The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Thinking about living again in Elizabeth's house.

  Thinking about Robert.

  Thinking about Lincoln.

  All those quarrels with Robert, the cold reasonableness of his voice . . . she knew now why they triggered in her such rage.

  He sounded exactly like Lincoln. The Lincoln she had screamed at, during those years of loneliness during the War. The Lincoln she had tried again and again to hurt, when he would shut her out, when he would meet her attempts to play her old part in his political life with such impenetrable evasiveness. He would listen to her spitfire rages, then walk away down the hall to his office, to fulfill a destiny in which she had no more place.

  It had all come down to that: that he'd left her behind.

  In a way, she realized, she'd known it even then. It was as if he saw further than she did, some larger plan beyond the day-to-day trading of influence and jobs that had been politics for her father and for every other man she'd ever known. As if he'd been looking down from above on a maze in which she wandered, only able to see a few feet before her. He'd gone ahead of her to where she could not follow. Had slipped from their earlier partnership, and abandoned her to the consolations of shopping and the gossip of her Blue Room salons.

  In some corner of his heart he had to have known it, too, she thought. He was kind, but in his indulgence and care, had there been some element of guilt as well? Guilt that he had left her out, that he had run on ahead to become what he must be, leaving her to be what she was?

  But at least, she thought, he was kind. He cared for me, made sure—in the best way that he could—that I was all right.

  Does Robert tell himself that's what he's doing?

  And now she would return to Springfield. To live again in Elizabeth's house. To walk on those streets once more, to pass by the market where she and her beloved had shopped for fish—with Lincoln stopping every three paces to talk to some crony . . . To be perpetually waiting to see him round some corner, straining to hear, in any crowded room, that crowing silvery laugh...

  I can't do it!

  To meet those other ghosts on every muddy street, on every dusty pathway in the countryside . . . on Ninian's porch...

  Dapper Stephen Douglas, bowing as he handed her up into his buggy.

  Intelligent, gentle Dr. Henry, listening in that perfect peaceful quiet by the fireside to anything she had to say. Returning from Washington only weeks after Lincoln's death, Dr. Henry's ship had gone down off the California coast. News of it had reached her during that first hellish summer in Chicago.

  Simeon Francis's bright blue eyes peering over the tops of his spectacles in that freezing, ink-smelling newspaper office.

  Edward Baker's chiming laugh.

  Eddie's quick pattering footfalls across a kitchen floor . . . Willie emerging from between the rows of the vegetable garden, covered with mud and his hands filled with wildflowers . . . the look on Tad's face as he sat in the parlor window, watching for his father coming up the street.

  I can't do it.

  Does that mean you'd rather Myra didn't try to get you out?

  That you'd rather live here in the land of the lotos-eaters forever?

  She laid her head down on her crossed wrists on the windowsill, too tired even to weep.

  MYRA BRADWELL SPENT THE NIGHT IN THE WATCH-ROOM ADJOINING Mary's, where Gretchen and Amanda generally took turns sleeping. Mrs. Patterson even had the cook send them up supper on a tray. John, lingering in the parlor while Myra talked to Young Doc in the office, had to marvel at the way the woman maneuvered the younger doctor, agreeing with everything he said, nodding and regarding him with an expression of awed respect that John hadn't believed her square, pleasant features capable of assuming.

  “Of course poor Mary is insane,” he overheard—Young Doc seldom shut the office door. “Good heavens, Doctor, I've known her since Mr. Lincoln was President, and I saw this coming for years. The improvement you and your father have wrought in her is absolutely marvelous....”

  John could only shake his head in amused wonder.

  “Of course, I'm not sure that a lunatic asylum is the proper place for her, when she does have family to stay with....”

  “I would agree with you, Mrs. Bradwell”—Young Doc always started out by agreeing with everyone—“if Bellevue Place were indeed a lunatic asylum. But it is not. It is merely a haven for those whose nerves are distraught, as Mrs. Lincoln's most certainly are....”

  And it was still Robert, thought John, who was calling the tune.

  Something told him that it would take more than entreaties from family and doubts concerning propriety, to gain that tall young lawyer's permission for his mother to leave Dr. Patterson's care.

