I went to Mary with the general’s despatch. I couldn’t find one particle of joy on her face, none of the bliss she’d had at the B&O, waiting with her hatbox and her footstool for a phantom car. I couldn’t enthrall her with the news about Bob.
“Father,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “Grant shouldn’t be that near our boy—his Butcher’s habits might spill onto Bob. Couldn’t you find something for him with the quartermaster, or else your Secretary of War, where Bob would be billeted in Washington?”
My feet were always cold. I had to warm them near the fire. I’d lope from shiver to shiver as I went through the corridors in my green shawl. And now my hands were shaking, too. I’d picked up Mary’s affliction—I was becoming as mercurial as my wife.
“Mother, he doesn’t want to be billeted in Washington. He’s had enough of us. He wants to see the war after five years at Harvard. He’s entitled to that, at least. You cannot keep coddling him.”
She’d arrived at some infernal bridge that could be crossed once, and only once, or she’d never come back with a moment of peace from that frayed edge. I had to bring her down, woo her off the bridge, but she would have smelled a whopper, so I couldn’t tell a bald-faced lie.
“A general’s family isn’t always near the front—Bob won’t have to follow the whistle of every bomb.”
“I’m still not glad about it,” she said. But that fork of dissatisfaction had disappeared from her forehead. And we had an extended truce until Bob arrived—in his captain’s bars. Mary showed him off wherever she could. Poor Bob had to escort her to shindigs in the Blue Room while she corralled some Senator in the hall and sang him a song. She bloomed like a winter flower around Bob. Her cheeks were always flushed. She had an inexplicable red rash at the back of her neck. She’d rub his sleeve and stand with her head on his shoulder, her satin slippers all curled out, like a ballet dancer. She called him Bobbie dear and darling Robert, sometimes even called him Abraham, and she’d cover her mouth like a little girl and commence to giggle.
“Robert,” she sang aloud, “your mother is losing half her mind—Lord knows what wisdom will fall from my mouth next.”
I was like a stranger, it seems, who happened to be her husband and President of the United States. I couldn’t break through that curtain Mary wove around Bob—nothing could. Finally she came to me, with all the bustle of her black silk flounces, in a moment of despair, her fat little hands moving like ferrets, her eyes unable to hold a strict gaze.
“You must write to Grant,” she announced. “You are the general of all his generals. I won’t be trifled with—or trampled on by that Butcher. I must have Bob for another week.”
She returned to her headquarters across the hall. I loped down the stairs in my winter boots, went out onto the lawn, the bite of February in my bones. I found Bob standing under a barren, wind-swept tree in his captain’s blouse. His throat was uncovered, and his gullet bobbed up and down, while his shoulders were weaving in the wind. He happened to glance up and I could see the furor in his eyes. And for a moment he looked like his mother—half mad.
“Father, I will not dance with her again—I’d rather set my uniform on fire, burn every patch.”
“It gives her so much pleasure, Son.”
“But it is unnatural. My brother officers will mock me. I have to rush from soiree to soiree, with my own mother on my arm. I’m not blind. All the Senators and matrons she wants to collect have begun to titter behind her back. And what must they think of you, Father, to allow it?”
I didn’t care a pin what they thought, all those leeches who sucked blood out of the war, with their government contracts and goose liver from Gautier’s, where my own generals loved to dine—except for Grant, who always dined in the field, with his men.
“Father, I could have joined some anonymous regiment. I didn’t need a special favor.”
“The favor was for me,” I said.
“No, no—you begged the general for Mother’s sake. To keep me close to the general’s skirts. But that’s what I am, Father—his puppy. Everyone’s careful around the Prince of Rails. Takes years for other men to make rank, and I was born a captain. I have had no training. I’ve never been under assault. I’m not even sure I could fire a gun.”
It was the longest conversation I’d ever had with Bob. I wanted him to laugh again. I took a gamble with Bob.
“Well, Son, consider yourself a political captain, sort of my eyes and ears—at Grant’s headquarters.”
He gave me one of Molly’s quizzical stares. “Your spy, you mean.”
