Of course a man who's been forced to hold his mother up to the scorn and ridicule of the entire city of Chicago—the entire nation, thanks to the press—would shed tears on the witness stand. How else could he make himself the victim, instead of me?
She could imagine—as Robert undoubtedly could, too—what the newspapers would say of a son who didn't shed tears on the witness stand as he asked the Court to lock his mother up.
“To think that my son would do this to me,” she said.
The courtroom was like a slow oven. Beneath layers of wool crape and black veiling Mary felt her flesh sticky, and burning as if dipped in acid. As the gentle effect of the medicine subsided the pain in her head mounted, confusing her. She couldn't bear the thought of asking Arnold—traitor, Judas, hypocrite!—if she might seek out the toilets....Would they have a Pinkerton agent follow her there?
Just get back to my room, she thought desperately. Just get away, out of the light, into the comforting dimness....The frantic anxiety she had felt in the street that morning returned, the aching need for medicine, the terror of more pain to come. Back to my room...
And she startled in shock. What if I can't go back?
What if they find me insane?
Until this moment it had never truly occurred to her that this hideous ordeal, this hotbox redolent of the stinks of sweaty wool suiting and cheap pomade, was anything more than a single awful afternoon....
What if they lock me up? Put me in a cell like a prisoner, chained to the walls like the people in pictures I've seen? Hide me and forget me, like Mr. Rochester's wife in Jane Eyre?
Her eyes shot to Robert—who was talking to Swett and Ayer and casting venomous glances at the reporters—and into her mind flashed a memory, the memory of those awful months after her son Willie's death. Willie had died in February: Mary had remained in bed herself for weeks, and as much as six months later the grief had still returned in blinding waves of incapacitating weeping. She remembered how after trying vainly to comfort her, her husband had led her gently to the window of the summer cottage where they were staying.
Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? She could still hear that high, husky voice, that could carry like a trumpet when he spoke to a crowd, soft now like a troubled lullaby. Could still conjure back the light firmness of that enormous hand on the small of her back. The new lunatic asylum was only partially visible from the windows of the Soldiers' Home—the stone cottage to which the President's family retired during the sticky horrors of Washington summers—but Mary knew what it was.
She could hear beneath the gentleness of Lincoln's voice how frightened he was, how helpless in the face of a grief whose blackness he understood himself, far too well. You must try to control your grief, or it will drive you mad and we may have to send you there.
He never would have. She knew that as clearly as she knew her name.
Not to an asylum. Like those hideous reports she had read of patients being doused with icy water or chained behind bars like animals, or like that dreadful story by Mr. Poe...
And I'm not mad....
At first she thought nothing of the scraping of chairs, the sudden rise of voices. It has to be the reporters getting excited about something.
But when she saw Robert hastily return to his seat, and Arnold gathering his papers, she swung around and saw the jury filing back into their box.
But they only just left!
The horrible suspicion seized her that one of her spells had come on her again. Time telescoped during those episodes. Hours could pass in the daydream of what felt like moments. But a glance at the courtroom clock, at the hot gold angle of light high on the wall, showed her that no, in fact only ten minutes had gone by.
“Gentlemen, have you reached a verdict?” The judge didn't look at her. Mary found herself trembling all over, struggling not to scream, not to start flinging things at Robert—books, pens, Arnold's useless and untouched papers....
“We have, Your Honor. This jury finds that Mrs. Lincoln is insane—”
No.
“—and though she is neither suicidal nor homicidal—”
No!
“—she is a fit person to be confined to an asylum.”
Reporters came crowding up. Swett, Arnold, Robert, and the two Pinkerton men—Where were you when my husband was killed? she wanted to scream at them—formed up around her, thrust their way through them to the back of the room. Mary stumbled in that circle of male shoulders, dark frock-coats smelling of tobacco and Macassar oil, the faces around her a blur.
Robert was speaking to her. Introducing her to a grave-faced man with a splendid chestnut beard, who had testified so learnedly about the vicious effects of Spiritualism and “theomania.” I believe Mrs. Lincoln to be insane from the account given to me by Mr. Robert Lincoln in his office....
