I Am Abraham (39 page)

“Mrs. Lincoln is my friend.”

“But you have to feed yourself, Elizabeth.”

I kept staring at the blood on her nightgown—from that stick Mary had to bite. “Oh, I have plenty of rich clients, Mr. Lincoln. Mrs. President pays me whatever she can.”

“But at least we could find you a regular room—on the family floor.”

She looked at me as if I were some imbecile fresh out of a circus.

“Doesn’t she have enough trouble, sir, without having a mulatto lady sleeping on the same floor? I’m fine where I am—up in the attic. And when she has her
blinders
, I sleep in the chair right next to her, or let her come to the attic and be my guest. She loves that ol’ attic chair.”

Elizabeth turned away from me. I couldn’t even tell if she was crying.

“I have a powerful affection for Mrs. Lincoln—and Taddie—and Bob—and even you
sometimes
, when you aren’t crawling up the shirts of those slavers in Kentucky. But I won’t discuss politics while Mrs. President is ill.”

Elizabeth brought her own royalty to the attic—not the noisome kind that paraded around in their costumes and titles and ornaments of silver and gold. She tutored the servants’ children, tied Tad’s laces, fed him when he forgot to eat, and attended to Mary like some strange midwife who could absorb every tantrum, every shriek—as if every damn blow in the universe rained down right off her head with no more harm than a scatter of pumpkin seeds.

38.

Apollonia’s Boy

T
AD
HAD
BLACK
hair, black eyes, and the brooding look of Lord Byron—Byron as a boy, in a 3
^rd
Lieutenant’s uniform, but without the clubfoot. He brooded more the closer we got to the anniversary of his brother’s death, and it took an ugly twist. He set fire to the shoes of a boy in Mrs. Keckly’s class, ransacked the closet of a maid who lived in the attic, stole some coins from the purse of Mary’s prize gardener. Mary couldn’t tame him—nobody could, not even Yib. So I sent for him. Tad loved the stables, which were rebuilt after the last fire, when Little Mac came marching out of the snow with a pair of spotted ponies. My generals didn’t house their horses with us any longer; they had their own big barn near the Navy Yard. But Tad would carouse with the stable boys, show them magic tricks—he wasn’t with the stable boys. The moment I was ready to sound the alarm, Tad walked into my office in his crumpled uniform.

I couldn’t have killed the wildness in him. I wouldn’t know how, but we did what we always did when both of us had the
bleeds
and were feeling blue. We marched right past Senators and salesmen who besieged the second floor and would have ripped my coat to bits, begging for favors I just couldn’t grant—a captaincy for some cousin, railroad passes for a tribe of sisters—and we skedaddled, wandered off to Apollonia Stuntz’s Toy Store on New York Avenue, a few hundred yards from the White House.

It was our favorite retreat, where we could gorge ourselves on tidbits from the penny counter—licorice as black as McClellan’s coal-black horse, buns in the shape of unicorns, jujubes that could gum up your teeth—and we walked among the toy soldiers on the tables that Apollonia’s husband, Joseph Stuntz, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, had crafted with his own hands before he died; there was a certain remorse as we fondled the soldiers in their
tricornes
and bandoliers, since we’d come here last when Willie was alive; he kept a whole battlefield under his bed, with cannons and horses and carts from Stuntz’s center table.

Tad stared at another prize, hanging from the wall, a soldier that had been hanging there even before Sumpter fell and wasn’t like any other toy in the store. Apollonia had dubbed that soldier Jackie Boy and refused to sell him at any price. Jack was a puppet without strings, a doll made of wood and cloth; bits of glass were wedged into his eye sockets with all the precision of a jeweler. Jack wore a uniform, but with no discernible rank. He could have been a general, else the rawest recruit. He was about a foot and a half tall. Apollonia had stuffed him herself and sewn up his innards. She sat near the window in a shop that was like a narrow cave filled with miniature warriors, and she watched Tad watching Jack. She was a war widow, even if her husband hadn’t died in battle; he’d lost a leg at Austerlitz, and had become a
toy soldier
, sitting with his wooden leg on a stool and carving little ghosts of the battles he’d been in. That’s why my own generals coveted Stuntz’s toys, with their genuine
stink
of war—startled eyes and soiled trousers. She still wouldn’t sell them Jack.

