So there they stood, on the sidelines of a city still crazily split between celebration and grief. The hotels were full, and visitors who couldn’t get into them were once more sleeping on porches and bathing in the fountains, as they had before Mr. Lincoln’s first inaugural. As the troops marched by to screaming huzzahs, the Capitol remained hung with crepe, and the Treasury Building decorated with the flag torn by Wilkes Booth’s spur. The parade went on and on, regiment after regiment, from dashing Zouaves to colored troops shouldering pickaxes, all of them moving between the White House, where Johnson and Grant and the Cabinet occupied a reviewing stand, and the Capitol, on whose steps a vast, disparate choir sang everything from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.”
Soldiers from the Twelfth passed Henry without recognizing him. Clara looked at the laces of her shoes and thought of the conspirators’ trial, which was still going on in the penitentiary. She was so cheated by fate that she might as well be wearing one of the plotters’ hoods, with no one to recognize or care about her. “Let’s go,” she said to Henry after twenty minutes at the avenue’s edge. “It’s time.” They walked in silence back to the corner of Fifteenth and H and climbed into the carriage they had told to wait. The driver now asked if the circuitous route he had in mind for getting to the station would do, and Henry said yes, anything that would get them around the parade. The terminal was bound to be chaotic, but their seats to New York were reserved. Papa and Pauline and the girls would follow tomorrow, and they would all be back in Albany in time for Amanda’s wedding.
When the carriage came as close as it would to the Mansion, Clara thought of Mrs. Lincoln, who two days ago had left it at last. She reached her hand over the rim of the coach, as if trying to touch or signal her spirit. Then she turned her head back toward Henry, and they rode in silence until he spoke in a tone he had never used with her before this moment. “I’m surprised you didn’t spend the last six weeks in there with her,” he said, gesturing toward the Mansion. “In fact, I’m sometimes surprised you came home at all that morning.”
“YOUR PAPA SAID Mr. Vassar’s hired a lady astronomer to teach the girls down at his college.” Mary Hall pointed to a bright star as she and Clara sat on the front porch of the Harris home in Loudonville on the third Friday in November.
“Yes.” Clara laughed. “And she’s going to live with her papa in the observatory.”
After eleven years of knowing Clara, Mary still didn’t always understand her humor — the private thought waiting behind the expressed laugh — so she paused to let her friend continue. “That would be a good life for me, Mary. Alone with Papa, just studying the moons of Jupiter through a telescope.”
They were the only two still awake in the house full of women. Amanda was living away from home with her husband, but Pauline and Louise and Lina were asleep upstairs, and all the men were gone: Will and Jared (now graduated from West Point) were away at their posts, and in the week since coming up here for “Thanksgiving” dinner — the custom revived by Mr. Lincoln two years ago, in 1863 — Ira Harris and Henry Rathbone had been back in Washington.
“Do you think a woman can really be an astronomer?” Mary asked.
“Of course,” Clara said. “You surprise me, Mary. You think the black man is the equal of the white one, but you never seem able to imagine the women of any race being equivalent to their men!”
“That’s not true. I simply don’t think everything should be meted out in like measure to men and women.”
“Mary,” said Clara, who had been irritable since late this morning, “don’t you dare bring up Mrs. Surratt again.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Yes, you were, and I’m not going to have another discussion of it. I’m glad they hanged her with the rest of them, just as I wish they’d hanged Mary Hartung six years ago after all the abuse and whispering Papa endured.”
“All right, all right,” said Mary. “Have you heard from Henry?”
Clara, wondering if the word “whispering” had prompted Mary to pick Henry as the change of subject, answered, “Yes, today. He’s writing an enormous end-of-the-year report, all about the dismantling of the army.”
“That’s wonderful,” said Mary.
Clara wanted to ask the question that had been on her mind all week — whether Mary had heard people in New York talk of Henry’s conduct on the night of the assassination. But she couldn’t. Instead it was Mary who screwed up the courage to ask, “Do you have a date for the wedding yet?”
“Soon,” said Clara. “But still no date.”
“A little more waiting isn’t so bad,” said Mary. “It will put the war further behind you.”
“You make the war sound like a summer in Newport or last year’s birthday, Mary. Something that will soon be completely and neatly forgotten. It’s not that convenient. Do you suppose Sybil Bashford will ever put the war behind her?”
“Yes, I rather think she will.”
The two women surprised themselves with sudden, uproarious laughter. “Oh, Clara,” said Mary. “God forgive us.”
