And by tomorrow afternoon, she thought, it would be “Emancipator's Widow Dead.”
She pressed her hands to her lips, and closed her eyes. They said suicides went straight to Hell. But in the dark parlors where spirits knocked and whispered in the shadows, she had heard the souls themselves give the lie to those joyless preachers and their mistaken ideas of faith. I will not go, she thought. Robert wants my money, well, he may have it: it's all going to him in my will in any case. Rather than be a prisoner for the rest of my life—rather than be stared at, pointed at, hear them whisper “That is Abraham Lincoln's widow, and now she's gone mad, poor thing,” I will simply depart. It can't be so terribly difficult. Everyone says that one just slips away.
And it is no more than I deserve....
And for an instant she was twenty-four again, with the heavy strength of a man's body lying on top of hers. Feeling the rough power of those enormous hands caressing her, seeing firelight reflected in the desperate darkness of deep-set gray eyes.
At Dole's they refused her outright. Time was passing—Robert might arrive at the hotel at any minute—so she did not argue. Would an account of her lunacy have come out in the newspapers already? Why else would they look at her that way, would refuse to sell her laudanum when they'd done so before? She didn't argue. She returned to her cab and ordered him back to the hotel, praying that Mr. Squair wouldn't give her any more trouble.
He didn't, though the cab driver as usual demanded far more than a ride of three blocks was worth: “You'll take fifty cents and like it,” snapped Mary, feeling as if her skull were about to split. “In my day gentlemen did not haggle with ladies over the cost of services. Your mother would be ashamed of you.” She turned and swept up the steps of the hotel before he could reply, trembling with anxiety and rage.
The bottle Mr. Squair gave her was labeled LAUDANUM—POISON and she drank it on the second-floor landing. She hadn't eaten since lunch and her head throbbed, her feet stabbed with pain as if every small bone in them had been broken. As always she felt, as she climbed the stairs, that she'd safely negotiated some terrible countryside filled with dangers, that she was approaching the place where she was safe, where she could rest....
From the top of the stair she could see the remaining Pinkerton man by the door of her room, talking with Mary Gavin. Gossiping about me, she thought. Whispering how I did or said this, that, or the other. They're all the same.
Mary Gavin's testimony on the stand stung her, how she'd blithely babbled to everyone in Chicago about Mary's nightmares, and the things she'd confided to her in the dim spells of confusion....
Haven't you ever heard about keeping confidences? Mary wondered bitterly as she forced herself to walk, head high, along that endless hallway. Or is it customary among you slum-Irish to chat to the neighbors about your friends' secrets and troubles, and how much they spent at the department stores? She'd given the woman presents, too, and money—which she'd doubtless spent on gin....
“That mentally deficient clerk at Squair's was taking so long to fill my order that I was forced to go down the street to Rogers and Smith,” said Mary as the Pinkerton man opened his mouth to admonish her. “Your partner will bear me out, sir, if you suppose that I'm a liar...or insane,” she added, with a vicious glance at Mary Gavin. “Provided he didn't stop at a saloon on his way.”
She thrust past Mary Gavin, adding over her shoulder, “Please close the door. And please ask those two gentlemen in the corridor to keep their voices low. I am, as you may suppose, very tired, and would like to lie down. Since you must be in here, please see to it that I'm not disturbed.”
She took off her bonnet, and lay down fully clothed on her bed, wondering how long it would take the poison to work. Everyone was always telling her how dangerous laudanum was, as if she hadn't been taking it without the slightest ill effect for years. But at the moment it didn't seem to be doing much, not even taking away her headache. The room was hateful to her, with Mary Gavin's gin-bottle and newspapers crumpled on the chair, and the empty purse that Mr. Arnold had torn out of her petticoats only a few hours ago lying flat on the table.
How dared he? The shame and humiliation flooded back at having pulled up her skirts in front of all those men—at having been forced to go through what she had been through that day. How dared Robert subject me to that....
