Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “AND THIRTEEN CENTS for the broken glass.”

  “But it’s yet to be repaired!” said Henry.

  “It will be, Rathbone, before the summer’s out. The carpenters have quite a bit else to do the day before commencement,” said Professor Pearson, not looking up from his desk in the treasurer’s office, just writing silently, forcing the young man to listen to the hammers and saws out on the lawn on this warm midsummer day in 1856. The young hothead said nothing, just stood there in front of him, seething. “I hope you don’t think I’m unaware of how the window broke, either,” said Pearson, proud of how little escaped him, pleased with how much he could get a junior proctor to divulge. “I’ll just add it to the fines for missed prayers and recitations. So,” he said, subtracting the $24 paid in May, at the beginning of term, “that makes one dollar and forty-four cents to be carried forward.” The precision, the paltriness; the boy would soon burst his collar, thought Pearson, if he had to listen to much more of this. But that’s what Pearson would make him do, just a little more. This boy could use a bit of toning down. There was too much blood in him for his own good.

  “And shall I send the bill to Judge Harris?” he asked.

  The judge’s ward, listed as such in large black letters of Pearson’s handwriting on the piece of paper directly between them, nodded with as angry a look as he dared.

  “He’s quite a man, your stepfather.” Professor Pearson put his pen back in the holder and looked up at the young man, as if to say, You don’t agree?

  “Yes,” said Henry.

  Pearson kept going. “Yes, Rathbone, the judge was graduated first in his class, as you no doubt know.” He pasted a copy of the term’s charges into the college bill book.

  “Is that all, sir?”

  “He was a legend,” said Pearson. “Nothing less, even in his own college days. Not long ago President Nott remarked to me, ‘Pearson, I don’t know which runs higher in Ira Harris, probity or perspicacity. It’s a splendidly close race between the two.’ A marvelous compliment, don’t you think? His service to the college has been exemplary, of course, but we all look forward to the time when he might be persuaded to do even more. Though goodness knows,” said Pearson, sighing so ostentatiously that he nearly laughed at his own sadistic success, “a man with his talents and sense of duty is bound to be spread pretty thin.” He just couldn’t prolong it anymore; it was indecently delicious. The boy’s little red whiskers looked as if they were about to pop, like a porcupine’s quills. “Very well, Rathbone. Have a pleasant summer, but do make some preparation for the fall. Moral Philosophy, Optics, and Electricity will make for no small set of burdens. They wouldn’t for even a gifted scholar.”

  The boy began to withdraw.

  “Our best to the judge, of course.”

  Out in the sunlight, returning to North College, Henry broke into a run, just for the pleasure of feeling his feet hit the ground as hard as he could make them. He imagined smashing his shoes, again and again, into Pearson’s soft, womanish face. Mounting the steps to North College, he struck blows against the handrail with his fist.

  Back in his third-floor room, he had a few minutes to sit on his packed trunk and wait for the carriage. The driver was hired to take him to the Schenectady train depot, from which he would travel home to Albany and Eagle Street. But could he really stand that? Going back there straightaway and handing his marks to the judge, who would be terribly understanding and fatherly about them? Could he bear to sit at the dinner table tonight, the disreputable center of attention, with no breeze to stir the hot air emanating from the noble milksop Will, who would be back from his second year at the University of Rochester, carrying marks as high as his father’s, full of Greek and Cicero and goodness to pour over them all? And all of them would drink it up — except for Will’s stepmother, Henry’s own mother, still less a Harris than a Rathbone, less proud to be part of a family that dealt in civic virtue and learning than the family she first married into, one that spun gold from iron and groceries. He could hear Will going on and on in his reedy preacher’s voice, sounding like one of his letters home. Actually, there was someone on the Harris side who wouldn’t be taken in. That was Clara, he thought, picturing the way she’d catch his glance at some point in the piety, and slyly roll her eyes, hiding behind the glass she sipped.

