Henry and Clara (34 page)

This morning Henry stopped to converse with a diamond-cutter, a Jew, who was going about his work. The man spoke English to us with the same care, if not exactness, that he used to chip his stones. It was curious, I told Henry as we left, that the Jew added value to something precious by reducing its size with his chisel. “Do you wish I’d bought you a smaller ring?” Henry asked, taking my left hand and making me laugh. As he caressed my fingers, our conversation moved from diamonds to gold — the news we read in the English papers about the discoveries in Wyoming. Once again Henry inclines toward fantasy — declaring that, upon our return to America, we should seek happiness in the solitary expanses of the West, away from the crowded parlors of Washington and Albany
.

Whenever his talk takes such a turn, I find myself frightened that he may be serious, but then I figure out what recent event has prompted the recurrence of The Frontier Theme (as Mary and I took to calling it last winter). I can easily guess the cause of today’s instance: last night’s supper in the hotel dining room, which, besides ourselves, contained two tables of traveling Americans. One party whispered throughout the meal, their stares beating a hasty retreat toward their plates whenever we looked over. The other, during brandy, came over to introduce themselves (three doctors and their wives, from Philadelphia) and say that they had been unable to help noticing our names in the hotel register when they signed it that morning — and would we accept their best wishes, as well as their delight in seeing how happy and healthy we looked after what we
had been through? Thanking them, as always, was left to me; Henry just regarded the lengthening ash of his cigar, and nodded
.

“This is the last hotel you choose from Harper’s
Hand-Book for Travelers,”
he scolded, upon our return upstairs. Rather than face “Americans in packs,” he declared that he is prepared to cancel any further reservations we have at any establishment listed in the guide. I succeeded in placating him, demanding praise for at least not having booked us into the Hôtel de l’Oncle Tom (there really is such a place) in Paris
.

But I understand his distress, and only wonder when there will be no more cause for it. Two years from now? Ten? I fear that people will never tire of talking about Wilkes Booth, any more than they will of talking about the war itself. In every hotel we’re in, as soon as people get wind of our presence, we feel ourselves become objects of morbid scrutiny. The worst stretch began three days before the voyage ended, when whoever wrote the “shipboard newspaper” — a detestable innovation! — decided to mention that those aboard the vessel would surely be interested to know that their fellow passengers included … And with that the whole story
.

This being the French Line, claret was served even with lunch, and no one’s tongue was ever idle for a moment; during those last three days, whenever we were in the dining room, we began to feel like zoo animals. Henry (who imagines that the whispering is more pointed and malicious than it can possibly be) twice threw down his napkin and stormed off to the gymnasium, to pound his anger into the boxing bag
.

More than a month has passed since all that, but incidents like the one last night are fresh fodder for Henry’s determination to be done forever with American cityfolk. So today it was Wyoming
.

Though our room is everywhere domesticated by floral needlepoint, the name of the hotel means “bull’s-eye.”
Harper’s Hand-Book
says so, making me think of arrows and Indians and the frontier, and my
own
determination that we shall resume our American life nowhere but in the much wilder precincts of Washington, D.C., which I miss even now, and of whose eventual possibilities I still believe Henry can be convinced. Yes, I’m like the Jew near the
Royal Palace: I prefer the small, finished, man-carved diamond to undiscovered veins of gold
.

We were in the Reliquarium this morning, unable to take the Crusaders’ trophies — bits of sacred tibia, pieces of holy hip-joint — with any seriousness at all. Henry the Lion brought them back from Palestine, but
my
Henry and I could not contain our giggling. We chased each other toward the Waterloo Platz like sweethearts half the age we are, along the way stopping at the hotel, to claim our letters
.

I wish we hadn’t. Because the day turned dark as we sat and opened them inside a café near the great column. One from Papa, another from Emeline, two from Will and Emma, and one from Pauline, this last full of newspaper cuttings: “Mrs. Lincoln’s Second-Hand Clothing Sale,” said the piece from
Leslie’s.
Everything was sold up — or at least offered — at Brady & Co., on Broadway. An awful spectacle: cheap muslin skirts for enormous prices; silk dresses so short of hem and low of neck they raised more laughter than money. The First Lady’s motives are attacked by everyone, most viciously of all by Mr. Weed, who claims the Republicans “would have made proper arrangements for the maintenance of Mrs. Lincoln had she so deported herself as to inspire respect.” He charges her with all manner of corruption and coarseness, insisting she also sold off Mr. Lincoln’s shirts, all but the one he was shrouded with
.

