The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  He remembered that Abraham Lincoln hadn't liked agricultural labor sixteen hours a day, either, and had gotten out of that business as quickly as he could.

  And for none of them—neither himself, nor Mary, nor Mr. Lincoln—had there been any going back.

  “Do you know”—Myra Bradwell's voice broke into his thoughts—“how the law in Illinois came to be made, that a woman had to be tried by a jury to be committed insane, rather than simply locked up on the testimony of her husband?”

  “Because of Mrs. Elizabeth Packard,” John answered. “When I worked at the state asylum in Jacksonville I met guards who'd known her.”

  At the time that the Reverend Theophilus Packard had had his wife kidnapped and locked away for disagreeing with his doctrine of the total depravity of mankind, John had still been picking tobacco-leaves and wondering what would happen to his mother and sisters if his master sold him to one of the slave-dealers going down to New Orleans.

  “At least four physicians,” said Myra, nodding, “testified that Mrs. Packard was insane, on such grounds as claiming to be older than her actual age, being an abolitionist, and refusing to shake hands with one of those examining doctors when he left. I read the transcripts. She was also a Spiritualist, and had the temerity to argue, in public, with her husband's religious opinions. It doesn't take much for a woman to be adjudged insane. Most doctors believe that women are more or less permanently insane anyway.”

  He opened his mouth to protest at this generalization and then closed it, remembering Dr. Patterson's strictures on women's mental and emotional derangements due to “the cycles of the female system”—i.e., menarche, menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, periods of sexual abstinence, menopause, and post-menopausal “drying of the womb.” He'd wondered frequently what Mrs. Patterson thought of her husband's convictions.

  Did she simply accept her husband's word as law, like a good wife should?

  “Before the War,” Myra went on, “like Mrs. Packard, I was an abolitionist. I broke with the mainstream of abolitionists when they decided to concentrate all their energies on freedom for the slaves, rather than freedom for all those whose lives and liberty can be disposed of at the whim of others. Though I rejoiced when Mr. Lincoln got up the courage and resolution—and the political timing, I might add—to liberate the slaves, I think that a great opportunity was missed. In many ways we're still trying to save a people, soul by soul. And in the course of the battle, I hear many of the same arguments. Only in this case the whole nation is what the South was—and every man is a slaveholder who fears the loss of what he.”

  The train rocked as it slewed around a curve. At the front of the car in which they sat a child cried, fretful in the heat. Its mother murmured, “We be home soon, Sugarbelle, I get you some water then. We got no money for lemonade.”

  John got to his feet, and walked down the narrow aisle, catching his balance on the ends of the seats. He handed the mother the half-bottle of warm lemonade. She looked up at him, torn between the pride that spurns charity, and her child's thirst: John said gravely, “I didn't spit in it or nuthin',” and she laughed, her child laughing with her.

  “You say thank you to the nice man, Sugarbelle.”

  Sugarbelle hid her face in her mother's skirts, giggling.

  When John returned to his seat he told Myra, “Dr. Patterson spends Saturdays in town, seeing clients—he has an office on Washington Street. He leaves on Friday afternoons. If you came by the last train on Friday, I'd let you in. You could speak to Mrs. Lincoln in her room, or out in the rose garden without him watching over your shoulder.”

  Myra was silent for a time, her face unreadable, save for the look of dispassionate calculation in her eyes. Like Cassy, John thought, when his sister was figuring out how to get money or food for the family when there simply wasn't any money or food to be got. Then her attention seemed to return to the here and now, and she said, “Thank you, Mr. Wilamet. That should do very nicely.”

  “From there . . .” He shook his head. “Even if Mrs. Edwards were to invite her sister to come live with her, we still have to contend with Mr. Lincoln. As Mrs. Lincoln's legal conservator, he has the right to dictate what Dr. Patterson does. And Dr. Patterson will obey him—he needs every patient he can get at Bellevue these days.”

  “Does he?” Myra raised her eyebrows. “How many women are there?”

  “About twenty. More than a quarter of the rooms at Bellevue are empty. It's been that way since the banks crashed in '73. Of the families who are wealthy enough to afford Patterson's prices, many more would sooner hire an attendant for Granny or Auntie and send her to Europe, rather than admit to society that a family member is in an asylum.”

