Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  Though it was unclear whether Reverend Sweetman, class of 1797, had actually finished speaking, he was now being led away from the pulpit, never losing the seraphic smile that had illuminated his old, unperspiring face throughout his long oration, during which the assembled men of Union sweated through their collars and tried to catch any breeze made by the ladies’ fans. The congregants could only hope that Alonzo Potter, ’18, the just-named bishop of Pennsylvania now coming to the lectern, a man whose expression bespoke more ambition than beatitude, would be quicker about the business of collegial gratitude.

  “That no college,” said Dr. Potter, “can claim credit for all the merit of its children is certain; but the concurrent judgment of mankind must be greatly at fault if such seminaries do not exert immense and almost unequaled influence on the foundation of character.” Ira Harris, whom Union College had certainly helped make into a good man, listened attentively straight through to the bishop’s benediction, and then gave Pauline Rathbone his right arm. They rose from the bench and made their way out of the church, on whose steps, in the hot sunlight, stoically indifferent to the coats and dresses sweeping past him, waited young Henry Reed Rathbone, the eldest of Pauline’s two surviving sons.

  “Well, Henry,” said Ira Harris, “in nine years’ time, if your mother is so inclined, you can be a Union man yourself. If I calculate correctly, Dr. Nott will be presiding over his fiftieth commencement just as you’re entering the gates. A great summer that will be.” Harris tapped Henry’s shoulder and attempted to read the boy’s expression. The child was looking up at his mother, as if trying to see whether she regarded Mr. Harris’s suggestion as complimentary or presumptuous.

  Pauline Rathbone’s face evinced nothing but delight. “That would be splendid,” she said, looking first at Harris and then at Henry. “Dr. Nott is one of our greatest educators,” she informed her son. “What a wonderful thing it would be for you to learn from him. Just look, Henry, right over there. That’s Dr. Nott himself, isn’t it, Mr. Harris?”

  “Indeed it is, Mrs. Rathbone,” said her escort. The little president, whose white hairs stuck out from under his high hat, was trying to break through a circle of handshaking well-wishers and begin the short walk that the emerging throng would now make to the college grounds. “I’ve always been happy to be led by Dr. Nott,” said Ira Harris. “Shall we follow his lead now?” Pauline Rathbone flung back her head in determined appreciation of her companion’s wit, and nudged her son forward with her free hand.

  Harris was surprised by Mrs. Rathbone’s energy, the spirit she seemed able to summon so soon after her loss. It put her in high contrast to her silent son. The two of them walked on different sides of Harris’s tall, manly figure, near the front of the chattering procession making its way to Union’s main gates. Keeping a protective eye on Dr. Nott’s bobbing hat, Ira Harris recalled the most powerful speech he’d ever heard him give, the Phi Beta Kappa address twenty-one years before, when Harris, ranking first in his class, had sat at the head of the table of initiates. What an extraordinary talk it had been, with Dr. Nott speculating on the very “inhabitability of the planets.” The young men had sat open-mouthed as that endlessly inquisitive man, who even then had the ancient aspect of a wizard, declared that “discovery will go on until the worlds are put in communication, and mutual signalings are made from every part of God’s kingdom.” Twenty years later, as word of Morse’s telegraph spread, Harris had shivered with the memory of Dr. Nott’s suggestive prophecies. No, he had never heard a speech to equal it, not in twenty years of law school lectures and bar association meetings and legislative debates.

  Nor would he this afternoon, as the roster of speakers went on and on under the hot sun. Governor Wright threatened to be interminable, and now, after dinner under the great broiling canopy, as the supper dishes were cleared, Mr. Spencer of Albany, head of the festivities, repeated motifs from the day’s long rhetorical music: “The subjects of study have been so selected as to prepare men, not for the cloister, not for the retired literary life, but for the world — a world of wonderful activity and enterprise, where passion and interest stimulate to the utmost tension of energy.”

