Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  Looking once more at the schoolboys’ paper silhouette, she wondered: when would her son start going to school? Just in time for the centennial, in ’76, she calculated, imagining the day she would paste his own first drawings, of cherry trees and cocked hats, to the panes in his bedroom window. She was glad they had bought this house in Lafayette Square, glad they had decided not to live at Fifteenth and H. The moment she and Henry stepped into a great welcome-home party on Eagle Street sixteen months ago, she had realized the need for a complete break with their peculiarly joined parents. She had known all at once that she couldn’t move into the Washington house that Papa and Pauline had occupied throughout the war, and when it developed that Admiral Alden’s was up for sale, she persuaded Henry that buying it constituted a radical departure — even if it was just inside the square, on the other side of the park, and involved little more, as Jared pointed out, than “looking at the other end of Andy Jackson’s bronze horse.”

  But little Riggs — as they’d be calling him to avoid confusion — had been born this morning into a whole different era of history in the square. Across the tiny park, on Madison Place, James G. Blaine, the speaker, was occupying the house where Mr. Seward once lived and nearly died. On their own side, two doors down on Jackson Place, Vice President Colfax had taken up residence in the stucco dwelling where Dan Sickles used to live and bellow. With the war five years over, men were building new houses everywhere in the city. They read stock quotations now, not casualty lists. Instead of hacking itself to bits, the country was bursting with growth. This was the good and exciting time into which her son had been born.

  She was all at once desperate to see him again, and so, carefully sitting up in bed, she called through the closed door and asked Mary to bring him to her. Mary had been an angel this past week, the only person Clara had wanted to come down and be with her. Lina was too easily distracted and Louise too squeamish, but Mary’s endless generosity had put up with Henry’s moods and pretended not to notice the spats that flared between the two of them at least twice a day. Mary’s work with the poor in New York was deepening her own natural goodness, giving her an ampleness of spirit that was lovely to observe. She was no longer just a passionately right-minded girl; she was becoming, Clara believed, a soul. Spinsterhood had already wrinkled Louise, but Mary was blooming. Still, Clara thought, hearing her steps come down the hall, how shockable she could be! The other day Clara had confided to her that not the least reason for looking forward to the baby’s arrival was the prospect of resuming relations with Henry as man and wife; the poor thing had blushed to match the crimson bell-pull. If only she knew how important this really was. The baby might be their creation, something that would finally give them a living, breathing common interest, an object of worry beyond themselves; but more important, its delivery from her body would give them back to each other, let them once more return to their nighttime world of almost violently happy lovemaking. It was daylight that always brought back trouble.

  “Look who’s here!” whispered Mary. Clara, extending her arms to the baby, recognized the robe he wore as one she herself had knit for Lina twenty years ago.

  “My precious little Riggs,” she said, taking him from Mary, who turned up the lamp. “Oh, Mary, look,” she softly cried as she fingered the down on the infant’s skull. “I never noticed this morning. It glints red in the gaslight, just like his papa’s whiskers. Yes, sweetness, you’re your papa’s little man, aren’t you?”

  Mary moved to close the door, but Clara asked her to leave it open. “I’ve been shut in here all day. I’d rather hear some noise from the rest of the house.” She joked about “confinement” being the right word for what she’d experienced. With relief she heard Henry turning pages in the library across the hall: the huge book of Egyptian history, she imagined, feeling calmer to know just where he was.

  “Let me go back out and get the telegrams,” said Mary while she smoothed the bedclothes. A moment later, after scurrying in with a pile of them and forgetting to leave the door open, she took a seat at the foot of the bed. In a voice too soft to disturb the baby, she read them one by one to Clara.

  There was one from Pauline and Papa, who was PROUDER THAN EVER. Mary held it up and Clara delighted in the black capital letters made by the miracle Dr. Nott had once prophesied (that story Papa never tired of telling). Had their own “annunciation,” as Henry called it, not gone out over the wire early this morning, Papa’s congratulations would have had to wait a few days before arriving in a letter, and its handwritten form would have saddened Clara: the small stroke he suffered last year had rendered his penmanship unsteady.

