The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “I didn't flee from Washington in the face of the rebels, sir, and I will not flee from here like a scared rabbit,” she retorted. “The French were always America's allies. Surely they will offer us no harm.” And she pulled Tad, who'd come that day to help her pack and label, closer to her side.

  “No, ma'am,” replied Sheridan, who Mary had always thought looked like a schoolboy dressed up in a false mustache. “But they may shell the town. And if there's a siege, I wouldn't like to see the pair of you caught up in it.”

  Tad's gray eyes brightened, and he said, “It wouldn't be our first.” He was, Mary guessed, within an ace of asking Sheridan if he could go along with him and observe the upcoming battle, so she caught his hand and said crisply,

  “We shall be quite all right, General. Thank you for your concern.”

  As it was, before she managed to arrange transport for all of her many trunks and crates, the battle was fought and over, and the German forces under Von Moltke—with Sheridan along as an advisor—were besieging Paris. Still, the pleasant little city of Frankfurt had become an army town, as Washington had been in the War. Too many soldiers, too many horses, skyrocketing prices of food and very few of her friends remaining. She would wake in the night hearing marching men in the street, and for an agonized moment she would be back in Washington, with torchlight flaring on the ceiling of her bedroom, and Lincoln's steps padding restlessly down the hall to confer in his nightshirt with Generals on the landing.

  It was time to go home.

  THEY LEFT FRANKFURT IN THE FALL OF 1870, FOR ENGLAND, intending to remain there—as Mary had intended to stay at the Hotel Angleterre—only a few weeks. But the journey, and the tensions of travel, were hard on Mary. Her headaches multiplied and she broke her journey at Leamington, which like Marienbad and Baden-Baden was a hydrotherapy spa. The solicitousness of the doctors there, and the friendliness of the English, soothed her. Though Tad was wild to return to America, she lingered in Leamington until nearly Christmas, then moved up to London—again, for a short time only, she said—to visit her Hotel Angleterre friend Mrs. Culver.

  She and Tad remained in London for another three months, at a boardinghouse in Woburn Square. With Mrs. Culver, she attended a number of séances among the Bloomsbury Spiritualists, but winter in London depressed her and brought on migraines and back pain again, accompanied now by the agonizing hot flushes of the change of life. The doctors—she could afford the best, these days—suggested a warmer climate for the remainder of the winter. Tad offered to take ship for America after Christmas, and she could follow after a few months of recuperation in Italy. But the idea of the young man facing the dangers of winter travel on the Atlantic brought her nightmares.

  “I could not bear it, if anything were to happen to you, my darling!” she sobbed. “I could not bear it! Oh, do not do this to your mother!”

  That said, she paid Tad's board in Woburn Square for the next few months, engaged a tutor for him, hired a nurse-companion for herself, and went to Italy. For two months she dreamed in the sun, marveled at the David in Florence and the multi-towered Cathedral in Milan. It was in many ways a dream come true. Growing up in that overcrowded house in Lexington, she had longed to see these things, to walk in the glittering Italian sunlight where Byron, Shelley, and Napoleon had walked.

  Would she have chosen this path here, she wondered, had she been told through what griefs and pain it would lead?

  She didn't know. But she got out more, and made a few friends. Her consumption of Female Elixir and Godfrey's Cordial declined as her health improved—it was in any case nearly as difficult to find them in Italy as it had been in Germany.

  She and Tad returned to New York on the Russia in May. The weather was rainy and nearly as cold as winter. Tad caught a cold, and Mary nursed him assiduously in their tiny stateroom. In the dining-room, she had her own private table where she sat, heavily veiled in black; on the first evening of the voyage she was greeted by, of all people, little General Sheridan, on his way back from the German war.

  She had never known the young commander well during the War, though since he was Grant's protégé she mistrusted him. But Sheridan was politely deferential to her, and on their arrival in New York he included her and Tad in his party that went ashore on the pilot's launch and avoided the three-day quarantine.

