A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (16 page)

But his own engine was going nowhere, thirsting and burning though he was. It was off the track, the gears frenetically spinning. He felt this acutely after witnessing Lincoln's triumph at the Young Men's Lyceum, after seeing him applauded and huzzahed for a speech that took no chances, that was full of sentiments that everyone—civil-minded Whigs and Democrats alike—could agree with. It would not be until many years later, when his friend proved willing to prosecute a relentless war against disorder and disunion, that Cage realized that the speech had not been empty after all, that Lincoln really did believe the things in it. He hated slavery, yes, but he feared chaos more. And perhaps he feared his own “towering genius,” the ruthless racing thing inside him.

It was nearly midnight but she would be awake. He had visited her at this hour before and found her at her dressmaker's dummy, contentedly sewing by candlelight, happy to interrupt her work. He stood up and assessed himself in the looking glass. A neutral face, small and sharp-featured, though his brown eyes were earnest and searching. His hair was awry and he brushed it downward and forward, so that it curled at the brow and at the edges of his side-whiskers in the style of Byron and Bonaparte and others who disdained the beaten path.

He walked with care through the hallway, avoiding the familiar warped floorboards that would creak and disturb his lodgers. Most would be asleep, including Mrs. Hopper, who had a righteous bedtime and was not to be disturbed after nine thirty. Theophilous Emry, however, was usually awake well into the early hours of the morning, playing his fiddle so softly—and so well—that the other residents never complained. Cage could hear “Brightly Speed the Hours” as he passed Emry's closed door.

The night was clear, the stars scattered like ice droplets in the frigid vault of the sky. It was very cold but there was no wind to drive the temperature down farther. Springfield felt exquisitely static and empty, a perfect little snow cave of a town, protected from the tumultuous world around it.

“The beaten path,” he whispered in this silence, stealing the phrase from Lincoln, testing it out for a title or first line of a poem. Path. Wrath. Math. Hath. Bath. Faith, if he wanted the effect of a glancing rhyme, though he rather doubted he did. Of the rhyming words that sprang to mind, “wrath” was the only one that suggested a hard surface upon which his forming ideas could be beaten into shape. “And winding on, through something-and-something, leads to the very seat of wrath.” Or to the very heart of wrath. Or to a strange flowering grove of wrath.

A cold poem for a cold night. But toying with the idea revived his spirits a little, made him feel that the editor at Little and Brown had read hastily, and with a provincial defensiveness of his own. Perhaps, even at twenty-eight, there was a future still looming for Cage. He had only to look to his friend Abraham Lincoln for an example of how to revive your fortunes when they were at a low ebb.

He came to the isolated house. The bottom floor where the disagreeable old woman and her son lived was dark, but upstairs there was weak candlelight visible through the curtains. She was awake, no doubt calmly sewing. She would be unsurprised when he climbed the outside stairway and knocked softly on her door. She would smile
,
just enough to give him heart, to allow him to believe he meant something to her, or could. She might be playing out a charade of affection, but she might just as well be playing out a charade of indifference, afraid for practical reasons—or for hidden emotional ones—to reveal the normal human longings that had to be there, and that for some reason Cage thought he must uncover.

He saw the nameless, ownerless dog curled up by her door—someone had covered him with a cast-off blanket. Cage was striding toward the stairway when Ellie's door unexpectedly opened and the dog leapt to his feet, throwing off the blanket. The figure that emerged was almost too tall for the doorframe, an unmistakably familiar figure, tall and thin with narrow shoulders and untamed black hair. He would have seen Cage if he had not immediately bent down to pet the dog, who—like everyone else—danced around his feet in adoration.

Cage drew back, out of sight in the night shadow of a neighbor's barn. Lincoln made his loose-jointed way down the stairs and took off toward the center of town, striding through the cold with a self-satisfied gait, his condensed breath streaming behind. It required an effort from Cage not to scramble out after him, to demand what he had been doing with her, what right he had to be here. But of course he knew what Lincoln had been doing, and he knew that he had every right. To accost him, to berate him for no coherent purpose would only mean piling on more humiliation than Cage already felt.

