There wasn’t anything in this speech to give a fright to the Harrises’ Irish maids, and as the crowd realized it wouldn’t be thrown the red meat of nativism, its members quieted down. But since the speaker was warning them against national breakup — something far more perilous than the peculiar habits of new arrivals to the American shore — they remained attentive, and Clara took advantage of everyone’s fixed position to make an orderly scan for Henry and Howard. She spotted the latter with his arm around a pretty girl and Henry on the other side of him. After pushing toward them, she tapped Henry on the shoulder from behind and said, “I see who gets Howard’s support.”
Henry turned around, delighted. “What a surprise, Cous’! Have you run away from the familial tomb, or have you converted Judge Harris to the hopeless cause of the Know-Nothings? I must say you were well spoken at the table tonight.” He took hold of her arm and gracefully parted the crowd around them, two by two, until he had steered her back to its edges.
Clara could remember only a handful of occasions in the last eight years when she’d been truly alone with Henry, and though she was hardly alone with him now, the lack of Harrises and Rathbones in the immediate vicinity gave this moment, lit by torches and the moon, such a complete feeling of privacy that she had trouble speaking.
“Must you provoke Papa so?” she finally asked. “You know that he was much more upset than your mother, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, Cous’.” He raised her chin with his hand so her gaze met his. “I also know that he’s your papa. And as for my mama, she can take care of herself.” Seeing he had not yet made her smile, he argued: “Haven’t I pleased him? Spending two years at bloody Union?” A cheer rose behind him as one speaker finished and another took his place. Henry glanced over his shoulder and then, with a smile, back at Clara. “It will soon enough be the only Union left.”
“You don’t really believe that,” she said.
“Oh, yes. It will all go up in flames.” He took his torch and held it under his chin and made a scary face, all bared teeth and flaring eyes. Clara remembered the night with the jack-o’-lantern, years before, and she laughed.
“But what will happen to us?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But more than silly dining room arguments and silly elections like this one. The terrible time of our lives.” His face took on a certain sadness. But he immediately cleared it, like a slate being wiped with a sponge, and put on a joking expression. He stripped off his Fillmore rosette and offered it to Clara like a bouquet.
A YEAR LATER, on the hot morning of July 22, 1857, Clara watched as Henry was graduated from Union College. She sat between Pauline and Will in the front row of spectators, a position accorded them not because of any distinction Henry had achieved during his three years in Schenectady, but as befitting the family of Judge Ira Harris, distinguished member of the class of 1824, who was on the dais and soon to make remarks.
As Pauline looked at the sea of black-robed graduates, she was aware of being on almost the exact spot where twelve years before she had set her widow’s cap for Ira Harris. Their amalgamated sets of children, who took up nearly this entire row, had since grown into adolescence and beyond, and their own Lina was now seven. But how little everything else had changed! Dr. Nott, who had just finished speaking on the wonders of the transatlantic cable, looked just as he had in 1845, neither more nor less ancient. Ira himself was heavier, his hair now completely silver, but he was otherwise much less transformed than she would have imagined a dozen years ago: he was soon scheduled to serve a brief term on the court of appeals — a step above the state supreme court, though it sounded a step below — before resuming his usual seat and the settlement of such dull disputes as managed to get started in Albany County.
Pauline had put on some matronly weight herself, and the heat made her more uncomfortable than it used to. Fanning herself with the program, which promised a long series of student orations on everything from “Modern Chivalry” to “Civil Engineering as a Science and an Art,” she wondered how she would stand it all; Henry’s short speech would not come until almost the end of the long afternoon. She knew, though, that it would be more inspired than the one she was now hearing, her husband’s. Really just a series of quotations from the New York Times’s July 4 editorial — which clung to the idea of “a glowing American nationality” and disbelieved that Northerners and Southerners really hated one another — Judge Harris’s remarks provoked somnolent nods of approval from the crowd. The only man who could possibly object was the Dictator, who would not be pleased to have one of his men retailing from the Times sentiments he might as easily have found in the Albany Evening Journal. Pauline twisted this way and that to see if she could find anyone likely to report back to Mr. Weed on the judge’s performance, though at this point she had to wonder why she even bothered.
Will Harris, on the other side of Clara, nodded vigorously over each paragraph of his father’s rehashings, as if that might inspire the judge to work on his political fortunes the kind of transformation that Will had, over the past year, worked in himself: he had inflated his physique with dumbbells and pulleys, forsaken Greek and the University of Rochester, and prevailed upon the judge to prevail upon the Dictator to prevail upon a pliant congressman to get him admitted to West Point. He had been there for a month, full of new zeal and ambition that, were he Pauline’s son, might have excited her support. As it was, she rather agreed with Henry on the subject of his stepbrother’s metamorphosis: “He’s made his body as hard as his head.”
