Mary put on a considering expression as she studied the trunks, then glanced at him, smiling. “If you're not too long about it.”
When the times were sweet, they were very sweet.
Lincoln had grown up in a man's world, and for years had associated mostly with men. With his agonizing shyness around women went a curiosity about them that few men had—as he was curious about all things, and all people. In the same spirit that he'd listened to the Speed slaves telling stories in the quarters, he would listen with a slow grin, cracking his knuckles, when Mary spoke of the intricacies of the Southern family feuds that had carried from Virginia to Kentucky and on into Illinois, and the inflexible rules about who left cards on whom, and why. He hadn't been joking when he'd said a woman should have the same right to sexual freedom as a man—he was also inclined to let women have the vote. “But God help you if you say so in this state.”
For her part Mary had never known a man like him. Her experience had for the most part been with men of her own class, townsmen who saw the world in terms of making a living, and connecting with other men—and peripherally with their families—who would further their own careers.
Lincoln's countrified earthiness, that had so repelled Elizabeth, drew Mary. She felt that she was dealing with a man from a different age of history, a woodsman at heart who saw the world in terms of simpler survival, and who thus saw through the persiflage of town life and town ambitions to the bone and bedrock of politics and law.
At night they would read to one another from her books or from the half-dozen newspapers that were the party organs of Democrats, Whigs, Locofoco Democrats, “the conscience Whigs,” anti-Tyler Whigs, and all phases of opinion in between. Or they would simply talk until the bedroom candle burned out. Shortly after they were married, as she brushed her hair before bed, he asked her shyly, “May I do that?” and she smiled at him sidelong:
“You heard the minister, Mr. Lincoln, and you know the laws of the state. It is now your hair, and you may do with it what you wish.”
But the sweetness of those times didn't make up for her constant dread of being found out in her lie, and the galling humiliation of being truly poor. And Mary quickly found how right Elizabeth had been. From the first she hated poverty—hated it and all that it meant.
During that freezing winter, when she would struggle through the mud of Adams Street on foot and see Elizabeth pass in Ninian's carriage, she didn't even have the consolation of sympathy. She knew what Springfield gossip was. She had proclaimed, again and again, to every one of her friends that Lincoln's poverty and debt mattered nothing to her. She knew how Elizabeth would look down her nose, if word reached her that Mary did not actually like to be cold in their little boardinghouse room (Mrs. Beck charged extra to keep fires burning during the day), or disliked the appalling sameness of Mrs. Beck's uninspired cooking. She could almost hear Elizabeth say it: You have no one to blame but yourself.
To be poor was to be branded wrong in the eyes of the entire town.
When, in years past, Mary had pictured herself as married, she had always assumed she would have a home—perhaps not as elegant as that of Elizabeth and Ninian, but at least a place of comfort, like that of Bessie and Simeon Francis. A place in which to be “at home” when friends came calling, a place where she could give dinners and put up preserves. But even with the little money from her mother's will that came to her on her marriage, Lincoln insisted that they had not the money for a house. So they remained at the Globe, where the noisy talk of the men in the common-room, the clang of the stagecoach bell, and the arguments of the Bledsoes next door kept Mary awake far into the nights.
What Lincoln had imagined marriage would be like, he did not say. Sometimes she wondered if he had ever pictured himself as being married at all. Or had he, she wondered, simply assumed that he would continue his bachelor existence of boardinghouses and courtrooms, arguing politics and swapping yarns with his male friends?
Whatever he'd been expecting—or not expecting—Mary found that Frances had been right in observing that at thirty-four, Lincoln was deeply set in his ways. She tried to remember this, when he'd stay out late at the law office, or the State-House library, or wherever it was he stayed until long after dark, leaving her to sit at the boardinghouse dinner-table with two dozen teamsters, laborers, clerks, and transients alone. Harriet Bledsoe and her six-year-old daughter Sophie were often the only other females at the table, and though some of the men were careful about their language, others weren't, and what Mary didn't learn about disgusting table-manners in that first winter could have been written on the back of a very small visiting-card.