The news items brought me near to tears (and anger, as I could imagine Pauline’s scissors at their gleeful work), but Henry would have none of it. He wondered if Mr. Seward “had sprung for any of the clothing” for his daughter-in-law — assuming he was in a mood to waste his personal treasury “after squandering the national one on Alaska.” When this left me cheerless, he became angry, railing at what an addled woman Mrs. Lincoln has always been, “the help-meet of that bloody-minded ape.” I tried to respond, but he insisted I keep silent, and that we have done with “the two of them” forever
.

It is this
— the two of them —
that I do not understand. Abuse of Mrs. Lincoln, cruel and undeserved though it may be, was common
currency before we left the States — from the President’s old friend Herndon to his last radical enemy in the Congress. She is a woman, and weak, a proper lightning rod for all the anger and resentment they stored up through the war, whereas Mr. Lincoln himself is subject only to reverence — except from Henry, and Henry alone, which makes his invective all the more chilling. I know it is his way of fending off the memory of what he was made to endure that night, but surely there must be some weapon less blunt and brutal. I never argue Mr. Lincoln’s merits, or for any rational perspective on that awful evening, of which Henry’s memories are, I’m sure, still disarranged. Trying to get him to talk about what happened leads only to his ugly censure of everyone’s behavior, mine included. I have told him I will not listen to that. And I would not this afternoon. We walked to Mt. Brilliant, the king’s country house, in a silence I enforced. Once there, in the garden, beside a still-green hedgerow, the squall that had gathered an hour before blew away. The clouds lifted, and we kissed, and remembered that the war is over. We went back to being school sweethearts, and my own Henry the Lion laughed and purred and nuzzled my neck and asked for forgiveness
.

In my mind’s eye — and I’m sure it must be so, this very instant, in Albany, a world away — sleighs are carrying partygoers all along State Street and Western Avenue, everyone anticipating the presents to be opened and rum punch to be drunk. If I allow myself to illuminate these lantern slides for more than a moment or two inside my brain, I become sick for home and Papa and Will and my sisters. So I do
not
show them to myself, and try instead to marvel at the strangeness of being where we now are, in three rooms of Shepherd’s Hotel in the middle of the night, the donkey drivers still arguing in the street below, the merchants soon to be spreading out their brass lamps and bolts of silk as if it were any other day on the calendar — which of course it is. Here in the “Franks’ Quarter” one sees an occasional little wreath, the improvised work of another
Western traveler, and the English in the hotel (who’ve no idea who we are) have been greeting one another with “Happy Christmas” in the breakfast room these last few days. But the Yuletide illusion is shattered by the horns calling Ali and Mohammed to their prayers. We are in another world, of mosques and massacred Marmelukes (this morning we saw some of their tombs), and when I give myself over to it — an immersion Henry seems to accomplish effortlessly
— I
appreciate its fascination. There are no street lamps anywhere, and the law requires us to carry a lantern when we walk about at night. The chances it offers for shadow play are endless, and Henry has frightened and charmed me with his inventions these past four nights
.

He is now sleeping in the next room. How I wish the third contained a child, or two or three of them, ready to be surprised by full stockings on Christmas morning. But their arrival will have to wait. We have taken special pains not to become expectant parents while abroad, the prospects for mishap or confinement being too worrisome to contemplate. (Henry has used a method I suspect he perfected with the girls on Quay Street, so far with apparent success and no diminution of pleasure.) Back home, Amanda’s baby is due any week, and I shall be Aunt Clara, a title I once thought might represent the final relation I had with children
.

I could start for home tomorrow — it would be a voyage toward my
own
children, whose souls I feel waiting to come down from heaven and be born. But Henry is determined for us to remain abroad some months more. The further away he is from America and Americans, alas, the better he feels. His spirits have been fine these past few weeks, and so I am happy, too. Despite the longings confessed above, travel suits me well. I am lean and fit as a racehorse, my body exercised and pleasured to a degree that makes me blush. There are still mornings when we do not go out at all. Yesterday we were supposed to undertake a five-hour excursion to Heliopolis, a plan we ended up laughing over as we lay together, hour after hour, the sun rising ever higher behind the cracks in the shutter. “We are
already
in the city of the sun,” Henry said, encircling me, and it was past noon when we rose
.

By evening I was longing for a world of people and chatter — the
world of home — but he will soon enough let me have that again. Meanwhile, as a world unto ourselves we can be splendid
.

