Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  In the four days since, the Harris family had waited for news of Will, whose exact fate was at last revealed after six P.M., when Clara saw her father, returning from a caucus of Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, cross Fifteenth Street with his long stride. Pauline presented him the envelope, and he gathered his women into the front parlor, where he read the letter in its entirety, his voice as steady as if he were once more routinely charging a jury, his feelings betrayed only by the slight shaking of the thin brown paper.

  Fort Albany, Monday evening

  July 22, 1861

  5:30 P.M.

  Dear Father

  I am well & have lost no blood. Our army, or rather that part of it commanded by McDowell is disorganized, routed & demoralized. I was in the saddle all night & then most of the past 48 hours. I fired two of our guns for several hours yesterday. We need reinforcements in the shape of reliable infantry & some cavalry & somewhat expect an attack at this point within twenty-four hours. Cushing is supporting a regiment of skirmishers with his 2 guns & as Green is not at all well, I have much to do yet this evening. If I can I will come and see you to-morrow morning. If I do not, I expect to stay here until our men & horses can receive some provisions & forage & our guns, ammunition.

  I have worked hard, but suffered nothing but regret & disappointment that my first battle should have terminated in a retreat — a rout.

  Believe me faithfully

  Your aff. son

  Wm. H. Harris

  Senator Harris allowed himself a sigh as he put the letter back in its envelope. Little Lina sobbed with relief as Amanda and Louise went into the kitchen, sniffing quietly into the fancy handkerchiefs they had sewn during breaks from havelocks and mufflers. Their father paced the parlor in a mixture of pride and frustration, while Pauline rubbed her hand across his broad back with a trace of the new wifely tenderness Clara had seen her display since her husband’s sudden political ascent. But by tomorrow at breakfast, Clara knew, her stepmother’s mood would have shifted like a powerful loom. Pauline would be in full-throttled argument about military appropriations and strategy, pressing her mild Whiggish husband with all the radical force of Senators Sumner and Stevens, insisting on a fuller, bloodier, faster prosecution of the war — whatever it took to get it over before Henry left his training for a battlefield like the one Will had just escaped. Pauline intended to have her son safe, the country reunited, and her husband part of a truly national Senate instead of a rump parliament. She wanted the atmosphere of constant emergency replaced by one permitting her more ceremony and notice. In this, thought Clara, she was not unlike the Southern ladies who still ran the serious social business of the town, and would settle for normality if they couldn’t have a Confederate victory.

  All Clara wanted was her wedding.

  She crossed the room to kiss her papa and lead him into the dining room for supper. When the meal was over, the evening’s letter writing would begin, with Papa conveying Will’s story to Uncle Hamilton; her stepmother sending it to Aunt Emeline and Joel; and her sisters passing it on to young Jared, who was still in Albany and hoping to be admitted to West Point, if his stepfather’s new adroitness at securing favors could get him the appointment. Clara herself would recount it to Henry, hoping that he would find some sympathy for Will’s ordeal. As she ate her mutton soup, she concentrated on the letter she would write first, to Mary Hall. She might be forbidden to share the secret of her engagement, but she could at least describe the dress she planned to wear, nine nights hence, at the Lincolns’ dinner for Prince Napoleon.

  “THE GIRL IN THE OPERA was just like Clara, wasn’t she, Mother?” Sarah Rathbone’s question to Emeline was irritating, and Clara was glad when the ever-solicitous Mary Hall clarified matters: “Oh, I don’t think so, Sarah. Clara reads all sorts of serious things. Norina only read silly novels.”

  Actually, Clara had not entirely escaped identifying with the heroine of Don Pasquale; she only wished there were a Dr. Malatesta in her own life, some well-intentioned schemer with the power to remove what stood between herself and her marriage. Putting an end to the civil war was a tall order, but to anyone who could manage it (even General Beauregard, she secretly thought), she would be forever grateful.

  “I didn’t mean anything nasty,” Sarah insisted.

