Alexander suggested that Temple get to Pennsylvania Avenue early Tuesday morning, well before the parade began at nine. They planned to meet at 15th Street, in full view of the Treasury and catty-corner from the President’s House, in front of which two large, canopied reviewing stands stood on either side of Pennsylvania. The stands would seat hundreds of military and political dignitaries who would observe and honor this final gathering of the army before troops were mustered out and sent home.
People were already jockeying for space on the sidewalks when Temple arrived, and Alexander was setting up his camera and other equipment on the top row of a small set of wooden bleachers that the government reserved for newspapermen and photographers covering the event. Temple, allowed entry by a soldier after he flashed the press pass that Alexander had given him for the inauguration months earlier, hobbled up the bleachers on his cane, balancing a thick bouquet of red roses in his left arm.
“My guess is that the posies aren’t for me,” Alexander said.
“Not today. They’re for Mr. Brooks whenever he arrives.”
“No insult taken. And I have a gift for you anyway.”
Alexander handed him a clean, clear photograph of Mary Ann and Pinkerton outside the Marshall House. Temple slipped it into his jacket and patted his friend on the shoulder.
“Noah’s over there,” Alexander said. “Introduce yourself. Gently. He still feels Lincoln’s loss.”
Noah Brooks was sitting alone at the end of one of the bleachers, slowly fanning himself with a newspaper and letting his head flop back as he looked up into the trees. He had several other newspapers from different cities piled next to him, a notepad and pencil in his lap, and a bright white carnation that was inadequately pinned to his lapel and sagged forward from his jacket as if it were napping. Brooks was bald and bearded and was so lost in thought that he didn’t appear to notice the occasional fly landing amid the small beads of perspiration on his forehead. By dint of a graceful pen and his frequent coverage of the president for the Sacramento Daily Union, Brooks had also become an intimate of Lincoln’s—more advisor than reporter, critics said—as well as one of the most well-known, closely followed journalists in Washington.
Temple’s cane knocked against the wooden bleachers, the sound preceding him as he made his way, and the tapping forced Brooks from his reverie. He looked at Temple, shading his eyes with his newspaper and tilting his head.
“Alexander’s friend?”
“Yes, Temple McFadden,” he said as he bent to put down the bouquet so he could shake Brooks’s hand.
“No need for courtesies, you can just sit down,” Brooks said, digging through the pile by his hip. “How’d you get the limp?”
“I was born in Ireland and had some poor luck.”
“So Ireland caused it, or was it poor luck?”
“Both.”
“Do you follow the papers?”
“Not nearly as many as you, I’m afraid.”
“Here’s an observation that will appear in tomorrow’s Daily Illinois State Journal on the parade we are about to witness today, written by a colleague who has shared with me a preview of his disappointment with the color line: ‘If Negro troops were in the vicinity and were intentionally excluded from the display, the fact should cause a feeling of shame to tingle upon the cheek of every loyal man in the land. The troops, who have met the common foe and assisted to vanquish him, had a right to be represented here as they were upon the field of battle.’ ”
“I had a discussion of the Negro soldiers’ absence in the Grand Review with a friend of mine on Sunday,” Temple said. “He is a Negro himself and deeply resents this inequity.”
“As we all should. But we all don’t. There is work ahead for this country.”
“Mr. Brooks, are you able to speak about President Lincoln?”
“No.”
“On a single subject, no more.”
“And no, again. I have lost many of my words since he was murdered.”
“Can you speak to me about the president and the railroads?”
“Mr. McFadden, you are intrusive and insensitive, which recommends you for a career as a reporter.”
“I’ll forward my case, then: what was President Lincoln’s opinion of the railroads?”
“Both enthralled and dismayed,” said Brooks, giving in and shaking his head. “He thought trains would knit the country together, increase prosperity, and propel settlement in the West. So he supported them. Later, near the end, I think he became worried about the financial and political power the rail barons were amassing.”
“So he would—”
“Nothing more about President Lincoln!” Brooks said. “I can barely manage his absence. Enough of the man. Gardner said you were interested in something other than that.”