“We’re all a bunch of spies, if it comes down to the essential business of rebellion. I wouldn’t want you to spy on your own general. I trust Grant. And you wouldn’t have to report to me, not on a regular basis. But you might give your Pa a little perspicacity, from time to time—about the war.”
“Perspicacity,” Bob muttered, and wandered out from under the branches that swayed in the wind. Then he turned to me with a flick of defiance. “Father, perhaps I could tell you a thing or two about headquarters—from time to time.”
SHE WOULD WANDER ABOUT, whirl like some caged animal—in her crinoline. No one dared interrupt her thoughts. She was as silent as General Grant, and even more mysterious. Her own powerful intuition must have told her how ruinous she had become on Bob’s little furlough to the White House. She wore a salmon tulle sacque on the day of his departure, and a headband garlanded with purple violets, like a giddy bride. She never clung to Bob, but she did swipe at him with her handkerchief on our carriage ride to the wharves, to get at a speck of dust near his eye.
There seemed to be an infinite parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, as procession followed procession. Officers rode in marvelous silver carriages with their concubines, as if the war had become a muffled drumbeat at some macabre bazaar—or harlequinade. Men in handcuffs marched along the Ave with large red labels tagged to their chests—I am a Pickpocket and a Thief—while members of the Provost’s squad prodded them with sticks and batons. Unlike these policemen, who had a scrofulous look, the pickpockets wore satin trousers and jackets of burning red silk, and were very bold and very shy. They paused on their march and bowed to Mary.
“You look immaculate, Madame.”
The policemen tripped them with their batons. “Desist! You cannot address the Lady President. It is illegal.”
Mary stood up in her salmon-colored tulle. “You must give them water,” she said, while our carriage proceeded with a jolt, and she watched her headband sail into the February wind.
“Timothy,” she shouted to the coachman, “I will have you flogged.”
We passed a cavalcade of hospital trucks loaded with nurses in dark tan traveling dresses; they looked like waxen creatures until they noticed Bob, and then their eyes filled with all the wonder of sweet fire. “Nan, Nan, there’s the young prince.”
Bob was panicked by this sudden notoriety. He would have liked to remain invisible in his seat. He scratched his mustache and ducked deeper into the carriage, as we cantered right onto the wharves, the horses’ hoofs sounding like celestial hammers on the hard wood—and it was as if we had entered some vast the-ay-ter on Sixth Street. The piers were packed with people—mechanics, carpenters, and clerks from the Navy Yard, wounded soldiers left on the wharves until an ambulance arrived, sutlers with their gunny sacks of goods, preparing to leave on the same small gunboat, clad in tin—the Juno—that would carry Bob to Grant’s headquarters at City Point. Then there were the captains’ wives, waiting to board in bell-shaped skirts; and roustabouts who loved to wander near the sheds and watch the constant flow of traffic.
All the bluster came to a sudden stop as Bob stepped off the carriage. Every eye was on Bob; the whole damn wharf could have come to celebrate his crossing. His face was like some variable mask where the emotions kept shifting. He couldn’t seem to locate who he was near the tinclad that would surrender him to City Point. It wasn’t fright or uncertainty. He must have sensed in his own
deep timber how tied he was to Mary, how volatile they were, how unanswerable to anything but their own turmoil. He had Mary’s feline nature. He wasn’t like Tad or his Pa. Tad’s sense of banditry was just under the surface. He was a buccaneer out of loneliness. But Bob loved to prowl.
And here were my two cat-creatures, who couldn’t decide whether to purr or claw each other to death. Mother wouldn’t have joined him on the Juno, with her hatboxes, like some captain’s concubine, but she could have annihilated him on the spot with that ferocious love of hers. They stood on the wharves together, Bob still gallant. He kissed Mary on the forehead, rubbed her cheek. And when her mouth trembled, he kissed her again and strode along the docks without a word.
Bob climbed onto the ironclad with all the concubines and sutlers and several other officers. A whistle shrieked across the morning wind; the twin smokestacks on board belched some black fire. Bob waved to us and went below.
