Mary, in a letter to the painter Francis Carpenter, recalled the boy’s “always unearthly” nature. “He was too good for this earth,” Lincoln remarked. After his death, both mother and father tended to view him as having been a sort of extraterrestrial visitor. Willie’s fairness of face and sweetness of disposition made him his parents’ darling. “Well, Nicolay,” a weeping Lincoln said to one of his secretaries on the afternoon of the twentieth, “my boy is gone-he is actually gone.” Four days after that, Willie’s body lay in the Green Room, next door to where Lincoln’s and, eventually, Kennedy’s would lie. Signs of improvement several days later engendered only false hope. On the evening of February 5th, the Lincolns had shuttled between his upstairs sickbed and the East Room. The boy had been seriously ill, probably from typhoid fever, for more than two weeks. Amid a clamor of national pride, the President quietly observed, “I have just been watching your father and mother on television, and they seemed very happy.” A hundred years earlier, almost to the hour, the set of parents then occupying the White House, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, were being plunged into an extreme grief by the death of their third son, Willie, who was eleven years old. Kennedy was on the phone congratulating John Glenn, who had just completed three orbits of Earth. Another eerie conjunction belongs to February 20th, which delivered to the White House, on two occurrences a century apart, some of the keenest joy and deepest sorrow to enter the building.Īt 4:10 P. Seekers of Presidential frisson cherish the synchronous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, on July 4, 1826, a temporal thrill doubled by the date’s being the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
Saunders, in his début novel, boldly enters the psyche of our sixteenth President.
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