  “Hmn.” Myra sniffed, and sipped her lemonade. “Rather than admit to the parents of potential sons- and daughters-in-law that there's insanity in the family, I daresay.” She held the bottle away from her as the train rocked. “Yet he's supposed to give excellent care.”

  “He does,” agreed John. “But it isn't cheap. And I know he's recommended incarceration to more than one of the gentlemen who bring their wives to him for treatment for their nerves. He isn't venal,” he added earnestly, seeing the calculating look return. “He would never recommend a treatment that he thought was harmful. But he's like my master, back at Blue Hill Plantation in Halifax County, Virginia, where I was born. He honestly believes that what he's doing is best. I think Mr. Robert Lincoln is the same way. That's hard to fight.”

  “Robert is certainly the same way,” murmured Myra. “He spent a part of his childhood in the Todd family in Lexington, while his father was in Congress. I suspect he was always a bit of a Southern gentleman in his heart, one of the old-style Southern gentlemen who knew they were the lords of creation. And growing up in a fishbowl the way he did—it absolutely blistered him to have the newspapers call him the ‘Prince of Rails'—he's always been excruciatingly sensitive about his mother's newspaper donnybrooks. But it doesn't give him the moral right to have her locked up, whatever his legal rights might be.

  “Yes,” she said briskly, “we're going to have to deal with Robert. But as for Dr. Patterson . . .”

  She set her lemonade aside, and withdrew a newspaper from her satchel.

  It was the Bloomington, Illinois, Courier, folded open in the middle.

  MRS. LINCOLN

  IS THE WIDOW OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN A PRISONER?

  NO ONE ALLOWED TO SEE HER EXCEPT BY ORDER OF HER SON

  AN ACCOUNT OF A REMARKABLE INTERVIEW WITH

  HER JAILER AND PHYSICIAN

  “As I said, Mr. Wilamet, you leave Dr. Patterson to me.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Bellevue Place August 1875

  “Springfield, 30 July, 1875

  My dearest sister,

  This afternoon Mrs. Bradwell was kind enough to pay me a visit, at which the subject of your health and happiness was discussed. . . .”

  Mary set the letter down and sat for a time looking out the window of her room, scarcely seeing the emerald of the lawn, the pale gravel of the drive glaring in the brilliant sun. Sunday stillness blanketed Bellevue, and the thick scent of cut grass. Like a jewel, the note of the church-bell in town touched the morning air.

  If Robert is agreeable, Ninian and I would be more than happy if you would come and make your home with us.”

  She drew a deep breath, feeling as if she had stepped into a torrent, was being swept off her feet. Carried away by feelings she could not separate or name.

  She should, she knew, feel relief and gladness. Myra was fighting for her, taking steps to free her.

  Why did she feel disappointment and rage?

  Why did she suddenly smell again the honeysuckle of summer twilight, and hear the retreating creak of Jimmy Shields's buggy-wheels along Second Street, and the quiet rustle of Merce's lavender muslin skirts? “They just want you to be happy,” Merce said. “We can't stay forever in our fathers' houses.”

  Our fathers die. Handsome Rob
ert Todd, and the lover, the husband, the friend I called Father. They abandon us. Can't we stay in our own houses?

  Her eyes burned with tears as she thought of the brick-fronted house on West Washington Street, that she'd so briefly lived in but had not been able to keep up . . . thanks to that lover, husband, friend being bone stupid enough not to make a proper will!

  I had the chance to live in my own house—my own place—for four years after Taddie's death, she thought.

  And what did I do instead?

  She squeezed her eyes tight, the tears sliding down her cheeks, and pressed her hand to her mouth as the final nightmare rose to her mind.

  SHE RETURNED TO CHICAGO IN THE FALL OF 1873, NOT BECAUSE SHE wanted to, but because she could think of nowhere else to go.

