Henry and Clara (13 page)

He said nothing as he rose to remove his coat and shirt. When he got back to the bed, she had unpinned her long dark hair and was reaching up for him, recalling summer nights in Loudonville
when there would be a storm, and she would put her arms out the window and try to coax the lightning down. As he pressed upon her, she struggled for one last moment, until he whispered that it was too late for that. And then he entered her, like a knife, and she screamed until the pain was gone, replaced with a joy and fierceness that, as they moved together, each seemed to borrow from the other. When it was over, they smoothed each other’s hair. He saw her look down at the bedclothes and once more take fright, but then he soothed her, saying softly that the blood was nothing to worry about.

“A
WASTE
of gunpowder, if you ask me.” Thus the masterful Joel Rathbone on the evening of December 3, 1859, sitting with friends and kinsmen in the main drawing room of Kenwood, grand site of his premature retirement just south of Albany, where yesterday morning, at the hour of his hanging, a one-hundred-gun salute had been fired in tribute to John Brown. The
Albany Evening Journal
was full of the details: the brave and dignified appearance Brown made while climbing to the scaffold; Colonel J. T. L. Preston’s declaration, “So perish all such enemies of Virginia”; the thirty-seven minutes that the body was left to hang. Most prominently featured was Brown’s written prophecy, handed to a bystander as the prisoner left his cell: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”

“The body’s to be buried in North Elba,” said Joel’s cousin John Finley Rathbone, repeating what everyone already knew, “and to come through Troy on its way. Giving the abolitionists righteous fits at every stop.” He could not say that a civil war’s lucrative effect on his foundry hadn’t crossed his mind, but outwardly this richest of the Rathbones continued to support President Buchanan and the commercial creed that peace was always the best prescription for prosperity.

“Lucky for Seward to be abroad until the New Year,” said Hamilton Harris, alluding to the absence of any comment from the senator in Mr. Weed’s paper. “Waiting to see what the Dictator wants him to say, I suppose.” Judge Harris’s younger brother took loyal pains to disparage the Albany boss’s favorite whenever
Ira was around, particularly since the latter had had to return from Europe and find that Hamilton had succeeded in winning an acquittal for Reimann, paramour of the still-imprisoned Mary Hartung.

“Seward’s waiting,” said John Finley Rathbone, “to see which comment can provoke maximum inflammation from Boston to Birmingham. A year from now he’ll have the presidency and we’ll all have his war.”

“A shame mankind can’t put all its energies into things like this Suez Canal,” said Ira Harris with a nobility no one could dispute.

“Seward’s proposing a canal?” squawked Mr. Osborne, an ancient friend of Joel Rathbone’s father.
“Suez,”
corrected several voices at once, reassuring the old man that this was something being undertaken very far away and not the sort of internal improvement Andy Jackson, rest his soul, had spent his years in Washington fighting.

“Henry?” asked Ira Harris, puffing on his pipe, content enough to risk drawing his stepson into the conversation. “You’ve been rather mum this evening.”

“Oh, I’m in firm agreement with Uncle Joel. They wasted the gunpowder. Consider the need they’ll have for it soon.” Given the discussion’s overall inclination toward the dire, Henry seemed less of a doomsayer than usual. But he kept the full measure of his feelings hidden. There was a part of himself, a part he feared, that would have been perfectly willing to drop the trap door beneath John Brown’s feet yesterday morning; and as Brown swung in the breeze, he’d have been happy to shake his hand, the one that had lit the fuse now lying in a straight line across a very dry field. As he had told Clara, the moving spark was visible just over the horizon. No one could deny that it was getting brighter, and closer, and heading toward them.

Attracted by the sound of her son’s voice, her old political instincts telling her what the men were discussing, Pauline Harris ventured in from the parlor and put her hands on Henry’s shoulders. “No, don’t get up,” she told the men, deciding after a brief look at them against entering this conversation. Like her husband, she had lost her touch for it. “Mr. Harris,” she said to Ira, “what was the name of the silversmith who sold you this
beautiful pin for me? The man whose little shop was near Santa Felicita?” She had been engaged with Emeline Rathbone in some traveler’s one-upmanship, a game she could finally play since their return in October; she’d be better off going back to that than trying to heat up any tepid remarks Ira might make about the political situation.

“Papi, my dear. Mr. Giuseppe Papi.”

“Thank you,” said Pauline, brushing her son’s cheek. “Although I expect he calls himself
Signor
Papi.” She exited to polite male chuckles.

“John Brown, of course,” reported Pauline when she retook her seat in the parlor between Emeline and Clara. Emeline twisted her mouth in displeasure, as if the boring nature of such a topic were self-evident, and Clara wondered what pitch of agitation her next letter from Mary Hall would reach. In the forty-five days since Brown’s capture at Harper’s Ferry, Mary had sent her one distressed missive after another, two of them tear-stained, so goodness knew what yesterday’s martyrdom might provoke. Clara had responded with appropriate expressions of concern, but except for its effect on Henry, the John Brown affair hardly engaged her. She wished that she could shift the subject of her correspondence with Mary to what she herself had been going through in the eight weeks since they’d arrived home. She was without anyone to confide in. Pauline was out of the question, and her sisters were too immature to be considered. Alas, sweet-natured Mary seemed to have no room inside her brain for anything but the bad case of abolitionist fever she’d caught during her father’s winter tour with Beecher.

