The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  To all intents and purposes, John understood that he was back at Camp Barker yet again, being told off by Washington ladies' yard-hands and beaten up by Irish teamsters.

  All because he had tried to help the woman whose husband had freed him. The woman who had treated him kindly, on his first day in the Promised Land.

  JOHN HAD FEARED THAT MR. LEELAND'S CASUAL REMARKS ABOUT THE charges being dropped were a mere justification for not putting himself to the danger of going out and looking for a witness, but it turned out that the lawyer had a clearer awareness of the courts' corruption than John did. On the eighth of September—almost a month after his arrest—he was taken out of his cell, informed that the charges against him had been dropped, and let loose onto the streets of Chicago. He was bearded, filthy, and shaky with lack of exercise. Through the two-mile-plus walk to the grid of dirty alleyways between train-tracks and stockyard near the levee, he had to stop repeatedly to regain his strength and his breath.

  If the breezes hadn't been cool that day off Lake Michigan he wasn't sure he'd have made it.

  At the house—where everyone had been living on oatmeal because Lionel was carrying the whole family on his slender wages—John had a bath in Cassy's used laundry-water, shaved, and slept for twenty-six hours. When he woke, the first thing he saw was Phoebe, sitting beside his cot with a fan of braided newspaper in her hands, keeping the flies off his face.

  The following day he walked back uptown to Michigan Avenue, to pay a visit to Myra Bradwell.

  The house was three stories, fronted with brown brick, reminding him a little of those he'd seen in New York. He had to squint to see the house number. Griffe Moissant had lent him a pair of glasses and they weren't nearly strong enough. A German servant answered the door, and she looked him up and down in horror. He wondered if a white man, clothed in the clean but shabby second-best suit that for a miracle Phoebe hadn't pawned for medicine-money, would have been asked over the threshold.

  “Yes?”

  “I'm here to see Mrs. Bradwell. Would you please tell her that Mr. John Wilamet from Bellevue Place is here?” A little awkwardly, because his arm was still in a sling, he put one of his cards on her tray.

  Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

  The woman's expression clearly indicated that only superhuman Christian charity prevented her from pointing out that she had knickknacks to dust and could not afford the time to be announcing Negroes to Mrs. Bradwell. When she closed the door in his face John kept his temper by counting the seconds. It was six and a half minutes—far longer than it would take for a woman to climb a flight of stairs and grunt a visitor's name—before the door was opened again, and the maid said grudgingly, “Please come in.” She took his hat with the delicacy of one who expected it to be lousy and put a piece of newspaper on the marble-topped rosewood hall table before setting it down, then followed him up the stairs like a detective trailing a prospective shoplifter.

  John was sorely tempted to turn around and yell, “Boo!”

  “Mr. Wilamet, I am delighted to see you!” Myra rose from her desk, strode to the door to meet him. The room—a bright little chamber above the kitchen that in any other house would have been a sewing-room—was clearly her fortress and sanctum, lined with shelves that bore law-books stacked neatly on their sides, long inky newspaper galleys, docketed folders of papers, and a dozen big commonplace-books of clippings. Wooden file cabinets and an old but spotless desk took up most of the room. There was one chair for a visitor and one at the desk, a bright rag rug, and pots of ivy on the sill of the windows that ran the length of the room and gave a view of a rather overgrown garden below.

  On the wall, bordered in black, was a sepia ambrotype of a little girl in a white dress, with bunches of fresh asters in the vase in front of it.

  Myra went on in her brisk voice, “Leeland told me Monday Judge Hertford was dropping the charges. Old Hertford's always ready to save himself trouble. I don't blame you for resting a few days before coming to see me.”

  Monday, he thought dourly. And yesterday—the day of his release—had been Wednesday. Two days, before they'd gotten around to actually letting him go. It figured. He was lucky they hadn't lost the papers until Christmas.

  “You're so thin, my poor boy! And your arm...I'm afraid you've had a most dreadful time. But Leeland is truly a marvel. You're lucky to have caught me—I'm leaving this evening for Springfield, to be there tomorrow when Mary arrives at her sister's house.”

