Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “All right, I will tell you,” said Henry, recalling the day he’d come into his inheritance and told Howard over oysters at the Delavan that he would never explain his feelings for Ira Harris.

  “You remember your real mother,” he began, as Clara tried keeping her eyes on one of the paintings. “And I remember mine. The way she was before my father died. She had a beauty and a brazen confidence beyond anything you can imagine. My father was mad for her, and dared anybody else not to be. He’d march all of us into the Eagle Tavern with him on Friday nights and hold court. He’d put Jared and me on his backers’ laps and sit my mother right beside him, without her hat, her curls glinting under the whale-oil lamps. She was like some cask of booty he’d flung open to make them gape. He knew they didn’t want her there, but he knew they couldn’t stop looking at her either, couldn’t stop being envious, because this was the woman who’d made him more than a grocer looking for votes, made him into something they could never be. She turned the two of them into a thing the others had to watch. And then he died.”

  Henry had sat down on the edge of a paint-splattered table. Afraid he might not finish the story, Clara pulled over the stool by one of the easels and sat in front of him. She took his hand in hers.

  “You never truly met her, Clara. She was transformed, shrunken, immediately after he died. I remember that summer when she took me off to Schenectady so she could be with your father at the Union commencement. I was eight years old and I watched her coquette with him. What I was most aware of was her fear. She needed him because she was afraid of being alone with only the money my father had left her. She was afraid of never again being an important man’s wife, afraid of no longer being allowed to sit and shine in the lamplight at the tavern. My father had left her an appetite, but the men at the Eagle had no more need of her. Without someone like your father, she wouldn’t have anybody looking at her the way those men had looked at her on Friday nights.”

  “Are you saying my father let her down? By not rising as high as she expected him to?” Clara kept her voice neutral, inquiring. She was trying to be Henry’s ally, not his opponent, on this unexpected journey into the past.

  “No,” said Henry softly. “I don’t blame him for that.” Clara squeezed his hand encouragingly. “I blame him for being so little from the start.” She drew away as if he’d clawed her. “My mother was something magnificent, almost wild. Then fear made her small. She was afraid to look back and to remember what she was, who he was — my father — and what they’d been together. It would be easier if your father had been some terrible usurper. But he’s not Claudius. He’s just Polonius, asked to play Claudius’s part.” He paused to look into her astonished eyes.

  “You are disgusting!” she said, pushing the stool out from under herself and slapping his face. “You ungrateful, horrible …” But she couldn’t get the words out; he’d spun her around and squeezed her waist so hard she could barely breathe. He was carrying her into the next room and onto Leander Reynolds’s bed. She was screaming now, struggling to get off the dingy linen.

  “I hate you!” she cried.

  “No, you don’t. You love me, and I love you, and have for years and years, watching you read in your window seat, looking at you across the dinner table as you struggled not to say all the clever things in your head because your manners told you to let your father and your brother have the floor.”

  He began to unlace her dress. Her hand rose, and he thought she was about to fight him again, but before he counterattacked, he saw that she had lifted her hand only to undo the dress herself. “I’m not Ophelia,” she whispered, through tears. “And you’re not Hamlet. We’re not any of those people.”

  He said nothing as he rose to remove his coat and shirt. When he got back to the bed, she had unpinned her long dark hair and was reaching up for him, recalling summer nights in Loudonville when there would be a storm, and she would put her arms out the window and try to coax the lightning down. As he pressed upon her, she struggled for one last moment, until he whispered that it was too late for that. And then he entered her, like a knife, and she screamed until the pain was gone, replaced with a joy and fierceness that, as they moved together, each seemed to borrow from the other. When it was over, they smoothed each other’s hair. He saw her look down at the bedclothes and once more take fright, but then he soothed her, saying softly that the blood was nothing to worry about.

