Henry and Clara (5 page)

“Shh,”
she whispered. “You’ll wake the dead.”

“You mean Will.”

“Henry,
stop
.” To change the subject, she asked, “Did your father ever read to you?”

“No. I read to him.”

“You couldn’t have,” she said. “You were only seven when he passed away.”

“But I did. While he was sick in bed. I read him the marine lists and the weather tables out of the
Evening Journal
.”

Clara could see him concentrating on this memory. She wanted to reach over from her chair and pat him, but then she remembered he was a boy, and only fourteen. He wouldn’t want her to.

Suddenly he brightened up. “I made some mistakes, but I stumbled through them.”

She wanted him to talk more, about his father and the hurt he must have felt when still so small, the same hurt she had felt when her mother died. She wanted them to exchange these two stories, which they had never really done since he’d come into the house three years ago, so full of reserve and resentment, so full, she was sure, of a deeper pain, still more fresh and raw than her own.

“Let’s go out, Clara!” he exclaimed, bringing himself upright on the bed.

“Where? It’s long since dark.”

“Come on,” he said, tossing her her shawl and taking her hand. “We’ll go for a walk in the woods. The leaves are already thick on the ground. Like a carpet.”

“But everyone’s —”

He pulled on her arm and dragged her after him, through the door and down the stairs, both of them stifling giggles as they passed Judge Harris’s study and noticed candlelight through a crack in the door. “He’s writing old Fillmore, I’ll bet,” whispered Henry. The two of them crossed the threshold out of the house and began to run, past the jack-o’-lantern Henry had set down on the porch, out onto the grass, past the cherry trees along the driveway, and finally into the orchard, where each of them took a great gulp of the mulchy air. In the dark, Henry took her hand. She looked at her stepbrother’s silhouette and wondered if he was feeling happy now, even smiling. He was taller than she, and with the moonlight blocked by the treetops it was easy to think he was older, too, a real young man. The rustle of leaves beneath their feet made her want to keep running, so she squeezed his fingers and the two of them laughed and began to race, hand in hand, away from her father’s house and deeper into the woods.

I
N THE YEARS
before the Civil War, Clara Harris became well acquainted with Southern girls and boys without ever traveling below New York City. It was in Newport — in those days summer home to more Southern planters than Northern millionaires — that she got to know girls like Sybil Bashford, from Camden, South Carolina, with whom she was now, late in August 1854, finishing an unpleasant walk along Bailey’s Beach. Sybil had just turned eighteen, and was not about to let anyone forget that last summer she had been left here by her mama to spend the whole year at the Newport Academy. Even at nineteen, Clara simply could not compete with history like this, and she was relieved when the two of them came back in sight of the Ocean House Hotel, where Pauline Harris, looking up from her newspaper, waved them toward the veranda. Sybil immediately abandoned Clara for the company of a young man in a sailor’s cap, leaving her to settle into a wicker chair beside her stepmother. Pauline passed her a sketchpad and pencil and went on reading her paper.

Most of the other adults on the hotel porch favored
Town Topics
and the Newport
Mercury
, even if these publications were written mostly for year-round residents who professed alarm (and kept quiet about their financial satisfaction) over the growing number of summer cottagers and hotel guests. More than sixty houses had been built this past winter alone, one of them by Sybil Bashford’s father. Pauline Harris — who owned no home in Newport, but each year took one or two of the Harris girls with her to the Ocean House — preferred reading the
Providence Journal
. She wished to know what was happening
on the contested landscapes of Kansas and the Crimea, not just the lawns of Bellevue Avenue. The newly founded Republican Party was a matter of special interest to her — and one she wished her husband would regard more carefully. Ira Harris was, to Pauline’s way of thinking, far too complacent about the imminent demise of the Whigs. If he didn’t take care, he would find himself without a party and a future. He might take Pauline’s advice about keeping his relations with Thurlow Weed in good repair, but to the broader movements of this turbulent decade he seemed resigned, as if large matters of destiny were impervious to manipulation by individuals. In contrast, Pauline was sure that, however wild a ride it might take him on, history offered a man its reins, to pull or slacken while he set the course. She could see her husband’s measure of vanity, and was glad he possessed it; she only wished it would overwhelm his dignity, which made him sit and wait for the advancement he was ashamed to pursue.

Ambitious for him and her two sons, and pleased by the little girl she and Ira had created themselves, Pauline found herself uninspired by the band of stepchildren she had acquired with her second marriage. Her relations with Will were cordial but more or less irrelevant, and with the Harris girls she had settled into a sort of chaperonage. Her presence was friendly, authoritative, and rarely emotional. In the six years she had been Clara’s stepmother, scarcely a scene or secret had arisen between them. Her own sons spoke to her in a way outsiders found curiously intimate, but she remained a sort of endlessly visiting aunt to the three Harris girls, whose memories of their real mother had begun to fade.

At this moment there was nothing Clara could say about her walk with Sybil Bashford that might compete for interest with the front-page columns of the
Providence Journal
, and Pauline was untouched by guilt. “There’s a letter from Henry you might want to read,” she said, pointing to a little stack of envelopes on the wicker table between their chairs, glad there was something besides the sketchpad to keep her stepdaughter occupied now that her friend had run off.