  “It's settled, then?” He wasn't really surprised. He'd followed the bitter interchange of letters in the papers, which Cassy and Clarice had brought him almost daily, including the quite masterful article by Franc Wilkie in the Times. Caught between Robert Lincoln and fear of public disgrace, Dr. Patterson had put up as much of a fight as he could, but the conclusion, John had guessed, was foregone.

  “There will be universal satisfaction to know that Mrs. Lincoln has been restored to her reason and to her friends,” proclaimed one journal, and another, “When a woman spends her own money lavishly and appears a little different from others she ought not to be placed behind iron bars. She has borne all and wronged no one.”

  Dr. Patterson had written in a letter to the Tribune, “I am willing to record the opinion that such is the character of her malady she will not be content to do this, and that the experiment, if made, will result only in giving her the coveted opportunity to make extended rambles, to renew the indulgence of her purchasing mania, and other morbid manifestations.”

  “DR. PATTERSON,” James Bradwell had responded in a final blistering letter to the Chicago Post and Mail, “IS A VERY PECULIAR MAN. . . .”

  “Robert is frothing at the mouth.” There was rich satisfaction in Myra's voice. “I've received some of the most frigidly polite letters in the English language from him, once he saw that he could not keep his mother under lock and key where she would be forced to stop spending the money that he's counting on, and behave the way he thinks a real woman ought to. I must say, he certainly doesn't have his father's way with words—or his mother's either, for that matter. It was Wilkie's article that did the trick, though!”

  She turned back to her desk, where she laid hands on it at once, already neatly cut and tucked into a folder.

  “That's what set off the round of support. You know there were ministers who made her the subject of sermons, demanding her release? Probably preached by the very same ministers who execrated her a few years ago for trying to sell off her old dresses. But there's nothing like a good newspaper campaign to force an issue....”

  “You might have told me.”

  At the hardness of his tone, her hazel eyes narrowed.

  “I daresay I might have,” she replied evenly. “Would you have helped, if you knew?”

  “If I'd known that it would cost me my job? The sole support of my wife, my mother, and my child? I don't know.”

  He saw her face change, all the triumphant ebullience leaving it, and that lawyer mask with which he was so familiar emerging, like the skull through the skin. “Is that why you're here?” she inquired. A lawyer's voice, like the face, that gave away nothing: every word precisely graded so as to offer not the slightest handhold to an opponent.

  He wondered if Lincoln had gotten like that in court, and then realized, Of course he had.

  “If you mean, am I here to ask you for money, no.” And to his complete surprise—because he hadn't had the slightest idea of what he was, in fact, going to say to her, he went on, “I'm here to thank you for sending Mr. Leeland to get me out. I probably owe him—and you—my life. Black men get very brief trials in this town.”

  She inclined her head, still watchful. “If you thought I would have abandoned you after the help you gave me and Mrs. Lincoln, you can't have formed a very complete picture of my character.” She was still angry.

  “To tell you the truth, Mrs. Bradwell, in the twelve years that I've been a free man—and the fifteen years I was a slave—I learned the hard wa
y never to completely trust whites, because so many of the things that go into making up their characters are . . . not things that I—we—have experience with. It's sometimes hard for me to read whites. Mostly, on Maxwell Street, we just know what's done to us.”

  His eyes were on hers as he spoke—and it was still strange to him, to look into a white woman's eyes after half a lifetime's training not to—and it was her gaze that fell.

  After a moment she said, “Won't you sit down, Mr. Wilamet?” She reached for and rang the silver bell on her desk. “Heidi . . . Please bring coffee for Mr. Wilamet and myself,” she told the maid and took her seat at the desk, turning her chair to face him as he sat down. “I'm sorry,” she said simply. “I was quite wrong not to trust you . . . not to consider the results of my action more carefully than I did. You must admit I was justified.”

