Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  Before she could rise from the floor, he had thrown down the clothes tree and left the house.

  “HE’S HUGE,” said young Henry Riggs Rathbone.

  “I could ride him,” said his even younger brother, Gerald, who squeezed between Riggs and their Uncle Jared to look at the tintype of Electioneer, the prize sire on Mr. Leland Stanford’s Palo Alto stock farm.

  “You could not!” cried Riggs, cuffing the younger child away from the breakfast table, on which their uncle had laid various emblems of his life in California.

  “Boys,” said their mother gently as she braided their little sister’s hair. Jared looked at the girl and her mother and smiled. “I remember watching you do that twenty years ago, for Lina.”

  “Yes,” said Clara, smiling as she tied the last of the ribbons. “I would have expected to be done with this by now. But here I am, a forty-three-year-old woman with a five-year-old daughter.”

  “Well,” said her brother-in-law. “The war kept you from getting an early start.”

  “Yes,” said Clara. “The war.” She said no more about it, just gave a final smoothing to her daughter’s honey-colored hair and picked up the novel Jared had brought her as a present.

  “Thank you again for this.”

  “I thought you could appreciate it better than most.”

  “You’re right,” she said, flipping through the pages of The American, by Henry James. “Though I could do with a bit less Europe.”

  “Then maybe it’s good this Copenhagen post never came through?”

  “No, it was a terrible defeat. For him, and for all of us. Really, Jared, I shouldn’t mind our being abroad under those circumstances. As it is, I’m sure Henry will have us back in vagabondage before another year goes by.”

  “Why not come west? Visit Maria and me in California. Bring all the children. She’d love to fill the house with them. It appears we can’t have any of our own, but she dotes on all the ones that come near her.”

  “Does she still paint?” asked Clara, not responding to the question of a visit, moving away from the subject as if it were a self-evident impossibility. The maid began to clear the table, and Clara told the boys they could take the turquoise buckles with them if they went into the parlor and agreed to play quietly.

  “Yes, she paints flowers mostly,” said Jared Rathbone. “Great blazing western ones you wouldn’t believe. They’re everywhere on the ranch, unlike anything you’ve seen. If they popped up in the Harris yard in Loudonville, you’d scream in horror.”

  She laughed. “Tell me more about what you do for Stanford. The children were all over you as soon as you came in last night. I hardly heard a word.”

  “We’re raising trotters now,” he began, happy for the chance to expound on the work he loved. “What we’ve got at Palo Alto, Clara, isn’t just a stud farm. It’s a sort of college for horses. Well, at least that’s what Maria calls it.” He laughed at his own grandiosity. “We train them according to the latest scientific methods. Look,” he said, hunting for a photograph amidst the pile the boys had disarranged. “Here, this one.”

  Clara stared at it, perplexed. “It looks like a cake that the mice have gotten to.”

  “No, look closer. It’s a rubber floor covered with flour. The depressions are the ponies’ hoofprints. We study the pictures to see exactly how they move.”

  She pushed the photograph back to him and smiled. “I don’t think even Dr. Nott could have imagined this.”

  Jared laughed. “Eliphalet Nott! I haven’t heard that name in years.”

  “Nor I,” said Clara, thinking of her father.

  “Well,” said Jared, “Dr. Nott was all for the future, and so am I. Clara, you should think about coming west. All of you.”

  “Do we live too much in the past?” she asked.

  “I fear that you do.”

  She looked at her brother-in-law, a smaller, softer version of Henry, still in possession of all his red hair.

  “I’m afraid there’s no escaping it, Jared.”

  “Isn’t there?”

  She shrugged, managing a wan smile as she straightened the photographs and little presents he had carried all the way from San Francisco. She didn’t want to tell him her troubles, but she was glad he was here. After all these years, she was feeling guilty about the scant attention she and the rest of the household had paid him when the Harrises and Rathbones were united. Will and Henry were the stars by which the girls had steered their way toward womanhood, while Ira and Pauline had both been too fixed on their firstborns to be much occupied by Jared.

