Tad-d-die—I—am—des-s-s-o-late—not—to—be—with—you—and—Fah-thuh—on—your—b-b-birth-day. I—love—you—more—and—more—and—more
I was feeling kind of strange—in the President’s chair, as if I were Mr. Jeff, presiding over some great ruin, with a bullet on my desk that must have served as a paperweight, and a few scattered documents no one seemed to want. Before I had a chance to blink, General Grant’s own courier arrived with a bundle wrapped in butcher paper. His field glass was inside—in a silver casing—and a note scribbled on the back of an envelope.
The telescope is for Lieutenant Tad.
Captain Bob is fine. He’s at the front with all the generals.
He worries about you and Tad in the old Rebel capital.
It would dishearten him, he says, if you caught Confederate fever. I told him he could always come and rescue the Commander-in-Chief.
Tad was filled with wonderment. He’d never had a general’s glass before. He kept poking out the window with it plugged to his eye.
“What do you see, Son?”
“Angels, Paw.”
The marines in the room smiled while they polished their carbines with their own spit. I didn’t smile at all.
“And what are the angels doing, Taddie?”
“They’re flyin’ on top of the smoke. But their wings are all filthy from the fire.”
“And are they laughing—or crying?”
“Both, Paw. Have a peek.”
I shuddered at the sound of my own boy, at the innocence—and the certainty—of his invite. But I wouldn’t allow Grant’s glass to scarify me. I screwed it into my lazy left eye. Richmond didn’t smolder or burn from the President’s rear window. I saw a rose garden. It must have bloomed like black blood during the fire, nourished by all the ashes and a wild wind. The roses weren’t dusty; they had a bountiful black sheen. But the general’s glass was playing tricks. Because at the edge of the garden I discovered Mr. Jeff—he hadn’t gone to Danville with all his record books.
Then I realized it wasn’t him, but a Rebel scout wearing the President’s fine frock coat. Perhaps he had been stationed there like a scarecrow, to distract us while Mr. Jeff was riding the cars on the Richmond and Danville line. A woman was with this scout, in ballet slippers and a blue silk dress; his female accomplice, I suppose, some facsimile of Varina Davis—or my wife, since she had Puss’s reddish brown hair. It was no trick of the glass, meant to unfrock me and gnaw at my heart. But it did gnaw, as my mind played its own tricks, and I imagined Molly as a Kentucky gal, dancing in her ballet shoes. And then a great roar from the river knocked me out of my reverie. The whole house shook—some phantom Rebel ironclad must have exploded in the harbor.
The woe has just begun, as the lady Pinkerton had predicted, but I didn’t unscrew my eye from the glass. I was tired, I told myself. Perhaps Mrs. Jeff’s servant had fed me a cup of rotten water—but all we had was a rose garden that slanted down into an isolated apple orchard—beyond that was the James, with smoke swirling above the river, like the random plumes of time. It was as if my damn life had been a trajectory to this very moment, from my near drowning in the Sangamon to the ravelment of war that entangled all our lives—President and plumber, pilot and vivandière, contraband and Copperhead. And I’d come to Richmond like some pilot out of the sea, with the dead riding in their own barge, not as ghosts, but as companions who might instruct a President. And I sorely needed instruction.
Tad tugged at my elbow. “Paw, do ye see the angels, Paw, with filth on their wings? I’m dyin’ to know.”
My lazy eye was still screwed into the glass, but now I could see all the soot. People were scurrying in and out of the swath the fire had left, like a sickly gray river of ash; not even all the ash in Richmond could undermine that monstrous movement of people with their bundles and carts, like a relentless surge, almost supernatural. No flag or musket we had ever brought to Dixie could deflect the path of that melodic sway. And from the distance, high on a President’s hill, I would have sworn that people were floating through the ash.
“Paw,” said Tad, “what do you see with my glass?”
“Angels laughing and crying.”
And I held him as close I could.
Author’s Note
I never liked Lincoln. It took me a month to memorize the Gettysburg Address for my fifth-grade class. But my first encounter with Honest Abe wasn’t at public school. It was at a Bronx movie house that couldn’t afford first-run features and had to play half-discarded films. And so I risked eighteen cents—the price of a ticket in 1947—to watch my favorite actor, Henry Fonda, wear a false nose in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln. I’d adored Fonda as Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine, also directed by Ford, but here he looked like a tall yokel in a tattered top hat. And when he rode into Springfield on some little nag, with his knees near the ground, he was so far removed from Wyatt Earp’s quiet menace and masculine charm, that the real Abraham Lincoln fell from my mind for fifty years.
Then several winters ago, I happened upon a book about Lincoln’s lifelong depression—or hypos, as nineteenth-century metaphysicians described acute melancholia, and suddenly that image of the backwoods saint vanished, and now I had a new entry point into Lincoln’s life and language—my own crippling bouts of depression, where I would plunge into the same damp, drizzly November of the soul that Melville describes in Moby-Dick. But I was no Ishmael. I couldn’t take my hypos with me aboard some whaler. I had to lie abed for a month until my psyche began to knit and mend, while some hired gunslinger of a novelist taught my classes in creative writing at the City College.
