Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  “So, Miss Harris, where are your papa and mama?” boomed a friendly, whiskey-laden voice coming up beside her. “Two of the best hosts I ever had. Your brother, too, though in somewhat less grand circumstances.”

  “General Grant,” said Clara, actually curtsying, her heart thumping a bit. “Mrs. Grant.”

  “Hello, dear,” said plump Julia Dent Grant, looking uncomfortable in her gown. “Go on, Ulys, take Miss Harris for a spin. I’ll inflict my company on Secretary Welles in the meantime.”

  So Clara’s first waltz of the night turned out to be with General Grant himself. The other couples glided away from them, like ripples made by a brilliant stone that had been splashed onto the dance floor. Some even stopped to applaud.

  Why such kindness from the general? she wondered. It was probably Mrs. Grant, said to be mindful of how it had very nearly been she and her husband sharing the box at Ford’s; the general’s wife still insisted that Booth and three of his band had been across from her at lunch at Willard’s on the day of the assassination. Clara was grateful for the solicitude, but wished that Grant would favor Henry, across the room, with at least a handshake. That would put an end to the whispering once and for all.

  “My wife,” said General Grant, pleasantly in his cups, “reminds me that there’s to be a wedding. When will it actually occur?”

  “Shortly before you begin your run for the presidency, sir.”

  He laughed, and twirled her a little faster, and as the night flowed on, she became his favorite. He came back to her three times, between her turns with a half-dozen other politicians — including Roscoe Conkling — and a small assortment of undersecretaries and army officers. At midnight, the general even escorted her to the supper table’s orderly arrangement of fruits and foie gras, whose fastidious ingestion was as different from what went on at Mr. Lincoln’s second inaugural as a carriage ride from a steeplechase. The dancing resumed after that, and Henry remained a distant presence, smoking a cigar with the men of the adjutant’s office, every so often getting one of them to hold it while he gave a spin to some ambassador’s daughter, dark girls mostly, wearing official-looking sashes. He would return to his colleagues as soon as the band hit the last note in its selection, as if he were trying to win a game of musical chairs. An hour went by before he even caught Clara’s eye, as she and General Williams, who had married Senator Douglas’s widow, cut a corner. Henry raised a champagne glass in ironic salute, as if to ask if she was happy now that she had her way.

  The first cotillion wasn’t called until dawn, and for the first time all night she and Henry touched as dance partners. He twirled her with a harsh, fast grace, through one round of a complicated minuet. At breakfast she sat beside the son of the Danish minister, smiling, without a common language, watching some golden crumbs of toast get lost in his identically colored beard. It was seven in the morning before the party ended, the women and men going off to do social and bureaucratic battle without bothering to change out of their finery. She had no calls to pay and didn’t set off with the ladies. She would have Henry walk her home. He could change uniforms at the house; meticulous as ever, he refused to see the charm of spending Saturday morning at the office in clothes he’d worn Friday night.

  The February air was very cold, and they could see their breath before them as they walked away from the marquis’ residence. The sounds of departing carriages and revelers began to fade, and he put his arm around her shoulders to keep off the chill. They walked quietly along H Street, her folded fan swinging beneath her gloved hands, timing their progress like a metronome.

  Finally, in a toneless voice he said, “Well, you’ve outshone my mother in her heyday.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The dozen men you had clustered about you.”

  She wasn’t sure if this was being offered out of admiration or jealousy. She hoped it was the latter.

  “I’ve always had to function as your mother, my sweet.” She swatted his free hand with the fan’s ferrule. “Ever since you were a disagreeable little boy of eleven.”

  As if she hadn’t spoken, he said, evenly, “This will be your town, you know, not mine.”

  “I intend to make it our city, Henry. I’ll give my own marvelous parties, and our pack of beautiful children will look down on them from the top of the stairs in their pajamas. And the men will still be clustering around me.”

  “Take care, darling,” was all he said; she didn’t know whether he was cautioning her against extravagance or other admirers.

  “You mean my trentogenarian self can excite your jealousy? I’m so glad, darling.”

