Henry and Clara (47 page)

“Down at the Newsboys’ Lodgin’ House. Right down at Park Place,” he said, rather proudly, pointing down Broadway toward
Printing House Square. “Lots of us winds up out west. A good deal all around, doncha know.”

Clara smiled down at this marvelous boy, so full of nerve and ginger that Henry himself wouldn’t be able to dash the life from him. She’d half a mind to take him back to Loudonville and make him change places with Gerald, just like the boys in
The Prince and the Pauper
, Mark Twain’s new book, which she’d given them at Christmas, and which Henry promptly condemned for making penny candy out of history.

“You take the rest of this nickel,” Clara told the boy, giving him back her change. “You’ll need it for seed money, for making your fortune out west.” Before she could change her mind, the boy tipped his cap and ran off into the late afternoon.

Clara did not arrive at Mary Hall’s until seven. She walked every step of the way back to Beekman Place, lost in her thoughts, unwilling to relinquish the unaccustomed solitude. A cloudburst soaked her with rain as she trudged north through Murray Hill.

“Come upstairs and let me undress you,” said Mary when she saw her in the entrance hall. “Never mind the maid.”

“It’s my own fault, Mary. I couldn’t persuade myself to take a carriage.” Clara shivered and allowed her friend to lead her up the stairs. The saturated dress with the torn pocket came off, as well as the undergarments. As Mary dried Clara’s back, she seemed to search her naked form for clues.

“No, Mary, you won’t find any bruises. It’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like?” asked Mary, surprised by her own boldness. “I mean lately.”

Clara closed her chenille robe and sat down at the foot of Mary’s bed. “Lately,” she said, “if one can call the last two years that, it has been very … lonely,” she said, choosing the word carefully, deciding that she would not cry. “Pauline no sooner returns from Newport than she’s off to St. Augustine. From Cleveland, Will inquires into nothing. Louise is supposed to join us in Europe later in the year; meanwhile she scurries away in terror at Henry’s very approach. Tutors come to teach the boys, but Henry sends them home before lunchtime, sure that he can more effectively impart wisdom to his sons than they can. No
tutors for little Clara. I’m keeping her ignorant, just like me. Riggs uses every ounce of strength he has to deny the strangeness of his situation. Gerald, I think, hates him.

“You won’t be surprised to know that I’m not looking forward to Germany and all the Old World wanderings that will precede it. I shall soon have quite enough of closed carriages.” She stopped to laugh, theatrically — a sign, thought her friend, that she desired interruption, some question or challenge. At a loss for the right one, Mary remained silent, and Clara resumed: “We shall sit amidst speculators and heiresses, the former pretending to solicit Henry’s advice. He will relish the chance to appear shrewd, a man of consequence, but they will be too rich already to have much interest in swindling him. They will just keep him talking and talking, hopeful that he’ll somehow wander into that precinct of conversation known as What Happened At Ford’s, so that they can have their own brush with the history their newfound companion so reveres. Chances are the hoped-for conversation will never take place, since even speculators have acquired too many manners to push him towards it, though as more and more whiskey is consumed, the electricity of risk will once or twice enter the air — and Henry may just be in the mood. The heiresses will look to me as a source of maternal advice, while their mamas will regard me as a potential purveyor of worldly wisdom, though the years since I was ‘Mrs. Rathbone, Lafayette Square’s notable hostess’ have begun to recede.”

“Must you go, Clara? Must any of you go? Is there any point to one more trip abroad?”

“Yes Mary, there is, albeit a hopeless one. There’s a stop in Geneva that’s been scheduled. A medical matter. That’s right,” she continued, avoiding Mary’s eyes, which had widened in surprise. Telling her what no one outside the family knew, she said, “It’s for Henry. For his mental condition. It’s not the first time this has been tried, either. Four years ago we sought out a man in Carlsbad, but it did no good. Once more the doctor comes on Jared’s recommendation, some bit of intelligence he picked up on his European travels for Mr. Stanford.”