“If I’m not imposing, I would like to get these to Mr. Stanton,” Temple said, holding out his bouquet. “I assume that he would know you from your time working with President Lincoln.”
“You want me to give flowers to the war secretary?”
“Victory roses. Yes.”
“Mr. Stanton is going to be sitting with President Johnson and General Grant in the reviewing stand, and they will be surrounded by soldiers and guards. I have no hope of approaching him. But there’s someone else who will get your bouquet to Mr. Stanton; trust me with that. It will happen once the parade begins.”
“The world turns on favors, Mr. McFadden.”
Temple returned to Alexander’s end of the bleachers and sat down, stretching out his bad leg to relieve the flash of pain he felt behind his thigh. He tugged at Alexander’s sleeve when he spotted Mathew Brady entering the bleachers and hauling his own photography equipment, but Alexander refused to look at his former mentor.
“Yesterday The New York Times predicted that nobody would stand in the sun for several hours just to watch a never-ending line of soldiers,” said Alexander. “It appears that that was a miscalculation.”
Crowds were now lacing the mile-and-a-half stretch between the Capitol and the President’s House, leaning out of open windows, lining rooftops, filling doorways, standing on sidewalks, and climbing trees. They were present in such abundance—greater in number than the crowds that attended the inaugural or President Lincoln’s funeral procession in the District—that members of the cavalry had to keep the spectators at bay lest they pour into the streets.
The firehouse had sprayed down Pennsylvania that morning so that the dust wouldn’t be kicked into clouds when the infantry and cavalry presented themselves. Hanging in the portico of the Treasury building was a flag from the department’s own regiment, torn at the bottom where John Wilkes Booth’s spur had caught it as he leapt from the president’s box in Ford’s Theatre after shooting him. And across the uncompleted façade of the Capitol was a large banner, proclaiming in outsized block letters, “THE ONLY NATIONAL DEBT WE CAN NEVER PAY BACK IS THE DEBT WE OWE TO OUR VICTORIOUS UNION SOLDIERS.”
Beneath the banner, on the steps of the Capitol, a choir of about two thousand schoolgirls erupted into song as soon as General Meade’s soldiers began their march down Pennsylvania. The schoolgirls had chosen “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Miss Howe had published to great acclaim in the Atlantic Monthly three years before.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Meade and his staff led their troops on horseback, with the eighty thousand soldiers of the Army of the Potomac following them in a dark blue phalanx, row after row of thirty men abreast spanning the width of Pennsylvania Avenue, their bayonets raised at their shoulders and gleaming in the sun, bursts of purple-tinged white and yellow.
An hour or so behind Meade came General Sheridan’s cavalry, who in turn were followed by the Zouave volunteers, dressed in bright red skullcaps and bespoke navy uniforms trimmed in crimson. Mounted artillery came next, pulling cannon by the hundreds, followed by tens of thousands of other infantry marching flawlessly in a rectangular, navy-hued block. A blizzard of flowers and flower petals swirled around the troops, flung from the sidewalks, rooftops, and trees by spectators; occasionally a woman would burst from the crowd and hang a garland around the neck of a horse as an officer passed.
When Sheridan’s troops reached the reviewing stand at the President’s House, a cry went up from the crowd as George Custer, the twenty-six-year-old war hero, approached on his stallion, Don Juan. Custer, the youngest general in the army and with his face and shoulders awash in a cascade of long honey-blond ringlets scented with cinnamon oil, was undeniably brave and an indisputable showboat. His leather jackboots were polished like mirrors, and he wore them over a pair of green corduroys; further departures from Union issue included a black velvet jacket edged in silver trim, a felt slouch hat with a broad brim, a billowy white sailor shirt boasting embroidered stars on its collar, and a crimson scarf that Custer kept loosely tied around his neck.
The ladies swooned.
When one of them burst off the sidewalk to hang a garland on Don Juan’s neck, Custer’s horse bolted away from his division, and the general had to maneuver to control him. He galloped past the reviewing stand before Custer got him under control, and only then because another officer rode his horse into Don Juan’s path to contain him. As his stallion settled, Custer turned back to the reviewing stand, sweeping his hat off his head and bowing in the saddle as he passed Johnson, Grant, and Stanton. The crowd screamed his praises again.
