couldn’t abandon Willie just like that. He’ll start to cry when he wakes up and finds me gone.”

  After it got late and Bud fell asleep near Willie’s bed, I picked up the boy, wrapped him in a blanket, and had my own bodyguard carry Bud home. Tad couldn’t visit his brother because he, too, now suffered from the same chills and high fever.

  I returned to the sick room and found Mrs. Keckly standing by the bed. She was taking care of all the Lincolns now and practically lived at the White House. My wife couldn’t have borne the burden of two sick boys without Elizabeth. Mother would keep vigil all the time, wandering from Willie’s room to Tad’s, like a sleepwalker with a wet rag. She kept wiping her hands, wiping her hands, and wouldn’t stop. Elizabeth had to tug at Mary to get that rag out of her hand.

  Now she tugged at me. “Rest up, Mr. Lincoln. I’ll mind the boy.”

  “But he might call for me, Madame Elizabeth.”

  And the sliver of a smile broke through her sorrow.

  “I’ll know where to find you, sir, even in this big house.”

  The stewards were very quiet, not wishing to disturb our boys. The maids curtsied and kissed my hand. Bob had come down from Harvard to be with us during our double affliction—two boys with bilious fever. He helped Elizabeth with her chores and was the only one who could calm my wife. She listened to Bob, like his own child.

  “Mother, go to bed!”

  For once, he wasn’t even wearing Harvard’s crimson cravat, nor did he say a word about gallivanting off to the army with Little Mac. He seemed to summon a strength none of us had. I sat with him in the sick room, while he held Willie’s hand. Little Mac’s own surgeon arrived to look after our boy—a major in McClellan’s medical corps. He had blood on his tunic from the operating table, and he was so damn tired, the color had bled from his eyes, like a salmon trout on a silver hook. He listened to Willie’s heart with the twisted tubes of a stethoscope, then took Bob aside, talked to him near the window, and vanished with his medical kit and the sour perfume of blood.

  “Bob,” I whispered, “what did that damn sawbones say about Willie?”

  “He’ll survive the crisis. The Doc gave his guarantee.”

  Guarantee. Our boy had had five or six surgeons, with their fancy syrups and hacksaws sticking out of their pockets, but Willie never stopped coughing strings of blood. He drank and drank, yet his mouth was all blistered. His eyes wandered from Bob to my beard, from my beard to the wall, as if he could suck meaning from every single glance.

  And then his hand went soft and the wandering stopped. His throat made one tiny rattle and a couple of chirps, each one faint as the last. The wind went out of him—and Willie was gone. My oldest boy wiped Willie’s eyes and took charge. He summoned Elizabeth and had her wash and comb his dead brother.

  I watched Yib undress my blue-eyed boy, pluck off his nightshirt, and I was terrified—not of the dying, that I understood, but of his swollen belly and the pale shine of his skin. He had no flesh on his arms, no flesh at all.

  Bob recalled what had happened when Little Eddie died twelve years ago, and his mother had surrendered to her nervous fits. He’d been around her while I was out on the circuit, his classmates poking fun of Cockeyed Bob—the two of us still had that lazy eye.

  He combed her hair with loving strides of the brush and sang to her, kept her out of the sickroom, so she wouldn’t see Willie’s pale mouth and ravished body. He was gentle to his mother, even gentler with me. I should have been the one to console him. I couldn’t.

  “Father, it was the typhoid. Nothing would have helped.”

  My stranger-son took me in his arms and stopped my shivering.

  “And if the same thing should happen to Tad?” I moaned, utterly unmanned.

  “I’ll watch over him—I will.”

  I let my boy go about his bidness. I was hampering him, like some melancholy aide. I wandered into the sickroom—a death room now—and watched Elizabeth wash and dress my blue-eyed Willie. She was bent over, moving with a marvelous, mournful rhythm, as if her hands could drum a little life into him.

  I looked at my dead boy—his crystal eyes shut now, his shoulders as narrow as pins.

