Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “Let’s thank God he took his own advice and went west, young man!” cried Mr. Ralph Eaglesfield, a representative of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Washington, who reached clear around Mrs. Hannibal Hamlin to slap the back of Congressman Roundtree, two seats farther down Clara’s big Eastlake table. A few feet away there was a second table just like it, whose diners brought the total in the room to sixteen.

  Clara was discomfited to realize that a clear majority of them were laughing at Mr. Eaglesfield’s remark. Would they not let the defeated Democrat rest in his grave? She looked around for some decently pursed lips or averted eyes, and could find only those belonging to Mary Hall, old Mr. Hamlin, and his wife. “Poor Mr. Greeley,” said the latter, with a gentle bipartisanship that Mr. Eaglesfield and Congressman Roundtree must be finding quaintly obsolete. “To lose his wife, his newspaper, the presidency, and his own life — in the space of a few weeks! I think we should toast his memory,” said Mrs. Hamlin.

  Gratefully, Clara raised her glass and thought something kind about Mr. Greeley. In fact, though it was twelve years too late, she wished that the New York legislature had chosen him instead of Papa for the Senate seat. How different everything would have been.

  “Well, I’ve still got some malice toward one,” said Mr. Eaglesfield — another good one that Congressman Roundtree would appreciate, and which a back number like Mrs. Hamlin could be counted on to recognize.

  The congressman was not the only one in Clara Rathbone’s dining room caught up in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. His name, she knew, had appeared on the Sun’s list of those given Union Pacific shares by Massachusetts’s Oakes Ames. Nothing can stop them, thought Clara, not even a scandal as big as this one. In November, the Republicans had made huge gains in the House, including the two new men at the next table, the kind of men who, even ten years ago, her papa would have had trouble bidding a good morning to. She did not like the unstirrable mixture of her own guests: crude, green buccaneers and white-haired relics. (Dear old Vice President Hamlin, back in the Senate since ’69, had shown up tonight in his black swallow-tailed coat.) The old ones were mostly true friends; the new ones would chew on any leg of mutton or hand extended in their direction. The people in between, the ones who really made things happen in Washington, were, with the exception of the secretary of war, absent. She was finding them harder to attract than she’d expected when they bought the house three years ago. Curiosity drew her first-time guests; was it Henry’s peculiarities that kept many of them from coming back?

  Oh, dear. Mary, bless her true-blue heart, was about to say something. Couldn’t she be stopped? Apparently not. A look from Clara failed to close her friend’s lips, which were trembling on the verge of utterance.

  “That’s not the spirit of my Republican Party, Congressman.”

  Roundtree moved his gaze to her. “And what spirit would that be, ma’am?”

  Mary searched her mind for a moment and declared brightly, “Why, the spirit of men like William E. Gray and John Ray Lynch.”

  Oh, she would, thought Clara. Naming two of the Negroes who’d actually been allowed to address the convention last summer. Roundtree and Eaglesfield were now leaning across Mrs. Hamlin to roll their eyes at each other. At the other end of the table, Henry seemed amused, wondering how Mary would, as always, dig herself in deeper.

  “Anyone else?” asked Mr. Eaglesfield.

  “Well,” said Mary, sputtering a bit, “Senator Hamlin, of course.” He bowed his head gratefully. To Mary’s mind, he had been a bit late in coming to the abolitionist cause (she could always tell you just what year in the 1850s any Northern politician had “turned”), but as Mr. Lincoln’s Vice President he had safe conduct into her pantheon. Even so, her heart really longed for the moment when the other guests would all be gone and she could slip across the square to Senator Sumner’s house, bringing that grand old radical a leftover cake and her own most humble good wishes. She made this pilgrimage every time she came to visit Clara in Washington, her awe never diminishing a jot.

  “Mrs. Rathbone, how is your good father?” asked Hamlin, deliberately changing the subject.

  “He does very well, sir. He’s a bit stiff in his legs, but he still works hard for the American Baptist Missionary Union.”

  “Past seventy now,” said Mary Hall, full of ecumenical admiration. Her own father, the Episcopal bishop, had passed away the previous year, leaving her alone in the house on Beekman Place.

