The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  December would see the opening of Congress and by October the local Washington hostesses would be putting in orders for new gowns . . . but Lizabet went.

  “I'd heard from her twice, maybe three times after I left them in Chicago,” said the seamstress, as they left the gaslights of Pennsylvania Avenue, entered the darker and shabbier precincts beyond. “I'd read in the newspapers about the subscriptions to raise money to pay her debts. She claimed Judge Davis was undermining these efforts by telling everyone she'd be perfectly able to pay her own debts once he got done probating Lincoln's estate. I don't know what the truth was, but Washington is worse than a girls' school, for gossip. But Mrs. Lincoln was my friend, and she needed me. So I went.”

  Mary's original plan was that Lizabet should go to New York first and procure rooms for them at the St. Denis Hotel, a plan conveyed in a letter written after Mary must have left Chicago, so there was no chance for Lizabet to write back suggesting any other scheme. Annoyed and filled with trepidation—Mary had a habit of proposing schemes that were abandoned at the last minute—Lizabet closed up her business.

  She found Mary, however, at the shabby-genteel establishment near Union Square, as directed, and after an argument with the manager over the hotel's policy of not renting rooms to people of color—something Mary hadn't even thought of—they were given adjoining triangular chambers on the fifth floor, barely larger than cupboards.

  “How provoking!” Mary sat down on Lizabet's bed, panting a little from the climb. “I declare, I never saw such unaccommodating people. I shall give them a good going-over in the morning.”

  The next morning, however, Mary knocked on Lizabet's door at six and urged her to come with her out to breakfast—since the St. Denis refused to serve persons of color in the dining-room, and it hadn't occurred to Mary to send for dinner in their rooms the night before—and to sit in the park and discuss the situation.

  “That fat blackguard Judge Davis, who I daresay wants to keep the interest for himself, still hasn't made a distribution of my Sainted Husband's estate.” Mary's face was pink with anger in the black frame of her turned-back veils. “I have written and written to those ungrateful Republican politicians whom my husband helped to positions of power, begging them—and threatening! For they are all scoundrels—to contribute something of what they owe to His memory, to my support. That young Mr. Williamson, that was Tad and Willie's tutor, has supposedly been acting for me in this, but he is a most dilatory young man!”

  Lizabet couldn't imagine what influence a Scots schoolteacher would have on the gang of hard-line radical Republicans currently in control of Congress, but didn't get a chance to speak, which was probably just as well.

  “I managed, by the most terrible sacrifices, to pay off some of my debts, with the niggardly pittance Congress gave me—only the first year's salary of my Dearest One's second term, after taking out six weeks' portion and Federal taxes! I was able to purchase a house in Chicago for Tad and myself, on the same street as my dearest Myra! But without money to keep it up, I have been forced to rent it out, and live once more at the Clifton House on the proceeds, a most plebeian atmosphere, when one considers the glory that once I knew.”

  Tears filled Mary's eyes, and Lizabet put her arms around those plump shoulders. For all her pretensions, her rages, and her blithe conviction of entitlement, Mary Lincoln had a sweetness to her, a genuinely good heart whose warmth drew Lizabet in spite of what she'd learned over the years of this strayed Southern belle. In the bright morning sunlight of the park, Mary looked somewhat better than she had that hot May day when she'd left Washington. She had noticeably put on weight over the past two and a half years, and she moved as if every gesture gave her pain, but there was, at least, a little of her old sparkle to her eyes.

  But it was brutally clear to Lizabet that her friend had lost the mainspring of her life. This beaten quality closed Lizabet's mouth on any remark she might have made about those who at least had a house, who were able to get their debts paid by others instead of having to work with thread and needle themselves. When she spoke, it was only to ask, “What did you have in mind?”

  “Say what you like about Mrs. Lincoln,” sighed Lizabet, as she threw open the windows in a vain attempt to lessen the day's accumulated heat in her boardinghouse rooms, “she wasn't one to sit quietly on the sidelines waiting for events to take their course. Will you have coffee, Mr. Douglass, or tea?”