Henry Fonda’s false nose and long frock coat began to fade the further I read into Lincoln’s life. He suffered from two severe bouts of melancholy, the first in 1835, after Ann Rutledge died, and he couldn’t bear the thought of rain pounding on her grave; and the second after “that fatal first of January,” 1841, when he broke his engagement to Mary Todd, went around Springfield like a disheveled loon, and claimed he was the most miserable man alive. He would endure other bouts of the hypos, until a permanent sadness settled onto his sallow face. Billy Herndon, his law partner and most lively chronicler, described him this way: “He was lean in flesh and ungainly in figure. Aside from the sad, pained look due to habitual melancholy, his face had no characteristic or fixed expression.”
This ungainly man soon percolated in my own melancholic imagination. And I realized I had been unjust to Lincoln all these years. He had his own quiet menace and a poetic voice that Wyatt Earp never had. According to Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, Lincoln’s poetry wasn’t revealed only in his letters and speeches and the tall tales he loved to tell. “He created himself as a poetic figure, and he thus imposed himself upon the nation.”
Yet he was molded by Mary Lincoln, might not have become President without her. Billy Herndon believed that Lincoln never loved his wife. But Herndon isn’t always reliable about Mary; they never got along. She was, in her own way, much more complex than either of them. Better schooled than most of the men around her, she wasn’t permitted to practice any profession, or disclose her own penchant for politics: she could become a schoolmarm, a nurse, a wife, or an old maid. As Adrienne Rich wrote in “Vesuvius at Home” of another nineteenth-century sufferer, Emily Dickinson: “I have come to imagine her as too strong for her environment, a figure of powerful will”—too strong and too intelligent, like Mrs. Lincoln. And Mary had to endure the deaths of two children.
How are we to measure her grief or that desperate desire to become part of her husband’s band of rivals? She used whatever powers she had as Lady President, intrigued with Manhattan politicos and other unscrupulous men. She would buy a hundred hassocks and three hundred pairs of gloves out of some insatiable need to own and possess, just as she clung to her eldest boy, Robert, wouldn’t let him go off to war, protected him in a way she couldn’t protect the President, and finally went half mad, because she could protect no one, not even
herself. She was part Medea, avenging betrayals that never took place, and part Ophelia, Lincoln’s child-wife.
I hope that the Robert Lincoln I reveal will rip through some of his enigmas, the aloofness that one finds in photographs of him—that essential sadness around the eyes, and sense of displacement, as if he longed for his own invisibility, and like his mother, was mourning a President who was still alive.
I’m no biographer. I’ve written a work of fiction, not a historical tract, and have invented where I had to invent. I’ve held to the chronicle of Lincoln’s life, haven’t violated any important dates, though I have tinkered with certain of Lincoln’s letters and speeches when I had to create my own sense of continuity. And I had to embroider the history of others a little. Henry Ward Beecher didn’t deliver a sermon on John Brown when Lincoln visited Plymouth Church in 1860, but the drama of that sermon seemed essential to the book, and I borrowed it for this occasion. And the pulpit I consigned to Beecher was like the gondola of a hot-air balloon, because I liked to imagine him as an aeronaut in his own church; such a gondola presaged the war itself, where generals of both sides had a fanciful notion about the utility of reconnaissance balloons.
Most of the characters in the novel, including Mrs. Elizabeth Keckly, were pulled from Lincoln’s life. A former slave, she worked for Mrs. Jefferson Davis before she went to the White House to become Mary Lincoln’s confidante and couturière. Her closeness to the Lady President would give her a certain prestige, but something else must have compelled her. Was she seduced by Mary’s terrifying isolation in a capital that called her the Traitoress, since so many of Mrs. Lincoln’s Kentucky relations fought on the Confederate side? Mrs. Keckly had her own workshop, could have grown rich as a mantua-maker for the wives of merchant princes. Yet she moves her workshop into the White House in my novel. She would have fights with Mary, who paid her a pittance and often flew into rages. The Lincolns were dependent on her nonetheless. Tad, their youngest child, who had a speech impediment, called her Yib, a “corruption” of Elizabeth, and Yib had a powerful presence in the White House.
I’ve invented very few characters—an odd soldier here and there, some African American farmers, a delinquent coachman who sets the White House stables on fire in a feud with Mary. But one invented character does have an important rôle in the novel: a lady Pinkerton named Mrs. Small. She’s no anomaly. Allan Pinkerton did use female agents during the Civil War, and I have my Pinkerton help foil a plot on Lincoln’s life in Baltimore.
