Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  Talking of photographs: I enclose my new carte de visite, whose picture was taken at Gardner’s the other month. I look like an old tsarina engraved on a coin. You shall want to hide this item at the bottom of your mess kit, lest your comrades think you are doting upon a picture of your mama instead of your sweetheart. (You will write back and tell me that I am really just fishing for compliments. I am; and I expect your next letter to overflow with passionate, reassuring ones.) As the picture was being taken, I could hear people tramping through Gardner’s gallery, just beyond the wall of his studio. All of the Gettysburg pictures are yet exhibited; their horror still compels the quiet crowds who come to see them. Amanda and Louise — and Mary, on a visit — twice made tearful visits to them. I simply cannot bear them, and as I passed through the exhibit on my way to the sitter’s chair, I shut my eyes and hummed a tune from Beaumarchais.

  Who will end it, Henry? Who will bring you home to me? All hopes — at least here — now reside in the person of Grant, whom I have seen, you will be surprised to know. A week ago Tuesday, he stunned everyone in the East Room, just turned up, suddenly, at 9:30, in the middle of a reception — like, everyone said, an angel — one more avenging than merciful, they hoped. He was not to be presented with his lieutenant general’s commission until the following morning, but Mr. Lincoln strode over to greet him with a step so fast and firm it might have riven the carpet in two. The crowd fell back and the two of them stood before the fire, alone, conferring like Priam and Hector.

  Will it be Grant who saves us? Who ends this war and brings you back safe and whole? If he does, he will come to our wedding and have the first dance with your bride — your loving, faithful

  Clara

  As she sealed the letter, she could hear below her the last sounds of the servants cleaning in the kitchen. The soft singing of the youngest, Myrtle, mixed with the sound of the skillets being hung up, their iron bottoms ringing like solemn bells as they came to rest against the walls of this Washington house, far from the Rathbone foundry where they had been cast years ago. Clara wasn’t sure she would ever get used to having Negro servants instead of the Irish ones who had always come and gone from the house in Albany, but tonight Myrtle’s voice seemed as soothing as a lullaby.

  It was late, and Clara was growing tired, too tired, she decided, to write another letter. She had meant to send one to Howard, who had been with them for the last three weeks, right until this morning, insisting that his lungs and heart were good and that the New York posting the Marines were sending him to, six months behind a desk in an office at the Battery, was truly dictated by the needs of the corps and not his health. It had been lovely to have him in the house, making his jokes at the supper table, telling the girls his traveler’s tales like an American Othello, and later, in the parlor, impressing Papa’s colleagues with sensible talk of the blockade’s effect on the walled-in Confederates. Once or twice he had taken her out, and remained cheerfully true to his promise not to provoke her on the subject of Henry. He offered no brief against the engagement, which by now, here and in Albany, was an open family secret. She knew he was not resigned to it, but he had the good nature and self-control not to let it ruin the evening they spent attending the theater and dining at the National. That same sunniness, that same command of himself, made him wonderful company, even gave her a moment — but no more than that — when his simple normality, the reliability of his moods and expression, seemed something she might wish to have permanently. Walking on Howard’s arm was like strolling through an open meadow on a clear night, whereas being out with Henry meant dodging the meteor shower of his moods. Which was why, of course, in her letter to him, she had not mentioned Howard’s presence at the fair. There was no telling what might excite his jealousy.

  Putting on her thin nightgown — here it was only March 19 and already like summer in Washington — she allowed herself to imagine Howard, and the charms of his equanimity. He could not have written the letters tied up in mauve ribbon and lying on her night table. If he, instead of Henry, were with the Twelfth, and writing her from all the places the regiment had fought its way through in the past fifteen months — Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Bristoe, and beyond — the stack would contain good-humored dismissals of all the hardships and fears he was enduring. As it was, coming from Henry’s pen, they were full of exciting alternations: exhilaration by gunfire one week, a fearful reappraisal of that same exhilaration the next, followed by a heart-rending denunciation of the war itself, a plague on both the houses fighting it. Howard’s letters would have been soothing and soft, so soft she would probably have slept with them under her pillow. But Henry’s, there on the night table, seemed to glow, like foxfire in a forest.