  Thus, in contrast to their quiet leavetaking, she and Tad came ashore to bands playing “Hail to the Chief,” and to reporters crowding around—mostly around General Sheridan, to be sure. But one at least came up to her, and asked—impertinently, she thought—how she liked to be home.

  “I like it very much,” replied Mary, and glanced back at the launch from which she had just stepped, bobbing in the dirty water at the dock. “So far.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  IT SOMETIMES SEEMED TO MARY, WHEN SHE LOOKED BACK ON HER return to America, that the Russia had taken a wrong turn somewhere and had deposited her and Tad on another planet, some world other than the one they had fled three years before.

  Everything was different. While Europe had dreamed in its centuries-old walls of stone and forest, in three years America had barged ahead into an era of railroad barons, monumental industries, get-rich-quick schemes, patent stoves, patent vegetable-slicers, bustle dresses, and bicycles, a world inconceivably distant from the America of the War.

  Still further off, like the landscape of a dream, lay the world she remembered so clearly, the world of Lexington in the Thirties, of shady alleys and Mammy Sally's kitchen, and flirting with young gentlemen under the locust-trees of Rose Hill. No one even talked about that vanished world anymore.

  No one talked about slavery, either, or secession, or the rights of the states. It was as if it had all never happened. They spoke instead of money, of Progress, of new places to go and new things to see and buy: of railroads, homesteads in the West, and the foolishness of women who campaigned for the vote.

  It was a Yankee world now, and Mary despised it.

  New York—where she stayed for some weeks—had spread north on both sides of the Park, and its crowded Irish slums had been invaded by Jews and Italians following the demands of factory labor. There were more buildings, higher buildings, walling the narrow streets into grim canyons of red and gray. When she returned to Chicago the noise of the railroads and the stench of the stockyards and packing-plants hung over the brand-new mansions and the filthy “patches” like a pall.

  The thought of surrendering the rent from the house on West Washington made her shudder. Her years of scrimping and saving, of the humiliation of seeing her Springfield friends ride by in their carriages, and later of fighting for the pension and for her inheritance, had left their mark. Everything cost so much more these days. She couldn't imagine running a household, even on $5,500 a year. With her ill-health and the migraine agonies of menopause, she calculated she would have to hire at least two servants, maybe three.

  “That's quite sensible of you, Mother,” Robert said, escorting her from the train to the rank of taxis and casting a resigned eye back at the army of black porters with the trunks. “You know there will always be a place for you in my home.”

  “Always” lasted all of about a month.

  Robert's house on Wabash Avenue was modest, with three bedrooms, a neat double-parlor, and a tiny yard behind it. Tad—still suffering from fits of coughing that he could not seem to shake off—had a small room in the attic, Mary the guest room adjoining little Mamie's nursery. Young Mary, who in her letters had expressed such graceful gratitude for her mother-in-law's advice about child-rearing, pregnancy, fashion, and household economy, proved to be, in person and out of her white satin wedding-gown, nervous and, her mother-in-law judged, hypocritical. Mary recognized the embroidered pillowcases she had sent from Germany, but saw no trace of the several lovely plaid dresses she'd sent, nor of the needlework waistcoats she'd bought for Robert.

  “Surely I thought you must have loved them,” she commented over supper that first
night. “They are all the fashion, you know.”

  She saw the glance between Robert and his wife: “They were so handsome, I thought I would save them for best,” said Robert after a moment. “As a young lawyer just starting out, I've found it pays to dress more plainly.”

  “And that ‘falling-leaf' color was the most elegant to be had.” Mary heard the defensiveness in her tone, as she turned to Young Mary. “I spent quite fifty dollars on the silk, plus the cost of having Mr. Popp make it up. He sewed for the Princess of Prussia, you know, so the style must have been impeccable.”

  “It was,” said her daughter-in-law quickly, setting down the soup tureen. The cook had laid out the dishes on the black walnut sideboard which badly cramped the inadequate dining-room—there didn't seem to be a maid to serve. “Only the dress didn't quite fit....”

