A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (28 page)

“Will you come see me this afternoon?” was all that the note from Mary Todd said. There was a question mark at the end of the sentence, but he could guess from the authoritative brevity of her message that she was not really asking a question but issuing a summons. Her handwriting, with its cramped, thickly inked letters, gave off the same starchy sense of expectation.

It was a few days after Lincoln's catastrophic interview with Mary, the incident that had driven him to the edge of the precipice. He seemed to be functioning well enough now, but once a man had gone that crazy there was no guarantee that suicide would not remain a chronic enticement. Cage was not sure he wanted to see Mary right now, especially when he felt ordered to do so, but he was curious about the nature of the strange embrigglement between Mr. Lincoln and Miss Todd, and thought that the more he knew about it, the better the chance he had of keeping his friend's sanity secure.

“Have you heard?” she said when he presented himself yet again in the parlor of the Edwards home. “He's jumped out of a window.”

“Is he dead?”

She blinked at him in surprise. Her face had been tense, her eyes red, perhaps from crying, but now there appeared a look of mordant amusement. “Of course not. Why would you think that? Is that even possible? I don't think there's a building in Springfield that's taller than Abraham Lincoln. No, he hasn't killed himself
,
just embarrassed himself, I'm afraid.”

She had heard the news from her brother-in-law. The papers would no doubt be full of it tomorrow. It had happened this morning at the Presbyterian church, where the assembly was still meeting before moving to the new statehouse next week.

“The Democrats were conniving to require the state bank to redeem its notes in specie. Well, of course, that's just their way of killing the bank and sowing havoc and making people miserable, which is all that Democrats care about. They came up with a trick of adjourning sine die and when the Whigs tried to keep them from having a quorum the sergeant at arms rounded them all up—even from their
sickbeds,
some of them—and locked them—locked them!—in the church. So the Democrats had their quorum, but apparently Lincoln thought he could still defeat it so he and two Whigs jumped out the window. It didn't work, though. The quorum held—or at least the Speaker ruled that it held. Which is what you would expect, since he's a Democrat. Now everyone is laughing at Lincoln and saying there's something wrong with his mind.”

She stared at Cage. “Is there?”

“He hasn't been his normal self.”

“In what sense has he not been his normal self? For heaven's sake, his normal self is not normal in the first place.”

“I think he's confused.”

“About me? He told me he loved me. Does he not?”

“If he told you he did, of course he does.”

She sat perfectly still on the horsehair sofa. She had not called for one of the servants to offer him anything to eat or drink. They could hear women's voices from upstairs, singing.

“That's my sister and Matilda. They like to sing together. I don't recognize the song, do you?”

Cage said he didn't. He could only make out bits of an unfamiliar melody, and none of the words. But Matilda's voice was clear and strong, a perfect match for her note-perfect beauty.

“You're right,” she said. “He's very confused. I suppose he told you that he came to see me.”

She saw that Cage was stalling for an answer and said, “Never mind. Maybe he didn't tell you. Women talk about these things openly with each other but I don't suppose men do. Or if they do they pretend they don't. I don't understand men at all. I doubt that I ever will. Are you finished with your book?”

“Not yet.”

“Please do hurry. I don't understand why it's taking so long. Why does everything have to take so long? I can't stand how slow the pace of life is. If things happened faster, people would be happier.”

“Maybe, but life might be over too soon.”

“What do you care? All you do is sit at your desk. I notice you haven't yet offered your affections at Matilda's shrine.”

“There are plenty of other men doing that. I don't like being in a crush.”

“You shouldn't be so solitary. No, I take that back. You should be solitary. It's your nature, and it's interesting. So whether you court Matilda or not—whether you court anybody or not—I don't care.”

But she did care. She wanted someone to take Matilda off her hands, and soon. Lincoln hadn't told Mary he was in love with Matilda—or that he thought he was in love with her—but she was shrewd enough to understand that the crisis between her and the man she had thought was her suitor had come upon the heels of Matilda's arrival in Springfield.

“Anyway,” she continued, “that's not the reason I asked you to see me. We're getting up an expedition to Jacksonville over Christmas. Mr. and Mrs. Hardin have asked us to visit them in their home. It's said to be lovely and they are so gracious to invite us. Lincoln will be there, and Speed, and two or three others. Will you join the van as well? I'm praying for snow so we can have a sleigh ride there. I want you along for the pleasure of your company, of course, but also because Lincoln seems to be in a confused state and I'm worried about him. He needs his friends around him.”

Mary was right. The papers were full of Lincoln's leap out of the window. In the
Sangamo Journal,
Sim Francis saw to it that the act was portrayed as a heroic last-minute effort to deny the Democrats a quorum and postpone a vote that would have the effect of destroying the state bank and ruining the economy. But since the vote had already occurred, that interpretation was only the Whig press trying to make the best of things.

