A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (45 page)

He looked down at the floor, his face set as he did his best to drive the memory out of his head. He looked up again and fixed Cage with a look of solemn directness.

“You remember your mother?”

“Of course.” But he didn't really. She'd had some nameless, endless wasting disease and she was taken from him in increments of suffering, so that each blighted day served to obscure the memory of what she had been like in those ancient days of full health. There were no portraits that he knew of. If there had been one, perhaps his father in his grief had locked it away or destroyed it.

“My mother had bluish-greenish eyes,” Lincoln said. “At least as I recall. Spare-built like me. Family talk said she had some knightly Virginia blood in her, but she came by it in a sideways bastardly sort of way, since her own mother got knocked up by some fancy planter. What would you think of that, if my mother was illegitimate?”

“I wouldn't think anything of it.”

“Gives you a feeling that you're not that legitimate either, and never was. I've always felt like that boy from the half-faced camp who has no right to be around regular people.”

Cage didn't bother to contradict him. Lincoln was enjoying his nostalgic self-deprecation, and now that he was a husband and father and likely going to Washington to represent Illinois in Congress in the next few years, melancholy was no longer a mortal danger for him
,
just a mood.

“I've got a copy of that at home,” Lincoln told him, indicating the poem that Cage was still holding. “Would you keep that one and do me the honor of suggesting how I can get some of the Wordsworth out of it? I miss talking to you about poetry.”

“I do as well.”

“And it mystifies me and bedevils me that that publishing company turned down your book. You'll send it out to someone else, of course.”

“Of course, but not for a while.”

“I can't fathom anyone passing up a chance to publish your work, when there are so many inferior things being brought out every day.”

If Cage's theory was correct, that Mary was responsible for Gray and Bowen's sudden disinterest in his book, Lincoln surely didn't know about it. Cage was touched by his friend's honest perplexity, and of course would not breathe a word of his suspicions about Mary.

“We should meet more regular,” Lincoln said. “Like we used to. I'd like you to come to the house for our conversations, but we might have to meet on neutral ground. Someplace like Cornelius's coffeehouse, or that island in the Mississippi. When Molly gets hold of a grievance she won't let go any more than a snapping turtle will.”

“I understand that very well.”

“I wish to God it was not so,” Lincoln said.

“D
EAR SIR, IT BEING A WHILE
since I took my buzzard quill in hand allow me to say that here is that same Rebecca that was last heard from in the pages of the
Sangamo Journal
but now has the honor of addressin the editor of the
Illinois State Register,
which is a fine Democrat paper and the only one I read now that I seen the mighty light of God's truth and am all for Polk and Texas and for stretchin the country out as far as it can git. I wished I had never wrote that letter about the Hon. Jas. Shields because it near got him into a Duel with that awfullest Mr. Linkhorn and his associates. Well now that I am come to be redeemed my eyes are popped open wide as a strangled possum. That was my ocular state when I was at table at a fine dining establishment of this city and seen one of Mr. Linkhorn's friends. Jeff I said to my dear husband, who was buyin me oysters on account of I aint never seen one yet to that day, aint that the very same man we saw on the duelin ground tellin Mr. Linkhorn he better open Mr. Shields with that broadsword? And are we sure that fancy lady sittin with him is as fancy as she thinks? Why is she not the same lady who sells dresses and fooferaw but used to sell another Commodity that did not involve the wearin of near as much Material?”

It went on for another two paragraphs, obliquely accusing the couple of living openly in an establishment named “for some Roman hill,” never naming them openly, careful not to use an incendiary word like “fornication,” and to filter its accusations through the same guileless character and voice—the farm wife named Rebecca—that Lincoln had invented to attack Shields. Cage folded the newspaper and pushed it back across the table to Lincoln. They had planned to meet at the coffeehouse to discuss edits Cage had made in “My Childhood Home,” but then Lincoln had sat down with a closed-up face and handed him the piece in that morning's
Register.

“What do you want to do?” he said when Cage had finished reading.

“What
can
I do?”

“We could sue for slander. But even in Illinois, which has a wider definition of slander than most other states, it's a hard notion to prove. About all we've got here is innuendo. It helps if the charge is direct—‘I saw so-and-so fucking so-and-so,' that kind of thing.”

Lincoln hesitated before he spoke again. “And then there's the matter of what might come out in a trial, about Ellie and—”

“No,” Cage said. “I understand. No lawsuit.”

