An Unlikely Friendship (2 page)

"None are as humorous as this one," he allowed.

"Oh, I think you just like the star, Laura Keene."

"She is a pretty one all right. But you know, Mother, it wouldn't have taken me much to stay home tonight. And be quiet with a beautiful lady like you."

"Except that it wouldn't be quiet," she reminded him. "The place is full of favor seekers. How many favors did you grant today, Abraham?"

He was quiet for a moment. "The last one would interest you. A mother of a young Northern boy, a deserter who was sentenced to be shot, came to me. She was from New York. A nice, plain woman. She begged me to pardon him. He was Robert's age."

"And did you?"

"I did, Mother. I figured, the war is over. We lost enough Roberts on both sides. Let him go home and be a productive citizen. Anyway, he's his mother's mainstay."

Mary put her hand on her husband's arm. "And he'll always have you to thank for his life," she said.

T
HEIR BAROUCHE MADE
its way down the cobblestoned streets to a brick Georgian house, the front of which was aglow with gaslight. There they picked up Clara Harris and Major Rathbone, both handsome enough and high enough in Washington society as to please Mary Lincoln.

They went on to Tenth Street, between E and F, and the barouche stopped outside the canopied front door of Ford's Theater. Mr. Ford's brother came out to meet them and a valet helped Mary down from the carriage and escorted them into the theater and up to the presidential box.

They were half an hour late and the play had already started, but the actors and actresses paused so the band could play "Hail to the Chief." Seventeen hundred people in the theater cheered and applauded. President Lincoln took off his stovepipe hat and waved it, and Mary settled her taffeta skirts into a plush chair next to the president's rocker.

The presidential box was decorated with red, white,
and blue bunting and Nottingham lace curtains. As the second act started, the place got drafty.

"Put on your overcoat, dear," Mary told her husband.

"Do you think it would be proper?"

"Of course. You mustn't catch cold. We have the most exciting times coming."

"We do, don't we?" He got up and put on his overcoat. In doing so he noticed that the guard sent to protect them had seated himself in the anteroom. But he said nothing, and let the man enjoy the play.

As he sat down again, he took Mary's hand. "As soon as my second term is up, we're going to make that trip to Europe you always wanted," he whispered. "Then we'll go back to Illinois and I'll reopen my law office. And we'll live happily ever after. Maybe Robert will come with us and practice law with me. And you can be the Queen of Springfield or Chicago or wherever we go."

She gazed up at him adoringly. "Oh, Abraham." She hugged his arm and rested her head on his shoulder. "I've never been so happy."

M
ARY DIDNT KNOW
which sound she heard first, the scream of a woman or the loud bang, which was like a firecracker. It was well into the third act, and she thought,
Firecrackers aren't part of the play.
Then she saw her husband's head slump forward, felt someone brush past her, and suddenly the form of a man holding a derringer stood poised before her on the railing of the box, half hidden by the Nottingham lace curtains.

"Stop that man! Stop him!" It was Major Rathbone's voice, shouting, as he threw himself at the dark form.

"Abraham! Abraham!" Mary shouted. "Oh, and they have shot my husband!"

She saw blood dripping from the back of Abraham's head, through the dark hair. His eyes were open but glassy. He could not see or hear her.

"Someone help us!" she pleaded. "Someone!"

Major Rathbone and the dark stranger were wrestling now, right in front of her. She saw a knife flash then heard a low moan from Rathbone. Then the stranger jumped from the box onto the stage below, dragging some lace curtain and red, white, and blue bunting with him.

The audience below was in a panic. The presidential box was full of people. Someone ushered Mary out. Doctors were there now, laying her husband down on the carpet. Laura Keene, the lead actress, was there. Clara Harris was sobbing and begging a doctor to see to her fiancé's arm, which was bleeding profusely.

Then they carried Abraham out. Strangers were helping, Mary noted. They carried him downstairs, outside, and across the street to the Petersen house. There they set him down on a too-small bed in a too-small bedroom.

Mary stood dumbly, looking around while people pushed past her. Important people like members of the cabinet. How had they gotten here so suddenly? Wasn't that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton? She blinked. Gaslight flickered. Long shadows were cast on the wall. People spoke in low tones. Yet she could hear Abraham's labored breathing.