Clara knew that her papa hadn’t done very well with the crowd, but she put it down to their impatience for what was to follow, the brief appearances of their own sons and brothers. She herself was looking forward to Henry’s performance too much to think about her poor father now. If only there weren’t so many others to sit through first! As the boys went about their stiff oratorical business under the hot sun, they presented a comical aspect to Clara. They might have been a small regiment, all in black uniforms, first one and then another standing up and sitting down, like musketeers daring to fire over the top of a trench and then be shot. The embarrassment of so many of them as they stood on gangly limbs in oversized robes, their manful attempts at whiskers hiding, or not hiding, boyish complexions, endeared them to her. But the dreariness of what they spoke made her glad of her own haphazard education, gained on the window seat in her bedroom with books carried up from her father’s library. Surely she had found more beauty and truth in that manner than these poor boys had found in three years of compulsory lectures.
At last, after a dozen more speeches and two musical interludes, it was time for Henry, who crossed the platform with the casual gait of a beau approaching a dance partner. Without breaking stride, he shook hands with Ira Harris, a gesture that touched Clara and made her wonder if Henry might somehow be ready to put away the animosities he had carried with him into the family ten years ago. He took the podium with a confident smile, and Clara noticed the sun glint off his whiskers and crown, from which his hairline had begun a slight, manly recession.
“The American Idol” was his subject, and it seemed that the object of national veneration he had in mind was, thankfully, good character. He began by quoting Mr. Emerson, surely something that would please Ira Harris and Eliphalet Nott: “We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.” By speaking sentiments such as these, Henry was performing much like those who spoke before him, though Clara took proud note of the way his clear, piercing tenor stirred the air as his predecessors hadn’t managed to.
But within a minute she realized that Henry’s speech was something altogether different; he was bringing up Mr. Emerson not as visionary but as false prophet. By Henry’s reckoning, it was neither dawn nor noon but rather a few minutes before midnight. No recitation of American promise and plenty was forthcoming. Instead, the
audience, increasingly amazed, heard the young man speak of police riots in New York City, polygamy in the Utah Territory, and William Walker’s self-coronation in the jungles of Nicaragua. “We pretend that history is a snake charmer, a piper who will uncoil men’s individual mysteries and set them marching in a straight line toward sunlight and progress. But only at our peril do we think of ourselves as domestic creatures. When we honestly reckon the intractable stirrings within men, we will speak more humbly about the future of Man. We claim the ability to undo history’s repetitions, to turn history into civics, but if we are truthful and if we are strong, we will admit that history’s whirlwinds are not ours to tame. The American Idol is civility, and that idol is shaking in the winds that now besiege the national temple. I look out upon these rows of friends and urge them to pay less heed to the slack tongues of reason and more attention to the gusts gathering behind them: ‘Not in the air shall these my words disperse, / Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak / The deep prophetic fullness of this verse, / And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse!’ ”
It was Lord Byron himself, Clara realized, as Henry took his seat to stunned silence, angry faces, and concerted cheering from a few pockets of the graduating seniors. A quotation from the libertine bard of Childe Harold seemed even more brazen than Henry’s own words, which had left the gray heads on the platform looking like a Roman senate forced to witness a stabbing in the chamber. Clara strained to read the expression on her father’s face, but the distress it must be exhibiting was hidden by the young form of Mr. Abner P. Brush, who had just gotten up to follow Henry’s jeremiad with some brief remarks on “The Scholar, his Trials and Triumphs.”
A susurrus traveled from the gowned graduates to the spectators behind them. It was clear that the boys, who within minutes would cast their votes for the two best speakers, were already fighting among themselves. Small groups swept away by Henry’s icon-smashing were determined, in a carnival spirit, to make a little revolution and bestow one of the Blatchford Medals on him. Clara could feel this happening, just as beside her she could feel Will twitching to put out the anarchic fire Henry had lit. Pauline strained to see the blank ballots being passed into the rows of graduates before poor Mr. Brush had even finished his oration.
The counting was accomplished as degrees were conferred. First prize went to Mr. Daniel W. Richardson of Middleton, Massachusetts, for his remarks on “Freedom of Thoughts,” and second prize to Henry Rathbone, the orator who had unexpectedly carried Mr. Richardson’s bland prescription into distant territory. Though the conventional students got to see their man take top prize, the real victory belonged to Henry’s impulsive party, who had succeeded in conferring one of the college’s honors on a highly unsuitable candidate. Their hurrahing had yet to cease when Dr. Nott began his benediction, sending these newest sons of Union “into the light, to serve their land and Lord.”
With that, the band struck up the alma mater. The black pool of graduates dissolved into the parti-colored one of friends and family. Henry Rathbone, never the most popular man in his class, now received the backslappings of his new claque, who were ready to revel in the way he had turned Schenectady, for one afternoon, into the Land of Cockaigne. Will went off in search of his father, and Clara made her way toward Henry.
“You were wonderful,” she said.