  “No quarreling now,” said her mother. “The night is far too lovely for that.” It was fine October weather, dry and cool with a hint of smokiness on the Hudson Valley air. Clara breathed in deeply, remembering the awful Washington summer she’d lived through. It was good to be home in Albany for a week. She and Pauline had stopped in New York, collecting Mary Hall as they continued north. Tonight the party of Harrises and Rathbones — Uncle Hamilton, Emeline, Joel, and Sarah — was smaller than it would have been a year ago, but as it proceeded from Tweddle Hall to Elk Street, passing en route a barracks and a new hospital, its members tried to act as if these were old, normal times.

  Waiting in the Rathbones’ dining room was a table piled with cake and Roman punch. Mary Hall, who cherished any new story about the leader of the Union, was eager to know if this was the sort of party fare Mrs. Lincoln served at the White House. The cake, said Pauline, speaking before her stepdaughter could, was similar to what Prince Napoleon had been given in August. That this knowledge was less than firsthand, that it had been communicated to her by Clara, the only member of the Harris family invited to the state dinner, was left unsaid. Clara herself went on to describe the affair, choosing details Mary would enjoy (the prince’s crimson sash, Mrs. Lincoln’s entry on his arm) and avoiding her own essential memory, which was that she hadn’t enjoyed the evening at all. Much of the conversation had been in French, a point of pride with Mrs. Lincoln, and beyond what Clara had taught herself on the window seat in her father’s house. And while the prince may have reviewed the Union army and inspected some camps, many of the legislators at the party had grumbled that he was here merely for the sport of seeing the New World’s rustics knock one another’s brains out. Looking past the back lawn of the White House at the unfinished Washington Monument (as hopeless a sight as the unfinished dome over the Capitol), Clara had felt futile and incomplete. She danced with some frail young men who had yet to join the army, but after hearing some matchmaking chatter from the old ladies, she decided to sit the next ones out, which succeeded only in angering her toward those who assumed she was already a spinster. All this endured to protect a secret she wanted to shout from the bandstand!

  By the morning after the visit, the administration’s critics were already complaining about its cost — the injustice of which criticism Clara would hear about from Mrs. Lincoln for weeks, during afternoons in the Red Room.

  “It was terribly hot that night,” added Pauline, safely enough, to Clara’s narrative.

  “Why don’t you spend more time up here?” asked Emeline.

  “Yes, we miss you and the girls,” said Uncle Hamilton.

  “Oh, there’s far too much we’d miss,” Pauline insisted.

  “Mother is right,” said Clara. “Just the other week we got to see beautiful Mrs. Greenhow dragged off to the Capitol Hill prison as a Confederate spy.”

  “What news is there of Henry?” asked Joel.

  Before Pauline could preempt this subject, too, Clara’s hand dove into her purse for a letter. “Still at the fort,” she said, rushing to extract the paper from its envelope. “Would you like to hear what he has to say?”

  “Of course,” said Uncle Hamilton. “Give us a recitation, my dear.”

  In comic imitation of Henry’s sarcastic baritone, Clara read out the following: “I’ll be a captain before Christmas, I’m assured, and that should keep me the kind of clubable man General Franklin always said he wanted for this regiment. He’s been heard to quote Caesar, about how fops make the best soldiers, something your textbook-trained brother wouldn’t want to hear.’ ” The family smiled nervously, and Mary Hall looked at the carpet, even though she had resigned herself to lo
sing the noble Will, ever since he’d begun talking, in his own letters, of a girl named Emma Witt.

  “ ‘As it is,’ ” Clara continued, “ ‘here inside the not terribly defensible walls of Fort Hamilton (our guns couldn’t repel an assault by Lina and her schoolmates), we listen to more dull instruction that I ever heard at Union. The rest is drilling and what Major Clitz still likes to call recruiting. He ought to call it kidnapping. I’ve already snatched willing fourteen-year-olds off the thoroughfares of Manhattan island, but as most of them have at one time or another already resided in government facilities — those of the police — the change in life is less abrupt than it might be. “The highest bounties will be paid, and good quarters, rations and uniforms furnished”: this is what we promise, in handbills and in speech, over the shouts of hecklers. But the first batches of uniforms sent by the Brooks Brothers were in truth somewhat less than durable. The pockets could be so easily ripped from the rest of the cloth that it was all the easier for the recruits to rob one another. It is a strange life here, for certain. Old Colonel Martin Burke, who entered the army forty years ago, parades around in dressing gown and slippers, chatting up all the dissenters who’ve been imprisoned within our walls (with no heed paid, by the way, to their real degree of dangerousness, not to mention their constitutional rights).’ ”