  In the first weeks after the Fire, businesses had reopened amid black mountains of charred brick in downtown Chicago while other areas of the town still smoldered. Within months of the fire, handsome structures of steel-reinforced stone went up along the great avenues. Houses were rebuilt on the lakeshore for the rich. Beyond the packing-yards, stock-pens, and railroad yards, miles of tiny cottages of wood and brick were built for the workingmen flooding into the city from the East. From a distance, in Waukesha and St. Charles and St. Catherine, she had read in the newspapers and in letters from Robert and Myra of how the city was leaping back from its ashes like a vulgar phoenix.

  It was two years before she could bring herself to return.

  Nightly, in her room in the new Grand Pacific Hotel, she would wake in panic, thinking she smelled smoke. Would rush to the window, heart hammering, fearing to see the wall of fire advancing, men and women fleeing before it like deer from a forest fire . . . A man on the sidewalk with his head bashed in. A drunkard hurling liquor on a young girl's flaming hair.

  In her dreams she would be standing again in the black waters of Lake Michigan with the crowding, sobbing damned, watched the flames advance. In her dreams the waters rose over their heads, and burned like oil with the flame advancing across them, to destroy them all.

  But Robert was in Chicago. Robert, her only living son, her only link now with the life that she'd lived. The only proof that she'd been loved. Robert was Lincoln's son; Robert had played in the big garden of the house on Lexington's Main Street, with Alec and Emilie, with Sam and David. Robert was all that was left to her of those days.

  She visited him when she felt well enough, though the sight of Lake Park and the streets around his house filled her with panic that was not lessened by her knowledge that it was unreasonable. Young Mary was “out with friends” when Mary called, more often than not. Robert refused to speak of her, or to answer the probing questions she asked about her daughter-in-law's housekeeping and child-raising habits.

  But the servants, she guessed, looking around the neat, plain parlor, weren't being kept up properly at their work. And five-year-old Mamie, though perfectly dressed and exquisite as a tiny princess, seemed to her to be growing more timid by the day.

  “She isn't treating that child rightly!” she stormed at Robert one Sunday afternoon, when his daughter burst into tears at spilling the sugar. “She's punishing her too harshly, isn't she? I daresay she slaps her for a trifling thing like that. Now, dearest, there's no need to cry, it's only a little sugar....”

  It was, in fact, about a half cup of sugar spilled into the blue-and-yellow Wilton carpet, and Mamie ground her small pink fists into her eyes and rushed from the room in confusion. Robert said, “It is not my habit to interfere in my wife's sphere, Mother, be the question one of servants or one concerning my daughter. Mary has shown herself to be a loving and willing helpmeet—”

  “How would you know that?” demanded Mary, stung. “If you spend all your days in your precious law offices and the courts, how would you know the first thing about what happens under your roof? That poor child isn't getting enough to eat and clearly is being mistreated, and I have a good mind to come here some day when your precious Mary is ‘out with friends' and take her away with me! I daresay your wife would scarcely miss the child until it came time to put her to bed and maybe not then!”

  Mary spent that night—and the remainder of the week—so sick with migraine that Robert sent a doctor to see her. Throughout the wretched Chicago winter Mary was ill, lying in the darkness of her curtained room with her head feeling as if the mad Indian shaman who ruled her headaches were trying to twist the bones of her skull apart. Her back and shoulder throbbed where the long-ago carriage-accident on the day of Gettysburg had jammed and wrenched the nerves. Some days she would leave the room only to go to the pharmacy for medicine, or down the hallway to the toilets, a dozen times in the day and again and again in the night, peering furtively through a crack in the door until the hall was clear, then darting along in her wrapper and shawl, her long graying hair lying like a heavy cloak over her back.

  Outside, the winds screamed across Lake Michigan in unbroken fury straight down from the wastes of Canada. In her room the stuffiness of the gas heater, the stink of the fishtail burners, made her head hurt worse. She spent her days dreaming on the sofa in wrapper and shawl, surrounded by newspapers and magazines, sending for her meals to be brought up to her and bribing the maids to get her medication for her pain. She tried dozens of patented cordials, balms, and elixirs that winter, sometimes individually and sometimes mixed. It didn't seem to matter. She was aware of long spells of dizziness but many days she had little sense of being in her body at all.

  The winter was one long, sickening blur.

