Henry and Clara (35 page)

How late the summer light lingers at this latitude. Tonight we used it in the Tivoli Gardens to read our books. Sitting in our chairs, side by side, we made a comic, prematurely aged sight, especially to ourselves. “Have we grown tired of each other’s company?” I asked at one moment when we both happened to look up from our pages. “Never!” said Henry, beginning a volley of melodramatic protestations we kept up for a good three minutes, our own imitation of the dreadful play we saw two nights ago at the Royal Theatre. Finally we settled back into our reading, ignoring the violinists and gymnasts and mimes quietly disporting themselves in the last hour of sunshine
.

I am halfway through
The Ring and the Book.
Henry is making a long march through volume one of Freeman’s
History of the Norman Conquest.
This follows a lengthy run of Macaulay and Gibbon and a dozen other historians whose books he has cogitated over with great intensity, as if gestating some complex theory of his own. The books are usually left behind in hotel rooms, along with the shoes and souvenirs we are constantly forgetting, but their sober matter seems to stay lodged inside Henry, like something he has swallowed, endlessly to ruminate
.

I care no more for what he reads than he does for Browning.
When it comes to men’s affairs it is Grant and Seymour, not William and Harold, about whom I want to hear. Our mail from home has been full of the election, but we will not be back for another month and a half, by which time the campaign will be nearly over. The letters from Albany clamor for us to return, and they make polite reference to the question of what it is Henry will “do” once we’ve recrossed the Atlantic. It is a question we have had almost no discussion of ourselves. What
I
shall “do” is much clearer: get us to Washington and bring forth a baby
.

H
APPY BUT STILL TIRED
, halfway between sleep and waking, Clara looked out the bedroom window into the moonlight and could have sworn she was seeing the silhouette of Abraham Lincoln. She squinted at what seemed attached to the glass, and in her gathering wakefulness realized it
was
the President’s profile: a black paper one commemorating his birthday that some schoolboys on a charity drive had sold to one of the colored servants the other morning. It was nighttime now, Clara could see, and she wondered if it was still February 12, as it had been, amazingly enough, this morning, when her son, Henry Riggs Rathbone, entered the world. Mary Hall, who had come down from New York for the lying-in, had greeted the coincidence with awe, telling her that she and Henry
must
think of naming the boy after Mr. Lincoln. No, Clara had replied, before falling into a long sleep; she didn’t think that was a good idea, at least not from Henry’s point of view. Now, almost fully awake, she wondered if Henry’s anxiety last night, after she had gone into labor — the wish he sent upstairs that she be a brave girl and make the effort to get through the ordeal as quickly as possible — wasn’t perhaps connected to a desire that the baby be born before midnight; that is, on February 11. No, she decided, that was foolish. She doubted Henry had even remembered the date of the President’s birthday until Mary reminded them this morning.

Looking once more at the schoolboys’ paper silhouette, she wondered: when would her son start going to school? Just in time for the centennial, in ’76, she calculated, imagining the day she would paste his own first drawings, of cherry trees and cocked hats, to the panes in his bedroom window. She was glad
they had bought this house in Lafayette Square, glad they had decided not to live at Fifteenth and H. The moment she and Henry stepped into a great welcome-home party on Eagle Street sixteen months ago, she had realized the need for a complete break with their peculiarly joined parents. She had known all at once that she
couldn’t
move into the Washington house that Papa and Pauline had occupied throughout the war, and when it developed that Admiral Alden’s was up for sale, she persuaded Henry that buying it constituted a radical departure — even if it was just inside the square, on the other side of the park, and involved little more, as Jared pointed out, than “looking at the other end of Andy Jackson’s bronze horse.”

But little Riggs — as they’d be calling him to avoid confusion — had been born this morning into a whole different era of history in the square. Across the tiny park, on Madison Place, James G. Blaine, the speaker, was occupying the house where Mr. Seward once lived and nearly died. On their own side, two doors down on Jackson Place, Vice President Colfax had taken up residence in the stucco dwelling where Dan Sickles used to live and bellow. With the war five years over, men were building new houses everywhere in the city. They read stock quotations now, not casualty lists. Instead of hacking itself to bits, the country was bursting with growth. This was the good and exciting time into which her son had been born.

She was all at once desperate to see him again, and so, carefully sitting up in bed, she called through the closed door and asked Mary to bring him to her. Mary had been an angel this past week, the only person Clara had wanted to come down and be with her. Lina was too easily distracted and Louise too squeamish, but Mary’s endless generosity had put up with Henry’s moods and pretended not to notice the spats that flared between the two of them at least twice a day. Mary’s work with the poor in New York was deepening her own natural goodness, giving her an ampleness of spirit that was lovely to observe. She was no longer just a passionately right-minded girl; she was becoming, Clara believed, a soul. Spinsterhood had already wrinkled Louise, but Mary was blooming. Still, Clara thought, hearing her steps come down the hall, how shockable she could be! The other day
Clara had confided to her that not the least reason for looking forward to the baby’s arrival was the prospect of resuming relations with Henry as man and wife; the poor thing had blushed to match the crimson bell-pull. If only she knew how important this really was. The baby might be their creation, something that would finally give them a living, breathing common interest, an object of worry beyond themselves; but more important, its delivery from her body would give them back to each other, let them once more return to their nighttime world of almost violently happy lovemaking. It was daylight that always brought back trouble.

