to 104 degrees, Garfield hovered over her, helping however he could. “If I thought her return to perfect health could be insured by my resigning the Presidency,” he wrote to a friend, “I would not hesitate a moment about doing it.”
While the White House did what it could to protect Lucretia from the outside world, banning carriages from the grounds and occasionally even closing the front gates, Charles Guiteau inched closer. When he had first submitted his application for an appointment, he had been told, as was every office seeker, that it would be put on file and considered. “In the majority of cases there was not the slightest possibility of any position being granted,” a White House employee who helped shepherd callers through the president’s anteroom later explained. “It was just the usual human method of saving trouble and avoiding a scene.” Guiteau, however, believed that the president was carefully studying his application and that his appointment was only a matter of time. When, after handing the doorman a note for Garfield one day, he was told, “The President says it will be impossible to see you to-day,” he seized on the word “to-day.” This was Garfield’s way, he thought, of telling him that, “as soon as he got Walker [the current consul-general to France] out of the way gracefully then I would be given the office.”
While he waited for his appointment, Guiteau survived as he always had. As well as skipping out on board bills, he had a long history of convincing people to lend him money, and he was proud of his straightforward approach. “I will tell you how I do it,” he would later explain. “I come right out square with a friend. I do not lie and sneak and do that kind of business, or anything. I say, ‘I want to get $25; I want to use a little money’; and the probability is that if he has got the money about him he will pull the money right out and give it to me. That is the way I get my money. I take it and thank him, and go about my business.”
The technique had worked often enough that Guiteau was reluctant to abandon it, but he was quickly running out of lenders. In mid-March, he finally tracked down a man named George Maynard, whom he barely knew and had not seen for more than twenty years. He had met Maynard in 1859, when he was a student boarding at Maynard’s mother’s home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Maynard had been living in Washington for the past seventeen years, working as an electrician, and knew nothing of Guiteau’s life since he had seen him last. He was the perfect person to ask for a loan.
When Guiteau suddenly appeared in Maynard’s office, he did not waste time with pleasantries but came quickly to the point. “Mr. Guiteau came into my office and said that he wanted to borrow $10 for a few days; that he was very hard up for money to pay his board bills,” Maynard would later recall. Guiteau told him that he was expecting a check for $150 and would pay him back as soon as he received it. Taking pity on the small, shabbily dressed man, Maynard gave him the money and in return accepted a card on which was written: “March 12th, $10 until the 15th.” He would not see Guiteau again until June.
In the meantime, Guiteau went about his solitary life. He had very little contact with people outside of his boardinghouse and the White House waiting room, and no social interaction at all. He had lived this way for most of his adult life, with the surprising exception of the four years he had been married.
Soon after leaving Oneida, Guiteau had met and married a young librarian named Annie Bunn, launching her into the most desperate and frightening period of her life. “I lived,” Annie would later say, “in continual anxiety and suspense of mind.” Not only was she forced to flee boardinghouse after boardinghouse, often leaving behind her clothing and belongings when her husband did not pay the rent, but she was constantly dunned by his creditors and a string of furious clients whom he had cheated.
Despite the constant humiliations, Annie likely would have stayed with Guiteau had he not treated her so cruelly. If she disagreed with him in the smallest way, he would literally kick her out the door and into the hallway, even if other