by Gore Vidal
“One of us must keep up with all the trivia, and I am the one. Now I’m off to Woodward’s Hardware Store in Pennsylvania Avenue, then to Gautier’s, then to Harper and Mitchell—but I’ll only look at clothes as we’re too poor for the moment—and then on to Jardin’s to see about a regular supply of flowers …”
“You take the Treasury. It is plain that you can run it. And it’s also plain that you’ll need its entire contents.”
Kate laughed. “I’m not that bad a manager. We’ll scrape by. You’ll be getting eight thousand dollars a year …”
“If appointed.”
“I’ve worked out a budget. Don’t worry.” Kate frowned. “You know, you could get Mr. Cooke to lend you that carriage.”
“A loan is equal to a gift.”
“No, it is not. The property is not yours.”
“But there would be the appearance of impropriety.”
“Only if you do favors for him. And since he is one of the richest men in Philadelphia—”
“How do you know that?”
“In Columbus, I used to talk to Henry Cooke about non political matters, too. I also heard about Mr. Cooke when I was at Miss Haines’s. We had quite a few girls from Philadelphia there. Anyway, I shall stop off at The Cedars on my way back from New York City. No matter what, we’ll need him for the next election.”
Chase had dreamed, always, of having a son in whom he might confide, to whom he might transmit what knowledge of the world he had acquired. Now he realized that in this remarkable daughter he also had a son but with none of the problems that two masculine wills are apt to produce.
“Have you seen Mrs. Lincoln yet?” The son was now a daughter again; curious to know about a woman she already regarded as a political and social rival.
Chase shook his head. “She was not visible last night.”
“I’m told she’s brought along one of her Southern half-sisters and a half-dozen cousins, all ladies from Springfield.” Kate went for her coat which was hanging in a wardrobe, marooned in the dining room. “I’ve also been told that the ladies of Washington have refused to call on her.”
“She is the wife of the President. Or soon to be. How can they not?”
“They are rebels, that’s why.”
Chase frowned. “I sometimes think that this is the most rabidly secessionist city in the country, and why we don’t turn it over to the South, I don’t know.”
“And move the Capitol to Columbus?” Kate smiled at him by way of the dusty mirror as she put on her hat.
“Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Trenton, any place but this wilderness.”
“I quite like what I’ve seen of it. Nothing’s finished but the landscape is beautiful and, most beautiful of all, is that lovely old house where you and I are going to live one day.”
“Do you really think so?” Chase was wistful.
“Yes, I do, Father. That’s why I live.”
“For the President’s House?”
“For President Chase.” Then Kate was gone.
Chase crossed to the study, where case after case of books were strewn across the floor. Now that he was alone, he could attack, full voice, “Rock of Ages,” which was bound, he was now certain as he unpacked Blackstone’s Commentaries, to cleave wide for him.
EIGHT
THE DAY of the inaugural, March 4, David Herold was awake at dawn. Since this was not a day to be missed, he had slept in all his clothes, including the disintegrating shoes. As he slept on a bunk in a sort of larder off the kitchen, there were no creaking stairs to worry about. He could hear throughout the house the heavy breathing and restive movements of eight women, all flesh of his flesh. Unlike Chase, who was content to have a daughter who was like a son as well, the nineteen-year-old David still longed for a brother to do things with, like … well, go to the Capitol and watch Old Abe get shot.
The morning was misty; and not cold. The frozen mud had melted, yielding the first crocuses and snowdrops of the season. At the Capitol, a few streets from David’s house, there was no crowd as yet; nor any sign of one. But there were troops everywhere. Some were in regulation blue; others were in dark green, with sharpshooter’s rifles. They appeared to be searching for … wild boys? wondered David, happy to be a mere onlooker.
No one tried to stop David as he walked right up to the small wooden platform that had been built on the Capitol’s east steps. The platform had a roof to it; presumably in order to keep anyone from shooting Lincoln from high up. Then David wandered over to the Capitol’s north side, where, to his surprise, a pair of long wooden walls had been built between the plaza and the entrance to the Senate chamber. This meant that when Lincoln got out of his carriage, he would be shielded by two walls of planking as he made his way into the Capitol.
