The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Her deepest regret about not accompanying Lincoln was that she couldn't be at Taylor's inaugural ball at her husband's side. He left early, he wrote her, and in the shoving and confusion of the gentlemen's cloakroom lost his hat, and had to walk back to his boardinghouse bare-headed in the rain.

  While he was gone, that winter of 1848, Mary enrolled Bobby in school. She was beginning to feel deep concern about her older son, and hoped the schoolmistress could do with him what she herself could not. But the boy was forever in trouble with his schoolmates, partly because he was teased about wearing patched breeches, but mostly because the other children called him “Cock-Eye.” When he wasn't in trouble he would simply run away, and even with Mary, his secrecy and his silent defiance were getting beyond what she could handle. After his fifth truancy, she took him to Dr. Wallace's small consulting-room behind the drugstore.

  “It's a relatively simple problem.” Dr. Wallace straightened up, gave Bobby a piece of peppermint, and drew Mary to the far corner of the office. “The muscle on the inner side of the eyeball is too short. It's a fast and easy operation to cut partially through it; in most cases the eye will return, if not to a completely normal position, at least to one that is barely obvious. There's a specialist here in town, Dr. Bell, who should be able to do it. Bobby will have to do eye exercises to restore the balance of the muscles, but I think that should solve the problem.”

  When Lincoln returned to Springfield in March, Mary told him what Dr. Wallace had said—told him, too, about Bobby's increasing quarrelsomeness and truancy at school. “If he's to get any education he mustn't be always fighting,” she insisted. “Dr. Wallace promises that the earlier the surgery is done, the more normal his eye will appear when it heals..”

  She tried to keep her anxiety out of her voice, to sound matter-of-fact. Try as she would, she could never completely push from her heart the ugly fact that the boy's inward-turning eye repelled her. Every time she saw her son's face, she heard the whisper in the back of her mind: Mary Todd played the harlot. Mary Todd lied to get a husband. This is God's punishment.

  She could speak all she wanted about what was best for Bobby, but in truth, she would have done anything not to have a child whose imperfection trumpeted her shame. She wanted to love him wholeheartedly—to be able to love him wholeheartedly. With the defect gone, at least her lie would not be literally staring her in the face.

  Lincoln nodded, though he didn't look happy at the thought of putting his son through the agony of surgery. That was the day they moved back into the cottage on Jackson Street, the boys dashing from room to echoing room in an atmosphere of soap and ironing and fresh paint. Lincoln carried the familiar furniture down from the attic room where it had been stored, reassembled their bed and put together small beds in the low-ceilinged attic bedroom for Bobby and Eddie (“Now, you boys remember I can hear every sound you make!” Mary warned). Eddie was dancing with joy at the prospect of sharing a room with his protector.

  The surgery was set for June, when Lincoln would have built up his much-neglected law practice again. The eye specialist, Dr. Bell, would perform it, with Dr. Wallace assisting. Mary felt reassured by Wallace's presence—she trusted Frances's husband as if he were her own brother. For a month and a half Lincoln was busier, as he said, than a one-armed paperhanger, writing letters for men to whom he owed political favors on top of his legal work, juggling what little influence he had acquired in Washington.

  Then in May he became entangled in what turned into a ferocious three-way tug-of-war over the one patronage office he truly desired, that of United States Land Commissioner. Though the flurries of letters and negotiations with Cyrus Edwards—father of the lovely Tilda, now long married to her handsome Mr. Strong—and other Whig leaders kept him preoccupied and absentminded, Mary understood, and followed the proceedings eagerly. As Land Commissioner, Lincoln would be able to dispense offices on his own and build up a network of influence that would lead to votes.

  A few days before Bobby's surgery, word reached them that a Chicago man named Butterfield was being seriously considered for the post. Wrought up and torn between his complex negotiations and the day-to-day demands of his practice, Lincoln lost his temper, one of the few times since the early days at the Globe that Mary had seen him in a real rage.

