A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (30 page)

“Why would you do that? What future can you have in Kentucky when all your friends are here?”

Speed explained about his dead father and his solemn duty to his mother to put the estate on a firm footing. Lincoln heard him out and nodded in an impatient way that of course he must leave if that was the case, if there was no other option, but it was all damned unfortunate.

“It's hard to see an intimate friend go,” he said. “Very hard, especially when we've built a city together out of the wilderness.”

“You'll come to visit me in Kentucky,” Speed said. “You and Cage both.”

“We will. We must. We can't lose touch with our friend.”

His voice broke, a quick spasm of grief, and then he did his best to recover his spirits yet again. But the three men said little else as they followed the road across the empty prairie toward Springfield.

When the year ended, the skies sealed tight with snow-bearing clouds. There was an unrelenting snowfall and savage wind and cold, the kind of weather that kills livestock and kills the farmers that try to save them. It was ten degrees below on New Year's Eve as Cage sat at his desk crossing out useless lines of verse with ink that he had had to thaw by the stove. As the long day wore on he felt imprisoned, and finally put on his warmest coat and scarf and tied down the earflaps of his thick fur cap to venture out to Iles's store to see if any of the mails had made it through.

He was rewarded with a few catalogs and books he had ordered, and a single letter that had arrived on the Jacksonville stage that afternoon. The stage's drivers were still huddled over the stove drinking whiskey and expressing their awe at the weather they had just passed through, declaring that they had barely escaped losing their toes to frostbite and that if God himself ordered them back out into that howling cold they would just as soon go with the Devil to hell.

Cage was in no hurry to go back outside himself, so he read the letter he received from Mary while standing at the edge of the crowd around the raging stove:

Dear Cage,

I write in haste before the weather closes up the mails. Here is a letter I want you to deliver to Mr. Lincoln. Will you do so? It is best that a friend be with him when he reads it, as his moods of late cannot be predicted. It may be that he will be very glad to receive it; it may be that it will have a different effect. I would like you to do me the favor of reporting his reaction to me, though I will understand if your friendship to L. somehow prevents that courtesy. I am still at Jacksonville and will return in a week or so, though I don't expect to meet him in the gay world upon my return. You are an excellent friend to us both.

Mary.

He was grateful that the letter for Lincoln was sealed, which saved him the moral struggle of having to decide whether to take a peek at it. As soon as he was thoroughly warm again he went back out, meaning to walk over to Lincoln's office and hand the missive to him, and then to decide after his friend had read it whether or not he wished to comply with Mary's request that he report back on the effect it had caused. (Her manipulating hand was as always a little too visible for his comfort.) But when he went outside again the wind had picked up and darkness was precipitously spreading through the empty streets. No lamplighters would be out tonight. It would be a night of sub-zero darkness as people gathered around their fires shivering and reading and listening to the wind howling with unbroken ferocity, as if generated across a frozen sea. Cage made it home to the Palatine, but by that time his hands and feet were so throbbing and numb that he thought he could not stand walking another block to Hoffman's Row, where Lincoln might or might not be found.

H
E STAYED IN BED LATE
on New Year's morning. The streets were suffocatingly quiet. Normally they would have been full-on bustling on the first day of the year, people traveling to one another's houses for the customary libations. But the cold kept everyone inside and the festive seedcakes in the confectioners' windows remained unsold. Against Mrs. Hopper's admonitions, Cage ventured out again before noon to deliver his letter to Lincoln, who he assumed would be at his lodging place in Speed's store. The wind was still strong, blowing the snow with lacerating force against his exposed eyes and cheeks. It was painful to breathe, and the sun seemed not just weak but almost extinguished, leaving the planet cold and hostile and dark and dying.

He opened the door to Speed's store and slammed it shut against the wind, gasping and stamping his feet. Speed and Lincoln, by the stove in back, looked up from their books in surprise.

“It's some sort of creature,” Lincoln said as Cage shuffled across the floor, unwinding his scarf and leaving behind a trail of melting snow, “but exactly what sort of creature remains a mystery.”

He was doing his best to simulate his old authentic liveliness, but his voice still had a deflated edge and his good cheer was hard-won. Cage pulled off his gloves and warmed his stinging hands by the stove while Speed poured him a cup of coffee.

