Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  My war has come full circle: once again I am a recruitment officer, this time Honest Abe’s personally appointed one. But what we are doing here is far worse than what we accomplished on the streets of New York. These crackers aren’t being sold on the army; they’re being starved into it. The denizens of the bull pen fully expect us to slaughter them once the snow falls and supplies are interrupted.

  Nonetheless, I will galvanize these rebels out of their gray and into our blue — all so they can go kill the red man. If they do a thorough job of that, what say you, Clara, to our heading west once we’re married? We can settle near some fort in Colorado and grow gaudily rich off the silver dug out of the new earth, and never again hear a syllable of oratory. I dreaded the war, but I thought it would at least blow away the old men and leave something new and exciting once the smoke cleared. Now I know the old men have managed to run the war as they did their businesses and law firms and all else. I hate what they’ve done and what I’ve seen. Had your Mr. Lincoln let the wayward sisters depart in peace, I’d have grown harmlessly, biliously old; as it is, a million lie dead and I, dear girl, am a wreck, deservedly so.

  Kiss mother and the girls for me. I kiss you myself — right now — this moment —

  Henry

  She read it twice, and she decided she would not cry over it. Surely this was a good letter, she thought, forcing herself, as she sat in her father’s study, to read it a third time. Henry had emerged from the torpor that gripped him after Petersburg. A wreck? Nonsense. He would not be looking west, and toward their marriage, if he were. This letter was a fine thing, however sad it might sound. Papa and Mr. Lincoln had saved him — she had saved him, right in this room, kept him alive. The war would end, and he would come home knowing that he owed her his life. And then they would make life together. A child, children, and a new life for themselves. Yes, maybe they would go west. On a shelf behind her, she looked for Papa’s copy of Parkman. She carried it upstairs to read, humming as she went.

  CLARA MOVED the flowers from the left side of her waist to the right. The mirror told her they looked better there, but for a moment she wondered if the shift might disrupt some symbolic meaning.

  They were awash in portents. Mrs. Lincoln’s latest enthusiasm was Spurzheim, the German who thought the bumps on everyone’s head had significance. The day before yesterday, when the President paraded to his second inaugural, everyone decided the dark clouds meant that peace was still further off than they’d been hoping. But when the sun broke through, right over Mr. Lincoln’s head as he began his speech, the crowd cried its approval. The President went on to promise moderation, not marvels, but at that moment you could have convinced anyone, even Henry, that a glorious victory was only weeks away.

  Mrs. Lincoln could use peace immediately. Since the reelection she’d become stranger, even less settled than before. Last month, in a response to one of her husband’s own ominous dreams, she had ordered a thousand dollars’ worth of mourning. She painstakingly explained to everyone in the Blue Room that this was a way of cheating fate, not abetting it, but no one felt the act’s strategic nature made it any less morbid. Clara tried to imagine her as she must be right now, across the park and inside the White House, getting into her dress for tonight’s ball at the patent office. Clara knew it was white silk covered with point lace, and that she’d be wearing a lace shawl over it. She further knew, from John Hay, that the dress had cost $2,000. Still, spending two times as much on the festive as the funereal had to be a good sign.

  Clara had no intention of covering her own shoulders tonight. The only thing her ensemble would have in common with Mrs. Lincoln’s was the spray of violets she now pinned into her hair. Another look in the mirror proved the deep apricot silk she had on to be a marvelous choice; she was already too old for pastels and chiffons, and if she had her way tonight, she would take a giant step toward being, at last, at thirty-one, a married woman.

