Mrs. Lincoln's Sisters Page 3

  Mary sighed and grudgingly let Ann cling to her hand as she unsteadily followed Elizabeth and Frances around the yard. Mary hated to be restrained from skipping along the stone paths or dancing over the lawn, free and unencumbered, and as soon as she could persuade Elizabeth to take over for her, she pried her fingers free of Ann’s grasp and darted away.

  Mama was too weary to join them for supper, but she was feeling so well that, as Papa assured the children, he could keep his promise to take them to the Independence Day celebration the next day. Mama would stay home and rest, with Grandmother Parker, Auntie Chaney, and Mammy Sally there to tend to her and the baby.

  But the next morning, Frances discovered, Mama had come down with a fever in the night. Responding swiftly to Papa’s summons, Mrs. Leuba had administered draughts and applied poultices, but when she left shortly after dawn, lips pressed together and strain evident in the lines around her eyes, Mama was no better.

  The children were still at breakfast, pretending to be cheerful for little Ann’s sake and murmuring worriedly among themselves, when Papa returned from fetching his friend Dr. Warfield, a professor at Lexington’s Transylvania Medical School. “Papa?” Mary called, bolting from her chair, but the two men hurried past the kitchen and up the stairs without a word. Elizabeth lay a hand on Mary’s shoulder, gently pushed her back into her seat, and encouraged her siblings to finish eating, but none of them were hungry anymore.

  A faint tremor in her voice, Auntie Chaney scolded them for not cleaning their plates and sent them out to play. Neither she nor Mammy Sally nor Papa had mentioned the Independence Day celebration. Indeed, their agitated father had scarcely spoken a word to any of them as he raced in and out of the house on errands, and as they left through the back door, the silent looks they exchanged conveyed that they all knew their mother was very ill—much too ill for Papa to leave the house except to fetch another doctor.

  As the day passed that was exactly what he did. After Dr. Warfield left, Papa summoned Dr. Dudley, a professor of anatomy and surgery at the university who was well liked by all and known for his cheerful manner. But he wasn’t smiling when Frances glimpsed him approaching their front door with his black leather bag, then scarcely pausing to remove his hat as Papa grasped his arm and led him upstairs to Mama.

  Auntie Chaney remembered to feed them lunch, but she made them eat outside on the veranda. They preferred eating on the veranda in the summer, but that day it seemed like a punishment, a means to keep them away from Mama. They picked at their food, but only Ann, unaware of the tension that gripped the rest of them, ate more than a mouthful.

  “Do you think—” Frances hesitated, then rephrased the question she was afraid to ask. “Do you think Mama will get better?”

  She had directed her question to Elizabeth, but Mary blurted, “Of course she’s going to get better! What a stupid thing to say. She’s just tired from having a baby.”

  Stung, Frances was about to retort when Levi said somberly, “Mama isn’t just tired. Papa wouldn’t call Mrs. Leuba and two doctors if she was only tired. He would just let her sleep.”

  “She has a fever,” said Frances, knotting her fingers together in her lap. “I heard Mrs. Leuba tell Mammy Sally. A fever took baby Robert—”

  “That’s different,” said Mary. “That was a baby sickness. Mothers don’t get baby sicknesses.”

  “Sometimes they do,” countered Frances. “Anyway, I’m not saying Mama has what took Robert, just that a high fever is very bad—”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Elizabeth interrupted, giving Frances a pointed look and tilting her head toward Ann, and then ever so slightly toward Mary, who had risen from her chair, face flushed, chin trembling, glaring at Frances as if daring her to speak another horrid word.

  Resigned, Frances said nothing more about the terrible, cold, sinking fear in her stomach that seemed to spread throughout her chest and into her limbs as the day passed. By midafternoon, as she sat on the blanket minding Ann while Elizabeth distracted Mary with games and Levi wandered off to find some mischief, a third doctor had replaced the second—Dr. Richardson, a standoffish fellow less popular in Lexington than Dr. Warfield and Dr. Dudley, but a specialist in midwifery and women’s ailments.

