Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  She leaned over to kiss him good night, and as she went upstairs to bed she realized that she, too, a year and a half into the war, was still what she was. Her mind was not on Sybil, or the soon to be liberated slaves, or the thousands of men whose blood soaked the Maryland soil. She was thinking only of Henry, of his bare chest and arms beneath the hot sun, walking amongst the dead, himself still alive, glistening, the blood still inside him, pumping.

  THROUGHOUT 1863, Clara and her father became occasional members of Mrs. Lincoln’s Blue Room salon, evening gatherings of what the First Lady liked to call the beau monde, a shifting company of writers, politicians, and adventurers who came to talk about literature and stayed to gossip about everyone but themselves. Pauline Harris’s exclusion was unremarkable: few wives were ever in evidence. Clara realized that she herself was allowed to accompany her father because she was young enough not to be regarded by Mrs. Lincoln as feminine competition. If anything, the First Lady thought of her as a social protégée, someone perhaps witty and comely enough to deploy as a rival to Secretary Chase’s daughter, if the war ever ended and a full social life bloomed in the capital. As for Papa, he had a soothing effect on Mrs. Lincoln, and since the real point of these gatherings was to distract her from endless grief over Willie, that was reason enough for him to be here.

  Her moods kept the congregants on edge, but her peculiar charm kept them coming back, or at least added to the pleasure of being near the most powerful President in the Republic’s history. Senator Sumner, an even more unlikely guest than Ira Harris, was always glad to further the radical cause by his presence in the Mansion, but in the Blue Room he seemed to forget his political self and take the evenings’ nervous froth as a tonic. Uncomfortable as they might be with each other in the Senate chamber, he and Ira Harris got on well here, united by a certain disdain for the less serious men who occupied a large number of the chairs. Nathaniel Willis, editor of a ladies’ magazine, was a fussy little mince, and Henry Wikoff, when he wasn’t spying for the English, was hardly more than a gigolo.

  Tonight, three weeks before Christmas, Clara took a seat on the left of Emilie Helm, Mrs. Lincoln’s “Little Sister,” as she was always addressed. Mrs. Helm was much younger than the First Lady, and the solace she had been receiving, during an extended visit to the Mansion, was more motherly than anything else: her husband, a Confederate officer, had been killed at Chattanooga, leaving her with three children and a terrible burden of grief that Mary Todd Lincoln was eager to meld with her own. Mrs. Helm’s visit had raised eyebrows among the radicals, but Clara thought all the more of the President for clutching this pretty young woman to the family bosom. As it was, since her arrival she’d given more comfort than she’d received, steering the First Lady away from her spiritualist, as well as taking her mind off Tad’s recent illness and the President’s mild case of smallpox, which Mrs. Lincoln said would not permit him to come down and say hello this evening.

  Clara was amused to see crazy Dan Sickles take the chair on Mrs. Helm’s right. Flushed with drink and not quite used to the wooden leg he’d acquired at Gettysburg, he ignored the particulars of Mrs. Lincoln’s introduction of her sister, but he didn’t let the young widow’s black dress keep him from making an appreciative survey of her form. Before he’d commanded Third Corps at Gettysburg (with such zest he nearly got all his men slaughtered), he had been famous as the congressman who murdered his wife’s lover — the major episode in a career whose eccentricities once included advocating New York City’s secession from the Union. He was, everyone agreed, an impossible man, and just as impossible to dislike: his loud arrival, as he thumped his way across the Blue Room’s thin carpet, had brightened up Senators Harris and Sumner.

  Clara was amused by his inventory of Little Sister’s charms. Perverse as she knew it to be, she herself couldn’t look at the widow’s black dress without a certain envy, almost as much as she’d felt three Saturdays ago at the sight of Sarah Rathbone’s white satin dress when it came down the aisle of the Second Presbyterian Church in Albany. Sarah’s wedding to Frederick Townsend had taken place the same afternoon as Mr. Lincoln’s oratorical success at Gettysburg, and upon Clara’s return to Washington, Mrs. Lincoln, who had been present at neither occasion (and had made sure she was absent from Kate Chase’s wedding on the twelfth), was eager for details of the dress. But Clara found it so hard to talk about someone else’s public badge of love that her description was less ample than it might have been.

