The Emancipator's Wife (37 page)

“No need to weep, child,” added Mammy Sally kindly. “You're home now.”

Y
EARS BEFORE, WHEN
L
INCOLN HAD RETREATED IN EXHAUSTION TO
Speed's plantation, Mary had pictured him in her home state, seeing close up for himself the conditions that so many Yankees fulminated against in self-righteous ignorance. In the three weeks they spent in the big front bedroom of her father's house that November, she had a chance at last to act as her husband's guide as he further explored the world of the South, this ambiguous double world of white and black.

Being Lincoln, of course, he would talk to anyone and listen to anyone, without the slightest sign that he even noticed whether they were white or black, male or female—he and Cash Clay were the only men she'd met in her life who had ever suggested that women as well as men ought to have the vote. She noticed that the house servants, who could be the sternest critics of “white trash” manners and pretensions, accepted him immediately—and not, she was sure, because he was a Congressman. They'd seen Congressmen before, and thought fairly poorly of some. One morning, waking early, Mary came downstairs and found Lincoln having breakfast in the kitchen, talking to Mammy Sally and Nelson. “You watch out for that one, sir,” she heard Nelson's voice as she crossed the shadowy dining-room. “She get mad at Mammy Sally once, she put salt in her coffee—”

“Now, I can't
believe
my Molly would do a terrible thing like
that
!” gasped Lincoln, in such exaggerated shock that both servants burst into the good-humored laughter of those—Mary reflected with wry affection—who knew her all too well.

Then she heard Mammy Sally say, more quietly, “She look happy, Mr. Lincoln. I always knew she'd need a strong man to take care of her; you're good for her.”

Elizabeth might have her doubts about what was due a Todd of
Lexington, Mary reflected, her heart warmed by joy. But it was wise Mammy Sally who saw more clearly what Mary needed.

It was good to know.

On the second night of their stay, Robert Todd held a party in their honor, and in the midst of flirting with old beaux (Nate Bodley had grown sadly stout and reeked of liquor) and catching up news from girlfriends (Mary Wickliffe had married the brother of Meg's husband, of all things), Mary glanced across the crowded room and saw Lincoln as usual in a knot of men, local politicians—listening with the air of a man who seeks to comprehend the place in which he finds himself.

He always listened more than he talked. She had heard him described as a jokester and a talker, but in fact he was more an observer. It was only that, when he talked, people remembered the tales and jests he told. She was intensely sorry Cash Clay was away—Cash had been among the first to volunteer, Meg Wickliffe (now Preston) had written her, and had gone with General Zachary Taylor to invade Mexico. He had been captured in January; “We just heard he's been freed,” Meg now informed her breathlessly. Even without Cash's assistance, Lincoln and Robert Todd were engrossed in conversation hours after Betsey had gone yawning up to bed and the servants had cleaned up after the rest of the long-departed guests.

“I don't think you'll find a man in this country who'd argue that with Oregon settling up, we shouldn't have the rest of New Mexico as well,” her father said. “Mexico can't hold the harbors of the California coast, for instance, and if we don't take them you know it's only a matter of time before Russia does.”

After making sure Bobby and Eddie were tucked up in the trundle-bed in the corner of the guest-room, Mary crept silently back downstairs. The rear parlor was dim but for a single lamp, its amber light outlining her father's blunt features, Lincoln's long nose and jaw.

“I s'pose the average highway robber would make the same point about the contents of your pockets—that he's got a better use for 'em, an' if he don't take 'em the feller down the road will.” Movement in the darker shadows of the front parlor, where Pendleton was loading the last of the abandoned punch-cups onto a tray. “But that aside, my question is: will the slaveholders in Congress try to make New Mexico into slave territories? An' then admit 'em as slave states?”

Robert Todd laughed. “We haven't even taken those places yet,
Lincoln, and here you're worrying about what their status as
states
will be?”

