The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  She loved him, he realized. Loved him more than the thought of their home, their survival as a family. Those paled for her beside fear for his survival.

  The understanding of the depth of her love—and of his love for her—was honey and sunlight, in the midst of Hell. It burned his eyes with tears.

  “And you think that's gonna get this white woman to lift a hand?” Cassy's voice was bitter.

  “I do, yes. Cassy, please.” She'd dealt with too many wealthy white women who wanted their sheets and petticoats washed right away and not starched too much, to have any high opinion of the breed. “She'll help,” he said.

  Cassy sniffed.

  “She's got to know lawyers. She's a lawyer herself. She owes me.”

  “I got lots of white ladies owe me,” retorted Cassy, getting to her feet. Through the haze of myopia John saw she was wearing her Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, faded sage-green chintz, the neatest she had. Like armor against the dirt and poverty and scorn of the jail. “And if they didn't need me for somethin' else, not a one of them would pay me.” She reached across the table, and took his left hand.

  “You keep strong, John. We'll get you out. With or without your white lady lawyer friend.”

  When John got back to the cell, Klauswijz and the boy Bailey were both gone. Before evening their places were taken by a gambler—who was bailed out within hours—and a morphine addict who proceeded to vomit, purge, and howl for the remainder of the day and night, but at least John got his own share of water and food. The gambler brought a newspaper with him, and left it behind. It contained a letter to the editor from Judge James Bradwell, accusing Dr. Patterson of treatment “calculated to drive Mrs. Lincoln insane” and a threat to come knocking on the “prison-house” doors with a writ of habeas corpus.

  That night he slept like a dead man, and dreamed of the tangled woodland battlefields of the Wilderness between Crown Point and Richmond. Dreamed of searching through the woods, and finding dying soldiers as they lay sobbing amid hackberry and weeds. Dreamed of carrying them back to the ambulance-carts, with their blood dripping down his back. He saw the dim shapes of the dead-carts above him, the piles of bodies heaped like cordwood. A tall man in shirtsleeves was working there alone, lifting the dead onto the cart, and as he came nearer John saw it was Mr. Lincoln, wearing a butcher's bloodied apron, his hands and arms crimson to the biceps. Every time he turned, John saw the gaping wound in the back of his head, where Booth's bullet had smashed through the skull.

  John asked him, “Did you know this was going to happen?”

  “I guessed it,” said Lincoln. “Yes.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  Lincoln bent to help John load a corpse onto the cart. It was the little whore who'd stared around her in such terror at Flossie's, the little girl who so resembled Lucy. The older man stood looking down at her for a moment, then sighed like a death-rattle. “I think so.”

  “Even for this?” The fog was thinning. The battlefield lay exposed, stretching as far as anyone could see, filling the world. Smoke drifted, with the stink of blood and sulfur. Flies roared in black clouds. This then was the glory of the coming of the Lord, John thought: bodies lying like the trampled skins of grapes, wrath hanging like a poison over the stricken field. Somehow he knew they'd be picking up the bodies of the slain for months, for years. His mother was out there dead somewhere, and Cassy and Lionel and Lizabet Keckley and Frederick Douglass, and men and women not yet born. “None of them asked to die. They asked only to live.”

  Lincoln said, “We all die, John.” And with a self-conscious gesture fingered the wound in the back of his head, looked at the blood on his hand, then shrugged and wiped it on his trouser-leg. “Would you go back if you could?”

  John grinned up at him. “Not a chance.”

  And Lincoln grinned back, suddenly young. “Neither would I.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  “I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I AM GOING TO DO WITH YOU!” ROBERT slapped the newspaper down on the bench beside Mary, the strained violence of his movement speaking volumes for a lifetime of restricting what he felt and how he reacted. A lifetime of dealing with Mary. Of being pointed at as Abraham Lincoln's son.

  He'd come on her in the rose garden, striding up the gravel drive—Mary had seen Argus let him in at the front gate, had seen by the way he walked that he was furious. She'd considered going into the house and making him ask Dr. Patterson to bring her to the parlor, where at least he couldn't shout and rail at her, but a kind of weary anger kept her in her seat.