  Conversation, a word Mrs. Lincoln liked to give its French pronunciation, was tonight, as always, about everything but the war. An exception was sometimes made to discuss the incompetence of particular generals, but this evening the talk seemed to be staying on the degree to which Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb and the Prince and Princess of Wales, both couples newly married, might be enjoying happiness. If peace ever came, Mr. Willis wondered, might Mrs. Lincoln invite the Prince and Princess to the White House? It was a fawning inquiry, a chance for “Madame” to speak from the lofty heights she occupied, but she never got a chance to answer, because General Sickles interrupted. “Not likely, I should think. I can’t imagine them wanting to pass through the Celtic mobs of New York City after disembarking.” The summer’s draft riot, which had left good Republican families like Mary Hall’s shaking inside their houses, had been forgotten by no one here, including Ira Harris. “Imagine the reward presented to some soldiers who’d just survived Gettysburg,” Sickles continued, deliberately shifting his wooden leg. “ ‘Now that you’ve beaten back the rebels, please nip over to New York and put down the Irish in Gramercy Park!’ ” He was fairly roaring.

  “A battalion of Henry’s regiment was there,” said Clara. “He wrote me about it.”

  “And where is Henry now?” asked Mrs. Lincoln, hoping this new line of inquiry might keep Dan Sickles under control.

  “In the winter camp at Rappahannock,” Clara replied.

  “After a very, very long year,” said her father, shaking his head and murmuring the names of battles like an old priest telling beads: “Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville …” The worst fighting was yet to come, and Ira Harris wondered how long his own family would continue to be spared. As if the ordinary familial afflictions, the kind that came without war, weren’t enough for human creatures to bear. Since Joel Rathbone’s sudden death in Paris in September, just two months before Sarah’s wedding, he’d had to offer Emeline all kinds of personal and practical comfort, from being with her to meet the body when it came off the ship to straightening out the enormous estate. He was as careworn as he ever hoped to be, and just an hour ago, while fixing his cravat, he’d told Pauline he prayed this would be the last Christmas of the war.

  “And where did you say you came from, little lady?” shouted General Sickles, unsubdued, to Mrs. Helm.

  “I didn’t say,” she replied, recoiling slightly from his breath. “But my sister, Mrs. Lincoln, may have explained to you the circumstances of my visit. Since my husband’s death, I have been trying to get to my mother in Lexington, Kentucky, but the war has prevented that. My daughter and I reached Fort Monroe but were prevented from going on from there. At that point Mr. Lincoln was kind enough to ask us here.”

  A light went on inside General Sickles. This was the Little Sister whose presence in the Mansion he’d been hearing about. His admiring gaze narrowed into something else. “You were prevented from leaving Fort Monroe, I take it, because you wouldn’t swear an oath of allegiance to the United States?”

  “My son Will spent some time at Fort Monroe,” said Ira Harris soothingly. “Early in the war. After that he was in Tennessee, and now he’s gone north to join General Burnside.”

  Although he wished no discomfort for this woman or Mrs. Lincoln, he couldn’t deny a certain resentment toward Mrs. Helm’s presence here. It made this awful war look even more senseless than he was coming to think it. If family loyalties counted more than national ones, how important could the latter finally be? He wanted his own family
together again. “My son has been a soldier for six years now,” he said. The occasional drinking he was doing in these long periods away from the Pearl Street Baptist Church was rendering him emotional, and the nearby log fire was heating his spirit into a sudden despair. “He used to be a gentle, temperate soul, my Will. But now he writes of rebels and Copperheads with fierce gusto.”

  “Hear, hear,” said General Sickles. “Mrs. Helm, since you’re just from the South, perhaps you can give Senator Harris some news of his old friend General Breckinridge.”

  “I’ve not seen the general for some time,” Emilie Helm replied, “so I cannot give Senator Harris any news of his health.”

  The thought of Mr. Buchanan’s Vice President, now a rebel general, flushed the already overheated Ira Harris with a mixture of nostalgia and anger. “Well, we have whipped the rebels at Chattanooga,” he said suddenly, his choice of words startling Clara, “and I hear, madame, that the scoundrels ran like rabbits.”

