Henry and Clara (46 page)

Sitting down at the kitchen table with a peeled apple and a glass of cold water, she thought of this dapper President-by-accident, who had, she’d read, hired a French chef, Monsieur Fortun, for his midnight suppers. If Johnny Hay was still in Washington, he must be pleased at how the new tenant had started fixing up the Mansion from top to bottom, trying to make it as perfect and polished as his green carriage with the morocco trim. His first state dinner, for the Grants, had included eight different wines, and poor Mr. Hayes had been appalled. “Nothing like it ever before in the Executive Mansion — liquor, snobbery, and worse,” he’d said. The worse must be that Arthur, on top of everything, was Conkling’s man.

But she liked him, liked the idea of him, this tuxeodoed beau
she’d seen years before at a college affair Papa had organized. He was running the sort of White House she had once dreamed about, and she was missing it all, left to feel as Pauline must have fifteen years ago when Conkling’s ascent forced her and Papa home. But even the indomitable Pauline, past seventy and as selectively perceptive as ever, was closer to the center of things. The President was spending his summer in Newport, and when Pauline arrived home in September, she could be counted upon to report her hand having been kissed by his lips, as Clara, who would be filling a trunk with woolens for yet another ocean crossing, politely nodded and asked for details.

She came out of her daydreaming when Gerald, who would turn eleven next week, crept into the kitchen and whispered, “Papa says I can have a glass of water.” She reached over to smooth her son’s hair, and in a loud voice, the kind she wished her children weren’t afraid of using in front of their father, said, “You’ll have a lovely glass of cold, sweet cider. And your brother will have one, too.” She got up to get the pitcher from the icebox. “Your papa can have the water — for his speaking voice — if he can pause long enough in his oration to take a breath.” She poured two glasses of cider and placed them on the tray, after clearing it of apple slices. “Did you know this tray was your grandpa’s? And that it was given to him by your grandmother?”

“Grandmother Louisa?” asked Gerald, still whispering. “The one I never met?”

“That’s right,” said Clara, lowering her own voice, not interested in having Henry hear this part of her conversation with her son. This was the sort of history, bits and pieces of family lore and better times, that she wished the boy were learning.

“Do you still miss her?” Gerald asked.

Clara thought for a moment, trying to give him the kind of truthful answer she believed was good for children. “No, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s too long ago since she left. I was only your age. That’s more than thirty-five whole years ago.”

“I’d still miss
you
,” Gerald said quietly as he experimented with managing the tray.

Clara took it from him and set it back down on the table. “Would you?” she asked, in a whisper so low the boy had to strain to hear it.

“Yes,” he said, looking up.

She took him into her arms and pressed his head against her cotton dress. “I’m not going anywhere, Gerry. I’ll be right here,” she said, stroking his red hair.

“But you’ll be coming to Germany, won’t you?” he asked, pulling away, looking anxiously up at her and forgetting to whisper.

“Germany?”

“Papa says he wants us to live there. He says that Germany, thanks to Bismarck and the emperor, is ‘where you can really see history at work.’ ”

S
IGHTING THE FIVE-STORY
, cast-iron immensity of A. T. Stewart’s, Clara pulled the check string on the coach and waited for the driver to stop his horses. She passed her fare up through the hole in the carriage roof and prepared to alight at the corner of Broadway and Tenth Street. She was surprised at how the sunlight had established itself since she’d left Reverend Hall’s house on Beekman Place an hour ago. She had walked all the way west to Fifth Avenue before hailing the carriage, too excited by the long-forgotten sensation of walking about, just herself, to mind the drizzle. She had arrived in the city yesterday, giving Mary no more than a single post’s notice of her intention to come down. In fact, she’d not had much more notice herself. On Sunday afternoon Pauline, just back in Loudonville from her winter in St. Augustine, had urged her to go, to see her friend and the city before, yet again, she had to board a ship for Europe. They would be sailing Saturday. “A little time for yourself will be refreshing, Clara. You can rendezvous with Henry and the children right at the dock if you like.”

Clara’s need for refreshment was, to Pauline’s way of thinking, attributable to her contrariness and ever-waning energies, defects Pauline had long since decided were of her own making. Clara was willing to assent to this fraud, no matter how insulting, if it sanctioned a journey away from the house. Besides, Pauline was surprisingly good with the children. Clara would never have gone off and left them with Louise, who was harrowed by Henry’s moods. Pauline’s presence would induce her son’s adoration and calm. So, as Clara wrote Mary to tell her she was coming, her only regret came from realizing it was her
own absence that would give her children their three most peaceful days this year. Otherwise, as she’d left the house for the Albany train station, she’d had a feeling of joy, a sense of being sprung from a box far more confining than the small carriage she was now getting out of.

It was years since she’d been in Stewart’s, and the midday bustle filled her with excitement. She couldn’t recall where any item was to be found, but she remembered the bank of elevators, and headed for it straightaway, pausing only once to look up at the great rotunda, arching her neck and allowing her head to swim for a delicious moment. She got out on the second-floor arcade, still unsure of her exact destination but eager to look over the railing onto the great main selling floor — high enough to enjoy the strangeness of the perspective, near enough to make out the faces of the shoppers. They moved below her like figures in an old genre painting, skaters, heading toward cases and counters with wonderful free-willed speed. Dozens of ushers stood like sticks frozen into the ice, around which the shoppers spun. The classes mixed freely, shopgirls and ladies and servants all in casual pursuit of what their money could buy.

“Madam?” inquired a callboy.

