The Murder of Willie Lincoln Read online

  On the afternoon of February 19, a Wednesday, Willie returned from the land of the dying. Hay heard the yowls of laughter from his desk on the second floor of the Executive Mansion. Some of them sounded like the president’s. An opportune time, perhaps, to bring the most urgent of the correspondence to his attention.

  Bud Taft, Willie’s most intimate playmate, was kicking a purplish ball against the scuffed walls of the drafty central hall. Ordinarily the most bashful of boys, he exulted in Willie’s revival. His next kick drove the ball directly at Hay’s groin. Hay jumped aside and blocked the ball with his knee and sent it skittering through the doorway into Willie’s sickroom.

  Hay scurried in pursuit. Inside the Prince of Wales Room, the heavy curtains were partly drawn. The sunlight sidled in, lending a cheer to the purple French wallpaper flecked with gold. (That invoice had made Hay gasp.) Steam-heated air gurgled from the registers, to fight the chill. Willie was sitting up in the seven-foot-long rosewood bed, the pillows piled nowhere near high enough to hide the birds and tangled vines carved into the gigantic headboard. On the wall above his head, a cornet of purple silk, crowned in gold, held lacy white curtains that helped relieve the gloom. The president occupied a wicker chair beside the bed; a nurse sat at the foot. The bed was so big, Willie might have gone unseen had he not been babbling with delight.

  “Look, Paw, I can eat!” Willie cried. He held a misshapen spoon that his father had whittled out of basswood on a rainy Sunday long ago. The boy slurped a whitish, viscous-looking pudding; a globule slid over the edge of the spoon and onto the sheet, settling like a blotch of decaying cod.

  “I can see that, son.” Lincoln’s high, reedy voice quavered. “You are taking your medicine?”

  “Oh yes, Paw. Every bit. I did.”

  “Good fellow.”

  “And, Paw, may I see Nanko?” That was one of Tad’s goats. “Taddie could bring him upstairs.”

  “Taddie is also ill, son.”

  “Then you could. Please, Paw. I need to see him, Paw.”

  “Well, maybe I can, my boy. Maybe I can.”

  There was a luminescence about Willie. More than intelligence—a liveliness, a life force. Willie was not painfully reserved like his older brother, Robert, nor twisted or odd like Tad, who was eight years old but seemed younger. Tad was a brat, like a boy reared by wolves. He pulled on men’s beards, hammered nails into the carpets, sliced the knobs off drawers using the saw in his toolbox, rearranged the books in his father’s library, yoked both of his goats to a chair and pulled them sled-like through an East-room reception, all while stammering his baby talk—from a misshapen palate—that no stranger could understand. Hay knew who was at fault—both of them. Neither parent would reprimand Tad or Willie or deny them a thing, not after three-year-old Eddy had died. “Let the children have a good time,” they would say. So, of course the boys misbehaved. Who could blame them?

  Hay could.

  But somehow, Willie had learned to discipline himself. He was good-natured and direct, comfortable with both his pals and adults, willing and able to lead (in pranks, best of all) but content to follow. There was a sweetness in the curve of his cheeks and an audacity in his energetic blue eyes. He was a brave and happy boy with a spunk that stopped short of self-indulgence. Willie’s round face resembled his mother’s—not a surface of it was flat. But in manner, in habits of mind, even in gesture—carrying his head inclined slightly to his right—in his soul, Willie was his father’s son. They were astonishingly alike. Hay had once watched the president watching Willie puzzle through a problem; ten minutes of concentration produced a clasp of hands and a smile. “There, you have it now, my boy, have you not?” Lincoln had said. Then, to Hay, “I know every step of the process by which that boy arrived at his satisfactory solution of the question before him, as it is by just such slow methods I attain results.” Like his father, but no one else in the family, Willie led an inner life.

  “But when, Paw, when?” The boy was still stuck on Nanko.

  “Soon, son. As soon as you are better.”

  “Oh, Paw, I know that the medicines ain’t gonna be enough.”

  “Why do you say that, son?”

  “Because everybody hushes so when they say my name.”

  Lincoln opened his mouth and then closed it. Hay pitied Honest Abe, unable to muster a lie when he needed one most.