We stood there as that tin tub broke away from the dock with a rattle that left a sting in my ears and then churned downriver—wasn’t much of a tub. It shivered up such a storm, I thought it would sink. I followed the wounds it left in the river, as if all that tin could cut deep. Mary was like a little general; she waved even after Bob went below.
48.
The Boy from Milledgeville
WE HAD BECOME the capital of butternut and gray, as deserters flocked into the District in tattered uniforms and cardboard shoes. They lined up at Lafayette Square, to take the oath of allegiance, hundreds in a single afternoon. I could see them on my way to the War Department, boys unraveling in front of my eyes, with black teeth, and black toes that shoved right out of the cardboard shoes, as nurses fed them sweet buns and let them have licks of coffee from a communal cup. They were neither soldiers nor civilians any longer, but lived in some no-man’s-land between North and South. Wagons would take them to some forlorn shelter at the Marine Barracks, where they would be shut away for the rest of the war, while they performed menial tasks for one of our departments. Grant didn’t want these shooflies to march with him. He considered half were secret agents put here by the Rebel White House, and the other half were worthless louts. The general was a bit disingenuous though. He knew the Rebels were leaking a regiment a day, and couldn’t override such a desertion rate, even if they took cadets out of their military college and conscripted boys of fourteen into their junior reserves.
I couldn’t recognize the town in this fifth year of rebellion. The generals no longer dined at Gautier’s; they’d all deserted us and gone to Grant. His headquarters on the James had become the new wartime capital and a Federal city all its own—with tents and houses for my commissioners and clerks, while we had the peculators and stragglers and little ghosts of war: hospitals where men lay groaning in darkened wards, caravansaries like the Willard and the National, where tycoons sucked on oysters in and out of season and made fortunes selling merchandise borrowed from Union stores, backstreet dens where deserters who didn’t take the oath lived in squalor, and sometimes haunted old, abandoned woodsheds and alleys beside the canal with impoverished vivandières, who had run out of festering pies to sell.
It was Mary who went among these desolate souls, fed them scraps from the kitchen, and gave the vivandières a portion of her clothes—a vast pile of outmoded skirts and bonnets from Springfield that had accompanied her to the capital on a separate car; she also had some old jackets and shawls for the men. I was dismayed at the habiliments Mother had collected—she couldn’t get rid of some ravaged ribbon box or a shoe with a splintered spine, but she would ramble through her boudoir at the White House and rescue some of her own garments, while she, Tad, and Elizabeth delivered her bounty in a wheelbarrow. I would catch them from my window, with Tad and Elizabeth steering the little truck, and Mother right behind them, her black veils like a flag in the wind. Mary seemed to have a desperate stride. She shuffled toward the Potomac in a mournful daze. Mother was marking time. Nothing could console my wife, who missed Bob without measure. She never talked of another furlough, never complained, never plotted some strategy to recapture Bob. She sat around and moped whenever she wasn’t with her refugees near the river.
So I was delighted to receive an invitation from the general, prompted by his wife, Julia, to come downriver. “Can you not visit City Point for a day or two? I would like very much to see you and I think the rest would do you good.”
Mother revealed nothing as I read her the invitation from Grant; not one muscle moved in her face, as if she had learned to disconnect herself from her own joys and desires—it astonished me, and troubled me, too.
Mother wouldn’t take Mrs. Keckly along—Keckly would have calmed her, but perhaps she didn’t want Julia Grant to see how dependent she was on her own couturière. So she brought one of her servants. We left in the middle of a squall—the twenty-third of March—arriving at the Arsenal Wharf in the early afternoon, with Tad and my bodyguard, Mr. Crook, and like good troopers, we climbed aboard the River Queen.
That night, while I was in the President’s stateroom with Mary, I dreamt that the White House was on fire; the oilcloth crackled and buckled up like breakers; the windows burst; the carpets in the East Room left a plume of smoke that traveled across the Mansion. I’m not sure why, but I took a certain pleasure in it all, as if I were the architect of this fire—the Arsonist-in-Chief.
