Henry and Clara (14 page)

“If only he were,” cried Mary. “But he’s still the least equivocal of any of the candidates about slavery — it’s
wrong
, Sybil — and he’ll keep it from entering any more territories, that’s certain.”

“Oh, pooh,” said Sybil. “There’s nothing wrong with slaves. They’re the reason even this town got built. The triangular trade. We learned about it in the academy.”

“Why, Sybil,” purred Clara, stirring the ice in a pitcher of lemonade. “I’m surprised by your scholarship.”

“A lot of lovely slaves are even part of my dowry,” Sybil continued.

“I shall scream!” cried Mary.

“It would do you good,” said Sybil, flipping over the sketch of a lace train and asking Clara to pour her another glass of lemonade.

“Stop it, both of you,” said Clara, quite calmly. The slavery question did not agitate her as it did Mary, who she had decided was a better person than she. But the ascendancy of Mr. Lincoln interested her deeply. She had discussed it over and over with Henry and Papa in the six months since Uncle Hamilton came back all excited from the Cooper Institute speech. It had happened so fast. After Harper’s Ferry, Mr. Seward, at the Dictator’s insistence, had tried to mollify the Southerners, convince them he wasn’t as extreme as they feared. It didn’t work, and the Republicans decided at their Chicago convention that only Lincoln stood a real chance of carrying what was being called the “lower North,” and thereby the presidency. Ira Harris had sent Seward his fulsome condolences, while Mr. Weed, shocked by defeat, journeyed to Springfield, his big black hat in hand, to call on the plain man who’d vanquished the brilliant creature he’d been grooming for the last dozen years.

“Sybil, think of it this way. It could be much worse. You could be faced with Mr. Seward instead.”

“Oh, him,” said Sybil, disgusted. “The ‘irresistible contest.’ ”

“ ‘Irrepressible conflict,’ ” corrected Mary, as if Sybil had misquoted a psalm.

“They’re the same thing,” Sybil said, putting her glass of lemonade down rather hard. “Oh, I
hate
August. No one even sends us letters now. They’re tired of writing the same thing they’ve written since the beginning of the summer, and they’re too hot to move in any case.”

“Have you had anything from Will?” asked Mary, who thought Clara’s brother a figure of wonderful rectitude.

“Nothing since he got back to Loudonville last month.”

“Then read us one of the letters he sent from West Point, back in June.”

Clara rummaged among the envelopes in her sewing basket as Sybil made a face. “Here’s the one about the dining hall,” said Clara. “How about that?”

“Oh, yes, read it,” said Mary.

“ ‘As an instance of the fare at our mess, the other day a cadet who sits opposite me tied a shoestring to a piece of crust, saying, “Let’s see if that comes in our pudding tomorrow.” Sure enough, the next day a lieutenant found it in his pudding, fished it out, and carried it on the point of his sword about the hall. Pudding is suspicious to me, and I quit eating it before I had been here three months.’ ”

Mary beamed over this display of healthy spirit. “Is he really the highest officer in his class?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Clara. “The sergeant major of the corps.”

Sybil moaned. “I shall spit if we have to sit here forever.”

“Let’s go up to Boston,” suggested Mary.

“It’s too hot,” said Clara.

“No, Mary’s right. Let’s go,” said Sybil. “My mama can get the carriage to take us to Providence, and we can take the train from there. It will be fun. We can look at bridal gloves.”

“And hear Mr. Seward,” said Mary.

“What?” cried Sybil.

“He’s speaking in Boston this evening,” Mary said.

Clara looked amused. “I’m beginning to think this is a good idea after all.”

“Absolutely not!” cried Sybil.

“Then neither of us will go with you. Isn’t that right, Clara?”

“I’m afraid Mary’s correct, Sybil. If she’s going to be dragged through the shops with you, there’s got to be something in it for her, too.”

Sybil growled, in a torment of indecision. “You are a
sneak
, Mary Hall. That abolitionist is the only reason you suggested Boston.” Losing ground, she raised conditions: “You can’t tell my mama we’re going to do anything but look at the gloves.”

Mary and Clara nodded.

“And I’m allowed to stuff my ears when he speaks.”

“Perhaps you should bring your salts,” said Clara.

It was a hot day, and even in this ocean-drenched little state, nothing could keep down the dust on the roads. By the time the
young women reached Providence, Sybil was so parched and cranky that Mary and Clara could get her onto the train only by buying her two different-flavored ices from the Italian man on the platform. The trip to Boston took nearly two hours, but the rush of air through the open windows refreshed the girls before they arrived. Once in the city, they had time for Sybil to visit just three shops in Newbury Street, none of them adequate to her demands. The young ladies were soon swept into the throngs moving toward Revere House, on whose steps Mr. Seward would deliver his remarks. It was a dreadful experience for Sybil, who hated being jostled. Her tortures were increased by Clara’s pointing to a Republican women’s banner —
WE LINK ON TO LINCOLN, AS OUR MOTHERS DID TO CLAY
— and by Mary’s knowing the words to every campaign ditty being sung. The wait for Mr. Seward seemed endless, but finally Governor Banks led him to the lectern, where he acknowledged the crowd’s cheers, none of them more lusty than those shouted by pale little Mary Hall. Clara divided her attention among Sybil’s theatrical agonies, Mary’s ecstatic partisanship, and the eaglelike face of Mr. Seward, whose thick planes of sharply cut hair hung immobile in the breezeless evening.

