The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “It'll mean a speaking tour, after Congress shuts up shop in summer,” he told her, a little apologetically. “Through New England, they say. Now, you can go on back to Springfield with the boys, Molly—I'm sure Washburne would be glad to escort you....”

  “If you dare to go traveling through New England without me, Mr. Lincoln,” said Mary, lowering her novel and regarding him with sparkling eyes, “after martyring myself in this dreadful city all winter, you'll come home to find the doors locked against you and all your clothes in a cardboard box on the porch.”

  Mrs. Penfold, the literal-minded and evangelistic lady who had the room next to theirs upstairs, looked up from her knitting, shocked. But Lincoln merely smiled and said, with deep satisfaction, “That's my Molly.”

  Eddie had a cold again after Christmas, and another in February. Lincoln would come in from sessions of the House, or meetings of the Postal Committee—to which he'd been appointed apparently on the grounds of his year's stint as postmaster of the village of New Salem—and would sit up nights with the feverish toddler so that Mary could get some sleep. Waking from a troubled doze—she seldom actually slept even when she could—Mary would see him, sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed with Eddie in his arms, rocking him and making the little rusty growls under his breath that passed, for him, for a lullaby:

  “The water is wide, I cannot get o'er,

  Nor do I have the wings to fly;

  Give me a boat that can carry two,

  And we both shall cross, my love and I. . . .”

  Had the mother he never spoke of sung him that, she wondered, when he was ill?

  He was up all the night, and gone in the morning to meet with Giddings on a bill to outlaw slavery within the District of Columbia, after going down to the yard in his shirtsleeves to chop kindling to keep Mrs. Spriggs sweet. So there passed another day, Mary reflected despairingly, that they couldn't make calls or set up connections, and that she would have no adult conversation and no time to read. How anyone could get along with Mrs. Spriggs she couldn't imagine, but Lincoln would do errands for her, and sweet-talk her out of extra firewood—for which she usually charged five cents extra, or ten if she had to cut kindling—or boiling water for poultices and tisanes.

  Eddie was on the mend—and getting fractious—when Lincoln came in, late that night, with the news that John Quincy Adams had been felled by a stroke during the session, and was not expected to live. “The poor old gentleman!” exclaimed Mary, sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed. She'd been trying to get Eddie to eat, but the child refused the porridge that was the only thing Mrs. Spriggs would cook for him.

  “He had an apoplexy not long ago, and got over it,” replied Lincoln, sitting on the other side of Eddie on the bed, with his big hands hanging down between his knees. Bobby, who'd been underfoot all day, ran to his father's side to be taken up on his knee. Lincoln hugged him, but absently, his mind still on the picture of that white-haired old gentleman toppling from his chair to the House floor, gasping for air. “They carried him into the Speaker's room, and there set up a cot; Douglas went to fetch a doctor. They say he'll stay there till he's fit to be moved, but myself, I think he'll end his life in the place where he spent it, in the house of service to his country. And that is not such a bad way to end,” he added softly.

  He sat silent, gazing into the shadows. How long he might have remained thus, oblivious to his surroundings, Mary didn't know; she'd seen him lost in one of his moods for hours. But Eddie seized the porridge-spoon from the bowl and whacked his father on the arm with it, leaving a long sticky smear. And, when Lincoln made no response whatsoever, piped up, “Papa, nasty!”

  Mary pulled the spoon from him. Lincoln, roused from his thoughts, looked down at the boy, amusement flickering in his eyes: “I should say it is nasty, son—and you're bound to spread the nasty around until something gets done about it, aren't you?”

  As Mary darted to the water-pitcher for a rag—her husband was perfectly capable of going into a debate on the floor of Congress with a smear of oatmeal on his sleeve—Bobby said, “Mama told Mrs. Spriggs to make Eddie a blancmange and Mrs. Spriggs said—”

  “Never mind what Mrs. Spriggs said,” snapped Mary, tears constricting her throat again at the recollection of that bitter exchange of personalities. Her head throbbed, with hunger as much as anything else, for in the wake of the quarrel with the landlady she'd been too exhausted to go down to supper. “Mr. Lincoln, that woman is impossible! I merely asked—a most reasonable request—that she make a blancmange for Eddie, or permit me the use of her kitchen to make one myself. In a most disagreeable voice she informed me that she could not spare the maid to help me or to go out for the almonds, of which she said she had none in the house. Though how any woman calling herself a cook could be without them . . .” She caught herself up, hearing her voice growing shrill. In the calmest tone she could, she added firmly, “We simply must find another place to live.”

