Henry and Clara (21 page)

“You see?” said Ira Harris. “This is just what the President wanted. He’s got everyone from Horace Greeley to your friend Mary thinking we’ve won a splendid victory. She now puts me in her personal pantheon, along with Sumner and Beecher and the rest of them.”

Clara laughed. “Poor Papa. Everyone’s a radical now.”

“That’s the trouble,” the senator replied. “This is beyond what was intended. Officers are already grumbling that they didn’t go to this war to ‘free the niggers,’ certainly not before they’d subdued the South. You may even be hearing such sentiments
from Henry, if he can come down from whatever private exaltation he’s feeling.”

“Papa,” said Clara, “Henry is doing only what Mr. Lincoln is. He’s trying to turn a calamity into a victory, just a small personal one in his case. Would you rather, at the moment of truth, that he’d found himself cowardly?”

“Well, it’s a strange sort of alchemy, if you ask me. By him
and
the President.”

Clara did not want to argue. The truth was, she thought Mr. Lincoln wholly different from any of them. There he was, calmly unshackling slaves in the South and suspending habeas corpus in the North — feeling transcendent if not serene. He was remade, never again to be the man he had been eighteen months ago. It was the rest of them who were somehow unchanged, incapable of being anything but what they were. Mrs. Lincoln might be mad with grief over Willie, dead for seven months now, but not so distracted that she couldn’t each day find new slights to rail at. The war’s enormities weighed Papa down with sorrow, but his vision could not encompass any meaning it might finally hold. In the Senate his greatest energy and clarity came when arguing small matters of right and wrong, whether Mr. Stark had the credentials to be seated or Senator Bright the guilt requiring expulsion.

Now he broke the silence. “I’m afraid I have one piece of bad news, my darling, and I must tell it to you, since it isn’t likely to come by any other means. It concerns another of your old friends, Miss Bashford. Her husband, a lieutenant, died at Sharpsburg last week. Mr. Stanton manages to get some of the rebel newspapers, and while I waited in his office trying to get word of the Twelfth, I scanned one from Charleston. Quite by chance I noticed the name Edmund Lodge Baxter on their casualty list. I’m sure it is he. I haven’t known whether to tell you.”

“It’s good that you did, Papa.” Clara tucked Mary Hall’s letter into its envelope. “Poor Sybil,” she said, shaking her head. “Losing her husband and her slaves, all in the same week.” The joke was more in Henry’s line than her father’s, but from behind his desk Ira Harris managed a smile.

She leaned over to kiss him good night, and as she went upstairs to bed she realized that she, too, a year and a half into the war, was still what she was. Her mind was not on Sybil, or the soon to be liberated slaves, or the thousands of men whose blood soaked the Maryland soil. She was thinking only of Henry, of his bare chest and arms beneath the hot sun, walking amongst the dead, himself still alive, glistening, the blood still inside him, pumping.

T
HROUGHOUT
1863, Clara and her father became occasional members of Mrs. Lincoln’s Blue Room salon, evening gatherings of what the First Lady liked to call the
beau monde
, a shifting company of writers, politicians, and adventurers who came to talk about literature and stayed to gossip about everyone but themselves. Pauline Harris’s exclusion was unremarkable: few wives were ever in evidence. Clara realized that she herself was allowed to accompany her father because she was young enough not to be regarded by Mrs. Lincoln as feminine competition. If anything, the First Lady thought of her as a social protégée, someone perhaps witty and comely enough to deploy as a rival to Secretary Chase’s daughter, if the war ever ended and a full social life bloomed in the capital. As for Papa, he had a soothing effect on Mrs. Lincoln, and since the real point of these gatherings was to distract her from endless grief over Willie, that was reason enough for him to be here.

Her moods kept the congregants on edge, but her peculiar charm kept them coming back, or at least added to the pleasure of being near the most powerful President in the Republic’s history. Senator Sumner, an even more unlikely guest than Ira Harris, was always glad to further the radical cause by his presence in the Mansion, but in the Blue Room he seemed to forget his political self and take the evenings’ nervous froth as a tonic. Uncomfortable as they might be with each other in the Senate chamber, he and Ira Harris got on well here, united by a certain disdain for the less serious men who occupied a large number of the chairs. Nathaniel Willis, editor of a ladies’ magazine, was a fussy little mince, and Henry Wikoff, when he wasn’t spying for the English, was hardly more than a gigolo.

