Henry and Clara (38 page)

She certainly wasn’t going to start fearing her own husband, and so she crossed the hall into the library. He could fume all he liked over his bad investments (if only Toledo & Wabash were the worst of them), and he could rail as he pleased over the vagaries of the U.S. mails, but she wouldn’t allow him indifference toward his own children.

“Henry, I want Dr. Carter to look at Riggs.” Her sons and daughter were usually healthy, and while she was not a nervous mother, she was determined that nothing was going to happen to them, the true success of her married life.

“You’ll condition him to think that it’s normal for every sneeze to make a doctor appear, like a genie blown out of a lamp.”

“For one thing, genies are
rubbed
out of lamps. You’d know that if you ever bothered to read your children fairy stories. And for another, he hasn’t sneezed at all. His ear is hurting him, so badly that he’s crying. He’d howl if he weren’t afraid to. You’d do well to remember Eleanor.”

This mention of Amanda’s baby, who’d died two years ago from what started as an ear infection, stumped him, as if Clara had just brought up Eleanor of Aquitaine in connection with her son’s ailment. But turning back toward his desk, he said, “Suit yourself. Just don’t summon Carter by mail, or Riggs will be dead by the time he gets here.”

“Thank you,” she said sarcastically, starting for the door.

“Seen the paper?” he called after her.

“No,” she said, hesitating.

“It’s full of the Beecher spectacle. Your papa’s old vanquished senatorial foe, Mr. Evarts, is going to help out with the defense. He’ll have quite an audience to play to. ‘Three Thousand Persons Seek Entry to Brooklyn Courtroom.’ ”

“Poor Mary,” said Clara, unable to smother a laugh. Her friend’s tottering idol, Henry Ward Beecher, was now accused of seducing a parishioner’s wife.

“What’s she written you about it?” Henry asked.

“Very little.”

“Probably disappointed it wasn’t herself. I always thought she was jealous of those colored girls — ‘Eliza’ and ‘Sarah’ and whatever else they were called — the ones whose freedom he got his congregation to buy.” He laughed at the memory of it. “The abolitionists’ slave auction!”

“Don’t you dare make fun of Mary,” said Clara, turning to go, her mild amusement now extinguished.

“Tweddle Hall,” said Henry in a tone of quiet reminiscence. “Do you remember that night we heard him, way back in ’fifty-nine?”

“Yes,” said Clara, pretending to look for her gloves on the cluttered hall table just past the threshold. She wondered where he was going with this.

“It was the night your papa proposed his grand tour, never knowing I would crash the party.”

“Yes, it was,” she said, walking away. He rose from his swivel chair and came up behind her shoulders and neck with his arms. “I was at least as good a seducer as Dr. Beecher, wasn’t I?” She felt herself getting warm, wanting to turn around and lead him into the bedroom, the one place where their aggressions still, on occasion, transported them to peace.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

She hurried down the stairs, put on her coat, and went out of the house to get Dr. Carter, whose consulting room was in Vermont Avenue. The January air struck her full in the face, and she felt tears coming. But she would not give in to them, would not let the ladies of Lafayette Square see them on her face. She didn’t care how cold it was; she would compose herself inside the park. Crossing Jackson Place, she entered the nearest gate and looked for a bench. She was distracted by the sight of a girl thinly wrapped in a shawl, a housemaid she vaguely recognized, standing by a Spanish chestnut tree, just west of Andy Jackson, with her eyes closed, intently whispering as if in prayer. She
was
in prayer, Clara realized: this must be the “wishing tree” her own housemaids sometimes talked about. Her foot cracked a dry
twig, and the girl, realizing she was being watched by one of the neighbors, opened her eyes and took off, as if the tree’s magical bark were like the bread in all the pantries on the square, the rightful property of the house owners. Clara felt embarrassed for both of them, but when the girl was gone she touched the tree herself and looked over at the late Senator Sumner’s house. “How is the colonel?” was the question he used to ask whenever she went to one of his evenings. These days any such inquiry would bring a hush to the room, as everyone waited for Mrs. Rathbone to give what they knew would be only a polite, correct answer, but which still interested them, charged as it was with the electricity of her odd, absent husband.

She hadn’t given a party of her own in months, and wondered if she’d been imagining things the last time she had, when the stack of regrets seemed a little higher than the time before, elevated, she thought, by the growing reluctance of the neighborhood ladies to go to the house of this man who was evidently peculiar, spending the days inside poring over his investments and history books, and now, it was said, his “writings.” Of the latter Clara could tell them no more than they had heard rumored; whatever historical tract he was laboring at, Henry never offered to show.

Was it too late for him to do something real? She had just passed forty, and he wouldn’t reach that age for another two years. She touched the ordinary-looking chestnut tree, this apparently magical growth at the center of all the vast nation’s power, and silently made a wish, not for a new prince but for a
job
, something that might still take her husband out of himself, if not away from her.

J
UDGE HARRIS
suffered his third and final stroke at home, late in November of 1875, while sitting at his desk cracking walnuts and writing a testimonial to the character of an Albany Law student. He was seized all at once, violently; a walnut slid, uncracked, across his desk and onto the carpet, and a moment later the judge fell down beside it. Pauline used the telegraph to draw his children home to Loudonville, addressing the Washington wire to Clara, treating the judge, as always, like a circumstance only incidental to Henry. Still, it was assumed that whatever turn the judge’s condition took, Henry, lacking any business of his own, would stay in Loudonville with Clara and the three children through Christmas.

