Henry and Clara (4 page)

“Are you my brother?” she asked.

Ira Harris, who was seeing some carefully delivered paternal explanation come apart, looked flustered. Pauline smiled and patted Clara’s curls. “Think of Henry as your cousin, darling.” She looked at her new husband and flashed the sort of smile she knew would please him. “Let’s defeat complexity with inaccuracy,” she said.

T
HE UNITED
Harrises and Rathbones had trouble fitting under one roof. Jared Rathbone’s old house at the corner of Eagle and State streets, into which the judge moved his family after marrying Pauline, was a large affair, but it teemed like a beehive on nights when all the boys and girls doubled up in its small bedrooms. Even the judge’s farmhouse in Loudonville was barely big enough to hold all the children.

On the last Friday evening of October 1851, the city house was empty. Pauline had taken Amanda Harris and Lina, the baby girl she and the judge had unexpectedly produced together, down to Kenwood, Joel Rathbone’s great estate south of the city. They would spend the weekend there, while out in Loudonville Judge Harris presided over his other daughters, his son Will, and the Rathbone boys. At twilight he and Will made the short journey over the plank road out of Albany, and upon arriving, Will ran into the house full of excitement. “Father has a letter from Mr. Fillmore,” he said to Clara, pompously setting the White House stationery on a table near Pauline’s sewing basket, which Clara and Louise had been organizing. Louise seemed uncertain who Millard Fillmore actually was and what he had to do with Papa. Clara, now seventeen, knew exactly how he’d become President when General Taylor died two summers ago, and she reminded her younger sister that they’d met the handsome, white-haired President at Papa’s wedding.

But Papa himself was all that mattered to Clara right now, and she rushed out to his carriage to greet him. “My darling,” he said, dropping a satchel of legal papers to embrace his favorite daughter. They walked back to the house and into the parlor,
where Will was again poring over Mr. Fillmore’s letter. Clara hoped it contained good news, since lately she had noticed that whenever talk in the house turned to politics or Mr. Weed or the state of the country, her papa seemed troubled and her stepmother impatient.

In truth, Mr. Fillmore’s letter contained little more than the courteous greetings of a genial man, one who remained friendly toward his old friend Ira Harris despite all provocations from “the Dictator” — Fillmore’s former patron and Harris’s present one, Thurlow Weed. The falling-out of Weed and Fillmore had begun as soon as the latter became Vice President — a position he owed, everyone felt, to Mr. Weed, who soon took offense at Fillmore’s assertiveness over the spoils of office. When President Taylor died — after drinking too much iced milk on a hot Fourth of July — the quarrel over patronage evolved into a war of principle. Thurlow Weed adopted the antislavery views of his most promising protégé, Senator Seward, the man he now hoped to make President, causing a rift with those Whigs who backed Fillmore’s efforts to enforce last year’s great Compromise, which might ensure the survival of slavery but would at least preserve the Union.

Judge Harris had been triply distressed by these developments. Temperamentally, he was with Mr. Fillmore, a man more interested in respect than power; morally, he was with Mr. Seward, whose boldness in citing God’s “higher law” against slavery was something Harris himself could never have managed; and politically, he seemed to be nowhere at all. Mr. Weed, who had been so attracted by the abilities he displayed in the legislature, had cooled toward him: the more brilliant Seward now claimed the Dictator’s attentions, while Harris, taken care of with a seat on the court, was more or less forgotten, except on those occasions when the editor of the
Evening Journal
needed a special favor, and Harris, rather to his shame, was willing to provide it.

Clara could sense that Pauline Harris’s frustrations were even greater than her husband’s. Not long ago she had heard her stepmother remark to one of her Rathbone in-laws, who was standing right beside Ira Harris, “Alas, there isn’t much supremacy to the supreme court.”

Now Ira Harris asked Clara, “Have you and Louise had your supper?”

“Yes, Papa. We ate with the boys.”

“Where are they now?” asked the judge.