  “I admit you were justified,” replied John quietly, and adjusted Griffe's glasses, which were too narrow and gave him a headache. “But you were also wrong.”

  Myra's lips tightened, and John recalled her words on the train from Springfield, about how the feminists in the abolition movement had been betrayed by those men who thought they could win if they separated freedom for black men from freedom for all. Enough to make a woman carry a grudge, if she didn't know too much about how those black men got treated after their much-talked-about Freedom finally came through.

  “Yes, I was wrong,” she told him. “And even giving you back a future isn't sufficient payment, if I've damaged that future beyond repair. What can I do for you?”

  “I don't know. What can you do for me? Besides colonizing me to Africa.”

  Myra laughed, just as Heidi came in with the coffee-tray. The maid's face was like stone as she set it down, but John guessed she'd have a few words to say to the cook about their mistress's eccentricities in welcoming a Negro as an equal. He wondered if the cup he drank from would be accidentally “broken” in the interests of “cleanliness,” while Myra was in Springfield.

  “How well do you write?” Myra asked. “How clearly? Most lawyers want clerks with some legal training, but I can certainly bully one of my husband's staff into taking you on as an assistant clerk. The pay won't be much....”

  “It's better than rolling cigars,” said John.

  Myra looked surprised.

  “Or sweeping a saloon—which are just about the only jobs a black man can get in this town, unless he knows someone. And black men never know anyone, except other black men.”

  “Rather like being a woman,” she replied drily. “A woman seeking employment—other than prostitution or sewing—encounters exactly the same thing. They take one look at you and say, ‘Oh, you're black.' They take one look at me and say, ‘Oh, you're a woman. You have a “nervous constitution” and can't be trusted not to—'”

  She broke off. “Mr. Wilamet,” she said, with a different emphasis on the words, “how well do you write? Because I need articles for my newspaper about laws concerning the treatment of the insane—particularly women. You worked at Bellevue—and as I recall you said you worked at the Jacksonville asylum as well. Do you think you could research in the law and medical journals to write about the abuses there, in the light of your own experience? Again, the pay won't be much.”

  “Again,” said John, “it's better than rolling cigars.”

  He stepped out the door of Myra Bradwell's home into sunlight, and wind blowing across the spangled surface of the lake. Beyond the trees of Lake Park a train rolled by along the dark cindery line of track between water and land, noisy even in this fashionable neighborhood. A policeman walking his beat eyed him, but didn't cross the street. John wondered if, in between writing about madhouses, he might slip in a few articles about the Cook County jail as well.

  He realized that for the next few years he'd be working with Myra Bradwell.

  Not how he'd pictured the Promised Land.

  But it was a start.

  Feeling as if he'd found a dollar in the streets of wartime Washington to carry back to Camp Barker, he set off down Michigan Avenue for home.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  “I TRUST EVERYTHING IS TO YOUR SATISFACTION, MRS. LINCOLN?”

  Dr. Patterson's voice was stiff, as he stood in the doorway of her little room, an indistinct shape against the gaslights of the hall. For the past month—since he had learned from Robert the identity of the Mr. Wilkie whom Myra had brought to see her—Patterson had been hard put to be polite to Mary, lecturing her several times a day on her untruthfulness, as if it were a mark of insanity to mistrust one's jailers. Every time she turned around, she'd encountered Gretchen or Zeus or Mrs. Patterson, scribbling notes of her behavior.

  Searching, she knew, for evidence that she was insane, and that Dr. Patterson and Robert were right.

  Lately—since Mr. Wilkie's article had appeared—this had ceased. But she still felt anxious, as if everything she did would be used against her.

  Patterson went on, “Your son will be here in the morning, to escort you to your sister's house. I have made arrangements for your trunks to be shipped at the end of the week. I hope you know what you're doing, in insisting on leaving Bellevue, Mrs. Lincoln....”

  It was a rhetorical opening to a lecture on the virtues of lotos-eating, but she responded sweetly, “That is the entire case at issue, Doctor, is it not?”

