The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  She thrust the thought from her mind, barricading the mental door with the image of the self-satisfied expression on Robert's face.

  One of them has to come, she thought desperately. One of them has to help me; has to bring a real doctor here to testify to my sanity.

  And when he, she, or they did, Mary realized, the game would be up, as the children would say. Patterson would be furious. This was “will to insanity” with a vengeance. He might lock her up in earnest—he would certainly consult with Robert. What legal rights, exactly, did Robert have over her? As a convicted lunatic, Mary knew that she no longer had any rights at all. The madwoman's family may do with her as they think best. . . .

  And anger flooded her, almost swamping, for a moment, her terror. Rage at the Pattersons—despite her gay chuckles at Mrs. Patterson's tale of some petty victory over the laundress—blind fury at Robert.

  At her father.

  At God, for ripping Lincoln from her and leaving her to face all this alone.

  She took a deep breath, and looked away, over the side of the carriage, at the pleasant white-painted shops, the blue shade of elm-trees, that made up Batavia's small downtown along Union Street. I can't let her see me tremble. I can't let her see my tears.

  Tears of bitterness and rage.

  One of them has to answer. The men—General Farnsworth and the others—she put no trust in. She never had known a man who hadn't betrayed her. She realized the next moment that that statement included Lincoln, but didn't change it in her mind. She knew it was illogical, but she could no longer pretend that she didn't feel it: deep anger at him, that he was gone.

  But Myra would come.

  Myra who had come to her in the most terrible hour—save only for the nightmare of Ford's Theater—in her life.

  WHEN JUDGE DAVIS FINALLY DISTRIBUTED LINCOLN'S ESTATE IN November of 1868 —and it still rankled with Mary that Lincoln had never bothered to make a will, for in that case instead of the legal one-third she'd probably have inherited everything, enough to keep house on—she began making arrangements to go to Europe. Robert came over to the Clifton House, where she and Tad were living, and put his foot down firmly. “You will not take my brother to live like a Gypsy in a succession of cheap German watering-places. He needs a proper education and he can get no better one than here in the United States.”

  “Tad is my son!” Mary put her arm around the skinny fifteen-year-old's shoulders, pulled him to her with a fierce grip. “He is all that I have left to me, since you have chosen to make your home apart from us!”

  She almost spit the words at him, and Robert's lips tightened. The Clifton House, though respectable bordering on genteel, was, when you came right down to it, a boarding hotel, and the two rooms she had occupied there since the previous March were the cheapest and dreariest in the place. Like every boardinghouse room she had ever occupied, they were jammed with trunks, boxes, and chests of her possessions—with packages of newer purchases piled higgledy-piggledy on top—and this increased their stuffy gloom. When first they'd come to Chicago three years before, Robert, then twenty-two, had elected to get his own rooms rather than share crowded quarters with his mother and Tad.

  She'd never quite forgiven him for that, either. Financially it would have made better sense for the three of them to remain together, instead of dividing the small income that Davis had paid them yearly from the estate.

  “Don' worry about me, Bob.” Tad's voice was just beginning to break. It would be light, as Lincoln's had been. “Last I heard, there were schools in Europe.” And he grinned, bringing an answering smile from his older brother.

  Three years in Chicago had altered Tad drastically from the restless hellion he'd been in Springfield and in Washington. At Robert's insistence, Tad had been sent to a number of elocution teachers, and as a result could speak and be understood by even those outside his immediate family. Perhaps because of this—or perhaps because of the terrible changes after his father's murder—much of Tad's wildness and anger had dissipated. He attended school regularly now, and had begun to catch up with the boys who were so far ahead of him. He had Lincoln's gray eyes, and coarse black hair. From beneath the softness of childhood, craggy familiar features were beginning to take shape.

  Mary supposed that Tad would have learned more quickly still, had he been sent to boarding schools. But without her boy—without wondering when he'd be home that day, and what he'd been up to—her life was nearly unbearable, and she'd turned away from several that Robert had urged her to investigate.

  Robert's mouth thinned to an ungiving line. “I forbid it.”