“I was feeling peculiar,” Lincoln admitted to Cage and Speed around the stove in the store that night. “You know how it is in that church. We were all packed together in the first place, and they had locked all the doors and the sergeant at arms had stationed guards in front of them. After the vote, I just couldn't breathe. I don't know why. I just had to get out of there, so I ran upstairs and opened a window.”

“You could have broken a leg jumping out of a window like that,” Speed said.

“It wasn't that far off the ground. I just sort of eased myself out. Maybe if I'd broken a leg people wouldn't be laughing at me so hard.”

He laughed himself, not too bitterly, a hint of his old self-deprecating good humor. Cage and Speed exchanged a quick look, gauging each other's impressions of the state of their friend's mental health. Lincoln had moved back to Speed's the night after the suicide vigil in Cage's room, and seemed generally sound again, but there was always the possibility that the armature that supported his remarkable character was somehow permanently askew.

“I would have done the same thing,” Cage told him now.

“What? Jumped out of a window?”

“I remember what it was like in that cabin at Kellogg's Grove before you and the rest of those men rode up. I felt like I was going to suffocate.”

“Well, it's kind of you to say that, Cage. I'd like to think that being surrounded by Democrats is about the same as being surrounded by hostile Indians, but my common sense rebels.”

He was sitting in a hard wooden chair, his legs stretched out, his coat off, his cravat untied, his chin resting in the spreading wings of his collar. He wore a velvet waistcoat that needed laundering, gravy having been spilled on it several meals past. He looked slowly from Cage to Speed and back again.

“Does it seem to you gentlemen that I'm losing my wits altogether?”

“Sometimes,” Speed admitted.

“And now news comes to me by way of Miss Todd that we're all going to Jacksonville together.”

“Would you rather we didn't?” Cage asked.

“No, it'll be a grand party, I'm sure. And it's always good to be out of town after you've made a fool of yourself. And I've made a fool of myself twice over this week.”

He stood up and grabbed another oak log to feed the fire in the stove, tamping it into place with the poker. “Speaking of making a fool of yourself,” he said, “I'm reminded of this old sucker we knew back in Indiana. A peculiar-looking fellow, with the biggest, shaggiest eyebrows you've ever seen. Well, one morning he goes out with his rifle hoping to shoot a squirrel for his breakfast. He spots a lively one on a tree branch not twenty yards from the house. He primes his rifle and takes aim and shoots, but he doesn't hit the squirrel and what's more the squirrel pays no attention at all to being shot at. So the old sucker loads and fires again, and the squirrel's still wriggling on the tree branch but staying in the same spot and still no more concerned about the sound of that rifle shot than a cloud passing over. The man loads and shoots thirteen more times and the squirrel's still there. He turns to his little son, who's been standing there watching all the time, and tells him, By jings, there's something wrong with my rifle. I been trying to hit that squirrel all morning and he's still standing there on that tree branch. So the son says, I don't see any squirrel at all, Pap.

“What do you mean you don't see any squirrel? the man says. Hell, he's right there, how can you miss seeing him? But the son still can't see the squirrel, and finally he turns to look at his old dad. And he looks at his face some more and breaks out laughing. I see your squirrel, Pap, he says finally. Why, he's right there and he ain't on a tree at all. Your squirrel ain't nothing but a louse in your eyebrow!”

When Lincoln began telling the story, the solemnity of his own mood bled into it, so that Cage was not expecting a funny tale at all but some sort of gloomy parable. As Lincoln continued to tell it, his inflection remained flat, and sometimes as he poked at the fire he affected to have forgotten his own narrative, and had to pause to recall it. He let the humor creep up on his two listeners and the story was explosively funny in the end, less for its merits than in the way the pleasure of telling it brought life back into Lincoln's face.

He was himself again for a moment or two, laughing along with Cage and Speed, but as the laughter fell off he withdrew once more into a black cloud of reflection. There was silence around the stove until he spoke again.

“I like her well enough, I reckon. There's no reason in the world not to marry her. She's the smartest woman I've ever met and a good-looking woman too, even with extra tonnage she's carrying around these days. I just panicked, that's all, the way I panicked being shut up in that church. But I couldn't break her heart when it came to it, so I guess that means I must love her or have some similar emotion about her after all.”

“But you're still not formally engaged?” Cage asked.

“Well, nothing specific has been said in that regard, but I'd be surprised if she didn't think we were—so I guess we are.”

He was seated in the chair again now, tilting back, staring up at the ceiling, his arms hanging at his sides.

“The two of you don't have to keep looking at me like I'm going to stab myself any minute. I'm clearheaded now. There's no reason Matilda Edwards should have any interest in me. There's no reason I should feel about another woman the same way I felt about my poor Ann back in New Salem. That's all over with. I know my future. I know what it has to be. I embrace it gladly and will complain about it no more.”