  The president looked up at Hay with unfocused eyes. “And what can I do for you, John?”

  Hay glanced to the foot of the bed. “Ma’am,” he said.

  The nurse seemed not to hear.

  “Please, ma’am,” Hay said, “if you would…”

  “As you say, sir,” she drawled. The buxom nurse had severe black hair. Shoulders hunched, she crossed to the door and swept it shut.

  “Sir,” Hay said. Lincoln disliked being addressed as “Mister President”—he preferred “Lincoln,” although Hay could not bring himself to presume such familiarity.

  The president accepted the goose-feather pen like an obedient child. He signed an act of Congress appropriating $15 million more for gunboats. Hay figured the letters to the feuding governors of New Jersey and New York could wait. But Lincoln needed to learn of the morning’s scuffle between Seward and Stanton, the secretaries of state and war, the diplomat versus the brawler, over how splenetic a tone to strike in the president’s next epistle to General McClellan.

  “Nonsense, I will decide,” Lincoln said, waving his hand before turning back to Willie, whose spills now resembled a map of Abyssinia.

  Hay had turned toward the door when Robert rushed in, a bowl of pudding in his hands. “Here, Willie, for you—brown charlotte.”

  It was heartening to see Robert so nice to his younger brother—to Tad, too. Robert was eighteen years old and always seemed sad, an intruder in his own family. Hay had known him at preparatory school back in Springfield, the Illinois capital, and they palled around whenever Robert visited Washington City. The semester had started at Harvard, but Robert showed no signs of hurrying back. He seemed to like it here; the boys idolized him and would do anything he asked.

  “I already have some,” Willie said.

  “Oh, but this is so good!”

  Hay took his leave. He grieved for this family enduring the saddest of times. In the hallway, neither the nurse nor Bud Taft was in sight.

  * * *

  Hay tensed for the punch that never came, so he threw one instead. The best defense was a good offense, or so Hay had decided after suffering a blackened eye—it kept the other fellow too busy to punch back. Hay’s hard right cross found the Irishman’s broad chin, but the man shook it off like a horse’s tail shoos away a horsefly. Hay’s knuckles cracked—he needed to remember to pull his punches, finger bones being more fragile than jaws. Hay never remembered anything while he was in the ring, not even to breathe, much less to relax. How could he? Someone was trying to hit him.

  To-night, it was a large-ish someone. Maybe Hay should feel flattered that his boxing instructor considered him worthy to fight the chesty, ruddy-faced redhead. True, the Irishman had never properly sparred before, hewing to the London prize ring rules. So, Hay determined to teach him a lesson or two. He snapped a jab, which the Irishman parried, then a second jab and a third, each time stepping forward as the man backed away. A fourth jab and a fifth pressed the Irishman into the ropes, and then Hay’s right cross got his attention. He followed with a left into the fellow’s jellylike belly and a left hook to the ear. Hay marveled at his own capacity for … what, exactly? Manliness? Savagery? Courage, mock or genuine? Freedom from—or indulgence in—fear?

  Hay was always jittery, his stomach knotted, before climbing into the ring. He liked having sparred better than he liked the sparring. Did that make him a coward? No, he had decided: Without fear, courage had no meaning.

  This lesson had been unexpected. He had taken up pugilism in Providence in pursuit of acceptance, to fit in among the Easterners who disdained his rough Western dress an
d his long hair coiled around his ears, like a Roundhead’s. The university had deemed boxing too uncivilized, too déclassé, to taint the campus, so Hay and fistic-minded schoolmates had hired a “professor of pugilism” in the city’s seedier section, who taught them how a gentleman could thwack blackguards and stand up for himself. Knowing he had the guts to face a bigger man in the ring had made Hay less afraid of the world.

  Hay had learned other things, too—for one thing, that he could take a punch, which in this capital of ruffians was useful to know. That, and how to respond when the Irishman, recovering, started jabbing back at him, driving Hay back across the ring. His fellow students of the manly art were cheering him on—damn if he would embarrass himself in front of his mates. As the Irishman kept coming at him, Hay pivoted to his right and punched him in the temple, then drove a left fist up into the undefended chin. The big redhead toppled onto his back, ending the round.

