Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “Thank you,” she said sarcastically, starting for the door.

  “Seen the paper?” he called after her.

  “No,” she said, hesitating.

  “It’s full of the Beecher spectacle. Your papa’s old vanquished senatorial foe, Mr. Evarts, is going to help out with the defense. He’ll have quite an audience to play to. ‘Three Thousand Persons Seek Entry to Brooklyn Courtroom.’ ”

  “Poor Mary,” said Clara, unable to smother a laugh. Her friend’s tottering idol, Henry Ward Beecher, was now accused of seducing a parishioner’s wife.

  “What’s she written you about it?” Henry asked.

  “Very little.”

  “Probably disappointed it wasn’t herself. I always thought she was jealous of those colored girls — ‘Eliza’ and ‘Sarah’ and whatever else they were called — the ones whose freedom he got his congregation to buy.” He laughed at the memory of it. “The abolitionists’ slave auction!”

  “Don’t you dare make fun of Mary,” said Clara, turning to go, her mild amusement now extinguished.

  “Tweddle Hall,” said Henry in a tone of quiet reminiscence. “Do you remember that night we heard him, way back in ’fifty-nine?”

  “Yes,” said Clara, pretending to look for her gloves on the cluttered hall table just past the threshold. She wondered where he was going with this.

  “It was the night your papa proposed his grand tour, never knowing I would crash the party.”

  “Yes, it was,” she said, walking away. He rose from his swivel chair and came up behind her shoulders and neck with his arms. “I was at least as good a seducer as Dr. Beecher, wasn’t I?” She felt herself getting warm, wanting to turn around and lead him into the bedroom, the one place where their aggressions still, on occasion, transported them to peace.

  “Leave me alone,” she said.

  She hurried down the stairs, put on her coat, and went out of the house to get Dr. Carter, whose consulting room was in Vermont Avenue. The January air struck her full in the face, and she felt tears coming. But she would not give in to them, would not let the ladies of Lafayette Square see them on her face. She didn’t care how cold it was; she would compose herself inside the park. Crossing Jackson Place, she entered the nearest gate and looked for a bench. She was distracted by the sight of a girl thinly wrapped in a shawl, a housemaid she vaguely recognized, standing by a Spanish chestnut tree, just west of Andy Jackson, with her eyes closed, intently whispering as if in prayer. She was in prayer, Clara realized: this must be the “wishing tree” her own housemaids sometimes talked about. Her foot cracked a dry twig, and the girl, realizing she was being watched by one of the neighbors, opened her eyes and took off, as if the tree’s magical bark were like the bread in all the pantries on the square, the rightful property of the house owners. Clara felt embarrassed for both of them, but when the girl was gone she touched the tree herself and looked over at the late Senator Sumner’s house. “How is the colonel?” was the question he used to ask whenever she went to one of his evenings. These days any such inquiry would bring a hush to the room, as everyone waited for Mrs. Rathbone to give what they knew would be only a polite, correct answer, but which still interested them, charged as it was with the electricity of her odd, absent husband.

  She hadn’t given a party of her own in months, and wondered if she’d been imagining things the last time she had, when the stack of regrets seemed a little higher than the time before, elevated, she thought, by the growing reluctance of the neighborhood ladies to go to the house of this man who was evidently peculiar, spending the days inside poring over his investments and history books, and now, it was said, his “writings.” Of the latter Clara could tell them no more than they had heard rumored; whatever historical tract he was laboring at, Henry never offered to show.

  Was it too late for him to do something real? She had just passed forty, and he wouldn’t reach that age for another two years. She touched the ordinary-looking chestnut tree, this apparently magical growth at the center of all the vast nation’s power, and silently made a wish, not for a new prince but for a job, something that might still take her husband out of himself, if not away from her.

  JUDGE HARRIS suffered his third and final stroke at home, late in November of 1875, while sitting at his desk cracking walnuts and writing a testimonial to the character of an Albany Law student. He was seized all at once, violently; a walnut slid, uncracked, across his desk and onto the carpet, and a moment later the judge fell down beside it. Pauline used the telegraph to draw his children home to Loudonville, addressing the Washington wire to Clara, treating the judge, as always, like a circumstance only incidental to Henry. Still, it was assumed that whatever turn the judge’s condition took, Henry, lacking any business of his own, would stay in Loudonville with Clara and the three children through Christmas.