T
HE NEXT WEEK
the doors of the new statehouse were officially opened. There were nightly receptions for the public, with free punch and cakes and a choir singing lively songs and Christmas ribbons hanging from the Corinthian columns. The building was still not finished, but the house and senate chambers and the governor's office were open and the legislature was now meeting at last in a public space consecrated for that purpose.

Cage walked alone through the edifice, listening as the voices of the singers and the chattering of the visitors echoed off the polished surfaces of Sugar Creek limestone. There were grand buildings like the American House in Springfield now, but this was different. This was like a great anchor thrown into the sea with the promise of holding the city in place.

“The thing is done at last!” Ned Baker said when he saw Cage. He was with Ash Merritt, the two of them pleasantly inebriated on multiple glasses of punch as they stood at the head of the stairway in the gleaming new legislative temple.

“What about Lincoln?” Baker asked Cage in a whisper. “What the hell is the matter with him?”

Cage told Baker and Merritt about the suicide vigil. He was under no obligation that he knew of to keep it a secret from Lincoln's friends, especially after he had made such an odd spectacle of himself by jumping out of the church window.

“He should drop that girl and have done with it,” Ash said. “She's too smart and too cunning for him. She's got him completely confused.”

“Maybe, but he might do well to marry her after all. That would settle the matter and settle his mind,” Ned said. “And there are worse things than a smart and cunning wife.”

But a crowded, echoing rotunda was not the place for an intimate conversation about Lincoln's marital prospects and mental health. As Baker turned to acknowledge the congratulations of one of his constituents, Cage excused himself and drifted off to have a glimpse of the house and senate chambers where so much solemn mischief would be enacted in the future. He noticed Stephen Douglas, whom the governor had just appointed secretary of state, grandly gesturing to a group of visitors, his stubby arms flung upward and outward as if to somehow fuse the building's magnificence with his own.

Among the men and women who had gathered to listen to Douglas's impromptu oration was Ellie. She saw that Cage had noticed her and discreetly stepped away
,
joining him where he stood at the staircase railing. The choir stood on risers behind them, singing “The Lakes of Pontchartrain.”

“Do you like our new statehouse?” she asked in a tone she would have used with a near stranger. Unaccustomed to meeting each other in public, uncertain if they should, they stood a few feet apart.

“Yes,” he answered. “It's suitably grand.”

“It's permanent. That's the most exciting thing about it. A very good thing for men and women of business.”

“Let's get out of here,” he whispered. “I'll follow you to the shop.”

“It's not our usual night.”

“Why does that matter?”

“I suppose it doesn't. I'll see you in a while.”

She left him and walked down the staircase. Ten minutes later he followed. The night was stark and clear. The choir could still be heard as its singing drifted out of the new statehouse and through the comfortable streets of Springfield and the still-hostile winter emptiness that lay beyond.

The door to her shop was unlocked and she waited for him in the back, all her clothes already removed, her body half-visible in the dim lamplight as if she were swimming toward him from the depths of a murky lake. Indeed, she fell on him like a selkie, her own desire fully and uncharacteristically exposed, with no coyness or coolness to mask it. It seemed to Cage that she meant to reveal something deeper than sexual hunger—a fondness that might have reached a point that bordered on love, a flash even of vulnerability. But there was no way for him to press his curiosity. When they had finished and were lying together quietly in the subdued light, he joked that she must have been stirred into a frenzy by the Little Giant's oratory.

“I was stirred by what a city we're becoming. By the sense that things are taking hold. There were so many things I never dared to think about that now seem almost possible.”

“What sort of things?”

“Being really free.” Her expression was guileless. “To do as I care to do, and to become rich and do even more that I care to do.”

“That's the sum of your ambition?”

“Yes. I know you disapprove, Cage, but I don't care. You may have your lofty dream about living beyond the grave, but my dream is to do very well for myself before I'm ever buried.”

“Don't you want anyone to remember you?”

“No, I'd be very happy to be forgotten about.”

“Not if you had children.”

“I don't have children, as you may have noticed, and don't plan to have any, as you may have also noticed.”

She settled against him, tracing a finger through the whorl of his ear. Her voice grew a little tighter but she did not lift the spell of physical intimacy.

“If that's what you want for yourself,” she said, “you know what a simple thing it is to have it. But you must have it with someone else.”

“I don't want children,” he said, assuming it was true though he had never seriously tested the idea with himself. But he could not fathom her indifference to any sort of legacy. An unremembered life, an unvisited grave, an empty posterity—those were the fates he worked against at his desk, deep into every night.

He changed the subject and told her about his upcoming Christmas trip to Jacksonville with Mary Todd and the coterie. He might have hoped for some trace of disappointment in her expression about being deprived of his company, about possibly losing it forever to Matilda Edwards or some other appropriate young lady. But he had to satisfy himself yet again with the fact that she was who she was and meant what she said.

