Henry and Clara (22 page)
Authors: Thomas Mallon
Senator Harris rose and addressed his last remarks to Mrs. Helm. “Madam, my one son is fighting for his country, but if I had twenty sons, they should all be fighting rebels.”
Clara was desperate to put an end to this, to explain to everyone that her papa was speaking out of despair (and drink), not with the sort of rabid pleasure he was providing Dan Sickles. But it was too late. Little Sister was on her feet, too. “And if I had twenty sons, Senator Harris, they should all be opposing yours.” Her pretty form strutted out of the room, and Sickles watched it through the bottom of his tumbler, which he emptied in a final gulp.
“Papa, we have overstayed our welcome,” said Clara, going to his side as Mrs. Lincoln rose to follow her sister. They crossed each other’s path as the rest of the guests murmured about getting up to go, and locked eyes for a second, in which time Clara realized that the First Lady, whose intuitions sometimes cut, like a lighthouse beam, through the great fog of her griefs and rages and enthusiasms, understood exactly what had come over Senator Harris and had already forgiven him.
Out under the portico Clara tried to rescue her father from Sickles’s noisy congratulations, which ended only when the general declared he would give Mr. Lincoln a piece of his mind right now. He stumped back into the Mansion, determined to go up to the President’s room.
“And I hope the President gives him smallpox in return,” said Clara, nudging her father down the steps toward home. “Oh, Papa, how could you!” The senator was quiet, confused and ashamed, and as the two of them made their way back to Fifteenth and H, Clara patted his hand and calmed down, and thought of how she was every bit as sick of this war as he. She couldn’t stop replaying the evening’s fiasco in her head, but when she was up in her room, having delivered Papa to Pauline’s avid questions, she found one shred of comfort. In shouting at Little Sister, Ira Harris had laid claim to just one son, Will: in his growing anguish, he had dropped the pretense, generously maintained for years, that Henry counted as another.
15th & H Streets
Washington
Sat., March 19, 1864
My dearest Henry,
The city has at last gotten to host its fair for the Sanitary Commission, so now I shall be able to reciprocate the excited accounts Mary is still sending of New York’s. These gaudy celebrations seem a strange way to raise money to prevent plague and dysentery among all of you who have already borne more than you ever should have had to; but can one deny their effectiveness? “A beneficent blend of Baghdad and Barnum,” the President whispered as we entered the Patent Building last night. In fact, the hall was bannered and bedecked and stuffed with more goods, for direct sale and competitive bidding, than any bazaar one could imagine upon the Euphrates. Beneath the clouds of bunting, a hundred booths enticed the crush of people with cakes and saddles and mufflers and bonnets and silver buckles and leather bindings — which a buyer could use to hold an autographed manuscript by Mr. Longfellow, or one by Mr. Lincoln himself, should the purchaser persist in his circuit of the booths and make a sufficiently generous offer for them as well.
There were even a few forms of gaming (the raffle tickets marked for some deserving soul in a hospital or camp), and the war has so relaxed Papa’s Baptist soul that he offered no objection. What
wasn’t
there to see? A puppet show, if that was one’s liking; or an Iroquois war dance, if one preferred.
I came away with a lovely silk foulard for you, something
I shall keep hung in plain sight here in my room, so that I may picture you wearing it — along with myself on your arm — at the first party of
peacetime
, a word I would like to festoon with more homages than a mere underlining. I missed my chance at one novel item I considered acquiring for zealous Will: a pair of socks with the rebels’ flag knitted onto the soles. By the time I’d decided to make the purchase I saw that dear old Benjamin Brown French had bought them up — with the intention, he told me, of giving them to Mr. Lincoln.
Our poor President would have been more cheered, I thought, by a kiss from one of the pretty girls selling them (fifty cents for a small buss on the cheek) at a stall toward the front of the hall. But Madame President was with him, and you can be assured that she permitted no momentary rival to get near, whatever the nobility of the cause. Little Lina, who grows pretty enough to have attracted a long line of commercial suitors, was forbidden to sell any kisses by your mother, who was not in attendance. (During the final days of the fair’s preparation, she quarreled — mightily, I am told — with the bossy Mrs. Brookfield, one of the committee’s principal dynamos, and so last night she withheld her presence.)
