Lincoln and His Boys

by Rosemary Wells

  Every evening my brother Tad and I run over to Father’s office on the corner of Adams Street. We huck handfuls of pebbles up at the windowpanes so Father knows we are coming. Tad is smaller than I am, but he can throw the pebbles harder and make more noise.

  Mr. Herndon, Father’s law partner, likes things neat and quiet. He says we act like little wild orangutans, which is true. But Father doesn’t ever scold us for what we do. If Mr. Herndon gets that look on his face and shakes his finger at us, Father laughs. Tad makes most of the trouble. I never squirt ink or ruin briefs. Mostly I stack the big old law books and make pyramids out of them and then knock them all down. It’s our job, says Mama, to pull Father out of his office and get him home for supper on time, so that’s what we do after the sun goes down.

  On the walk home to our house on Jackson and Eighth, Father and Tad and I always stop and talk to neighbors and dogs, which makes us late. Then we run into the house and Father puts his arms around Mama and waltzes her around the room until she smiles and comes out of her fretfulness about our being late for supper.

  When we sit at table, Mama makes dead sure we have good manners. We are not allowed resting on elbows. Sometimes she chides Father for wearing shirtsleeves around the house and not putting on his coat. He puts on his coat to make her happy. Then he puts his hand over his smile and declares the coat has just taken flight like an eagle and come to rest on the back of his chair.

  We chew with mouths closed and don’t slurp our soup. Tad has trouble eating. He was born with a hole in the roof of his mouth and has to have all his food cut up for him. His manners are not as good as mine, but they are on the way up.

  Tonight at supper, when Tad pulled my hair, Mama said, “Taddie darling, who knows where we’ll be a year from now? It might be in the finest palaces of Paris, France! They don’t let little boys with no table manners eat in the dining rooms in the palaces!”

  Immediately I wonder why Mama says this about palaces in France. It might could mean she is planning an escape from Springfield to a fancier place. Long ago Father was a congressman in Washington. Does this mean Father is redding up for another election? Willie and I discuss it in bed.

  “Mama ordered a new black suit for Papa-day,” says Taddie from his pillow. “She sent money in the letter. Two pair of trousers.”

  “How do you know?” I ask.

  “She told me,” Taddie answers. “She let me mail the letter to Mr. Steinway, the tailor in Chicago. That’s how. I said to Mama, ‘What’s this letter for, Mama?’ and she tried to get me to read the address and I couldn’t. But then she said it’s to Mr. Steinway’s tailor shop on Dearborn Avenue in Chicago. It’s for a new suit.”

  “What do you think the new suit means, Tad?” I ask.

  Tad doesn’t hesitate. “Papa-day’s gonna turn around and re-whup Mr. Douglas.” Taddie always says Papa-day; it’s his way of saying Papa dear. Taddie’s cleft palate gives him lots of lispy speech trouble. Sometimes I have to translate what he says to people outside the family. A lot of people think Taddie is slow, but he doesn’t miss a thing. He’s as smart as a snake. When the time is right, I’ll ask Father if indeed he’s working up to another scrap with Mr. Douglas. Mr. Douglas beat Father in the Senate election in ’58. We did not like that one bit, since Mr. Douglas told lies about Father during their debates.

  It is decided that I, Willie, have good enough manners that I may visit Chicago with Father when he goes to the courthouse there in early June. I am more excited than I have ever been in my nine years on earth.

  On June 2nd, the morning of our trip, Mama parts my hair with her ivory comb. She slicks it down both sides with water. It stays in place until the station. Then she kisses the top of my head when the train comes down the tracks. I let go her hand and change it for Father’s. Her hand is no bigger than a plump little sparrow. His hand is hard and brown and the span of my whole arm.

  Father scoops up my small bag and his large one. A strand of Mama’s black hair has come loose. It blows in her face until she tucks it back into its bun. She waves to us until I know it hurts her arm. Her eyes are shaded with her other hand, and she is squinting under the sun until she can’t see us or the train anymore.

  Now I have Father all to myself. “This is a superior train, Pa,” I tell him proudly because it is my first train. Father says that it’s a pretty tinky railway compared to others in Pennsylvania and New York.

