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Extract from ‘Mrs Lincoln ’
I read today the account of my attempt at suicide. It was printed
in the
Chicago Inter Ocean – on the front page, where appear all the
worst
stories about me. This is not to say that Doctor Patterson
allows the
eighteen female lunatics under his care newspapers.
Indeed, he believes all
news of the outside world to be excessively agitating.
It is Doctor Patterson’s opinion that the tumult of late-nineteenth
century
life is responsible for diseases of the brain. He explained
to me
during our first interview that female nerves – which are smaller
than
those of men – are more likely to be drained of their vitality
by the chaos
of modern life.
“Newspapers would only serve to overstimulate your already
deranged mind,” he told me.
Our interview was conducted in Doctor Patterson’s office, which
is
fitted up like a lady’s boudoir,with velvet chaises and a great
many needleworked
pillows. A décor designed to make comfortable the doctor’s
patients, all of whom are possessed of those female
nerves.
“I do not believe that my mind is deranged,” I said to
the doctor.
“Addled from too much chloral hydrate and laudanum, perhaps.
Unsettled by the ten-year anniversary of my husband’s killing.
But not
deranged.”
The doctor pulled at his coarsely curled hair, which
he wears quite full
in the back, as if to give the impression of a very
large brain. “Your bladder
is hysterical,” he informed me.
“My bladder, I believe, was damaged by the birth of my last
son.”
“You are also possessed of an irritated spine.”
“It is an arthritic condition which has come upon me since I
passed
fifty.”
“And you have engaged in the religious excitement of séance.”
“As has Queen Victoria and fully one-third of the gentlemen
of my
husband’s cabinet.”
I had perhaps sounded too definite in defense of my
sanity,
for Doctor Patterson raked at his unruly beard with
impatience.
“How long shall I have to stay at Bellevue Place?” I asked,
in a tone
more meek.
Doctor Patterson relaxed back in his leather chair,
the only masculine
furniture in the room. “You should not dwell too much upon leaving,” he
told me.
“But seeing an end to my time here will make the days more tolerable.”
I watched the doctor handle the paperweight he kept
upon his desk,
a dragonfly caught in amber – an object which feels cruel to
me, put
before ladies who have been committed here.
“You will remain at Bellevue Place,” said Doctor Patterson, “until
I –
and your son – determine that your reason has been restored.”
“And how shall you determine such a thing?”
The doctor rose and went to stand before a lace-curtained
window
which looked out upon the lawns surrounding the asylum. “Treatment
at
Bellevue Place,” he explained, “is based upon the wholesome
benefits of
fresh air, moderate exercise, and the therapeutic effects
of cooling baths,
in addition to the essential practice – particularly for those
of the female
sex – of moral restraint.”He turned to regard me with
a stern expression.
“I shall decide your sanity by your willingness to participate
in these
activities.”
“I shall do whatever you require to prove my underangement,” I
told
him.
In the three days since that interview, I have every
morning gone for a
drive in the asylum carriage – which unlocks only from the outside –
through the unpretty town of Batavia. Batavia is a
quarry town, and
everything in it – its clapboard houses, horse carts, and citizens – appears
dulled by a fine powdering of limestone. I have also
allowed Mrs. Ruggles,
the matron with the forearms of a man, to soak me three
times a day in
cold, salted water, and have engaged in countless games
of croquet with
my fellow madwomen, games which are frequently halted
so that
Mrs.Munger, the wife of a Chicago banker, can shout
at her ball. I pursue
no moral unrestraint, and at the close of each afternoon,
I walk the
long path that traverses the asylum grounds all the
way to the unfinished
greenhouse at the edge of the property, returning by
way of Mrs.
Patterson’s kitchen garden in the event that lady should wish
me to dig up
some radishes for the good mental hygiene of it.
It is because of these walks that I have come to know
Doctor
Patterson’s retarded daughter, Blanche, a twelve-year-old child
with the
facial features of an Asiatic. And it is because of
Blanche that I learned of
the story of my attempt at suicide.
Blanche is not an attractive child. Her face is too
round and her eyes
too lidded. Also, Mrs. Patterson keeps her weak-minded
daughter’s hair
braided so tightly, the child’s head appears too small for her
chubby body.
But Blanche possesses an affection which does not demand
to be
deserved, and seems incapable of judging anyone’s actions; and
over the
days that I have been here, I have developed a fondness
for her.
I visit with Blanche every afternoon, for she is a
child of firm habits,
and that is when she comes to sit upon the stone steps
of the back porch
with a pair of shears and her family’s discarded newspapers.
