Your loving sister,
Clara
She put the letter into its envelope, quickly, before she could think about the two little lies in its last paragraph. Not everyone was missing Will (Henry couldn’t have borne his presence), and it was of course Henry, not Amanda, with whom she was going to stroll.
“I’ll be back,” she said to her sisters, who looked up from their novels and knitting and curling papers to nod at Clara and, after she’d closed the cabin door, one another.
She knew just where he’d be, and in the dark she walked with careful speed along the damp wooden deck, trying not to slide toward rail or rigging. She felt the vibrations of the boilers beneath her feet as she looked for the air funnel behind which Henry had stood waiting for her each of the past two nights. She thought she had the right funnel in view, but there were so many of them; perhaps she was wrong. Or maybe she was early. Or perhaps he’d decided not to come. She pulled her shawl tighter and hoped no one would see her and wonder what she was doing by herself.
It was so dark that when the voice came she nearly screamed.
“You’re not below, praying with your papa?”
“No!” she shouted, before realizing who it was. Then relief made her angry. “I nearly jumped out of my skin! And don’t scoff at Papa!”
“I’m not scoffing at your papa,” the voice said, laughing. “I’m too occupied with his daughter.”
Her fear gave way to a different sort of excitement, though another, delicious sort of fear was mixed into it. She tried to calm herself, to keep him from thinking she was scared of the dark. “Do you think,” she asked, in too much of a rush to sound as casual as she wished, “that our Italian trip will be spoiled? It’s a shame the Piedmont may be torn up by war just because the French and Austrian emperors can’t get along.”
He laughed. “Have you been writing to Will? On affairs of state?”
She tried to laugh with him, but was still worried that anyone who saw them, tucked into this dark alcove, might start some talk. “There’s a woman over there,” she said, pointing toward the railing.
“Do you think she’s going to jump?” he asked. “A jilted maiden who purchased a ticket to come out upon the ocean and do away with herself? They say it happens, you know, even on the commodore’s ships.”
“I think she’s a happily married mother,” said Clara, not pleased at the way he was spooking her tonight. She wanted to get out of this small space, to see his face. “I think,” she added, trying to push him away from her, back into some moonlight, “I think she’s probably trying to get away from a roomful of beautiful, noisy children who haven’t given her a moment’s peace all day.”
He laughed at her hypothesis and at her pushing, and he took her wrist and pushed back, gently at first and then harder, until she whispered “Henry!” loud enough, she hoped, to make him stop what he was doing, but not so loud the woman at the railing would be alarmed. But now the woman was out of her view, erased by the black silhouette of Henry’s head, which was moving closer, blocking everything else from sight, until his face reached her own and he pressed his lips against hers. He took hold of her with both arms and squeezed her, so hard he forced the breath out of her mouth and into his. He removed his lips and brought them to her neck, and when she realized her mouth was free, and open, she expected to hear herself crying out, to the woman at the railing, for help. But the sound she heard coming from herself was a soft moan, a series of murmurs keeping time with the strokes of Henry’s hands upon her breasts. Her thoughts went back again to the woman, who now seemed only an annoyance, a hindrance to this moment her own body wanted to continue, this moment that her hands, pulling on Henry’s shoulders — and her face, biting at his whiskers — were trying to prolong.
And just when she thought her pounding heart might burst, the moment was stopped by the sound of footsteps. Two evening strollers were approaching, and as she closed her eyes, breathing with fear, several seconds passed before she realized that Henry had slipped away into the dark. She was alone.
ON THE LAST Friday morning in May, Pauline Harris sat on a bench in the Tuileries, reading the copy of the London Times she had purchased at Galignani’s. Henry and three of his sisters were taking a turn about the statuary, still near enough for Pauline to hear their feet scrunching the gravel paths that ran beside the orange trees and lilacs. Judge Harris, complaining of indigestion (the result of having had too late a supper after last night’s opera), was back at the hotel, being cared for by Amanda.
