A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (27 page)

Cage and Speed left the party together at eleven o'clock that night, slipping past the other departing guests standing outside the Edwards mansion waiting for their carriages to be brought up. The temperature had fallen but there was no wind and it was a fine night for walking.

“Have you ever seen a creature quite that exquisite before?” Speed asked.

“No, I don't think I have.” But the truth was that, for Cage, Matilda's beauty was like a thing in itself, a completed thing like a painting. With Ellie, there seemed something always to be added, something yet to be understood. So when Speed abruptly announced his intention to marry her, Cage felt no competitive resentment
,
just a sense of comradely caution.

“You'd better waste no time in trying,” he said. “Did you see the way she was surrounded tonight?”

“Of course I saw it. And she saw it too, of course. She knows exactly what a prize she is. It's driving me crazy already.”

They had gone several hundred yards when they heard frantic footsteps from behind and turned to see Lincoln sprinting to catch up. When he reached them he planted his feet and came to an awkward accordion-like stop. It took him a few seconds to collect his breath as he bent over, his hands on his knees.

“I need to talk,” he gasped.

They walked to Speed's store, where they watched Lincoln as he crouched in front of the stove stirring up the flames with a bellows. He did this for a disconcertingly long time without bothering to speak. He looked miserable, and the reflection of the flames—highlighting the despairing hollows of his eyes—made him look more miserable still. His urgent need to talk seemed to have evaporated and he had sunk into a solitude from which Cage—impatient and sleepy now—decided it was time to rouse him.

“For God's sake, Lincoln,” he said, “what's the matter?”

Lincoln moved from his crouch into a nearby chair. He had taken his boots off and his feet, clad in ragged gray wool socks that needed washing, looked as disproportionately large as a rabbit's.

“The matter is that I don't think I want to marry her.”

“Mary Todd?”

He nodded solemnly.

“Well, then don't marry her,” Speed said. “People don't marry other people every day.”

Lincoln was silent, wiggling his great feet by the fire.

“Wait a minute,” Cage said. “Are you saying you've asked her?”

“I don't know. We were sending letters back and forth for a month or so. I may have gotten a little caught up in the spirit of it.”

“So you're engaged?”

“I can't remember everything I wrote to her. It doesn't seem to me that we are, but she might have a different view. You know how it is when somebody writes you a letter. When you write it's like you've heard the tone they're using and you naturally try to match it.”

“Did you tell her you loved her?” Cage asked.

“It's possible. I might have told her that.”

“But you didn't specifically ask her to marry you?”

“No, now that I reflect about it, I'm pretty sure that I didn't.”

“That's good,” Speed said. “That's very good. You haven't quite put your foot into the bear trap yet.”

“The thing is,” Lincoln mused, “I want to marry that other girl.”

“What other girl?”

“Miss Edwards. The one who was at the party tonight. I think that if I married her I'd be happier all around.”

Speed shifted his eyes to Cage, but said nothing to betray that Lincoln had a rival around the fire. Since the rivalry for Miss Edwards was thick to begin with, maybe it wasn't even worth mentioning.

“I'm going to write Molly a letter,” Lincoln declared.

“Who's Molly?” Speed asked.

“His pet name for Mary,” Cage said.

“Good Lord, you have a pet name for her? You can't break it off too soon!”

“I'll write her tonight and tell her I love Matilda Edwards instead.”

“Are you insane?” Cage said. “Don't do that.”

“Well, I think I have to give her a reason, don't you? And I have to be honest. I won't lie to her.”

“For one thing, you can't possibly be in love with Matilda Edwards. You hardly know her. And for another, you'll make an enemy of Mary if you tell her you're dropping her for somebody else, and Mary Todd is someone you don't want for your enemy.”

“What do I tell her then?”

“I don't know,” Cage said. “Tell her that you've greatly enjoyed your conversations with her, both in letters and in person, but you find you're so presently oversubscribed with your political and legal activities that regrettably you must fade away from such rich companionship, but trust that sometime in the future…and cetera and cetera.”

“She'd have to be very stupid to believe a word of that,” Lincoln said. “And she's very far from stupid. And like I said, I have to tell the truth, or at least some part of it. Maybe I don't have to mention Miss Edwards but I have to tell Molly that I don't love her. It has to be clean and it has to be fair. I'll write her tonight.”

“No,” Speed said, “don't write her. You have to tell her face to face.”

“Why?”

“Because it would be the coward's way. And because once you put your words in writing she can read them again and again. In her poor broken heart, they'll be a living and eternal monument against you.”

Lincoln chewed over this advice with a look of deepening anguish, finally turning to Cage.

“What do you think?”

“Speed's right. You have to do her the honor of telling her in person.”

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
Speed showed up, frantic and unannounced, at Cage's door.

“You've got to take Lincoln off my hands!”

“What are you talking about?”

“He says he wants to kill himself, and my store is full of kitchen knives and axes and razors and all sorts of deadly implements.”

