She turned away. She was not ready to discuss this. “Jared, some things cannot be avoided. Whatever our fates, whatever our crosses —”
“But fates can be undone, Clara. Crosses can be lifted.” He went over to her at the sideboard. “Clara,” he said, turning her around to face him. “I was in London only recently, selling Stanford’s horses. There are streets there being lit with electricity. They’ve managed to move Cleopatra’s Needle there from Egypt, and a block away from it people are eating beef that was shipped frozen all the way from the Argentine.”
She smiled. “You sound like Dr. Nott again.”
“But these things are true, Clara. Not just visions. Do you know there are doctors looking at strains of bacteria, magnifying them to look like insects in a garden? Doctors who are trying new means to cure afflictions, even ones inside the brain? There are doctors who might be able to help Henry.”
She pushed him away. “We have a doctor just blocks away, Jared.”
“I’m not talking about some purveyor of bromides and laxatives, Clara.”
“Jared, Henry is not one of your racehorses. He’s not going to yield up his sorrows and secrets to somebody who comes at him with a measuring tape and a camera, if that’s the kind of thing you’re thinking of.”
“No, Clara, not —”
“There is only one thing that can help him, and that is love. No matter how useless it may seem. I am the only one who can give it to him. That is my duty, Jared. You know,” she said — her voice breaking, her face collapsing like a flower in the rain — “I still love your brother. With all my broken heart.” She reached for a tea cloth and wiped her face.
“Henry,” she cried, heading out of the kitchen to stand at the foot of the stairs. “Won’t you play teatime with little Clara Pauline? She wants you to, I know she does.”
“Yes, darling,” he called back. “I’ll try to come down.”
IT WASN’T A CITY, it was a city-sized sanitarium. And at that, she thought, looking out the waiting room window at the plumes of steam curling through the pine trees, the whole place looked more infernal than healthy. They had come to Carlsbad four days ago, on the train from Prague, to find this medicinal resort that seemed more like Lourdes, which she’d seen, than her idea of Hot Springs, which, despite its being in her native land, she hadn’t. Down below her, the town was a jumble of stage sets, the granite pillars of the new Mühlbrunnen Colonnade appearing to have been set up for the production of a Roman tragedy, while the gabled gingerbread houses looked ready for someone’s dramatization of a fairy tale.
This almost was the seacoast of Bohemia. The town’s two parts, on each bank of the river moving through it, supported all kinds of strangeness and contradiction: the old and sometimes twisted bodies of the guests, wrapped in bathing costumes, climbed paths from one spring to another, as all the bubbling hot water they craved lay in sight of snow-covered peaks. These restorative pools for soaking and drinking actually contained, she was told, traces of arsenic, the magical secret perhaps, working with the topsy-turvy logic of inoculation. At this moment she knew Henry was inside the new iron-and-glass Sprudel Colonnade, being blasted with a jet from the 164-degree geyser beneath — as if whatever fluids running inside him needed heating up instead of freezing.
It had been Henry’s idea to come. The waters, he had decided, would be good for the maintenance of his forty-two-year-old physique, of which he was still justifiably vain. The mineral springs might also help the dyspepsia he claimed to suffer from. The discomfort was nothing remarkable, he insisted, but why not see if, incidentally, the waters might relieve it? For once the children would be home in Washington with Lillian, so he and Clara could “pamper themselves”: that is what he’d said upon unfolding the itinerary he’d devised for this, their third trip abroad since the chargé d’affaires fiasco two years ago.
Accustomed to defeat, she had agreed to the journey. He had not struck her since that day in ’77, but he had not apologized either. It was as if they’d made an agreement never to speak of the incident, to pretend it had never taken place — a fiction that, as the first months went by, she knew was the best she could hope for. It was only later, after more than a year had passed, that she realized, with some fright, that Henry truly believed it had never happened; he had no memory of it, and none of the incident that had “provoked” it. She had never again seen Webb Hayes, except once or twice from the bedroom window. She had not gone out to speak with him and never taken Riggs to the White House. Henry now joked about the whole office-seeking episode, recalling it the way one might a New Year’s resolution that had been made and quickly broken.