  Clara looked up when she realized how quiet everyone was. Mary was kneading her handkerchief, Emeline fussing with some crumbs on her silk sleeve. Joel Rathbone looked scandalized, and young Sarah was on her way upstairs. Clara turned to Uncle Hamilton. “Go on, dear,” he said. “Henry’s unorthodox point of view is good for us all, I’m sure.”

  “Senator Harris depends on it,” Pauline said. “As you can imagine, we’re surrounded by flatterers in Washington.”

  “Of course,” sighed Emeline.

  “Henry is always good for a dose of reality,” said Hamilton Harris.

  “At least his own sort of reality,” said Joel.

  “I’ll read just a bit more,” said Clara. “ ‘I’ve still no idea when we’ll be permitted to travel south and join the Army of the Potomac. At the present rate of things, I fear it won’t be until the war is over. There are all sorts of ways to define readiness, and I am ready in all the important ones.’ ”

  “Hear, hear,” said Hamilton Harris.

  Clara decided to stop there. As it was, she had never intended to read them the letter’s last page, though she could have done so from memory: “You remember the crannies of the Vanderbilt, don’t you, darling? Well, on one recent voyage its non-paying carriage consisted of the boys of Billy Wilson’s Sixth Regiment, on their way down toward the war, throughout which they will have to suspend their dog fights and rat-baiting. If you knew what a filthy business all this really is — even hundreds of miles from the lines! Your innocent friend Mary should see what we send to fight for precious freedom. A recent night spent camped at the Palace Garden on Sixth Avenue, after a day of dragooning Paddies into the Rail Splitter’s service, left me yearning for the rough linen inside the walls of Fort Hamilton — let alone the ironed masterpieces brought up every third morning by our maid on Eagle Street. I long for their smell, and yours — the clean secret message of your unperfumed skin as I used to pass it in the hall, after breakfast, as we observed the enforced decorum of our familial mornings. I also long for killing, with an ardor that frightens me. But that is what we were assembled to do. Perhaps I’ll have the chance to do it soon, and exhaust the worst that’s in me on what others call the national purpose. But my real goal, darling, is to come home to you.”

  After silently playing Henry’s latest Byronic song, Clara became alert to the room’s still uncomfortable feeling and declared, “Perhaps I should find Sarah.” Emeline quickly said, “No, Clara, that’s not necessary.” But Clara, rising from her chair, insisted: “No, I ought to. I should have remembered that the sound of Henry always scares her.” To more awkward laughter in the room, she went up the stairs, and became aware of Sarah’s soft voice, talking, Clara imagined, to one of her white cats.

  “Sarah?” she called, moving down the hall to Howard’s room, where the cat was probably playing inside one of his old valises. But there was no cat in the room, only Sarah and Howard himself, whose presence so startled Clara that the younger girl quickly exited into the hall, as if she had spilled a secret.

  “Yes, it’s only me,” said Howard jauntily, patting the bedclothes and urging Clara to take the spot Sarah had occupied. “Another bout of lungs and stomach, I’m afraid. So I’m home once more. I seem to have a pattern. I alternate four months on the high seas with two atop soaked sheets. I’ve just about sweated this one out, I think.”

  “Howard, don’t joke,” said Clara, touching his thin face, which remained handsome and merry at all its sharp angles. “Why didn’t your parents tell us you were up here?”

  “They would rather keep these recurrences quiet. As would I. If they continue, I shall be one of the few men forced to exercise family influence to stay in the service.”

  Clara shook her head, angry at Emeline and furious at the thought Pauline may have known about this.

  “Now, Clara,” said Howard, reaching for her hand, “you’re not to worry. I shall soon be good as new, and permanently this time. By Christmas I’ll be blasting through the Confederacy’s coastline, just you wait and see. So let’s change the subject. Sarah tells me you’ve been downstairs spreading sedition.”

  She laughed. “Not sedition, just Henry.”

