The First Lady and the Rebel, page 37
“Oh, you ought to,” Mary said. “It promises to be a fine performance.”
* * *
The Lincolns returned to the Executive Mansion in plenty of time to dine and dress for the theater, but they were delayed by the arrival of some acquaintances from Illinois, and almost delayed some more when Mr. Browning turned up. “I can’t see him tonight,” Mr. Lincoln told the servant who announced his arrival. “We’re already late. Tell him to come back tomorrow.” He looked apologetically at Mary as the servant left the room. “I feel bad not seeing Browning, but if I did, we might as well not go at all, and we’ve promised Major Rathbone and Miss Harris to pick them up.”
“Indeed, Mr. Lincoln, you should turn more people away, rather than allow them to harass you so.”
“Well, there’s not much I can do at this late hour to help him anyway, if it’s about the cotton business. Which it undoubtedly is. By the by, I’ve been thinking that maybe a postmistress situation might do for Emily.”
Mary, still somewhat irked at Emily for her letter of the previous year, was about to say that it had better do for the ungrateful chit, but remembering her promise earlier, said, “It would do very well, I’m sure, and it is kind of you to think of it.”
Their conversation took them to Senator Harris’s house at Fifteenth and H Streets, where Clara Harris and Major Henry Rathbone awaited them. It was the residence of both, as the couple were not only engaged to each other, but were stepsister and stepbrother. This circumstance struck Mary as a bit odd, much as she liked Clara—a sensible woman of thirty who shared Mary’s interest in politics. Still, it certainly made for a compact family circle, and at least the couple would be well aware of each other’s peculiarities by the time they married.
As Miss Harris arranged her skirt over the obliging leg of Major Rathbone, the President thanked them for accepting the invitation at such a late hour. “Change in plans,” he said apologetically.
“Yes, I read that General Grant was expected to attend. It is a pity that Henry did not wear his uniform, so the crowd might not be terribly disappointed by us being there instead.”
“I will try to look properly martial,” the major said.
“And soon, I hope, you will be looking marital,” Mary said, and her guests tittered.
The play—Our American Cousin, a comedy about a rustic Vermonter visiting his aristocratic English relations—was underway when their carriage arrived at the theater. Almost every self-respecting theatergoer knew the plot, so Mary knew that she would not have missed much, nor would the audience likely mind the interruption.
And what an interruption it was! As the Lincolns and their guests made their way to their seats, Miss Keene and her fellow players froze onstage, smiling, as the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief” and the audience, many of them in military uniform, stood and cheered. Only when the quartet settled into their seats—the President in Mr. Ford’s own plush-covered rocking chair, the ladies in cane chairs, and Major Rathbone on a sofa—did the play resume.
The President watched intently, occasionally lapsing into thoughts of his own as he often did at the theater, but never missing any of the jokes, which were plentiful. Mary, not as attracted by the broad humor, kept her eyes fixed on the stage but contentedly dwelled on the fine outing she had had with her husband. When was the last time she had had such a happy afternoon? Not in months—no, not in years.
The night before, her optimistic thoughts had centered on the future of the nation, but there was cause to be hopeful on a personal level as well. Bob, having got the military out of his system, would get through law school and enter the profession, after which he was bound to marry Miss Harlan. There would be grandchildren—no substitute for dear Willie or poor, short-lived Eddie, but still a comfort and joy to her in her advancing years. As for Tad, it was really time that his education was taken in hand—he had just turned twelve—but surely with no war to distract him, he would be more inclined to settle to his lessons. He would have to do so sooner rather than later, because Mary had every intention of holding her husband to his intent to travel after he left Washington. Mary smiled at the thought of them all having an audience with Queen Victoria, who would surely be amenable to receiving the president and his family.
Of course, she would want a female companion to take with her. Her mind drifted to Emily. Despite her late disagreeableness, there was no one better to accompany her. Though in truth, Emily might well find a second husband long before that. Why, perhaps after a few more months had passed, Mary might even consider doing a little matchmaking on her sister’s behalf.
