Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “Yes,” Harry Hawk shouted from the stage, making one more joke about Lord Dundreary’s dyed red whiskers. “About the ends they’re as black as a nigger’s in billing time, and near the roots they’re all speckled and streaked.” She turned back toward Henry, whose fire-colored mustache had always been the subject of family jokes and her own twirlings. He smiled at her, though she was sure he hadn’t caught the line, or much of anything else. She knew where he was, could tell from his expression: back in Virginia, awash in blood and screams and flying bones at the battle of the Crater. Had he noticed that General Burnside was in the house tonight, down there in the front row, having arrived even later than the four of them?

  How strange that they should all be sitting here. How extraordinary, too, that she and Mrs. Lincoln had managed to stay friends — even after the night Papa had asked why Robert wasn’t in the army. But the First Lady’s nature was more forgiving than it was ferocious; Clara had seen that again and again, on all the occasions when she and others had unaccountably displeased her.

  Poor Mr. Lincoln was cold. He’d looked around for his coat and was awkwardly putting it on. The gesture reminded Clara of the only one of his wife’s séances she’d attended. (If her Baptist papa ever found out!) The spiritualist hired to conjure up the presence of Willie kept asking them if they didn’t feel the sudden rise or fall in the room’s temperature — observations that had the ladies tearing off or reaching for their shawls. It was hard to tell whether Mrs. Lincoln’s imagination brought her more comfort or pain on that occasion, but right now there was no disputing the blessing it was to her, supplying the evening with all the little touches of glory Clara thought it missing. The First Lady was delighted with the play, fizzing with joy, unable to sit still or keep herself from talking. The President had taken her hand a few minutes ago, and now Clara could hear her playing the coquette, asking him, “What will Miss Harris think of me?”

  “Why, she will think nothing about it,” he replied.

  She will think nothing about it. He was only trying to quiet her, of course. Surely he wasn’t thinking, How can she think anything about it? After all, she’s about to marry a man who’s virtually her own brother. No, it was foolish to worry about that. She was too sensitive on this point. But after just one month of being openly engaged to Henry, she was tired of having to explain to people who’d just met them, and were confused, that there was no blood between them.

  She would not start thinking about that now. She would force herself to be interested in this play, which alas had no intermission. “People sometimes look a great way off for that which is near at hand,” said the fortune-hunting Mrs. Mountchessington to Asa Trenchard. Mrs. Lincoln laughed, and Clara smiled. Perhaps there was a little life in this old chestnut; Mr. Lincoln showed signs of dozing, but the audience seemed to be warming up. Mrs. Mountchessington was certainly a perfect stage version of Pauline: “I am aware, Mr. Trenchard, you are not used to the manners of good society, and that, alone, will excuse the impertinence of which you have been guilty.” The tone and the bearing were comically approximate. Did Henry see the resemblance too, and should she risk trying to share the joke with her mother-worshiping fiancé? She turned around to him, but he wasn’t even looking at the stage. He was gazing intently at the door to the box, as if imagining the moment they could all get up and go.

  “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh?” bellowed Harry Hawk, so loudly that Clara immediately resumed looking down at the stage. “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap.”

  Clara felt the muscles of her arms jump inside their puffed sleeves. A trap door must have been sprung onstage, a play on “man-trap.” The loud crack was some bit of stage business, like this burst of blue smoke she could see and smell. But that had to be wrong, she realized, turning left in her seat: the smoke was behind her. The box was filled with it, and before she could turn far enough to see Henry, she realized that he was on his feet, along with another man who was now in the box, whose face she couldn’t see behind the smoke. There was a gleam, which she suddenly recognized as the long silver blade of a knife. The faceless man was plunging it into Henry.