“I am, yes. That's a flaw of my character. Because as long as slavery has a legal foothold in this country, it's gonna be like an alligator in your bathtub: every time you turn around, there the blame thing is. And the more I look at the problem, the more it seems to me that it's beyond my ability to come up with
any
solution that won't cause more damage than it remedies.”

Mary slipped through the door, and settled on the black horsehair sofa, content to simply listen to the talk of these men that she loved. Lincoln was smiling, cracking his knuckles, his eyes very bright. In the forgiving warmth of the lamplight, her father's face shed years; it was as she remembered it from her childhood.

She was, again, her father's favored child, listening to the talk as she'd always listened, included in that circle of friendship and power.

If there was greater contentment in life, she couldn't imagine what it might be.

T
HREE WEEKS OF PEACE.
T
HREE WEEKS OF BEING ABLE TO LIE ABED
with her husband in the mornings, secure in the knowledge that Mammy Sally was looking after Eddie and that Bobby had been absorbed into the flock of younger Todds, playing noisily in the wide garden with Alec and Elodie, Mattie and Kitty. On the first day of their stay, she and Betsey had taken the children aside and ordered them on pain of death not to tease Bobby about his eye, and so far the threat seemed to be working. And even if Bobby ran away, Jane or Judy would find him, not she.

Three weeks of Chaney's marvelous cooking, of rides in the countryside with her father and her husband. Of watching Lincoln's utter bliss in browsing through her father's library and reading everything he could lay hands on, far into the night. Three weeks of listening avidly to talk of the war and the upcoming session of Congress. Of seeing the men of the district encounter Lincoln without the memory of the uncertain hick who had first come to Springfield in buckskin britches shrunken halfway up his shins. Here, he was, instead, a man who had been elected by the voters of his state.

A man who would one day have power.

And their approval shone back onto her, who had seen this man's promise and married him, when nearly everyone else had turned away.

They went to hear Henry Clay speak, first in the courtroom, then in the town's brick market-house while the rain pounded down outside. Thin and brittle-looking now, his hands stiff with arthritis, Clay blazed with his old intelligent fire as he denounced the war with Mexico, which had already claimed the life of his oldest son. Afterwards Mary fulfilled one of her deepest dreams by introducing Lincoln to Clay, beside the rough temporary stage that had been erected at one end of the hall. She flashed her old flirtatious smile at the statesman who had been like a second father to her: “And I promise you, Mr. Clay, he will be President one day. Though I'm still waiting for that invitation to
your
inaugural ball.”

Clay laughed, “It may happen yet, Miss,” and shook one long finger at her. His ginger hair was snowy now and this made his eyes seem pale as the wintry sky. He glanced across at Lincoln—there was not much difference in their heights. “I'm running for the Senate again this year—drives me crazy to see others making a mess of things up there.”

“I'll try to keep things from going all to hell, sir,” promised Lincoln, a little shyly, “till you arrive.”

They took the stage to Winchester, Virginia, and from there the railroad to Washington City. They arrived late—the December night was bitterly cold and drizzly, the streets outside the depot swamps that rivaled the worst of Springfield's hog-wallows. Lincoln found porters for their four trunks, free blacks or, Mary guessed, slaves “working out” and bringing their owner part of whatever they earned for the day. As they walked down the dark street toward Brown's Hotel—recommended by Lincoln's legal colleague Judge David Davis—Lincoln gazed around him, as if sniffing the air in this, the largest city he'd seen in his life.

Far down one street the dark bulk of the Capitol loomed, lost in a maze of scaffolding. Brick houses stood among trees, some of them mellowed and elegant with years. Here and there newer buildings, taller and bulkier, shouldered each other in modern blocks. The streets were extravagantly wide, and gold lights shone in a few windows, blurred with mist.

“So this is Washington,” said Lincoln softly. He carried both his sons, Eddie on his arm as easily as if the boy had been a parcel and Bobby on his shoulders, looking out wearily over his tall black hat. Both boys, after darting crazily up and down the aisle of the train car all day as was their wont, had suddenly crumpled with exhaustion, and Eddie was snoring softly in the circle of his father's arm.