  On Thursday evening, December 2, Ira Harris’s life was nearing its close. Pauline, tired from her vigil, went to bed after dinner. Little Clara and Gerald were left to play with the kitchen maid, and Henry took charge of Riggs. On their way out of the house to walk in the orchard, father and son passed Clara, who was about to join Will at the judge’s bed, which had been made up in the study where he was stricken.

  “Where are you taking him?” she asked Henry. “He’s not dressed warmly enough to go out.”

  Riggs kept his eyes on the hall carpet.

  “For a short walk,” said Henry. “I’m going to explain death to him.”

  Oh, this would be a wonderful speech for a five-year-old, she was certain. A piece of ill-informed grandiloquence designed to convince a shivering boy that what was happening to his beloved grandfather was all connected to the bloody harvests of men from Thermopylae to Fredericksburg.

  “Don’t keep him out there long” was all she said, moving past them, brushing Riggs with her skirts and a quick caress.

  As she entered the study, Will nodded rapidly to her, to indicate that the end was approaching. The judge’s breathing was loud and spasmodic. Unable to move or talk, he still had the disconcerting use of one eye, which he had half open, appearing to take a last inventory of his possessions. His vision traveled to a piece of mission art that Jared had sent from California; to the letter knife his old partner, Julius Rhoades, gave him when he was elected to the assembly; to the tin tray with the painted apples, on which he had stacked letters for the last thirty years. Now he remembered the piles of them that arrived after Louisa’s death, and wondered who in the house would answer the ones arriving after his own, which he knew was at hand. He moved his eye in Clara’s direction and struggled to make a sound.

  She leaned over and said he mustn’t strain, as she pondered the cruelty of this speechlessness that had settled upon her father after a lifetime of words, too many to be sure, but sincere as they were prolix, all of them uttered in the comforting baritone she knew she would never again hear. If only men might devise some way of preserving sound, so their voices might be kept with photographs and engravings, not just sent out from the body to die upon the air. She stroked her father’s cold, immobile hands and listened, in her mind, to the flourishes of his voice as she had heard them in the Senate gallery during the debate on Senator Bright — “Oh, how it must satisfy the rebels to know that as they assault our lives and property, we may be counted upon, ourselves, to destroy the honor of the finest among us” — or as they took their stately annual wing, like returning birds, over Union College commencements. How many times had she heard him send boys “into the sunlight, to find their lives and serve their Lord.” These were the words she tried to hear now, not the paternal flummery of the last few years. “Henry is a fine man,” he would tell her, in panicked reassurance, on those occasions when she allowed her fright to spill over the proud fortress of denial in which she had come to live.

  “Papa, don’t try to speak,” she said, smoothing his white hair, which lay on the pillow, still thick but now in an unfamiliar tangle.

  As the evening wore on,
the judge’s breathing became ever more raspy. The movements of his left eye, random now, unnerved Will into occasional bursts of declamatory conversation, which his father was beyond comprehending. “There’s been a letter inquiring after your condition from President Raymond down at Vassar, Papa, and Governor Tilden sent his personal representative to convey his best wishes.” During these loud speeches Clara would touch her brother’s arm, signaling their futility. As the hours passed, she thought of little stories she might have told her father and offered them to Will. “A day or two before we came up here, I was out walking in the square with Riggs, and he pointed to the Mansion and asked me, ‘Do all of General Grant’s soldiers live there with him?’ ” Will said, “That’s Henry’s doing,” and Clara replied, “Yes, he’s already filling him full of the war.”

  A few moments after this, a spasm seized the judge’s face and turned it toward the right side of his pillow.

  “He’s gone,” said Clara to Henry an hour later, after telling Pauline the news. She got into bed.