Yet she must have sniffed the agony between Tad’s shoulder blades, must have tasted his want, because she got up from her chair, unwound Jack from his peg on the wall, and gave that puppet to my boy.

“But I can’t pay you, Apollonia.”

I didn’t even carry a purse. And I couldn’t ask Tad to dig into his collection of coins. It wasn’t proper for a President to borrow from his own boy. But I’d misread the proprietress, who wasn’t in the mood to part with Jack for money.

“I’m lending him to the White House, Mr. Lincoln, on a kind of permanent loan. Tad and my Jackie will make good soldiers together.”

Tad saluted Apollonia, clicked his heels, and marched out of the shop with that doll cradled in his arms. I was hoping Jack might provide my 3
^rd
Lieutenant with a little companionship, and he did, but that damn doll didn’t draw the meanness out of him. Jack aided and abetted Tad’s own flair for savagery. That boy and his doll went on
razzias
in the White House and upset every protocol with their plundering. They pilfered soap from the maids, squandered gooseberry pies from Mary’s kitchen, and set up headquarters in the attic, where Tad could appraise his treasure in peace.

I couldn’t bear the notion of corporal punishment. I’d never spanked Tad once in my life. I kept waiting for all the banditry in him to burn out. Yib wouldn’t let him into her classroom with that piratical puppet. So his speech grew wild. But Tad wasn’t
deef.
He could hear the terrible tattoo of the drums at Fort Stevens, as recreants were rapped right out of their regiment and had to walk through a
firing line
of officers who beat them like donkeys with their batons. Such disgraced soldiers, who might have stolen cash from their own corporals’ fund, couldn’t walk into a tavern in the District, or put on their regimental colors again. They would become walking ghosts, condemned to wander in the midst of war. That tale and the tattoos had touched my 3
^rd
Lieutenant. His own rampages stopped. He quit his headquarters in the attic, and asked my secretaries for an official appointment with the Commander-in-Chief. He was somber and subdued when he came into my office, his black hair slicked down, his cap over his heart. He must have realized that he couldn’t deploy a puppet, that Jack had his own terrifying inertia. Or else Jack had disobeyed one of Tad’s commands—there could have been a thousand arguments between a puppet and a boy.

He knew I could pardon any soldier, save him from being drummed out of his regiment with a scratch of my pen. Tad wanted me to pardon Jack.

“Taddie, what has Jack done?”

“He’s
derelicked.
He won’t get up when I tell him. He won’t do his chores. But I’d like you to pardon him on account he’s Jack.”

I did pardon Jack on a piece of Presidential paper, but I saw the same turmoil in Tad’s eyes, the same deep reverie. The heart had been torn out of him. He suffered Willie’s absence somewhere beneath his bones.

Reporters wrote about him as the First Child who watched over the White House. They never understood how alone he was, with some
razzia
raging inside him that couldn’t be calmed by Stuntz’s toys. He saw the wounded soldiers, heard the tattoos, and he echoed the carnage around him in his rampages—there wasn’t much room for little boys in a rebellion.

I was the one who discovered Jack the very next day hanging from a tree on the south lawn. There was a piece of paper attached to Jack’s leg, like a rooster’s tag. Nothing was written on it. Tad’s
derelicked
soldier couldn’t bear to be pardoned, else Tad couldn’t bear to pardon himself. It might have been much simpler than that—the First Child getting sick of a soldier stuffed with straw. But I didn’t cut Jack down. I left him to dangle, like some grim reminder of a dangling war—there wasn’t a damn finisher among Jack and all my generals. And then, after a month or so, I cleaned up Jack’s sooty britches, and returned him to Mrs. Stuntz’s store.

39.

Old Capitol

I
T
WAS
LIKE
some insane turkey shoot without turkeys, as officers and raw recruits attacked contrabands—runaway blacks—in the streets of Washington, firing a couple of shots over their heads or hurling stones at them, and tossing children into the offal of the old canal. Invalids, returning to active duty from some military clinic, beat the tar out of black dishwashers at the Soldiers’ Retreat, that canteen on the Sixth Street wharf. No ambulance arrived to deliver these broken dishwashers to the Colored Hospice near the Poor House; they were left to rot in the rain. And while they groaned on the docks, a black angel appeared, dressed in bombazine like a war widow, and carted them off in the Presidential carriage.

