The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Brought back the makeshift Rock Island depot, a shelter of crude lumber hastily erected amid the scorched ruins of downtown Chicago, visible like a blackened battlefield through the building's open sides. Brought back the stench of ashes, and memories that she could not put out of her mind.

  How long she'd remained at Robert's house after the Fire, she no longer recalled. She thought it was several weeks.

  Conditions weren't good in Chicago that autumn. Ninety thousand had lost their homes, and every surviving house was jammed. Boxcar-loads of food were being shipped in from all over the country but prices were sky-high. The city fathers in charge of such things ruled that the wealthy who had been left homeless be given first priority in the assignment of shelter, since the poor were more used to hardship.

  Winter winds blew cold across Lake Michigan.

  With nowhere in Chicago left to move to—and with Robert not about to offer continued residence under the same roof with himself and his still-in-Iowa bride—Mary wrote to Spiritualist friends in St. Charles, not far from Batavia, asking for recommendations of good boarding hotels near the Spiritualist congregation that was forming in that town. Anything was better than the nightmare stench of smoke and ashes that still hung over Chicago's ruins.

  The community of Spiritualists in St. Charles had welcomed her. In the flickering candlelight of their darkened parlors she had sought, again and again, to hear Tad's voice, or Lincoln's, or to catch a glimpse of Willie's glimmering form coming toward her out of the gloom with outstretched hands. But it seemed to her she had lost all capacity or desire to make friends with the living.

  Thus, the next three years were years of travel: Boston, the resort spas of Wisconsin, upstate New York, where Spiritualism and so many other odd movements had their birth. For a time she went to Canada, to another Spiritualist camp on the edge of Lake St. Catherine. Tad's inheritance, equally divided with Robert, made it possible for her to hire a nurse-companion. She found these women for the most part as grasping, irresponsible, and impossible to deal with as she'd long ago found the Portuguese and Irish girls of Springfield, and she went through them almost as quickly. Though she had hated slavery, she found herself longing for the good-natured reliability of Mammy Sally or Granny Parker's old Prudence....Were there no such people left in the world anymore?

  Even when she had a companion to look after her, she was alone.

  “I DON'T KNOW IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND,” SAID MYRA BRADWELL softly, “the . . . familial quality of the Spiritualists. Not the charlatans, or the fakes like that absurd ‘spirit photographer' in Boston—the one who ‘miraculously' produced a photograph of her with the ghostly shape of Mr. Lincoln standing behind her. She went to him incognito, but of course he'd seen a dozen likenesses of Mrs. Lincoln and knew her the moment she walked in his door. She bored everyone to distraction with the story of how Lincoln had projected his image on the photographic plate without the photographer knowing. Poor Mary. She had the maddening quality of never letting anyone's grief be more important or deeper than her own....”

  She frowned a little, her sharp hazel eyes losing some of their focus, as if she looked again, from her seat in the Patterson carriage, into the dim recesses of a parlor lit only by candle-flame. As if she listened for spectral knocks, or saw a name being spelled out, letter by letter, by a planchette.

  Then she glanced up at John again and her eyes were bright.

  “Everyone who comes to Spiritualism does so because they're in grief—a grief that's too deep for them to endure with the ‘holy resignation' that unimaginative preachers recommend. So whatever her faults—or theirs—Mary sought other people of like experience. To her—as to me—it was a blessing beyond compare, to be able to talk to others who have passed over that same terrible road.”

  John recalled the sweetly reasonable Olivia Hill, whose steadfast Spiritualism was accompanied by an equally steadfast conviction that a squadron of demons was invisibly pursuing her and had to be destroyed at all costs. Remembered, too, the framed picture garlanded with flowers in Lizabet Keckley's sitting-room.

  He asked, “Do you really speak to the dead?”

  Would Lucy hear, if I called her name?

