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the clutter or even the smell, but he could not ignore the heat. For a man who suffered blinding headaches brought on by heat, spending the hottest days of summer in Washington, D.C., was excruciating. The summer before, he had complained that his “headache has taken root in my left eye and is flourishing!” Even when he could not bear the sound of a slamming door or ringing telephone, however, he had refused to stop working. “Alec says he would rather die than leave work,” his exasperated wife had written to his mother.

So engrossed had Bell become in his work that he had little time to think about anything else, even his wife, who was pregnant and miserable in sweltering Boston. After not writing to her for more than a week, he apologized for his “epistolary silence,” but then quickly lapsed back into it. Mabel, on the other hand, wrote frequently—both to Bell and about him. “Alec says he is well and bearing the heat well,” she wrote to her mother. “Still I shall be glad to have him home again and his work accomplished. I fear he won’t have the rest he so much needs after all.”

Mabel understood the importance of her husband’s work, but she also knew that he would literally work himself to death before he would give up. She had seen him sick with worry and determination too many times before, and it frightened her to know that this invention, and the good it could accomplish, meant as much to him as anything he had ever done. “I want to know how you are personally,” she wrote to Alec a few days after he had left for Washington. “I fancy you are so eager and excited that you don’t feel the heat as you otherwise would. Only for my sake do take care and don’t wear yourself all out. I … would think the President’s life a poor exchange for yours.”

• CHAPTER 18 •

“KEEP HEART”

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written

upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

While Mabel’s anxiety for her husband grew, Lucretia’s fears for James slowly began to ease. As the weeks passed and the president, whom few had believed would survive the first night, lived on, clear-eyed and cheerful if too weak even to sit up, the sharp terror that had seized her began to loosen its grip. “I hope the dangers are nearly passed,” she wrote to a friend on July 14. “My heart is full of gratitude … so full that I have no words wherewith to express it.” By late July, she had settled into a nervous but steady vigilance. Although she continued to spend the greater part 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,