  Hay’s second delivered a bottle of water to his corner and sponged off his face and chest. Josiah was Hay’s only true pal at the boxing gymnasium. The street urchin with straw-colored hair had no notion of where Hay lived and worked, and Hay reveled in his not knowing. This shabby place, on the wrong side of Pennsylvania avenue, was as distant as the moon from the Executive Mansion. Its denizens lived in a separate world, quite to Hay’s delight. He could come here without being noticed, and when life grew too unyielding, nothing satisfied him more than to pound away on something hard, whether inanimate or human. The Ancient as well as the Hell-cat would be aghast to know his whereabouts, especially as Willie lay ill. Even Nicolay might look at him sidewise. No matter. Hay needed this. Not only as an escape from the cauldron of the Executive Mansion but also from his own lingering sense of duty shirked. Rare in Hay’s acquaintance was the young man of unasthmatic constitution who had not yet volunteered to take up arms for the Union. Yes, it was true, he was probably more useful to winning the war by passing paper to the commander in chief than by ducking minié balls on a muddy field. But still: A red-blooded young man ought to show his mettle in the time-honored way. Here, in the ring, Hay could punch away any feelings of shame.

  The thirty seconds of rest expired, and the referee called the fighters back from their corners. Hay felt wobbly, but his opponent looked worse—until they were told to resume, and the Irishman advanced suddenly and plowed his right fist into Hay’s solar plexus. The pain radiated through his torso and doubled him over. Then came the punch to his mouth, and it was Hay’s turn to tumble back onto the canvas. The second round, all of ten seconds, was over.

  Hay sat up quickly and shook his head, and the pain faded—rarely did it take more than a few seconds to pass—enough that he could climb to his feet. He staggered to his corner, and as he arrived, his left leg sagged. Just barely did he land on the stool.

  Josiah handed him water and whispered, “Do what you know how to do.”

  That was the nicest thing he could have said to Hay. Useful, besides.

  When the thirty seconds ended, Hay was first to reach the scratch line and also the first to throw a punch. But this time he switched to a southpaw stance, and his jab, jab, jab left the discombobulated Irishman open to a cross from Hay’s left. Then came a hard right hook to the Irishman’s head. The chess-like quality to boxing—each punch set up the next—kept Hay’s mind engaged along with his instincts, before and after the sparring if not in the midst of it.

  “Good hook, Mistuh J.,” Terrance called from beyond the ropes. The proprietor, a freedman, was Hay’s new professor of pugilism.

  At Hay’s hard right uppercut, the Irishman’s mouth opened in a perfect O—a look of surprise, as if the Virgin Mary herself had descended into the ring—and then it closed to a point, just as his torso pitched sideways onto the canvas.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Hay blurted.

  “There is no ‘I’m sorry’ in boxing!” Terrance exclaimed.

  Actually, Hay was not sorry in the slightest.

  * * *

  That night, Willie took a turn for the worse. His pulse grew rapid and weak, and he sank into a coma. A pall settled over the Executive Mansion. Hay occasionally ventured into the central hall and saw the president or Mrs. Lincoln or Dr. Stone rush in or out of the Prince of Wales Room. Dr. Stone said Willie was unlikely to last until morning.

  Hay was surprised to be awakened by the sunlight—he and Nicolay had forgotten to draw the frayed curtains closed. But now, he dreaded leaving his bed. He persuaded himself to peek from under the quilt: Nicolay had gone. That Teutonic sense of duty put Hay to shame.

  He must have fallen back to sleep, because when he opened his eyes, Nicolay was hovering over the bed, reporting that Willie was fine—in any event, better. The boy was sitting up and eating a little, “in thrall to yet another winter’s day.” It was unlike Nicolay to wax poetic.