  Myra smiled thinly. “I think the real question is, Do I really believe that the dead have spoken to me? Is it less reasonable to speak to the dead than it is to speak to an invisible Entity which created everything which is? At least we know who the dead were. We know they existed, once upon a time. Yet people—mostly men—present company excepted, Judge—claim every day that the theoretical Architect of the Universe takes time off from wars and famines to give them specific instructions about how people should behave, on whom they should love and how they should dress if they wish to please Him.

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “To answer your question, Mr. Wilamet, I believe that my daughter Myra has communicated with me, both through rappings, and through the movement of a pen held in a medium's hand. I do not believe that all communications purported to be from her were in fact from her. I certainly don't believe some of the ghostly white figures drifting around the parlors of such gentlemen as Lord Colchester were anything but Colchester's confederates draped in cheesecloth washed in a dilute phosphorus solution. But then my faith that little Myra lives on the Other Side, and loves me, is stronger than poor Mary's. She wants so desperately to believe. And she had—has—nothing else.”

  Two women strolled by, artificial flowers bobbing on their stylish bonnets. They glanced idly at the carriage, and John knew he would have to deposit the Bradwells at the station and return to Bellevue soon. He wasn't sure, but he thought Patterson was asking a little too frequently about his dealings with Mrs. Lincoln, and not because the doctor was interested in the progress of her case.

  “Do you mean to help her?” he asked.

  “I mean to see her, if I can.” Grimness glinted in Myra Bradwell's voice. “If, as I suspect, she's been railroaded into that place, as so many women are railroaded for being Spiritualists if they happen also to be inconvenient to their menfolks—yes, I mean to help her. But an insanity verdict cannot be overturned for a year in this state. It will do her little good to be released from one asylum if she's only going to return to her son's house and her son's care . . . though it would serve him right,” she added with a half-smile, “if it comes to that. Would you be willing to go down to Springfield with me tomorrow, to consult with Mrs. Lincoln's sister Mrs. Edwards? To see if we can convince her to open her house to her sister, as she offered to some years ago?”

  “My day off is Wednesday. But nobody will question it if I trade it for Friday. I'll go down with you then.”

  “Excellent. Thank you. Could you meet me at the Galena Depot at noon, or as soon after noon as there is a train from Batavia? They must have shopper's trains in the morning.”

  “I'll be there. As to your getting in to see Mrs. Lincoln, that may be more difficult. Mr. Lincoln has said many times that his mother must be kept from Spiritualists, since they only feed her mania, as he puts it. As you found out, he's arranged with Dr. Patterson—”

  “Robert knows perfectly well that I was a friend of his father's while Robert was still a schoolboy—or nearly so.” A combative light flickered in Myra's eye. “As for Dr. Patterson, he'll find I'm not easily gotten rid of with two cups of tea, a lecture on Moral Treatment, and a piece of yesterday's cake.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  Springfield July 1875

  JOHN WILAMET TOOK THE FIRST TRAIN INTO CHICAGO THAT FRIDAY morning, and by two in the afternoon was stepping off, with Mrs. Bradwell, in the depot in Springfield within a stone's throw of the handsome sandstone State House with its graceful dome.

  Though he'd lived in Chicago for almost six years, John had never visited the state capital. After the insane scramble of people rushing through the lakeside city's streets, the jackhammer noise of the trains, the jostle of wagons, drays, carriages, the overwhelming stench of the yards, Springfield seemed rustic under the cr
ushing summer heat. As they walked along Second Street toward the Edwards residence, the hotels and boardinghouses around the State House—hushed and half-deserted during the summer's Legislative recess—quickly gave way to handsome frame residences surrounded by gardens, where cats blinked sleepily from under hedges of jessamine and yew.

  “Did Mr. Lincoln live in one of these houses?” He tried to picture the man he'd seen riding through the burned streets of Richmond—the tall form silhouetted in the evening moonlight on the steamboat's deck—walking these board sidewalks and mud-wallow crossings, as Mrs. Lincoln had described, a marketing-basket in his hand.