  The light of the single lamp on the bedside table picked out the surge of jaw-muscle as Lincoln clenched his teeth. Resentment flooded through her, anger not only at the petty and avaricious Mrs. Spriggs, but the chewed-over details of the quarrel that she'd been waiting until nearly nine o'clock at night to present to her errant husband.

  At the same time she saw his eyes travel to her—her hair loosened from its pins with Eddie's fitful pulling, the oatmeal-stains on her own dress and shawl, her eyes swollen with tears and headache. And past her, to the room, stuffy, cluttered with the boys' things, smelling faintly of mildew and chamber pots, two cans of the morning's wash-water still not carried out and a huge damp stain on the rug where a third can had been overturned by Bobby. The day had been rainy and Bobby bored to distraction and petulant. Mrs. Spriggs and her own husband were the only adults she had spoken to since she'd waked that morning.

  Her eyes burned again and she felt the frustration blossom in her, turning her sick.

  Very gently—in the same voice he'd used to try to conciliate her in her quarrels with his cousin Hetty Hanks—Lincoln said, “Mother, the town is as full as it can hold, with Congress sitting. But I will look—”

  “When?” retorted Mary bitterly. “If you can't even come in time for supper, or to spend an hour with your wife and sons . . .” That hurt him—she saw him flinch like a man struck by an arrow—and felt a hateful spurt of pleasure that she'd at least gotten his attention. Did he realize that while he was politicking with his men friends and laying plans to elect Zachary Taylor President—on God knew what platform, since the man had no opinions on anything that Mary had ever read!—his wife was cooped up in a twelve-by-fourteen room with two squalling children, waiting for a word with him?

  “I'm going back to Lexington,” she said.

  Lincoln's eyes widened, stricken, but he said nothing.

  “I'm writing to my father tomorrow. You don't care if I'm here or not....”

  “Now, Molly, that's not true....”

  “It is,” she cried hotly, “and you know it is.” The instant guilt in his face confirmed her words. Fury blinded her: at the mighty Washington hostesses who had no time for the wife of a mere Representative, at Mrs. Spriggs, at the other boarders who slurped soup through their whiskers or cleaned their ears at the table, at the poverty that would not let them take a house here, that for five years now had reduced her to the status of servant and drudge. Bobby and Eddie, as they generally did during their parents' quarrels, clung closer to Lincoln, making themselves invisible in his bony shadow. “You don't care....”

  Trembling, she forced herself to stop, hiccoughed, and stood, fumbling at her skirt pocket for a handkerchief.

  Lincoln silently fished a clean one from his coat. Years of living with Mary had taught him to carry them.

  She took it from him, feeling surprisingly, suddenly clear in her mind and heart. The poison-pain of resentment dissolved; it was as if a door had opened, in her life and in her mind. The words, flung at him in anger, showed them
selves now as an actual solution, and it was as if an iron bond broke from around her chest.

  She stretched out her hand, and laid it alongside his face. He looked up at her in surprise that was almost comical.

  “You know Eddie hasn't been well,” she said softly. “And poor Bobby is bored frantic, aren't you, darling?”

  Bobby regarded her for a moment with those wide-set, mismatched blue eyes, gauging what she wanted him to say. Then he nodded.

  Lincoln shut his eyes, drew in his breath, and let it out. Then he looked up at her again, and took her hand between both of his. “You truly don't mind?”

  “Of course I mind.” She bent to kiss his cheek. “And I'll be miserable away from you.” The old rallying tone crept back into her voice. “But we're both miserable now. And if we're both going to be miserable anyway—and you had better be miserable while I'm away, Mr. Lincoln, and I'll write to Mr. Douglas and ask him to make sure that you are—at least the boys will have their cousins to play with, and be happy, and you'll get some work done without worrying about us.”

