Henry and Clara (45 page)

“Speaking of ghosts,” said Cameron, by way of a cue, as if the quicker he could get Hay to complete his repertoire, the quicker they could make their way out of here.

“Oh, yes,” said Hay. “Mrs. Sprague. She’s alone in a
little
house, on Connecticut Avenue.”

“Is her divorce soon to go through?” asked Clara, who still read Miss Snead’s column in the
Evening Star
, even if she no longer went to the dinner parties that supplied its items.

“Yes,” said Hay. “She’s very proud, but I suspect she fears pauperdom. She’s fallen so far so fast, she can’t see any reason she shouldn’t crash to the very bottom. But a minute after fretting over it all, she can be bold as brass. She paints her cheeks now — it’s a sad sight — and she invited me to join her for dinner at the Conklings’. Imagine, dining
à quatre
with her and her paramour and his wife!”

There were a dozen questions and comments, both charitable and feline, that Clara could have spoken, but she could focus only on the thought of divorce — that unspeakable possibility she had herself entertained, never for more than a moment at a time, in the middle of the night, lying awake beside Henry. She thought of it now, but with her heart already going from the evening’s unexpected events, she forced herself to change the subject.

“Too depressing, Johnny. Tell me about your
new
friends.”

“Friends?” asked Hay in mock astonishment. “I have no friends, only hosts and hostesses. None so fine as you, but a few exotic ones here and there. Zamacona, the Mexican minister, gives some good feeds, and Mrs. Bancroft sets a beautiful table, prettier than the one laid in the White House, I can tell you. Lord, the place is shabby, Clara. I was over there at Christmas; all the decorations couldn’t hide the torn curtains and loose floorboards. The whole house needs a thorough overhaul.”

There was a time when she would have faked a knowing expression, tried to mislead him into thinking she regularly had lemonade with Lucy and waltzed in the East Room with Webb
Hayes, but there was no point in trying to create such misapprehension, not when her own house was looking more neglected than the Mansion could possibly be. Still, Johnny’s talk — all the names, all his silly exuberance — seemed to give her energy, a dose of hope, enough to make her think she might still somehow recover her vitality, even a piece of her old Washington dream.

The boots were coming back down the stairs.

“Senator Cameron, Mr. Hay,” said Henry, ignoring the tumbler of whiskey that Maggie had brought in. His wife’s guests both stood up to a height much lower than his own. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that my children are braying for a story. I’m going to read them a very brief one and then retire. I’ve had something of a headache since I got on the train in Jersey City. So if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to let my youngsters exacerbate it into something truly skull-cracking and then head off to sleep. My charming wife will, I know, continue to entertain you.”

It was
he
who was charming; wonderfully so, she thought, silently praising the Lord for letting this particular mood be the one her husband rode into the house tonight.

Hay shook Henry’s hand, and Cameron did the same. “Good night,” said Henry to each of them, before adding, to Cameron, “I’ll tell Senator Harris you came by. I know my stepfather will be pleased to hear you called.”

Now, as he kissed her good night, Clara knew what his earlier puzzled expression had meant. He thought that Don Cameron was his father, Simon; thought, she realized horribly, that Johnny-now was Johnny-then, that the war still raged and Papa was alive, and that somehow, children and all, they were still in the house at Fifteenth and H. Her heart was racing, and she knew that she had reached a lower and stonier depth than Kate Chase Sprague was ever likely to strike.

She would pretend not to have heard, pretend that Hay and Cameron hadn’t either. She would get them out the door, and Henry to sleep, and then she would sit here alone, facing the moment that had arrived: the time when, instead of restarting her Washington dream, they must sell this house; leave the city forever; go home to Loudonville and hide.

U
NCLE HAMILTON
came to see Clara and the children once a week, and she was always grateful, since otherwise there was almost no one to talk to. The house in Loudonville, which had had rooms and dormers added over the years, was now so large that the children could war amongst themselves in some distant corner of it without her even hearing them. There were hours during these hot September days when her solitude was more lonely than peaceful, and the arrival of her papa’s quick-moving younger brother — his sentences still as neat and clipped as his mustache — inevitably cheered her. She was even more appreciative for knowing that these Saturday visits afforded him so little pleasure of his own. He would make some quick inquiries about how they were all getting on while he glanced nervously around the premises, as if he’d just heard a strange noise. In the Harris family manner, he outwardly assumed the best and never probed her polite assurances that everything was fine.

Sometimes he went into the library to greet Henry and give him some cigars, but mostly he stayed with Clara out on the porch, catching the children as they flew past and telling their mother a few bits of gossip about those men in the legislature she might still remember, or amusing new ones, like Theodore Roosevelt, “who intends to be minority leader before he’s twenty-five!” Though he had left the state senate himself, punctilious Uncle Hamilton was more influential than he’d ever been. He headed the board of commissioners charged with rebuilding the state capitol, and generally exercised such power behind the Republican throne that politicians now joked about Ira Harris’s having died and come back as Thurlow Weed — in the mortal envelope of his brother.

With Clara he seemed embarrassed about his influence, about having learned to play the game better than her father had, so he tended to talk to her more about the past than the present. Today, along with the stack of books he always brought, he had included a pamphlet sent to him by John K. Porter, a friendly adversary back in the ’fifties, when he’d been district attorney. Porter had just achieved a measure of fame for prosecuting Charles Guiteau, the hapless fanatic who had killed President Garfield last summer. His courtroom questioning of the assassin had been deemed so effective that now, months after Guiteau’s hanging, a transcript of it was available in a little book. It made a peculiar present, but Uncle Hamilton was famous for the well-intentioned gaucherie of his gift-giving: a waffle iron for the boys, gloves four sizes too big for their sister.

