The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Lizabet embraced her silently, and Lincoln led the seamstress down the hall to the cot that had been fixed up for her in Mary's room. Mary heard his steps retreat toward his office; she drew her shawl more closely about her, and sat in the chair that had been Lizabet's, beside the bed with its drapings of purple and gold. Her little protector, she thought, looking down at his face, her champion, whose faithful presence had gotten her through all those years of Illinois thunderstorms.

  He'll be fine, Lincoln had said. She repeated the reassurance to herself—he had to be fine. She could not imagine . . . Her mind hesitated over even forming the words. She could not imagine anything else.

  She supposed she should light the lamp, for the room was growing dark, but could not bring herself to turn away from the bed, or to let go of her son's fingers. She was still sitting there, holding that thin little hand, about an hour later when Willie died.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  New York and Washington July 1875

  THERE WERE VERY FEW PLACES IN THE WORLD WHERE JOHN WILAMET felt safe, and New York City wasn't any of them.

  His initial contact with Irish teamsters on his first day in Washington during the War had been followed by a hundred potentially similar incidents in his years with the Medical Corps. Whole regiments of the Union Army had been Irish, and the Irish, in general, had no use for black men, free or otherwise. New York had always been an Irish city, and as far as John could see, as he came down the granite steps of the Grand Central Depot on Forty-second Street, it hadn't changed.

  The city was as squalid now as it had been just after the War, the streets clogged with the dung of a hundred thousand horses and humming with flies in the sweltering heat. He left his grip at the railroad hotel Zeus had told him about—it catered mostly to the colored waiters and railroad porters—and took the elevated train up Third Avenue, glancing repeatedly at the address on one of the two letters in his pocket. The city had grown, spreading above Forty-second along both sides of the wild green woodlands of the Park. Rows of neat brownstones were broken by occasional giant blocks of European-style apartments. Did squatters still camp in shacks on the broken ground around Harlem Heights? Once upon a time there'd been hundreds of them, black and white, eking a living from vegetable-patches, free-roving swine, and theft.

  The address he'd been given, however, was a respectable small wooden house on East Ninety-second Street, set high above the street and brightly painted. Dr. Jacob Sunderhof registered only the slightest surprise to see that the John Wilamet who'd written him about his “Guaranteed Cure for Drug and Alcohol Inebriety” was a black man. He stepped around the desk in his consulting-room and shook hands with John warmly, and if he looked surprised at least his face didn't fall into that expression of disappointed annoyance with which John was so familiar in dealing with Americans.

  “It is so difficult to convince doctors in this country that there is any need for a cure for inebriety,” sighed the German doctor, gesturing him to a chair. “They point out—quite correctly—that as long as an opium-taker continues to take opium in moderation, there is no problem. His symptoms are suppressed, and laudanum is inexpensive and easily obtainable. A patient can live for decades, for the rest of his life, in fact, with no ill effects whatsoever.” He shrugged. “So where, they ask, is the problem?” He was a little ginger-haired man of about fifty, with a Prince Albert beard that was darker than his hair. His consulting-room, with its matched suite of blue plush chairs and its charts of physiognomical regions and “types,” spoke of a prosperous practice.

  “Where the problem always lies with alcohol and drugs,” said John softly. “With those who don't take them moderately. Who seemingly can't take them moderately.”

  “Exactly.” Sunderhof nodded sadly. “They would like to stop, but their bodies have become so habituated, and their characters so degenerated, that the physical effects of withdrawal drive them back to their bad habits. It is a much more widespread problem than you would think, especially since the War. Men come to me all the time, men who were wounded, or who contracted the flux, which was terribly prevalent in both the armies of the North and the South....”

  “I know,” said John. “I was in the Medical Corps at Crown Point and at Richmond.”

  “Were you?” Sunderhof's eyebrows shot up. “I didn't know....Well, then you understand whereof I speak.”

  “All we had was opium,” agreed John. “I don't think anyone even thought about how difficult it was to quit.”