Newspapers
which she snips into elaborately outfitted – though oddly shaped –
silhouettes of ladies.
On this day – the day I read about myself in the Chicago Inter
Ocean
– I returned from my walk to find the girl sitting in her usual
place upon
the porch steps, a stack of newspapers at her side
and her white lawn dress
littered with snippets of black words.
“Abraham’s Widow!” the child exclaimed upon seeing
me. Someone –
the girl’s mother, I expect – must have explained to Blanche
who and what
I was, and this piece of information is all of the
explanation which has
fixed in her mind, for she uses it in place of my name.
“Good afternoon, Miss Blanche,” I said in reply. I like
to call her
“Miss” in the Southern style for the way that it causes
her to touch
her tight plaits, as if they have miraculously turned
into curls. I
gathered my skirts and sat beside the child. “Let me see what
you have
done.”
She handed me the newspaper she was cutting into a
lady, and then
rested her head upon my shoulder. At twelve, Blanche
retains the warm,
milky scent of a much younger child – a symptom, perhaps, of
the undeveloped
state of her mind.Whatever it is, I have found none
of Doctor
Patterson’s treatments as soothing as his daughter’s head
upon my
shoulder.
“You have made this lady very elegant,” I told her. I
held the paper to
the sun to better see the silhouette, and also to read
something of what
that scoundrel Grant, who has astoundingly become president,
might be
up to. I have passed the whole of my life following
politics and only find
it agitating to my female nerves to be cut off from
them.
The late-afternoon sun was low and shining into my
eyes; and I nearly
returned the paper to the frail-minded girl without
reading any of it. But
as I angled the page to set it down, I was stopped
by what I saw there. For
just above the place where Blanche had cut her lady’s head was
the headline,
“Another Sad Chapter in the Life of the Demented Widow.”
I gasped, a short intake of breath which made Blanche
stare up at me
with worry, as if she feared she had stabbed me with
the scissors. But it
was not Blanche’s scissors which had so unsettled me; it was
the knowledge
that I am the country’s only demented widow, and that the sad
chapter reported in the newspaper could only be my
own.
“Are you well, Abraham’s Widow?” Blanche shouted
into my ear.
Almost all of the retarded girl’s utterances are rendered in
overemphatic
tones.
“I think an insect must have flown too near to me,” I
told her. And
though the child waited, I did not return the newspaper,
for I knew that
once I let her take possession of it, she would cut
the story about me into
a paper lady’s bonnet.
“Would this lady not be prettier with a hat?” I asked
her.
“Yes, Abraham’s Widow!” she exclaimed.
“Let me design one for you.”
Carefully, I removed the shears from Blanche’s awkward fingers,
and
while she watched closely, as if I were working magic,
I cut a small flattopped
hat which took up very little of the page.
“Is that not more in fashion?” I said, putting the paper
lady into
Blanche’s hand and tucking the rest of the page into my pocket.
At that moment, I saw Mrs. Patterson coming from the
kitchen
garden with a bunch of stunted-looking onions in her
arms, and quickly
worked the shears back into Blanche’s fingers, for only the
staff – and this
retarded child – were allowed scissors. Then, I rose from the
steps.
“You are going, Abraham’s Widow?” asked Blanche.
“Yes,” I said. I feared that if Mrs. Patterson encountered
me, she was
likely to ask me to return with her to the garden in
order to enjoy the
wholesomeness of weeding. “Cut a lady with a great long train,” I
told
Blanche, “and show it to me tomorrow.”
“I will!” she shouted.
j
I rested a hand upon her narrow head and then disappeared
into the
dank coolness of the limestone building.
I found myself in the corridor outside the asylum kitchen,
where I
could see the Negro cook pouring something pale and
watery into a
cauldron. Doctor Patterson believes in the benefits
of a bland diet upon
unquiet minds, and all the food we are served at Bellevue
Place is tasteless
and white and smells of steam. Although I was anxious
to read the story
about my suicide, I did not linger here to do it, for
I believed Mrs.
Patterson to be headed toward the kitchen with her
onions – though not,
I assumed, in order to add them to our lunatics’ supper. I hurried
toward
the staircase at the end of the hallway and rushed
up to my second-floor
room.
I have been told by the doctor’s wife that my room is one of
the best
of the asylum, in recognition of the position I once
held. That may be so
– I have not seen where the other inmates are kept. Still, the
room makes
me think too much of a second-class boardinghouse.