  WILLIAM BRADY AND SAMUEL KEYES, DIAMOND MERCHANTS OF 609 Broadway, assured Mrs. Lincoln that the gowns she'd worn while the President's wife, the furs in which she'd wrapped herself and the jewelry that had glittered on her throat in the midst of those terrible days of war, would bring in somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars. Lizabet had distrusted those two smooth-talking gentlemen, when they came to call at the St. Denis, but had held her peace. “The people will not permit the widow of Abraham Lincoln to suffer; they will come to her rescue when they know she is in want.”

  For several days Lizabet walked around New York City in quest of dealers in secondhand clothing, and drove with Mary to various stores on Seventh Avenue with the dresses worn during her four years as the Republican Queen. Afterwards, Lizabet tried to push the squalid bargaining, the polite dismissals, the barely concealed contempt, from her mind. Brady insisted that Mary write letters to him, purportedly from herself in Chicago, which he would then, he said, show to prominent politicians, forcing them to buy or be exposed as abandoning Lincoln's widow to her fate.

  When these letters were roundly ignored, Mary threw up her hands, turned the whole business over to Brady and Keyes, and returned to Chicago—with the request that Lizabet remain in New York as her agent, continuing the quest and overseeing Brady's exhibit and sale of the dresses, shawls, and jewels.

  “I DON'T KNOW WHAT SHE THOUGHT I WOULD LIVE ON.” LIZABET shifted the kettle onto the single burner of the iron heating-stove, knelt to puff the coals beneath it to flame. “She'd already borrowed six hundred dollars from Mr. Brady, not a penny of which she gave to me. I was angry—and the results of Mr. Brady's ‘exhibit and sale' I think you already know.”

  The newspapers had been merciless in their criticism, both of the sale itself and of the dresses: . . . they are jagged under the arms and at the bottom of the skirt, stains are on the lining . . . some of them are cut low-necked, a taste which some ladies attribute to Mrs. Lincoln's appreciation of her own bust. . . .

  As a rider, one or two journals brought up again the gossip of wartime Washington, the accusations of spying or bringing in relatives to spy in the White House, the tales of financial chicanery and cutting up the Presidential sheets for drawers. They spoke of her “good Republican” friend Simeon Draper, whom she'd recommended for the highly lucrative post of customs collector for the port of New York after he'd paid $20,000 of her debts.

  One newspaper spoke of her as “a termagant with arms akimbo, shaking her clenched fist at the country, and . . . demanding gold as the price of silence and pay that is her due because she was the wife of a President.” Another spoke of “conduct throughout the administration of her husband . . . mortifying to all who respected him . . .”

  People had stared—people had whispered—but few bought.

  “AT THE SAME TIME AS ALL THIS WAS GOING ON,” SAID DOUGLASS, from the faded brocade sofa, “Lizabet was making the rounds among the free colored of New York like the hero she is, trying to get up a lecture series whose proceeds would go to Mrs. Lincoln. I agreed to lecture. So did the Reverend Henry Garnet, and other men of color who had led in the abolitionist movement before Emancipation. But Mrs. Lincoln declined . . . for reasons best known to herself.”

  It had been years ago, thought John, but the bitterness of the rebuff still tinged Douglass's voice.

  “And all that time,” the flame-glow of the lamp warmed Lizabet's features as she measured out tea from a slender stock, “she wrote me, urging me to keep after Brady and Keyes—as if a pair of white diamond-mer
chants would pay the slightest attention to anything a woman of color said—and to remain in New York to look after her interests. I had to go back to sewing just to pay my rent. Naturally I'd abandoned the Union Place Hotel the moment Mrs. Lincoln was gone, and was boarding with a private family. When a Mr. Carleton contacted me about writing a memoir, I should have suspected something. Maybe I was too angry to care.”

  From the street below, musical with distance, rose the voices of children playing, and the sing-song cry of the candy-seller making a final round.

  “I'd just heard, through a mutual Spiritualist friend, that she'd finally got the distribution of Mr. Lincoln's estate, and was fairly well-off. She never offered to send me so much as a dollar. Mr. Carleton's people interviewed me, and published the book under my name. But they'd re-written it, to make her look foolish—not that she wasn't completely capable of making herself look foolish when she tried. The chapter about the sale of the clothes was . . . nastier than it needed to be.” She hesitated, then sighed again. “And I sold them the letters she'd sent to me. They promised they'd only use a few excerpts. I can't imagine why I was stupid enough to believe them. Of course they published them in full. She never forgave me for that.”

