Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “Yes, Mr. Hammersmith. Right away. Lafayette Square.”

  Bill walked to the supply cabinet to get a new reporter’s pad, losing any interest in the assignment as he went. He sat down beside Sally, trying to shift the girl’s attention from her typewriter to him.

  “What’s old Yammersmith want?” she asked without letting up on her keyboard.

  “Some old houses being pulled down on Jackson Place. Jeez, the things that guy thinks are stories.”

  “It’s summertime, sweetness. Stories are scarce, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “Why can’t we leave town with Fatty Taft?” Bill whined. “How about it, just you and me?” He reached over to tickle her wrist.

  “We stay because we’re wage slaves, Princeton. At least those of us without trust funds.” She returned the carriage so fast it nipped his hand. “So quit bothering me and go about your business. You can take me out for a soda when you get back.” She handed him his straw hat, which had been on her desk all morning, since he’d made the first of half a dozen trips over to it.

  It was blazing hot on Pennsylvania Avenue. Making things even less comfortable, drowning out the clip-clop of the horses, were all the proud belching cars, thousands more of them than when Bill first came to the capital three years ago. He was drenched in sweat by the time he passed the White House and turned into the square. What in hell did Hammersmith expect him to come back with? he wondered, lifting his suspenders to peel the shirt away from his chest. It was just some guys with a steam shovel, taking a bite out of a house and cursing the temperature as they worked — plus a little crowd of onlookers, heat-whipped clerks from Treasury who’d come to Lafayette Square in search of some lunchtime peace and found this instead. They didn’t know any more about what was going on than he did. What did Hammersmith want him to do? Find some old-timer who could wax nostalgic about Benjamin Harrison and bemoan the march of progress that had taken the country to 1910? The only old man he could spot was a colored fellow in a waiter’s jacket, and Bill knew that Hammersmith, who hailed from Birmingham, wouldn’t want him serving up some darky’s dialectal reminiscences. Still, it was a start.

  He tapped the waiter on the shoulder. “You know what they’re doing?”

  “Tearing it down,” the old fellow replied, looking a little sad under his grizzly white hair. “Making room for an extension of the Cosmos Club.”

  “Ah,” said Bill. It was even more boring than he’d thought. “That where you work?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the colored man. “Over forty-two years.”

  “You don’t say. Do you know who was living here before now?”

  “Oh, I’ve known most of ’em, going almost all the way back to the war.”

  Bill smiled. The old man seemed sharp, and better company than half the fellows in the newsroom would be this afternoon.

  “This used to be the colonel’s house,” the waiter said.

  “Who’s the colonel?” asked Bill. “And who are you?” he added, extending his hand. “Name’s Bill Curtis, with the Star.”

  “My name’s Johnny,” said the man, not sure he preferred the handshaking ways of these young white fellas to the older gentlemen he was used to waiting on. “The colonel was Colonel Rathbone. He and his wife and his children lived here, thirty, forty years ago. Used to see her in the morning when I’d cross the park to go to work. Found her lots of times out by the wishing tree. That’s gone, too,” he said, looking through the wrought-iron fence toward Jackson’s statue.

  “The wishing tree?” asked Bill.

  “Yeah, the wishing tree,” interjected a sharp New York voice. “Like in, where you’d go to make a wish you were somehow gonna come back from this place with a story.”

  Bill laughed. “Hey, Eddie.” It was McClanahan, his opposite number at the Post. “Meet my friend Johnny.”

  “A pleasure,” said McClanahan, not offering a handshake.

  “Johnny’s telling me about the neighborhood, about some old colonel.”

  “I know who he’s talkin’ about. The guy who was with Lincoln on closing night. Booth cut him up on his way out of the theatre. Years later he killed his wife. Over in Germany. Emptied a whole barrel into her chest.”

  Bill cast an inquiring glance at Johnny, who confirmed McClanahan’s account with a quiet nod. Well, that would be a story, if it hadn’t happened about thirty years ago, and if McClanahan, who liked to point out that his education stopped at P.S. 5, not Princeton, didn’t already, as usual, have all the details.

