The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  But she felt the woozy aftermath of one of her “spells” still on her, even as she'd had Gretchen help her dress, and the urgency of her instinct to hoard the medicine frightened her.

  “Would you like a little medicine to get you through the morning?”

  Mary met Patterson's gaze, trying to read his intent, but in his brown eyes she saw only kindness and concern. He truly believes that giving me opium is the best way to deal with me. Her glance passed over his shoulder, to Mrs. Hill and Mrs. Johnston, who sat placidly near the window, gazing out into the grounds.

  And what does he give to them?

  “No, thank you, sir,” she said. “I think a little walk in the garden will do me good.”

  “Splendid!” Patterson rose, and helped her to her feet. “Most of our troubles today arise out of irritated nerves, Mrs. Lincoln. Modern cities are no place for those of delicate constitutions. No wonder so many women find themselves prey to hysteria and delusions. All the hurrying and scurrying, all the clocks and traffic and noise! The best mode of life is quiet, without overstimulation. You do very well to take just a little mild exercise. Would you like Gretchen or Amanda to accompany you, Mrs. Lincoln?”

  “Thank you, no. I'd like to be by myself.”

  He frowned at that, and gave her a grave talk about not permitting herself to fall into morbid reflection, but in the end let her go. As she walked out into the graveled terrace above the roses she could see Mrs. Wheeler and Mrs. Edouard sitting quietly on a bench beneath an elm-tree. Talking commonplaces, neatly dressed, just as if Rosemary Wheeler hadn't spent all day yesterday howling and pounding on the walls of her room, and Heloise Edouard hadn't been subjected to a “water treatment” every day for a week.

  The best mode of life is quiet. And if you're not sufficiently quiet yourself, thought Mary, a little medicine will make you so.

  Does Robert know?

  Of course he does.

  The smell of roses and grass washed over her, sun-warmed and soporific. Though it was high spring, the breezes from the Fox River flickered through the trees, cooling the blessed shade. It would be good, thought Mary, to stay here, to never worry about things again. To not be afraid; to not be sad; to feel neither humiliation nor grief—not for long at a time, anyway. The perfect life.

  The resting-place she had been seeking for ten years.

  “Live and lie reclined

  On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

  For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled

  Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled

  Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world . . .”

  She remembered reading Tennyson's “Lotos-Eaters” to her husband in bed, and the far-off look in his gray eyes as he savored the words. This was during the second winter of their marriage, which they'd spent in that tiny rented cottage on Fourth Street. Sleety wind howling outside the windows, Robert soundly asleep in his cradle at the foot of their bed. The lamp burning with a warm amber radiance and Lincoln crowded up close beside her under the heap of quilts: he was perpetually cold, and the room was freezing. One of the good times.

  She'd set the book down on the counterpane, and they'd talked about that dreamy land, and what each would do, if offered the chance to live there.

  “Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil,” he'd repeated, one big hand ruffling the fur of Lady Jane, the cat that lay on his stomach. “The shore / Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; / Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.”

  AFTER A TIME MARY TURNED AWAY, FROM THE SUNLIGHT AND THE roses of Bellevue's garden, and from that cherished memory, and circled the house, to the corner where the side door was hidden behind a little wall. That was where she'd seen John Wilamet, more than once, standing where he could look out over the garden without being observed from the house. As she walked, she was conscious of Amanda, watching her from the parlor windows.

  She supposed that was something that one became used to. Part of the price one paid for this ultimate peace.

  As she'd thought, John was standing near the side door.

  He saw her come around the corner of the house and made to go in. She called out softly, “Please don't go, Mr. Wilamet,” and quickened her step to reach him. “I wanted to tell you . . . I wanted to ask your forgiveness for my losing my temper at you yesterday. I . . .” She hesitated, looking up at him. His eyes were grave and tired behind his spectacles.

  She realized he'd probably spent a worried night, wondering if she really would complain about him to Dr. Patterson, and what she would say. In her Washington days she'd seldom hesitated to complain of fancied ill-treatment. She swallowed, and drew a deep breath.