  Mary, her face beginning to pinken with anger, retorted, “Pooh! It's my money now, and I shall do with it as I please. You only want me to stay so you can borrow my money and get in on Judge Davis's real-estate schemes.”

  And Robert, stonily silent, made no reply.

  The distribution of Lincoln's estate had freed Robert, too, from having to live solely on his earnings as a newly fledged attorney. That November he was making preparations of his own, to purchase a home on Wabash Avenue—in a considerably better neighborhood than Mary's now-rented house on West Washington, she reflected resentfully—and to marry Miss Harlan. In an atmosphere of chilly tension he took the train to Washington and formally proposed: the wedding was set to take place in Washington at the end of September. Mary and Tad would depart two weeks later on the City of Baltimore.

  When Mary had left Washington, workmen were tearing down the last of the black draperies from the White House windows, left from Lincoln's funeral.

  She and Tad stayed in Baltimore. She never ventured from her hotel room. She hated this city that had plotted Lincoln's murder before he'd ever arrived in Washington, but she did not think she could bear more than a necessary few hours in the capital itself. They took the train to Washington only on the morning of the wedding, Mary heavily veiled in black and fortified with Indian Bitters and Ma-Sol-Pa Herbal Infusion and leaning on Tad's arm. “Don't leave me, Taddie,” she whispered, clinging to his elbow as they mounted the steps of James Harlan's rented town house, as she saw the moving host of beautifully dressed Cabinet members, Senators, family friends. “Stay right beside me every minute and don't leave me.” Though almost six months had passed since Lizabet Keckley's infamous book had appeared, and over a year since Herndon's lectures on Ann Rutledge, she felt every glance, every whisper, as if they were burning coals being applied to her flesh.

  Her veils were the only armor she had, her only means of keeping the curious at bay. Like a black opaque cloud amid the puffs and bows, satins and silks, fashionable pale pinks and blues, Mary spoke her briefest greetings to even her old friends like Ginny Fox, Jacob Seligman, and Charles Sumner. She wished only to be gone.

  Robert's bride—also named Mary—was a fair, pretty, and ethereal-looking young lady in a gown of white satin, everything a well-bred young lady should be. She smiled sweetly as Mary took her hands.

  “How I have always wished for a daughter! My dearest child, I have so longed to see this day!”

  Other than that she recalled little of the reception, beyond an overwhelming sense of dread that she assuaged by a couple of surreptitious sips of Indian Bitters in the cloakroom. For nearly a year after Willie's death she had found herself unable to bear large groups of people, particularly strangers or semi-strangers. After Lincoln's death, the presence of anyone other than a few well-loved and well-known friends (which had included, alas, the perfidious Lizabet Keckley!) had filled her with a sense of nearly unendurable alienation from the whole race of humankind. She longed for comfort, yet when Charles Sumner came over to speak with her she found herself on the verge of tears.

  Few others approached her. In three years, the cast of characters had changed in Washington, and people had heard enough about her battles with Congress over a pension.

  She spent much of the ensuing three weeks in Baltimore in her room at Barnum's Hotel, emerging only for carriage-rides with Tad, or to vi
sit a medium named Gibson, whom Cranston Laurie had recommended. Mr. Lincoln was present in the room, Gibson assured her, and disavowed any knowledge of any Ann or Nan Rutledge. There was no such person there with him in the Summer Land, nor had he known anyone of that name in his life.

  But he did not materialize, nor speak to her. The night before the City of Baltimore was to depart she dreamed of him, in the dappled sunlight of the Land that lay beyond Death's Veil—dreamed of him walking hand in hand with the red-haired girl that Herndon had so eloquently described.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  TAD AND MARY WERE IN EUROPE FOR THREE YEARS.

  And if she could not be happy—and she could never be happy, she reminded herself every morning when she woke, when her Beloved One had left her here alone—at least she felt at peace.