  Let him shout, she thought. Though Dr. Patterson had only told her that John Wilamet had “decided to quit us,” she knew Robert must have had something to do with his dismissal a week ago. And her anger at the loss of her friend—at the loss of the only person in this place who truly had her good at heart—had fire-cured the hard knot of strength within her that had somehow gotten lost in the soft haze of her medicines. She found that even in cold blood, she no longer really cared whether Robert was angry at her or not.

  She picked up the paper and glanced at the place to which Robert had folded it open.

  “Why is it necessary that you do anything with me?” she asked quietly. “Because you can't endure the thought of having a mother who travels around the country without a male protector? Or a mother who is interested in politics and writes letters to newspapers? Or is it just that you don't like the sight of me spending money that you think of as yours?”

  “We've been through this before, Mother.” He spoke as if trying to conceal a painful carbuncle whose existence was beneath the dignity of Abraham Lincoln's son. “You think that by getting your friends to bring calumny down upon Dr. Patterson and his family—none of whom have ever done you the slightest harm...”

  “Not done me harm? Not done me harm, to suggest to you that the best thing that you could do with an embarrassing female relation is to have her declared mad and locked up? In his private madhouse, at the rate of two hundred dollars a month . . . Or did you find Bellevue with a pin and a City Directory?”

  Robert's blue eyes shifted, then returned to hers aflame with indignation. “It didn't happen like that at all. Dr. Patterson's brother examined you in Washington, when you had your carriage accident. Dr. Patterson was one of several doctors I consulted about your sanity.”

  “The only one who runs a private institution and was looking for patients to fill it up, I daresay. And on the subject of calumny, you have been calling me insane—in the public newspapers, no less—since the time I began fighting for Congress to give me the remainder of your father's salary so we could have something to live on while that dilatory hog Judge Davis collected the interest on your father's estate. You called me insane while I tried to get a pension to live on at a time when Congress and every wealthy businessman in the East were shoving handfuls of greenbacks and house-deeds into Sam Grant's pockets for doing less to save the Union than your father did, and at far less cost to himself. Don't think I don't know that you were calling me insane to your cronies at Harvard and in the Army as well.”

  “You are insane!” he shouted at her. “Good God, Mother, you should have seen yourself when you came off the train last March, raving that I was going to die! When you were wandering around the halls of the Grand Pacific in your nightdress, swearing that voices were speaking to you out of the walls!”

  Tears filled Mary's eyes and with them, the blinding urge to turn on him her old weapons of sarcasm and hysterics, of guilt and shame. Instead she said, “Obviously, I was ill, and now am better. You can ask Dr. Patterson, or his son, if I have had any such delusions while I have been here. I reserve the right to remain eccentric—I never noticed anyone trying to lock up your Uncle Levi when he'd go on shouting rampages, or for heaven's sake Cash Clay....”

  “The only reason no one has tried so far to lock up Cassius Clay is because they're afraid he'll shoot them in the process.”

  “The only reason no one has tried to lock up Cash,” said
Mary firmly, “is because he is a man. And a man can make as much of a jackass of himself as he pleases, writing letters to newspapers or switching political sides or speaking to mobs of freedmen urging rebellion against Reconstruction . . . or keeping a harem of Russian dancing-girls and driving his poor wife to distraction and divorce, for that matter. And half the members of Congress, over the years, haven't been much better.”

  She folded the newspaper with James Bradwell's letter in it and set it again on the bench at her side, and shaded her eyes as she looked up at her son. “But a woman is considered mad if she spends her own money to excess, or loses her temper too often and too loudly, or seeks communication with the souls of those she loved in life, in order to comfort her grief.”

  “If she hands all her money to charlatans who claim to be the ‘media' of that communication, yes, I'd say that was insane,” snapped Robert.

