“Go take a flying fling. Oh, here’s Sam at the door. Get off the phone. And don’t call me Pris. My name’s Pristine, Pristine Womankind. Go back to Boise and dabble with your poor little stunted second-rate simulacra, as a favor to me, please?” Again she waited and again I could think of nothing to say; nothing anyhow that was worth saying. “Goodbye, you low-class poor ugly nothing,” Pris said in a matter-offact voice. “And please don’t annoy me with phone calls in the future. Save it for some greasy woman who wants you to paw her. If you can manage to find one that greasy, ugly and low-class.” This time the phone clicked; she had at last hung up, and I shook with relief. I trembled and quaked at having gotten off the phone and away from her, away from the calm, stinging, accusing, familiar voice.
Pris, I thought, I love you. Why? What have I done to be driven toward you? What twisted instinct is it?
I sat down on the bed and closed my eyes.
14
There was nothing to do but return to Boise.
I had been defeated–not by powerful, experienced Sam K. Barrows, not by my partner Maury rock, either, but by eighteen-year-old Pris. There was no use hanging around Seattle.
What lay ahead for me? Back to R & R ASSOCIATES, make peace with Maury, resume where I had left off. Back to work on the Civil War Soldier Babysitter. Back to working for harsh, grim, bad-tempered Edwin M. Stanton. Back to having to put up with interminable readings-aloud by the Lincoln simulacrum from _Winnie the Pooh_ and _Peter Pan_. Once more the smell of Corina Lark cigars, and now and then the sweeter smell of my father’s A & Cs. The world I had left, the elecronic organ and spinet factory at Boise, our office in Ontario . .
And there was always the possibility that Maury would not let me come back, that he was serious about breaking up the partnership. So I might find myself without even the same drab world I had known and left; I might not even have that to look forward to.
Maybe now was the time. The moment to get out the .38 and blow off the top of my head. Intead of returning to Boise. The metabolism of my body was speeding up and slowing down; I was breaking up due to centrifugal force and at the same time I groped out, trying to catch hold of everything near me. Pris had me, and yet in the instant of having me she flung me away, ejected me in a fit of cursing and retching. It was as if the magnet attracted particles which it simultaneously repelled; I was caught in a deadly oscillation.
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.