“Out near the orchard, playing ball.”

“Well, my lady,” said Ira Harris, relaxing a bit now that everyone was accounted for, “as soon as I get cook to feed me and Will, perhaps you and I can read a little of Mr. Irving together. Would that suit you?”

“Yes,” said Clara, smiling up at Ira Harris’s graying head.

“Good. I’ll find you upstairs.”

Clara was willing to agree that Washington Irving was the greatest man the Hudson Valley had produced, because her papa said so, and she always looked forward to the tales that Ira Harris read in a fine baritone. Her own adolescence was being lived between boys who might themselves be the magnetic poles of a fairy tale. The studious, flaxen-haired Will Harris had had little to do with the dark, choleric Henry since he came into their house three years ago. Right now, in the last available daylight, Henry was out in the orchard with his cousin Howard, batting fallen apples. From her bedroom window Clara watched and listened without making a sound, smoothing the silk cover of a diary that Howard had brought her back from Germany last year, when all the Joel Rathbone family made a six-month tour of the Continent.

Howard pitched from a supply of apples continually replenished by Henry’s little brother, Jared, who would scamper to the edges of the orchard for armfuls of fruit to lay at his cousin’s feet. Howard would throw the apples toward Henry, who swung a broom handle into them, sending the hard ones sailing high and away, and pulverizing the ones that had gone soft, exploding them into jets of pulp and water. His fourteen-year-old frame was already as strong as a man’s, and whenever he missed a swing, Clara heard the sound of the air being sliced, like the stroke of a handsaw through a block of wood.

From the moment she saw him six years ago, on the church steps after his father’s funeral, she had wanted him to notice her; during the three years of their parents’ courtship, when the
children were never introduced to one another, she had remembered his face, his expression, and had always asked her papa, whenever he came home from Mrs. Rathbone’s, what her eldest son had said or done. After the wedding and the decision to move the Harrises into the Rathbone house on Eagle Street, she knew that Henry looked upon their coming as an invasion. She could see him, still disapproving, when Ira Harris crossed the threshold into Mayor Rathbone’s old bedroom, or picked up a carving knife with the Rathbone monogram, or just took down one of the books in the mayor’s library. Henry had taken the arrival of Clara’s younger sisters as an irritant, a feminine smothering. Within the family this reaction was regarded as comic, just a case of a boy being a boy. But in observing Henry’s discomfort, Clara had taken pains to differentiate herself from the rest of the girls, using the chief advantage she had, her age, to treat him in a way that Louise and Amanda couldn’t. She would mother him a little, straighten his tie, smooth his cowlick, brush a speck of lint from his pretty face, ask him if he remembered to pack his paper and nibs when he went out the door to school in the morning.

Gradually, he came to depend on her as someone who seemed to understand him, though to her he was like a magic-lantern slide she could never keep in focus very long. In the evenings, they were often wordless company to each other, sitting on opposite sides of the dining room table, she with a book and he with the string and sticks and knife he needed to make a model ship. Now that she was seventeen, the rest of the family had begun to make gentle jokes about possible suitors, which she disliked, but which Henry made thrilling one night by declaring, “Anyone who comes calling on Clara will have to have my approval.” The remark was considered funny by Will and Amanda — this boy of fourteen laying down the law — but Clara realized it was true: she wouldn’t want any beaux without his approval.

She was thinking of all these things as she watched the ball game below her window, losing interest in it when Henry wasn’t swinging the stick. At the moment Howard was out of apples.
He reached down, found none, and looked around for his young cousin, whose attention had been captured by a squirrel that couldn’t decide whether to head into the orchard or back to the cherry trees along the driveway. Howard smiled, but Henry was annoyed by the boy’s dereliction, and before Jared knew it, the backs of his legs were smarting from a blow delivered by his older brother. He erupted in wails, squatting down and grasping his bare calves, feeling the apple grease left by Henry’s stick. Howard shook his head, and up at her second-story window Clara clasped her book more tightly. “Game’s over,” pronounced Henry, abandoning the stick with a debonair toss. “And it’s Jared’s fault. Now stop whining. You’ll know to pay attention next time.”

