The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Now Willie was gone.

  The newspapers resounded with Union victories at Fort Donelson, Tennessee, and in Missouri: 15,000 Prisoners Taken. Missouri Cleared of Rebels in Arms. The People Disgusted with Secession. But though Mary was as aware as Lincoln was of how critical those victories were, they felt unreal to her. She knew she should care, but couldn't.

  Willie was gone.

  It was Lizabet Keckley who first told her that those who had passed the veil of death could speak through it to the living who were willing to hear. Mary had sobbed, “He's gone . . . he's gone . . .” as she had sobbed for days—weeks, maybe—in the dim, stuffy room, while Lizabet held her, her scented cheek pressed to Mary's hair. “He's gone and I'll never see him again.”

  “But he's so happy where he is,” Lizabet said gently. “Happy in the Summer Land. He wants you to be happy, here on earth.”

  She spoke with calm confidence, the first person, of all those who'd come to her in her bereavement, who seemed to have anything to say besides I'm so sorry and You must be brave. . . .

  “They all want us to be happy, for the few seasons that we're on opposite sides of the Veil that divides this world from the next.”

  And Mary raised her head and looked at her, remembering things Lizabet had said, when in the course of fittings, or while the seamstress dressed her hair for parties, they'd spoken of griefs passed, and of the sons each of them had lost. Mary whispered, “Is it true? You told me once you'd . . . you'd spoken with George.” George was the son who had died in battle in Missouri, at the age of twenty-one, having enlisted as a white man since men of color were permitted in the ranks only as ditchdiggers and teamsters.

  Lizabet nodded mutely. Mary had listened with interest at the time that she had first spoken of the “Circles” that met in darkened parlors by candlelight, to hear the words of the dead through the lips of mediums, but it had been like hearing about the ceremonial customs in the court of the Tycoon of Japan. She recalled the giggling séance in the parlor at Rose Hill, the summer Lincoln was in Congress, and how she and the Wickliffe girls had all jumped a foot every time the old house creaked.

  Remembered, too, Granny Parker's acrid opinions about the famous Fox sisters of New York that summer, and their spirit-rapping ghosts.

  Indeed, it had been Meg Wickliffe Preston who had, on a recent visit to Washington, introduced Mary to a “trance-medium” named Cranston Laurie: “His control has revealed the most astonishing things about the future,” Meg had assured her.

  Like the clear metallic click of a key in a lock, Mary thought, I can talk to Willie again. Hear his voice.

  I can ask him to forgive me. . . .

  It was as if a paving-stone of granite laid over her heart cracked, revealing beneath the first green shoots of spring.

  LIZABET KECKLEY WENT WITH HER TO CRANSTON LAURIE'S HOUSE IN Georgetown for that first séance. Mary told Lincoln she was going to spend the evening with old Jesse Newton, of the Department of the Interior, and his wife. Lincoln expressed only deep gratitude that she was feeling well enough to go out. Elizabeth, Lizzie, and the girls had returned to Illinois by that time, though Lincoln, Mary knew, had begged at least Lizzie to stay. Though chilly, the air was beginning to smell of warmth renewed.

  Mary was obsessed with the thought of meeting someone who could possibly communicate with Willie, with the thought of speaking again to her son.

  Of asking his forgiveness, for her vainglory and her pride.

  She had dreamed of him, over and over, in the month of darkness in her room. Dreamed of being back in the house in Springfield, of hearing his footsteps running up the stairs ahead of her, of hearing his laughter, only to open the door of his room and find no one there. From these dreams she would wake weeping, her head throbbing and all her limbs seized with painful restlessness. She knew she was taking more of Dole's Cordial or Indian Bitters than Dr. Wallace would probably approve, but she knew too that they were the only solace she had. She would, she vowed, reduce her consumption of them when her sadness had passed and she was feeling better. Lizabet bought them for her, and brought them to her in her sewing basket . . . and Mrs. Cuthbert and Ruth Pomeroy, each ignorant of the other two, did the same.

  But the thought of speaking to Willie swept away any need for oblivion, and she stepped down from the carriage in front of the small Georgetown house with her heart pounding in anticipation.

