Free Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker Page B

muttered dramatically, casting an eye over the mob. “Ready to strike, as soon as break and riot come—”
    At least we will be here, then, at a safe distance, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Just then Old Abe stepped out of the barouche with his usual lanky grace. I had seen him the year before, when he had come to electioneer at the Cooper Union, and he had been impressive enough then. Now, though, he seemed like some primal force—astonishingly talland lean and muscular. His clothes black and simple, tanned Western face furrowed like the soil of a new-plowed field.
    He ushered his short, dumpling wife into the hotel lobby—a gesture both gallant and prudent—before he turned back down the steps to face us again. Standing with his hands clasped behind his back, looking us all over with an expression of polite but detached curiosity.
    There were calls for a speech, but he begged off, nodding and bowing slightly on the Astor House steps, bending his high frame like a bow pulled taut to the arrow. The people, his master. Telling them with his disarming honesty that everything was shifting too rapidly, that “before I should take ground, I might be disposed by the shifting of the scene afterwards again to shift.”
    That brought a laugh, and a hand from the crowd, and I thought then that I had been wrong, that with his long neck and stovepipe hat, his tousled hair and his apelike arms, Lincoln seemed like a very modern force. Some rude device, the engine of a Western riverboat, perhaps. A tinkerer’s dream, with all his ungainly, misshapen, improvised parts, yet hammered nevertheless into a machine of formidable power.
    Of course, after that we put him through all the usual inanities we inflict upon our politicians. Nothing would do but that he had to be presented with a wreath from the Astor House manager. Next a tall man insisted upon measuring himself against his height and, again with that casual tolerance, Lincoln agreed. Obligingly turning back to back with him—the crowd cheering again when the president measured two inches taller than the tall man.
    At that he was finally allowed to continue inside, to his room and bed. As he went up the rest of the stairs, a spontaneous cheer rang out from the crowd—nothing else so rare, or so moving in this town full of professional agitators and pitchmen. He stayed his steps again for a moment, looking back, surprised for the first time, and more cries—real sentiments—poured from the crowd:
    â€œGod bless you, sir!”
    â€œStand firm! Stand firm for the Union!”
    â€œIt’s a hard day’s work you have!”
    And finally, in a child’s voice:
    â€œI hope you will take care of us! We have prayed for you!”
    He smiled, pausing once more at the top of the steps to address thecrowd, that sly, gently ironic smile of his just touching his lips, though his eyes watered with emotion.
    â€œBut, you must take care of me,” he said softly—and then was gone, into the shadows of the Astor House.
    I saw him only once more before he left the City, before the war came. That was the following night, when he went to see Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, at the Academy of Music. Mrs. Lincoln had gone to a reception at Barnum’s American Museum, with all its marvels—its white whale, and its Fiji mermaid, and a dwarf who could recite any passage of Blackstone’s law by memory—and he was alone again.
    I watched him up in the presidential box, his face its own mask. Sitting there high above the rest of us, listening to the divine music. Giving away nothing himself, nodding gravely to all who nodded to him. During the performance he sat slumped back in his chair, with only a single white-gloved hand visible from below. It seemed to glow in the darkness there, that white glove, swaying slightly with the music, hovering above us all.
    I touch the pistol Raymond gave me, in my coat pocket. It