Lincoln's Assassin

by J F Pennington

  Cursing,

  Dreading to die,

  Selling my soul to whomever would buy,

  Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread,

  Hating the living and fearing the dead.

  Ella’s familial home outside Washington City was built in that Italianate style that had, of late, invaded our evolving national version of Greek and Gothic architecture. With its round-arched windows, broad bracketed eaves and campaniles, it looked very much like a Mediterranean villa—even amidst the signature Columbian acreage. My mother, sister, and her family had been expecting me this same evening, but Ella had insisted we dine with her father and his friends. I do not think she wanted to meet my family.

  I hitched Cola beneath a row of cypress and found myself upon the porch with a thought to rest the moment in an unexpected bentwood rocker before knocking the announcement of my arrival. This was not pure anxiety, I assured myself uncertainly. An afternoon sun beamed past the several squared and splintering columns, striping the veranda against the grain of its bleached ash planks. I waited, watched and wondered, some misfit pawn on a squeezed and angled chessboard, until Ella appeared from around one corner of the porch.

  “Where have you been?” she said with some enthusiasm. “My father has been awaiting your arrival and speaking only of how much he wishes to talk with you and compliment your work.”

  Flattered, I was yet disappointed it was not her enthusiasm that was expressed. She opened the door and led me into a roomful of essayingly eager and affectedly apologetic strangers, as regular and seemingly mutable or malleable as the green Venetian blinds decorating every window.

  The senator was just another of those many legislators who truly merit the name politician, people whose pearly smiles along with a deeply sensed gentility and concern clothed or masked the deeper desire to meet their own ends. They would make of any discussion or issue what served them best, then skilfully award the populace with an amended rhetoric of pabulum to quell any hunger for reform. Virtues of which they knew nothing wrung from blotted platitudes and stretched parchment. Milk-and-water oaths, biscuit promises. Nothing of the fierce truth and vigor that had so characterized the first federal Congress. Republicanism was a political entity, not an honorable tenet. Democracy was a platform, not an ideal.

  “I am familiar with your namesake, Wilkes,” said the senator.

  “Thank you,” I responded with polity only.

  “A fine actor like yourself.”

  “A what?”

  “Like yourself.”

  “No more than yourself,” I said wryly. “A politician.”

  “I was told—”

  “And so was I,” glancing sidelong toward Ella. “Excuse us,” I added, gathering my senses as Ella followed me numbly apologetic into the next room.

  “You said he was interested in talking to me. He knows nothing of me.”

  Her eyes fell low.

  “Worse, that will not stop him from inventing compliments.”

  “He only means—”

  Angrily, I turned to walk away. The senator stood in the doorway.

  “Forgive me, son. I don’t know what I was thinking. Of course, everyone knows of the great John Wilkes, Mayor of London—champion of political rights and Liberty.”

  “Everyone except the senator,” I answered his freshly-briefed self. “Lord Mayor.”

  Turning my eyes again toward Ella, I bowed and slipped quietly out of the house.

  ***

  Spring 1864. Washington City.

  “They are tickets,” she said. “To see opera.”

  It was my birthday.

  “Tomorrow night.”

  She looked pleased, yet I could see the opera meant nothing to her. A night at the opera, despite some identification with her maternal Italian heritage, was tantamount to an evening of whist. And she could not know that I had rather sit myself at a smoke-filled table of gambling strangers than subject myself to a single aria. Indeed, there were many times I suspected she was with the wrong brother, after all. But that all changed and I will never hear a single note of one without her voice too in my ear.

  Of course I agreed most heartily that it should be a rare treat for us both, summoning my most convincing smile. By this time she was too pleased with herself to mark my charade. All I could think about was how Edwin would pant at this opportunity to mingle again with the cultural elite, nod at all of the foreign innuendo with which he could fill his pride for understanding, and share the approbative attitude of his fellow devotees when some unknowing audience member—perhaps myself—displayed a show of approval—through simple applause—in the middle of an orchestral movement. Quel horreur!