  Myra Bradwell shook her head. “They lived over on Eighth Street. In a place much less fine than any of these—just a simple frame house. No better than most, though Mary did furnish it up fine. I'll take you by there and show it to you. It's still rented out, and getting shabby these days. Most of their furniture—and Mr. Lincoln's books—were up in Chicago, at a museum I think, or some Exhibit Hall, and burned in the Fire. Mary told me when they first lived here you could walk a block from their house and be on the prairie. But it's much the same as it was.”

  Mrs. Ninian Edwards was taller than her sister and didn't resemble her in the slightest. With her long jaw and firm mouth, she more closely resembled Mary's descriptions of her fearsome Granny Parker. But about her clung the old-fashioned formality, the steely strength, of a Southern lady. And John found that like many Southern ladies, she was far friendlier toward him as a black man than women like Mrs. Patterson. The doctor's wife seemed to regard him as an archetypal Representative of his Race rather than an individual man.

  If she believed in her heart—and she probably did—that he couldn't be trusted with certain tasks and was of a species wholly foreign to herself, at least Elizabeth Edwards was friendly, and believed him capable of being a doctor.

  “I'm glad to hear she's doing better,” she said, bringing in tea—for the three of them, a tribute to her fine-graded evaluation of social niceties. Had Myra not been there, John guessed, there would have been no tea. “I was most distressed when Robert wrote to me saying Mary's mind had broken down at last under the griefs she had suffered. And God knows, the sorrows she's seen would be enough to drive anyone raving mad. Your Dr. Patterson must be a very wise soul.”

  “He is,” agreed John. He had spoken to Myra of Mary's misuse of medicines because he knew from years on the South Side that it was plain stupid to lie to your lawyer and because, as a professional, he trusted Myra Bradwell's professional ethics. But it wasn't anything Mrs. Edwards had to know. Even had he not been bound by his position of trust, Mary's shame and humiliation about being a habitual opium-taker would have been enough to keep him silent.

  There was gossip enough about her.

  “The problem is that now that she is better, Robert still wishes her to remain at Bellevue,” said Myra. “I think you'll agree with me, Mrs. Edwards, that even if she wished to remain there—which she emphatically does not—a lunatic asylum is scarcely an appropriate place for a lady, however eccentric, of good family.”

  Elizabeth's breath blew out in a sigh and she made a gesture that in anyone less well-bred would have been a dramatic up-flinging of hands. “Precisely what I told Robert! My sister is—and always has been—an eccentric, particularly since poor Mr. Lincoln's death. But my nephew has never had the patience—or, I am sorry to say, the sympathy—to deal with her. All his life she has been an embarrassment to him, and when I heard of her incarceration the first thing that went through my mind was to wonder whether she had in truth crossed over the line into insanity, or whether Robert had convinced himself she had because he didn't want her to be out running about the world in a position to embarrass him still further by her antics. Particularly if he aspires to go into politics. But then of course I read in the newspaper that she had attempted to take her own life. There is no further danger of that now, is there?”

  “No,” said John. “But she is . . . most unhappy at Bellevue, deprived as she is of her liberty. As any sane person would be.”

  “It is a pity,” interposed Myra, “that she felt herself unable to come and live with you here four years ago, where she would have the quiet and regularity of life that she needs.”

  Elizabeth sighed again, and shook her head. “I thought it was, though I confess . . . Have you ever tried to live under the same roof as my sister, Mrs. Bradwell?” The affection in her crooked smile—suddenly extraordinarily like Mary's—was mixed with wry wisdom and a lifetime of exasperation.

  She went on, “But a few years ago was . . . not a good time for Mary to come to Springfield. I would have preferred to see her do so, but 1872 was the year that oaf Billy Herndon chose to publish his biography of Mr. Lincoln—as if the world needed another one—and Mary was incensed. And since my sister is seldom incensed quietly, there was the usual shrieking-contest in the newspapers, with accusations of drunkenness on one side and insanity on the other, and everyone taking sides—mostly taking Mr. Herndon's side, because of that ridiculous quarrel over the Monument. All the wartime scandals were raked into the open again, and after all was said and done Mary felt that she could not come to the only family that she has.”

  “Did you read Mr. Herndon's book?” asked John curiously.