“...Dr. Richard Patterson,” Robert was saying. “Dr. Patterson operates a private sanitarium in Batavia.”
“You mean a madhouse.” Mary's voice sounded flat in her own ears, and queerly alien, as if someone else were speaking.
Robert's eyes shifted, but Dr. Patterson said, “Bellevue Place is a pleasant house where people can rest and get better, Mrs. Lincoln. We think you'll be very comfortable there.”
She opened her mouth to snap, And it doesn't matter what I think?
And then realized, No, it doesn't.
You're a madwoman. You must go where they send you, and do what you're told.
Forever.
Trembling, she said, “You set this up between you, didn't you? You had a prison all ready for me before we ever walked into this courtroom.”
While her heart whispered to her, It was my doing. my punishment. My shame. No more than my deserving...
Reporters were craning to listen. Calmly, as if she had said nothing, Robert said, “Mr. Arnold and I will escort you to Bellevue Place tomorrow, Mother. I've taken a room next to yours at the Grand Pacific for tonight. But first, Mother, I must insist that you turn over to me the bonds that you have been carrying with you—”
“The ones you bribed chambermaids to tell you about? Or did you peek through the keyholes at me yourself? That's what you wanted all along, wasn't it? To get hold of my money?”
Robert raised his voice just slightly, though he didn't even glance at the purposefully loitering members of the press. “You're talking foolishly, Mother. You know I've always had the management of your affairs. And you also know that it's dangerous to carry them on your person as you do. Of course I will write you a proper receipt....”
“Surely,” put in Swett in his silky voice, “you would wish to spare yourself the humiliation of having the sheriff take the bonds from you by force, Mrs. Lincoln?”
She rounded on him. “Robert will never have anything of mine!”
“Then perhaps you would prefer to hand them over to Mr. Arnold?”
“I will not hand them to anyone! And I'm sure,” she added, “that since—as all the world now knows, thanks to your paid testimony, sir—I carry the bonds in my underclothing, even my son wouldn't wish me to be indelicate in the presence of all the people in the courtroom. Now I'm hot, and tired, and I wish to go back to my room—or do you propose to chain me now in a cage, and feed me through the bars?”
“Of course you will be allowed to go back to your room, Mother,” said Robert unhappily.
“Once you promise to give Mr. Arnold the bonds when we arrive there,” added Swett.
“He can have what he likes.” Mary's voice cracked and she forced it steady, forced herself not to give them even the smallest satisfaction. Hating them, and hating Robert most of all. “Take from me what he likes. Only let me go back.”
Leaving the courthouse was like those dreams she'd had as a girl, of attending her classes at Ward's Academy and discovering in the midst of recitation that she was still in her nightgown....
They used to let people tour madhouses and stare at the lunatics, she thought, dizzily
sinking into the upholstery of Swett's closed brougham, sweating in pain at every jolt of the pavement. Do they still? Evening was beginning to come on, though the bustle of pedestrians and vehicles on Clark Street was worse, if anything, than it had been in the heat of the afternoon. A breath of breeze from the lake brought a little freshness, but not one jot of relief. We think you'll be comfortable there....
No. Not that.
She closed her eyes and wondered how much it would hurt to die.
With stony dignity she stepped out of her group of escorts—Swett, Arnold, the two faithful Pinkertons, and a very uncomfortable-looking Mary Gavin, whom they'd gathered up on their way through the Grand Pacific lobby—and into the ladies' toilets down the hall from her room. Blessed relief—blessed, blessed silence, stillness, privacy away from staring eyes and whispering men...
They were all waiting in the hall for her when she came out. She almost laughed at their clumsy unease.
“The bonds,” Swett reminded her as she unlocked the door of her room. He reached to take the key from her but she closed it tight in her palm.
“You shall have nothing from me, sir. My husband left me those bonds....”