She scooted her chair closer to her husband’s and took his arm. Really, they were acting more like young lovers than were the real things on Mary’s side—or at least Mary was. “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?” she whispered.
The President chuckled faintly. “She won’t think anything of it,” he hissed.
Mary’s hand was on her husband’s knee when Harry Hawk, alone onstage, fulminated, “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal. You sockdologizing old mantrap!”
Nearly drowned out by the laughter of the crowd, there was a click, then a flash. Both of them seemingly too inconsequential to upend her entire world.
Were they part of the play? Mary turned to her husband, to see if he was as bemused as she. His head drooped. She patted his forehead, and he drooped even lower. She patted the back of his head, and just as her fingers felt something warm and sticky, someone slid past her, so close that he brushed her fine black lace shawl off her shoulders. A man, wielding a knife against Major Rathbone, who had sprung out of his seat to grapple with him, then leaping out of the box.
Mary screamed. They were all screaming now—Major Rathbone, demanding that they stop the man; Miss Harris, echoing his cry; the man, now standing on the stage and yelling something about tyrants. Four of them screamed, enacting their own terrible drama while Mr. Lincoln drooped in his chair and the audience stared like flies drenched in amber.
Then the cry went up. “What’s the matter?”
Miss Harris leaned over. “The President has been shot!”
Surely Miss Harris was wrong? But there had been that flash, that click…
The rest of the theater came to life. Women shrieked, their cries melding with Mary’s. Miss Keene ran onto the stage, waving for order. Men were everywhere, some thundering across the stage, some running toward the stairwells, others simply cursing and throwing their chairs about. Only one man in the entire place was still, and Mary, her screams turning to sobs, instinctively held him upright in his chair as someone began banging at the outermost door granting passage to their box. She did not dare to leave her place to open it; everything somehow appeared to depend on her holding her husband in his place.
Slipping in the blood dripping from his gashed arm, Major Rathbone, finding the door had been barred from within, struggled to remove the barrier. Succeeding, he staggered back into the box with a young man behind him. “Dr. Charles Leale, Mrs. Lincoln. Please let me examine the President.”
“Do help him,” Mary choked out.
Dr. Leale nodded. He felt Mr. Lincoln’s pulse, and then motioned to two other men, who helped move the President to the floor. There was blood on his shoulder, and Dr. Leale knelt to examine him after one of the men cut the President’s coat and shirt away, Mary felt a surge of hope. A shoulder injury could make a man faint, surely, couldn’t it? Couldn’t it?
There was not a mark on the President’s shoulder.
With a rustle of skirts, Miss Keene entered, still in full stage attire and makeup and bearing a pitcher of water like a scepter. “Please let me assist,” she said reverently.
Dr. Leale made a motion, and Miss Keene sank amid her hoops and supported the President’s head on her lap as the young surgeon continued his probing, having turned his attention to his patient’s head. Mary could not even muster a protest.
“Ah,” said Dr. Leale said, and made a quick movement with his fingers, resulting in a trickle of blood. Instantly, the President’s breathing became somewhat more natural. “A bullet wound to the head. I removed a clot, which has released some of the pressure.”
“Will my husband live?”
“Madam—”
He was saved from answering by the appearance of two men, entering the box by the way of the balcony with the help of the crowd below and Miss Harris above. Mary recognized one of them—Dr. Charles Taft, the older half brother of Willie’s young friends. The association did not bode well. Weeping, she watched bleakly as he and Dr. Leale conferred with the third man, who turned out to be another doctor. “Should we take him to the White House?” Dr. Taft asked.
Dr. Leale shook his head. “No. I’ve seen too many men with similar wounds die in army ambulances from the jouncing about. If he must be moved, it should be to someplace close by, and with great care.”
