Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “There’s no need for you to go, darling,” said Henry. “I’ll check on the children myself. Will you excuse me?” he asked Cameron and Hay. “I’ll join you shortly.”

  “Good,” said Clara, smiling too broadly, fluttering her hands until she thought to call out to Maggie to prepare more coffee and a drink for Colonel Rathbone.

  She noticed Hay and Cameron conferring with a glance, and told them, “No, you mustn’t go yet.” They couldn’t leave the house until they could take with them some happy domestic illusion, like leftover cake on a covered dish. “Johnny, you haven’t told me nearly enough about your triumphal return. I want more tales of adventure. Who’s been lucky enough to have your company? Anyone from the old days?”

  “One or two,” said Hay, lowering his eyes and voice, sufficiently encouraged to launch into another party piece, this time a somber one. “Old General Holt, whom you’ll surely remember.” Clara nodded silently, wishing he had mentioned almost anyone but the judge to whose military court Henry once swore his version of the events at Ford’s, as the reporters on the chairs next to her snickered and speculated. “He’s retired now, all alone in the world, rattling around in his big house up on Capitol Hill, like a ghost.”

  “Speaking of ghosts,” said Cameron, by way of a cue, as if the quicker he could get Hay to complete his repertoire, the quicker they could make their way out of here.

  “Oh, yes,” said Hay. “Mrs. Sprague. She’s alone in a little house, on Connecticut Avenue.”

  “Is her divorce soon to go through?” asked Clara, who still read Miss Snead’s column in the Evening Star, even if she no longer went to the dinner parties that supplied its items.

  “Yes,” said Hay. “She’s very proud, but I suspect she fears pauperdom. She’s fallen so far so fast, she can’t see any reason she shouldn’t crash to the very bottom. But a minute after fretting over it all, she can be bold as brass. She paints her cheeks now — it’s a sad sight — and she invited me to join her for dinner at the Conklings’. Imagine, dining à quatre with her and her paramour and his wife!”

  There were a dozen questions and comments, both charitable and feline, that Clara could have spoken, but she could focus only on the thought of divorce — that unspeakable possibility she had herself entertained, never for more than a moment at a time, in the middle of the night, lying awake beside Henry. She thought of it now, but with her heart already going from the evening’s unexpected events, she forced herself to change the subject.

  “Too depressing, Johnny. Tell me about your new friends.”

  “Friends?” asked Hay in mock astonishment. “I have no friends, only hosts and hostesses. None so fine as you, but a few exotic ones here and there. Zamacona, the Mexican minister, gives some good feeds, and Mrs. Bancroft sets a beautiful table, prettier than the one laid in the White House, I can tell you. Lord, the place is shabby, Clara. I was over there at Christmas; all the decorations couldn’t hide the torn curtains and loose floorboards. The whole house needs a thorough overhaul.”

  There was a time when she would have faked a knowing expression, tried to mislead him into thinking she regularly had lemonade with Lucy and waltzed in the East Room with Webb Hayes, but there was no point in trying to create such misapprehension, not when her own house was looking more neglected than the Mansion could possibly be. Still, Johnny’s talk — all the names, all his silly exuberance — seemed to give her energy, a dose of hope, enough to make her think she might still somehow recover her vitality, even a piece of her old Washington dream.

  The boots were coming back down the stairs.

  “Senator Cameron, Mr. Hay,” said Henry, ignoring the tumbler of whiskey that Maggie had brought in. His wife’s guests both stood up to a height much lower than his own. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that my children are braying for a story. I’m going to read them a very brief one and then retire. I’ve had something of a headache since I got on the train in Jersey City. So if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to let my youngsters exacerbate it into something truly skull-cracking and then head off to sleep. My charming wife will, I know, continue to entertain you.”

  It was he who was charming; wonderfully so, she thought, silently praising the Lord for letting this particular mood be the one her husband rode into the house tonight.