  At least that was what Grandmother Parker told them when she arrived to look after them while their mother was subjected to complicated medical treatments they were too young to know about. But Frances knew something of this forbidden knowledge, for she had surreptitiously read a book Mrs. Leuba had left for Mama when she entered her confinement. She wondered if they had given Mama calomel for purging, or laudanum to reduce cramping, or if they would perhaps try bloodletting. The descriptions hadn’t bothered Frances when she had read the words on the page, but when she imagined the treatments being inflicted upon her mother, she felt sick and wanted to sob. She couldn’t seek comfort from anyone, however, because she wasn’t supposed to have read that book and it was her own fault for doing it on the sly.

  Grandmother Parker sent them to bed early, even Elizabeth, who crept from her own bed into Mary’s when the younger girl began weeping into her pillow. Eventually Elizabeth was able to calm her, and to the sound of her younger sister’s sniffling, Frances drifted off to sleep.

  In the morning she woke to an unsettling silence. As she sat up in bed, Elizabeth stirred, one arm still around Mary’s shoulders as she slept. Their eyes met, and they both knew that something was terribly wrong.

  Slowly they washed and dressed, delaying the blow to come, then crept quietly from their room rather than wake their sisters. The door to their parents’ bedchamber was closed, and from behind it came the sound of low, muffled weeping. Papa? Frances had heard him weep only once before, when baby Robert—

  A chill swept over her, so cold she could scarcely breathe. She felt Elizabeth take her hand. “We must be brave for the little ones,” her elder sister choked out in a whisper.

  Frances’s first contrary instinct was to think that maybe they wouldn’t have to, maybe it wasn’t what they feared. Her next thought was, Who will be brave for me?

  They descended to the kitchen, where they found Auntie Chaney fighting back tears as she sliced and buttered bread for their breakfast as if it were an ordinary day and not the worst of all their lives. She and Mammy Sally abruptly broke off their hushed conversation when the children entered. “Poor little lambs,” Mammy Sally said and held out her arms. They ran to her embrace, but Frances couldn’t hear her words of comfort over the roaring in her ears. She didn’t want to hear them. Until she did, she could cling to the hope that everyone was sad only because Mama was very ill, nothing worse than that, and in time she would get better and no one would need to be sad anymore.

  But Grandmother Parker entered then, ashen-faced and trembling, George in his swaddling blanket in the crook of one arm. She grasped the back of a chair for support, inhaled deeply, and told them that their mother had passed away in the night.

  Frances stumbled through the hours that followed in a daze, numbly looking on as Levi and then Mary joined them in the kitchen and absorbed the terrible news. Before long Ann’s plaintive cry drifted downstairs to them, and since Elizabeth was holding Mary, tears streaming down her own face as she tried to soothe her younger sister, Frances was sent upstairs to get Ann. “Mama is gone,” Frances told her as she changed her diaper and washed her face and hands, but Ann only blinked at her, uncomprehending. Lucky Ann, Frances thought, but immediately realized how wrong she was. Ann would have no memories of their beloved mother in the years to come. Even sad memories were better than none.

  Frances carried Ann downstairs and fed her some bread and butter. Soon thereafter Papa appeared, eyes bloodshot, face pale and haggard, and told them in a husky, unfamiliar voice that they must all come upstairs and say good-bye to their mother. For a moment Frances felt a rush of hope: they could not say good-bye if Mama had already left them. But when her father and grandmother took them upstairs and arranged them aroun
d the bed and she saw her mother lying in repose on the pillows, her laughing eyes closed forever, her graceful hands folded upon her chest, Frances understood, and she felt a terrible surge of rage toward her father for unwittingly deceiving her.

  The children said their hesitant good-byes, all save Ann, who frowned and repeated, “Mama? Mama?” as she looked from the still, silent figure on the bed to the faces of her father and siblings, uncomprehending. She dutifully kissed their mother’s cheek when Frances held her near, but then her brow furrowed and she began to cry because everyone else was crying.