  “A WASTE of gunpowder, if you ask me.” Thus the masterful Joel Rathbone on the evening of December 3, 1859, sitting with friends and kinsmen in the main drawing room of Kenwood, grand site of his premature retirement just south of Albany, where yesterday morning, at the hour of his hanging, a one-hundred-gun salute had been fired in tribute to John Brown. The Albany Evening Journal was full of the details: the brave and dignified appearance Brown made while climbing to the scaffold; Colonel J. T. L. Preston’s declaration, “So perish all such enemies of Virginia”; the thirty-seven minutes that the body was left to hang. Most prominently featured was Brown’s written prophecy, handed to a bystander as the prisoner left his cell: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”

  “The body’s to be buried in North Elba,” said Joel’s cousin John Finley Rathbone, repeating what everyone already knew, “and to come through Troy on its way. Giving the abolitionists righteous fits at every stop.” He could not say that a civil war’s lucrative effect on his foundry hadn’t crossed his mind, but outwardly this richest of the Rathbones continued to support President Buchanan and the commercial creed that peace was always the best prescription for prosperity.

  “Lucky for Seward to be abroad until the New Year,” said Hamilton Harris, alluding to the absence of any comment from the senator in Mr. Weed’s paper. “Waiting to see what the Dictator wants him to say, I suppose.” Judge Harris’s younger brother took loyal pains to disparage the Albany boss’s favorite whenever Ira was around, particularly since the latter had had to return from Europe and find that Hamilton had succeeded in winning an acquittal for Reimann, paramour of the still-imprisoned Mary Hartung.

  “Seward’s waiting,” said John Finley Rathbone, “to see which comment can provoke maximum inflammation from Boston to Birmingham. A year from now he’ll have the presidency and we’ll all have his war.”

  “A shame mankind can’t put all its energies into things like this Suez Canal,” said Ira Harris with a nobility no one could dispute.

  “Seward’s proposing a canal?” squawked Mr. Osborne, an ancient friend of Joel Rathbone’s father. “Suez,” corrected several voices at once, reassuring the old man that this was something being undertaken very far away and not the sort of internal improvement Andy Jackson, rest his soul, had spent his years in Washington fighting.

  “Henry?” asked Ira Harris, puffing on his pipe, content enough to risk drawing his stepson into the conversation. “You’ve been rather mum this evening.”

  “Oh, I’m in firm agreement with Uncle Joel. They wasted the gunpowder. Consider the need they’ll have for it soon.” Given the discussion’s overall inclination toward the dire, Henry seemed less of a doomsayer than usual. But he kept the full measure of his feelings hidden. There was a part of himself, a part he feared, that would have been perfectly willing to drop the trap door beneath John Brown’s feet yesterday morning; and as Brown swung in the breeze, he’d have been happy to shake his hand, the one that had lit the fuse now lying in a straight line across a very dry field. As he had told Clara, the moving spark was visible just over the horizon. No one could deny that it was getting brighter, and closer, and heading toward them.

  Attracted by the sound of her son’s voice, her old political instincts telling her what the men were discussing, Pauline Harris ventured in from the parlor and put her hands on Henry’s shoulders. “No, don’t get up,” she told the men, deciding after a brie
f look at them against entering this conversation. Like her husband, she had lost her touch for it. “Mr. Harris,” she said to Ira, “what was the name of the silversmith who sold you this beautiful pin for me? The man whose little shop was near Santa Felicita?” She had been engaged with Emeline Rathbone in some traveler’s one-upmanship, a game she could finally play since their return in October; she’d be better off going back to that than trying to heat up any tepid remarks Ira might make about the political situation.

  “Papi, my dear. Mr. Giuseppe Papi.”

  “Thank you,” said Pauline, brushing her son’s cheek. “Although I expect he calls himself Signor Papi.” She exited to polite male chuckles.