“Look who’s here!” whispered Mary. Clara, extending her arms to the baby, recognized the robe he wore as one she herself had knit for Lina twenty years ago.

“My precious little Riggs,” she said, taking him from Mary, who turned up the lamp. “Oh, Mary, look,” she softly cried as she fingered the down on the infant’s skull. “I never noticed this morning. It glints red in the gaslight, just like his papa’s whiskers. Yes, sweetness, you’re your papa’s little man, aren’t you?”

Mary moved to close the door, but Clara asked her to leave it open. “I’ve been shut in here all day. I’d rather hear some noise from the rest of the house.” She joked about “confinement” being the right word for what she’d experienced. With relief she heard Henry turning pages in the library across the hall: the huge book of Egyptian history, she imagined, feeling calmer to know just where he was.

“Let me go back out and get the telegrams,” said Mary while she smoothed the bedclothes. A moment later, after scurrying in with a pile of them and forgetting to leave the door open, she took a seat at the foot of the bed. In a voice too soft to disturb the baby, she read them one by one to Clara.

There was one from Pauline and Papa, who was
PROUDER THAN EVER
. Mary held it up and Clara delighted in the black capital letters made by the miracle Dr. Nott had once prophesied (that story Papa never tired of telling). Had their own “annunciation,” as Henry called it, not gone out over the wire early this morning, Papa’s congratulations would have had to wait a few days before arriving in a letter, and its handwritten form would
have saddened Clara: the small stroke he suffered last year had rendered his penmanship unsteady.

“One from your Aunt Emeline,” said Mary, “and another from Amanda and Tom.”

“Does she mention that I’m still one behind?” asked Clara.

“Yes, she does!” said Mary. Amanda and her husband, Mr. Thomas Ewing Miller of Columbus, Ohio, had had their second child last month.

There was even a wire from General Schofield, on whose staff Jared now found himself, and another from Emma and Will, who was commanding the Watertown Arsenal.

“Is Will supposed to be there much longer?” asked Mary, who still felt a pang or two of curiosity about the noble young soldier she’d years ago had a crush on.

“No,” said Clara. “Probably not more than a few months. When his discharge comes through, he’ll be secretary and manager — I think that’s the title — of the Decatur Rolling Mill Company. Henry calls it the Tolling Bell Company, but I don’t see why he makes fun. It’s a very Rathbone-like thing Will’s decided to do: he’ll soon be a mighty manufacturing man, not just another orating Harris like Papa and Uncle Hamilton.”

“Has Henry been discharged himself?” asked Mary, who had been circumspect this past week in inquiring about his plans.

“He will be, at the end of the year,” said Clara, before shifting the topic to the wondrous intricacy of Riggs’s fingers. Henry had been unassigned from any duty since March of last year, and it was unclear to Clara what real difference his formal discharge, when it finally came around, would make. His lack of plans must seem uncomfortably evident in contrast to Will’s, but she was grateful that Mary asked no further questions, just as she appreciated her not commenting on the quarrels, or on how few acquaintances called during the days and evenings Henry spent inside the house. Perhaps Mary thought everything was fundamentally all right. Well, now that Riggs had arrived, everything
would
be fine, or at least very much better.

There was a sharp rap at the door. The two women started, but the baby slept on. “You’ll have to learn to start playing
pianissimo
, heart,” whispered Clara, after Henry entered.

“Something from Mrs. Grant,” he said, handing Mary a parcel. “A boy just delivered it.” It was a bedjacket, blue quilted cotton, quite merry and not at all fancy. Clara pronounced it enchanting and wondered how the First Lady had gotten the word: “We didn’t send
them
a telegram, after all.” Henry supposed it was their own cook talking to the Vice President’s that had started the very short grapevine needed to reach the White House from Jackson Place.

“Come look at the telegrams,” said Clara.

“I’ve already been through them. I’m sure tomorrow will bring many more congratulations upon your feat, dear.”

“Mary’s done most of the hard work. I feel as light as air, but she must be ready to drop.”

“Where will our son and heir be spending his first night?” asked Henry.

“I offered to put him in my room,” said Mary. “I thought that would give Clara a better night’s sleep. But she wants him right here.” She pointed to the cradle that the maid had placed in the room an hour ago.

“That’s fine,” said Henry, “though I can’t say what it will do for
my
night’s sleep.” The three of them laughed. Mary took the baby from Clara, kissed her good night, and placed Riggs in his cradle. She smiled at Henry and left for her room down the hall.

Clara wanted to see her husband pick up his son, wanted him to find irresistible the idea of waking Riggs up and hearing his little lungs. But Henry just looked down at him, in a manner that seemed disappointingly objective. She closed her eyes.

“Tired, darling?” he asked.

“Yes, a little.”

“Let’s go to sleep, then. And hope that he does.”

He turned down the lamp and kissed her. Clara watched him shed his waistcoat and trousers and place them on the chair with his old comical neatness, more dandified than military. He put on his nightshirt and came around to her side of the bed, pausing only to peel the Lincoln silhouette from the window and toss it into the fireplace.