  Cranston Laurie was a man of quiet, silver-haired dignity. He and his wife welcomed Mary with gentle goodwill, and the others gathered in the candlelit parlor—how sweet candle-light seemed, after the cold modern White House gaslight!—greeted her but kept their distance, respecting the grief that was as clear on her face as it was in the sable crape of her dress. The Lauries' daughter, Mrs. Belle Miller, spoke of her own experiences with the spirits: “My spirit control loves music, and will sometimes take me over when I'm playing. Everyone tells me that at such times my playing is completely different, strong and unearthly.” She laughed a little and waved at the shiny black grand piano that filled a quarter of the parlor. “I wish I had been acquainted with the spirits when I was a girl and forced to have lessons!”

  Her parents laughed as well.

  “Just as well you weren't, Puss,” smiled Laurie. “You'd have sent your music-teacher running. When Belle is seized by her spirit control—a French nobleman named Ramilles, who studied with Mozart and was later guillotined in the Revolution—the strength of the spirit music will sometimes lift the piano bodily from the floor!”

  “What is it like?” asked Mary timidly. “When the spirits come?” She thought of Mammy Sally's ghost-tales, and of the stories Meg had heard from her mammy and whispered in their room at Rose Hill, of haunts that followed people back from cemeteries in the darkness, to pluck at the covers of their beds.

  Young Mrs. Miller frowned. “I can't really say. Once Ramilles enters into my body, I remember nothing. Only a deep sense of well-being and peace.” She smiled, her face lit with the memory of ecstasy. “Of course you understand that in forming a Circle, we pray and sing hymns, and surround ourselves with a shell of pure thoughts, so that no evil or angry spirit can enter. Please do not think that there is any danger in what we do!”

  Mrs. Laurie exclaimed in denial of the very thought, but Mr. Laurie said gravely, “Please, Mrs. Lincoln—we would like to share with you the comfort that we partake of during our Circles, but if you have the smallest doubt or mental reservation, by all means withdraw. We would not for the world wish you to do anything you were not comfortable with.”

  “No,” said Mary slowly, “no, what you say is . . . is familiar to me, in a way. As if I half-knew it already. I would like very much to see a medium in action.”

  Mr. Laurie beckoned. From the shadows near the fireplace a young lady rose, diminutive and childlike in her white schoolgirl dress and hair-ribbons. “Nettie, dearest,” said Mrs. Laurie, “this is Mrs. Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln, Miss Nettie Colburn. She's come to Washington to be closer to her father and her three brothers. All of them have enlisted in the Army. Nettie has been receiving visits from the spirits since she was quite a tiny girl.”

  Nettie curtseyed gravely, and regarded Mary with childishly wide-set blue eyes. “It's a gift God has given me,” she said. “They want so badly to come, to comfort those who weep for them—and to bring messages from the Other World.”

  The half-dozen other people in the parlor assembled around the table in its center, Belle Miller going to the piano. There she played “Shall We Gather at the River,” and Mary felt both self-conscious and uneasy as she sang, wondering what Dr. Smith back in Springfield would say—or her sister Elizabeth, for that matter. Yet the atmosphere was soothing, and the prayer Mr. Laurie invoked to “The Highest Lord of the Universe” unexceptionable. Glancing sideways, she saw Lizabet Keckley's face relaxed and serene, eyes closed, waiting in confident joy.

  Nettie Colburn sat with bowed head for a few moments, then looked up suddenly and gasped, “Sh
e's coming . . . !” and her head dropped over sideways, exactly as if she had fallen asleep. In the candlelight her face seemed suddenly older. At her side, Mr. Laurie breathed to Mary, “It is her spirit control, an Indian spirit named Pinkie.”

  “Many spirit here tonight,” said Nettie—Pinkie—opening her eyes, and her voice was different, a deep contralto instead of the girlish soprano in which she'd spoken before. “Many spirit cry out to be heard; cry out to welcome wife of Big Chief.”

  It's true, thought Mary, shocked, staring across the table at the girl's transformed face. The spirits do come. . . .

  “Is my son one of them?” she demanded breathlessly, and Nettie—Pinkie—regarded her with an infinity of compassion.