  Sometime during the spring—and the days, by this time, were mostly the same—she was roused by some small sound in the night to find herself on the sofa where she'd drifted off in the midst of reading The Moonstone. It was late in the night, and the hotel deathly silent; only the hissing of the gas jet broke the stillness, and its cold small flame gave the room a frozen air, as if it could be anytime, day or night, outside the shut velvet curtains.

  Lincoln stood in the room, ghostly and blue, shining as Tad and Willie shone when they would come to see her. His eyes had the bruised and sleepless look they'd had toward the last days of the War, but his face was the face of an old man, gouged with the lines of an age he had not lived to achieve. His beard, which flowed down over his chest now, was nearly white, as was his hair. He looked exhausted, and infinitely sad.

  He looks as he would look today, thought Mary, shocked. Like the husband I would have today.

  Dear God, I have aged too!

  Their eyes met, and she thought, It has been nearly ten years.

  I am fifty-six, and in February I will be the same age that he was, when he was killed.

  How the years have crucified us both!

  She tried to say, My darling, but her tongue felt thick as wet cotton. Lincoln smiled at her, that old familiar smile that lighted up the whole of his tired face, and said, I look forward to being with you again on the sixth of September, a sentence from one of his letters, written to her when she was at her father's in Lexington, getting ready to rejoin him in Washington for his speaking-tour of New England.

  Waking, she thought, Dear God, are those truly the length of my days? Will we truly be together, at last, in the Summer Land, on that date?

  Did he really come to me, to tell me, warn me?

  In a way, it was as if the whole of the year, from that spring night until September, she was waiting. Waiting for him to come for her.

  In her dreams, she would picture that scene, herself laid out on her bed in a darkened room. Once she'd imagined Willie kneeling by her bed. Now she saw Robert and Mamie there, weeping bitterly (Young Mary was “out with friends” and good riddance to her). The shining doors would open in the dark of the gaslit room, and Mr. Lincoln would come in, with Willie and Tad—Tad so tall, carrying little Eddie on his hip—trailed by all the others, her father and Ben Helm and Granny Parker and that glowing, radiant woman whose face she remembered in the tiniest detail, her mother, as lovely as she had been.
. . .

  Robert would look up and see them and sob, “I see them! I see them! Oh, Mother, I was so wrong....”

  (Or maybe Mamie would see them first, point and cry out, “Papa, shining angels!” And then Robert would look....)

  Mr. Lincoln would hold out his hand and smile. “Mother, I've come to take you home.”

  And she would sit up, young and pretty again as the girl in the pink ruffled dress, who'd perched in Ninian's carriage in the Globe Tavern yard, looking around her with wrinkled nose at the dusty pig-infested streets of Springfield.

  As if her body were preparing, she was ill much of the year. There were wars with Indians who refused to give up their lands, and struggles in the Army-occupied South against the corrupt administrators that imbecile Grant had seen fit to put in charge, but it mattered almost nothing to her. She read of the events with a vast sense of detachment.

  I look forward to being with you again. . . .

  But she did not die in September. She couldn't understand what went wrong. Mr. Lincoln couldn't have been mistaken. She sat up all night on the fateful eve, with the gaslights flickering in her little room at the Grand Pacific, wondering what Robert would say when Mr. Turner the hotel manager contacted him in the morning, brought him to her chamber (she'd paid the maids specially to have it tidied that day) to see her lying cold and still on her bed....

  It was a windy night, not the great terrifying thunderstorms that sent her shuddering under the bedclothes, but a dry howling gale that filled her with the dread that she would smell smoke upon the wind.

  At dawn she poured herself a glassful of medicine and drank herself to sleep.

  Winter was coming on.

  She had nothing to live for, not even, it appeared, death.

  Throughout the year of waiting, dread, and illness she had gone out so seldom, and seen so few people. There was a lively circle of Spiritualists in Chicago, including Myra Bradwell, but they lived mostly in the northwest suburbs, and Mary did not feel herself able to deal with a streetcar, and grudged the expense of a cab. But she had kept up a correspondence with her friends, and Ella Slapater in Pennsylvania wrote warmly recommending that she journey to Florida, rather than endure another winter of Lake Michigan's brutal snows.