  “When one . . . ceases to take opium . . . what else can one take, for pain? Because I do have genuine pain, you know. All my life I have suffered from migraines, and twelve years ago I was in a carriage accident, and suffered injury to my back and shoulder. I cannot . . .”

  The memory of the empty medicine bottle returned to her, and her frantic thoughts of hiding medicine. The memory, too, of the medicine she had hidden, in every room she'd inhabited, all those years. She felt her face grow red. In a suffocated voice, she went on, “I cannot be without something.”

  She had turned her eyes down to her small chubby hands as she spoke. Now, looking up again, she saw respect and pity mingled in the young man's face.

  “I'll see that you get only as much as you really need,” he said. “But I promise you, you're going to think you need more. And I promise you, too, that you're going to feel terrible.”

  “It's so . . . humiliating,” said Mary quietly. “To realize . . . to realize what one has become. In spite of oneself, one's best intentions. And you're quite right,” she added, more briskly, “Dr. Patterson doesn't see any reason at all why every woman in this place shouldn't be opiated twenty-four hours a day. We're only lunatics, after all. I'm sure he considers it more restful for everyone concerned.”

  “It is,” said John, and Mary stared at him, startled, before breaking into laughter. He laughed, too.

  Of course it was. That was why Robert had sent her here.

  It felt good beyond belief to laugh again.

  Then she sighed, feeling the anxiety that was already beginning to gnaw at her grow stronger, the restlessness in hands and feet that at times could drive her to distraction. Remembering the migraines, and the nightmares from which she fled. The memories of guilt and shame. In a muffled voice she said, “I think I will need a great deal of help.”

  “I promise you,” said John, “that I will give you all the help that I can.”

  THE REST OF THE DAY MARY SPENT IN HER ROOM, AND MANY DAYS after that. In part this was because she feared that, if Dr. Patterson pressed medicine of some kind on her for her restlessness and pain, she would swallow it gladly—would swallow anything, to be rid of the physical malaise and the horrible darkness.

  And in part, it was because the grief that descended upon her was so incapacitating that she thought she would die of it. It was as if everything that she had fled and pushed aside, all those years, was returning, distilled and fermented by time. Everything that she had been unable to cope with then assailed her now, a night ocean in which she was adrift in the most fragile of canoes.

  Without John coming to see her—coming to talk, to hold her hands, to give her small amounts of watered laudanum to hold the worst of the physical symptoms at bay—she did not think she could have endured it.

  He came every few hours, sometimes so stealthily that she was certain Dr. Patterson did not know of the frequency of his visits and would not have agreed with either his diagnosis or his treatment. Mostly he simply let her talk, about Lexington, about Springfield—about Mr. Lincoln, and Elizabeth, and Betsey, and her boys. About the horror of her loneliness; about her anger that had all her life run like fire and poison in her veins.

  But there were alway
s those times at night, when all the house slept and she could not. When the door was locked and, far off, she could hear one of the other patients screaming. Then all she could hold on to was the memory of that windy night over thirty years ago, and Lincoln turning his head on the pillow to look at her:

  “Would you go live in the land of the lotos-eaters, if you could, Molly?”

  And she'd replied with the prompt optimism of twenty-five, “Of course not! It sounds flat dull to me.”

  His eyes twinkled. “You wouldn't notice how dull it was, you'd be so happy all the time.” His hand stopped scritching Lady Jane's chin and the cat wrapped her paws protestingly around his wrist. One of the first things Mary had learned about her husband was that he always had a cat or two around him, and could never pass up even the straggliest stray. She'd fretted about one of the four currently in residence scratching the baby, but Lincoln had said, “Oh, I don't think they will,” and so far they hadn't.

  “Would you go there?” she asked. “To live where you could do nothing, and be happy all the time?”