As Custer circled past the bleachers to rejoin his division, Noah Brooks stood up and yelled to him. Custer, as attuned to reporters and publicity as he was to his clothing, trotted over to the newspaperman.
“Say, General Custer, I have a bouquet to honor Mr. Stanton,” Brooks shouted. “Will you be so kind as to deliver it to the war secretary?”
“I shall, Noah, but you’ll owe me an interview this evening.”
“The bargain is struck, General.”
Custer took the bouquet, turned his horse around, and trotted over to the reviewing stand. The only stars in the parade that were bigger than the pair on Custer’s collar were those atop the reviewing stand, which were crafted from ferns and flowers, each of them about three feet high. Red, white, and blue banners hung from the roof of the stand and were draped across its front. Forty soldiers, in two lines of twenty, guarded the very center of the stand, where Johnson, Grant, and Stanton sat, while another eight protected the rest of the stand’s expanse. As Custer rode up, the cluster of soldiers in the center simply parted, allowing the war hero to bring Don Juan to the very edge of the stand.
“I have a victory bouquet from an admirer of Mr. Stanton’s, the renowned and incomparable journalist Noah Brooks.”
Stanton stood up, the roses were passed up to him, and Custer tipped his hat and rode off. As the clapping died down, Stanton plucked a note card from the center of the bouquet and adjusted his spectacles as he read it:
Mr. Stanton: I am in possession of the misplaced diaries. Please arrange a meeting today through Mr. Brooks or I will be forced to publicize what I have.
Stanton sighed and exhaled, rubbing his fingers along the edges of the bloodred petals resting in his lap.
HUNDREDS OF MILES away from the Grand Review, Mary Todd Lincoln was adjusting to the ill effects of a fitful and sleepless night on the Pioneer. They had reached Pittsburgh earlier in the day, at six in the morning, and the twelve hours she had spent on the train before then had been filled with headaches and tears. In Pittsburgh they were forced to get off the train so that it could change tracks, and now, several hours further along, she was regaining her senses as she reclined in her bed in the sleeper car. Lizzy was rubbing her temples, while Fiona dabbed at her forehead with a moist cloth. Robert and Tad had spent most of the day in the parlor car avoiding their mother, playing checkers, and napping.
“I never should have begun reading that forsaken diary of mine last night,” she said, the back of her hand pressed across her eyes. “Such turmoil.”
“Just breathe deeply,” Fiona said. “Try to distract yourself.”
Snapping upright and pulling her sheets around her shoulders, Mrs. Lincoln accused Fiona of deliberately bringing the diary to cause her pain and slapping at the cloth that Fiona was using to wipe her head. Lizzy asked her to stop screaming, but she continued until her small, pale, fleshy hands were balled into fists.
Just as quickly as the widow had flown into a rage, she stopped.
“May I speak, Mrs. Lincoln?” Fiona asked.
“You may.”
“I only returned the diary to you because it was rightfully yours. I had no other intention.”
“I know, my dear, I know. I become … I become other than myself at times. Please forgive me.”
“You have endured many burdens, ma’am.”
“We nearly escaped our burdens, my husband and I. He wanted to build a home in California when we left the White House, but I insisted that Boston would be better for us. It would have been more genteel. He, of course, would have followed my wishes.”
The widow broke down again, and Lizzy and Fiona let her weeping run its course this time. When she had recomposed herself, Mrs. Lincoln placed her hand on Fiona’s.
“I would like to know more about you, my dear—what you do and where you are from.”
“I was born twenty-one years ago in Oswego, New York, to extraordinary parents. They were abolitionists and freethinkers, and they raised me with an education and with opinions of my own.”
“I was raised with an education, too, in Kentucky, but I was not encouraged to have opinions.”
“Mrs. Lincoln, are you going to let Mrs. McFadden tell you her story or not?” Lizzy asked. “I recall you asked her about herself, ma’am.”