“Come on, Jared,” said Howard. “I’ll help you carve your pumpkin.” Halloween was just a few nights away.

Henry, left alone, began throwing apples. Gracefully twisting his torso, he sent them into high, lonely arcs over the treetops before they plunged into the darkness of the orchard. Clara watched as they flew, and once, as Henry turned around to take another apple from the ground, he caught sight of her up at the window. He smiled and made a low, beseeching bow, sure the eager reader above him knew the balcony scene in
Romeo and Juliet
, which he and his classmates had studied at the Albany Academy. To tease her further, he fell to one knee and mimed the offering of a bouquet.

Suddenly, for the first time tonight, Henry saw Ira Harris, who had stepped out onto the back porch of the house. He was giving his stepson a puzzled, discomfited look, but after turning to look up at the window, he chose to say only, “I’ll be up in a moment, Clara.” Henry nodded to him before disappearing into the orchard.

Ira Harris went as promised to his daughter’s room and together they read some pages of the
Sketch Book
. More than an hour passed before he kissed her good night and went back down to his study to answer Mr. Fillmore’s letter. Throughout the storytelling, Clara had stolen glances out the window, looking for a sign of Henry. Now, after getting into her nightgown,
she propped herself up on the windowsill and leaned out into the darkness. But still, the only face she saw was the fiery, cackling one of the jack-o’-lantern Howard had carved for Jared. She watched it flicker until she grew sleepy, and lowered her head to her folded arms on the ledge. She didn’t know how long she had dozed before she heard a low whistling sound, and awoke with a start. The flaming pumpkin had begun to move, was dancing on the night air.

“I’m the Headless Horseman,” she heard a voice say — a boy’s imitation of an old man.

She laughed. “Henry, you’re a fool.” He had his jacket pulled up over his head and the jack-o’-lantern riding above it, like a substitute skull.

“Was that tonight’s tale from Mr. Irving?”

“No,” she hissed, still laughing. “The Spectre Bridegroom.”

“He’s dull, dull,
dull!
” he shouted.

“Henry, you’ll wake the girls.”

“Probably wake Will, too. I’m sure he’s already asleep.”

“If you want to talk, come up here.” She shut the window and smiled, hoping he’d take her invitation. A moment later she heard him on the stairs, knew he had already gone past Papa’s study and was on his way to her.

He flung open the door and stood there, his jacket once more pulled above his head, the candle he held lighting nothing but the empty space above.

“Will you
stop?
” She laughed, taking the candle and pulling down his coat. “There’s no predicting you whenever your mother’s gone away.”

“Well, you can’t be my mother, too,” he said, flopping down on the bed but keeping his boots off the counterpane. “You’re already my sister, and everyone calls you my cousin.”

“I’ll be your teacher,” she said. “I think you’re in the mood to be read to. I think you’re envious of me and Papa and Mr. Irving.”

He pulled the pillow over his head and groaned.

She laughed again. “All right, no Mr. Irving. The truth is, even Papa wasn’t much in the mood for him tonight. He could hardly stop talking about Mr. Fillmore.”

“Politicians,” he said with exaggerated disgust.

“How can you say that?” she scolded. “Your father was a politician of a kind.”

“Only for a while. He was a merchant, even when he was mayor. He helped put the food on your table.”

“And we cooked it in a stove made by your uncle. That’s what you’re going to tell me next.”

“That’s right,” said Henry, brightening. “We Rathbones make things.”

Clara smiled at the manful little “we,” but she could see how serious he was.

“Politicians don’t make anything,” he said.

“You’re wrong,” she replied. “They make history.”

He rolled his eyes over the riddle she’d made of his words, and retaliated with a ball of yarn thrown in her direction. “Good catch!” he cried.