A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (41 page)

“I don't like to be uninformed,” she was saying, the words calculated as a parting statement as she headed to the door.

“I think they're back together,” he said.

“Who?”

“Lincoln and Mary Todd.”

“Your friend is an interesting case,” she said, finally lightening enough to give him a smile. “He doesn't seem to tire of finding new ways to destroy himself.”

I
T WAS FINISHED.
Cage leaned forward in his chair and squared the loose papers on his desk into a neat stack. The fair copy of his manuscript—endlessly revised, boldly reconceived more than once—was in the end only a physical object, of less discernible value than the pot of glue resting beside it. But to him it was a living thing, as breathing and brooding as its author. He had titled it
The Prairie Road.
Those three words, written in as elegant a hand as he could command on the top sheet of the manuscript, seemed to rise from the page with startling clarity and rightness, as if there could never have been any other title. It was the record of a trackless journey, of one soul's progression toward an invisible destination, through a wilderness without landmarks. Everything was in it, he thought: everything he was, everything he had seen or sensed in himself or others. It was partly a record of his own longing, a portrait of an orphaned soul afraid of being shut out of the normal congress of human life, yet almost as afraid of fitting into it. But it was also the chronicle of a city struggling to rise from the wilderness, and of other men and women with their own towering dreams. Some of these people—like Lincoln—had come from nothing, and yet had somehow developed a conviction that they could not allow themselves to be simply mortal, that they had to strive and achieve and advance and write themselves into the pages of history.

He had been awake until four in the morning writing out the fair copy, and after that he tried to go to sleep but could not. He was too excited about the finished manuscript on his desk, too full of thoughts about what it might portend. So now he was in a sleepless and exhilarated state. He washed and cleaned his teeth and changed out of yesterday's clothes, and heard the breakfast bell ringing downstairs. He was thrillingly hungry and almost quaking with joy and bewilderment that the great task had really been completed.

He couldn't be alone. He needed to tell someone. He could already picture the blank look on Ellie's face, her refusal to understand why he would be in such an emotional churn over the completion of a manuscript that was only 136 pages long, and in which the writing did not even extend margin to margin. Her own creative instincts—her eye for color and material, her almost visionary sense of the kind of things women would want to wear in one year and look back upon with horror in the next—were to her mere tools for a larger strategy of business success.

Lincoln would understand. Lincoln would celebrate with him, would be openly and flatteringly envious. Cage ran downstairs, meaning only to say good morning to his boarders as he downed a cup of coffee and took a biscuit with him to eat on the way to Lincoln's office. But he ran into Ellie in the parlor. She was fully dressed, a warm shawl around her shoulders and a bonnet tied tight to her chin, and on her way out the door.

“Well, this is a thunderbolt,” she declared.

“Yes, it is,” he said, thinking somehow that she knew he had finished his book. “It took me a little by surprise. But how did you know? I don't remember telling you it was about to happen.”

“You didn't have to.
She
did.”

“What do you mean? Who are you talking about?”

“Well, Mary Todd, of course. She left a note for me with Mrs. Hopper at seven this morning. No time to wait until the shop opens. She needs her dress altered by tonight or there'll be no wedding.”

“Mary Todd is getting married? To whom?”

“I don't understand. You mean you don't know? She's getting married to Lincoln. Tonight! What did you think I meant?”

So the thunderbolt Ellie had been talking about wasn't Cage's completion of his book. It was a genuine thunderbolt, a perplexing out-of-nowhere development that made no sense. Cage hadn't talked to Lincoln for weeks—he had been out on the autumn circuit—but surely he would have written him if, in the two months since he had reconnected with Mary, he had decided to throw himself headlong into that particular swamp again.

He walked over to Lincoln's office. It was a Friday in early November, a clear sky, a cold wind coming in off the prairie agitating the leaves remaining on the trees. Stray dogs shivered in doorways and below porches, business signs swung and creaked on their chains.

“He's across the street at that new jewelry store,” Stephen Logan said from his desk when Cage entered the office. “Buying a ring. Have you heard he's getting married?”

Lincoln was on his way out of the jewelry store just as Cage walked up to it. He was holding a small velvet bag and was looking just as sleep-starved and weirdly alert as Cage felt himself to be. He wore a beaver hat and his most-abused suit of clothes, wrinkled and road-worn from his circuit travels. The bow of his tie was so haphazardly made it was almost perpendicular.

“There you are!” he said to Cage. “I was on my way to find you. I'm getting married tonight and I need a best man. Will you do it?”

“Where did this idea come from?”

“Well, it came up quick, I admit. Molly and I have been sending letters back and forth while I was on the circuit and got sort of friendly through the mails again. So when I got back to Springfield we just figured why not?”

“That doesn't make any sense. Why does it have to happen tonight? Why are you just now asking me to be your best man?”

“People get married on a whim all the time, don't they? Of course there's some feathers that'll need smoothing. Mary's sister Elizabeth's a little agitated about it, and Ninian's always looked down on me, but they're turning their house over to us for the wedding and rustling up some gingerbread to feed the guests. Reverend Dresser said he'd do the honors, and I got this jeweler in there to engrave this ring overnight so we're all set for the particulars except I don't have a best man.”

He opened the bag and held the gold ring out to Cage. “It'll take me another half dozen bankruptcy cases to pay it off. Take a look inside the band. I had him write ‘Love is Eternal.' I hope it is.”

Cage took the ring, inspected the writing inside it, then handed it back to Lincoln without commenting on it. The shops were all open now, and despite the cold the streets were crowded with people going about their morning business.

“Don't marry her,” Cage blurted out.

