Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “Come on, Ira. Let’s you and Jack and I go upstairs for a brandy.”

  The three gentlemen left for a more private room. Mr. Osborne and Lina had already been brought home, leaving Henry to walk Clara back to Eagle Street. He held the umbrella over her with his left hand, tilting it in from the street, so that his right was free to grasp her waist. She could smell the whiskey he had drunk all night instead of cider. It had left him drowsy — peaceful, she thought.

  Arriving at number 28, where Pauline and Jared and the girls had gone to bed, Henry spread the Evening Journal on the steps for Clara to sit upon. The rain was slackening, and he closed the umbrella. He sat down beside her and unpinned her hair. She shut her eyes and let her head fall back as he separated her long damp tresses, the way she had Lina’s. He didn’t know how to make braids, but he stroked the different strands, folding and unfolding them, one over another, in a way that made his breath fall faster on the back of her neck. And then he gently let go, letting her hair fall to its full length, down to the wet pages of the newspaper.

  She was thrilled by this tenderness; she’d never had it before.

  “So,” she said, “has our hour come round with Mr. Lincoln’s?”

  She saw him smile before he nestled his head, childishly, into her bosom.

  “Soon,” he said. After another moment he brought his lips to her ear and whispered, “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do love you, Clara.” And then he replaced his head upon her breast. As she looked down Eagle Street — determined that she would manage her father, and that he would manage Pauline — Henry fell asleep in her arms.

  SHORTLY AFTER TEN P.M. on February 2, 1861, Hamilton Harris and John Finley Rathbone were finishing supper at the Delavan.

  “Do you think he really wants it?” Rathbone asked.

  Hamilton Harris laughed. “Don’t let the Olympian demeanor fool you. He wants it as heaven ‘wanted one immortal song.’ ” Then Hamilton’s face turned grave, and he looked around the dining room for a clock. “I just hope he doesn’t come up dry. A month ago he wouldn’t dream of the possibility. But for the past three weeks he’s thought of nothing else. I can’t stand the idea of his hopes being crushed.”

  “Not to mention Pauline’s.”

  “Damn it all,” said Hamilton, bringing his hand down hard enough to rattle the silverware. “He deserves it after all these years in the wilderness.”

  What Ira Harris deserved, according to his younger brother, and what he just might get tonight, was the Senate seat occupied for the last twelve years by William Henry Seward. To the surprise of nearly everyone, Mr. Lincoln had asked the eagle-nosed wizard of Auburn to serve as secretary of state in the unity Cabinet he was trying to assemble, leaving New York’s legislators with the task of sending someone to the U.S. Senate in Seward’s place. Thurlow Weed was determined it wouldn’t be his enemy Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune’s editor, about whom the Dictator grumbled, “The man never met a reform he couldn’t chant for.” A few weeks ago he’d given the machine’s blessing to William M. Evarts, a New York lawyer.

  But the Greeley forces, scenting blood from the wounds Weed suffered last May in Chicago, had proved formidable throughout a bruising series of ballots, the eighth of which had given 47 to Greeley, 39 to Evarts — and 19 to Ira Harris, the sentimental favorite of a third faction that saw the chance to keep both Greeley and Weed from having their ways. But earlier tonight the Dictator, fearing Greeley was about to go over the top, put out the word that his Evarts men were to shift to Harris — anything to keep his rival editor from getting the seat he’d plumped Seward onto a dozen years ago.

  “Do you think he’ll be able to swing enough of them over?” asked John Finley Rathbone for the third time tonight.

  “It will be close,” replied Hamilton Harris, as he had twice before. What he would not tell him was that even before Evarts ran into trouble, the Dictator had privately asked Ira to serve as backup man. There was life yet in the wily old boss, and the original Harris backers would be surprised to know they hadn’t been as independent a faction as they’d believed. Hamilton felt there was something unseemly to the alacrity with which Ira, after being passed over and ignored for a dozen years, had agreed to cooperate with his tormentor, but whatever shame was in the bargain would make victory only a little less sweet: the Dictator would still be humbled by the loss of Evarts, and Ira would see his youthful promise blaze up after such a long time sputtering. If, that is, the Greeley forces didn’t yet carry the day. The wait was maddening. Hamilton Harris refilled his pipe and tried to change the subject.