  He pokered up exactly like young Mr. Presby used to, when Mary had pinked a hole in the tutor's Yankee self-righteousness. He said, “Good-night, Mrs. Lincoln,” and stalked off down the hall.

  She closed the door. She could hear Amanda moving around in the adjoining room. Packing, she supposed. Amanda had agreed to accompany her as a nurse to Springfield, for despite—or perhaps because of—or in addition to—her reduction in her medicines, Mary still felt far from well.

  Her back, neck, and shoulder still hurt; her privates itched and she still had to use the toilet a dozen times a night (and wouldn't that be a pleasure with Elizabeth's room next to hers!). She still quarreled unreasonably with whoever crossed her path some days, still had those strange moments of feeling detached from her body, of feeling she was on the verge of losing herself.

  And that was, she supposed, what her life would become. Amanda was one of the few who had agreed with John Wilamet's judgment that no more than two watered spoonfuls of medicine were to be taken on any one day, no matter what she said or felt. Mary knew this was best, but no day went by that she didn't think, at least once: Just one more spoonful, because my back is extra bad today. . . . She thought about the long years ahead and shivered.

  It had been easier to put such thoughts away when she'd had John to talk to. Myra had told her that Patterson had dismissed the young black man assisting them, and that he'd later gotten into trouble—wrongfully—with the police: that she was getting one of Jamie's law cronies to help him. Once she got to Elizabeth's, she reflected, she'd ask Myra where to write to him, perhaps even see him. On the days when the cravings were so bad, it did her good to talk.

  On the nights like tonight, the thought of seeing Myra, or John, or one of her other friends was the only thing she could hold on to, like lights glimpsed in a wilderness of dark.

  If she went back to taking more medicine than she should, Robert would be able to lock her up again. This time forever.

  The little warm stir of anger—of fight—helped. I'll show him.

  In nine months, Myra had told her, they'd be able to go to court and have the judgment of insanity lifted from her.

  In nine months she'd be truly free.

  And then, I will return to Europe, where Robert will not be able to touch me. Where he'll never be “embarrassed” by me again.

  She closed her eyes, recalling the warming sunlight of Italy, the tumbled bronze-purple hills of Scotland, London's rain-gray streets. The wooded hills above Frankfurt, its cobbled lanes and the bright-hued dresses of the ladies strolling along the Zeil in the chill sunshine.

  Nine months of living with
Elizabeth, whom she had not seen in ten years. Of living under the same roof as Ninian, as she had when she was twenty-one.

  Nine months of coming downstairs every day to the double-parlor where Dr. Henry had sat by the fire: He is a man whose heart is stronger than his body. . . . Nine months of crossing the porch where Ninian had stood in the snow and told Lincoln to relinquish his sister-in-law's hand.

  We cannot always be children under our fathers' roofs. . . .

  Nine months of eating dinner in the dining-room where Lincoln had slipped on her finger the now-too-tight gold band that said, A.L. to M.T. Nov. 4 1842 Love Is Eternal. Of seeing his gray eyes looking out of every shadow at her.

  Of knowing that Merce Conkling and Julia Trumbull and her perfidious sister Ann and all the other false friends of former days were whispering about her over their afternoon tea.

  She did not know how she was going to endure it.

  Nor could she even contemplate how she was going to live through the years to come.

  THAT NIGHT SHE DREAMED ABOUT LINCOLN.

  She was in the carriage with him again, under the dappled shade of the Washington dogwoods. She thought, No! Not this again . . . ! unable to bear the thought of what was coming. To sit beside him in the theater, to hear the crack of Booth's pistol and feel her husband's arm jerk in her grip, then the weight of him slump down on her shoulder. “We must both try to be more cheerful,” he was saying, and looking up, she saw again how worn his face was, how lined with four years of sleepless nights, four years of sorrow. “With our dear Willie's death, we have both been very miserable.”

  “I have been very miserable,” said Mary firmly, and took his hand. “And not just because of Willie's death.”