Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  SIGHTING THE FIVE-STORY, cast-iron immensity of A. T. Stewart’s, Clara pulled the check string on the coach and waited for the driver to stop his horses. She passed her fare up through the hole in the carriage roof and prepared to alight at the corner of Broadway and Tenth Street. She was surprised at how the sunlight had established itself since she’d left Reverend Hall’s house on Beekman Place an hour ago. She had walked all the way west to Fifth Avenue before hailing the carriage, too excited by the long-forgotten sensation of walking about, just herself, to mind the drizzle. She had arrived in the city yesterday, giving Mary no more than a single post’s notice of her intention to come down. In fact, she’d not had much more notice herself. On Sunday afternoon Pauline, just back in Loudonville from her winter in St. Augustine, had urged her to go, to see her friend and the city before, yet again, she had to board a ship for Europe. They would be sailing Saturday. “A little time for yourself will be refreshing, Clara. You can rendezvous with Henry and the children right at the dock if you like.”

  Clara’s need for refreshment was, to Pauline’s way of thinking, attributable to her contrariness and ever-waning energies, defects Pauline had long since decided were of her own making. Clara was willing to assent to this fraud, no matter how insulting, if it sanctioned a journey away from the house. Besides, Pauline was surprisingly good with the children. Clara would never have gone off and left them with Louise, who was harrowed by Henry’s moods. Pauline’s presence would induce her son’s adoration and calm. So, as Clara wrote Mary to tell her she was coming, her only regret came from realizing it was her own absence that would give her children their three most peaceful days this year. Otherwise, as she’d left the house for the Albany train station, she’d had a feeling of joy, a sense of being sprung from a box far more confining than the small carriage she was now getting out of.

  It was years since she’d been in Stewart’s, and the midday bustle filled her with excitement. She couldn’t recall where any item was to be found, but she remembered the bank of elevators, and headed for it straightaway, pausing only once to look up at the great rotunda, arching her neck and allowing her head to swim for a delicious moment. She got out on the second-floor arcade, still unsure of her exact destination but eager to look over the railing onto the great main selling floor — high enough to enjoy the strangeness of the perspective, near enough to make out the faces of the shoppers. They moved below her like figures in an old genre painting, skaters, heading toward cases and counters with wonderful free-willed speed. Dozens of ushers stood like sticks frozen into the ice, around which the shoppers spun. The classes mixed freely, shopgirls and ladies and servants all in casual pursuit of what their money could buy.

  “Madam?” inquired a callboy.

  “I need summer suits for my two sons. I have their measurements written on a piece of paper,” she said, reaching into her dress pocket. “They’re nearly as big as you, and I hope they haven’t grown since I wrote these numbers down on Sunday.”

  “Let me take you to the salesman, if you please, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” she said, falling in step beside him.

  “It’s ready-made suits you’re wanting, am I right? This is the floor for them.”

  Clara paused, losing her gaiety in a rush of indecision. Whatever she decided now would leave her vulnerable to Henry’s sarcasm or rage. If she had the suits custom-made, she would be attacked as a spendthrift; buy them ready-to-wear and she would be charged with dressing her children like newsboys. Suddenly she felt depleted, heavy, and wanted to let herself down from the giddy height of the arcade. “Are the custom goods on the first floor?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I had better go there, I think. Thank you.”

  Within another ten minutes she had ordered two fancy linen suits in which she could picture poor Riggs and Gerald — ridiculous to themselves and pitiful to her — having to sit for long, silent hours on hotel patios in Nice and Wiesbaden and Geneva as their father showed them off to titled frauds and vacationing financiers. “Please have them sent to Number Four Beekman Place. You really can have them there by Friday afternoon?”

  “Rest assured, ma’am,” the clerk said.

