I Am Abraham (47 page)

“Mother, where are you going?”

“To Richmond,” she said, like a moody child. “Father, I’m delirious with joy. The stationmaster has promised me the next car will come along. I can ride to Virginia with one of your regiments. The
Secesh
wouldn’t dare disturb Mary Lincoln’s car.”

There were no cars to Richmond. And the stationmaster couldn’t have produced one even if the whole damn war depended on it. He must have coddled my child-wife, watched her come into the depot like a distracted barefoot queen, and wanted to get on her good side. But nothing I said could break Mary’s own conviction.

“A car will come—if I wait long enough. I have a rendezvous with Mrs. Jeff Davis. We’re the only ones who can stop this war.”

Mother had some powerful logic—wives were as worthy as generals in this scrape. I should have kept a cool hand at the depot, but seeing Mother like that in her flimsy gown, with goose bumps between her bosoms, unsettled me and I began to cry. That startled my child-wife.

“Husband, it’s the only way to bust loose from the Locos and Little Mac.”

I couldn’t
smash
that spell of hers. Mother was on a peace mission. She might have waited until the next full moon for a car to Richmond. I had to depend on Elizabeth, who jolted Mary with a little pack of lies.

“Mrs. President, isn’t it a shame about Mrs. Jeff?”

My wife scowled at Elizabeth. “Lizzie, are you saying the cars won’t come?”

“They’ll come, Mrs. President. But Mrs. Jeff won’t be there to meet
your
car. She’s been at the hospital all night, helping to bandage up children caught in the fire and smoke from Mr. Grant’s siege guns.”

Mother put her fat little hand over her heart. “Poor, poor Varina and her hospital children. If they expire, they’ll be all alone in
immensity
, like my little son, and there won’t be a soul to sing to them, or my Willie. Father, we must have Senators and Stanton’s clerks, and all the reprobates from Old Capitol, every one, on the train to Richmond. . . . Lizzie, round up all the contrabands you can find and all the colored maids, and Grant must come with us and beg forgiveness to Varina and the children. Father, summon the Butcher, grab him by his straps . . .”

She fell silent, exhausted by her own melodic chant. Elizabeth took Mother by the hand and led her away from the car shed and across the depot, as the stationmaster curtsied with the key in his fist. “It was an honor to have the Lady President at the B&O. I trust we’ll be seeing Madame again.”

I could have lashed at him for selling my wife a song about some spectral car to Richmond, only what would I have done in his shoes, if the Lady President walked into my terminal in her nightgown, and with
nek-kid
toes, like some Ophelia of the plains? I might have sold her the same song about the Baltimore–Richmond line. I strode out of the depot with Mother’s hatbox and footstool. That recreant, Tim, was waiting for us on Jersey Avenue with our carriage, and we lit out of there, the coachman clucking at his horses like a gifted marriage broker. The wind on her face must have refreshed Mary.

“I’ll have to wear silver,” she said. “I won’t have Mrs. McClellan dancing around me with her good looks, not when silver is so exceptional on my skin.”

I didn’t know what to do. Mary’s
seasons
were as variable as monsoon weather. But Elizabeth and I returned to the Mansion and tucked Mary in. Mother didn’t talk about the cars, and her jaunt to Jersey Avenue in the middle of the night, like a somnambulist with her eyes wide open. I knew she couldn’t rest at night, that some dream of our lost boy wandering in
immensity
would startle her sleep. That’s why Yib came down from her attic workshop and slept beside Mary on a vermilion sofa.

As I clutched Yib’s hand, I felt that same electric pull we’d had at the séance in the Soldiers’ Home, with Lord Colchester.

“Lizabeth, if a calamity should occur—anything—promise me you won’t abandon Mary and Tad, that you’ll look after them. I mean, I might run into a Rebel sharpshooter at the B&O, or some lady spy could poke me at the the-
ay
-ter with a pocket pistol . . .”

She was silent for a second. “Sir, I’d never leave Mrs. President and the boy.”