I Am Abraham is a family chronicle, where the fury of war and politics rumble in the background, while Lincoln does a macabre dance with his generals, feuds with his eldest boy, and tries to contain the furies of his wife. The novel is told entirely in Lincoln’s voice, that strange mix of the vernacular and the formal tones of a man who only had a few months of learning at a “blab school” and essentially had to teach himself. And so we have reverberations of the Bible in his letters and speeches and spoken voice, echoes of Blackstone and Æsop, and the yarns Lincoln heard as a boy (his Pa was reputed to have been a gifted storyteller). I also thought of Mark Twain, as I imagined Lincoln inhabiting the voice Huck Finn might have had as an adult. Twain modeled Huck on his own boyhood companion Tom Blankenship, who became a frontier marshal in Montana. And Lincoln himself was like a marshal in the “badlands” of wartime Washington, suspending habeas corpus and bending whatever laws had to be bent.
In a gorgeously crafted introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lionel Trilling writes about the music of Huck’s voice, which revels in the dread and deep truth of the Mississippi, but also has another kind of power—“the truth of moral passion [that] deals directly with the virtue and depravity of man’s heart.” Lincoln embodied much of the same moral passion. We deify him now. Yet his own Party wanted to get rid of him in 1864 and nominate Grant. Lincoln prevailed, wearing his green shawl in the White House, and gripped with melancholy, his feet constantly cold, he preserved a nation that had begun to unravel, often holding it together with nothing more than the flat of his hand and his unfaltering sense of human worth—a frontier marshal with a sense of poetry and a profound sadness in his soul.
IT WAS WHILE WANDERING through the nursery at the Confederate White House in Richmond that I re-imagined the ending of this novel. I would like to thank Dean Knight of the Museum of the Confederacy for taking me on a wondrous two-hour trip through the halls and rooms of Jefferson Davis’ White House and sharing some of his wisdom and lore about Lincoln’s voyage to Richmond.
I would never have discovered the enormous cloth checkerboard that Lincoln employed to play with Tad—and “whup” him sometimes—if I hadn’t visited Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldiers’ Home in Washington, DC. And I would like to thank John Davidson and Callie Hawkins of Lincoln’s Cottage for allowing me to inspect every mysterious corner of the Lincolns’ summer retreat.
I would also like to thank National Park Service Ranger Clyde Bell, Civil War enthusiast Michael Plunkett, and novelist Fred Leebron for their many kindnesses on my own pilgrimage to Gettysburg.
I might not have written this novel if I hadn’t had lunch one afternoon several years ago with literary critic and social historian Brenda Wineapple, and talked about Lincoln as a prose poet rather than a politician.
I couldn’t have navigated the James River without the help of environmentalist Kurt Riegel, since that damn river always seemed to be going up when it was really going down.
I would also like to thank Georges Borchardt for his perceptive reading of the novel, Samantha Shea and Phil Marino for their particular insights, and Michael Gorman for his miraculous map of wartime Richmond. Most of all, I would like to thank Robert Weil for taking me to the furthest point on the voyage of I Am Abraham.
Illustration Credits
Frontispiece
Lincoln Family at Home
p. xii
Lee on Traveller (Corbis Collection)
p. 1
Lincoln wrestling Jack Armstrong (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library)
p. 69
Lincoln’s law office, Springfield, Illinois (Corbis Collection)
p. 115
Mary Lincoln, c. 1846 (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter)
p. 167
General George McClellan riding Dan Webster (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter)
p. 235
Willie Lincoln (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter)
p. 273
Lincoln and Tad (From the Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, courtesy of the Indiana State Museum and Allen County Public Library)
p. 299
Gettysburg, 1863 (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter)
p. 357
Negro soldiers of the North (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter)
p. 397
Lincoln and Tad enter Richmond (Courtesy of Paul McWhorter)
About the Author
JEROME CHARYN has received the Rosenthal Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He was named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture in 2002. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Narrative, The American Scholar, StoryQuarterly, and other magazines. His most recent novel was The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, published by Norton. He lives in New York and Paris.
OTHER BOOKS BY JEROME CHARYN
FICTION
Under the Eye of God
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution
The Green Lantern
Hurricane Lady
Captain Kidd
Citizen Sidel
Death of a Tango King
El Bronx
Little Angel Street
Montezuma’s Man
Back to Bataan (young adult)
Maria’s Girls
Elsinore
The Good Policeman
Paradise Man
War Cries Over Avenue C
/> Pinocchio’s Nose
Panna Maria
Darlin’ Bill
The Catfish Man
The Seventh Babe
Secret Isaac
The Franklin Scare
The Education of Patrick Silver
Marilyn the Wild
Blue Eyes
The Tar Baby
Eisenhower, My Eisenhower
American Scrapbook
Going to Jerusalem
The Man Who Grew Younger & Other Stories
On the Darkening Green
Once Upon a Droshky
NONFICTION
Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil
Marilyn: The Last Goddess
Raised by Wolves: The Turbulent Art and Times of Quentin Tarantino
Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel
Gangsters & Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway
Bronx Boy
Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins: Ping-Pong and the Art of Staying Alive
The Black Swan
The Dark Lady from Belorusse
Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture
Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace and Magical Land
Copyright © 2014 by Jerome Charyn
All rights reserved
First Edition
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