  “While you forgave her,” Douglass pointed out gently, “for stranding you in New York, for causing you to lose your very profitable business in Washington, for treating you like a servant, while she went back to where she had friends, a house on whose rental she could live, and a pile of government bonds?”

  Lizabet shook her head. “It wasn't an easy time for her either,” she said. “That was just after Mr. Lincoln's old law partner, Mr. Herndon, began lecturing about Mr. Lincoln's life—claiming that Mr. Lincoln had only married Mrs. Lincoln in the wake of losing the single, great, true, and only love of his life . . . a New Salem girl named Ann Rutledge.”

  “Was that true?” John had read Herndon's biography a few years before, and had found it a welcome relief from the mawkish torrent of hagiographical idealization of Lincoln that had deluged the country immediately after the assassination. He couldn't imagine what the real Mr. Lincoln would have said of those awful paintings of George Washington welcoming Lincoln to Heaven while Liberty herself held a halo of stars over the Emancipator's neatly brushed hair.

  On the other hand, he reflected, Mary Todd Lincoln would have bought every print of those she could get her hands on.

  “That he loved Ann Rutledge?” Lizabet gazed for a moment into her tea, as if the truth might be divined in its slow-settling leaves. “I think he did. That she was the only woman he ever loved with the whole of his heart? No. Did you ever see them together? Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln?”

  John nodded, remembering again those two disparate figures, silhouetted in the twilight.

  “I don't think anyone ever knew the whole of Mr. Lincoln's heart,” said Lizabet slowly. “I never met Mr. Herndon, but Mrs. Lincoln loathed the man—in the whole time he was Lincoln's law partner she'd never have him in her house. It isn't surprising he couldn't imagine that his friend would or could really love her. But whatever Mr. Lincoln felt about Miss Rutledge when he was twenty-five, he loved Mary. For all her faults, he told a visitor once—I forget who—that ‘my wife is as handsome as when she was a girl and I a poor nobody.' He fell in love with her then, he said, and had never fallen out.”

  “Did you ever see her again,” asked John, “after that trip to New York? After your book came out?”

  Lizabet set her tea down, and folded her hands. Older and grayer, thought John, but still with that rock-strong calm that had struck him first in the provision tent at Fort Barker, all those years ago. That same patient affection for her volatile friend. “After I read the book—my book, I mean—and saw what they'd done with my story, I wrote her asking forgiveness. I don't know if she ever got my letter. She may have been taken up with Robert's preparations for marriage—I'm pleased to say his young Miss Harlan, the daughter of the Senator from Iowa, stayed faithful to him even when he ceased to be the President's son and became just a law clerk in Chicago. And after that, of course, Mrs. Lincoln left the country. I never saw her again.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Bellevue July 1875

  “WE'VE BEEN ALL OVER THIS BEFORE, MOTHER.” UNDER HIS HEAVY fair mustache, Robert's mouth was starting to pinch up. “Dr. Patterson says that you need rest, and you certainly wouldn't get rest living with Aunt Elizabeth.”

  Mary immediately lowered her shoulders and cast down her eyes, an old trick of her belle days that she'd remembered. She couldn't think when she'd stopped doing it, but knew she hadn't done it in years. “Of course you're right, Robert,” she made herself say, in a tone of contrition she was far from feeling. Betsey would have been proud of her. “It's been many years since your aunt and I have seen eye-to-eye, if we ever did. But Elizabeth still is my sister. And time heals many wounds. It would be a blessing and a comfort if I could at least write to her.”

  She tucked her chin and raised her eyes to his, hoping she looked as timid and hopeful as she had when she'd been trying to wheedle a new gown out of her father. Much as it scorched her with humiliation to realize it, she had to admit that John Wilamet was probably right about the medicine. Since she'd cut herself down to two watered spoonfuls a day—come headaches, hell, or high water—she'd found that in between feeling anxiety and depression, she was thinking much more clearly. The memories of her younger days were bringing not only pain and regret, but the awareness of how she'd manipulated gentlemen to get what she wanted.