The bureau is oak
and was once decorated with acanthus leaves, which
have long since fallen
away, leaving behind their ghostly outlines. I have
also a rocker which has
been made to an odd geometry, and when I sit upon it,
it makes me feel
as if it wishes nothing more than to pitch me to the
floor. The room
possesses a table, covered with a cloth which has lost
half its tassels, and a
strange little desk decorated with the carved face
of an angel at the joining
of each of its legs. Only the mattress is new, for
I had it brought here on
my first day – less to keep myself from sleeping upon bedbugs,
as to avoid
placing my head where others have dreamt their mad
dreams.
I have a view of the river from my one window, but
there are bars over
the glass.
Shutting the door behind me – although a desire for privacy
is
thought at Bellevue Place to demonstrate an unwillingness
to participate
in the institution’s therapeutic activities – I dropped
into the inhospitable
rocker and took the newspaper clipping from my pocket.
“On the evening following her trial for insanity,” I read
between the
cuts on the page, “Mrs. Lincoln, overcome by melancholy, eluded
the Pinkerton guards stationed outside the door of
her hotel room and
escaped to the pharmacy of Squair & Company. Acting in appearance
both anxious and uncoherent, Mrs. Lincoln demanded
of the druggist a
lethal mixture of laudanum and camphor. When Mr. Squair
expressed
concern over providing such a poisonous concoction,
the despairing lady
informed him that she intended to use the potion to
bathe a neuralgic
shoulder. Unable to dissuade Mrs. Lincoln from her
request, the druggist
retired to a back room, and after some short moments,
during which the
demented lady grew increasingly agitated, Mr. Squair
returned with a
bottle marked ‘Laudanum – poison.’ Grabbing the
potion from the
druggist’s hand, Mrs. Lincoln rushed into the street; whereupon,
she
immediately poured the entire contents into her throat.
Then,
she returned to her hotel to await her death.
“The nation was only spared further sorrow by the fact that
Mr.
Squair had recognized the Widow of the Martyred President
beneath her
veil, and divining her purpose, substituted burnt sugar
water for the
laudanum.”
No one would believe this of me, I told myself.No one
would believe that
a fifty-six-year-old lady who is slightly arthritic
and plumper than she
should be could escape two Pinkertons. No one who knows
me could believe
that after all which has happened in my life, I would
choose to end my life
over commitment to the madhouse.
But of course they will believe it. For now that I
have been proven insane,
anything might be believed of me.
It is a singular experience to be adjudged insane,
to sit in a courtroom
in muddied skirts while seventeen witnesses swear to
your derangement.
My skirts were muddied because the man who had come
to bring me to
the courthouse, Leonard Swett, would not allow me to
change my dress.
“I am not to let you from my sight,” he explained. He
was standing in
the doorway to my room at the Grand Pacific Hotel with
two policeman
behind him. “We want no possibility of escape.”
“We are on the third floor of the hotel,” I said. “Even
as a young
woman, I could not have managed it.” Mr. Swett was a former
colleague
of Mr. Lincoln, and his resemblance to my husband had
always made me
feel warm toward him. I recalled then that Mr. Swett
had lately acquired
the title of “The Insanity Lawyer,” and I made myself
smile into his stern
face to remind him that we knew each other, and that
I was Mrs. Lincoln
and not his latest lunatic.
But Mr. Swett only fixed me with a hard look from behind
his small,
pince-nez spectacles. “I shall give you the choice of traveling
to the courthouse
in my carriage,” he said to me, “or in that of the officers.”
“Where is Robert?” I asked him. “Where is my son?”
“Mr. Lincoln is waiting at the courthouse.”
Robert is waiting there to defend me, I told myself.
He will not let Mr.
Swett commit me.
The courthouse was filled; overflowing with people
who had known
I was to be tried for insanity before I had. They crowded
the benches and
stood in the aisles, staring at me with eager expressions,
in hopes, I
supposed, that I would succumb to a fit of madness
before their eyes.
But I barely saw these men and women who had come to
witness a
mad First Lady. I searched only for my eldest son,
finding him at last at
the front of the courtroom behind a mahogany desk,
well dressed and
handsome in dark brown. Robert has inherited none of
the homeliness of
his father. His nose is straight and aristocratic,
and his mouth is well
formed. The only features he shares with his father
are a small indentation
pressed into his chin, which I always wish to put my
finger to, and eyes of
an uncommonly pale shade of gray. Robert’s left eye, however,
does not sit
entirely straight in its socket. As a child, he was
made by doctors to look
through keyholes to straighten that eye, and now that
Robert is a man of
thirty-one, it is a little less inclined – save when he is overcome
by some
emotion, when it cants violently toward his nose.
“Please,” I begged Mr. Swett, “take me to my son.”
“You must sit with your own lawyer,” he instructed me.