  “It's tempting,” he admitted. “When I get the hypo—hypochondria, Dr. Henry calls it—it seems to me that if what I feel could be evenly distributed through the whole human race, there wouldn't be a smiling face left on the surface of the planet. But it's happened to me enough now for me to know that I won't die of it, and it will end—it always does. And it seems to me that if we were all to sit, every man under his own vine and fig-tree, we wouldn't do much to help those that need helping. And you notice, those lotos-eaters don't seem to have families, or children, or friends. Would you trade a whole bouquet of lotos-blossoms for Bobby, even when he's squalling his head off? Or for either of your sisters, even when they're hell-bound to tell you about what a mistake you made marryin' me?”

  Mary feigned deep thought. “Ask me the next time Bobby's squalling,” she said.

  DESPITE HIS INITIAL DISMAY AT FINDING HIMSELF A HUSBAND AND A father, Lincoln worked hard to do his best at both. He still had his periods of bitter resentment at the loss of his easygoing bachelor life—his silences, his absences, an occasional flash of volcanic temper. But he adapted—outwardly at least—more quickly than did Mary.

  When Bobby was wailing, or Mary had to leave some all-too-rare gathering of her friends to go home and care for him, she reflected that Lincoln could adapt because there was less change for him to adapt to. It was far easier for a man than for a woman, to be somewhere else.

  Perhaps because of the tensions in that cramped boardinghouse room, Robert was a fussy, nervous child. He had been born, moreover, with a left eye that turned sharply inward, a deformation that Mary was sometimes able to ignore, and sometimes—to her abiding shame—was not. From the first heart-sinking moment she saw her son's eye, she felt certain that God had punished her lie by giving her a defective child. Every time she picked him up, in spite of all her will to feel something different, she was overcome by shame.

  The infant felt it—she knew he felt it—and he would scream and would not be comforted.

  But Lincoln had only to lift his son in his huge hands for the baby's cries to cease. With his great physical strength, and his calmly logical intelligence, he had a vast store of tenderness, and an almost womanly patience. He likewise exerted himself in caring for Mary, whether during one of her migraines or merely in her simple day-to-day conflicts with the world; caring quietly and without fuss, as he had the night she gave birth to their son. He would have been, in fact, the perfect husband, if he'd been around most of the time.

  But he wasn't.

  A month after Bobby was born, Lincoln was back on the circuit, leaving Mary to deal with Mrs. Beck and those other inhabitants of the tavern who didn't appreciate an infant's screams at all hours of the night. Mary knew they were right, but her shame at agreeing with them made her defensive, and she found herself in a number of sharp quarrels even with Harriet Bledsoe, who took care of her following the birth.

  Knowing Lincoln couldn't afford to live anywhere but at the Globe, when her father came to Springfield to see his new grandson she swallowed her pride and asked him for money to set up housekeeping. With what he sent—ten dollars every month thereafter—they were able to move to the cottage on Fourth Street. Elizabeth, to whom Mary was speaking again by that time, thanks to their father's patient negotiations, sent Eppy to help nurse Bobby and deal with the heavier indoor chores.

  The smiling freedwoman had been given as a gift to Ninian's father when she was seven, long years ago. Eppy undertook to teach Mary—who was already accounted a good cook—the heavier skills of day-to-day plain cooking, things the daughter of Robert Todd—or the sister of Elizabeth Edwards—had always been able to relegate to a servant: gutting and boning, and how to judge the amount of kindling and the heat on various portions of the cottage's old-fashioned open hearth.

  She initiated Mary, too, into the never-ending routines of keeping house—the first time that Mary truly learned the sheer physical drudgery of being a poor man's wife. As with the cooking, she had helped out in Elizabeth's house, and knew what had to be done. But she'd always known that if there were morning-calls to make, or a picnic to go to, someone else would sweep the floors, clean the lamp-chimneys, clear the ash from the kitchen hearth, keep the boiler topped up with hot water, make sure the family chamber pot was clean and scoured, air the beds to keep the ever-present bugs at bay, keep up the kitchen fire, and cut up newspapers to furnish the out-house. This didn't even include the labor of washdays, and the tedious exertions involved in making sure that Lincoln had a clean shirt and her own petticoats were fresh and starched.