  Papa’s voice broke as he handed baby George to Mammy Sally and told her to take the children away. As soon as she led them from the room, Levi bolted down the stairs and out the back door, while the sisters went to the parlor, waiting for whatever would happen next, dreading it.

  Sick at heart, Frances longed to rest her head on Elizabeth’s shoulder and find comfort in her soothing words and gentle embrace, but Mary had gotten there first, scrambling onto Elizabeth’s lap the moment she sat down, wailing and shrieking with grief so that Frances could barely hear herself think. There was nothing for Frances to do but find herself a place on the sofa opposite and cuddle Ann on her lap, since she absolutely refused to be put down. Frances glowered at Mary as she waited for her sister to calm herself and take a breath so that she could have her turn in Elizabeth’s arms, but Mary would not be consoled. That was the moment when Frances knew that Mary would always—always—need Elizabeth more than she did, and that Elizabeth would always be there for her, trusting that Frances would be fine on her own.

  She would have to be, Frances realized, hugging Ann a little tighter as she burned with grief and resentment. Mary would always come first.

  3

  May 1875

  Ann

  Ann did not quite know what to make of the note that Elizabeth’s messenger delivered two days after Mary’s trial. The elegant handwriting on the thick, creamy ivory paper was clear enough, but not her rationale for summoning the Todd sisters—those who lived in Springfield at least—to discuss what was to be done about Mary. What was to be done? According to the reports Ann had read in the papers, there was only one thing to be done, and their nephew Robert had done it.

  Just that morning, the Chicago Tribune had published a sympathetic editorial—not to grieve the lady’s friends or to pander to curiosity, they emphasized, but to assure the concerned public that Mrs. Lincoln had been treated in the most kindly and gentle manner throughout the proceedings, and that she had maintained her dignity and character as a cultivated lady. For years she had suffered under the mental strain of losing three sons to illness and having her husband cruelly assassinated before her eyes; the dreadful scenes playing over and over in her mind’s eye ever since had worn away her reason. When her increasingly distracted thoughts and erratic behavior had suggested that she might come to some harm, Robert had finally had no choice but to seek to have her committed. “This proceeding, and the circumstances attending it, had long been foreseen by her intimates,” the article concluded, “and it was postponed as long as affectionate regard could allow.”

  What intimates? Ann had wondered as she read the final lines. Mary’s sisters certainly had not been consulted, and they knew more about her long, fraught history of “distracted thoughts and erratic behavior” than anyone. Ann could have shared a few significant facts with that panel of concerned friends and learned physicians, facts that might have swayed their decision. Not that Mary shouldn’t remain exactly where she was for a while, if only to teach her a lesson. She had carried her ploys for attention and sympathy too far this time, and now she must suffer the consequences.

  Mary was hardly the only woman to have lost children and a husband, Ann thought, stung by sudden contempt. Ann herself had lost her precious firstborn son, and the dreadful war had rendered their forcibly reunified country a land of widows and orphans and broken survivors. The other Todd sisters, though, like the vast multitude of women North and South alike, had never behaved as disgracefully as Mary had, embarrassing herself and shaming her family. Mary was always landing in the newspapers with some new, outrageous scandal: her pathetic pleas to Congress to provide for her as the widow of the great martyred savior of the nation; her restless wanderings from health spa to Spiritualist retreat in search of comfort; her defensive, very public responses to the offensive claims made by Mr. William Herndon in the biography he had written about Abe, his former law partner. Granted, the book and the many speeches associated with its publication were a disgrace to journalism, reeking with egregious lies and some of the most maliciously distorted scenes ever to travel from frenzied brain to poison pen, but the appropriate response would have been dignified silence. Mary had occasionally managed to act with dignity, but silence seemed beyond her abilities.

  Except when it came to cutting out of her life someone whom she accused of wronging her. Then Mary could achieve perfect stubborn silence, even when the person in question was a once-cherished friend, such as Mrs. Elizabeth Keckly, her longtime dressmaker and erstwhile confidante. Even when the person was a sister.

  What would the panel of distinguished gentlemen have made of that?

