Assassination Vacation (5 page)

“Oh, that guy,” says the receptionist. “Yes, he lived here.”

She says she’s interested in reading the novel I mentioned, asks me to repeat its title. On the notepad she uses to take while-you-were-out messages, she jots down
Henry and Clara,
as if her boss is supposed to call them back.

H
enry Rathbone and Clara Harris were not Mrs. Lincoln’s first choices for theater companions. Booth read in the newspaper that Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant would be accompanying the Lincolns to Ford’s, but the general and his wife backed out. Still, April 14 was a nice day for the Lincolns. Early that morning, their eldest son, Robert, showed up. After graduating from Harvard, Robert had passed the final few months of the war as a captain on General Grant’s personal staff. (That Robert sat out most of the war at Harvard was a political liability for his father, considering how willing he was to send other people’s sons to the front. But Mrs. Lincoln had lost one of Robert’s little brothers in Springfield and another in the White House, so when she begged the president to spare their firstborn, Lincoln gave in. She tolerated Robert’s position with Grant because it was a cushy gig mostly involving escorting bigwigs who came to visit.) Robert was with General Grant at Appomattox. And at breakfast that morning he told his father about meeting Robert E. Lee. In the afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln took a carriage ride, both of them vowing to lighten up a little now that the war was over.

Lincoln was late for his own assassination. The play, Tom Taylor’s
Our American Cousin,
had already started by the time the president and the first lady, along with Rathbone and Harris, arrived at the theater. Seeing the party enter the presidential box, the audience, along with the actors on stage, applauded the president.

Surely the plot appealed to Lincoln. The story of a comical American rube bumbling amidst his aristocratic English relatives must have reminded the occupant of the Executive Mansion of his rail-splitting, log cabin past. In fact, Booth, who knew the play well, timed his shot to coincide with a surefire laugh line. (It is a comfort of sorts to know that the bullet hit Lincoln mid-guffaw. Considering how the war had weighed on him, at least his last conscious moment was a hoot.)

At Ford’s Theatre, I notice that the National Park ranger who delivers the tour does not quote the laugh line. After the tour, I go up and ask him why not.

“Tell you what,” he says. “I’ll tell you the line. You decide if it’s funny.” Then, pretending to be the character Lord Dundreary, calling after a Mrs. Mountchessington (who had just accused him of “not being used to the manners of good society”), “‘Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap.’ ”

I don’t laugh, it’s true. I ask what “sockdologizing” means and he and his fellow ranger discuss having looked it up in various old dictionaries. “It means ‘manipulative,’ ” he says.

I ask if the spirit of it is more “you lying son of a bitch” manipulative or “gosh darn you” manipulative. One ranger says the latter, the other says the former.

Whatever the nuance of “sockdologizing” was, after the line, then the laugh, the subsequent events happened fast. The ranger, when he was telling the story of Booth’s jump to the stage, held an imaginary dagger, yelling
“Sic semper tyrannis!”

Various people rushed to Lincoln, including the star of the play, actress Laura Keene, whose bloodstained collar is on display, along with the top hat Lincoln wore to the theater, in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

When a doctor was called for, Charles Sabin Taft, an army surgeon attending the play, was lifted up to Lincoln’s box. Taft asked that Lincoln be removed to the nearest home, which turned out to be the Petersen boardinghouse, across the street, now better known as The House Where Lincoln Died.

Lincoln was laid diagonally across a bed — the original is on display in the Chicago Historical Society. Surgeon General Barnes arrived, probing for the bullet. Robert Todd Lincoln was summoned from the White House, along with Lincoln’s young secretary, John Hay. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton showed up too, famously pronouncing the next morning, after Lincoln’s last breath, that “now he belongs to the ages.”

Luckily, Dr. Taft went straight home and described his night in his diary, which is now in the special collections of McGill University in Montreal, thanks to an alumnus who bequeathed his collection of Lincolniana to his alma mater. I happened to be in Montreal to do a reading at the annual Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, so I swung by the library to look at Taft’s book. He wrote, “I remained with the President until he died, engaged during a greater part of the night in supporting his head so that the wound should not press upon the pillow and the flow of blood be obstructed.” Oh, the agony of hours and hours of holding up the weight of Lincoln’s head. The next day, surely Taft’s arms were sore, so sore I’d imagine that every time he had to lift something, reach for the salt shaker, say, he would throb with the muscle memory of Lincoln’s heavy head.

I find it strange that such an evocative artifact of the Lincoln assassination is archived in Canadian exile. But that night at the comedy festival, as I listened to American comic Rich Hall sing a country song he wrote about the current president called “Let’s Get Together and Kill George Bush,” a song the audience of Quebeckers loudly adored, I remembered that Canada in general and Montreal in particular were thick with Confederate Secret Service agents during the Civil War. John Wilkes Booth himself used to come here to conspire. So I took a stroll in the neighborhood in which Booth was known to lurk, the old part of Montreal known as “Old Montreal.” Walking in Booth’s footsteps, I was thinking of Lincoln’s head.