  Late in the afternoon, Hay was working at his upright mahogany desk, his eyelids drifting shut. For hours the rain had pelted his windows; the fireplace threw off too little heat. Hay huddled over the untidy piles of correspondence. Pleas for office, applications for pardons, diatribes from lawmakers, religious exhortations, unsolicited counsel, slander against public men—such an omnium-gatherum was the president’s mail, of which three or four out of a hundred he would show to the president. Into the willow basket at his feet Hay tossed a Rhode Island senator’s arrogantly worded appeal to reconsider his brother-in-law’s bid (twice rejected by the War Department) to supply the army with used bandages. Then he remembered the senator’s artful equivocation on the legal tender bill and retrieved the letter and placed it on the pile requiring a reply. Hay was reaching for the next envelope when a guttural wail erupted outside, in the waiting room that separated Hay’s office from the president’s.

  Hay leapt for the door. He knew whose wail it was, although he had never heard it before.

  Lincoln was stumbling the length of the waiting room, past his own office door and in through Nicolay’s, at the end on the right. As Hay rushed across the waiting room, a woman screamed beyond the folding double doors. Someone—no, two someones—held a torso by the shoulders and guided it into Mrs. Lincoln’s bedroom.

  Nicolay’s office was narrow and dark, like a passage to purgatory. Nicolay lay on the sofa, propped up on his elbows, half-awake. Lincoln stood by the window, swaying, his body bent.

  “My boy is gone,” he wailed into his big, bony hands. “He is actually gone!”

  Then he burst into sobs and rushed past Hay and out the door.

  The burning behind the eyes before the tears arrive—Hay’s entire body felt that way. On the verge of … something unfathomable. He loved the boy—that, he knew—and the father, too. Hay simply could not believe what he had heard. Yet he knew in his bones it was so.

  * * *

  It occurred to Hay, and not for the first time, that the extent of clutter on a man’s desktop was directly proportional to the orderliness of his mind. He liked to think so, anyway, given the jumble of papers that covered both of his desks. But still, he had done what needed doing, whatever Nicolay had no time for—dispatching messengers to the cabinet secretaries and congressional leaders, wiring the president’s political friends in Springfield, notifying the diplomats. He was in a fog; he felt nothing at all. Yet phrases leapt into his mind. Hay reached for a pen and tore off a scrap of foolscap.

  Tearless & calm in the grave he shall sleep,

  Weary & worn on the earth we shall weep …

  Too plain, he judged—boring. Maybe:

  Death’s thick trailing veils of miasma will rise …

  No—too … too … something, but definitely too. It was hell being a better critic than a writer. Still, writing it down relieved him of the need to think about it. Dealing with death must get easier with practice—everything else did. Hay had known little enough of death in his score and three years—two grandparents, an ancient aunt, an elderly neighbor, all in the natural order of things. And the sister he had been too young to remember. Even
his grandfather was still alive, who had been patted on the head as a nine-year-old by George Washington himself because his father had served under the general’s command.

  Hay stuffed the foolscap into the satchel that hung from a peg on the wall. It was a gift from his father for passing the Illinois bar exam just days before Hay accompanied the president-elect and his entourage to Washington City. An envelope jutted from the outside pocket—he had not seen it there before. Occasionally, Nicolay used the outside pocket for a message too private to consign to Hay’s chair, but he would have positioned the envelope precisely perpendicular to the lip. This envelope was furled—crumpled, almost—and shoved in at a provocative angle. By someone in a hurry.

  Hay reached for the envelope and grasped the corner. He laid it along the front edge of his desk and pressed down the corner that begged to curl up. The oyster-white envelope had a crinkly grain that suggested age or wear. It had no postmark or return address. Across the back, in thin black ink, written in a shaky hand, was the name of the addressee:

  MR. TRAITOR LINCOLN

  Hay had seen countless letters of hatred and threats to Lincoln’s life. And to Mrs. Lincoln’s—he remembered one that showed a noose around her neck. The president would brush them aside, explaining that his fate was out of his hands, instructing his secretaries to dispose of the letters without bothering him. Hay was about to discard this one, unopened, when a question popped into his mind: If Nicolay had not jammed the envelope into the satchel, who had?

  Using his bone-handled knife, Hay slit open the envelope and removed a single page of blue foolscap. The roughly textured paper had been folded over twice. Hay flattened it, best he could, across the uneven topography of his desktop. Four lines of a crude cursive slashed across the page, but the boldness of the strokes did not prepare him for the words they spelt.