Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [53]
For Garfield, Lucretia had become the “life of my life,” and as he now sat by her bed in the White House, watching as her temperature steadily climbed, he realized with a helpless desperation that he could do nothing to save her. She was “the continent, the solid land on which I build all my happiness,” he had once told her. “When you are sick, I am like the inhabitants of countries visited by earthquakes. They lose all faith in the eternal order and fixedness of things.”
On the night of May 10, after Lucretia had been moved to a room on the north side of the house, “to get her further from the river air,” Garfield sat with her until 4:00 a.m. A few hours later, news of her illness appeared in the newspapers, stirring dark memories of President John Tyler’s wife, Letitia, who had died in the White House less than forty years earlier. “I am sorry to say that I have grave fears about Mrs. Garfield,” James Blaine’s wife, Harriet, wrote to her daughter. “She is very sick, and after hearing exactly how she is, I confess I am very uneasy.”
Garfield could think of nothing but Lucretia. “I refused to see people on business,” he wrote in his diary on May 11. “All my thoughts center in her, in comparison with whom all else fades into insignificance.” Having buried two children, he knew far too well the devastation of losing someone he loved. After Trot’s death, he had been so paralyzed with grief that he had nearly left Congress. “I try to be cheerful, and plunge into the whirlpool of work which opens before me,” he had confided to a friend, “but it seems to me I shall never cease to grieve.”
Every day, Garfield consulted with the group of doctors he had gathered around Lucretia. They had come to the conclusion that she was suffering from a combination of exhaustion and malaria. Sixteen years before malaria was finally traced to mosquitoes, Lucretia’s doctors did not know what caused the disease, but they did have ways to fight it. They gave her “fever powders,” presumably quinine, which had been used to treat malaria in the West since the early 1600s, and bathed her with alcohol and ice water. As Lucretia’s fever worsened, rising ominously 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