  It takes all of a day to get to Chicago. Father and I walk to the Tremont Hotel. I never did imagine so many people or so much noise all in one place.

  “Willie, you look like the preacher on his first day in heaven,” Father says to me. “Surprised to see that so many other people got there too!”

  People say about Father that he’s pine tall. This is due to his double-long legs. In the way that tall people do, Father tips sideways to hold my hand.

  In the Tremont Hotel lobby is a whole forest of trees set in porcelain tubs. I ask what their strange long leaves are. Father says they are palms. “The palm has a frond, not a leaf,” he explains. “F-r-o-n-d. Frond.”

  I spell it back to him and he is pleased.

  Then there is strange music. It is not fiddle. It is not piano or horn.

  “What is it, Pa? What is that little popping music?” I ask him.

  “It’s a harp,” says Father.

  So I say, “That lady playing it must be an angel. Only angels play harps!”

  Father agrees that she must be an angel. He tells me, “Close your mouth, son, and don’t forget to blink your eyes once in a while!”

  Suddenly a whole bunch of men come up and talk to Father. A year ago, when he was running against Mr. Douglas, these same sort of men were always circling Father and doing the same important-sounding talk. Father loves to talk back. It’s because he is a lawyer, and Mama says lawyers are paid a dollar a minute to chatter away like monkeys in the trees.

  One of the men comes over and claps me on the back. His shirt is moon white, his fingernails clean and shined up like a woman’s.

  I must be quiet and wait until they stop talking. If spoken to, I must answer with a straight-shooter look in my eyes, Father tells me. “That’s the key to it. Look them spang in the eye and speak up. Then they won’t treat you like a squirt,” he says.

  I watch Father talk to these spiffed-up men with soft hands. He makes them listen and makes them laugh. He’s easy with them. It’s Mama who taught him just how to be easy with rich men. Mama comes from Kentucky people who own a fine amount of land. They drink out of pure crystal glasses and ride fancy horses. Mama knows about how to be rich like these men. She’s proud of it.

  We sit down to supper in the hotel dining room. It looks sheerly like the royal banquet hall in King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

  Father says to me, “I am going to shoot the breeze with you, Will, about a very grown-up set of things.” He picks a piece of bread out of the basket that the waiter brings us and takes a bite of it. “I can talk to you, Scout, better than to your big brother.”

  Bob Lincoln is my big brother. He is away in the East at preparatory school. He’d be at Harvard but he failed his exams and must try again. Father and Bob haven’t ever been close friends like Father and me. They get under each other’s skins.

  I ask Father, “Pa, is it those fancy duded-up men? Do they want you to run in another election?”

  “You are sharp as a new tack, Scout,” he says. He opens his menu and orders for both of us to the waiter, who writes it down on a pad.

  I cannot eat my bread because my mouth goes a little dry. “They want you to leave home again and travel all over the place? Like you did when you were running against Mr. Douglas?” I ask.

  “I will
have to travel even as far as New York and Massachusetts and Maine, son. That’s a far piece! You must take care of your Mama now that Bobby’s not home.”

  “Taddie and me, we hate being home without you, Pa,” I say. “Mama is always fretful when you’re not there. She treads back and forth in the bedroom and makes the floor squeak.”

  “I know it. There’s not a thing I can do about it.”

  “Will you be senator this time, Pa?” I ask.

  “President, son.”

  “President of the whole United States?” I say. I don’t think I heard him right.

  He looks in my eyes. He says, “Will, it’s a derby race, and I’ve got a plow horse’s chance. But if somebody doesn’t shake these Southern blockheads in Washington by the ears, we’ll be living in a different country next year. Slavery’s going to split America the way an ax cuts an apple.”

  All of the last year, Father and Mr. Douglas debated up and down the state of Illinois. Mr. Douglas was for slavery being allowed in every state. Father was against it. Mr. Douglas won the election, but Father got to be famous all the way to Boston and New York for his speeches.

  He has ordered us oysters, roast quail, steak royale, and sherbet Jenny Lind. We eat every bite.

