A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (22 page)

Cage fell asleep long before the end of the story. He was shaken awake by Lincoln just as the sun was coming up. Speed and Herndon were snoring on the double bed, lying foot to chin. Baker was passed out on the floor and Ash Merritt had apparently slipped away at some point to go home.

“Let's play ball,” Lincoln whispered to Cage.

The rain had stopped and an icy early-morning sunlight presided over the city. They walked to the makeshift playing court behind the square. The city was waking up and they could smell bread from the bakeries. From the kitchens of homes and taverns and lodging houses came the aromas of coffee and hoecakes and frying meat. Cage enjoyed the sensation of being ravenous, of knowing that soon—but not yet—he would have his breakfast. They took off the good wool coats they had worn to the cotillion and unbuttoned their waistcoats and played ball in their shirtsleeves, building up a fine sweat in the cold air as they listened to the rhythmic
thunk
of the ball and the hammering and clinking of the stonemasons who were already at work trying to finish the long-overdue statehouse.

They played silently, losing themselves in the intensity of the game. Cage was quicker than Lincoln and had a better eye for where the ball was going to be, but his opponent's arms were still hazardously long, and dodging them was like trying to dodge the blades of a spinning windmill. When they had finally decreed an end to the contest—Cage up by a game—they were both heaving for breath. Lincoln said that despite the fact he had not slept all night he must go home and get cleaned up and be in his office by eight thirty. There were a number of cases that needed attention immediately, and Stuart's continued absence in Washington City added exponentially to Lincoln's workload. A “damned hawk-billed yankee” kept writing him about the eighty dollars that he said his client was owed; and Mr. Wright, who lived up in South Fork, was anxious about some deeds that Stuart had assured him were in the office somewhere but that Lincoln had never seen.

“A two-man law office runs better when there are two men running it,” he said.

“You may have forgotten that I'm also a damned hawk-billed yankee.”

“I meant no offense to Massachusetts men, or for that matter to the avian race. Should I pursue Miss Todd?”

“Do you like her?”

“I don't know. I like the idea of her. She scares me a little.”

“I wouldn't marry a woman I was scared of.”

“I don't mean that. I could wrestle her down in a fair fight. But she's formidable, don't you think? She speaks French as natural as a dog barks. And did you see her dancing? I could never keep up with that. I shouldn't even try it.”

“Then why?”

“Because she unsettles me in a way that I like. She's too good-looking for me, she's too proper for me—she's a Todd, for God's sake!—and she's too smart for me. Therefore, to one way of thinking, she's perfect for me.”

He bounced the ball on the ground a half dozen times, catching it in his hand with an increasingly agitated swipe as he pondered the issue.

“Be careful you don't set something in motion you won't be able to stop,” Cage said.

“I'm a long way from that. I'm just starting to get my thoughts in order. And of course she would have to like me back, and as we know I'm rough and peculiar and not fit for a woman's company. The whole affair would likely be me and Miss Owens all over again.”

He turned his head, squinting against the low winter sun as he looked at Cage.

“What about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she's come to Springfield to get married. She won't leave until she does. Why don't you marry her yourself and put an end to my deliberations in the matter?”

Cage had thought about it
,
just for a moment when he had first been introduced to her by Mrs. Edwards, caught up in Mary's beaming smile, her intoxicating enthusiasm for all the commotion going on around her, the way her eyes searched the crowded hall as she talked to him. But he knew almost instinctively that their natures could never be compatible, that her appetite for excitement—for victories and defeats and all-enveloping contests, for friends and enemies and ceaseless campaigns waged with her whole heart—was something that would seek to obliterate the quiet reflection he knew he needed for his work.

“No,” he told Lincoln, as if the thought of marrying Mary Todd had not occurred to him. “Stephen Douglas might be in your way, and who knows who else, but not me.”

Lincoln accepted this answer with a thoughtful grunt, but as they were walking back in the direction of Speed's store he turned to Cage and asked, “Who
will
you marry, then?”