“Is Robert not my lawyer?”
“Your lawyer is Mr.Arnold.”And as if Mr. Swett had conjured
him out
of the air, Isaac Arnold, a man who had been a friend
of Mr. Lincoln’s and
of mine during our time in Springfield, stood beside
me.
“Perhaps you do not consider Robert experienced enough,” I
said to
Mr. Swett. “But I believe in my son and would prefer to have
him defend
me.”
Mr. Swett made an irritated exhalation. “It is Robert who has
drawn
up the application to try your sanity.”
“Robert wishes to commit me to a madhouse?” The noise
of the
courtroom grew deafening, and I found I could draw
no air into my
lungs.
“Robert only wishes what would be to your benefit,” said
Mr. Swett.
“And Mr.Arnold is here to ensure that afterward, no one can
say that what
is decided was not to your benefit.”He gazed pointedly at Mr.Arnold,
and
though I wished to understand the meaning of that gaze,
I could not, for
the gaslight which reflected from the lenses of Mr.
Swett’s pince-nez
spectacles turned his eyes to opaque disks.
Mr. Arnold, however, seemed in no doubt of what he
was to do. He
led me across the room, where he settled me behind
my own mahogany
table, in opposition to that of my son, and sat quietly
as Mr. Swett
proceeded to call sixteen witnesses to testify to my
madness.
I was light-headed from my inability to breathe and
brain-numbed
from shock; and as the witnesses spoke about my insanity,
I sometimes
believed that this was no more than a dream induced
by laudanum, hoped
that it was.Nothing the witnesses said of me was untrue,
and while all that
I had done and thought had felt sound at the time,
now that it was spoken
aloud, it seemed the behavior of a madwoman.
“Mrs. Lincoln spent more than six hundred dollars on Belgian
lace
curtains,” declared a clerk employed at Mattock’s Department
Store.
“Though she told me that she does not own a home.”
“I have had to send men to search the rooms next door to Mrs.
Lincoln’s,” said Mr. Turner, the manager of the Grand
Pacific Hotel,
“because she insisted there were assassins in them plotting
her death.
When my men found no assassins, Mrs. Lincoln swore
they were living in
the walls.”
“One night,” whispered the hotel housekeeper, her voice
full of the
excitement of relating scandal, “Mrs. Lincoln was found running
through
the hallway in her nightclothes, shrieking that her
son was trying to
murder her.”
Once the hotel employees and shopkeepers had finished
describing my
lunacy, five doctors were called. I had been examined
by none of these
doctors, had only seen them over the past weeks coming
from Robert’s
room at the hotel. Yet it was the opinion of each of
these gentlemen that I
had lost my reason due to excessive grief on the brain
force.
The testimony of the doctors cut through my opiate-like
haze like
scalpels. I am going to be shut away with madwomen!
I clutched at Mr.
Arnold’s hand to keep myself from acting as insane as I was
being
described – and to urge him to make some defense of my sanity.
But Mr.
Arnold only patted my fingers with a palm made slick
from the pomade
he uses to fix the hair combed to hide his baldness
and did not question
any of Mr. Swett’s witnesses.
When the sixteen witnesses were done, Mr. Swett called
Robert Lincoln
to the stand.
He will not go, I told myself. And when Robert did
go, taking the seat
at the front of the courtroom and keeping a hand pressed
over his flawed
eye, I told myself that still, he would not tell this
courtroom he believed
me insane.
Apologizing first for obliging my son to speak about
unhappy
occurrences, Mr. Swett asked him to describe my spending
since I had
returned to Chicago.
“My mother has spent two hundred dollars upon soap and perfume,”
he told the court.“More than she will be able to use in a lifetime.
She has
purchased seven hundred dollars’ worth of jewelry, which she
will never
wear, for she lives in mourning. The closets in her
hotel room are so overfilled
with purchases, she is in danger of being crushed by
them.”
“Does your mother suffer from delusions?” asked Mr. Swett.
“She hears voices.Men who argue about the most efficient method
of
murdering her.”
My son told the crowded courtroom every irrational
thing I had
done these past months, every utterance I had made
that sounded
unreasoned. “My mother’s behavior has become so erratic,” he
declared,
“I have had to engage Pinkertons to follow her whenever she
leaves the
hotel.”
“Can you tell us,” said Mr. Swett smoothly, “why
you drew up the
petition to try your mother’s sanity?”
Robert’s left eye tugged furiously toward his nose. I hoped
the
emotion pulling upon it was love. Or at minimum, regret.
But I had never
possessed any skill for reading my eldest son’s emotions, and
could not say
which one now worked upon him.