  “Have you seen any more of the letters Will’s been sending from West Point?” he asked. “Enough to break one’s heart. Clara showed me one she’d got right after New Year’s. Tells how one of his best friends in the class, boy from Alabama, was summoned home after three and a half years at the academy. A wonderful fellow apparently, wanted to be a cavalry officer, no sort of secessionist at all. Will says he and his mates treated this boy and another one from the South to a bottle of wine before carrying them to the dock on their shoulders. They’re all keeping up their spirits, he says, but it’s a terrible thing. Best young men in the world being sundered from one another.”

  “Likely to be killing one another soon,” said John Finley Rathbone. “Boys slaughtering boys.”

  “Speaking of boys and slaughter,” said Hamilton Harris. “I’m going to slaughter this damned office boy of mine. Where is he? I told him to be over at the State House, and he swore he’d race over here as soon as there was any news.”

  “He’s probably been enticed into a card game by Henry,” grunted John Finley Rathbone. “I don’t know how you keep him on.”

  “Oh,” said Hamilton Harris, “Henry just needs a good challenge. When one comes along, he’ll come into his own. Damn it, let’s go over there ourselves. I can’t stand this waiting any longer.”

  A brisk walk took the two men to the State House and up the stairs leading to the Governor’s Room, where they knew Thurlow Weed was keeping his command. As they reached the top of the flight, they saw a small clamor of activity. Weed had just emerged into the corridor. His cigar twitching in his mouth, his black hat clamped over his wild white hair, the old man had one arm around a young assemblyman and the other around a reporter from the Albany Argus, who was putting a question to him so timidly that Hamilton Harris and John Finley Rathbone couldn’t overhear it. Weed’s reply, however, boomed out loud and clear: “Do I know Judge Harris personally?” He roared with laughter. “I should rather think I do. I invented him!”

  Ira Harris had defeated Horace Greeley by eleven votes, and Mr. Weed was, if all these gentlemen would kindly let him through, on his way over to 28 Eagle Street to congratulate the new junior senator from the state of New York, “and his wife, Pauline, a lovely woman, used to be married to Mayor Rathbone back in the forties. Fine woman, fine woman.”

  Hamilton Harris looked at the lined face of Thurlow Weed and, despite all the Dictator had inflicted upon his brother, could feel only admiration for the vitality that had kept the man charging through life ever since his days as a drummer boy in the War of 1812. He’d just suffered a defeat, whether the boy from the Argus understood that or not, and he’d never again be as powerful as he’d been before the advent of the Rail Splitter, but his head was high and his step still quick, so quick that Hamilton had to nudge John Finley Rathbone, telling him to hurry down the stairs if they were going to make it over to Ira’s house before Weed got there.

  Upon entering his brother’s parlor, Hamilton Harris saw Pauline, in excelsis, wearing a great purple garlanded dress, a pearl bracelet, and feathers in her hair. By now she was quite stout, tending toward Queen Victoria, but still beautiful — and newly radiant. She must have started dressing hours ago. Bless her — the chance she’d taken of having her heart broken! They had only gotten the word a moment or two ago: Jared had been up at the capitol with ins
tructions from his mother to fly down the hill like Mercury as soon as there was news, and the young man had done just that. (How Hamilton would box his office boy’s ears when he saw him!)

  He kissed Pauline’s hand and shook Ira’s. “Brother, the people of this great state could be no better served in this time of trial. Their tribunes have chosen well.”

  “Because they didn’t choose the Tribune,” cried Clara, who breezed in from the hallway to greet her Uncle Hamilton and John Finley Rathbone. She straightened the antimacassar behind her father’s head, and he reached up to squeeze her hand. She was happy, but also, Hamilton Harris thought, agitated with something besides pure pleasure in her father’s elevation. In contrast to her regal stepmother, she couldn’t keep still.

