Henry and Clara

by Thomas Mallon

  The purple robes and golden stoles of the entering choir brought a murmur from the audience. Along with everyone in the mezzanine’s first row, Henry and Clara leaned forward for a closer look. As she gripped the wooden railing, Clara caught sight of Mrs. Carswell, who down below was giving her an emphatic wave: well done, it seemed to say. The gas lamps were lowered, and Herr Wenzel raised his baton. Henry inserted his left hand into Clara’s mink-trimmed muff, which lay between them. With her right hand still inside it, she took hold of him and smiled like a young lover. He was so thin, she thought, feeling the fingers. Except for the receding hair, he could, in these dim lights, pass for a college boy, or a young man the age his cousin Howard was when he gave her this muff one Christmas long ago, before the war.

  Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight and the rough places plain. As the nervous young tenor sang these words in his German-accented English, she could remember Reverend Bridgman reciting them in the pulpit on Pearl Street as she sat next to her papa, his Roman head nodding in silent appreciation. Right now it would be midafternoon in Albany. She tried to imagine the sleighs on Broadway and State Street, and she wondered what pantomime might be on tonight at the Leland or the Levantine. Was Washington perhaps getting one of its rare snows? Were Lafayette Square and Andy Jackson’s cocked hat right now dusted with just a bit of white? It was amusing to think of President Arthur, all powdered and primped, climbing the steps of St. John’s on Christmas morning, arm in arm with that dour scholar-gypsy Matthew Arnold. Whatever would they talk about? Below her the choir soldiered on through Handel, afraid to take their eyes off their big square song sheets, which reminded her of the children’s books she used to stack in the sewing room. She wished her sons and daughter hadn’t passed the age when they wanted to be read to. Would Louise have gotten them to sleep by the time she and Henry made it home?

  Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, boomed the bass. Yet once a little while and I will shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land; and I will shake all nations; and the desire of all nations shall come. Henry’s eyes, she could now see, were too attentive, too intense. Once or twice he had turned around to see over his shoulder, and she’d patted his hand inside the muff to get him to return his gaze to the choir. But now his eyes seemed riveted, as if convinced the choir were singing man’s true history, not his mere hopes. She patted his hand once more and wished that Herr Wenzel would reach the point where the alto sang soothingly of the Virgin.

  Before long Henry seemed calmer, leaving her to be the one struggling for control of her emotions. Like a horoscope, every verse in the recital seemed meaningful, and when the bass began to sing of how The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; and they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined, she felt her own tears coming, for they were singing her own guilty hope for deliverance, which one moment felt still too dangerously far off, and the next just selfish, something she ought to be too faithful to need. Still, perhaps all manner of thing would be well. Henry would leave them, but just for a time. Her children would grow up strong, and then he would return to them, old, but well and whole. He would come home someday, an old campaigner through madness, scarred but full of lucid tales of what he’d soldiered through. And she, his Desdemona, would listen to him, marveling and grateful, as they spent their winter years together, a long miracle, by the fireside. They would be rewarded for their suffering, for what they were passing through now.

  Henry, too, had a glint of moisture in his eyes — she could see it in the dimmed gaslight — as the chorus sang of all the torments heaped upon the Savior, the sort that for years had been heaped upon Henry himself, all because that night he had failed at being superhuman, the savior people wished had been present. Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows! He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him. She patted his hand as she looked down on the crowd, too warm in their coats, with all their gloves and scarves and Homburgs piled upon their laps. It was a vision of self-satisfaction, while up here in the balcony she and Henry were doomed to keep twitching and suffering. But suffering together, she thought, grateful for this reunion with him, however painful, that she was feeling.

  She was so tired. She turned her eyes back to the choir’s regal coverings, to the holly and poinsettias all over the stage, and let herself be lost in the music instead of the words, until the end was near, and the bass voice came like a gong: Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. She nudged Henry and motioned that they should go. She did not want to be caught in the departing crowd, sprayed with its holiday chatter, did not want to exchange bromidic winks with good Mrs. Carswell. She wanted to get home to her own hearth, damp and alien as it was. She would put her poor husband to bed, and with a small blessing from God — just a little favor, not the apocalyptic Good News promised by the choir — tomorrow would contain moments of contentment like the ones today had brought. Henry looked up at her, gentle and confused, but content to be led. They muttered their apologies and exited the mezzanine’s front row, before finding a staircase that led out of the theatre.

  Back on George Street, Clara put her arm through her husband’s.

  “Are you warm enough, dear?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She now had both her own hands inside her muff, and the two walked for a full minute with no sound but Henry’s boots crunching the snow. “I’m fine,” she assured him. “I’m only tired, that’s all. I’m glad we came out to hear the music.”

  “Yes,” said Henry. “I’m glad you brought me. The singers were rather good, didn’t you think?”

  “Yes, though a little comical, too. Those German accents made me think of Johnny Nicolay, when he used to talk about ‘army bensions’ and the slowness of the ‘bost office.’ ” Henry said nothing then, and she realized she had ventured into risky territory by making even this casual reference to Lincoln’s Bavarian-born secretary.

