Impasse. Stuart hated impasses. He hated ambiguity of any kind. The older he got, the more ambiguity he saw in the world. He hated that, too. "In a battle, by God, you know who's won and who's lost," he complained to his aide-de-camp. "That's what war is good for."
"Yes, sir," Sellers agreed. "But what do we do now, since nobody here knows anything and nobody much wants to find out?"
"Convince the Apaches and the Mexicans to forget this time, since nobody is sure about it," Stuart said. "That's all I can think of now. Next time they quarrel, maybe who did what to whom will be a little clearer. I hope to heaven it is, I tell you that."
He did his best to keep the peace between allies and subjects. Time helped, too. When they hadn't flown at each other's throats for a while, he decided they probably wouldn't, not over this. He wished he could believe either side would really forget it. Try as he would, he had no luck with that.
Chapter 16
F rederick Douglass' Train pulled into Chicago at the south side depot, on the corner of State and Twelfth Streets. Looking out the window at the hurly-burly on the platform, Douglass was forcibly reminded that, while the Army of the Ohio butted heads with the Confederates at Louisville, most of the United States kept right on with the business on which they had been engaged before the war began.
After seeing nothing but blue uniforms for so long (save only during that brief, appalling interlude when he saw gray and butternut uniforms instead), Douglass blinked at the spectacle of checked and houndstooth and herringbone sack suits and brightly striped shirts on men, and at the fantastic, unfunctional cut and bright colors of women's clothes. Truly this was a different world from the one he'd just left.
Carrying his suitcases, he made his way to the waiting line of Parmelee's omnibuses. The driver, who was taking a feed bag off a horse's head, looked at him with something less than delight. "What would you be wanting?" he asked, brogue and carroty head of hair alike proclaiming him an Irishman.
"To go to the Palmer House," Douglass replied evenly.
As they often did, his deep, rolling voice and educated accent went some way toward making up for the color of his skin. So did his destination, one of the two best hotels in Chicago. Instead of snarling at him to take himself elsewhere, the omnibus driver, after a visible pause for thought, said nothing more than, "Fare is fifty cents."
Have you got fifty cents? lurked behind the words, as it would not have were the driver addressing a white man. With practiced carelessness, Douglass tossed him a half-dollar. "I've been there before," he said.
The driver plucked the coin out of the air, as if it would vanish if he let it touch the ground. Douglass boarded the half-full omnibus. The driver stared at him, as if wondering how much he could get away with. Douglass looked back with imperturbability as practiced as the carelessness. The Irishman's shoulders slumped. He picked up Douglass' bags and heaved them, a little harder than he might have, into the boot at the rear of the omnibus.
Before long, all the seats on the conveyance were taken-except the one next to Frederick Douglass. He wondered how many times he'd seen that over the years. More than he could count, certainly. The driver evidently reckoned that last seat would not be filled, for he climbed up into his own place, flicked the reins, and got the omnibus rolling. Above the streets, telegraph wires were as thick as vines in the jungle.
"Palmer House!" the driver shouted when he got to the hotel, which occupied the block on Monroe between State and Wabash, the entrance lying on the latter street. Douglass, a couple of other men, and a woman got off the omnibus. Douglass tipped the driver a dime for getting his bags out of the boot, then went inside. The lobby was a huge hall with a floor of multicolored marble tiles. Spittoons rang to well-aimed expectorations; poorer shots gave the marble new, less pleasant, hues. Western Union boys and letter carriers hurried through the hall in all directions.
To Douglass' relief, he had no trouble with his reservation. "Room 211," the desk clerk said, and handed him a key with that number stamped on it. The fellow looked back at the great grid of pigeonholes behind the front desk. "Yes, I thought so-there's a letter waiting for you."
"Thank you." Douglass took the envelope, which bore his name in a script long familiar. The note inside was to the point. If you are not too tired, it read, meet me for supper at seven tonight in the hotel restaurant. We were in at the birth; let us pray we are not to be in at the death. As usual, the signature ran the cross stroke of the initial of the Christian name into the beginning of the first letter of the surname: A. Lincoln.
"Help you with anything?" the desk clerk asked.
"Only in reminding me whether I remember correctly that the entrance to your restaurant is on the State Street side of the building," Douglass replied.
"Yes, that's right." The clerk nodded. He wasn't calling Douglass sir, but in all other respects seemed polite enough. The Negro discounted slights far worse than that.
He went upstairs, unpacked, and took a bath in the tin tub down at the end of the hall. Refreshed, he went back to his room, relighted the gas lamp above the desk, and wrote letters and worked on a newspaper story till it was time to join the former president for supper.
At the Palmer House restaurant, the maitre d' gave him a fishy stare. "I am to dine with Mr. Lincoln," he said, and the ice began to break up. A discreetly passed silver dollar made the fellow as obsequious as any Confederate planter could have wanted in a slave.
Lincoln was already seated when Douglass came up. He unfolded to his full angular height like a carpenter's jointed ruler. "Good to see you, Fred," he said, and held out his big, bony hand.
Douglass took it. "It's been too long," he said. "But neither of us is in fashion these days, and so we both have to work harder just to make our voices heard. That leaves too little time for sociability."
"Ain't it the truth?" Lincoln said in the rustic accents of his youth. "Well, sit yourself down, we'll get outside some supper, and then we'll hash this out and see what we come up with."
"An excellent proposal." Douglass did sit, then examined the menu. He spoke with firm decision: "I shall have a beefsteak. If I can't get a good one in Chicago, they have vanished off the face of the earth."
"I had beef last night, so I believe I'll order the roast chicken," Lincoln said. "Considering what we shall be about over the next few days, though, I wonder whether cooked goose wouldn't be a better choice."
"Surely things have not come to such a pass," Douglass said.
Lincoln looked at him. Lincoln, in fact, looked through him. The ex-president said not a word. Douglass, feeling himself flush, was glad his brown skin kept that from showing. When the waiter came round to see what the two men wanted, he reckoned the interruption not far from providential.
His beefsteak, when in due course it arrived, occasioned another interruption, a rapturous one. Across the table from him, Lincoln methodically demolished half a chicken. Both men drank whiskey with their meals.
"How you stay so lean with such an appetite is beyond me," Douglass said, patting his own considerable girth.
Lincoln shrugged. "I eat-and I am eaten." He had not drunk to excess, any more than Douglass had, but perhaps it was the spirits that let his frustration with the world in which he found himself come forth to a degree he did not usually permit. Or perhaps it was something else. After one of his self-deprecating chuckles, he said, "I bear up well in the presence of mine enemies; only with my friends do I let my sorrows show. Having so few friends these days, I am most often quite the jolly gentleman."
He looked as jolly as an undertaker. He usually looked that way, regardless of how he felt. Douglass said, "Surely the state of the Republican Party cannot be so bad as you implied in your invitation to this supper."