  Like permission to write letters.

  She could just hear Mammy Sally's voice, Now, child, you know you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. . . .

  “Very well.” Mollified, Robert reached across the space between her sofa and his chair, to take her hands. “I know what a comfort it is to you, to write to responsible friends who have your best interests at heart—who know not to excite you with trifles. I'll speak to Dr. Patterson before I leave.”

  But Mary made sure to follow Robert to the carriage, and, when he simply started out the door, ducked her head into Dr. Patterson's office to call out gaily, “Oh, Doctor, my dearest, dearest son has said that I might now write to my sister!” She threw all the gladness of which she was capable into her voice, and Robert, instead of looking annoyed, merely smiled indulgently. “Whoever had a more thoughtful and generous son?”

  You treacherous, unnatural blackguard, I will thwart you if I can.

  “My mother seems to be so well recovered, I don't see the harm in it for her to write to her sister Elizabeth Edwards in Springfield,” said Robert. “And to . . . Who else would you like to write to, Mother? Perhaps Mrs. Conkling? Or Mrs. Wheelock?”

  She nodded with an expression of joy, though she had had no contact with either of her former Springfield friends since the bitter quarrel over the Lincoln Monument and didn't want any. The things those wicked traitors had said! But one didn't waste possible opportunities that might be needed later.

  After two months in Bellevue she knew better than to suggest permission to write to any of the Spiritualist friends who'd given her such understanding support.

  After Robert got into the Patterson carriage to be taken to the train-station, Mary went to gather a handful of stationery, an inkwell, and an envelope from the desk in the parlor: “I want to write my sister a nice long letter,” she explained, beaming at Mrs. Patterson as the doctor's wife came in from the garden. “We have so much to catch up on! It's true we've been estranged for many years, but Elizabeth raised me, you know, and in so many ways stood as a mother to me. I hope and pray that she will at least let bygones be bygones, and be my friend again.”

  Her heart was pounding as she sat in the gloomy parlor, conscious of every person passing through the room. When John Wilamet—just returned from his trip to New York—came in and asked if she were well, she nearly jumped out of her chair with guilt. But she folded her hands in a most natural way over the letter, an
d asked after his trip: “Did you speak to the nerve-doctor that you said you wished to consult there? Was the result as you hoped?”

  The minute the young man's back was turned she slipped two more envelopes from the desk into her skirt pocket.

  And, the next time the parlor was empty, two more.

  She folded the five written sheets, in her jagged, closely crossed handwriting, sealed them in an envelope, and addressed it to Elizabeth. “Could you ride with me to the post-office?” she asked Mrs. Patterson, when that lady returned to the parlor. “It's such a lovely afternoon, now that it's growing cooler. Perhaps Blanche would like to bear us company?”

  Gratified, Mrs. Patterson fetched Miss Blanche from her room. The simpleminded girl's face was bright with pleasure at the prospect of a drive into town. And indeed, though Mary's heart hammered as if she were back at Rose Hill hiding copies of The Liberator under her mattress again, she found the sultry evening air pleasantly sweet.

  Mrs. Patterson—as Mary had hoped—remained in the carriage with Blanche. Mary tripped up the Post Office steps, and once inside that gloomy little lobby pulled the four stolen envelopes from her pocket and broke the seal on Elizabeth's letter.

  She left only one sheet—the one actually to Elizabeth—in that envelope. Working fast, she addressed three others to the most politically prominent men whose addresses she could remember, and the fourth to Myra Bradwell. It took most of her little money to post them....

  “Dear, they must test those postal clerks for slowness,” she laughed, as she hurried, panting a little, down the steps to the carriage. “What, she sold a single stamp in under five minutes?” Her voice flexed to mock an imaginary inspector's outrage. “No job for her!”

  And Blanche crowed with laughter.

  In the carriage riding back to Bellevue, Mary was hard put to keep from trembling, had to fight the waves of agitation that welled almost sickeningly behind her sternum. I'll never get to sleep tonight, she thought. Surely this justifies another little teaspoonful. . . .