  Actually, thought Ira Harris, looking around the table at his contemporaries, the world was now a much less rough-and-tumble place than what they had left dear Union to enter twenty years ago. On the whole, this new world was to his liking. Gone were the foolishly tight red and blue jackets they’d sported as young fellows; everyone in this accomplished throng now wore a dignified black coat. And one would be hard put to find any of them eating with their knives, as they would have back in the twenties. No, the fork’s civilizing triumph was complete, just as the nation pushed toward a second ocean and telegraphy promised eventual communication with those other men on other planets.

  Pauline Rathbone’s thoughts, taking place behind the vivacious, attentive gaze she granted every speaker, were at this hour strictly microcosmic, centered upon the nearby city of Albany and the scenes she had so recently played on its social stages. Being surrounded today by all this male accomplishment made her miss Mr. Rathbone’s political dinners at the Eagle Tavern; the balls at Stanwix Hall; the four o’clock dinners in the house of every great merchant in the city; even prize day at the Albany Academy, when she, the mayor’s wife, would bestow the penmanship award. Mr. Rathbone’s vitality and ambition had been marvelous to her: nearly fifty-five at his sudden death, he always gave the impression of a man ten years younger, whereas Mr. Harris, who at forty-three (she had inquired) was ten years younger than Mr. Rathbone, looked, for all his fine frame and full crop of hair, rather older than her husband had done. But he was still a rising man — new to the state assembly, and thought a likely prospect for the upper chamber or a judgeship or even something beyond that. This was the essential thing to ponder, and as Dr. Nott began his climactic remarks, Pauline swelled with excitement over the achievements of men in the civic arena.

  In a voice amazingly strong for his years, the president hit his oratorical stride: “Preceding generations bequeathed to us a noble inheritance — and shall we not add something to that inheritance, ere it be left to those who shall come after us?” The assembled graduates leaned toward him with renewed attention.

  “Yes, Henry,” whispered Pauline to her young son, who throughout the day’s long proceedings had sat nearly wordless between her and Mr. Harris. “You shall be a Union man.” The boy just nodded as he stared straight ahead, letting his mother know this was nothing he looked forward to. But his impassivity could not quench the high spirits of Pauline Rathbone, who a second before squeezing her son’s hand had decided that she would marry Ira Harris.

  LOUISE AND AMANDA HARRIS were scarcely heard as they shrieked, at the top of their little girls’ lungs, over the sight they could see from the dining room window of the Delavan hotel. Jared Rathbone, four years old, was outside chasing a frightened pig, one of the roaming thousands that kept down the garbage on Albany’s streets. He nearly had it by the tail, and the closer he got, the louder Louise and Amanda cried with disgust and delight.

  The army of wedding-breakfast guests were making too much social din to notice. Judge Harris, on the other side of the huge room, was having trouble finding his new wife, who had organized this party on a scale that astonished him. Pauline had been a widow for more than three years, so there was no reason she couldn’t arrange for festivities that were actually festive, but this was beyond any of Harris’s expectations. Instead of having something at home on Eagle Street, or in the more modest Albion Hotel, she’d chosen this great place on Broadway, which seemed hardly large enough for all the people with whom she’d filled it. On Harris’s right, a large lady in a green silk dress was speaking loudly to a gentleman squeezed up against her other side, talking about the latest boy the papers were reporting killed by Niagara Falls. She was practically shouting the details — the naked body, the crushed forehead. The gentleman she had cornered nodded and smiled, appealing for rescue
from Ira Harris, who knew neither of the parties in this conversation but assumed them to be some of the dozens of Rathbones. Harris was too busy looking for Pauline to help the man.

  There she was, chatting with Erastus Corning and Reverend Welch, who an hour ago had performed the marriage at the Pearl Street Baptist Church. She was still in her bonnet and clutching her violets, pretty as a picture in her powder-blue dress, unwilling to don the old maroon mourning they used to stuff widows into. He needed her now, for something important. If he could only catch her eye.