  Clara headed out of the store, onto Broadway. She walked north toward Eleventh Street, past veterans selling pennywhistles and popguns, women hawking candy and cigars. A half hour ago she would have found the loud street life appealing, but the boys’ suits had forced her mind toward Friday and the passage to France. Her immediate destination, McCreery’s, exposed her to the same conundrum she had rehearsed on the second-floor arcade. If she went in to have a new ball gown made up, she would be scalded with charges of extravagance; fail to go in and, come summer, Henry would rail at her for shabbiness. When should she take delivery of his abuse? She would schedule it for the summer, she decided; the hot weather would leave Henry with less energy to dispatch the insult. It might spoil the quicker and be discarded with the custards and creams rotting on the hotel patio.

  So she would not go into McCreery’s. Besides, she had long since lost her appetite for clothes. Years ago she would stand inside the White House like a Maypole, Mrs. Lincoln with her dressmaker whirling round her, festooning her simple frock with silk flowers and paste jewelry. She had once or twice come back to Fifteenth and H so done up that her sisters couldn’t decide between admiring exclamations and fits of laughter. In fact, she was rather shabby now. The dress pocket from which she’d pulled the list of the boys’ measurements was torn at the corner, and on her collar there was a small sauce stain that just this morning she’d noticed but not bothered to remove. Looking as she did, she knew it was no wonder the callboy back at Stewart’s had assumed she wanted the ready-made suits.

  She was tired, torn between starting back for Mary’s and continuing to savor her free movement through the city. She decided to walk east, through a gay gantlet of balloon men and shoelace sellers, toward the Astor Library on Lafayette Place, where she could sit down by herself. Once inside its reading room, she took a volume of Wordsworth from behind the grille and smiled at the memory of her father, who years ago had gently suggested that Bryant might be better nourishment for an American girl in the Hudson Valley. But until her twenty-first birthday it was Wordsworth she had loved; then she fancied herself outgrowing him for the wickedness of Byron and Thackeray, writers who seemed proper companions for the clever-tongued woman everyone said she had become.

  As if but yesterday departed,

  Thou too art gone before; but why,

  O’er ripe fruit, seasonably gathered,

  Should frail survivors heave a sigh?

  Why, for the sake of self-pity, naturally. She sighed, even now, over the departure of her long-lived father, and could feel some remnant of her former witty self rebuking the naiveté of the even earlier girl. And yet, the next verse reminded her that the poem left plenty of room for grief over the death of that person closest of all to her:

  Mourn rather for that holy spirit,

  Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep;

  For her who, ere her summer faded,

  Has sunk into a breathless sleep.

  It was she herself who was dying. She was expiring beneath the force of Henry’s misery, just as he was being crushed by all the hateful history he worshiped, and in which he’d been caught. Just look at it, shelf after shelf of it, all around the upper reaches of the reading room, oppressing the poetry shelves beneath: Tacitus and Livy and Gibbon and Carlyle, all of it laden with doom, some of it — right at this hour in Loudonville — being poured into the uncomprehending ears of her sons.

  Mr. Astor’s library closed each weekday at four. Clara stayed, turning the pages of Wordsworth and McClure’s, until the chime rang at 3:50, after which she started not for her temporary home at Mary’s, but farther southward into the city, down Broadway, block after block, with no purpose, as far as Broome Street, the corner on which Mrs. Prevost’s Theatre used to be, where Pauline and Emeline saw Joh
n Wilkes Booth play Henry V one night in 1862. Newsboys were hawking the afternoon editions. She got through several competing packs of them before deciding that with a paper under her arm she might walk in peace. So when the next group came up — “News of the day, ma’am?” “Telegram? Telegram?” “Only two pennies, only two pennies” — she took one from the smallest boy she could spot, thereby earning him a few good pokes in the ribs from the rest of the gaggle, before they dashed off to another possible patron. “There you go, ma’am,” said the boy, making change from Clara’s nickel. “That’s a nice cartoon of Ol’ Mutton Chops we’ve got today, ain’t it?” He pointed to a caricature of the widowed President Arthur shying nervously away from the seductions of Britannia.

  “And what if I were to tell Old Mutton Chops that that’s what you call him? He was a friend of my father’s, you know.”

  “Yer foolin’.”

  “No, I’m not,” said Clara, laughing. “And what’s so astonishing about that, anyway? Don’t you think you yourself might be President of the United States someday? Or at least senator from New York?”

