I Am Abraham (26 page)

“Ah, but I will recommend Lizabeth to you—as a personal favor from me and my husband. And you must come again, Miss Kate.”

Kate rose up with that swanlike neck of hers. “My dear Mrs. Lincoln, I shall be delighted to have
you
call on
me
, with your major domo at our dinner table!”

Chase and his daughter had moved out of their apartments at the Willard and into a brick mansion on E Street. An invite to one of her dinners had become the most precious ticket in town.
Old
Washington, with all its Cave Dwellers, flocked to her soirees. The only one who remained loyal to my wife was Mrs. Keckly. And when I felt the
unholies
coming on after one of our Cabinet meetings, I would cross the hall to Mary’s headquarters and listen in. I couldn’t save the Union flag in Charleston harbor without putting our men in the middle of a firestorm. So I crossed the hall and listened to some
creole
. It wasn’t hard to catch. They were talking about what Mrs. Jeff had told Elizabeth before she vanished with her furniture and her hatboxes and her husband’s prize horses.
Lizzie, I would rather remain in Washington and be kicked out, than go to Alabama and be Mrs. President. But as soon as we go South, we will raise an army and march to Washington, and then I shall live in the White House.

The two Mrs. Presidents had never met, and they were still involved in a war over the White House. Elizabeth seemed to brood as she sat on Mary’s divan, while I could imagine the Rebels sneaking up from Alabama and bivouacking in Lafayette Park. I lit out of there—I had to be alone. The White House was packed with office seekers. I rushed out the rear door and wandered into the wild lands beside the Potomac.

I wasn’t alone very long. The twigs crackled—a man crept up to me with a gun in his hand. I figured he was stalking Presidents. I couldn’t holler my way out of this scrape. Then I recognized his derby and that trim beard of his—it was the railroad detective, Allan Pinkerton. Mary must have voiced her fears to General Scott, and the General had asked Pinkerton to guard the grounds as a special favor. I was wrong about the little detective. Pinkerton was carrying that gun for his own protection. He wanted to consult with me in private.

“Mr. President, that modiste who belongs to your wife . . .”

He meant Mrs. Keckly, but he had a damn detective’s way of declaring it.

“She’s invaluable, sir. We’d like to borrow her from your wife and send her to Montgomery on a special train.”

But Mary had chased Pinkerton out of her boudoir, called him a rascal for even suggesting that her mantua-maker spy on Mr. and Mrs. Jeff. That little tale cured my
unholies
, as I imagined Mother ripping into the railroad detective. And I left him there, in the wild lands, with his silver-handled Colt.

23.

A Mountain of Dust

I
WATCHED
THEIR
WHITE
tents bloom like malignant blossoms as I climbed up to the roof of the White House—as if we were the interlopers, and they were the real owners of the District, gathering their Parrott rifles and other ten-pounders and biding their time. They wore ragged homespun coats dyed deep yellow or butternut, and they looked like circus trainers with hatchets and long knives rather than soldiers of some identifiable army; and this randomness only added to the general gloom, because there would be no
reason
to their attack; they would come at us like savages in their piebald coats, that butternut color bleeding in the sun.

And that afternoon was the first time I heard the banshee cry of these wild men—their Rebel yell. It could crack your bones right where you stood, and make a man piss blood. They whooped and yawped with an unnatural glee that had nothing to do with the sounds of war. There were several Comanche among them who wore the same ragged butternut coats. They didn’t do most of the howling. I espied several dwarfs. They stood on other men’s shoulders with their red signal flags and kept signaling into the wind. I’m not sure the flags made much sense, but out of what cave or hill or perverse apple orchard did these dwarfs and Comanche and butternut warriors come from, with their hatchets and howls? Some of them had servants who lathered their beards, or carried ammunition belts and poured red wine from dented silver flasks, and howled along with the rest.

I had my own armed guards—Willie and Tad. They’d built a little fort on the roof, with a few broken rifles and blocks of wood, but we had no Comanche in our ranks, no dwarfs with red flags.