  During the past three years, Pauline Rathbone had rarely let herself lose sight of Ira Harris. The rising man she spotted at the time of their mutual bereavement had quickly passed from the assembly to the state senate and onto the supreme court of New York; for one thrilling month not long ago, it had even appeared as if he might be nominated for governor. But the judge had been slower about matters of the heart. Season after season he had gone on raising his four children by himself, aided only by a housekeeper. He continued to escort Pauline Rathbone to one social function after another, but the question of an alliance never quite arose. Did he imagine the acquisition of her own sons would push his household toward levels of noise and bustle for which even the addition of a mother would not compensate? Certainly the financial considerations weighed favorably with him — or did they? Did the prospect of marrying into the piles of Rathbone money Pauline had inherited embarrass his sense of manhood?

  It had taken Mr. Fillmore — thank goodness for his arrival on the scene! — to move matters forward. Late this spring, before General Taylor selected him to run for Vice President, the former congressman had been with the judge at a Whig dinner in Albany. When he heard that Ira Harris was slowly courting Pauline Pinney, one of the Pinneys from his home city of Buffalo, the happily married Fillmore boisterously asked the cautious widower what he was waiting for. And so: the morning after he’d been clapped on the back at the Eagle Tavern, Ira Harris walked around to Pauline Pinney Rathbone’s door and asked for her hand in marriage.

  In the weeks since, things had moved with a swiftness matching Niagara Falls’. This morning she had been given away by her former brother-in-law, Joel Rathbone, so rich from manufacturing stoves that he had retired from business seven years ago at the age of thirty-five. He was the greatest man here, she believed, even if one put Mr. Corning, Dr. Nott, and Thurlow Weed into the reckoning.

  Mr. Weed, the editor of the Albany Evening Journal, was only one of the political men she had made sure was here this morning. All of her late husband’s colleagues from the city government were present, too, along with the friends he’d acquired long before, while making his fortune as a wholesale grocer. Add to all these the swarms of Rathbones, and the Harris clan. Ira’s young son, Will, so prematurely judicious, so unnaturally obedient, seemed to her particularly lacking in spirit. There he was, just ten years old, listening dutifully to his uncle Hamilton, another lawyer, as the rest of the room shook with singing and laughter and the feet of children running between tables laden with food. The Rathbone boys provided a contrast that she was proud to note. Little Jared had run off on his own, while Henry and his cousin Howard, thirteen-year-old son of the masterly Joel, were swallowing pastries, balancing crockery, and teasing girls who’d come up on steamboats from as far downriver as Poughkeepsie.

  Ira had been doing his best to introduce everyone to everyone else, a process complicated by his own formality and the fact that so many of those he was presenting to others were unknown to himself. Right now — she’d just seen him waving to her — he seemed to have something important on his mind. He had his hands on the shoulders of his daughter Clara — what was she, thirteen? — and he was making a gesture to indicate that Pauline should come toward them and bring Henry with her. While collecting her son from a table piled high with pudding, she thought about how during the last three years she had taken care to keep her boys in the background; they had yet to meet their new stepfather’s own children.

  “Henry,” said Ira Harris when the boy came face to face with his daughter, “this is Clara.”

  With the polish that so pleased his mother, Henry smiled and extended his hand to the girl, at which point Pauline noticed that her eleven-year-old son’s thumb was wearing the wedding ring Mr. Rathbone had presented to her years before, and which at home this morning, keeping with custom, she had removed. Uncertain of what to do with it, she had, during the carriage ride to the church, presented it to Henry as a memento of his father.

  Clara, who took the boy’s hand without removing her gaze from his eyes, seemed confused enough even without seeing the ring.

  “Are you my brother?” she asked.

  Ira Harris, who was seeing some carefully delivered paternal explanation come apart, looked flustered. Pauline smiled and patted Clara’s curls. “Think of Henry as your cousin, darling.” She looked at her new husband and flashed the sort of smile she knew would please him. “Let’s defeat complexity with inaccuracy,” she said.