  She could hear Pauline in the next bedroom, straining to get herself into the purple bombazine she’d bought. Much more tasteful than bright colors during wartime, don’t you think, Clara? What Clara really thought was that, except for her beloved feathered headdress, Pauline would look like one of the Catholics’ giant statues wrapped up for Lent. Her stepmother was doubly happy if she could criticize Clara and the First Lady in one fell swoop of moral fashion. Mrs. Lincoln had consistently disappointed her these past four years: any solidarity that might have arisen from mutual antipathy to Mr. Seward and Mr. Weed had long since congealed, on Mrs. Harris’s part, into hostility. Indifference by the First Lady toward the whole Harris family would have been preferable to the way she dispensed social favors exclusively to Clara and Ira. Things had reached a pitch of pique on Friday, when Mrs. Lincoln insisted that Senator Harris be her escort to the swearing-in of the new, dead-drunk Vice President. Clara, now putting some jasmine in with the violets, relished recalling the sight of Pauline, looking on from a distant part of the Senate gallery and practically having a seizure over her banishment. This morning at breakfast she’d actually told her husband, “I hope that tonight you’ll be cautioned by Andy Johnson’s example,” the first reference anyone in the family had ever made to Ira Harris’s steadily greater tippling. The poor old thing had been crushed by the remark, unable to make a sound as he spooned his egg and munched the rest of his bacon. Well, Clara hoped he would take as much punch and spirits as he liked tonight. She had a small design that depended on his slight inebriation.

  Bless Papa, he’d already done so much. When the Rock Island mission was finished and she urged him once more to keep Henry away from battle, she’d never expected her father would manage to bring Henry home, six days before Christmas, with a promotion to major and a job — behind a desk! — a few blocks away in the provost marshal’s office. Henry was commanding eighteen clerks and messengers now, disbursing hundreds of thousands of dollars to every regiment in the army. “In a year or two,” she’d said, flinging her arms around him while he worked at a ledger in Papa’s study one night, “you’ll have put yourself out of business, paid the last volunteer and draftee and helped send them home. You’ll shut the cash drawer and hear a nice hollow thud, and we’ll know the war is over for good.”

  At ten o’clock the four of them could hardly squeeze into one carriage for the ride to the ball. Clara’s gown billowed over Henry and Papa, and when one of Pauline’s feathers found its way into Senator Harris’s mouth, everyone actually succeeded in laughing together. Henry, pointing to the bunting that covered the patent office, wondered “how much commutation money this party would be eating up,” but Clara decided his words were offered more in a spirit of teasing than as serious inquiry about the twenty million dollars he now knew the provost marshal had collected from men buying their way out of military service.

  “Now, Henry,” said Ira Harris, for once feeling confident his rejoinder wouldn’t bring on a squabble, “I’ve got it on good authority — which is to say my daughter — that they’ve sold four thousand tickets at ten dollars apiece, and that all of it will go to the families of soldiers.”

  Just before it parked, the carriage hit a bump, bouncing the occupants and their finery. When Pauline settled back down, the same purple feather reentered her husband’s mouth. The coachman, soon at the door with an apology, his arm out for the ladies, smiled at the sight of what he took to be a happy family.

  “Thank you, young man,” shouted Senator Harris, clapping the boy’s back and pressing a half dollar into his hand. “Isn’t it a fine night?” Along with the bunting, the building was also hung with huge portraits of the President and Vice President, and great torches sent up plumes of smoke that dissipated like the tops of the Ionic columns. Climbing the steps, Clara could hear an army band, and her heart beat faster. Henry had her left arm, and she gave her right one to her papa, who all week had vented optimism over the military situation. Even old Mr. Weed had sent the President a telegram conveying admiration for Saturday’s inaugural addre
ss. “The nation’s wounds will be bound up,” said Harris as he marveled over the militarv might assembled here. Farragut, Hooker, Banks, and Halleck, all in one room. And to think that they would soon be going home to their barracks!

  Clara’s optimism surpassed her father’s. She looked around the vast hall, nearly three hundred feet from end to end, and decided she and Henry had no need of the West and its open spaces. The two of them would be fine right here in this city. All the mountain peaks and Indian chiefs in the territories could not compete with the music, plumage, and power in this room. She squeezed Henry’s hand just before the army band quit in mid-march, took a breath, and struck up “Hail to the Chief.” The roar that greeted Mr. Lincoln, arriving arm in arm with Speaker Colfax, could have cleared the rebels from their last Virginia strongholds, she thought. She pulled Henry along, to the front edge of their side of the crowd, which was parting to make room for the President as if he were Moses himself. Mrs. Lincoln was on the arm of Senator Sumner, passing right by Clara, smiling into her eyes without a hint of recognition. She was on that stratum of trance-like excitement Clara had witnessed a few times before; her eyes were as bright and expressionless as the Tiffany seed pearls at her neck. “Two thousand dollars,” Clara said to Pauline over the din, hoping this bit of gossip would create some feminine solidarity between them. Her goodwill extended all the way to her stepmother tonight, but Pauline reciprocated with only a small clucking sound.