When her uncle was gone, Clara opened the book:

The pamphlet was thin enough to tear in two, and that’s what Clara did, before tearing it again, into quarters, and walking to the bin at the edge of the orchard. Tomorrow the illiterate boy
from Rensselaer could burn it with the rest of the rubbish when he came to do his chores. She wouldn’t have it in the house. This printed interrogation, coming up from the page with such quiet madness, unsettled her more than it should have, but the affinities between Guiteau’s voice and Henry’s were inescapable. People said that Secretary Blaine remembered brushing aside the office-seeking assassin whenever he was accosted by him in the months before the killing. Who knew, she wondered, what crazy fantasies Henry might have entertained, even five years before, against Mr. Evarts and President Hayes? Guiteau had claimed credit for Garfield’s victory in 1880, on the basis of some mad speech he’d written and never delivered — a boast oddly like Henry’s own occasional assertions that he was the cause of various events from which he stood far removed. As she picked a skirtful of apples, she felt sick recalling how, when Mr. Garfield finally expired last September, Henry had said he was thinking of offering his services to the new President, since, after all, Chester Arthur was a Union College man and might be in need of him.

The eighty summer days during which Garfield lingered and suffered, rallied and relapsed, had been dreadful for anyone reading the newspapers: the ghastly paragraphs about drainage and pus; the unhealing wound that the physicians’ fingers probed again and again; the attempts to cool the sickroom by blowing air over a huge box of ice. Every Sunday the sermons were full of it, as the congregation at Albany’s Cathedral of All Saints fanned themselves and nodded with equal fervor over mercy and retribution. She had been prepared for the congregants to stare at herself and Henry, since memories of Mr. Lincoln’s killing were newly revived, but there turned out to be fewer eyes on them than she’d expected. It was as if this second shooting of a President in sixteen years had at last made the first one old news. The glances, when they did come, were mostly the sort that villagers might direct toward any couple who, after long absence, had come back to live among them.

This summer was nearly as hot as last, and as she rinsed the apples in the kitchen, she felt grateful for the coolness of her
father’s house. So much of what was here had been his. In these last few years she and Henry had acquired almost nothing of their own, had come back from Europe so empty-handed that customs agents eyed their trunks with suspicion. Even now she was aware of slicing the apples onto a painted tray that her mother had given Papa forty years ago. She should put it away for her daughter, she thought, not keep adding knife marks to it; and she should do the same with other items, for Amanda’s children. She had asked Amanda please to come this summer and bring them all with her, but her sister hadn’t been able to. There were times when Clara almost wished for Pauline’s cold, aging presence in the big house, but she had gone to Newport and taken Lina with her. Mary Hall, merrily working herself to death at some charity house on Canal Street, had declined her invitations, too. Louise and Lillian were here, but Louise scurried away from Henry with the same speed she used to avoid a field mouse, and the businesslike briskness that allowed Lillian to cope not only with the children but with the oddities of their father made her, alas, not very relaxing or intimate company.

The house ran on a needlessly rigid schedule, and since it was now past three in the afternoon, the day’s history lesson had begun in the dining room. She could hear it going on, more a recitation than a lesson, a two-hour drone from father to sons, no interruptions permitted. She stilled her paring knife to listen to Henry’s strong, invisible baritone:
“Upon discovering the position that Lieutenant Benedict was in with his company, I ordered him to fall back with his company to a ditch near the cemetery, and from thence to the cemetery itself, if possible. Previous to Lieutenant Benedict making the move, he had lost seven men wounded, and while making it, he himself was wounded severely and one sergeant mortally. I then determined to occupy the tannery (which was a good brick building), and after making loopholes in the end, and posting a few good men at them as well as at the windows, succeeded in keeping the enemy’s fire under until midnight, when we were relieved by a portion of Couch’s division of volunteers.”

She smiled in spite of herself. It wasn’t violent, just deadly. It was some officer’s dispatch from Fredericksburg, printed word for
word in
The War of the Rebellion
, the official history of the Union and Confederate armies, which the government had begun issuing two years ago and would go on issuing for years to come, in dozens more volumes than Nicolay and Johnny Hay would need to cover Mr. Lincoln. Colonel Henry R. Rathbone was a charter subscriber to this clerkly bookkeeping of the apocalypse he once prophesied; the document-filled installments now arrived in Loudonville with only a little less regularity than
Harper’s
and
Leslie’s
.

Little Clara was exempt from the recitals, but the boys were too scared to ask for even temporary leave. They just waited hopefully for their father’s next trip to New York, which would come unannounced and leave them to climb the trees and play ball and once in a while take a carriage into town to play with their Rathbone relatives. Clara no longer asked Henry where he went, and upon returning home from the city, he offered no evidence to make her think he’d been with Jack Barnes. Since he could hardly go satisfy himself along the quays here in Albany, she hoped for his own mad sake that he was staying out of Manhattan’s rougher dens; she didn’t want to have to tell her children their father had been murdered in the streets. While he was gone she liked to think he was in one of the fancier houses of assignation, some quiet and nearly respectable place not far from the house Chester Arthur still owned on Lexington Avenue.