A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (43 page)

“Certainly not.”

“Gray and Bowen found it wanting.”

She drew back her head in surprise, though her surprise did not seem very great.

“Oh, what a disappointment. I'm sorry to hear that. But no doubt there's another publisher who'll be very happy to take it on.”

She said this with such a disturbing lack of inflection that Cage wondered if he had imagined the enthusiasm with which she had championed his work, and how through her family connections she had elicited the interest of the publisher who had just rejected it. He withdrew from her company, after the exchange of only a few more words, feeling less like a friend than a stranger who had just been granted a formal audience.

It was about ten o'clock by then, and soon afterwards he heard her announcing that she was going upstairs to bed, saying good night to other people in the room with a comradely affection that she had unmistakably withheld from him. The rest of the guests—all men—lingered by the great fireplace, talking about Joseph Smith and the tariff and whether England's claims on Oregon had any legitimacy at all. Baker was holding forth on this issue when Lincoln put a hand on Cage's shoulder and whispered in his ear, “Stay till the bitter end, won't you? I've missed talking to you.”

So he stayed, and by one in the morning he and Lincoln were alone in the room, Cage holding a glass of brandy, Lincoln holding nothing
,
just gripping the arms of his chair while the firelight danced across his great knuckles and he prodded a log that was not yet aflame with the toe of his boot. There was something new in his appearance—an aura of consistency. Mary no doubt enforced his grooming and made sure his clothes fit, and a slight fullness in his face testified to the fact that he had been introduced to regular mealtimes. But his ever-calculating political mind showed no sign of being at ease. Perhaps the locomotive of his ambition was running even faster, since he now had a partner who was as restless for success as he was.

“It'll be an unholy muddle, that's for sure,” he was saying. “Me and Hardin and Baker all with our claws out for the same seat. The thing will have to be done carefully or we'll end up with our tidy little Whig house divided.”

“Why don't you take turns?”

“It's worth thinking about, but no matter how much you'd like politics to be a cotillion it just naturally wants to be a dirt fight. Reminds me of those Clary's Grove boys over in New Salem.”

He veered off into a reminiscence of first coming to live in New Salem as a young man, having to prove himself fit for habitation there by wrestling one of the town toughs while his companions hooted and spit.

“I was a scientific wrestler. It was my understanding there was supposed to be rules, but this was a tussle-and-scuffle crowd if I ever saw one. The Clary's Grove fellow I was fighting didn't waste any time in legging me and taking me down. But I decided to spring up from the ground and smile and shake his hand just like he'd never cheated. Which he hadn't, because as I had just learned there were no rules to begin with.”

He smiled at the memory, kicked the fire again and studied the spray of sparks that erupted. “It hurt to lose, though. I had a high opinion of my strength back then. I could lift a barrel of whiskey by the chimes and drink out of the bunghole if I wanted to. By God I bet I could still do it today, though I'd have to forgo the drinking part because of my temperance leanings. Want to wrestle me on the carpet right now?”

“No.”

“And now it's—what? Ten years later? Twelve?—and I'm thirty-four years old and married and sitting by the fire and thinking about my breakfast. And here's the strangest news of all.” He lowered his voice and looked around the room
,
just to make sure it was empty. “She's going to have a baby.”

“That's good news. I'm glad.”

“So it turns out we were right to get married when we did. It was a near-run thing. Nobody knows about it yet. Haven't even written Speed. She told me not to tell anybody but I've just done so, haven't I? One thing I've experienced about being married so far is the dangerous thrill of defying your wife.”

“She was pointedly unfriendly to me tonight, by the way. Is there a reason?”

“Oh, that's just because her humors are all fluctuous because of the—”

“That's not the reason and I don't believe you think it is. What has happened?”

Lincoln retreated into a careful silence. The clock above the mantelpiece, its circular dial flanked by miniature bronze maidens, beat out the passing moments like a blacksmith striking an anvil.