  She was so different from Louise and Amanda and Will. Once in a while he imagined that she was his real sister and had somehow managed to keep the gaiety that had gone out of life and left him so unhappy when his father died. He thought back to his earliest memories, stories his mother had later filled in, of how, no more than three or four years old, he’d gone with his parents to Stanwix Hall and the Albany Burgesses ball, and the St. Patrick’s dinner at the Eagle, and clapped with delight at the sight of his dancing parents, who at some point in their whirlings would pick him up and dance him between them. Everyone loved the sight of the mercantile mayor, who’d stayed a bachelor past forty, doting on his child and being dazzled by his wife. All the young matrons who for years had plied him with invitations before settling for someone duller couldn’t help joining in the applause and enjoyment.

  When a few years later the city’s politicans tired of him, he accepted his time’s being up, laughing as he walked away from office, looking as happy as when he’d entered. Which is how he continued to look, brave and gay, all through his painful, ugly sickness, as Henry sat by his bed and read him the newspaper.

  In the three years after he died, Henry thought that, like his younger brother, he was getting over it — growing up and “becoming a little man,” as his mother liked to put it. And so he had been, until she married the judge, who moved his family into the Rathbone house and himself into Jared Rathbone’s room and bed. Instead of feeling as if he had a father once more, Henry felt orphaned, as if now his mother had been taken from him, too. When the Harris regime of cold-water baths, morning prayers, and egg whites was fully imposed, she seemed to realize her mistake. But she could not admit it, and he remained lonely, with only Clara’s protective attention for solace.

  The gap between them had grown ever smaller — she was now twenty-one and he nineteen — but would her loving company, her mischief, be enough to get him through tonight?

  Once back in Albany, why not make for Elk Street instead of Eagle? Aunt Emeline would be glad to give him a bed at her house, where he could have a night of honest Rathbone noise instead of Harris hush. If cousin Howard was home, they could go see what was on at the Levantine, maybe afterward go flirt with the girls under the gas lamps on Maiden Lane.

  Where was the blasted driver? Henry got off the trunk and lay down on the stripped bed, taking care not to hurt the crease in his pants. His fastidious dress and toilet were a joke in his small circle of friends; even now, alone in the room, he positioned himself like a ramrod. He looked out the broken window at the tops of the trees ringing the empty circle where the huge Central Building, the domed centerpiece of the architect’s grand plan for this pretentious seat of learning, was supposed to have gone. Even Eliphalet Nott, in his fifty-two years here, despite all the help of civic-minded disciples like Ira Harris, had yet to find the money to get it built. How many times Henry had had to hear about this folly, during wistful sermons in the chapel and forward-looking utterances at the Harris dining room table. He looked at the trees circling nothing but grass, before he closed his eyes and wondered just what he would tell the judge about his latest collection of bad marks and petty fines.

  “Rathbone!”

  He started. It wasn’t the driver who’d arrived, but his classmate Leander Reynolds.

  “Now, old boy, how can you lie there with your eyes closed and miss the splendid clarity of this view? Why, there’s not so much as a piece of glass to dull it.” Imitating an unctuous shopkeeper, he traced the outlines of the missing pane.

  Henry lay back and closed his eyes. “Reynolds, go away.”

  “Go? Without the chance to reminisce about that grand rec
ent occasion leading to the ventilation of this prospect of Nott’s arbored nothingness? Go? With no opportunity to be nostalgic for the celebration, three weeks ago, in this room, of the nineteenth birthday of Henry Reed Rathbone, at which festivity Messrs. Leander Reynolds, Bowen Moon, Gerrit Van Voast, Peter Wyckoff, and James B. Beveridge did toast the guest of honor six, or eight, or was it twelve times? However many, with great gusto, until the honoree terminated the proceedings by hurling a tumbler — with the whiskey still in it, more’s the pity — straight through the glass and out onto the college lawn. By the way, Rathbone, how much did old poncy Pearson dun you for the window?”

  “Thirteen cents, Reynolds,” said Henry without opening his eyes. “Are you through?”

  “Not just yet,” he said, serious now, sitting down at the foot of the bed. “Not until you tell me just what made you so mad at Van Voast. You damn near broke his head along with the window when you threw that glass. We tried all the next day to figure out what set you off, and we quite honestly couldn’t.”

  “It was something about his face,” Henry said softly. “I decided I didn’t like the look on it.”