“What? Why?”

“She's bad for you. You know that. Look what happened to you before.”

“That was almost two years ago. I didn't have the sense then to know how right she is for me.”

“She's
not
right for you!”

He had been speaking above the noise of the wind, but it had died down an instant before and his exasperated voice suddenly erupted with a clarion intensity he didn't intend. It startled him for a moment, but the people in the busy square went on about their errands as if they hadn't heard. Cage lowered his voice. “She'll make you miserable.”

“Oh, I doubt that she will too much.” He nodded hello to several men walking across the street to the capitol, then lowered his voice as he spoke to Cage again. “Anyway, the thing is done.”

“Why is the thing done? Where is the harm in backing out of a rash decision? The Edwardses will be relieved, and if you and Mary decide you want to get married you can take your time and—”

“We can't take our time, Cage. If we do, there's the matter of running the risk of consequences.”

“Do you mean—”

“Let's go over here.”

He led Cage to the back of Hoffman's Row where they used to play fives, a time that seemed suddenly as remote to Cage as childhood. Lincoln craned his neck up and around, making sure the windows looking down on them were all closed. Still, he kept his voice almost to a whisper.

“When I got back home the other night, I wanted to see her, and I knew the Edwardses wouldn't want the two of us at their house after all the confusion that had happened between Molly and me. And they didn't think so highly of her getting involved in that Shields business, either. So I asked Sim Francis if we could meet at his house. Well, we did, and Sim and Eliza went up to bed and they left us down there in the parlor alone and told us to stay and talk as long as we wanted. So we stayed and we talked and then we started kissing and that led us on to other endeavors.”

“Such as?”

“Christ, Cage! Do you have an imagination or not?” He looked up at the windows again
,
just to make doubly sure.

“So you see I've got to marry her.”

“I don't see that at all. Plenty of men and women have had sexual relations without getting instantly married.”

“There might be a baby coming.”

“There's probably not!”

“But if there is, and we wait any longer to get married how would it look when the baby was born? Molly would be cast down pretty low, don't you reckon? And I wouldn't be raised up too high, either. It's a dilemma with an elegantly simple remedy. I've already got a room for us at the Globe to live in. Anyway, getting married is something I should have done a long time ago. I might be entering hell but I think not. Mary's smart and good-looking and I have the feeling she'll help take the slack out of me and improve my character and my prospects along with it. Look at Speed. Look at how happy he turned out to be with Fanny.”

Cage felt all at once that he was sitting in the jury box, listening to Lincoln deliver a closing argument in a trial, an argument whose coils of logic were woven so tight that doubt could not breach them. But this time Lincoln was also trying to convince himself. His voice was higher-pitched than it would have been in a courtroom, and his gray eyes were desperate and pleading.

“I'm sorry I didn't give you more notice,” he said. “But everything sort of had to happen at once. I'd like you to be my best man, as I said. I'd be honored if you would do so. All it would require is for you to take this ring and put it in your pocket and hand it to me when the reverend says it's time.”

Cage had no choice but to nod. Lincoln handed him the velvet bag again and he slipped it into his waistcoat pocket, charging himself with remembering it was there when he changed clothes for the wedding.

“Don't look so solemn,” Lincoln said, looking solemn himself. “I'm the happiest I've ever been.”

They were back in the parlor of the Edwards house, the site of so many festivities in the past and now the scene of a strange and ambiguous marriage. The light had fallen, the candles in the chandeliers were lit, a buffet table at the far end held a wedding cake Elizabeth Edwards had somehow come up with at a day's notice, along with stacks of gingerbread and a bowl of punch. Mrs. Edwards and her husband stood behind the bride and groom as they faced the Episcopal minister who was droning his way through
The Book of Common Prayer.
Ninian Edwards looked annoyed, but that was his usual expression. Elizabeth looked worried, no doubt wondering about her sister's future with a man who had no money and no breeding and who had already rejected her once and had a tendency to embarrass himself in public. Now, if he embarrassed himself again, he would be dragging the Todd family into the center of his troubles. But even Elizabeth had to know that Abraham Lincoln was the furthest thing possible from an inconsequential man. Here he was, after all, in the Edwards house on Aristocracy Hill, marrying the sometimes beautiful, temperamental, and hard-to-interest young woman who had grown up gossiping about politics with Henry Clay and was not likely to choose a husband who did not appear to her to wear the mantle of destiny.

In any case, Mary Todd's eyes were on the preacher, not on her disapproving sister and brother-in-law. The dress Ellie had altered for her that day—perhaps taken in, since she had lost a little of the weight she had gained—was a subtle yellow, with a chain of equally subtle embroidered flowers at the neckline. The pale silk set off Mary to great advantage. Her face was a mask of triumph. From time to time she looked from Reverend Dresser to the tall, rangy man standing beside her. From time to time their eyes met, but for the most part Lincoln was looking over the head of the man who was marrying them, staring at the pattern in the wallpaper as if it held an infinity of wonders. From all appearances, he had tamed his uncertainty and was confident next to his bride. He was fashionably clothed for once, the coat tight in the sleeves, the waistcoat cut low, his cravat in a cramped bow beneath his chin. His hair was neither too short nor too wild, and weeks on the circuit had exposed his skin to the sun, so that his face was hale and ruddy, bearing no traces of the parchment-like pall that crept over it when he was worried and overworked. He was not in the least peculiar-looking on his wedding day
,
just a tall, gangly, rugged man, maybe handsome, maybe not, but with an evident ascetic strength of body and character, a man willingly following the course before him, hoping but not counting on it to lead to happiness.