  The conflict within him, between disdain for the war and excitement in battle, was as thrilling to track as the war itself. Before Fredericksburg, as he waited for the pontoon bridges to arrive, the ones that would take him across the Rappahannock in full screaming charge, he wrote of the banging in his veins, from sheer anticipation — even as he cursed his susceptibility to the war’s drums. “The old men who have sent us here are too cowardly and weak to pound those drums themselves, but once I hear them, I forget who hung them round the necks of the innocent boys hitting them with their sticks; my body wants only to do their bidding, like a mad Apache.” But after the bridge had been crossed and the battle joined and his own killing was done (he believed he had shot two men), the bottom would fall out of his spirit; his letter would turn tender as a girl’s, as he devoted two pages, their handwriting shaky with grief, to the tale of a young boy from a Connecticut tobacco farm who had died in his arms after being shot through the eye. Seven months after that, when the draft wasn’t filling the army as it should, he sent her angry denunciations of whole cities, full of fury that any young man might be spared the old men’s war by the old men’s money. “We learn that Providence manages to send not one man into the army; thanks to the tax money she spends on commutation.” That word, “commutation,” had become the eighth deadly sin, a hot spice upon his tongue, something he spit out and ground into his letters every chance he got.

  Howard’s greatest virtue, she thought, was simply that he had been here, on her arm these past three weeks, a living male come into the frilly house in which she was tired of living. She was a lover of men, of their talk and their deeds and the spotlights they could shine upon one; there was no doubt that by now she preferred the Blue Room to all other places in Washington. These past few weeks, with the field clear of any male rival, might Howard have succeeded in turning her head if he had dared begin orating upon the good sense of considering his suit instead of Henry’s? At last to begin living life, at thirty, without another month’s dreadful waiting! Might he have persuaded her to leave this war-obsessed city, its social life and emotions forever in abeyance, and fly to New York? She might have said, yes, she was tired of waiting for Henry, and for the further uncertainties his presence always brought; she had seen the error of her ways and the logic of Howard’s persuasions. Yes, she was ready to settle down right this minute and be his bride.

  No, she insisted to herself, turning over on her side and cursing the clammy heat in the room. No, she would not allow herself to think of such things. Henry would return, and the time would come again when she and he and Howard found themselves in the same room, as so often in the past. And then the sensible fancies of a calm life with Howard would once more seem preposterous, like straining to admire a buttercup when the sky above it was filled with a dazzling summer storm. That is what she would make herself wait for — Henry — as she endured the company of women, with all their fine, dutiful feelings.

  In the room next door, one of those women was only now taking up her pen, to write in a hand that, with the passing years, had lost its feminine swirl and grown angular.

  March 19, 1864

  My dearest son,

  We’ve just this morning said good-bye to Howard, and a joy it was to have him in the house —
to Clara especially, I think. He looks as healthy as I can remember him — fine and strapping and handsome as the best of the Rathbone men. What a handsome couple he and Clara made arm in arm last night at the fair (I enclose a cutting from the Star), even more so than when they went out to see Edwin Booth’s Hamlet at Grover’s a week or two ago. You’ll be glad to know he’s been such a tonic to her spirits; I haven’t seen such vitality in her since we met the Russian sailors a few months ago, when they made their visit to the Mansion. I’m sure I should be leaving Clara to write all these things herself, but I couldn’t resist the chance to let you have my own impressions, which are certain to reassure you, of how strong and manly your cousin now looks.

  We are all so proud of you. Wherever this letter reaches you, it comes with the love of your

  Mother

  AT 4:30 A.M. on July 30, 1864, Ira Harris lay, trying to sleep, in a guest room of the president’s house on the Union College campus. Just before bedtime the senator had written to his son about the fortieth reunion of the class of 1824. “It was a large and a good class — Time and Providence have dealt kindly with it and a large number still survive.” Amazingly enough, so did Dr. Nott, ninety-one years old and sound asleep downstairs after being serenaded by the returning classes.