He picked up the newspaper and walked over to the fireplace. It was a starkly cold winter day and the fire was well built up. He slipped the paper into the flames and walked back to his seat. In his imagination—perhaps in reality—every other patron in the coffeehouse was aware of what had just been written about him in the newspaper and was observing him with clinical curiosity.

“It has to be Nimmo Rhodes who wrote this,” he said.

“That's my thinking too. It's all my fault. You wouldn't have made an enemy of him if it wasn't for me.”

He thought there was more pain in Lincoln's expression than there must be in his own. Lincoln should very well be sorry. He had all but invented the weapon—the anonymous letter to the editor—that Rhodes had now deployed.

“If there's to be a duel,” Lincoln said, “you can count on me to—”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, Lincoln, there's not going to be another duel.”

He needed to talk to Ellie, but knew that if he was seen walking to her shop it would only help combust the bonfire of gossip that Nimmo Rhodes had so carefully kindled. He went home instead to the Palatine, climbed the stairs without greeting Mrs. Hopper or any of the people gathering at the table for supper. There was usually lively conversation emanating from the dining room but all he heard was an unnaturally careful discourse as the residents of the Palatine did their best to avoid speaking of the topic they must have all read about or heard about by now. Hours passed as they lingered in the parlor. He finally heard them saying good night to one another and going upstairs to their rooms.

It was long after midnight when Ellie came home. He was in bed by then, though far from sleep. He heard her footsteps on the carpeted stair runner, the sound of her door closing at the end of the hall. Twenty minutes later his own door opened and she slipped into his room on bare feet and let her robe drop to the floor. She wore nothing underneath, and wore no particular expression on her face. She shivered with cold when she joined him in bed, and continued shivering, or perhaps trembling, as they made love. He knew without having to ask that she had read Nimmo Rhodes's letter, that she understood that the boundary shielding their private lives from the world had been torn down and that there was no reason to pretend it still existed. That was why she had come so openly into his room, and why she was giving him a glimpse of what they might have had if there had not been a boundary between them as well. It was not until they were still, lying on their backs in his narrow bed, watching the down quilt move subtly up and down with their respiring, that he understood this had been the last time, and that her undisguised wanting of him tonight was an act of grieving finality that was still not quite, never would be, love.

“Not very many people on Aristocracy Hill,” she finally whispered, “are going to want to buy their dresses from a whore.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Fill whatever orders aren't canceled in the next few days, take a good inventory, then take the stage to Chicago to find a place to lease. Cordelia will go with me. She's already said yes and I can't manage without her. I don't know about the other girls, but I can find help when I get there.”

“People might forget about it. They might not care about it in the first place.”

“They'll care about it. Do you think Mary Lincoln and all the other almighty Todds won't care about it?”

She pulled back the quilt and stood up, her naked body silhouetted against the window, her breasts swaying as she clasped her arms and rocked back and forth against the cold. She bent down and picked up her robe and slipped it on quickly, hiding herself from him. She stood over his bed, looking down at him, tears streaking her face even though her expression was resolute and her voice firm.

“It would matter very much to me if you told me you understood.”

E
LLIE HAD BEEN GONE
from Springfield for a year. Her letters to Cage were predictably few, carefully worded, offering very little in terms of private information about herself. There were occasional wistful recollections of their time together—“I have not forgotten and will not ever forget how kind you were to me”—but he guessed such passages were written late at night, in a low mood, and did not really reflect a spirit of looking back or regretting what she had lost. She had lost nothing, she had simply moved on. She was the same Mrs. Bicknell in a new place, in a new thriving shop. Writing back to her, Cage concealed himself as he had grown used to doing when she lived in Springfield. In his letters, he was not someone who had ever been uselessly in love with her, but only a friend and former business associate, someone who took a proportional personal interest in how she was getting on and what she would do next. He wanted to settle her mind, and in doing so perhaps settle his: he would not be coming in pursuit of her, he was through trying to claim her.

Ned Baker had won his congressional seat the previous August, and in November of 1845 the Whigs threw a party at the American House to see him off to Washington. At the event, Cage tested the waters with Mary Lincoln once again and found that her frostiness toward him had not abated. “Good evening, Cage,” she said. He had just watched her hugging Ned Baker like a brother but when she turned to him her bearing was so rigid he was forced into greeting her with an awkward bow. He was angry and couldn't stop himself from emitting a little snort of exasperation, to which she raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“Is something the matter?” she asked.