  Hay shook Henry’s hand, and Cameron did the same. “Good night,” said Henry to each of them, before adding, to Cameron, “I’ll tell Senator Harris you came by. I know my stepfather will be pleased to hear you called.”

  Now, as he kissed her good night, Clara knew what his earlier puzzled expression had meant. He thought that Don Cameron was his father, Simon; thought, she realized horribly, that Johnny-now was Johnny-then, that the war still raged and Papa was alive, and that somehow, children and all, they were still in the house at Fifteenth and H. Her heart was racing, and she knew that she had reached a lower and stonier depth than Kate Chase Sprague was ever likely to strike.

  She would pretend not to have heard, pretend that Hay and Cameron hadn’t either. She would get them out the door, and Henry to sleep, and then she would sit here alone, facing the moment that had arrived: the time when, instead of restarting her Washington dream, they must sell this house; leave the city forever; go home to Loudonville and hide.

  UNCLE HAMILTON came to see Clara and the children once a week, and she was always grateful, since otherwise there was almost no one to talk to. The house in Loudonville, which had had rooms and dormers added over the years, was now so large that the children could war amongst themselves in some distant corner of it without her even hearing them. There were hours during these hot September days when her solitude was more lonely than peaceful, and the arrival of her papa’s quick-moving younger brother — his sentences still as neat and clipped as his mustache — inevitably cheered her. She was even more appreciative for knowing that these Saturday visits afforded him so little pleasure of his own. He would make some quick inquiries about how they were all getting on while he glanced nervously around the premises, as if he’d just heard a strange noise. In the Harris family manner, he outwardly assumed the best and never probed her polite assurances that everything was fine.

  Sometimes he went into the library to greet Henry and give him some cigars, but mostly he stayed with Clara out on the porch, catching the children as they flew past and telling their mother a few bits of gossip about those men in the legislature she might still remember, or amusing new ones, like Theodore Roosevelt, “who intends to be minority leader before he’s twenty-five!” Though he had left the state senate himself, punctilious Uncle Hamilton was more influential than he’d ever been. He headed the board of commissioners charged with rebuilding the state capitol, and generally exercised such power behind the Republican throne that politicians now joked about Ira Harris’s having died and come back as Thurlow Weed — in the mortal envelope of his brother.

  With Clara he seemed embarrassed about his influence, about having learned to play the game better than her father had, so he tended to talk to her more about the past than the present. Today, along with the stack of books he always brought, he had included a pamphlet sent to him by John K. Porter, a friendly adversary back in the ’fifties, when he’d been district attorney. Porter had just achieved a measure of fame for prosecuting Charles Guiteau, the hapless fanatic who had killed President Garfield last summer. His courtroom questioning of the assassin had been deemed so effective that now, months after Guiteau’s hanging, a transcript of it was available in a little book. It made a peculiar present, but Uncle Hamilton was famous for the well-intentioned gaucherie of his gift-giving: a waffle iron for the boys, gloves four sizes too big for their sister.

  When her uncle was gone, Clara opened the book:

  MR. PORTER: Do you feel under great obligations to the American people?

  GUITEAU: I think the American people may sometime consider themselves under great obligations to me, sir.

  MR. PORTER: Did the Republican Party ever give y
ou an office?

  GUITEAU: I never held any kind of political office in my life, and never drew one cent from the Government.

  MR. PORTER: And never desired an office, did you?

  GUITEAU: I had some thoughts about the Paris consulship. That is the only office that I ever had any serious thought about.

  MR. PORTER: That was the one which resulted in the inspiration, wasn’t it?

  GUITEAU: No, sir, most decidedly not. My getting it or not getting it had no relation to my duty to God and the American people.

