Mary had been so pleasant, cheerful, and friendly to Ann since her return to Springfield that naturally Ann’s suspicions soared. They had never been as congenial as sisters were supposed to be, although they had become friendlier during the years Mary and Abe were married. Ann had always liked Abe, even when Elizabeth had her convinced that he was an unsuitable match for Mary—an absurd worry, as it had turned out. As for her own husband, Clark had admired Abe almost to the point of idolatry, especially after he ascended to the presidency. Perhaps, Ann mused, their fondness for Abe had helped her see Mary in a new light. She and Mary might have become quite close if Mary had not spoiled it by assuming an insufferably imperial manner after becoming first lady. Ann had complained to mutual friends that Mary expected them to address her as if she were Queen Victoria. Word eventually got around to her sister, who took great offense and assumed even more regal airs.
Now Ann did not know what to think. Earlier that spring, she had believed that Mary was feigning her illness in order to win sympathy from her family and the public, but especially from Congress, so that it would be moved to increase her pension. But upon seeing her after her release from the asylum, Ann had been shocked by her wan, aged appearance and subdued manner. Mary had always been vain and would not have let herself go, even to further a profitable scheme. The only plausible explanation was that she was too depressed to bother with the outward show that had once meant so much to her.
Granted, Mary still cared about fashion, but her desire for new dresses and fine fabrics seemed obsessive to Ann, a symptom of her mental illness. She ordered dresses made up and never wore them, and then she turned around and purchased yards of fabric—always mourning black—and never had it made up into dresses. But when Ann suggested to Elizabeth that Mary’s urgent and persistent need to shop could be a mania, Elizabeth emphatically disagreed. “Her acquiring items, even if they’re unnecessary, is not excessive, considering what she can afford,” she said. “If we would all simply adopt a position of indifference to her spending, she might become less defensive and more willing to discuss it.”
When Ann remained skeptical, Elizabeth hastened to remind her how far Mary had come since she left the asylum. Her color was much better and her eyes were clear. She no longer fidgeted in her chair or jumped at the slightest sound. She enjoyed visiting friends and family, she was cordial and lucid when chatting with callers, and with her sisters she was more reasonable and gentler than she had been in years. “I have no hesitation in pronouncing her sane,” Elizabeth declared.
Ann let the argument drop. Elizabeth seemed determined to see only the good in Mary. Robert, on the other hand, was inclined to doubt that his mother was any better than when she had left Bellevue. “Her demeanor since the trial has shown that in general she is able to control her impulses if she has a reason to do so,” he replied after Ann wrote to warn him of Elizabeth’s revised assessment of his mother’s sanity. “She will appear rational until you bring up the subject of money, which draws her mania to the surface.”
Ann agreed with her nephew, but apparently he was unaware that there was another subject besides money about which Mary was not entirely rational. Recently, Ann had noticed, even if none of her sisters had, Mary became vexed whenever Robert’s name came up in conversation. Vexation was not mania, but it seemed irrational enough. But if Ann conceded that Mary was not entirely rational now, would she not also have to admit that the same had been true back in the spring? Only a fool would believe that Mary had been pretending to be mad in the spring but was genuinely mad today.
Bemused, Ann mulled over the disturbing events that had led up to Mary’s insanity trial, not only the strange visions she had confessed to her doctor and her suicide attempt, but the bizarre frenzy of fear that had come over her a month before Robert first consulted Dr. Patterson, and two months before the panel of learned physicians had declared her insane.
In January 1875, Mary had gone to Jacksonville, Florida, to spend the winter. A nurse had traveled with her to tend to her various ailments, and Mary’s first letters home had been entirely lucid and conversational, describing her travels, the weather, the landscape, and her health. She had enjoyed the benevolent climate, gone sightseeing, and received callers in the elegant parlor of her boardinghouse suite.