Shame tore at her, the frantic shame that had followed her all her life, and the burning torment of guilt. The old feeling overwhelmed her, of wishing she could go back in time and scrub out events and scenes; make them be gone, have never happened. A single lie...
How could God be said to forgive, when events followed you through life that way, stacking up more events like tokens in some hellish game?
She sat up, and fished from the cupboard as many bottles as she could reach—Nervine and Catawba Indian Balsam—and poured a dollop of each into her glass, as she had that afternoon. After drinking it she lay down again. The familiar sweet warmth steadied her, lessening her anxiety. With luck when Robert got here they'd tell him she was resting. She pictured his shock and grief when they told him she was dead, when they found the empty bottle—LAUDANUM—POISON—in her handbag, when he realized what he'd driven her to.
Though of course he'd find some way of keeping it out of the newspapers.
Or maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he'd tell the reporters all about it, as proof that she was insane. Only insane people committed suicide, after all.
No, she thought, as sleep stole on her—final sleep, she thought, endless sleep. One doesn't have to be insane to want to die.
One only has to be lonely for long enough.
“Oh, my darling,” she whispered to that tall shadow that she could half-see, where the dim pink-amber of the lamplight did not reach. “Oh, my beloved, forgive me.”
Though as she slipped over into darkness she could not have said whether she wanted forgiveness for taking her own life, or for keeping him waiting so long.
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS A FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN APRIL, MUGGY AND HOT. THOUGH the curtains of that large oval parlor on the White House's second floor were closed, still the sharp yellow light pierced the chinks. Sitting in the dimness, Mary tried to summon enough energy to go over and close them more firmly.
But it did not seem worth the effort of getting to her feet, crossing the room.
The darkness comforted her. In the darkness, in the quiet, she could feel that Willie hovered near her. She could almost see the child's sweet spirit tiptoeing out of the shadows, flowers in his hands. He had been her boy, her treasure, the most intelligent of her sons and the most loving. Even when the boys were small, it was Tad who'd go crashing outside at a run to play, Willie who'd stop his headlong rush after him to ask, “Is there anything you need, Mama?”
Is there anything you need?
I need you, my darling! I need your cheer to make me laugh, your smile to make me know I'm alive! When she thought of herself in old age, it was Willie she had pictured at her side. Dear God, the sight of his face, wax-white and so thin, on the satin pillows of his coffin!
“Mother?”
It was her husband. He stood in the doorway of the secret hall that he'd had put in between his offices and the family rooms. For four years he'd had to go through the public hallway on the Executive Mansion's second floor to get from one place to the other, the hallway so crowded with people bringing petitions or seeking favors or asking for jobs for themselves or their family members that it sometimes took him an hour and a half to walk a few dozen feet. He still had a boyish glee about using the inner door, as if it were a secret passage designed to thwart the grown-ups....
His head came within a few inches of the lintel. In the light that came through from his secretary's office beyond, flecks of gray showed in that coarse Indian-black unruly hair that had begun its stealthy retreat back up his forehead. She saw, too, how thin he'd become, not that he'd ever been stout before. But the dark suit that had fit him two years ago h
ung baggy over his shoulders, and his eyes had a bruised look in hollows under the heavy brow.
“I'm sorry I am late,” he said. “Will you come driving with me after all?” He spoke diffidently and a little stiffly, and did not move from the door, as if he feared yet another half-sobbed demand to be left alone.
He was indeed late, and Mary felt a flash of anger at him, for she had looked forward all day to the ride, and now he had spoiled it with his endless meetings. “I thought you had forgotten,” she said, “and had gone with Mr. Stanton?” She hated the nervous, masterful Secretary of War who was so often Lincoln's companion on his drives. Couldn't he see the man was dangerous?