“You must be missing our company awful bad,” Lincoln said, “to come out in weather that can turn a man's pecker into an icicle.”

Cage continued thawing. He thought about saying something to Lincoln by way of an overture, but in the end he just reached into his overcoat pocket. His fingers were still so cold he could barely feel the letter as he withdrew it.

“What's this?”

“A letter to you from Mary, in Jacksonville. She sent it in care of me.”

Lincoln unsealed the letter and leaned back in his chair. His temple pulsed as he read and his jaw was set tight. The letter was evidently brief. After he read it, he left it unfolded in his lap. For a moment it seemed he would toss it into the fire, but he handed it to Cage instead without a word. There was something like a smile on his face, but not very much like a smile.

Speed scooted his chair around so he and Cage could read the letter together.

Dear Mr. Lincoln,

I know you do not love me. You have said you do but it is obvious to me and to anyone observing your behavior around me that you do not. You say you love another. I do not think this is true either, though you may believe it. I am convinced you do not know what love is or how a person who pledges such an emotion to another is bound by his honor to behave. This is not your fault. You are an admirable man who has remarkably triumphed over a rude start in life, but some parts of your character are yet to be sketched. You are not yet steadfast. I hope that someday you may be, I hope that someday you may love a woman with your full heart so that she will not be confused and made to suffer by your words alone. I am disappointed as my affection for you remains constant. I will not hear a bad word said of you. You have hurt me but I judge you blameless by reason of your unusual nature and coarse upbringing. With this letter I release you from any obligations you may feel toward me. We are not engaged and I will never expect to be married to you. Please do not answer this letter. Doing so will make my present unhappiness deeper.

I would like to remain friends, after the “healing of time” has had its effect.

Mary Todd

“Well,” said Cage as brightly as he thought he could get away with, “there's an end to it.”

“Yes, thank God it's over,” Speed said. “You can go back to the work you were born to do and not have to torture yourself anymore about this woman.”

“The poor creature,” Lincoln said. “What have I done to her?”

“You've done nothing to her,” Cage said. “She'll be happily married within the year to someone else.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Of course I do.”

Lincoln folded the letter and slipped it into his coat pocket. He folded his arms tight across his narrow chest and crossed his legs.

“Are you all right?” Cage asked, to break the ponderous silence.

“Of course I'm all right,” he replied. “I've secured my freedom.”

But Lincoln was not all right. The next morning he was back at the legislature, and that afternoon, when Cage spotted him on the opposite side of the square talking to a group of boys who were sharpening the blades of their sleds he appeared to be in a good humor, though more subdued and preoccupied than usual. But over the next week his brooding mind would not let him rest, until he was so degraded with the hypo that Speed visited Cage once again in alarm.

“He's been lying up there in our room for two days. He won't eat and he'll barely talk to me.”

Cage went to the store and found Lincoln flat on the bed staring out the window at a dead tree branch that twitched with an almost imperceptible motion against a sepulchral gray sky. It was still very cold, outside and in, and Lincoln was fully dressed, even to his brogans and the scarf around his neck. He smelled bad and two days of not eating had swiftly highlighted the despairing opacity of his eyes. His hair was greasy and lank, and the ears that were attached to the sides of his shriveled face loomed freakishly large.

“What in hell is wrong with you?” Cage said. He didn't mean to sound so harsh.

Lincoln said something but his voice was so weak Cage couldn't hear him.

“What did you say?”

Lincoln repeated himself but he was still inaudible.

“I still can't hear you.”

“I said there's no reason for you to come visit me. I'm fine as I am.”

“You're obviously not. What's the matter?”

Lincoln turned his head away on his sweat-soaked pillow and looked out the window again without answering. He was so profoundly enervated it seemed possible that he was actually dying.

“It's still cold out,” Lincoln mumbled.

“Yes, it's still cold out.”

“The clouds are so dark and heavy. They make you feel like you can't breathe.”

“You may feel that way, but you're breathing just fine. Will you please tell me what's happened to you?”

He didn't answer at first, didn't seem like he was ever going to. Speed had come into the room and stood at the door with a look of deepening alarm. Finally Lincoln made some muttering response, a single unintelligible word.

“What was that?” Cage said. “Can you please speak a little more clearly?”

“Honor.”

“What about honor?”

