Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

When I sat down to write I did not intend alluding to these fearful events, at all — but I really cannot fix my mind on anything else, though I try my best to think of them as little as possible. I cannot sleep, & really feel wretchedly. Only to think that fiend is still at large! There was a report here yesterday that every house in the District of Columbia was to be searched today. I hoped it was true, as the impression seems to be gaining that Booth is hidden in Washington. Is not that a terrible thought!

  Mr. Johnson is at present living in Mr. Hooper’s house opposite us. A guard are walking the street in front constantly —

  It will probably be two or three weeks before Mrs. Lincoln will be able to make arrangements for leaving. She has not left her bed since she returned to the White House that morning.

  We expect to be able to leave next week for New York, but on what day, it would be impossible yet to say. I will write you in time however. So that I shall be sure to see you, while there.

  Please give my love to all the family, & believe me

  Ever truly yours

  Clara H.

  Clara shook the blotting sand off the last sheet of the letter and reached for an envelope. Her stack of fresh ones lay atop a copy of Mr. Stanton’s latest reward poster: $50,000 for the capture of John Wilkes Booth, “THE MURDERER OF OUR BELOVED PRESIDENT IS STILL AT LARGE!” it proclaimed, with as much panic as vengefulness. Papa said they had lost count of the number of people arrested, with or without a reason. No other official had been struck down since the President and Mr. Seward were attacked ten days ago, but everyone in the square remained fearful. It was two A.M. now, actually the twenty-sixth of April, Clara realized as she glanced again at her letter to Mary Hall. Everyone else in the house was asleep, and she would not allow herself to retire without checking the bolt on the front door one more time. From her window she could see the guards puffing on their cheroots next to Congressman Hooper’s house. President Johnson must have long since gone to bed, and the only sound came from the boots of some pickets stationed farther up the street.

  She no longer followed a normal human schedule. She slept whenever fear and memory let her, but even then she was awakened by Henry’s moans from the room above — either the wakeful groaning he had from his arm or the dull cries he let out during nightmares. When she was up late, as now, she relived the days since the assassination over and over in her head.

  When she’d arrived home an hour after Mr. Lincoln died, and gone up to Henry’s room, he seemed on the verge of telling her something. His eyes had a despairing urgency, as if he were trying to bring himself to communicate some vital matter that had been lost in the violence and chaos. But he succeeded only in upsetting himself, and his pain and loss of blood sent him in and out of consciousness. For the rest of Saturday, on Pauline’s orders, only the army surgeon was allowed in his room.

  The following day, Easter Sunday, Pauline sent Lina to church, and while she was there, Judge Olin of the District of Columbia’s supreme court showed up to take statements. That Henry was in no condition to give one counted for nothing. The judge was insistent, and Pauline, possessed by the fright that had taken hold of the city, relented. So Henry, behind a closed door, set about answering the judge’s questions as well as he could, his murmured replies interrupted at frequent intervals by louder cries of pain. Clara busied herself downstairs, putting lilies into vases and refusing to cry.

  In the middle of all this, Papa finally arrived from Albany and, in a burst of decisiveness that no one in the family had seen from him in years, put a stop to the interrogation, telling Judge Olin that he himself, as a United States senator, would take statements from his daughter and stepson, and that would be the end of it. He personally handed the judge his hat.

  But as the full extent of Washington’s panic made itself clear to him, Senator Harris proved unable to shield his stricken family from it. An hour after leaving, Judge Olin was back — on orders from Mr. Stanton, he said: the secretary’s investigators were making a survey of the box at Ford’s, and Miss Harris was wanted for help in arranging the chairs as they had been when the assassin struck. The senator weakly questioned the need for this, but within minutes Clara was tying her bonnet and getting into a carriage with her father and Judge Olin.

  The awfulness of what was being asked of her registered when she saw they were traveling the exact route to the theatre that she had ridden less than forty-eight hours before. All the victory torches were gone, and most of the houses, even those she recognized as belonging to secessionists, were hung with crepe and portraits of the President. In the last hundred yards before the theatre, the carriage had to make its way through a crowd of the curious, similar enough to the one that had greeted them on Friday night to make her feel she was in a dream: day had been substituted for night, her companions in the carriage changed.