  “And you haven't altered it in three years?” Mary recoiled a little from the soup: “Dear heavens, that isn't beef, is it? In weather like this? Beef makes me quite bilious....”

  Robert took the streetcar north into the city every morning, to the offices he shared with his law partner, Mr. Scammon. Tad, though he was still coughing and in Mary's opinion should have remained in his bed, went with him. The Lincolns kept no carriage, not even a buggy: “It's a ridiculous way of economizing, if that's what you're trying to do,” protested Mary, after two days of being trapped on Wabash Avenue watching her daughter-in-law assist the maid-of-all-work in dusting knickknacks and sweeping floors. The thought of being stared at on the streetcars filled her with horror. “When Mr. Lincoln and I were first married, I assure you, we were quite poor, but we always had a buggy.”

  “I rejoice to hear it.” An edge like glass glinted in Young Mary's voice. “As it happens, just now we do not.”

  “And it's equally ridiculous that you should be doing a servant's work,” added Mary. “Surely for the money you're paying that cook, and that scullery-girl, you could get a couple of good parlormaids who know their way around the kitchen and can take care of Mamie as well. Why, times cannot have changed so much that you can't get a good girl for a dollar a week....”

  Robert's wife, Mary found in very short order, was also given to fits of tears. She suspected, and said to Robert after four days, that Young Mary drank as well. Within the first week they had two vicious arguments about the housekeeping money, steely-voiced on the younger woman's side, with Mary flying into rages which escalated into tears and migraines that laid her up for two days. Her daughter-in-law and Tad were forced to care for her with tisanes, quiet, drawn shades, and Nervine. Robert looked haggard when he came into her room to hear her side of it—through the closed door Mary had already heard Young Mary's twisted accounts of the quarrels the moment the young man walked into the house—and began to stay later and later at the office, as his father had before him.

  As they all did, thought Mary in a fury of resentment. Anytime any man doesn't want to deal with his women at home, he disappears into “business,” and gives that shopworn excuse, “I'm the one who supports the household, I have the right to a little peace. . . .”

  At the end of a month came the worst quarrel of all, which ended in a screaming-match between the two women. In a way this gratified Mary, for generally Young Mary grew maddeningly quiet and spoke her unforgivable accusations in a calm voice that made her want to box her ears, as she had on many occasions done with her sister Ann when they were small.

  When Robert came home—late—Mary was lying in her room with a pounding headache and the sick swoony dizziness that so often followed the taking of several tablespoons of Godfrey's Cordial. She'd heard Young Mary moving about her room for some time. It was full summer, breathlessly hot and unnaturally dry. The air felt electric, pressing her skull like a tightening iron band. Far off, thunder growled over the lake, only a few streets from Wabash Avenue on the other side of the small park. Her old sense of panic filled her, of the frightening approach of some crushing doom.

  She heard Robert say, “Darling, what is this?” and Young Mary's voice, quiet as ice.

  “It's a suitcase, Robert. And that smaller one is for Mamie. Your mother apparently doesn't consider me an adequate keeper of the household on your income....”

  I did not say that! thought Mary furiously. Not in those words, anyway . . . And in any case, it's true!

  “. . . though I can't imagine where she gets her advice from, having no experience herself in running a household within a budget. She saw fit to dismiss Mrs. Phelps today—for theft, she said, to her face....”

  “Darling . . .”

  “So I thought it best, if she thinks she can make a better home for you than I can, to get out of her way and let her do so.”

  “Darling!” Robert sounded desperate. As well he should, thought Mary resentfully, if he's been married for three years to that whining little harpy. “You must remember, my mother isn't quite right in her head.”

  It was the first time she had heard Robert say it out loud, though in the newspaper flurry that had surrounded what was now called the Old Clothes Scandal the awful word insane had been applied to her before—and reportedly, by Robert. Anger blazed up in her like matchwood and she staggered from her bed, catching her balance on the bedpost.

  “She says things she doesn't mean. Since my father's death...”

