Henry and Clara (26 page)

At ten o’clock the four of them could hardly squeeze into one carriage for the ride to the ball. Clara’s gown billowed over Henry and Papa, and when one of Pauline’s feathers found its way into Senator Harris’s mouth, everyone actually succeeded in laughing together. Henry, pointing to the bunting that covered the patent office, wondered “how much commutation money this party would be eating up,” but Clara decided his words were offered more in a spirit of teasing than as serious inquiry about the twenty million dollars he now knew the provost marshal had collected from men buying their way out of military service.

“Now, Henry,” said Ira Harris, for once feeling confident his rejoinder wouldn’t bring on a squabble, “I’ve got it on good authority — which is to say my daughter — that they’ve sold four thousand tickets at ten dollars apiece, and that all of it will go to the families of soldiers.”

Just before it parked, the carriage hit a bump, bouncing the occupants and their finery. When Pauline settled back down, the same purple feather reentered her husband’s mouth. The coachman, soon at the door with an apology, his arm out for the ladies, smiled at the sight of what he took to be a happy family.

“Thank you, young man,” shouted Senator Harris, clapping the boy’s back and pressing a half dollar into his hand. “Isn’t it a fine night?” Along with the bunting, the building was also hung with huge portraits of the President and Vice President, and great torches sent up plumes of smoke that dissipated like
the tops of the Ionic columns. Climbing the steps, Clara could hear an army band, and her heart beat faster. Henry had her left arm, and she gave her right one to her papa, who all week had vented optimism over the military situation. Even old Mr. Weed had sent the President a telegram conveying admiration for Saturday’s inaugural address. “The nation’s wounds
will
be bound up,” said Harris as he marveled over the militarv might assembled here. Farragut, Hooker, Banks, and Halleck, all in one room. And to think that they would soon be going home to their barracks!

Clara’s optimism surpassed her father’s. She looked around the vast hall, nearly three hundred feet from end to end, and decided she and Henry had no need of the West and its open spaces. The two of them would be fine right here in this city. All the mountain peaks and Indian chiefs in the territories could not compete with the music, plumage, and power in this room. She squeezed Henry’s hand just before the army band quit in mid-march, took a breath, and struck up “Hail to the Chief.” The roar that greeted Mr. Lincoln, arriving arm in arm with Speaker Colfax, could have cleared the rebels from their last Virginia strongholds, she thought. She pulled Henry along, to the front edge of their side of the crowd, which was parting to make room for the President as if he were Moses himself. Mrs. Lincoln was on the arm of Senator Sumner, passing right by Clara, smiling into her eyes without a hint of recognition. She was on that stratum of trance-like excitement Clara had witnessed a few times before; her eyes were as bright and expressionless as the Tiffany seed pearls at her neck. “Two thousand dollars,” Clara said to Pauline over the din, hoping this bit of gossip would create some feminine solidarity between them. Her goodwill extended all the way to her stepmother tonight, but Pauline reciprocated with only a small clucking sound.

The First Couple took their places on a large blue and gold sofa, the applause and huzzahs hardly subsiding as the dais filled up with members of the Cabinet. Senator Harris, his tall form on tiptoe, managed to make Mr. Seward see a wave of his hand before Pauline could retract it with a tug on his coattail. He
smiled at her, misty-eyed with fellowship and craving a drink. Clara dispatched Henry to get him one.

“A poor spectacle for a republican government,” Pauline shouted into his ear, pointing to the dais and its distinct air of a court around a throne, with Madame President its unchallenged queen.

“Rejoice!” Senator Harris shouted back. “Two years ago this room was a hospital full of dying soldiers. Let yourself feel our triumph. It’s a good one.” He was back up on tiptoe, waving to Gideon Welles with such a sweeping arc of his big hand that he accidentally bashed the headdress of Mrs. Edwin Morgan, who was squeezed up against him.