  She felt herself trying to scream, but she couldn’t; the only voice she heard belonged to the unknown man. He had just hissed the word “freedom.” He was coming at her now, his bloody knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, but he wanted only to get past her. He was trying to climb over the edge of the box, to find a grip amidst the bunting. Henry had come after him and was reaching for his coat, just barely touching it, when she felt a hot liquid spraying her face. It was in her mouth and tasted of metal. Her dress was wet.

  The man got over the railing, but she never heard him land on the stage because by now Mrs. Lincoln was screaming. Clara moved toward her, colliding with Henry, who was leaning over the balcony.

  “Stop that man!” he shouted.

  For a second there was no sound but Mrs. Lincoln’s wail, like a train whistle in the dark. Clara saw the audience rising to their feet; here and there drawn pistols glinted like stars.

  “Oh, my husband’s blood! My husband’s blood!” screamed Mrs. Lincoln. She was pointing at Clara, who now realized that her dress and face and mouth were covered with blood, but blood that could only be Henry’s, since the President was still sitting, undisturbed, in his rocker.

  “Water!” Clara heard herself screaming, as if the balcony really were part of the stage and she had finally come to her lines. “Water!”

  She was now crazed with fright and could think only of getting the blood off her face and out of her mouth. But the blood was everywhere, an ocean of it. Below her the crowd roared, and some of its members leapt onto the stage. She heard a furious pounding, a hail of fists on the door to the box, and she looked toward it, crying “No!” She was sure a gang of men were about to come in and kill them all. “No!” she screamed again as she saw Henry struggling to open the door and let them in.

  A square of light revealed several blue army uniforms. One of the men — a colonel, Clara could tell — hurriedly spoke with Henry. A very young soldier, a doctor, was rushed toward Mr. Lincoln, whom he touched gently, like a large animal he was afraid to wake. His hands hovered over him, searching for something. He asked the others who were filling up the box to help him lay the President on the floor so he might cut away his clothing. Another doctor, just as young, assisted; the two of them felt for a pulse, and they blew breath into Mr. Lincoln’s mouth and nostrils.

  “I am bleeding to death.” It was Henry’s voice, near the door of the balcony, but the small space was now so packed with people, even Miss Keene, that Clara couldn’t get to him. A soldier had moved her and Mrs. Lincoln onto the sofa from which Henry had watched the play. It was soaked with blood, but Mrs. Lincoln had ceased screaming; she now held out her arms mutely, grasping at nothing.

  Clara began to weep. With all the men in the balcony, she thought, someone must be attending to Henry, but she couldn’t see him clearly, and her attention was distracted by all the loud voices arguing over whether the President was to be kept here, or taken home, or moved somewhere else.

  After a minute of this, during which Mrs. Lincoln resumed screaming, the colonel took charge, and suddenly everyone was on his feet and filing out, deliberately, as if a train had just arrived for boarding and Mr. Lincoln’s limp form, preceding them, were a trunk that had to be carried on first. A tailor’s house, across the street from the theatre, the colonel explained, was being prepared to receive the President.

  They left the theatre the same way they had come in, through the narrow corridor and down the stairs to the lobby. As they walked, a great roar grew ever closer. It came from the street, which was so full of torches that the late hour seemed more like a brilliant twilight. Police and soldiers were everywhere, pushing back the crowd, keeping the torches away from the theatre, and cuffing those who clamored for it to be burned to the ground. People desperate t
o get close to Mr. Lincoln screamed the question “Is he dead?” over and over. They were answered by shouts of “He’s dead!” or “He’s alive!” from onlookers too far away from the limp form to tell. In the shoving and chaos, the President’s gold spectacles fell into the mud of Tenth Street.

  Halfway across the gutter, Clara at last reached Henry’s left side, gasping when she saw the knife wound that ran almost the length of his upper arm. A strip of pink flesh hung like a ribbon through the rip in his sleeve. His face, pale and shocked, stared straight ahead as he moved like a phantom, steadied by an army major and propelled by the crowd.