David still remembered the last inaugural vividly. He and the wild boys had had a marvelous time, whooping it up, cheering the President, Old Buck, and the beautiful lady got up as the Goddess of Liberty, as she stood on a moving float just in front of Old Buck’s carriage while, back of him, there was a second float on which had been placed an entire warship filled with sailors. But today there were no signs of splendor. There were few flags in evidence and none of the red, white and blue bunting that was traditionally used to decorate the speaker’s stand on Inaugural Day. On the other hand, he had never seen so many soldiers.
As David made his way up Pennsylvania Avenue to Fifteenth Street, the town was coming awake. The usual Negro population was being added to by the thousands of out-of-towners who had filled up the hotels. Early as it was, a crowd had gathered in front of Brown’s Hotel, and as always, Willard’s was the center of much activity. David stared up at the windows of Lincoln’s suite. The presidential parlor was right over the main door, and an American flag had been attached to the window.
“Hello, David!” David turned and saw the round, cherubic face of Scipione Grillo, a professional musician, who had just opened a restaurant next to one of the town’s most popular theaters.
“Hey, Skippy!” This was Mr. Grillo’s universal nickname. “What’re you doing up so early?”
“I go to the Center Market. I go buy food. We have a full house for every meal today.”
“What’s at the theater?”
“I don’t notice. But whatever’s there, we got good audiences.” Skippy maintained that he could always tell what a play was like by what its audience drank at his bar. For instance, they drank wine or champagne before and after a good comedy, while good tragedy required champagne before and whiskey after. But if it was an opera, there was little or no drinking because Americans know nothing of music, said Skippy; and that was why he was abandoning music for the food-and-drink business.
David knew every theater manager in the town. As a result, he could almost always get a seat in the gallery for nothing. If he brought Annie Surratt or some other girl, he was expected to pay for the one ticket. If he should have no money left after a performance at Ford’s, Skippy would give him a free beer. In payment, David would do odd jobs for Skippy. He also worked for the various theater managements whenever an extra hand was needed to help load or unload scenery. He was besotted with the theater. In fact, had he been taller and his teeth less bucked, he would have been an actor; or, perhaps, a theater manager.
“You going to watch the inaugural parade, Skippy?”
“How can I? I make dinner. Anyway, there’s only the two bands. If there was the three, I’d be there. But I play violin tonight at the Union Ball. Mr. Scala needs me, he said. Marine Band’s weak in the string section, he says.”
“So you’ll get to see the whole lot.”
“All I look at is the sheet music. Oh, these new dances …!”
As Grillo crossed Lafayette Square, David presented himself at Thompson’s Drug Store in Pennsylvania Avenue, close to Fifteenth Street. Although the store was not yet open for business, David knew that “William S. Thompson, Proprietor” was already busy at work, filling prescriptions and supervising the b
lack woman who cleaned up.
David opened the door and took a deep breath. If nothing else, he had always liked the smell of drugstores. In the last three years, he had worked first as a delivery boy and then as a prescription clerk for Mr. Thompson. Now he was about to enter, seriously, Mr. Thompson’s employ. He was wretched at the thought; but he had no choice.
“ ’Morning, Mr. Thompson. It’s me, Davie.” David blinked his eyes in the dim room, where one entire wall was occupied by a sort of wooden wardrobe containing a thousand small drawers while, parallel to the back wall, a highly polished wood counter supported two sets of scales and six huge china vases on whose sides gold Gothic script testified, in Latin, to their contents. David had picked up enough Latin in his last year at school to read a doctor’s prescription; it was about the only thing that he had ever learned that had proved of the slightest use to him. Mrs. Herold had wept bitterly when he left school. But since there was no money in the family, there was no choice. He lived at home; worked when he needed money; enjoyed himself in ways that would have caused his mother distress, but then she was, as Sal always said, a saint; and saints suffer.