  The pamphlet was thin enough to tear in two, and that’s what Clara did, before tearing it again, into quarters, and walking to the bin at the edge of the orchard. Tomorrow the illiterate boy from Rensselaer could burn it with the rest of the rubbish when he came to do his chores. She wouldn’t have it in the house. This printed interrogation, coming up from the page with such quiet madness, unsettled her more than it should have, but the affinities between Guiteau’s voice and Henry’s were inescapable. People said that Secretary Blaine remembered brushing aside the office-seeking assassin whenever he was accosted by him in the months before the killing. Who knew, she wondered, what crazy fantasies Henry might have entertained, even five years before, against Mr. Evarts and President Hayes? Guiteau had claimed credit for Garfield’s victory in 1880, on the basis of some mad speech he’d written and never delivered — a boast oddly like Henry’s own occasional assertions that he was the cause of various events from which he stood far removed. As she picked a skirtful of apples, she felt sick recalling how, when Mr. Garfield finally expired last September, Henry had said he was thinking of offering his services to the new President, since, after all, Chester Arthur was a Union College man and might be in need of him.

  The eighty summer days during which Garfield lingered and suffered, rallied and relapsed, had been dreadful for anyone reading the newspapers: the ghastly paragraphs about drainage and pus; the unhealing wound that the physicians’ fingers probed again and again; the attempts to cool the sickroom by blowing air over a huge box of ice. Every Sunday the sermons were full of it, as the congregation at Albany’s Cathedral of All Saints fanned themselves and nodded with equal fervor over mercy and retribution. She had been prepared for the congregants to stare at herself and Henry, since memories of Mr. Lincoln’s killing were newly revived, but there turned out to be fewer eyes on them than she’d expected. It was as if this second shooting of a President in sixteen years had at last made the first one old news. The glances, when they did come, were mostly the sort that villagers might direct toward any couple who, after long absence, had come back to live among them.

  This summer was nearly as hot as last, and as she rinsed the apples in the kitchen, she felt grateful for the coolness of her father’s house. So much of what was here had been his. In these last few years she and Henry had acquired almost nothing of their own, had come back from Europe so empty-handed that customs agents eyed their trunks with suspicion. Even now she was aware of slicing the apples onto a painted tray that her mother had given Papa forty years ago. She should put it away for her daughter, she thought, not keep adding knife marks to it; and she should do the same with other items, for Amanda’s children. She had asked Amanda please to come this summer and bring them all with her, but her sister hadn’t been able to. There were times when Clara almost wished for Pauline’s cold, aging presence in the big house, but she had gone to Newport and taken Lina with her. Mary Hall, merrily working herself to death at some charity house on Canal Street, had declined her invitations, too. Louise and Lillian were here, but Louise scurried away from Henry with the same speed she used to avoid a field mouse, and the businesslike briskness that allowed Lillian to cope not only with the children but with the oddities of their father made her, alas, not very relaxing or intimate company.

  The house ran on a needlessly rigid schedule, and since it was now past three in the afternoon, the day’s history lesson had begun in the dining room. She could hear it going on, more a recitation than a lesson, a two-hour drone from father to sons, no interruptions permitted. She stilled her paring knife to listen to Henry’s strong, invisible baritone: “Upon discovering the position that Lieutenant Benedict was in with his company, I ordered him to fall back with his company to a ditch near the cemetery, and from thence to the cemetery itself, if possible. Previous to Lieutenant Benedict making the move, he had lost seven men wounded, and while making it, he himself was wounded severely and one sergeant mortally. I then determined to occupy the tannery (which was a good brick building), and after making loopholes in the end, and posting a few good men at them as well as at the windows, succeeded in keeping the enemy’s fire under until midnight, when we were relieved by a portion of Couch’s division of volunteers.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. It wasn’t violent, just deadly. It was some officer’s dispatch from Fredericksburg, printed word for word in The War of the Rebellion, the official history of the Union and Confederate armies, which the government had begun issuing two years ago and would go on issuing for years to come, in dozens more volumes than Nicolay and Johnny Hay would need to cover Mr. Lincoln. Colonel Henry R. Rathbone was a charter subscriber to this clerkly bookkeeping of the apocalypse he once prophesied; the document-filled installments now arrived in Loudonville with only a little less regularity than Harper’s and Leslie’s.

