The Woman in the Photo

by Mary Hogan

  “The carriage has left the Willard,” someone shouted.

  Earlier that morning, Mr. Lincoln’s heart had pounded, too. He could scarcely intake proper breath. Delivering his inaugural address was the nerve-jangling first step in the long and pitted road he had ahead of him. The country was in deep trouble. North and South were entrenched in their disparate positions. America had been built on the backs of slaves; now slavery might well be her undoing. South Carolina had already declared its secession from the Union. A fate he simply could not allow.

  When he folded himself into the carriage waiting at the Willard Hotel, settling in alongside outgoing President Buchanan, he asked, “Any final words of advice, James?”

  James Buchanan grunted. “Good luck.”

  The carriage clip-clopped down the cobblestoned thoroughfare to the Capitol. Clara Barton held her position in front of the crowd. Upon seeing the presidential convoy, she waved enthusiastically. Always opposed to the barbarism of slavery, she felt a surge of hope. The wise and thoughtful Mr. Lincoln would calm the raging passions in her country and set things right.

  Order out of chaos. That’s what Clara Barton lived for. And meaningful work was the fuel that fed her self-worth. Without a useful occupation, she felt the same way she had as a child: in the way.

  On the day of Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Clara was filled with the effervescence of optimism. She had written countless letters of praise to any congressman or senator who decried the abomination of slavery. Thank goodness Mr. Lincoln had been elected. At last, humanity could prevail.

  The crowd amassed behind the presidential carriage. Clara again wriggled her way to the front so that she might be in a fine position to hear Mr. Lincoln address the country once he arrived at the Capitol.

  She was. Right up front, beaming.

  “Fellow citizens of the United States,” Mr. Lincoln began, standing tall and gangly at a podium on the Capitol steps. He dove directly into the anxiety of the day. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists.”

  Applause broke out. Clara felt her heart pump blood into her ears. The new president had clearly chosen his words carefully. For the next several minutes he spoke at length about maintaining states’ rights and upholding the Constitution. He acknowledged the differing points of view between southerners and northerners. In the end, however, he vowed to maintain the Union, at all cost.

  “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

  As Abraham Lincoln stepped away from the podium, Clara—and hundreds of other Americans who crowded around her—had tears in her eyes. Theirs was an imperfect union, though a union it would remain.

  Clara Barton returned home that day with a full heart.

  Thirty-nine days later, in the dark hours before dawn, a single mortar shot exploded over South Carolina’s Fort Sumter. There, a garrison of Union soldiers was awakened by terror. Already, they had been riddled with anxiety. Food and supplies were low. If they were not replenished soon, the men would starve to death. And now Confederate boats filled the Charleston Harbor. With seacoast mortars pointed at the fort and plentiful ammunition.

  There was no way out. The worst had happened.

  Civil war had begun.

  When Clara Barton heard the news, she was devastated. How could this occur in the United States?

  For the next four years, the country would fight its most vile war: Us against Us. Americans killing Americans. Ugly, face-to-face combat. Terrified young men bayoneting, stabbing, clubbing, shooting other terrified young men who would otherwise be their friends. Soldiers—on both sides—perished in fields of mud, their open wounds untended, their hands unheld. Field hospitals were a shambles. The stench from rotting piles of severed limbs made breathing unbearable. Men died from ghastly infections simply because no one was there to clean a wound.

  As soon as word spread about the dire conditions on the battlefield, Clara felt the same way she had many years earlier when her brother suffered his fall: compelled to help. To be useful. So, at forty, she did the unthinkable. Single and childless, she used her own money to arrange for a horse-drawn cart full of supplies—clean bandages, books, favorite treats—to ferry her through the muck and blood to the moaning, screaming, bleeding, dying soldiers on the front lines.

  At first, she tried to get permission. When consent was not forthcoming, she went anyway. The field commanders were furious. Who the hell was this woman? An unmarried do-gooder wandering among burly, sweaty, bloody men? Barely five feet tall. Who did she think she was? At best, she’d pass out at the first sight of an armless soldier; at worst, she’d be hit by a bullet. How could they explain that to the secretary of state?

