Henry and Clara (50 page)

“Henry, let it be. You did everything anyone could have.”

“No,” he said through his tears. “No, I didn’t. You don’t understand.”

“I
do
understand, Henry. People have been foolish to think —”

“No!” he shouted, gesturing with the pistol as if it were merely a part of his hand. “No! You
don’t
understand! And neither do they! I did
not
do everything I could, and I was not negligent, either.
I saw him open the door
, Clara. I saw him stand there for a good five seconds. I never got up from my chair. I
let
him do what he did!”

“No, Henry. You’re imagining this.”

“Our eyes locked, Clara. His and mine. I let it happen. I
wanted
it to happen.”

“No!” she cried, as if what had just taken place down the hall lay eighteen years in the past, and her present frantic business was to thwart the murder of Mr. Lincoln.

“Yes, Clara, I
wanted
it to happen. I wanted to avenge all the soldiers he’d sent to die. I wanted to hurt all the old men who’d made the war.”

“Stop, Henry! I shall go mad!”

“I regretted it the moment the gun went off, and then I leapt to stop Booth. I tried to tell you. Tried to tell you crossing Tenth Street, but I couldn’t, because the widder-woman kept pulling on my arm, bleeding me to death!” His tears were no longer coming. The baffled, childlike gentleness was gone, replaced by bellowing rage. “I tried to tell you the next morning, when you finally came home. But I could hardly stand to look at you, because I knew you’d spent the night with
her
. You left me! The way you’ve always left me ever since, for any man who stepped into our house!”

She couldn’t attend to the rest of the tirade, though it had the peculiar comfort of familiarity. She could see only what she had seen eighteen years ago, yet remembered and understood only now: his eyes, as they had been in the dark of the box, looking toward its door. From the moment it had happened, she had sensed there was a secret sewn into the violence of that night. She had been afraid to go home for fear of what he would tell her, and so she’d stayed across the street past dawn, locking her suspicion in the cellar of her mind, until this minute, when he’d at last dragged it up and let it out.

“You won’t leave me now!” he cried, raising the gun.

“No!” she cried. “I won’t. Oh, Henry, let me live!”

She had fought for her children’s lives, but beyond this plea, she would not fight for her own. She closed her eyes and heard him fire the gun at her, once, twice, three times, the sound, it seemed, not the bullets themselves, knocking her onto the bed. There was a great roaring in her ears as the blood rushed up from her chest and into her mouth, spilling onto her face with the same warmth she remembered from that night. She knew that she was dying. Louise’s shouts and her knocking at the door seemed irrelevant. Clara wearily opened her eyes, as if the noise were an unnecessary imposition. She wanted to tell Louise to go back to bed; she wondered why Henry wasn’t telling her to do that, why instead he was standing over her with the knife he had picked up from the stove.

“Don’t,” she whispered as he plunged it into her already gaping chest. She knew, quite calmly, that she was thinking her last thoughts. Everything was clear. Henry had turned into Booth, and she into Henry. He was using the knife on her as Booth had once used it on him; he was killing her for saving the children, killing her for doing what he hadn’t done eighteen years ago. All that remained was for him to kill himself, to thrust the knife into his own body. She saw him withdraw the dagger from her heart, saw her own blood clinging to its blade, which he now drove through his white shirt.

A look of peace came over him, as if he were satisfied that their blood was now finally mingled, that they were at last brother and sister, as they had been husband and wife. The last of her attention and strength ebbed away, and she wanted to say, again, “Don’t.” She saw him take the knife from his own breast, to begin hacking at his arms and trunk and thighs. He was drenched in blood as he dropped the dagger and walked to the door, opening it at last for Louise, whose screams at what she saw competed with the sound of Herr Kiesinger’s boots bounding up the stairs. Henry ignored both of them as he went back to the bed and took Clara into his arms, kissing her saturated hair and whispering the last words she would ever hear. “Who could have done this?” he asked. “Who could have done this, my darling?”

“T
ELEPHONE
, Curtis.”

“Yeah, Sally. In a second. First come have a look at this.” Young Bill Curtis couldn’t stop laughing over the sight below his fourth-floor window. Outside the creamy, iced-wedding-cake offices of the
Evening Star
, the paper’s cantankerous treasurer was trying, without success, to crank his new Packard to life. As soon as she arrived at the window, Bill slipped his arm around Sally Kenyon’s waist and directed her attention to old man Hubbard, sweating and swearing in the noontime sun as his car sat there like a mule. Sally laughed and removed Bill’s arm. “You’d better get your Princeton mitts around the phone, Curtis. It’s Hammersmith, and he sounds in a hurry.”

“Yes,
ma’am
,” said Bill, stealing a kiss and sprinting back to his desk at the far end of the newsroom. Before the receiver was up to his ear, he could hear the features editor barking.

“Yes, Mr. Hammersmith. Right away. Lafayette Square.”

Bill walked to the supply cabinet to get a new reporter’s pad, losing any interest in the assignment as he went. He sat down beside Sally, trying to shift the girl’s attention from her typewriter to him.

“What’s old Yammersmith want?” she asked without letting up on her keyboard.

“Some old houses being pulled down on Jackson Place. Jeez, the things that guy thinks are
stories
.”

“It’s summertime, sweetness. Stories are scarce, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Why can’t we leave town with Fatty Taft?” Bill whined. “How about it, just you and me?” He reached over to tickle her wrist.

