Henry and Clara (43 page)

“You do not
know
what may be physically wrong with him. So much of the physical is hidden — the brain and the nerves …”

“How does one determine their condition?”

“You must bring your husband in and let me examine him.”

“He will never come,” said Clara.

“If he will not come,” asked Dr. Beierheimer, “then why is he here in Carlsbad?”

“He’s come to take the waters for his general good health, as well as occasional stomach trouble.”

The doctor seemed moderately intrigued by the last piece of information, and he made another note. As he did, Clara asked him if the hot springs really did anyone any good.

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Beierheimer with a shrug. “Some somatic distractions may be minimally useful. The baths are certainly more beneficial to people with mental complaints than bleedings and purgatives have been. Tell me, Frau Rathbone, have you consulted a physician at home?”

“No,” said Clara, who had just noticed, on the table behind the doctor, beneath a framed diagram of a dog’s skull, a black box with a dial.

“The brain runs by electricity,” he said, spotting the focus of
her interest and swiveling his chair around to it. “Shocks to its specific sectors can make the body move in particular, predictable ways. It stands to reason that the exact locations of all the mind’s feelings and moods will one day prove detectable.”

“What bearing does all this have on my husband’s character?”

“Differences in personality may really come from different wirings of the brain. Think of the old ‘doctrine of the humors,’ but with electrical impulses, not fluids, accounting for our discrepant natures.”

“And injury to the ‘wires’ leads to mental defect?”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “Precisely.”

Clara looked out the window, at a bird flying through a plume of steam, and thought about how little this could possibly have to do with Henry, as if he were the key on the end of Benjamin Franklin’s kite. She was too tense to sigh, but her attention was beginning to wander.

“Does your husband have any phobias, Frau Rathbone?”

“Phobias?”

“Unnatural fears.”

She thought for a moment. “He imagines people whispering about him, just out of the range of his hearing. For a time, after the killing of the President, this may have been true, but it’s long since ceased. Even so, he —”

“Obsessions?” asked the doctor.

“He is more and more preoccupied with his food. He lives, sometimes for days, on small portions of vegetables, professing a horror of animal blood and tissue. He associates different dishes, single ingredients, with different states of mind.” She paused again to think. “I suppose his preoccupation with history is an obsession. And he may be obsessed with Mr. Lincoln himself. On those occasions when he permits himself or others to speak about him, he abuses the President’s memory in mystifying ways.” She was once more absorbed in this conversation with the doctor, excited by its possibilities. But then Dr. Beierheimer inquired, “Does he have any abnormal sexual practices or enthusiasms?” He pronounced the last word with a kind of juiciness, a function, she was sure, of his accent, but even so, he
made the word sound concupiscent, and she felt herself blushing, as if she were Mary Hall.

“No. We had a happy life together. It is gone now, but it was happy.” She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, tell him of the vigor of their nights together — the shouts and scratchings, the games and sometimes terrible language. She was sure these things were “abnormal,” had always been sure of that, but they had always been normal to her and Henry, and that was the only standard she had held them against, all through the days when they banished the world and made her — made the two of them together — happy.

“Has your husband ever suffered from syphilis?”

The word, which she had never heard uttered by any man in any room she’d sat in, struck her like a hand. Her eyes widened, but she made no response.

“
Any
venereal disease?” the doctor asked. Clara felt naked to his gaze and thoughts, and she was astonished to hear her own disclosures. “None that I know of,” she said, fixing her eyes on the drawing of the dog’s head. “But in the years before the war he was sometimes in the company of prostitutes. And I have my suspicions that he may again be with them now, from time to time, when he travels by himself to New York.”

The doctor made a notation.

“Do these diseases play a part in disordering the mind?” Clara asked.

Dr. Beierheimer, who seemed to have lost interest in his own question, closed his eyes and shook his head and touched the dial on the black box behind him. “We don’t really know,” he said. “I would certainly have to see your husband to begin to make a determination.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said Clara.

“Then why,” responded the doctor, a hint of irritation curling up from his smooth manner, “did you come here?”

“Because of my brother-in-law,” said Clara, preparing to leave. “His intentions, and mine, were honest, but perhaps naive. I had hoped that you would be able to suggest something, even without seeing Colonel Rathbone.”

“Sit, please, Frau Rathbone,” said the doctor, urging her to unclasp her shawl and go back to the leather couch. “There,” he said when she once more appeared at ease. He put down his pen and pushed his notes aside, and for the first time since bringing her into the consulting room, he smiled. “Tell me,” he said, and Clara leaned forward, hoping that this new question would be easier than the last ones. “Tell me what President Lincoln was really like. I’ve heard so much about his moods.”

There were towels everywhere, strewn about the hotel suite. Steam danced out through the open doorway of the bathroom, where Henry, in an exuberant mood, was shaving.

He stopped his humming when he saw her.

“No plates?” he asked, noticing she was empty-handed. “Not one china cup, or even a thimble, after touring a porcelain factory?”

“No,” Clara answered, untying her bonnet. “They didn’t give anything away, and I didn’t think to make purchases.”

“You need to indulge yourself more, my dear wife.” He banged his razor against the enameled sink, shaking loose the blood-flecked lather. She watched him dry off and comb his hair, which had retreated an inch in the dozen years they had been married and now had strands of gray amidst the red. The vein at his left temple, like a crack in the sidewalk, asserted itself more strongly than it used to.