  The Irish boy was laughing with her now. “Nah,” he said. “Senator from the Dakota, maybe. That’s where they’ll be sendin’ me, soon as they can find someone ter make use of me out there.”

  “Where do you live now?” asked Clara.

  “Down at the Newsboys’ Lodgin’ House. Right down at Park Place,” he said, rather proudly, pointing down Broadway toward Printing House Square. “Lots of us winds up out west. A good deal all around, doncha know.”

  Clara smiled down at this marvelous boy, so full of nerve and ginger that Henry himself wouldn’t be able to dash the life from him. She’d half a mind to take him back to Loudonville and make him change places with Gerald, just like the boys in The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain’s new book, which she’d given them at Christmas, and which Henry promptly condemned for making penny candy out of history.

  “You take the rest of this nickel,” Clara told the boy, giving him back her change. “You’ll need it for seed money, for making your fortune out west.” Before she could change her mind, the boy tipped his cap and ran off into the late afternoon.

  Clara did not arrive at Mary Hall’s until seven. She walked every step of the way back to Beekman Place, lost in her thoughts, unwilling to relinquish the unaccustomed solitude. A cloudburst soaked her with rain as she trudged north through Murray Hill.

  “Come upstairs and let me undress you,” said Mary when she saw her in the entrance hall. “Never mind the maid.”

  “It’s my own fault, Mary. I couldn’t persuade myself to take a carriage.” Clara shivered and allowed her friend to lead her up the stairs. The saturated dress with the torn pocket came off, as well as the undergarments. As Mary dried Clara’s back, she seemed to search her naked form for clues.

  “No, Mary, you won’t find any bruises. It’s not like that.”

  “Then what is it like?” asked Mary, surprised by her own boldness. “I mean lately.”

  Clara closed her chenille robe and sat down at the foot of Mary’s bed. “Lately,” she said, “if one can call the last two years that, it has been very … lonely,” she said, choosing the word carefully, deciding that she would not cry. “Pauline no sooner returns from Newport than she’s off to St. Augustine. From Cleveland, Will inquires into nothing. Louise is supposed to join us in Europe later in the year; meanwhile she scurries away in terror at Henry’s very approach. Tutors come to teach the boys, but Henry sends them home before lunchtime, sure that he can more effectively impart wisdom to his sons than they can. No tutors for little Clara. I’m keeping her ignorant, just like me. Riggs uses every ounce of strength he has to deny the strangeness of his situation. Gerald, I think, hates him.

  “You won’t be surprised to know that I’m not looking forward to Germany and all the Old World wanderings that will precede it. I shall soon have quite enough of closed carriages.” She stopped to laugh, theatrically — a sign, thought her friend, that she desired interruption, some question or challenge. At a loss for the right one, Mary remained silent, and Clara resumed: “We shall sit amidst speculators and heiresses, the former pretending to solicit Henry’s advice. He will relish the chance to appear shrewd, a man of consequence, but they will be too rich already to have much interest in swindling him. They will just keep him talking and talking, hopeful that he’ll somehow wander into that precinct of conversation known as What Happened At Ford’s, so that they can have their own brush with the history their newfound companion so reveres. Chances are the hoped-for conversation will never take place, since even speculators have acquired too many manners to push him towards it, though as more and more whiskey is consumed, the electricity of risk will once or twice enter the air — and Henry may just be in the mood. The heiresses will look to me as a source of maternal advice, while their mamas will regard me as a potential purveyor of worldly wisdom, though the years since I was ‘Mrs. Rathbone, Lafayette Square’s notable hostess’ have begun to recede.”

  “Must you go, Clara? Must any of you go? Is there any point to one more trip abroad?”

  “Yes Mary, there is, albeit a hopeless one. There’s a stop in Geneva that’s been scheduled. A medical matter. That’s right,” she continued, avoiding Mary’s eyes, which had widened in surprise. Telling her what no one outside the family knew, she said, “It’s for Henry. For his mental condition. It’s not the first time this has been tried, either. Four years ago we sought out a man in Carlsbad, but it did no good. Once more the doctor comes on Jared’s recommendation, some bit of intelligence he picked up on his European travels for Mr. Stanford.”