“My mother has long been a source of great anxiety to me,” Robert
told Mr. Swett.
“Do you believe she is insane?” asked the lawyer.
Please, say no. For I am your mother, still.
Robert rubbed again at his defective eye. “I have no doubt of
it,” he
declared.
A lady seated behind me gave a small cry, as if she
had come upon
something shocking, a dead bird or other small animal;
and for a moment
I could not be certain that it was not I who had made
the cry.
Mr. Arnold called no witnesses. It required only ten
minutes for the
gentlemen on the jury to decide me mad.
I thought then that I would go mad, for I was terrified
of being locked
up with lunatics. But for the moment, it was not fear
I felt. Even the
deepest dread could not be more powerful than the emotion
which now
claimed me, which overrode all other feelings. And
when my son at last
crossed the room to me, I found voice only to speak
the one thought
which pushed out all others.
“To think,” I said to him, “that my son would ever
have done this.”
It is now well past midnight, and I am seated at the
little desk carved
with angels reading again the story I rescued from
Blanche’s scissors. As I
read, I can hear above me Mrs. Wheeler’s pounding. Mrs. Wheeler
beats
her fists upon the walls of her room every night until
she is dosed with
chloral hydrate. But Mrs. Ruggles, the mannish matron,
is a sound sleeper,
and so the sound continues without ceasing for most
of the night. During
the day, Bellevue Place is subject to a different type
of pounding noise,
that of the machinery at the nearby quarry breaking
up the limestone. I
sometimes imagine that the asylum possesses a malevolent
heart, and that
those of us who are confined here will never escape
the sound of its
beating.
I do not sleep at Bellevue Place. But it is not only
Mrs. Wheeler’s
ravings which keep me from resting. Since my arrival
here, I have given up
my nightly doses of chloral hydrate and laudanum, refusing
them when
Mrs. Ruggles comes with the bottles. I have long suspected
that the drugs
addled my thinking, even when awake, and since I have
left off taking
them, I have grown more clearheaded. However, I also
cannot sleep.
And so I find myself awake, reading lies about myself
printed in a
newspaper.
None of this is new to me. From the time that I became
a president’s
wife, I have come upon too many stories of myself which
contain no
truth. I have read that I spied for the Confederacy
during the war and sold
my husband’s speeches to pay for my dresses. I have read that
I kept slaves
in the basement when I lived in the President’s House and stole
the silver
when I left it. I have read so much that is false and
so little that is true, that
I now believe paper cannot be made to hold one authentic
fact of my
history.
Perhaps it is this last thought which made me look
inside the odd
little desk for pen and ink, made me write the sentence, “I
read today the
account of my attempt at suicide,” then made me write everything
which
fills these pages, more true words about myself than
have ever been inked
before.
I cannot say if it is this tally of words which decides
me. Or if it is only
the unfilled hours of my sleeplessness. Whichever it
is, I somehow am
decided. I shall spend my nights at Bellevue Place
writing my true story.
Every night, while Mrs. Wheeler pounds upon the walls
and the other
mad ladies cry out in their sleep, I shall write. And
the exercise will help
the night to pass. And make me forget that I am locked
in a madhouse.
And keep me sane.
My first strong recollection is of the summer my mother
died. I was six
years old and the month was July – cholera season in Lexington,
Kentucky. The windows of our brick house on Short Street
had been shut
tight against the poisonous gases that drifted up from
the lowland swamp,
and my mother was forced to breath her last in a shuttered
house filled
with the scent of her own bloodletting – the smell of the big
copper penny
known as the “large cent,” used to keep shut the eyelids
of the dead.
For two days, the stifling house swelled with the screaming
of my
mother giving birth to her seventh child in twelve
years. Usually when
my mother’s time came, my sisters and brother and I would be
taken out
of the house, sent up the road to Grandmother Parker’s farm.
But because
the air was filled with cholera, we were forced to
remain at home, shut in
with the sound of our sibling being delivered. I passed
most of those two
days in the sweltering bedroom I shared with my three
sisters, removing
the dresses from my china-faced dolls – relieving them of their
clothes
made me feel cooler – and singing hymns to cover my mother’s
screaming.
During the night of the second day, the house went
quiet, and I woke
feeling panicked, for I had gotten used to the cries,
which had come at
intervals like the ringing of a clock. I slipped from
the bed I shared with
my eldest sister Elizabeth and crept into the hallway.
There, I spied the
thirteen-year-old wet nurse sent down by Grandmother
Parker coming
from my mother’s room, my just-born sibling in her skinny black
arms.
© Janis Cooke Newman 2007 |