  “John Brown, of course,” reported Pauline when she retook her seat in the parlor between Emeline and Clara. Emeline twisted her mouth in displeasure, as if the boring nature of such a topic were self-evident, and Clara wondered what pitch of agitation her next letter from Mary Hall would reach. In the forty-five days since Brown’s capture at Harper’s Ferry, Mary had sent her one distressed missive after another, two of them tear-stained, so goodness knew what yesterday’s martyrdom might provoke. Clara had responded with appropriate expressions of concern, but except for its effect on Henry, the John Brown affair hardly engaged her. She wished that she could shift the subject of her correspondence with Mary to what she herself had been going through in the eight weeks since they’d arrived home. She was without anyone to confide in. Pauline was out of the question, and her sisters were too immature to be considered. Alas, sweet-natured Mary seemed to have no room inside her brain for anything but the bad case of abolitionist fever she’d caught during her father’s winter tour with Beecher.

  If it were otherwise, Clara would tell her about that afternoon in Munich, and its single repetition in London just before sailing home; of her father’s hoping-against-hope silences when they returned with excuses Henry put little effort into fabricating; of Pauline’s stern glances and Clara’s fear that she had guessed or, even worse, been told by Henry. Worst of all was Henry’s inscrutability, his disinclination to speak of what had happened between them, or to discuss the future of it.

  It was the only future she wished to contemplate, though she knew it was an impossible one for her father and Pauline, and even for Henry himself, to accept right now. Social awkwardness would be the chief item on the bill of particulars drawn up against the idea of their becoming man and wife. But each passing month, she felt, could be made to work to her advantage: she was willing to keep a distance from him, to minimize their joint appearance at family occasions such as this, until everyone eventually got it into their heads that Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone shared less blood than the second cousins whose weddings they were forever attending up and down the Hudson Valley. She would keep to herself, to Wordsworth and the window seat, as Henry, on his way to seeing the logic of his ardor, put in his lazy hours in Uncle Hamilton’s office and spent his inheritance too freely. Even if he spent it on the girls of Quay Street, she would be patient. He would see his war — she’d become certain of that today — but she would have him, before he and Will went off to fight it.

  Pauline and Emeline were disputing the merits of Florentine coffee when Howard Rathbone abandoned the drawing room for the parlor. He took a seat beside Clara, who hoped his arrival might save her from this new twist of the continental competition between her stepmother and Henry’s aunt. How sadly pale he looked! Months on the ocean had left him no more hardy than he’d been that day in April when they’d all said goodbye; she wondered if there was more than holiday generosity to the shore leave he’d been granted.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” said Howard, inching his chair closer to hers. He had actually enjoyed her silences at dinner, preferred them to the sarcastic chatter he remembered from the months before she went abroad, all that mimicry of Henry which continued in her letters, as she attempted to keep up with him and appear more formidable to Pauline.

  “I’ve already bored half of Albany with my ‘European impressions,’ ” she responded. “Besides, what can compete with John Brown?”

  “Real life?” sighed Howard, who had none of the family taste for politics. “The things right in front of us?”

  “You need to find yourself a new girl, Howard.” Clara smiled at him and patted his knee.

  He realized he was a little in love with her, knew she was the real reason he could never stick with any girl for long. “What’s wrong with an old girl?” he asked, taking her hand and squeezing it, but not daring to lose his smile and show this was more than a jape. “What’s wrong with a girl you’ve known practically forever?”

  “Why, Howard Rathbone,” she replied, keeping up the illusion of playfulness, swatting his hand once she’d withdrawn her own. “You and I are cousins by marriage. Don’t you think that’s dangerously close for a man to be to a girl he wants to court?”

  She regretted the joke as soon as she made it. She had no desire to hurt dear Howard, whose cheeks had just gone as red as his hair. She didn’t particularly resent his opposition to the idea of Henry and herself getting together. Howard’s objections were sweetly intentioned, and they would be the least of the obstacles she and Henry would have to overcome. She knew perfectly well that Howard was in love with her, but she was sure he would get over it. When he did, he might even be persuaded to help them with the rest of the family. And now she’d gone and embarrassed him by making a joke — in Henry’s exact style, too — about his well-meant alarm.

