Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,89

of her days and evenings at James’s bedside, he had convinced her to sleep in a room in another corner of the house, apart from the shuffling and whispering attendants who always surrounded him, and even to venture out on occasion, taking quiet rides through the city.

When she was not with her family, Lucretia had always preferred to be alone. Since becoming first lady, she had dreaded public functions, painfully aware that she paled in comparison to her immediate predecessors, Julia Grant and Lucy Hayes, who were effortless and enthusiastic hostesses. “I hope I shall not disappoint you,” Lucretia had told a group of women who had called on her after James’s inauguration. She also found the rules of etiquette that accompanied her position confusing and almost impossible to follow. In her last diary entry before James was shot, she had lamented a small misstep in protocol that had been quickly reported in the newspapers. “Blundered!” she wrote. “I wonder if I shall ever learn that I have a position to guard!”

After the assassination attempt, Lucretia endured a far more intense and prolonged public scrutiny than any first lady before her. In the midst of it, she won not only the approval of the American people, but their hearts as well. Throughout the country, families who had lost fathers, sons, and brothers to the Civil War, or had watched them suffer and survive, took pride in Lucretia’s courage, knowing far too well how difficult it was to sustain, day after day. “In these few weeks of trial and anxiety,” the New York Times wrote, “Mrs. Garfield has achieved a distinction grander and more lasting than ever before fell to the lot of a President’s wife.” Although worry had taken its toll, and Lucretia was even thinner and paler than before, she seemed to those around her to have an almost supernatural strength. “She must be a pretty brave woman,” Mabel wrote admiringly to Bell. “The whole nation leans upon her courage.”

Lucretia’s courage was buoyed by genuine hope. She refused to be lied to or shielded in any way, and she had never been one to pretend that things were better than they were. She now felt, however, that she had real reason for optimism. Not only had her husband survived the initial trauma of the shooting, but his natural vitality and strength had made it possible for him to fight off the early infection introduced by the bullet, and his doctors’ fingers, in the train station. Since July 6, Garfield had been making slow but undeniable progress. His pulse and temperature had been steady. He had been eating and sleeping well, and the pain in his feet and legs had eased. “His gradual progress towards recovery is manifest,” Bliss’s morning bulletin announced on July 13, “and thus far without complications.”

Hope filled the White House, and, as the nation eagerly read Bliss’s bulletins, which were posted several times a day, every day, it radiated throughout the country. Every day, newspapers ran headlines proclaiming that the president was “On the Road to Recovery” and announcing that his condition was “More and More Hopeful.” So confident of Garfield’s survival was the governor of Ohio that he wrote to his fellow governors suggesting that all thirty-eight states designate a “day of thanksgiving for the recovery of the President.”

Garfield himself made every effort to assure those around him that he was not only well but content. “You keep heart,” he told Lucretia. “I have not lost mine.” He endured without complaint excruciating pain and daily humiliations. “Every passage of his bowels and urine required the same attendance bestowed upon a young infant,” one of his doctors would recall. He could not bend his spine, so, in an effort to avoid bed sores, his large body was rolled from one side to another as often as a hundred times a day, a ritual that required at least three people and the strongest linen sheets the White House could find. Garfield, however, “rarely spoke of his condition,” an attendant wrote, “seldom expressed a want.”

The president’s only complaint was loneliness. Although Garfield appeared to have improved dramatically, Bliss continued to deny him any visitors. For a man who cherished his friends and delighted in long, rambling conversations, this isolation was more painful than anything else he had had to endure. His only link to the outside world was through the one window not obscured by the screens Bliss had placed around his bed. It was the same view