Able to abide it no more she wedged herself between all the important men and threw herself on Abraham. "Oh husband, husband, don't leave me like this!"

But Abraham was not responding. Of a sudden his cheeks looked sunken in. His eyes were unseeing, there and not there. Blood stained the pillowcase under his head. "Do something," she scolded the doctors. "Can't you do something?"

"Someone get that woman out of here!" It was Secretary Stanton's voice. Oh well, she had never liked the man anyway, nor had he liked her. But always he had treated her with the deference of her position.

Now she had no more position. If Abraham died, no one would treat her with deference; she would be a nobody. The thought seized her, and she felt that fear piled onto the other.

"Mother, come. Come into the other room with me."

It was Robert. She turned and he stood there, tall and a boy no longer; he was a man now. If the war hadn't done it to him, this would. She took his hand, and he led her across the hall to a small gaslit parlor. People left them alone there. Robert sat next to her on the sofa. She suddenly saw tears brimming in his eyes and held him close. He needed her as much as she needed him.

"Who did this thing to your father?" she asked him. "Did they find out?"

"A man named John Wilkes Booth. The actor."

She shook her head. "No, no, it couldn't be. We saw him once in a play. Why would he? Why? Is he a Southern sympathizer?"

"No one knows the why of it yet, Mother."

"Did they catch him?"

"Not yet. No. But they will. They're all looking for him."

"The dream," she told Robert. "It's your father's dream. He told me of it within the last week. Do you want to know what he dreamed?"

"Becalm yourself, Mother. Here, I'll get you some brandy." He got up and went to a small table where there was a brandy set. He poured some in a glass and brought it to his mother.

"He told me he dreamed he awoke in his bed to the sound of people crying. He betook himself below stairs and there he saw, in the East Room, a corpse lying on a catafalque, surrounded by soldiers on guard. 'Who is dead in the White House?' he asked one of the soldiers. 'The president,' came the answer. 'He was killed by an assassin.' Then, sweating and shaking, he woke up. And he couldn't sleep the rest of the night."

"Mother, you must becalm yourself."

Mary looked around the small room. "Someone is missing, Robert."

"Who? Everyone is here. Except Tad. I didn't want to wake him."

"No, Lizzy. I want Lizzy Keckley, Robert. You must send a carriage for her." Mary was becoming agitated. "Please, Robert, send a carriage for her now. I must have Lizzy with me. I cannot endure this without her, Robert."

***

T
HE NOISE OUTSIDE
on Twelfth Street did not waken Lizzy Keckley that night. She slept undisturbed until the knock came on the door at eleven o'clock. She got up, put on her robe, and went to the door before the knocking could wake the Lewises, her landlords.

It was a neighbor, Mrs. Brown. She looked desperate. "Mr. Lincoln has been shot," she told Lizzy.

At first she thought Mrs. Brown was drunk. Over her shoulder she saw revelers in the street, still celebrating the end of the war. But wait, they were not celebrating.

There were soldiers all about, with drawn bayonets, and the people—men, women, and children—were in nightclothes, some of them, and seemed to be wandering around aimlessly. They were wailing, sobbing. Some men were putting the flags at half-mast.

"Where?" she asked Mrs. Brown. "Who shot him?"

"I heard an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth. The army is out looking for him now."

She drew in her breath sharply. Mrs. Lincoln! She must go to her. But go where? The play must be over by now. To the White House! "I must dress," she told herself. The night had grown chilly and there would be rain. "I must go now."

Within ten minutes she was out on Twelfth Street, pushing her way through the crowds of milling people. "Who shot him?" someone said. Then, "There's a reward of twenty thousand dollars for the murderers."

And, "Excuse me, ma'am, but you're colored, aren't you? All the colored people are assembling in front of the White House."

"Thank you," Lizzy said, and made her way toward the familiar mansion, walking briskly. Already soldiers were marching to the barking of orders; men were tearing down the flowers from light poles and putting up draped black bunting.