  At about ten the following morning, when Young Doc was starting his rounds, Myra Bradwell came downstairs—having breakfasted with Mary in her room—and sought John out in the rose garden. “Would you keep an eye on the front of the house after noon or twelve-thirty,” she asked softly, with a watchful glance at Zeus and Gretchen, who were helping Minnie Judd to a comfortable seat on a bench in the sunshine. Miss Judd had woken in a sobbing fit last night, screaming out that she had committed the Unpardonable Sin and must be punished—she was still visibly woozy from the chloral hydrate that had finally quietened her into sleep.

  “There's a young gentleman coming to visit Mrs. Lincoln, with whom I'll be working to secure her release. I would appreciate it if he could come in to confer with us both in quiet.”

  Lawyer, thought John immediately. Though Myra Bradwell was barred from practice herself—no woman being legally able to enter into independent contracts—after their first meeting he had found and read copies of the Chicago Review of Law, which she edited and published. She undoubtedly had at her beck and call a score of hopeful newcomers to the profession.

  If not a lawyer, a tame doctor.

  “I'll be waiting,” he promised her.

  When she returned a few hours later—from the train-station, presumably—he guessed the brisk young man in the tobacco-colored suit who accompanied her was a lawyer, rather than a doctor. He was far too flashy to engender confidence in a patient. She introduced him as Mr. Wilkie, and John guided them around the house to the small door of the family wing, then checked to make certain Mrs. Patterson was nowhere in sight before letting them in with his key.

  Wilkie and Myra left together at about four. After seeing them to the end of the drive, John returned to Mary's room, and found her still sitting by the window, the curtains half-open, as if she had watched them pass across the yellow-gold triangle of visible gravel.

  “Do you feel all right?”

  When she glanced up at him her face answered his question. It was calmer and more relaxed than he had seen it, he thought, since her arrival three months ago. Her eyes had a perpetually bruised look, from sleeplessness and weeping, but within the puffy flesh it pleased him to see that they were alert, as they usually were these days.

  “I am,” she said, in her small, sweet voice. “Thank you for asking, John. You seem to be the only one these days who's genuinely concerned about what my answer to that question might be. You and Myra, and Myra—well, once she sees a solution to a problem she goes at it like a bull at a gate, and doesn't ask what one feels about it, so long as it gets done.”

  On the corner of her dressing-table he saw the pages of Mrs. Edwards's letter from Springfield, and a half-dozen sheets, scribbled and crossed out, in Mary's erratic hand.

  “You'd best not let Gretchen find those in your room and tell Mrs. Patterson that you have pen and ink,” he warned. “I'll keep them in my room for you, if you'd like.” And seeing her mouth pucker with weary anger at being always observed, always forbidden, like a schoolgirl, he added, “Or I'll help you pry up a floorboard under the bed, like prisoners do. You can wait till Amanda goes down the hall to the toilet, then whip out your pen and write a few lines....”

  And her puffy face broke into its sidelong smile. Leaning close, s
he whispered, “Amanda never goes to the toilet. Nights when I lie awake, I can hear every sound....I believe the woman is made of iron. Or is solid all the way through, like a carrot....Dear God, what it is, to laugh again!” she added, as John gathered up the scribbled sheets, corked the ink-bottle securely, and slipped it into his pocket. “I don't think I've had a laugh since . . . since my friend Sally Orne came to stay with me at that dreadful little hostelry in Germany, and we kept every other traveler on our floor awake all night with our giggling and carrying-on!”

  “I take it the interview with Mr. Wilkie went well?”

  Mary hesitated, the joy wiped from her face, her tired eyes filling with tears once more. “Do you know, I dare not even think about it? That equal poise of hope and fear that Milton speaks of . . . it all seems so . . . so hopeless. And yet I cannot give up hope. I will not give up hope. I will banish squint suspicion. . . .” She fished in her drawer for a clean handkerchief. Every one had black borders an inch deep.

  “Will you walk with me a little in the garden, Mr. Wilamet? It has been a long and tiring day.”