  Papa held on to her as they mounted the theatre’s stairs, but she felt no real weakness until she was in the box itself and saw Henry’s blood everywhere, dried to a dull brown. “Good God!” Senator Harris exploded, to Judge Olin’s complete indifference. The investigators went about their measurements and drawings like a team of decorators hired by some unseen chatelaine. No one asked her to sit down, and she could not have done so in any case. Only Judge Olin took a chair, the President’s, after she positioned it in the spot it had occupied during the play. His purpose in sitting was to determine if Booth might have fired through the hole that had been bored through the wooden door behind the chair. But most of the investigators thought it more likely the opening had been used as a peephole, before the assassin made his entrance. They noted the evidence of fresh drilling (the sharp knife marks where the shavings had been dislodged), as well as the arrangements Booth had made to brace the door shut once he was inside.

  She followed the conversation and surveying with care. She was trying not to recall what had really taken place here, was glad to concentrate on these engineering details, which seemed so remote from the horror, even though it was all the drilling and bolting and bracing that had led to the screams and gore, by making the box into a trap, ready for springing. The carefulness of the assassin’s preparations had made the tragedy inevitable, and for some reason this realization came as a relief. Nothing could have prevented it. The portents had been there all along: Mr. Lincoln’s fatalistic dream had been the true harbinger, his wife’s mourning purchases a futile defense.

  A half hour after she and Papa arrived, while she was staring down at the stage set — its chairs and papier-mâché window still ready for the entrance of Miss Keene, whose next line would have been “What do you mean by doing all these dreadful things?” — Judge Olin told them they could leave, and the two of them rode home in silence. It was still midafternoon, and when they reached Fifteenth and H, she told Papa she wanted to be by herself for a while, that she had not been out of the house since yesterday morning and needed to walk. So she strolled down H Street for many blocks, past more crepe and engravings of Mr. Lincoln, past more soldiers, until she reached Sixth Street, where a crowd as large as the one outside Ford’s was peering at the shuttered windows of the boarding house where the assassin and his accomplices were said to have hatched their plans. It was, she realized, just a few doors away from the rooms of Johnny Hay’s friend, where she and Henry had gone last September. It was only at this moment, turning and starting for home at twice the speed she’d come here, that her tears began flowing, in great sobs beyond anything she had cried Friday night. She and Henry were being racked and squeezed like creatures in a tale by Edgar Poe. They had fallen into a nightmare, and as she ran back along H Street, disbelief competed with her anger and calculation. The only way they could escape destruction was to hurry their marriage, to be safely joined as one, stronger than madness and murder.

  Henry did not leave his room for a full week, and even then, after just ten minutes sitting in the parlor, he was in such pain that he had to be helped upstairs. If he could not sleep, he would never recover, but Papa cou
ld not get the soldiers outside Mr. Hooper’s house to cease their tramping over the paving stones. The crowds wanting a glimpse of the new President were even noisier, chattering all the while they stared at Congressman Hooper’s windows, their backs to the Harris house, ignorant of the part its members had played in Good Friday’s events. Two or three times newspaper reporters came looking for her and Henry but were firmly turned away by the parlor maid. Mr. Hooper’s own servants came by, at least once a day, to borrow items from the Harris kitchen: their employer was home in Massachusetts, and even President Johnson’s modest wants couldn’t be satisfied from the meager stuff in the pantry.

  Over the past few years, Clara had been to Mr. Hooper’s parties on several occasions, always a little uncomfortably, since he was a great ally of the treasury secretary, and Mrs. Lincoln didn’t want her enjoying the hospitality of someone in league with Kate Chase’s father. On Tuesday afternoon she had started remembering all this, and was struck by how last week’s life now seemed a decade in the past. She had been assailed by a sudden longing for Mrs. Lincoln. Throwing on a shawl, she left the house and crossed the square to the Mansion, but old Edward told her that the First Lady was still seeing no one but Robert, Tad, and Mrs. Keckley, her Negro dressmaker; she had not been downstairs since Saturday morning, and no one expected to see her in the East Room for tomorrow’s funeral.