  The letter to Will was on the senator’s night table, ready to be mailed to General Burnside’s headquarters first thing in the morning. It contained Harris’s hope that he could soon manage a visit to the Ninth Corps, though he confessed: “I cannot comprehend your objects and plans — I really do not understand what you have been doing for the last month. There is a mystery about it that all my reading has failed to penetrate. Perhaps your next letter will give me some light — or must I wait until I can ‘come and see’? If you knew the deep interest with which we follow you, and how often and anxiously you are upon our thoughts and tongues, you would, I think, both of you, write a little more frequently. We have feared that Henry was not quite well, but have not been able to learn from him. He is not quite reliable in some things. Do write some of us, if only a few lines.”

  It still seemed extraordinary that the two of them should now be together on Burnside’s staff, Will heading up the ordnance department and Henry the commissary of musters. The senator had not liked using influence (he didn’t even like the word) to put Henry where he was, but the pressure at home to pull strings (another detestable phrase) had been like nothing he’d felt before. For once, Pauline and Clara had joined forces, however different their motives. His wife resented her stepson’s rise and the attentions Will was forever being paid; when the University of Rochester, the school he’d abandoned for the Point, granted him, at twenty-six, an honorary degree, she had barely been able to offer her congratulations. She insisted something be done for Henry, to the point of raising her voice one night in the presence of the girls, crying she would not have her own son’s situation “occupying less of my husband’s attention than some postmastership in Utica.” Senator Harris had counted on Clara to come to his defense, but he waited in vain. She thought being on Burnside’s staff would keep Henry well behind the lines, and she was willing to bite her tongue and watch her papa suffer for. the sake of her beloved’s safety.

  The senator resisted for weeks. True, he took pride in his ability to play the game of patronage at a level the Dictator could now only imagine, but post offices and customs houses were one thing. Playing with lives — safeguarding his family’s while draftees were being slaughtered — was quite another. But Pauline and Clara and the anxiety of three years of war succeeded in wearing him down. And hadn’t the Harrises and Rathbones given their share? Even young Jared was getting ready to leave West Point for the war. So he had relented, and fixed things.

  As he tossed and turned now, he hoped the temporary peace between Pauline and Clara was holding in Newport. It was strange to think that, while he idolized Will, both their attentions remained focused on Henry. But with the two boys posted together, news of one meant news of the other, and he had to admit the wisdom in having arranged the appointment. It made it easier to imagine his family as a happy, normal one.

  If only this thought were enough to let him sleep! As night neared morning, his mind was still on the war and what the Ninth Corps might be up to. News of what they were calling the Richmond Campaign had been terribly grim these last weeks: he knew, however cryptic Will’s letters, that his son and the other men had endured a season of marching, exposure, and incessant enemy fire. It could not last another year, the senator told himself, falling back on his belief in Lincoln and Grant, which somehow grew with every month the war continued. They would bring it to a close. He had faith, though he would admit that faith had been tested tonight when he watched Dr. Nott praying for the war’s conclusion and noticed him quivering from his years and the enormous nature of his petition. Even he seemed powerless against this remorseless beast continuing its rampage.

  On the same night, four hundred miles to the south, at Petersburg, Virginia, Will Harris looked up from the letter he was writing to his fiancée by the candlelight in Ninth Corps headquarters at Fort Morton. He grunted hello and returned to his composition: “Henry has just come in looking very dirty (for him) but delighted with his inspection of a certain part of our line.”

  How he wished he could tell Emma what was really going on here tonight. In a matter of hours, when they captured the rise, the war would be over. This morning he had climbed a tall tree and looked down on Petersburg, picking the best-looking house, the one he would confiscate and make into his quarters. Across the room Burnside’s bags were already packed, and Generals Ferrero and Ledlie were back in their shelter with a whiskey bottle between them, playing cards and waiting for the explosion.