“It was nothing,” said Henry, blowing his mother a kiss and promenading Clara away from his troops. “As it is, passion came in second to prudence.” But his expression belied his words, and he took Clara in his arms and made her dance with him to the recessional airs the band was piping. “It was a silly speech,” he said.
“But you meant it,” she argued.
He did not slow their dance, but his expression became more serious. “I meant all my fears of the war. And what it will do to every man in this class if these politicians bring it upon us. I can think of nothing else.”
“You won’t go to it,” said Clara, unsure if she meant this as a question or just her own pointless wish.
“Oh, I’ll go to it,” said Henry. “With relish. From the same part of me that relished being up here today.”
“The best part.”
“The impulsive part. The part that can’t help itself.”
They laughed together at this last elaboration.
“The best part of me is the one you bring out,” he declared.
She lowered her eyes, unsure of what to say.
“Have they sent you to attend me as a nurse?” he asked, whirling her across a patch of the lawn. “Are they afraid my departure from the arms of Union will mean the end of all restraints on my behavior? Are you to be your brother’s keeper?”
Clara only laughed, silently thanking God that Henry Rathbone was not her brother, since he was, she now realized, looking into his eyes, the man with whom she had fallen in love.
IRA HARRIS’S younger brother, Hamilton, had a thriving law practice in the Exchange Building. His clientele was a mixture of commercial men and criminal defendants, the latter made up partly of people he had prosecuted during his three-year term as Albany County’s district attorney. That had ended in 1856 and now, two years later, he kept himself and a small team of copyists busy with a steady flow of deeds, affidavits, and motions for dismissal. He had also taken on a law student, his nephew Henry Reed Rathbone. This was done at the request of Ira Harris, who had suggested his stepson give the law a try while waiting for his true vocational desire to make itself known. Henry, who had shown scant anxiety about this delayed revelation, agreed to the arrangement, much to the judge’s surprise and Pauline’s satisfaction. The political ambitions of her brother-in-law Hamilton were, in contrast to her husband’s, still waxing, and should Henry decide that he himself had aspirations in that realm (something Pauline hoped for), she knew he would learn more of what he needed to know by toiling in Hamilton’s busy law offices than idling in Ira’s august chambers.
In fact, on this July afternoon a year after his graduation, Henry was not working terribly hard. He and one of the scriveners were engaged in a contest to see who could more accurately pitch balls of paper into the unlit Rathbone stove standing in the corner. (John Finley Rathbone, who had been started in business by Howard’s father, Joel, was now making thousands of them each year in a foundry on North Ferry Street.) Every few minutes, after a particularly good or bad shot, the two young men would shout loud enough to make Hamilton Harris scowl at his desk behind the screen, where he was deposing a client. He wished Henry would take things a bit more seriously, but he didn’t count on it. He’d seen the boy grow up in his brother’s house and knew that he was more than a little mercurial. Still, Hamilton Harris didn’t mind having him around; he had brains and a certain rhetorical flair, which Hamilton might one day usefully deploy, if he could get the young man to learn the basics of the law. So far Henry’s progress had been sporadic; he seemed no more inclined to stick with a book during the day than he was to stay in one place at night. Hamilton never knew when, or from where, his nephew would roll in each morning: Loudonville, Eagle Street, his Aunt Emeline’s house on Elk, they were all possibilities, along with, Hamilton feared, rooms where Henry spent the night with girls who sold themselves along Quay Street. He was scattering his wild oats in a gloomy, peevish way that alarmed Ira and even Pauline. But given a choice, Hamilton would take Henry over his “solid” stepbrother, Will, who might have wound up in this office if he hadn’t gone off to the Point.
A few minutes before five o’clock the doorbells jingled, and in came Pauline and Clara. They’d been out shopping all afternoon, and Clara was in a rush to tell Henry what they’d just heard: “Mrs. Hartung has been captured!”
“You don’t say,” replied Henry, taking Clara’s bonnet from her and setting it on his pigeonholed desk. “Have you got all the details?”
“Just a few,” said Clara, still breathless, as Pauline took a chair near the scrivener who’d been playing ball with Henry. “They found her in New Jers
ey, in a town called Guttenberg, like the Bible, and they’re bringing her back.”
“Was her ‘paramour’ with her?” asked Henry, playing with the word Mr. Weed’s Evening Journal liked to use for William Reimann, who was widely thought to have helped Mary Hartung poison her husband before the two of them fled Albany several weeks ago.
“I think so,” said Clara. “Do you think they’ll put them on trial together?”
Henry laughed. “Appeals to your sense of romance, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, it’s a wonderfully romantic story, all right. Especially the part about how the coroner found enough arsenic in Mr. Hartung to do away with a whole family.” Clara leaned over, laughing, and Henry gave a playful swat to the hair piled atop her head.
The bells on the door jingled once again. “So what are you two delighting in?” Howard Rathbone asked as he entered the office. “Oh, I’m sorry, Aunt Pauline. I didn’t see you. I should have said three.”
Henry and Clara Page 5