“Well,” Lincoln said, “I told you about the satisfaction I take in defying Molly from time to time. And that's why you're here tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

“The day of the wedding, when we were standing outside the jeweler's and you were trying to argue me out of going through with it? Julia Jayne happened to be walking by and overheard what you said. She made it her business to tell Molly, of course, but at least she waited until a week or so after the wedding. When Molly finally heard about it I experienced some weather out of the Old Testament. The skies parted in anger and there was thunder and lightning.”

“Christ.”

“You know Molly, she keeps a list in her head of who's her friend and who's her enemy and she doesn't like anybody wandering from one column to the other. But I didn't intend to celebrate my birthday without you being invited. She shouted at me about it some, but I wasn't going to hang my harp on the willow, and so here you are.”

They tried to talk about other things, but there was no use. There the matter stood, as it must stand forever. Cage could not plead to Mary that he had been misunderstood, because he had not. He would not beg for her forgiveness, both because he did not care to and because in her rigid mind he had committed an unforgivable crime.

At three in the morning he walked home and went to bed, though he knew it was hopeless to try to sleep. His mind kept searching for a solution, and when it could not find one it insisted on going back in time to the improvident moment when he had told Lincoln not to marry Mary Todd. A part of his imagination seemed to think it could erase that moment. Once or twice, as he drifted off to sleep despite his gnawing restlessness, he thought he actually had. But then he would be startled awake again by the sure knowledge of a mistake that had actually happened and could never be made right.

Usually when he was too agitated for sleep, the solution was to light a candle and sit at his desk, scrawling out words and phrases, doing his best to outpace his conscious thoughts and provide a trail to follow for the next day's writing. But this habit of wild creativity was no longer of any relevance. His book was finished, locked in a drawer, rejected. The very thought of it humiliated him—all the wasted years he had given over to its composition, all the dreams he had naively allowed himself to cultivate.

A bolt of clarity shot through his thoughts: this was her work, a vengeful counterstrike at the man who had declared on a Springfield street that Mary Todd would ruin Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps she had written her father, asking him to inform his friends at Gray and Bowen that while the decision to publish Mr. Weatherby was of course one they would independently make, he himself regretted—upon further consideration of the work—that he could not support it with the same degree of enthusiasm it had once inspired. He would be very sorry if because of his recommendation they had felt their time had been wasted.

There were other ways the thing could have played out, but however it happened it would not have taken much. The publishers were busy men in a risky and unpredictable business, and any note of caution or indifference would in effect be a killing blow.

He didn't hate her, and he couldn't fault her. She was looking to her interests, striking the man she had decided was her enemy in his most vulnerable part. But from now on, he understood, being a friend of Mr. Lincoln would be a much trickier thing for Cage than it had been in the past.

H
E WAS SHAVING
when he caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye: a folded piece of paper slipped through the bottom of his door with the snap of an unseen wrist, enough velocity to propel it to the middle of the room. It was a note from Ellie. “Will you see me at the shop this morning on a matter of business?”

Why wouldn't she just knock on his door, or simply open it and walk inside? Their personal relationship had to be an open secret by now, and the habitual subterfuge they employed had begun to strike Cage as not only unnecessary but almost comical. They both made their home at the Palatine, but precisely because they were so intimate they could not enjoy the easy familiarity that naturally arose among people sharing meals and residing in the same house. When they were not alone, engaged in their twice-weekly sweaty lovemaking in the back of their dress shop, they could not break out of a stiff—and probably transparent—politeness.

“Here I am, I've answered your summons,” he told her when he arrived at the shop a few hours later. It was only midmorning, but business was already lively. Cordelia was in the back of the store supervising two other young needlewomen. Her habitual air of nervous watchfulness no longer held her quite so tight. She was at ease and in charge. The new girls were daughters of Irish railway workers. Since they were white, there was no danger they would require the colossal expense of a certificate of freedom, though he rather doubted their diligence and skill would ever rise to Cordelia's standard. Ellie had also hired a new clerk, who was spreading out several rolls of spring fabrics on the counter for two young married women who were shopping together.

“It wasn't a summons,” Ellie said as she led him past Cordelia and the two new girls to her office in the back. Cordelia paused in her work as he walked by and said good morning to her. She returned the greeting with a bow and the hint of a smile, a servile gratitude that made him feel uncomfortably satisfied with himself.