  Now Mrs. Lincoln was calling for Clara, pushing her way toward her. She saw Henry’s tall form and immediately grasped his forearm with both her hands, pulling on it, as if imploring him, oblivious of his wound. “Oh, why did they let him do it?” she wailed. The pain of her touch sent his eyeballs up into their sockets, and even with the other major’s assistance, he looked ready to faint. Clara begged, through tears, “Ma’am, please, please let go of him,” prying the First Lady away, pushing her the last few steps to the tailor’s house.

  “Where is my husband?” Mrs. Lincoln shouted when they reached its threshold.

  Inside, soldiers were lighting candles and clearing a path to a room at the back. The army major assisting Henry told Clara his name was Potter. He was joined by another man in uniform. They took Henry into the hallway, where he sat down on the floor and at last passed out.

  “Please do something for him,” cried Clara, one more urgent plea in a house that was ringing with them. Only now did she understand how gravely Henry was injured; for the first time she was seized by the idea that both he and Mr. Lincoln might die here. “Please take him home,” she begged the second soldier as Major Potter tried to bandage the arm. “Please take him to my father’s house,” she said, aware of some strange courtesy making her say “my” father instead of “his,” as if she were paying a respectful gesture to the dead. She feared that the soldier going for a carriage would never secure one in the infernal street. From outside, the screams for vengeance and the shrieks toward heaven came through the open windows of the parlor, where other soldiers were trying to get Mrs. Lincoln to sit down on one of the black horsehair chairs. Alternating between wails and silent supplication, she begged to be brought to the back room where the President had been laid on a bed — diagonally, according to a soldier who came out muttering with awe at the size of the wounded man.

  “I’ve got one! Now!” cried Major Potter’s helper, rushing back into the house and urging that Henry be hurried into the waiting carriage. As the two men hoisted his insensible form out the door, Clara kissed its white forehead, recoiling at the small blood smear her own cheek left on it. She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief, and another soldier, or a policeman, she wasn’t sure, asked her to help calm Mrs. Lincoln, who had at last sat down on a sofa. Clara took a place on the cushion next to her and tried to put her arms around the First Lady, but this succeeded only in agitating her again. “It’s the blood,” said Clara to one of the soldiers, pointing to her dress as the source of Mrs. Lincoln’s new cries. Helpless, Clara gave way to sobs for the second time since the gun had been fired.

  She now knew that that was what the loud crack and blue smoke had been, just as she knew, from bits of rushed, overheard conversation among all the doctors and politicians streaming in and out of the house, that one of the President’s pupils was wildly dilated, that his heart was functioning at only forty-four beats per minute, and that the catastrophe was thought to have been perpetrated by Edwin Booth’s younger brother, who had apparently escaped. Senator Sumner had arrived, and Robert Lincoln came in with Secretary Stanton, who insisted the President’s wife be kept from his bedside, which was now littered with mustard plasters, hot water bottles, and dried blood. The doctors were trying to keep the tiny puncture behind his ear from clotting; the pillow, Clara heard Stanton tell Sumner much too loudly, was a terrible sight.

  It was the middle of the night before Clara heard the tick of the front parlor’s clock above the diminishing roar in the street. The crowd had been pushed back, but until two A.M. its sound came through the window like the noise of the ocean each summer in Newport. She was exhausted and her mind kept wandering, back to Albany and the days of her childhood, before returning to this time and this room, which had come to feel like eternity. By three A.M. it seemed as if they were no longer waiting to see when Mr. Lincoln would cross the border into another world; it was as if all of them already had crossed over, and this was it, a world in which they would forever reel, growing always more sore and exhausted. At one point Mr. Stanton came out from a back parlor, where he seemed to be running the whole government, to ask Clara what she had observed in the box. She made an effort to tell him, but he became impatient with her imprecision and went back to his business like a storekeeper who had a richer customer to see. Sometimes Mrs. Lincoln seemed as unconscious as her husband, but no one considered moving Clara from her side, not even when Miss Keene took up a plaintive position, on her knees, in front of the First Lady.