  “Read it? I was in it. Billy came here—sober, for once—and asked a great many impertinent questions about my sister and Mr. Lincoln. And while I'm delighted that someone finally pointed out to the nation that Mr. Lincoln put his pants on one leg at a time like everyone else, Billy does tend to take straws and make trees of them simply because he likes the look of trees.

  “The true problem was, I think,” she continued, “that both Billy and my sister want to be the Keeper of the Flame, the True Authority on the National Martyr. The one that everyone else has to come to. The same way they both wanted to be first in his affection while he lived. But while Billy wanted to portray Mr. Lincoln as a man among men, Mary wanted to purge out all those unpleasant human details that showed him to be less than incomparably perfect—and that, incidentally, might reflect badly on her. And really, when it came to Billy claiming that Lincoln's mother was illegitimate—which true or false is taking realism a little far—or that Lincoln was an Unbeliever, I can understand Mary's point, though I do believe berating him like a fishwife in public print was not the best way to deal with the problem.

  “The shouting seems to have died down now, though.” She set her teacup down with a precise click. “I think that were Mary to come live in Springfield, she could do so without undue animosity.”

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” ASKED MYRA, AS SHE AND JOHN TOOK THEIR seats once again in the train for Chicago late that afternoon. At no time was train travel in summertime enjoyable, for smoke and cinders blew in through the windows every time anyone opened them in an effort to mitigate the stifling heat, and the Illinois Central, like other lines, tended to relegate its oldest rolling stock to duty as “colored” cars. The hard wooden seats and battered paneling gave off a smell of ground-in dirt, tobacco smoke, and the sweetish reek of tobacco expectorate; the window-sashes were either broken or loosened and rattled like castanets with every jolt of the wheels; and the floors were clearly not swept as frequently as elsewhere on the train.

  In the other seats, mothers hushed sleepy children, and men talked of prospects for work, in Springfield and points west, in quiet, beaten voices. Some glanced curiously at the well-dressed white woman in her striped summer skirts and parasol, but no one commented, and the boy who came through selling peanuts and bottled lemonade gave her a friendly grin when she bought some of his wares.

  “About Sister Elizabeth? Allow me.” John gestured Myra to put away her coin-purse, and handed the boy a silver quarter. The boy dug in his pocket for the nickel change from two bags of peanuts and two bottles of lemonade, and John waved it aside. With another smile the boy opened the bottles for them in a great fizz of carbonation, and went on his way wiping his hands on his apron.


  “About Mary.” Myra settled back on the scarred old seat. “In your opinion, is she well enough to be released into her sister's home?”

  “Yes. Although whether Dr. Patterson would agree with me—”

  “You leave Dr. Patterson to me.” She sounded like a very businesslike knight referring to a very old and toothless dragon. “I must see her myself to be sure, of course, before I commit myself to any course of action. Or are you one of those who believe that such matters are best judged by physicians?”

  John was silent for a time, cradling the lemonade bottle in his gloved hands. Thinking about Mary Lincoln. About the fragile and melancholic Mrs. Hill. About women he'd known in Jacksonville, women who'd been put there years before by husbands or fathers who found them troublesome, sowers of discord, constantly angry for no reason that those husbands and fathers thought justified . . .

  Slowly he said, “No. Dr. Patterson doesn't agree with the law in this state that a jury trial is necessary—he's been working for years to have it overturned, to permit commitment on the signatures of two physicians. But in my years of working with the insane, I've met far more than two physicians I wouldn't want as judges of my sanity. The more I deal with the insane—the more I realize I just don't know. I don't think anyone knows.”

  He fell quiet again, gazing out the window at the green-gold wheat-fields streaming past the windows, baking in the lengthening light of the evening sun. Birds flew up along the track, their calls drowned by the hammering of the wheels.

  Peace and silence and stillness. The “rest” that Patterson kept advocating for the women under his charge, because their “systems” could not take the stress and noise of the cities . . . much as, before the War, John had heard it argued by his master's friends that to free black men and women from the joys of sixteen-hours-a-day agricultural labor would be no kindness.