Previously in the book: Private Adam Christy, under orders from Secretary of War Stanton, led the Lincolns to the basement of the White House where they would spend the duration of the war. Placing rat traps in a corner of the basement room was the janitor Gabby Zook, ill-equipped for the emotional turmoil about to be thrust upon him.
“That old man gives me the willies,” Neal said to Phebe in a soft voice, but Gabby, across the hall in the furnace room, heard him. He prided himself on his keen sense of hearing almost as much as he prided himself on his intuitive discernment of the human condition.
“He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Phebe said as she continued to chop vegetables.
Gabby smiled as he bent over to place a rat trap near the furnace. He always knew Phebe was a kind soul. Mama, before she died, had told Gabby it was a sin to assume a black person was bad or mean or stupid. No, Gabby had decided soon after he arrived at the Executive Mansion that Phebe was not bad, mean, or stupid. Now as for Neal, on the other hand, Gabby had not made up his mind.
“Think he’s always been like this?” he heard Neal ask Phebe.
“Most likely so,” Phebe replied with a sigh, her chopping more intense.
Gabby hung his head as he retreated further into the furnace room, placing his rat traps along the way. Phebe’s acceptance of Gabby’s current condition as being congenital weighted his soul, because even now he knew things other people did not. For example, he knew the official name of this building was the Executive Mansion; White House was kind of a nickname. Because Phebe did not realize he knew things did not lessen her kindness or intelligence. It only made her, Gabby decided as he coughed back tears, like all the others who thought so lowly of him—and they were all wrong, oh, so very wrong.
As he walked out of the furnace room and entered the next door down the hall, Gabby recalled how his life had been different in Brooklyn, New York, where he had lived with his father, his mother, and his older sister Cordie in a modest brownstone. His early years were filled with happy days of hiding in the corner of his father’s law office on the first floor of their home. The clients were always common workers and immigrants who ill could afford a lawyer when circumstances found them up against local authorities. The Zooks were not wealthy, but they were held in high esteem by their lowly neighbors whose husbands and fathers Zook had saved from prison or financial disaster. It was then Gabby had developed his ability to be still, to fade into the woodwork and take in all that was being said, digesting it so that the information was his own. Gabby also liked to reach up to his father’s bookshelves and randomly select thick texts on subjects ranging from the law to Romantic poetry to integral calculus. The calculus ran a little deep for the boy, but he always enjoyed the challenge. And it was a good thing Gabby did indeed like challenges, because it turned out his life was going to be one challenge after another.
His first came just before his thirteenth birthday, when his father died of influenza. He had contracted it from a family of Irish textile workers whose landlord had sued them to remove their loom from the parlor in which they eked out a living, creating elegant lace much sought after by the wealthy ladies whose estates lined the banks of the Hudson River north of the city. Before he died, however, father Zook won the Irish family’s right to their livelihood. In gratitude, they created a lovely lace pillowcase on which Gabby’s father’s head was laid. Gabby’s keenest memory of that day was the embrace of his father’s brother Samuel, the true success of the Zook family, a top member of his graduating class from the United States Military Academy at West Point. Samuel Zook was already a major, and the family expected him to become a general. He was tall, straight, and very impressive in his pressed blue uniform, Gabby thought, as he looked up at his uncle and felt proud. His eyes scanned the room to see many poorly dressed men and women, including the Irish people, crying softly. Gabby was at once sad to see the tears and pleased his father had had so many friends. He was further saddened to see his mother collapsed on the divan, life seemingly drained from her haggard body. His sister Cordie, seventeen, sturdily built and plain to the eye, enveloped their mother in her strong arms. Gabby remembered smiling when his best friend Joe VanderPyle slowly entered the room, wary of seeing his first corpse in a coffin displayed in a family’s parlor, but determined to comfort his chum.
Walking to Joe, Gabby tentatively stuck out his hand to shake with his friend, since that was what Uncle Sammy had been doing all afternoon, and with his left hand patted Joe’s shoulder, replicating Uncle Sammy’s other gesture.
“Hi,” Gabby said, his eyes staring at the floor.
“Hi,” Joe replied.
“Yeah.”
After a moment of silence, Gabby said, “He’s over there.”
“Who? Your uncle?”
“No—I mean, yeah, he’s here. In his uniform. He looks like a huckleberry above a persimmon. See?” Gabby stepped aside and pointed to Samuel.
“Yeah. I wish my uncle was a major.”
“Yeah.” Gabby looked down and then chose his words carefully. “No; what I meant was, my pa is over there.” He nodded toward the plain coffin.
“Oh.” Joe stiffened. “Have you looked at him?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t look different than before. He just looks like he’s asleep.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want to see him?”
“All right.”
Gabby led his friend through the crowd. Just before reaching the casket, Joe stopped and gripped his sleeve.
“Gabby?”
“Yeah?”
“Were you scared? To look at him, I mean?”
“No. It’s just pa.”
“You’re braver than me.” Joe shook his head. “I ain’t seen a dead body.”
“You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”
“I’m your friend.” Joe straightened his shoulders. “I should look because that’s what friends do.”
“Then you’re braver than me.”
“What?”
“To do something you’re not afraid of isn’t brave. Doing something that scares you, that’s brave.”
“Oh.” Joe smiled. “Thanks.” He glanced at the coffin again. “I want to look now.”
Standing in the billiards room, gray-haired Gabby shook his head and laughed. He knew he had lied that day to his friend about being afraid. When the casket first arrived at the house that morning, Gabby’s mother gently pushed him toward it to make him look at his father’s corpse. It was only after an hour of gazing at the cold countenance that Gabby had become comfortable, but he did not want to tell Joe that. He wanted his friend to feel braver than him, and that helped him feel brave.
Looking around him, Gabby sighed. He bemoaned the fact that he had no need to be brave now, and no need to be brave when catching rats. Counting the traps thrown across his arm, Gabby saw he had three left, and placed one under the worn but elaborate billiards table and another in the fireplace before deciding to place the last behind a stack of barrels and crates in the far corner.
Bending over behind the barrels and crates, Gabby thought how his new life, living in a boardinghouse in the nation’s capital with sister Cordie, was pleasant enough.
He heard, or thought he heard, a hushed voice out in the hall say, “Quickly.”
Life was not as good as in New York, but not as bad as he had feared when Cordie said their father’s money was gone, and they had had to sell the brownstone and move. Uncle Samuel, now a general, arranged a job for Gabby in the Executive Mansion. Cordie mended clothes at their boardinghouse and volunteered at the hospital. His teen-aged years had been good in Brooklyn, where he and Joe VanderPyle had laughed and played through their school years. Both enjoyed everything from mathematics and science to literature and music, but exulted in running, jumping, climbing, and swimming. Each was hoping to receive an appointment to West Point, each secretly confident both would make it.
On his knees, looking down at the trap and at his spreading belly, Gabby touched his cheeks, now sagging, his eyes now surrounded by wrinkles, and his mouth now jerking in constant, silent conversations, and wondered what had happened to his dreams. No, he knew what had happened to his dreams, but he did not want to think about those tragedies, for they had destroyed him and cast him into a frightening world of brief, precious moments of clarity and long, disturbing periods of confusion, anxiety, and fantasy.
Gabby was on the verge of tears, which he often was when he allowed himself to dwell upon what was and what could have been, when the billiards room door opened, causing him to jump and hover behind the barrels and crates, shivering over the iron trap, as though he were a rat himself.