A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (25 page)

“They might.”

“But does he like me?”

“I think he does.”

“You're no help at all.”

She sat down in her chair and stared at him in exasperation. “Did he visit me today for any particular reason?”

“He heard that you were leaving, and I think it scared him, that you would get away without him…saying anything. And I think he brought me along because it scared him that he might…say something.”

“So what do you advise?”

“Advise? I don't know what to advise. I don't know what you want.”

She held her pose in the chair for a moment, then stood up and walked to the window again, moving about like a character in a play. Maybe she
was
a character in a play, very much alert to her own unfolding performance.

“I've been at Springfield for—what? Six months? I've had a chance to look around at some of the gentlemen in this town. Their attention has been very flattering. As yet there's no principal lion. As yet. But that won't be the case forever and if I'm going to marry somebody—which I am—I would very much like that somebody to be an interesting person, a person with an evident future ahead of him.”

“Do you want me to tell Lincoln he has a chance to be your principal lion?”

“Of course not. Do you think I'd be so obvious and grasping as to have you carry a message like that to him? But I'm off to Missouri and I'd like somebody to know how I feel about him. I'd like
you
to know it. It's comforting to share a secret with someone you trust.”

Her confiding tone, her open and innocent expression—it could have been stagecraft. But Mary Todd was the sort of person in whom artifice and authenticity were always richly entwined. Cage understood why Lincoln had wanted him in the room today. Lincoln was captivated by her energy and intelligence, but aware that her surface emotions were manifestations of deeper currents swirling and boiling below. They were a match that way, and he must have sensed it just as she did, though whether those currents would merge or collide was the great question.

“And what about you?” she asked Cage in a different tone of voice, cordial and businesslike. Her posture had straightened; her vulnerable and confiding mood had passed. “What will you do in the long summer ahead?”

“Devote myself to my book, and to my business affairs.”

“Anything else? Or anyone else? A principal lioness?”

He smiled and told her no, but he must have inadvertently given something away, because he caught a calculating flash in her eyes. Did she know about him and Ellie? It was unlikely but possible. She was, after all, a young woman of unabashed curiosity.

“Mr. Edwards's young relation Matilda is coming for a visit in the fall,” she said. “I should be home then as well. I'll make sure you receive a suitable introduction. She's eighteen, I think. I'm twenty-two, so compared to her I'm ancient. And unlike me she's very beautiful.”

Cage made the necessary rebuttal about her looks. At that moment—in that summer of 1840, before all the bitterness and horror and heartbreak that would later rule her life and stamp her character—he did think she was beautiful. Or at the least she was beautifully presented. Every detail of her appearance—her dress, her hair, the tiny watch hanging from her throat—seemed in perfect conformity with every other part. She was looking at him, half smiling now, her blue eyes shining with candor.

“You're a gentleman for saying such kind words. But don't be too much of a gentleman. Because if you decide you want to marry Cousin Matilda, you'll have to fight everybody else off.”

T
HE MAN RUNNING AGAINST LINCOLN
for his reelection to the assembly was Jesse Thomas. He was a Democrat who had begun political life as a Whig and was of course for that reason regarded by the Whigs as a turncoat. He was now a judge, and had presided in court during the Henry Truett trial. To Cage's mind he had presided fairly enough, though there had been something odd about him as he sat behind the bench. He rarely spoke during the proceedings, but when he did his voice was as high as a girl's. He was not fat, but he had a swollen-looking body, along with bulging eyes and a strange placidity of manner that made you think of a frog sitting on a log, observing the world in front of him while taking no apparent interest in it. Every now and then his lips would rise into a quizzical half smile whose meaning, if there was one, remained provocatively hidden.

It was partly because of Thomas's unreadable frog-like facade that Cage was curious about how he would conduct himself in a debate with Lincoln that was to take place a few weeks before the election. His curiosity grew enough that he abandoned work one Monday morning to go to the courthouse to witness it. He got there nearly an hour early, knowing that the courtroom would be crowded with people eager for a contest between two such opposite personalities. Thomas was already there in the front of the packed courtroom, pacing back and forth and conferring with his Democratic friends who were huddled near the witness chair, now and then taking a seat at the judge's bench as if to remind himself and the onlookers that it was still his property. A half hour before the debate was to begin, Lincoln had still not arrived, and Judge Thomas was growing agitated. He reminded Cage of a boxer who had prepared himself too early for the fight and could not hold on to his nervous energy any longer. Finally Thomas stalked once more back to the bench, standing behind it as he called for silence with his gavel.