  Reynolds laughed and got up from the bed. “All right, Rathbone. I see I won’t be getting anything out of you. We’ll just hope your twentieth is more peacefully festive. See you in the fall, old man.” He waved goodbye and, spotting the coachman in the corridor, directed him into the room.

  Henry said nothing, just pointed to the trunk, which the driver and his boy assistant hoisted between them. He followed them out of North College.

  “To the train, sir?”

  “Yes,” said Henry, sighing.

  The coach set off, beginning a circle toward the main gates, passing the treasurer’s office, where Jonathan Pearson looked up and smiled.

  From inside the carriage, Henry pondered the circle of trees ringing the bare patch of ground where the unbuilt rotunda should have been. Without it Union College looked curiously empty, its two main buildings, North and South colleges, facing each other in distant, nearsighted bafflement over the large expanse of intervening landscape. The sight of the treetops made Henry recall the perspective from which he’d regarded them minutes ago, up in the third-floor rooms, when Reynolds had asked why he threw the glass. The strange thing, he now realized, is that when he told him it had only to do with the look on Gerrit Van Voast’s face — and the inexplicable impulse of a single instant — he had been telling the truth.

  Henry returned to Eagle Street after all, having decided it was better to get his homecoming over with. As the parlor maid took his coat, Pauline came out from the dining room to kiss him. “Only one more year of it,” she said soothingly. “The heat is terrible, isn’t it? Jared and the girls, all of them but Clara, are in the country. Everyone else is at the table.”

  Henry shook hands with Ira Harris and Will. His cousin Howard, who’d come over to give him a surprise welcome home, got a hearty clap on the back. “What have I been missing here?”whispered Henry.

  “Clara is wondering who will act as Mr. Buchanan’s First Lady if he’s elected.”

  “Perhaps he won’t have anyone at all,” she said of the Democrats’ bachelor candidate. “If England could have a Virgin Queen, why can’t we have a Virgin President?”

  “Clara, really,” said Pauline. Henry and Howard laughed loudly, while Will looked scandalized. Judge Harris, at the head of the table, said nothing, but was amused at Clara’s remark. During the last year she’d found her tongue. She read every newspaper that came into the house and tore through all manner of novels and poems, sometimes making fun of his fondness for native bards like Whittier over Englishmen like Tennyson. She would be twenty-two this year, and he was proud of all the learning she’d accumulated on her own — though he drew the line at Lord Byron, and had asked her to return Don Juan to the bookshop as soon as he’d seen her with it.

  “So politics is the evening’s topic?” asked Henry.

  Ira Harris glanced down at his soup, leaving Pauline to respond, “Can there be any other?” This summer, after John Brown’s party had massacred the Kansas slavers at Pottawatomie, and Mr. Sumner had been thrashed within an inch of his life on the Senate floor, it would be hard to challenge her point.

  “There’s a torchlight rally for Fillmore tonight. Care to go?” Howard asked Henry.

  “No, Howard,” said Pauline, giving him a hard look. “No.”

  “Not even to rally for an old friend?” asked Henry, toying with her, knowing how frustrated she was by all the events painting her second husband into an irrelevant corner.

  Judge Harris continued to eat in silence. Millard Fillmore, after four years’ absence, was trying to return to the White House at the head of the American Party ticket. The judge would have liked to be able to vote for him, but there were too many reasons he couldn’t. The Nativists and Know-Nothings were using Fillmore, and Harris had little resentment in his own heart against the immigrants and Catholics who so frightened the followers of this new third party. For God’s sake, it was an Irish girl, a cheerful little thing named Matilda, who was setting a plate of fish in front of him this very minute. There were always a couple of them in the house, singing away as they worked. In any event, Mr. Weed had virtually ordered the Whigs into the Republican Party, through which he might one day succeed in making Senator Seward President of the United States. Harris had been on the bench for ten years now, and would probably die on it. If not for Pauline, he might be content to watch the whole political parade go past, but she insisted that he keep on marching behind Mr. Weed, along with all the others still dependent on the Dictator’s favor. So he would vote for Frémont and prepare to spend what remained of his career with the infant Republican Party, while Pauline kept hoping, with less and less reason, that the forces pulling on the poor Union might somehow toss her husband up to new heights, like a morsel of bread from a loaf being ripped in two.