According to Robert, and to the many newspaper reports Ann and Clark had read with fascinated horror in the days that followed, all had seemed well until mid-March, when Mary suddenly and inexplicably became convinced that Robert was deathly ill, and no reassurances from her nurse or from her Jacksonville acquaintances could disabuse her of her fears. She sent a frantic telegram to Robert’s law partner asking about his health and declaring her intention to depart for Chicago immediately. Ninety minutes later, she had telegraphed Robert directly: “My dearly beloved son Robert T. Lincoln rouse yourself and live for my sake all I have is yours from this hour. I am praying every moment for your life to be spared to your mother.”
Immediately wary, Robert telegraphed the Jacksonville Western Union office to ask, discreetly, if Mrs. Lincoln seemed to be in any difficulty, “mentally or otherwise.” The manager promptly responded that she seemed “nervous and somewhat excited,” and that her nurse companion believed that she ought to return home as soon as possible. In the meantime, Mary sent Robert another telegram, saying, “Start for Chicago this evening hope you are better today you will have money on my arrival.”
Dismayed by his mother’s excessive anxiety and irrational behavior—including her apparent conviction that if she promised him wealth, he would find the will to live—Robert realized that his experience with all her eccentricities and manias in the past had not prepared him for the difficult choices that would soon confront him.
When he met his mother at the station in Chicago, she seemed shocked to see him in perfect health. He invited her to come home with him, but she declined, as she and Robert’s wife were estranged. Instead, Robert escorted his mother to the Grand Pacific Hotel, where he arranged a room for her and ordered supper; while they ate, she lamented that a man on the train had poisoned her coffee. Deeply troubled, Robert reserved the room next to hers so that he would be near if she became distressed in the night.
He had intended to take his mother home the next morning. Instead, they had remained at the hotel for two weeks.
Every night Mary had woken from a restless sleep, and, terrified to find herself alone, she had knocked on Robert’s door and tearfully asked to stay with him. One morning she tried to descend in the elevator half-dressed, and when Robert and a hotel employee prevented her, she fought them, screaming, “You are trying to murder me!” When they managed to get her back to her room, she told them an outlandish story about a man who had stolen her pocketbook on the train and planned to return it to her that afternoon. Later that day she accosted the hotel manager, telling him that something was wrong with the building: she heard strange sounds in her room at all hours, and she was afraid to be alone. She complained that people were speaking to her through the walls; she insisted that the South Side of the city was on fire and that their lives were in danger; she believed that a strange man in the corridor intended to molest her. When the hotel staff reported other bizarre behaviors they had observed, the manager warned them that she was deranged.
With each passing day, she became more agitated and paranoid, and as the tenth anniversary of his father’s assassination approached and terrible memories resurfaced, Robert feared that she might break down completely. Erring on the side of caution, he hired a pair of Pinkerton agents to shadow his mother whenever she left the hotel. Whenever Robert was absent, Mary hurried out to the nearby stores and indulged in a frenzy of reckless spending, purchasing forty pairs of lace curtains for $600, three watches for $450, soaps and perfumes for $200, and $700 worth of jewelry. Since she had no home to furnish and wore only mourning black without jewels, Robert condemned the bulging parcels as entirely unnecessary and returned as many of the items as the merchants would accept.
On and on it went, until Robert could bear no more. Resigning himself to his utter lack of options, he consulted expert physicians and began the process to have his mother tried and committed.
As always was the case with Mary, the entire painful, heartrending, embarrassing episode had been thoroughly examined and adjudicated in the press. Ann remembered well the pitying looks and sidelong glances she had received as she went about her errands and calls in Springfield, as if acquaintances wanted to offer consolation but assumed that she would prefer they not acknowledge the incidents, as if strangers wondered whether Ann might suddenly go mad like her sister right before their eyes.
If Mary never had been insane, as she claimed, how did she account for her deranged behavior in those terrible weeks? And if it had all been an act, would that not reveal a derangement of a different sort?
Harassed by unslaked curiosity, Ann finally decided to come right out and ask Mary to explain herself.