  The room fell quiet except for Sickles’s laughter and the applauding thump of his wooden leg against the floor. He was delighted by his sober-sided colleague’s loss of control.

  Mrs. Helm rose to the challenge. “It was the example, Senator Harris, that you set them at Bull Run and Manassas.” She was shaking, and Mrs. Lincoln was clearly angry with everyone. Clara watched with inert horror, even as she entertained the thought that if the President were here instead of sick upstairs, he would be amused.

  “There are only three weeks until Christmas,” said Mrs. Lincoln, trying to change the subject. But Senator Harris wouldn’t let her, and Clara’s ears could not believe what they now heard him ask the First Lady: “Why isn’t Robert in the army? He is old enough and strong enough to serve his country. He should have gone to the front some time ago.”

  “Papa!” said Clara, who saw Mrs. Lincoln go white and General Sickles happily bare his teeth. It was common talk that the President agreed Robert should be in a soldier’s tent instead of in Harvard Yard, but people generally sympathized with Mr. Lincoln’s problem: if his wife were to lose a second son, she would be completely ungovernable, and wasn’t he already burdened enough?

  “Robert is making preparations now to enter the army, Senator Harris. He is not a shirker, as you seem to imply. He has been eager to go for a long time. If fault there be, it is mine. I have insisted that he should stay in college a little longer, as I think an educated man can serve his country with more intelligent purpose than an ignoramus.”

  Senator Harris rose and addressed his last remarks to Mrs. Helm. “Madam, my one son is fighting for his country, but if I had twenty sons, they should all be fighting rebels.”

  Clara was desperate to put an end to this, to explain to everyone that her papa was speaking out of despair (and drink), not with the sort of rabid pleasure he was providing Dan Sickles. But it was too late. Little Sister was on her feet, too. “And if I had twenty sons, Senator Harris, they should all be opposing yours.” Her pretty form strutted out of the room, and Sickles watched it through the bottom of his tumbler, which he emptied in a final gulp.

  “Papa, we have overstayed our welcome,” said Clara, going to his side as Mrs. Lincoln rose to follow her sister. They crossed each other’s path as the rest of the guests murmured about getting up to go, and locked eyes for a second, in which time Clara realized that the First Lady, whose intuitions sometimes cut, like a lighthouse beam, through the great fog of her griefs and rages and enthusiasms, understood exactly what had come over Senator Harris and had already forgiven him.

  Out under the portico Clara tried to rescue her father from Sickles’s noisy congratulations, which ended only when the general declared he would give Mr. Lincoln a piece of his mind right now. He stumped back into the Mansion, determined to go up to the President’s room.

  “And I hope the President gives him smallpox in return,” said Clara, nudging her father down the steps toward home. “Oh, Papa, how could you!” The senator was quiet, confused and ashamed, and as the two of them made their way back to Fifteenth and H, Clara patted his hand and calmed down, and thought of how she was every bit as sick of this war as he. She couldn’t stop replaying the evening’s fiasco in her head, but when she was up in her room, having delivered Papa to Pauline’s avid questions, she found one shred of comfort. In shouting at Little Sister, Ira Harris had laid claim to just one son, Will: in his growing anguish, he had dropped the pretense, generously maintained for years, that Henry counted as another.

  15th & H Streets

  Washington

  Sat., March 19, 1864

  My dearest Henry,

  The city has at last gotten to host its fair for the Sanitary Commission, so now I shall be able to reciprocate the excited accounts Mary is still sending of New York’s. These gaudy celebrations seem a strange way to raise money to prevent plague and dysentery among all of you who have already borne more than you ever should have had to; but can one deny their effectiveness? “A beneficent blend of Baghdad and Barnum,” the President whispered as we entered the Patent Building last night. In fact, the hall was bannered and bedecked and stuffed with more goods, for direct sale and competitive bidding, than any bazaar one could imagine upon the Euphrates. Beneath the clouds of bunting, a hundred booths enticed the crush of people with cakes and saddles and mufflers and bonnets and silver buckles and leather bindings — which a buyer could use to hold an autographed manuscript by Mr. Longfellow, or one by Mr. Lincoln himself, should the purchaser persist in his circuit of the booths and make a sufficiently generous offer for them as well.