  She took a room in the Hotel Angleterre in Frankfurt, intending to stay for a week. Jacob Seligman had highly recommended Dr. Hohagen's Institute on the nearby Kettenhofstrasse, and it was here that she enrolled Tad. But from the first night, the friendly and un-curious camaraderie of the English and American expatriates who lived at the Angleterre drew her in and made her welcome. These were people who had not been raised with the rending questions of abolition, who had not gone through the horror of war firsthand; people who had the distance to be objective, and the pleasant good manners that Mary craved.

  She stayed another week, and then another. After all, she could not abandon Tad. On his single day off each week they would take a carriage along the zigzag paths of the park where the city ramparts had once stood, or cross the bridge to Sachsenhausen and so to the green and peaceful countryside beyond. Sometimes they would take the train to Weimar, to see Goethe's house, or take a little excursion steamer down to the Rhine at Mainz.

  And when Tad was in school, to her surprise she found the days were not as long as she'd feared they'd be. The little group of Americans in the hotel called on her and invited her to visit their rooms, and her circle of acquaintance widened to their American and British friends in other parts of the little city. They were a lively group, the ladies always willing to get up excursions or day-trips to the spas of Wiesbaden or Marienbad, or to hold afternoon teas. Even after Mary removed to the less expensive Hotel Holland she retained a number of friendships, and would go to the Angleterre's reading-room to keep up on the American papers.

  This was partly to follow how her old friends and enemies were doing—Charles Sumner was still in the Senate, and Mr. Seward, recovered from the wounds he'd received on the night of Lincoln's assassination, still ruled as Secretary of State. (What a pity it was not he who had died that Terrible Night, if one must have died and the other be spared. . . !)

  And partly, to follow what was being done about her battle for her pension in Congress.

  During her first summer in Frankfurt, she went for several weeks to Scotland, where she visited dear old Dr. Smith from Springfield, whom Lincoln had made a consul. On her return she encountered, of all people, Sally Orne from Philadelphia at one of Frankfurt's summer spas. It was good beyond words to talk American politics again with someone who truly knew Washington, who'd been through the War. The two women chattered non-stop for several nights—completely disturbing everyone in the hotel-rooms around them—and the upshot was that Sally, who'd been traveling in luxury with maid, valet, and daughter in tow, agreed to put pressure on all her political connections once again to have Mary's pension put through.

  “It's a disgrace—an absolute disgrace!” Sally cried, looking around the dreary fifth-floor chamber of the Holland, carpetless and crammed nearly to the ceiling with trunks and packages. “Your husband gave his life for his country, as surely as any of those poor soldiers did! You deserve no less than they!”

  In point of fact—as the American newspapers shortly pointed out in a succession of blistering satires on Mrs. Lincoln's requests for her pension bill to be passed by Congress—the average widow's pension was about twelve dollars a month, and Mary was asking for three thousand a year. “My case is entirely different!” she insisted to Sally, when that lady and her entourage were preparing to continue on their journey to Italy. “Those young men, though I say not a word in their disparagement, at least had respite and sleep at night—which my poor husband never had, in four years of war. And moreover I was very much his partner in his task of governing, for which I deserve at least some credit!”

  Between shopping for Robert's Mary—Young Mary, she called her—and for Baby Mamie, who was born in the fall of 1869—and writing streams of letters to Congressmen, Mary felt herself revive.

  The American consul, Mr. Murphy, called now and then with his son (To keep an eye on me for that traitor Seward, I'll wager). There were several American and British gentlemen—not to mention several more of the Seligman banking clan—who would squire her for Sunday drives. Her special friends from her days at the Angleterre, the Mason family, still included her in their circle as if she were an aunt. Two British ladies from the Angleterre—Mrs. Culver and Mrs. Blaine—were Spiritualists, and it was a relief to Mary to be able to talk of matters concerning those who had passed over the Veil. Twice they held séances, and though no spirits materialized or spoke on those occasions, she left them filled with a deep sense of calm.

  More than anything else, she wished Lincoln could be here with her, to see the cathedral in its old-fashioned square, to pass the dark rocks where the Rhine maidens were said to guard their hidden gold.