  “So what happened to the colonel after that?” asked Bill.

  If Johnny knew, he decided it wasn’t his place to say; he let McClanahan rattle on with the story: “Nothin’ good. They threw him in some German jail. He couldn’t’ve lasted long. He’d cut himself to ribbons after he shot the wife. ‘A sordid story,’ as we like to call ’em on page eight.”

  The steam shovel was now buzzing at a higher pitch, making all three men wince. Over the din Johnny mimed that it was time for him to go back to work, and McClanahan shouted that this demolition was for the birds. He was going to head on over to the morgue instead. “Girl there dead from an ‘illegal operation,’ as we also always say on page eight. See you around, Curtis. Don’t let the ivy grow over your eyes.” He swatted him with his pad and took off, leaving Bill to stare at the bedroom wall left exposed, by a bite of the steam shovel, on the house’s second story. You could still see the squares of unfaded wallpaper over which the last owner’s pictures had hung.

  He was too hot and too lazy to stay here and get the lowdown on the Cosmos Club’s architectural plans. As it was, nothing he did today would satisfy Hammersmith. He might as well just hunt up a sketch of the dead colonel. They could run it beside a picture of the crumbling house, and he could do a “historical notes” caption. With any luck that would pass for a day’s work, and by four he’d be sitting over a phosphate with Sally Kenyon, pushing his luck as far as he dared. As he walked west to the Pension Building, thinking they might have a clipping or a sketch inside the colonel’s file, he entertained his fantasy of Sally, and worked up his lines. He’d get one straw from the counterman instead of two, and when she asked him where his was, he’d just say, “Yours’ll be sweeter,” and see where that got him. Hurrying down F Street, he looked toward what had once been Ford’s Theatre, still boarded up after it collapsed and killed all those clerks, poor sons of bitches. Happened years and years ago, when it was still offices. Lucky the colonel wasn’t there that day.

  He’d never much liked the Pension Building, those times he had to go to it. The outside was grand enough, all the soldiers and sailors going round and round it, frozen on the frieze, but the inside was crazy, halfway between a hive and a stadium, thousands of clerks toiling around that huge fountain. Anyway, here he was, striding through its Corinthian columns and checking his pocket watch, 1:35 P.M., and figuring he’d be back at the Star in another hour.

  He filled out the form and showed the silver-haired clerk his press card, which didn’t speed things up. Even so, the file appeared in ten minutes, and Bill put out his hand to receive it.

  “Can’t do that,” said the old man in a Mainer’s accent.

  “How so?” asked Bill.

  “Living pensioner. Private file.”

  “Living?”

  “Living. Which is to say none of your business.”

  “Where is the man?” asked Bill, his tone more respectful, even a bit hushed.

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “Oh, come on. He was a famous man in his day. I’m here on newspaper business. Historical interest.”

  “You kin of his?”

  “No,” admitted Bill.

  “Then I can’t help you.”

  “Well, who can, then?”

  The old man squinted through his glasses at the handwritten notes on the file’s jacket. “Pensioner’s nearest kin is his son, Henry Riggs Rathbone. Least he’s the one getting the checks, at Sixty-seven West Washington Street,
Chicago, Illinois. The Land of Lincoln,” the old man added in a little flourish, before frowning at the sight of another notation.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Bill.

  “Unfortunate,” said the clerk.

  “What’s unfortunate?”

  “Oh, suit yourself,” said the old man, either tired of Curtis’s manner or unable not to be the bearer of bad news. He pointed with his immaculate index fingernail to the designation “LUNATIC,” before retracting the file once more. “The man is confined to an asylum in Hildesheim” — he pronounced it, slowly, as Hildy-shame — “Germany. He’s certified, according to the act of June 27, 1890, as possessing ‘a permanent physical disability not due to vicious habits.’ His son administers the pension and has since the death of the man’s brother-in-law, one William Hamilton Harris, in 1895. And that’s all I’m going to tell you, son. It’s far more than I’m supposed to.” With that, he took the jacket of papers away with him, back into the vaults where the Union dead took their official, statistical rest.

