“One at a time, please,” the nurse had said after telling Howard they were there. “He asked that it be that way.”
Clara went in first. Howard was gaunt, in terrible pain, coughing into a filthy cloth, his big, sudden smile just camouflage for a wince. He took her hand. “I saw your announcement.”
“Yes,” she answered, gently rubbing his wrist with her thumb. “Mother insisted on its being in the papers everywhere, here and Albany and Washington. Determined to salvage social prestige from the ‘disaster.’ ”
“How is Henry?” he asked.
“Fine,” she whispered, fussing with the blanket. “Getting ready to demobilize the Union army from a desk in Washington. Oh, Howard,” she said, prying the cloth from him and bringing his hand to her cheek. “Everything will soon be well. Can’t you be, too?”
“I’m afraid I can’t, Clara. I’m going home to die.”
“No,” she said.
He had turned his head away, exhausted. “Please bring Henry in. I want to say goodbye to him.”
She had begun to cry, and while she was afraid to kiss him, had been scared even to touch his handkerchief, she took him in her arms — there was nothing but bones beneath the nightshirt — and kissed his mad-hot cheek. He was also crying, holding her with one arm, clutching the iron rail of the bed with the other, squeezing it until his knuckles turned white and he could feel something besides the pain in his stomach.
“Don’t, Clara,” he gasped, making her think she’d hurt him. She gently laid him back down against the pillow, but even when he was free from her grasp, he groaned, “Don’t. Don’t go through with it. For your sake, not for mine.”
She said nothing, just put a fresh cloth into the basin of water. She mopped his forehead and hushed him and hummed a soft tune until he fell asleep. Back out in the hall she told Henry his cousin was finally resting and it was better that he not go in.
Now, as Howard’s coffin was lowered into the freshly spaded earth, she thought back to the uproarious night of the inaugural ball and wondered how she might regain that hopefulness. As she started sobbing, Papa came to her side and put his arm upon her shoulders. “Don’t cry, my darling. Everything will be fine. Peace will be here very soon. Howard will have everlasting life, just as his monument will say.”
She dabbed at her eyes with her gloves.
“That’s better,” said Senator Harris. “I am going to remain here for a while helping Emeline. Henry will take you and Mother back. He will take care of you now. The next telegrams coming will be full of joy and peace, not sadness. I only hope I get back to the capital soon enough to be with Mr. Lincoln at the War Department when the great news comes in on the wire. This is the last terrible thing,” he said, pointing to the grave, which some boys nearby, tugging on their caps and trying to be quiet, were waiting to fill in.
“All right, Papa, I’ll be happy. Don’t stay away from us long.” She reached up to kiss him. Henry shook Harris’s hand and took Clara’s right arm. With her left hand, as they walked away, she closed her mourning shawl, a borrowed item from Mrs. Lincoln’s fate-defying spree the other month. The First Lady, having no real need of it herself, had pressed Clara to take it when Louise came with the news about Howard.
“IT’S A QUARTER PAST EIGHT,” said Lina Harris. “Where are they?”
“Come away from the window,” called her mother from the dining room.
“But what good is an invitation to the theatre if you miss half the play?”
Laughter came down the stairs with Clara. It floated ahead of her pink satin gown, which descended to the approving shriek of her young half-sister.
“A little lateness is to be expected,” said Clara. “The war may have ended, but I suspect the President still has a few things on his mind.” Lina kept her at the bottom of the stairs, circling the dress, admiring and fluffing, preparing her for the inspection of Henry, who was waiting in the parlor.
“Well?” asked Clara, striking a pose so pretentiously regal that both her fiancé and Lina understood her to be imitating that young queen of Washington society, Kate Chase Sprague.
“Stunning,” said Henry, before he returned to his Evening Star.
“Hmmph,” said Clara, pretending to be miffed. Toward Lina she made a confidential gesture with her fan. “Our brother can’t be expected to appreciate these things. I’ll let you attend me on the sofa.” They went across the room, giggling, though they both stole an anxious glance at the clock, which now showed the time at 8:18.