  “But he is here, don't you see?” asked Mrs. Culver, setting her teacup down—Mary had invited her up to her room at the Holland to take tea and look at the needlework vests, the blue- and white-silk wrapper, that she'd bought for Robert's bride. “When a soul passes to the Other Side, they can come and go here as they please, like the angels of God. When you walk down the Zeil looking into shop windows, be sure that he's there at your side. When you stand in the cathedral and look at the arches and tombs and stained glass, you are sharing that moment with him, as you would have in life had God so willed.”

  “Of course,” responded Mary instantly, “of course. But knowing that somehow, sometimes . . . just isn't the same.”

  But it was close to that, when she was with Tad.

  At Dr. Hohagen's, her son seemed to recover some of his old mischievousness, tempered now by European manners and the school's firm discipline. As the weeks and months floated by she was amazed and delighted at Tad's growth from boy to young man. He was beginning to read on his own, and talk to her like a man, and not a child, about the things he read. He took the lead in their excursions, escorting her to places his friends at school had said were wunderbar! From speaking only a few halting words in German—inculcated with enormous labor by his teachers in Chicago—Tad rapidly became far more fluent than Mary.

  He was a comfort to her, too, when the American newspapers published indignant criticisms of her campaign for a pension. “They don't know you, Mama,” he soothed, when she met him in front of the school brandishing the latest, a sarcastic account of how a fictitious German count was courting her in the hopes of getting hold of Old Abe's pension. “They're politicians. They'll say anything—they have to.”

  A later article pointed out that $27,000,000—nearly ten percent of the nation's budget—went to pensions already, and the widows of officers were content with $600 a year, not $3000: “poor needy widows who do not already have fifty or sixty thousand dollars.” Another excoriated her for taking Lincoln's “brilliant boy” to be educated away from “American institutions.” “They must have been talking to Robert,” fumed Mary. As 1869 wore into 1870, the debates—duly sent on to her by Sally Orne—became more vicious, dredging up yet again the old rumors of her extravagance, her Confederate sympathies, and speculation of improper conduct with, of all people, the charming Commissioner Wood who had escorted her on her first buying-trip to New York.

  Her headaches worsened. She wrote reams of angry letters to Sally, to her Spiritualist friend Ella Slapater in Pennsylva
nia, to Robert and his wife. Her neuralgia grew more frequent and painful as well, tightening the damaged muscles of neck and back and starting yet another round of sleepless nights, Godfrey's Cordial, Indian Bitters, and as many visits to spas as she could afford. Now fifty-two, she began to have night sweats, and her copious monthlies became erratic, until she never knew when they'd begin or how long they'd last. Sometimes it felt to her, looking back on those days, that she was angry all the time.

  But in a curious way the anger made her feel alive. She was fighting, she told herself, for Tad's future—fighting, too, to be recognized for who she was: Abraham Lincoln's widow. The wife of the Great Emancipator. The woman who had stood by him through the terrible years of the War, the woman he had married—and loved, no matter what Billy Herndon said.

  Just as she had been the legal keeper of his body, in the fight with the Monument Association, so now she was the keeper of his memory, and his son. She still lived for him, though he had gone on to the Summer Land; still managed his affairs in this world.

  They could not deny her without denying him.

  In July of 1870, President Grant signed the bill giving her a pension of $3,000 a year. This more than doubled her income, added to the $2,500 interest from the bonds Lincoln had left her and the rent from the Chicago and Springfield houses. She celebrated by buying pillowcases, a watch, and an evening dress for Young Mary, and several tiny bracelets for little Mamie, and by taking Tad, who was on summer holiday, to Austria.

  In Austria, word reached them that France and Germany had gone to war. On their return to Frankfurt, the consul, Mr. Murphy, called on Mary at the Hotel Holland and warned her to leave—the French troops were advancing on Frankfurt, which controlled Germany's railroads as Atlanta had the South's. While she was still trying to organize her trunks and luggage—really, it was astonishing how much she'd accumulated in her travels!—one of the generals she'd met in Washington, little Phil Sheridan, who stood shorter even than she did—called to reiterate the warning.