Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  The first round were from the Harris family, whose enthusiasm for Clara’s undertaking had already been expressed in notes addressed solely to Mrs. Henry Rathbone at her home address. The letters they wrote to State were more professional in tone, but they beat the drum unflaggingly. From Columbus, Amanda’s husband Tom Miller noted that he would also be appealing directly to the President, a fellow Buckeye, on behalf of this model brother-in-law, “a gentleman of high culture and stainless character, a good soldier, a staunch Republican always reliable and of prepossessing manners.” He was about half right, Clara thought, grateful that Henry still put money into Republican coffers in Albany and New York, if only to help his investments. There was no need, she thought, for the Buckeye in the White House to know that the subject of these letters of tribute had not actually voted in the past two presidential elections, not when Tom Miller went on to say that “he adds to a kind heart and amiable address an excellent collegiate education and knowledge of the French.” Well, maybe Henry would now be thankful to old Union, and perhaps she could count those European hours, when he strained to converse with potted old veterans at the Invalides, to have been not entirely wasted.

  “He is a warm friend of mine,” wrote Uncle Hamilton, who was still giving him the benefit of the doubt, twenty years after he’d extended it at his law office. “And Mrs. R. is my niece. Hence I have a personal interest in his procuring such a position. Aside from that, however, I believe his appointment would be highly reputable and strengthening.” Strengthening? The word seemed to betray an awareness of Henry’s unhealthy situation, or her own. So much of what was written seemed telltale, to have a text beneath it in invisible ink, a hidden charge ready to backfire as soon as the phrase was properly decoded. When letters from the generals began arriving, she wondered, for instance, if Schofield’s, saying “Col. Rathbone is too well known in Washington to need any endorsement from me,” might be taken as evidence of notoriety instead of approbation. No, surely what counted was the general’s declaration that Henry was “precisely the character of man whom those Americans who are jealous of their country’s good name would most desire to meet abroad as the representatives of the intelligence and refinement of their countrymen.” And yes, General Sherman might be stretching things — bless him — in saying, “I have known him since the war intimately,” but what counted was the fact — it was a fact, she decided — that Henry would “worthily represent the better elements of American character abroad.”

  Walking home on these first afternoons of spring, looking at the crocuses already up in the park, she rehearsed favorite passages from the letters swinging inside her reticule, and tried to imagine a life in Copenhagen. They would be respected, enviable, with Henry made social and useful, not to mention grateful for the part she would have played in the transformation. Hadn’t Bishop Doane written that the colonel’s wife “is a most charming lady, and while the interests of the Government would be more left in his hands, the best social and personal traits of a people will be represented in Mr. & Mrs. Rathbone”?

  Each afternoon her fantasy held until the time she would mount the stairs to the second floor of the house and pass her husband, who had fallen asleep over a book and a tumbler of whiskey in his library, the vein on the left side of his head, like an extension of the scar on his arm, throbbing angrily through his unquiet nap. She would hear Lillian through closed doors, warning the children — who instantly heeded the warning — that they mustn’t disturb their father; and it was then that Clara admitted to herself the real reason she’d asked Hal Tomkins for copies of the incoming testimonials. It was not to keep track of the progress of her campaign; it was for the flickering illusion that the man discussed in them was the real Colonel Rathbone, the true adult aspect of the boy she had fallen in love with thirty years ago. As the weeks went by, she stored the letters not in the top drawer of her writing desk, but in the wicker box at the bottom of her closet, the one that contained such ancient treasures as letters from Howard, handkerchiefs her real mother had embroidered, and a small wooden decoy that she and Will had carved for a birdhouse in Loudonville.

  After two months, she finally summoned the courage to ask Hal if he didn’t think there should be some hint of a response by now, and in the nervous blink of his eyes, before he could even mumble about the slow pace of things at State, she realized the truth. Secretary Evarts wasn’t trying to balance the surface endorsements against the subliminal hints of trouble, wasn’t attempting to square Henry’s war record with the whispers of failure and unreliability that had trailed him in the years since. No, it was all too painfully obvious, as it should have been from the start. Evarts was simply ignoring them, for why should he take any trouble to think about doing a favor for Ira Harris’s son-in-law — or was it his son? — sixteen years after the judge and the Dictator had cheated him out of the Senate seat that should have been his to occupy all through the war, with real purpose and distinction, not just as a lock in the canal of patronage. Hal needn’t have troubled to write out copies of the letters; for all the attention they were getting, he might as well have given her the originals. She thought back to that afternoon in ’61 when Mr. Weed came huffing and puffing up Eagle Street ahead of the newspapermen, and Pauline sat in her parlor like Queen Victoria, and Uncle Hamilton nearly wept at the news of his brother’s elevation. She was the only one to have seen it as trouble, the sudden undertow that would sweep them all too far out, as it had. But even she could not have foreseen such petty little ripples as this, sixteen years later, spraying her like cold rain.