Aside from Papa and myself and Mrs. Lincoln, the President’s party included General Oglesby and Commodore Montgomery and, you may believe it or not, Dan Sickles. The Christmastime contretemps has been, it seems, all patched up. Cousin Emilie is long since gone, and Mad Dan and Mrs. Lincoln were positively flirtatious with each other last night. I’m sure she would have purchased the flag-embroidered socks as a present for him — perfect for stomping out rebels — had not Mr. French gotten to them first (and if there weren’t the inconvenient matter of having to fit one of them over the general’s wooden leg).
My own moods and likings are — as you have reason to know — more constant than Mrs. Lincoln’s, and I
cannot
permit myself to abide Dan Sickles, not since that silly, firebreathing night in the Blue Room. He made a ferocious speech last night, completely out of keeping with Mr. Lincoln’s kind and courtly one. After claiming never to have studied the art of
paying compliments to women, the President devoted all of his brief remarks to praising what women have done to help the war effort. I do hope all the Harris and Rathbone men of my acquaintance will take note of this — not that I have contributed overmuch to my sex’s labors. For the last weeks Amanda and Louise have baked and knit themselves into an exhausted trance, whereas I have found it hard even to make my twice-weekly visits to the hospital. When I do go, I flee early, God forgive me, glad to be back home in my room with my novel, or down in the study talking politics with Papa. You have heard — perhaps you haven’t — that Mr. Chase has taken himself out of contention for the presidency. His dear daughter will have to forgo her fond hopes of residing in the White House, and be content with mere visits there. Perhaps the disappointment, or at least the four years’ delay, will at last make her turn her attentions to Sprague. She is the only young wife I know who still concentrates all her mind and emotions upon being a daughter.
Oh, to be no longer a daughter myself! I shall be
thirty
this September, too old to be only the apple of my papa’s eye. I long to be, first and foremost and forever,
your wife
. I am not yet too old for that, am I? I may
be
the apple of Papa’s eye, but to my own I am more and more a wrinkled, stewed one, stuck in a jar upon a shelf, stored for the winter and likely to be forgotten when that season finally arrives. If I had more goodness and less vanity, I could wrap myself up like one of the sour and serious nurses (just the way Miss Dix prefers them) who were everywhere at the fair, keeping one stern eye upon the rafflers and the other on the kissing booth.
I myself so lack for excitement — other than the constant rumors of battlefield catastrophe and triumph, which fill the streets each afternoon and our parlor every night — that I wished for
three
eyes at the fair, so that I might take in its every single sight, might make my eyeballs like the plates of a Daguerreotype, retaining each gay image I saw for the hours I spend alone in my room each night.
Talking of photographs: I enclose my new
carte de visite
, whose picture was taken at Gardner’s the other month. I look
like an old tsarina engraved on a coin. You shall want to hide this item at the bottom of your mess kit, lest your comrades think you are doting upon a picture of your mama instead of your sweetheart. (You will write back and tell me that I am really just fishing for compliments. I
am;
and I expect your next letter to overflow with passionate, reassuring ones.) As the picture was being taken, I could hear people tramping through Gardner’s gallery, just beyond the wall of his studio. All of the Gettysburg pictures are yet exhibited; their horror still compels the quiet crowds who come to see them. Amanda and Louise — and Mary, on a visit — twice made tearful visits to them. I simply cannot bear them, and as I passed through the exhibit on my way to the sitter’s chair, I shut my eyes and hummed a tune from Beaumarchais.
Who will end it, Henry? Who will bring you home to me? All hopes — at least here — now reside in the person of Grant, whom I have
seen
, you will be surprised to know. A week ago Tuesday, he stunned everyone in the East Room, just turned up, suddenly, at 9:30, in the middle of a reception — like, everyone said, an angel — one more avenging than merciful, they hoped. He was not to be presented with his lieutenant general’s commission until the following morning, but Mr. Lincoln strode over to greet him with a step so fast and firm it might have riven the carpet in two. The crowd fell back and the two of them stood before the fire, alone, conferring like Priam and Hector.