The town was bewildered by this mysterious lady in a widow’s black veil, who arrived out of nowhere that March of ’63. She rescued wounded contrabands, pulled them out of the mud in Mary Lincoln’s own cabriolet. That angel in bombazine was Mrs. Keckly, who wasn’t just a couturière and a schoolmarm at the White House. She would flit across Washington like a lunatic in widow’s weeds—it was Keckly’s way of disguising her mission. Pickets and boys from the military police wouldn’t chase a widow down, even if she was carting contrabands. Besides, these pickets were reluctant to stop the Lady President’s white horse, and interfere with her tiny silver carriage.

As President of the Contraband Relief Club, Elizabeth would pluck endangered runaways off the
Ave
and bring them inside the wooden walls of the camp on Boundary Street, where they wouldn’t starve; but the camp was overcrowded, and an entire tent city rose up outside its walls. And when the Sanitary Commission started to whisper about a smallpox epidemic at the camp, boys from the Provost Marshal’s office arrested the black widow as a provocateur, shackled her like a slave, and sent her to the Old Capitol Prison with deserters, prostitutes, and prisoners of war.

That was enough to wake Mary out of whatever mournful slumber she was in. She hurried to Old Capitol the moment she heard of Elizabeth’s incarceration. But the sentinels wouldn’t even let her past the outer hall. It was a Federal facility, they said, and Lady Presidents had no jurisdiction there.

I had half a mind to shut that jailhouse and toss the sentinels into the Potomac.

“Mary, what did you do?”

“Shout,” she said.

Then a captain arrived who was a touch more cautious—said the prisoner was being interrogated and would return to her bunk, with all the prostitutes who’d been corralled that week.
Our little mamzelles
, he called them. Mary would require a special license from the prison’s own magistrate to meet with the black angel—but the prison was out of licenses, he said.

So we climbed into Mary’s carriage, sailed down Pennsylvania Avenue, and stopped in front of an old brick barn on A Street, across from the Capitol, with a great arched window above its medieval metal door. I could see a panorama of prisoners in the broken window panes—men and women with wild hair and mottled red cheeks, standing like florid ghosts on display. That brick barn with wooden slats across every other window had been a boardinghouse for Senators that ran into ruin. It had no proper prison cells—its rooms weren’t even locked. Old Capitol had to rely on its sentinels, who patrolled the area around A Street and every corner of the yard with their blackjacks and their clubs. They had mean little eyes like killer hogs. Their hands were gnarled, their faces ripped raw of sunlight.

They met us in the outer hall—sucking at the blisters on their lips as they stroked truncheons that could have split a man’s skull.

They bowed to Mary in their own mocking manner. I wanted to bite their throats. A body could disappear in this endless cave of unwashed walls, with curtain after curtain of spider webs. They were the monarchs here, but they should have been kinder to my wife. I looked into their mean little eyes and played a little Presidential poker.

“We’re forming a new regiment, boys. The 13
^th
Ohio. Daredevils. They like to hop around with mud and cartridge powder on their faces, like wild Injuns. We’ll drop them behind enemy lines. And I’m including all your names. You look like worthy souls.”

That malicious grin was gone, and suddenly their Superintendent arrived, William Wood, a stocky little man who’d once been a private in the Union Army, and loved to lord it over the imprisoned officers at Old Capitol. Wood was a favorite of my Secretary of War, who told me how the Super would come crashing through the corridors and yell to the prisoners, “All ye who want to hear the Lord God preached according to Mr. Jeff Davis, go down to the yard; and all ye who want to hear the Lord God according to Abe Lincoln, stay right where ye are.”

Prisoners with cash in their pockets, or a friend in high places, didn’t have to eat the usual prison slop. They were given a special card, which allowed them to wash in the sentinels’ own sink, and to buy grub and tobacco from the prison commissary at piratical prices. I watched these star boarders shuffle around, as if they were at some indoor plantation rather than a prison. They swaggered in their winter cloaks, saluted the sentinels, and shoved other prisoners aside, while I was filled with a melancholic rage.