Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “Yes,” said Clara, smiling up at Ira Harris’s graying head.

  “Good. I’ll find you upstairs.”

  Clara was willing to agree that Washington Irving was the greatest man the Hudson Valley had produced, because her papa said so, and she always looked forward to the tales that Ira Harris read in a fine baritone. Her own adolescence was being lived between boys who might themselves be the magnetic poles of a fairy tale. The studious, flaxen-haired Will Harris had had little to do with the dark, choleric Henry since he came into their house three years ago. Right now, in the last available daylight, Henry was out in the orchard with his cousin Howard, batting fallen apples. From her bedroom window Clara watched and listened without making a sound, smoothing the silk cover of a diary that Howard had brought her back from Germany last year, when all the Joel Rathbone family made a six-month tour of the Continent.

  Howard pitched from a supply of apples continually replenished by Henry’s little brother, Jared, who would scamper to the edges of the orchard for armfuls of fruit to lay at his cousin’s feet. Howard would throw the apples toward Henry, who swung a broom handle into them, sending the hard ones sailing high and away, and pulverizing the ones that had gone soft, exploding them into jets of pulp and water. His fourteen-year-old frame was already as strong as a man’s, and whenever he missed a swing, Clara heard the sound of the air being sliced, like the stroke of a handsaw through a block of wood.

  From the moment she saw him six years ago, on the church steps after his father’s funeral, she had wanted him to notice her; during the three years of their parents’ courtship, when the children were never introduced to one another, she had remembered his face, his expression, and had always asked her papa, whenever he came home from Mrs. Rathbone’s, what her eldest son had said or done. After the wedding and the decision to move the Harrises into the Rathbone house on Eagle Street, she knew that Henry looked upon their coming as an invasion. She could see him, still disapproving, when Ira Harris crossed the threshold into Mayor Rathbone’s old bedroom, or picked up a carving knife with the Rathbone monogram, or just took down one of the books in the mayor’s library. Henry had taken the arrival of Clara’s younger sisters as an irritant, a feminine smothering. Within the family this reaction was regarded as comic, just a case of a boy being a boy. But in observing Henry’s discomfort, Clara had taken pains to differentiate herself from the rest of the girls, using the chief advantage she had, her age, to treat him in a way that Louise and Amanda couldn’t. She would mother him a little, straighten his tie, smooth his cowlick, brush a speck of lint from his pretty face, ask him if he remembered to pack his paper and nibs when he went out the door to school in the morning.

  Gradually, he came to depend on her as someone who seemed to understand him, though to her he was like a magic-lantern slide she could never keep in focus very long. In the evenings, they were often wordless company to each other, sitting on opposite sides of the dining room table, she with a book and he with the string and sticks and knife he needed to make a model ship. Now that she was seventeen, the rest of the family had begun to make gentle jokes about possible suitors, which she disliked, but which Henry made thrilling one night by declaring, “Anyone who comes calling on Clara will have to have my approval.” The remark was considered funny by Will and Amanda — this boy of fourteen laying down the law — but Clara realized it was true: she wouldn’t want any beaux without his approval.

  She was thinking of all these things as she watched the ball game below her window, losing interest in it when Henry wasn’t swinging the stick. At the moment Howard was out of apples. He reached down, found none, and looked around for his young cousin, whose attention had been captured by a squirrel that couldn’t decide whether to head into the orchard or back to the cherry trees along the driveway. Howard smiled, but Henry was annoyed by the boy’s dereliction, and before Jared knew it, the backs of his legs were smarting from a blow delivered by his older brother. He erupted in wails, squatting down and grasping his bare calves, feeling the apple grease left by Henry’s stick. Howard shook his head, and up at her second-story window Clara clasped her book more tightly. “Game’s over,” pronounced Henry, abandoning the stick with a debonair toss. “And it’s Jared’s fault. Now stop whining. You’ll know to pay attention next time.”

  “Come on, Jared,” said Howard. “I’ll help you carve your pumpkin.” Halloween was just a few nights away.