Mary drew a deep breath, trembling all over with excitement, anticipation, triumph. “Yes,” she said, and her breath misted amber in the lights of the hotel as they approached its doors. “We're finally here.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-EIGHT

Washington 1848

T
HEY REMAINED ONE NIGHT IN
B
ROWN
'
S
H
OTEL.
T
HE FOLLOWING
morning Lincoln went out and found them quarters at Mrs. Ann Spriggs's boardinghouse on First Street, just down the hill behind the Capitol, where both Cousin John Stuart and E. D. Baker had stayed.

And Mary remembered all over again why—and how much—she loathed boardinghouses.

She had met already Mr. Washburne, Lincoln's plump and pink-faced Congressional colleague from Galena. The first night at Mrs. Spriggs's, Mary could see the two men making a great effort to keep the conversation general at the common-table, before vanishing into the parlor to the more serious endeavor of hashing through what kind of political horse-trading each had had to do to get here, and comparing impressions of just how the land lay in the House of Representatives. Mary longed to join them as she'd joined Lincoln and her father but here there was no Mammy Sally to make sure Eddie was tucked up warmly and to keep Bobby in his bed. By the time overexcited Bobby was finally asleep—he wanted both a song and a story—it was quite late. Slipping down the stairs, she found
Lincoln and Washburne still beside the parlor stove, with an elderly, ascetic gentleman who'd been introduced to her as Mr. Joshua Giddings—a name she recognized instantly from the abolitionist papers that Cash still sent her.

“You'll find within a day how it is in this city, sir,” Giddings was saying, jabbing a skinny finger at Lincoln. “Slave pens within a hundred yards of the Capitol Building. Aside from the sheer disgrace of it, the traffic in Washington City represents a constant danger to every free man and woman of color who tries to go about their business here, for the slave-dealers do not scruple to kidnap men and women of color on these very streets, drug them with opium, and sell them south to Virginia and Georgia under the name of law. How anyone can hesitate to take a stand against such doings . . .”

“It all depends on what kind of stand you're fixing to take,” replied Lincoln in his slow, light tenor. “I'll do my utmost to bring about whatever change in the law will mitigate the situation, but I can no more oppose the Constitution as it stands, than I can plead in court that my client should be permitted to break a law which I—or he—privately considers to be unjust.”

Giddings's pale eyes glinted behind their spectacles, but for a moment he said nothing. Cash, Mary reflected, would have been on his feet and shouting.

“If nothing else,” put in Washburne, “God help any man hopeful of being elected to anything who says the blacks should be freed. There are few enough jobs for white men in Illinois. You speak to any laborer on the street in Galena and he'll tell you there are too many Portuguese and Irish and Italians coming in as it is. And that in Illinois, let alone what it's like in New York. It wasn't more than a dozen years ago they were burning colored orphanages and beating free Negroes to death in the streets. They won't stand for it, sir—and a man who doesn't get elected loses his chance to do any good whatsoever for anyone.”

“That reminds me of a story,” remarked Lincoln, stretching out his long legs to the stove—which barely provided enough heat to encompass the three sitting near it, much less Mary in the darkness of the stairway arch, with her shawl of pink cashmere wrapped around her shoulders. “You ever hear about the Continental soldier after the Battle of Bunker Hill who scouted on ahead to the British lines? First he put on a red coat, so the British wouldn't shoot him, then he picked up a British musket, because it would shoot straighter than his own old piece, then he put on a pair of British boots so the British pickets wouldn't identify him by his old moccasins, and then a powdered wig for the same reason....He ended up looking so much like a redcoat that he was finally obliged to shoot himself.”

Listening to him—watching his exaggerated gestures, the way his face changed to the voice of this character or that, Mary had to smile. They would love him here in Washington. This was his place . . . and she would be here at his side.

