The Emancipator's Wife
Page 77
He looked surprised, because this had not actually happened, nor had she ever dreamed of stepping out of the actual past before. This memory of their last afternoon together had always been too precious to alter, even to evade the grief that followed. He put his arm around her then, and sighed. “I know,” he said. “I am sorry, Molly.”
She could feel the warmth of his fingers through the gloves they both wore.
“You did the best you could,” she told him quietly, and rested her head on his shoulder, thankful that this dream didn't include the cavalry escort. “And you did a hero's work. But you abandoned me. You left me behind—left me out of your life. After all our years together. And then you left me alone.”
It was the thing she had always longed to say to him, in all those darkened parlors, in all those ghostly rooms where the music of far-off violins had whispered across the Veil between the worlds. She never had, for it would not do, to let anyone know the truth about him: that like other men he was a man, capable of temper and thoughtlessness, and of ignoring or disappointing his wife.
It would never do to let anyone know the truth about her: that her wholehearted love had been mingled, all along, with anger, frustration, and the selfish, devouring need to have more of his love than he would give. More than he could give.
Maybe more than anyone could ever give.
She had never known how to break past this: first because he would be great, then because he was President, and finally because of the death that had raised him to martyrdom and herself to the thankless role of a martyr's wife.
And he had never appeared to her, as Tad and Willie and Eddie had, in those hazy, glowing spells that she now recognized as opium-dreams.
He asked gently, “Do you think I really wanted to leave you, Molly? In the end?”
In life she would have wept, but in her dream she seemed to have control of both her temper and her tears. “No. And I know I'm not an easy woman to live with. I could have done better. . . . But so could you. I know you didn't mean to hurt me, but you did. I wish I could say that I never meant to hurt you. . . . I am sorry that I did mean it, sometimes.”
He smiled at her, as he had when she'd work herself into a fret about a fancied slight or some day-to-day crisis in their Springfield days, and squeezed her shoulder gently with one long arm. “It happens. I recovered.”
The sun was sinking, and looking past him, she saw that they weren't in Washington at all, but driving along the Richmond road on the outskirts of Lexington. She saw Henry Clay's house, Ashland, among its beautiful gardens, and the low brick shape of Rose Hill on the other side of the road. But the countryside that lay beyond them was the Illinois prairie, as it had been when first she and her father had taken the stage up from St. Louis, empty, baked, and golden in the fading evening light.
She took a deep breath, and said, “I'm sorry I lied to you. About Robert, I mean.”
“Bob's a good boy,” said Lincoln. “And a fine man. He has his own path to walk. You did for him what you could.”
“I just didn't want to be alone.” And hearing her own words, she smiled her rueful sidelong smile. “And now after all that, here I am, alone anyway.”
“We're all alone sometimes, Molly,” said Lincoln gently. “Sometimes that's the way we need to be. We all do what we have to do about it. Like the old farmer said, some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you. I am purely sorry that I made you unhappy—and glad that I could make you happy, when I did. Promise me you'll do what you need to do, to be as happy as you can.”
She sighed, and answered, “I'll do what I can.”
“That's my Molly.”
They were coming into Springfield, passing the Globe Tavern, where she glimpsed an empty carriage standing waiting for her, and a gaggle of loungers listening to a storyteller in the darkness of the porch. In the flare of torchlight as they went by the tavern's doors she saw that it was John Wilamet driving the carriage in which they rode—Myra, she thought, must have gotten him that job after he'd been dismissed from Bellevue. His eyes met hers and he smiled.
Then Lincoln drew her to him, and kissed her in the sunset's amber glow, the strength of his arm so familiar, the taste of his mouth what it had always been. They held each other like adolescents in the first wild springtime of love.
The carriage turned down Second Street, and Mary saw Elizabeth waiting for her in the dim glow of the porch lamps, Ninian standing tall behind her. Myra was beside her, and Robert, looking like he'd been sucking a lemon. In the soft blue twilight with its thick scent of honeysuckle, she glimpsed other forms on the porch: Lizabet Keckley, she thought, and handsome young Elmer Ellsworth in his Zouave uniform, and Stephen Douglas like a dandified little bantam rooster, and Dr. Henry and Cash Clay.
