On July 15, 1882, the eleventh anniversary of Tad Lincoln’s death, Elizabeth fought back tears as she telegraphed Robert in Chicago: “Your mother collapsed of a stroke. Insensible and failing. Come at once if possible to bid farewell.”
Next she sent similar telegrams to Emilie in Lexington and Margaret in Cincinnati, knowing they would want to be notified even though they could never reach Springfield in time to say good-bye.
Then she hesitated, debating whether to telegraph their brother George in South Carolina. Even amid a family that included numerous former rebels, George was notorious, estranged even from his siblings who had supported the South. Elizabeth had exchanged a few letters with him after he had signed up as a surgeon with the Confederate Army, but she had broken off contact entirely after it became widely known that he treated Union prisoners of war, especially colored troops, with shocking brutality, violating his Hippocratic Oath and all the rules of human decency. During the war, he had also publicly declared that his brother-in-law Abraham Lincoln was “one of the greatest scoundrels unhung.” Mary had never forgiven him for it, nor had he sought forgiveness. It would be a betrayal even to invite him, though it made no difference now to Mary, who was not conscious enough to realize an invitation had been considered. So Elizabeth sent no telegram to George. He would not have come anyway, and he would learn of Mary’s death from the papers all too soon.
Did she have days left, or merely hours? The doctors could not say with any certainty.
Frances, Ann, and Lewis had been keeping vigil by Mary’s bedside ever since they realized that she was not likely to rise from her sickbed. In that time, several of Mary’s other grandnephews and grandnieces had passed in and out of the Edwards residence, looking in on their great-aunt Mary. They prayed silently with heads bowed in the parlor and helped the Todd sisters however they could.
So few of their siblings remained to mourn Mary’s passing. Sam and Aleck had been killed in action during the war, and in 1871 David had at long last succumbed to the injuries he received at Vicksburg. Levi had died of liver failure in 1864, decades of heavy drinking having finally exacted their inexorable toll. Martha had perished of a brief illness in 1868 when she was but thirty-five years old, and Kitty, the youngest of them all, had died of heart disease when she was only thirty-four. Most recently, Elodie had died in childbirth in 1877. At sixty-three, Mary had long outlived them, and yet to Elizabeth, five years older, Mary’s imminent passing still seemed to have come much too soon.
Before death had parted them forever, war and time and circumstance had scattered the sisters and brothers far from their Lexington birthplace. None had traveled farther than Mary.
On her last trip abroad, Mary had not wandered about Europe as widely as before, but had mostly remained in the resort town of Pau, making occasional sojourns to other cities in France and Italy. Her letters home had been quite cheerful and optimistic; she was either received anonymously, which relieved and relaxed her, or treated like honored aristocracy, which delighted her beyond measure. She occasionally complained of various ailments—fatigue, neuralgia, chest colds, aches and soreness—and also rather suddenly lost a significant amount of weight, which she considered a cause for celebration rather than concern.
After the first year, however, the tone of her letters turned melancholic. She dwelt upon her past losses as much as the impressive views of Herculaneum, the Bay of Naples, and Mount Vesuvius. By October 1879, she had begun to express a deep longing to return to America, referring to herself as an oppressed, heartbroken woman and her long absence from her homeland as an exile. All that kept her from returning, she confided to Elizabeth, was her profound terror that Robert would seek to have her committed the moment she set foot on American soil.
“That is preposterous,” Robert protested when Elizabeth told him of his mother’s fears. “Please assure her that under no possible circumstances would I do so. I have no reason to think that such interference is now or will hereafter be proper. Even if it were, I would do nothing. If I could have foreseen what a torment this entire experience would be for me, nothing would have induced me to go through with it. The ordinary troubles and distresses of life are enough without that.”
Elizabeth passed on Robert’s assurances—in her own, more encouraging words—but Mary demurred. Nevertheless, she had begun sending Robert’s daughter occasional presents from France and Italy, and Elizabeth decided to interpret this as a faint glimmer of hope, however improbable, that Mary might one day reconcile with her son.
In December 1879, Mary seriously injured her spine after falling from a stepladder while trying to hang a painting. Her physicians set her in plasters, but even after they were removed, she suffered intense pain and weakness along her left side and found it difficult to walk. Six months later, the lingering debilitation caused her to trip and fall down a flight of stairs, worsening the damage to her back so that certain movements inflicted excruciating pain.
Mary was too unwell to live alone any longer, so despite her anxiety over Robert’s intentions, she had to return to America.