  She tried to change the subject. “It’s wonderful of Maria to let you make the journey. I only wish she’d felt up to coming with you. It still seems a —”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Boys!” she shouted, hearing them run for it. “Don’t answer it!” She got up to make sure they didn’t. “Excuse me, Jared. I’ll be back in a minute. They don’t understand. It’s Thursday the thirteenth. Betty! Where are you?” She hurried into the hall, nearly colliding with the parlor maid.

  “It’s only the mailman, Mama,” Riggs told the two of them. “He says there’s postage due.”

  “Oh, is that all?” asked Clara. “Betty, can you pay him what’s owed?”

  She came back to her guest in the kitchen. “I never have a cent on me,” she explained to Jared with an embarrassed laugh. “Thank you, Betty,” she told the maid, who put the letters on the kitchen table. “I’ll pay you later. Or you can get the boys to give you the penny from their banks.” She turned back to Jared. “With all the children and commotion, I can’t keep anything straight.”

  “Not even the date,” said Jared, smiling. “It’s Saturday, not Thursday.”

  “Oh, ‘Thursday the thirteenth’ is just an expression of mine. The day before April fourteenth is always, to my mind, a Thursday, and usually unlucky, since it brings the newspaper reporters around. They do anniversary stories. I was afraid it was one of them at the door. They come and ask questions, stupid ones that upset Henry. It won’t be so bad this year, but three years ago, on the tenth anniversary, it was constant. And goodness knows what 1885 will bring. When that year gets here, I intend to shut myself up in a box for the entire month of April.”

  “Exactly what questions do they ask?”

  “Oh, from me they only want some little story of Mr. Lincoln’s kindliness, or some lie about what last wise words he spoke in the darkness of the theatre. I just close the door as politely as I can.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “It isn’t. It’s what they ask Henry, if they catch him instead. They’ve even lain in wait for him on the sidewalk. ‘Good afternoon, Major Rathbone. Could you tell us what you’re thinking today? What do you think President Lincoln might be doing if he were still alive? Do you ever think about how different the country might be if you had been able to stop Booth?’ He will always be ‘Major’ Rathbone.”

  “What does he say to them?”

  “He gives them odd answers about history, ones that confuse them and which they end up not printing. But every year, if we’re not in Europe when the date comes around, they’re back for more.”

  Jared said nothing, and Clara began to examine the letters. “There’s one here from Louise, which will make the children laugh. She writes the same thing from Loudonville every other day, all about how the custard’s just gone into the oven now that the chicken has come out, and how she wishes Pauline had more of an appetite. I don’t think it’s yet occurred to her that your mother is going to outlive us all. Here’s one from Will.”

  “I’d be ashamed to tell you how long it’s been since I’ve been in touch with either him or Louise,” said Jared.

  “There’s nothing to feel guilty about. You’ve made a fine life in a truly new world, and I know they are only pleased for you.” She paused for a moment. “The Harris and Rathbone blood never really mixed, except in little Lina.”

  “And in your own chil
dren, of course,” said Jared.

  “That’s true,” said Clara, shaking the crumbs from Riggs’s and Gerald’s napkins.

  “How is Will?”

  “He’s very well,” said Clara. “Still making steam shovels and raising his boys. His and Emma’s letter is bound to have a bit more news than Louise’s. They’re usually adding a room or buying another horse.”

  “Then it sounds as if he could afford the right amount of postage!” Jared joked.

  “No,” said Clara, “the penny was due on this one.” She handed him a letter postmarked Virginia City, Nevada. “I don’t know who Eller Browning is.”

  “I do,” said Jared with some surprise. “He was in the Twelfth. I knew him slightly, Henry somewhat better. I think he stayed on after both of us had left the army.” He turned the letter over in his hand. “I’ll take this upstairs to Henry. I didn’t find much to break the ice with, when I got in last night. Maybe this will help.”

  “He’ll be up in the library.”