This afternoon she had lied to him, told him she was joining a group of English and American ladies for a carriage ride to Dallwitz and a tour of the porcelain factory there. She would be back by dinnertime. Fine, fine, he’d said, in a peculiar good humor as he got ready for his geyser. She’d hurried here instead, to the office of Dr. Heinrich Beierheimer, taking care not to be seen by any of the acquaintances they’d made in their four days here. She had arranged the consultation by mail three months ago, before they’d left the States, with the help of Jared. As soon as Carlsbad was on the itinerary, she’d swallowed her pride and asked him if one of these innovative doctors he’d talked to her about last year might be found amidst the spa’s bubbling springs. Henry’s brother, after calling on some of Leland Stanford’s cosmopolitan connections, replied confidentially that while there she ought to make Henry see this man Beierheimer, a disciple of Wilhelm Griesinger. This name meant nothing to her until she accompanied Henry to the Library of Congress one afternoon and, on the other side of the reading room, engaged in some research of her own — “looking up a few things about Wordsworth,” she’d claimed.
“Frau Rathbone,” the physician now said, hitting the t quite hard.
“Herr Doktor.”
“Welcome to Carlsbad. I hope you have been enjoying a pleasant stay. Won’t you come inside to the consulting room?”
Jared’s letter had mentioned the doctor’s five years in London. His English was as correct and formal as his manners, and his office furniture, most of it maroon-colored leather, betrayed an Anglophilic fondness for men’s clubs. He sat her down on a sofa in front of his desk, and in the still-bright afternoon light she appraised his large head. Its thinning blond hair rested atop a protuberant brow whose skin was so fine as to seem translucent, the minimum coverage required for all the mental matter under the skull.
“Tell me about your husband,” he said. “Just, for the moment, verifiable data of his life, a sort of curriculum vitae.”
“He is about your age,” she began, relieved that he was making her start out in the precincts of established fact. “He was born in Albany, New York, the state capital, in 1837. His father was that city’s mayor for a time. He has one brother, a few years younger than himself. Mayor Rathbone died in 1845, and three years later the boys’ mother married my father, a widower. From the time I was thirteen and Colonel Rathbone was eleven, we were raised as brother and sister, though our families liked to call us cousins.”
Dr. Beierheimer said nothing, but made his first note.
“Colonel Rathbone was educated in a nearby city called Schenectady, at Union College, the alma mater of many public men, including my father, a United States senator, and Mr. Seward, the late secretary of state.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Beierheimer with a smile. “Seward’s Follies.”
Clara didn’t stop to correct this one solecism. “Henry briefly studied law in my Uncle Hamilton’s office, but when the war came he joined a regiment of infantry and saw two years of very brutal fighting.”
“Gettysburg?” asked the doctor.
“Nearly everything but,” replied Clara. “Antietam, Fredericksburg, the battle of the Crater.”
Beierheimer nodded sympathetically and made another note.
“As I told you in my letter, we accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln to the theatre on the
night the President was killed. My husband was —”
“He was your husband then?”
“No, not yet. My fiancé. He was badly wounded by the escaping assassin, had the length of his upper arm slashed with a dagger. But he recovered, and we married two years later. That is, twelve years ago.”
“Children?”
“Three. Two boys and a girl. They’re not with us on this trip, though they usually accompany us on our travels through Europe. It has been our habit to spend some of the year in Washington and the rest of it over here.”
“Does your husband still practice the law? When you are at home?”
“No. He looks after his investments. He inherited a great deal of money before the war — the Rathbone family are very wealthy. He also writes.”
“What does he write?”
“I’m afraid he never shows it to me. But I believe he is composing a theory of world events. He spends hours each day reading the great historians, especially military ones.”
