Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “Do you eat well?” asked Bill.

  “I neither like nor trust the food. I have suffered from dyspepsia for many years, and I have always disliked fleshiness, so I eat sparingly. Several months from now I plan to stop eating altogether.”

  Bill noticed that the man was almost skeletal. He was afraid Rathbone would see he was staring, and take offense, but then he realized that his host was looking off into the middle distance and smiling. He decided that he had to bring himself to ask about Clara.

  “Your wife —”

  “Did you hear that? That gliding? That rustling out in the corridor?”

  “No,” said Bill, “there’s no —”

  “I had no wife,” said Henry.

  “Clara?”

  “Clara Harris was my sister.”

  “Sister?”

  “A woman of great beauty and virtue. I miss her very much.”

  Bill Curtis avoided the man’s eyes, but made a quick note on his pad. He wanted to leave. Madness, he decided, was finally uninteresting; its arbitrariness put it beyond profitable inquiry. But he had to ask about 1865. That was why he had come.

  “You’ve seen so much history,” he began cautiously.

  “I write about history,” said Henry.

  This was something Bill had not heard from even Dr. Israel. “Really?” he asked. “May I see what you write?”

  “I’m not quite ready to reveal it,” said Henry. “It is a theory of the Accidental Man. The right man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He turns the wrong place and time into the right ones. It is complicated.” He directed Curtis’s attention to a top shelf with dozens of black notebooks, presumably filled with his own words.

  Bill noticed, on the same shelf, a rack of pipes and a small wooden doll. He made a note on his pad. “I’m afraid I’m baffled,” he confessed.

  “You won’t be when you see it,” Henry said.

  “About the history you saw — Mr. Lincoln —”

  “I never discuss him,” Henry said quite firmly, but without losing any of his politeness.

  “Not even in your writings?”

  “Not one word. My own experiences have given me insight into analogous situations. But I do not need to discuss myself, any more than an architect needs to leave a scaffolding in front of a building he has built.”

  Feeling at a dead end, Bill looked around the room.

  “I think you need to go outside,” said Henry. “I’ll take you to her.”

  “Her?”

  “Miss Harris.”

  Bill stared.

  “Her grave,” said Henry.

  The younger man assumed this was a delusion, and he wondered how he could conclude the visit. But Rathbone was reaching for his coat and hat, as if to go out. Was there an attendant Bill could summon before the man wandered off?

  “Gunther!” cried Henry, before explaining, softly, to Curtis: “My manservant.”

  Gunther, a large curly-haired youth, came in from the hall. Henry introduced him to Curtis, adroitly alternating English and German. Gunther gave Bill a knowing smile, and Henry, in German, issued Gunther an order. “ ‘To Miss Harris’s grave,’ ” Henry translated for Curtis. Gunther nodded to the patient and indicated that it was quite all right for the visitor to follow along. The three of them walked down one more stone corridor leading away from Dr. Israel’s office, and came out the back of the monastery. It was not possible, thought Bill. Surely they brought her home with the children, to be buried in Albany or Ohio.

  “You’ll want your coat,” said Henry.

  “I’m fine,” said Bill.

  “The coach contains blankets.”

  Bill put one of them over his knees as they rode in silence over the snowy winter landscape, its brown outcroppings straining for the weak warmth of the sun. They were soon at the edge of the village graveyard, “something right out of Thomas Gray,” Bill wrote in boilerplate on his reporter’s pad. Gunther stopped the carriage in an automatic way that suggested the place was a frequent destination. He alighted from the coachman’s seat and came around to let Henry out. The old man’s frailty was evident as he stepped down. Gunther motioned to Bill for one of the blankets, which he draped over his charge’s shoulders. The three men walked no more than ten yards, past a few bordered graves, before they reached a simple headstone.

  CLARA H. RATHBONE

  1834–1883

  A mind at peace with all below,

  A heart whose love is innocent!

  Bill’s heart pounded. He had been a poor enough student at Princeton, but even he could recognize the last two lines of “She Walks in Beauty.”