  No examination of Mary’s aberrant behavior could exclude that dreadful business in New York back in 1867 when she had enlisted Mrs. Keckly in her scheme to raise funds and public sympathy by selling off her wardrobe, a painfully embarrassing episode still snidely referred to as “the Old Clothes Scandal.” Even that was presaged by her behavior as first lady, her spending sprees while the nation was engulfed in war, running up extraordinary debts buying lavish monogrammed china and fringed silk shawls while brave Union soldiers shivered in frosty encampments without blankets. Ann had found all too credible the rumors that Mary padded legitimate White House refurbishing bills with her own expenses, rumors that had run rampant almost from the beginning of her husband’s administration. Ann had learned to avoid certain acquaintances whenever she went out in Springfield or visited family in Lexington because invariably they would interrogate her about Mary’s latest antics. The inquisitors would frame their words in the guise of innocently polite inquiries about her family, but their eager glee never failed to reveal their true purpose.

  Ann was tired of making excuses for or feigning ignorance about Mary’s conduct. Why should she embrace the role of Mary’s apologist? Mary apparently never once paused to consider how her behavior would reflect upon her sisters, the damage she would do to their prospects and fortunes. Never, it seemed, did she regret how poorly she repaid her family’s love and loyalty, an affront Ann had experienced personally on more than one occasion. In those winter months before President-Elect Lincoln departed for Washington, for example, when throngs of ambitious office-seekers and newspapermen had descended upon Springfield, had it not been Ann and her husband, Clark Smith, who offered Abraham a quiet refuge in the backroom on the third floor of Clark’s dry goods store so he could write his inaugural address in peace? Since the early days of Abraham’s administration, Clark had displayed that desk in the large storefront window facing the courthouse square in his honor. It still drew curious passersby inside, where, after admiring the artifact of the martyred president, they often browsed and bought something. What if one day Mary’s scandals obliged Clark to remove the desk from view? The store’s receipts would drop precipitously, and even though Clark had four other successful shops scattered about the region, the Smiths could not take their income for granted. Had Mary given that a single passing thought? Could she not for once consider how her reputation affected them all?

  As for the sage journalists’ opinings that the tragedies Mary had suffered as a wife and mother had driven her insane, Ann could attest that her eccentricities had manifested long before she suffered these losses. Even as a child, Mary had desired fine things and the latest fashions more than modesty allowed, but more troubling was how she had always harbored excessive ambition and flaunted an unladylike interest in politics. W
hen she was twelve years old, she had repeatedly begged their father to run for president because she yearned to live in the White House. At mealtimes and rare moments when their father relaxed with the family in the garden, Mary would pounce, imploring him to seek the office so earnestly that tears filled her eyes. Only when her father firmly, unequivocally refused did she join him in supporting his candidate of choice—Mr. Henry Clay, the former US senator, speaker of the House, and secretary of state, one of Lexington’s leading citizens, and Papa’s dear friend.

  A year later, when Mary was a precocious girl of thirteen, she had ridden two miles from home to Ashland, Mr. Clay’s gracious country estate. She had interrupted a dinner party, but Mr. Clay indulgently had led his guests from the table outside to admire her new pony and then invited Mary inside to join them at the table.

  She was seated at his right hand, and during a lull in the conversation she said, “Mr. Clay, my father says you will be the next president of the United States. I wish I could go to Washington and live in the White House.” She frowned, wistful. “I begged my father to be president, but he only laughed and said he would rather see you there than to be president himself.”

  “Well, if I am ever president,” Mr. Clay had replied, charmed, “I shall expect Mary Todd to be one of my first guests. Will you come?”

  Mary eagerly accepted, adding, “If you were not already married, I would wait for you.”

  The guests burst into laughter, and sensing that it was at her expense, Mary graciously excused herself and left the party. Thoroughly pleased with herself, she had trotted home and boasted to her sisters about the invitation. Elizabeth had smiled and congratulated her, but Ann and Frances, heaving sighs of exasperation, had declared that their father’s esteemed friend was only being polite. He might be president one day, but he would never invite little Mary Todd to the White House.