  Jared climbed the stairs to the second floor, passing the brass sconces, which were missing a candle here and there and in need of some polish. He’d been surprised yesterday evening when he’d arrived on the dot at the station and found no family carriage to meet him, just a ragged old driver whose hack had been hired off the street and sent to fetch him at the last minute. He had no clear idea of how Henry spent his money, or how much of it he had left. In what state of dishevelment, Jared wondered, did he spend his mornings? How did his brother occupy himself?

  In fact, Henry was sitting straight-backed at his desk. His grooming was as rigid as his posture, his whiskers precisely shaped above a starched white collar and a tightly knotted cravat. His newspaper lay folded at the edge of his desk, and he sat before a half-filled sheet of paper, his pen poised a few inches above it, awaiting his next thought.

  He calmly greeted his younger brother.

  “Jared, come in,” he said, getting up to take his hand. “I’m sorry we didn’t have much chance to talk last night. I was so tired, though I’m sure not as tired as you were after the last leg of the trip. I hope it wasn’t rude of me.”

  “Not at all, brother,” said Jared, sitting down on a chesterfield sofa across from the desk. “I was hoping to see you at breakfast this morning.”

  “I’m afraid I never eat with the children. The noise makes me nervous.”

  “I can understand that,” said Jared. “It took a bit of time for me to get used to the sound myself. But I envy your having them. I’m afraid I may have to content myself with being an uncle.” He looked to Henry, expecting some words of inquiry or sympathy, but his brother regarded him with a thin, bland smile. Jared couldn’t be sure what he’d said had really registered. “I brought you up a letter,” he went on. “Eller Browning. Does that name ring a bell?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Henry, reaching across the desk to take the envelope. “He writes me once or twice a year. He’s still with the Twelfth. A good man, rough old bachelor. Got badly hurt at Fredericksburg.” He slit open the letter. Jared was relieved that there would be something to talk about now.

  Henry read silently for a moment, lifting an eyebrow and frowning, more alive to Eller Browning’s presence than that of Jared directly across from him. At last, in medias res, he began reading aloud:

  The railroad ruined us as a civilization, I always thought, and you can be damned sure it was the horse ruined these Nez Percés — turned them from fishers into hunters, and then into warriors — this tribe so accommodating to us white brutes that they once asked us to send some Christian missionaries out their way! I never heard of any group so friendly to our coming in. Someone should have told them to beware, for sure enough our lust for gold has done them in. That’s what started this war — our pushing them around — and don’t you let the papers or any friends you still have in Adjutant’s office tell you any different. Last June we were ordered up to San Francisco from Fort Yuma. Spur of the moment, underfinanced as usual, barely enough money to hire the red scouts we needed to lead us from S.F. into Montana. But we got there, and we were told to wait in the valley of the Big Hole until they needed us. And, sure enough, the time came when Gibbon did: after he’d roared into their camp one night and cracked their sleeping skulls and killed half their babies. He didn’t figure on the counterattack their braves were able to mount, and that’s when we had to go help him. When we rode into the Indians’ camp, I was more sickened by the sight than by anything I’ve laid eyes on in forty years of life, including those long-ago four when we were sometimes together. You would be ashamed of your old regiment. General Howard even let his savages, those expensive Bannock scouts, dig up the Nez dead and mutilate the corpses, after which we pursued the living ones into Yellowstone. One night they raided us, and when I found myself wishing they’d gotten away with the cavalry as well as the pack horses, I knew it was time for me, after twenty years in, to get out. Otis Howard went into Virginia City for supplies, and I went in with him and resigned from the United States Army. I’ve been at this hotel all these months since, thinking over my next move …

  It was a terrible story, and Jared didn’t want Henry to go on with it. His brother looked to be morbidly involved by the narrative. His brown eyes were moist, and his hand holding the paper had begun to shake.

  “I suspect he did the right thing,” said Jared. “I can’t say I know much about this tribe or what the Twelfth is like these days.”