“When Mr. Lincoln arrives,” he announced in his high-pitched squeak of a voice, “our conversation will begin in earnest, but I see no reason why I should not issue a few remarks as preamble. And let us begin those remarks by reacquainting ourselves with Abraham Lincoln's long record of calumny and insult in the pages of the so-called newspaper the
Sangamo Journal.
If you'll recall, only a few years ago he was disguising himself as a character named Sampson's Ghost, who—”

Cage was sitting on the aisle on a bench toward the rear of the courtroom. He sprang up and left the room and sprinted across the square to Speed's store, where he found Lincoln in the upstairs bedroom in front of the looking glass, getting dressed for the confrontation that was not scheduled to begin for another half hour. Speed and Billy Herndon were with him.

“You'd better get over there right now,” Cage said. “Thomas has already started the debate by himself.”

“Started the debate? How can he do that if I'm not there?”

“See for yourself.”

Lincoln ran down the stairs and out onto the street, pulling his coat over his shoulders as he went. His neckwear was askew and one side of his shirt collar, not yet buttoned, flapped up and down as he dashed across the square. When he made his way into the crowded courtroom, he stood at the back with Cage and Speed and Billy. Thomas was still speaking. He had not yet noticed Lincoln, and was so wrapped up in his oratory that he failed to register the hum of excitement that Lincoln's presence had brought to the room. The judge now stood in front of the bench, his hands clasped in front of him, his bug-eyed face with its eerie half smile swiveling slowly as he swept his head from left to right, right to left. He was talking now about something that he said had happened two years ago, when Lincoln or one of the Whig junto had published anonymous anti-Douglas letters in the
Journal
and set in motion a rumor that Thomas was the author.

“To what purpose was this done?” he asked the audience rhetorically. “Well, I think it's obvious. The Whigs could not abide me switching parties and wanted to discredit me among my new Democratic friends. Well, no one was fooled by their device, and—”

He had seen Lincoln now, who called out amiably from the back of the room as he finished tying down his collar. “Please continue
,
Judge. I didn't know I was going to hear all about myself before the debate started. I feel like the man who sat up in the casket at his own funeral and wanted to know who this exceptional individual was that everybody was talking about.”

In one easy verbal swipe he had won the audience over to his side. Though Jesse Thomas did his best to get back on track, he couldn't concentrate with Lincoln there grinning at him from the back of the room. He kept to his theme of Lincoln's underhanded political maneuvering, but nobody cared any longer, and after a few minutes he muttered some concluding remarks and sat down.

This left the floor clear for Lincoln, who walked down the center aisle and stood in his courtroom posture in front of the judge's bench, staring at the floor. He was smiling a thin smile and shaking his head in wonderment at Thomas's charges. Cage knew him well enough to know he was angry, but the impression Lincoln sought to convey was that of a man saddened and stupefied by the low depths to which his opponent had sunk.

He dispensed with the high oratorical style he had used in his speech to the Young Men's Lyceum, and he didn't speak with the exaggerated folksiness he displayed at large campaign gatherings like the rally on the courthouse lawn. The courtroom was an unimposing setting that would hold only a few hundred people, so he barely needed to lift his voice to be heard. He spoke as if to a group of intimate friends.

“Thank you
,
Judge Thomas,” he said, glancing over at his adversary, who was sitting now at the defense table, “for that expansive introduction. It's not every man who can say he has been handed a complete inventory of his failings. I believe if I go down the list and correct everything that Judge Thomas says is wrong with me, I'll emerge about as pure as a newborn Democrat.”

It was such a graceful and good-natured riposte that even Thomas allowed himself to laugh along with the courtroom audience.

“And I'm also fortunate,” Lincoln went on, “in that I've discovered in Judge Thomas such an example of learning and eloquence. He is inflated with those qualities as few men are. In fact, he is a veritable balloon of humanity, growing ever bigger and more perfect, swelling with wisdom until it seems he might float away from us and take up residence in the ether.”

As he spoke, he began to somehow transform his angular face into an impression of Thomas's bulging amphibian features. He moved his eyes from side to side in imitation of his opponent's blank all-seeingness, and he also managed a perfect parody of his inscrutable grin. He held the pose for a good thirty seconds, saying nothing
,
just letting the absurdity of Judge Thomas's appearance wash over the audience, who were already not just laughing, but gasping. Then he began to mimic the judge's high-pitched voice.