From upstairs, Bobby's voice called out fretfully, “Mama!”

Elsewhere in the house another voice replied, “Can't someone shut that brat up?”

Mary tore herself away from the glow of the fire, the three men's faces, the laughter and the talk, and hastily ascended the stair to her child.

She got Bobby settled—the room was freezing cold, and Eddie was coughing—and then got into her nightdress behind the dressing-screen, brushed out her hair, and got into bed. She fell asleep still waiting for Lincoln to come upstairs.

L
IVING IN
W
ASHINGTON, EVEN IN A BOARDINGHOUSE, HAD ITS
compensations. Their first Friday evening in the city, Lincoln bribed Mrs. Spriggs to look after Bobby and Eddie, and took Mary to a “drawing room” at the White House. The hack let them off some distance down Pennsylvania Avenue due to the crush of other hacks and polished town-carriages, all vying for position in the black sea of mud. Picking their way along the edge of the unpaved street through the raw mists under the shelter of her husband's big black umbrella (“And you
will
fold that thing up before we reach the steps.... What a sight we'll present to the President, coming up like a . . . a greengrocer and his wife . . . !”) Mary saw its windows glowing through the darkness, and it seemed to her that her heart turned over in her breast.

The Executive Mansion.

We will live there. I know it.

Her grip tightened hard on the bony arm linked through hers and wild excitement shivered through her like a flame. In a way, she knew they were coming home.

“Whatever you say, Mother,” Lincoln agreed, in his most placid bumpkin style, but she could tell that he was as excited as she. She glanced up at his face, saw the light in his eyes as he looked at the place, the hard eager folds at the corners of his mouth. He didn't speak much of his ambition—he didn't speak much, Mary knew, of anything that mattered deeply to him. But since they'd left Springfield under its gray prairie skies five weeks ago, she'd felt in his flesh and his bones and his breath the vibration of his exultation.

He was, at last, coming into the place where he could make some difference in the lives of men. Where he could use his abilities, and be recognized and heard.

And she was by his side, his partner before all the world.

She made a mental note to write Elizabeth all about “our evening at the Executive Mansion,” “our conversation with Mr. Polk,” even if Polk
was
a Democrat. That should teach her to call Mary's husband a hayseed.

The doors of the mansion stood open. Voices poured out, into the raw winter air.

The gathering, Mary realized with a pang of disappointment as they stepped into the lamp-lit hall, was not a select one. It seemed like everyone in Washington was there.

An endless reception line snaked from the front hall into the Red
Parlor, where the diminutive President Polk and his dark-eyed imperious wife stood side by side, shaking hands with all comers. Mr. Polk smiled and nodded and spoke a few words of greeting to “our new colleague from Illinois,” but passed on immediately to greet Mr. Washburne, in line behind them. Mrs. Polk expressed a polite hope that Mary was finding residence in the capital comfortable, while coolly evaluating: dress, hair, deportment, toilette, and jewelry in a single all-appraising glance. Ticked off on a mental list, filed for future reference, and the page turned. Mary wasn't even given a chance to say whether she was finding residence in the capital comfortable or not.

I'd like to see you try to put yourself together for a reception in a boardinghouse room with two boys underfoot and no one but your husband to lace you up,
Mary reflected, looking back at the elegant, slim woman already exchanging affectionate greetings with a quiet-voiced Virginia lady, scion of one of the local planter families and—from the way everyone greeted her—hostess to half the government. Mary picked out the expensive sheen of Italian silk in the golden warmth of the chandelier, fabric unobtainable in Springfield, the tulle light as summer breath. The swagged double skirts made her own tiers of ruffles appear slightly dowdy and very much a remnant of last year or the year before.

Little Stephen Douglas came over to her, dandified as ever, and joked about old times. But he was drawn quickly back into the circles of the Southern Senators, whose wives all seemed to be cousins or schoolmates and have little interest in Illinois Whigs. Douglas had recently married the daughter of a North Carolina planter, and seemed to have been taken in as a brother by every slaveholding Democrat in Washington, she reflected.