  “One from your Aunt Emeline,” said Mary, “and another from Amanda and Tom.”

  “Does she mention that I’m still one behind?” asked Clara.

  “Yes, she does!” said Mary. Amanda and her husband, Mr. Thomas Ewing Miller of Columbus, Ohio, had had their second child last month.

  There was even a wire from General Schofield, on whose staff Jared now found himself, and another from Emma and Will, who was commanding the Watertown Arsenal.

  “Is Will supposed to be there much longer?” asked Mary, who still felt a pang or two of curiosity about the noble young soldier she’d years ago had a crush on.

  “No,” said Clara. “Probably not more than a few months. When his discharge comes through, he’ll be secretary and manager — I think that’s the title — of the Decatur Rolling Mill Company. Henry calls it the Tolling Bell Company, but I don’t see why he makes fun. It’s a very Rathbone-like thing Will’s decided to do: he’ll soon be a mighty manufacturing man, not just another orating Harris like Papa and Uncle Hamilton.”

  “Has Henry been discharged himself?” asked Mary, who had been circumspect this past week in inquiring about his plans.

  “He will be, at the end of the year,” said Clara, before shifting the topic to the wondrous intricacy of Riggs’s fingers. Henry had been unassigned from any duty since March of last year, and it was unclear to Clara what real difference his formal discharge, when it finally came around, would make. His lack of plans must seem uncomfortably evident in contrast to Will’s, but she was grateful that Mary asked no further questions, just as she appreciated her not commenting on the quarrels, or on how few acquaintances called during the days and evenings Henry spent inside the house. Perhaps Mary thought everything was fundamentally all right. Well, now that Riggs had arrived, everything would be fine, or at least very much better.

  There was a sharp rap at the door. The two women started, but the baby slept on. “You’ll have to learn to start playing pianissimo, heart,” whispered Clara, after Henry entered.

  “Something from Mrs. Grant,” he said, handing Mary a parcel. “A boy just delivered it.” It was a bedjacket, blue quilted cotton, quite merry and not at all fancy. Clara pronounced it enchanting and wondered how the First Lady had gotten the word: “We didn’t send them a telegram, after all.” Henry supposed it was their own cook talking to the Vice President’s that had started the very short grapevine needed to reach the White House from Jackson Place.

  “Come look at the telegrams,” said Clara.

  “I’ve already been through them. I’m sure tomorrow will bring many more congratulations upon your feat, dear.”

  “Mary’s done most of the hard work. I feel as light as air, but she must be ready to drop.”

  “Where will our son and heir be spending his first night?” asked Henry.

  “I offered to put him in my room,” said Mary. “I thought that would give Clara a better night’s sleep. But she wants him right here.” She pointed to the cradle that the maid had placed in the room an hour ago.

  “That’s fine,” said Henry, “though I can’t say what it will do for my night’s sleep.” The three of them laughed. Mary took the baby from Clara, kissed her good night, and placed Riggs in his cradle. She smiled at Henry and left for her room down the hall.

  Clara wanted to see her husband pick up his so
n, wanted him to find irresistible the idea of waking Riggs up and hearing his little lungs. But Henry just looked down at him, in a manner that seemed disappointingly objective. She closed her eyes.

  “Tired, darling?” he asked.

  “Yes, a little.”

  “Let’s go to sleep, then. And hope that he does.”

  He turned down the lamp and kissed her. Clara watched him shed his waistcoat and trousers and place them on the chair with his old comical neatness, more dandified than military. He put on his nightshirt and came around to her side of the bed, pausing only to peel the Lincoln silhouette from the window and toss it into the fireplace.