  I covered my own face with my hands.

  “It’s hard, hard to have him die.”

  THE EMBALMER WAS a little man with a derby and a general’s goatee; he had the delicate fingers and musical gait of a dancing master; his apprentice, who couldn’t have been older than Willie and had some of Willie’s blond hair, carried all his embalming fluids and other tricks of the trade in a satchel that dragged at his feet—the boy could have been lugging cannonballs around, and nearly stubbed my toe.

  The embalmer cuffed him on the ear. “Careful, careful. That’s the President’s foot.”

  The boy seemed so harassed that I wanted to rescue him from the embalming business. The embalmer dove into his satchel and plucked out a portrait of Willie with blond hair and blue eyes painted in.

  “Mr. Lincoln, is that the likeness you and the Lady President are looking for?”

  The question troubled me; I didn’t know what to say to this ghoul, who was about to manhandle my own little boy and suck the juices out of him. Bob had to rescue his Paw.

  “Sir, we do not want my mother to be shocked by what she sees. That is the sole purpose of your visit.”

  The embalmer smiled; he was much more comfortable around my older boy.

  “I understand perfectly, Mr. Robert.”

  He tipped his derby, grabbed his satchel in one hand and his apprentice in the other, and disappeared inside the Green Room. I heard the lock click; the embalmer had bolted himself inside. He worked for six solid hours and communicated with no one. Then the lock clicked again, and he emerged from the Green Room with his apprentice, their own faces embalmed with a waxen look, as he bowed and ushered us in like a ballet master.

  I was scared to look. All I could remember was that pale skeleton with sunken cheeks—but the skeleton was gone. Willie had the sweetest smile. That embalmer must have engineered flesh with his balls of wax. Willie’s fingers were polished; his cheekbones weren’t sharp as knives; the apprentice had washed and combed Willie’s hair. And now I understood the embalmer’s art. He used a live boy to groom a dead one.

  I got them out of the Mansion as quick I could. While Willie lay there in his silver casket, Bob summoned his mother; she descended in her black veils and didn’t want to enter the Green Room. Bob had to entice her, lure her in, and get Mary to look inside the silver casket.

  “That’s not my Willie,” she said. “It’s a wax boy. His cheeks are all rouged.”

  Bob kept her in the Green Room, and we had our own private service—there were no prayers. Mother was decked out in her widow’s weeds—layer upon layer—until most of her was obscured under her veils, but the little I could see of her mouth was white as chalk. We couldn’t control
her wailing—no one could, not even Bob—but he kept her afloat with his quiet power.

  She couldn’t bear to face other mourners, she said, and wouldn’t attend the funeral. “I won’t parade in public with my Willie gone.” So Bob delivered her back upstairs while the casket was shut tight with its silver screws.

  The services were held in the East Room, where my wife had presided over the Lady-President’s Ball. I remember how the caterers had arrived from Manhattan two whole afternoons before the ball—Monsieur Maillard with a platoon of chefs. We all stared at pastry guns that could sculpt nougat mountains and spin sugar into beehives or revenue cutters and mermaids leaping out of waterfalls composed of charlotte russe, while Mother babbled with Monsieur Henri in French. She waved her arm like a magic wand and yet another piece of confection appeared. Both our boys had a candy mountain named after them, even if they were too ill to feed on their mountain, and Mother herself would become the first fatality of her own ball . . .

  The Capitol had shut down for the day in remembrance of Willie. Willard’s canceled its afternoon tea. The bordellos of Marble Alley wouldn’t accept a single client. Little Mac arrived at the White House in his brocaded uniform and embraced Bob—he looked like a popinjay in his yellow sash. He’d come with his wife, Nell, who didn’t have his hauteur in her hazel eyes. She was, in fact, much prettier than McClellan in a black cloak without a warrior’s ribbons. She clutched my hand and didn’t have to say a word.