“I have none. That's what she said.” He withdrew the folded letter from his coat, handed it to Cage, and pointed with a pale finger to the line in which the word appeared: “I am convinced you do not know what love is or how a person who pledges such an emotion to another is bound by his honor to behave.”

“It's just a word she threw into a sentence. There's no reason to regard it as a defining statement.”

“Yes, there is. She's right. I have no honor. I made a pledge and didn't stand by it, and now I'm nothing.”

Cage sat back in his chair, exchanging another what-are-we-going-to-do glance with Speed. This was different and somehow more frightening than the suicidal mania that had taken hold of Lincoln a month ago when he had tried without success to break it off with Mary. They'd had to make sure he didn't really try to kill himself, but otherwise there had been more than sufficient energy in his body to keep it vital. Now that energy was entirely gone. There was no animating purpose, no will.

“He's missed two days of the session already,” Speed told Cage.

“It doesn't matter,” Lincoln said. He sighed in an extravagant death-rattle sort of way, releasing a cloud of rancid breath.

“It might just matter to the people of Illinois,” Speed said, “if there's no Abraham Lincoln in the statehouse to save the bank and keep our state solvent and get the railroads running.”

Lincoln looked at Speed with a pained smile. The idea of his own destiny was now absurd to him.

“What do you mean he can't function?” Ned Baker asked Cage as they sat at a table that night with John Hardin at the American House. “Is he truly sick or does he just have the blues?”

“It may just be the blues, but when you see him he has the look of a dying man.”

“Good Lord,” Baker said. “Don't tell anyone about this except his closest friends. If word got out that he's missing votes because of a woman problem—”

“It's more complicated than that.”

“It might be, but it won't be seen that way, particularly by the Democrats. He's already been made to look a fool after that window business.”

“Ned's right,” Hardin said. “There needs to be a specific complaint he's suffering with that we can put out. He's passing gravel. No one will think twice about that, and no one will bother him. The most black-hearted Democrat will have pity on a man passing gravel.”

They agreed that if they were asked about Lincoln they would say that he was writhing in pain and unable to see anyone until the stones had made their way through.

“Mary Todd is a very anxious and excitable young woman, in my opinion,” Hardin said. “I saw that side of her well enough over Christmas at Jacksonville. If Lincoln is to have a wife—which I'm not sure is even a good idea—she ought to be someone like my Sarah, someone pleasant and calm who wouldn't think of meddling in the emotions of her husband.”

“Our emotions are a foreign realm to women,” Baker agreed. “A woman has no more business in that territory than England has in Texas.”

“All this is beside the point,” Cage broke in. “And it's not Lincoln's career that needs protecting now, but Lincoln himself. He can't be roused. It's no use trying to talk him out of this state he's fallen into.”

“Will he kill himself?” Hardin asked.

“No. He doesn't have the energy. But he'll try his hardest to allow himself to die.”

“It's hard to understand,” Hardin said. “Here's a man who has made himself by force of will into one of the most indispensable men in Illinois. Meanwhile he's made a very respectable name for himself as a lawyer. He could very well be governor of this state in a few years. He knows everyone, and most of the people he knows, with a few exceptions here and there, like him a great deal, or at the very least think he's funny. A man who's that gifted and that determined to succeed wouldn't just give up because he thinks he's lost the respect of a woman—a woman he doesn't even want to marry.”

“But he has
,
John,” Ned said softly. “He's a mystery to us and to the logical mind.”

They agreed Lincoln needed the help of a doctor. That night the three of them, along with Speed, arrived at Lincoln's room, somehow got him up out of his bed and into a semblance of decent dress, and walked him over to Ash Merritt's house on Jefferson Street. It was a journey of only a few blocks but Lincoln was teetering and depleted by the end of it. He displayed no more personality than a corpse as his friends got him out of his clothes and into one of Ash's nightshirts, which was comically too small for him but at least freshly laundered. Without complaint, he allowed himself to be laid down on Ash's spare bed. Ash spread a quilt over him and took his pulse.

“It's not just a duck fit,” the doctor told Lincoln's friends in a whisper as they congregated in the parlor. “He's in the grip of a melancholy passion. What did Mary Todd do to him? Was it an especially brutal rejection?”

“She didn't reject him at all,” Cage explained. “She released him from any obligation he felt toward her, but she did so in a way that made him feel his honor was compromised.”