The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  After months of finding no work at all, John had secured a place as assistant to a surgeon attached to a private sanitarium in Lake Forest, for a third what a white man would be paid. The sanitarium had closed in '71; that was when he'd gone to work at Jacksonville, after yet more months of helping Cassy do white people's laundry, and rolling cigars in the Maxwell Street room by the light of a single kerosene lamp to make the rent. When the banks all failed in '73 he'd been let go from Jacksonville—not that they could spare a single man from that overcrowded and hellish warehouse for the permanently insane—and with that failure, it seemed to him, even the nasty and backbreaking employment tended to go to the white men, who mostly had brothers-in-law or cousins or friends in city government or the packing-yards or the railroads. At least they got paychecks.

  And he was, for all intents and purposes, back on that street in Washington being beaten up by the Irish teamsters, who feared that newly freed slaves would take their jobs.

  The recollection of that day was clear in John's mind as he read over the reports from Mrs. Lincoln's trial, and the evaluations of Drs. Jewell, Isham, Danforth, et al. concerning the sanity of the President's widow. For years John had regarded Abraham Lincoln with skepticism for backing the colonizers, the men who'd wanted to free the slaves only if they could be shipped out of the country where they wouldn't interfere with the white men. Now, he wondered if the man hadn't simply guessed what would likely happen if all black men were given their liberty at once, as the abolitionists had demanded: that in such numbers, most black men would be unable to find jobs.

  John lowered the papers, looked out through the window of his tiny office—like a dressing-room off Dr. Patterson's handsome study, with its shelves of books, painted lamp-globes, and imposing rosewood desk—and thought about the stout little Southern belle who would come to the contraband camps with boxes of clothing or blankets, brisk and busy and bossy. The woman who would give such wickedly funny accounts of the reactions of the pro-Southern society matrons of the town to her requests for help. Swinging from energy to tears to hysterical rage with the same unexpected violence, fragile in the same way that his mother was fragile.

  But Mr. Robert Lincoln—and Drs. Jewell, Danforth, Isham, etc.—were wrong if they thought her insanity began when her husband's blood had been splattered over her gray silk dress at Ford's Theater that Friday night in 1865.

  Whatever was wrong with Mary Lincoln, it started long before that.

  Dr. Patterson had Argus—the attendant who doubled as coachman—harness the team and rode down to the train-station late in the afternoon. They returned in the evening, an hour before supper, when the first cooling breezes rustled the trees around Bellevue Place. Mrs. Patterson shut her daughter, Blanche, into her room in the family wing—Blanche was simpleminded and often kept out of the way—and with her son, also named John but referred to throughout Bellevue as Young Dr. Patterson, went out onto the steps.

  John Wilamet watched from the window of his cubbyhole as Peter opened the iron lodge gates to admit the vehicle. When it reached the steps, two men—one lean and bearded with a mouth like a bracket, the other burly, mustachioed, and dressed with the finicking care of a dandy—helped a stout black figure out. Dr. Patterson made a sweeping gesture with one arm, taking in the three-story brick house, with its lower wings and comfortable-looking bow windows. Mrs. Patterson came down the steps and held out her hands to the veiled widow; Mrs. Lincoln pulled her hand sharply from the other woman's grip. John saw Mrs. Patterson's back stiffen, and knew Mrs. Lincoln had already made an enemy, before she even crossed the threshold.

  Somehow, that didn't surprise him.

  A number of the other patients were in the parlor when Mrs. Lincoln was escorted in. Mrs. Goodwin, of course, was still confined to her hydrotherapy tank, wrapped in wet sheets with a steady stream of water flowing over her to calm her spirits. But Minnie Judd was there, sharing the green-tufted sofa with Mrs. Edouard—up and around for once—and the restless-eyed Lucretia Bennett. By herself at the table sat Mrs. Johnston, to whom most of the other ladies gave a wide berth. Mrs. Munger quietly brooded in a corner. Mrs. Patterson made introductions, not mentioning that “Mrs. Lincoln” was in fact the wife of the man whose idealized image, decorated with an incongruous halo, was appearing coast-to-coast on china souvenir plates and allegorical paintings of apotheosis in Heaven.

