He'll be fine, Molly. City Point's away back from the front lines, and fighting, he'll be an adjutant running messages for General Grant.
The war will take our son! A sniper, or a shrapnel shell. Or typhus, same as took Willie, it takes hundreds of boys a day! He'll die, uselessly, and how will I ever forgive you? Most men, their firstborn is their favorite. You...you've always blamed Robert for being born, for trapping you in a marriage that's only ever given you grief and caused you regret!
That's simply not true.
And if the slaughter of Cold Harbor is on your hands same as Grant, God help us! We'll pay for the oceans of spilled blood you've sanctioned, the uncountable corpses we'll be made to pay with our son's dear blood.
Just...just this once, Mrs. Lincoln, I demand of you to try and take the liberal and not the selfish point of view! Robert will never forgive himself, can you imagine he'll forgive us if we continue to stifle this very natural ambition?!
[smiles mockingly]
And if I refuse to take the high road, if I won't take up the rough old cross, will you threaten me again with the madhouse, as you did when I couldn't stop crying over Willie, when I showed you what heartbreak, real heartbreak looked like, and you hadn't the courage to countenance it, to help me...
That's right. That's right. When you refused so much as to comfort Tad...
I was in the room with Willie, I was holding him in my arms as he died!
...a child who was not only sick, dangerously sick, but beside himself with grief! Oh, but your grief! Your grief! Your inexhaustible grief!
How dare you throw that up at me?!
And his mother wouldn't let him near her...
I couldn't let Tad in! I couldn't risk him seeing how angry I was! [Mary starts crying]
...'cause she's screaming from morning to night pacing the corridors, howling at shadows and furniture and ghosts! I ought to have done it, I ought have done for Tad's sake, for everybody's Goddamned sake, I should have clapped you in the madhouse!
Then do it!! Do it! Don't you threaten me, you do it this time! Lock me away! You'll have to, I swear, if Robert is killed.
[pauses]
I couldn't tolerate you grieving so for Willie because I couldn't permit it in myself, though I wanted to, Mary. I wanted to crawl under the earth, into the vault with his coffin. I still do. Every day I do. Don't... speak to me about grief. [he pauses again] I must make my decisions, Bob must make his, you yours. And bear what we must, hold and carry what we must. What I carry within me, you must allow me to do it, alone as I must. And you alone, Mary, you alone may lighten this burden, or render it intolerable. As you choose.