  “But now,” beamed the doctor, reaching into his desk, “the problem has been solved.” He opened the little rosewood box with its mountings of brass. Within was a glass-and-steel hypodermic syringe and needle, and a vial of clear liquid. “My system is simple, and makes use of regular injections of morphine. It works for both drunkards and opium-takers. No patient who has been treated with this system has shown the slightest inclination to return to his old ways.”

  John shut his eyes, trying not to imagine what his mother would do if given access to regular injections of morphine. Then he looked at Sunderhof again. “And they are able to quit using morphine, too?”

  “Dear heavens, why should they?” asked Sunderhof, genuinely surprised. “Morphine is part of the treatment. While undergoing my morphine treatment, I have never had a patient relapse.”

  FROM NEW YORK IT WAS A HALF-DAY DOWN TO WASHINGTON BY train—the capital had changed, if anything, more than New York.

  Both cities seemed to John not only bigger, but heavier, more clogged with stone and brick and humanity. There were more buildings in downtown Washington, and the streets in the center of the city had been paved. Gaslights and sidewalks gave the place more the air of a true city than it had had during the War. But as John walked away from the center of town toward the streets above K Street, he was conscious of more grime, of more loafers both white and black along insalubrious streets, of a deeper sense of desperation and poverty.

  During the long ride down from New York that morning, he'd tried to digest his disappointment, and the cold tiredness that settled on his heart. Maybe there was no answer for his mother, no way to break her desperate predilection for the drunkenness of gin or paregoric. As the handsome houses of downtown gave way around him to run-down cottages and weedy ditches, his mind roved back to his childhood. To his mother's constant quarrels with the other women in the quarters at Blue Hill, to her inexplicable rages that alternated with periods of childlike sweetness.

  Maybe there was no answer for him, or for any of those who had to live with her.

  Lizabet Keckley still lived in the same neighborhood where she had before the War, but the neighborhood itself had deteriorated. The wooden cottages of the free colored servants and artisans were dilapidated and mostly needed paint. Porches and porch-roofs sagged. The streets were unpaved, and nobody had bothered to clear dead dogs, dead cats, dead rats out of the gutters. Flies glittered in the hammering heat.

  But the big wooden house from which Mrs. Keckley's letter to him had been addressed was as spotlessly neat as any John had been in, painted fairly recently, the porch in good repair, although laundry hung prominently in the yard. As he came up the steps to the porch Mrs. Keckley rose from the wickerwork chair where she'd been watching for him, setting aside her sewing. She took his hands in hers, kissed his cheeks, and smiled her familiar smile.

  “Mrs. Keckley,” he said.

  “John, you're a grown man now and you can certainly call me Lizabet.”

  “I wouldn't dare,” he said, and they both laughed. When he had first read Dr. Sunderhof's article about a cure for drunkenness and drug-taking, he had written to Elizabeth Keckley, telling her he was coming to New York, and asking if she would see him.

  She occupied two rooms at the back of the house. She had lived with the owners—the Lewises—in half a dozen successive boardinghouses that they had owned, and the rooms were spacious, airy, and as comfortable as any rooms could be in Washington in the summer. From the wide windows the
y could look down on the yard, which though weedy and hung with still more laundry, at least hadn't degenerated into a trash-pile the way so many did in this neighborhood, where the demands of making ends meet took precedence above the time required to keep some absentee landlord's property neat.

  As they drank lemonade by the open window he answered her kindly questions about his mother's health and mental state as well as he could, and about Clarice and little Cora, Cassy and Lucy's children, and what it was like in Chicago. He found himself, a little to his surprise, telling far more than he'd meant to. There was something about this calm, strong woman that engendered trust. She listened without putting in any opinions, any remarks—listened gently and givingly.

  No wonder the wives of two rival Presidents had taken her into their confidence.