Mr. Thompson emerged from the back room. He was a cheery man who wore thick glasses with tiny metal frames. He had been related, somehow, to David’s father. But then David was related to half the town: the lower half, Annie liked to say, as she thought of the Surratts of Surrattsville as being gentry, which they were not: just farm folk with a bit of money, in Mrs. Herold’s phrase.
“Well, David, are you prepared to enter man’s estate?” Mr. Thompson’s concern in the past had been with David’s entirely undisguised lack of seriousness about work of any kind.
“Yes, sir. I’m ready to go to work now, and settle down and everything.” Even as David said this with perfect insincerity, he felt as if a prison door was swinging shut on him. He was only eighteen; he had never been anywhere, or done anything exciting; now he was to go to work as prescription clerk for the rest of his life in a shop just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Treasury building and just around the corner from Willard’s, where the grandees made love to their beautiful women and drank at the long bar and made fortunes at cards and dice and politics, unaware that just up the street David Herold, slave, was at work, filling prescriptions for them, nine hours a day, five-and-a-half days a week, with Sunday off to catch up on all that he had missed during the rest of the week. David felt the tears come to his eyes. Surely, something or someone would save him at the last minute. No young man in any play that he had ever seen had ended up like this.
“All right, Davie. We’ll start you in today. You’re to be here at seven o’clock every morning. I’ll give you a key. Then you let Elvira in at seven-fifteen …” Elvira appeared from the back room. She grunted when she saw David; who grunted back. Elvira was not given to human speech.
“I wondered, sir, if I could start tomorrow? You see, I’m supposed to help out at the Union Ball tonight, as a waiter.” David was a quick and adroit liar. He had learned how to lie partly from the actors whose work he had studied so carefully but mostly from his sisters on the subject of their beaux. Between what they said of the young men behind their backs and to their faces, there was a stunning gap. When David would taunt them, they would laugh at him; and tell him to mind his own business, which he was perfectly glad to do.
“Well, it is a half holiday today.” Mr. Thompson was agreeable. “So you can work through the morning and then help me close up at noon, and still get to listen to Mr. Lincoln.”
“I can’t say that I care to all that much.”
“Now, now, Davie. He’s the President, after all.”
“Jefferson Davis is our President.”
Mr. Thompson frowned and smiled. “Now let’s have no secesh talk in this shop. It does damage to my digestion—and business.”
“But you ain’t Union, Mr. Thompson. You’re from Virginia, like us.”
“What I may be in my heart of hearts, Davie”—Mr. Thompson was now solemn—“I keep to myself, and I suggest you do the same because of our numerous distinguished customers.”
“Mr. Davis was one of your customers?”
“One of my best customers, poor man. I’ve never known anyone to suffer so much from that eye condition of his. He’ll be blind by the summer, I said to Dr. Hardinge, if you don’t change the prescription. But you can’t tell Doctor Hardinge anything. On my own, I gave Mr. Davis belladonna to stop the pain—”
“So then he is your President.”
“If I were in business in Montgomery, Alabama, yes, he would be. But I am here—with my loved ones—in a shop at Fifteenth and Pennsylvania Avenue, and I am the official unofficial pharmacist for the presidents of the United States and as I looked after Mr. Buchanan and Miss Lane—she’ll never make old bones, I fear—I intend to look after the Lincoln family, a large one, for a change, and sickly, I should think, wonderfully sickly, from the glimpse I had of them yesterday.” Mr. Thompson was smiling, without knowing it, thought David, who was aware that actors’ tricks were not exclusive to actors, only the knowledge of them was.
“Well, you may not get your chance. There’s talk he’ll be shot today.”
“Oh, the wild boys.” David found disappointing Mr. Thompson’s contemptuous dismissal of the dedicated young men of the National Volunteers. “General Scott will shoot the whole lot full of holes before the day’s over. Which reminds me, fix a draft for his dropsy and take it straight across the road to the War Department, the new one up the street. The prescription’s in the back.”