  Behind them, in his study, Dr. Patterson was saying to Mrs. Lincoln's two escorts, “I know your mother will be comfortable and happy here.” So one of them—it had to be the younger man, in the natty gray suit, with the watchful, suspicious eyes—was Robert, Abraham Lincoln's oldest—and only surviving—son.

  “Here at Bellevue we offer the modern management of mental disease through moral treatment, not restraint. Rest, proper diet, baths, fresh air, occupation, diversion, change of scene, an orderly life, and no more medicine than is necessary are all that are required, we believe, to restore the failing reason to health, if in fact it can be restored. And I believe we have had a good deal of success in that field.”

  “As to that,” said Robert Lincoln in a light voice that reminded John at once of his father's, “I'm not sure how much success anyone could have with my mother. The important thing is that she is placed somewhere safely, where she can do no harm to herself. Beyond that...”

  If in fact it can be restored, thought John, quietly leaving the cubicle and following Young Doc, Mrs. Patterson, and Mrs. Lincoln into the hall that led to the family wing. Aye, there's the rub. At Jacksonville, where he'd sometimes doubled as an attendant, he'd seen those upon whose restoration to reason family, doctors, state had given up: the maniacs pounding on walls, writhing in the metal-barred cribs to which they were confined, shrieking or weeping as they were held down for “water cures” considerably more rough-and-ready than Mrs. Goodwin's hydrotherapy. He'd watched the delusional confined to “tranquilizing chairs”; the melancholy wasting silently away unnoticed, except when force-fed through tubes; the syphilitic screaming in pain and the filthy avoided by everyone.

  Many of them hadn't seemed worse than some of the ladies here—only poorer, long ago abandoned by families who could deal with them no longer, and picked up on the streets by police or strangers who turned them over to the courts.

  Could some of them be cured, he wondered, if treated with rest, proper diet, baths, fresh air and all the rest of it instead of the Utica crib or the metal collar? How could you reach them if they barely heard you? What could you do?

  “Now, I'm sure you'll find this room very comfortable.” Mrs. Patterson's voice drifted around the corner from the hall that ran down the center of the wing where she, Dr. Patterson, Blanche, and Young Doc had their private rooms. John had guessed, a few days ago, when one of the small patient rooms on that wing—and its next-door “attendant's room”—had been aired and made up, that someone of some importance, a “special case,” was being brought in. “You'll be free, of course, to walk around the grounds and in the garden—I'm quite proud of my garden—and of course you'll have the use of the carriage for riding anytime you care to. Our grounds are quite extensive. We encourage our ladies to walk in the fresh air.”

  Argus had brought in Mrs. Lincoln's trunks already, five of them, and half a dozen carpetbags. They crowded the bright, bare little room with its single iron-framed bed, its white curtains that did not hide the window-bars, its small barred judas-hole in the door. Mrs. Lincoln put back her black veils and regarded Mrs. Patterson with those large, tourmaline-blue eyes John remembered: eyes red with weeping now, and settled into unhealthy-looking pouches of pale flesh. In Washington, struggling to regroup from the death of her beloved son, Mrs. Lincoln had struck John as brittle, changeable, volatile.

  Now she looked beaten. In her small, silvery voice she said, “I don't suppose anyone in this place has bothered to tell you that I'm not a well woman? I suffer from headaches—not that my son will admit that they're anything but a figment of my imagination, as he wis
hes they were—and from pain in my back.”

  “Of course Dr. Danforth has been over all that with us—”

  “Dr. Danforth,” retorted Mrs. Lincoln witheringly, “would undoubtedly prescribe poison for me—if he thought he could get away with it. And my son would thank him for it, always supposing he didn't request it to begin with.”

  “Now, Mrs. Lincoln,” smiled Mrs. Patterson, “you know you don't mean that. You're just tired. Of course you'll have medicine here, all the medicine you need. This is John Wilamet....” She gestured toward him as he stood in the doorway. “John helps my husband, and he will bring you whatever you ask for.”

  John supposed there were worse things than being treated like an attendant by Mrs. Patterson. At least Dr. Patterson consulted with him over treatment of patients, and taught him what he had learned in over twenty years of dealing with those troubled in their minds. And it certainly beat rolling cigars until your fingers bled, or ironing shirts that white folks' servants brought to be washed.

  But such an attitude didn't bode well for his chances of becoming a doctor of minds himself.