  “When I was sweating blood to get Taylor elected Justin Butterfield was all for Clay; when I was making speeches here, there, and yon he was sitting home with his feet on the fender! There isn't a Whig from central Illinois that's received any office, not one! Did someone forget to count our votes?”

  After more letters—more nights of coming home late, of the dining-room lamp's glow dimly seen under the shut bedroom door—Lincoln packed his bags and took the stage for Indianapolis, whence the railroad cars would bear him to Washington. “You want to have Wallace put off the surgery?” asked Lincoln, the night before his departure, as Mary washed up the supper dishes.

  She shook her head, aghast at the thought of further delay. Bobby had run away from school again that morning, after Lyman junior had taunted him, and the schoolmistress had informed her in private that one more problem and he would be dropped from her class. With Eddie down with another cold, and constantly underfoot, Mary couldn't imagine teaching her defiant elder son his letters herself at home. “We'll be all right,” she said. “The longer we delay, the worse it will be.”

  But when Bobby was strapped down to the padded table in Dr. Bell's surgery—when Dr. Wallace gripped his head, and Dr. Bell pulled back the eyelid to expose the mucous membrane, and Bobby started screaming in terror and pain—her nerve failed her. She fled the room, sick and fainting. Crumpled on a chair in the empty outer office, she heard the little boy's screams through the open door; pressed her hands to her ears, knowing she must go back into the surgery to be with him but knowing that if she did she would start screaming, too....

  Before she could gather her strength to stand, Dr. Wallace emerged, spots of blood dabbling his clothes. “We're done, Molly.” He gave her a few sips of brandy and then led her into the surgery and she held the sobbing, half-fainting boy in her arms, dizzy herself and terrified by the greenish pallor of his young face. But at least she was able to keep her composure. Dr. Wallace walked them home and Mary put Bobby to bed, then went to bed herself, trembling and shivering.

  In the weeks after the bandages came off, Bobby did his eye exercises with diligence strange in a six-year-old, and after that time he was quieter, less quarrelsome but also far less communicative, even with Eddie.

  He never spoke to either parent about the surgery.

  As far as Mary could tell, he never mentioned it to a soul.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ON THE THIRD OF JULY, LINCOLN WAS HOME AGAIN. “BUTTERFIELD got it,” he said, as Mary came into the lamplit kitchen from the dining-room where the boys were having their supper—as usual Lincoln had come in through the side door into the kitchen, dusty and tired from riding in the Indianapolis stage since dawn. He hugged Bobby—“Your uncle tells me you were a brave boy. Are you all right?” Then he turned to Mary. “I read the papers in Washington.”

  Mary nodded, though her head ached. She knew she looked terrible, haggard with sleeplessness and night after night of nightmares since first she'd read the news in the Journal a week earlier that cholera had broken out in Lexington. “Emilie wrote me,” she said as Lincoln gently folded her into those long arms. “What a sweet child. She said she knew I'd be worried about Papa, and she says they're all well. They're out at Buena Vista, the house Betsey owned at their marriage, you remember. It's five miles out of town. Even Levi and his wife and their children are there. Catch Betsey thinking to write.”

  “News in Washington was that Mr. Clay was down sick.”

  “Emilie says he's better. Both he and his wife were ill. She says Papa's still campaigning for the Senate, in spite of the epidemic. He lived through one epidemic perfectly well,” she added, a little shakily. “Of course they'll all
do fine through this one.”

  Lincoln smiled, and kissed her on the top of the head. “That's my Molly.” Bobby, his eye covered with a bandage, ate his soup and said nothing.

  That night she dreamed of the cholera. Smelled again the thick choke of lime and gunpowder in her throat, and heard baby David crying, crying like an endless, steady machine-whistle. Dreamed of hearing thumping in the darkness, and of creeping out of her bedroom into the dark upstairs hall, to see Nelson and her father bringing down trunks from the attic to give to old Solly the gravedigger, because there were no more coffins to be had in the town.

  And in her dream, both Nelson and her father were dead. Their faces were green with decay and their hair and clothes smelled of the mold of the graves. Outside in the streets the green, glowing essence of the cholera flowed like fouled water through the streets, shining sickly in the night.