  The First Couple took their places on a large blue and gold sofa, the applause and huzzahs hardly subsiding as the dais filled up with members of the Cabinet. Senator Harris, his tall form on tiptoe, managed to make Mr. Seward see a wave of his hand before Pauline could retract it with a tug on his coattail. He smiled at her, misty-eyed with fellowship and craving a drink. Clara dispatched Henry to get him one.

  “A poor spectacle for a republican government,” Pauline shouted into his ear, pointing to the dais and its distinct air of a court around a throne, with Madame President its unchallenged queen.

  “Rejoice!” Senator Harris shouted back. “Two years ago this room was a hospital full of dying soldiers. Let yourself feel our triumph. It’s a good one.” He was back up on tiptoe, waving to Gideon Welles with such a sweeping arc of his big hand that he accidentally bashed the headdress of Mrs. Edwin Morgan, who was squeezed up against him.

  The crowding at ten o’clock was nothing compared to what happened with midnight’s arrival. Supper was brought in as another wave of ticket holders and gatecrashers rushed into the hall. The scramble toward the platters of tarts and oysters and terrapin was frightening, like a reenactment of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. The President had left an hour before, but those still on the dais risked being trampled with everyone else. The glass cases lining the walls, housing hundreds of patented inventions from the telegraph to the orange squeezer, threatened to shatter one by one, but whenever the sound of smashing glass came, it turned out to be a dish or a goblet. More people were standing on the long tables than were seated at them, and the food was grabbed with such abandon that more of it wound up on the guests’ skirts and shoes than in their mouths. When it became clear that everyone was merely being mauled, and that no one was likely to suffer broken bones or suffocation, the crowd settled into a kind of pleasant mass hysteria.

  “What would old Mr. Osborne say?” Clara shouted up to her father, who, like Senator Morgan, was standing on a chair to survey the proceedings.

  “ ‘It’s like Andy Jackson’s first day in the White House!’ ” father and daughter yelled together, mimicking deaf old Mr. Osborne’s characterization of every family and civic commotion he’d witnessed in Albany for the last thirty-five years.

  “They say fifteen thousand came through the Mansion on Saturday,” shouted Ira Harris.

  “And I heard how they left it, too,” said Henry. “With big holes in the carpets and curtains.”

  A naval officer six feet away brought his sword down upon a cream cake, sending salvos of filling in all directions and exciting happy shrieks from the ladies. Mrs. Morgan scooped some cream from her husband’s shirt cuff and took an approving taste while he shouted to Senator Harris atop the next chair, “The President and Sumner seemed to be getting on well tonight.”

  “All manner of thing shall soon be well,” said Harris, clinking his empty glass against his colleague’s half-full one.

  “Henry,” said Clara, “find more spirits for Papa.”

  This was easier said than done, but Senator Harris was already swaying from what he’d had.

  “Look!” cried Clara, nudging Henry. “Robert Lincoln’s over there.”

  “Looking well rested, too.”

  “Indeed,” said Pauline. “Worn out from three whole months with General Grant at City Point.”

  “Who’s he with?” asked Clara. “Mary Harlan? Oh, look, they’re trying to dance.” A clutch of young people stood by the Prince of Rails and his partner, laughing at their attempt to move amidst the crush.

  “I wish there were room to dance,” said Clara, slipping her arm through Henry’s.

  “If there were,” said Mrs. Morgan, licking a finger, “you still wouldn’t see Kate Chase out there.”

  “Why not?” asked Pauline.

  “Expecting.”

  “To new life!” cried Senator Harris, still atop his chair and raising his long-since-drained glass.

  “To your own grandchildren!” cried Clara. “Before another Congress is elected!”

  “Clara Harris,” said Mrs. Morgan, “what are you trying to say?”

  “Ask my papa.”

  “Senator?” said Mrs. Morgan.

  Pauline looked up with an imploring glare, hoping to forestall him, but his mood was too happy, his desire to please his Clara too strong. There was no stopping the marriage now that peace was here. Clara would redeem his four-year-old pledge the moment General Lee handed Grant his sword, so why wait for the Star to announce the news? Why not let it out tonight and bless it with some luck from this grand occasion?

