Henry and Clara (2 page)

He spurs the horse again, cursing the animal, though it isn’t her fault. She’s racing down Fourth to Indiana as fast as she can go. She is as scared as he, baffled about being spurred with one boot, frightened by the smell of blood that clings to her rider. It
isn’t the Ape’s blood, of course. The one little ball from the derringer went too perfectly into his head to make a mess. The blood belongs to the other fellow, the one who should have been Grant. He hadn’t known until ten minutes ago, when Johnny Buckingham, reading the
Star
in the ticket booth, let him in as the third act was on. “Is the general with him?” he’d asked. “Naw,” said Johnny, “the paper says he was supposed to be, but it’s just some major and his girl.”

It was the only thing amiss, if you didn’t count forgetting about the stage. He’d made his way down the dress circle and caught a distant glimpse of Lincoln, leaning forward and grinning his ape’s grin over the line Harry Hawk was hamming for dear life. The sight so sickened him, made him so wild with purpose, he’d only wished he could shoot him full in the face instead of from behind.

But how everything else cooperated! He reached the passageway to the box, and his luck astonished him: the white chair, empty. The fat patrolman who should have been in it had gone off to watch the play or get a drink at Taltavul’s. So he slipped in and jammed the door with the pine board he’d planted there in the afternoon. From that moment on — still less than five minutes ago — absolutely nothing could have stopped him. Could anyone deny that fate had wanted him to do it? Let the preachers spend tomorrow writing their Easter sermons and looking for another explanation.

“Freedom.” That’s what he thinks he said to the major when he thrust the knife into him. What brought the word to mind, he doesn’t know. A thought of this mute statue — for that’s what they call it — catching the moonlight atop the Capitol? As the horse races over the south grounds, he gives the dome a backward glance. Its marble looks like the bone of a giant skull. The Ape, whose own skull now is surely shattered, had moved heaven and earth to get it finished in spite of the war. Well, now they can lay his body out beneath it, and all the ladies, even the secesh ones who love a good cry, can pass by, snuffling into their silk handkerchiefs. His own girls, Ella and Lucy, would love it, poor things, but they’ll be too afraid to show their faces after the newspapers reach the breakfast tables.

A mile and a half to go. Will he have to kill the sentry at the bridge? He guesses that he won’t. Lincoln himself has abetted his escape — lifting the ban on travel between Washington and the Confederacy. One week after Lee had given up! Did the Ape think everyone would forget and forgive so soon? Virginia was still full of men whose blood boiled in their breasts, and they would welcome John Wilkes Booth as a hero, once he reached them and safety.

He might not have to kill the sentry, but had he killed the major? His blood, which the horse can smell, had sprung forth like a fountain. Had he bled to death by now? If there was a doctor in the house, was he still trying to dislodge the pine board to get through the door to the box? No matter. The Metropolitan Police’s night scrivener could draw up two murder indictments instead of one. What difference did it make after a half million dead on both sides? Let the major’s girl mourn for him.

She wasn’t a girl, actually. He’d gotten a good look at her through the peephole, and even in the box’s shadowy light he could tell she was thirty. Had she been waiting for the major through four years of war? Had he at last come home to her, only to die amidst the cushioned sofas and flowered wallpaper of box number 8? She’d seemed bored with the play, wasn’t even looking at the stage, was looking across the way instead, at the empty box on the other side of the theatre, as if she were disappointed no one was in it to watch her and the major lap up the limelight with the Ape and his consort.

He, too, had wanted the other balcony occupied: he would have liked an audience. By now everyone knew who’d done it, but they hadn’t
seen
him do it. He wishes someone had been watching as he went through the last door, a moment too soon, and stood there, looking at the back of the Ape’s hairy skull, waiting a last ten seconds for the cue he’d picked for himself, the line that would leave just Hawk onstage and fill the house with laughter, enough to muffle the pistol’s crack and give him a precious, confused instant more to make it over the railing and onto the stage.

Pennsylvania Avenue, at last. Straight on from here to Eleventh Street and the bridge. His leg is aflame, and he wants to cry
out into the night at the injustice of it all. He curses his fall, and. wishes he could somehow have been hoisted into the flies, set free from the theatre like an angel, and spared this pain that is cutting him in two.