Clara settled down, relieved. “I do love you, Mary, and I’m sorry I’ve been so grumpy. I promise to be better in the morning.” She kissed her friend good night, and the two of them went upstairs, Mary to a room at the top of the house and Clara to her old window seat, where she lit a candle and took out two letters from the pocket of her dress. The first had come from Henry:
… your father is only beginning to realize the tone this new session of Congress is taking. “Smiler” Colfax, Thaddeus Stevens, Sumner — they’ve all got their scissors out, ready to cut up Andy Johnson and his Reconstruction plans faster than he ever trimmed a pair of breeches back in Tennessee. Darling, the mild, Whiggish Republicanism of Senator Ira Harris is finished: the radicals intend to scald his portion of the party with the same lye soap they’ll be using on the South. Your papa thinks he can put himself in their good graces, catch up to their runaway train and jump on. But they know his heart isn’t in it, and they don’t settle for anything but purity. He and his moderate friends will be packing their bags a year from now. This fellow Conkling, who struts like a turkey but is much more glamorous than his name, means to have your father’s seat. And he probably will. The fight that’s getting under way is the same bloody game of parlor oratory all these “statesmen” played in the years before the war. Its most eager spectators are the misfits and pansies who never found the battlefields, the little clerks who now buzz about politics in the taverns and sashay into the galleries of Congress to look down on the players …
She shook her head and set the piece of paper aside. The second letter, from Papa, had been written the same evening, three nights after his and Henry’s return to Washington, and it contained what he hadn’t been able to tell her face-to-face here in Loudonville last week:
… Henry alternates between vociferation and anomie. I cannot keep track of his movements or moods. He is doing superb work for the Adjutant General — I know as much from my friends — but his overall reliability seems more questionable than ever. The other night some fellows from his office came by, and he was the old Henry — merry and saturnine by turns, sarcastic throughout — but when the conversation among them turned to General Grant and Mr. Lincoln, he abused the General and the President’s memory in the most shocking way, and was unrecognizable for the rest of the evening. (The soldiers who fought the war, on either side, are now saintly in his mind; the politicians who prosecuted it are, to a man, devils.) I fear he is still hopelessly dislocated by what he experienced on the battlefield and at Ford’s, and however much I dread telling you this, my dear, I must: I want you to postpone your marriage yet a little further, for another year at least, so that we may see what stability he comes to …
This was the third time she had read these letters since their arrival this morning, and she was determined never to read a pair like them again. To think of these two men, alone in that h
ouse except for the servants, sitting in different rooms, neither one communicating with the other, each complaining to her — it made her furious. She loved them both, but she would not be the victim of Henry’s anger and Papa’s dithering; she would no longer be crushed between their cross purposes. So she brought the candle to her table and commenced writing two letters of her own. As she flexed her hands, squeezing the last of the late autumn cold from them, she felt herself taking control of matters once and for all.
Dear Papa,
I will postpone the wedding for one year — not because I share your alarm, only because I don’t wish to add to it.
You must know that I lived through the war on the strength of your promise, and I will not allow you to break it — I shall not become Louise, who is six years younger than I and already a skitterish spinster. If I allow you to delay the fulfillment of this promise, then I have the right to set some conditions of my own. When Henry and I marry, we shall remain in Washington, whether or not you are returned to the Senate. If you must come back here, we shall buy the Washington house from you. I know that you will fight hard to be returned, just as I know your good service makes that the only just eventuality, but you must realize by now that the odds against it are growing long. Mother does not speak of it, but I know that she is resigned to being back in Albany a year from now. You must have noticed how the trunks she packed to precede us on this last trip up here contained more than the usual assemblage of clothes that had fallen behind the fashion. I notice bibelots laid out on tables here and on Eagle Street that I haven’t seen at these latitudes in five years.
She is preparing for the next portion of her life, up here, and I do not mean to share it with her. I do not mean for Henry and myself to pass our marital existence as an exotic hybrid inside a forest of Rathbones and Harrises. I mean for us to have our own life, in Washington, the only other place I really know. There will be plenty for Henry to do there — you yourself admit his talents for administration — and if he does nothing but live off the Rathbone money, that will be fine too.
It is time for me to be insistent. You are to discuss this letter with Henry before you come back here for Christmas, and when I see you we shall plan a new announcement of the marriage, with a new date, in 1867, during which year I shall turn thirty-three. You must not doubt my love for you, but you must now exercise yours for
Your devoted daughter
Clara
Without pausing, she reached for another sheet of paper.
I have sent Papa a letter. You are to discuss what it says with him. I insist on everything that is in it. I shall wait no longer than I promise to in that letter. I shall not allow us to drift, to be latter-day victims of the war, like soldiers dying of resurgent infections. If you love me as you say, you will agree to what I propose — and you will let the better angels of your nature conquer your anger and sorrows. I mean to be happy, and to make you happy too.
She feared losing the courage to mail both letters, so she hurried downstairs and put on her coat and went out to the box at the edge of the plank road. The boy would pick them up early in the morning. Crossing the lawn back to the house, she realized that she had quoted Mr. Lincoln to Henry: “the better angels.” This was probably not a good idea, but either he wouldn’t catch it or any feelings it pricked would be overwhelmed by the rest of the letter’s urgency.
She could hear frost crunching beneath her feet. It made the only sound in the cold blackness, until she neared the front door and heard a scream. Her eyes darted to its origin, Louise’s room, where some candlelight flickered. She raced upstairs, throwing off her coat as she went. Mary Hall, candle in hand, had already arrived at Louise’s door and was asking what was the matter.
“The dress,” said Louise, who was sitting on her bed, shaking and trying to apologize.