The crowding at ten o’clock was nothing compared to what happened with midnight’s arrival. Supper was brought in as another wave of ticket holders and gatecrashers rushed into the hall. The scramble toward the platters of tarts and oysters and terrapin was frightening, like a reenactment of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. The President had left an hour before, but those still on the dais risked being trampled with everyone else. The glass cases lining the walls, housing hundreds of patented inventions from the telegraph to the orange squeezer, threatened to shatter one by one, but whenever the sound of smashing glass came, it turned out to be a dish or a goblet. More people were standing on the long tables than were seated at them, and the food was grabbed with such abandon that more of it wound up on the guests’ skirts and shoes than in their mouths. When it became clear that everyone was merely being mauled, and that no one was likely to suffer broken bones or suffocation, the crowd settled into a kind of pleasant mass hysteria.

“What would old Mr. Osborne say?” Clara shouted up to her father, who, like Senator Morgan, was standing on a chair to survey the proceedings.

“ ‘It’s like Andy Jackson’s first day in the White House!’ ” father and daughter yelled together, mimicking deaf old Mr. Osborne’s characterization of every family and civic commotion he’d witnessed in Albany for the last thirty-five years.

“They say fifteen thousand came through the Mansion on Saturday,” shouted Ira Harris.

“And I heard how they left it, too,” said Henry. “With big holes in the carpets and curtains.”

A naval officer six feet away brought his sword down upon a cream cake, sending salvos of filling in all directions and exciting happy shrieks from the ladies. Mrs. Morgan scooped some cream from her husband’s shirt cuff and took an approving taste while he shouted to Senator Harris atop the next chair, “The President and Sumner seemed to be getting on well tonight.”

“All
manner
of thing shall soon be well,” said Harris, clinking his empty glass against his colleague’s half-full one.

“Henry,” said Clara, “find more spirits for Papa.”

This was easier said than done, but Senator Harris was already swaying from what he’d had.

“Look!” cried Clara, nudging Henry. “Robert Lincoln’s over there.”

“Looking well rested, too.”

“Indeed,” said Pauline. “Worn out from three whole months with General Grant at City Point.”

“Who’s he with?” asked Clara. “Mary Harlan? Oh, look, they’re trying to dance.” A clutch of young people stood by the Prince of Rails and his partner, laughing at their attempt to move amidst the crush.

“I wish there
were
room to dance,” said Clara, slipping her arm through Henry’s.

“If there were,” said Mrs. Morgan, licking a finger, “you still wouldn’t see Kate Chase out there.”

“Why not?” asked Pauline.

“Expecting.”

“To new life!” cried Senator Harris, still atop his chair and raising his long-since-drained glass.

“To your own grandchildren!” cried Clara. “Before another Congress is elected!”

“Clara Harris,” said Mrs. Morgan, “what are you trying to say?”

“Ask my papa.”

“Senator?” said Mrs. Morgan.

Pauline looked up with an imploring glare, hoping to forestall him, but his mood was too happy, his desire to please his Clara
too strong. There was no stopping the marriage now that peace was here. Clara would redeem his four-year-old pledge the moment General Lee handed Grant his sword, so why wait for the
Star
to announce the news? Why not let it out tonight and bless it with some luck from this grand occasion?

“Yes!” boomed Ira Harris, as if he were twenty years younger and standing on a tree stump in his first campaign for the state assembly. “My son will soon be my son-in-
law
. Henry and my Clara intend to be married.”

“Oh, how marvelous!” cried Mrs. Morgan, simultaneously clapping her hands and casting her own husband a look of sarcastic disbelief. “How extraordinary!”

The wonderful cat was out of its bag, at last and forever, just as Clara had hoped, thanks to her papa’s good mood and empty stomach. She had seen Mrs. Morgan’s glance, but she wasn’t going to let it spoil her triumph.

“Isn’t that Senator Hale’s daughter?” asked Pauline, bitterly attempting to change the subject.