Until his foot hit the stage, it had gone so perfectly. He’d heard the line,
Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap
, and with it the Ape laughed his last. The ball went into his brain. He dropped the pistol as if it were no more than some spent taper he’d used to light a fireplace. But then the major was on him. The fellow had been so inert, he was surprised to see him come to life at all. But he’d been ready for this halfhearted attempt at stopping him, and he plunged the knife into him, the knife he’d been ready to use on the policeman, and which he’ll use on the sentry a minute from now if he has to. The blood came so fast, a shower of it everywhere. Even now he’s not sure where the dagger entered. He could hear the moaning as he made his leap and rushed toward the wings, staggering past the callboy and Miss Keene, made up like an ancient procuress, twenty years too old for what she was playing. He’d wanted to douse the gaslights but couldn’t find the wheel, and there was no time to search for it. The major was shouting
Stop that man!
and the audience beginning to pick up his cry. He made it to the alley with no time to spare, kicking the nigger who held his horse and racing it away down Baptist Alley.

Eleventh Street. Through the navy yard’s stretches of timber, all the hulls and masts being hewn for engagements that now won’t be fought. Finally he sees the bridge. Giddy with pain, he’s whistling “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” There it is, the river he will cross. He sees its water catch the moonlight, and remembers the last word he heard as he ran out the stage door and into the alley.
Water!
someone had screamed in a high voice, a voice he knows must be beautiful when it isn’t stretched by panic.
Water!
It was the major’s girl, he realized. Who was she? As he looks for the sentry box, he wonders: Would her major recover, or had he died in her arms? Had John Wilkes Booth destroyed her evening or her life?

“A
ND TOMORROW
I shall be forty-three years old,” whispered Ira Harris while writing down the date, May 30, 1845. As he sat alone at his desk, it was not the rapid advance of years that prompted his disbelief; it was rather his youthfulness, his being too young to be a widower left with four motherless children, as he had been for the past two weeks.

The Irish mouse of a parlor maid had kept the Argand lamps so funereally low these last twelve days that it was doubly hard for him to perform the task for which he’d set aside this night: answering the notes of condolence that started coming the morning after Louisa passed away. There, on her last year’s birthday present to him, the tin tray with its painted picture of Cortland apples growing in their orchard outside, lay all the sympathetic communications he must attend to. He rose to turn up the flame in the bronze sconces over the mantel. He’d finally bought them last Christmas to replace the pewter ones about which his wife would always jokingly complain. So many letters; a tribute to Louisa’s sweet nature, to be sure, but also to his own increasing prominence. Amidst all those from neighbors and friends were short, solemn expressions from his new colleagues in the state assembly, and one from the governor himself. But none had surprised him more than the letter from Pauline Rathbone, widow of the just-deceased Albany mayor. Though Mr. Rathbone had left office four years ago, the stationery still bore the mayor’s seal.

May 23, 1845

Beneath the signature there was a tiny, parenthetical “Pauline” — perhaps in apology for the pompous mayoral paper, or in bafflement at her own new widowhood. Harris could recall the tears in her eyes as she stood below the steps outside the church two weeks ago, her hands on the shoulders of her seven-year-old son, Henry. He’d gone past them, holding his daughter Clara’s hand and never imagining, sick though she was, that his own dear wife would be in a coffin just days later. Mrs. Rathbone’s expression had touched his heart, and he could remember nodding to her. But what stayed with him more vividly was having to tug at young Clara, who could not stop staring at the stiff, noble face of Mrs. Rathbone’s young son as he watched his father’s coffin being hoisted onto the funeral wagon.

Among his four children, ten-year-old Clara was Ira Harris’s darling, and on July 22, while sitting on a hard bench in Schenectady’s Reformed Dutch Church and listening to the venerable Reverend Sweetman, he diverted himself with the thought of how yesterday afternoon she had informed her younger brother that “Father is going to school tomorrow.”

What she meant, of course, was that as a loyal member of the class of 1824, Ira Harris would be going from Albany to Schenectady to attend the semicentennial celebrations for Union College. It would be the biggest gathering the city had ever seen,
and up until the time Louisa became ill, he had been in the thick of the planning for it. How odd that at this moment he should be sitting not by her but by Pauline Rathbone, a woman whose husband he had never really gotten to know, not even when they’d served together on the church’s board of trustees. After their simultaneous losses and her initial letter of condolence, Mrs. Rathbone had continued responding to his notes of thanks, drawing him into a long volley of reciprocated courtesies. Jared Rathbone had not been a Union man, but last week it struck Ira Harris as being seemly to invite the Albany mayor’s widow to the college’s festivities, since he would be without his own Louisa and since most of the celebrations would be open to the ladies. (This had been decided after great debate within the semicentennial committees, and with the reluctant progressivism that was becoming his political hallmark, Ira Harris had voted to invite the fair sex.)