Mary's resentment took the form of fits of rage; Lincoln's, of silence and absence, from which he'd return to apologies, embraces, and long sweet nights of lovemaking and talk. During the day when he was gone Mary would sometimes go calling on Julia or Bessie or Merce Conkling, but she found herself embarrassed, for they were now wealthier than she. They generally asked her to stay to luncheon or dinner (“Darling, everyone in town has heard about Mrs. Beck's cooking!”) but she dreaded the thought that she was being looked upon as a cadger.
When she stayed at the Globe, she ran the risk of the equally idle Harriet Bledsoe knocking at her door, “for a chat.” Harriet's husband was a new-fledged lawyer, just entering partnership with Lincoln's English friend Ed Baker, but Harriet herself read little but the Bible and had no conversation beyond her family back in New England and how much she missed the way things were done there. Mary's delight in dresses and jewelry she regarded as sinful; her newspaper-reading and interest in the question of Federal lands she considered simply bizarre. She'd bring Sophie to do her samplers in quiet beside the little fire—Mary sometimes suspected that Harriet was in the habit of letting the fire go out there, and brought her daughter over to Mary's room only so that the two of them could stay warm—at the Lincolns' extra expense.
“It seems like I saw more of you before we were married than I do now,” Mary complained late one evening, when Lincoln finally came up the narrow wooden stair. It didn't help that she'd heard his voice downstairs in the common-room for a good hour already, talking to drunken Professor Kittridge and Billy Herndon. His high laughter was distinctive, and could pierce walls. She had waited, trying to read by the single candle that was all they could afford that week, with growing impatience—did the man have no concept of time?
Apparently not, because Lincoln looked mildly startled and said, “I'm only making hay while the sun shines, Molly. Mr. Logan's taken on more cases, with the Supreme Court sitting....”
“Surely you can work on those while the sun is actually shining, and not leave me waiting for you alone in this wretched room in the dark!”
His face clouded in the candlelit gloom. “It's the work I do that will get us out of this room....”
“If you do it! If you do it, and don't spend your days the way you've spent the past hour and a half, sitting around with those idlers downstairs while I waited up here!”
“Molly, I'm sorry....”
“You've said you're sorry and you always end up doing the same thing! Sitting around in the common-room with every drover and law-clerk and pettifogger in town . . . !”
“A man is entitled to his friends, I guess,” retorted Lincoln, “as you're entitled to running about all day with yours.”
At that Mary lost her temper completely and lunged at him, hands striking out blindly. He caught her by the wrists and held her off with the same brutal, easy strength that five years before he'd used to hold off Professor Kittridge, while she screamed at him, words that she later could not even remember, words of reproach and fury that she wasn't even sure were directed at him. She didn't know who it was, at whom she wanted to scream, You are always gone, always! You always leave me alone!
He finally shouted at her, in anger of which she hadn't thought him capable, “Any man would leave you alone if he could!” and thrust her down onto the bed. Then he strode from t
he room, shutting the door behind him. Mary staggered to her feet and yanked the door open again, screamed after him,
“Get out of here! Get out!”
She slammed the door, then slammed it again. Then she stumbled to the bed, fell on her knees beside it, and barely had time to pull the chamber pot out from underneath before she began to vomit, her body spasming agonizingly in her stays. For a long time after that she simply lay on the floor beside the bed, sobbing and too exhausted to get up, her head throbbing and the room spinning around her.
They had quarreled before, but not like this. She had read in his anger the bitterness of his frustration at being tied down, as his father had tied him. He didn't even need to know I lied, to turn against me, she thought in despair. He was afraid to marry me, afraid of my temper, and now he hates me. . . .
She vomited again and sweat poured down her face, down her aching body. . . .
What is wrong with me?
And she thought, What I told him was true.
It wasn't a lie after all.
I really am going to have a child.