  “I have heard, every single, solitary day, about your father's death,” replied Young Mary in a voice like over-wound violin-strings. “And how your mother has suffered since. And with all due respect to Mr. Booth, I would not at all be surprised if I heard that your father had arranged to have himself shot.”

  “That is infamous!” Mary shoved open the bedroom door and strode down the stairs. “How dare you say such things?”

  Sitting among the pillows of the blue plush sofa, tiny Mamie—not quite two—began to wail, staring anxiously from face to face in the gas-lit gloom. Tad, who'd retreated up the attic stairs at the beginning of the quarrel, came down looking as if he might start crying, too.

  “I have a good mind to leave this house,” cried Mary, “and to take that poor little child away with me, to get her out of the care of an ungrateful, whining, drunken—”

  “Mother!” Robert thundered, as Young Mary's eyes overflowed with silent tears and she reached down for the handle of the small wicker suitcase at her feet.

  The rest of the evening passed in a blur, first of shouted words that Mary barely remembered on waking the next morning, then of migraine agony and lurid dreams. It was nearly noon, and suffocatingly hot, when Tad came into her room and said gently, “If you meant what you said last night about finding a place to board, maybe I could take the streetcar into town and make some inquiries? Mr. Scammon and Mr. Trumbull both speak very highly of Clifton House these days.”

  She had no recollection whatsoever of saying she would look for a place to board, but felt too exhausted and sick to argue. She said, “Lyman Trumbull is a lying blackguard,” forgetting entirely that Trumbull had been one of her chief supporters during the pension fight and at one time—many years ago in Springfield—her favored beau. She remembered only how he had refused to step aside during the Senate race in 1856, and had taken the office from Lincoln.

  If he had not done so, she thought, tears flowing down at the memory of Lincoln—alive, breathing, present, caring for her—among that little band of supporters in the parlor of the Jackson Street house, how much would have been different. . . . “And his wife is a treacherous hussy. Any place that he would speak well of must be a den of infamy.”

  Two days later, she and Tad moved into the Clifton House.

  They occupied two modest rooms on the second floor, and at Mary's insistence ate their meals in Tad's room rather than going down to join the other boarders in the dining-room. Tad's cold was worse, and she occupied herself in making poultices, steaming herbs, coaxing him to take a wide variety of patent medicines. When he was better, he said, he would begin clerking with Robert at Scammon's.

  But h
e didn't get better.

  Within two weeks he was so seriously ill that she sent for one of the best pediatricians in Chicago, though Tad was eighteen. “It isn't consumption, sir,” she insisted, as Dr. Smith tapped the young man's thin chest. “It cannot be consumption, for I have taken very good care of his health. He is Abraham Lincoln's son!”

  Tad, who like Robert had for the past ten years heard himself described in terms of his father, winced slightly and traded a sleepy glance with the doctor; Mary had found that Godfrey's Cordial not only eased her own neuralgia well, but was also a marvelous suppressant of coughs.

  At Dr. Smith's suggestion, Tad was propped up to sleep, so that he could breathe better. First this was done with pillows on his bed, and then, as the suffocating dry heat of July deepened and his breathing labored harder against the edema in his lungs, in a specially made chair with a rod across the front, to prop him up when he fell asleep. Even a shaky stagger down the hall to the toilets exhausted him, and Mary carried chamber pots, made medicines, rubbed eucalyptus balm on her son's chest and back. Her world—so wide and pleasant only a few months ago in Italy—shrank to a single curtained room, a single other person, a young man whose face was so like Lincoln's that sometimes in her dreams she wasn't sure whether she was dreaming of one or the other.

  Then the sound of his gasping would jolt her out of her catnap sleep, the thready weak voice—identical to Lincoln's in its lightness—would gasp, “Mama . . .”

  Robert would come, after a day of writing briefs and taking depositions, and stay with Tad until long after dark, so that she could sleep. It was Robert who told her that Tad was dying, Robert who insisted that she face the fact and not exhaust his brother with selfish demands that he live on for her. “You know nothing about it!” she sobbed, “nothing . . . !”