“But surely this
is
a hopeful sign, Clara.”

“No, Mary.” She now looked into her friend’s eyes. “I’m afraid it isn’t. Henry sees nothing whatever wrong with himself. He will sit and listen to the doctor and compliment him on his erudition. Then he will leave the consulting room and pour the doctor’s advice, along with his potions, down the hotel bathroom’s drain.”

“Then why does he go to these doctors at all?”

“He
agrees
to go. He fears that Jared will try to cheat him of the rest of Pauline’s money after she’s dead. He’s decided that going to these physicians and talking sweet reason in their presence — you know, he’s become a much better actor than Wilkes Booth was — will be, in the eyes of some probate court one day, a clearer demonstration of goodwill and sanity than adamant refusal to act upon family advice regarding his lapses into ‘melancholy.’ How I love that elastic word!”

“But perhaps this doctor really can be of some help, in spite of Henry’s resistance. Oh, Clara, I’m just certain things will have improved by Christmas!”

“Oh, Mary,” said Clara, coming across the room to embrace her friend, to hold Mary’s head against her own damp hair. “You sound just like my papa.”

We arrived here in the usual unpatterned way. (Riggs charts our “progress” — no word ever meant more its opposite — on a map, and the lines he draws create a mad cat’s-cradle, resembling what I still think of as Henry’s “wiring”) Our previous location, for all of four days, was Amsterdam, where we saw one more world’s fair. Had we been abroad last year, I am sure we would have attended Moscow’s. I have seen half a dozen of them over the last fifteen years — but never one in my own country
.

I don’t know when our German residence is supposed to begin, or where exactly we’re supposed to spend it. The pace of our travels has so quickened that I wonder if Henry will ever be able to brake us; perhaps we shall go on forever. I think he believes that moving like dervishes will keep us all together, by some sort of centripetal force. He has once more been asking the question he put to me in Carlsbad four years ago: “Are you going to leave me?” He has asked it a half-dozen times since we’ve been over, in every possible manner — panicked, imploring, angry, and just casually curious, the way the children used to inquire whether streetcars could fly
.

This afternoon in the hotel garden we paced mechanically — twelve times around it, in one of those mathematical repetitions Henry sometimes insists upon. On most of the circuits we were accompanied by a fat gentleman from Manchester, who looked like the Prince of Wales and told us about his investment in this train the papers are full of. Less than two months from now, the Orient Express will depart from Paris toward Constantinople, carrying forty people through Munich and Vienna and Budapest, stuffing
them with caviare as they go. The furnishings sound beyond anything I can recall from the
Vanderbilt:
Turkish carpets, silk sheets and wall coverings, a different bathroom for every two couples. A gipsy band will come aboard somewhere in Hungary, and when the whole Barnum-like production rolls through Bulgaria, King Boris III, who has a passion for trains, will put on a pair of overalls and take the controls
.

By the time the Manchester man was through with his description, Henry was prepared to write a check for shares in the company. Of course, we shan’t see any of this train ourselves. Henry is in the trough of his mental economic cycle, preaching frugality and sacrifice to me and the children. When his mood arrives back in the extravagant part of its arc, I hope we are through with the German experiment and home for good
.

We
are a train, a runaway one, with mad King Boris at the controls. Henry goes on playing at life, according to whatever impulses run through his wires, and the rest of us follow behind, like motorized mannequins. A month has passed since the “consultation” in Geneva, which took just the course I anticipated. Henry was exceptionally plausible, and charming, getting this “specialist” to believe it really was just dyspepsia he suffered from, and that he’d only made the appointment to placate his beloved but alarmist wife. We left with two prescriptions, one for his stomach and another for my nerves. Back at the hotel, I noticed how he carefully put the doctor’s receipt with his most important papers: as “proof,” I am sure, of good intentions and mere physical malady, to any court that might one day be interested in the matter
.