  Only seven women held any of the six hundred tickets given out for the ceremony, and Clara was not one of them. She remained at home, out of sight of the funeral procession to the Capitol, which she heard making its turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue at the corner of Fifteenth Street, its drums and dirges growing louder. When the sounds receded, the silence was frightening: for the next two hours not a whisper or a moan was heard from Henry’s room. When Papa arrived home from the Rotunda, he went in to check on his stepson and came down to the dinner table looking very grave. “He is beside himself” was all he would say, a figure of speech whose aptness only she really knew, having seen, after Petersburg, one Henry, a strange and ghostly one, displace the other, assume its mortal shape and banish it to a corner of the room, from which it never wholly disappeared.

  Papa had planned to leave with the funeral train on Friday the twenty-first to oversee the reception of the President’s body in Albany, as he had the arrival of the President-elect four years ago, but he became so distressed by the state of his own household that he decided to remain in Washington through the weekend. He would catch up with the train on Monday, in New York. So for the next few days telegraph boys ran between the Harris house and the War Department, carrying communications between Papa and the Albany organizers, who planned, he told her, to bring Mr. Lincoln’s body to the assembly chamber on a catafalque drawn by eight white horses. John Finley Rathbone would command the militia guard on the brief journey from the railway station.

  The train was scheduled to arrive in Albany at midnight on the twenty-fourth, and Clara realized, an hour after sealing her letter to Mary Hall, that Papa must now be putting himself to bed on Eagle Street. She imagined his exhaustion so sympathetically that some of it seemed to seep into her, allowing her at last, at four A.M., to fall asleep.

  It was late afternoon before she awoke to the sound of newsboys selling an extra edition of the paper to the little crowd outside Mr. Hooper’s. As she dressed, Pauline came into her room with a copy, which carried the news that John Wilkes Booth had been shot to death in a barn in Port Royal, Virginia, around the time she had been writing her letter to Mary. She read down the columns as fast as she could, avid for details — he had broken his leg fleeing the theatre — until she reached the speculation that Mr. Stanton would now persuade the President to proceed with a military trial of the remaining conspirators.

  Good, she thought. It would happen quickly, summary justice, and then be over. Henry needed to know this. She finished dressing and went downstairs to tell the cook she would bring him his beef tea and chicken herself. She found him awake, staring at the wallpaper, the pile of books and letters on his end table still untouched.

  “What’s happened?” he asked, pointing toward the window, through which he’d heard the excitement of the crowd in the next street.

  “I’ll read it to you.” She pulled the wicker chair close to the edge of the bed.

  She got no further than the second paragraph. As soon as she read that Booth had died saying nothing more than “Useless, useless,” while regarding his own murderous hands, Henry closed his eyes and sighed, as if a great slab had been lifted off his chest. She continued reading, but for the first time in eleven days, Henry had fallen deeply asleep.

  WEEKS PASSED without their being able to leave for New York. On May 15, Clara was escorted past the fashionable ladies, curious soldiers, and souvenir seekers thronging the corridors of the Old Penitentiary Building. She took a seat on the left of General Holt’s huge improvised courtroom, amidst several spectators she took to be military friends of the judges, and nodded to Henry, who was already at the table where witnesses gave testimony. She was part of an audience for the first time since the night at Ford’s, eager for Henry to get through his part and be done with the killing forever. Though no one had scrupled about making her return to the blood-stained box on Easter Sunday, it had been determined that Henry’s testimony would be sufficient for both of them today. Whenever the judges finished conferring at their round table across the room, and the reporters stopped chattering at their square one in the center, Henry would speak his piece. All the windows were closed, making the buzz of conversation louder and increasing the heat to the level of a midsummer day.