“One of you three, tell me! Will my husband live?”
The three medical men looked at each other. Finally, Dr. Leale said, “Mrs. Lincoln, we will do our best. But—”
“Tell me!”
“I do not believe he will survive.”
For all the threats Mr. Lincoln had received over the years, Mary had never dared to wonder what she would feel upon hearing such words. Now she knew why. “Then I wish, sir, you would do me the favor of killing me, too.”
* * *
The pounding on Emily’s hotel door at four in the morning could mean only one thing: something had happened to the children. Not bothering to throw on a robe, she sprang up and ran to the door. “Who is it?”
“Mabel! Let me in!”
Emily undid the latch, and a pretty woman about ten years her senior ran into the room. A Baltimorean of decided Confederate leanings, Mrs. Cranford was staying at the hotel while her house was being renovated. “Lincoln’s been shot!”
“Shot?”
“In the head, in a theater in Washington. He’s not expected to live. They say the actor John Wilkes Booth did it.”
“Booth?” Emily stared. “But I saw him act. Why on earth would he do that?” She thought of the good-natured, good-looking young man who had so cheerfully signed Kitty’s carte de visite. Why would such a man do such a dreadful thing? “Surely this is a wild, foolish rumor.”
Mrs. Cranford lifted the window, which Emily had shut against the chilly night air. “Listen. Look.”
On Monument Square, a crowd had gathered. “Hang him!”
“Kill him!”
“Catch Jeff Davis, and string him up!”
“Kill all the rebel sons of bitches! This is their work.”
“Burn that damn hotel! It’s full of rebels, always has been!”
Emily slammed down the window as Mrs. Cranford began to cry. “They’ll come after us! That mob will come after us, you just wait. Women, children—they’ll have no mercy!”
“Now, now,” Emily said. “I’m sure the authorities have a watch on this place.”
She scarcely knew what she was saying, scarcely cared. Absentmindedly, she patted Mrs. Cranford’s trembling hand as she tried to absorb the news. Mr. Lincoln, whom Mary loved so much. Mr. Lincoln, who had tried his best to keep Hardin on his side. Mr. Lincoln, who had loomed so large in Emily’s world ever since she was a child. Dying, and after such a horrid act! How would Mary bear it? Emily tugged at Mrs. Cranford’s hand. “My sister! Was she at this theater? Was she harmed?”
Mrs. Cranford sniffled. “They say she was there with him. No word that she was hurt.”
But being there was harm enough. Emily shivered.
Until dawn, Mrs. Cranford wailed and fretted until Emily at last persuaded her to go to her room and rest. Alone, Emily knelt and prayed, tears streaming down her cheeks as she waited for the inevitable news that there were now two Todd sisters who were widows.
* * *
The house that the President had been taken to, immediately across the street from the theater, was owned by a Mr. William Petersen, and it was a very nice house. So Mary, bewailing that Mr. Lincoln had to die in this horrid tenement, was informed by Miss Pauline Petersen, who along with the rest of the household was pressed into service to deal with the raft of unexpected visitors that arrived that terrible night. The fourteen-year-old was the only person who did not inform Mary that what was happening was God’s will or beg her to compose herself, and for those things Mary was immensely grateful. “Father doesn’t need to take in boarders,” Miss Petersen said, handing her a cup of tea. “He just likes a little extra money.”
“Very sensible of him,” Mary agreed.
It was in one of those boarders’ rooms that Mr. Lincoln lay, in a bed that was too short for him. Mary was allowed in the room only periodically, which later she supposed was reasonable, because each foray was worse than the last, and each prostrated her. Bob or Senator Sumner—their eyes red and swollen—or someone else would lead her in, and despite her resolution to sit quietly beside Mr. Lincoln and quietly hold his still hand, she would end up begging him to say just one word, to twitch his lips, to only open his eyes a little, to move his hand—just one finger! His worst habit in life had been his ability to shut himself off from her when he pleased, and now, in dying, his remoteness was absolute. He had not exhibited consciousness of anything since Harry Hawk had called someone a sockdologizing old mantrap.