Mrs. Lincoln fell silent as the train rumbled along, from Pittsburgh toward Youngstown and Akron on its way to Chicago, and Fiona spun her history. Her family owned an apple farm—they had cows and chickens on it, too—that her mother, Barbara, oversaw down to every last bushel of fruit and pail of milk; Fiona and her two sisters had worked on the farm as children until—magically it seemed—they no longer had to work. Fiona had been eight years old when her family’s circumstances elevated. Her father, Arthur, a country doctor, had invested in land and, to his great delight, in a boring little shipping company at the port of Oswego. The port, and Arthur Linton’s investment, boomed when the Erie Canal and the winding skein of railroads linked to the New York Central turned Oswego into a sprawling, bumping transportation hub.
Fiona remembered winters of cascading snowstorms and winds that whipped her wool leggings as she skated on the frozen canal; she remembered her parents’ laughter and her sisters’ games; and she remembered piles of books stacked in the corners and on the tables of almost every room in their house because the bookcases were overflowing.
Books were the family’s only indulgence. Even after they came into money, the Lintons encouraged their daughters to live modestly, and the family never moved out of the simple frame house on a hill surrounded by orchards, the house where all of their daughters were born. They expanded two of the rooms off the back of the house and used them as study halls for the girls, who were instructed by the finest tutors the Lintons could hire.
“I was fortunate enough to grow up in a part of the state singing with reform,” Fiona told Mrs. Lincoln. “The movement for abolition was strong, as was an open-mindedness about religion and the women’s movement. We had a grand meeting for women’s rights not too far from us in Seneca Falls when I was just four years old, and my parents insisted that I be taught and raised in an environment of equality and progress.”
“I have little use for these women on the move,” said Mrs. Lincoln. “I am from old stock and a noble culture that finds women more effective if they press their interests quietly and through the arts of the home and ministrations to their husbands.”
“Mrs. Lincoln, ma’am, you’re taking the conversation into your lap again,” Lizzy said.
The widow fell silent, and Fiona continued on. Her parents, ascribing to the philosophy of Amelia Bloomer of the nearby town of Homer, had encouraged their daughters to wear comfortable clothing as young teenagers, so Fiona wore dresses only to social functions. As their education continued, Fiona emerged as the brightest of the three Linton girls. Her father told her she had a keen mind; her sisters teased that she was merely keen to have a mind. Such was her parents’ commitment that when she was seventeen, they sent her to Syracuse Medical College so that she could train to be a doctor. The thirty-nine-week course cost $165, and Fiona threw herself into her studies, set on learning all that modern medicine had to offer.
After Fiona earned her certification, Arthur Linton had taken her into his practice, but father and daughter soon discovered that no matter how much upstate New Yorkers convened to preach the notions of equality, few of them were ready to place their faith and their health in the hands of a female doctor. Arthur convinced his daughter to playact at being a nurse, but as the months wore on, Fiona bridled at the arrangement. When she turned eighteen, she decided to be of service in the War Between the States, where the demand for physicians was so great that surely she could practice as a doctor, even if Oswego wouldn’t have her.
One of her predecessors in college, and a mentor, Mary Edwards Walker, had followed this path and introduced Fiona to Dr. Gross, who helped train Fiona and found her medical work at the hospital fashioned inside the Patent Office in Washington. She’d had the joy of meeting her husband in Washington, but also discovered that the men leading the war effort were no more willing to embrace a female doctor than the good people of Oswego.
“What of your husband?” Mrs. Lincoln asked. “How did you meet him?”
“We were introduced,” Fiona said. “We were both new to Washington and we both knew Alexander Gardner. He invited us to a dinner.”
“Mr. Gardner was much admired by my husband. And what convinced you that your husband was someone you would marry?”
Fiona paused at this: a simple question without a simple answer. Although she was barely acquainted with Mrs. Lincoln, the moment offered her a chance to maintain and build upon this small bond. In ways, from what she heard tell of the president, he and Temple were similar men, though Mr. Lincoln was blessed to be without Temple’s impatience and occasional furies. Each man had big, strong hands—the hands of workers. The president was taller than her husband by two inches, but Temple still usually towered over those around him. Like the president, he had knowing gray eyes.
Fiona remembered how pained Temple had been when word of the assassination first reached them, how the anguish had creased his eyes. He’d gone to his little shelf of books and come back to her with a ragged copy of Julius Caesar, flipping through the pages until he found the passage he wanted, which he read to her aloud.
