A Warrant for Mrs. Lincoln

Contents

Acknowledgements

PART ONE

Prologue

HELEN WAITE

(1919)

HELEN WAITE

(Then)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

MRS. LINCOLN

(May 19, 1875, Morning)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

HELEN WAITE

(Then)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

MRS. LINCOLN

(May 19, 1875, Afternoon)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

HELEN WAITE

(Then)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

MRS. LINCOLN

(May 19, 1875, Afternoon)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

HELEN WAITE

(Then)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

mrs. lincoln

(May 19, 1875, Afternoon)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

HELEN WAITE

(Then)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

PART TWO

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

HELEN WAITE

(Then)

hELEN WAITE

(Now)

MRS. LINCOLN

(May 20-21, 1875)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

HELEN WAITE

(Then)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

MRS. LINCOLN

(July 1875)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

MRS. LINCOLN

(September 1875-ugust 1876)

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

MRS. LINCOLN

(1880)

MARY LINCOLN

(July 16, 1882)

EPILOGUE

HELEN WAITE

(Now)

Author’s Note

References:

About the author

Acknowledgements

T his book is dedicated to Helen and Henry Lerner, whose life-long romance

inspired my fiction, and to my husband, Martin, my daughter, Sunny, and her family, who bring me infinite joy and restore my sense of balance.

I would also like to thank Jeff Gerecke, who helped me develop a more literary style and a better story, Anne Dubuisson Anderson who gave me a number of useful pointers, and Elizabeth McQueen who helped put the final version of this book together for publication. Finally I also acknowledge my readers, Marsha Rosen, Joni Goodman, Linda Koenigsberg, Sharon Silver and Ken McQueen. A special thanks to Diane Gaines.

I also acknowledge two authors, Jean H. Baker, author of the definitive Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, and Jane M. Friedman, whose America’s First Woman Lawyer: The Biography of Myra Bradwell introduced me to Mrs. Lincoln’s fascinating story.

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

HELEN WAITE

 (1919)

I am staring squarely into a window on a moving train, a window that reflects

a woman old enough to do as she pleases, including wearing a dead fox as a necklace. The dead fox’s glass eye looks back at me with recrimination. Such an ugly thing, this fox, eye and claw still intact, hanging from my shoulders around my neck. It’s as admired, this shrewd furry morose necklace, in little society circles, as the bob hair-do, or the current slouch that is the fashionable replacement for correct posture. It’s as admired as the returning Northern soldiers were when I was a girl.

I look into that window, and instead of seeing the cows in the fields, I see fragments of my past, distorted by the almost seamless retouchings that memory forces upon the truth. Fondness irons out the wrinkles of the seams, and anger ruffles up the indignities.

What am I doing on this train?

Of course, this odd trip, or at least the concept of it, really started a few days before I entered the train station. It occurred when my landlady called up the stairway.

Haloo—Haloo. Miss Waite! Are you there? There’s a telephone call for you. Long distance!"

A telephone call? For me? Who would be calling me, an old maid, six years retired and plainly bored to tears by how her world has shriveled from a great plum to a dried out prune?

Mrs. Hubble? Did you ask who is on the line?

"Sure and I hope it isn’t any of my business, Miss Waite. I wouldn’t put myself in the way of gettin’ the reputation of a busybody. Eloise does that enough for the whole town… . Come on, Miss Waite. Telephone calls are expensive, now—and this one’s callin’ from New York. Fancy that."

Eloise is the switchboard operator who sits in the telephone office, handles calls, and mills rumors.

Still stiff from sitting and reading for so many hours, I try my best to accelerate the beat of my waltz-step. Step-Step-tap. Step-step-tap. At the bottom stair, I murmur, Thank you very much, Mrs. Hubble, hoping this will suffice to give me privacy.

It doesn’t.

Mrs. Hubble hovers as if I am a side-show.

Eloise has an annoying whispery voice. I have a call for you Miss Waite.