As David entered the familiar back room, he felt as if he had left all life behind. But what else could he do? As he mixed General Scott’s prescription, he toyed with the idea of going south, to Montgomery, to join the army that Mr. Davis was supposed to be raising. But wasn’t the army just another form of imprisonment? David wanted a world to conquer, any world, no matter how small. Idly, he wondered if he could seduce Annie; he decided that he could, but if he did, the greatest of all prison doors would then swing shut upon him: marriage, children and years of making up prescriptions for the likes of General Scott. It was too late to be General Scott when he grew up; you had to go to West Point for that, or serve a long time in the ranks. Were he better-looking, he might be an actor. After all, he could learn lines; and was a lot better at making believe than most of the touring-company players who came to town. But how was he ever to begin? A single warm tear was inadvertently added to General Scott’s prescription.
While David Herold was enjoying a bearable amount of self-pity, John Hay was already at work in Parlor Suite One with Nicolay. Two large crates lay open on the floor and Hay was transferring folders filled with applications, affidavits, supplications, yellowed newspaper cuttings and fervent prayers from the room’s wardrobe to the cases. “We have received, personally, nine hundred and twelve applications for jobs,” said Hay, studying the last of the folders.
“It seems more like nine thousand,” Nicolay still retained a slight German accent which Hay enjoyed imitating. Nicolay sat at a table, making a report to the President on which applications seemed promising.
“How much longer does this go on?”
“Until we leave office.”
“I had no idea,” said Hay, who had indeed had none. “I thought a few people might show up and he’d give them a postmaster’s job and that was that. But we’re going to have to deal with all thirty million Americans before we’re through.”
“Less the twelve million or so Mr. Davis has to find jobs for.” In the distance, there was a premonitory roll of drums.
“Did you know Mr. Seward was thick as thieves with Mr. Davis, right up to a few weeks ago, when he left town and the Union?”
Nicolay nodded. “The Tycoon wanted the two of them to talk as much as possible.”
Hay frowned. “Do you think Mr. Seward’s really serious about taking himself out of the Cabinet?” Hay had been present in Lincoln’s parlor when the Albany Plan had bee
n revealed. The New York delegation, echoing Seward, had insisted that Lincoln exclude Chase from the Cabinet, which should be made up entirely of Whigs, instead of the four Democrats and three Whigs that Lincoln had in mind. When Lincoln had reminded the New Yorkers that he, too, was a Whig, which evened things, they had still been intransigent. They warned the Tycoon that Seward would not serve with Chase, to which Lincoln replied that he would be sorry to give up his first Cabinet slate in favor of a second list which he had prepared; but if that was the case, then he would appoint that good Whig Mr. Dayton as Secretary of State, while Mr. Seward could go as minister to London, a city that he had so recently taken by storm.
Alarmed, the New Yorkers withdrew; their Albany Plan a temporary failure.
Seward’s rage when Lincoln’s words were repeated to him resulted in a letter of withdrawal from the Cabinet. Lincoln had chosen not to accept Seward’s defection; and had responded with a polite note, asking Seward to remain where he was. As Lincoln signed the letter, he said, half to himself, half to Hay, “I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick.”
“Personally,” said Nicolay, “I’d rather Seward stayed out. But …”
The door to the parlor opened, and the vast Lamon filled the doorway. “He wants to see you boys.” Lamon lumbered out of view.
“What’s Lamon going to be in the government?” asked Hay.
“Marshal of the District of Columbia, which means he can go on being a bodyguard.”
“One of many, let’s hope.”
The city was filled with alarming reports. The President would be shot on his way to the Capitol. The President would be shot at the Capitol. The President would be kidnapped at the Inaugural Ball and taken across the Long Bridge to Virginia and held hostage. Of all the rumors this one struck Hay as a possibility. It had also enlivened General Scott, who had placed two sharpshooters in every window that looked upon the eastern portico of the Capitol, as well as sharpshooters all up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, not to mention plainclothesmen everywhere.