“But she won’t always be
Mrs. President
. And it will be hard for her without that mantle . . . and a load of servants.”

Elizabeth didn’t try to steer me away from death and destruction. We could still have been in Colchester’s spirit house, roaming with all the angels, the good
and
the bad, looking for the perpetual corn and lilacs of Summerland. I should have realized that Colchester’s orchards and fields were battlegrounds where all the blood had cleared, and all the groans of the wounded had washed into the ether.

“I won’t leave her, Mr. President.”

Then all the electricity left my hand. And she did a strange thing. She shut her eyes and caressed the contours of my face with her own two hands—my chin, my cheeks, my bony brow—like a blind woman encountering a death mask. And she went back inside Mother’s headquarters without another word.

M
ARY
WORRIED
ABOUT
Little Mac’s
deepening
presence. The war wouldn’t last a week after he was elected, he told the
London Times
. He was photographed with his Nellie in her handsome silk bonnet. People bowed in front of their carriage. Stanton called them a pair of traitors, but it wasn’t true. Nell had been kind to Mother after our Willie passed, her robust blue-eyed blondeness hidden under a veil she wore out of respect for Mother’s grief. She was like one of Mary’s half sisters, eighteen years younger, and that’s what troubled Mother during the canvass, that she had a beautiful young rival, with a piercing blondeness that trivialized her own plump look. And so everything to do with Nellie and Little Mac filled her with terror now, and she would fly into a fit at the least mention of
McClellan
. But that didn’t mean Little Mac was a traitor. It was the usual flimflam of Presidential politics. His posters were set in bleached brown, with his silken mustache looking severe, his dark eyes contemplating the Presidency, his hair combed high on his forehead, his buttons bristling, his general’s cape curled around his shoulders.

McCLELLAN is the MAN

I couldn’t compete with that stunning image, not in my stovepipe hat, my sallow face half a mountain of hollows, and Mary made matters worse with all her vitriol. After shellacking Nell and calling her a
blonde
toadstool
, she went after Little Mac like a thirsty shark. “He’ll declare Richmond the new capital of the Republic after he sits down with Mr. Jeff at the Rebel White House.” I couldn’t rein her in. It was as if her life depended on the canvass, and perhaps it did. I knew she owed money to a certain dry goods baron in New York for the little hurricane of hats she acquired on her last trip to the metropolis. And she wouldn’t have been able to bargain with him once she lost her mantle as Lady President. I could have exiled her to that little room in the basement where she passed the worst of her
monthlies
, but Tad would miss her. So would I—and Bob. He’d come down from Harvard to be with us. Her barrage of bitter remarks—and the mad pulse above her eye—troubled Bob. I could tell how embarrassed he was from the little twitch of his mustache. He would shout at her in the middle of a tirade.

“Mother, you must stop this. It does not become you to be a harridan. Mr. McClellan is not a convict, for God’s sake, and Nellie is not his whore.”

She would vanish into her headquarters and return after an hour with a
suspicion
of red paint on her cheeks, and all her mad trembling gone—that’s how susceptible she was to Bob.

Serenaders showed up every night. We stood on the south porch, Mary in a black silk dress, Tad with some engine of destruction in his hand—a penknife or the ripped pieces of a captured Confederate flag—and Bob, in a splendid suit, his arms crossed, like some champion, his mustache neat as a general’s.

That’s how the serenaders saw him, as my general in civilian clothes.

Who’s the prince we love the best?

Bob—our Bob—the Prince of Rails

The serenaders begged him for a little speech. Bob blushed. He wasn’t much good at speechifying. But he addressed the serenaders with the merciless tap-tap of a telegraph machine.

“I’m here to help my Pa,” he said.