  While it provoked Henry to neither sarcasm nor anger, the calm reply he made was nearly as dismaying: “I’m trying to recall if before tonight we’d ever sat in a balcony — since Ford’s.”

  “I’m sure we have, darling. More than once, I’m certain, at theatres in New York, in the first years we were married.” She walked faster, pulling him gently by his right arm, as if a quicker pace might succeed in changing the subject. “Let’s not think about that,” she added. “Let’s look forward to Christmas. Do you think you’ll have Clara’s doll finished in time?”

  “I should,” said Henry.

  “Good. I’ll put it into her stocking tomorrow night.”

  “It’s such a plain thing,” he said. “I wish it were something fancy, like that frilly Marie Antoinette we bought for Lina years ago in Paris. Do you remember?”

  “Of course I do,” said Clara. “But what you’re making is lovely. Much nicer than this gaudy thing. Look,” she said with a disapproving face, directing his attention to a shop at the corner of their street, through whose darkened window one could still see the crudely painted figures of a Santa’s workshop. They quietly walked the last fifty yards to the steps of the boarding house.

  “The children are asleep,” he said, looking up at the second-floor windows. “Louise is, too.”

  “Even Frau Kiesinger and her husband.” Clara pointed to the shutters a story below.

  They shook the snow from their shoes and climbed the stairs to the apartment. In the faintly lit hallway, Clara moved to kiss Henry good night and go off to join Louise in her room. But he gently restrained her. “Clara, stay with me tonight.”

  “All right,” she whispered, pleasant surprise outweighing any wariness.

  Once inside the bedroom, she sat down on the upholstered wing chair, instead of the straight-backed one at her vanity. She undid her h
air and began brushing it. Henry went into the bathroom to perform his still-meticulous nightly wash-up. The softness of the chair and the rhythm of the brushing soothed the tension from her; she felt like a cat whose fur was finally settling down, and before she knew it she had dozed off, the brush falling onto the cushion with the hairpins. A minute or two passed before she opened her eyes and found that her husband was still not in bed. “Henry?” she called softly, wondering what could be keeping him this long at the sink; but when she looked through the door of the bathroom, she saw it was empty.

  “Henry?” she whispered, venturing out into the hallway.

  She saw that the door to the children’s bedroom was open, and she walked toward it, relieved to find him standing just inside the room. It was a sweet sight. He had his back to her, his arms crossed in front of him, regarding his three sleeping offspring in the moonlight coming through the window. She came up silently behind him and slipped her arm through his, as she had ten minutes ago on the street. But this time her hand struck something sharp. As Henry turned his head, calmly, to look at her, she glanced down toward her own bare arm. It had been nicked by the ivory-handled knife he was holding in his left hand. For an instant she closed her eyes and offered what she swore would be the last prayer she ever prayed if only it were granted: please let his other hand be holding the wooden doll. But when she opened her eyes, she saw that it contained the revolver he had kept for the last few weeks under his pillow.

  She knew what it was like to feel her heart hammering, but at this moment she thought her blood had frozen, that her heart had stopped entirely, and that she would faint at his feet. But she squeezed her fists and gathered her last wits and whispered, “Henry, come away from here.”

  “No,” he said quietly, exercising the same care she was in not waking the children. “This is something I must do for us.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, affecting reasonableness, trying to keep him calm.

  “I must keep us all together. I can’t let us come apart.”

  “We’re not coming apart.”

  “Yes,” he said in a spirit of gentle contradiction. “We are. I’m sure you’re going to leave me. You’ve been planning it for years, and you’re going to take the children with you. So I’m going to arrange things differently. I’m going to keep us all together, in paradise.”

  “Henry, stop.” Her voice was louder now, but only a little. She realized the impossibility of rousing Louise, who was behind a closed door at the far end of the hall, without waking the children.

  “No,” said Henry, raising his right arm and pointing the revolver at little Clara. “I must.”

  “Stop it!” she cried, not reaching for the gun but swerving around behind him, to his other side, where she took hold of his damaged left arm and squeezed it with all her strength, until he groaned with pain and both arms fell to his sides. He growled, but quietly, as if he, too, still wanted to avoid disturbing his sons and daughter, who had all begun to stir. Clara again pulled hard on his left arm, this time dragging him backward, across the threshold and out into the hall. She pulled the door closed and began beating on his chest, punching and pushing him toward their own bedroom. As he moved backward under the rain of blows, he looked at her without any anger, just perplexity over her failure to see the wisdom of his plan.

  “Henry, get inside!” She succeeded in forcing him into their room, but her hopes of rushing back out to the hallway to wake Louise and Herr Kiesinger were now thwarted. Henry had gotten behind her and locked the bedroom door.

  He put down the knife on the porcelain stove, but he kept the revolver at his side.

  “Why did you stop me?” he asked quietly, though his calm was finally shattering and he had started to cry. “I never stopped him.”