  Clara Barton ignored them all. As if to compensate for the chronic shyness that tormented her all her life, she marched onto the battlefield without a thought for her own safety. She bullied her way into the war, ignoring the generals who tried to stop her.

  In a rickety open carriage pulled by a plodding horse, she rode straight into harm’s way. As every other civilian fled or hid, Clara Barton moved forward. Into the bloody battle. The air was choked with musket smoke and the wretched smell of death. Between mortar blasts, commanders shrieked orders. “Forward to that ridge!”

  Bullets whirred past. Cannons bellowed. Fear was as thick as artillery residue. The unseeing eyes of the dead reflected yellow sunlight and silver moonlight. Their arched backs and open mouths resembled those of suffocated fish. Lifeless gazes stared up from the battlefield like a thousand strewn marbles. Clara was horrified. Yet, she continued on.

  Upon hearing a soldier’s moan, Clara stopped the horse. Amid the whistle of rifle shot, she climbed down from her cart and wove among the corpses to the sound of despair.

  “Hello, sir,” she said, finding him, affixing a gentle expression to mask the gruesome sight of his injuries. “I’m Clara. Where are you from?”

  Union or Confederate, it didn’t matter. The “Angel of the Battlefield” believed every soldier deserved respect and care.

  Throughout the war, Clara Barton walked among corpses that lay crumpled in ditches or flat in rows where they’d stood. She passed the scattered remains of human life: arms, torsos, severed heads. On the front lines and back, Clara waded onto blood-soaked battlefields to wrap clean bandages around wounds as purple-red as horsemeat. She held the trembling hands of dying men, soothed the panic in their eyes. She made sure they didn’t die alone in the mud.

  Death’s acrid smell was barely endurable. Clara was petrified. Yet, she maintained a serene expression. As she’d seen the doctor do those many years ago when he tended her broken brother, she projected a calm demeanor so that others would trust her competence. She tucked her fears inside so that she might soothe the frightened men around her.

  Clara witnessed grisly sights she would never forget. Often, the hem of her skirt was so stained with blood she struggled to scrub it clean each night. In the field hospitals, she read aloud to soldiers too sick or wounded to do anything but keen. Her ears were filled with the terrifying sounds of men screaming in agony. The sickening smell of rotting flesh never left her nostrils. But, she didn’t blink. Instead, she proved that a woman could be as strong as a man. Even stronger. One small woman could make a big difference. She could matter.

  CHAPTER 21

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  Present

  Lee Parker was impressed. In the afternoon glow of the Beverly Hills Library, she sat back in her chair. As the dipping sun bounced orange light off the stones in her bracelet, she reflected upon the woman she’d been researching all day—a woman born at a time when docto
rs believed that being scholarly damaged a woman’s uterus. Lee marveled at Clara Barton’s guts. She wasn’t born to greatness; she created it. Her heartbreaking experiences in the Civil War inspired her to continue helping soldiers and others displaced by disaster by founding a humanitarian organization that would continue to flourish more than a hundred and forty years later. One horrible morning in September, the American Red Cross would be on the front lines of a war Clara Barton couldn’t even fathom: passenger planes intentionally flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, still another—on its way to Washington, D.C.—crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

  If Clara were alive today, Lee thought, reality would kill her. People murdered one another in the name of God. Bad police officers shot unarmed citizens in the back or the face. Young people who felt like they didn’t matter—people like Clara herself—brought assault weapons into schools and opened fire. If Clara were alive today, she’d never get out of bed.

  For a moment, Lee sat still in the quiet of the library. She felt frustrated. Though it had been interesting learning about a trailblazer like Clara Barton, Lee was no closer to identifying her great-great-great-grandmother than she had been when she’d first arrived. The woman in the photo from her adoption file could be anyone. A battlefield nurse, the wife of a soldier searching for her slain husband, a passerby who got caught in a snapshot of history.