“
Paw
,” Tad said, shivering in the sun; the Rebs must have scared him in the right way, because his own little song wasn’t imperiled by his lisp. “Ye think they were born in hell? They’re like bloodhounds with boots and tents.”

I imagined those Rebel demons capturing the Long Bridge, crossing the Potomac, and massacring children on the White House lawn.

I shook myself out of my own disaster dream and scrutinized the Potomac with my telescope. I couldn’t see any signs of a rescue mission, no transports or barges filled with troops. “Where are they?” I muttered, collapsing the telescope and trying not to alarm Willie and Tad.

Our General-in-Chief was racked with rheumatism, but he surveyed the District from an ambulance, and was disheartened by those Comanche yells. He had no one on hand, nothing but his Silver Grays, as he called them, old recruits from some earlier Indian war. They didn’t even know how to yell. The tents on the far side of the Potomac flapped in the wind like grounded white birds. I worried more about Mother than Willie and Tad, who could ride out this insurrection on the roofs. But Mary kept
seeing
my assassination; it traveled with her, a nightmare that meandered like a river’s bloody wake. Shadows grew out of my beard, my fingers were tall as a tent—Mary’s bosoms flew under her bodice like bowling balls.

General Scott insisted that she evacuate the capital with our two boys. He could insist until his head caught fire. Not even all the
Secesh
on the other side of the bridge could have told Mother what to do if she didn’t want to do it. Scott had cured her hysterical fit.

“General,” she said, with that Kentucky tartness of hers, “attend to your Silver Grays, and I will attend to my husband.”

Mother followed me often as she could, and the two boys became her accomplices. Tad would interrupt Cabinet meetings, sit on my lap, peruse every face, and then saunter out like a Comanche—not a Rebel in a butternut coat, but a real Comanche, who might attack you at your own peril, but wouldn’t have joined up with the
Secesh
. He’d race up and down the stairs, ring all the buzzers in the attic, and the servants would collect in a panic, believing the First Lady had summoned them. He had Mary’s hot temper and caprice. He’d stop a maid on the stairs and collect tribute from her, like a highwayman. He’d even harangue my ministers.

“Pay or die,” he’d growl, with a tin pistol that couldn’t have fired a plug of spit. No one dared disobey him, not even his Pa, who was nothing more than a captive President on that planet Tad had created in our halls. The District had tightened into a couple of staircases and an attic where he could count his coins. Willie never joined his brother’s escapades—he didn’t have Tad’s piratical streak.

Tad still had to contend with other pirates, like General Scott’s Silver Grays, who foraged in the deserted streets, stole whatever food they could, and decided to protect the White House on a whim. They camped out in the East Room, scratching their backs against the carpets. These recruits looked ferocious in their frontier uniforms, with feathers in their hair and war paint on their sunken cheeks—yet they serenaded Mary with their own gnarled voices. And it helped lift her. She forgot about the danger we were in—unprotected and utterly isolated from the North—and blushed near the Silver Grays.

“You gentlemen have a lot of sauce—serenading the President’s Lady.”

She brought them little gifts from the pantry, invited them into the Crimson Room, which was
her
parlor, and talked to them about their kin, while Mrs. Keckly served the last little cakes that were left. Mary was in her element now—she had an audience of raw old men who worshiped that Southern singsong in her voice.

“It’s kind of you to camp here and protect Mr. Lincoln and our little boys.”

They weren’t kind at all; they were bigger rascals than the butternut warriors across the bridge, but they couldn’t have menaced a flea. They didn’t even carry any cartridges, and I’d wager that their scalping knives had never
breathed
, and were kept in some snug portion of their pants. Meantime a pair of stragglers from a lone Massachusetts regiment snuck across the railroad bridge, wandered into the White House with the yellow eyes of wounded animals, and wolfed down whatever scraps we had.

I looked at them with bewilderment and muttered, “I don’t believe there is a North! It can’t exist. You Massachusetts boys are the only real thing left in the world!”