  THE UNITED Harrises and Rathbones had trouble fitting under one roof. Jared Rathbone’s old house at the corner of Eagle and State streets, into which the judge moved his family after marrying Pauline, was a large affair, but it teemed like a beehive on nights when all the boys and girls doubled up in its small bedrooms. Even the judge’s farmhouse in Loudonville was barely big enough to hold all the children.

  On the last Friday evening of October 1851, the city house was empty. Pauline had taken Amanda Harris and Lina, the baby girl she and the judge had unexpectedly produced together, down to Kenwood, Joel Rathbone’s great estate south of the city. They would spend the weekend there, while out in Loudonville Judge Harris presided over his other daughters, his son Will, and the Rathbone boys. At twilight he and Will made the short journey over the plank road out of Albany, and upon arriving, Will ran into the house full of excitement. “Father has a letter from Mr. Fillmore,” he said to Clara, pompously setting the White House stationery on a table near Pauline’s sewing basket, which Clara and Louise had been organizing. Louise seemed uncertain who Millard Fillmore actually was and what he had to do with Papa. Clara, now seventeen, knew exactly how he’d become President when General Taylor died two summers ago, and she reminded her younger sister that they’d met the handsome, white-haired President at Papa’s wedding.

  But Papa himself was all that mattered to Clara right now, and she rushed out to his carriage to greet him. “My darling,” he said, dropping a satchel of legal papers to embrace his favorite daughter. They walked back to the house and into the parlor, where Will was again poring over Mr. Fillmore’s letter. Clara hoped it contained good news, since lately she had noticed that whenever talk in the house turned to politics or Mr. Weed or the state of the country, her papa seemed troubled and her stepmother impatient.

  In truth, Mr. Fillmore’s letter contained little more than the courteous greetings of a genial man, one who remained friendly toward his old friend Ira Harris despite all provocations from “the Dictator” — Fillmore’s former patron and Harris’s present one, Thurlow Weed. The falling-out of Weed and Fillmore had begun as soon as the latter became Vice President — a position he owed, everyone felt, to Mr. Weed, who soon took offense at Fillmore’s assertiveness over the spoils of office. When President Taylor died — after drinking too much iced milk on a hot Fourth of July — the quarrel over patronage evolved into a war of principle. Thurlow Weed adopted the antislavery views of his most promising protégé, Senator Seward, the man he now hoped to make President, causing a rift with those Whigs who backed Fillmore’s efforts to enforce last year’s great Compromise, which might ensure the survival of slavery but would at least preserve the Union.

  Judge Harris had been triply distressed by these developments. Temperamentally, he was with Mr. Fillmore, a man more interested in respect than power; morally, he was with Mr. Seward, whose boldness in citing God’s “higher law” against slavery was something Harris himself could never have managed; and poli
tically, he seemed to be nowhere at all. Mr. Weed, who had been so attracted by the abilities he displayed in the legislature, had cooled toward him: the more brilliant Seward now claimed the Dictator’s attentions, while Harris, taken care of with a seat on the court, was more or less forgotten, except on those occasions when the editor of the Evening Journal needed a special favor, and Harris, rather to his shame, was willing to provide it.

  Clara could sense that Pauline Harris’s frustrations were even greater than her husband’s. Not long ago she had heard her stepmother remark to one of her Rathbone in-laws, who was standing right beside Ira Harris, “Alas, there isn’t much supremacy to the supreme court.”

  Now Ira Harris asked Clara, “Have you and Louise had your supper?”

  “Yes, Papa. We ate with the boys.”

  “Where are they now?” asked the judge.

  “Out near the orchard, playing ball.”

  “Well, my lady,” said Ira Harris, relaxing a bit now that everyone was accounted for, “as soon as I get cook to feed me and Will, perhaps you and I can read a little of Mr. Irving together. Would that suit you?”