  For the past three months she had been forced to wait upon events. After Will’s time home for Christmas, his leavetaking for the Point had been dreadful; her father had looked at his son as if he might never see him again, and Henry told her this was no time to ask her papa to give up his favorite daughter — “certainly not to the likes of me.” She had argued with him and let the weeks pass, and then the Senate rumors suddenly began. She’d given them no credit until last week, and now here she was, standing behind her father — who had been resurrected, she feared, as something more formidable than the man she’d counted on dealing with.

  “Was Henry at the capitol?” she asked Uncle Hamilton.

  “No, he wasn’t, and when I get my hands on young Georgie Ensor …”

  Before he could finish, Clara bustled back toward the dining room.

  “Thank you for your confidence, Ham,” said Ira Harris. “I’m truly grateful, as well as quite unworthy.”

  “Nonsense,” said John Finley Rathbone.

  “Must look alive now,” said Hamilton Harris. “Mr. Weed is on his way over.”

  “Is he?” asked the senator-elect, genuinely surprised. By reflex he began to rise, until Pauline reached over and pulled his elbow back to the armrest.

  The door knocker sounded, and Clara rushed past the parlor maid. Pauline and Ira Harris straightened up in their chairs, and the whole house fell silent in anticipation of the Dictator’s entrance. But it was only Henry, with Georgie Ensor, who, as John Finley Rathbone suspected, had never made it from Hamilton Harris’s law office to the capitol. Spotting his boss’s glare, the boy ventured into the parlor to take his punishment. Clara pushed Henry back out onto the front steps.

  His grudging congratulation of her papa could wait. She needed to speak to him this instant, because she knew he would be the only one to grasp the real implications of what was happening.

  “You know?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “State Street’s buzzing with it.”

  “The two of them don’t understand it at all,” she said in a rush. “Perhaps it’s still too much of a shock, but all they can think of is Mr. Weed and all the little humiliations of the past. Your mother is acting as if she’s back at the Eagle Tavern with your father. She thinks she’s been given a second chance, allowed to go back.”

  “And so she has,” said Henry.

  “No,” said Clara. “They’re not thinking of what lies ahead. Their lives, all our lives, have just been turned upside down. We’re about to go off to a city they’re not even sure the new President will reach alive. We’re being thrown into this cauldron, and all they can attend to are feathers and bracelets and restored pride.”

  “Let me go in. I must see her.”

  “Henry, surely you understand what it means.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then marry me. Now. Before we’re all stirred into the catastrophe.”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her, and when she opened her eyes she could see, over his shoulder, the fast-approaching figure of the Dictator.

  “I must get in there,” said Henry.

  He opened the door and stepped into the house, leaving her on the steps to greet Mr. Weed, who threw his dead cigar into the shrubbery as he came bustling up. “Clara Harris,” he called. “Dear child.”

  Within half an hour the house was full. Lina, Amanda, and Louise rushed about with trays, making sure Emeline had her second glass of sherry; that the telegraph boy bearing Mr. Seward’s congratulations received his dime; that Will’s friends had their sandwiches. Judge Harris kept his seat throughout, as did Pauline, flanked on her right side by Henry, who sat on an ottoman and scarcely took his eyes off her.

  “Father,” whispered Clara when she could wait no longer, “may I see you alone for a moment? Upstairs?”

  “Of course, my darling.”

  They went to the window seat in her bedroom. She took both his hands in hers and looked into his eyes. “Papa, I want to marry Henry. Before we go off to Washington.”

  He turned his head away, but she gently pulled on his arms, demanding he look her once more in the eye.

  “No, Clara.”

  “Papa, this is going to happen! You can deny it to yourself as long as you like, but it’s going to happen.”

  “I fear so, my dear, though I cannot say it will ever have my blessing.”

  She had not expected this resignation, and now that she heard it, she wanted to protect him from the hurt he must be feeling. She started to say something when he interrupted: “Not now, Clara. Not now.”