But he couldn't check himself from climbing the stairs, once Lincoln was out of sight, and rapping angrily on Ellie's door. The dog rose to greet him, but seeing that he would be ignored he burrowed down into his blanket as Ellie opened the door.

“I saw you standing down there,” she said. She held the door open for him to come inside. She was wearing a dark blue dressing gown, her hair was undone and hanging loose in a way that tormented him with its casualness, its hints of an intimacy he could witness but not share. As they stood looking at each other, she brushed her hair with a brush whose silver backing depicted a goddess in a chariot.

“You look very angry,” she said. “But you know, don't you, that you have no right to be?”

“It must give you some sort of satisfaction to pretend that normal human emotions are a violation of nature. Do you think I'm perverse for wanting you?”

“You're not perverse. But you're making yourself very miserable trying to imagine me as something other than I am.”

“Did you charge him the same as you charge me? Or were you so stirred up by his speech that you—”

“Oh, stop it. I went to hear his speech because everybody's always talking about him and I was curious about what he had to say. I'm not stirred up, I'm not infatuated. In fact it's very late and I'm very tired and I think it would be better if you went home.”

“He wrote a poem about a whore. He read it to our poetry society.”

She looked away from him, made a show of surrendering to disappointment as she resumed pulling the brush through her hair.

“I don't care if he wrote a poem about a whore. I don't care if you're trying to shock me with that word. That's not the way I think of myself, and I don't think it's the way you think of me either. I'm something different. And you and I together are something different than people would expect, maybe than either one of us would expect.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was here for an hour, Cage, and then he was gone. I doubt very much he'll even come back. He doesn't think of me the way you do. Only you think of me the way you do.”

“But you don't think of me at all.”

“I'm thinking of you right now,” she said. “I'm thinking of how welcoming I'd be if you went home now and came back when you weren't feeling angry at me and sorry for yourself. I would be so pleased to see you in that condition.”

T
HE TWO YOUNG MEN
Billy Herndon brought to Cage's room looked familiar. As he was pulling out the chair from behind his desk to make sure that everyone had a place to sit, he realized why. They had been part of the Reverend Porter's entourage that day when the scuffle had broken out in front of the First Presbyterian Church.

Their names were Benbrook and Westridge, both attorneys from Alton. Benbrook was disheveled-looking, his coat smudged with cigar ash, his hair cut short as if he were emerging from an illness. Westridge was tall and trim and wore his clothes well. He sat with his thin legs elegantly crossed and one arm hooked casually over the chairback. But otherwise there was nothing casual about either of them. They were direct and fervent.

“Mr. Benbrook and Mr. Westridge were both close associates of Reverend Lovejoy,” Billy said. “Of course they're grieving his death terribly.”

“His murder was an outrage,” Cage said.

“It was a shock but not a surprise,” Benbrook said. “We were well-armored, you could say, because we had been preparing ourselves for it, or for something like it, for quite some time.”

“But nothing can really prepare you for such savagery,” Westridge said. “Well, you yourself saw a little taste of it here in Springfield when Reverend Porter tried to make his way into the church.”

“As you say,” Cage said, “only a little taste. But how can I help you?”

“They've come to see you about a woman,” Billy said.

“A Negro woman,” Benbrook said. “Her name is Cordelia, or at least that's the name she goes by now.”

“As you know,” Westridge said, unhooking his arm from the chairback and leaning forward to fix Cage in his earnest gaze, “Illinois is a free state, though the word ‘free' is really only a rhetorical construction. Section Three, Article Eleven of our state constitution, for instance, blurs any real distinction between indentured servitude and slavery, making them in essence—”

“Don't bore him with articles, Gideon,” Benbrook said.

“And of course a runaway slave has no right to reside here at all,” Westridge went on, ignoring his friend. “If such a person were to set foot in Illinois and be apprehended and turned over to the sheriff, she would be sent straight back into bondage.”