  Such faux pas, certainly, though scarcely more than the manner in which the uninitiated can be remarked or improved, are the signs and tokens by which artlessly stone-deaf ruffians secure and fortify their arbitrary stations, which no amount of wealth could readily guarantee. Hence the ritualized participation, the cultured bravi. Woe to the practitioner of spontaneous enthusiasm.

  Having once arrived at the theater she retrieved the tickets held under the name Cara, while I watched remarkably on. These were no mean orchestra seats she had purchased for the occasion, but had us placed into a private box, house left. How we spent the better part of the opera occupied, curtains drawn, I need not tell you. For while we listened to every note, my hands still ache from the absence of her form and her scent lingers yet upon my lips.

  ***

  If I tell you now I feel you thinking of me, will you deny it? Will you refuse the knowledge you know we share, which I more than guess? I know your silence like I know your breath. I feel your thoughts upon the nape of my neck. Taste your sweet and steady pulse. We can have no secrets, hide no desires, exclude each other never. When I hear anything it is you. When it is your music, I become you. I allow myself to want you until my heart can stand no more.

  It would be as to have, in some future moment of retrieved gentility, an offered salade au ris, yet not think of you.

  ***

  Fall 1864. Washington City.

  By mid 1864, I had rented a second floor room in the pleasantly stylish if simple house of a certain Mrs. Fisk. From my front window I could see all the way up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. If one could ascribe a certain charm to this capital city of the North, it would be for its resemblance to the more deliberate urban centers of the South. There is little of the makeshift aspect of Boston or Providence, which some yet find so pleasant but can only be considered truly haphazard.

  Late one evening, lying in bed and admiring the reckless rhythm of the October rain, I almost thought to hear a loud, long whistle in the night. Moments later, three distinct and unmistakable raps upon my windowpane interrupted my reverie at regular intervals to draw me to the sash. Standing on the macadamized street below with a dark overcoat and slouch hat, I could barely make out the concentrated gleam in the eyes of an otherwise expressionless face. The stranger held a fresh handful of stones in the right hand, a single other poised in the left, but once my attention was certain, dashed straight across the road to the side of the boarding house.

  There was a playfulness about the quick scuffling up the trellis and across the short eaves below my window before the moustachioed face appeared in the blanching moonlight. I recognized the eyes, their deep sparkle and beckoning warmth. They were Ella’s.

  She smiled mischievously and somewhat out of breath as I opened the window for her to enter. She tossed off her hat and threw open her topcoat to reveal only a clinging wet gossamer nightshirt before falling atop me onto the bed in a deep embrace.

  “Why you little monkey!” I laughed, getting soaked myself.

  “I’m an ape. Apes don’t have tails. You’re the monkey!” she corrected with a laugh. “When I was a little girl, my father used to complain about my tree-climbing. I thought he was afraid I would fall. Now I realize it was simply premonition.”

  She drew her face to mine.

  �
�Have you never kissed a woman with a moustache?”

  “Never.”

  “Choice or habit?”

  “Lack of occasion, I imagine.”

  “Shall I take it off? It’s only applied with spirit gum.”

  I caught her hand on its way to her lip.

  “That could hurt, but if it gets very wet it may come off of its own,” I whispered with half a kiss.

  She played her hand inside mine and our others followed into the sport.

  “Your hands,” she said. “Your pale white hands. I will never forget your hands,” she continued, placing them upon her neck. “I’ll have to leave before full daylight.”

  Then, with a slightly serious smile, “You have more spirit gum here, of course? I’ll need to re-affect my disguise to find my way back without trouble.”

  ***

  Time. Washington City.

  The YOUNG WOMAN and THE ACTOR stroll along the streets of the capital city. A theater marquis advertises Charlotte Cushman.

  “Perhaps I’ll be an actress some day. Like Charlotte Cushman. A great actress. Our children too will be great actors.”

  “I do not think to let my children devote their lives to the theater. It is too ruinous.