Ellie closed the office door behind them. She pulled out the chair for him and hitched herself up onto the desk, crossing her ankles beneath the hem of her deep blue silk dress. The room would have been dark if not for the window above her head, open to the cloudless blue of a late spring sky.

“What is your matter of business?” he asked.

“I want to buy you out.”

She left the statement hanging there for him to contemplate, busying herself by pretending to straighten her whitework cuffs.

“You have the money to buy me out?”

“Yes. The shop has done well and I've managed it very carefully, as you know.”

He did know. He had made back his initial investment almost a year ago and was now in regular receipt of a small profit.

“But I like being in business with you,” he said.

“Why?”

He shrugged.

“Are you confused?” She had dropped her voice to almost a whisper. “Do you think if you're not in business with me you can't be in bed with me?”

“That's putting it a little too succinctly.”

“If you think that, if you ever thought that…then you were wrong.”

“All right.” He studied her face as she looked at him, waiting for what he would say next. What did she see? A man of strength who had helped to elevate her into her present respectability, or a weak and infatuated man she had taken pleasure in manipulating? He didn't know which she saw—he didn't know which he was. All he knew was that they fit together somehow, answered some need in each other for both closeness and distance.

“What's the reason you want to buy me out?”

“I want a free hand.”

“Have I told you what to buy or sell, or how to buy or sell it?”

“No, but I feel your presence.”

“Sorry, but you'll have to tell me why my ‘presence' is so terrible.”

She pointed through the closed door to the unseen shop. “Because it keeps this from being mine. From feeling like mine. I want that feeling, I've never had it. I want to know what it's like to own something.”

He believed her, was moved by her uncomplicated ambition. It made no sense to deny her request on emotional grounds. If all that was binding them to each other was indeed a business partnership, then it was better to have done with it. And accepting her offer made economic sense for him. He was low on money. Since Cordelia's trial he had bought not just her certificate of freedom but those of two other Negroes whose plights he had learned about from his abolitionist contacts Benbrook and Westridge.

Aside from that, he had leveraged himself heavily to become part of a partnership with two other men, a prosperous Whig Party operative named Rascoe and a Black Hawk War veteran named Dillon whom Cage had known casually ever since the march through the Trembling Lands. The three had signed a note with a merchant named Jacob Bunn, who in those years after the Democrats had killed off the state bank managed most of the moneylending in Springfield. The object of the partnership was to buy up even more land in the Western Military Tract, land that would be leased to farmers who would have more markets for their products if the Whigs won this year's presidential election and managed to pass a protective tariff against English goods. The Whigs were running Henry Clay, though Cage questioned whether the great man was past his prime and out of tune with the spirit of the country, which had taken on an alarming enthusiasm for the annexation of Texas and the expansion of slavery that must follow it. Whether Clay won or not, Cage had been in a mood lately to risk his assets. He had written nothing since the failure of his book and the reckless, speculative impulse that had once driven him to poetry had seamlessly transferred itself to his investments.

So he said yes to Ellie. They agreed on a price. The next day they went to Lincoln's office to have him draw up the contract. It had been almost a year and a half since the birthday party at the Globe. During that time Cage had seen Lincoln only in passing, Mary not at all. The Lincolns had moved out of the Globe and had bought a house on the corner of Eighth and Jackson. They had had their baby.

When Cage and Ellie arrived at Lincoln's office they were surprised to discover the baby there with him. He was sitting on the table his father used as a desk and teething on the knob of an ink blotter.

“Mrs. Lincoln has the headache today,” he explained, “so Bobbie has fallen into my care. What do you think of him? Does he look cross-eyed to you?”

“Not at all,” Ellie said. The baby by now had crawled across the baize tabletop and was reaching out his arms for her. She picked him up and in a business-like way stroked the still-downy hair on his head as he played with the strings of her bonnet. She appeared captivated and distracted in the same measure.

“Good,” Lincoln said. “My wife thinks there's something wrong with his eye, but I don't see it and I'm not going to worry about it.”