“Of course something's the matter, Mary. What can we do to put a stop to this charade between us?”

“I don't know what you mean. There's nothing between us and nothing to put a stop to.”

Her expression was cruelly indifferent but her face was almost ravishing, her skin warmly aglow from the lamplight spreading from a nearby sconce, but also from the surging blood within. He was pretty sure she was carrying another child.

“All right,” he said. “That's where we'll leave it. I'm glad to see you looking so well.”

She said she was glad to see him looking so well too, and turned away so swiftly it was almost a pirouette. Cage was eager to leave, to spare them the discomfort of being in each other's company, but he stayed long enough to say goodbye to Ned and wish him the best of fortune in Washington City. He was going to Congress at a momentous time. Texas had not yet been officially annexed but Baker would be arriving in time to vote on the resolution. Meanwhile Polk had sent an army to the border region claimed by both Texas and Mexico, with the transparent purpose of provoking an all-out war.

“Yes, there are great questions to be decided,” Ned said. He had a tendency toward grandiosity and could be forgiven for not holding it in check tonight, when he had a secure grip on the next rung of his destiny. He looked even more resplendent and imposing than usual. Even his thinning hair presented an advantage, since partial baldness made the swept-forward eagle's wings on the sides of his head appear as dramatically ruffled as if he were standing with his back to a hurricane. He was a loyal Whig and a faultless Clay man, but it would be hard for an individual with such a measure of personal expansiveness not to want to apply it to the whole nation, to do his part in acquiring Oregon and Texas and any other territory that would make the map complete.

At the moment, he was careful not to be drawn into stating too firm a position on any particular issue. “One thing I'm sure of is that Washington will be a different place than Springfield. I'm told that for all its supposed excitement the house is very dull, and that nobody will listen to anyone except John Quincy Adams. A surprising number of its great men are really pigmies.”

He set a conspiratorial arm on Cage's shoulder, drawing him closer and away from the general conversation.

“
He's
not a pigmy,” Ned said, glancing at Lincoln, who stood in the center of the room talking to Sim Francis and Ash Merritt and a half dozen other Whig party men. “And he needs to be on a bigger stage where he can prove it. I've promised him that I'll only serve one term, but he's going to have a hard time getting the nomination over Hardin. Do what you can to keep his spirits up, won't you? I'm afraid if he can't get himself elected to Congress he'll slip into the hypo again.”

On the surface, Lincoln's spirits seemed fine. He was laughing and conniving and betraying none of the envy he must have been feeling as he prepared to usher his friend off to take the congressional seat he himself very much coveted. He was even crossing the room just now to shake hands with John Hardin, who had arrived accompanied by a dramatic flurry of snow. Cage hadn't seen Hardin since he had lost the sight in his right eye in a shooting accident, not long after his heroics on board the
Princeton.
The eye was now a grayish-white field with an unmoving brown eyeball hovering near the top, though it was intact enough that it still appeared somewhat functional and made it difficult to know from which eye he was observing you. It was disconcerting, but maybe for a man like Hardin there was a sliver of an advantage, since much of politics was about hidden angles of sight.

Otherwise, Hardin was out in the open. He had just announced his candidacy for the same Seventh District congressional seat he had already held once, and which Baker was now heading off to Washington to claim. Any agreement he had made not to contest Lincoln for the nomination had been destined to fall apart, especially after Hardin's latest heroics. Affairs had been deadly between the Mormons and the rest of the population of Illinois ever since Joseph Smith and his brother had been murdered last year by a mob in Nauvoo. Anarchy had finally broken out over the summer and Hardin had been appointed by the governor to lead an expedition to put down a Mormon uprising in Carthage, which he had done with his usual decisiveness. Now, dangerously fueled by the acclaim of a grateful gentile populace, Hardin saw no reason why he shouldn't reoccupy his old congressional seat, whether or not a deal with Lincoln had been in place.

“It's a great annoyance to poor Lincoln that Hardin can't seem to do anything wrong,” Ned told Cage. They stood there watching Lincoln and Hardin greeting each other, pretending still to be friends, when in fact they were each actively and covertly lining up pledges for the 1846 nomination.

“If I weren't a political creature myself I'd be sorely offended,” Ned said good-naturedly. “This is supposed to be my going-away party, and they're fighting to replace me before they've even seen me off. Will you at least wish me an honest goodbye?”