  THREE YEARS LATER, on March 3, 1873, Henry stepped off the Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar at a point slightly beyond Lafayette Square. He was returning from an afternoon spent reading Carlyle in the Library of Congress. Entering the square on the Madison Place side, he began a slow counterclockwise circuit toward home. As always, the houses surrounding the park excited familiar reflections and long-held resentments. He walked over the spot where fourteen years ago Dan Sickles had shot his wife’s lover, and he thought of Clara, advancing toward forty and, after three children, still beautiful — though too eager to be reminded, by every congressional clerk and Tuscan fop, of just how lovely and spirited she was.

  No house in the square was more potent to Henry than Mr. Seward’s place, as he would always think of it, even though it had belonged for some time to Speaker Blaine. Seward had died last fall, and Clara’s slow recovery from the birth of their third child and first daughter, Clara Pauline, had given them an excuse not to travel up to Auburn for the funeral. Judge Harris (as everyone once more called him) had sent them an account by letter, his handwriting still more quavery after a second stroke. Even so, he’d managed all the telling details, including Mr. Weed’s attempt at pallbearing amidst a flood of tears. The description was friendly, even heartfelt: the judge was content with teaching law and being chairman of the American Baptist Missionary Union, a position that provided Pauline with the small bit of social recognition she still craved, though it was nothing, of course, to the road show of lionization that Seward traveled, from Mexico City to Shanghai, after leaving office and Lafayette Square in ’69.

  Nobody, thought Henry, was where they had been just a couple of years before. All the army men had quit, not just himself and Will, but even Jared, who’d left Schofield’s staff and gone out to California to raise horses. He’d make a success of it, too, just as the noble Will was doing with the Tolling Bell Company. But their western ventures left Henry without any desire to compete. The more he heard of them at family holidays up in Loudonville, the more inclined he was to live off his money like a gentleman, adding to it by investment, spinning paper from paper in the speculative spirit of the Age of Ulysses. His brothers could hew and haul; the precise numerical manipulations he plotted in his own library let him feel like an artist. In this town, to his satisfaction, the accumulation of money set him apart from all the men accumulating power. It was true that he hadn’t yet increased his fortune — in fact, he’d so far lost more than he’d made — but he knew a good return would soon come his way. If it was so important for Clara to stay here, fine; but he would carve out a separate existence for himself, and she would have to agree to a few months in Europe each year, when he could shed Americans like his itchy winter coat.

  It would all have turned out differently, he thought — passing the great house where McClellan had quartered himself during the war — if preposterous Little Mac had managed to beat Lincoln in ’64. But he hadn’t, and it had come out the way it had, and at just this moment Henry would not allow himself to think about it, would put one foot in front of the other as he turned the corner onto H. He would not look down toward the old house at Fifteenth. He’d look instead toward the Wormley Hotel, wondering if one of the diplomats nested there was planning a party that would interfere with Clara’s tonight.

  Well, good luck to her. He wouldn’t be staying to the end of it anyway. After an hour he would slip out to gamble at John Chamberlain’s or dine at Welcker’s, where he could sit amidst walnut panels instead of the floral wallpaper that now filled his house. At Welcker’s he could look at women, not wives, and converse with some honest bookmaker instead of the politicians who, except for the odd poet, would make up Clara’s whole guest list. At Welcker’s the crowd changed from night to night, and he could sit there without having to make friends, without getting to know anyone well enough that they’d dare ask him anything he didn’t wish to be asked.

  He was passing Senator Sumner’s house now. And wouldn’t you know, the old gentleman was out in front, his neck tilted backward, the better to warm his face in the fading afternoon sun. As he heard Henry’s walking stick approach, without even opening his eyes, he asked, “How is your father progressing, Colonel Rathbone?”

  “My father-in-law does very well, sir. He walked the length of Mr. Seward’s funeral procession and came home to write us all the details.”

  “Well, that’s one good piece of news to come out of such a sad occasion.” The old man brought his head down and looked at Henry. “No matter how many years go by, I still miss having Ira Harris at my ‘evenings.’ Though your wife’s presence is a beauteous substitute.”

  “I shall pass the compliment on to her, sir.”

  “Please do that. We always hope to have you join us yourself, Colonel.”