In the dining room, Clara could see Pauline Harris arranging lilacs and jonquils and feigning indifference to the President’s arrival. She had been silently furious ever since this afternoon, when Mrs. Lincoln’s footman arrived with the invitation. If Senator Harris had been here instead of in Albany, she would have everyone believe, the invitation would have been for the two of them, not Henry and Clara. This was ridiculous, Clara knew. Actually, General and Mrs. Grant had probably been the First Lady’s preferred companions, but Papa and Pauline had certainly never been in the running.
“Here’s the proof,” said Henry, reading an item from the paper that corresponded to what Clara was thinking and they had all discussed at dinner:
LIEUT. GENERAL GRANT, PRESIDENT and Mrs. Lincoln have secured the State Box at Ford’s Theatre TO NIGHT, to witness Miss Laura Keene’s American Cousin.
Pauline came to life in the dining room. “I’m afraid the theatregoers will be disappointed,” she called.
Lina pinched her older sister and the two of them stifled laughter. Pauline simply would not let Clara enjoy it, would never forgive Ira Harris for being away with his two other daughters.
Sitting across the parlor, Henry looked almost his old self to Clara, fuller in the face behind his red whiskers and mustache. He hadn’t put on the foulard she’d bought him at the Sanitary Fair, but still, how wonderful it was to see him out of uniform, in shoes instead of boots.
But it was 8:20 now, and even Henry could no longer concentrate on the Star. He folded it up and crossed his legs, drummed his fingers on his shin and picked at the velvet sofa, the same sort of nervous movements he had made all day in the adjutant general’s office as he toted up the blood money, the government’s filthy take from commutation, each $300 of it a bullet that one Northerner had fired into another’s back. When his disgust got the better of him, he would take a break and look at Clara’s photograph from Gardner’s studio, which sat on his rolltop desk, and he would try not to imagine, once more, the romantic farewell he was sure she and Howard had taken of each other in the New York Hospital.
Pauline entered the parlor and took a chair beside him. “Of course,” she said, “I’ve already seen Miss Keene do this play, six or seven years ago at her theatre in New York. It wasn’t long before we took our European trip.” Clara was about to say something, but she stopped herself. Her spirits were too good tonight; she would not be drawn into any war of oblique words with Pauline. She would listen to the tick of the clock, smooth her handkerchief, and imagine herself a little while from now, standing in the golden glow of the gaslight at Ford’s, between Henry and Mr. Lincoln, as the audience came to its feet.
“The story is crude but amusing,” said Pauline. “A lot of fuss over an inheritance. But you’ll be amused by Lord Dundreary’s silly affectations. Sothern was marvelous in the part. He —”
Lina shrieked.
“Let the girl get it,” cried Pauline, but it was too late. Her youngest child had already raced past the maid to the door, opening it for Charles Forbes, who took off his hat and inquired, “Major Rathbone and Miss Harris?”
“They’re right in here,” said Lina, pointing from the hallway into the parlor.
“Please tell them that the President and his lady are here.”
Before Lina had a chance to follow his instructions, Henry and Clara had come into the hall. “Good evening, Mr. Forbes,” she said. He smiled at this one of Mrs. Lincoln’s favorites and stepped aside so she and
Major Rathbone might precede him to the coach. Lina followed the three of them with her eyes, straining for a glimpse of the President inside the carriage that had just made the brief journey from the Executive Mansion. But he and Mrs. Lincoln were seated in the hooded half of the coach, and Lina couldn’t see him in the dark. Henry and Clara were taking the open seats behind the driver’s box. The coachman looked ready to snap his reins, and Pauline was about to close the door. But just then, in response to a smile and gesture from Clara, the tall man in his high black hat leaned forward and waved to the wife and daughter of Ira Harris, his loyal, if irritating, supporter from the state of New York.
The carriage clattered into H Street, heading toward Fourteenth. The pink satin of Clara’s dress caught a ray of lamplight, and Mrs. Lincoln shrieked with a piercingness that outdid Lina’s display five minutes before. “So beautiful!” she exclaimed.