  While they talked she kept working, stitching tiny jet buttons on a bodice of pink silk and black flowered net, her strong, supple hands quick and neat as machines. Her parlor was her workroom—there was a recent-model Singer sewing machine by the window where the light was best, and the silks draped over racks and hangers were as elegant as anything Dr. Patterson's ladies brought with them to Bellevue in their copious luggage. Beside the fireplace—which had been re-modeled to accommodate a little heating-stove—hung photographs of Abraham and Mary Lincoln, and of two little white boys whom John guessed were Willie and Tad. On the other side hung a larger one, of Frederick Douglass, the black runaway who had been abolitionism's spokesman for twenty years.

  “I heard Mrs. Lincoln is at your sanitarium,” said Mrs. Keckley, and her soft voice was sad. “Poor woman.”

  “Do you think she's insane?”

  She regarded John in surprise over her reading-glasses. “You're the doctor, John. And you've seen her. I haven't seen nor spoken to her since 1868 .”

  “Was she insane then? Or when you knew her first?”

  She was silent, neatly whipping thread through the shank of the button, watching him from her beautiful dark eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  “Is she insane?”

  “Yes.” And then, “No. Not really.” She tied off her thread, snipped it with small gold scissors shaped like a crane. “Crazy,” she said. “But not insane.”

  He smiled wryly at the distinction. “Did she get worse, after her son died?”

  Lizabet Keckley sighed, and sat still, the needle and scissors motionless in her hands. “I think any woman goes crazy for a time when her child dies, John. I know I did. You keep thinking there was something you could have done, or done differently. And mostly there wasn't.”

  She brought the pink and black gown around in her lap, with a gentle rustling of silk taffeta, and threaded up her needle again. Her hair was graying at the temples, and the lines in her face were more pronounced than they'd been ten years ago: there were more shadows of weariness accumulated in her eyes. She positioned a flounce of black lace, and spoke as she sewed, neat and perfect.

  “Willie's death struck her down like she'd been hit with a two-by-four. She was never the same after that. She told me that it was all her fault. That it was God's vengeance on her for holding such a splendid reception the week or two before.”

  “That's common,” said John, thinking of all the hundreds of women he'd encountered—at Dr. Brainert's clinic, at Lake Forest and Jacksonville—who were convinced there was something they could have done. It no longer surprised him.

  “From the day I met her,” Lizabet said, “—the day before the Inauguration—she could be so sweet and genuinely thoughtful some days, and other days would fly into rages or take pets over anything. She'd make all kinds of threats and say anything that would hurt you, and later she'd come back apologizing in tears. And she'd be truly upset, truly sorry, not pretending just to use you. I think she genuinely couldn't help the things she said. That was how she was.”

  John nodded, remembering the woman who'd held his shoulders through paroxysms of sickness that first day, with the tender firmness of a mother—and like no mother John had ever had—and the next moment had been shrieking like a harpy at the ladies of the Freedmen's Relief Association for not keeping better order in the tents.

  It crossed his mind to wonder whether Lizabet Keckley got along so well with Mary Lincoln because at some time in her life, Lizabet had learned to deal with someone even more abusively capricious, from whom she was not free to walk away.

  “And she was inconsistent,” Mrs. Keckley went on. “She had such lovely manners, the kind they teach in young ladies' deportment classes. Yet I've seen her—”

  She laughed softly, ducking her head. “Oh, dear, I shouldn't tell this story on her....One day Mrs. Taft, the mother of Tad and Willie's little friends, came calling wearing a new bonnet, straw trimmed with purple ribbon, embroidered in black. Mrs. Lincoln thought this was the prettiest thing she'd ever seen, and went to the same milliner—Willian's on Pennsylvania Avenue—and asked for another just like it. Mr. Willian told her that he had no more of the purple velvet ribbon with the black figures, so Mrs. Lincoln went to Mrs. Taft and asked her to give her the ribbon off her hat.”

  It was exactly the kind of thing John's mother did, when she'd had a drink or two, or a nip too many of “pain medicine.” Not drunk enough to be noticeable, but not quite paying attention to what she should be doing.

