Henry and Clara (32 page)

Without pausing, she reached for another sheet of paper.

She feared losing the courage to mail both letters, so she hurried downstairs and put on her coat and went out to the box at the edge of the plank road. The boy would pick them up early in the morning. Crossing the lawn back to the house, she realized that she had quoted Mr. Lincoln to Henry: “the better
angels.” This was probably not a good idea, but either he wouldn’t catch it or any feelings it pricked would be overwhelmed by the rest of the letter’s urgency.

She could hear frost crunching beneath her feet. It made the only sound in the cold blackness, until she neared the front door and heard a scream. Her eyes darted to its origin, Louise’s room, where some candlelight flickered. She raced upstairs, throwing off her coat as she went. Mary Hall, candle in hand, had already arrived at Louise’s door and was asking what was the matter.

“The dress,” said Louise, who was sitting on her bed, shaking and trying to apologize.

“Be quiet,” said Clara.

“I couldn’t sleep, so I went back to work on the closets,” Louise rushed on. “I opened the box, thinking it was just one more that Mother had shipped up here.”

“And so it is,” said Clara, picking up the pink satin dress from where Louise had dropped it. “I don’t know why I meant to save it. It seemed important to, six months ago. It no longer does.” She took the gown and shook it, and the crusted blood flaked off it and fell to the floor like iron filings. Mary gasped, and Louise began to cry again. “Stop it,” said Clara, throwing the dress back into its carton. “I’ll dispose of this in the morning. I said stop it, Louise, and I mean it. You’ve seen blood before, and you’ll see it again. Now go back to bed, both of you. You’ll wake Mother.”

“M
AJOR
Henry Rathbone and Miss Clara Harris!”

Stepping into the French minister’s ballroom on the evening of February 9, 1866, Clara felt as many eyes upon her as she had sequins on her dress. Even the Marquise de Montholon, the minister’s wife, jeweled fleurs-de-lis all over her, the Order of Napoleon dangling from her bosom, was looking.

Clara knew exactly how a hundred conversations were proceeding. “Isn’t that the couple …” would be the question from one woman to another. “Yes, can you imagine the horror of it …” would come the response. “But you know,” would add the first — and here fans would go up to mouths, and voices would drop to whispers — “isn’t it peculiar that he was unable to …”

She kept smiling, moving down the line of hand-kissing men, and meeting the gaze of each of their wives, as Henry came stiffly behind her. When she got to the end, she decided, she would unclench her teeth and begin to enjoy herself. This was not, after all, just a White House reception hosted by Mr Johnson’s daughter, or another party at the Chase mansion on E Street; this was the greatest affair the city had seen since before the war, and she was going to delight in it as much as anyone. They owed it to her, all of them — Henry, Papa, Fate.

There were army officers, senators from both sides of the aisle and across the great divide within the Republican Party, berib-boned diplomats of every complexion, Kate Chase Sprague in white moire and a diamond tiara. All of those things were predictable, she thought, working her way down the receiving line, taking kisses, extending her hand, passing the huge vases of poinsettias and the swinging censers. What seemed odd was the reappearance of so many Southerners, older men and women
who had lived on in the District through the war without ever venturing forth to a party given by Mrs. Lincoln.

She reached the end of the line as the orchestra returned from a break. Henry spotted friends from the adjutant general’s office and headed across the marble floor in their direction, handing Clara over to old Gideon Welles, who professed his delight. “Though I’m afraid my legs have grown too stiff to dance,” said the navy secretary.

“Then we’ll just stand and have a look together,” Clara replied, patting his hand. “All these Southerners! What do you make of it?”

“It was the same at a party my wife gave, and at the last few receptions in the Mansion. They’re showing the flag. It has less to do with the last war’s being over than the one we’re engaged in now, with these radicals. A terrible business. We need all our troops. Where is your father, Clara?”

“Just back from Dr. Nott’s funeral in Schenectady.”

“How old was the man?”

“Ninety-two.”

“Good Lord,” said Welles, laughing. “I’ll see the twentieth century if I go on that long. You’ve made me feel younger than I have in months.”

“Then I’m glad I came out tonight.” She wished that a realization of Dr. Nott’s antiquity would make Papa feel younger, too, but the funeral had had the opposite effect. He’d arrived home the other night looking, at sixty-three, like an old man. Dr. Nott had been alive longer than the Republic, and his continuing presence had kept a part of all the Union men of his time feeling like boys, needful of instruction from the little wizard in the pulpit at the front of the college chapel. Now he was gone, and the years had suddenly tumbled down on Papa like a snowfall.

“You tell your father to come see me over the weekend. We need him back in the game immediately. The President needs him.”

“I shall do that first thing upon arriving home.”

Mr. Welles would need luck with Papa, who’d be an exasperating ally, trying to trim a moderate course, hoping to do what Mr. Lincoln would have wished, but still trying to curry favor
with Thad Stevens and the radicals. He needed someone to lay down the law to him, the way Mr. Weed used to years ago, but there wasn’t anybody like that now. Clara was sure he would be back in Albany in twelve months’ time, bewildered. For that matter, she suspected Mr. Welles would soon be home in Connecticut, editing his old newspaper.