“I need summer suits for my two sons. I have their measurements written on a piece of paper,” she said, reaching into her dress pocket. “They’re nearly as big as you, and I hope they haven’t grown since I wrote these numbers down on Sunday.”

“Let me take you to the salesman, if you please, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” she said, falling in step beside him.

“It’s ready-made suits you’re wanting, am I right? This is the floor for them.”

Clara paused, losing her gaiety in a rush of indecision. Whatever she decided now would leave her vulnerable to Henry’s sarcasm or rage. If she had the suits custom-made, she would be attacked as a spendthrift; buy them ready-to-wear and she would be charged with dressing her children like newsboys. Suddenly she felt depleted, heavy, and wanted to let herself down from the giddy height of the arcade. “Are the custom goods on the first floor?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I had better go there, I think. Thank you.”

Within another ten minutes she had ordered two fancy linen suits in which she could picture poor Riggs and Gerald — ridiculous to themselves and pitiful to her — having to sit for long, silent hours on hotel patios in Nice and Wiesbaden and Geneva as their father showed them off to titled frauds and vacationing financiers. “Please have them sent to Number Four Beekman Place. You really can have them there by Friday afternoon?”

“Rest assured, ma’am,” the clerk said.

Clara headed out of the store, onto Broadway. She walked north toward Eleventh Street, past veterans selling pennywhistles and popguns, women hawking candy and cigars. A half hour ago she would have found the loud street life appealing, but the boys’ suits had forced her mind toward Friday and the passage to France. Her immediate destination, McCreery’s, exposed her to the same conundrum she had rehearsed on the second-floor arcade. If she went in to have a new ball gown made up, she would be scalded with charges of extravagance; fail to go in and, come summer, Henry would rail at her for shabbiness. When should she take delivery of his abuse? She would schedule it for the summer, she decided; the hot weather would leave Henry with less energy to dispatch the insult. It might spoil the quicker and be discarded with the custards and creams rotting on the hotel patio.

So she would not go into McCreery’s. Besides, she had long since lost her appetite for clothes. Years ago she would stand inside the White House like a Maypole, Mrs. Lincoln with her dressmaker whirling round her, festooning her simple frock with silk flowers and paste jewelry. She had once or twice come back to Fifteenth and H so done up that her sisters couldn’t decide between admiring exclamations and fits of laughter. In fact, she was rather shabby now. The dress pocket from which she’d pulled the list of the boys’ measurements was torn at the corner, and on her collar there was a small sauce stain that just this morning she’d noticed but not bothered to remove. Looking as
she did, she knew it was no wonder the callboy back at Stewart’s had assumed she wanted the ready-made suits.

She was tired, torn between starting back for Mary’s and continuing to savor her free movement through the city. She decided to walk east, through a gay gantlet of balloon men and shoelace sellers, toward the Astor Library on Lafayette Place, where she could sit down by herself. Once inside its reading room, she took a volume of Wordsworth from behind the grille and smiled at the memory of her father, who years ago had gently suggested that Bryant might be better nourishment for an American girl in the Hudson Valley. But until her twenty-first birthday it was Wordsworth she had loved; then she fancied herself outgrowing him for the wickedness of Byron and Thackeray, writers who seemed proper companions for the clever-tongued woman everyone said she had become.

Why, for the sake of self-pity, naturally. She sighed, even now, over the departure of her long-lived father, and could feel some remnant of her former witty self rebuking the naiveté of the even earlier girl. And yet, the next verse reminded her that the poem left plenty of room for grief over the death of that person closest of all to her:

It was she herself who was dying. She was expiring beneath the force of Henry’s misery, just as he was being crushed by all the hateful history he worshiped, and in which he’d been caught. Just look at it, shelf after shelf of it, all around the upper reaches
of the reading room, oppressing the poetry shelves beneath: Tacitus and Livy and Gibbon and Carlyle, all of it laden with doom, some of it — right at this hour in Loudonville — being poured into the uncomprehending ears of her sons.

Mr. Astor’s library closed each weekday at four. Clara stayed, turning the pages of Wordsworth and
McClure’s
, until the chime rang at 3:50, after which she started not for her temporary home at Mary’s, but farther southward into the city, down Broadway, block after block, with no purpose, as far as Broome Street, the corner on which Mrs. Prevost’s Theatre used to be, where Pauline and Emeline saw John Wilkes Booth play Henry V one night in 1862. Newsboys were hawking the afternoon editions. She got through several competing packs of them before deciding that with a paper under her arm she might walk in peace. So when the next group came up — “News of the day, ma’am?”
“Telegram? Telegram?”
“Only two pennies, only two pennies” — she took one from the smallest boy she could spot, thereby earning him a few good pokes in the ribs from the rest of the gaggle, before they dashed off to another possible patron. “There you go, ma’am,” said the boy, making change from Clara’s nickel. “That’s a nice cartoon of Ol’ Mutton Chops we’ve got today, ain’t it?” He pointed to a caricature of the widowed President Arthur shying nervously away from the seductions of Britannia.

“And what if I were to tell Old Mutton Chops that that’s what you call him? He was a friend of my father’s, you know.”

“Yer foolin’.”

“No, I’m not,” said Clara, laughing. “And what’s so astonishing about that, anyway? Don’t you think you yourself might be President of the United States someday? Or at least senator from New York?”

The Irish boy was laughing with her now. “Nah,” he said. “Senator from the Dakota, maybe. That’s where they’ll be sendin’ me, soon as they can find someone ter make use of me out there.”

“Where do you live now?” asked Clara.