Voices from the Past Part 153

Someone set fire to the White House stables. I rushed out when I saw the flames and heard men shouting. Our fire engine crew arrived too late. Willie's pony died.

Tad's pony died. Four horses died, three survived, among them Old Abe. The fire occurred at night, while Willie and Tad slept. How much more disastrous it would have been if they had been awake. A number of us worked for five or six hours, to calm the surviving horses, to drag away the ponies on a sledge, for later burial. In the morning it was a very hard task to inform the boys.

With Tad sprawled on the bedroom floor, and Willie slumped in a chair, Mary and I attempted to comfort them.

They were not to be comforted. We promised replacement ponies. They wailed and cringed at "replacements." The day was lost.

Arson, yes, everyone thinks it was arson. Some of the stable hands feel that the fire was set to bring me to the stables at night-a possible a.s.sa.s.sination attempt.

The White House

The Library

I have sought sanctuary in the library.

Willie is dead.

He was thirteen, handsome, intelligent, gentle, fond of each of us. For two weeks he battled for survival, his doctors helping little or not at all. When his doctor left him, when I was alone with him, I felt his cold face and held his cold hands. I thought, he's not really dead.

It must be an error. He isn't dead because I feel his presence in the room, hear his voice.

Typhoid killed him.

Mary, hysterical, suffered grave headaches at his death. She is unable to comfort Tad. She is unable to speak coherently. She sometimes fancies that he is not dead: she wants to go into the bedroom and speak to him.

She says she hopes to communicate with him through a seance. Only I have a chance at comforting Tad. Sitting on my lap, his head against my shoulder, he sleeps.

Certainly he knows the sleeve of care, the worn sleeve.

Today we buried our Willie. Mary and Robert and Tad and I stood side by side at the grave.

It was like burying a part of my own body... I felt the earth strike my hands, my arms, my face, my mouth.

Cabinet members attended, military men, friends, White House staff. Tad held Jip in his arms. It rained some.

I'm a tired man. Sometimes I'm the tiredest man on earth.

August '64

Mary has pa.s.sed days in her darkened bedroom, wracked by headaches, scarcely able to communicate, hardly able to eat. Her faithful Mrs. Keckley looks after her. There is little or no response when I attempt to comfort her.

G.o.d, she claims, has deserted her.

I return to my office.

Now the war is my distraction. There is a h.e.l.lish healing power in the roll of drums, the rumble of caissons, the tramp of a regiment. Was.h.i.+ngton's armed camp is always on the move.

Willie...

Maybe he is fortunate. At least he has been spared the confrontation of brother against brother.

I return to Mary's bedroom.

I offer coffee. She declines.

Robert came and knelt by her. He will go back to Harvard next week. Tad lay asleep at the foot of Mary's bed. Sometimes, when the four of us are in the bedroom I feel that grief is fourfold.

I retreated.

Jip comes.

August

After Willie's death I received a warm and understanding letter from Billy Herndon, my Billy. Each word weighed carefully.

Through the years he was much more patient than I; when I read aloud, back in the back of the office, he overlooked the nuisance. He tolerated my kids when they burst in on me. They sometimes wrecked havoc. He never brought his kids, never permitted them to come to the office...or if he did, they were no problem.

Billy could prepare his cases faster than I.

"Abe, are you still lingerin' over that Moffit suit?"

When he stood before a jury he was accurate and his accuracy taught me to prepare my cases with care.

Billy liked Willie. Well, he liked all my children.

How often we spread ourselves in my parlor and talked.

Billy is like a cedar post, deeply imbedded.

Maybe he misses the buffalo stampede of my kids.

Summer

Personal tragedy strikes most of us. At this time personal loss is the fabric of this country.

What does a man do, does he sit in his chair, in the middle of a room, and wait?

I have not adjusted to Willie's death.Just a few days ago he was alive, riding on his pony; then, then the four of us stood around his grave.

The night he died I sat up all night; I worked with letters, doc.u.ments, senate papers, proposals for a rail west, telegrams reporting the war. Someone brought me coffee.

Jip came in, and sat on my lap.

It is one thing to encounter personal loss in the theatre, another to read a tragedy; certainly it is another emotion to face it yourself, to realize that no power can reinstate.