  Henry, left alone, began throwing apples. Gracefully twisting his torso, he sent them into high, lonely arcs over the treetops before they plunged into the darkness of the orchard. Clara watched as they flew, and once, as Henry turned around to take another apple from the ground, he caught sight of her up at the window. He smiled and made a low, beseeching bow, sure the eager reader above him knew the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, which he and his classmates had studied at the Albany Academy. To tease her further, he fell to one knee and mimed the offering of a bouquet.

  Suddenly, for the first time tonight, Henry saw Ira Harris, who had stepped out onto the back porch of the house. He was giving his stepson a puzzled, discomfited look, but after turning to look up at the window, he chose to say only, “I’ll be up in a moment, Clara.” Henry nodded to him before disappearing into the orchard.

  Ira Harris went as promised to his daughter’s room and together they read some pages of the Sketch Book. More than an hour passed before he kissed her good night and went back down to his study to answer Mr. Fillmore’s letter. Throughout the storytelling, Clara had stolen glances out the window, looking for a sign of Henry. Now, after getting into her nightgown, she propped herself up on the windowsill and leaned out into the darkness. But still, the only face she saw was the fiery, cackling one of the jack-o’-lantern Howard had carved for Jared. She watched it flicker until she grew sleepy, and lowered her head to her folded arms on the ledge. She didn’t know how long she had dozed before she heard a low whistling sound, and awoke with a start. The flaming pumpkin had begun to move, was dancing on the night air.

  “I’m the Headless Horseman,” she heard a voice say — a boy’s imitation of an old man.

  She laughed. “Henry, you’re a fool.” He had his jacket pulled up over his head and the jack-o’-lantern riding above it, like a substitute skull.

  “Was that tonight’s tale from Mr. Irving?”

  “No,” she hissed, still laughing. “The Spectre Bridegroom.”

  “He’s dull, dull, dull!” he shouted.

  “Henry, you’ll wake the girls.”

  “Probably wake Will, too. I’m sure he’s already asleep.”

  “If you want to talk, come up here.” She shut the window and smiled, hoping he’d take her invitation. A moment later she heard him on the stairs, knew he had already gone past Papa’s study and was on his way to her.

  He flung open the door and stood there, his jacket once more pulled above his head, the candle he held lighting nothing but the empty space above.

  “Will you stop?” She laughed, taking the candle and pulling down his coat. “There’s no predicting you whenever your mother’s gone away.”

  “Well, you can’t be my mother, too,” he said, flopping down on the bed but keeping his boots off the counterpane. “You’re already my sister, and everyone calls you my cousin.”

  “I’ll be your teacher,” she said. “I think you’re in the mood to be read to. I think you’re envious of me and Papa and Mr. Irving.”

  He pulled the pillow over his head and groaned.

  She laughed again. “All right, no Mr. Irving. The truth is, even Papa wasn’t much in the mood for him tonight. He could hardly stop talking about Mr. Fillmore.”

  “Politicians,” he said with exaggerated disgust.

  “How can you say that?” she scolded. “Your father was a politician of a kind.”

  “Only for a while. He was a merchant, even when he was mayor. He helped put the food on your table.”

  “And we cooked it in a stove made by your u
ncle. That’s what you’re going to tell me next.”

  “That’s right,” said Henry, brightening. “We Rathbones make things.”

  Clara smiled at the manful little “we,” but she could see how serious he was.

  “Politicians don’t make anything,” he said.

  “You’re wrong,” she replied. “They make history.”

  He rolled his eyes over the riddle she’d made of his words, and retaliated with a ball of yarn thrown in her direction. “Good catch!” he cried.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “You’ll wake the dead.”

  “You mean Will.”

  “Henry, stop.” To change the subject, she asked, “Did your father ever read to you?”

  “No. I read to him.”

  “You couldn’t have,” she said. “You were only seven when he passed away.”

  “But I did. While he was sick in bed. I read him the marine lists and the weather tables out of the Evening Journal.”

  Clara could see him concentrating on this memory. She wanted to reach over from her chair and pat him, but then she remembered he was a boy, and only fourteen. He wouldn’t want her to.