  “You may not always be.”

  “All right, dear,” she said, squeezing his bad left arm just a little. “Next summer on the lawn at Kenwood I shall dance only with you and Papa.”

  They continued walking east into the orange sun, a great medallion still rising in the sky.

  AT 28 EAGLE STREET the unlit candles were going soft in the evening sun. Had the wedding presents on the parlor table not been sterner stuff — ivory knives, silver kerosene lamps, mahogany mirrors — they might be melting too. The heat inside the Pearl Street Baptist Church, as the Reverend C. DeW. Bridgman wed Clara Harris to Henry Rathbone, had been stifling, and afterward, the five dozen guests who jammed the Harris house couldn’t down their punch and dripping ices fast enough, so eager were they for the day’s real treat, a lawn party down at Kenwood, Joel Rathbone’s old estate. An endless convoy of carriages — “more cavalry than I’ve seen since Gettysburg!” shouted Dan Sickles — was organized to take them two miles south, to the little village once called Lower Hollow, where the rolling grasses and shady trees would soothe their overheated brows. The notes of “Beautiful Dreamer,” Mr. Foster’s very last song, wafted in greeting from a small orchestra at the edge of the huge lawn, where a hundred wicker chairs sat like whitecaps on a green sea.

  “Bonnets are smaller this year,” said Lina Harris, now seventeen and mad for clothes. Her older sister Louise, wearing the same straw hat she had donned the past three Easters, took little interest in the tulle and crepe and lace that topped the heads of all the Albany and Washington women. She just nodded. Lina, still aggrieved that Pauline had not bought her one of the white mohair suits that all young girls now wanted, consoled herself by imagining what outfit Mary Hall was helping Clara into somewhere inside the house. “I’m predicting gray poplin,” she said. “If you trim it with gray silk it’s very fashionable. I love to think of what she’ll be wearing once she and Henry get to London. They say that bodices have dropped to the point where the women there are hardly wearing anything at all above the waist. Do you think Clara is too old to be décolletée?” Louise, fingering the paper rose at her neck, said she didn’t know, and Lina, undiscouraged, asked, “Did you hear that Tom Thumb has managed to raise a mustache?”

  The slow, schooner-like strains of Stephen Foster gave way to something like a tugboat blast as the orchestra launched into “There’s a Good Time Coming.” A few feet away from the girls, their Uncle Hamilton Harris and his friends began to shout a bit louder amongst themselves.

  “So are we really going to have some Negroes in the United States Senate?” asked John Finley Rathbone.

  “To hear Sumner tell it, I’d say the answer is yes,” said Hamilton Harris. The two of them shook their heads, more in amazement than anything like clear approval or distaste.

  Nearby, Ira Harris was having a bourbon with Indiana’s Henry Lane. They had been seatmates in the august body being discussed, until Roscoe Conkling and the radicals had sent Harris packing six months ago. “Ira!” called Hamilton Harris, always solicitous when his brother’s fortunes were in a downturn. “Come over and join us. Bring Mr. Lane.”

  “Quite a feather in your cap, having the chief justice in your parlor,” said John Finley Rathbone when the two men arrived. “What’s his thinking on impeachment these days?”

  “Oh, you’d have to ask someone else,” said Ira Harris, who
had been thrilled to get Chase up to Albany, even if he’d declined this second party here at Kenwood. “I’m just a professor at the Albany Law School now. For political intelligence, you should try my old friend Lane here.”

  “Nonsense,” said Hamilton Harris. “You’re still at the center of things. Delegate to the state constitutional convention. Busier than ever. Did you know,” he asked Lane and John Finley Rathbone, “that he was in the assembly chamber last night to hear Lucy Stone? ‘Votes for Women!’ ” cried Hamilton in imitation of her troops, the idea more strange to his manly nature than the notion of Negro senators.

  “What’s that for women?” asked ancient Mr. Osborne, looking up from his lawn chair before subsiding back into his nap.