“He says what?”

“Do you have guns here? Knives?”

“No guns. I have a bowie knife from the war. A letter opener. A razor. I can't think of anything else.”

“Hide them away. Leave them with Mrs. Hopper or somebody. Come on. Billy Herndon is with him now, but the sooner we get him out of the store the better.”

As they walked across the square Speed did his best to relate what had happened. “He went to the Edwards house this morning to break it off with her like we told him to do. Face to face, no ambiguity, a clean break. But she started crying, of course, and he didn't know what to do, so he dug himself in deeper. He said he took her on his knee and kissed her, and now she thinks they're in love again. It's a bad lick, Cage. He's in deeper than he was before.”

“So he wants to
kill
himself?”

Speed answered with a fatalistic shrug as they entered the store and climbed to the upstairs room where he and Lincoln lived. When they opened the door they heard Lincoln give a startled yell and saw him back across the room to stand against the far wall, exactly the way a caged wild animal might have reacted to an expected intruder.

“Calm down, Mr. Lincoln,” Billy Herndon said. “It's just your friends.

“I can't get him to talk to me,” Billy said to Cage and Speed. “He just keeps saying he wants to die over and over.”

“You know me, don't you?” Cage said softly to Lincoln.

“Of course I do. I haven't gone insane. I know everybody I'm supposed to know.”

But his eyes were darting back and forth, his breathing was rapid, and there was a frightening animus in his expression. Some internal spring had broken and as a result the whole mechanism of his being appeared to be racing but going nowhere.

“I'm going to take you home with me,” Cage told him.

“Why? I don't want to go home with you. I don't want to go home with anybody. I don't want to be anywhere. I just want to be dead and you gentlemen are in my way. Please leave me alone.”

“You know we won't do that.”

“If you were truly my friends you would.”

For a moment, Cage thought Lincoln's derangement might be an elaborate jest. It didn't seem possible that a man of his intelligence and acuity could lose his bearings so utterly, and for such a character reversal to happen in the course of a single day. But as brilliant as Lincoln was at telling stories, he was no actor. He could not have faked the pain and despair that were in his eyes.

For all his agitation, he was strangely compliant, obedient as a child when Cage walked across the room and took his hand. He led him down the stairs, Lincoln walking behind and muttering that he would kill himself one way or another no matter where Cage took him. It was only a matter of time and opportunity and there was no reason to postpone the matter.

“All right,” Cage said, “but if you're determined to do it there's no hurry and no reason why we can't discuss it.”

Lincoln was immune to logic, but a commiserating tone seemed to have some sort of calming effect. Or perhaps this was due to the fact that they were now out on the street, in full view of his friends and constituents, and there was enough of the politico still residing in his tortured mind to not want to be shamed in front of them. For that reason Cage let go of his friend's hand and simply walked close to his side the few blocks to the Palatine and pretended to be in an intense conversation with him. Passersby nodded or tipped their hats to Lincoln and he had enough wits left to smile vacantly in return.

When they got to the house, Cage ushered Lincoln rapidly through the parlor, where Theophilous Emry still worked in an orphaned way on his French. “Is that Mr. Lincoln?” he called out in surprise, but Lincoln didn't answer and Cage pretended that neither had heard him. They managed to get to the stairway without encountering Mrs. Hopper, but on the landing they passed Ellie on her way out on an errand. She smiled and opened her mouth to say something but must have seen the grim look on Cage's face, so she just nodded a quick greeting and went down the stairs.

Cage opened the door to his room and ushered Lincoln inside, then ordered him to take off his coat and hat and sit down. Lincoln complied distractedly, handing his coat and hat to Cage as if to a servant, but he was too agitated to sit. He paced around the room, glancing at the pictures on the walls, grabbing books off the shelves and putting them back without looking at them. Before he had left with Speed, Cage had taken his bowie knife out of his desk drawer and his razor off the washstand and hidden them beneath his mattress. But the way Lincoln was so nervously inspecting everything made him worry that he would happen upon them.

“Do you think you could make an effort to sit down and tell me what happened?”

Lincoln sat down in a chair but then sprang up again. A sudden wave of lucidity passed over his face. “Nothing happened. Well, nothing that was supposed to. I'd written out and memorized what I was going to say to her. I thought it was best to get the brutal truth out as soon as possible, so I told her I'd made a mistake and that I didn't love her. You should have seen the look of shock on her face, the power of her suffering. It was like I'd hit her over the head with a skillet. And then she started crying, of course, and begging me to say it wasn't true.”

“And that's what you said?”

“Yes, I told her I loved her after all. What else could I do? The poor woman was so miserable! When I recanted, when I told her what she wanted to hear, it was like watching a child wake up from a terrible nightmare. And now the nightmare is mine, and I have to end it.”

“There are ways to end a nightmare without killing yourself.”