The carriage drew to a halt, and Lincoln opened the door and swung lightly down, holding out his hand to her to steady her on the high step.
“You can't come in with me?” Mary asked, though she knew that wasn't allowed. “Even for a little?” He shook his head.
“I'll meet you a ways down the road.”
Mary smiled at him, gathered up her petticoats, and stepped down. She was wearing, she noted, the pink faille that she'd had on that first evening in Springfield, when her father had gone looking for Ninian and drunken old Professor Kittridge had come over to lecture her on the evils of slavery.
She looked up at Lincoln and smiled. “I'll look forward to it.”
“As will I.”
He took off his hat and leaned down to kiss her, then sprang up into the carriage again. “You have a good time, Molly.”
Not at all sure that she would, Mary walked up the path to her sister's house through the dream's blue twilight, trying not to look back.
EPILOGUE
ON JUNE 15, 1876, THE CHICAGO COURT REVERSED ITS DECISION AND declared Mary Todd Lincoln sane. She left Springfield in September, traveling to New York with her great-nephew Lewis Baker and thence to Europe, where she settled in Pau, a pleasant town at the foot of the French Pyrenees. For four years she lived there alone, alternating between profound self-pity and the comfortable solitude of an expatriate widow. Though always a recreational spender, she never again ran into serious debt and always kept meticulous track of her money through a financial manager. She traveled to Italy and through southern France, and even stayed out of politics (mostly).
When former President Grant and his wife stopped in Pau in December of 1879 on their round-the-world post-Administration trip, Julia Grant claimed that she had “not learned” of Mrs. Lincoln's presence in Pau until the night before they were leaving town, and it was “too late to make her a visit” or invite her to any of the receptions, parades, or banquets given the war hero by the city fathers.
In 1880, her health and eyesight failing, Mary returned to Springfield. There she lived as a semi-invalid in four rooms of Elizabeth's house: bedroom, sitting-room, and two rooms in which to store the sixty-four trunks whose weight nearly caved in the floor-boards. Her relatives describe her as living alone in the darkened rooms (kept dim because of corneas literally abraded from half a lifetime of tears), compulsively sorting through the contents of her trunks. But when President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 and his widow was given a pension of $5,000, Mary assembled helpers and rushed to Washington to demand parity. She got it, plus back payments, plus interest.
She collapsed on the eleventh anniversary of Tad's death—July 15, 1882—and died of a stroke the following day, which was the thirty-third anniversary of her father's. Robert came to the funeral, and inherited close to $58,000.
Mary was buried with Willie, Eddie, Tad, and Mr. Lincoln in Springfield.
Robert Todd Lincoln lived to be eighty-three, serving as President of the Pullman Company and dying a millionaire. He was Secretary of War, to James Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, and his objections and obstructions about sending support to the Greeley Polar Expedition of 1884 have been blamed for the disaster that overtook t
he explorers. From 1889 to 1893 he was the U.S. Minister to Great Britain.
In 1881, Robert Lincoln was among President Garfield's party at the train-station when Garfield was shot by a disappointed office-seeker, and was present at the President's deathbed. In 1901 he happened, purely by chance, to be in the crowd at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo when Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley, and thereafter refused all invitations to the White House or to any occasion on which he would be in the same room as the President of the United States.
He selectively pruned his father's papers, burning some and putting others under seal not to be opened until twenty-one years after his own death.
He died in July of 1926, and in keeping with his desire to be perceived as a man in his own right and not as Abraham Lincoln's son, lies buried in Arlington National Cemetery, on the hillside just below Robert E. Lee's house.
His estate threatened Myra Bradwell's granddaughter with a lawsuit until she sold them not only all of Mary Todd Lincoln's correspondence with Myra, but all of Myra's correspondence with Mary, and the article that she was writing about the events of July–September 1875. All of these were destroyed.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The Emancipator's Wife is a work of fiction. I've made surmises about the way things may have happened, and the possible reasons events took place, that cannot be substantiated, but I've tried not to portray anything contrary to documented events. As all historical novelists must, I have taken my best guess at those occurrences or motivations for which there are no records.