  Eppy came over to help on those days—it was appalling how much linen a six-month-old baby went through in a week—but Mary always felt behind. She was not lazy, and when she felt well enough was perfectly willing to work, but life did not stop when she had a headache.

  Then Bobby would cry, and Mary would have to go attend to him, leaving the rugs half-beaten or the few lunch dishes still sitting in their pan of cooling water....

  And at night, aching with fatigue, she would be too weary to open a newspaper or to care whether President Tyler had been drummed out of the Whig Party, or why. She would lie alone and listen to the far-off thunder of the prairie storms, trembling with panic and head throbbing with the onset of migraine, tensely waiting for Bobby to start shrieking again just when things looked to be finally settling into silence....And she would hate Abraham Lincoln.

  That was her second secret, never whispered to a soul—for to whom could she whisper it without admitting that she'd been wrong?

  She hated him as she had hated her father when he was not there. And the shame of feeling what she felt was worse a thousand times than that of the lie she had told. Then he would come home, and the sweet times would return.

  At winter's end, Lincoln started negotiating with Reverend Dresser, who had performed their wedding. In May—between the Champaign Circuit Court, the Moultrie Circuit Court, and a convention of the Seventh Congressional District Whigs in Tremont—they moved into Dresser's four-room frame cottage on the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets: Lincoln, Mary, Bobby, six cats, Bob the Horse, and Clarabelle Cow in the stable out back.

  They played hide-and-seek, laughing, in the bare whitewashed rooms, and made love on the naked planks of the bedroom floor.

  It wasn't Ashland—or even the House on the Hill—but it was theirs.

  Then Lincoln disappeared on the circuit again, leaving Mary to her own devices.

  He made arrangements with the neighbor, Mr. Gurney, to do the heavy work of cutting kindling, hauling water from the well, and milking Clarabelle. He also wrote to his cousin Dennis Hanks, back in Coles County, Indiana, offering to house Dennis's young daughter Hetty so that the girl could come to Springfield and go to school. Mary welcomed this arrangement, in part because she felt so completely unable to cope with the physical toil of running even a small house unaided, and in part remembering what little Lincoln
had told her of his own childhood—the hopeless childhood of the uneducated dirt-farmer.

  If it had been so for him—like the snaggle-haired silent backwoods children Mary remembered from the Lexington Court Days, ill-clothed and illiterate as puppies—how much worse was it for a girl, who couldn't even leave her family's house to strike out on her own?

  Hetty Hanks stayed for nearly eighteen months. Looking back on that time later, Mary supposed that if she herself had been more used to the demands of housework, less terrified about money, less resentful of Lincoln's absences, she and Hetty might have gotten along better than they did. Indeed, as it was she often enjoyed the company of this tall, quiet, skinny girl—as if Hetty were the daughter Mary one day hoped to have.

  Elizabeth—and particularly the sarcastic Ann, who was now living in the front bedroom of the House on the Hill and cutting her own swath through Springfield's bachelors—rolled their eyes when they encountered this gawky backwoods girl in Mary's kitchen, calling a chair a “cheer” or saying she had a “heap sight” of chores. But Mary made the girl welcome, bought dress-goods at Irwin's and helped her make new clothes, bought her the first pair of shoes she'd ever owned.

  Those were on her better days. But Hetty's ideas of “working for her keep” were very different from Mary's, and, like her cousin, she had a tendency to disappear when she didn't like what was going on. She also had an appetite like an anaconda (though she never appeared to gain an ounce, reflected Mary ruefully). In weeks when Lincoln had been too forgiving about his fees—or simply hadn't bothered to collect them—the perpetual theft of eggs, bread, butter, and sausages made a difference, particularly when Hetty would share them with her friends.

  Quarrels were inevitable, and grew worse, rather than better, over time. Every time Lincoln would take his young cousin's side (“She treats me like she thinks I'm one of her daddy's slaves!”), Mary felt furious and betrayed. To her mind Hetty was simply lazy, as Lincoln was lazy. When he was away riding the circuit, as he so often was, there was no one to arbitrate at all, and there were days of silent sulking and resentment that defeated her best efforts to understand.