Tonight, three weeks before Christmas, Clara took a seat on the left of Emilie Helm, Mrs. Lincoln’s “Little Sister,” as she was always addressed. Mrs. Helm was much younger than the First Lady, and the solace she had been receiving, during an extended visit to the Mansion, was more motherly than anything else: her husband, a Confederate officer, had been killed at Chattanooga, leaving her with three children and a terrible burden of grief that Mary Todd Lincoln was eager to meld with her own. Mrs. Helm’s visit had raised eyebrows among the radicals, but Clara thought all the more of the President for clutching this pretty young woman to the family bosom. As it was, since her arrival she’d given more comfort than she’d received, steering the First Lady away from her spiritualist, as well as taking her mind off Tad’s recent illness and the President’s mild case of smallpox, which Mrs. Lincoln said would not permit him to come down and say hello this evening.

Clara was amused to see crazy Dan Sickles take the chair on Mrs. Helm’s right. Flushed with drink and not quite used to the wooden leg he’d acquired at Gettysburg, he ignored the particulars of Mrs. Lincoln’s introduction of her sister, but he didn’t let the young widow’s black dress keep him from making an appreciative survey of her form. Before he’d commanded Third Corps at Gettysburg (with such zest he nearly got all his men slaughtered), he had been famous as the congressman who murdered his wife’s lover — the major episode in a career whose eccentricities once included advocating New York City’s secession from the Union. He was, everyone agreed, an impossible man, and just as impossible to dislike: his loud arrival, as he thumped his way across the Blue Room’s thin carpet, had brightened up Senators Harris and Sumner.

Clara was amused by his inventory of Little Sister’s charms. Perverse as she knew it to be, she herself couldn’t look at the widow’s black dress without a certain envy, almost as much as she’d felt three Saturdays ago at the sight of Sarah Rathbone’s white satin dress when it came down the aisle of the Second Presbyterian Church in Albany. Sarah’s wedding to Frederick Townsend had taken place the same afternoon as Mr. Lincoln’s oratorical success at Gettysburg, and upon Clara’s return to
Washington, Mrs. Lincoln, who had been present at neither occasion (and had made sure she was absent from Kate Chase’s wedding on the twelfth), was eager for details of the dress. But Clara found it so hard to talk about someone else’s public badge of love that her description was less ample than it might have been.

Conversation, a word Mrs. Lincoln liked to give its French pronunciation, was tonight, as always, about everything but the war. An exception was sometimes made to discuss the incompetence of particular generals, but this evening the talk seemed to be staying on the degree to which Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb and the Prince and Princess of Wales, both couples newly married, might be enjoying happiness. If peace ever came, Mr. Willis wondered, might Mrs. Lincoln invite the Prince and Princess to the White House? It was a fawning inquiry, a chance for “Madame” to speak from the lofty heights she occupied, but she never got a chance to answer, because General Sickles interrupted. “Not likely, I should think. I can’t imagine them wanting to pass through the Celtic mobs of New York City after disembarking.” The summer’s draft riot, which had left good Republican families like Mary Hall’s shaking inside their houses, had been forgotten by no one here, including Ira Harris. “Imagine the reward presented to some soldiers who’d just survived Gettysburg,” Sickles continued, deliberately shifting his wooden leg. “ ‘Now that you’ve beaten back the rebels, please nip over to New York and put down the Irish in Gramercy Park!’ ” He was fairly roaring.

“A battalion of Henry’s regiment was there,” said Clara. “He wrote me about it.”

“And where is Henry now?” asked Mrs. Lincoln, hoping this new line of inquiry might keep Dan Sickles under control.

“In the winter camp at Rappahannock,” Clara replied.