  In the dark, in his own bed on the other side of the room, Henry lay with his eyes open and struggled with himself, trying, from a sense of form and a weak flicker of tenderness, to find something to say. But nothing came to him. Clara knew he was hardly thinking of Papa at all. He was putting his memories through their nightly mill grind. Perhaps Petersburg, maybe Ford’s, or the money he’d lost in the ’73 panic — she didn’t know what-all. But his agitation cast a charge across the room, like a spark coming off the counterpane.

  Her instinct was to shield herself, and her father’s spirit, from the electricity she could feel dancing over her husband’s silhouette. As if to repel it, she spoke the first bromide that came to mind: “There was nothing that could have been done. Not since Friday morning, Dr. Crane said.”

  “I’ve taken care of Riggs,” said Henry, he too using words as a repellent, this time against that detestable phrase — nothing that could have been done — which he’d heard spoken and whispered, as a question, to his face and behind his back, for the past ten years.

  “What do you mean, ‘taken care of Riggs’?” asked Clara. “You didn’t know Father was dead yourself until this moment.”

  “I mean I’ve instructed Riggs in the general idea of death. He’ll now find understanding this particular instance of it easy enough.”

  Even a year ago, she would have snapped back, said something like, “Ah yes, Union College, Mental and Moral Philosophy. It was the second part of the lectures you were fined for not attending, am I right?”

  As it was, tired and unsure of herself in the dark, and aware of being in new waters, stripped of even the flimsy protection of her father’s love, all she replied was, “I’ll see to Gerald and little Clara myself.”

  The next morning Henry rose before everyone but the kitchen girl. When Clara came down she found him in the dining room reading the newspaper. “There’s nothing in the Argus,” he informed her, “but Dr. Crane has gotten the word round. A memorial photographer was here to ask if we wanted a picture of your father’s corpse. I told him no. I’ve taken the liberty of opening up his letters. I know the one on top will interest you.”

  Springfield, Ill.

  My dear friend Judge Harris,

  It is with the greatest sorrow, that I learn through the papers, of your very severe illness. Dearly, did my noble husband & myself, love you & my deeply afflicted heart goes out to you in my prayers, for your speedy recovery.

  Please present my warmest love to your wife & family, and accept for yourself, dear & honored friend, my sincerest love.

  Most affectionately yours,

  Mary Lincoln

  “From Springfield,” said Henry. “I was unaware that they’d unlocked the asylum in Batavia and let the widder-woman out. ‘Ow, yes, Mister Ratboon,’ ” he continued in the Irish accent of the servant girl, “ ‘the dair thing’s been allowed ’oom since September.’ ”

  Clara put the letter into the pocket of her dress and reached for the next one on the pile.

  Paris

  20 November 1876

  I see I’ve even begun to write my dates like a European — that’s how long and often we’ve been over here. The children, bundled onto train after train, week after week in country after country, look up at me perplexed when their ears realize it’s a different unintelligible language they’re now hearing. Henry promises to get us home by January, in time for the season, but it won’t make up for all I’ve missed this year, especially the election (the result is even now in doubt). To read Uncle Hamilton’s accounts of warring Stalwarts, Half-Breeds and Carpetbaggers, you would think he was writing from the Dakota Territory instead of his desk in the state legislature.

  I am sick unto death of Europe, heartily and forever sick of holding the chain of my children’s hands as we rush for the next ferry or coach or streetcar. There are mornings when I would rather drown them all like kittens than get them ready for another day of touring. I would also rather go out my own front door and look ten times a day at Washington’s silly monument, still unfinished, than have one more glance at a perfect Saint-Cloud. I want to hear Riggs sliding his bare feet across the linoleum in the kitchen; here he’s squeezed into little leather shoes that go clicking across the marble corridors of whatever museum is in Henry’s plan for the day. We have missed the Philadelphia Exhibition, which Amanda and Tom say they went twice from Ohio to see: we read their accounts of machines that “type” and ones that sew after we’ve spent hours looking at glass-encased crossbows. But it isn’t only novelty and sleekness I crave; it’s also the familiar shabbiness of home — the Negroes and the mud, the very stench upon the District’s summer air.