“Or perhaps you'd rather go with Julia Grant?” She remembered how her husband had laughed at some witticism of his chief General's bosomy wife, and the attentions he'd paid the woman when they'd gone down to Richmond last week. They were going to the theater with the Grants tonight, too, and she didn't know how she'd manage to sit in the same box with Julia all night, not to mention that coarse drunkard brute of a husband of hers....
The minute the words were out of her mouth she regretted them. Tears flooded her eyes. Her temper had gotten worse since Willie's death and she knew it. As whose wouldn't, she thought defensively, in the face of her husband's growing silences, his absence for eighteen hours out of twenty-four. He had used to share things with her, talk over his plans and his hopes, the cases he had in the courts. He used to ask her advice about his speeches: Would “supremacy of law” offend the Southern moderates she'd grown up with, or should he soften it to “primacy”? Now he talked of nothing but commonplaces, left her out of the circles of power, pushed her aside....
She looked back at the doorway, expecting it to be empty. But he still stood there, though by the deepened lines of his face she could see she'd hurt him. Good, she thought. Maybe next time he'll take to heart what I say.
Maybe he'll leave me alone....
“I'd like your company best, Mother,” he said. “As I always have.”
Her mouth opened to rage at him—A pretty poor way you've had of showing it lately!
But something in the weariness of his eyes stopped her, the silence like a man who takes a whipping without a sound. For a moment she saw, not a tired man of fifty-six with gray in his beard, but a gawky, gaunt, and painfully shy Kentucky barbarian in a suit that didn't fit, standing in the doorway of her sister Elizabeth's house under Elizabeth's withering gaze....
She smiled at that far-off young man, and said instead, “Pretty poor company I've been, too,” and watched the tension melt out of his eyes. She got up and took his hand. “I'd like to go driving with you, Mr. Lincoln. Thank you.”
Outside the air was cooler than she'd feared it would be, the first stirrings of breeze wafting across the Potomac to rustle the dogwoods. The dappled sun on her face felt like a blessing, dissolving her disappointed anger. It dissolved even some of the terrible grief over Willie's death that seemed to have turned her heart to stone. The small escort of cavalry that followed the carriage kept their distance. “A lot of use they'll be if a rebel assassin shoots at you from the trees,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.
“The only way they could prevent a rebel assassin from shooting from the trees is to surround us like a wall,” Lincoln pointed out, in a tone of academic observation, as if he had not been receiving death-threats and letters filled with unbelievable hatred for nearly five years. “And even then they couldn't stop a man from flying overhead in a balloon and dropping a brick on my head.”
“Will you be serious?”
“No,” said Lincoln, and smiled—that sweet lightening of his whole ugly face that the photographers never caught. “I have been serious all morning and I am mighty weary of it.” He curled his enormous hand around her small, plump fingers. “Besides, what point would there be in murdering me now? The war is over, all but the shouting—of which I'm afraid there'll be plenty, once Congress hears that there are to be no war trials or hangings or firing-squads for men who were only following their consciences. I want a carriage-ride with the woman I love, not a military parade.”
Mary blushed, and tightened her hand over his. How could he still love her? A few days ago she had apologized for the scene she'd made on their trip to Richmond—an apology she wasn't sure she'd have offered if she'd known it would lead to the invitation to spend this evening in a theater-box with General and Mrs. Grant—and things had been easy between them, easier than they'd been in months. It was good, she thought, to have her husband back, at least for an hour or two....
“By the way,” he said, “the Grants have been forced to beg off from the theater this evening. Robert's given his excuse as well....”
Mary's lips tightened at this newest evidence of their oldest son's estrangement from his father.
“But we could ask Senator Harris's daughter Clara and her fiancé....Or we could cry off ourselves, which I've half a mind to do. We've both seen the play before, after all.”
“Oh, no!” said Mary quickly, the prospect of an evening at the theater without Julia Grant and her cigar-stinking husband beckoning like a circus-treat in her childhood. “We've already announced to the newspapers that we would be there; it would be a shame to disappoint them. And it would do me good to get out.” She sighed, and settled back on the cushions, looking out over the open barouche's sides at the lush sweetness of the woods north of the last houses of the town, the silver sparkle of far-off water among the trees.