  “And your brother Jared, Mr. Rathbone? Still on General Schofield’s staff?”

  “No, out in California, Senator. Raising horses and pursuing some mining ventures.”

  Clara looked solicitously at Mr. Hamlin. She knew he must be requiring his pipe by now, and she gestured for the server to speed things up and bring in the cheeses.

  “Good for him,” said the senator. “Too many men have been staying on in the army longer than it needs them. Even fine West Pointers like your brother. The war’s long over. We’re friends again, and blessed with a protective ocean on either side of us. We can do with a smaller service. We need talented men like your brother to be settling the great open spaces.”

  “So long as Congress allows them to,” said Mr. Eaglesfield.

  “Sir?” inquired Hamlin.

  “So long as Congress doesn’t fence off half the West into some giant preserve. Some of you men on Capitol Hill won’t be satisfied until they make this Yellowstone Park a hundred times bigger than it already is.”

  “Nonsense,” said Hamlin, putting a wedge of Stilton onto his slice of pear. “There will always be plenty of room for the entrepren —”

  “I’m afraid Eaglesfield is right, Senator,” interrupted Congressman Roundtree. “The country’s got to grow. We can’t be fencing off great parcels of it just because —”

  “Am I the only one here who’s read Mrs. Southworth’s new book?” asked pretty Mrs. Eaglesfield in her silvery voice. She seemed to mean well, looking first to Clara and then Mary, hoping to tame the men before they got into a real row.

  “No,” said Mary. “I’m afraid not. But I have just finished Mr. Charles Reade’s A Terrible Temptation.”

  Mrs. Eaglesfield blushed. “It sounds quite scandalous.”

  “It exposes abuses in the regulation of lunatic asylums,” said Mary, an answer that brought forth a hoot of laughter from Mr. Eaglesfield. His wife just said, “I see,” clearly perplexed by the thought that a spinster like Miss Hall should interest herself in such dreadful things. She looked away from the table, toward the Japanese prints on the far wall. (Clara was determined to keep up with the fashion in furnishings.) Mrs. Hamlin, by way of compromise, mentioned how much she had enjoyed Mr. Roe’s Barriers Burned Away, all about the Chicago fire of two years before; but this new offering failed to light any conversational sparks. Mr. Eaglesfield, who by now had drunk too much wine, had picked a pomegranate from the fruit bowl and, leaning backward behind Mrs. Hamlin, was waggling his wrist to demonstrate to Congressman Roundtree the newly approved baseball throw, which allowed the pitcher to put a bit of spin on the ball, even if he was still prohibited from throwing it overhand.

  Clara knew that Mr. Eaglesfield was one of nature’s bullies, the kind of man who, if he were still a boy, would be out in the gutter hurling insults at whoever was attempting to master the bicycle. He had looked down the low, feather-trimmed neckline of her dress when he’d come through the door tonight, fresh from Capitol Hill, where he had no doubt been applauding the victory all his well-paid congressmen had won over salacity this afternoon, when they passed the Comstock Act. Clara was willing to put up with these hypocrites if they could make a difference to Henry’s situation, but the evening would soon be over and he had made no real effort to talk to anyone, including the secretary of war. If nothing happened when the men went up to the library with their cigars, she would soon have to put on yet another dinner like this one.

  “So what’s your theory?” shouted Mr. Eaglesfield to Congressman Roundtree, b
oth of them now leaning forward, the question going straight down the table and across poor Mrs. Hamlin.

  “Theory of what?” asked Roundtree.

  “Yes, of what, Mr. Eaglesfield?” Clara asked, hoping to bring the table into one last round of unified conversation before the sexes rose and went their separate, post-prandial ways.

  “Theory of the Mary Celeste, of course,” said Eaglesfield, surprised that she should even have to ask. The mystery of the American ship had, after all, been in the papers for days. She’d been discovered by the Dei Gratia, a British brigantine, floating between the Azores and Portugal, still carrying her 1,700 barrels of alcohol, but without a sign of her seven-man crew, or her captain, or the captain’s wife and daughter, who had accompanied him on the voyage out of New York. The lifeboat was missing, too, but what had possessed anyone to get into it? There was only a little water in the hull, according to the crew of the Dei Gratia, who had boarded the drifting ship on December 4, and since then testified to a court of inquiry in Gibraltar.