  “As for you, you are far too beautiful to spend your talents upon some playhouse boards. Actresses are rarely as beautiful in real life as they appear, dressed and made-up upon the stage. Of course, with your moustache, you are edging on your Miss Cushman’s tradition—to play the man’s roles. But no, a truly beautiful woman belongs in the circles of society where people may view and judge her close and personal, not as some superficial character at a distance.”

  Strophe

  She had what I had ever lacked—true will. It is a strange admission from a man, yet I know it to be true. Her control over me came within the confrontation of her willful nature and my desire to be under it. What she willed I performed, thought at the time, I truly believed. I was exercising some new-found, long-desired and well-deserved power. I see now I only fell prey again to my own inadequacy and another’s ability to control me. The one great deed I performed I cannot even claim as mine.

  Why I was so, and why my argument will find such strong opposition from you I am not sure. Or am I trying merely for some desperate, hollow vindication? Believe me, babies, I would prefer you found me heinous than cowardly, disagreed with me entirely than found no opinion to contest. I am old, spent and in need of clarity—if only with, and for myself.

  ***

  Given my opinions of that day and the certainty of this, I would hope I might now prove the power of my claims to do what demands the private hours of a man’s desire, regardless of perception. After all, what guarantee can anyone give of this chaotic life? We struggle vainly, comically for order, sense and reason. Or can we truly lay claim to any?

  ***

  I took Ella with me to St. Louis—still do not know what pretense of a cousin in need of a visit she made to her father, but the two of us were off and into each other’s arms. My engagement at DeBar’s was scheduled to begin the fourth. I called off the first week of my performances and spent it all with her. We learned a lot of each other that week.

  It was her voice and laughter that ever ensnared me. Womanly enough to promise all, passably childlike to deny knowledge of any. Either one, or sometimes both together, bursting, gurgling forth from the clear, cool, sloping spring of her throat.

  She knew of my father’s love for the East, embodied partly in his naming my one sister Asia, as much after the continent as the wife of Prometheus in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. She knew too of my shared fascination for the same. One afternoon in answer to her regimen of questions I had rattled off my favorite color, number, cuisine, author, stageplay, children’s names, and named the children of my father in their order, twice including my own in that order after first being questioned for omitting it altogether. I explained of all the destinations in the world I fancied, the East was where I would most like to visit, stay, live. That day when she introduced nabobs and seraglios into the conversation, I fooled myself for an instant into thinking she might share a conventional point of view.

  ***

  Sunday, January 10, 1864. Hotel room, St. Louis.

  Evening. THE ACTOR sits almost uncomfortably upon the high-backed wooden chair in one corner of the room. The YOUNG WOMAN lounges languorously upon the room’s double bed. She wears a rust-colored dress with a simple bow. Next to the bed an open door gives to the adjacent room.

  YOUNG WOMAN (giggling): Do they really believe I am your niece?

  THE ACTOR: I am sure I do not know.

  YOUNG WOMAN (with disarming candour): What do you think of harems, Johnnie?

  Her playful nose angles delicately as she hugs one of several satin-covered throw cushions upon the bed.

  YOUNG WOMAN (cont’d): I mean, what do you think of a man having more than one wife—several, ten times ten, or twelve times twelve—any or all of whom may be called to serve him or be discarded at any time. That’s how the sultans of the East do it. Of course the Koran only allows them four true wives. The rest are concubines. But it is all the same thing. I suppose I need only go to Oneida—except their usage is far too practical. I have no wish to be too practical.

  THE ACTOR (hoping to please as he rises to look out the window): I do not think I like the idea of discarding anyone.

  YOUNG WOMAN: No, nor do I. I would never be so callous. I would do my best to please and love each one. I think there would always be something for all of them to do. Of course, I think a hundred would be far too many.

  THE ACTOR (turning to her with half a laugh): What? You?

  YOUNG WOMAN (frankly): Why yes. Did you think I was talking about you? Really! That would not be like you at all. (cataloguing on her fingers) I could have one husband with whom I might talk about anything—the stars, the several varieties of birds, God. (smiling) And one who would be my lover—that would be you. How dashing you might look in a fez. And one to support me and make me very, very rich, and one with whom I could attend parties and the theater (smiling broader)— that might be you, too.