“I'm sure Mr. Lincoln would not have left them to you had he known you were going to walk around Chicago with ten thousand dollars' worth pinned in your petticoats!”
Her head splitting, her stomach queasy with the aftermath of migraine and medicine, her whole body trembling with exhaustion, Mary shouted at them, raged at them, backed into a corner of the dark suffocating room with its crowded packages and high-piled trunks. But they did not leave, would not leave. They stayed, argued, insisted, and refused to listen when she begged them to leave, begged them to let her alone, to let her rest. At last, sick and dizzy and shaking, Mary retreated to a corner among the trunks and pulled up her heavy overskirt, so that Arnold could tear the bonds out of the pocket sewn to her petticoat.
Then they left, all except Mary Gavin, who settled in her usual chair, as she did all those nights when Mary could not sleep and paid the stolid Irishwoman to spend the night in her room with her.
The bonds were gone.
Her money was gone.
She was helpless. She was exactly where she had all her life feared she would one day be: penniless. And alone.
This is what it is, she thought, frantic, exhausted, fighting with all her strength not to collapse in tears, to be a madwoman.
It is to be a child again, without a penny, with no place to live but what they give you and no place to go but what they permit.
I am not insane!
She lay for a long time on the bed, her hands pressed to her mouth, her face turned to the wall, burningly conscious of the woman on the other side of the cluttered room.
Always watched. Never alone.
The sharp curve of her stays gouged her ribs as she drew in a breath, let it out.
She thought, with aching longing, of the medicines in the cabinet, of their promise of sweet sleep and oblivion.
But if she slept, she thought, she'd only wake in the morning with Robert and that hateful Dr. Patterson at the door, waiting to take her to the madhouse.
If she slept, she'd lose whatever time she had to act before Robert arrived to spend the night in the next room.
She took another breath, and sat up. “I'm going down the hall,” she announced.
Mary Gavin hastily screwed the top back onto the little flask she'd withdrawn from her reticule, tucked it away out of sight.
“You don't have to come with me,” added Mary, getting to her feet. “I won't be long.” She knew the maid never liked to get out of her chair once she'd settled in with her little nips of gin. Through the curtained window, light still lingered in the airshaft. It was seven o'clock. Here downtown, most shops remained open until eight, and those within the hotel itself until ten.
Her heart beat fast as she opened the door, praying the maid didn't see—black against the black of her mourning dress, in the dense dimness of the room's single gas jet—that she had her reticule with her, her reticule that had in it, now, all the money she had in the world.
She prayed it would be enough.
The Pinkerton men got to their feet and one of them hastily stashed the Police Gazette in his pocket. Coldly, Mary informed them, “I am going down to Squair's Pharmacy in the lobby, to get some medicine for my neuralgia. I shall be back in a few minutes.”
The two men glanced at one another uncertainly and she walked off down the corridor, head high. One of them put on his bowler hat and followed her; Mary stopped, turned back and leveled a freezing glare at him, a glare that only the students of a select Female Academy such as Madame Mentelle's of Lexington, Kentucky, could muster.
Cowed, the man hesitated, fell back, and though he followed her—lumbering rapidly down the stairs as she steeled herself to take the elevator—he kept his distance.
And that, Mary knew, would be enough.
“I WOULD LIKE TWO OUNCES EACH OF LAUDANUM AND CAMPHOR, SIR.” Her voice sounded reasonable, if rather flat and distant—it was astonishing, she thought, how difficult it was to sound normal when one was trying to sound normal. What was “normal-sounding,” anyway? The doctors in the courtroom that afternoon had seemed to be very sure of it. She thought Mr. Squair's clerk looked at her oddly—had she sounded too normal?—and she added, “I suffer from neuralgia of the shoulder, and bathe it in laudanum and camphor for relief.”
“Of course, Mrs. Lincoln. Just a moment, please.”