  “Mr. Lincoln knew there was something wrong.” Lizabet returned to her sewing, and her eyes filled with tears at his name. “She'd always been temperamental, but this was different. He knew it. He knew there was something wrong, and he knew it was getting worse. He was frantic over it. But he didn't know what the problem was, and there wasn't even anyone he could talk to.”

  No, thought John. Not in the riven world of Washington politics, with every newspaper in the country watching and waiting for him to fail.

  “The President didn't have clerks and aides and a staff the way he does now. Just his secretaries. They lived as part of the household, and all of them working together in that same big room like a shoemaker and his apprentices in the same shop. Every decision about the War had to come to him—nobody else could make it. Four years, I don't think the man had a full night's sleep. He could see there was something happening to her, but he didn't know what he could do and he couldn't spare a minute of his attention from taking care of the country and running the War. He was like a sentry on duty, that no one remembered to relieve.”

  She sewed in silence for a time, and in the little garden behind the house, two children ran back and forth among the laundry, screaming with laughter.

  “So she was alone,” went on Mrs. Keckley. “And when you're alone like that, in as much grief as she was, it's terribly easy for the unscrupulous to take advantage of you. You'll believe anything they tell you. She was never one who could endure the deaths of those she loved. She was a faithful church-goer, but her faith wasn't strong. And when the blows fell on her, there was nothing to ward them off.”

  She hesitated, looking up from her work, as if there were something else to be said that she was uncertain about trusting him with. Her eyes went to a corner of the room, where a framed daguerreotype hung, a young man who looked almost like he could have been white, but for a suggestion of fullness in the lips. He wore the uniform of the First Missouri Volunteers—not a colored regiment—but John was long used to the subtle signs identifying those who “passed.”

  A small vase stood on the table before the picture, with a fresh-picked rose.

  “And in this world,” finished the seamstress in her soft voice, “if you seek the solace that the dead offer to the living who reach out to them anyone will call you insane.”

  MARY HAD NO RECOLLECTION OF SUNLIGHT AT ALL, IN THE SPRING OF 1862.

  For a month after Willie's death she kept to her room, with the curtains tightly drawn. Sleep and waking blurred together in a long, confusing haze. She had memories of waking in darkness, head throbbing, eyes hurting—remembering, and weeping afresh.

  Willie was gone.

 
Sometimes Elizabeth was there, or Lizzie or her nieces Young Bess and Julie Baker—blessed, blessed comfort of having women she knew around her, women she trusted, before whom she did not have to even think about keeping up the façade of politeness or restraint. For many nights Lizzie slept in bed beside her, so that when Mary woke from her suffocating nightmares she had someone to cling to, someone to hold.

  Sometimes Lincoln was there, exhausted and haggard. She had a confused impression of shoving him away, of screaming at him things that her mind refused to bring back when she thought of it later . . . maybe the whole incident was a dream. Surely she would never, ever say to him, He would not have died if we'd stayed at home. . . . You killed him, bringing him here so you could be President. . . .

  Surely that was a dream. And in any case it was her fault, her whose pride and vainglory God was punishing. If it wasn't a dream, would he have, in other fragments of recollection, cradled her in his arms as he did, rocked her on his knees like a child?

  It was only later that Elizabeth told her how sick Tad was, during those days of mourning. Between the crushing demands of Cabinet meetings, conferences with Generals, and diplomatic consultations, Lincoln spent hours with his youngest son, who had emerged from his own fever to be told that the brother he cherished was dead.

  Mary knew she should have gone to Tad, should have come out of her room to comfort her husband. But the thought of emerging even into the hallway filled her with dread. The thought of speaking to anyone was both frightening and confusing, as if for a time no one was real anymore.

  She could not imagine living without Willie.

  When, in moments of self-pity, she had in the past pictured her own deathbed, she had always imagined that it would be Willie beside her, clasping her hand as he'd held it against the terror of prairie thunder. It was Willie with whom she would spend her old age, after Mr. Lincoln—who was after all a decade older than herself—passed on.