“I'm not sure that I have to marry anyone.”

“So it's enough—what you have with her?”

“What I have with whom? Are you talking about Ellie?”

“Of course I am. You moved her into the Palatine, you went into business with her. Do you think your friends are completely unobservant? You know, of course, your attachment to her being what it seems, that we would never think to…”

Unable to find the words to complete his thought, he left it unfinished. Cage felt his habitual burden of jealousy lightened a bit.

“I know”

“As soon as it became clear…”

“Yes.”

“Let me ask you this,” Lincoln said, “are you happy with her?”

“I don't know. I would like to be, if she would allow it.”

Lincoln smiled, his sunken, fatigued eyes lightening. His face was unshaven and his hair was plastered with sweat. “I don't know if I would be happy with Miss Todd, or even should be. They say happiness can slow a man down, and I don't have time for that.”

T
HE SLEIGHING PARTY SET OUT
in late afternoon beneath a flawless blue sky, the sun still blindingly bright on the new snow covering the road to Mount Auburn. The members of the high-spirited coterie that had sprung into existence with Mary Todd's arrival in Springfield had sorted themselves into four sleighs, two of them belonging to Ninian Edwards and his wife, one to Joshua Speed, and the other—a two-seater bobsleigh—leased from the town livery. Just after dark they pulled up to a tavern outside of Mount Auburn. The proprietor, knowing it would be a full moon and that there would be sleighing parties heading out in every direction, had the big public room ready, a great fire going, the japan candlesticks out, the floor cleared for an impromptu frolic. He serenaded the party with his fiddle as they pulled up, and kept the music going past midnight while one son worked the bellows at the hearth and the other passed out crullers and quinomie cakes. Everyone was drinking toddies and the ladies were throwing back their heads and proclaiming, “Whig husbands or none!” It was a “William Henry Harrison for President” crowd. No Democrats had been invited, especially Stephen Douglas, whose manners at present were deemed wonderfully inexcusable. He had recently attacked Sim Francis for something the editor had allowed to be published in the
Sangamo Journal.
His weapon had been a cane borrowed from Candlebox Calhoun—leading to many jokes about Douglas's own “diminutive cane,” its lack of “sufficient length,” etc.

The dancing was loose and ragged, no one afraid to hold back for fear of making a fool of himself, as had been the case at the cotillion before the turn of the year. Lincoln was in the middle of it, clomping when he should be gliding, looming above everyone else, helplessly off-beat, turning what started out as a contra dance into a series of formless collisions. He was not drunk like everyone else, but neither was he the preoccupied observer he could become on such occasions. It was one of those rare nights when individual worries and ambitions became somehow irrelevant, forgotten in the flood of music and friendship, light and warmth. If Lincoln had decided after all to begin a campaign for the affections of Mary Todd, Cage saw no evidence of it tonight. The dozen or so people in the party had squeezed into the sleighs haphazardly on the way out, with no special maneuvering to sit with anyone in particular, and the dancing was too chaotic and energetic for any valsing that might have separated the partygoers into couples. But Mary Todd was very much aware of Abraham Lincoln, laughing at his awkward footing, constantly turning her head and glancing upward as if to make sure he was still in the room.

At one in the morning Ned Baker walked among the men holding out his hat, and they put in four and sixpence apiece to pay the exhausted tavernkeeper and his sons, then they all trooped out into the snow again for the ride back to Springfield. It happened that Cage and Mary found themselves in the backseat of the bobsleigh, with Lincoln and Sim Francis crowded together on the narrow seat in front with Mercy Levering, who was visiting Springfield from Baltimore and whom Mary had adopted as one of her great coterie friends. Francis handed the reins to Lincoln, pleading blind drunkenness.

“Also,” he said in a slurry, sarcastic voice, “I shouldn't drive because I must at all times remain vigilant. I live in terror that Stephen Douglas may jump out of a tree and attack me with a cane again.”