  In June she read in Miss Snead’s column that the Copenhagen post was about to be filled. In a fit of embarrassment, Hal told her it looked as if it would go to someone owed a favor for “particularly important services” rendered during the election dispute last fall. Two weeks after that, they were off to Loudonville for a summer so isolated they didn’t travel the plank road to Albany more than half a dozen times. She and Henry went for weeks without speaking of what had happened. Pauline said something about the job’s having been beneath Henry’s abilities. Clara herself brushed off commiseration from Uncle Hamilton and Mary Hall with a resigned smile and knowing jokes about “politics.”

  But she was not resigned. The episode had left her not just angry at Evarts, but frightened. She could see the next decades before her, stretching past the turn of the century: the children would be grown and gone, and she and Henry would still be traipsing through Europe, floating from country to country like the shades of Paolo and Francesca, lighting for a few months each year back on Jackson Place, where they would gradually stop being called upon and, finally, cease being invited.

  She would not accept Mr. Evarts’s refusal. She would mount a second campaign, not for the Copenhagen post but for any in Europe. She would dare the secretary to insist there wasn’t a consulate on the entire Continent that could use the services of the kind of man whom all the letters described. She solicited another round of them, and this time Tom Miller sent a copy of the letter he’d mailed to his old “friendly acquaintance,” President Hayes. She felt no embarrassment at its urgency: “It is with great diffidence that I once more appeal to you in behalf of Col. Rathbone … I only beg as an especial favor, for which I must be ever loyally grateful, that you will give the matter your personal attention … If you think of it, my wife, who truly loves the Chief Lady of our land, desires to be remembered to her — Mrs. Miller seriously thought of coming to you to make personal application for her brother, but her courage was not as strong as her sisterly solicitude.” Well, brava, Amanda, for even considering it. Clara found the contemplated gesture no more extreme than a recent one of her own: asking General Burnside to send a copy of Henry’s military record to Evarts (as if he needed another one) with a personal note attached.

  This, of course, she had not told Henry; knowing she’d asked the overseer of the battle of the Crater to come to his aid would be more than his temper could abide. But otherwise he had been will
ing, even eager, this time around, to hear of every new development and stratagem. She had come across the draft of a letter he had himself written to Jack Barnes, to accompany the gift of two expensive books of naval history. It announced: “I intend going into action the last of this week and hope that you will find yourself able to help me in the way you indicated.” His rejection, she realized, had shocked some part of him, not the one accustomed to feeling himself the target of whispering conspiracies, but the old proud part that couldn’t help expecting Evarts or any other man to anoint him to the post, once he’d condescended to permit his wife and friends to advertise his availability. It was this portion of him that had now been jolted into competitiveness, and Clara welcomed its assertion. She only wondered how long he would be able to sustain and modulate it before it exploded into pique or was extinguished by the stronger tendency toward righteous withdrawal. He had been shocked back to his senses, but she knew how easily he could be shocked back out of them. She’d been reading Riggs A Pilgrim’s Progress and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and wondering if her son’s effortless entrance into these bedtime allegories came from his being already so used to his father’s moods, where what was good and what was bad turned into each other as fast as Riggs could make a ball come bouncing back from the wall. What she had to do was keep at bay the taste for aggrievement until her second effort had a chance to succeed.

  She would do anything. One noontime in the middle of November she was on the verge of going over to see President Hayes, when she looked through her bedroom window at the front of the house and noticed one of the most handsome men she’d ever seen. He was strolling up Jackson Place, heading into the park through the gate she entered whenever she went to talk to the wishing tree. What could this young man possibly have to wish for? He was tall and slim, though broad-shouldered, with fine wavy hair and a face so cleanly beautiful she could almost smell the soap on it. She closed her eyes and folded her arms in front of her, pressing them against her waist, which Henry had not circled with his own arms for more than a month. She took a deep breath and, with her eyes still closed, imagined what it would be like actually to smell this glorious young man’s cheek, to put her hand into his wavy hair and take a strand of it in her mouth.

  When she opened her eyes and quietly raised the window for a better look, she noticed two old ladies passing in front of the Parker house and whispering to each other. One of them, with the gloved hand not covering her mouth, now pointed to the young man. Well, Clara thought, if these two, old enough to be his grandmother, find him an Adonis, she could scarcely, being only old enough to be his mother, feel ashamed herself. But when she saw the second lady squinting and finally nodding, she realized it was not the young man’s beauty, but his celebrity, that was causing their discreet excitement. Suddenly she too knew who it was: the smooth, stunning face belonged to Webb Hayes, son of the massively bearded President. She had read and heard all about him, even though, like alcohol, she had yet to be invited into his mother’s White House. He was just out of Cornell, a footballer, serving as his father’s private secretary. In the months after the disputed election he had functioned as his bodyguard: even in Europe she and Henry had heard the rumor about a bullet being fired through the Hayes’s Ohio dining room window.

  Fully awake from her romantic daydream, she raced to open the bedroom door. “Riggs!” she called, not caring if she disturbed his father. “Get your ball right now. And meet me just inside the front door. Lillian, put his coat on him. Right away!” She combed her hair as she ran down to the first floor. At the mirror in the hall she checked her face before rummaging the clothes tree for a shawl with a bit more color than the one she had on. At the same time she rummaged for facts: he had a sister, Fanny, about ten, and a much younger brother — Sam? Scott? — not much more than five or six, who had a — pony? well, at least a mockingbird. “Riggs! Lillian! Hurry!”