The doctor made a third note, and Clara realized she had reached the conclusion of her chronicle. As she regarded the carpet and played with one of the buttoned puckers in the upholstery, she felt ridiculous, like someone escaping a building whose interior was aflame, only to remark, to the first person she met outside, upon the structure’s handsome cornices and columns.
“Now,” said Dr. Beierheimer. “Tell me what you think is wrong with your husband.”
“He suffers from periods of melancholy,” she said, hurriedly speaking the language she had rehearsed this morning. “He is sometimes enraged, occasionally against me. From an early age his mood was cynical — Byronic, if you will — but as the years go by it becomes —”
“Disconnected?” the doctor suggested. “From the realities of the world?”
“Yes,” said Clara with the first trace of enthusiasm she had felt.
“Frau Rathbone, you mention Byron to me. And ‘melancholy.’ Have you read Goethe as well?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Romantic nonsense,” said the doctor, putting down his pencil. “The mind’s moods do not simply descend upon it, like a witch’s curse or the morning dew. They are all manifestations of the physical. Every one of them.”
“There is nothing physically wrong with my husband,” Clara answered, more in disappointment than irritation. “Other than his war wound and the injury he suffered at the theatre —”
“You do not know what may be physically wrong with him. So much of the physical is hidden — the brain and the nerves …”
“How does one determine their condition?”
“You must bring your husband in and let me examine him.”
“He will never come,” said Clara.
“If he will not come,” asked Dr. Beierheimer, “then why is he here in Carlsbad?”
“He’s come to take the waters for his general good health, as well as occasional stomach trouble.”
The doctor seemed moderately intrigued by the last piece of information, and he made another note. As he did, Clara asked him if the hot springs really did anyone any good.
“Perhaps,” said Dr. Beierheimer with a shrug. “Some somatic distractions may be minimally useful. The baths are certainly more beneficial to people with mental complaints than bleedings and purgatives have been. Tell me, Frau Rathbone, have you consulted a physician at home?”
“No,” said Clara, who had just noticed, on the table behind the doctor, beneath a framed diagram of a dog’s skull, a black box with a dial.
“The brain runs by electricity,” he said, spotting the focus of her interest and swiveling his chair around to it. “Shocks to its specific sectors can make the body move in particular, predictable ways. It stands to reason that the exact locations of all the mind’s feelings and moods will one day prove detectable.”
“What bearing does all this have on my husband’s character?”
“Differences in personality may really come from different wirings of the brain. Think of the old ‘doctrine of the humors,’ but with electrical impulses, not fluids, accounting for our discrepant natures.”
“And injury to the ‘wires’ leads to mental defect?”
“Yes,” said the doctor. “Precisely.”
Clara looked out the window, at a bird flying through a plume of steam, and thought about how little this could possibly have to do with Henry, as if he were the key on the end of Benjamin Franklin’s kite. She was too tense to sigh, but her attention was beginning to wander.
“Does your husband have any phobias, Frau Rathbone?”
“Phobias?”
“Unnatural fears.”
She thought for a moment. “He imagines people whispering about him, just out of the range of his hearing. For a time, after the killing of the President, this may have been true, but it’s long since ceased. Even so, he —”
“Obsessions?” asked the doctor.
“He is more and more preoccupied with his food. He lives, sometimes for days, on small portions of vegetables, professing a horror of animal blood and tissue. He associates different dishes, single ingredients, with different states of mind.” She paused again to think. “I suppose his preoccupation with history is an obsession. And he may be obsessed with Mr. Lincoln himself. On those occasions when he permits himself or others to speak about him, he abuses the President’s memory in mystifying ways.” She was once more absorbed in this conversation with the doctor, excited by its possibilities. But then Dr. Beierheimer inquired, “Does he have any abnormal sexual practices or enthusiasms?” He pronounced the last word with a kind of juiciness, a function, she was sure, of his accent, but even so, he made the word sound concupiscent, and she felt herself blushing, as if she were Mary Hall.