  “Yes!” boomed Ira Harris, as if he were twenty years younger and standing on a tree stump in his first campaign for the state assembly. “My son will soon be my son-in-law. Henry and my Clara intend to be married.”

  “Oh, how marvelous!” cried Mrs. Morgan, simultaneously clapping her hands and casting her own husband a look of sarcastic disbelief. “How extraordinary!”

  The wonderful cat was out of its bag, at last and forever, just as Clara had hoped, thanks to her papa’s good mood and empty stomach. She had seen Mrs. Morgan’s glance, but she wasn’t going to let it spoil her triumph.

  “Isn’t that Senator Hale’s daughter?” asked Pauline, bitterly attempting to change the subject.

  “Yes, it is,” said Clara. “They say she’s in love with Edwin Booth’s brother. And look, Henry, there’s little Fanny Seward standing next to Admiral Farragut. I must meet him.” Getting to the admiral required squeezing through half a dozen couples, but Clara seemed to float over them on her own happiness. Left beside Pauline, Henry watched his fiancée make her way through, the whole vast hall now her Eagle Tavern, her own hour finally come round.

  “EVENTUALLY it became apparent that some mysterious form of disease had assailed him, with which medical skill found it hard to grapple; though there were intervals in the progress of his malady, when strong hopes were indulged that it had been, or would soon be, permanently arrested.” Just when, Clara wondered, had it become “apparent”? Reverend Sprague, preaching Howard Rathbone’s funeral sermon in Albany’s Second Presbyterian Church, made it sound as if everyone had known his condition and been anxiously discussing it for months. She had heard nothing until ten days ago, when word reached Washington that he lay dying in the New York Hospital after collapsing in the street. He had been trying to reach the railroad station, hoping to go home to Kenwood for what he surely knew was his last “shore leave.”

  He died on Wednesday at the age of twenty-nine. Now, Saturday, April
1, 1865, all the Rathbones and Harrises save Will stood on the tall grass of the Rural Cemetery, having come in six different carriages over the plank road from Albany to Loudonville. Clara was aware of being somewhere between the skeletons of Henry’s father and her own real mother. At the top of this gentle slope, she could see Mayor Rathbone’s sarcophagus, a row of sculpted rosettes beneath its stone lid, and she knew she could still find her way through the cemetery’s oaks and pines toward the simpler grave into which Louisa Tubbs Harris had been placed the same week, twenty years ago.

  For Howard, said John Finley Rathbone in a quavering voice, they would erect a monument worthy of his soaring, generous spirit. He had already talked to the Italian man who would carve the obelisk, and told him just what Howard wanted inscribed on the plinth, John 3:16. It was typical of Howard, wonderfully typical — offering comfort to those who approached the stone, not memorializing any virtue or accomplishment in his own short life. Hamilton Harris, shaken by the sight of Emeline Rathbone, now deprived of both husband and son, nervously tried to distract himself by asking Pauline if she knew where in the cemetery the Dictator had bought his large plot. Clara patted his hand, and he resumed listening to the minister’s muttering.

  She herself was thinking back a week and a half, to the night before Mrs. Lincoln accompanied the President to Grant’s camp at City Point. She’d been upstairs with the First Lady and Mrs. Keckley when old Edward brought in Louise, who had run across Lafayette Square to tell her there was bad news from New York. Howard was “poorly,” she said; Clara had to shake her, right in front of Mrs. Lincoln, to get the real news. It was a cancerous stomach, what it had probably been for years, and, no, he wouldn’t recover.

  Two days later she and Henry stood before the huge stone hospital on lower Broadway, a terrible-looking place out of a Wilkie Collins novel; she could imagine the grave robbers pulling up to it in the middle of the night with corpses for the researchers. The north building? a gatekeeper had inquired of them, assuming they were there to see a wounded soldier. No, it was the main building they needed, for that’s where Howard was, amidst the charity patients and merchant seamen, for the moment too weak and hopeless to be moved. They went down the gaslit corridor, freezing from the air that poured through open windows at each end, cross ventilation trying to keep down the ship-fever germs that Irish patients carried into the country with them.