I Am Abraham (48 page)

There was
civil
war
in the District between McClellan’s supporters and our own Elephant Clubs, with competing torchlight parades. The McClellan Legion had a hard time finding raw recruits in the Republican precincts, while the Elephant Clubs marched through the streets with howitzers and military ambulances and lit-up transparencies—one of General Grant and another of myself in a stovepipe hat and long tails that seemed to flare up and shoot sparks into the sky. As the Elephants marched past Democratic headquarters at Parker Hall with their bits of fire, a banner of McClellan strung across the
Ave
burst into flames, and
McCLELLAN
shriveled and turned to smoke. The Legionnaires were furious, but they couldn’t muster many Locos among the troops. They called the Elephants “abolition traitors,” and had to retreat into Parker Hall in a storm of cobblestones. Some of the Elephants wept, even as they hurled the stones. They belonged to the Army of the Potomac, and still loved their old leader, but could never vote for McClellan.

His own boys turned against him when the Democrats talked of peace while soldiers were dying in the fields. A young Vermonter, who was a McClellan man
clear to the bone,
said he’d rather rot under Rebel ground than vote for
dear
George
.

A
WEEK
AFTER
the canvassing was done, Mary came to me, swathed in black from head to toe. She looked like a creature of cold, hard chalk under her veils. But there was nothing
pale
about her blue eyes. I wondered if Mary was on another mission.

“Father,” she said, “we will have to do something about Robert. He can no longer tolerate his portion—he’s quitting law school. You must use all your influence to find some light task for him in the military. I will not have my son ending up as cannon fodder.”

My Ophelia wasn’t waiting for some spectral car to Richmond, wasn’t in bare feet. She was made of chalk this afternoon. But I couldn’t sacrifice other sons for her sake.

“Mary, I’m Commander-in-Chief. I cannot shield my own boy.”

Then all that veneer suddenly broke down, and her little chalk house commenced to crumble, and I saw a hollow in the veil where her mouth was, as she made little sucking noises like a child under duress.

She’ll go to the cars again, stand under that tin roof in her sleepwalker gown,
and my heart will tear
—
one thread at a time. I won’t survive that second ride to B&O.

“Mr. Lincoln,” she said in the rumbling voice of a petitioner, “if Bob goes to the front, who will do his
wash
? I’ll have to get a chit from Ulysses Grant. There must be accommodations for mothers and wives. I’ll live with the sutler women, sell chocolate to the soldiers. And I’ll have to take Lizzie, hear? And one of the other gals. Tad will want to come see his brother. The District is dead this time of year.”

“Mother, for God’s sake—stop!”

She ripped off her veil with one savage sweep of her hand. Her eyes were swollen. Her mouth was twisted at the corners into a snarl, as if some demented bear had bitten her. And then that forlorn mask disappeared.

“Goodness, other mothers have sons in the war. We’ll pack a picnic for Robert. He loves the pickled ham they serve at the Willard, and poached eggs on a sliver of toast.”

“Molly,” I whispered, soft as a serpent, “I’ll find a way to shield Bob.”

I didn’t want to wound my wife, just to calm her down. And I didn’t want Bob to chaperone his mother to the government insane hospital, not in his last act as a civilian. But Mary hummed to herself, and her eyes raced with rapture over Bob. She was as cunning as a gifted, petulant little girl who loved to bribe and be bribed. She strolled into her headquarters under all her widow’s weeds, while I went into my office, stood near the window, and could
see
the end of the war in the chipped glass, as if it were a general’s translucent map. As I looked deep into the glass, it flashed like a mirror in the sun. I was frightened of my own face. It wasn’t my sunken cheeks. I was getting used to that. I’d become a bag of bones. It was the
terror
on my brow—fierce and unfriendly as an open sore. My face was a silent scream that suddenly cracked open, shook the chandeliers, and shivered right through the glass.

47.

Captain Bob

January 19, 1865

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL GRANT:

Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend. My son, now in his twenty second year, having graduated at Harvard, wishes to see something of the war before it ends. I do not wish to put him in the ranks, nor yet to give him a commission, to which those who have already served long are better entitled and better qualified to hold. Could he, without embarrassment to you or detriment to the service, go into your military family with some nominal rank, I, and not the public, furnishing his necessary means? If no, say so without the least hesitation, because I am as anxious, and as deeply interested, that you shall not be encumbered. . . .

I would have volunteered in Bob’s place, gone into battle with a bent bayonet and my pockets stuffed with hardtack, slept on the ground like General Grant, and carried the slop of an entire regiment—rather than use my office in the service of my son. I hoped—in secret—that the general would deny my request, and hoped that he wouldn’t. He didn’t stall, as I had done, but wrote back in two days, never once flaunting his power. “I will be most happy to have him in my military family,” he said, and suggested that the rank of captain would be just about right.

I went to Mary with the general’s despatch. I couldn’t find one particle of joy on her face, none of the bliss she’d had at the B&O, waiting with her hatbox and her footstool for a phantom car. I couldn’t
enthrall
her with the news about Bob.

“Father,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “Grant shouldn’t be that near our boy—his Butcher’s habits might spill onto Bob. Couldn’t you find something for him with the quartermaster, or else your Secretary of War, where Bob would be billeted in Washington?”