“Not so pretty as yours,” said Clara, smiling at the President as she returned his wife’s compliment, and thought of all the times she had accompanied the First Lady in pursuit of what her husband called “flubdubs,” expensive dresses whose making he endured for the brief elevation they gave to his wife’s mood.
“My apologies for our lateness,” said the President. “I had Speaker Colfax and then Congressman Ashmun. I wouldn’t have gotten away at all if Mother hadn’t threatened the three of us with bloody reprisals.”
“At least you didn’t have Senator Harris,” said Clara, whose gentle joke on her favor-seeking father coaxed a smile from Mr. Lincoln. Not long ago the President was reported to have said, “The last thing I do before going to sleep at night is check under my bed for Senator Harris,” a remark that made its way through Washington and to the house at Fifteenth and H, where Pauline had failed to find it amusing.
“Where is your good father this week?” asked Mr. Lincoln, looking first at Clara and then at Major Rathbone, unsure which one to put the question to. To his mind they were both Harris’s children, and when Mrs. Lincoln burbled the secret of their engagement to him last year, he had stood for a moment without saying anything, just feeling that it was a peculiar thing for a boy and girl raised together as they had been to be marrying each other.
“Papa is in Albany on family business. Henry’s cousin Howard died last month, and Papa is helping his widowed mother get things in order. Also, my sister Amanda is getting married next month, and he’s been dragged into the preparations.”
The President just nodded, but his wife burst into renewed speech. “Clara, we must start thinking about your own wedding. Have you set the date? You must set the date, right now. We don’t want you two to waste a minute of peacetime.”
Clara was happy to see her in such high spirits — she’d witnessed her low ones and her rages — but she feared her mood might be too good tonight, a dance upon a precipice; her high-pitched chatter made a jarring contrast to Henry’s silence and the President’s amiable exhaustion.
“Father!” the First Lady cried, grasping his long forearm. “I insist that Major Rathbone and Miss Harris have their nuptials in the Mansion. In fact, I want you to give Clara away. Her papa can’t very well give his daughter away to a young man who’s his son!” She laughed loudly, turning for appreciation first to the President and then to Henry, who smiled politely.
Clara’s heart leapt at the thought of being married in the White House, but the President was not rushing to embrace his wife’s excited suggestions, and Henry, who had spent most of his life insisting that he was not Ira Harris’s son, was just looking out of the coach, westward, into Fourteenth Street.
“Mother,” said the President at last, “I suspect Mrs. Harris will have some ideas of her own about her children’s wedding. Wait to hear her will in the matter. Senator Harris and I are occupied with less explosive affairs, like the demobilization of the rebel army and the reconstruction of the Union.”
Clara waited out the moment, crossing her fingers beneath her fan. The President’s joke might provoke a storm of anger or merriment or anything in between from his tightly strung wife. Fortunately, it was Mrs. Lincoln’s shrill laughter that filled the carriage as it rounded Fourteenth Street and turned onto F. Clara looked toward Pennsylvania Avenue in the distance. Some white victory torches and a triumphal arch were visible through the evening’s clouds. The night was enchanted, its perfection safely beyond the reach of anyone’s moods and sorrows. Even Henry had joined the conversation.
“Are you expecting the surrender in North Carolina, sir?”
“Any hour now, Major. That’s what Secretary Stanton tells me. There may be a few scattered engagements before it’s all over, but over is what it appears to be.”
Mrs. Lincoln rapped the President’s gloved knuckles with her fan. “From now on, the only talk of engagements will be about the kind Major Rathbone and Miss Harris are having.”
“All right, Mother,” said the President. “We shall exchange the martial for the marital.” They all laughed.
“This is our second carriage ride today,” Mrs. Lincoln said suddenly, putting her hand on Clara’s knee. “During the first, this afternoon, the President and I made a pact that we would both be more cheerful from now on.”
“A fine idea,” said Clara, who could remember all the black days she’d endured alongside Mrs. Lincoln, especially after Willie died.
