Henry and Clara (18 page)

“No,” said Pauline, sternly, to eleven-year-old Lina Harris. She likewise forbade Clara and Louise to open the letter that had come an hour ago and lay in the front parlor, ticking with the unknown, on a marble tabletop beside a vase of hollyhocks. The arrival of the letter, whose envelope showed it was from Colonel William Harris of the Fourth U.S. Artillery, had occasioned peals of joy from the Harris girls, and even a silent thanks from the author’s stepmother. But Pauline insisted that the letter, which proved Will’s survival in Sunday’s battle at Manassas Junction, remain sealed until Ira Harris arrived home from the Senate, which was meeting in special session all through this hot July. “Not another word,” she said, telling the girls to busy themselves however they could. The letter continued to lie near the open window, through which a smell of the capital’s sewage came to mingle with the scent of the hollyhocks.

Clara went up to her room, feeling that the war, which these past three months had been firmly declared but otherwise unreal, was at last upon them. It had entered their house, like a sniper’s bullet, with this letter. Will was alive, but in what condition? At this moment, she could hear the sound of soldiers marching on a nearby street. Since April, parades and reviews had been a daily occurrence, part of a pageant, not a war. Thaddeus Lowe’s observation balloons flew gaily above the city, the delight of all who saw them; the balloons’ actual purpose — to spy on the movement of Confederate soldiers whose guns would be murdering the boys of the Union — was all but disregarded.

Her own days had been quiet, sewing havelocks with her sisters for the Christian Commission down H Street; supervising
Lina’s reading; and endlessly writing letters, batting them back and forth like shuttlecocks, to her Albany cousins, Mary Hall in New York, Will with the Fourth, and Henry, training at Fort Hamilton. Her nights were quiet except for Fridays, when she would walk across Lafayette Square with Papa and Pauline to the Lincolns’ evening receptions. She would stay straight through, from “Hail to the Chief” to “Yankee Doodle,” the usual recessional, and return home feeling so lively that her sisters joked about her becoming a rival to Kate Chase, the socially ambitious daughter of the secretary of the treasury.

Mrs. Lincoln had taken a liking to her, and three times had had her to the Red Room for one of her “afternoons,” when between more formal courtesies the First Lady would seize her arm and wail confidentially about her ague, or her husband’s burdens, or the cost of entertaining, until the fretful monologue was interrupted by an appearance of the elfin, peculiar Tad, who had learned to greet her as “Mith Cwawa.”

Before this week, it was in the East Room of the Mansion that Clara had felt the closest approach of the war. Late in May the beautiful body of Colonel Ellsworth had lain there; he’d been killed when his Zouaves marched across the Long Bridge and retook Alexandria for the Union. The feat had given the capital’s morale a great lift, a euphoria tempered only by the slaying of Ellsworth himself. Mrs. Lincoln set a wax laurel wreath on his casket and gushed tears, which was not surprising, though the visible distress of the President himself shocked Clara and everyone else present. The colonel’s corpse was marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the music of a new march by Sousa and then sent home to New York — preceded by an especially florid letter that Clara wrote for the pleasure of Mary Hall.

But even this episode, with the colonel lying demonstrably dead before their eyes, had not seemed real. The romantic effect had lingered all the way through this Sunday morning, when the sound of cannon told the city that rebel forces were being engaged at Bull Run. Half the ladies in Lafayette Square had jumped into their carriages, some of them with picnic hampers, to be spectators at the instant victory they expected. Lina had begged
to join the rush, and Louise and Amanda — just as bored as Clara with the months of sewing and bandage rolling — were about to say yes when Senator Harris, vibrating with a wholly new paternal severity, informed his daughters that their brother Will was probably manning one of the guns they could hear booming across the river. From that moment the day froze into a vigil, a long and eventually frightened one: word came late in the afternoon that the Federals were racing back toward the city in panicked disarray.

In the four days since, the Harris family had waited for news of Will, whose exact fate was at last revealed after six
P.M
., when Clara saw her father, returning from a caucus of Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, cross Fifteenth Street with his long stride. Pauline presented him the envelope, and he gathered his women into the front parlor, where he read the letter in its entirety, his voice as steady as if he were once more routinely charging a jury, his feelings betrayed only by the slight shaking of the thin brown paper.

Dear Father

I am well & have lost no blood. Our army, or rather that part of it commanded by McDowell is disorganized, routed & demoralized. I was in the saddle all night & then most of the past 48 hours. I fired two of our guns for several hours yesterday. We need reinforcements in the shape of
reliable
infantry & some cavalry & somewhat expect an attack at this point within twenty-four hours. Cushing is supporting a regiment of skirmishers with his 2 guns & as Green is not at all well, I have much to do yet this evening. If I can I will come and see you to-morrow morning. If I do not, I expect to stay here until our men & horses can receive some provisions & forage & our guns, ammunition.

I have worked hard, but suffered nothing but regret &
disappointment that my first battle should have terminated in a retreat — a
rout
.

