Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [52]
Finally able to express herself in a letter, Lucretia still struggled to show physical affection, and Garfield’s frustration deepened until he confessed that he had grave doubts about their marriage. “It seemed a little hard to have you tell me … that you had for several months felt that it was probably a great mistake that we ever tried married life,” Lucretia wrote to James while he was in Columbus, working in the state senate, and she was home, expecting their first child. “I am glad you are coming home so soon, but you must come with a light face, or the shadow of those hours of terrible suffering, which are so surely and steadily coming upon me, will steal over me with its chill of death.”
Not even Trot, whose birth in 1860 brought James and Lucretia joy, and whose death, just three years later, knit them in a shared grief, could help them overcome their differences. The divide that had always separated them continued to widen until, in 1864, Garfield nearly destroyed any hope they had ever had of happiness together. In the spring of that year, he had an affair with a young widow named Lucia Gilbert Calhoun. He had met her in New York, where she was a reporter for the New York Tribune, and they had fallen in love, the kind of love he had for so long yearned to feel for Lucretia.
A month after meeting Lucia, James went home to Ohio and confessed the affair. Although angry and heartbroken, Lucretia forgave him, demanding only that he end the relationship immediately. Garfield agreed. He was certain he was walking away from his one chance at real love, but he was deeply ashamed of his infidelity. “I believe after all I had rather be respected than loved if I can’t be both,” he wrote sadly. He thanked Lucretia for her “brave words of good sense,” adding, “I hope when you … balance up the whole of my wayward self, you will still find, after the many proper and heavy deductions are made, a small balance left on which you can base some respect and affection.”
Garfield feared that, in the wake of his confession, Lucretia would lose all faith in him. Instead, his own feelings began to change. As he watched her bravely endure the pain and heartbreak that he had caused, Garfield suddenly saw Lucretia in a new light. She was not cold and unreachable but strong, steady, and resilient. Slowly, he began to fall in love with his wife.
As the years passed, Garfield’s love for Lucretia grew until it eclipsed any doubts he had ever had. His letters, which once alternated between terse, cold replies and painfully honest confessions, were now filled with passionate declarations of love. Lucretia was finally the object of James’s “gushing affection.” “We no longer love because we ought to, but because we do,” he wrote to her one night from Washington. “The tyranny of our love is sweet. We waited long for his coming, but he has come to stay.” A few months later, he again poured out his heart to her. “I here record the most deliberate conviction of my soul,” he wrote. “Were every tie that binds me to the men and women of the world severed, and I free to choose out of all the world the sharer of my heart and home and life, I would fly to you and ask you to be mine as you are.”
During the Republican convention, Garfield missed Lucretia desperately. “You can never know how much I need you during these days of storm,” he wrote to her just days before his nomination. “Every hour I want to go and state some case to your quick intuition. But I feel the presence of your spirit.” When he won the nomination, the first thing he did after making his escape from the convention hall was to send Lucretia a telegram. It said simply: “Dear wife, if the result meets your approval, I shall be content.”
By the time Garfield became president, Lucretia was completely confident of his love for her. For years, she had waited at home for him, asking when he would return, wondering