  There were even a few forms of gaming (the raffle tickets marked for some deserving soul in a hospital or camp), and the war has so relaxed Papa’s Baptist soul that he offered no objection. What wasn’t there to see? A puppet show, if that was one’s liking; or an Iroquois war dance, if one preferred.

  I came away with a lovely silk foulard for you, something I shall keep hung in plain sight here in my room, so that I may picture you wearing it — along with myself on your arm — at the first party of peacetime, a word I would like to festoon with more homages than a mere underlining. I missed my chance at one novel item I considered acquiring for zealous Will: a pair of socks with the rebels’ flag knitted onto the soles. By the time I’d decided to make the purchase I saw that dear old Benjamin Brown French had bought them up — with the intention, he told me, of giving them to Mr. Lincoln.

  Our poor President would have been more cheered, I thought, by a kiss from one of the pretty girls selling them (fifty cents for a small buss on the cheek) at a stall toward the front of the hall. But Madame President was with him, and you can be assured that she permitted no momentary rival to get near, whatever the nobility of the cause. Little Lina, who grows pretty enough to have attracted a long line of commercial suitors, was forbidden to sell any kisses by your mother, who was not in attendance. (During the final days of the fair’s preparation, she quarreled — mightily, I am told — with the bossy Mrs. Brookfield, one of the committee’s principal dynamos, and so last night she withheld her presence.)

  Aside from Papa and myself and Mrs. Lincoln, the President’s party included General Oglesby and Commodore Montgomery and, you may believe it or not, Dan Sickles. The Christmastime contretemps has been, it seems, all patched up. Cousin Emilie is long since gone, and Mad Dan and Mrs. Lincoln were positively flirtatious with each other last night. I’m sure she would have purchased the flag-embroidered socks as a present for him — perfect for stomping out rebels — had not Mr. French gotten to them first (and if there weren’t the inconvenient matter of having to fit one of them over the general’s wooden leg).

  My own moods and likings are — as you have reason to know — more constant than Mrs. Lincoln’s, and I cannot permit myself to abide Dan Sickles, not since that silly, firebreathing night in the Blue Room. He made a ferocious speech last night, completely out of keeping with Mr. Lincoln’s kind and courtly one. After claiming never to have studied the art of paying compli
ments to women, the President devoted all of his brief remarks to praising what women have done to help the war effort. I do hope all the Harris and Rathbone men of my acquaintance will take note of this — not that I have contributed overmuch to my sex’s labors. For the last weeks Amanda and Louise have baked and knit themselves into an exhausted trance, whereas I have found it hard even to make my twice-weekly visits to the hospital. When I do go, I flee early, God forgive me, glad to be back home in my room with my novel, or down in the study talking politics with Papa. You have heard — perhaps you haven’t — that Mr. Chase has taken himself out of contention for the presidency. His dear daughter will have to forgo her fond hopes of residing in the White House, and be content with mere visits there. Perhaps the disappointment, or at least the four years’ delay, will at last make her turn her attentions to Sprague. She is the only young wife I know who still concentrates all her mind and emotions upon being a daughter.

  Oh, to be no longer a daughter myself! I shall be thirty this September, too old to be only the apple of my papa’s eye. I long to be, first and foremost and forever, your wife. I am not yet too old for that, am I? I may be the apple of Papa’s eye, but to my own I am more and more a wrinkled, stewed one, stuck in a jar upon a shelf, stored for the winter and likely to be forgotten when that season finally arrives. If I had more goodness and less vanity, I could wrap myself up like one of the sour and serious nurses (just the way Miss Dix prefers them) who were everywhere at the fair, keeping one stern eye upon the rafflers and the other on the kissing booth.

  I myself so lack for excitement — other than the constant rumors of battlefield catastrophe and triumph, which fill the streets each afternoon and our parlor every night — that I wished for three eyes at the fair, so that I might take in its every single sight, might make my eyeballs like the plates of a Daguerreotype, retaining each gay image I saw for the hours I spend alone in my room each night.