  Mrs. Lincoln regarded him bleakly. He couldn't tell whether she recognized him or not.

  “Supper will be at six,” said Mrs. Patterson. “You'll want to wash up, of course, and change your dress. You shall take your meals with the family, rather than with the other patients....” She smiled in what she'd probably been told was a kindly way. John wasn't sure her square, expressionless face was capable of much else. “Someone will knock on your door.”

  She rustled off down the hall, like a solid rectangle of corsetry. John knew what was expected of him. His hand on the door, he asked, “Can I bring you anything, Mrs. Lincoln, or do anything for you?” He had to check on Mrs. Goodwin before supper, and look in on Mrs. Wheeler, who frequently became disoriented at this time of the evening. But he could not, he thought, simply leave this woman here without a word. There was something in the way she looked around the small room in the graying light that reminded him of a child, sent to a strange place alone.

  She snapped, “No.” And then, as he began to withdraw, her square, heavy face softened infinitesimally, and she added, “Thank you, Mr. Wilamet.”

  John closed the door, and bolted it from the outside.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  N FRIDAY AFTERNOONS, DR. PATTERSON WAS DRIVEN IN THE carriage to the railway station to take the Chicago and Northwestern to the city. John had learned to lie low and stay quiet until the superintendent's return. Though neither Young Dr. Patterson nor Mrs. Patterson had ever spoken a word of disapproval about taking a man of color to train as an assistant—and though neither was ever anything but polite—neither treated him in any way different from Gunther, Peter, and Zeus, the men who made the rounds of the rooms with the door-keys every night and were ready at call to restrain unruly or hysterical patients, or from Amanda, Katie, Gretchen, and Louise, who were in charge of making up beds and walking with the patients in the gardens. John had once overheard Mrs. Patterson say to her husband, “I don't see what the point is, since there are no Negro doctors anyway,” and had been unable to hear what Patterson replied. Her tone had carried the self-evident inflection of one who says, You know they don't enter sheep in the Kentucky Derby.

  John knew that there were, in fact, black doctors, most of them trained overseas. But there weren't many of them, and those there were made an extremely poor living, as few blacks had the money to call a doctor when they were sick.

  And no blacks that he knew had the money to seek out help for the terrifying agonies of the mind.

  So on the Fridays and Saturdays while Dr. Patterson was gone, John slipped into the invisibility he had perfected most of his life. He mixed medicines for the patients—camphor, laudanum, morphine, saline draughts, chloral hydrate, belladonna, ergot, cannabis indica...despite Dr. Patterson's assurances about “no more medicine than is necessary.” Croton oil for those who stubbornly refused to move their bowels and tartar emetic for those whose frenzies or obsessions were best controlled by keeping them semi-nauseated most of the time. He helped Gunther and Gretchen with the hydrotherapy patients, making sure the water in which they lay was tepid—Dr. Patterson at least didn't believe in such “stimulating” treatment as “the bath surprise,” unexpectedly pouring ice water down a patient's sleeve in the hopes of snapping their mind back to sanity, a favorite at Dr. Marryat's sanitarium in Lake Forest. He helped Young Doc in leeching those patients like Mrs. Wheeler who had exhibited signs of over-excitement and mania, and took his turn at observing those who were confined.

  He prepared a blister for the back of Mrs. Johnston's neck—as a counter-irritant to the irritations of her brain—and more tartar emetic to puke Miss Canfield out of her lethargy. Young Doc gave an electrical treatment to Mrs. Hill, who was also slipping into a lethargy, but unlike Patterson he did not permit John to observe.

  At least, John reflected, Patterson's refusal to deal with the chronically violent precluded such techniques as refrigeration—or maybe it was only that the wealthy gentlemen who installed their female relatives here didn't wish to see them going about with their heads shaved.

  In any case, John didn't see Mrs. Lincoln again until late Friday afternoon, twenty-four hours after her arrival.

  Bellevue Place, before Dr. Patterson had purchased it, had been a school. Although most of its sixteen-acre grounds were occupied by graveled paths, green lawns, and little copses of trees, there was a formal garden to one side of the main house. This Mrs. Patterson had had put into shape again, so that the twenty or so ladies under Dr. Patterson's care—he admitted neither epileptics nor syphilitics, no “furiously insane” nor of “filthy habits” (except of course Mrs. Johnston)—could have at least a chance of regaining the balance of their minds by fresh air and quiet. After the hellhole stench and noise of the state asylum at Jacksonville, John wholeheartedly agreed with this treatment. He loved the garden, though he did not walk there or sit there except in attendance on one of the patients.