  Lincoln shook her awake in the darkness and she rolled over and clung to him, pressing her face to his bony chest, sobbing as if her heart would break. When she slept again she was back in the Winchester stagecoach, twisting around to get a final glimpse of her father as he stood waving to her in the Courthouse square.

  But he wasn't there.

  Two weeks later she got a letter from Emilie, telling her that her father was dead.

  MARY WEPT UNTIL SHE WAS SICK. THE DEATH HIT HER DOUBLY HARD, for the same day she received Emilie's letter, Julia Trumbull's five-year-old son, Lyman, died as well, from scarlet fever. Lying in the dark of her bedroom, head throbbing with migraine, she was only dimly aware of comings and goings in the house. Lincoln would sit beside her for hours in the darkness, or stretch out next to her on the bed, quiet as one of the cats, and hold her as he did during a thunderstorm.

  None of it seemed to touch the bottomless core of her grief.

  Fanny and Dr. Wallace came in and out often during the daytimes. They'd taken Bobby and Eddie to stay at their home—Mary heard later that it was there that Lincoln ate, when and if he ate. Sometimes she would sleep, and would dream of her father. In her dreams she was still sitting on the porch with him in the mosquito-humming darkness, smelling the smoke of his cigars. Then she'd wake and remember that he was gone.

  And she would weep again, as if she did not know how to stop.

  Even when she was up and around again she felt dazed, and her father's image haunted her. Fanny, Merce, Cousin Lizzie, and Bessie Francis took it in turns for weeks to come calling, as they were taking it in turns to call on and care for Julia. They were almost the only outsiders she could stand to see, and sometimes she could not even endure being with them. She emptied the little chest of trinkets her father had given her—pearl earbobs, silver combs, the sapphire pendant that she hadn't even unwrapped in years—and gave them to her friends, unable to look at them without seeing her father's face. During the days Lincoln took the boys to the office with him, and later she heard that Bobby and Eddie both came very close to driving Billy Herndon into murdering them and pitching their bodies into the street.

  Mostly she simply couldn't believe that her father was gone. When Lincoln told her that he'd been offered the governorship of the Oregon Territory, she could only shake her head tearily and whisper, “No . . . no . . .” The thought of leaving her friends and family again, of months on a ship around Cape Horn and years of living in God knew what wild conditions in the forests, filled her with horror. Lincoln nodded—by the look in his eyes she could see he didn't think much of the idea himself—and no more was said of it. But she noticed that he was offered nothing else.

  She was only beginning to believe her father was actually dead—only beginning to adjust—six weeks later, when her sister Ann came flouncing into the kitchen in red-faced fury with a letter in her hand and announced, “That imbecile brother of ours is trying to get Papa's will thrown out of court!”

  Mary didn't need to be told which imbecile brother Ann meant. Levi was a sulky tosspot, but like his father tended to deal with problems by simply not being there. George—a young man who also, as they said, had a spark in his throat—was volatile and temperamental and generally in debt, and loathed Betsey perhaps most of all Robert Todd's “first children.” Mary paused only long enough to instruct Ruth—the current “girl”—in getting dinner into the Dutch oven (God knew whether she would, or what would come out), then took off her apron, collected Eddie and Bobby from the yard, and followed Ann to Elizabeth's, where an indignation meeting was in progress in the parlor. The upshot—after several hours' free exchange of personalities about George and Betsey—was that when she returned home that evening, it was to ask Lincoln to go with her to Lexington, to safeguard the interests of the four Todd sisters when George's challenge of Robert Todd's will came to court.

  They stayed with Granny Parker, in the big house Mary remembered so well from childhood. Long residence in Lexington had given her a front-row seat on the almost unbelievable viciousness of family quarrels in the large clans of the county, once the terms of some patriarch's will emerged. She herself had personally expected that Betsey would bag most of her father's money for herself and her children—that was what Betsey had all her life maneuvered to do—and had resigned herself to letting that happen rather than causing the kind of storm that had torn apart the various branches of Wickliffes, Bodleys, Crittendens, and Breckenridges over the years.