I couldn’t keep quiet. I told Mary about my dream. I was the biggest damn fool on the Potomac. Mary started to moan. She never much trusted my dreams, but this one, she said, was an omen. She had two telegrams sent to the capital, and didn’t stop fidgeting until she heard from Mrs. Keckly.
There isn’t the littlest trace of a fire, Mrs. President.
My wife wasn’t reassured until Bob appeared at City Point in his captain’s bars. She marched down the gangplank with him, unable to mask her shiver of joy; it was Mary’s first smile in a month. But Bob couldn’t squire his own mother around. He had to return to headquarters—and from that moment, as Bob receded up the hill to Grant’s cabin—without her—Mary remained in a surly mood. Her mouth quivered, as she kept perusing that hill. Nothing could please her, certainly not the two other prominent ladies at City Point, neither Mrs. Grant nor Mrs. General Ord, who was much younger than my wife, with saucy red hair and a piquant nose. She had warm, gentle eyes, and Mary didn’t take a shine to her at all. My wife expected to be surrounded by her royal subjects. It was some kind of disillusion. And she was chagrined when neither lady would bow to her.
Bob was embarrassed when he saw how imperious his mother could be as a guest of Julia Grant, while he himself was half in love with Mrs. General Ord. That much I could tell, and I could also imagine him dancing with her at one of the camp soirees. Mary wouldn’t allow poor Mrs. General Ord to say a word at dinner, interrupting her all the time. Her real target was Julia Grant, who had to squint constantly out of her walleye. Mary couldn’t forgive Julia for inviting me here, as if it had diminished her somehow, exposed her crazy desire to be around Bob. And when General Ord asked what should be done with Jeff Davis if he was ever captured, Mary broke in with a growl. “Why, whup him like a dog, for stealing our boys—whup him until the bleeding never stops.”
Then she turned to Julia Grant with a cherubic smile. “Suppose we ask Mrs. Grant. She ought to enlighten us. What ever shall we do with Mr. Jeff?”
Julia was far more diplomatic than my wife, and wouldn’t fall into one of Mary’s snares.
“I think,” she said, licking her lip as she looked into my wandering eye with her own walleye, “Mr. Jeff can be trusted to the mercy of our most gracious President.”
That silenced Mary; she sat with a vacant stare, clutching her knife and fork until her knuckles turned red, but in the middle of our plum pudding, she started in again. “Mr. Grant, I’m told you can run into George Washington anywhere in Richmond, find a portrait of him on every street corner. Now isn’t that a queer thing?”
“Not so queer,” said Ulysses. “
After all, he was from Virginia.”
“And beloved by North and South,” said General Ord.
My wife wasn’t satisfied. “His face is on their currency. They use Washington to legitimize their tyrannical impulses. Mr. Jeff calls him father of the second Revolution, forgetful of the first.”
Mary was right, of course. The Rebels claimed that Washington—or his spirit—would have bolted from the Union and fought on the Rebel side. It was another example of their piracy and plunder. They wanted to drag France and England into the conflict by invoking the one real Father we had . . .
Mary couldn’t stop there. She babbled about my Secretary of War and Grant’s positions at Petersburg; she chattered on and on—until I had to slow the engine down.
“Mother, that’s enough. You’ll mix up General Grant—until he can’t think about the war.”
The general was much more magnanimous. Perhaps he could feel the pain of a woman who mourned her husband while he was still alive and lived in a constant state of fear—that fear had deranged her, a little, and obliged Mother to put on an arch mask when she also had a lot of sweetness in her nature. Grant saw right under the mask.
“Mrs. President isn’t bothering me at all. I’m always mixed up before a battle.”
And we managed to return to the River Queen without any more scrapes.
Mary’s sullenness was gone once we met with the wounded soldiers. One of them looked like little more than a skeleton. He watched me with an air of cautious hostility. He didn’t have a tooth in his head. It took me a while to realize he was a Rebel. “What’s your name, son?”
I Am Abraham Page 35