  Henry and I had a great discussion (I mean, of course, a ferocious fight) last night. I think we have a compromise, though what he chooses to remember of it will no doubt change by Christmas. I told him I would not come over here again without a fixed abode and the chance for my children to spend time, much of it and regularly, with their own countrymen; and since the best way to achieve such an end would be a diplomatic posting, I have declared that that is what we must seek for Henry once we get home. I am beyond being fed up with his investing and scribbling, and am determined that my sons shall observe their father in some posture other than angry idleness.

  I have, for what it’s worth, his word. Perhaps he will keep it; perhaps he finds appeal in the idea of being some charge who gets to tyrannize baffled American travelers and would-be emigrants. Either way, I told him it is the only circumstance that will get me once more across the ocean.

  How difficult will it be to find such a position? (I have no doubt that the finding of it will be left to me.) The Harris family’s political connections are not what they used to be, but I think I have made enough friends of my own to do the trick, assuming the State Department proves to be President Hayes’s and not President Tilden’s. If the Republicans remain, I will talk to Hal Tomkins about the possibilities. I already suspect — to my shame — that what will motivate him on my behalf is pity.

  Rutherford B. Hayes — “His Fraudulency” to Henry Rathbone and millions of others — was sworn in on March 5, 1877, after the Electoral Commission declared he’d won the presidential election with fewer popular votes than Governor Tilden had received. “Mr. Evarts’s silver tongue serves some peculiar causes,” said Henry. “But he does seem to get his way.” The man Thurlow Weed had had to ditch for Ira Harris back in ’61 won the day for the Republicans with his argument before the commission, just as two years ago his speech to a Brooklyn jury had saved Henry Ward Beecher from conviction. There had been jokes in ’75 about how he might expect eternal salvation as his fee, but there was nothing speculative about the reward this time: William Evarts was the new secretary of state.

  The atmosphere in Washington had been made so tense by the election dispute that there was no inaugural ball, just a reception at Willard’s to which Clara could not secure an invitation — a circumstance that left her
feeling apprehensive about the campaign for office she was ready to begin. But her spirits lifted within a week of the swearing-in, when Hal Tomkins, her versifying friend at State, returned one afternoon to his widowed mother’s house in J Street, which Clara had taken to visiting each day, and told her there was an opening that just might suit Henry: chargé d’affaires in Copenhagen.

  Clara thought back ten years, to her honeymoon, to the two of them reading in the late summer light at Tivoli, and to two other visits they had made to the city during their endless European treks, before she replied, “I think Denmark will suit my lord Hamlet very well.”

  She began her work that night, telling Lillian, the children’s nurse, that she would be unable to read them a story. She went into the sewing room, at the back of the house, taking with her a bottle of the brightest blue ink she had: the letters needed a feminine appeal, a sort of exuberant helplessness that would make their male recipients eager to assist. The tiny room had a strong lamp, and though the March wind came through the poorly sashed window, within a few minutes of starting, Clara had so warmed to her task that she scarcely noticed the temperature. Within an hour she had drafted a half-dozen witty, imploring letters to everyone from Uncle Hamilton and Bishop Doane in Albany to General Schofield at West Point and Governor Hartranft in Pennsylvania. She made a list of the names on the back of an envelope containing one of Mary Hall’s letters (could Mary enlist the mayor of New York? Her father had been a friend of his) and vowed to add another dozen to it by March 20. Before she was finished, she would pull out more stops than Papa had for any postmaster or customhouse controller.

  Two weeks later she spent every afternoon in Mrs. Tomkins’s parlor, sympathizing with the old lady’s neuralgia and joining in criticism of her married sons, none of them attentive like her darling Hal. Like many other young Washington men, the skinny, sparsely mustached Hal Tomkins showed a tendency to crush upon the beautiful Mrs. Rathbone — so clever, so teasing, so self-assured, and yet, surely, somewhere inside, so sad? — and each day, when he came home just before five, out of the sight of his mother, he showed Clara the testimonials that had begun to arrive on the Department of State’s mahogany desktops.