“So it might seem to you. I have no interest in any other course, and if you and Speed think you can talk me out of it, or keep me from it, you've deluded yourselves.”

“Hasn't the session started? Shouldn't you be there?”

“What does it matter? The whole internal improvements system is a disaster. The bond payments alone might bankrupt the state. And it's all my fault. It would be a favor to the voters if I were dead and unable to cause any more mischief. And if the Democrats want to destroy the state bank, let them! I'll be happily underground. Nobody will remember me, nobody will care about me, and that's the way it should be.”

Cage tried to make him eat, to take coffee, or to set aside his temperance habits and have a glass of whiskey, but Lincoln would hear none of it. All he wanted to do was talk about how he had no choices left but to destroy himself or live the rest of his life with a woman he did not love.

“I think you must love her at least a little bit,” Cage ventured at one point.

“No, I love Matilda Edwards.”

“You've barely met Matilda Edwards.”

“It doesn't matter. I can't have her in any case. If I have to live, I have to marry Molly. Honor demands it. To get rid of myself would be an act of kindness to her, and the poor bewildered creature deserves at least that much.”

He talked on for hours, his eyes wild with fatal determination. He said the same things over and over again, sometimes varying the words a little but never straying from the themes that were torturing him—the futility of his life, the demands of honor, the hurt he had caused an innocent soul. Cage was growing hungry but he could not take Lincoln out in this condition or leave him alone in the room while he saw to his own dinner, so he steeled himself for a long, hungry night. At about midnight he managed to talk Lincoln into getting into the bed, making sure his restless guest occupied the side next to the wall so he couldn't slip away without Cage being aware of it. After they were in bed Lincoln talked with perfect but manic coherence for an hour more about how he wanted to die, unable to let go of the topic, unable to recognize that everything he was saying he had already said four or five dozen times before. At some point in the early hours of the morning he fell silent, but it was a loud silence, a brooding so intense it radiated outward like the heat from a stove. Lying next to him, Cage drifted off for a few minutes and woke to the sense of Lincoln next to him in the bed. He was sitting upright, staring into the center of the dark room, maybe even silently plotting the details of how he would depart from life.

Cage dared not speak to his ghostly bedmate for fear that doing so would stir up another endless soliloquy. This was the second time he had shared a sleepless night in bed with Abraham Lincoln, and that other night now came back to him with heartbreaking clarity: the two of them in Lincoln's cramped room in the Carmans' cabin in New Salem, talking until dawn about poetry, about love, about destiny and death and the imperative of being remembered beyond the grave. Sleep had been impossible because there was too much to be said, too much life to be desperately lived. How had it happened that that wondrous future life had suddenly become such a burden and a horror to him, something that needed to be swatted away like a crawling spider?

Cage remembered standing in a bank office in Marseille, reading the suicide letter that had been handed him by his father's banker. His father had been a quiet-mannered man, kind to everyone, much admired by his friends, a companionable and indulgent figure to his only surviving child. He was unlike Lincoln. He was not a captivating storyteller and his political philosophy, if he had one, was a personal secret. But he had been a man of rigid honor and, as with Lincoln, that honor had turned somehow to shame.

Lincoln finally lay down again and Cage fell into a vivid half-sleep, in which he saw a scene clearer than he could have encountered it in life. A man sitting on a rock, waiting patiently for the tide to come in, a man who had never before touched a needle and thread clumsily sewing shut coat pockets filled with round, sea-washed stones. A seal lifting its head out of the water twenty yards offshore, staring at the man, the man staring back, the tide coming in and the cold water filling his boots. Feeling resolve more than fear; in fact no fear at all, no regret
,
just a harrowing, relentless need whose satisfaction was now the towering goal of his life.

It was the material of a poem, arising from terrible real-life memory and from hallucinatory sleep, a poem that might help provide his unfinished collection with a binding resonance. He sat up in bed, meaning to go to his desk and write something down: the face of that seal, its neutral curiosity. But his desk was occupied. While he had been dreaming, Lincoln had apparently risen. He was searching through the drawers of Cage's desk.

“What are you doing?” Cage asked, afraid that Lincoln was looking for some novel instrument to kill himself with. “Stay out of there. There's nothing that will help you.”

Lincoln turned to face him. “I was looking for a piece of paper so I can write you a note. I didn't want to tear a page out of your notebooks.”

He rubbed the stubble on his face and stretched his arms. He looked weary and resigned, purged of the frightening energy that had kept him awake all night. His suicidal mood had broken in the night like a fever. “I didn't want to wake you but I thought I owed you a few lines of gratitude. Don't worry, I decided to go through with it.”

“Go through with what?”

“With being alive. Being alive and being married to Molly. Like my father always told me, when you make a bad bargain you hug it the tighter.”

“That sounds like the worst sort of advice.”

“Well, Cage, you can have me dead, or you can have me hugging a bad bargain. Which is it? And where can we get some breakfast?”