Lincoln was out nearly all night. Mary lay awake, waiting—listening to the voices downstairs. She thought she heard his laughter before she fell asleep. He must have come up sometime after midnight, with such silent animal stealth that he did not wake her, for she was wakened in the darkness by his voice sobbing out, crying confused words of terror, and she felt his body struggling at her side.
“Mr. Lincoln,” she whispered, reaching over to shake his bony shoulder, “Abraham . . .”
He came awake with a choked cry and she felt him half sit up, bone and sinew trembling like a whipped horse beneath the coarse linen of his nightshirt. He gasped, “I done my best!” It was the hopeless plea of one who knows that one's best is no extenuation in the face of Fate.
“I'm here,” she said, touching his arm again. “I'm here.”
With a sob he caught her to him, clinging tight with arms and legs, like a drowning child. “Don't leave me,” he implored her, and Mary locked her arms around his ribs.
“Never, my love.”
His big hands closed in the thick handfuls of her hair.
SHE PASSED A WRETCHED SPRING AND SUMMER. LINCOLN WAS GONE all of April, for the circuit courts, and again for nearly three weeks in May and June. Her pregnancy was a difficult one, an exhausting cycle of migraines, queasiness, and alternating rage and tears. She quarreled repeatedly with Mrs. Beck, with Mrs. Bledsoe, and whoever else came within her range, including both Frances and Elizabeth. When Julia Jayne came to her, breathless with delight, with the news that she was going to marry Lyman Trumbull, Mary burst into hysterical sobs.
Mary tried to explain, but couldn't understand herself, the blind rages that came over her, in which she would say anything and which left her ill with remorse. How could she explain, she wondered, to women who'd never felt the need for bright intellectual sword fights how dreary the feminized world of babies and pregnancy could be? After her quarrel with Elizabeth—from whose house she stormed back to the Globe on foot—she sent a note to her sister apologizing, but received only the briefest and coldest reply.
Only Lincoln seemed to understand. After that single outburst of frustrated anger he seldom lost his temper with her again. He'd do his best to talk or joke her out of her rages, but if he could not, he would simply leave. Sometimes he wouldn't come back till the small hours of the morning, though she would hear his voice, and his distinctive laugh, downstairs. Mary hated him at such times—she would infinitely have preferred a good fight—but the hatred vanished with her anger, clearing up the way her headaches cleared up, and she would apologize in the morning.
“I don't mean what I say,” she promised anxiously, one hot June morning as Lincoln brought her up coffee, toast, and a copy of the Sangamo Journal from the dining-room before leaving for his office. It was her one consolation in the final stages of pregnancy, that even Mrs. Beck wouldn't expect her to come downstairs in her condition, and made up trays for her. If Harriet Bledsoe brought them up, the coffee was usually tepid and mouth-wringingly strong—the dregs of the pot—but Lincoln could always talk the landlady into making fresh.
Lincoln, Mary was finding, could talk just about anybody into just about anything.
“In fact I don't . . . sometimes I don't know what I say,” she added, a little uncertainly, for this was something she'd never admitted to anyone else. “It's as if someone else is talking—someone I don't know . . . someone I hate. And I think, Who's saying those terrible things? And it's me.” She leaned forward on the pillows, looked up at him as he rolled down his shirtsleeves and fetched a sock from the over-jammed drawers of the hotly-contested bureau. “Do you understand?”
He smiled down at her. She'd heard him at dawn in the yard, splitting Mrs. Beck's kindling for her—looking down from the little dormer window at the end of the hall she'd seen him in his shirtsleeves, handling the ax as casually as she herself would wield a crochet-hook.
“I understand there's folks that are that way,” he said. “There was this feller in New Salem, used to pick a fight with anybody, just about. Seemed to be nuthin' he could do about it. He'd only do it once a month or every six weeks, and you could tell he was spoilin' for it because he'd come out of his house without his hat on, so everybody knew. And everybody would just figgur, ‘Here comes old Benson without his hat on, better get out of the way,' same as we say, ‘Oops, it's rainin', better take an umbrella.'” He leaned down and put his hand on her nightgowned side, where the child that would be Robert slept within her flesh, and kissed her on the top of her head. “He wasn't near as sweet as you, between-times.”