  Suddenly he brightened up. “I made some mistakes, but I stumbled through them.”

  She wanted him to talk more, about his father and the hurt he must have felt when still so small, the same hurt she had felt when her mother died. She wanted them to exchange these two stories, which they had never really done since he’d come into the house three years ago, so full of reserve and resentment, so full, she was sure, of a deeper pain, still more fresh and raw than her own.

  “Let’s go out, Clara!” he exclaimed, bringing himself upright on the bed.

  “Where? It’s long since dark.”

  “Come on,” he said, tossing her her shawl and taking her hand. “We’ll go for a walk in the woods. The leaves are already thick on the ground. Like a carpet.”

  “But everyone’s —”

  He pulled on her arm and dragged her after him, through the door and down the stairs, both of them stifling giggles as they passed Judge Harris’s study and noticed candlelight through a crack in the door. “He’s writing old Fillmore, I’ll bet,” whispered Henry. The two of them crossed the threshold out of the house and began to run, past the jack-o’-lantern Henry had set down on the porch, out onto the grass, past the cherry trees along the driveway, and finally into the orchard, where each of them took a great gulp of the mulchy air. In the dark, Henry took her hand. She looked at her stepbrother’s silhouette and wondered if he was feeling happy now, even smiling. He was taller than she, and with the moonlight blocked by the treetops it was easy to think he was older, too, a real young man. The rustle of leaves beneath their feet made her want to keep running, so she squeezed his fingers and the two of them laughed and began to race, hand in hand, away from her father’s house and deeper into the woods.

  IN THE YEARS before the Civil War, Clara Harris became well acquainted with Southern girls and boys without ever traveling below New York City. It was in Newport — in those days summer home to more Southern planters than Northern millionaires — that she got to know girls like Sybil Bashford, from Camden, South Carolina, with whom she was now, late in August 1854, finishing an unpleasant walk along Bailey’s Beach. Sybil had just turned eighteen, and was not about to let anyone forget that last summer she had been left here by her mama to spend the whole year at the Newport Academy. Even at nineteen, Clara simply could not compete with history like this, and she was relieved when the two of them came back in sight of the Ocean House Hotel, where Pauline Harris, looking up from her newspaper, waved them toward the veranda. Sybil immediately abandoned Clara for the company of a young man in a sailor’s cap, leaving her to settle into a wicker chair beside her stepmother. Pauline passed her a sketchpad and pencil and went on reading her paper.

  Most of the other adults on the hotel porch favored Town Topics and the Newport Mercury, even if these publications were written mostly for year-round residents who professed alarm (and kept quiet about their financial satisfaction) over the growing number of summer cottagers and hotel guests. More than sixty houses had been built this past winter alone, one of them by Sybil Bashford’s father. Pauline Harris — who owned no home in Newport, but each year took one or two of the Harris girls with her to the Ocean House — preferred reading the Providence Journal. She wished to know what was happening on the contested landscapes of Kansas and the Crimea, not just the lawns of Bellevue Avenue. The newly founded Republican Party was a matter of special interest to her — and one she wished her husband would regard more carefully. Ira Harris was, to Pauline’s way of thinking, far too complacent about the imminent demise of the Whigs. If he didn’t take care, he would find himself without a party and a future. He might take Pauline’s advice about keeping his relations with Thurlow Weed in good repair, but to the broader movements of this turbulent decade he seemed resigned, as if large matters of destiny were impervious to manipulation by individuals. In contrast, Pauline was sure that, however wild a ride it might take him on, history offered a man its reins, to pull or slacken while he set the course. She could see her husband’s measure of vanity, and was glad he possessed it; she only wished it would overwhelm his dignity, which made him sit and wait for the advancement he was ashamed to pursue.