  “Yes,” said Howard. “Henry.” They were silent for a moment. Clara rose to straighten the bottles of powder and ointment on Howard’s dresser. “Tell me something,” she heard him say from behind. “What exactly is it?”

  “It?”

  “What is it that still attracts you to him?”

  “Howard,” she said flatly.

  “No, I must know. I’ve thought and thought, but I only come up with explanations for the long ago. There you were, a girl of thirteen in a house full of other little girls and one overly responsible brother. In blew this dark strong boy with his temper and tongue. How could your little girl’s eyes not have widened?”

  “Howard, stop. Right now. Please.”

  “But that was thirteen years ago. How has it lasted? You’re no longer a girl, and the novelty is long since gone.”

  “I love Henry,” she said, turning around. “I can’t say why.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” he asked.

  “Won’t. Can’t. I don’t know. How does one explain love? How do you explain what you felt for Annie Martin and all the rest of them?”

  “That wasn’t love.”

  “Well, this is, and I can’t say any more about it. Why must you be so wary of Henry? He’s your cousin and your friend. Life isn’t finished with him, Howard,” she said, sitting down on the bed once more, as if prepared to point out some delightful fact he’d overlooked. “The war will change him, I know it. He hints at that himself in his letters. It will purge him of all that aggression he has inside.”

  “Then he’ll be the first man war ever changed for the better.” Howard took her hand. “As for me, I am as I am. Why not love me instead?”

  She looked in his eyes and knew he meant it. “Howard.”

  “I am healthy, Clara,” he said, sitting up straighter against the headboard. “In all the ways that count. And I soon shall be in all the others, too. We can be rich and idle and happy once this war is over. We’ll raise a beautiful tribe of children down at Kenwood. I’ll buy you every book ever printed. I’ll buy you Tennyson himself. I’ll pay him to recite his poems every night at the dinner table.”

  “It’s a lovely vision, Howard, for some other girl. But I’m going to marry Henry when the war is over. You’re the only one I’ve told, but it’s going to happen. Papa and my stepmother have agreed.”

  “Reluctantly, no doubt.”

  “That’s being generous,” she admitted.

  “All right,” said Howard, sud
denly approximating his old gaiety. “We’ll never speak of this again. Tell me about the opera instead. I should have gone. I would probably have gotten more sleep there than I did here.”

  Clara laughed, but she longed to get away. “I can hear them downstairs, Howard. They’re getting ready to go.”

  “Yes, you’d better return to them. As it is, they’ll be annoyed that you’ve discovered the invalid in the attic.”

  She kissed him and started for the door.

  “Clara,” she heard him call. She turned around and saw that his smile was gone.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She went quickly down the stairs, trying to think of anything but these words and why they couldn’t move her. Was there something wrong with her heart? Did she even want the war to change Henry? Didn’t she really just want the war to make him miss her?

  The Rathbones’ butler helped her with her coat as Emeline tried to think of an explanation to offer about Howard. “We thought it best …” she murmured.

  “It’s all right,” said Clara, whose distress was taken by everyone as a sign of worry about the young man upstairs.

  “Give our love to the judge,” said Emeline, kissing Clara and speaking loudly enough for Pauline to hear her and understand that Albany remained the real world, and that its titles mattered more than such remote and temporary ones as Senator.

  15th and H Sts.

  Washington

  February 24, 1862

  My dearest Henry,

  They buried Willie Lincoln today, amidst howling winds and rain. He had been sick with the bilious fever for days, and I spent the greater part of them with his mother, who from the beginning of his ordeal seemed more abstracted from reality than he. He was such a brave boy, religious and poetic (do you remember? he wrote a lovely verse when Colonel Baker was killed), and yet for all that a boy, still just eleven years old, romping with his younger brother up and down the stairs all this winter. I cannot imagine Mrs. L’s recovering: she is mad with grief, transformed utterly from the woman Mrs. Keckley and I wrapped in white satin three weeks ago and sent down to her 800 guests, guests who shouted their admiration (and whispered their contempt). It was the Lincolns’ first ball in the Mansion, and I should not be surprised, even if the war ended tomorrow, if it were their last.