  Six months later, Bill Curtis turned up the collar of his alpaca coat and walked up the hill to the gates of the old Benedictine monastery in Hildesheim. He showed his letter of introduction, stamped by the American consul, to the gatekeeper, whose scrutiny of it was interrupted by the shouted greeting of Dr. Israel, the provincial asylum’s director, a genial bald man bounding down the path from the main building and instructing the guard to let the young American in. “Yes, yes,” said Dr. Israel, shaking Bill’s gloved hand, “I know all about you. You’re here to write about our colonel. We got your editor’s letter,” he said in his fluent English. “We’re all ready for you. And so pleased you’ve traveled all this way to see him.”

  “Actually,” said Curtis, trying to keep up with Dr. Israel’s fast pace, “I’m over here to write about the German army, but since last summer I haven’t quite been able to get the colonel out of my mind. My editor thought it might be worth taking a side trip to come see him.”

  “Excellent,” said Dr. Israel. “Your editor writes that you have just received a promotion.”

  “Undeserved,” said Bill with a smile. Getting shifted to the foreign desk, away from Hammersmith, had been a gift horse whose mouth he hadn’t looked into.

  “I’m sure it’s otherwise,” said Dr. Israel, leading Curtis into the building and instructing a woman in white — a secretary or nurse, Bill wasn’t sure — to bring them some tea and cake. “Come, sit down,” he said, laying Bill’s coat over a heavy wooden table. “Despite its current function, we owe this great building to Ludwig the Pious, son of Charlemagne, not the mad King Ludwig of later days.”

  “Has he really been here the whole time?” asked Curtis, eager to get on with what had occasioned this long detour. “Colonel Rathbone, I mean. I’ve had no cooperation from his son, and I don’t know much more than I found out from my visit to the army’s pension office.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Dr. Israel. “The local authorities agreed with your State Department to discontinue criminal proceedings if the colonel were confined to St. Michael’s. The sister sailed home with the children. The brother from Ohio, a model of a man by all accounts, brought them up. The colonel, had he been in his right mind, could not have asked for more. All this was taken care of early in 1884. It happened very quickly, given modern communications. Did you know, by the way, that your President Arthur got the news as he came out of church on Christmas day — right on the steps, I was told — less than two days after the incident?” Dr. Israel, who seemed proud of being not merely the colonel’s physician but a historian of his case, explained that he had heard all the details years ago, when he first came to St. Michael’s, from old Dr. Rosenbach, the royal Prussian district physician.

  “Where is the colonel?” asked Bill.

  “He is out,” said Dr. Israel, reaching for his meerschaum pipe.

  “Out?”

  “Yes, on a drive. He keeps a carriage.”

  Bill laughed incredulously. “He keeps a carriage? A lunatic on a soldier’s pension?”

  Dr. Israel held a lit match to the pipe’s bowl and sucked it to life. “Even though the colonel remains rather wealthy in his own right, the family have always taken the pension. That’s how the rich stay rich. The colonel is a gentleman, so we let him live like one. The ‘servants’ in his dining hall are really guards, but what harm, after all —”

  “His own dining hall?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Curtis. Come, I’ll show you his apartment. I see you’re too impatient for my chatter. All you young American men have the energy of your Mr. Roosevelt. Well, more power to you!” Dr. Israel smiled and led his guest out of the office, through two long halls, to another wing of the building, where they entered a small library with British and American magazines on a table. From there, with the help of the doctor’s key, they entered a small bedroom, sparsely furnished and militarily neat.

  “Is that a picture of Mrs. Rathbone?” Bill asked nervously, pointing to the dresser. An oval frame contained the photograph of a gray-haired woman.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Israel. “But of the preceding Mrs. Rathbone. The colonel’s mother. Later Mrs. Ira Harris.”

  “I see,” said Curtis, noticing the absence of other photographs. “Are there no pictures of his children?”

