I Am Abraham (55 page)
I allowed myself to sit in Mr. Jeff’s plush chair, sank into the pink cushions, when a bunch of Provost Marshal’s boys arrived with black powder on their faces and little red tails tied to their caps. They were shoving along a woman with an even dirtier face than theirs. She was dressed up in a cartridge belt and tattered grays, like some poor soul who’d just survived a barrage of cannon fire.
“We caught her, Excellency,” they sang, jumping up and down like agitated bullfrogs. “She’s Colonel Kate—had her own squad of Rebel rangers. We’d like your permission, Excellency, to
enfilade
her against the rear wall of the Rebel White House.”
Something about their little colonel rubbed at me. That gal should have been petrified. She was about to face the lick of a firing squad. Then I noticed her pockmarks under all the gunpowder and that soft, subversive smile of the lady Pinkerton who had rescued my hide in Baltimore.
“Friends,” I said to the Provost boys, “you can leave the little colonel with me. I’ll arrange for her enfilade.”
I had to borrow some biscuits for the lady Pinkerton, who was famished.
“What in tarnation are you doing in Richmond, Mrs. Small?”
She had quit Allan Pinkerton for a while, attached herself to Stanton’s own secret service, but my Secretary of War had never bothered to mention a word. She went into the heart of Dixie Land, formed her own company of Rebel rangers as the fictitious Colonel Kate, and led these men into one suicide mission after the other.
“Mr. President, I must have had a couple hundred boys
kilt
. And I’m not too proud of that. . . . I wanted to meet up with you at Rocketts, but I had a chore to do.”
Seems a clever little band of female agents, posing as flower girls, had decided to assassinate me and Tad once we got to Richmond, and the lady Pinkerton had to deflect the flower girls.
“What happened,
Paw
?” Tad asked.
“They’re pretty much defunct,” she said.
And I talked to her about the Provost boys. “They weren’t smart enough to capture you, were they, Mrs. Small?”
“No,” she said with a smile that revealed the gaps in her mouth. “I had to
capture
them. I knew they couldn’t resist bringing a prize packet like Colonel Kate to the Commander-in-Chief.”
There was a certain disquietude—a despair even—under all that bravado. Her hands were trembling. She’d become the Union’s own
benevolent
monstrosity of war.
“You could remain here with my party, Mrs. Small.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she said. “I’m going to Danville. I might steal some of President Davis’ despatches.”
I scrutinized that pockmarked face. “The war might be over by then.”
She looked right into the dark well of my gray eyes. “It will never be over, sir. There will always be more Rebels to catch. The woe has just begun.”
She chomped into a cracker, shook Tad’s hand, and was gone in her tattered grays. I guess she had a Pinkerton’s point of view, that war was some kind of continuous stripe, a battleground for spies. Her misfortunes—her own early life as a pickpocket, her
bondage
to Allan Pinkerton—had made her into a curious sibyl. She could pierce that curtain of the unknown and predict every sort of
desolation
. And while I pondered all that, a porter appeared. His clothes were much cleaner than mine.
He saluted me. “General, Mrs. President Davis said I was to keep the house in good condition for the Yankees.”
“That was mighty kind of Mrs. Davis.”
He brought everyone in the room some bourbon—and water for me and Tad. A courier arrived with a telegram from Mary at the
other
White House, a telegram for Tad; but he couldn’t even mouth a word. Still, I had him take a stab at it. A 3
rd
Lieutenant had to read his own telegram.
Tad-d-die—I—am—des-s-s-o-late—not—to—be—with—you—and—Fah-thuh—on—your—b-b-birth-day. I—love—you—more—and—more—and—more
I was feeling kind of strange—in the
President’s
chair, as if I were Mr. Jeff, presiding over some great ruin, with a bullet on my desk that must have served as a paperweight, and a few scattered documents no one seemed to want. Before I had a chance to blink, General Grant’s own courier arrived with a bundle wrapped in butcher paper. His field glass was inside—in a silver casing—and a note scribbled on the back of an envelope.
The telescope is for Lieutenant Tad.
Captain Bob is fine. He’s at the front with all the generals.
He worries about you and Tad in the old Rebel capital.
It would dishearten him, he says, if you caught Confederate fever. I told him he could always come and rescue the Commander-in-Chief.