"And just remember that it is a call for me, Eloise. I don’t want to hear my conversation told back to me when I’m purchasing my groceries tomorrow."

Why, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Eloise’s voice sounds as breathy as asthma, as cold as an ice freighter. Your caller is a Mr. Barlow. I’ll transfer him.

At the name Barlow I put my cane down hard on the floor, and the backs of my knees buckle.

Are you all right, Miss Waite? Mrs. Hubble asked. Your color’s gone quite off.

Perfectly all right, I lie. Why shouldn’t I be? But, truth is I’m sixty-five years old and the name has left me weak-kneed. I put my face close to the talking box, and speak into a little round brass plate.

Hello.

My voice shimmies. I am aggravated at myself. With a single word I have already revealed too much.

Why, hello Helen. I’m glad I finally found you, it took a lot of asking around.

It takes me a moment to answer. I want just the right reply. True to history, I pick just the wrong one. It must have taken quite a lot of asking around, after all, it’s been forty-odd years.

Now, Helen. Don’t make this difficult. Let’s just say I’ve thought of you. Actually, let’s just say I think of you often. I’ve a house on the beach… sea grass and sea oats, and ocean right to the horizon. I just thought you and I could catch up. I’d love for you to meet my granddaughter, Fanny.

Somehow I have accepted. Against logic. Against the weight of memory. Even after all these years. Even after everything. I must be a fool. What was I thinking when I said yes?

HELEN WAITE

 (Then)

My closest companion at the age of ten was a broom. I was convinced

that I had been born with that broom in my hands, my life spent forcing the woven hard strands into knotholes and dragging the corn-straw across the weathered joints of floors that collected adhesive grit and loose soil. Gathering dust devils from one side of the room to be emptied upon the neighborhood through an open door. Blistering my hands with obligation. Watching my father’s foot, as he tapped it against a blackened brick of the fireplace that just happened to show a speck of dust, and muttered What’s that?

So I must have been sweeping the floor the day that my Uncle Adam opened the kitchen door with a cavalry cheer. The glee in his voice was so out of the ordinary that I could imagine the knot-holed eyes of the wooden boards opening wide with surprise. Like a good part of the population in Illinois, my uncle was a lawyer, normally composed, though much more affable than my father. Unlike my father, he was also a true Lincoln man. The moment he heard the news that Richmond had fallen, he raced over to our house, swept my mother in his arms, and waltzed her around the room. Meg, he said, The war is over. I’m taking you and the children for the victory celebration in Washington D.C.

I remember using my broomstick as a dance partner, twirling around the room, momentarily forgetting that my father was in the kitchen reading the newspaper until father stepped out into the parlor. What’s wrong with the victory celebration in Chicago? he asked, sourly.

Margaret, he said, You can go. The girl can, too. But I’m keeping Johnny with me. Whether by commission or omission, Uncle Adam had excluded Father from his travel plans. My father’s brief remark solidly demonstrated his resentment towards my uncle, towards my mother, towards me, towards everybody. Father didn’t call Mother Margaret unless his dander was up, which was often, and Father had forgotten the name of his only daughter. Helen. The name of the world’s great beauty. On that point, I’m sure I disappointed him. So be it. We would travel to the Capitol city without him, and I was glad of it.

My uncle Adam, my mother, and I woke up the next morning in a yellow light. I felt all the excitement of my first adventure, and breathed a sigh of relief from the oppressive sullenness of my father’s moods. We arrived at the railway depot. It looked like a monumental dance floor, filled hoop-to-hoop and crinoline-to-crinoline with the women’s best day dresses, the men throwing their Honest Abe high-hats into the air with abandoned glee. I had rarely gone further than the neighborhood store, nor been in a gathering of more than ten people at a time. The tight jostling of elbow and knee came as a surprise to me. Except that my brother, Johnny, and I shared a bed, we rarely touched in my family.