F
rom the Petersen boardinghouse, a hearse took Lincoln’s body back to the White House. There, army surgeons Joseph Janvier Woodward and Edward Curtis performed the autopsy. Addressed to Surgeon General Barnes, Woodward’s official report is by the book, so specifically scientific I had to consult a dictionary to understand it. Parts of Lincoln’s face are “ecchymosed” — swollen. His brain is “pultaceous,” which means, according to the
Shorter OED,
“semifluid, pulpy.” It must have been a great relief for Woodward to hide behind words like that, the august Latinate words of his profession — “pultaceous” being as distant as ancient Rome compared to the horrifying here and now of “pulpy.”

In Washington, far from the National Mall, artifacts from the Lincoln autopsy are on display in what used to be the Army Medical Museum. Now known as the National Museum of Health and Medicine, it’s located on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. To get in, one passes through a military checkpoint.

Being searched and questioned by camo-clad armed soldiers is disquieting enough if you are a small, meek white woman whose bag contains nothing more menacing than a Lemony Snicket novel and cinnamon gum; but if you are the Arabic-speaking cabdriver who drives her there and you are ordered to get out of the car to open the hood, the sweat starts to spurt off your forehead as if your turban is wound out of a garden hose that just got turned on. Maybe the terror of getting past the checkpoint is part of the medical museum experience: rattled and perspiring, once you finally get inside the cool, dark building, you feel so lucky to be alive that the display about Civil War scabies seems less depressing.

The exhibition devoted to Civil War medicine is called “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds,” a play on a line from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Still, the display case devoted to his assassination is shoved to the side. It could be easily missed. Dr. Woodward, he of “pultaceous” and “ecchymosed,” would approve of the clinical arrangement. Lincoln’s skull fragments — the little pieces of bone that shattered when Booth’s bullet made impact — are contained in what looks like a Petri dish. The probe Surgeon General Barnes used to locate the bullet lies there next to a teensy gray metal blob matter-of-factly labeled “The bullet that took the president’s life.”

My head tells me autopsies after murders are routine, that before Ford’s Theatre turned into a shrine it was a crime scene, that of course the evidence of the crime was analyzed, then archived, that Abraham Lincoln was not just a martyr or a myth but a case file, what the pros nowadays call a “vic.” So the evidence here calls up the corporeal presence of Lincoln (pieces of his head —
gross
) and Booth, who bought this very bullet, put said bullet in his pistol, then into Lincoln, which struck the skull, thereby chipping off these little pieces of it, mashing the bullet itself. These well-labeled, well-lit artifacts also suggest the existence of: the autopsy surgeon, the file clerk who catalogued and stowed them, the curator who decided to put them on display, the carpenter who built the display case, etc. Even though I am currently the only pilgrim paying my respects to the relics in this out-of-the-way museum, it suddenly feels pretty crowded in here, what with all the people who made this exhibit possible — from John Wilkes Booth on down to the intern who probably typed the labels — breathing down my neck. I can’t make up my mind which step in the process is weirder, the murder or this display, unless the weirdest step of all is taking a fourteen-dollar cab ride to look at the display about the murder.

The “cuff stained with Lincoln’s blood from the shirt of Edward Curtis who assisted in the autopsy” is there in the same case with the bullet and bones. After the procedure that stained his shirtsleeves, Curtis wrote a letter to his mother. It stands to reason that this doctor’s letter to his mom is more vivid than his coworker’s report to their boss. Curtis’s description is everything Woodward’s is not — physically, palpably aware of who the dead man was and what the dead man meant.

Curtis and Woodward were examining Lincoln’s head, looking for the bullet, this bullet now in this museum. Curtis wrote, “Not finding it readily, we proceeded to remove the entire brain.”

Think about that. I know I have. For the first few days after I read that, every time I took a five-dollar bill out of my wallet I looked at the engraving of Lincoln’s head and couldn’t get the image of his detached brain out of
my
head. Curtis goes on to write that as he was lifting the brain out of the skull, “suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin that was standing beneath.” Listen. That room was so quiet. Of course it was. When the bullet dropped in such a quiet room, it must have been almost as jarring as the original gunshot. In less steady hands, the brain could have fumbled to the floor. Curtis stares at that bullet:

There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger — dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world’s history as we may perhaps never realize…. Silently, in one corner of the room, I prepared the brain for weighing. As I looked at the mass of soft gray and white substance that I was carefully washing, it was impossible to realize that it was that mere clay upon whose workings, but the day before, rested the hopes of the nation. I felt more profoundly impressed than ever with the mystery of that unknown something which may be named “vital spark” as well as anything else, whose absence or presence makes all the immeasurable difference between an inert mass of matter owing obedience to no laws but those covering the physical and chemical forces of the universe, and on the other hand, a living brain by whose silent, subtle machinery a world may be ruled. The weighing of the brain…gave approximate results only, since there had been some loss of brain substance, in consequence of the wound, during the hours of life after the shooting. But the figures, as they were, seemed to show that the brain weight was not above the ordinary for a man of Lincoln’s size.