  “Big Chief lady lose two son,” she said softly. “Both here—both so happy. Little boy, bigger boy . . . big boy say he came to take the little one's place. Two men, one short, one tall . . .”

  “Father . . .”

  “Two women,” said Pinkie. “One old, old—she wears a shawl. And one young, so pretty. So sad. She hold out hand, she say ‘My little girl. My little Mary Ann.' ” Then the medium shuddered, her head jerking, and her face altered again. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, looked straight across the table at Mary and said, in what seemed to Mary to be exactly Willie's voice and expression, “Mama?”

  Mary began to sob, barely conscious of Lizabet's comforting fingers squeezing her hand. She did not know exactly what had happened, there on the other side of the table, in Nettie Colburn's thin body. But she knew the terrible weight of loneliness eased and lifted, as if light had shone through the Veil from the Summer Land beyond.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  SHE WENT BACK, AGAIN AND AGAIN, TO THE HOUSE IN GEORGETOWN.

  She did other things in those weeks. She visited the wounded and the sick in the Washington Army hospitals.

  A battle was fought at Shiloh Church on the Tennessee River, fought for two days, leaving almost 24,000 men wounded or dead on the blood-soaked field—a quarter of all the soldiers involved. Wounded poured into Washington, and Mary, like nearly every other woman in town, went to visit them, to write letters home for them, to fetch water for them in the heat of the hospital wards. To bring them fruit and keep their spirits alive in the face of exhaustion and pain.

  With Lizabet Keckley's guidance she became involved in the work of the Freedmen's Relief Association. Upon occasion she rode out in the carriage with Lincoln to the Navy Yard to watch the testing of new guns, and even received a few private callers. But in truth she lived from séance to séance, and the days between were often a blur.

  All of Willie's things she gave away, except his pony, Napoleon, which Tad refused to part with. She found herself unable to even look at the Taft boys, or Julia, and sent Julia a note asking her to stay away. Tad himself went into hysterics at the sight of the girl who had been his and Willie's friend. Tad's behavior worried and frightened Mary, for the boy missed his brother frantically, and his tears would trigger in her fits of uncontrollable weeping. Lincoln could deny the boy nothing, and let Tad sleep in bed with him, to still the child's nightmares. Many nights Lincoln stayed in his office until two or three in the morning, conferring with Generals or debating in agony over the military pardons of which he was the final judge of life or death. Tiptoeing down the dark hall, Mary would see the skinny, pale-faced child asleep in Lincoln's bed, waiting for him, his black hair sticking up stiffly in all directions like his father's, surrounded by a half-dozen slumbering cats.

  She felt paralyzed. She knew there was something she should do, for her husband and her son, but could not bring herself to face their pain as well as her own. The spring heat advanced, and she began to suffer again from chills and fever, and from agonizing recurrences of the female infections that had plagued her since Tad's birth. There were days now when she could not get out of bed without a spoonful or two of Indian Bitters, Braithewaite's Patent Nerve-Food, or Dole's Quaker Cordial.

  Lonely and confused, without even the Taft boys for company, Tad refused to proceed with his lessons, and poor young Mr. Williamson was reduced to simply keeping the boy occupied and amused for a few hours a day. Even what little Tad had learned, he seemed to have forgotten in his distress. She could see the boy retreating daily into a world peopled by his father and by animals—a Philadelphia merchant had sent him a family of white rabbits, to which had been added Nanko and Nanny, a pair of enterprising goats. Always outgoing, Tad had a lot of friends, especially among the White House military guard, but there was no one, it seemed, to whom he now gave his heart.

  And piled on top of all of the grief and worry, there was the continued nightmare of the bills. They poured in without cease. Though Mary dismissed more servants, and even appointed Johnny Watt's twenty-one-year-old wife, Jane, as White House steward in return for a portion of her salary, it did not seem to help. The newspapers were relentless, running articles about how the President's wife was buying cashmere shawls and carriages for her relatives out of taxpayers' money, while soldiers starved and shivered in their camps on the Potomac.

  There was a poem someone had written, about the ball she'd given in February . . . the ball during which she'd been frantic with worry over Willie lying sick upstairs.