Clara reached toward the pile out of reflex obedience and a measure of real excitement. Each letter had an Albany postmark — daily communications from her kind and dutiful papa — except for a single Schenectady one, the first letter she’d seen from Henry since his departure for Union College a month before. The words in bold black ink were addressed to Pauline, and reading them gave Clara a thrill of intrusion:

Clara was so agitated by this letter that she couldn’t remember the name of the girl now shyly asking if she minded her taking the chair beside her. No, said Clara, adjusting her own so that she might face Mary Hall — that was it — the daughter of an Episcopal priest in New York City.

“It’s from my brother,” said Clara, noticing Mary’s interest in the letter she held. “He’s away at college.”

“Oh, that sounds so exciting,” said Mary. “I think even Sybil Bashford might envy having a learned brother.” The two of them shared a laugh against the belle at the other end of the porch. “Could I hear some of it?” asked Mary.

Clara read her the first paragraph, and was again disturbed by the conspiratorial tone between Henry and his mother. The expressions of frustration with studying in the summertime were understandable, she supposed, but calling Dr. Nott the Little Wizened One, and comparing him to a toy cricket! That would crush Ira Harris. And yet the epithet was used as if Pauline already knew it, perhaps even used it herself, with Henry. At the least, Henry seemed to know that she could be counted on to laugh at this most revered of all the Harris household’s gods. Looking over toward her stepmother, Clara decided she must have been too occupied by events in the newspaper to remember the letter’s containing this terrible reference to Eliphalet Nott.

At home she often heard Pauline and Henry talking behind a closed door. Clara would stand in the hall, fussing with herself at the mirror, pushing up her brown hair to give herself a higher forehead, admiring the fullness of her breasts and wishing the family lived in a warmer climate, where she might have more occasions to dress them to advantage. But before she could ever hear anything Pauline and Henry were saying, she would grow bored with her attempts at allure, and come away from the mirror, doubly frustrated.

This letter was such a fraud upon poor Papa. But Clara was conscious of having just perpetrated her own fraud, upon shy Mary Hall. She knew why she hadn’t read the letter’s salutation, and why she’d stopped before the short paragraph containing Henry’s wishes — including the astonishing one that she be kissed. It was that she wanted Mary to think Henry had written this letter not to his mother, who remained too deep in the
Providence Journal
to hear any of its recitation, but to herself. She wanted to impress Mary and regain confidence after the walk with Sybil, but it was not just a matter of enhancing her status. If Mary Hall and Sybil Bashford had been nowhere around on this summer afternoon, she would still be wishing that Henry had written this sarcastic, flirtatious, and seditious letter just to her and her alone.

“A
ND THIRTEEN CENTS
for the broken glass.”

“But it’s yet to be repaired!” said Henry.

“It will be, Rathbone, before the summer’s out. The carpenters have quite a bit else to do the day before commencement,” said Professor Pearson, not looking up from his desk in the treasurer’s office, just writing silently, forcing the young man to listen to the hammers and saws out on the lawn on this warm midsummer day in 1856. The young hothead said nothing, just stood there in front of him, seething. “I hope you don’t think I’m unaware of how the window broke, either,” said Pearson, proud of how little escaped him, pleased with how much he could get a junior proctor to divulge. “I’ll just add it to the fines for missed prayers and recitations. So,” he said, subtracting the $24 paid in May, at the beginning of term, “that makes one dollar and forty-four cents to be carried forward.” The precision, the paltriness; the boy would soon burst his collar, thought Pearson, if he had to listen to much more of this. But that’s what Pearson would make him do, just a little more. This boy could use a bit of toning down. There was too much blood in him for his own good.

“And shall I send the bill to Judge Harris?” he asked.

The judge’s ward, listed as such in large black letters of Pearson’s handwriting on the piece of paper directly between them, nodded with as angry a look as he dared.

“He’s quite a man, your stepfather.” Professor Pearson put his pen back in the holder and looked up at the young man, as if to say, You don’t agree?

“Yes,” said Henry.

Pearson kept going. “Yes, Rathbone, the judge was graduated first in his class, as you no doubt know.” He pasted a copy of the term’s charges into the college bill book.

“Is that all, sir?”

“He was a legend,” said Pearson. “Nothing less, even in his own college days. Not long ago President Nott remarked to me, ‘Pearson, I don’t know which runs higher in Ira Harris, probity or perspicacity. It’s a splendidly close race between the two.’ A marvelous compliment, don’t you think? His service to the college has been exemplary, of course, but we all look forward to the time when he might be persuaded to do even more. Though goodness knows,” said Pearson, sighing so ostentatiously that he nearly laughed at his own sadistic success, “a man with his talents and sense of duty is bound to be spread pretty thin.” He just couldn’t prolong it anymore; it was indecently delicious. The boy’s little red whiskers looked as if they were about to pop, like a porcupine’s quills. “Very well, Rathbone. Have a pleasant summer, but do make some preparation for the fall. Moral Philosophy, Optics, and Electricity will make for no small set of burdens. They wouldn’t for even a gifted scholar.”