I Am Abraham (29 page)

M
OTHER
’
S
C
OUNTER
C
ABINET
convened in the Crimson Room, and like my own Cabinet, its members were all male. It included the White House gardener, John Watt, an unsavory man who collected tribute from our servants and picked their pockets from time to time. He had a terrible thirst for money and should have been treated like a bandit, but Mary seemed to admire him so. She had a fondness for adventurers who quickened her blood. Among them was a New York Congressman, Daniel Sickles, who had shot a man to death for being a little too
amorous
with his wife. But Sickles never sat in jail. His kingpin lawyers convinced the jury that their client had suffered from a fit of temporary insanity.

I shouldn’t complain. I would have worked that jury the same damn way. And now Sickles had tea and crumpets in the Crimson Room with Mary’s other scoundrels. Her favorite was the Chevalier Wikoff, who’d been a spy in several European capitals and had a habit of running off with other men’s wives and tossing them away at his convenience. He was a great flatterer, this Chevalier, but he didn’t try to peddle any of his stuff on me. Still, he was always around. He had free run of the White House, thanks to my wife. I could find him dozing on some chair in the corridor, a silk hat over his eyes.

God help us all, but he had become Mary’s social adviser. The Chevalier introduced her to other
aristocrats
—other silken peddlers—like himself. The Crimson Room was full of that lot. My secretaries could hear them talk up a storm about
love, law, and literature
. I would have thrown them onto the manure pile, but they kept Mary occupied with their
lust
for literature—and other matters. Whenever a new adventurer arrived—a fallen duke, a penniless colonel, a Harvard man who’d gone to rot—Mary would welcome him into her Counter Cabinet with a bouquet from the White House’s glassed-in garden.

I let them clatter around until her Cabinet intruded upon mine. She would come to me with her “womanly intuition,” inspired by the Chevalier and his little circle, who loved to play politics. Perhaps the Chevalier wanted to become my new Secretary of State. I ain’t certain, but it seemed like that.

She was shrewd enough not to mention Wikoff, but I could figure out which cabal had been coaching her. I was stretched out on my rattan sofa, reading the
New York Times
, which hadn’t left off crucifying me and my Cabinet, when Mary sauntered in, wearing one of Keckly’s creations, a silk gown that blossomed on her like the plumage of some rare bird. She was all breathless in her gown of feathers. She started with an attack on my Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Chase, who’d been caring for wounded soldiers in his E Street mansion. Miss Kate had converted his parlor and study into a sanitarium after Bull Run; there were no more midnight suppers on E Street.

“Father,” she said, without a bit of rancor in her voice, “I do wish you would inquire into the motives of Mr. Chase. He belittles you behind your back.”

Mary had pushed right up against my spleen. “Is that the Chevalier’s opinion?”

Her face went white as the powder on Willie and Tad’s chalkboard.

“What Chevalier? Father, you must be delirious!”

And she gathered up her silken feathers and the wondrous folds of her gown and marched out of my office. That wasn’t the end of it. She mounted another campaign within a week. Mary wanted me to rescue a militiaman named William Scott. He was a Vermonter who had fallen asleep while on picket duty and was about to be executed for dereliction. Mary gathered her own little army in her behalf—Tad. He came to me in the middle of a Cabinet meeting, but it wasn’t to slip onto my lap.

“
Paw
,” he said in his vernacular lisp, “if it was your own little boy who was just tired after fightin’, and marchin’ all day, that he could not keep awake, much as he tried to—would you have him shot to pieces like some buzzard, would you,
Paw
?”

I had to retreat. I couldn’t fight so eloquent an advocate, even if I didn’t enjoy interfering in McClellan’s military matters. After I was done with the Cabinet, I raced downstairs. The Chevalier was dozing on a divan. I couldn’t drag him along the Potomac on a rail. It would have damaged Mary’s pride—Wikoff was her confidant and her protégé.

I scrambled over to Little Mac’s headquarters. As usual, he was much too busy to meet with the President. I walked right past his phalanx of aides and went into McClellan’s private office. His blue-gray eyes seemed to startle out of his head. The little general had never seen me in such a shivering rage.

“General,” I said, without a particle of politeness, “I’m the one urgency you have—not Richmond, not the Rebels, but Abraham Lincoln. And I’m a man who does not relish barking at his generals.”

He was still kind of stunned.

“I’d like you to issue a Pardon for Private William Scott of K Company, the Third Vermont Infantry.”

Finally he spoke, but in a subdued voice. “On what grounds, Excellency?”

“Any damn grounds you want. But you could give as a reason that it was by request of the Lady President.”

He pondered that.
The Lady President.
One Lincoln had been quite enough. And now he had to contend with the Chief Executive’s wife. He’d misjudged Mary’s worth, never bothered to notice her intelligence or her stubborn streak.

While he was pondering, I left him there with his books and his maps. I saw a red streak of railroad lines, around Manassas Junction, and a bunch of poker chips—white and blue—that could have marked out Rebel formations and munitions depots on one of his maps. He must have spent half the day shoving those chips around, when he wasn’t riding his horse from camp to camp, or peering down at us from his gondola in the sky.

28.

Flub Dubs

S
HE
’
D
BEEN
FINAGLING
with that White House gardener, John Watt. They moved around funds they didn’t really have. I should have shaken her like a petulant child. Things were complicated in the middle of an insurrection. Members of the White House staff had to have some kind of military appointment or they couldn’t be paid. Mary conspired with my Secretary of War to have her gardener appointed to the cavalry and stationed at the Mansion. I was
powerless
. I wouldn’t block one of the Lady President’s own commissions. I was glad she hadn’t assigned the Chevalier as Captain of the White House Watch—he was near the Crimson Room often enough to command some kind of post.