  The nurse rushed the boy from the kitchen into the hall, buttoning his jacket as she pulled him along. He looked up at his mother with a confused expression, holding his biggest red ball out toward her, wondering why it was so important for them to go out and play with it right now. She licked her fingers and wiped a smudge from his face, and together they dashed through the vestibule, stepping on the letters that had just come through the mail slot. But before they went down the front steps, she knelt and whispered to him, “We’re going to go into the park and play a game. When I signal to you, pretend to throw the ball to me, but I really want you to hit the back of the man I’ll be standing next to. Can you do that?” Riggs, looking very grave, nodded to indicate that he thought he could.

  They reached the park in no more than a minute.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” cried Clara as soon as her son had carried out her instructions.

  Webb Hayes turned around and flashed his white teeth. “That’s all right,” he said with a laugh, scooping up the ball in a single elegant movement. He tossed it back and asked the boy, “What’s your name?”

  “Henry Riggs Rathbone.”

  “We call him Riggs,” said Clara.

  “Like the bank,” said Riggs.

  The President’s son laughed again and extended his hand to the boy. “I’ve got one of those last-name first names, too. Mine’s Webb. It was my mother’s name before she married my father.”

  The boy seemed to have no idea this was the President’s son, but instead of enlightening him, the beautiful young man turned to Clara and said, “I am Webb Hayes. I take it you are Colonel Rathbone’s wife.”

  “Yes,” said Clara, nervous about what part of Henry’s reputation had preceded her into the park. “Do you walk here often? I’ve not seen you before.”

  “Only once in a while. My father usually keeps me at work during lunchtime. He dictates letters between bites of his chop. There was a change of plans today. He’s over at the British legation having a proper meal, and since I wasn’t invited, I decided to stretch my legs. I didn’t know I’d have a ball game into the bargain. Come on, Riggs, throw!” He faded back and extended a long arm into the air. Riggs’s throw came nowhere near it, but Hayes still managed to catch it with one hand.

  “You should be entertaining your own little brother instead of being so kind to my boy.”

  “Oh, fat little Scottie is probably riding around on his velocipede. I just bore him.”

  “Does he ride it in the Mansion?” Clara asked, remembering the way Tad Lincoln used to drive his goat through the hallways.

  “No,” said Webb Hayes, jumping to net one of Riggs’s throws. “His mother can be quite strict.”

  “I remember that Mrs. Lincoln —” she began, but there was a sudden loud shout from across Jackson Place. It seemed to Clara that the ball froze in midair.

  “Riggs!” cried Henry’s distant voice. “Come back here right now. And bring your mother.”

  Riggs rushed after the ball, and as soon as he had it began tugging at his mother’s skirt. She tried to stall him, to get just a few more words in, dreading all the while that Henry would shout something else or, even worse, come over to the park.

  “You saw some terrible things with her,” said Webb Hayes, calmly getting back to the subject of Mrs. Lincoln.

  “Yes,” said Clara. “But they were in the service of our country.” She hated the pomposity, the idiocy, of what she’d just said, but she was determined to press on with it. “Since then, my husband and I have spent much of our time abroad. As a matter of fact, he is now seeking a diplomatic position.” She looked pleadingly into Webb Hayes’s eyes, blue as two huge cornflowers, before saying, “Excuse me. I should be going. My husband needs me.”

  “Riggs,” called Webb Hayes to the boy, who was already running back to the house. “Come to my house with your mother some morning around ten. It’s over there.” He pointed to the White House. Clara saw her son’s eyes pop as he realized this man lived where General Grant and all his soldiers used to. She laughed for joy. “Thank you, Mr. Hayes.”


  “We’ll see what we can do.”

  “Come on, Riggs,” said Clara, gaily catching up with her son, hurrying him out of the park as she waved goodbye to Webb Hayes. “I’ll race you to the house!” She and Riggs darted across Jackson Place, bumping into the old Negro vegetable man. Running up the steps, Riggs shouted, “I won!” and banged the knocker to signify his victory. But the door was already open. Henry was standing just inside, holding the letters he’d picked up from the tiles.

  “I have something to tell you,” said Clara.

  “Go upstairs,” he said sharply to Riggs. The boy did as he was told.

  “Henry, listen to me,” said Clara as she took off her shawl. She hung it on the clothes tree, over the brown one she’d rejected five minutes before, and then turned around to deliver her good news. Her face was met by the full force of Henry’s open hand. She fell backward into the little space between the stairway and the parlor wall, scraping her head against the portrait of the two of them that William Merritt Chase had done, and which even now she was aware of hating for the way the artist had put them in different chairs, as if they were watching the play, as if he wanted to fix them in their famous moment for all time.

  “Don’t you ever,” Henry said, coming closer. “Don’t you ever,” he said again, looking down at her, his eyes devoid of all the normal ambition she’d seen in them this morning. “Don’t you ever conduct one of your disgusting flirtations in front of my son.”