  “This is where I shall lie,” said Henry, pointing to an empty plot of snow-covered earth, already bordered, next to his wife’s. “As soon as I finish my work and cease eating.”

  Bill said nothing.

  “Byron was her favorite,” said Henry, “though our father disapproved of him. She had this in her pocket the day she died. Here, look,” he said, offering Curtis a folded, disintegrating paper from his own pocket. Bill opened it carefully, afraid it would rip at the creases and scatter on the winter wind. The ink remained surprisingly vivid; the hand was distinctly feminine:

  There was in him a vital scorn of all.

  As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,

  He stood a stranger in this breathing world,

  An erring spirit from another hurl’d;

  A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped

  By choice the perils he by chance escaped;

  But ’scaped in vain, for in their memory yet

  His mind would half exult and half regret …

  You could not penetrate his soul, but found,

  Despite your wonder, to your own he wound;

  His presence haunted still; and from the breast

  He forced an all unwilling interest:

  Vain was the struggle in that mental net,

  His spirit seem’d to dare you to forget!

  — Byron, “Lara”

  Henry motioned to take the paper back from Curtis, who refolded it gently.

  “She copied it out two days before she died,” Henry explained. “At a desk by a small porcelain stove in her room. It’s the last time I can remember seeing her.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Henry and Clara is based on a wide variety of research material: published histories of the Civil War era; diaries and correspondence of the Rathbone and Harris families; contemporary newspaper accounts; military records; pension files; census reports; alumni records; State Department documents in the National Archives. Insofar as the historical record exists, I have tried to find it and, in most cases, adhere to it. The essential facts of Ira Harris’s political life and Henry Rathbone’s army career, as well as the chronology of births, marriages, and deaths among the Harrises and Rathbones, are true to life as presented here. Nearly all the book’s principal characters, and most of its minor ones, were living persons. Nearly all the extracts from letters and journals that appear in the text are made up, but in places quotations from actual material are included. The letter from Clara Harris to “Mary,” for example, which opens Part Three of the novel, is a real letter in the possession of the New-York Historical Society. The identity of “Mary” is not certain, but my discovery of this letter led to the invention of the character of Mary Hall, who in the novel is made its recipient.

  The available documentation of Henry and Clara Rathbone’s story — substantial in places, almost entirely lacking in others — amounts in the end to no more than a scaffold, and the reader should know that I have taken liberal advantage of the elbow room between that scaffold’s girders and joists. The narrative that follows is a work of inference, speculation, and outright invention. Nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase “historical fiction” it is important to remember which of the two words is which.

  Still, the facts have been the seeds of the fiction, and I am gratef
ul to the many people who helped me gather and make sense of them. Chief among these are Melinda Yates of the New York State Library and Norman S. Rice, director emeritus of the Albany Institute of History and Art. During the past few years, whether guiding me through microfilmed ledgers or cemetery rows, they have been unfailingly patient and helpful, and I am deeply in their debt. Thanks also to all the librarians who helped me find elusive bits of the Rathbone story: Jean Ashton (New-York Historical Society); Lisa Browar (New York Public Library); Barbara Durniak (Vassar College); Ellen H. Fladger and Elaine Shull (Union College); Karl Kabelac (University of Rochester); Sally Marks and Dane Hartgrove (National Archives); Linda J. Long (Stanford University); Sam Streit and Jennifer Lee (Brown University). Mrs. Sumner Crosby, Jr., and Mrs. Edward Hart Green, present-day relations of the principal characters, supplied me with information, and the distinguished Civil War historian Stephen W. Sears gave me useful advice. Professor Edith Toegel of Hamilton College translated correspondence with officials in Germany, where the Rathbones’ story came to a close.

  As the facts grew the fiction, I depended on good advice from Cindy Spiegel, Janet Silver, and Laurence Cooper of Ticknor & Fields / Houghton Mifflin; my agent, Mary Evans; Frances Kiernan; Lucy Kaylin; and the incomparable Sallie Motsch. Thanks to all of them.

  And thanks, as always, to Bill Bodenschatz.

  New York City

  January 14, 1994