And just as the
unholies
were hitting hard, I heard some light thunder outside my window, that telltale rat-a-tat of regimental drums. I went to the window. I couldn’t see anything but a mountain of dust on the
Ave
, as locals loved to call Pennsylvania Avenue. The mountain of dust commenced to move. Then I could make out that thickening tread of an army—patches of blue emerging from the dust on their coats. The 7
^th
New York had arrived. Somehow I couldn’t heed this parade. I’d lived with those Rebels a little too long—their piebald coats seemed much more real.

I scampered up to the roof with my telescope and tall hat. And what I saw stupefied me. The white tents had scattered like macabre trees on a windy plain. The dust cleared a little, and the dwarfs I had imagined with their red flags were child buglers; else it’s possible the dwarfs had disappeared and were replaced by children with wrinkled faces, their bugle cries much more plangent than the Rebel call. Black servants ran across the fields with piles of ammunition on their shoulders. The Parrott guns were gone, and there was a great flurry of butternut coats, and not a single one of the horses I saw had a rider. The horses leapt into dust clouds with their rippling flanks—every muscle as secure as silver. It was my first Rebel retreat.

24.

Spotted Ponies

C
UT
ME
TO
PIECES
after what folks in the District started to say about Mary. They called her the
Traitoress
, just because some of her brothers and half brothers had decided to join the insurrection. Mrs. Keckly was kind enough to act as my secret agent in matters that concerned the welfare of my wife.

“They’re vicious,” she said, “these high-blood Washingtonians.”

Her nostrils flared up, but neither of us had the perspicacity or the power to keep my wife away from the bear traps those highfalutin ladies had set for her, or the traps she sometimes set for herself. The White House had fallen into ruin under President Buchanan and his niece. Miss Hallie had the finest chandeliers installed in the public rooms, but she paid no mind to the President’s quarters, which had all the idle charm of a second-rate hotel. The oilcloth on some of the floors creaked and was just about as unpredictable as a swollen sea; the walls were peeling, the lamps were chipped. The furniture looked like refugees of some old curiosity shop. And it troubled Mary’s own esteem.

Congress had set aside a whopping sum of twenty thousand dollars to
prettify
the Mansion, and she meant to eat into that fund as much she could. In May, after the District was secured, Mary decided to visit Philadelphia and New York with one of her little cousins and William Wood, our new commissioner of buildings. She was in some kind of
duel
with her mortal enemy, Miss Kate, who had already gone to Manhattan to buy carpets for her father’s E Street house.

Mary had put on her war bonnet—she was screaming for a fight. I’d kept her out of politics, she said, shoved her to one side. Mother was once my secretary of war and peace, but I would have been crucified had I allowed the First Lady to haggle with my Cabinet and General Scott. And she was wild to see Bob, as she always was. She’d visit him at the tail end of her shopping tour. I missed my child-wife after she left for the depot with all her sundries. I paced that creaky oilcloth in my office.

I found a pair of spotted horses in the White House stables after my wife returned from the trip—ponies they were, for Willie and Tad.

“Oh, they’re anonymous gifts,” she said.

I knew what
anonymous
meant. Mother had done some serious horse trading on her own, without considering how it might compromise me.

“Who gave them to you, Mary?”

We’d had our quarrels, but for the first time in our marriage she avoided my glance, like a scheming little girl.

“I can’t recall,” she said. “I was at a dinner with some bankers and I happened to mention that we might have to sell the manure in our stables—that’s how strapped we were.”

I wanted to slap her for such an outright lie, but I was haunted by the image of my father’s angry red face—like a poker iron that was piping hot. She shouldn’t have made up that tale about manure. Mother counterattacked, said I was handing out postmasterships and other prizes while we lived like paupers with holes in our carpets. I deflected her attack, or we would have had to discuss every damn scoundrel at our door.

“Now what did you promise these men?”

“
Nothing.
I said they could write to me. They had my permission. They’re friends of Mr. Wood’s. And they would be obliged if Mr. Wood received a
permanent
appointment as commissioner of buildings.”

“And is that why you got the ponies? On the promise of that appointment?”