Mary recognized at once who the influential hostesses were, around whom the men clustered; the talk was of politics, but politics as a closed club of who knew whom. The wives of the powerful Southern Senators, or of local bankers and landholders, had their townhouses here and could entertain such birds-of-passage as mere members of the House. They greeted Mary politely—when they noticed her at all—but spoke of politics in the context of long-standing personal alliances: who could be trusted and who could not, who was on the outside and who was on the in, and who was discreetly keeping a mistress in some little rented cottage in Alexandria across the river.

Five years of marriage had accustomed Mary—almost—to no longer being the belle of the ball, but in Springfield at least she was more and more being recognized as Abraham Lincoln's wife.

Here, no one seemed particularly to care what things were like in Illinois, or who her husband was.

Behind her, as she moved away from one chatty group in quest of her husband—who as the tallest man in the room wasn't hard to locate—Mary heard someone say, “Oh, she's from the West.” She didn't know whether it was she whom the speaker meant or not.

In the chilly winter months that followed, she attended five more Friday “drawing rooms” at the Executive Mansion, and seldom spoke to a soul.

Dutifully, the day the family moved to Mrs. Spriggs's, Mary had gone to a printer's and had new cards made up:
Mrs. Abraham Lincoln—
gilt-embossed in the most handsome Germanic black-letter—and smaller ones with just
Abraham Lincoln.
She'd been warned by Cousin John's wife that Washington printers cost three times what Simeon Francis charged and were slow to boot, but there was no getting around them. With the most furious haggling Mary could do, she could not get any of the three printers she consulted to lower the cost by so much as ten cents on the hundred, and the dent they made in her monthly budget was painfully large.

When first Mary had married him, Lincoln had joked about morning-calls and visiting-cards as the flub-dubs of the rich, on par with President Van Buren's notorious golden spoons. He'd changed his tune, however, when Mary had started making morning-calls on the wives of those politicians who came to Springfield for the Legislative sessions, and the dinner parties she'd organized had smoothed the rough edges of acquaintanceship among men of power from different parts of the state.

He himself had commented—a little to his surprise—on how much difference it made, trying to talk a man into throwing his support to a road-building appropriation, whether you talked to him in a tavern's common-room or in your own comfortable parlor after a good dinner.

Leaving cards was another way of cementing ties—of marking yourself as someone to be taken seriously by people of wealth and power.

Thus, by the time they reached Washington, Lincoln was willing to do what all Congressmen did: spend an hour or two between breakfast and the start of the Congressional sessions at eleven, two or three days a week, in attendance on Mary as she made the rounds of the homes of Washington's elite, leaving a trail of cards in their wake. Two of Mr. Lincoln's (for
Senator Useful and Mrs. Useful) and one of Mary's (for Mrs. Useful—God forbid even the implication that a lady should call upon a man!), with a corner folded down to indicate that Mrs. Lincoln had called in person. Mary deeply enjoyed this ritual, whether Lincoln accompanied her or not. If the hostess was “at home,” it was a way of learning news and rumor, of getting the name Lincoln known, and of talking—if she was lucky—of something other than servants and children for fifteen minutes.

Many Congressmen made calls on Sundays as well, but Lincoln drew the line at that, preferring to take the boys down to the steamboat wharves on the Potomac while Mary attended St. John's Episcopal Church, or to take his sons to look at the ragged mudholes and heaped masonry where contractors were preparing to rear a granite obelisk as a monument to George Washington. As the winter advanced these outings became less possible. Washington was cold with a damp, clinging chill entirely foreign to the hard iciness of the Illinois prairies or Lexington's upland frosts. Few streets in the city were paved, and like Springfield's humbler ways, the vast and splendidly named avenues of the capital turned from aisles of dust to rivers of mud.