He stared at the baby sitting in Ellie's lap with such a transparent expression of tenderness that Cage almost felt he ought to look away. Lincoln, for all his guile and comical shape-shifting, was the most open man Cage had ever known. Having a son had evidently unleashed in him a raw paternal love he did not know how to hide or contain.

The boy was strategically named Robert Todd Lincoln, after Mary's father, whose wealth had no doubt been a factor in the family's upward move from their one-room dwelling in the Globe to their spacious new house. The law office was its usual mess but Lincoln himself looked well tended, his face shaved and hair crisply cut by Billy Florville, his collar wings starched and unstraying, the wide revers of his new broadcloth coat shiny and free of dandruff.

Ellie was warming to the baby. She had taken the watch chain from her neck so that Bobbie could examine it, and she regarded him with much the same level of curiosity as he regarded the watch chain. Maybe there was a maternal impulse beneath the curiosity, or maybe Cage just wanted there to be. If it existed, it was not as strong as her determination to keep it hidden.

While she kept Bobbie occupied, Lincoln prepared the documents for their signature and talked with Cage about the terrible disaster on board the new naval frigate
Princeton,
which had been cruising the Potomac a few months earlier to show off its massive naval gun to distinguished government visitors. But when the cannon was fired it exploded, killing eight men including the secretary of state and grievously wounding many others. President Tyler had been belowdecks—romancing a young girl, it was said—and was spared. The hero of the affair had been none other than John Hardin, the new congressman from Illinois. He had been on board as well, had survived, and had swiftly taken charge after the disaster.

“Well,” Lincoln reflected, “Hardin's a heroic sort of creature. Always in the right place at the right time—stopping a duel from happening here, saving a damsel on an exploding vessel there.”

The edge of bitterness in his voice was probably warranted. After all the maneuvering for the Congressional seat for the Seventh District during the last election, Lincoln and Baker and Hardin had arrived at some sort of agreement to keep peace among themselves and within the party. Hardin would get the Whig nomination first, then Baker, then Lincoln's turn would come third. It was a long time to wait, and of course there was human nature to take into account. All three men believed themselves to be in the hands of destiny, and Hardin especially might think it a disservice to the country for him to follow through with the deal and relinquish power after only one term.

And everyone's political future was hostage to the Texas question. It had been less than ten years ago when there had been such a great commotion in town about the fall of the Alamo, a minor battle that had occurred at some vague locale in Mexico few of them could have found on a map, assuming there had even been a map of Mexico in all of Springfield. The vast Texas territory seized in that conflict had become its own country, but a shaky and bankrupt country whose seat of government was a mere cluster of log houses somewhere on the southern prairie. It wanted to join the United States, and the Democrats vociferously wanted it to do so.

“All annexation would mean is a clear field for the expansion of slavery,” Cage said as he signed the contract that Lincoln slid across the table toward him. “That, and probably a war with Mexico into the bargain.”

Ellie handed Bobbie over to Cage so that she could countersign. The child flexed his legs against Cage's thighs and stared into his eyes with an infant's unembarrassed fixity. The probing gaze, the earnest desire to understand exactly what was going on and why—this seemed to Cage a legacy from his mother. Maybe one eye was indeed a little off. It was hard to tell.

Lincoln was still talking politics as he gathered up the signed papers.

“This fever for Texas is intolerable high,” he said. “It's possible the Democrats will turn their backs on Van Buren and nominate a fire-breathing expansionist like Polk instead. And where would that leave Henry Clay?”

“It would leave him where he was to begin with,” Cage said, “against the spread of slavery and therefore on the moral high ground.”

“Well, the moral high ground is a mighty crumbly place.”

They talked for a few minutes longer: Henry Clay, annexation, the tariff, the joy of lying on the floor bouncing Bobbie on his stomach. It was the sort of discussion that might have taken place between any lawyer and his client after business had been concluded. The civility of their conversation was awkward to them both. Their old intimacy was missing. It was forbidden, thanks to Lincoln's unforgiving wife.

Ellie noticed it as well. As they emerged from the office she slipped her hand into the crook of his arm, a natural enough thing for a woman to do while walking along the street with a male friend. But she had never taken his arm before, so the gesture rather startled him.