A brief look around convinced Pauline that it was unusual for a woman to sit here by herself reading the newspaper, but none of the strolling dandies and mothers with children seemed to be paying her much mind. More likely these days to crave solitude than attention, she took a long, slow breath and appreciated the momentary absence of the chattering girls, and of her husband, too, who remained almost as fretful and self-pitying as he’d been the day of Mary Hartung’s conviction. It had never been like him to find fault with trifles, but so far his progress through Europe had been a parade of small, nervous complaints about everything from how the breakfast eggs had gone off to the way the fabulous sets at the Opéra only distracted one from the music. Over the years, he had learned to watch her for signs of irritation, but these past several weeks their parts had been reversed, and she was grateful for the escape his indigestion was affording her this morning.
Alas, there was no escaping Mr. Seward. Along with news of the fighting in Italy, the London paper was full of his English trip: the way the Ariel’s band had piped him aboard with “Hail to the Chief,” how he’d been presented at court and entertained at Lord Palmerston’s home in Piccadilly. It was as if the Harris party had been in London just to sweep an anonymous path before him: Mr. Seward’s French plans included a visit to Napoleon’s tomb, which Henry had insisted on their seeing just the other afternoon. At least they would be gone from Paris by the time Mr. Weed’s favorite caught up with them. After that, their paths would diverge, Mr. Seward going off to see the pope in Rome and the Harrises proceeding east into Germany.
A few dozen yards away from Pauline, Clara’s gaze paid less attention to the sculptures and flowering trees than to the gravel at her feet. She and her sisters followed Henry as he recited from Baedeker’s and delivered an ironic commentary on the guidebook’s account of the treasures they were passing. Even solemn Louise giggled at his cleverness, but Clara walked in silence, confused and humiliated: the girls might as well be pigeons trotting behind a priest, as he strolled through the matutinal passages of his breviary.
Had she dreamed those nighttime walks on the deck of the Vanderbilt? From the moment they docked at Southampton, Henry had made not the slightest allusion, by word or glance, to them — not even to counsel secrecy. Her instincts and shame kept her from making any reference herself. Would this whole grand tour have to be a mere interval, until they were embarked for home and she and Henry could once more safely meet amidst the shipboard shadows?
Since their arrival in England, every day had been smothered in a jabbering fuss about carriages, trunks, itineraries, and meals, all of it made worse by Papa’s sulkiness. The exasperation she felt with him and with all the touristic nonsense should have drawn Henry closer to her, made him realize she could finally appreciate the way he’d endured the whole past noisy decade of doubled family life. But all the bother of travel seemed to trouble him not at all. In fact, Amanda had taken to teasing him about his cheerful new disposition.
An hour later, among the tangled vines and leering funerary monuments of Père Lachaise, Clara continued to worry. Pauline had gone back to the hotel with Louise to check on Papa, leaving her and nine-year-old Lina to stumble with Henry over the illustrious corpses. The Gothic gloom didn’t fret Lina; she went gamboling among the sarcophagi, popping up here and there in imitation of a gargoyle’s eyes and open mouth, while Henry looked up from his guidebook just long enough to laugh.
Clara felt sick with frustrati
on, wondering why, even in this threatening place, Henry seemed unable to resurrect his doom-saying self. “Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,” she wanted to cry out. “Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!” But he remained horribly merry and fraternal. Only Howard, who Clara hoped was out of his sickbed and on the high seas, could have been gladdened by this new incarnation. The afternoon wore on, and during a long walk through Les Halles, the noise and smells and butcher’s blood succeeded only in further animating Henry and Lina. After they had all, at Henry’s ciceronian insistence, crossed the Pont Neuf and walked clear through Montparnasse, Clara was still unable to find her nerve and demand an explanation of his good spirits.