  “But it is my money. If I were to hand it all to the Catholic Church, or to the Freedmen's Relief Association—or to the clerk at the jewelry counter at Marshall Field's, for that matter, like some women I could name—it is my business, and not yours.”

  And she saw him stiffen up with stubborn anger at the idea that any doings of his female belongings—whether mother, wife, or daughter—were not his business.

  She went on, “My sister tells me that you wrote to her warning her that Myra Bradwell was the ‘high priestess' of a ‘gang of Spiritualists' who were trying to get their hands on my money. And that she is in perfectly good health, and not—as you specifically told me—that she was too ill to have me go and stay with her.”

  “I did not say specifically that she was too ill.”

  She promptly fished for the letter in her reticule, and with blotches of anger staining his cheekbones Robert raised his hand. After a moment he said, “I was only thinking of you, Mother. This place is good for you. You said yourself you have ceased having those delusions, and it is because you have been living quietly here, and not exciting your brain with the confusing distractions of travel and of those da—” He caught himself from swearing, and corrected, “—those wretched table-tappers who do nothing but raise the passions of women to such a degree that they result in derangement.”

  “You mean they raise the passions of women to such a degree that they result in disagreement with men,” retorted Mary. And then, as Robert opened his mouth, she added, “As you just said yourself, we have been through this before, and we shall probably never agree. But there is a law of habeas corpus in this state—”

  “You damned—wretched—women, quoting the law . . .”

  “The law that you'd rather we didn't know about? As slaveholders preferred that their chattels not learn about it? I expected better of your father's son!”

  Mary stood, and shook out her black skirts. The morning was growing hot. The scent of the roses swathed her like a veil, as if the sweetness were intended to mask the dim screams coming from the house. That would be Mrs. Hill, strapped in a hydrotherapy tank.

  “There is a law of habeas corpus in Illinois, Robert. And I am going to get out of this place. As I'm sure that neither of us wishes me to come live with you and your lovely wife—” her voice twisted with scorn “—perhaps it would be best if you stopped lying to my sister, and Mrs. Bradwell, and Dr. Patterson, and accepted that fact. It is possible for me to be sane in places other than the one you sanction, and to get help from sources other than those of which you approve.”

  “I will not have you running about the world creating an embarrassment for the Lincoln family!”

  “Your embarrassment is your own problem, Robert, not mine,” she pointed out icily. “Please feel free to disown me. And if at any time in the future I start hearing voices coming out of the floor, or begin having delusions of men following me—that is, men other than those you have hired yourself—you may call in your mad-doctors to examine me again. But not until that time. May I take this?” She held up the newspaper.

  Robert turned from her without a word, and walked stiffly away down the gravel drive to the gate. She watched him go, her heart aching. Not with the loss of the man, she realized. For years, she understood now, he had been a stranger to her. Maybe he always had. But she was losing the sturdy boy who'd run through the leafy aisles of the vegetable garden on Jackson Street, the boy the other children had called Cock-Eye, the boy who'd darted about the steamboat deck to look at the paddles, and the young man who'd written to her wild with excitement: The other boys said how proud I must be, to have him for my father.. . .

  Her heart went back further, to the rainy November night and the silence of Simeon Francis's house; Lincoln's weight pressing her body into the worn sofa. The hoarse gasp of his breath, the brush of his lips on her face, the fire reflected in his gray eyes.

  Life is short. We don't know what the future will bring. I don't want never to have done this. . . .

  She realized that she still felt the same way. That if she could go back, and erase everything that had passed between that night, and the tall angry figure striding from her down the garden path, she would not. It was all precious to her, every moment, the painful along with the sweet. The lie that she had told had made Robert what he was, and what he would go on to be: the whole of their relationship implicit in those few impulsive words that she could not take back, once they'd been spoken.

  Everything that had come of that lie seemed to settle into her heart, like wings folding. It was what was. For the first time in over thirty years, she felt no shame, only a profound sadness.

  Robert was gone. With him he was taking Mamie, and the other children Young Mary would bear: Abraham Lincoln's grandchildren. Her grandchildren.