  Not, she reflected, that Lincoln did worry about her, much, when he got talking politics with his cronies....

  But he knew he ought to.

  “You are a saint and a martyr, Mother.” He scootched Eddie aside, to make room for Mary on his knee.

  The following morning at breakfast he managed to sweet-talk Mrs. Spriggs into making a blancmange, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  INQUIRING AMONG HIS CONGRESSIONAL COLLEAGUES, LINCOLN FOUND A respectable middle-aged clerk named Shepperton and his wife who were traveling to St. Louis via Lexington on family matters early in March. Mr. Shepperton proved a reliable and helpful traveling companion: laughing indulgently at the boys' obstreperousness, keeping track of the trunks and parcels, tipping porters just the right amount, and deferring to Mary in all things. Mrs. Shepperton adored him and agreed with everything he said, stupid or not, in the course of the four-day journey. She herself talked of nothing but the superiority of honey and onions for the cure of every ailment from catarrh to leprosy and Mary suspected that if, like Petruchio, he'd called the sun the moon his wife would have cheered his perception, but the couple were otherwise perfectly friendly and pleasant to travel with.

  Mary was simply ecstatic at the thought of going home.

  Chaney, Pendleton, Nelson, and Mammy Sally crowded to embrace her. Margaret and Mattie, Elodie and Emilie, gay young Alec and little Kitty, and the rest engulfed Bobby and Eddie into their midst; even Robert Todd beamed and Granny Parker gave her dry acerbic smile, and Betsey tried to look as if she were pleased.

  It was heaven to be in Lexington again.

  This was a true homecoming, she felt, coming home to be again someone she hadn't been in a long, long time. The woman she had become in Illinois—the poor man's wife who washed her own dishes and cowered from thunderstorms—faded almost at once. She felt, if not like a belle again, at least like her former self.

  It was wonderful simply not to have a headache, something she'd suffered every spring she'd been on the Illinois prairies. It was wonderful beyond words not to be tied to the drudgery of housework. Wonderful, too, to know that the work of the house was being done by reliable slaves who knew their business instead of facing the daily exasperation of trying to explain to a sulky fourteen-year-old Irish girl that the entire floor of the parlor needed to be swept, and not just the parts that showed.

  With Mammy Sally to look after the boys, Mary found her irritation at them dissolved. She could laugh and play with them, sympathize with Bobby's attempts to adopt a kitten (Betsey's hatred of the whole cat tribe remained as virulent as ever), and take the time to read to them each night. As Betsey's notion of bedtime didn't include bedside candles, much less chapters of Young King Arthur, the group around the trundle-bed in the guest-room rapidly expanded to include Kitty, Emilie, Elodie, and Alec—Betsey sniffed and clicked her tongue, but said only, “Well, just one chapter, and no talking afterwards.” Sometimes, when he was home, Mary's father tiptoed in to listen, too.

  With the improvement of the railway to Frankfort, Robert Todd was home most weekends, and that spring of 1848 was the most Mary had seen of him in her life. In the long mellow twilights, while the children dashed madly about the wooded lawns behind the house and down to the spring, she would sit with him on the gallery overlooking the garden, and talk of the upcoming election, and Lincoln's plans, and how to revive the flagging Whig Party in the face of the Democrats' war-time triumphs. He listened attentively to her descriptions of Washington, and spoke to her of his worries and doubts concerning the vexing issue of slavery: “The abolitionists are going to drive this whole country straight to perdition, with their disregard of facts as they are. Yes, slavery is wrong, but it exists! And there's no way you're going to keep it out of the territories. You can't just legislate it away, poof—and devil take the hindmost!”

  Sometimes Betsey would join them, and Mary was surprised at her own ability to get along with her stepmother, now that she was no longer the unwanted stepdaughter who refused to marry the first man who would take her off Betsey's hands. They even laughed together about the Spider Incident, though Betsey never spoke of why Mary had been angry with her—Mary pretended she no longer recalled. That was all past and done now, and Mary was married to a Congressman, a fact, she knew, that made her father enormously proud.