  He does not notice whether she is still smiling.

  YOUNG WOMAN (cont’d): And one who might be a little of all those things. (pouting deliberately) But that’s only five. What do they do with the other one-hundred thirty-nine or so? Though I like the idea of having that many, I just wouldn’t know what to do with them all.

  THE ACTOR: They give them to their friends.

  YOUNG WOMAN: Oh, yes! (exaggeratedly) But, I have none. Besides, I don’t know if I could really do that—share like that.

  Crossing to the bed and sitting next to her.

  THE ACTOR (whispering): I think I would rather be the one who could be just a little bit of everything.

  YOUNG WOMAN: Oh no! (bubbling as she pulls herself close to him) You must be my lover—my one true lover. (kissing him as only she could, then biting his chin) At least, most of the time. (she inhales flirtatiously, then blurts suddenly) No! Do not close your eyes! You must leave them open. Look at me!

  She smiles as they kiss again, wide-eyed.

  YOUNG WOMAN (cont’d): Do you think it is still snowing outside?

  ***

  I could not be hurt or angry. Her laugh was so playful, her skin so fragrant, complete. Her kiss—how should I stop to tell you more?

  Scene III

  Merciful God! have I fallen so low?

  I only ever wanted to be an artist. And ever thought of myself as such. Never an actor, Always, and only, an artist. Almost only. Actually, my first ambition was simpler, wilder, romantic. I wished to be a gypsy—but I have told you this.

  I was under the impression I had but a few requisites to achieve this early goal: turban my head with a colorful silk—easy enough, a dive into any of my father’s traveling trunks would readily yield the transforming tissue; pierce one ear—it was nearly a family tradition as my father, again, had long sported a jeweled ring
both on and off his performance tours (in point of fact, I would here resemble his Richard as much as any Magyar prince); tattoo my skin—whether sailing ship, anchor, mermaid, leviathan or serpent, I would finally settle for my hastily crooked initials upon my wrist, of which you shall doubtless hear more.

  All this attended soon enough there was then but one aspect unaccomplished. This alone some practiced months away—oh, to play the violin like Ritter or Paganini, and so serenade the loveliest of dark-eyed camp-dancers and crystal soothers, or fair-haired, tower-damsels whose dreams rolled over their stone-walled sleep into pin-wheeled wagons to the strains of my lullaby of Hungary or the pizzicato, bumped and bowed Caprice 24. Of course, in time I would learn the arts of tarot and palmistry—astrology too, but for now I understood the need for lessoned learning.

  St. Timothy Hall at Catonsville had a fine enough orchestra. And its string section not so crude that the addition of true genius might even elevate it to remarkable heights. Or so I imagined. And armed with this knowledge I approached Maestro Halivas, the academy’s music teacher and conductor.

  “We don’t need another violin,” he politely indicated, his bobbed black mane combed straight back off his narrow, Serbian forehead, and barely a glance at my steel-gray, artillery-cadet uniform. “But we are about to lose our second cellist this spring. Perhaps I could get you an early start in third chair come autumn? The cello and violin are essentially one and the same instrument.”

  Of course nothing could be further from the truth. But how could I explain the difference to him? The total absence of romance. I needed only visualize toting this cumbersome viol about before coming to rest in a squatting, leg-spread and knee-clamped position—romantic for a harlot at best—to know this was not my idea of destiny.

  So I was to become only an actor, as my father. And I imagine that an ability to succeed in one form of creative expression may well predilect another. As the stifled desire for the violin yielded to the one—or that one, to the current undertaking of this manuscript?

  If I am completely honest with myself, I am not sure how I feel about it. About any of it. But who could be? I only know how I view my very subjective self, replete with motive and rationale. And even that, I imagine, is only a half-true observation. Shall I pretend more objectivity than I readily decline?