  Nor did Clara herself think of moving, though at any moment she might have asked one of her father’s colleagues, who continued tramping through the house, to take her home. She was afraid that if she returned there, she would find Henry dead, or that she herself would be murdered en route: the statesmen shuttling between the bedroom in which the President lay and the room in which Mr. Stanton worked talked as much of Mr. Seward as Mr. Lincoln, of how he had been stabbed in his bed at home in Lafayette Square, and would probably die with the President. A strange feeling that she had been painted into history, inserted into a tableau, also kept her from moving. It was a terrible feeling, though at moments exhilarating — this sense that she would forever be as she was now, arrested, like the play across the street, which would never move beyond the second scene of act 3. If she tried to leave, the tableau would come to life and move toward an even more terrible climax, some dramatic revelation that would destroy her. And so she stayed.

  More than an hour after Clara first heard the clock, Mrs. Lincoln succeeded in her demands to see her husband. Clara and Miss Keene were asked to assist her in the bedroom. The First Lady proved silent, even stoic, at the sight of the President’s head, with its blackening right eye. She put her cheek against his, tenderly, without agitation or theatrics, until he let out a long, tormented breath that startled her into shrieks. Mr. Stanton became furious, and she was not allowed back in until long after dawn, after the newsboys could be heard screaming in the streets. Robert Lincoln escorted his mother into the bedroom, while out in the parlor Clara listened to the last minutes of the waiting, which ended with the First Lady’s terrible cry — “O my God! I have given my husband to die!” — and the murmuring of prayers by the Lincolns’ family pastor, the Reverend Phineas Densmore Gurley, who had been busily introducing himself in the parlor, announcing his ridiculous name over and over, like one of the characters in the play.

  Mrs. Lincoln was brought through the hallway and led from the house. Miss Keene was suddenly nowhere in sight, and Clara realized that she herself was at last free to go, that in fact she must go. A soldier she had not seen before found a carriage for her, and she made the journey back toward Fifteenth and H alone, along the same Z-shaped route she had traveled with the others twelve hours before. Beyond the carriage’s half-covering hood, the rain fell on her absurd dress, wetting the satin and bloodstains. The bells from every church in the city swung and banged, again and again, as if pulled by the fast-moving hooves of the horses.

  Lina opened the door and flung her arms around Clara.

  “Don’t cry, Lina darling. You must let me get upstairs to see Henry.” She closed her eyes and clenched her fists, bracing herself, waiting for her little sister to say that Henry was dead.

  But there was no terrible news. “Papa is coming” was all that Lina said. “They reached him with the telegraph.”

  Clara moun
ted the stairs. Through the open door to Henry’s room she could see Pauline sitting at his bedside. Her stepmother rose and came toward her, stopping to say only “My son nearly died” before relinquishing Henry to his fiancée. Pauline brushed past Clara as if the younger woman had tried all their patience by staying out at a ball until morning.

  Henry lay still, his white forehead furrowed with pain. Clara knelt down and softly put her hand on his chest.

  “Is he dead?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  His eyes looked past her, toward the door at the edge of the room, just as she remembered them doing before the loud crack and the blue smoke.

  Washington

  April 25th

  My dear Mary,

  I received your kind note last week, and should have answered it before, but I have really felt as though I could not settle myself quietly, even to the performance of such a slight duty as that. Henry has been suffering a great deal with his arm, but it is now doing very well, — the knife went from the elbow nearly to the shoulder, inside, — cutting an artery, nerves & veins. He bled so profusely as to make him very weak. My whole clothing as I sat in the box was saturated literally with blood, & my hands & face — You may imagine what a scene. Poor Mrs. Lincoln all through that dreadful night would look at me in horror & scream, Oh! my husband’s blood, — my dear husband’s blood — which it was not, though I did not know it at the time. The President’s wound did not bleed externally at all — The brain was instantly suffused.