“And he speaks,” Lincoln said with the timbre of a mouse, “with an Olympian majesty that befits such a superior being. Now, if anyone were ever to dare to put a pin into this singular man, who is filled with so much wonderful air, the result of course would be a catastrophe. But who would do such a thing? Not me! I like him just the way he is!”

He continued to hold his face and body in the froggish aspect of Jesse Thomas, letting the impersonation linger. Cage was laughing, but he was starting to feel uneasy, thinking maybe the jest was going too far. But it went farther still, as Thomas's smile disappeared and his face began to turn red with embarrassment. Lincoln couldn't, or wouldn't, stop himself. He pantomimed what would happen if his opponent were in fact stuck with a pin, all the air sputtering out, his voice growing even higher, his eyes spinning wildly in confusion.

The laughter in the courtroom was delirious, but there was another sound beneath it, one that for a moment Cage found hard to credit. He turned to Speed, who was looking at him, an expression on his face of both confusion and confirmation. Someone was not just weeping, but sobbing. Then they both directed their attention to where Judge Jesse Thomas stood in front of the jury box, covering his reddened face with his hand and weeping in loud, convulsive heaves, exactly like a child. Lincoln was so involved in his comical character assassination that he failed to notice that his audience's quaking laughter had begun to subside into embarrassed silence. It was not until the laughter had almost entirely disappeared that Lincoln became aware of the awful bleating emitted by his shattered opponent.

“And if the good judge would only…,” he said, before letting the thought dissolve and staring at Thomas with a mixture of pity and horror. Thomas met his eyes, stuffed his hat on his head, and ran down the center aisle of the courtroom, still covering his face, still wracked with sobs as he burst out the front door.

Lincoln opened his mouth to speak, but he didn't know what to say. An accusatory silence enveloped the courtroom, and a voice called out, “Cruel! Cruel, sir!” The Democrats in the room took up the cry, or variations of it, and the Whigs seemed to understand it would be unseemly to mount a too enthusiastic defense of Lincoln when he had just reduced a man to tears. Lincoln just kept standing there uncertainly, absorbing the jeers, until Cage and Speed and Billy went to his rescue and removed him from the scene of the offense.

They retired to a curtained booth in Cornelius's coffeehouse, where Lincoln sat without touching a drop of his tea, looking perplexed and stricken.

“I admit that I meant to give him a skinning,” he said in a hollow voice. “He deserved it. He came clawing at me before the debate started, when I wasn't even in the room.”

“You were well within your rights,” Billy said. “The man did you a terrible wrong.”

“But was I cruel?”

No one answered him. He fixed Cage with an almost frightened look.

“Was I cruel?”

“You went a little far.”

“I wouldn't worry about it,” Speed said. “Some men can't bear ridicule, can't control their emotions. Poor Thomas. He'll never be able to live that down: crying like a child who's been slapped by a bully in a schoolyard.”

“Maybe I'm the one who'll never be able to live it down. Maybe I'm the bully who slapped him.”

They tried to cheer him up, to talk of other things, but Lincoln couldn't get his mind off the thought that there was something in his character, and not his opponent's, that had turned the day sour.

“I enjoyed it too much. I knew I had him, I could feel the hook in his mouth. A man ought not to enjoy another man's misery so much. He ought not to enjoy his misery at all. I've got to find him. I've got to apologize!”

He stood up abruptly, pulled back the curtain and left the booth. The coffeehouse was crowded and oppressively smoky, and the patrons noticed Lincoln as he walked out. They tracked him in silence for a moment until he disappeared out the door, and then turned busily back to arguing and gossiping among themselves about his satirical ferocity.

“What else was he to do after being attacked like that by Thomas?” Billy said to his companions in the booth. “He was within his rights. That's for sure.”

“Still, he took it too far,” Cage said, “and he knows it.”

“Now that he's out of our hearing,” Speed said, “I'll tell you what I thought. It was savage. He was trying to kill him with ridicule and you could tell by the look in his eyes that he meant no mercy. I didn't know Lincoln had that sort of savagery in him.”

“We all do,” Billy said, picking up his hat. “We're all merciless creatures at heart and sometimes it shows in even the best of us.”

He stood up and walked away, leaving Cage and Speed to silently consider the black rot at the base of the human character. Speed poured sugar in his coffee and then stared into the cup with the look of a man who had just performed a scientific experiment and was waiting to examine the results. When he looked up again his eyes were filmy.