All I ever saw him do with the bottle of medicine was stare at it. He read the label a dozen times over, until he had entranced himself and was on one of those frightening trips back to the war. He seemed to think he was looking at a bottle of liniment in a hospital tent, the one he’d actually been in after the Crater. For a quarter of an hour he was calmly, genially, out of his mind — during which time Riggs and Gerald came into the room and for the first time witnessed their father being quite unaware of who they were. I summoned Louise, who hurried the boys into the next room, telling them the stomach medicine had had some adverse effect upon their
papa and that he would soon be well. But I am sure they knew otherwise: Gerald had gone white, and Riggs, in his manly little way, urged Louise not to go back and sit by Henry’s side “until his stomach settles.” I wish, instead of the two of them, that little Clara had been the one to see Henry this way: she has a sharper instinct (and tongue) and is more resilient than her brothers. I think she is entirely aware that her father is not “right,” and I believe she’s been so for the last few years, since she was six or seven. No matter, I eventually got everyone to bed, and I ended the evening by looking at my own bottle of medicine, the tonic prescribed for my “nerves.” The skull-and-bones on its label shrieked that not more than a teaspoonful could be taken every twelve hours, and had I not known just how ineffective it was (I had tried it that morning), I might have contemplated swallowing the entire contents — “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen.”

Last week at this hour we were passing through the Hartz Mountains, staring up from the coach at the Brocken, all of us marveling, even Henry, at the white mists surrounding it. We felt ourselves to be flying rather than pulled along terra firma by a team of bays. But only hours later we returned to the mundane earth — in the form of this city — with a great bump. I do not like Hanover; I never have since that day sixteen years ago when we had a terrific fight in the Waterloo Platz (over what, I cannot now remember). Henry has managed to settle us into a damp-filled boarding house, with the children crowded into a single room. (We are still near the nadir of his economic cycle, and such places as the Hotel de Russie are out of the question.) He told the landlady that he was determined to keep us here for the “extended experience” of Germany he is bent on having. (Solemn remarks about Bismarck and the emperor and the nation-state, to which Riggs and Gerald are expected to attend, emanate from him every several minutes.)

Up until yesterday I was grimly adjusting. I had discovered a small community of Americans and English among whom the children
might find some friends (I no longer bother to seek any for myself), and I was determined I would find the courage to order that Henry’s German experience be fully “extended” and complete before Christmas. But then yesterday morning he announced his intention to remove us all to Berlin, so that he might read history in the national library. This undertaking required a special pass, he thought, and so he piled us all onto a train for nearby Brunswick, where he could talk to the American consul about getting one
.

While Henry called at the man’s office, I was left to explore the town with the children. Henry would not give us the $2 fee to visit the palace, so we went off to the cathedral instead — one more cathedral, one more set of Henry the Lion relics. After perusing them, the four of us returned to the open air, walking along what once were ramparts, and deciding that Brunswick is a much nicer place than Hanover. Everywhere below us were lovely houses upon green hillsides. We chased and ambushed one another along the walkways, playing tag and singing in rounds. There I was with my three beautiful American children, ridiculously — but for a moment so happily — bellowing “Oh! Susannah” into the German air. For the first time in months I felt happy to be alive, rebellious, or — my old favorite word — encouraged. I believed I might yet overcome the disaster of my life, this disaster of my own making, created from my stubborn, blind love
.

And then the day was over. We arrived back here in the dark, all of us silent in the face of Henry’s bad humor, which was brought on by the consul, who had denied him whatever application he sought. He would not eat his dinner, and would not allow the children, despite my angry protests, to touch anything but the vegetables on their plates. Today he has spent all day in the next room. (“Menschenscheu,” I heard the landlady whisper to her husband when he wouldn’t come to lunch — “Shy of human beings”) He did not permit the children to go out (they are now playing — happily enough, according to my ears — in a shuttered room), and he has forbidden me to sit by the window
.