  What matter that I, poor private,

  Lie here on my narrow bed,

  With fever gripping my vitals

  And dazing my hapless head!

  What matters that nurses are callous

  And rations are megre and small,

  So long as the beau monde revel

  At the Lady-President's ball!

  The condition of the soldiers, at least, was no exaggeration. Trainloads of wounded were pulling daily into Washington—wounded men, and men who had come down sick from the diseases of the camps: typhoid, pneumonia, measles. Houses and churches all over Washington were converted into hospitals, including that of Adele Douglas on Lafayette Square. Simon Cameron's system of favoritism, contracts, and bribery was having its inevitable result in mismanagement and shortages of which the ultimate victims were the men.

  Men—and boys no older than Robert—lay tossing on those narrow bunks, waiting for someone to change crusted bandages or soiled sheets; delirious, sometimes dying before anyone ever saw them. As the spring advanced and the weather turned hot, flies tormented them, and such was the dirtiness of most hospitals that sickness spread among the men like fire in old straw.

  Fighting now raged up and down the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia, as Stonewall Jackson outflanked and outfought three Union armies at Cross Keys, at McDowell, at Strasburg. In addition to thousands of casualties, the rebel forces supplied themselves happily from captured Union depots.

  Though Mary did no actual nursing, she was aware that merely the presence of the volunteers, and the members of the newly founded Sanitary Committee, cheered the wounded. Some of them laughed with her over Lincoln's brief foray as actual Commander-in-Chief, when he'd gone down to Fort Monroe in May. General McClellan had been “too busy” to see him, so Lincoln had looked around him and enquired if anyone had thought to take the rebel-held Navy yard at Norfolk—something that had evidently never occurred to McClellan. Lincoln had personally supervised the reconnaissance for landing-sites, and had the Navy start a bombardment. The rebels had cleared out in a matter of days.

  “Service is the best cure for grief that there is,” said Lizabet, one afternoon in the full heat of spring, as they carried water in from the big water-butts in the center of the hospital camp at Mount Pleasant among the trees on Fourteenth Street. In the tent wards they, and a woman from the Sanitary Committee, dipped up water from the pail in tin cups and carried it to the men who lay on the cots, moaning softly with pain or murmuring under the influence of the opium pills the surgeon had handed out.

  There was no banter, no joking in this ward. Most of the men didn't even know who she was.

  This was the ward of men newly brought in, where their field dressings w
ould be cut off and from which they would be taken for surgery in their turn. Mary shivered at the smell of blood and dirt, at the smell of gangrene. Minié balls did savage damage, literally disintegrating the bone within the flesh; these men would return home minus an arm or a leg, if they returned at all.

  Yet strangely, these days she did not often find herself thinking, Not Robert . . . as she moved from bed to bed with her dripping cup. In the bearded—or pitifully beardless—faces, she saw other women's husbands, brothers, sons, men who had thrown themselves into battle for those things that Lincoln himself would have fought for: for the Union, and the right of the government to say to the individual states, I don't care if it's what the majority of your citizens find most profitable, some things are simply WRONG.

  When she visited the hospitals—and, more and more now in Lizabet's company, the growing number of contraband camps—she found sometimes even her dread and terror of the mounting bills in her secretaire didn't torment her. There were now days when she was even able to put her grief aside.

  “You're right about that, Madame.” The woman from the Sanitary Committee looked up from the letter she was writing for a scared-looking young soldier: a tall, stout, fair-haired woman with a hooked nose and a decided chin. She, too, wore the deep black of mourning, her sleeves turned back over stout forearms. She laid one broad, soft hand comfortingly on the wrist of the man in the bed, and said to Mary, “If we cannot ask why those we love were taken from us, at least we can demonstrate our trust in God's goodness by doing His work. And goodness knows,” she added, with a quick flash of humor in her hazel-gray eyes, “with the amount there is to do around here, one is simply too tired to grieve.”

  She rose from her stool beside the cot: “We've met before, I think, haven't we, Mrs. Lincoln? In Chicago, during the convention? My name is Myra Bradwell. I'm one of the organizers of the Sanitary Committee.”