  The roof rattled like a lumbering barn and the chandeliers shivered—a terrific storm seemed to rip right through our attic just as the general’s aides filed into the funeral with all the majesty of their polished chevrons. They might have smirked if they hadn’t promised Miss Nell to be on their best behavior. Their loyalty was to the General-in-Chief and his bride. A window shattered somewhere in the house. Mary’s own preacher talked about Providence. I didn’t listen to a word—I found myself in a carriage pulled by two black horses with silver bells on their bridles, and Bob right beside me. We were riding to a chapel vault in Georgetown.

  Our carriage rocked under the assault of the whipping rain. I saw a building collapse—its roof spun in the air like a murderous projectile. An uprooted tree was in the middle of the road. The ground seemed to saunter like a swollen snake. The wind curled the horses’ manes. A rocking chair in the grass could have been the relic of some lost battlefield.

  “Father,” Bob said, “we may have to put her away for a while.”

  “Put who away?”

  “Mother,” he said. “Her mind is clouded.”

  I stared at this general, who was planning his line of battle.

  “Bob, it’s been a great shock, and we’re not over it. We’ve both witnessed Mary’s dry spells.”

  “But this is worse,” he said. “We may have to lock her up at St. Elizabeths.”

  I was pretty much silent after that, with the rain pelting our leather carriage like live bombs. I’d visited the government asylum, a brick castle across the Navy Yard Bridge; St. Elizabeths sat on its own hill—the castle had a crenellated roof and cages in its back yard that served as a storage bin for tigers and elephants from the Smithsonian—you could hear the elephants trumpet their own sad cause from the Sixth Street docks. I took Tad and Willie to see the tigers once; their coats were covered with sores, and they had drugged eyes; they weren’t much better off than the lunatics inside . . .

  MOTHER GOT RID of Willie’s toys and clothes, tossed them into a barrel—wouldn’t even offer a trinket to one of the White House’s colored boys. She couldn’t bear to look at his picture or one of his poems. The least mention of Willie would have her fly into a rage. Not even Keckly, who was mistress of her wardrobe, could escape Mother’s wrath. She’d become a Juggernaut—you were overrun if you got into her way. I wouldn’t have been bothered much if she hadn’t hurt our other boy. Tad must have reminded her too much of Willie. She cackled at him, nearly struck him, too, her fist flying out from within her welter of black crêpe and veils.

  “You’re not my son. You’re some impostor who happens to live here—go away, or I’ll kill you.”

  Molly couldn’t have meant that, but Elizabeth and I still had to watch over Tad.

  “Paw, is Yib my mama now?”

  I didn’t know how to tell him that his mama wasn’t right. She hated the corridors where Willie had walked, the servants who had looked into Willie’s eyes, the very walls that had witnessed his pranks with Tad, and she must have hated herself for being alive while Willie’s bones were in a crypt. God had punished her in a furnace of afflictions.

  I would catch her biting her own fist. And she would flail at me.

  “Mr. Lincoln. You were dancing downstairs with Miss Kate while our boy had the fever. You kissed her, had both your hands inside her skirts. You brought a strumpet into this house. That’s why God has abandoned us . . . while the beau monde was reveling at my Lady-President’s Ball.”

  You couldn’t reason with her, and I didn’t try. I let her whack at me until she got a little tired. She would withdraw into her bedroom in the crêpe of a demented queen, with Keckly as her companion and nurse—she had no other friends in the capital. Sometimes she would wail for Willie half the night, with the sounds ripping through the walls.

  “Where’s my angel boy? Who stole him from me? Was it that chocolatier, Henri Maillard? I’ll smother him in his own charlotte russe.”

  Bob called her a candidate for that hospital on the hill, but he had much more patience than his Pa. If she passed him in the corridor in her mountain of crêpe, he would peck his mother’s hand and survey her with his own mountain of pity.