  Henry put Eller Browning’s letter back into its envelope and set it aside. He looked at Jared with a sudden brightness. “So how is the driver of the golden spike?” he asked.

  “Stanford’s all right,” said Jared. “A good boss. Maybe even a great man. I don’t see how any of us could ever have suspected he’d finish a transcontinental railroad, certainly not because his father built that little spur between Albany and Schenectady.”

  “Yes,” said Henry, “but that was a pretty grand feat in its day. I remember our own father used to talk about it as an amazing thing. He used to go on and on about the changes it had made in his business. Do you remember that, Jared?”

  “Yes, I do,” said his brother, noting how warm and normal Henry’s smile now seemed, how connected it was to the ordinary words he was speaking, words of pleasant memory, of simple fraternal conversation — ones that seemed to bring him at last into the room, as if from some far country. Jared grinned back at him, hoping he could capture Henry like a wild horse, hold him in this domestic light and keep him from racing back to that unintelligible realm. “Do you remember Jane Lathrop?” he asked. “She’s the girl Leland married.”

  “No, I don’t,” said Henry, getting up and walking over to his bookshelves, which ran from the ceiling to the floor.

  “Sure you do,” said Jared. “A pretty girl, about Clara’s age. I remember Clara saying, around the time Mama married the judge, that she was jealous of how Jane got to go to the Albany Female Academy.”

  Henry said nothing. The normal, connecting smile was gone. He was lost in thought, and Jared decided to try something bolder.

  “Why not come out west?” he asked. “You and Clara and the whole lot of you.”

  Still Henry didn’t reply.

  “Think about it, brother. Leland has his finger in a dozen different pies, not just horses and railroads. He’d know a hundred men who could use you to do law for them. Or anything else you’d enjoy doing. It’s a place where people make things, Henry. It’s the place to fulfill the Rathbone in you. It’s a shame things didn’t work out with that consular post, but put it behind you. You’ve been in Washington too long. Come out to San Francisco and make a fresh start. It’s a beautiful city —”

  “I couldn’t,” said Henry, as if stating something as factually evident as the temperature. “There’s no fresh start for me.” He continued looking at the shelves, all of them filled with histories, huge tomes about civilization from the Incas to the industrial age. Half a minute passed in silence.

  �
�Henry?”

  He turned around to face Jared. He again wore the distressed expression he’d had when reading Eller Browning’s letter. “Those Indian mothers and their children,” he murmured. “They’re probably better off dead, better off than if they’d awakened to what was left of that camp.”

  “Henry —”

  “And the worst of it is, Jared, that if I’d been there with the Twelfth, I’d have made the loudest noise and come away with the bloodiest hatchet.” He sat back down at the desk, tired out, it seemed, from his own imagining.

  “Nonsense,” said Jared, who went quickly back downstairs, where he found Clara still in the kitchen.

  “Something in that letter upset him. I left him looking as if he were somewhere else entirely.”

  “He is somewhere else, Jared. Whether it’s the Crater, or Chancellorsville, or Ford’s, I don’t know. He goes deeper into his memories every month.”

  “Does he have delusions?” asked Jared, not sure that was the right word for what he had in mind.

  “No,” said Clara as she put some coasters into a stack. “I don’t think so. I think he just suffers from his real memories. Although,” she said, her reluctance to speak breaking up, “lately he hasn’t seemed quite …”

  “Clara,” said Jared, “sit down with me.” He took her hand and tried to lure her to the table. She would not budge, so he stood next to her as he spoke. “I know I’ve been too occupied by my own ambitions these past ten years to pay enough attention to even the Rathbones in my family, let alone the Harrises. But I want to try to amend that. That’s one of the reasons I’ve made this trip. Maria is right in what she’s told me: without children of our own, what else have we but the families we’ve come from? I know my own letters have been poor things, with intervals too long between them, but I’ve read your own attentively, and I’ve read Henry’s, too, and I know from them that Henry is not right. I know that he is in the grip of some affliction that is making you suffer, too.”