They all laughed because Sim was such a big man that people called him the White Bear, and because the only damage that Douglas had done to him with Candlebox Calhoun's cane was to squash an apple he had been carrying in his coat pocket.

Lincoln was an inexpert driver, but a sober one, and the two horses that had been leased along with the sleigh from the livery knew the way back home to their warm stalls in Springfield and were quite willing to head in that direction without a guiding hand. The little sleigh caravan took off, the moonlight illuminating the mounded snow at the sides of the road and the great surging fields of whiteness beyond with such intensity that any lamplight or candlelight would have been a corruption. The moon was brilliant enough that Cage could see its light actually sparkling on the snow, he could read every line in his palm when he held his hand up to his face in wonder. Even the horizon was visible, and the wolves calling to one another from the heart of the night expressed themselves with a symphonic complexity. The sound of the sleigh bells teased around at the edges of this great natural orchestration, sometimes eerily harmonizing with the voices of the wolves.

The sleigh glided along on the new-laid snow covering the road, moving as silently as the scraps of cloud overhead. The mood of the expedition was still high, but no one was speaking anymore. They were listening to the wolves and the bells and studying the eerily bright landscape and the glowing clock dial of the moon. Mary and Cage sat with a buffalo robe up to their chins, both of them staring at Lincoln from behind as he held the reins. He was wearing his usual tall hat and a heavy wool scarf whose bright blue color was as detectable in the moonlight as it might have been in daytime. The scarf covered his face to the bridge of his nose. Sim and Mercy were slumped down in the seat beneath their blankets. She was a slight girl and bundled up next to the White Bear she appeared even slighter. Lincoln sat upright as he drove, the profile of his towering body vividly clear against the sky. He and Sim Francis were speaking about the
Old Soldier,
the pro-Harrison newspaper that Francis was publishing out of his office along with the
Journal,
but they were speaking in low tones and the sound of the sleigh bells obscured most of what they said.

“He looks like Father Jupiter,” Mary whispered to Cage.

“A little,” he admitted.

“Or like the Ancient of Days. Is it blasphemous to say that?”

“I don't know what God would think. I doubt that Lincoln would appreciate hearing himself described that way.”

“Do you think he heard us?”

Lincoln was still listening to something Francis was saying so Cage shook his head, guessing he had not.

She leaned closer to him, so close that their cheeks touched, and he could feel her cold flushed skin against his own. Her whisper was barely audible.

“I don't know if he's handsome. Well, I'm sure he's not. But it's interesting for a youngish man like him to look like Father Jupiter. What do you think?”

“Yes, I suppose it's always more interesting when people stand apart a little from the expected.”

“
You
stand apart.” The intimate declaration, combined with her breath tickling his side-whiskers, startled him. Her whisper was so low now he wasn't entirely sure if he had heard her correctly. But he needed to reply and so he did.

“I don't know that I do.”

“Oh, I'm quite certain of it. I've read your poems. I read the one last week in the
Journal.
”

She was referring to a piece of Cage's that Sim Francis had published just before Douglas had caned him. It was called “The Indifferent Beast.” Cage had begun writing it shortly after he had been bitten by that dog on the square. Something about looking down at the top of the dog's head as it gnawed on his leg had produced a meditation in six stanzas on the frightening implacability of nature, each living thing locked in its own mind, following its own unshared directives. The poem had flirted rather boldly with the theme of an uncaring universe, of a God implicitly absent. But as far as he knew he had not been charged with infidelity by the citizens of Springfield. Very few of them, he supposed, had even noticed the poem at all.

“You must read the paper thoroughly,” he said to Mary.

“Oh, every word, of course. I don't want to miss anything. You have a gift. I can understand why you don't want to spend all your energy on politics, like the rest of us do. When will you publish another book so the world can properly take notice?”