“Goodbye, Ned, and good luck. And may you find your waveless shore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That poem you wrote. Don't you remember? When we were all amusing ourselves in the poetry society.”

“Yes, of course I do, now that you remind me. ‘For the land I seek is a waveless shore / And they who reach it shall wander no more.' Not so terribly bad, is it? God, it seems like a thousand years ago that we all sat around reading our poetry to each other. The time for poetry has passed, I suppose. Time for us all to get out of Springfield and take hold of the world.”

Lincoln got the nomination after all. Despite Hardin's popularity among the electorate, Lincoln had played a closer and more strategic game among the party men, visiting and re-visiting, promising and re-promising, never taking any pledge for granted. He had managed to convince these men, and to hold them to the conviction, that Hardin and Baker had had their turns and that if Whig loyalty meant anything then turnabout was fair play. Cage heard all this not from Lincoln himself, as he would have in the old days, but from William Florville as his hair was being cut.

“Mr. Francis left this chair not five minutes ago,” Florville said. “He was on his way to his newspaper office to put out the afternoon edition. He said Mr. Hardin was agitated about losing to Mr. Lincoln, but the two men are old friends and I expect they'll shake hands again soon enough.”

They may shake hands, Cage thought, but it won't be the same, at least not if Mary Lincoln brings her own resentments into the matter.

Cage went over to Lincoln's office to congratulate him in person, even if he had only learned about the victory secondhand. Lincoln and Logan had dissolved their association the year before, and Lincoln had taken on Billy Herndon as his junior law partner and set up a new office with him on a different floor in the same building. Cage found the door of the new office closed, neither Lincoln nor Herndon in evidence. No doubt they were out celebrating the nomination somewhere with their intimate political associates, all the Whig men Lincoln had so carefully been lining up for years to support him against Hardin. Cage was not a party workie, he was just a friend—or at least had been—so he merely slipped a note of congratulations under the door and went by the post office to collect his mail.

There was a letter from Speed, writing from Kentucky, declaring himself happy and productive, bound up more than ever in family business but wonderfully content with his ever-supportive and even-tempered wife. He was desperate for Illinois news and for Illinois gossip. Cage hadn't written him about his rupture with Mary—or about the abandonment of his poetical career, or the abrupt departure of Ellie from his life—so every detail about old friends and old times that Speed inquired about seemed to probe at an old wound. There was no letter from Ellie, none really expected. Until he read the letter from Jacob Bunn, the creditor who held the note to the partnership he had entered into for the purchase of lands in the Western Military Tract, he had no suspicion that there was any threat to the continuance of his benumbed state of existence.

Dear Sir,

Please do me the favor of appearing at my office immediately upon receipt of this missive to present your solution to the satisfactory settlement of your current debt to me. Yours sincerely
,
Jacob Bunn.

Cage had no clear idea what Bunn was talking about. Yes, with his partners Rascoe and Dillon he had arranged a loan from Bunn to buy land in the Military Tract, but the note was not due for another year and the urgent tone of this letter made no sense.

“Are you serious?” Bunn said when Cage presented himself that afternoon in his office on the second floor of his sprawling store. He was younger than Cage, barely over thirty, with slick sandy hair and blandly regular features. He sat behind a polished desk he had designed himself, with carved scrollwork on its edges and cunningly recessed inkwells and letter slots. “Your associates have told you nothing?”

“I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about
,
Jacob. Nothing about what?”

“Well, turns out your Mr. Rascoe is a bankrupt and your Mr. Dillon saw a meteor in the sky and in a fit of delusion concluded his fate was to follow it to Texas. Which he apparently did day before yesterday, after selling off everything he had of value and taking the money with him.”

“He said nothing to me.”

“He said nothing to me, either. Nor did your other partner, Mr. Rascoe, who among other irregularities signed over as security for the note a farm in Indiana whose title has turned out to be a forgery and a mill in Morgan County that apparently doesn't exist at all. The man is a reckless gambler and he has gambled away your money.”

“My money?”

Bunn opened a hinged door on the surface of his desk, withdrew a document and slid it across to Cage.

“You have joint and several liability. You signed a note together with your partners. They cannot pay, and you are liable for the whole debt. Can you pay me, and when?”

Cage sat there in Bunn's storeroom office, looking up from the document at the barrels and sacks and hogsheads stacked against the walls—coffee and molasses and New Orleans sugar. His body felt as light and agitated as a bird's.