“So this Cordelia is a runaway slave?”

“We have not said that,” Benbrook said. “And will not say it. Let's just say instead that Cordelia is a young woman of elusive origins who can read and write and is extremely skillful in the domestic realm. She's someone who needs employment, and who we can guarantee will return value to her employer. Even more than a job, she needs the appearance of having a job, of being part of the warp and woof, so to speak.”

“A woman with that sort of situation,” Westridge said, “employed by a reputable citizen, is less likely to be asked to show a certificate of freedom.”

“And what would it take to obtain a certificate of freedom?”

“A thousand dollars,” Benbrook said.

“That's a lot of money.”

“It is,” Westridge said. “If it were only the case of this one woman, we could raise it, but there are many others with the same plight, and we feel the best we can do for them is to find them a job where over time they could save enough money to buy the certificates for themselves.”

“Why do you come to me?”

“You were willing to hear Reverend Porter speak, for one thing,” Westridge said, “and Mr. Herndon has implied your ideas aren't so far out of line with ours. Also, we've read your poetry about the Black Hawk War. Your sympathy for those poor wretched Indians is evident on every page. It wasn't a great stretch to think that feeling might extend to Negroes as well.”

“There might be a grain of risk,” Benbrook explained. “Probably not physical risk, but if this girl was indeed a runaway slave—a fact we have not communicated to you, by the way—you could for instance be fined for employing her.”

“I understand,” Cage said. The grain of risk, the hint of conspiracy, was welcome. Anything was welcome that could distract his jealous mind from recalling last night's covert sighting of Lincoln leaving Ellie's room.

“I don't have anything for her here at the Palatine,” he told the two abolitionists. “I have a strong-willed housekeeper and can't impose a new staff member on her. But I might be able to turn up something helpful if you can give me a little time.”

“Why do you keep asking me about what I thought of Lincoln's speech?” Ellie was carefully cutting a strip of pale green fabric with her long shears. “Is it because you like to hear me talk about him? Because you like to be jealous? I don't like jealousy. I have no tolerance for it.”

“I'm interested in your answer for its own sake.”

“All right, here's my answer. I think that if I could vote, I would vote for Frances Wright, if a woman could run for something, and I wouldn't concern myself too much with what Abraham Lincoln or any other man had to say about anything.”

“Even if you could vote, you wouldn't have the luxury of ignoring men. We would still tend to be in your way.”

“You're in my way now,” she said, brushing past him to look for something in her sewing basket. She smiled, busy, preoccupied, but happy enough to have him there. It was a professional visit—the only kind she gave any indication of allowing—but she was not in a hurry and certainly he wasn't either. He craved the illusion that they were companions, that the time they were together could be freely wasted and was not a commodity. It was an illusion he was trying hard to maintain, though he was still burdened by the sight of Lincoln at her door.

She sat down again to her sewing, making a show of ignoring him. It was four in the afternoon, still January, still cold, snow falling. He had not taken off his gloves, though his new John Bull hat hung on the bedpost.

“As for the speech itself, I thought that what he had to say was something that I already knew: people should behave themselves.”

She was aware of him watching as she worked, the needle in her hands darting in and out of the cloth with frenetic precision.

“If I could,” she said, “I'd walk up to all the women of this town and rip off their mutton sleeves. It would be a great favor to them. Your Mr. Lincoln could build his railroad in the time it takes for word to arrive from Philadelphia that the styles have changed.”

“He's not my Mr. Lincoln.”

“Good. He's not mine either.” She stared up at him from her chair. He was still standing. He hoped his tortured thoughts didn't show in his face, but of course they did. In another moment or two she would put down her sewing and stand up and walk over to him, turning her back so that he could slowly undress her, aware that he craved the illusion of slow-moving normalcy.

“Are you going to confront him?” she asked. “Challenge him to some kind of fight?”

“Why would I do that? It would be petty of me.”

“So you won't even speak to him about it?”