Now the three of them were prowling the dark aisles of Saint Sulpice. Each ecclesiastical pillar rested on a huge block of streaked marble resembling the great slabs of fatty beef they’d seen at the market, and as she passed them Clara thought she would be sick. She hurried ahead, keeping her eyes on the plain straw chairs, as if this bland visual food might settle her stomach. In the first row, just before the altar, she sat down. Papa would never forgive her if she knelt in this popish place, but she wished she could pray to the sculpture before her: the Virgin Mary, standing upon a stone globe over some stone clouds, her Infant in her arms. Clara longed to ask for an end to the confusion she was feeling, but no matter how sweet the carved face, her Baptist soul would not permit her to petition this graven surrogate.
What she truly needed was the light of day, an escape from history and the dead and all this obligatory looking at them. She rose from her seat, intent on fleeing, and reached the nave after skirting the complexities of the floor by the altar, a series of wooden trap doors and hinges leading farther into the violent past. As her heels clicked across the marble toward the sunlight, she closed her eyes and imagined her father’s apple trees in Loudonville — a sight Parisians ought to be crossing the ocean to see.
Outside in the square she sat on a ledge of the fountain, wondering if Henry and Lina had taken notice of her absence and if she might be able to find her way back to the hotel, halfway across the city, without them.
“Eh bien. La poupée.”
A loud American accent coming from the church steps made her look up. It was Henry, waving off Lina, giving her permission to visit the dollmaker’s shop they’d passed on their way to the church, the one whose front window was filled by the figure of Marie Antoinette wearing a bell-shaped gown the dollmaker had fashioned entirely from starched doilies. As Lina ran off, Henry strode toward the fountain. The last thing Clara now wanted was what she’d wished for all morning, to be alone with him. Even so, she could feel the frustration drain from her all at once, as if her body were a lock on the Erie Canal; what rushed in to refill it was the excitement she remembered from the ship.
Suddenly she had the courage to stand up and fling questions at him: “Why are you treating me this way? Why are you being so horrible to me, after …” She couldn’t finish.
“After what?” asked Henry, smiling at her.
“After all that’s happened,” she answered.
“All that’s happened?”
“On the ship!” she cried.
“Nothing’s happened,” said Henry, as if trying to soothe some childish misapprehension.
“Nothing!” shouted Clara.
“Nothing yet,” said Henry.
She fell quiet, until his laughter brought her back to angry life. “Yet? Does that mean something is supposed to follow all this indifference? Why are you testing me! And what are you testing? My strength? My discretion?”
“Our strength,” he whispered, creating new hope in her tired face. “Our discretion.”
Sensing she might let herself collapse in a tearful heap on the fountain’s ledge, Henry swept his arm around her waist and projected her into the square. “Come,” he said, getting her feet to scamper across the cobblestones. “Let’s go buy Lina the decapitated queen.”
“IT’S JUST LIKE the Pitti Palace,” said Mrs. Alexander Stafford, pointing to the Königsbau. “You’ll realize that as soon as you get down to Florence. Mark my words.”
“I’m sure,” said Pauline. The Staffords and their two plain daughters had run into the Harrises an hour ago at the cathedral and agreed to join forces in exploring the old city of Munich. The Königsbau having been dismissed as a replica, the combined group went on to the small theatre nearby, where the Staffords’ hotelkeeper had assured them small parties of tourists were, during the noon hour, welcome to stand at the back and glimpse the players in rehearsal.
“The costliness of that victory at Solferino was nothing short of astonishing,” declaimed Mr. Stafford, clapping Judge Harris’s back as they mounted the steps together.
“From what I read,” replied the judge, “even beyond what he paid at Magenta.” The appearance of Mr. Stafford, a bluff Alabama planter, had contributed to a rise in the judge’s spirits that had been perceptible since crossing the Rhine. The Hartung fiasco had at last begun to fade, and he was finally taking an interest in their sightseeing and the news of the day, which this month consisted chiefly of Napoleon III’s victories over the Austrians down in Italy.