  IT WAS ALMOST A WEEK BEFORE MARY WROTE BACK TO ELIZABETH. During the scorching, humid August days, as John assisted Dr. Patterson or Young Doc with Mrs. Wheeler's hydrotherapy or in force-feeding Miss Judd, he overheard the comments of Mrs. Patterson: comments that sounded less and less like the observation of symptoms and more and more like backstairs tale-telling.

  Mrs. Lincoln ordered cornbread again for breakfast and then refused to eat it. Mrs. Lincoln asked for the carriage to be brought around and then delayed for three hours, ultimately deciding to spend the day in her room. Mrs. Lincoln had her room changed back to the first floor and then complained about having a different set of bedsprings, even though the new ones were of the same pattern as the old....

  When he saw her during those days, to walk in the gardens or to talk in the parlor, he read the nervousness that lay behind her capriciousness, the tension that brought on headaches, the recurring waves of hope and fear.

  She spoke to him many times about Springfield: about having been sent there by her stepmother, “in the hopes I'd land a husband and wouldn't be on her hands for the rest of my life, God forbid!” About what the town had been like in the 1830s and '40s, with muddy streets and a hog-wallow the size of a small lake occupying one corner of the State House grounds, and the green prairies blanketed with flowers, two blocks' walk from the little brown house on the corner of Eighth Street and Jackson. About buggy-rides in the countryside with one or another of her many beaux, and picnics in the shade along the Sangamon River; about political-speakings in the State House square and the crying of crickets in the long blue twilights, when she'd sit on the porch with Merce Levering or Julia Jayne and chat about friends or fashion or politics when politics was still a game....

  “I never thought I would have to go back to living under Ninian's roof.”

  On Wednesday John took the train to Chicago, melting and stinking and scorching on the shores of the lake. Most of Cassy's customers had gone out of town, leaving the family broke but with a little breathing-room. By dint of burying small sums of money under the floor the way they used to as children in the quarters at Blue Hill, Cassy had saved enough for a family picnic on the lakeshore, and for once everything went well.

  His mother was feeling well, and when washed and dressed and with her hair put up was still the wildly beautiful woman he had worshiped as a child. She talked and laughed and made jokes that had the children whooping with delight, and joined them in their hunt for fireflies in the bushes of Lincoln Park as the sun went down. He watched them from the bench where he sat with his arm around Clarice, loving the touch of his wife, the scent of her flesh and her hair, glad to be alive.

  When times were bad they were bad, he reflected, smiling at Selina as she sat with baby Cora on her blanket, weaving a chain of daisies from the grass. But when times were good, there was nothing sweeter than these long summer twilights, other loving couples walking along the path in the park, the tall bronze shape of Lincoln's statue standing against the luminous cobalt sky.

  Robert Lincoln came to Bellevue Friday morning, rigid with outrage. Though John was fully occupied with Mrs. Wheeler—who had spent the night screaming and pounding on the walls of her room, and had had to be sedated and, in the morning, forcibly gotten up and walked in the gardens to restore her “vital system”—he caught snatches of the lawyer's furious voice through the open windows:

  “. . . the woman is a pest and a nuisance, the queen of a gang of Spiritualists, whatever you might say! I've warned Aunt Elizabeth against her—and against whatever henchmen she may choose to employ in this self-serving campaign to give you back control of your money!”

  And later, as John guided the still-groggy and weeping Mrs. Wheeler through the hall to her own room again,

  “Mother, I've gone to considerable trouble to find you a place where you will be safe, happy, and well taken care of! Now, thanks to your table-tapping friend, Dr. Patterson is in a panic, terrified of what bad publicity will do to this entire establishment . . . !”

  “Well, God forbid that the jail where I have been locked in by my own child—where other women are locked up as well!—should have bad publicity! Oh, get me my smelling salts lest I faint with chagrin!” Mary's voice was shrill with sarcasm.

  And when John emerged from Mrs. Wheeler's room after turning her over to Gretchen, Zeus passed him in the hallway and whispered, “Mr. Lincoln's gone to talk to Dr. Patterson. He don't look like a happy man.”