  “Pauline!” cried Hamilton Harris when he spotted his sister-in-law talking to Henry. “Tear yourself away from the bridegroom and join us. We want to know if you were cheering with your ‘sisters’ last night.”

  Pauline held him off with a wave. She was occupied with an important matter of social record. “Henry,” she said. “Before you go, you must send a letter to the Express and get them to correct their error.”

  “What error is that, Mother?”

  “Tomorrow they’ll be saying in their announcement of the wedding that you’ve resigned your commission in the army. An old friend of Howard’s who works at the paper just gave me a piece of the page proof. It must be corrected.”

  “Is that all?”

  “It’s important for people to know you are still a colonel, even if you’ve decided to leave the adjutant general’s office.”

  “I can’t very well stay there while I’m on a yearlong honeymoon.”

  “Henry,” said Pauline severely. “I want you to make sure you do this. It will take you five minutes. Then you may go.” She did not reiterate her disapproval of the trip’s length.

  “Too bad the Dictator isn’t here. We could get him to correct the matter in the Commercial Advertiser.”

  Pauline shook her head. Thurlow Weed’s absence from the wedding — no matter how much power he had lost, and no matter that he’d moved away from Albany to run another paper in New York City — had annoyed her. Ira Harris could once more be snubbed with impunity. She and her husband were old now, and she didn’t like it. Her nature could not content itself with the memory of his elevation in ’61, or even with Justice Chase’s presence here today.

  Henry knew that further joking would only inflame his mother; but he had already drunk too much to do anything else. “You know, Mother,” he said, “you should concentrate on the weightier items in the daily paper. Did you see what today’s Journal has next to the news of this happy affair? Just one column to the right,” he said, getting ready to intone the item he had already recited half a dozen times since the wedding: “ ‘There seems to be no doubt of the death of Dr. Livingstone.’ Axed in the head by a Mefite tribesman. Not a pretty juxtaposition, is it, Mother? Should Clara and I take it as a warning against tarrying abroad?”

  Pauline pursed her lips and focused on the lawn. Noting how old his mother looked, Henry, in a burst of alcohol-induced tenderness, leaned down to kiss her lips, an action that recalled her momentarily to life. “I insist, Henry. Before you leave for the pier.” Tonight he and Clara would be taking the boat from Albany to New York, then sailing for Southampton in the morning.

  He was about to say all right, of course, anything for you, my darling mama, when his brother Jared, carrying a huge stein full of the Beverwyck Brewery’s best lager, clapped him on the back and tried to pry him away from their mother.

  “Can’t you find some pigs to chase?” Henry asked him. “Isn’t that your usual wedding-day trick?”

  Jared burst out laughing as he recalled making the Harris girls shriek twenty years ago at the Delavan, when his mother married the judge. “Come on, Henry. Come over and join us.” Thirty feet away, Jared’s army friends, West Pointers mostly, were rounding into one more chorus of “We Are Coming Father Abraam, 300,000 More.” Henry, who had few friends of his own here, heard the song and declined to participate, as did Will Harris, who sat on a wooden love seat with his wife, Emma, and looked impassively at the masses of Rathbones disporting themselves on the lawn. He especially avoided the glance of the bridegroom, the stepbrother who was now his brother-in-law.

  A sixth round of “Father Abraam” was drowned out by sudden peals of feminine appreciation and hearty masculine clapping. Clara had emerged from the great house in her traveling clothes. Lina was delighted to find herself wrong about the gray poplin. The outfit — embroidered black silk with its trim of guipure lace — was so stunning, and the guests’ cheering so sustained, that Clara wondered if she should take a bow. Instead of waiting for Henry to come and take her arm, she just smiled, beaming straight into the last of the flattering sunlight, aware that she was not a blushing bride but a woman nearly thirty-three, at the height of a beauty lit by the mature intelligence beneath it.

  Reverend Bridgman, who had performed the ceremony, took her hand and Henry’s in his own. “There were times, children — when Howard died, and when you both had to share Mr. Lincoln’s agony — when I thought your two families would never be truly happy again. How wrong I was! How happy I am to have been so wrong!”