  Ambitious for him and her two sons, and pleased by the little girl she and Ira had created themselves, Pauline found herself uninspired by the band of stepchildren she had acquired with her second marriage. Her relations with Will were cordial but more or less irrelevant, and with the Harris girls she had settled into a sort of chaperonage. Her presence was friendly, authoritative, and rarely emotional. In the six years she had been Clara’s stepmother, scarcely a scene or secret had arisen between them. Her own sons spoke to her in a way outsiders found curiously intimate, but she remained a sort of endlessly visiting aunt to the three Harris girls, whose memories of their real mother had begun to fade.

  At this moment there was nothing Clara could say about her walk with Sybil Bashford that might compete for interest with the front-page columns of the Providence Journal, and Pauline was untouched by guilt. “There’s a letter from Henry you might want to read,” she said, pointing to a little stack of envelopes on the wicker table between their chairs, glad there was something besides the sketchpad to keep her stepdaughter occupied now that her friend had run off.

  Clara reached toward the pile out of reflex obedience and a measure of real excitement. Each letter had an Albany postmark — daily communications from her kind and dutiful papa — except for a single Schenectady one, the first letter she’d seen from Henry since his departure for Union College a month before. The words in bold black ink were addressed to Pauline, and reading them gave Clara a thrill of intrusion:

  Dear Mother,

  I have found some pretty good fellows, Hastings and Van Voast, with whom I wrestle and ride. Even amidst the sea breezes of Newport you probably realize that it is too hot to be doing any of this, but these activities seem far more sensible than what we spend the rest of our summer hours doing — reading Tacitus and working Geometry and saying prayers in that stifling chapel. (The Little Wizened One leads us in them like a happy wind-up cricket.) Perhaps I will bear all this more cheerfully in the fall term. Nonetheless, I remain quite unsure that I should be here at all. Ah, the things I do to please my mama.

  When you get back to Albany, you may embrace the Rathbones and give mere regards to the Harrises. While in Newport you may kiss lovely Clara for me.

  Your loving son,

  Henry

  Clara was so agitated by this letter that she couldn’t remember the name of the girl now shyly asking if she minded her taking the chair beside her. No, said Clara, adjusting her own so that she might face Mary Hall — that was it — the daughter of an Episcopal priest in New York City.

  “It’s from my brother,” said Clara, noticing Mary’s interest in the letter she held. “He’s away at college.”
>
  “Oh, that sounds so exciting,” said Mary. “I think even Sybil Bashford might envy having a learned brother.” The two of them shared a laugh against the belle at the other end of the porch. “Could I hear some of it?” asked Mary.

  Clara read her the first paragraph, and was again disturbed by the conspiratorial tone between Henry and his mother. The expressions of frustration with studying in the summertime were understandable, she supposed, but calling Dr. Nott the Little Wizened One, and comparing him to a toy cricket! That would crush Ira Harris. And yet the epithet was used as if Pauline already knew it, perhaps even used it herself, with Henry. At the least, Henry seemed to know that she could be counted on to laugh at this most revered of all the Harris household’s gods. Looking over toward her stepmother, Clara decided she must have been too occupied by events in the newspaper to remember the letter’s containing this terrible reference to Eliphalet Nott.

  At home she often heard Pauline and Henry talking behind a closed door. Clara would stand in the hall, fussing with herself at the mirror, pushing up her brown hair to give herself a higher forehead, admiring the fullness of her breasts and wishing the family lived in a warmer climate, where she might have more occasions to dress them to advantage. But before she could ever hear anything Pauline and Henry were saying, she would grow bored with her attempts at allure, and come away from the mirror, doubly frustrated.

  This letter was such a fraud upon poor Papa. But Clara was conscious of having just perpetrated her own fraud, upon shy Mary Hall. She knew why she hadn’t read the letter’s salutation, and why she’d stopped before the short paragraph containing Henry’s wishes — including the astonishing one that she be kissed. It was that she wanted Mary to think Henry had written this letter not to his mother, who remained too deep in the Providence Journal to hear any of its recitation, but to herself. She wanted to impress Mary and regain confidence after the walk with Sybil, but it was not just a matter of enhancing her status. If Mary Hall and Sybil Bashford had been nowhere around on this summer afternoon, she would still be wishing that Henry had written this sarcastic, flirtatious, and seditious letter just to her and her alone.