  “I’ll be happy to go and hurrah for Mr. Fillmore,” said Henry, provoking an appalled look from Will, who remained in all things his father’s loyal son.

  “I know why Henry is for Mr. Fillmore,” said Clara.

  “Oh, you do?” asked Howard, smiling.

  “Yes, it’s because he … knows … nothing.”

  Henry joined his cousin in laughter. “No,” he said. “It’s because I’m sentimental about old things that are coming apart, like Mr. Fillmore and the United States of America.”

  “Henry,” said Ira Harris sternly, “you go too far.”

  Will declared, “Henry fancies he can take his lack of principle to such lengths that it becomes a principle in itself.”

  “Very good, Will,” said Henry. “I’ve heard reports of the high marks you were getting in Moral Philosophy out there at Rochester. You can’t expect me to keep up. I’m just a poor Know-Nott.”

  Clara was the only one at the table to recognize the pun, and she broke into a peal of laughter, which she quickly stifled for her poor papa’s sake. Will looked quizzically at Henry, who turned his eyes away, too bored by his stepbrother to give him the fight he wanted. “Clara, will you come along with Howard and me? Another torch for old Mr. Fillmore?”

  Before Clara could answer, Pauline stood up and threw her napkin onto her plate. “Good night.” She waved off her husband, too bent on getting away from the table to wait for any gallantry with the back of her chair. The whole situation left her furious: having to play the prudent partner of her futureless husband and his spotless son. With the exception of Henry, she was tired of all these children, tired of Albany itself, and wishing right now that she’d spent at least another week in Newport.

  Everyone was silent as she exited the room. When she’d crossed the threshold of the parlor, she turned around and said, “Clara, you are to stay inside tonight.”

  Clara appealed to Ira Harris with a look, but before his wife was out of earshot he said, “You must do what your mother says.”

  Henry got up and gestured for Howard to com
e with him. “I suppose we should apologize. Then we can head out.”

  The three Harrises finished eating. “I’m sorry, Papa,” said Clara at last. “I do love you.” She walked around to the head of the table and gave him a kiss before going upstairs to the room she usually shared with Louise. She was sulky about the lonely evening she had to look forward to, while Henry and Howard got to carry torches through the streets of Albany. From her reading, Clara was aware of melancholy’s pleasures, so she took down Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical from its place on the shelf beside bundles of Henry’s and Will’s letters. She opened to “Mariana” and tried to puff up her own plight into something worthy of verse six:

  All day within the dreamy house,

  The doors upon their hinges creaked;

  The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse

  Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,

  Or from the crevice peered about.

  Old faces glimmered through the doors,

  Old footsteps trod the upper floors,

  Old voices called her from without.

  She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

  He cometh not,’ she said;

  She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,

  I would that I were dead!’

  Too cranky to achieve the grander depths of despair, Clara put the book aside and spent the next two hours fidgeting and sewing and sketching, until she went to sleep from sheer boredom, without getting up from the window seat. Except for the kitchen maid tidying up downstairs, the house was soundless.

  Then, around ten o’clock, with her sleeping face still turned toward the window, Clara began to hear a distant roar of voices, just loud enough to make her open her eyes and see a hundred orange tufts of flame, like a sea of marigolds, a half block away. The torchlight parade for Mr. Fillmore was coming up Eagle Street. Its sight and sound were suddenly as desirable as the lover Mariana sighed for. Swinging her legs down from the window seat, she put on her shoes, did up her laces, and tiptoed to the door. Satisfied that her stepmother and father were asleep, and that Will was in his room, absorbed by a book, she hurried down the stairs and out of the house. She ran up the street, smiling, as the torchlights brightened and the voices swelled. Reaching the crowd, she squeezed through row after row of it, excusing herself as politely as she could, until she had a clear view of the man standing atop the ship’s crate and holding forth for Mr. Fillmore in Mr. Fillmore’s own words: “ ‘If there be those either North or South who desire an administration for the North as against the South, or for the South as against the North, they are not the men who should give their suffrages to me. For my own part, I know only my country, my whole country, and nothing but my country!’ ”