She posed the question one afternoon as they walked together in the Edwardses’ gardens, luxuriant in autumn blooms and fall foliage. To her surprise, Mary did not take offense, but pondered in silence for a long moment. “The signs of derangement I exhibited last spring must have arisen from a physical disorder,” she eventually replied, her voice low, her expression pensive. “My health was poor before I went to Florida—hence the hiring of a nurse as a traveling companion—and it worsened after I was caught out in a rain shower and developed a dreadful cold. I was conscious of a fever, and at the time I was taking chloral hydrate very freely, to induce sleep. Those causes had much to do, undoubtedly, with producing the untoward behavior.”
Ann studied her sharply, unable to discern whether Mary was telling the truth—or rather, whether to believe she was. Mary’s cheeks were flushed, suggesting she had indeed just made an embarrassing confession. Ann was on the cusp of accepting her sister’s explanation, but then she considered that Mary had no fever at the moment, and she was not taking chloral hydrate as far as Ann knew, and yet she still displayed signs of mania. Perhaps this so-called explanation was no more than an elaborate lie deftly woven to ensnare the most skeptical of the Todd sisters. If Mary could convince Ann, the others would be easily won.
If Mary could pretend, so could Ann. She would act as if she believed her elder sister, yet all the while, she would watch her surreptitiously for signs of madness.
By the end of October, Ann still could not decide whether Mary’s increasing annoyance at Robert qualified as mania or was merely an ordinary, regrettable quarrel between a mother and a son.
The crux of the matter was the control of her property.
Although Mary had secured her release from the asylum, she remained legally insane, and Robert remained her conservator. According to state law, she could not appeal to change her status until at least one year after her commitment trial. This immutable fact gnawed at her. Robert hadn’t written the law, but she blamed him for her legal circumstances, and as the weeks passed her resentment steadily and visibly grew. Mary was proud and liked to think of herself as independent, and it galled her that her son controlled her bonds and had been given most of her trunks and possessions for safekeeping.
Her discontent surfaced with greater frequency from late October into November. She would seem perfectly amiable, polite, cheerful, and affectionate in company, but if the subject of her property was broached, she suddenly became agitated and irritable. She disparaged Robert to her sisters as she rarely had before, provoking mild remonstrances from Elizabeth. “I am convinced that the only alternative, for the sake of peace and quiet, will be for Robert to yield to Mary the right to control her possessions,” she told Ann and Frances wearily one afternoon when Mary was not there to hear.
“Do you mean her bonds and accounts too?” asked Frances.
Elizabeth hesitated. “Yes, I believe so. Regardless of her legal status, Mary is no longer insane—”
“In your opinion,” said Ann pointedly, her tone conveying that it was something less than an informed medical judgment.
“In my opinion, based upon close observation,” Elizabeth emphasized. “In such altered circumstances, Robert ought to let Mary do whatever she chooses, whether it be shopping, traveling, living where she likes, or managing her money. Mary has suggested that if her bonds were returned to her, she would entrust them to Mr. Bunn at the Springfield Marine Bank. He was a close friend of Abe’s, someone she trusts. She isn’t planning to carry the bonds about with her as she did before.”
“I see nothing wrong with letting Mary have her trunks and belongings, but her money is another matter,” said Frances, brow furrowing. “She’ll spend it all on frivolities and clothes she’ll never wear. There will be nothing left for her to live on in the years to come.”
“If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that once you have done all you can for people, you ought to let them be,” said Elizabeth, lifting her chin. “I am going to write to Robert and tell him so.”
Frances regarded her levelly, a faint frown turning the corners of her mouth. “Then you oblige me to write to him as well, to give him my opinion.”
Elizabeth inclined her head, acknowledging her right to do so.
Ann looked from one sister to the other, wary and wondering, until a faint stirring of anger took greater hold. The three Todd sisters who called Springfield home had always shared a particularly close bond, not only because they saw one another more often, but because of a deep affinity borne of similar perspectives and shared experiences. Mary had always lived outside their small circle—or, as she probably preferred to believe, above it.
Mary had disrupted nearly every relationship in her life. Would she now come between her sisters, setting one against another, their longtime amity forgotten?