But oh, the crowd in front of the White House! She would never get through! She would go the back way, a way familiar to her, through alleys and shanties of the colored people. But it was dangerous going alone this time of night. She would go back to the house and get her landlords, the Lewises, to accompany her. Mr. Lewis was a big, brawny man and had a gun.

They were awake when she got back, throwing questions at her as they pulled on rain clothes, and she told them what it was like outside. "I can get us to the White House the way I know, but I can't go it alone," she told them.

They agreed to come with her. Mr. Lewis put his gun inside his oilcloth slicker and picked up and lighted a lantern. And once again she ventured out, this time feeling confident that she would get there.

By now it was quarter of one in the morning but it was like daylight in the streets, what with torchlight and bells tolling and army wagons rushing along and people gathering in bunches to console one another. All the windows of the houses were lighted, and there was an angry murmuring in the crowds.

Lizzy led the Lewises the back way, away from the crowds, through the alleyways, and along the paths that she knew. She could smell the Potomac River as they rushed along past hovels and huts of the poor, with the rain beating down on them now. Milk wagons and mail carts rushed past them, only to be turned back at the first corner by soldiers.

Finally they came to a great open space and saw the back of the White House looming up before them, like a giant birthday cake about to melt in the rain. Lights shone from all the windows. Lizzy opened a gate on the far end of the grounds and led the Lewises past the carriage house, the horse stables, the pen where Tad's pet goats were housed.

But there was another gate to go through now. And, as she feared, armed soldiers were guarding it. Oh well, they would know her. All the guards did.

"Halt there, identify yourselves."

Rifles with bayonets attached to the ends were pointed at them. A large lantern cast its light in their eyes, blinding them.

"I'm Elizabeth Keckley, Mrs. Lincoln's dressmaker. I'm here to help her. She'll need me."

One of the guards, a tall soldier with a Yankee twang, approached her. She didn't know him, didn't recognize any of them. Oh, this was bad.

"Who are these other people?" he asked.

"My landlords. The Lewises. Responsible people. We live on Twelfth Street."

"I don't care where you live, lady," another one of them said as he stepped forward. "The president's been shot this night and is near death. We're letting nobody in. And one thing's certain: Mrs. Lincoln isn't going to need any dressmaker tonight. No sir. So you just take yourself and your responsible friends and go home and stitch a fine seam."

They were treating her like a nobody! How could she make them understand? Inside her heart was breaking. Mary would be looking for her, expecting her. How could she explain? She couldn't. She was just another of hundreds of colored women to these war-weary soldiers. Just another threat on a nightmare of a night.

"Come on, let's go," she told her friends. And the three of them turned and left.

M
EANWHILE, THE CARRIAGE
and driver Robert had dispatched to fetch Elizabeth Keckley in her house on Twelfth Street was searching and searching for her, but the driver got lost, what with the crowds, the armed soldiers, and the stopping and searching of each carriage on the streets.

So Mary Lincoln had to go back to the White House alone that terrible rainy morning after they pronounced her husband dead.

As she left the lodging house on Tenth Street, a doctor was putting silver dollars on Lincoln's eyelids. "Oh, that dreadful, dreadful place," she was saying of Ford's Theater. "That horrible place."

Apparently others felt the same, for crowds gathering on Tenth Street were already shouting "Burn it down, burn it," at Ford's Theater.

As she climbed into the carriage, a group of people were carrying a long coffin down the steps of the Petersen house. A group of army officers followed the coffin, bareheaded, back to the White House. Robert Lincoln followed on his horse.

In the White House Mary Lincoln wandered around upstairs aimlessly. She could not bring herself to go into any of the familiar bedrooms. She wrung her hands and cried. Her head pounded. She needed Lizzy Keckley. Oh, where was Lizzy? Mammy Sally had always been around when she needed her. Where was Lizzy?

Finally she allowed two friends, Elizabeth Dixon and Mary Jane Welles, to put her to bed in a small, unused room.

She cried all through the early rainy morning, hearing the crowds outside on Pennsylvania Avenue, listening to the church bells toll, seeing lights and shadows cast on the flowered wallpaper. Robert came and went, gave her a powder and some water. She finally dozed, and when she awoke on that Saturday morning, she gave the order again.