If it were otherwise, Clara would tell her about that afternoon in Munich, and its single repetition in London just before sailing home; of her father’s hoping-against-hope silences when they returned with excuses Henry put little effort into fabricating; of Pauline’s stern glances and Clara’s fear that she had guessed or, even worse, been told by Henry. Worst of all was Henry’s inscrutability, his disinclination to speak of what had happened between them, or to discuss the future of it.

It was the only future she wished to contemplate, though she knew it was an impossible one for her father and Pauline, and
even for Henry himself, to accept right now. Social awkwardness would be the chief item on the bill of particulars drawn up against the idea of their becoming man and wife. But each passing month, she felt, could be made to work to her advantage: she was willing to keep a distance from him, to minimize their joint appearance at family occasions such as this, until everyone eventually got it into their heads that Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone shared less blood than the second cousins whose weddings they were forever attending up and down the Hudson Valley. She would keep to herself, to Wordsworth and the window seat, as Henry, on his way to seeing the logic of his ardor, put in his lazy hours in Uncle Hamilton’s office and spent his inheritance too freely. Even if he spent it on the girls of Quay Street, she would be patient. He would see his war — she’d become certain of that today — but she would have him, before he and Will went off to fight it.

Pauline and Emeline were disputing the merits of Florentine coffee when Howard Rathbone abandoned the drawing room for the parlor. He took a seat beside Clara, who hoped his arrival might save her from this new twist of the continental competition between her stepmother and Henry’s aunt. How sadly pale he looked! Months on the ocean had left him no more hardy than he’d been that day in April when they’d all said goodbye; she wondered if there was more than holiday generosity to the shore leave he’d been granted.

“You’re quiet tonight,” said Howard, inching his chair closer to hers. He had actually enjoyed her silences at dinner, preferred them to the sarcastic chatter he remembered from the months before she went abroad, all that mimicry of Henry which continued in her letters, as she attempted to keep up with him and appear more formidable to Pauline.

“I’ve already bored half of Albany with my ‘European impressions,’ ” she responded. “Besides, what can compete with John Brown?”

“Real life?” sighed Howard, who had none of the family taste for politics. “The things right in front of us?”

“You need to find yourself a new girl, Howard.” Clara smiled at him and patted his knee.

He realized he was a little in love with her, knew she was the real reason he could never stick with any girl for long. “What’s wrong with an
old
girl?” he asked, taking her hand and squeezing it, but not daring to lose his smile and show this was more than a jape. “What’s wrong with a girl you’ve known practically forever?”

“Why, Howard Rathbone,” she replied, keeping up the illusion of playfulness, swatting his hand once she’d withdrawn her own. “You and I are cousins by marriage. Don’t you think that’s dangerously close for a man to be to a girl he wants to court?”

She regretted the joke as soon as she made it. She had no desire to hurt dear Howard, whose cheeks had just gone as red as his hair. She didn’t particularly resent his opposition to the idea of Henry and herself getting together. Howard’s objections were sweetly intentioned, and they would be the least of the obstacles she and Henry would have to overcome. She knew perfectly well that Howard was in love with her, but she was sure he would get over it. When he did, he might even be persuaded to help them with the rest of the family. And now she’d gone and embarrassed him by making a joke — in Henry’s exact style, too — about his well-meant alarm.

“I’m just a silly tease, Howard.” She gave his thin rib cage a good-natured poke. “Let’s go into the other room. Mother, Aunt Emeline: I’ve asked Howard to see if his presence will be enough to secure me admission to the drawing room.” Emeline gladly waved her away and Pauline smiled, a bit nostalgically. Taking Howard’s arm, Clara crossed the threshold over which the sliding doors ran, and the gentlemen stood up through a cloud of their pipe smoke to greet her. Howard relinquished her to Henry, who made a place for her beside himself on the sofa. “Proceed, Uncle,” he said to Hamilton Harris.

“Not much more to say,” said the crisp attorney. “The invitation was issued weeks ago, and he’ll be talking in Brooklyn on the twenty-seventh of February. If you’re interested in seeing somebody other than Mr. Seward move into the White House a year from now, you might think about going down to hear him.”

“Whom are they talking about?” Clara whispered to Henry.

“Abraham Lincoln,” he replied.

“U
GH — UGH — UGH
,” chanted Sybil Bashford on the porch of Ocean House in Newport. She scratched her stomach, too, in ape-like imitation of the Republican candidate for President — all to infuriate poor Mary Hall.

“Stop it, Sybil,” she cried. “That’s awful!”

Clara Harris just laughed.

“He’s not at
all
like that,” Mary said. “My father took me to see him at the Cooper Institute in February, after they’d moved the meeting from Reverend Beecher’s church. The crowd was
enormous
, and he couldn’t have been more eloquent. ‘Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us —’ ”

“Oh, Lord, she’s committed it to memory! Someone make her stop!” shrieked Sybil. “If that abolitionist wins, he’s liable to spoil my whole wedding next May.” She pouted, and returned her gaze to the illustrations of bridal accessories she’d been perusing on this hot summer day.

“He’s not an abolitionist,” Clara offered as correction to Miss Bashford, a graduate of the Newport Academy whose interest in national affairs knew many bounds.