  He wouldn’t leave while Taddie tossed with the typhoid. It was Tad who kept him here, not his mother’s mourning. Tad would only take his dose of medicine from Bob’s hand, or mine. And the moment Tad’s crisis passed, Bob had to pack. His jaw was bristling with emotion. He was a boy who never cried, not even as a little-un. He offered to skip a semester at Harvard, stay here with us, but I wouldn’t allow it.

  So I watched over Tad. He would sit perched on my shoulder at Cabinet meetings, like some obligatory owl, or would hide under my desk when I had some writing to do. Then I would carry him down the hall, with his head ducking under the chandeliers, and both of us would sleep on my narrow bed.

  Still, matters got worse once we went into April; the lamps sputtered as Molly wandered around in her veils and slapped a couple of servants for bringing up Willie in her presence. So I crashed into her headquarters in my old subaltern’s shirt that I used as a dressing gown. She was sobbing with Mrs. Keckly at her side, aswim in black crêpe.

  “Mother, you cannot hide Willie’s death under your veils.”

  I could see her mouth sucking against all that black silk. I’d startled her. I must have looked like some crazed Cossack.

  “Father,” she muttered, as if she were in a trance, “everything appears a mockery when my idolized one is not with us.”

  Took her gently by the hand and led her to the window.

  “Mother, do you see that large red castle on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

  Molly was silent for a moment, like a general gathering the last troops she had left. Her eyes blazed—then she gave up the battle. She dug at her heart, as if she were about to stab herself with a sharpened silver spoon. And a kind of clever smile erupted on her mouth as she chanted to herself about the beau monde and the Lady-President’s Ball.

  I COULD HAVE BEEN a sleepwalker, like my wife. Weary as I was, I put a shirt over my subaltern’s gown, decked myself in a green shawl, and walked out the Mansion well after midnight. It was no idle march. I saluted the armed guards who never questioned one of my rambles, and was nearly run down by a barouche full of drunken officers. The carriage lurched to a halt. And then an officer leapt down from the roof with the slight contempt of a cavalry man for all noncombatants, clicked his heels, and said, “It wa
s unconscionable, Mr. President. Our coachman was blind. But I don’t blame him. I should have noticed ye, and I did not.”

  I could tell from his swagger that he must have served with McClellan. And there was no getting free of him now. He insisted that I ride with him and his fellow officers, who had none of his flair. I wouldn’t get into his military car. I hung from the coachman’s handle, like some silver wraith with hair on his chin.

  “The Patent Office,” I said, and we flew into the wind, up past Willard’s and onto F Street. It was the first moment of delight I’d had since Willie’s death. I was unencumbered, unshackled, clutching that handle on the outside of a car. And then the Patent Office rose out of the fog, like some benign monstrosity that covered an entire block—half the town could have lived inside its marble pillars. My Secretary of War had moved all the Patent Office examiners to a back stairway, and converted the building into a barracks and a morgue—and a military hospital in three compartments under the ornate ceiling of the second floor. I had no trouble gaining entry, even in my unusual garb. The male nurses and chief surgeon saluted me. The chief’s name was Mallory. He’d suffered a nervous collapse during Shiloh, after presiding over the amputation tables for thirty-six hours, until his gown was one great smear of blood, his face a grim mask, and his fingers nearly ruined from the mark of his own scalpel and hacksaw—and still he cut, until his aides had to subdue him, and he returned from Shiloh with a slight tremor and half his thumb gone. And now he was stationed here, a chief surgeon who no longer amputated limbs, but could guide the hacksaws of younger surgeons like a maestro and rally nurses who’d been on the wards without a moment of rest. He wore carpet slippers, like the President of the United States. He was the gentlest sort of man, and I could imagine what all the hacking had done to his constitution.

  He still wore his surgeon’s cap, like some great thinker out of the Bible.

  “Mr. President, I’m so sorry about your loss. We worshiped the young prince.”

  I couldn’t talk about Willie, couldn’t even thank the chief surgeon for his remembrance of my little boy.