  “Who is Jenny Lind?” I want to know.

  “She is the best lady singer in the world,” says Father. “That is why they named an ice cream for her. Tomorrow night we will go and hear her at McVicker’s Theatre.”

  Father loves entertainments. When he was a boy, he had no entertainments ever. Brother Bob told Tad and me that when Father was a boy, he lived in a poky little shack in the middle of the wild forest. Father’s own pappy was a sometime drunk, says Brother Bob. Mostly out of work. He beat Father for reading too many books.

  Bob told me and Taddie in secret that Father disliked his own pappy so much he wouldn’t so much as visit the old man on his deathbed or raise a tombstone over his grave. This is not entirely true, Mama said when she heard the story. Father tried a deathbed visit the year before, but his pappy stayed alive. However it is, we don’t ever see any kin from the Lincoln side, only Mama’s side. Mama’s people, the Todds, live in Lexington, and my uncle Ninian gives me the piece of mint out of his mint julep and I suck the sugar off it and eat the lemon peel.

  In the morning, we go to the Cook County Courthouse. Father puts on his glasses and commences two hours of lawyer work. I sit in a window seat and read everything in the Chicago Tribune.

  Across the room, Father winks at me. He’s talking to heavy-suited other lawyers who smoke cigars and chew big wads of tobacco. They spit squirts of brown tobacco juice into the metal cuspidors around the corners of the room. I hate that. So does Father.

  Somewhere a noon whistle blows. Father folds up his glasses and squirrels them away in a breast pocket. We are suddenly free.

  We hop on the Dearborn Street horse trolley. The first stop is Mr. Steinway. All Father’s suits are black. Mama says you don’t want to trust a man who wears blue suits or brown suits, because they look cheap. Mama sees to it that Father wears respectable clothes and cravats. She has to, to keep him up with the other biggity lawyers.

  “You, sir, are the longest man in Illinois,” says Mr. Steinway, his mouth full of pins.

  I tell Father, “Pa, Taddie knew you were going to run again the minute Mama ordered up that suit.”

  “He reads the signs well, Scout,” says Father.

  “Pa, will you have to run against Senator Douglas again?”

  “Most likely,” answers Father. He holds out his arms for Mr. Steinway to measure.

  “I don’t like Senator Douglas,” I tell him. “The boys at school won’t let me forget he skunked you in the election. How did such a wormy little man skunk you, Pa?”

  “Senator Douglas is not a wormy little man,” says Father.

  “Brother Bob says he is,” I tell him.

  Mr. Steinway makes marks along the lines of the lapels and down the back of the coat sleeves.

  Father doesn’t answer. Sometimes he likes to visit inside himself and his eyes go away to a place that only he is allowed to see.

  At last he says, “There are a hundred reasons why things happen, Willie. Those reasons fan out like circles around a stone thrown into a pond. The stone in the center of those reason rings is called truth. Truth is the very hardest thing on earth to see clear.”

  “What is the truth?” I ask him.

  Father smiles that big grin that changes his whole face, and his eyes come back to me. “Next year I will skunk Senator Douglas!”

  “How are you going to do it?” I want to know.

  Father’s left eyelid closes and he does not answer me when or how. “We will get your mother a pair of kid gloves for her birthday,” he tells me, and his hand strays to my hair and he messes it up.

  Palmer’s Circus of Dry Good Dreams is a thousand times as big as the general store in Springfield. The glove lady places a rainbow of kid gloves on the high counter for us to study. Father braces me up to see.

  “Red,” I say, “because Mama’s fancy shoes are red.”

  “Blue,” says Father. “Because forget-me-nots are her favorite.”

  We cannot decide. So we go over to belt buckles and get a nice steel one to send to Bob at school. We get socks for Taddie and caramels for me and Taddie. Then we go back to the gloves. We still can’t agree, red or blue, and so we buy both colors.

  “We will go to McVicker’s now and purchase two tickets for Jenny Lind,” says Father.

  “Pa, what will Miss Jenny Lind sing tonight?” I ask.