  The war was going to end — in one great bang. Everyone said it couldn’t be done, but Colonel Pleasants and his regiment of coal miners had accomplished it: a month of digging had taken them right under the Confederates’ artillery salient. Six hundred feet of tunnel, with two shorter arms extending beneath the rebels’ trenches. Soon four tons of gunpowder would send both arms flying upward. General Mahone’s South Carolina companies would be swept away like a tableful of toy soldiers.

  Will could now hear the click of Henry’s silver scissors as he sat on his cot and trimmed his whiskers for the second time that day. This was distracting enough, but when his brother began to talk — “starting in,” as the family called it — Will had to throw down his pen and quit.

  “Tell me, Cousin,” said Henry, using Pauline’s solecism, which Will so disliked. “Isn’t secrecy an essential component of any major military operation? That is the sort of thing they teach at West Point, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Henry,” said Will, blotting that portion of the letter he’d managed to complete. “Anyone who gained a position on this staff through merit, experience, and training would agree to that.”

  “Then I wonder,” said Henry, laying his scissors down, “why I just heard so much shouting across the lines.”

  “And what were they shouting?”

  “ ‘When you-all nigger lovers agoin’ ta blow us up?’ ” cried Henry in his best imitation of a South Carolina accent. “That, as you’ll imagine, came from our opponents, who received an equally loud reply, shouted into the dark by our young men: ‘ ’Fore you know it, you’ll be chasin’ your ass back to rebeldom.’ ”

  “Excellent mimicry, Henry. Yes, rumors of Colonel Pleasants’s scheme have reached even the ordinary Johnny. But you miss the important point.”

  “Tell it to me.”

  “If their commanders truly believed that what they’ve heard were even remotely possible, the Johnnies wouldn’t be left sitting where they will shortly be blown to kingdom come.” Will looked at his pocket watch, a present from Ira Harris when he’d won the sophomore Latin Prize at Rochester. “You see, Henry, that’s the beauty of this operation. It succeeds by seeming too good to be true.”

  “Well,” said Henry, “the rebel commanders may
not believe it will happen, but our own Irish and niggers certainly do. You should hear them out there, saying their Hail Marys and moaning their spirituals in the middle of the night.” He paused for a second before muttering, “The poor niggers …”

  Will spun around. “I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter.” The last-minute decision by General Meade, over Burnside’s objections, not to use five regiments of General Ferrero’s Colored Troops had certainly put a snag in the operation. It didn’t matter, Meade had told Will, that the coloreds had practiced hard for a month. “If they get cut down in the first wave, all the radicals and abolitionists, like your father’s friend Senator Sumner, will be screaming about ‘cannon fodder.’ We can’t have it. I don’t care how exhausted Ledlie’s men are. They go in first.” It seemed to Will that Meade was the exhausted one, too tired to see this operation was going to succeed no matter who led the assault. History would remember Meade only for nervousness, and Will was damned if Henry was going to make him nervous, too. “I’m telling you,” he repeated, “it doesn’t matter.”

  Henry rolled over on the cot and shut his eyes. “No, it doesn’t.”

  A half hour after the explosion, when the first reports began to reach staff headquarters, Will realized he had been almost all wrong. The bomb had detonated at 4:45 A.M., and the South Carolinians were duly flung into the air, finding themselves, upon their return to earth, at the edges of a crater seventy feet wide and thirty feet deep. But when the order came for the Union forces to climb out of their trenches and capture the rebel ground behind the crater, the tired, ladderless men, gasping and choking from the fumes and soil the explosion had driven into their lungs, found it almost impossible to clamber over the top. Nearing suffocation, many of them panicked. After finally recovering breath and sight, those who managed to stagger to the edge of the crater became giddy over what their eyes disclosed: a great scoop of the earth was gone, as if a meteor or the hand of God had struck and departed.