Then he was off, to the County Court or the Whig Party meetings, and Mary had to get through another day alone. Another day of wondering how she could possibly look after a child—how she could have been so stupid as to get herself “in a fix,” as they said, and throw away comfort and friends.
She rarely felt well enough to go out, and few visited her. When one is in no position to entertain, Mary discovered, one gradually ceases to be invited. The gay Coterie of her Springfield friends seemed to have forgotten her in the flurry of picnics and dances and parties leading up to Julia Jayne's wedding.
Bessie Francis came, brought her books and newspapers, and helped her sew for the baby. Her talk of Legislative scandal and Locofoco enormities was the breath of life. But Bessie had her own house to run and half of Simeon's newspaper as well. Mostly Mary was left alone, with her resentment, her headaches, her swollen feet, and the everlasting, oven-like summer heat.
Twice she dreamed of crouching in the darkness of the upstairs hall at the old house on Short Street, listening to baby Georgie crying in the dark. Praying she'd wake up before the bedroom door opened and the men carried her mother's body out, her long dark hair trailing down to the floor.
Robert was born on the first of August, in the upstairs room of the Globe Tavern, with a midwife, Mrs. Beck, Bessie Francis, and Harriet Bledsoe in attendance. The labor seemed endless, the airless room filled with flies. Bessie closed the curtains on the wide windows, to cut down the grilling sun-glare, but the dimness was terrifying, and Mary, alternating between the bed and the birthing-stool that the midwife set up, lost track of time. Pain wrenched her, but no child came; only memories of the smell of blood and her mother's moans—and afterwards that terrible silence.
“Mammy Sally?” she whispered, clinging to Bessie's hands. “Where is she? Why doesn't she come?”
Bessie whispered, “Hush, dear. Hush.”
Once, as if through a long tunnel of pain, she heard Lincoln's voice, and Bessie's replying, “Not yet. It's just taking longer. You go back downstairs.”
“Is that the truth?” he demanded, his voice hoarse with raw fear. Then immediately, “I'm sorry, Bessie. Just—my sister died this way. Died because they wouldn't send for a doctor.” From the bed Mary saw him in the doorway, framed by the gloom of the hall, sweat on his face and his black hair h
anging in his eyes. Past Bessie's shoulder his eyes met hers, and Mary held out her hands to him.
“This is no place for a man,” insisted the midwife firmly. “They only get in the way—and faint, like as not, at the sight of a little blood.”
But Mary whispered, “Please,” and in the end the midwife let him in. He might have no parlor conversation, but he held Mary's hands, stroked her hair and her back with the wordless gentle strength of a man encouraging a mare in foal.
“You'll be fine,” he told her, and though she'd heard his fear about his sister's death, there was something in his voice that kindled belief, and Mary knew, then, that she would be fine.
A few hours later Robert was born.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Bellevue 1875
“IS IT TRUE?” MARY ASKED DR. PATTERSON, WHEN THE NEXT afternoon, sluggish and aching, she came down to the wide parlor of Bellevue Place. “Is it true that the medicine that I've been taking is mostly opium?”
“Oh, not mostly, Mrs. Lincoln.” Dr. Patterson seated himself on the chair across from her, and peered intently at her face. “There's only a little, for medicinal purposes, and of course if it's properly taken there is no more harm in it than a sip of after-dinner sherry. How do you feel this morning? You look tired.”
“I don't feel well,” she said. “I . . . I slept badly, and I'm afraid my neuralgia is acting up again.” Waking, she had hidden the empty medicine bottle. She guessed that John would get into serious trouble for leaving it in her room, though she was honest enough to know that she'd have done everything in her power—up to and including physical violence—to keep him from taking it away from her, when she needed it so. She had been appalled to find it empty. Surely, surely she hadn't drunk the whole thing? She couldn't remember. She should have saved it, hidden it for the next time they wouldn't give her as much as she needed....
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