My feet were always cold. I had to warm them near the fire. I’d lope from shiver to shiver as I went through the corridors in my green shawl. And now my hands were shaking, too. I’d picked up Mary’s affliction—I was becoming as mercurial as my wife.

“Mother, he doesn’t want to be billeted in Washington. He’s had enough of us. He wants to see the war after
five
years at Harvard. He’s entitled to that, at least. You cannot keep coddling him.”

She’d arrived at some infernal bridge that could be crossed once, and only once, or she’d never come back with a moment of peace from that frayed edge. I had to bring her down, woo her off the bridge, but she would have smelled a whopper, so I couldn’t tell a bald-faced lie.

“A general’s family isn’t always near the front—Bob won’t have to follow the whistle of
every
bomb.”

“I’m still not glad about it,” she said. But that fork of dissatisfaction had disappeared from her forehead. And we had an extended truce until Bob arrived—in his captain’s bars. Mary showed him off wherever she could. Poor Bob had to escort her to shindigs in the Blue Room while she corralled some Senator in the hall and sang him a song. She bloomed like a winter flower around Bob. Her cheeks were always flushed. She had an inexplicable red rash at the back of her neck. She’d rub his sleeve and stand with her head on his shoulder, her satin slippers all curled out, like a ballet dancer. She called him
Bobbie dear
and
darling Robert
, sometimes even called him
Abraham
, and she’d cover her mouth like a little girl and commence to giggle.

“Robert,” she sang aloud, “your mother is losing half her mind—Lord knows what
wisdom
will fall from my mouth next.”

I was like a stranger, it seems, who happened to be her husband and President of the United States. I couldn’t break through that curtain Mary wove around Bob—nothing could. Finally she came to me, with all the bustle of her black silk flounces, in a moment of despair, her fat little hands moving like ferrets, her eyes unable to hold a strict gaze.

“You must write to Grant,” she announced. “You are the general of all his generals. I won’t be trifled with—or trampled on by that Butcher. I must have Bob for another week.”

She returned to her headquarters across the hall. I loped down the stairs in my winter boots, went out onto the lawn, the bite of February in my bones. I found Bob standing under a barren, wind-swept tree in his captain’s blouse. His throat was uncovered, and his gullet bobbed up and down, while his shoulders were weaving in the wind. He happened to glance up and I could see the furor in his eyes. And for a moment he looked like his mother—half mad.

“Father, I will not dance with her again—I’d rather set my uniform on fire, burn every patch.”

“It gives her so much pleasure, Son.”

“But it is
unnatural.
My brother officers will mock me. I have to rush from soiree to soiree, with my own mother on my arm. I’m not blind. All the Senators and matrons she wants to collect have begun to titter behind her back. And what must they think of you, Father, to allow it?”

I didn’t care a pin what they thought, all those leeches who sucked blood out of the war, with their government contracts and goose liver from Gautier’s, where my own generals loved to dine—except for Grant, who always dined in the field, with his men.

“Father, I could have joined some anonymous regiment. I didn’t need a special favor.”

“The favor was for me,” I said.

“No, no—you begged the general for Mother’s sake. To keep me close to the general’s skirts. But that’s what I am, Father—his puppy. Everyone’s careful around the Prince of Rails. Takes years for other men to make rank, and I was born a captain. I have had no training. I’ve never been under assault. I’m not even sure I could fire a gun.”

It was the longest conversation I’d ever had with Bob. I wanted him to laugh again. I took a gamble with Bob.

“Well, Son, consider yourself a
political
captain, sort of my eyes and ears—at Grant’s headquarters.”

He gave me one of Molly’s quizzical stares. “Your spy, you mean.”

“We’re all a bunch of spies, if it comes down to the essential business of rebellion. I wouldn’t want you to spy on your own general. I trust Grant. And you wouldn’t have to report to me, not on a regular basis. But you might give your Pa a little perspicacity, from time to time—about the war.”

“
Perspicacity
,” Bob muttered, and wandered out from under the branches that swayed in the wind. Then he turned to me with a flick of defiance. “Father, perhaps I could tell you a thing or two about headquarters—from time to time.”

S
HE
WOULD
WANDER
ABOUT
, whirl like some caged animal—in her crinoline. No one dared interrupt her thoughts. She was as silent as General Grant, and even more mysterious. Her own powerful intuition must have told her how
ruinous
she had become on Bob’s little furlough to the White House. She wore a salmon tulle sacque on the day of his departure, and a headband garlanded with purple violets, like a giddy bride. She never clung to Bob, but she did swipe at him with her handkerchief on our carriage ride to the wharves, to get at a speck of dust near his eye.

There seemed to be an infinite parade on Pennsylvania Avenue, as procession followed procession. Officers rode in marvelous silver carriages with their concubines, as if the war had become a muffled drumbeat at some macabre bazaar—or harlequinade. Men in handcuffs marched along the
Ave
with large red labels tagged to their chests—
I am a Pickpocket and a Thief
—while members of the Provost’s squad prodded them with sticks and batons. Unlike these policemen, who had a scrofulous look, the pickpockets wore satin trousers and jackets of burning red silk, and were very bold and very shy. They paused on their march and bowed to Mary.