The train hoot could hardly be heard above the crowded noise of the station, but we could not be deaf to the slide of the brakes against steel. The crush of bodies carried us onto the train, the women, children, and babies sitting three and even four to a seat, and the men trying to stay vertical through a long, hard, noisy, dirty passage. Mother brought a big picnic basket of food for our journey, as had the other women, and by the end of the first day, the train smelled variously of boiled eggs, cornbread, the smoky maple and hickory cure of ham, and the bristly cork and pop smell of pickles. By the third day, apple cores and the crumbs of day old biscuits littered the floor of the carriage, and the whole car smelled like a piece of rotting fruit, not to mention sour bodies, and the smell of tobacco.

As we neared the Capitol, the air soured so that the small lavatory between the two cars could not accommodate the traffic of queasy ladies and twisting children. I fretted and writhed like the rest of them. An engineer familiar with the modern science of sanitation assured us that the smell came from Washington City’s open sewer system.

To my eyes, long accustomed to the confines of a small unpretentious neighborhood in Chicago, Washington City was all at once the grandest and the most unfinished place in the world. At the hub of the city stood the Capitol with its newly added, almost completed dome, a monumental building designed for a government of checks and balances, housing elected Representatives who had protected the notion that all men were created equal. My neighbors, Mr. Finney and Mr. Talbot, my Aunt Sarah’s son Rupert, and my Uncle Eb gave muscle, bone, and blood to uphold the principles that mortared the walls. Not far away, the incomplete Washington Monument sat forlorn, as barren as an abandoned factory, with corrugated construction buildings hovering low and slovenly, haphazardly placed atop a muddy mound.

Unlike the modern wooden sidewalks of Chicago, here there were no sidewalks or paved streets anywhere, just powdery dirt that lifted its choking dust with each turn of a wheel, with each step of a boot. As we approached the mercantile center of the city, great parades of returning Union soldiers marched down the streets, as well as a ragged, scratching, hungry-eyed procession of colored folk, the first I had ever seen. Merchants set up stands to sell cold drinks and all manner of food, or to hawk commemorative souvenirs lined up on wooden planks: painted pictures of Mr. Lincoln on plates and mugs; pretty little spoons; chapbooks of victory poems; medallions and plaques.

Of course, not a boarding house or inn was available in the whole celebrating Washington City—people were camping out under trees and on porches—but my Uncle Adam had already arranged for us to stay with his army friend’s family, the Woodrows, where Mother, my uncle, and I shared the same narrow bed, me wedged in the middle. I grappled with the problem by laying myself across the foot of the bed. Mother’s knobby ankles and Uncle’s rancid feet made for an unbearably long night, but in front of me was a window with lace curtains, the first I had ever seen, and the moon came in through the holes of the net-work.

Mrs. Woodrow had a penchant for the theater. That is how we wound up going to see Our American Cousin starring Laura Keene, reported to be the most beautiful woman, and Harry Hawk, reported to be the funniest man, alive. A rumor floated that the President and Mrs. Lincoln would be attending the performance. I glued myself to the playbill in the front of the theater watching a swirl of lace and swans-down and white-illusion, the men with boots shining so brightly I could see my reflection, the women flowered and feathered and jeweled. For the first time I realized how plainly my mother dressed and how dusty her shoes were.

Finally, the theater door opened and I was swept along with the crowd into the narrow theater lobby, then up the stairway leading to the balcony. I had never seen anything like the lofty elegance of the theater that spread before me the moment I reached the top of the stairwell. Gas-lit chandeliers brightened the auditorium. A giant skirt of green velvet curtains cloaked the stage, and Grecian urns decorated the proscenium.

Mrs. Woodrow apologized, worrying that she had failed us with the seats, high up on the middle balcony on the extreme side of the stage. When we sat down, however, much to our pleasure, we found ourselves almost straight across from the Presidential box, which was a part of the stage, cantilevered forward to give the audience a view of the dignitaries: a vanity box with a poor view of the actors. I peered through Mrs. Woodrow’s opera glasses to see the sofa, parlor chairs, and an empty upholstered rocking chair.