But she would stay right here. She had had her way about the wedding date: July 11, 1867. It still seemed distant, but it was fixed, and she finally had an engagement ring on her hand. When the house was theirs and their lives their own, she would give her own parties, not so grand as this, but good enough to match Kate Chase Sprague’s. They would be a good investment of Henry’s money. If he could learn to hold his tongue, there might be a Senate seat in his own future. But that didn’t matter. When she truly had him, her ambitions would be fulfilled, for the first time since she’d unconsciously realized them, twenty years ago at the Delavan, at Papa and Pauline’s wedding breakfast.

She wished Mr. Welles would relinquish her. There was much she wanted to learn tonight, and she needed to get out on the floor. Where, she wondered, was Alice Hooper? She was always a good source of information; she, if anyone, could confirm the astonishing story Clara had heard the other day, that Kate Sprague was dallying with Ira Harris’s young rival, Conkling.

“So, Miss Harris, where are your papa and mama?” boomed a friendly, whiskey-laden voice coming up beside her. “Two of the best hosts I ever had. Your brother, too, though in somewhat less grand circumstances.”

“General Grant,” said Clara, actually curtsying, her heart thumping a bit. “Mrs. Grant.”

“Hello, dear,” said plump Julia Dent Grant, looking uncomfortable in her gown. “Go on, Ulys, take Miss Harris for a spin. I’ll inflict my company on Secretary Welles in the meantime.”

So Clara’s first waltz of the night turned out to be with General Grant himself. The other couples glided away from them, like ripples made by a brilliant stone that had been splashed onto the dance floor. Some even stopped to applaud.

Why such kindness from the general? she wondered. It was
probably Mrs. Grant, said to be mindful of how it had very nearly been she and her husband sharing the box at Ford’s; the general’s wife still insisted that Booth and three of his band had been across from her at lunch at Willard’s on the day of the assassination. Clara was grateful for the solicitude, but wished that Grant would favor Henry, across the room, with at least a handshake. That would put an end to the whispering once and for all.

“My wife,” said General Grant, pleasantly in his cups, “reminds me that there’s to be a wedding. When will it actually occur?”

“Shortly before you begin your run for the presidency, sir.”

He laughed, and twirled her a little faster, and as the night flowed on, she became his favorite. He came back to her three times, between her turns with a half-dozen other politicians — including Roscoe Conkling — and a small assortment of undersecretaries and army officers. At midnight, the general even escorted her to the supper table’s orderly arrangement of fruits and foie gras, whose fastidious ingestion was as different from what went on at Mr. Lincoln’s second inaugural as a carriage ride from a steeplechase. The dancing resumed after that, and Henry remained a distant presence, smoking a cigar with the men of the adjutant’s office, every so often getting one of them to hold it while he gave a spin to some ambassador’s daughter, dark girls mostly, wearing official-looking sashes. He would return to his colleagues as soon as the band hit the last note in its selection, as if he were trying to win a game of musical chairs. An hour went by before he even caught Clara’s eye, as she and General Williams, who had married Senator Douglas’s widow, cut a corner. Henry raised a champagne glass in ironic salute, as if to ask if she was happy now that she had her way.

The first cotillion wasn’t called until dawn, and for the first time all night she and Henry touched as dance partners. He twirled her with a harsh, fast grace, through one round of a complicated minuet. At breakfast she sat beside the son of the Danish minister, smiling, without a common language, watching some golden crumbs of toast get lost in his identically colored beard. It was seven in the morning before the party ended, the
women and men going off to do social and bureaucratic battle without bothering to change out of their finery. She had no calls to pay and didn’t set off with the ladies. She would have Henry walk her home. He could change uniforms at the house; meticulous as ever, he refused to see the charm of spending Saturday morning at the office in clothes he’d worn Friday night.

The February air was very cold, and they could see their breath before them as they walked away from the marquis’ residence. The sounds of departing carriages and revelers began to fade, and he put his arm around her shoulders to keep off the chill. They walked quietly along H Street, her folded fan swinging beneath her gloved hands, timing their progress like a metronome.

Finally, in a toneless voice he said, “Well, you’ve outshone my mother in her heyday.”

“Meaning?”

“The dozen men you had clustered about you.”

She wasn’t sure if this was being offered out of admiration or jealousy. She hoped it was the latter.

“I’ve always had to function as your mother, my sweet.” She swatted his free hand with the fan’s ferrule. “Ever since you were a disagreeable little boy of eleven.”

As if she hadn’t spoken, he said, evenly, “This will be your town, you know, not mine.”

“I intend to make it
our
city, Henry. I’ll give my own marvelous parties, and our pack of beautiful children will look down on them from the top of the stairs in their pajamas. And the men will
still
be clustering around me.”

“Take care, darling,” was all he said; she didn’t know whether he was cautioning her against extravagance or other admirers.

“You mean my trentogenarian self can excite your jealousy? I’m so glad, darling.”

“You may not always be.”

“All right, dear,” she said, squeezing his bad left arm just a little. “Next summer on the lawn at Kenwood I shall dance only with you and Papa.”

They continued walking east into the orange sun, a great medallion still rising in the sky.