  “But none of us knows what lies ahead. There may be a war, and —”

  “That only makes it worse,” he said. “I want to shield you from as many unpleasant eventualities as I can.”

  “Let my marriage shield me from them.”

  “It won’t shield you from widowhood,” he said.

  She looked away from him, through the glass and into the street.

  “Clara.” He sighed. “My darling. Let us wait until we know some more. There is still a chance this whole crisis will pass, and if it does, I’ll think anew. But I wish you would find another man, the right man. If you did, I’d march you down the aisle of the Pearl Street Baptist Church, as proud as any man in Albany, and happier than all the city’s brokenhearted bachelors.”

  “Oh, Papa,” she said, turning back toward him. The din of the impromptu party was still coming up the stairs. She thought of all the young men she knew, most of whom were in the house. She doubted she’d ever leave them brokenhearted, but she wondered which among them might soon be dead.

  WHEN, on the morning of March 4, 1861, Ira Harris finished taking his oath of office, he looked up from the floor of the Senate to make two dignified nods, the first to his wife and the second to Abraham Lincoln, who sat in the gallery’s center beside Mr. Buchanan. For another half hour or so Lincoln would be no more than a former congressman: his own swearing-in would come only when that for the new senators and Vice President Hannibal Hamlin was complete. But to the crowd filling the gallery, Lincoln had already taken on strangeness. Impending history had not draped him in a mantle; it had stripped him bare. His presence spoke more of vulnerability than power. That he had made it unharmed to this place and hour was thought remarkable, and the riflemen perched at the windows of the Capitol only served to remind the new President’s observers of the constant dangers to his person. The incompleteness of the Capitol dome made the building feel like a crater, as if it were inviting the heavens to fling a lightning bolt at this rustic titan who dared to say he would hold together a continent so manifestly wanting to split apart.

  As Mr. Hamlin went on, and on, with his own inaugural speech, Clara, sitting at the end of the row of Harris women, watched Mr. Lincoln and recalled her first sight of him exactly two weeks ago today. He had arrived in Albany on the afternoon of February 18, the windows of his railway car hung with blue silk and embroidered stars, to be met by loud, shoving crowds and chaos before his parade up State Street to Public Square. Because of his new position, her papa had been picked to head the city’s reception committee, an honor that so dazzled him and Pauline that even now the two of them couldn’t admit what was evident to everyone else: the day had
been a fiasco.

  The friendly noise of the parade had soon given way to a terrible stiffness inside the legislative chamber, where the bitter feelings of the Senate contest still persisted. That night, at the Delavan, chaos resumed. The separate ladies’ reception planned for the following morning had to be canceled due to the press of Mr. Lincoln’s schedule, so the fair sex was left to fight its way through the hotel’s Broadway entrance, along with everyone else, on Monday night. Pauline lost a pearl button while pushing through a crowd of inebriates, and the resulting imperfection preoccupied her as she stood on the receiving line. Mr. Lincoln showed a kindly patience, Clara thought, when she herself was presented to him as Ira Harris’s daughter.

  “So it’s your father who is responsible for this day,” he’d said.

  “Yes,” she replied. “And I hope you won’t hold it against him, sir.”

  Pauline later told her that this response had been unbecoming, even if it had made the President-elect smile, and produced an enchanted titter from his spouse. Back home in the parlor of 28 Eagle Street, Mrs. Harris had pronounced Mr. Lincoln “somewhat common” and the wife “unexpectedly stout.” Clara bit her tongue, except to remind the pot that the kettle in question was known to share her antipathy for Mr. Seward.

  Henry and Will had not been at the reception, nor were they here now, as Mr. Hamlin finally prepared to perorate. Will could hardly secure leave from the Point at a time like this, and Henry had elected to stay in Albany. His slender excuses for not sharing his stepfather’s hour of triumph were accepted as a gesture of generosity: Ira Harris would have no coolness or sarcasm to fear, and every detail of Pauline’s social renaissance would be left fresh for her to tell her son; she would be the protagonist of each tale, something that would please both her and Henry.