On Thursday evening, December 2, Ira Harris’s life was nearing its close. Pauline, tired from her vigil, went to bed after dinner. Little Clara and Gerald were left to play with the kitchen maid, and Henry took charge of Riggs. On their way out of the house to walk in the orchard, father and son passed Clara, who was about to join Will at the judge’s bed, which had been made up in the study where he was stricken.

“Where are you taking him?” she asked Henry. “He’s not dressed warmly enough to go out.”

Riggs kept his eyes on the hall carpet.

“For a short walk,” said Henry. “I’m going to explain death to him.”

Oh, this would be a wonderful speech for a five-year-old, she was certain. A piece of ill-informed grandiloquence designed to convince a shivering boy that what was happening to his beloved grandfather was all connected to the bloody harvests of men from Thermopylae to Fredericksburg.

“Don’t keep him out there long” was all she said, moving past them, brushing Riggs with her skirts and a quick caress.

As she entered the study, Will nodded rapidly to her, to indicate that the end was approaching. The judge’s breathing was loud and spasmodic. Unable to move or talk, he still had the disconcerting use of one eye, which he had half open, appearing to take a last inventory of his possessions. His vision traveled to a piece of mission art that Jared had sent from California; to the letter knife his old partner, Julius Rhoades, gave him when he was elected to the assembly; to the tin tray with the painted apples, on which he had stacked letters for the last thirty years. Now he remembered the piles of them that arrived after Louisa’s death, and wondered who in the house would answer the ones arriving after his own, which he knew was at hand. He moved his eye in Clara’s direction and struggled to make a sound.

She leaned over and said he mustn’t strain, as she pondered the cruelty of this speechlessness that had settled upon her father after a lifetime of words, too many to be sure, but sincere as they were prolix, all of them uttered in the comforting baritone she knew she would never again hear. If only men might devise some way of preserving sound, so their voices might be kept with photographs and engravings, not just sent out from the body to die upon the air. She stroked her father’s cold, immobile hands and listened, in her mind, to the flourishes of his voice as she had heard them in the Senate gallery during the debate on Senator Bright — “Oh, how it must satisfy the rebels to know that as they assault our lives and property, we may be counted upon, ourselves, to destroy the honor of the finest among us” — or as they took their stately annual wing, like returning birds, over Union College commencements. How many times had she heard him send boys “into the sunlight, to find their lives and serve their Lord.” These were the words she tried to hear now, not the paternal flummery of the last few years. “Henry is a fine man,” he would tell her, in panicked reassurance, on those occasions when she allowed her fright to spill over the proud fortress of denial in which she had come to live.

“Papa, don’t try to speak,” she said, smoothing his white hair, which lay on the pillow, still thick but now in an unfamiliar tangle.

As the evening wore on, the judge’s breathing became ever more raspy. The movements of his left eye, random now, unnerved Will into occasional bursts of declamatory conversation, which his father was beyond comprehending. “There’s been a letter inquiring after your condition from President Raymond down at Vassar, Papa, and Governor Tilden sent his personal representative to convey his best wishes.” During these loud speeches Clara would touch her brother’s arm, signaling their futility. As the hours passed, she thought of little stories she might have told her father and offered them to Will. “A day or two before we came up here, I was out walking in the square with Riggs, and he pointed to the Mansion and asked me, ‘Do all of General Grant’s soldiers live there with him?’ ” Will said, “That’s Henry’s doing,” and Clara replied, “Yes, he’s already filling him full of the war.”

A few moments after this, a spasm seized the judge’s face and turned it toward the right side of his pillow.

“He’s gone,” said Clara to Henry an hour later, after telling Pauline the news. She got into bed.

In the dark, in his own bed on the other side of the room, Henry lay with his eyes open and struggled with himself, trying, from a sense of form and a weak flicker of tenderness, to find something to say. But nothing came to him. Clara knew he was hardly thinking of Papa at all. He was putting his memories through their nightly mill grind. Perhaps Petersburg, maybe Ford’s, or the money he’d lost in the ’73 panic — she didn’t know what-all. But his agitation cast a charge across the room, like a spark coming off the counterpane.

Her instinct was to shield herself, and her father’s spirit, from the electricity she could feel dancing over her husband’s silhouette. As if to repel it, she spoke the first bromide that came to mind: “There was nothing that could have been done. Not since Friday morning, Dr. Crane said.”

“I’ve taken care of Riggs,” said Henry, he too using words as a repellent, this time against that detestable phrase —
nothing
that could have been done
— which he’d heard spoken and whispered, as a question, to his face and behind his back, for the past ten years.

“What do you mean, ‘taken care of Riggs’?” asked Clara. “You didn’t know Father was dead yourself until this moment.”

“I mean I’ve instructed Riggs in the general idea of death. He’ll now find understanding this particular instance of it easy enough.”

Even a year ago, she would have snapped back, said something like, “Ah yes, Union College, Mental and Moral Philosophy. It was the
second
part of the lectures you were fined for not attending, am I right?”

As it was, tired and unsure of herself in the dark, and aware of being in new waters, stripped of even the flimsy protection of her father’s love, all she replied was, “I’ll see to Gerald and little Clara myself.”