“As soon as a publisher decides not to turn me down.”

“Turn you down? That's nonsense. I'll write to my father in Lexington. I'm sure he knows publishers in Boston and Philadelphia who would be pleased to bring it out.”

She said this so casually he hardly knew whether to credit it, but she clearly came from a different world, a world in which certain obstacles that ruled most people's lives simply didn't exist, in which frosty, unapproachable publishers were family friends.

“That would be generous of you,” Cage told her.

“Generosity has nothing to do with it. I'd do it for my own pleasure.”

She smiled in a conspiring way and bumped her foot against his beneath the buffalo robe. It was a casual, unreadable gesture—perhaps flirtatious, perhaps not—but it summoned his attention in a way she must have meant for it to. She was not interested in Cage as a future husband. That was clear enough, despite her seductive, confiding conversation. She was a natural-born denizen of the political world, and she would not want a husband who could not place her in the middle of the constant excitement that that world kept manufacturing for itself. But the touch of her boot suggested that it was natural in her to lay a claim where she could
,
just for the purpose of doing so.

“Lincoln!” she called out, breaking without warning the web of intimacy she had just spun for Cage. “Stop the sleigh!”

“For what purpose, Miss Todd?”

“For the purpose of a snowball fight, of course.”

Lincoln reined the horses to a stop and the sleighs behind followed suit, and in a moment the whole party was climbing up the snowbanks on the side of the road and into the virgin whiteness beyond, stumbling about as they sank to their knees and packed the snow tight in their gloved hands. Mary Todd declared that the fight should be the women against the men, so the two sexes formed battle lines several dozen yards apart and launched snowballs until their arms were exhausted and their extremities numb. After everyone else had raced back to the sleighs and bundled themselves under blankets and quilts, Miss Todd declared that she would continue the contest even unto frostbite if only there were a man willing to stand against her.

“Mr. Lincoln!” she demanded as he was heading back with the others to the sleigh, “where is your courage?”

“Miss Todd, where is your sense?”

She already had a snowball in her hand and when he turned away from her to climb into the sleigh she hit him with a perfectly aimed throw on the exposed stalk of his neck.

There followed a general commotion in which Lincoln and Speed and Ned Baker chased the wild Kentucky belle through the snow and wrestled her back to the waiting sleighs. Cage hung back, feeling that he had had enough for one night of being a participant in one of Mary Todd's tableaux-vivants. He stood next to Ninian Edwards, who watched his sister-in-law laughing and writhing as the three men carried her back like a rug. He was a priggish man and though he had given himself over to the evening's dancing and toddy-drinking and snowball-fighting, his priggishness had returned. Or at least it had seemed to
,
judging by the look of stony assessment on his face as the men set Mary down in the double sleigh, in the front seat this time. It was Lincoln, not Speed or Baker, whom Ninian had his eye on now. Of all the men in the coterie, it could certainly be argued, he was the least likely fit for the latest Miss Todd from Kentucky: too tall, too poor, too coarse. But Ninian must have known that his sister-in-law was the sort of woman not to allow herself to be entrapped by anything expected.

For the final drive into Springfield Cage ended up in the backseat of the sleigh again, but this time he was joined by Mercy Levering and Sim Francis, both of whom promptly fell asleep, lost to drink and exhaustion and the narcotic schussing sound of their conveyance as it sped through the snow. Mary was in front now, next to Lincoln, her face turned toward his as he watched the road ahead and nodded and smiled as she spoke to him in confiding tones. Suddenly ignored in the backseat, Cage strained to hear what she was saying: how beautiful Lexington was, with its wide streets and great houses and venerable shade trees, but how it was the scene for her of a “desolate childhood.” Her mother dead in childbirth when Mary was six, her father remarrying a horrid selfish woman who kept populating the house with an endless succession of her own children, treating Mary and her full siblings as if they were of no more concern to her than the slaves. She was better treated at her boarding school than in her own house!