  “It was a mutiny,” Congressman Roundtree said definitively.

  “Couldn’t have been,” shot back Eaglesfield. “Mark my words, this Captain Briggs was conniving with the skipper of the Dei Gratia.”

  “You mean with the captain who discovered her?” asked Senator Hamlin. “That seems fairly preposterous.”

  “Yes,” said Mary Hall. “And it doesn’t explain where everyone else is.”

  “Something went wrong between the two of them,” said Eaglesfield. “Some sort of falling out. The Dei Gratia’s man ended up having to get rid of his confederate and all the rest of them. Don’t forget the bloody sword they found on board.”

  By now the eight guests around the other Eastlake table were tilting their heads toward Clara’s group. The Mary Celeste, about which everyone in the country held an opinion, had unified the conversation beyond her expectations.

  “That blood you’re referring to turned out to be rust,” said Senator Hamlin. “That’s what the board of inquiry says.”

  “Indeed,” declared Mr. Eaglesfield. “That’s what they say.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they abandoned ship in a moment of panic,” said Mrs. Eaglesfield, giving her husband a conspicuously adoring look, one that told the other guests it was her happy duty to calm the male feelings of her imposing spouse. “There’s the theory of the waterspout,” she reminded them. “That bit of water in the hull came in in such a great rush, they didn’t realize it would end up being just a small pool. They feared they were about to be overwhelmed, and they made too much haste toward the lifeboat. Panic can make people overreact. Or sometimes it can make them fail to react at all.” She looked to her right, to the head of the table, and straight into Henry Rathbone’s eyes. Within seconds, all the other heads and gazes in the room traveled to the same location. No one said another word; they just waited for him, this recognized expert on panic and inaction, to say something.

  The sound of ringing startled them back to their former postures, and their manners. Clara shook the white china dinner bell once more, until the butler came to pull back the ladies’ chairs, and the other servants began the clearing of plates. “The gentlemen to the library,” she announced as gaily as she could. “And the ladies into the parlor.” Mary helped her herd the rustling silk-and-feather-clad women, while the men began climbing the stairs and talking gruffly on some other topic they could pretend they had been talking on all along. Henry went with them, smiling stiffly and saying nothing. His wife watched him, now wishing he would go off to Welcker’s and get himself away from these rude sensation seekers.

  Dear old Mr. Hamlin took her arm and gave it a small squeeze as he passed her on his way to the landing, a sign of solidarity. He had told her years ago that he wished fate had been less cruel to her and Henry; his own escape from that violent night’s disruptions had always struck him as an undeserved mercy. After all, Lincoln might have run with him again in ’64 instead of Andy Johnson!

  Clara gave him a grateful look, then let him catch up with Henry, where he tried to restart that discussion of Yellowstone Park. She excused herself from the ladies, pleading an obligation to check on things in the kitchen, though she actually made her way into the alley, where she stood under the stars for a moment or two, losing her anger, and then gaining it all back when she realized she was looking vaguely northward, toward Tenth and F, where Ford’s Theatre still stood, in perpetual mockery of Henry. It had been purchased and remodeled by the government to house, among other things, the adjutant general’s office! It now held the pension files of the men who had fought Mr. Lincoln’s struggle. To Clara’s mind, this was grotesque; why could they not pick another vacant building? Let them tear down that detestable place.

  She closed her eyes and smoothed her dress and made herself the same vow she had already made a number of times in the past year or two: to her own list of admitted faults — her stubbornness, her love of admiration, her lack of piety — she must not add self-pity.

  She returned to the house and climbed its back stairway to the children’s rooms on the third floor. If the boys were already asleep, it would be a small miracle, but she heard nothing from their room. It was from the nursery that she heard soft, soothing sounds. She went to the door and opened it.

  “Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me …”

  “Henry?” she whispered.