Nowhere have I found any biographer who came out and said that Mary Todd Lincoln had a substance abuse problem. Given the list of her known ailments—an unspecified “female problem” resulting from Tad's birth, migraines, menstrual problems, what sound like allergy-related sinus head-aches, and injuries from her carriage accident in July of 1863—it would be astonishing if she didn't. Opium and alcohol figured prominently in most over-the-counter medicines in that era, and her biographers agree she took them in quantity: one friend described her as pouring dollops from five or six various bottles into a glass and chugging the result. Before the early twentieth century, no manufacturer of the various female cordials, soothing elixirs, and patented cure-alls was required to list anywhere the percentage of narcotics that these “medicines” contained. Many, many women of stronger will and character than Mrs. Lincoln ended up addicted.
It is also a fact that although she became seriously delusional during the period after Tad's death, when she was solitary and had little to occupy her time, nowhere have I found even a hint that she suffered delusions either while she was incarcerated in Bellevue Place, or following her release. In fact, after she emigrated to Europe in 1876 she also kept herself clear of major debt.
Did Mary Todd entrap Abraham Lincoln into marrying her? Looking at the manipulative chicanery she later indulged in with White House funds, and with promises dealt out to get her debts paid, I can only say that I wouldn't put it past her. She loved him deeply and possessively. She waited for him for twenty months after their breakup in January of 1841 while he tentatively pursued at least two other young ladies. Several of Lincoln's friends attested to the strong streak of physical passion that underlay his iron self-control. When they started spending time together again—unchaperoned and late in the evening at Simeon Francis's house—Mary was a month shy of twenty-four, approaching old-maid territory by almost anyone's standards. They were married on a half-day's notice and their son Robert was born nine months less four days later.
Was Mary Todd Lincoln really insane?
She was undoubtedly eccentric. It's generally held now that she was bipolar—even people who loved her describe her as being subject to wild and abrupt mood-swings, starting in childhood; friends and neighbors interviewed by Billy Herndon in Springfield, and Lincoln's two secretaries Hay and Nicolay, agree that she had a horrendous and perhaps hysterical temper. Recent biographers have suggested the effects of untreated diabetes as well. After the deaths of three of her children, and two separate incidents of major trauma—having her husband's brains blown out while he was sitting beside her and later having the Chicago Fire come within three blocks of her less than ninety days after the loss of her beloved son—she was, if nothing else, a candidate for serious therapy. Though I have been able to find no specific account of what Mary did during the Chicago Fire, her delusion, reported at her trial, that “the South Side of the city was on fire” sounds a great deal like a flashback of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Descendants of the Todd family to whom I've spoken say that the family tradition is very clear that both Mary and her brother Levi were “crazy.”
The Spider Incident is completely fictitious, but there was certainly friction between the second Mrs. Todd and her husband's children by her predecessor. There may be no more to Elizabeth's departure from the Todd home in Lexington before her marriage at the age of seventeen than overcrowding, but the departure of all four of the first Mrs. Todd's daughters seems more than coincidental. The fact that Mary was sent away to boarding school a mile and a half from her father's house sounds like a compromise to deal with some underlying problem.
John Wilamet and his family are completely fictitious, but I have tried to be as faithful as I could to the experience of post-Reconstruction blacks.
BARBARA HAMBLY
Los Angeles, 2003
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Barbara Hambly is the author of A Free Man of Color, Fever Season, Graveyard Dust, Wet Grave, Sold Down the River, Die Upon a Kiss, Days of the Dead, and Dead Water.
Also by Barbara Hambly
A FREE MAN OF COLOR
FEVER SEASON
GRAVEYARD DUST
SOLD DOWN THE RIVER
DIE UPON A KISS
WET GRAVE
DAYS OF THE DEAD
DEAD WATER
THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE
A Bantam Book / February 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Hambly
Bantam Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hambly, Barbara.
The emancipator's wife / Barbara Hambly.
p. cm.
1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Fiction. 2. Lincoln, Mary Todd, 1818–1882—Fiction. 3. Presidents—United States—Fiction. 4. Presidents' spouses—Fiction. 5. Married women—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.A4215E43 2005
813'.54—dc22 2004048797
Published simultaneously in Canada
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eISBN: 978-0-553-90121-4
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