  Robert Lincoln was just coming out of Patterson's office when John came down the stairs to the parlor—Mrs. Lincoln was nowhere in sight. Through clenched teeth, Robert said, “I quite understand your position, Dr. Patterson, but please consider mine. In spite of appearances my mother is not competent to live on her own, at my Aunt Elizabeth's house or anywhere else! You can have no idea how difficult it is, to deal with someone who is insane in one area and appears normal in other respects....”

  “I can,” replied Patterson drily, “and believe me, Mr. Lincoln, I do. I have been in touch with the Bradwell woman this week, too—all these Spiritualist harpies are alike!—but I am in an extremely difficult position, both financially and, to be frank, legally. Laymen who have no understanding of the workings of the deranged mind and the feminine nervous system are more a nuisance than anything else, for all they see are the rights of the sane and the normal. But those, unfortunately, are the laws that bind us!”

  “Please,” begged Robert. “Please do not do anything until you hear from me. This matter will be straightened out—it must be straightened out. The thought of my mother rambling about at large with the whole of her fortune stuffed into pockets in her petticoats—going off to California or God knows where to get into God knows what kind of scandal . . . ! Though trying to convince any of the Bradwell woman's gang of Spiritualists of anything may well be beyond any man's abilities. But I will try.”

  Patterson saw him to the door and paused, turning back, as he glimpsed John passing through the parlor. “John,” he said, “I want a word with you.” And to Robert, holding the door, “If they threaten to publish, there is not much that I can do.”

  “What you can do,” replied Robert, “is get anything—anything at all—to support a diagnosis of continued insanity in my mother. We both know she is insane. What more do we need? It is, after all, for her own good.”

  And he strode down the brick steps, to where his cab stood in the graveled circle of the drive.

  Patterson turned back, and stood for a moment, regarding John with tired and angry eyes.

  Without a word being spoken, John felt his heart sink and turn cold.

  “Mrs. Patterson informs me, John, that you were the one who admitted Mrs. Bradwell's friend Mr. Wilkie to the house last week, in my absence, to visit Mrs. Lincoln.”

  “Yes, sir.” He wondered who Mrs. Patterson had heard it from.

  “Did you inquire who Mr. Wi
lkie was?”

  “No, sir. Mrs. Bradwell said he was a friend of Mrs. Lincoln's.”

  “She was lying,” said Patterson quietly. “Something she does rather readily.” In his mind John heard Mary's voice: Myra . . . Well, once she sees a solution to a problem she goes at it like a bull at a gate, and doesn't ask what one feels about it, so long as it gets done.

  And Myra's voice, as she handed him the newspaper on the train: You leave Dr. Patterson to me.

  No, he thought, seeing what was coming.

  No.

  It was as if he stood in a burning house, looking up and watching the ceiling collapsing down upon him in an avalanche of flaming debris.

  “Mr. Franc Wilkie is a reporter for the Chicago Times,” said Patterson. He drew a deep breath. “I know you and I haven't agreed on the diagnosis of Mrs. Lincoln, John. And I have made countless allowances for your lesser experience and for the flaws in your education, as well as, perhaps, your prejudice concerning the widow of the Great Emancipator. But I did trust that you would be professional enough to consult with me, rather than taking matters into your own hands. I am very sorry that I am going to have to dismiss you.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Chicago August 1875

  ALL THE WAY BACK TO CHICAGO, JOHN KEPT THINKING: WHAT AM I doing going back so soon? I just rode this train....

  He felt numb with shock, as if he'd offered his hand to help a child who'd fallen on the street, and the helpless tot had produced an ax and chopped off his arm.

  Not just the pain of betrayal—the question of how he was going to get through life missing an arm.

  He'd have to tell Clarice.

  He'd have to tell Cassy.

  He could just hear his sister's scathing voice: You lost your job over helping a white woman? A crazy woman? If you gonna lose your job helping a crazy woman, how come you don't help Mama?

  The fact that Mary Todd Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln's widow wouldn't cut any ice with Cassy. And in fact, John had not helped Mrs. Lincoln with any thought in mind that assisting her toward liberty was in any sense a payment for his own freedom.