Senator Harris allowed himself a sigh as he put the letter back in its envelope. Little Lina sobbed with relief as Amanda and Louise went into the kitchen, sniffing quietly into the fancy handkerchiefs they had sewn during breaks from havelocks and mufflers. Their father paced the parlor in a mixture of pride and frustration, while Pauline rubbed her hand across his broad back with a trace of the new wifely tenderness Clara had seen her display since her husband’s sudden political ascent. But by tomorrow at breakfast, Clara knew, her stepmother’s mood would have shifted like a powerful loom. Pauline would be in full-throttled argument about military appropriations and strategy, pressing her mild Whiggish husband with all the radical force of Senators Sumner and Stevens, insisting on a fuller, bloodier, faster prosecution of the war — whatever it took to get it over before Henry left his training for a battlefield like the one Will had just escaped. Pauline intended to have her son safe, the country reunited, and her husband part of a truly national Senate instead of a rump parliament. She wanted the atmosphere of constant emergency replaced by one permitting her more ceremony and notice. In this, thought Clara, she was not unlike the Southern ladies who still ran the serious social business of the town, and would settle for normality if they couldn’t have a Confederate victory.

All Clara wanted was her wedding.

She crossed the room to kiss her papa and lead him into the dining room for supper. When the meal was over, the evening’s letter writing would begin, with Papa conveying Will’s story to Uncle Hamilton; her stepmother sending it to Aunt Emeline and Joel; and her sisters passing it on to young Jared, who was still in Albany and hoping to be admitted to West Point, if his stepfather’s
new adroitness at securing favors could get him the appointment. Clara herself would recount it to Henry, hoping that he would find some sympathy for Will’s ordeal. As she ate her mutton soup, she concentrated on the letter she would write first, to Mary Hall. She might be forbidden to share the secret of her engagement, but she could at least describe the dress she planned to wear, nine nights hence, at the Lincolns’ dinner for Prince Napoleon.

“T
HE GIRL IN THE OPERA
was just like Clara, wasn’t she, Mother?” Sarah Rathbone’s question to Emeline was irritating, and Clara was glad when the ever-solicitous Mary Hall clarified matters: “Oh, I don’t think so, Sarah. Clara reads all sorts of serious things. Norina only read silly novels.”

Actually, Clara had not entirely escaped identifying with the heroine of
Don Pasquale;
she only wished there were a Dr. Malatesta in her own life, some well-intentioned schemer with the power to remove what stood between herself and her marriage. Putting an end to the civil war was a tall order, but to anyone who could manage it (even General Beauregard, she secretly thought), she would be forever grateful.

“I didn’t mean anything nasty,” Sarah insisted.

“No quarreling now,” said her mother. “The night is far too lovely for that.” It was fine October weather, dry and cool with a hint of smokiness on the Hudson Valley air. Clara breathed in deeply, remembering the awful Washington summer she’d lived through. It was good to be home in Albany for a week. She and Pauline had stopped in New York, collecting Mary Hall as they continued north. Tonight the party of Harrises and Rathbones — Uncle Hamilton, Emeline, Joel, and Sarah — was smaller than it would have been a year ago, but as it proceeded from Tweddle Hall to Elk Street, passing en route a barracks and a new hospital, its members tried to act as if these were old, normal times.

Waiting in the Rathbones’ dining room was a table piled with cake and Roman punch. Mary Hall, who cherished any new story about the leader of the Union, was eager to know if this
was the sort of party fare Mrs. Lincoln served at the White House. The cake, said Pauline, speaking before her stepdaughter could,
was
similar to what Prince Napoleon had been given in August. That this knowledge was less than firsthand, that it had been communicated to her by Clara, the only member of the Harris family invited to the state dinner, was left unsaid. Clara herself went on to describe the affair, choosing details Mary would enjoy (the prince’s crimson sash, Mrs. Lincoln’s entry on his arm) and avoiding her own essential memory, which was that she hadn’t enjoyed the evening at all. Much of the conversation had been in French, a point of pride with Mrs. Lincoln, and beyond what Clara had taught herself on the window seat in her father’s house. And while the prince may have reviewed the Union army and inspected some camps, many of the legislators at the party had grumbled that he was here merely for the sport of seeing the New World’s rustics knock one another’s brains out. Looking past the back lawn of the White House at the unfinished Washington Monument (as hopeless a sight as the unfinished dome over the Capitol), Clara had felt futile and incomplete. She danced with some frail young men who had yet to join the army, but after hearing some matchmaking chatter from the old ladies, she decided to sit the next ones out, which succeeded only in angering her toward those who assumed she was already a spinster. All this endured to protect a secret she wanted to shout from the bandstand!

By the morning after the visit, the administration’s critics were already complaining about its cost — the injustice of which criticism Clara would hear about from Mrs. Lincoln for weeks, during afternoons in the Red Room.

“It was terribly hot that night,” added Pauline, safely enough, to Clara’s narrative.

“Why don’t you spend more time up here?” asked Emeline.

“Yes, we miss you and the girls,” said Uncle Hamilton.

“Oh, there’s far too much we’d miss,” Pauline insisted.

“Mother is right,” said Clara. “Just the other week we got to see beautiful Mrs. Greenhow dragged off to the Capitol Hill prison as a Confederate spy.”

“What news is there of Henry?” asked Joel.

Before Pauline could preempt this subject, too, Clara’s hand dove into her purse for a letter. “Still at the fort,” she said, rushing to extract the paper from its envelope. “Would you like to hear what he has to say?”

“Of course,” said Uncle Hamilton. “Give us a recitation, my dear.”