His mother still kept him on a string. He studied law on her account, stayed clear of a Massachusetts regiment. He preferred his cramped quarters at Harvard to his
suite
at the White House, which must have reminded Bob of how he’d always been caged in by her emotions and moods and her
beau ideal
of him, the Harvard gentleman from Illinois. She couldn’t cure my rotten habits—welcoming guests with my shirttail sticking out, reading with my elbows on the floor, jabbing at my vittles with a knife, cussing like a mechanic. She cured Bob, but it only made him wilder. He had perfect diction. He could perform a duet at the dinner table with his knife and fork. Still, I never saw my son smile. And he told me once, half in jest, that he’d rather run away with a circus than study the law. But even clowns and acrobats had to enlist. And almost every circus died during the insurrection.

His hands were trembling as he waved to the serenaders.

“Bobbie,” Mother said, “Bob,” in that teasing voice of hers, like a piece of silk with a ragged edge, “shouldn’t you
engage
them a little, tell people about your plans after the canvass. It would be a kindness to me and your father.”

He turned from her, like that little boy who ran away from home when he was six, and now there was nowhere to run. He’d never attack his mother or Tad, but he might gnaw off his own arm, if I wasn’t careful with him.

He stopped me in the hall after the serenaders had gone, pleaded with his Pa. My Bob would rather be the lowliest private than the Prince of Rails. He couldn’t fight Mary alone.
She smothers, she overwhelms.
I tried to comfort him, to touch his arm, but he pulled away, as if I were a water moccasin.

I had to help Bob, or I’d lose him to some
insane
circus without a single acrobat. But I couldn’t do a thing until the canvass was over . . .

My managers cautioned me about McClellan, hinted that I should fetter the soldier vote wherever I could. But I wanted soldiers to vote. “We are as certain of the soldier vote as we are certain of the sun,” McClellan’s managers said. I didn’t care. I couldn’t ask a soldier to gamble life and limb and then turn around and pilfer his right to vote. I had my Secretary of War devise a plan to help soldiers cast absentee ballots in the field. My critics swore I was prepared to carry around a carpetbag and collect the ballots myself. Indeed, I might have done so with Tad. But my 3
^rd
Lieutenant was already involved in the canvass, him and Gulliver, his pet turkey. This fine turkey, with full black feathers, and a solid white breast, had been sentenced to the dinner table—until Tad purloined him and defied his Pa and the White House cook. He’d run around the Mansion, teaching his turkey every sort of trick. When the Pennsylvania boys camping at the White House started to cast their ballots, Gulliver mingled among them and interfered with the commissioners at the polling station. The commissioners were querulous at first. They couldn’t conduct their polling with a live turkey in the same precinct.

“Son,” I said, “is your turkey a Pennsylvanian? Does Gulliver intend to vote?”

“No,” Tad whipped right back. “He is not of age.”

The commissioners all laughed. But I was haunted by that image of McClellan in his cape, as if he could straddle the world in one great stride. And on the very eve of the election, I saw a flickering light in my window and heard a low hum, as if some angel were trying to console me. I went to the window, and there was a damn sight—a parade of candles across the lawn, like the rising up of the dead; soldiers lost on the battlefield had come to curse their President. Perhaps I needed cussing. I’d
spent
their manhood and hadn’t delivered much. I could catch the hollows of their eyes, the broken boot tips, the wasted limbs.

They tossed their caps into the air when I waved to them. And one of these silent serenaders shouted, “We ain’t for no damn Jersey general. We’re for Ol’ Abe.”

Then they danced, blew out their candles, and disappeared from the lawn. I was left with the fury of my own wants and the taste of gall on my tongue—a Commander-in-Chief who was hostage to every act of carnage, every bit of battleground, and every single cavalry charge in his name. Grant and Sherman didn’t have McClellan’s flair to build fortresses a hundred miles from the front, but they knew how to kill. And I couldn’t preserve the Union without those killers of mine . . .

McClellan came down off his mountain and swaggered here and there with his young wife—certain fancy folks took to calling her Mrs. President. He was welcomed in Philadelphia and New York as the nation’s commander-king. His managers talked of using my skull for target practice. They maligned my wife, said she was the secret queen of Richmond—that’s what stuck in my craw, and Little Mac promised to ride to the gates of the White House on his beautiful black stallion, with the soldier vote behind him, but it was a lot of
tin
.