“No. We had a happy life together. It is gone now, but it was happy.” She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, tell him of the vigor of their nights together — the shouts and scratchings, the games and sometimes terrible language. She was sure these things were “abnormal,” had always been sure of that, but they had always been normal to her and Henry, and that was the only standard she had held them against, all through the days when they banished the world and made her — made the two of them together — happy.
“Has your husband ever suffered from syphilis?”
The word, which she had never heard uttered by any man in any room she’d sat in, struck her like a hand. Her eyes widened, but she made no response.
“Any venereal disease?” the doctor asked. Clara felt naked to his gaze and thoughts, and she was astonished to hear her own disclosures. “None that I know of,” she said, fixing her eyes on the drawing of the dog’s head. “But in the years before the war he was sometimes in the company of prostitutes. And I have my suspicions that he may again be with them now, from time to time, when he travels by himself to New York.”
The doctor made a notation.
“Do these diseases play a part in disordering the mind?” Clara asked.
Dr. Beierheimer, who seemed to have lost interest in his own question, closed his eyes and shook his head and touched the dial on the black box behind him. “We don’t really know,” he said. “I would certainly have to see your husband to begin to make a determination.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said Clara.
“Then why,” responded the doctor, a hint of irritation curling up from his smooth manner, “did you come here?”
“Because of my brother-in-law,” said Clara, preparing to leave. “His intentions, and mine, were honest, but perhaps naive. I had hoped that you would be able to suggest something, even without seeing Colonel Rathbone.”
“Sit, please, Frau Rathbone,” said the doctor, urging her to unclasp her shawl and go back to the leather couch. “There,” he said when she once more appeared at ease. He put down his pen and pushed his notes aside, and for the first time since bringing her into the consulting room, he smiled. “Tell me,” he said, and Clara leaned forward, hoping that this new question would be ea
sier than the last ones. “Tell me what President Lincoln was really like. I’ve heard so much about his moods.”
There were towels everywhere, strewn about the hotel suite. Steam danced out through the open doorway of the bathroom, where Henry, in an exuberant mood, was shaving.
He stopped his humming when he saw her.
“No plates?” he asked, noticing she was empty-handed. “Not one china cup, or even a thimble, after touring a porcelain factory?”
“No,” Clara answered, untying her bonnet. “They didn’t give anything away, and I didn’t think to make purchases.”
“You need to indulge yourself more, my dear wife.” He banged his razor against the enameled sink, shaking loose the blood-flecked lather. She watched him dry off and comb his hair, which had retreated an inch in the dozen years they had been married and now had strands of gray amidst the red. The vein at his left temple, like a crack in the sidewalk, asserted itself more strongly than it used to.
“Are we going out tonight?” she asked. “Or only to the dining room here?”
“Out,” said Henry, emerging from the bathroom and surprising her with a quick kiss on his way to the armoire. “We’re going to that little restaurant near the colonnade, and we have guests: Monsieur and Madame Gilles, from Bordeaux. He’s a fine fellow. Makes farm equipment. I think I see a good investment.”
Clara reacted cautiously. “Where did you meet him?”
“At the Sprudel geyser.”
“What did you say?”
“Oh, he knows all about us. He was a great sympathizer with the Confederates, told me he’d loved doing business with the old Southern planters in the years before the war. He’s a friendly type, not at all like a Frenchman. He also happens to be hideously ugly. I can trust you with him.”
“Stop it,” said Clara, who realized she was staring at her husband’s forehead, contemplating it as he put on his shirt, wondering about the “wiring” beneath it and whether that prominent vein wasn’t a diversionary channel, rerouting the whole system toward a place it oughtn’t go. “If he wants your money, all right,” she said over Henry’s whistling, “but I hope you didn’t entertain him with our life story.” After years of his almost frantic silence about Ford’s Theatre, her husband sometimes now volunteered a string of reminiscences to near strangers. She could never tell if he was seeking their approval, trying to shock them, or testing some limit in himself. The subject would be closed as quickly as it came up, with Henry apparently on the verge of recounting some crucial detail — and then thinking better of it.
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