  There was only one other woman here, and she too was fanning herself, behind a heavy veil. Clara started with the realization that this was the boarding-house keeper, Mrs. Surratt, at the far end of the row of conspirators, all of them seated behind a railing at the front of the room. They weren’t wearing the hoods she’d read about, and Clara looked at each one, her eyes lingering over the magnificent form of Lewis Paine, who’d stabbed Fred Seward and his father; she wondered how he maintained his physique while chained up in the basement.

  General Holt finally rose and walked over to Henry. As a courtesy, the chief judge would himself lead the major through his testimony, which he now invited him to give in a single long statement. In a voice much softer than the one he used to use in the dining room on Eagle Street, Henry began to drone. After a couple of sentences, Clara recognized most of what he was saying as an exact memorization of the affidavit Papa had written for him on Easter Sunday: “… When the second scene of the third act was being performed, and while I was intently observing the proceedings upon the stage, with my back toward the door, I heard the discharge of a pistol behind me, and, looking round, saw through the smoke a man between the door and the President. The distance from the door to where the President sat was about four feet. At the same time I heard the man shout some word, which I thought was ‘Freedom!’ I instantly sprang toward him and seized him. He wrested himself from my grasp, and made a violent thrust at my breast with a large knife. I parried the blow by striking it up, and received a wound several inches deep in my left arm, between the elbow and the shoulder. The orifice of the wound was about an inch and a half in length, and extended upward toward the shoulder several inches …”

  The precision of the recollections was so at odds with the vagueness of Henry’s demeanor that some of the twelve judges appeared embarrassed, as if they were watching a cripple. Clara wanted someone to put a stop to this right now. But Henry went monotonously on: “The clothes, as I believe, were torn in the attempt to hold him. As he went over upon the stage, I cried out, ‘Stop that man.’ I then turned to the President; his position was not changed …”

  Why, Clara wondered, her anger rising, must any of this be gone into? Booth was dead. The question of his cohorts’ guilt depended on what dealings they had had with him before he entered the box. What transpired once he went in was now moot. Could no one else see that?


  Colonel Clendenin brought a bowie knife over for Henry’s inspection. Even from where she sat, Clara could see that its long blade still held Henry’s bloodstains. Surely, she thought, this would animate him; but he just continued droning: “This knife might have made a wound similar to the one I received. The assassin held the blade in a horizontal position, I think, and the nature of the wound would indicate it; it came down with a sweeping blow from above.”

  Colonel Clendenin entered the knife in evidence, and Henry was permitted to step down. A buzz of conversation resumed at the reporters’ table, and the judges’ as well, everywhere but in the row of conspirators. As Clara closed her fan and straightened the black silk flower on her hat, she heard one newspaperman say to another, in a hiss of sarcasm, “ ‘Stop that man.’ For Christ’s sake, why didn’t he stop that man?”

  Clara stared at the two of them in disbelief.

  “ ‘Intently observing the proceedings upon the stage,’ ” mimicked the second one. “What a fine idea a week after Appomattox! Couldn’t imagine there’d be trouble!”

  “The man’s a fool,” said the first one.

  “Or worse,” his companion replied.

  Nine days later, his arm still in a sling, Henry stood with Clara on Pennsylvania Avenue and watched 150,000 soldiers parade by in the Union’s official victory celebration. The Twelfth New York was marching, and Clara, Ira Harris, and Pauline had all urged Henry to march with it. “You are a hero,” his mother had insisted. “From Antietam to Petersburg. You should be with your comrades. You should not be leaving the field to Will.” But he did not relent. He had come to realize, in the weeks after Ford’s, that many of those who read the newspapers and talked endlessly of the assassination had formed a very different view of him than the heroic one held at Fifteenth and H streets. The monstrous injustice of the whispering — the absurdity of the idea that Henry might somehow have prevented the killing of the President — was never discussed by anyone in the Harris house. Its members tried to ascribe his refusal to join the parade to anything — physical pain; modesty; perversity; just being Henry, the old Henry — except the shame they feared he was feeling. What he actually thought remained unclear. He spoke little to anyone, including Clara; the two of them avoided the only topic on their minds.