I have cheered myself by writing. Indeed, I am now in a sparkling enough mood to pen my weekly missive of unadulterated optimism to Mary!

We spent most of the afternoon apart, Henry exploring the Army Amphitheatre and I sitting on the Spanish Steps, writing letters to Emeline and Will and looking up at the window of the little room where Keats died. I reflected, of course, upon Howard, that other merry, robust spirit jailed in a dying body, gone three years already. This melancholy train of thought must have given me a poetic look: before I finished the letter to Will, I noticed a young man, two steps below and to my left, looking up at me with interest and concern. He was a pretty boy of about eighteen, very thin, without whiskers, but possessed of thick curls that crept over his collar like the paws of a kitten. His name, he told me, after I smiled at him, was Adam Simpson, a Bostonian who has been in Rome for eight months trying to paint. “I have no gift for it at all,” he explained, with as much matter-of-factness as he said his name. He has been, in fact, the model for more pictures — most of them done on the Steps — than he’s been the artist
.

He is just young enough to have escaped the war, and I think he sees his life as a demonstration of God’s caprice. He is plainly delighted to be here and alive, unsure but untroubled as to why it turned out differently for others. We spoke of Keats, and he offered to be my guide through the Protestant cemetery. I declined, telling him my husband would be along at any moment. He bought me an ice, and we recited bits of the Odes until he confessed that he preferred anything of Shelley’s to them. He knows nothing of what is going on back home: he has a large prosperous family who write him regularly, but he retains little of what they say. I gave up on asking for the news, my usual hungry manner of acquainting myself
with other traveling Americans. (When I mentioned Mr. Johnson’s acquittal, I think Mr. Simpson took it to mean that the President had been tried in an ordinary court of law, for shoplifting or perhaps vagrancy.)

Henry soon came trotting up the Steps to retrieve me. I introduced him to my new friend, who immediately turned shy. He looked up at Henry, towering over his own slight, seated form, with a mixture of fear and awe. “We’ve been talking about Shelley and Keats,” I explained, adding, “Adam Simpson, this is Lord Byron.” Though he and Henry had yet to exchange more than hellos, little Mr. Simpson understood what I meant by the joke, and Henry, on his best behavior, laughed along with us, until I said, “We’ve also been speaking of Mr. Johnson,” which sent an uncomfortable look across his face. I asked him about the Amphitheatre, which he proceeded to describe with tremendous precision. Mr. Simpson, whose interest in martial matters, I would venture to guess, is ordinarily slight, hung upon his every word. In wonderment, he asked Henry what he had done in the war, so Henry recited the awful names — Antietam, Fredericksburg, Petersburg — which sounded like the Stations of the Cross. Even Mr. Simpson, looking reverent and unworthy, seemed to know their import. As if ashamed, he soon made his excuses, gathering up his sketchpad, shaking Henry’s hand and kissing mine, and disappearing into the Via dei Condotti, a sweet and faintly ridiculous figure
.

A minute or two later Henry and I descended the Steps. “I suppose you told him everything,” he said. “I never even gave my name!” I answered, something I hadn’t realized until that minute, and which set me to laughing. “He didn’t seem to need it,” Henry countered bewilderingly. Then I understood that he was thinking Mr. Simpson had been satisfied just to swim in the deep pools of my eyes! “Oh, Henry,” I said, laughing harder. “Surely he was a girl-boy. I’m quite certain he spent more time looking at your shoulders than my eyes.” At this point I was upbraided for my naiveté, as well as for talking filth. Finally, sensing (perhaps) that he had been too harsh, he changed the subject slightly, to ask if Mr. Simpson had been sympathetic to the President’s cause. “He doesn’t even know what the President’s cause is,” I said. Trying to leave Mr. Simpson
behind forever, I said I was glad the President had survived his impeachment, and that I was proud Papa had ceased vacillating and become one of his allies in those last months in the Senate. I speculated that Mr. Johnson was grateful for that still, a year and a half since Papa’s return to Albany. This remark Henry seemed to find hugely amusing. “Mr. Johnson has far greater reason than that to be grateful to this family.” I didn’t know what he meant; I was only sorry that what should have been a pleasant memory of little Mr. Simpson had had all this cold water preposterously thrown upon it. We were a quarter hour into our circuit of the Pantheon — during which time Henry asked me if Mr. Simpson hadn’t reminded me of Howard — before each of us regained his humor with the other
.