  “Probably songs in German and Italian,” answers my father.

  “Will I like that, Pa?”

  “Your mother made me swear on a stack of Bibles I would take you to hear Miss Jenny Lind for your edification, son.”

  “I heard her say it, Pa. She said she doesn’t want me growing up to be a prairie tick like other people she was not going to name.”

  “Exactly so, son. Your mother is completely right. I am a prairie tick,” says Father.

  “Pa, the newspaper had a notice that the Chinese acrobats and jugglers are in town. They are at Metropolitan Hall.”

  We see both shows.

  On the train home the next morning, I sit back and close my eyes. I dream of the Chinese acrobats. Genies in red silk twirl on silver balls. Wizards in gold silk fly through the air, filling my sleepy mind.

  Father reads a book. When he reads, he reads aloud. He makes pencil notes on the pages. I watch his lips form the words. The train is bumpy as horseback. Sometimes his glasses fall off his nose.

  “What is that, Pa?” I ask.

  “It’s a play by Shakespeare called Julius Caesar,” Father answers. He looks in my face and explains, “I have no proper schooling, son, not a nickel more than nine months altogether. Next year there will be a squad of patroons running against me. They all have Harvard educations and were born in silk pajamas. Your pa does not want to sound like a prairie tick alongside ’em on the podium. Shakespeare is a tonic for the mind. It plates the tongue with silver.”

  We head into Springfield. “Look, Pa! Mama is on the platform waiting!” I shout. “She has brought Taddie to meet us!”

  Father puts away his Shakespeare. “Always,” he says, “she is afraid of the angel of darkness when we are not with her.”

  I know about that angel of darkness. It came and brushed over Mama when my least brother, Eddie, died of fever. He was only three. Ever since Eddie, Mama has been fearful.

  I say to Father, “But in the hotel we saw a good angel playing the harp, didn’t we, Pa?”

  “We will tell her,” says Father.

  “And we will give her the gloves now and not wait for her birthday!” I say because I see the worry frown above Mama’s eyes through the window of the train.

  Then Father lifts me up. He puts his whole face into my hair because he loves to smell it. Then the train stops and we alight into the sun.

  Fath
er has been elected president, but some busybody little girl writes him a letter and says he’d look much snappier in whiskers, so he is growing a beard on his chin, no mustache. “It is a good time to grow whiskers,” he says. “We will have twelve days on this train before we get to Washington. By the time I wave to all the people in Washington, D.C., they will never know I started out the trip clean-shaven.”

  Some nights we sleep on the train. Some nights we get off and stay at a hotel. Each day the beard gets a little thicker. Father rehearses his speech that he will give on the first day he is president. He writes and rewrites and then he reads it out loud and crosses out some and begins again.

  At one hotel Father gave the speech in a satchel to Bob for safekeeping. But Bob found a bunch of young people and went out for brandy fizzes. He lost Father’s inauguration speech, the only copy. I have never seen Father so angry, but it turned up in the hotel baggage room after a two-hour search.

  The train goes slowly and stops at every little town in Indiana and Ohio. Tad asks me to read out the names of the stations and I do. Lebanon, Cadiz Junction, Ashtabula. Taddie says the town names after me.

  At each stop the train fills with men and then empties of some of them farther along the line. Some of them are in uniform, some in suits. They want to talk to Father all the time.

  People in the towns come out to see Father and hear his voice. Sometimes they get close enough to the train to stare in the window of our car.

  “Who are they?” I want to know.

  “Farmers, mostly” says Father. “Look at their boots. You can tell a farmer from a drover because one’s got muddy brogans and the other’s got rider’s boots. Then there’s the shopkeepers. Clean leather shoes on them. Kits, cats, sacks, and wives. They need to see the face of the man they elected president. Otherwise I am just an engraving in the newspaper.”

  Somewhere in east Ohio a man mounts the platform and comes shyly to our window with a tin box in his arms. He is covered in flour as if with snow. Out of the tin box he removes two muffins, wrapped in heavy napkins, still hot from the oven. They drip butter. He holds them out to me and Taddie. I thank the baker and smile.