The clerk, a young man with a mustache that made him look like a terrier, disappeared through a white-painted door into the room behind the counter. Mary stared at her reflection in the mirrors that caught the last daylight from the lobby, the gas jets that were just beginning to be lit throughout the Grand Pacific Hotel. For two months now she'd been in and out of Mr. Squair's pharmacy, which opened out of the lobby. It was more expensive than Dole's Pharmacy three blocks down Clark Street, but when her migraines were upon her she was willing to pay almost anything, just to be able to purchase medicine and go quietly to her room. In the mirrors she could see the Pinkerton agent—the fatter of the two, like an immense squash in his cheap mustard-colored suit—in the lobby, looking around him unhappily.
Let him look, she thought. He can't stop me. If he tries to come in here I shall complain....
To whom?
She was a madwoman. She was going to be sent to an asylum in the morning. She had only tonight left to her.
Had she dreamed that hideous trial, the way she dreamed and re-dreamed about the Fire? About her mother's death? About that last night in the theater...
It would not be the first time that she'd acted on some too-vivid dream.
No. The Pinkerton man was proof of that.
“I'm sorry, Mrs. Lincoln.” The clerk re-emerged from the white door. “We—er—the medicine will take a half hour to make up. If you can—please come back in thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes?” Mary's temper snapped. “That's outrageous! I can't possibly wait thirty minutes! I'm in pain....Thirty minutes for something you only have to pour out of a bottle? Is Mr. Squair here?”
“No, ma'am. He just—he's having his supper—he went home to have his supper....”
The clerk was trying to sound normal, too.
Mary caught at her temper, breathing hard. Waiting infuriated her, but lashing out at Mr. Squair would only cost her time and draw attention to her. Much as she would have liked to get this officious young lout fired, she knew time was what she did not have. Robert might arrive any minute. If he came before she could procure the laudanum, he would never let her go....
He would never let her go anywhere again.
She drew a deep breath and said—still trying to sound normal—“When I come back, young man, I shall have some words to say to Mr. Squair about your incompetence and rudeness to a good paying customer! I have never been so ill-treated in my life!”
There were two entrances
to Squair's, which formed a corner between the main lobby and the hotel's side entrance onto Quincy Street. Mary stormed out the secondary door before the Pinkerton in the squash-colored suit could react—really, it was no wonder that murdering beast was able to shoot my husband, with blockheads of that stamp for his defense!—and through the hotel's side door.
There was the usual line of cabs drawn up along the curb on Clark Street and it was no time to count pennies. Mary climbed into one and said, “Rogers and Smith drugstore, please.” It was only about a block, but this wasn't the first time she'd taken a cab that short distance. The cabmen didn't like it, but there was no time to waste.
“Shall I wait for you, ma'am?” The driver's voice had the flat vowels of Kentucky. One of the legs propped on the cab's dash was wooden, gone just below the knee. Mary wondered which side he had fought on.
“Of course you shall wait; I'm not in any condition to walk back to the hotel.” With traffic as heavy as it was this time of the evening she would have done better to walk, but she was exhausted and in her tight shoes her swollen feet felt as if someone were trying to cut them off at the ankles. The clerk at Rogers and Smith was even stupider and more incompetent than the one at Mr. Squair's. He was gone so long in the back room that Mary left before he even came out, consumed with the fear that the Pinkerton agent would come in, would stop her, would drag her back to the hotel and her guards.
Of course, she thought, I can always tell him the truth, that Squair's stupid young man wasn't able to fill the order. That my shoulder was hurting so badly I had to seek relief elsewhere. They can't quarrel with that. Even Robert can't quarrel with that....
“Dole's Pharmacy,” she told the cab driver, and the cab lurched away into the thick mill of carriages and drays in the street.
It was dark now, the white glare of the gaslights making the faces of passersby seem harsh, and alien beyond belief. Staring out the cab window, Mary shuddered at that wall of humanity—going where? Doing what? Tomorrow it would be in all the newspapers: “Wife of Lincoln Found Insane.” That morning she had cursed at them for not knowing who she was—such unfeeling anonymity seemed a blessing to her now.
The Emancipator's Wife Page 6