Tad was filled with wonderment. He’d never had a general’s glass before. He kept poking out the window with it plugged to his eye.
“What do you see, Son?”
“Angels,
Paw
.”
The marines in the room smiled while they polished their carbines with their own spit. I didn’t smile at all.
“And what are the angels doing, Taddie?”
“They’re flyin’ on top of the smoke. But their wings are all filthy from the fire.”
“And are they laughing—or crying?”
“Both,
Paw
. Have a peek.”
I shuddered at the sound of my own boy, at the innocence—and the certainty—of his invite. But I wouldn’t allow Grant’s glass to scarify me. I screwed it into my lazy left eye. Richmond didn’t smolder or burn from the President’s rear window. I saw a rose garden. It must have bloomed like black blood during the fire, nourished by all the ashes and a wild wind. The roses weren’t dusty; they had a bountiful black sheen. But the general’s glass was playing tricks. Because at the edge of the garden I discovered Mr. Jeff—he hadn’t gone to Danville with all his record books.
Then I realized it wasn’t him, but a Rebel scout wearing the President’s fine frock coat. Perhaps he had been stationed there like a scarecrow, to distract us while Mr. Jeff was riding the cars on the Richmond and Danville line. A woman was with this scout, in ballet slippers and a blue silk dress; his female accomplice, I suppose, some facsimile of Varina Davis—or my wife, since she had Puss’s reddish brown hair. It was no trick of the glass, meant to
unfrock
me and gnaw at my heart. But it did gnaw, as my mind played its own tricks, and I imagined Molly as a Kentucky gal, dancing in her ballet shoes. And then a great roar from the river knocked me out of my reverie. The whole house shook—some phantom Rebel ironclad must have exploded in the harbor.
The woe has just begun
, as the lady Pinkerton had predicted, but I didn’t unscrew my eye from the glass. I was tired, I told myself. Perhaps Mrs. Jeff’s servant had fed me a cup of rotten water—but all we had was a rose garden that slanted down into an isolated apple orchard—beyond that was the James, with smoke swirling above the river, like the random plumes of time. It was as if my damn life had been a trajectory to this very moment, from my near drowning in the Sangamon to the
ravelment
of war that entangled all our lives—President and plumber, pilot and
vivandière
, contraband and Copperhead. And I’d come to Richmond like some pilot out of the sea, with the dead riding in their own barge, not as ghosts, but as companions who might instruct a President. And I sorely needed instruction.
Tad tugged at my elbow. “
Paw
, do ye see the angels,
Paw
, with filth on their wings? I’m dyin’ to know.”
My lazy eye was still screwed into the glass, but now I could see all the soot. People were scurrying in and out of the swath the fire had left, like a sickly gray river of ash; not even all the ash in Richmond could undermine that monstrous movement of people with their bundles and carts, like a relentless surge, almost supernatural. No flag or musket we had ever brought to Dixie could deflect the path of that melodic sway. And from the distance, high on a President’s hill, I would have sworn that people were floating through the ash.
“
Paw
,” said Tad, “what do you see with my glass?”
“Angels laughing and crying.”
And I held him as close I could.
I never liked Lincoln. It took me a month to memorize the Gettysburg Address for my fifth-grade class. But my first encounter with Honest Abe wasn’t at public school. It was at a Bronx movie house that couldn’t afford first-run features and had to play half-discarded films. And so I risked eighteen cents—the price of a ticket in 1947—to watch my favorite actor, Henry Fonda, wear a false nose in John Ford’s
Young Mr.
Lincoln
. I’d adored Fonda as Wyatt Earp in
My Darling Clementine
, also directed by Ford, but here he looked like a tall yokel in a tattered top hat. And when he rode into Springfield on some little nag, with his knees near the ground, he was so far removed from Wyatt Earp’s quiet menace and masculine charm, that the real Abraham Lincoln fell from my mind for fifty years.
Then several winters ago, I happened upon a book about Lincoln’s lifelong depression—or
hypos
, as nineteenth-century metaphysicians described acute melancholia, and suddenly that image of the backwoods saint vanished, and now I had a new entry point into Lincoln’s life and language—my own crippling bouts of depression, where I would plunge into the same damp, drizzly November of the soul that Melville describes in
Moby-Dick
. But I was no Ishmael. I couldn’t take my
hypos
with me aboard some whaler. I had to lie abed for a month until my psyche began to knit and mend, while some hired gunslinger of a novelist taught my classes in creative writing at the City College.
