Meanwhile Pris continued on without noticing.
The meaning of my life was at last clear to me. I was doomed to loving something beyond life itself, a cruel, cold and sterile thingthing--Pris Frauenzimmer. It would have been better to hate the entire world.
In view of the near hopelessness of my situation I decided to try one final measure. Before I gave up I would try the Lincoln simulacrum. It had helped before; maybe it could help me now.
"This is Louis again," I said when I had gotten hold of Maury. "I want you to drive the Lincoln to the airfield and put it on a rocket flight to Seattle right now. I want the loan of it for about twenty-four hours."
He put up a rapid, frantic argument; we fought it out for half an hour. But at last he gave in; when I hung up the phone I had his promise that the Lincoln would be on the Seattle Boeing 900 by nightfall.
Exhausted, I lay down to recover. If it can't find this motel, I decided, it probably wouldn't be of use anyhow... . I'll lie here and rest.
The irony was that Pris had designed it.
Now we'll make back some of our investment, I said to myself. It cost us plenty to build and we didn't manage to make a deal with Barrows; all it does is sit around all day reading aloud and chuckling.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled an anecdote having to do with Abe Lincoln and girls. Some particular girl he had had a crush on in his youth. Successful? For god's sake; I couldn't recall how he had come out. All I could dredge up was that he had suffered a good deal because of it.
Like me, I said to myself. Lincoln and I have a lot in common; women have given us a bad time. So he'd be sympathetic.
What should I do until the simulacrum arrived? It was risky to stay in my motel room... go to the Seattle public library and read up on Lincoln's courtship and his youth? I told the motel manager where I'd be if someone looking like Abraham Lincoln came by looking for me, and then I called a cab and started out. I had a large amount of time to kill; it was only ten o'clock in the morning.
There's hope yet, I told myself as the cab carried me through traffic to the library. I'm not giving up!
Not while I have the Lincoln to help bail me out of my problems. One of the finest presidents in American history, and a superb lawyer as well. Who could ask for more?
_If anybody can help me, Abraham Lincoln can_.
The reference books in the Seattle public library did not do much to sustain my mood. According to them, Abe Lincoln had been turned down by the girl he loved. He had been so despondent that he had gone into a near-psychotic melancholia for months; he had almost done away with himself, and the incident had left emotional scars on him for the remainder of his life.
Great, I thought grimly as I closed the books. Just what I need: someone who's a bigger failure than I am.
But it was too late; the simulacrum was on its way from Boise.
Maybe we'll both kill ourselves, I said to myself as I left the library. We'll look over a few old love letters and then-- blam, with the .38.
On the other hand, he had been successful afterward; he had become a President of the United States. To me, that meant that after nearly killing yourself with grief over a woman you could go on, rise above it, although of course never forget it. It would continue to shape the course of your life; you'd be a deeper, more thoughtful person. I had noticed that melancholy in the Lincoln. Probably I'd go to my grave the same sort of figure.
However, that would take years, and I had right now to consider.
I walked the streets of Seattle until I found a bookstore which sold paperbacks; there I bought a set of Carl Sandburg's version of Lincoln's life and carried it back to my motel room, where I made myself comfortable with a six-pack of beer and a big sack of potato chips.
In particular I scrutinized the part dealing with Lincoln's adolescence and the girl in question, Ann Rutledge. But something in Sandburg's way of writing kept blurring the point; he seemed to talk around the matter. So I left the books, the beer and the potato chips, and took a cab back to the library and the reference books there. It was now early in the afternoon.
The affair with Ann Rutledge. After her death from malaria in 1835--at the age of nineteen--Lincoln had fallen into what the Britannica called "a state of morbid depression which appeared to have given rise to the report that he had a streak of insanity. Apparently he himself felt a terror of this side of his make-up, a terror which is revealed in the most mysterious of his experiences, several years later." That "several years later" was the event in 1841.
In 1840 Lincoln got engaged to a good-looking girl named Mary Todd. He was then twenty-nine. But suddenly, on January first of 1841, he cut off the engagement. A date had been set for the wedding. The bride had on the usual costume; all was in readiness. Lincoln, however, did not show up. Friends went to see what happened. They found him in a state of insanity. And his recovery from this state was very slow. On January twenty-third he wrote to his friend John T. Stuart:
I am now the most miserable man living. If what
I feel were equally distributed to the whole human
family, there would not be one cheerful face on the
earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell;
I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is
impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.
And in a previous letter to Stuart, dated January 20, Lincoln says:
I have, within the last few days, been making a most
discreditable exhibition of myself in the way of
hyochondriacism and thereby got an impression that
Dr. Henry is necessary to my existence. Unless he
gets that place he leaves Springfield. You therefore
see how much I am interested in this matter.
The "matter" is getting Dr. Henry appointed as Postmaster, at Springfield, so he can be around to keep tinkering with Lincoln in order to keep him alive. In other words, Lincoln, at that point in his life, was on the verge of suicide or insanity or both together.
Sitting there in the Seattle public library with all the reference books spread out around me, I came to the conclusion that Lincoln was what they now call a manic-depressive psychotic.
The most interesting comment is made by the Britannica, and goes as follows:
All his life long there was a certain remoteness
in him, a something that made him not quite a
realist, but which was so veiled by apparent
realism that careless people did not perceive it.
He did not care whether they perceived it or not,
was willing to drift along, permitting circumstances
to play the main part in determining his course and
not stopping to split hairs as to whether his
earthly attachments sprang from genuine realistic
perceptions of affinity or from approximation more
or less to the dreams of his spirit.
And then the Britannica commences on the part about Ann Rutledge. It also adds this:
They reveal the profound sensibility, also the
vein of melancholy and unrestrained emotional
reaction which came and Went, in alternation
with boisterous mirth, to the end of his days.
Later, in his political speeches, he engaged in biting sarcasm, a trait, I discovered after research, found in manicdepressives. And the alternation of "boisterous mirth" with "melancholy" is the basis of the manic-depressive classification.
But what undermines this diagnosis of mine is the following ominous note.
Reticence, degenerating at times into secretiveness,
is one of his fixed characteristics.