“It behooves you, solid men of Boston, if such are here” — great cheers — “and if the solid men are not here, then the lighter men of Massachusetts” — great laughter followed by an even greater cheer — “to bear onward, and forward, first in the ranks, the flag of freedom.” It was a performance Clara’s father never could have given; it had a gaiety Papa would never allow to scamper out from under the heavy folds of his rhetoric. Late this spring the gossip in Uncle Hamilton’s law office was that Mr. Seward had taken his defeat hard, been too distressed to stir from Auburn; but to Clara’s eyes, and judging from his schedule of campaign speeches, his recovery was admirably complete. Should Mr. Lincoln win, the new President would have a formidable ally in the Senate. If only her papa had had such resiliency after the case of Mrs. Hartung — a far smaller thing to endure than the loss of the White House.

“Come,” said Clara, catching Sybil and Mary at the elbows
as soon as Mr. Seward showed signs of finishing. “Let’s make our escape. The other speakers will go on all night.” Mary looked wistfully back at the Revere House steps, but deferred to Clara’s authority. The clamor of the rally and the rare victory of her own will over Sybil Bashford’s had left her tired.

They stayed overnight at a small hotel on Beacon Hill, and the following day, in a mood to make things up to Sybil, Mary and Clara gave over the whole morning and most of the afternoon to bridal shopping. By the time they finished the train ride back to Providence and a steamship run down to Newport, during which Clara knitted and Sybil snored, it was nearly midnight. As the boat docked, Mary realized that the day’s excitement wasn’t over. Marching toward them along the shore were crooked lines of young men in capes and shiny hats, carrying torches in a loud procession. “Clara, look! Some Wide-Awakes!” A lusty party of Lincoln cadres, the sort now found on the streets of Albany and other Northern cities almost every night, were marching to one of their songs, whose lyrics Mary joined in singing:

“Sybil,” called Clara, poking her in the ribs. “Wake up.”

“Mmnnh,”
said Sybil, ostentatiously rubbing her eyes. “What is it?”

“Men,” said Clara. “Yankee men, but young and good looking nonetheless.”

This intelligence roused Sybil to life. She sat up in her deck chair and squinted. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Home,” said Clara.

“Speak for yourself,” she replied. “And will
you
,” she added, turning toward Mary and pinching her on the arm, “stop that caterwauling?”

Back at Ocean House the women were surprised to find Pauline
Harris still up, sitting on the porch and staring out toward the sea. She greeted them wearily: “Did you have a good time?”

“Yes,” said Clara. “Sybil saw some lovely wedding things.” She knew better than to talk of Mr. Seward.

“There’s a letter for you from Henry,” said Pauline, pointing to it on a nearby table.

Sybil, who had been thoroughly revived by a long look at the broad shoulders of the Wide-Awakes, said, “Clara, you need a beau. The only letters you get are from brothers.”

“I
have
a beau,” said Clara.

Mary’s eyes widened, and Pauline picked this moment to raise her ample form from the wicker chair and announce her retirement for the night.

“Who?” insisted Sybil as soon as Mrs. Harris had gone in.

Clara said nothing, just lightly ran her fingers over Henry’s letter and tenderly grazed it against her cheek. Before Mary could drop her jaw and Sybil begin an interrogation, Clara left the porch to go inside and up to the second floor. She found Pauline in the front room of the suite the two of them were sharing with Louise.

“Your sister is asleep,” whispered Pauline, indicating the door of the girls’ room as she unpinned her hair.

“I saw the look on your face,” said Clara. “But you should know that I’m going to marry Henry.”

“No,” said Pauline. “You are not. Your father will never permit it.”

“What can he object to? There’s no blood between us.”

“It isn’t right,” said Pauline, brushing out her hair and pretending casually to consider her looks in the vanity’s mirror. “You have been brought up too closely for too long. A marriage like this would not bring you happiness.”

“Why are you now so interested in me?” asked Clara, trying to equal her in nonchalance as she removed a tortoise-shell comb from her own hair.

“I’ve always been interested in you,” said Pauline.

“That’s not true!” said Clara, unable to control herself. “Isn’t your real thought that I’m not worthy of Henry? That he’d be another Rathbone wasted on another Harris?”

“You’re being ridiculous,” said Pauline, whose composure did not desert her as she swept her hairpins into a china dish. “You must wait for someone else.”

“I’m nearly twenty-six. I’ve done my waiting — for Henry!”

“Calm down, you’re going to wake Louise. This discussion is concluded. You are not right for Henry, and that is all there is to it.”

Clara’s whisper was a hiss. “Who
would
be right for Henry? Someone more like his mother?”

Pauline ignored whatever suggestion hung in the room. She merely repeated her main point. “You’ve been joined as brother and sister for a dozen years.”

“We’ve been joined more closely than that for some time. Since an afternoon in Munich last summer.”

Clara saw Pauline’s silhouette stiffen in the mirror. She ran back downstairs, not because any display of wrath was likely to emanate from her stepmother, but because she feared the secret, the thing itself, that she had let loose, like an animal, into the dark. There was just a single candle burning in the hotel parlor, enough to let her find her way out to the porch.

Mary Hall pretended to be asleep in one of the wicker chairs. From the chaise longue Sybil Bashford reached up and grabbed Clara’s gingham sleeve. “Tell us
everything
,” she demanded.

T
HE POLLS CLOSED AT 4:47 P.M.
, sunset, on November 6, but the sun had been so little in evidence all day that its departure was hardly noticed. Rain had fallen steadily on the crowds lining up to vote throughout the city, from Franklin Street in the First Ward to Elm and Swan in the Tenth. Mr. Weed’s paper exhorted the citizenry to
BEWARE OF SPLIT TICKETS, WATCH FOR FRAUDULENT VOTERS
, and do all they could to secure
A GLORIOUS VICTORY
for the Republican Party in the county, state, and nation. In a further effort to whip up fervor, the City News column reported an assault on a Wide-Awake that had taken place during the previous night’s procession down Pearl Street.