“Wait until the political conversation turns to matters domestic,” Henry said to Clara as the two of them followed behind. “You can wager the bonhomie won’t last when yo’ pa heahs about Massa Stafford’s chained-up Negroes — of whom I suspect there are plenty.” Pauline, walking arm in arm with Mrs. Stafford, looked over her shoulder to give Henry a cautioning glance. She wanted nothing to confound the morning’s pleasant turn of events. Whatever the reason Mr. Stafford acted as a tonic to the judge’s spirits — perhaps the amiable Southerner buoyed his belief in the chances of preserving the Union — Pauline wanted nothing to dilute its effect; she only wished there were enough of it left over to dose Clara, who during the past few weeks of travel had been terribly glum.
Laertes was making his first-act goodbyes to Ophelia — in German — when the Harrises and Staffords were startled by some incomprehensible barking from a man standing near them at the back of the auditorium. He was apparently the director and, as nearly as one of the Stafford girls could figure out from her pre-travel language lessons, he was trying to indicate that this whole exercise in Bavarian bardolatry would collapse if Laertes couldn’t manage to talk to Ophelia like a brother instead of a householder scolding a servant. Dummkopf! The object, he assured the actor, was to get her to stay away from Hamlet, not to dust more assiduously.
“This is our cue,” whispered Henry to Clara, easing her through a red velvet curtain, back into the lobby and out to the street, where he showed the driver of an empty diligence a city map with an X penciled on the outskirts. The driver nodded and helped the two Americans to their seats before clattering off with them in the direction of the Isar River.
“All right, Henry,” said Clara, determined to be calm, even hopeful. “Tell me where we’ll be while Papa spends the rest of the afternoon worrying himself sick.”
“X marks the spot. A little studio inhabited by my old Union friend Leander Reynolds. The great artist of my set in North College. He came here a year ago, determined to become the new Kaulbach by taking advantage of the scenery and the prices. I think he’s probably spent more time drinking beer in the Bock-keller than he has painting, but we’ll probably find one or two canvases propped up in his lair.”
“Is he expecting us?”
“I hope not, since he’s in Paris at the moment. But when I wrote to tell him I’d be over, he said I should feel free to have a look around whether he was there or not. The door is never bolted.”
Clara remained silent, and Henry took her hand. As they drove through the old city, she told herself that she was on her way to her heart’s desire, that she could not wait another day for it, that she and Henry would now bring themselves together forever in the way they were meant to be. Their union as man and woman would now be accomplished, and be so evident to others that no one would
any longer be able to look at them as brother and sister. And yet, in the back of her mind, as they drove on, she wondered if this submission were wise, and if perhaps there really wasn’t some good reason they remain apart. Yes, she would have her Lord Byron, but might people now look at Henry as they had looked at the poet, whispering about what he’d done to his sister? No, she decided, closing her eyes decisively. She and Henry were not brother and sister, and never had been. There was no blood between them, and nothing to stop them from loving each other.
Leander Reynolds’s studio was really a little cottage in sight of the river, surrounded by a fence and flowers. Henry paid the driver and helped Clara down. He waved to the hausfrau in the next yard, pushing open the cottage door as if he were returning home for the thousandth time.
Determined to look brave — unsure whether she was alarmed or relieved at what might finally be about to happen — Clara took off her bonnet and began exploring the little studio, which was, in fact, full of spun-sugar landscapes, so many that it seemed like one more museum on the Harris family itinerary.
“Awful, aren’t they?” asked Henry, picking up a pastel-colored oil of the Aukirche’s tower.
“Terrible,” Clara agreed, wondering what her father would be thinking when the Harrises and Staffords explored that very church this afternoon. Poor Papa. Just when he was regaining his old self, she joins with Henry in betraying him. But would they really be betraying him by doing what they might soon be … doing where? She looked into the cottage’s only other room and spotted Mr. Reynolds’s unmade bed.
“Why do you hate Papa so?” she asked, surprised at the question, at the ease with which it had escaped her lips. She was right now so anxious that Henry’s unconquerable dislike of his stepfather seemed almost a conversational matter, like Leander Reynolds’s pictures, just a way to pass the time until the moment arrived and they went into the other room.
Henry and Clara Page 8