“No, I wouldn't think of speaking to him about a private transaction.”

“Men are interesting.”

“We're placed in the position of being interesting by women like you. You mentioned some sort of millinery idea. Tell me about it. Aren't there enough shops in town already?”

“No,” she replied without expression. He saw she was making an effort not to appear too interested in the question. “We have clothing stores, and dry goods stores, and women who sew in their homes, but not a shop like I have in mind. Not just a place where ladies buy their accessories but where they can have a dress run up by somebody who knows what's in fashion and, more important, what's not. A place that will give them somewhere to go. Women like to get out, you know. Since there's no longer any doubt we're the capital, somebody is bound to open a shop like that. Women will need clothes. There'll be parties and cotillions all through the regular sessions of the legislature. And there'll be special sessions because nothing will get done in the regular sessions, and so there'll be more parties and cotillions for those.”

He asked her where she would put such a place. She told him the rents in the center of town, where the new statehouse was going up, were already too extravagant, but that didn't matter anyway, because people were accustomed now to searching out intriguing shops off the main square. Jefferson Street, perhaps, or as far east as Seventh.

“If a person were far-sighted enough,” she said, “he might even buy Chicken Row, tear down those ugly stinking stalls, and build something nice out of brick.”

“I'm not that far-sighted, and I'm not that rich. What would you need in the way of help?”

“A girl at two dollars a week, to start with. A good needlewoman.”

“I might have someone.”

“Do you? Someone who can do a vertical stitch?”

“I don't know what that is.”

“Then I don't know why you would want to recommend her.”

“She would have to be part of the enterprise.”

“Why?”

“Because she's a runaway slave and I want to help her.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“You don't care about slavery?”

“No, I don't. And if we were in business together I would never allow you to make a decision based entirely on sentiment.”

“Then we won't be in business together.”

“Have you even met her?”

“No.”

She slumped in her chair, making a show of her disapproval. But the sense of opportunity he had awakened in her was still keen.

“What about the rent?” he asked her.

“Are you serious about this? Why would you want to set me up in a shop? Is it so you can possess me?”

“It was your idea in the first place.”

“Because I've had enough of men possessing me. You must accept that, because if you can't there's no way I would go into business with you.”

Her face was flushed with sudden emotion and she dabbed with her handkerchief at the corners of her eyes before the fat tears that had formed there could fall. Nothing he had ever said or done had unsettled her before. She reacted to the possibility of him setting her up in business as another woman might to an offer of marriage. He made a determination to stay where he was and not move toward her. She did not need or want comfort, and would swat him away just now if she sensed he was trying to edge too close to her vulnerable core.

He spoke to her in a flat voice. “If you could find a suitable location, and could make a plan for your shop that would make sense for me, and agree to hire this Negro woman, something between us might be gotten up. In that case I assume you'd want to break your arrangement with Speed.”

“So that I can start a new arrangement with you? So that I can't be shared?”

“It has nothing to do with that.”

“I don't consider myself to be Joshua Speed's chattel, and if we open a shop together I won't consider myself to be yours. So nobody will be ‘sharing' me. I'll share myself, of my free will, and with whomever I want.

“And at the moment,” she said, slowly unbuttoning her dress, “that happens to be you.”

Lincoln's new poem was about suicide, an unexpected topic for someone who had just given a triumphant speech. He introduced it to the members of the poetical society with a grin by saying he had been wandering in a dark forest on the Flat Branch of the Sangamon, deep in thought about specie payments and the subtreasury and the state bank, when he came across a skeleton, still gripping this suicide note in the bones of its hand.

They all laughed, of course, thinking they were in for another dose of Lincoln's ribald verses. But the poem really was about suicide, starkly so, with lines about self-imposed dagger thrusts ripping up organs and sending out showers of blood. Lincoln succeeded alarmingly in putting himself in the mind of this miserably solitary creature who had killed himself, who thought of the hell he was destined for as a place where the screams of the damned and the searing flames would help him to “forget.”