  “It’s always good of you to ask,” Henry responded with a tip of his high hat. He continued walking west, past St. John’s and then old Montholon’s place. Clara’s own parties must seem inexpensive to her, he thought, given the way she could remember the French minister’s famous ball every time she looked out her windows.

  It was only four-thirty, and he didn’t want to go home yet, so he went into the park and sat on a bench that afforded him, through the now bare magnolia branches, a sight of both the White House and Seward’s old home. He thought, as always, of the gigantic Lewis Payne crashing up the steps of the latter just as Booth was doing his work at Ford’s. Doing his work right in front of Henry himself. Carlyle maintained that all history depended on the will of great individual men. Nowhere did he acknowledge what resulted from one man’s doing something he had neither planned nor understood. This, Henry felt sure, was the other mainspring of history, the second one, which he would someday, after many more volumes and much more reflection, figure out. At that point he would have his peace, and the rest of the world a new parcel of enlightenment.

  It was quite dark before he got up and crossed Jackson Place toward number 8. Reaching the door, he could hear Gerald’s wailing and Riggs’s chattering. The nurse, who had Clara Pauline in her arms, let him in. He handed her his hat and went into the main parlor, where Clara was sitting on the carpet, finishing a romp with the boys and soothing a freshly raised bump on Gerald’s forehead. They were both their mother’s creatures. They had little affection or curiosity, and she no mothering, left over for him. She had a peculiar way — admirable, he thought at times; embarrassing, he believed at others — of entering their world completely, of making herself their equal. This was one of those moments; it was only his entrance that caused her smile to fade. She looked up while replacing a hairpin.

  “It’s six o’clock, Henry. Six o’clock at least. You should be larking about with my darlings. I have a dozen things yet to oversee.” She rose from the carpet and wiped the dust off her dress. She offered him her cheek, which he kissed, before asking, “At what hour may we expect the rush of peacock feathers?”

  “Eight o’clock,” she answered.

  “And for what fare?”

  “Chicken cutlets, sweetbreads, charlottes, two wines — no, three, but only three. Oh, Henry, I can’t remember it all. Ask cook, if you must.”

  Henry, who prided himself on his dining discipline, and whose stomach was as hard as it had been at Union College, smiled. “I trust the wines will be good ones. Their luncheon oysters will barely have t
raveled south from their gullets; they’ll need something fine to slide them on their way.”

  “The wines are quite modest, actually. And I haven’t stuck a diamond in my bonnet, like Mrs. Sprague.”

  “You know I want you to do things in style, dear.”

  “Yes,” she said, straightening some ferns. “I do know. And I trust you’ll tell me when I’ve begun to spend our capital.”

  “I shouldn’t worry,” he said, accepting the rolled-up Evening Star from Riggs, who had manfully toddled in with it from the hall.

  “The secretary of war is coming,” she said, attempting a playful, wheedling tone. “I should think, with the President’s second term getting under way, that thirty-five is just the right age for a new undersecretary.”

  “Not interested,” said Henry as he allowed Gerald’s tiny fingers to explore his boot buckle. “I made them what they are, in any case.” He opened the paper and sat down on the sofa. Clara shook her head over this one more cryptic bit of self-assurance. “You exasperate me, Henry. Mind that Gerald doesn’t hit his head again. Betty! There you are. Come in, please. Tell cook to set out a punch bowl in the library. And tell Edwin not to let the gawkers get too close to the front steps when the guests are arriving.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And take Riggs in for his dinner, please.”

  Now she could get dressed. She made one last glance toward Henry, who had quite forgotten Gerald at his feet. “I’m counting on you to be here from beginning to end,” she said, and left the room, envying Kate Chase Sprague, who, with or without a diamond in her bonnet, had only a husband’s drunkenness to worry about.

  “To think it could have been Greeley!” shouted Congressman Roundtree, thinking ahead to tomorrow morning, March 4, 1873, and Ulysses S. Grant’s second inaugural. Clara’s guests, Republicans to a man (and to an unenfranchised woman), were raising their goblets of Madeira in a toast to the reelected President.