  It would not do for these wealthy ladies to think that the silence and repose being paid for by their families were being shared—and gratis at that—with a black man.

  So on Friday afternoon he stepped out the side door as he usually did, and stood near it where the corner of the wall shielded him. Feeling the sun on his face, listening to the silence and birdsong and drinking in the scents of warm mulch, of grass, of sweet alyssum and June roses. Thinking of those, like Mrs. Wheeler, or Mrs. Edouard who had spent most of the night screaming and who now lay in opiated sleep, so lost in their lightless inner labyrinths that they were cut off from this beauty, this peace.

  The door creaked behind him and he straightened, turned back to the house with the air of one hurrying from one duty to the next, as a stout crape-clad figure stepped out. “Excuse me,” she said, “I was looking for—” Mary Lincoln stopped on the threshold, gazing out at the brilliant green, the neat hedged squares, and the exuberant colors—Ispahan and La Noblesse, Painted Damask and Ville de Bruxelles. Her face, puckered a little with annoyance, relaxed into her slightly crooked smile.

  “How beautiful,” she sighed, and looked up at him, shading her eyes with her hand though she wore the black bonnet of a widow. “We had a rose garden, when we lived in Washington....Will you walk with me, John? Mr. Wilamet, I should say now. It's good to see you after all these years.” She seemed relaxed and cheerful—as well she should be, thought John, considering the amount of laudanum she'd had that morning for back pains, headache, and what Mrs. Patterson had described as “agitation.” Her voice had the slight dreaminess with which he was well familiar. “I had no idea that being clapped up as a madwoman could be so pleasant.”

  “I wish I could say I was delighted to see you, ma'am.” John smiled and offered her his arm. “And I would be, under other circumstances, I hope you know.”

  “What a dilemma for the writers of etiquette books.” Mrs. Lincoln laid a small plump hand on his elbo
w, and with her other hand opened her fan. Her black straw bonnet—worn without a veil—was in the latest style, John observed. He knew she'd been assigned Amanda as a permanent attendant and wondered how that quiet, matter-of-fact quadroon woman had dealt with the contents of those five trunks and numerous hatboxes and carpetbags in the confines of the small room. He'd already heard from Peter that another eleven trunks were expected later in the week.

  “I'm sure my husband would have come up with a dozen formulae for introductions and greetings when one meets an old friend in a madhouse, or in jail, or in the gutter outside a tavern: ‘Why, whatever are you doing here?' seems somehow inadequate to the task. Is there any possibility of getting a decent novel to read here rather than the collection of moralizing tracts they have in the library? Or will I be put in a straitjacket only for asking?” Her voice was careless, with an echo in it of a Southern belle's ineradicable flirtatiousness, but John heard the tension hidden beneath. She doesn't know the rules, he thought. She is in a new place, and, in spite of the laudanum, watchful.

  She may, too, have heard some of the commotion last night when Mrs. Edouard started beating the walls and screaming.

  “You won't be put in a straitjacket,” he replied. “Dr. Patterson practices what they call moral treatment, rather than chaining up lunatics the way they used to....” The way they still do, he reflected, in every institution but those wealthy enough to hire the staff needed for adequate attention to their patients. “In a way it's almost like letting the mind heal itself, the way the body heals itself, provided there is no infecting agent poisoning the system. There are lectures every Sunday night, and concerts—and of course you may call for the carriage to go riding anytime you wish.”

  Beyond the garden, he could see Mrs. Johnston walking with young Miss Canfield and ignoring the nurse Louise, who walked in attendance behind, as if she weren't there. Maybe to Mrs. Johnston she wasn't. At the far end of the aisle of roses, Mrs. Hill sat alone on a bench, rocking back and forth and presumably communing with the voices that spoke to her out of the air. With a kind of wry bitterness John reflected on the filthy brick wards of Jacksonville, on the never-ending smells, on the notorious “swing” that the few overworked doctors there told themselves and each other was actually calming and therapeutic...and had the added benefit of being a threat that all but the most frantic lunatic understood.