The carriage had turned into Tenth Street and was in sight of Ferguson’s restaurant and the theatre. The street was lined with the coaches of people already inside watching the play, but the waiting drivers, mostly Negroes, turned around on their boxes for a look at the President and his party, tipping their hats and softly cheering. A small crush of people, enough to require the attentions of a policeman, waited in front of Ford’s. Someone was struggling to lay a wooden crate down in the gutter so the ladies wouldn’t muddy their dresses as they descended.
“Goodness,” cried Mrs. Lincoln, delighted by the little crowd. She straightened her brooch and put on a grander air. “It reminds me of the night we all first met. Do you remember the mob outside the Delavan House? Do you, Clara? Do you, Henry? Father?”
The President took her hand. “Your memory is a formidable thing, Mother. That was four long years ago.” The coach came to a stop. Clara was sure she could recall that night even more vividly than Mrs. Lincoln: the terrible commotion; the struggle to get through the crowd; her first sight of Mr. Lincoln’s long, kindly face, so much less ravaged than it was tonight.
The spectators outside the theatre were clapping for the President, who stepped down from the carriage and tipped his hat with a trace of embarrassment. Charles Forbes extended his arm up to the First Lady. Once she had alighted, Henry helped Clara down, lifting a flounce of her gown away from the gutter. The ushers cleared a path through the lobby. The President shook hands and murmured apologies for their lateness. Clara could feel herself and Henry being stared at by people who thought they might be the Grants. Once these people realized their mistake, their eyes quickly shifted to the Lincolns, but one woman, convinced that Henry was commander of all the Union’s forces, whispered to her companion, “He’s so young!”
A man handed them programs while they mounted the stairs at the theatre’s south end. Walking the length of a narrow aisle toward the room leading to the state box, Clara could hear the sounds of the play through the wall. It was curiously quiet when they entered the box. Mrs. Lincoln made a whispery fuss of arranging them all: the President in a rocker, herself beside him, Clara on a chair to her right, and Henry on a small sofa behind his fiancée. “Will you be able to see?” Clara asked him. Everything, she noted, was red: the floral wallpaper, the carpet, the damask of Henry’s couch. The balcony seemed a toy world, like the doll’s house her father had given her years ago in Albany, the Christmas just after her own mother died.
The President leaned over to show himself to the audience, which applauded and cheered just long enough to stop the action onstage. The play resumed so quickly that Clara was disappointed.
She had hoped for a longer demonstration and the chance for them all to stand. The little orchestra might have played “Hail to the Chief,” but it didn’t. She reached over the balcony’s railing to touch the red-white-and-blue bunting and finger the lace curtain that hung along the indentation separating her and Mrs. Lincoln. They were so close to the stage that they might almost be on it. As it was, their box seemed better decorated: the sets, Clara could see, were threadbare. She looked across the theatre to the opposite box. It was empty, she was sorry to discover. She was in a mood to be watched tonight, and she wondered how she would be able to sit through the rest of this silly play until the moment came when she and Henry could descend, with the Lincolns, into the envious, excited crowd.
The performance didn’t seem to be going over. There had been scarcely a laugh since they took their seats, and the actors were shouting their lines in sweaty near desperation. Miss Keene looked like a fool, all the paint and powder adding years instead of subtracting them. She was affecting the gaiety of a girl, and the results were grotesque. Mrs. Lincoln might be too old for what she was wearing tonight (Henry had given Clara an amused nudge about the low cut of the First Lady’s gown), but at least her childlike animation was something that bubbled up from her own complicated nature, not something pinned on like one of Miss Keene’s curls.
Clara leaned back and glanced at the President. It would be a pleasure to see him laugh tonight, after all his trials of the past four years, from the rivers of blood he had been forced to navigate, to the inveiglings of her own dear prolix papa — not to mention the frights and tantrums of his wife. Even here he wasn’t safe from bother. A few minutes after they sat down, Clara heard a man out in the hallway telling Mr. Forbes about a dispatch the President must see.
Henry and Clara Page 19