“Is it true that Lincoln and the Todd girl are going to marry?”

“I don't know. It's not a settled issue.”

“It's certainly the impression that people have. Everybody who comes to the shop talks about it.”

He told her about how Lincoln had tried to break it off with Mary, but in the attempt had only succeeded in making the bond tighter.

“Well, that was a ridiculously clumsy thing. He knows nothing at all about women.”

“Is that what you learned when he came to see you that night?”

It was exactly the sort of question he had managed to keep himself from asking her for over a year. She wriggled away in surprise, sat up on her elbows so that she could peer down disapprovingly at him.

“You still haven't put that out of your mind?”

“I have, but it keeps returning.”

“I thought you didn't like me to talk about such things.”

“I don't. Tell me what it was like. What you were like with him.”

“I have no interest in tormenting you, even though you think I enjoy doing so. And by the way, in case you've wondered, which I suppose you've been doing obsessively, it really was only that one time. It hasn't happened again.”

“Would you ever let it happen again?”

“No. There'd be no point.”

She laughed a little, saying this. She wasn't unaware of how cold she could sound, how cold she could be.

“Besides, he would never think to come see me again. He really is your friend, Cage.”

She slipped back down beside him. They were silent for a moment, staring past the open door of the back room at their barely detectable reflections in one of the glass sales counters, two bodies beneath a quilt, two heads with peering eyes.

“If you want me to tell you what he was like,” she whispered, “I will. He was just like you were that first time—not knowing quite how to behave or what to say. Except even worse. Both of you thinking that a night spent with a woman binds you to her forever in a solemn contract.”

“I'm not that naive.”

“He is. Almost. He'd been to whorehouses, I suppose, so he knew how the thing was done, though no idea what it was supposed to mean or not mean. If I'd said we have to be married now he would have put on his hat and walked me to the church. You should have seen the confusion on his face when he paid me—much worse than you, and you were bad enough.”

“Stop talking about it.”

“Even if he hadn't found out how you felt about me, I doubt that he would have ever come back. I don't think he could bear to think of himself as nobody special
,
just another sex-starved male creature who needed to—”

She noticed the look on his face and broke off, having no interest in provoking his jealousy further. “Anyway, maybe Mary Todd is what he needs. A firm woman who knows her mind might make him happy.”

“I don't think so. He said he wanted to kill himself.”

“Did you believe him?”

“Yes.”

Cage felt her unclothed body shifting comfortably against his. “What a dreadful trap the whole idea of love is,” she said.

Mary's wish for enough snow for a sleigh ride did not come true, so most of the party ended up taking the stage for the Christmas excursion to Jacksonville, with some of the men following behind on horseback along a road that was rutted and boggy, the horses' hooves melodiously breaking up the remaining splinters of melting ice. Cage rode Mrs. P, who was no longer in her prime but still delighted to be out in the open air in company with the horses ridden by Lincoln and Speed and John Hardin. It was to Hardin's house that they were all headed, to celebrate the season and the end of the legislative session. Cage had not seen Hardin since the party at the Edwards house to celebrate the Whig victory in the 1838 election. That had been almost two and a half years ago, and Hardin had not changed in the interim. He looked even more composed and self-assured than he had that night, and he seemed immune or at least inured to the sideways glances of the female members of the party. He was steadfastly, unflappably married. Like most politicians, he took a crucial interest in getting to know and subtly assessing the potential value to himself of the people he met. As they rode along he quizzed Cage with flattering intensity about the craft of poetry, about whom he ought to read, and whether or not the great music of the Renaissance could ever have been composed had it not been for the words that underlay it.

“Yes, music is music,” he theorized, “but the shape and tempo of a piece has to start from somewhere. Words firm music up, they give it direction and purpose, that's what I think. Otherwise what do you have? Just notes.”

Mary and Matilda and the rest of the group inside the stage were in high spirits, and one or the other of the ladies kept peering out of the windows and looking back at the trailing horsemen, insisting that they join in their Christmas songs, warning them that if they did not Saint Claas would leave them nothing in their stockings, or they might even be visited by the evil Bersnickle. Lincoln was doing his best to take part in the revelry, but he still looked like a man ensnared, and whenever Mary's insistent and energetic face appeared at the window Cage could see that Lincoln felt the bonds drawing tighter still.

Hardin was homesick and eager to see his wife. The session had been trying and tendentious and he had made the mistake of boarding in Springfield at an establishment that served second-rate food. How he looked forward to his own home, he said, his own dear Sarah, the food from the cooks in his own kitchen. For now the disappointments of the session, the coarse maneuvering of the Democrats to destroy the state bank, could be set aside. There would be a lively round of parties in Jacksonville for the next week or so, but also time for rest and reading and discussions with the fine gentlemen riding alongside him.