  Clara extracted her hand in order to pat his and thank him for the sermon this morning. But he flooded on, announcing that he had one last treat in store for them. He hushed the throng with a great tamping motion of his arms, and called for ten robed members of his choir to come forth and sing an envoi for Mr. and Mrs. Henry Reed Rathbone.

  The ice in the drinks had long since melted, and there wasn’t so much as a tinkling glass to interrupt the song, whose harmony traveled out over the lawn, down toward the river and the setting sun, as all stood silently listening.

  This woman she was taken from inside Adam’s arm;

  And she must be protected from injury and harm.

  This woman was not taken from Adam’s feet, we see;

  And she must not be abused, the meaning seems to be.

  Clara felt a tear coming, but she was determined not to cry through her shining hour. She looked down at her silk shoes as the choir continued, and Henry squeezed her hand.

  This woman she was taken from near to Adam’s heart,

  By which we are directed that they should never part.

  The book that’s called the Bible, be sure you don’t neglect,

  For in every sense of duty, it will you both direct.

  Henry leaned down to whisper to her, “I shall try to make you happy, Clara. I shall try with all my heart.” She took his face in both her hands, brushing his whiskers with her bouquet, and she kissed him as the singers began the last verse of the white-man’s spiritual they’d chosen for their serenade:

  To you, most loving bridegroom; to you, most loving bride,

  Be sure you live a Christian and for your house provide.

  Avoiding all discontent, don’t sow the seed of strife,

  As is the solemn duty of every man and wife.

  “Hear, hear!” shouted Hamilton Harris without looking up from his watch, which he’d been nervously consulting since before Clara’s emergence. “That’s sound advice, sound advice.” The rest of the Baptists and Presbyterians nodded in agreement until Mr. Osborne, fully alert now, as if participating in a scene from his long-ago youth, cried, “Your flowers, child. Your flowers.” The crowd roared its encouragement, and Clara feigned a fluttery indecision as she scanned the crowd and decided where she would throw her bouquet. There was no point in wasting it on Louise or Mary Hall; they were never going to marry. Better to speed up the prospects of one who was, she thought, tossing it straight at Lina, whose catch delighted the guests. “That’s so you won’t have to wait until you’re twice as old as you are now!” said Clara, bringing forth laughter from everyone, including those who still harbored reservations about what had finally occurred today.

  At exactly 8:20, from the direction of the river
, there came a great whistle blast that startled everyone. Hamilton Harris smiled down at his watch and got on a chair to let it be known that his last treat for the departing couple was arranging that they not have to go back to Albany at all. Captain Christopher had agreed to stop the St. John right here at Kenwood. Now all Henry and Clara had to do was hop into a carriage and be driven to the riverbank; they’d be rowed out to the steamer in a dinghy strung with roses.

  The crowd shouted its approval. Clara thanked Uncle Hamilton for his ingenuity and led Henry toward the rig before the captain could give another pull on the horn. She kissed her sisters in a great sequential rush, accepted a hug and dry cheek from Pauline, and assured Mary Hall that she would write her every week from Europe.

  Then she saw that Ira Harris was crying. She told Henry to get inside the coach; she would follow in a moment.

  “Dearest Papa,” she whispered. “You mustn’t. My dreams have just come true.”

  He leaned over to kiss her and apologized for being a foolish old man. “I have one more present for you, my darling. A letter that arrived at the house just this morning.” Clara looked at the thick cream-colored envelope with Mrs. Lincoln’s familiar handwriting under a Chicago postmark. “I know how happy she must be for you both,” said the judge. Clara tucked the letter into the small beaded handbag hanging from her wrist and gave her father one last kiss before allowing herself to be helped into the carriage.

  “The St. John will have you in New York by dawn,” called out Hamilton Harris. “Godspeed to you both.” The horses took a step and the crowd fell back, all except Jared Rathbone, who rushed through it and shouted up to his brother, “Good news, Henry. The man from the Journal says there’s late word on Livingstone. He’s alive and well after all. So you don’t need to be scared of travel!”