The President and his wife were not in their seats and I assumed, with bitter disappointment, that the President had decided not to come. The gas lights turned down, a hush fell upon the crowd, and the curtains opened. A parlor, a magnificent salon, had been transported, whole, onto the stage, with sofas, chairs, framed portraits, and candelabra. I immediately forgot about the President and his wife.

The plot was a bit of Tomfoolery. A Yankee bumpkin was to inherit $400,000 as the beneficiary under a will, but the dim-witted fellow inattentively used the will to light his See-gar. A former will left everything to his English cousin.

Then the plot stopped cold, gas lamps went up, and the orchestra struck Hail to the Chief. The audience rose as if on cue, as President Lincoln, his wife, and another couple entered the box, waving to the audience. The theater shook with the stamping of feet.

The actors waited on the stage for the lights to go down and the noise to subside. As the light dimmed, the American Cousin mouthed a line twice, unheard over the clamor. Finally the American Cousin gave us a small signal, a cough, a motion of his hands, and the audience grew quiet. He looked over at the President’s box. This reminds me of a story… as Mr. Lincoln would say.

I slyly aimed the opera glasses and peeked into the Presidential box, where I could see every detail clearly, right down to the black lace on Mrs. Lincoln’s gray gown. President Lincoln chuckled at the ribbing he received at the hand of the actor, as all the world knew that our President loved nothing better than to tell a long and winding yarn. Then I realized that if the President looked my way with an opera glass, he would be able to see me. The thought of the President setting his eye upon me, as if I was the celebrity, plucked goose prickles up, lifting the hair on my arms. I peered at the President. And then I saw him do it. I am as sure of that now as I am of my own name.

President Lincoln gave me a wink.

Laura Keene, thinking Harry Hawk was rich, tried to trick the American Cousin into marrying her daughter. She was warm and cozying with her silver tea set. Discovering later that the American Cousin was nothing but a dolt, she turned to ice.

I am aware, Mr. Trenchard, that you are not used to the manners of polite society, she said and walked off the stage in a huff.

Harry Hawk stood in the spotlight, scratching his chin.

Heh, heh. 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 man-trap.

As the audience roared, a single piercing crack of noise made a hole in the laughter.

Mrs. Woodrow touched my mother, holding her heart. What’s that?

I raised the opera glasses once again, and peered into the Presidential box. Mrs. Lincoln was standing and bending over the President, whose head had drooped onto his chest. Then I saw Mrs. Lincoln’s feathered fan.

It was drenched in blood.

HELEN WAITE

 (Now)

Henry’s invitation has propelled my memory like an avalanche, snowy youth

bearing down hard upon the calm still deep forest of age, encumbering me with memories that have hurried the passage of the train ride, although I have managed to rock and sway and watch the speeding, dancing flashes of trees and fields and towns from time to time during my trip from Chicago to New York. I finally alight from the train, fully expecting Henry to be there to greet me, only to find crowds of people milling around the station but no Henry. Finally, a determined young woman approaches me, dressed in the fashion of the day, a tailored gray linen blouse that falls in a straight line to about six inches from her knees, partly covering a little flutter skirt of gray chiffon that hangs to mid-calf. A navy cloche hat fits her head like a helmet. She walks snappy, and looks about with a slightly masculine air of industriousness. She resembles Henry.

Miss Waite? Hello, I’m Fanny.

I don’t know what Henry must have told her with his ridiculous stories, but I am certain, by the slightly relaxed drop of the muscles in her face, that she expects someone who looks shorter, taller, thinner, fatter, prouder, kinder, pinker, paler or at least less gray-haired.

Where is your grandfather? I ask.

I’m sorry, he’s out of town for just a few days.

I feel the heat climbing from my chin to my forehead. My embarrassment discomfits her into silence.