  With him he was taking the past, and whatever future that she might have had, with Abraham Lincoln's only surviving son.

  And though a tear crept down her face for that vanished future, she was still glad that she had done what she had done, and had what she had had.

  CASSY AND CLARICE BOTH CAME TO THE COOK COUNTY JAIL ON Saturday to visit John, and again on Sunday with Selina and Phoebe and a box of apples and hard-boiled eggs. If there had been any repercussions or rage on Phoebe's part—or Cassy's, for that matter—about money and the future, they had taken place at home. Just the knowledge that his family knew where he was, that they cared about him enough to endure the streetcar ride and the walk in the brutal August sun, made the jail-cell bearable.

  On Monday a young white gentleman named Leeland turned up. A lawyer, he said, and a friend of Mrs. Bradwell, he was willing to argue John's case. In the crowded visiting-room he listened to John's account of the evening at Flossie's, and took notes. This was more than was being done, John couldn't help noticing, by the sparse scattering of pro bono attorneys pulled from the court roster to help the more deserving or endangered of the other prisoners. One of these, a stout sleepy gentleman in an appalling checked suit, kept shaking his head at his client's impassioned protests of innocence and saying, “I'll do what I can, Mr.—uh—Mr. Belker—but you understand I mostly do probates, not murders....”

  He also couldn't keep from noticing what was obvious even without his spectacles: that he was the only black man in conversation with a member of the legal profession, probates or otherwise. He guessed—his guess a near certainty—that without Myra Bradwell pulling in a favor, he'd have been arguing his own not-very-convincing case in court.

  “Oh, they haven't got a leg to stand on,” said Leeland, when John had finished his account of what little he'd seen of the fight. “The police had a couple of bodies on their hands and wanted to make an arrest to impress their sergeant. I'd wager they don't even have any witnesses, other than the flatfoot who made the arrest.”

  “That'll be enough to get me hanged, if we don't have at least one witness that I was knocked out on the floor,” pointed out John grimly. “And you're going to have your work cut out for you finding one. I surely don't advise you to try going into Flossie's alone and asking questions.”

&n
bsp; “Good God!” Leeland looked horrified at the thought. “I know better than to do that. But we'll be all right.” The young lawyer gave John a cheerful slap on the shoulder. “Half the time, when the judge hears that there's going to be an attorney for the defense at all, he just drops the charges, especially if there's no witnesses. I'll see what I can do.”

  He stood—he'd talked to John for all of about five minutes, an eon in that room and those circumstances. The man at the next table seemed to be vainly trying to state his case in a language his attorney didn't understand. Leeland said, “Mrs. Bradwell told me to get you off, and she'll never speak to me again if I don't.”

  “You work for her?” John stood also—the bored-looking guard came forward, to take him back. When John moved, the manacles on his wrists jangled on the battered wooden table, rubbing older scars. He was surprised at how angry it made him, to wear chains again.

  “In a manner of speaking.” Leeland resumed his stylish new derby with a flourish. “She got me work in her husband's office when I first started out, and had no money, and let me earn extra writing articles for her newspaper. I owe her.”

  As he walked John back to the cell the guard muttered, “Lawyers for niggers, what'll they want next?”

  Through the next nerve-wracking week he was keenly aware of how lucky he was, as he saw some of those who'd been in the holding cell before him taken away. He heard from others about the cursory trials that lasted barely twenty minutes, testimony from policemen, storekeepers, bartenders who merely shrugged off the questions put to them by the accused, or answered with wisecracks that drew grins from the jury.

  The fact that he knew he wasn't going to have to get up and question a couple of white cops who wanted to impress their sergeant with their detective abilities eased his mind considerably, but did nothing to reduce the furnace of sour anger burning within him. He would—probably—walk out of here with his life, but there remained the question of where he would go when he did. And in the weeks in the cell, he saw what he had always been able to turn away from before: the sheer extent of what poverty did, to those whom no one regarded as quite human enough to employ.