Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,103
that he could bolster her spirits, if only for a short time. Taking a pen, he began writing in a thin, shaky script that slipped down the page.
Dear Mother,
Don’t be disturbed by conflicting reports about my condition. It is true I am still weak, but I am gaining every day, and need only time and patience to bring me through.
Give my love to all the relatives & friends, & especially to sisters Hetty and Mary.
Your loving son,
James A Garfield
Only to his wife did Garfield admit his weariness. “I wonder,” he told her one night, “if all this fight against death is worth the little pinch of life I will get anyway.” Lucretia knew that what her husband wanted more than anything now was to escape, not just from this dreary, lonely room, but from Washington altogether. He dreamed of returning to his farm in Ohio, seeing his old friends, sitting in the shade of his neighbor’s maple trees, maybe even having a slice of his aunt’s homemade bread.
If he could not go home, he hoped to go to the sea. He had never lost his childhood love of the ocean, which had seemed almost mythical to a boy from Ohio, and he wanted to see it one last time. “I have always felt that the ocean was my friend,” he had written in his diary just a few weeks before the assassination attempt. “The sight of it brings rest and peace.”
Bliss, however, terrified that Garfield would not survive the trip, refused. “It would not now be prudent,” he told the president. He could leave Washington as soon as his stomach was stronger.
“It’s all right now,” Garfield replied. “I want to get away.”
Although Harriet seemed to speak for everyone in the White House when she admitted to her daughter that she had lost “heart and spirit,” there remained two people who refused to surrender. Lucretia had been so sick with worry for so long that her hair had begun to fall out, forcing her finally to cover her head with a scarf. Still, a reporter from the Evening Star marveled, she seemed to have “banished despair, and hopes even when to everyone else there was no hope.”
The only person in the White House whose determination equaled Lucretia’s was Garfield’s young secretary, Joseph Stanley Brown. Although he would describe this time in his life as “one prolonged, hideous nightmare,” Brown would allow no one, not even the members of Garfield’s cabinet, to express anything but optimism in his presence. At a meeting of the cabinet members in late August, “despair,” a reporter noted, “was in their countenance, and in their speech. They said, ‘He must die.’ ” Brown, who had not yet turned twenty-four, stood and addressed the men, each one old enough to be his father. “Let nothing but words of cheer ever reach the President,” he reprimanded them. “He will not die.”
Brown rarely left the White House, sleeping, when he slept at all, on the small sofa in his office. Garfield wanted Brown near him, so the young man divided his days and nights between the sadness of the sickroom and the madness of his own office, where he replied to thousands of letters and telegrams, fielded journalists’ questions, and greeted dignitaries. “During all this terror, hope, despair, and rush at the White House,” a reporter for the Evening Critic wrote, Brown has been “the ruling spirit of the Mansion, and his young hand, guided by his wise head and kind heart, has been upon all.”
One night, as Brown was working, a member of the White House staff brought him a message that the first lady wished to see him. When he appeared before her, Lucretia did not at first speak, waiting “until control of her voice was assured.” Finally, she asked, “Will you tell me just what you think the chances are for the General’s recovery?”
Brown took one look in Lucretia’s “anguished face,” he would later say, and “threw truthfulness to the winds, and lied and lied as convincingly and consolingly as I could.” Then, as quickly as possible—“as soon as decency permitted”—he excused himself and left the room. “Once beyond the door,” he admitted, “all restraint gave way.” He could not bear to tell Lucretia the truth, but he could no longer hide it from himself. He was, he would acknowledge years later, “utterly shattered and broken.”
• CHAPTER 21 •
AFTER ALL
Despite the prayers and tears, and earnest pleading,