As the carriage rattled along the dusty roads in the slanted evening light they talked of small things: how Jip the dog kept trying to convince one of the kitchen cats to play with him, and the scheme their just-turned-twelve-years-old Tad had evolved to trap the last holdouts of the rebel army in North Carolina. The fighting was over, and Mary reveled in Robert's safe return—not that he'd ever been in real danger, as a member of Grant's staff, but one never knew. It was good beyond computation to see how the years melted away from her husband's face, to see the mischief and the old delight sparkle in his somber gray eyes.
Good to have him to herself, as she had used to do in their old home in Springfield, before office-seekers and Generals and Cabinet members and, as he would put it, “every man and his little black dog” had a claim on his time and attention and energy. For five years now, all she had wanted was to have him to herself.
Good to hear him laugh when she mimicked Julia Grant, conjuring up a scene of the woman measuring the White House for her own furniture. Good to laugh almost to tears at his own imitation of the barely literate brother-in-law of some Ohio Representative's cousin who'd come requesting to be made military governor of New Orleans on account of his services to the Republican Party back home in Cincinnati....
As they came back into town again, and the walls of the White House made a pale blur in the gathering gloom, Lincoln said, “Mother, it has been such a joy only to be ourselves again. We must both be more cheerful in the future; between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have both been very miserable.”
Mary nodded. “I know. And I have been as guilty of it as you. With the war over now it will be easier.”
“I hope so. I find myself looking forward to the end of my term as much as any of the poor slaves looked forward to Freedom. Where shall we go, when I finally get my own emancipation papers? I know you've always said you wanted to travel.”
“Oh, yes! Paris first, and then Rome...Oh, and we must visit Venice....” She checked herself in her visions of the Opéra and the shops along Rue de la Paix, and asked, “Where would you like to go?” And was surprised at herself, because she realized—even after twenty-three years of marriage—that she didn't know.
“I'd like to go to Jerusalem,” he replied, and she thought, Of course. For a skeptic who stayed as far away as he could from anything resembling a Church, he knew the Bible, as if it were some marvelous storybook. Of course he would want to see David's city, and the remains of Solomon's Temple....
“California?” The name had an almost mythical ring to it, a place at the farthest end of creation.
“To see the goldfields,” he explained. “When the men are done in the Army, many of them will go there to find jobs in the mines. And after that,” he smiled, “I think the place I look forward most to seeing is Springfield again, and the inside of my old law office. To having things be as they used to be...Except with Emancipation, you can bet there'll be more litigation over it than if I'd put a tax on air.”
She laughed over that, and in her dream Mary clutched at the happiness she felt; clutched at the white clouds of the dogwood against the graying evening sky, and the sweetness of the air on her face. She knew what was coming next and she tried to run from it, tried to put it aside, like a book whose ending she didn't wish to read. Let it end here, she begged. This is all I want to remember....
But of course she found herself in the carriage again, later that night, the fog so thick she could see nothing beyond the carriage windows. Senator Harris's daughter Clara was a pretty young thing and her fiancé, Major Rathbone, was overwhelmingly jolly, like some character out of Dickens. But Mary didn't care. In the dark of the carriage she held her husband's hand.
We must both try to be more cheerful, she thought, knowing what he had said was true. She had put off her mourning for Willie that night, and wore a gown of stiff gray silk that rustled like silver as Lincoln helped her down from the carriage, led her up the theater steps and through the dress circle to their box above the stage. The play had already begun, but the conductor of the orchestra spotted them, and broke into “Hail to the Chief.” Lincoln—whose main objection to a cavalry guard was that it embarrassed him to be treated like an emperor—nodded gravely and gestured his thanks to the conductor, and to the actors smiling up at them from the stage; Mary basked in the music, as if in that afternoon's sun.
The Emancipator's Wife Page 7