She was more interested in the gardener now—John Watt. She had his wife appointed as White House steward. Most of Madame Watt’s salary went to pay Mary’s creditors, I imagine. I’d catch her huddling with a Washington upholsterer, or a minor prince from a dry goods palace, who was always accompanied by mysterious men with hats over their eyes. A dozen footstools appeared one day, and were gone the next. Draperies arrived, and were never installed. The East Room was like one of Little Mac’s encampments, where a whole
battery
of furniture kept shifting around—nothing was safe, not even the spittoons. I couldn’t rest my eye on a single marker; Mary suffered from some terrible affliction, like a madwoman bartering in her sleep. In less than nine months Mother had swallowed up that twenty-thousand-dollar fund Congress had given her to refurbish the White House with carpets and all the other
flub dubs
that were dear to my wife. And she still owed another six or seven thousand dollars.

I wasn’t blind to her predicament. Mother had to drive the rats out of that maze of rooms in the cellar before the whole Mansion was infested. She had to buy new china and Parisian wallpaper. She couldn’t have a Crimson Room without crimson carpets. I’d catch her in the middle of the night with a hammer in her hand. She had to nail down some carpet, or fix the leg of a favorite chair. She’d gone to Manhattan with that gardener of hers and spent six thousand dollars on curtains, sofas, and hassocks. I hadn’t been President more than a couple of seasons, and still Mother worried about my prospects. The little sultans who let her borrow to the hilt would demand payment in full once I had to vacate the White House. I learned all this from Nicolay & Hay, who were like my own detective bureau.

While they spied on the Hell-Cat, as they called her, she angled to get them fired. And she almost did. In the end, with no more means to hide her misconduct, Mary came to me. I was glad she didn’t bring my boys into the fracas and have Willie or Tad sing about the high cost of chalk in their classroom. She wore a simple black gown with long sleeves and only a single feather—kind of a mourner’s costume—without a particle of decoration in her hair. She’d been crying. But she wasn’t crying now, and she didn’t aggrandize herself, tempt me with the ghost of Dolley Madison.

“Father, I overspent.”

“We’ll manage,” I said. “But, Mother, it would stink in the land to have it whispered that the money for furnishing this house was tossed into the wind by the President when soldiers are freezing and don’t have proper blankets and shoes.”

Mary blinked at me. “Wind,” she said. “I didn’t . . .”

“I’ll never approve the bills for
flub dubs
for this damn old house.”

Her shoulders shivered under that mourner’s costume. There was a wall of frozen pain on the side of her face, like a momentary paralysis. Her mouth twitched. She had a worse stutter and lisp than Tad—and a terrible pout. Her temples throbbed. I knew what she was trying to pronounce. So I pronounced it for her.

“
Flub dubs
.”

And her old flare of anger came back. She no longer had a lisp.

“Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “I’m not in the habit of buying
flub dubs.
Mr. Buchanan and his niece turned the White House into a wilderness. Miss Hallie tinkered with the East Room and left our own quarters uninhabitable. I will not have my boys live in a field of rats. I spent more than I had the means to spend. But the task was prodigious.”

I meant to kiss Molly and hold on to that sweet musk of hers, but I couldn’t. Was I jealous of the Chevalier and his
lust
for literature? Did I want to tear down the Crimson Room with its Parisian wallpaper? But she shouldn’t have been
that
foolish, to turn a gardener into a finagling cavalry man, and fill the Mansion with some sultan’s carpets while I had to hold the Union together with the flat of my hand.

I let her wander away, the skirts of her gown gliding against the oilcloth with a strange
whish
while I stayed there, in the dumps. Tad’s kitten leapt onto my lap. Tabby commenced to tear at my sleeve, and pretty soon it had a tiny batch of thread in its paw—I could feel that little cat unravel me. I stuffed him in my pocket, while I was raveling out somewhere on some private moon.

29.

Noel 1861

I
COULD
HEAR
THE
church bells clap like a melody of thunder in this first year of war—and the rumble of men returning from battle without their boots on, ambulances caught in the ruts of a road, boys with blood on their faces trying to outrun a cannon’s brutal song. I’d just come back from McClellan’s camp with Mary and the boys to offer little gifts to the soldiers in their winter huts. We couldn’t stay long—there was an epidemic of measles. But Mother and her White House sewing circle had knit socks for the soldiers. And despite the measles, Mary traveled from hut to hut, with bundles of woolen socks until she looked like some strange martyr. She asked every single soldier his name and where he was from. Mother could see how gaunt they were; she had nothing from her garden to give them in the December frost, so she dug into her bundle, and they kissed her hand as she delivered the socks.

“Bless you, Madame President.”

We could only bring a pittance for them. I was feuding with the War Department. A clever little band of foxes in Manhattan were making a fortune speculatin’ on this
conflagration
—the war was like a burning barn, and we were saddled with half-blind horses and pistols that shattered after the first shot. Soldiers went into the field with gimcrack guns that could make them lose a hand or an eye and might get them killed. I couldn’t even complain to Little Mac. He fell ill with typhoid fever just before Christmas. No one was permitted to see him, not even his generals.

“The bottom is out of the tub,” I told my secretaries.

Bob had come down from Harvard in his crimson cravat, and I felt impoverished in front of him with that little rope of silk around my neck. He’d run away from home as a little boy. It was Mary who found him hiding under the porch. I was out on the circuit, in one of the far counties, while Bob must have been dreaming of a far county of his own. He was an outrider, like his Pa. We had a similar streak of
terrifying
loneliness.