  For a second she didn’t know what he meant, but then she realized, of course, that he was talking about Wilkes Booth, and she decided she would not scream for Louise, that she would gain control of the situation by having the same conversation they had had so many times over the last eighteen years. As he stood before her with a revolver, a moment after trying to kill their daughter, she told him that he mustn’t be so hard on himself.

  “Henry, let it be. You did everything anyone could have.”

  “No,” he said through his tears. “No, I didn’t. You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand, Henry. People have been foolish to think —”

  “No!” he shouted, gesturing with the pistol as if it were merely a part of his hand. “No! You don’t understand! And neither do they! I did not do everything I could, and I was not negligent, either. I saw him open the door, Clara. I saw him stand there for a good five seconds. I never got up from my chair. I let him do what he did!”

  “No, Henry. You’re imagining this.”

  “Our eyes locked, Clara. His and mine. I let it happen. I wanted it to happen.”

  “No!” she cried, as if what had just taken place down the hall lay eighteen years in the past, and her present frantic business was to thwart the murder of Mr. Lincoln.

  “Yes, Clara, I wanted it to happen. I wanted to avenge all the soldiers he’d sent to die. I wanted to hurt all the old men who’d made the war.”

  “Stop, Henry! I shall go mad!”

  “I regretted it the moment the gun went off, and then I leapt to stop Booth. I tried to tell you. Tried to tell you crossing Tenth Street, but I couldn’t, because the widder-woman kept pulling on my arm, bleeding me to death!” His tears were no longer coming. The baffled, childlike gentleness was gone, replaced by bellowing rage. “I tried to tell you the next morning, when you finally came home. But I could hardly stand to look at you, because I knew you’d spent the night with her. You left me! The way you’ve always left me ever since, for any man who stepped into our house!”

  She couldn’t attend to the rest of the tirade, though it had the peculiar comfort of familiarity. She could see only what she had seen eighteen years ago, yet remembered and understood only now: his eyes, as they had been in the dark of the box, looking toward its door. From the moment it had happened, she had sensed there was a secret sewn into the violence of that night. She had been afraid to go home for fear of what he would tell her, and so she’d stayed across the street past dawn, locking her suspicion in the cellar of her mind, until this minute, when he’d at last dragged it up and let it out.

  “You won’t leave me now!” he cried, raising the gun.

  “No!” she cried. “I won’t. Oh, Henry, let me live!”

  She had fought for her children’s lives, but beyond this plea, she would not fight for her own. She closed her eyes and heard him fire the gun at her, once, twice, three times, the sound, it seemed, not the bullets themselves, knocking her onto the bed. There was a great roaring in her ears as the blood rushed up from her chest and into her mouth, spilling onto her face with the same warmth she remembered from that night. She knew that she was dying. Louise’s shouts and her knocking at the door seemed irrelevant. Clara wearily opened her eyes, as if the noise were an unnecessary imposition. She wanted to tell Louise to go back to bed; she wondered why Henry wasn’t telling her to do that, why instead he was standing over her with the knife he had picked up from the stove.

  “Don’t,” she whispered as he plunged it into her already gaping chest. She knew, quite calmly, that she was thinking her last thoughts. Everything was clear. Henry had turned into Booth, and she into Henry. He was using the knife on her as Booth had once used it on him; he was killing her for saving the children, killing her for doing what he hadn’t done eighteen years ago. All that remained was for him to kill himself, to thrust the knife into his own body. She saw him withdraw the dagger from her heart, saw her own blood clinging to its blade, which he now drove through his white shirt.

  A look of peace came over him, as if he were satisfied that their blood was now finally mingled, that they were at last brother and sister, as they had been husband and wife. The last of her attention and strength
ebbed away, and she wanted to say, again, “Don’t.” She saw him take the knife from his own breast, to begin hacking at his arms and trunk and thighs. He was drenched in blood as he dropped the dagger and walked to the door, opening it at last for Louise, whose screams at what she saw competed with the sound of Herr Kiesinger’s boots bounding up the stairs. Henry ignored both of them as he went back to the bed and took Clara into his arms, kissing her saturated hair and whispering the last words she would ever hear. “Who could have done this?” he asked. “Who could have done this, my darling?”

  “TELEPHONE, Curtis.”

  “Yeah, Sally. In a second. First come have a look at this.” Young Bill Curtis couldn’t stop laughing over the sight below his fourth-floor window. Outside the creamy, iced-wedding-cake offices of the Evening Star, the paper’s cantankerous treasurer was trying, without success, to crank his new Packard to life. As soon as she arrived at the window, Bill slipped his arm around Sally Kenyon’s waist and directed her attention to old man Hubbard, sweating and swearing in the noontime sun as his car sat there like a mule. Sally laughed and removed Bill’s arm. “You’d better get your Princeton mitts around the phone, Curtis. It’s Hammersmith, and he sounds in a hurry.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Bill, stealing a kiss and sprinting back to his desk at the far end of the newsroom. Before the receiver was up to his ear, he could hear the features editor barking.