  Plus, Lee was hungry. Her thermos was empty. Soon there would be traffic back over the canyon. The L.A. challenge: getting on the road before everyone else does.

  Once more, Lee grabbed the mouse and jiggled it to revive the computer screen. She again typed “Clara Barton” into the search engine, clicked on the “images” link. A screenful of small, square, black-and-white portrait photos appeared. A pageful of passport shots. Clara Barton’s face in all its ages—youthful plump cheeks, eyes lidded by middle-aged wisdom, elderly sagging on both sides of her chin. Leaning close to the screen, Lee examined each photo. One by one. They all had the same serene smile. Gently upturned lips, no display of teeth. The outward expression of calm and competence. Clara’s shiny crinoline dresses were all long-sleeved. Dark. Their white collars, buttoned to the neck, were adorned with round brooches.

  “Talk to me,” Lee whispered to the many faces on-screen. “Where did you meet my relative?”

  Lee’s gaze moved from left to right across the screen. Tick, tick, tick. Like a loud clock in her head. She stared at each photo before moving on to the next. And the next, and the nex—

  “Hey, wait a minute.”

  Beside her, another woman with carp lips looked up from her laptop and said, “Shhh.”

  “Sorry,” Lee mouthed.

  In silence, Lee examined each photograph. One by one. Clearly, Clara Barton had aged from a young woman to an elderly one, yet two things remained the same in each photo: her tranquil smile and her hairstyle. Incredibly, Clara never updated her hairstyle from youth to old age. It was always parted down the middle in a hatchet-straight line, with each side rolled backward into a tight, tidy bun at the nape of her neck.

  Hairstyles must have changed. Clara Barton lived into her nineties. When she was born, women spent their entire lives inside the home; by the time of her death, Harriet Quimby had flown herself over the English Channel. Corseted waists were set free, bustles disappeared, hairstyles softened. As Lee remembered it, the woman in the photo next to Clara Barton had a less buttoned-up look than Clara did. Her hair was somewhat haphazard: loosely upswept in a pouf, with wispy bangs. A softer appearance. Was it possible that Lee’s great-great-great-grandmother was in style and Clara was not?

  Feeling a surge of energy, Lee Googled “Victorian hairstyles” and watched an array of fussy hairdos fill the screen. Corkscrew tendrils, back braids, billowy topknots, and . . . bangs. Ringlet bangs, finger waves, frazzles. There was nothing simple or static about any of the women’s looks. Sheesh, she thought, the amount of time those women put into their hair. No wonder the rich needed maids.

  She examined each photo until she spotted one that most resembled the hairstyle her great-great-great-grandmother had sported. Long hair knotted loosely on top of her head, soft wisps about her face. Bangs frizzed across her forehead. Not overly coiffed. A hairstyle definitely unlike Clara Barton’s rigid center part and bun. When Lee clicked on it, she was linked to a Pinterest page with several hairstyle drawings from that same era. As it turned out, they were all from the end of the Victorian era. Closer to the beginning of the Edwardian years when styles loosened up.

  One photograph in particular caught Lee’s eye. It was a picture of a woman in a white shirtwaist, a ruffle of lace down the front. Her skirt was dark and unbustled. Falling unfettered to the floor. Her waist was tiny, secured by a plain black band. One hand held a tiny beaded handbag, the other rested gently atop the back of a carved wood chair. Rings adorned neither hand, yet it was clear she was a woman above the working class. A teacher, perhaps? The way she posed her delicate fingers spoke of breeding. But what struck Lee most was her hair. Exactly the same style as the woman’s in the adoption file photo, it was loosely bound on top of her head. Dancing across her forehead were bangs that were frazzled just so.

  Lee checked the year: 1889.

  She gave it a try. Back up to the search engine, she typed: “Clara Barton 1889.” The screen immediately filled with links about a place she had never heard of before.

  Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

  CHAPTER 22

  Courtesy of the Johnstown Flood Museum Archives, Johnstown Area Heritage Association

  SOUTH FORK FISHING AND HUNTING CLUB

  Summer 1888

  Almost instantly, croquet bores us both. On her turns as striker, Ivy grips the mallet too tightly, foolishly uses the side face despite patient instructions not to, crookedly aims, and carelessly takes her shots. The first falls far short of the hoop, the second veers off in a spinning wiggle. The third—walloped in frustration—flies past two wickets straight into the underbrush.

  “Is there more to it?” she asks me.

  I camouflage my peevishness with a smile. Did she not ask me to teach her the game? “It’s more fun once you’re able to sharpen your aim,” I say. For a brief moment I am tempted to display my expertise by knocking my yellow ball through all six wickets so that I might hear the satisfying thunk of a win. But I contain myself. Ivy would surely report back to her brother that I am as conceited as he.

  “Know what I’d really like to do?” Ivy drops the mallet in the dirt.

  Silently, I pray that she does not wish to attempt badminton. “The clubhouse has draughts and dominoes,” I say.

  “Certainly not,” she replies. “Now that I am free, I plan to stay outside. Mother treats me like a toddler. She’s afraid I’ll mature and marry and leave her. Which, of course, I desperately want to do. But am I not entitled?”

  “Surely she wants you to have a life of your own one day.”

  “No.” Ivy’s ringlets bounce childishly when she shakes her head. “Raising me is Mother’s only purpose. Once I am on my own, she will cease to be useful. She has told me so herself.”

  My heart softens as I picture my own mother. Without Henry to fret over, how would she fill her days? I, too, have bristled under the chafe of a mother’s grip on my spirit. The longing to be set loose. Feeling more kindly toward this girl who is so clearly a different person away from her suffocating mother, I say, “Okay, then. Today we are both free. How shall we make the most of it?”

  Ivy’s green eyes go round. They are lit by a fire within her. Like her brother’s. Both contain the soul of a rapscallion. “Please, Miss Haberlin,” she says with a pixie’s grin, “will you take me sailing? Mother won’t allow me on the water. She frets over every possible moment of my fun.”

  I glance at the discarded croquet mallet. As smart as a whippet, Ivy adds, “Real fun.”

  Now I laugh. I remember my delight when Mother allowed me to race in last summer’s clubhouse reg
atta. Who am I to squash the same?

  “Come,” I say, reaching up to cup Ivy’s chin the way Mother does mine from time to time. “We’ll row across the lake in our private skiff. No one needs to know about our real fun except you and me.”

  Clapping her hands like a toddler, Ivy grins with her whole face.

  “But you must promise me one thing,” I say.

  “Anything.”

  “You will call me Elizabeth from this moment on.”

  “Yes, Elizabeth. Most certainly, yes!”

  “Good. Now, follow me. We have one stop to make first.”

  Wending along the shaded path behind the boardwalk, Ivy and I both feel the cool kiss of low-hanging trees. The dirt is soft beneath our feet and the silence of the woods is glorious. It speaks of the freedom to be ourselves. To breathe. To shake off the shackles of propriety. Everyone is at the clubhouse. No doubt preening around Ivy’s family like squawking mallards diving for bread crusts thrown on the lake. For the moment, I am utterly content to leave all that nonsense behind. My spirit is renewed by glimpses of twinkling sunlight and the melodic warble of water thrush.

  “Our cottage is up ahead,” I say.

  “Oh, joy!” Ivy replies. “May I see it?”

  “Of course. I want to change my skirt.”

  “Not the cottage. The dress.”

  I smile. She reminds me of a younger me. As I did earlier at the clubhouse, I take her hand and squeeze it. A bit shyly, Ivy asks, “What possessed you to do it?”

  “Do what?” Not that I don’t know.

  “Walk through the clubhouse in that gown?”

  Between the thick groupings of hemlock trees, with their glossy spinach-green needles and ammonia-like scent, I stop and turn toward the impressionable young girl. “Sometimes a woman must stir the pot.” Then I turn away and walk on. Over my shoulder, I add, “If my maid is there to help, I’ll let you try it on.”

  Never before have I seen a happier girl.