Will it be Grant who saves us? Who ends this war and brings you back safe and whole? If he does, he will come to our wedding and have the first dance with your bride — your loving, faithful
Clara
As she sealed the letter, she could hear below her the last sounds of the servants cleaning in the kitchen. The soft singing of the youngest, Myrtle, mixed with the sound of the skillets being hung up, their iron bottoms ringing like solemn bells as they came to rest against the walls of this Washington house, far
from the Rathbone foundry where they had been cast years ago. Clara wasn’t sure she would ever get used to having Negro servants instead of the Irish ones who had always come and gone from the house in Albany, but tonight Myrtle’s voice seemed as soothing as a lullaby.
It was late, and Clara was growing tired, too tired, she decided, to write another letter. She had meant to send one to Howard, who had been with them for the last three weeks, right until this morning, insisting that his lungs and heart were good and that the New York posting the Marines were sending him to, six months behind a desk in an office at the Battery, was truly dictated by the needs of the corps and not his health. It had been lovely to have him in the house, making his jokes at the supper table, telling the girls his traveler’s tales like an American Othello, and later, in the parlor, impressing Papa’s colleagues with sensible talk of the blockade’s effect on the walled-in Confederates. Once or twice he had taken her out, and remained cheerfully true to his promise not to provoke her on the subject of Henry. He offered no brief against the engagement, which by now, here and in Albany, was an open family secret. She knew he was not resigned to it, but he had the good nature and self-control not to let it ruin the evening they spent attending the theater and dining at the National. That same sunniness, that same command of himself, made him wonderful company, even gave her a moment — but no more than that — when his simple normality, the reliability of his moods and expression, seemed something she might wish to have permanently. Walking on Howard’s arm was like strolling through an open meadow on a clear night, whereas being out with Henry meant dodging the meteor shower of his moods. Which was why, of course, in her letter to him, she had not mentioned Howard’s presence at the fair. There was no telling what might excite his jealousy.
Putting on her thin nightgown — here it was only March 19 and already like summer in Washington — she allowed herself to imagine Howard, and the charms of his equanimity. He could not have written the letters tied up in mauve ribbon and lying on her night table. If he, instead of Henry, were with the Twelfth, and writing her from all the places the regiment had fought its
way through in the past fifteen months — Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Bristoe, and beyond — the stack would contain good-humored dismissals of all the hardships and fears he was enduring. As it was, coming from Henry’s pen, they were full of exciting alternations: exhilaration by gunfire one week, a fearful reappraisal of that same exhilaration the next, followed by a heart-rending denunciation of the war itself, a plague on both the houses fighting it. Howard’s letters would have been soothing and soft, so soft she would probably have slept with them under her pillow. But Henry’s, there on the night table, seemed to glow, like foxfire in a forest.
The conflict within him, between disdain for the war and excitement in battle, was as thrilling to track as the war itself. Before Fredericksburg, as he waited for the pontoon bridges to arrive, the ones that would take him across the Rappahannock in full screaming charge, he wrote of the banging in his veins, from sheer anticipation — even as he cursed his susceptibility to the war’s drums. “The old men who have sent us here are too cowardly and weak to pound those drums themselves, but once I hear them, I forget who hung them round the necks of the innocent boys hitting them with their sticks; my body wants only to do their bidding, like a mad Apache.” But after the bridge had been crossed and the battle joined and his own killing was done (he believed he had shot two men), the bottom would fall out of his spirit; his letter would turn tender as a girl’s, as he devoted two pages, their handwriting shaky with grief, to the tale of a young boy from a Connecticut tobacco farm who had died in his arms after being shot through the eye. Seven months after that, when the draft wasn’t filling the army as it should, he sent her angry denunciations of whole cities, full of fury that any young man might be spared the old men’s war by the old men’s money. “We learn that Providence manages to send not one man into the army; thanks to the tax money she spends on commutation.” That word, “commutation,” had become the eighth deadly sin, a hot spice upon his tongue, something he spit out and ground into his letters every chance he got.