Lincoln by Gore Vidal

at home; worked when he needed money; enjoyed himself in ways that would have caused his mother distress, but then she was, as Sal always said, a saint; and saints suffer.
    Mr. Thompson emerged from the back room. He was a cheery man who wore thick glasses with tiny metal frames. He had been related, somehow, to David’s father. But then David was related to half the town: the lower half, Annie liked to say, as she thought of the Surratts of Surrattsville as being gentry, which they were not: just farm folk with a bit of money, in Mrs. Herold’s phrase.
    “Well, David, are you prepared to enter man’s estate?” Mr. Thompson’s concern in the past had been with David’s entirely undisguised lack of seriousness about work of any kind.
    “Yes, sir. I’m ready to go to work now, and settle down and everything.” Even as David said this with perfect insincerity, he felt as if a prison door was swinging shut on him. He was only eighteen; he had never been anywhere, or done anything exciting; now he was to go to work as prescription clerk for the rest of his life in a shop just across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Treasury building and just around the corner from Willard’s, where the grandees made love to their beautiful women and drank at the long bar and made fortunes at cards and dice and politics, unaware that just up the street David Herold, slave, was at work, filling prescriptions for them, nine hours a day, five-and-a-half days a week, with Sunday off to catch up on all that he had missed during the rest of the week. David felt the tears come to his eyes. Surely, something or someone would save him at the last minute. No young man in any play that he had ever seen had ended up like this.
    “All right, Davie. We’ll start you in today. You’re to be here at seven o’clock every morning. I’ll give you a key. Then you let Elvira in at seven-fifteen …” Elvira appeared from the back room. She grunted when she saw David; who grunted back. Elvira was not given to human speech.
    “I wondered, sir, if I could start tomorrow? You see, I’m supposed to help out at the Union Ball tonight, as a waiter.” David was a quick and adroit liar. He had learned how to lie partly from the actors whose work he had studied so carefully but mostly from his sisters on the subject of their beaux. Between what they said of the young men behind their backs and to their faces, there was a stunning gap. When David would taunt them, they would laugh at him; and tell him to mind his own business, which he was perfectly glad to do.
    “Well, it is a
half
holiday today.” Mr. Thompson was agreeable. “So you can work through the morning and then help me close up at noon, and still get to listen to Mr. Lincoln.”
    “I can’t say that I care to all that much.”
    “Now, now, Davie. He’s the President, after all.”
    “Jefferson Davis is
our
President.”
    Mr. Thompson frowned and smiled. “Now let’s have no secesh talk in this shop. It does damage to my digestion—and business.”
    “But you ain’t Union, Mr. Thompson. You’re from Virginia, like us.”
    “What I may be in my heart of hearts, Davie”—Mr. Thompson was now solemn—“I keep to myself, and I suggest you do the same because of our numerous distinguished customers.”
    “Mr. Davis was one of your customers?”
    “One of my
best
customers, poor man. I’ve never known anyone to suffer so much from that eye condition of his. He’ll be blind by the summer, I said to Dr. Hardinge, if you don’t change the prescription. But you can’t tell Doctor Hardinge anything. On my own, I gave Mr. Davis belladonna to stop the pain—”
    “So then he
is
your President.”
    “If I were in business in Montgomery, Alabama, yes, he would be. But I am here—with my loved ones—in a shop at Fifteenth and Pennsylvania Avenue, and I am the official unofficial pharmacist for the presidents of the United States and as I looked after Mr. Buchanan and Miss Lane—she’ll