  “But surely this is a hopeful sign, Clara.”

  “No, Mary.” She now looked into her friend’s eyes. “I’m afraid it isn’t. Henry sees nothing whatever wrong with himself. He will sit and listen to the doctor and compliment him on his erudition. Then he will leave the consulting room and pour the doctor’s advice, along with his potions, down the hotel bathroom’s drain.”

  “Then why does he go to these doctors at all?”

  “He agrees to go. He fears that Jared will try to cheat him of the rest of Pauline’s money after she’s dead. He’s decided that going to these physicians and talking sweet reason in their presence — you know, he’s become a much better actor than Wilkes Booth was — will be, in the eyes of some probate court one day, a clearer demonstration of goodwill and sanity than adamant refusal to act upon family advice regarding his lapses into ‘melancholy.’ How I love that elastic word!”

  “But perhaps this doctor really can be of some help, in spite of Henry’s resistance. Oh, Clara, I’m just certain things will have improved by Christmas!”

  “Oh, Mary,” said Clara, coming across the room to embrace her friend, to hold Mary’s head against her own damp hair. “You sound just like my papa.”

  Nice

  10 August 1883

  We arrived here in the usual unpatterned way. (Riggs charts our “progress” — no word ever meant more its opposite — on a map, and the lines he draws create a mad cat’s-cradle, resembling what I still think of as Henry’s “wiring”) Our previous location, for all of four days, was Amsterdam, where we saw one more world’s fair. Had we been abroad last year, I am sure we would have attended Moscow’s. I have seen half a dozen of them over the last fifteen years — but never one in my own country.

  I don’t know when our German residence is supposed to begin, or where exactly we’re supposed to spend it. The pace of our travels has so quickened that I wonder if Henry will ever be able to brake us; perhaps we shall go on forever. I think he believes that moving like dervishes will keep us all together, by some sort of centripetal force. He has once more been asking the question he put to me in Carlsbad four years ago: “Are you going to leave me?” He has asked it a half-dozen times since we’ve been over, in every possible manner — panicked, imploring, angry, and just casually curious, the way the children used to inquire whether streetc
ars could fly.

  This afternoon in the hotel garden we paced mechanically — twelve times around it, in one of those mathematical repetitions Henry sometimes insists upon. On most of the circuits we were accompanied by a fat gentleman from Manchester, who looked like the Prince of Wales and told us about his investment in this train the papers are full of. Less than two months from now, the Orient Express will depart from Paris toward Constantinople, carrying forty people through Munich and Vienna and Budapest, stuffing them with caviare as they go. The furnishings sound beyond anything I can recall from the Vanderbilt: Turkish carpets, silk sheets and wall coverings, a different bathroom for every two couples. A gipsy band will come aboard somewhere in Hungary, and when the whole Barnum-like production rolls through Bulgaria, King Boris III, who has a passion for trains, will put on a pair of overalls and take the controls.

  By the time the Manchester man was through with his description, Henry was prepared to write a check for shares in the company. Of course, we shan’t see any of this train ourselves. Henry is in the trough of his mental economic cycle, preaching frugality and sacrifice to me and the children. When his mood arrives back in the extravagant part of its arc, I hope we are through with the German experiment and home for good.

  We are a train, a runaway one, with mad King Boris at the controls. Henry goes on playing at life, according to whatever impulses run through his wires, and the rest of us follow behind, like motorized mannequins. A month has passed since the “consultation” in Geneva, which took just the course I anticipated. Henry was exceptionally plausible, and charming, getting this “specialist” to believe it really was just dyspepsia he suffered from, and that he’d only made the appointment to placate his beloved but alarmist wife. We left with two prescriptions, one for his stomach and another for my nerves. Back at the hotel, I noticed how he carefully put the doctor’s receipt with his most important papers: as “proof,” I am sure, of good intentions and mere physical malady, to any court that might one day be interested in the matter.