Dr. Robert Stone, Willie’s old doctor, who had been fetched shortly after the horrendous deed (“assassination” sounded so formal, so cold, to Mary), told her that he doubted the President was feeling pain; the damage inflicted by the bullet was too great. But then why did he emit those awful moans from time to time, which made even the men around the bedside flinch? Those sounds, and the increasing distortion of her husband’s beloved face, were too much for Mary. So she had submitted herself to be ordered out of the death chamber and back onto the black horsehair sofa in the Petersens’ front parlor—the gracious parlor, she had assured Miss Petersen—where she sat and watched the night wear on. From the window, she could see the crowd that had collected in the street keeping the same watch. Her grief had become the nation’s.
Though her companions—Miss Harris, who had stayed even after poor Major Rathbone, having fainted through loss of blood, had been driven home, and Mrs. Elizabeth Dixon, a senator’s wife—seemed to think that she should be spared all news of what was going on, Mary had demanded otherwise. Keeping abreast of what was unfolding outside of the parlor and the bedchamber where her husband lay dying was the only way she could avoid being enveloped by panic and grief.
Mr. Lincoln’s assassin had been identified as the actor John Wilkes Booth—had not Mary had a strange feeling about the man? Whether he was plain crazy, or a rabid rebel, or both, was being debated all over Washington this long, miserable night.
Booth was at large, and so was a second assassin—a young man who had barged into the home of the Secretary of State and attacked the convalescent Mr. Seward in his bed. A mishap with his gun had forced him to use a knife instead, and between the metal immobilizing the Secretary’s injured neck, the intervention of the Secretary’s male nurse, his sons, and his servant, and the piercing screams of the Secretary’s daughter, the assassin had succeeded only in badly injuring, not killing, the Secretary, who was expected to recover. There had been dreadful rumors that all the President’s Cabinet and Vice President Johnson had been attacked, but these proved false. Most of the Cabinet members, in fact, had come through the doors of the Petersen house at one point or the other to sit by the President’s bedside.
Secretary Stanton had come early in the night to the deathbed, had come out with tears in his eyes, had given Mary his condolences, and then had commandeered a room in the house and set to work, investigating the crime and giving the nation periodic updates in messages he sent to the War Department to be telegraphed. For hours now, a parade of knock-kneed witnesses had come through the Petersen door to be interrogated, their answers captured in shorthand by a neighboring war veteran with not one but two artificial legs, and the secretary already had a list of Booth associates to chase down. He was particularly interested in a John Surratt.
“Why, I know him,” said Miss Petersen. “Or at least I know someone who knows him, one of his mother’s boarders who knows Ma and Pa. We know that horrible man Booth, too; he visited an actor who boarded here once or twice.”
“You seem to know everyone, my dear.” Mary put a hand to her head. “I just hope they track Booth down soon and hang him. And all of his accomplices.”
“Oh, they will,” Miss Petersen said confidently. “Count on that.”
“Will you bring my son to me, child?”
Miss Petersen obeyed, and Bob came into the front parlor, his eyes tired and full of misery. It was close to seven in the morning. “Let me see your father again.”
“Mother—”
“You will not keep me from his side!”
“I won’t. But he looks much worse than he did when you saw him last. The swelling and all—”
“Take me in.”
With Mrs. Dixon’s assistance, Bob obeyed. Mary stepped into the room where Mr. Lincoln lay diagonally across the too-short bed. She took a single look at him and fainted dead away.
Bob kindly did not say “I told you so” when they revived her and she recovered enough to take a seat. “One word!” she begged. “Just live to speak to us once—to me and to your children!” The tears poured down her face, and instead of directing her frustration at the dying, silent man, she yanked out a chunk of her own hair.