  Little Clara was exempt from the recitals, but the boys were too scared to ask for even temporary leave. They just waited hopefully for their father’s next trip to New York, which would come unannounced and leave them to climb the trees and play ball and once in a while take a carriage into town to play with their Rathbone relatives. Clara no longer asked Henry where he went, and upon returning home from the city, he offered no evidence to make her think he’d been with Jack Barnes. Since he could hardly go satisfy himself along the quays here in Albany, she hoped for his own mad sake that he was staying out of Manhattan’s rougher dens; she didn’t want to have to tell her children their father had been murdered in the streets. While he was gone she liked to think he was in one of the fancier houses of assignation, some quiet and nearly respectable place not far from the house Chester Arthur still owned on Lexington Avenue.

  Sitting down at the kitchen table with a peeled apple and a glass of cold water, she thought of this dapper President-by-accident, who had, she’d read, hired a French chef, Monsieur Fortun, for his midnight suppers. If Johnny Hay was still in Washington, he must be pleased at how the new tenant had started fixing up the Mansion from top to bottom, trying to make it as perfect and polished as his green carriage with the morocco trim. His first state dinner, for the Grants, had included eight different wines, and poor Mr. Hayes had been appalled. “Nothing like it ever before in the Executive Mansion — liquor, snobbery, and worse,” he’d said. The worse must be that Arthur, on top of everything, was Conkling’s man.

  But she liked him, liked the idea of him, this tuxeodoed beau she’d seen years before at a college affair Papa had organized. He was running the sort of White House she had once dreamed about, and she was missing it all, left to feel as Pauline must have fifteen years ago when Conkling’s ascent forced her and Papa home. But even the indomitable Pauline, past seventy and as selectively perceptive as ever, was closer to the center of things. The President was spending his summer in Newport, and when Pauline arrived home in September, she could be counted upon to report her hand having been kissed by his lips, as Clara, who would be filling a trunk with woolens for yet another ocean crossing, politely nodded and asked for details.

  She came out of her daydreaming when Gerald, who would turn eleven next week, crept into the kitchen and whispered, “Papa says I can have a glass of water.” She reached over to smooth her son’s hair, and in a loud voice, the kind she wished her children weren’t afraid of using in front of their father, said, “You’ll have a lovely glass of cold, sweet cider. And your brother will have one, too.” She got up to get the pitcher from the icebox. “Your papa can
have the water — for his speaking voice — if he can pause long enough in his oration to take a breath.” She poured two glasses of cider and placed them on the tray, after clearing it of apple slices. “Did you know this tray was your grandpa’s? And that it was given to him by your grandmother?”

  “Grandmother Louisa?” asked Gerald, still whispering. “The one I never met?”

  “That’s right,” said Clara, lowering her own voice, not interested in having Henry hear this part of her conversation with her son. This was the sort of history, bits and pieces of family lore and better times, that she wished the boy were learning.

  “Do you still miss her?” Gerald asked.

  Clara thought for a moment, trying to give him the kind of truthful answer she believed was good for children. “No, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s too long ago since she left. I was only your age. That’s more than thirty-five whole years ago.”

  “I’d still miss you,” Gerald said quietly as he experimented with managing the tray.

  Clara took it from him and set it back down on the table. “Would you?” she asked, in a whisper so low the boy had to strain to hear it.

  “Yes,” he said, looking up.

  She took him into her arms and pressed his head against her cotton dress. “I’m not going anywhere, Gerry. I’ll be right here,” she said, stroking his red hair.

  “But you’ll be coming to Germany, won’t you?” he asked, pulling away, looking anxiously up at her and forgetting to whisper.

  “Germany?”

  “Papa says he wants us to live there. He says that Germany, thanks to Bismarck and the emperor, is ‘where you can really see history at work.’ ”