“Are we going out tonight?” she asked. “Or only to the dining room here?”

“Out,” said Henry, emerging from the bathroom and surprising her with a quick kiss on his way to the armoire. “We’re going to that little restaurant near the colonnade, and we have guests: Monsieur and Madame Gilles, from Bordeaux. He’s a fine fellow. Makes farm equipment. I think I see a good investment.”

Clara reacted cautiously. “Where did you meet him?”

“At the Sprudel geyser.”

“What did you say?”

“Oh, he knows all about us. He was a great sympathizer with the Confederates, told me he’d loved doing business with the old
Southern planters in the years before the war. He’s a friendly type, not at all like a Frenchman. He also happens to be hideously ugly. I can trust you with him.”

“Stop it,” said Clara, who realized she was staring at her husband’s forehead, contemplating it as he put on his shirt, wondering about the “wiring” beneath it and whether that prominent vein wasn’t a diversionary channel, rerouting the whole system toward a place it oughtn’t go. “If he wants your money, all right,” she said over Henry’s whistling, “but I hope you didn’t entertain him with our life story.” After years of his almost frantic silence about Ford’s Theatre, her husband sometimes now volunteered a string of reminiscences to near strangers. She could never tell if he was seeking their approval, trying to shock them, or testing some limit in himself. The subject would be closed as quickly as it came up, with Henry apparently on the verge of recounting some crucial detail — and then thinking better of it.

“So what if he’s interested in what happened to us?” asked Henry. “As the years go by, I’m more and more convinced I did fine that night.”

“That’s what I’ve told you for years,” said Clara, warily hopeful, “every April fourteenth when the newspapers hound us and you feel such distress. No one could have done any more.”

“You’re right,” said Henry, sticking the pin into his cravat. “No one could have done better.” Clara helped him find his studs in a jumble of pins and jewelry, shaking her head in confusion. Had Dr. Beierheimer cured Henry through a kind of magical sympathy? Perhaps some electrical currents had floated across the air from his consulting room to the hotel.

“You should listen to this fellow tonight,” said Henry, taking a pair of horseshoe-shaped cufflinks from Clara. “On the subject of the South, especially. They were a good people. We should have let them go. No, my darling,” he said, pushing one of the links through its hole in the cuff, “I did fine that night.”

Her small hope faded to nothing. Here comes the rambling, she thought — one of the peculiar chains of associations she could not follow. She said nothing, just helped him with his cuff.

“You’re the one whose behavior I’ll never understand.” He said it quietly, as if in a spirit of sincere inquiry. “Why did you leave me that night?”

“I won’t go into this again, Henry. Yes, I did ‘leave’ you. I let you go home to Papa’s in the company of a surgeon, whose work I should only have interfered with by being in the carriage. I stayed with Mrs. Lincoln because that’s where people thought I was needed.”

Henry’s tone changed to something more sarcastic. “Even after Miss Keene arrived to provide her with some feminine support? Even after the Prince of Rails managed to bring himself from the White House to his mama’s side?”

“That’s the end of this discussion,” she said, letting go of his left arm and quitting the room. She took a seat on a sofa in the suite’s tiny parlor.

No, she would not talk about this again; she wouldn’t even let herself think about it. It was useless, a trivial matter from the past that he brought up whenever he wanted to accuse her of faithlessness. But still the question bothered her. She had never really understood why she didn’t rush back to Fifteenth and H that night, why even when the morning came, after the long fatal vigil at the tailor’s house was over, she somehow resisted returning home, amidst the drizzle and bell ringing, to her future husband, who needed her. She knew all the explanations: she had been frightened; the tailor’s house was safer than the streets and the unguarded Harris home; Mrs. Lincoln had genuinely needed her; she would only have been in the way while Henry was properly bandaged and surveyed; she wasn’t thinking clearly. Over the last fourteen years, she had told herself all these things any time he forced the absurd subject, but she knew that if she was honest with herself, she would admit how her own behavior
had
been odd, would acknowledge that she had not returned home for some more unsettling reason. Could it really have been an instinctual love of the limelight? The possibility was grotesque, and the fact that Henry had more than once thrown it into the buckets of abuse he poured over her had let her dismiss it as irrational. The real truth, she thought, although she didn’t
understand it exactly, was something worse, something having to do with a fear of Henry — not the mild fear she had always had, or the near-constant one she would suffer in the years after that night, but some vague fear particular to that moment, a fear that if she went back home, he would tell her something awful, a hideous detail, something that would make the horror reenact itself more clearly and terribly inside her mind — something that would forever keep her from getting over it.

Now he stood in the doorway to the little parlor with yet another look on his face, so plaintive and innocently frightened that for a second she thought she was seeing not Henry himself but some bewhiskered version of their son Riggs.

“You’re not going to leave me
again
, are you? You wouldn’t, would you?”

“No,” she answered, in the same tone she used to soothe her children out of their repetitive worries and questions. “Of course not.”

“Good,” he said, smiling, happy and relieved, his mood altered as suddenly and completely as Riggs’s or Gerald’s or little Clara’s would have been. He was ready to go back to the armoire and his dressing, but not before again saying, “Good,” and then, after a pause, adding, “Of course, I wouldn’t let you in any case.” His boy’s expression vanished, like a sheet of paper being torn from a tablet. The next look, sly and confident, was more familiar. “Come, darling,” he now said. “Pick up the pace. Change into your purple dress, and let’s not be late.”