“After a very, very long year,” said her father, shaking his head and murmuring the names of battles like an old priest telling beads: “Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville …” The worst fighting was yet to come, and Ira Harris wondered how long his own family would continue to be spared. As if the ordinary familial afflictions, the kind that came without war, weren’t
enough for human creatures to bear. Since Joel Rathbone’s sudden death in Paris in September, just two months before Sarah’s wedding, he’d had to offer Emeline all kinds of personal and practical comfort, from being with her to meet the body when it came off the ship to straightening out the enormous estate. He was as careworn as he ever hoped to be, and just an hour ago, while fixing his cravat, he’d told Pauline he prayed this would be the last Christmas of the war.

“And where did you say you came from, little lady?” shouted General Sickles, unsubdued, to Mrs. Helm.

“I didn’t say,” she replied, recoiling slightly from his breath. “But my sister, Mrs. Lincoln, may have explained to you the circumstances of my visit. Since my husband’s death, I have been trying to get to my mother in Lexington, Kentucky, but the war has prevented that. My daughter and I reached Fort Monroe but were prevented from going on from there. At that point Mr. Lincoln was kind enough to ask us here.”

A light went on inside General Sickles. This was the Little Sister whose presence in the Mansion he’d been hearing about. His admiring gaze narrowed into something else. “You were prevented from leaving Fort Monroe, I take it, because you wouldn’t swear an oath of allegiance to the United States?”

“My son Will spent some time at Fort Monroe,” said Ira Harris soothingly. “Early in the war. After that he was in Tennessee, and now he’s gone north to join General Burnside.”

Although he wished no discomfort for this woman or Mrs. Lincoln, he couldn’t deny a certain resentment toward Mrs. Helm’s presence here. It made this awful war look even more senseless than he was coming to think it. If family loyalties counted more than national ones, how important could the latter finally be? He wanted his own family together again. “My son has been a soldier for six years now,” he said. The occasional drinking he was doing in these long periods away from the Pearl Street Baptist Church was rendering him emotional, and the nearby log fire was heating his spirit into a sudden despair. “He used to be a gentle, temperate soul, my Will. But now he writes of rebels and Copperheads with fierce gusto.”

“Hear, hear,” said General Sickles. “Mrs. Helm, since you’re
just from the South, perhaps you can give Senator Harris some news of his old friend General Breckinridge.”

“I’ve not seen the general for some time,” Emilie Helm replied, “so I cannot give Senator Harris any news of his health.”

The thought of Mr. Buchanan’s Vice President, now a rebel general, flushed the already overheated Ira Harris with a mixture of nostalgia and anger. “Well, we have whipped the rebels at Chattanooga,” he said suddenly, his choice of words startling Clara, “and I hear, madame, that the scoundrels ran like rabbits.”

The room fell quiet except for Sickles’s laughter and the applauding thump of his wooden leg against the floor. He was delighted by his sober-sided colleague’s loss of control.

Mrs. Helm rose to the challenge. “It was the example, Senator Harris, that you set them at Bull Run and Manassas.” She was shaking, and Mrs. Lincoln was clearly angry with everyone. Clara watched with inert horror, even as she entertained the thought that if the President were here instead of sick upstairs, he would be amused.

“There are only three weeks until Christmas,” said Mrs. Lincoln, trying to change the subject. But Senator Harris wouldn’t let her, and Clara’s ears could not believe what they now heard him ask the First Lady: “Why isn’t Robert in the army? He is old enough and strong enough to serve his country. He should have gone to the front some time ago.”

“Papa!” said Clara, who saw Mrs. Lincoln go white and General Sickles happily bare his teeth. It was common talk that the President agreed Robert should be in a soldier’s tent instead of in Harvard Yard, but people generally sympathized with Mr. Lincoln’s problem: if his wife were to lose a second son, she would be completely ungovernable, and wasn’t he already burdened enough?

“Robert is making preparations now to enter the army, Senator Harris. He is not a shirker, as you seem to imply. He has been eager to go for a long time. If fault there be, it is mine. I have insisted that he should stay in college a little longer, as I think an educated man can serve his country with more intelligent purpose than an ignoramus.”