In October 1880, she sailed from Le Havre to New York aboard the steamer L’Amerique. Lewis met her at the dock, but she felt too ill to continue on, so he checked them into a suite at the Clarendon Hotel. There she was examined by Dr. Louis A. Sayre, a world-renowned orthopedic physician and a childhood friend, who diagnosed her condition as an inflammation of the spine, disorder of the kidneys, and a “great mental depression,” requiring proper medical treatment and “the sympathy of family and friends.”
When Elizabeth read Lewis’s telegram, the doctor’s recommendation struck her as a stinging rebuke. If sympathy could have cured Mary of her mental afflictions, she would have been well long ago, but sympathy and love had never been enough. For many years and possibly still, Mary had required the thoughtful attention of a skilled physician specially trained in diseases of the mind. That was precisely the kind of care she had had from Dr. Patterson at Bellevue Place, where she had greatly improved. If not for the Bradwells and their misguided mission to rescue her from mortal embarrassment, Mary would have remained in the asylum until she was fully restored to reason, rather than thrust back out into the world before she was ready and subjected to new injuries before the old wounds had scarred over.
When Mary became well enough to travel, Lewis escorted her on the train from New York to Springfield, where Elizabeth and her granddaughter Mary Edwards helped her settle into her old room. Elizabeth hid her dismay at her sister’s debilitated condition, her pain, her limited mobility, her depressed spirits, and her failing eyesight. How had Mary managed so long on her own, so far away across the sea?
As the weeks passed, Elizabeth, Ninian, and Lewis discovered that although Mary usually seemed perfectly rational and pleasant, she still suffered from troubling manias and delusions. She insisted upon sleeping on one side of the bed in order to leave her husband’s side undisturbed for him, and sometimes she alarmed companions by giving a sudden start and asking if they too had just heard his voice. She kept sixty-four trunks of clothing in the Edwards residence, and she would spend hours each day opening, unpacking, sorting, and repacking them, grimacing in pain as she bent and knelt in her work, yet doggedly persisting, driven by some compulsion that Elizabeth could not understand.
And yet there were bright moments, glimmers of the woman Mary might have been had she not been tormented by loss and abandonment ever since their mother’s death and their stepmother’s rejection so many years before. She adored Lewis, and she was amiable and merry and charming in his company. She was generous to Frances, who had suffered financial hardships since William’s death a few years after the war. Mary kindly gifted her hundreds of dollars for necessities and the payment of debts, refusing to consider it a loan; while still abroad, she had sent Frances hundreds of dollars’ worth of fine woolen goods to replace the faded, threadbare clothing she otherwise would have worn until the patches needed patches.
Then, in May of 1881, after months of gentle but persistent cajoling on Elizabeth’s part, she agreed to meet with Robert.
Eleven-year-old Mamie had been begging to see her grandmother ever since Mary returned from abroad, eager to thank her in person for the lovely gifts she had sent from France and Italy, to read poetry together, to listen, enchanted, as her grandmother regaled her with stories of her travels. Elizabeth invited Robert to bring Mamie for a visit, and then, instead of leaving his daughter at the front door and going off to spend time with his aunts, Robert accompanied Mamie inside and joined her and his mother as they sat in the parlor and took tea in the garden. It was a strained détente, but it was a beginning, and as the weeks passed it took a firmer hold. By winter, Mary and Robert were exchanging cordial letters, and although Mary remained estranged from Robert’s wife, the arrangement between mother and son suited them both.
How fortunate it was indeed, Elizabeth thought as she left the telegraph office, that Mary and Robert had reconciled before it was too late. She could not bear to imagine how Robert might have suffered in the years to come if he and his mother had not made peace, if their last parting, now swiftly approaching, had been made from a cold distance rather than in amity and love.
Robert arrived in Springfield early the next morning. Tears in his eyes, he quickly greeted Elizabeth with a kiss on the cheek, then hastened to his mother’s bedchamber. Fighting back her own tears, she joined him and her sisters in the vigil that would surely reach its inevitable conclusion before the day’s end.
Soon Mary’s suffering would be over, Elizabeth told herself. That was how she must think of her sister’s passing. At last Mary would find the peace and solace that had eluded her in life.
Would peace come to the sisters she left behind?
When Elizabeth’s own last day came, she hoped she would be able to look back on her life and know that she had done right by her sisters. As the eldest, she had always wished to do her duty, relying upon the wisdom of others for guidance. If she had been too indulgent, her consolation would be that she had erred on the side of humanity.
All her life, through the ebb and flow of the years, through estrangement and friendship, through times of bright hope and times of bleakest despair, Elizabeth had loved Mary, always, and had needed her. Who but a sister could a woman count on to truly understand her, even when they did not understand each other at all?
Though passions had strained, they had never broken their bonds of sisterly love. The war with all its divisiveness and rancor had not done that, nor would even death.
For whatever the world took away from them, even taking them from one another, love would abide.