  He didn’t seem to hear her, didn’t turn around, just kept singing softly to the infant daughter in his arms, the two of them in a rocker near the window, looking out into the square. She felt her eyes glisten at the sight of her husband stroking the hair of this baby he had named for his wife and mother. What it must be like for him, she thought — though this was more a feeling, a rush of sympathy as strong as what she had felt the morning she came home from Ford’s to find him moaning in his bed. For eight years now he had lived with this. Those people downstairs, eating his food and drinking his wine, would never let it be otherwise. How could she get this agony out of him? Might it have failed to root itself if she had gone home with him, instead of staying with Mrs. Lincoln, in those first hours? Why had she been afraid to? Was he failing her now, failing their children, because she had failed him? She had to remember that for all his bad moods and his frequent unkindness, he had done nothing wrong. He was Booth’s second-worst victim; he had suffered more even than Mr. Seward, who, once his stab wounds had healed, was again whole in his mind. She had to remember that the real Henry was the man in front of her, the man crooning to this little girl he loved, the man who would rather be with her, and his wife, than with the great men of action in the library.

  She walked slowly up behind him and touched his shoulder. He wheeled around, his face going white in the moonlight.

  “Darling,” she whispered, “don’t let that awful woman downstairs upset you. We know she’s wrong, and that’s all that matters.”

  “Yes,” he said, reaching up to take Clara’s hand, as the baby slept on. “She is wrong. I didn’t panic. I was very clear about what I did.”

  SHE DIDN’T WANT to go in and talk to him. He had been in a terrible humor all morning, ever since a letter he wrote nearly a month ago, requesting advice from his old friend Jack Barnes about shares in the Toledo & Wabash Railroad, had been returned by the mailman, crumpled and dirty, despite its having been correctly addressed. The week he wrote it, he’d been angry at the poor performance of Toledo & Wabash; the week before New Year’s he’d been angry at Jack Barnes for not bothering to respond; and today, January 16, 1875, he was angry at the United States Post Office.

  Clara recognized the Christmas season as a bad time. This one had been especially so. With Aunt Emeline’s death last August, Henry seemed more surrounded by Harrises than before. Out in Loudonville he was scampered over by Will’s and Amanda’s children as well as his own three, who were all now full-throated and fast on their feet. Even Pauline had less attention available for Henry, though she would not in any case have acknowledged his
strange new tempers and withdrawals. What wounded Clara, what made her feel lonely and vulnerable during the family frenzy, was Papa’s apparent unwillingness to notice these problems. Her own veiled complaints about her husband, her measured confessions of distress — each one made at high cost to her pride — he immediately deflected, as if they were more than an old man who had suffered two strokes could be expected to bear. But she believed that his alarm over what he gleaned from her hints — as well as whispered reports from his other children, and the observations of his own failing eyes — was secretly greater than her own. And what right had she to ask for his worry now? Would he not just remind her of his warnings fifteen years ago? No, he wouldn’t. That was not his way, any more than it was hers to doubt that she had done the right thing.

  She certainly wasn’t going to start fearing her own husband, and so she crossed the hall into the library. He could fume all he liked over his bad investments (if only Toledo & Wabash were the worst of them), and he could rail as he pleased over the vagaries of the U.S. mails, but she wouldn’t allow him indifference toward his own children.

  “Henry, I want Dr. Carter to look at Riggs.” Her sons and daughter were usually healthy, and while she was not a nervous mother, she was determined that nothing was going to happen to them, the true success of her married life.

  “You’ll condition him to think that it’s normal for every sneeze to make a doctor appear, like a genie blown out of a lamp.”

  “For one thing, genies are rubbed out of lamps. You’d know that if you ever bothered to read your children fairy stories. And for another, he hasn’t sneezed at all. His ear is hurting him, so badly that he’s crying. He’d howl if he weren’t afraid to. You’d do well to remember Eleanor.”

  This mention of Amanda’s baby, who’d died two years ago from what started as an ear infection, stumped him, as if Clara had just brought up Eleanor of Aquitaine in connection with her son’s ailment. But turning back toward his desk, he said, “Suit yourself. Just don’t summon Carter by mail, or Riggs will be dead by the time he gets here.”