Take me to the ticket office please. I’m booking the next train back home.

Oh, Miss Waite. Please do stay. I so want to talk to you, and grandfather… you cannot even imagine how much he’s anticipated your coming.

Well, he has a fine way of showing it!

She takes my hand. Please. Please don’t go.

I wear my irritation like a sash of declaration, but, as she doesn’t see me stomping off to the ticket office, Miss Barlow busies herself with the chore of finding me a porter for my bags. Our ride, she explains, is waiting at the curb. The porter hailed, the bags lifted onto the trolley, we remain almost silent until we finally arrive at a bold white open automobile driven by a handsome blond man in his early twenties. He sports a straw boater and wears a flax colored suit, and he remains seated while the porter stacks the trunk and hat boxes and opens the front door. My hostess introduces the young man as Teddy and indicates that I should creep into the back seat, while she gaily sits herself in front.

We pull out of the station and putter along the roads of the town, stalled behind the carriages and wagons, the horse and pedestrian traffic. As the town thins out to green countryside, granite peeking out from uplifted ridges, the young man calls back, Hold on to your hat, and we bolt away, dust flying and me bouncing up and down along with my three hat-boxes. We follow this country road, its trees flying and blurring, its grasses bending and undulating with the force of our passage, until, on a slight rise, we spot the beach and the ocean in the distance. The sunset has just started to streak the sky. Just a little more, and we’ll be home I promise, Miss Barlow yells back at me. Isn’t it a glorious evening?

I hold onto my hat which sits akimbo on my head and I clutch the side of the car to keep from being jolted clear to the other side of the seat. Despite my grumpy expression, I think, yes, it is a lovely evening. Finally, Miss Barlow announces the house. Henry’s house.

I have socked away the fox in a closet. The pristine room reserved for me is all dressed in white. I wonder whether it is Miss Barlow or Henry who have assigned this virginal room to me. Someone has laid out a white bathrobe and bath things on the bed. A bathroom sits off to the side of my room—absolute luxury! One of the maids knocks on my door to deliver my clothes, unpacked, ironed, and hung upon satin hangers. Dinner will be in half an hour, Madam, she says. Hardly enough time to change, but there you have it, the soup’s hot and the roast is almost ready. Mr. Deekes will come to show the way.

Barely have I taken off my travel-weary shirtwaist, replaced it with one of my two dresses suitable for evening, and re-pinned my hair, when Mr. Deekes knocks on my door. The house requires a tour-guide, I suppose. It’s large enough.

I hope your room is satisfactory, Miss Waite. Mr. Barlow and Miss Fanny have worried over every detail for the entirety of last week.

Well, at least Miss Fanny.

We travel through the paneled corridor of the bedroom wing and a long gallery that offers views of diverse rooms before we reach a formal dining room with a dinner table that might accommodate a party of sixteen but is set for only two, one formal place setting at the helm, the other meant for me. Mr. Deekes pulls out my chair, shakes out my napkin, places it on my lap, and leaves the room. My hostess has not yet arrived so for amusement I stare at the ornate grandfather clock long enough to see the minute hand move several irritable ticks. Then Miss Barlow bursts through the double glass doors with her bright smile, face ruddy with fresh air, and wind-tousled hair. Back from my walk, she announces. You must take in this glorious night in our lovely garden after dinner. Grandfather always goes out at this time of day. When it’s warm like this.

If he happens to be in town.

She’s ignored my quip or taken no note of it. He turns-up the bottom of his trousers and walks barefoot in the sand, just like a little boy.

Yes. That’s my general recollection of him.

It’s actually one of his great qualities, Miss Waite.

Mr. Deekes returns with a tureen.

Ah, Mr. Deekes, what will it be tonight? Fanny asks. Miss Waite, I wanted to impress you.

Crab soup. Truffled fish. A roast in a sauce laced with mulberries. Asparagus. New potatoes, shining with parsley and melted butter, and I think, two Cornish hens.