  In this she'd guessed correctly. The bulk of the money—and all seven slaves—were to go to Betsey, with the surprising exception of Nelson. Nelson, it turned out, had bought his freedom years ago at a nominal fee and had simply continued as the Todd coachman because manumitted slaves were legally obliged to leave the state, and Nelson had too many friends in Lexington. The rest of the money was to be “equitably divided” between the “first and second children.”

  Which left only a pittance for George. With the invalidation of the will, and the resulting forced sale of all Robert Todd's property—including the slaves—all proceeds would be equally divided among all the heirs, Betsey and the fourteen Todd children getting equal shares. Even with six of those children's shares put in trust under her administration, this would leave Betsey barely able to continue housekeeping at Buena Vista and could entail the sale of Buena Vista itself.

  “I always hoped the woman would get a comeuppance somehow,” stated Granny Parker, folding her clawlike hands over the ivory head of her cane. “But damned if I don't feel sorry for her.”

  The situation was further complicated by the lawsuit Mary's father had been embroiled in against Old Duke Wickliffe at the time of his death. At issue had been the large estates of Duke's second wife, one of Mary's Russell cousins. “I never seen so much dirty laundry washed in public in my life,” muttered Lincoln, turning over the forty pages of the closely written document defending Old Duke's right to the estates.

  “Does it mention that octoroon boy, that was Mary Russell's only grandchild from her first husband?” demanded Granny Parker, who was having tea with Mary and Lincoln on the porch as Lincoln thumbed through the document. The autumn sun splashed the frowsty lawn between the old house and the small brick dwelling on Short Street where Mary had spent her first thirteen years. Levi and his wife lived there now, and their two older children dashed back and forth with Eddie and Bobby, with Elodie and Kitty and Alec, shrill laughter ringing in the hazy air.

  “Oh, Molly knows all about it,” stated Granny Parker, when Lincoln glanced over at Mary, with a gentleman's hesitancy about going into the whole sordid story in front of his wife. “Everybody in town knows Old Duke blackmailed his wife into conveying her property to him, under threat he'd sell that boy and his mother, who'd been mistress to Mary Russell's only son.”

  Lincoln lowered the document and stared at the old lady, baffled. “And there are still people in this state who claim that the institution of slavery is . . . is beneficial? That it doesn't corrupt everything and everybody it touches?”

  Granny Parker let out a sharp crack of laughter, her eyes bright. She'd taken to
Lincoln at once, and the gracious wealth of the Todds be damned. It might have had something to do with the number of his Lincoln cousins she'd encountered over the years—one of them had been Sheriff of Lexington for a time. But Mary guessed that the old lady saw in Lincoln the kind of men who'd come out to Lexington with her in her youth, back in 1790 when the only thing there had been a blockhouse in the canebrakes. “Thousands of them, boy, thousands of them.” She nodded thanks as her elderly maid, Prudence, came out with more hot water for the teapot.

  “You all right, Mr. Lincoln?” asked Prudence, holding up the pot, and Lincoln said,

  “Yes, ma'am, thank you.”

  “The only reason I haven't freed Pru, Annie, and Cyrus so far,” said Granny Parker as Prudence departed, “is that then they'd have to leave Kentucky, and I can't do without 'em. Besides, where would they go, that they wouldn't be in danger of some slicker like old Robards trapping 'em back?”

  She jerked her head toward Short Street, across which the wall of Robards's slave jail was visible. As usual this time of the afternoon his common stock was out on benches beneath the awning, as Pullum's had been before, the men dressed in new blue coats and plug hats, the women and children in clean calico. Mary knew from Cash that Robards kept “choice stock”—coincidentally all of them light-skinned girls under the age of twenty—inside, where buyers could look at them in private.

  Lincoln folded his hands and said nothing for a time, but his face was harsh with disgust. Mary knew he hadn't forgotten.