When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
Still, similarities were not familiarities, and Fiona hesitated an instant longer before deciding to share her affections for Temple with Mrs. Lincoln.
“He gave me a sense of security and belonging that I never understood I hadn’t had before in my life until I had it with him,” Fiona responded to Mrs. Lincoln. “At his core he is true and good and resolute as an oak, yet kind to me beyond measure. He is a wonderful and patient listener, and he can fill me with laughter. I feel utterly well met and well matched in Temple. I am devoted to him.”
“He has no flaws?”
“He does.”
“Well, then?”
“I find it harder to discuss his flaws than his strengths, I’m afraid.”
“Mrs. McFadden.”
“Ma’am?”
“These men are all scarred. They bring their bad to us with their good—as sons and as husbands. The boardinghouse owner, she had a son.”
“Mrs. Surratt.”
“Yes, her. Her son is said to be a confidant of my husband’s murderer, but it is only the mother they have imprisoned. And me, here now on this train and abandoned by my husband—the entire world feels like a prison to me. My son Robert aspires to keep it as such. I tell you, these men visit as many ills upon us as they do joys. Perhaps more.”
“My husband gambles and is loose with money,” Fiona said. “And I fear that he doesn’t want me to bear him children.”
“You are steady with your passions and with money?”
“I am far steadier with vice and with money than my husband, yes.”
“You anchor him as my husband anchored me,” the widow replied. “You and my Abraham have interior discipline. He grew weary of me many times. Are you weary of your husband?”
“No, I am not weary of him. I am unsure of him.”
“Why does he not favor children?”
“He is an orphan. He also feels constrained by normal living.”
“Yet you are bound to him.”
“Am I?”
“We all are, my dear. Bound to men. It is the way of the world. What measures do you know of that he favors in you?”
“He said he was enthralled by my eyes and my love of medicine. He said I challenged him and that being with me gave him a sense of purpose. And he respected my opinions!”
“Yes, yes, yes. Opinions. Yes, yes. Oh, I fear my opinions were just a lashing for Mr. Lincoln. Yes, yes. Like a whipping.”
The widow broke down crying again, pulling the sheet up to her face and moaning softly. Robert looked in from the parlor car, saw that his mother was sobbing, and closed the door.
As the door shut, Mrs. Lincoln stopped crying, pulled the sheet from her face, and glared at the spot where Robert once stood. Her voice steadied and she sat up, transformed into a woman so cool and deliberate as to be unrecognizable as the wailing, damaged creature huddling under her sheets only a moment before.
“The lawyer overseeing my husband’s estate extends me only a hundred and thirty dollars each month for my living expenses. I stand to inherit almost forty thousand dollars, but until then I am entirely dependent on the character of our lawyer and Robert’s support. And Robert,” she said, turning toward Fiona, “wants that money for himself.”
“Ma’am, do you really want to speak about money issues around Fiona?” Lizzy asked.
“I want her—I want everyone—to understand why I don’t trust my son. I will speak of it on the streets if it suits me, and I will speak of it with perfect strangers.”
“Ma’am, don’t you—”
“I also have debts of seventy thousand dollars from my four years in the President’s House. Decorating. Clothing. I have much to attend to. Yes, yes, yes.”
“Were you happy in the President’s House, Mrs. Lincoln?” Fiona asked.
“Only in the beginning, in the first months we were there. But we have other paths to occupy us now, and other things to talk about. Yes. Other matters. Tell me about your husband.”
“I do believe that he is the best man I have ever met; he is my partner and I am his. And he is a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department.”
“Is that how he came to possess my diary?”
Fiona explained the fighting at the B&O to Mrs. Lincoln and that amid the brawling, Temple had come upon her diary quite accidentally. The widow pulled her journal from beneath the blankets and began flipping through it.
“Did he read through all of this?”
“No, Mrs. Lincoln. I wouldn’t have allowed that. He said there were many letters and entries in your journal that he did not explore once I raised the matter of your privacy with him.”
“What are his interests in my diary?”