“Yes, it is,” said Clara. “They say she’s in love with Edwin Booth’s brother. And look, Henry, there’s little Fanny Seward standing next to Admiral Farragut. I must meet him.” Getting to the admiral required squeezing through half a dozen couples, but Clara seemed to float over them on her own happiness. Left beside Pauline, Henry watched his fiancée make her way through, the whole vast hall now
her
Eagle Tavern, her own hour finally come round.

“E
VENTUALLY
it became apparent that some mysterious form of disease had assailed him, with which medical skill found it hard to grapple; though there were intervals in the progress of his malady, when strong hopes were indulged that it had been, or would soon be, permanently arrested.” Just when, Clara wondered, had it become “apparent”? Reverend Sprague, preaching Howard Rathbone’s funeral sermon in Albany’s Second Presbyterian Church, made it sound as if everyone had known his condition and been anxiously discussing it for months. She had heard nothing until ten days ago, when word reached Washington that he lay dying in the New York Hospital after collapsing in the street. He had been trying to reach the railroad station, hoping to go home to Kenwood for what he surely knew was his last “shore leave.”

He died on Wednesday at the age of twenty-nine. Now, Saturday, April 1, 1865, all the Rathbones and Harrises save Will stood on the tall grass of the Rural Cemetery, having come in six different carriages over the plank road from Albany to Loudonville. Clara was aware of being somewhere between the skeletons of Henry’s father and her own real mother. At the top of this gentle slope, she could see Mayor Rathbone’s sarcophagus, a row of sculpted rosettes beneath its stone lid, and she knew she could still find her way through the cemetery’s oaks and pines toward the simpler grave into which Louisa Tubbs Harris had been placed the same week, twenty years ago.

For Howard, said John Finley Rathbone in a quavering voice, they would erect a monument worthy of his soaring, generous spirit. He had already talked to the Italian man who would
carve the obelisk, and told him just what Howard wanted inscribed on the plinth, John 3:16. It was typical of Howard, wonderfully typical — offering comfort to those who approached the stone, not memorializing any virtue or accomplishment in his own short life. Hamilton Harris, shaken by the sight of Emeline Rathbone, now deprived of both husband and son, nervously tried to distract himself by asking Pauline if she knew where in the cemetery the Dictator had bought his large plot. Clara patted his hand, and he resumed listening to the minister’s muttering.

She herself was thinking back a week and a half, to the night before Mrs. Lincoln accompanied the President to Grant’s camp at City Point. She’d been upstairs with the First Lady and Mrs. Keckley when old Edward brought in Louise, who had run across Lafayette Square to tell her there was bad news from New York. Howard was “poorly,” she said; Clara had to shake her, right in front of Mrs. Lincoln, to get the real news. It was a cancerous stomach, what it had probably been for years, and, no, he wouldn’t recover.

Two days later she and Henry stood before the huge stone hospital on lower Broadway, a terrible-looking place out of a Wilkie Collins novel; she could imagine the grave robbers pulling up to it in the middle of the night with corpses for the researchers. The north building? a gatekeeper had inquired of them, assuming they were there to see a wounded soldier. No, it was the main building they needed, for that’s where Howard was, amidst the charity patients and merchant seamen, for the moment too weak and hopeless to be moved. They went down the gaslit corridor, freezing from the air that poured through open windows at each end, cross ventilation trying to keep down the ship-fever germs that Irish patients carried into the country with them.

“One at a time, please,” the nurse had said after telling Howard they were there. “He asked that it be that way.”

Clara went in first. Howard was gaunt, in terrible pain, coughing into a filthy cloth, his big, sudden smile just camouflage for a wince. He took her hand. “I saw your announcement.”

“Yes,” she answered, gently rubbing his wrist with her thumb. “Mother insisted on its being in the papers everywhere, here and Albany and Washington. Determined to salvage social prestige from the ‘disaster.’ ”

“How is Henry?” he asked.

“Fine,” she whispered, fussing with the blanket. “Getting ready to demobilize the Union army from a desk in Washington. Oh, Howard,” she said, prying the cloth from him and bringing his hand to her cheek. “Everything will soon be well. Can’t you be, too?”