  “The colonel has no curiosity about them. His brother, Jared, who became the American consul in Paris twenty years ago, would visit him from time to time, but most everyone has lost interest by now. Miss Harris, the sister, an old lady, still sometimes writes with news of his grown children, as does an elderly lady in New York, a Miss Hall, but he ignores the communications. It is cold in here. Let us go back to the office and have out tea.”

  Over plates of chocolate cake, Dr. Israel explained the colonel’s initial symptoms, in 1884, to his visitor, who took notes. “When he came here, he was entirely under the influence of hallucinations and the mania of being persecuted. He believed himself to be surrounded by enemies who made him drink liquids through the wall. He thought poison was being given him in his medicine and victuals, and refused to take any food which had not been tasted before his eyes.”

  “Does he hear voices now?” asked Curtis.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dr. Israel. “And sees specters. But ones that have grown familiar to him. His early fears were much worse. The hallucinations were manifold. At times he believed himself to be persecuted by other patients in the asylum; he thought the ceiling would come down on him; he feared people would go to his rooms during his walks in the garden and injure his clothes; he feared he would get a yellow complexion from drinking the water. And he believed that he was kept in the asylum to be experimented on.”

  “How is he physically?”

  “For a seventy-three-year-old man, his condition is satisfactory, though it is always hard to keep him eating adequately. He complains of pain, but that is in his mind. The pupil of his right eye is slightly dilated, always. But that is irrelevant. The cause of his difficulties is not physiological. In most respects the Romantic writers were correct. You see —”

  The woman in white had come in. She spoke softly to Dr. Israel and exited with a sociable smile in Curtis’s direction.

  “The colonel has returned,” said the doctor. “Shall I take you to him?”

  “Yes, please,” said Bill.

  “Ignore any strange requests,” the doctor suggested as they went back down the hall to Henry’s apartment. “Treat them matter-of-factly.”

  Trying to imagine what these requests could be, Bill remained silent. They strode past the monastery’s old stone walls.

  “Colonel,” Dr. Israel called into the library. “You have a visitor from Washington.”

  Henry stood up very straight, extending his hand as he lowered his head. Bill noticed that the American colonel’s manners were more formal than those of his European physician. He was thin to the point of gauntness, and his hair, what was left of it, had gone white. The enlarged pupil of the right
eye was noticeable, and disconcerting, as was the slightly throbbing vein at the left temple.

  “I’ll leave you,” said Dr. Israel, startling Bill. The doctor discreetly nodded to indicate that things would be all right, and he exited.

  “Sit down, Mr. Curtis.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  “ ‘Mister’ is fine. I retired from the army more than forty years ago.”

  “Of course.”

  “Would you examine one of these?” Henry passed him a plate of biscuits. “They are trying to kill me with them, I’m sure.”

  “After twenty-seven years here, sir? It seems unlikely.” Bill politely declined to take anything from the dish. “I just had cake in the doctor’s office.”

  “May I ask you something?” said Henry.

  “Certainly.”

  “Would you kill me with that knife?”

  “No, Mr. Rathbone,” Bill replied. “That wouldn’t be wise.”

  Henry, as if long accustomed to having such favors withheld, changed the subject without any fuss. “I don’t think Taft will be nominated again, do you? I think Roosevelt is coming back.” This statement startled Bill even more than the request to kill his host, and Henry seemed to perceive that. “I get most of the magazines and newspapers I want,” he said, “including the Star. It comes very late, several weeks, but Mr. Thompson, the consul, sees that it gets through.”

  “I’m not sure about President Taft,” said Bill, who realized not only the preposterousness of the conversation, but also that he was probably less informed about American politics than his host. “I doubt he was encouraged by the off-year elections.” There was a short pause, and he decided to change the subject. “How are you feeling, sir?”

  “I am well, for the most part, though the walls contain an apparatus that blows gas and dust into my room at night. This is what causes my headaches.”

  Bill, taking a risk, said, “I believe Mrs. Lincoln had a similar complaint when she was confined.”

  “I do not know the lady,” declared Henry, calmly.