“Be quiet,” said Clara.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I went back to work on the closets,” Louise rushed on. “I opened the box, thinking it was just one more that Mother had shipped up here.”
“And so it is,” said Clara, picking up the pink satin dress from where Louise had dropped it. “I don’t know why I meant to save it. It seemed important to, six months ago. It no longer does.” She took the gown and shook it, and the crusted blood flaked off it and fell to the floor like iron filings. Mary gasped, and Louise began to cry again. “Stop it,” said Clara, throwing the dress back into its carton. “I’ll dispose of this in the morning. I said stop it, Louise, and I mean it. You’ve seen blood before, and you’ll see it again. Now go back to bed, both of you. You’ll wake Mother.”
“MAJOR Henry Rathbone and Miss Clara Harris!”
Stepping into the French minister’s ballroom on the evening of February 9, 1866, Clara felt as many eyes upon her as she had sequins on her dress. Even the Marquise de Montholon, the minister’s wife, jeweled fleurs-de-lis all over her, the Order of Napoleon dangling from her bosom, was looking.
Clara knew exactly how a hundred conversations were proceeding. “Isn’t that the couple …” would be the question from one woman to another. “Yes, can you imagine the horror of it …” would come the response. “But you know,” would add the first — and here fans would go up to mouths, and voices would drop to whispers — “isn’t it peculiar that he was unable to …”
She kept smiling, moving down the line of hand-kissing men, and meeting the gaze of each of their wives, as Henry came stiffly behind her. When she got to the end, she decided, she would unclench her teeth and begin to enjoy herself. This was not, after all, just a White House reception hosted by Mr Johnson’s daughter, or another party at the Chase mansion on E Street; this was the greatest affair the city had seen since before the war, and she was going to delight in it as much as anyone. They owed it to her, all of them — Henry, Papa, Fate.
There were army officers, senators from both sides of the aisle and across the great divide within the Republican Party, berib-boned diplomats of every complexion, Kate Chase Sprague in white moire and a diamond tiara. All of those things were predictable, she thought, working her way down the receiving line, taking kisses, extending her hand, passing the huge vases of poinsettias and the swinging censers. What seemed odd was the reappearance of so many Southerners, older men and women who had lived on in the District through the war without ever venturing forth to a party given by Mrs. Lincoln.
She reached the end of the line as the orchestra returned from a break. Henry spotted friends from the adjutant general’s office and headed across the marble floor in their direction, handing Clara over to old Gideon Welles, who professed his delight. “Though I’m afraid my legs have grown too stiff to dance,” said the navy secretary.
“Then we’ll just stand and have a look together,” Clara replied, patting his hand. “All these Southerners! What do you make of it?”
“It was the same at a party my wife gave, and at the last few receptions in the Mansion. They’re showing the flag. It has less to do with the last war’s being over than the one we’re engaged in now, with these radicals. A terrible business. We need all our troops. Where is your father, Clara?”
“Just back from Dr. Nott’s funeral in Schenectady.”
“How old was the man?”
“Ninety-two.”
“Good Lord,” said Welles, laughing. “I’ll see the twentieth century if I go on that long. You’ve made me feel younger than I have in months.”
“Then I’m glad I came out tonight.” She wished that a realization of Dr. Nott’s antiquity would make Papa feel younger, too, but the funeral had had the opposite effect. He’d arrived home the other night looking, at sixty-three, like an old man. Dr. Nott had been alive longer than the Republic, and his continuing presence had kept a part of all the Union men of his time feeling like boys, needful of instruction from the little wizard in the pulpit at the front of the college chapel. Now he was gone, and the years had suddenly tumbled down on Papa like a snowfall.
“You tell your father to come
see me over the weekend. We need him back in the game immediately. The President needs him.”
“I shall do that first thing upon arriving home.”
Mr. Welles would need luck with Papa, who’d be an exasperating ally, trying to trim a moderate course, hoping to do what Mr. Lincoln would have wished, but still trying to curry favor with Thad Stevens and the radicals. He needed someone to lay down the law to him, the way Mr. Weed used to years ago, but there wasn’t anybody like that now. Clara was sure he would be back in Albany in twelve months’ time, bewildered. For that matter, she suspected Mr. Welles would soon be home in Connecticut, editing his old newspaper.
But she would stay right here. She had had her way about the wedding date: July 11, 1867. It still seemed distant, but it was fixed, and she finally had an engagement ring on her hand. When the house was theirs and their lives their own, she would give her own parties, not so grand as this, but good enough to match Kate Chase Sprague’s. They would be a good investment of Henry’s money. If he could learn to hold his tongue, there might be a Senate seat in his own future. But that didn’t matter. When she truly had him, her ambitions would be fulfilled, for the first time since she’d unconsciously realized them, twenty years ago at the Delavan, at Papa and Pauline’s wedding breakfast.
She wished Mr. Welles would relinquish her. There was much she wanted to learn tonight, and she needed to get out on the floor. Where, she wondered, was Alice Hooper? She was always a good source of information; she, if anyone, could confirm the astonishing story Clara had heard the other day, that Kate Sprague was dallying with Ira Harris’s young rival, Conkling.
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