  Granny Parker and Emilie joined them too, those soft twilights when the air was filled with the smoke of lemongrass smudges. On several occasions Cash Clay and Mary Jane came, their own rowdy band of offspring joining the shrill-voiced shadows chasing back and forth among the trees beside the stream. Cash was full of descriptions of Mexico, and of its capital where he'd been held prisoner, like a gaudily-colored island in the midst of its shining lakes. He had, for over a year before the war, operated an abolitionist newspaper in Lexington, the True American. At the mention of it, Robert Todd rolled his eyes. “You could have got yourself killed,” he said.

  “If I had,” declared Cash, leaning forward impetuously and jabbing with his finger, “I would have taken many a man of the forces of iniquity with me.” With his black hair tumbled over his forehead, he seemed unchanged from the wild young man who'd smuggled Mary copies of The Liberator at Madame Mentelle's. He had, he related, reinforced with sheet iron the doors and windows of the True American, and installed two brass cannon on the table inside, pointed straight at the doors. To this he'd added a trapdoor on the roof and enough kegs of powder to blow the building and any invaders thereof sky-high. Mary knew this was not braggadocio: Abolitionist editors had been murdered before this, and their presses and offices wrecked.

  “And I'd have stood them all off, and died in the attempt,” he vowed, with a vast sweep of his arm, “had I not come down with typhoid fever, and had them destroy the newspaper in my absence.”

  Mary laughed, but in the dim light of the lamps and mosquito-smudges, she saw Mary Jane's glance slip sideways to her husband, and in her eyes there was no mirth. Cash was still, thought Mary, as ready to get himself killed without a moment's thought about how his wife and children might fare without him, as he had been when he'd accepted the challenge to a duel on his wedding-eve fifteen years before.

  More than at Cash's egoism, Mary was shocked at the violence with which the town's slaveholding faction had greeted Cash's newspaper. She had always feared the readiness to lash out, that lay beneath the surface of Southern manhood; their willingness to destroy life or property to make a point. She remembered too vividly Elliot Presby's blood in the ditch of Main Street, and the men who had seen nothing wrong with beating him only for speaking to them of the evil of holding slaves. According to her father, the Legislature was increasingly in the hands of slaveholders, men whose factories, plantations, livery-stables, or sawmills simply could not operate without unpaid black labor.

  Spring waxed warm. Eddie's sickliness abated, and with Chaney's cooking, his thinness filled out to pink-cheeked
strength. Though he tired easily, her younger son was treated as a sort of beloved mascot by the other children, and showed signs of Bobby's—and his father's—insatiable curiosity, coupled with a sweet-tempered friendliness to all. Bobby—whose speech had picked up a marked Kentucky flatness of vowel—had become his protector and minor god.

  Mary and Emilie spent long evenings together, talking of dresses, of hope, of love. Letters came from Washington, letters that brought pangs of loneliness, of longing to lie curled up against that long leathery bag of bones—longing for those endless wonderful talks after the candle was blown out, longing for the touch of those big callused hands, for the passionate strength of his kisses.

  Pangs of guilt, too, because she hadn't the slightest wish to rejoin him in that horrible boardinghouse in that miasmic swamp of a town. Lincoln wrote of missing her terribly, wrote with longing of his sons, but she knew that if she were with him he'd go on his absentminded way just as before, not coming back from the House of Representatives until midnight, not giving a thought (or much of one) to what she might be doing all day, cooped up in a boardinghouse room with two small boys.

  And sometimes—though she would never have admitted it to a soul—it was so good simply to have the luxury to sleep alone!

  So she visited Mary and Margaret Wickliffe—now both Preston—quietly, because her father was engaged in a lawsuit with their father over a cousin's inheritance that was being claimed by Old Duke—and walked out to Rose Hill to have coffee and to laugh with Madame Mentelle. Her old teacher was as sharp as ever, and full of cynical comments about the new phenomenon that was sweeping the East, the conviction that certain persons could communicate with the dead.

  “A mishmash of Swedenborgianism and plain superstition,” Madame pronounced, and refused to participate when the Wickliffe-Preston girls, Mary, Emilie, and Madame's daughter Maria—who had married one of Henry Clay's sons—organized a séance in the Rose Hill parlor to communicate with the spirit of George Washington. The result was inconclusive, but everyone giggled and had a spookily good time.