  “I’m just a silly tease, Howard.” She gave his thin rib cage a good-natured poke. “Let’s go into the other room. Mother, Aunt Emeline: I’ve asked Howard to see if his presence will be enough to secure me admission to the drawing room.” Emeline gladly waved her away and Pauline smiled, a bit nostalgically. Taking Howard’s arm, Clara crossed the threshold over which the sliding doors ran, and the gentlemen stood up through a cloud of their pipe smoke to greet her. Howard relinquished her to Henry, who made a place for her beside himself on the sofa. “Proceed, Uncle,” he said to Hamilton Harris.

  “Not much more to say,” said the crisp attorney. “The invitation was issued weeks ago, and he’ll be talking in Brooklyn on the twenty-seventh of February. If you’re interested in seeing somebody other than Mr. Seward move into the White House a year from now, you might think about going down to hear him.”

  “Whom are they talking about?” Clara whispered to Henry.

  “Abraham Lincoln,” he replied.

  “UGH — UGH — UGH,” chanted Sybil Bashford on the porch of Ocean House in Newport. She scratched her stomach, too, in ape-like imitation of the Republican candidate for President — all to infuriate poor Mary Hall.

  “Stop it, Sybil,” she cried. “That’s awful!”

  Clara Harris just laughed.

  “He’s not at all like that,” Mary said. “My father took me to see him at the Cooper Institute in February, after they’d moved the meeting from Reverend Beecher’s church. The crowd was enormous, and he couldn’t have been more eloquent. ‘Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us —’ ”

  “Oh, Lord, she’s committed it to memory! Someone make her stop!” shrieked Sybil. “If that abolitionist wins, he’s liable to spoil my whole wedding next May.” She pouted, and returned her gaze to the illustrations of bridal accessories she’d been perusing on this hot summer day.

  “He’s not an abolitionist,” Clara offered as correction to Miss Bashford, a graduate of the Newport Academy whose interest in national affairs knew many bounds.

  “If only he were,” cried Mary. “But he’s still the least equivocal of any of the candidates about slavery — it’s wrong, Sybil — and he’ll keep it from entering any more territories, that’s certain.”

  “Oh, pooh,” said Sybil. “There’s nothing wrong with slaves. They’re the reason even this town got built. The triangular trade. We learned about it in the academy.”

  “Why, Sybil,” purred Clara, stir
ring the ice in a pitcher of lemonade. “I’m surprised by your scholarship.”

  “A lot of lovely slaves are even part of my dowry,” Sybil continued.

  “I shall scream!” cried Mary.

  “It would do you good,” said Sybil, flipping over the sketch of a lace train and asking Clara to pour her another glass of lemonade.

  “Stop it, both of you,” said Clara, quite calmly. The slavery question did not agitate her as it did Mary, who she had decided was a better person than she. But the ascendancy of Mr. Lincoln interested her deeply. She had discussed it over and over with Henry and Papa in the six months since Uncle Hamilton came back all excited from the Cooper Institute speech. It had happened so fast. After Harper’s Ferry, Mr. Seward, at the Dictator’s insistence, had tried to mollify the Southerners, convince them he wasn’t as extreme as they feared. It didn’t work, and the Republicans decided at their Chicago convention that only Lincoln stood a real chance of carrying what was being called the “lower North,” and thereby the presidency. Ira Harris had sent Seward his fulsome condolences, while Mr. Weed, shocked by defeat, journeyed to Springfield, his big black hat in hand, to call on the plain man who’d vanquished the brilliant creature he’d been grooming for the last dozen years.

  “Sybil, think of it this way. It could be much worse. You could be faced with Mr. Seward instead.”

  “Oh, him,” said Sybil, disgusted. “The ‘irresistible contest.’ ”

  “ ‘Irrepressible conflict,’ ” corrected Mary, as if Sybil had misquoted a psalm.

  “They’re the same thing,” Sybil said, putting her glass of lemonade down rather hard. “Oh, I hate August. No one even sends us letters now. They’re tired of writing the same thing they’ve written since the beginning of the summer, and they’re too hot to move in any case.”