“I believe he cares about the railroads, Mrs. Lincoln, but beyond that I confess to not having a very complete sense of what exactly it is that he is pursuing.”
“Railroads. Yes, yes, yes. We mustn’t talk of railroads when Robert nears. My husband and he were divided over the railroad men. Our Robert began trooping them through the President’s House like salesmen in our last year there.”
Mrs. Lincoln sobbed again, and her head drooped into her bedding. Fiona slipped her hand into Mrs. Lincoln’s, but the widow didn’t seem to notice. A moment later Mrs. Lincoln began flipping through her diary, fanning the pages so rapidly that Fiona thought some of them might tear. When Mrs. Lincoln found the section she wanted, she plucked out a letter that had been pressed between two pages and was written in the late president’s hand. She studied it at length, moving her head back and forth in small bursts and shaping the words she was scanning with her lips. She paused, read more, stopped, then looked at Lizzy and Fiona and began reading:
April 7, 1865
Dear Mr. Scott:
As the misery of this cruel war and our noble endeavor come to an end, I am, by the day, growing profoundly aware that the Republic may well bend to a force that the war itself has helped advance and institutionalize: the might of the railroads and of the great men that create and support them. Our railroads, as you and I well know, are a national treasure and I remain inspired by the promise they embody for a nation so recently divided. In my darker moments, however, I confess to worries that the money powers behind the railroads will seek to reinforce our prejudices and prolong our differences to further aggregate their wealth. Informed by my anxieties, I would ask you and Mr. Stanton to meet with me to consider our goals for the railroads during my second term.
Sincerely,
A. Lincoln
Mrs. Lincoln looked up from the letter, awaiting a response. None came. Fiona was uncertain what to say and looked to Lizzy, who was equally at a loss. As the train rumbled along, passing into the western flats of Pennsylvania, the widow stared back quietly at Fiona and Lizzy, then slapped the letter and her arms down on her lap.
“Don’t you understand? It’s to Mr. Scott!”
“But who is Mr. Scott?” Fiona asked.
“He is Thomas Scott. He works closely with Mr. Stanton as the assistant war secretary, and he was a railroad man before Mr. Stanton and my husband called him to Washington,” she said, her voice slipping into a low, breathy whisper as she leaned forward in her bed toward Fiona and Lizzy.
Their lack of understanding appeared to send Mrs. Lincoln into a panic, and she plucked a squat brown bottle of laudanum off her bedside table. She poured the drug into a spoon and tipped it into her mouth, waiting for it to take hold before she began speaking again.
“Mr. Scott and my Robert are friends, you see. They are devoted to the rails, and Robert is devoted to creating his own fortune,” she continued. “If it were not for my Tad, I would not want to be with Robert on this train or in Chicago. I will be betrayed. Yes, yes, yes. A house divided. Yes, yes, yes.”
The door to the sleeping car slipped open and Robert Lincoln stepped inside, gazing at the three women huddled around the bed. He sat down on a small bench bolted to the wall between the beds that Fiona and Lizzy slept in, and he stared out the window as if accounting for every tree or small barn they rattled past. He rubbed his fingers against the glass and wiped them on his trousers.
“Even though it’s warming up outside, the window is cool,” he said. “Mother, I wasn’t aware you were keeping a diary or that you had any of Father’s letters.”
Mrs. Lincoln stared down into her bedding.
“Do you know what people in the President’s House called my mother, Mrs. McFadden?” Robert continued. “My father’s secretaries referred to her as ‘Her Satanic Majesty.’ My father’s physician simplified things—he just called her ‘the Devil.’ ”
Mrs. Lincoln threw her diary across the car and it careened off Robert’s head, drawing a faint line of blood near his eye before it fell to the floor. Her eldest son pulled a kerchief from his vest pocket to blot his scratch and bent down to scoop up the journal. He stood up and walked back to the door, turning to Mrs. Lincoln as he opened it.
“I think I shall acquaint myself now with your diary, Mother,” he said, stepping back into the parlor car, where, through the gap in the door, the three women could see Tad on the floor reading a book.
Mrs. Lincoln fell back onto her pillow, pressing her lips together as she stared into the ceiling and began counting the lines and cracks traced in the walnut slats above her bed.