Henry Fonda’s false nose and long frock coat began to fade the further I read into Lincoln’s life. He suffered from two severe bouts of melancholy, the first in 1835, after Ann Rutledge died, and he couldn’t bear the thought of rain pounding on her grave; and the second after “that fatal first of January,” 1841, when he broke his engagement to Mary Todd, went around Springfield like a disheveled loon, and claimed he was the most miserable man alive. He would endure other bouts of the
hypos
, until a permanent sadness settled onto his sallow face. Billy Herndon, his law partner and most lively chronicler, described him this way: “He was lean in flesh and ungainly in figure. Aside from the sad, pained look due to habitual melancholy, his face had no characteristic or fixed expression.”
This ungainly man soon percolated in my own melancholic imagination. And I realized I had been unjust to Lincoln all these years. He had his own quiet menace and a poetic voice that Wyatt Earp never had. According to Edmund Wilson, in
Patriotic Gore
, Lincoln’s poetry wasn’t revealed only in his letters and speeches and the tall tales he loved to tell. “He created himself as a poetic figure, and he thus imposed himself upon the nation.”
Yet he was molded by Mary Lincoln, might not have become President without her. Billy Herndon believed that Lincoln never loved his wife. But Herndon isn’t always reliable about Mary; they never got along. She was, in her own way, much more complex than either of them. Better schooled than most of the men around her, she wasn’t permitted to practice any profession, or disclose her own penchant for politics: she could become a schoolmarm, a nurse, a wife, or an old maid. As Adrienne Rich wrote in “Vesuvius at Home” of another nineteenth-century sufferer, Emily Dickinson: “I have come to imagine her as too strong for her environment, a figure of powerful will”—too strong and too intelligent, like Mrs. Lincoln. And Mary had to endure the deaths of two children.
How are we to measure her grief or that desperate desire to become part of her husband’s band of rivals? She used whatever powers she had as Lady President, intrigued with Manhattan politicos and other unscrupulous men. She would buy a hundred hassocks and three hundred pairs of gloves out of some insatiable need to own and possess, just as she clung to her eldest boy, Robert, wouldn’t let him go off to war, protected him in a way she couldn’t protect the President, and finally went half mad, because she could protect no one, not even herself. She was part Medea, avenging betrayals that never took place, and part Ophelia, Lincoln’s child-wife.
I hope that the Robert Lincoln I reveal will rip through some of his enigmas, the aloofness that one finds in photographs of him—that essential sadness around the eyes, and sense of displacement, as if he longed for his own invisibility, and like his mother, was mourning a President who was still alive.
I’m no biographer. I’ve written a work of fiction, not a historical tract, and have invented where I had to invent. I’ve held to the chronicle of Lincoln’s life, haven’t violated any important dates, though I have tinkered with certain of Lincoln’s letters and speeches when I had to create my own sense of continuity. And I had to embroider the history of others a little. Henry Ward Beecher didn’t deliver a sermon on John Brown when Lincoln visited Plymouth Church in 1860, but the drama of that sermon seemed essential to the book, and I borrowed it for this occasion. And the pulpit I consigned to Beecher was like the gondola of a hot-air balloon, because I liked to imagine him as an aeronaut in his own church; such a gondola presaged the war itself, where generals of both sides had a fanciful notion about the utility of reconnaissance balloons.
Most of the characters in the novel, including Mrs. Elizabeth Keckly, were pulled from Lincoln’s life. A former slave, she worked for Mrs. Jefferson Davis before she went to the White House to become Mary Lincoln’s confidante and couturière. Her closeness to the Lady President would give her a certain prestige, but something else must have compelled her. Was she seduced by Mary’s terrifying isolation in a capital that called her the
Traitoress
, since so many of Mrs. Lincoln’s Kentucky relations fought on the Confederate side? Mrs. Keckly had her own workshop, could have grown rich as a mantua-maker for the wives of merchant princes. Yet she moves her workshop into the White House in my novel. She would have fights with Mary, who paid her a pittance and often flew into rages. The Lincolns were dependent on her nonetheless. Tad, their youngest child, who had a speech impediment, called her
Yib,
a “corruption” of Elizabeth, and Yib had a powerful presence in the White House.