Eat heartily, she commands.

I am used to my daily diet of soup and bread. Surely I will suffer indigestion and regret all of this delicious excess.

After dinner Miss Barlow takes me through the French doors. Now to the promised land. We turn the corner of a quarried-flint path leading to dark prisms of wild-flowers and polygons of roses emptied by the night of their color but not their shapes. Miss Barlow has not exaggerated. The combination of salt air and flowers makes a heady perfume.

Where is your grandfather, Miss Barlow?

I thought you knew.

If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.

Lobbying in Albany for the suffrage amendment, of course. He’s always been so grand on the issue.

Grand on the issue, indeed. My thoughts must show on my face in the unfortunate moonlight, for Miss Barlow looks at me curiously. I am cups and liters, feet and meters: a measured object.

So, you worked with my father at Mrs. Bradwell’s News?

Yes. Of course.

And he says you knew the Lincolns.

Not the Lincolns. Not really.

She looks at me with expectation. She’s been quite hospitable, and I curt and moody. It’s not her fault that her grandfather has been a boob.

I did not know the Lincolns, but he was right in one respect. I did know Mrs. Lincoln.

Grandfather tells me stories about Robert sometimes. But Mrs. Lincoln? Grandfather has hardly mentioned her at all.

Well, our employer knew Mrs. Lincoln rather well. Mrs. Bradwell was her friend.

So, that’s how you met her? We walk to a balustrade looking out at the sea. The air gets salty at this time of night. Look, the moon’s hiding in the cloud. I think it will be lovely out tomorrow.

She turns to me, as if on a whim. So tell me something about Mrs. Lincoln. I always enjoy stories.

MRS. LINCOLN

 (May 19, 1875, Morning)

O nce again, a great flutter of wings grazed her head. The bird, a white

dove, cut the air in an upward movement, the flap of its wings pounding in her ears. Then a feather, white as death, slowly drifted down. As she stared at it, she observed a small puffy haze of bluish smoke, heard a shot, tasted fear, acrid and metallic, and then realized the audience’s laughter. The actress had just walked off the stage, and the actor posed for effect in the spotlights. Then a flash and she saw her feather fan, the blood on her feather fan, the blood spreading along the shaft of the feather.

As always, she woke up. As always, her heart beat too quickly and she feared going back to sleep, sat up for a few moments, and laid down again, her back pressed against the feather mattress, her hands cradling her head, elbows crooked like the beating wings of that white dove, until, slowly, sleep overtook her to the next morning.

Then it was just another day. She awakened in her hotel room residence and went to her wash stand for her morning ablutions. She had taken her bi-weekly trip down the hall to the shared bath just the night before, adding a bottle of cure-water. Therefore, a simple wash, a freshening of the face, a cool damp cloth under her arms was really all that was needed.

Drying off with a woven linen towel bearing the Grand-Pacific’s imprint, she began the painful process of dressing. Since she arrived back in Chicago her neuralgia had intensified and her fingers, thick and stiff with arthritis, had trouble gripping the buttons.

As always, she dressed in mourning black. Although she had no more use for the fashionable colors that she loved in the springtime of her youth, she longed for the memory of those sweet fashions so much that she had bought a colorful dress or two… just to keep in her trunks to look at. She fixed her bustle, heavy with horsehair, and pinned on the ebony and gold mourning watch, a medallion-looking timepiece, elegant, but well in keeping with her grieving state. Then she felt for the thickness in her petticoat where she safely entombed, in a secret pocket, a small envelope holding approximately $57,000 worth of bonds. She had nothing to fear from bank failures, for wherever she went, her money traveled with her.

Finally, she tied on a small black bonnet with a short veil that made her wide face look even older. She had been criticized for wearing mourning for too long so she had transitioned to the shorter veil. But why should she not mourn long and hard? She had so much to mourn for. Oh, Father, Father. If Mr. Lincoln were still here, perhaps the journalists would not take