“We stay because we’re wage slaves, Princeton. At least those of us without trust funds.” She returned the carriage so fast it nipped his hand. “So quit bothering me and go about your business. You can take me out for a soda when you get back.” She handed him his straw hat, which had been on her desk all morning, since he’d made the first of half a dozen trips over to it.

It was blazing hot on Pennsylvania Avenue. Making things even less comfortable, drowning out the clip-clop of the horses, were all the proud belching cars, thousands more of them than when Bill first came to the capital three years ago. He was drenched in sweat by the time he passed the White House and turned into the square. What in hell did Hammersmith expect him to come back with? he wondered, lifting his suspenders to peel the shirt away from his chest. It was just some guys with a steam shovel, taking a bite out of a house and cursing the temperature as they worked — plus a little crowd of onlookers, heat-whipped clerks from Treasury who’d come to Lafayette Square in search of some lunchtime peace and found this instead. They didn’t know any more about what was going on than he did. What did Hammersmith want him to do? Find some old-timer who could wax nostalgic about Benjamin Harrison and bemoan the march of progress that had taken the country to 1910? The only old man he could spot was a colored fellow in a waiter’s jacket, and Bill knew that Hammersmith, who hailed from Birmingham, wouldn’t want him serving up some darky’s dialectal reminiscences. Still, it was a start.

He tapped the waiter on the shoulder. “You know what they’re doing?”

“Tearing it down,” the old fellow replied, looking a little sad under his grizzly white hair. “Making room for an extension of the Cosmos Club.”

“Ah,” said Bill. It was even more boring than he’d thought. “That where you work?”

“Yes, sir,” said the colored man. “Over forty-two years.”

“You don’t say. Do you know who was living here before now?”

“Oh, I’ve known most of ’em, going almost all the way back to the war.”

Bill smiled. The old man seemed sharp, and better company than half the fellows in the newsroom would be this afternoon.

“This used to be the colonel’s house,” the waiter said.

“Who’s the colonel?” asked Bill. “And who are you?” he added, extending his hand. “Name’s Bill Curtis, with the
Star
.”

“My name’s Johnny,” said the man, not sure he preferred the handshaking ways of these young white fellas to the older gentlemen he was used to waiting on. “The colonel was Colonel Rathbone. He and his wife and his children lived here, thirty, forty years ago. Used to see her in the morning when I’d cross the park to go to work. Found her lots of times out by the wishing tree. That’s gone, too,” he said, looking through the wrought-iron fence toward Jackson’s statue.

“The wishing tree?” asked Bill.

“Yeah, the wishing tree,” interjected a sharp New York voice. “Like in, where you’d go to make a wish you were somehow gonna come back from this place with a story.”

Bill laughed. “Hey, Eddie.” It was McClanahan, his opposite number at the
Post
. “Meet my friend Johnny.”

“A pleasure,” said McClanahan, not offering a handshake.

“Johnny’s telling me about the neighborhood, about some old colonel.”

“I know who he’s talkin’ about. The guy who was with Lincoln on closing night. Booth cut him up on his way out of the theatre. Years later he killed his wife. Over in Germany. Emptied a whole barrel into her chest.”

Bill cast an inquiring glance at Johnny, who confirmed McClanahan’s account with a quiet nod. Well,
that
would be a story, if it hadn’t happened about thirty years ago, and if McClanahan, who liked to point out that his education stopped at P.S. 5, not Princeton, didn’t already, as usual, have all the details.

“So what happened to the colonel after that?” asked Bill.

If Johnny knew, he decided it wasn’t his place to say; he let McClanahan rattle on with the story: “Nothin’ good. They threw him in some German jail. He couldn’t’ve lasted long. He’d cut himself to ribbons after he shot the wife. ‘A sordid story,’ as we like to call ’em on page eight.”

The steam shovel was now buzzing at a higher pitch, making
all three men wince. Over the din Johnny mimed that it was time for him to go back to work, and McClanahan shouted that this demolition was for the birds. He was going to head on over to the morgue instead. “Girl there dead from an ‘illegal operation,’ as we also always say on page eight. See you around, Curtis. Don’t let the ivy grow over your eyes.” He swatted him with his pad and took off, leaving Bill to stare at the bedroom wall left exposed, by a bite of the steam shovel, on the house’s second story. You could still see the squares of unfaded wallpaper over which the last owner’s pictures had hung.

He was too hot and too lazy to stay here and get the lowdown on the Cosmos Club’s architectural plans. As it was, nothing he did today would satisfy Hammersmith. He might as well just hunt up a sketch of the dead colonel. They could run it beside a picture of the crumbling house, and he could do a “historical notes” caption. With any luck that would pass for a day’s work, and by four he’d be sitting over a phosphate with Sally Kenyon, pushing his luck as far as he dared. As he walked west to the Pension Building, thinking they might have a clipping or a sketch inside the colonel’s file, he entertained his fantasy of Sally, and worked up his lines. He’d get one straw from the counterman instead of two, and when she asked him where his was, he’d just say, “Yours’ll be sweeter,” and see where that got him. Hurrying down F Street, he looked toward what had once been Ford’s Theatre, still boarded up after it collapsed and killed all those clerks, poor sons of bitches. Happened years and years ago, when it was still offices. Lucky the colonel wasn’t there
that
day.

He’d never much liked the Pension Building, those times he had to go to it. The outside was grand enough, all the soldiers and sailors going round and round it, frozen on the frieze, but the inside was crazy, halfway between a hive and a stadium, thousands of clerks toiling around that huge fountain. Anyway, here he was, striding through its Corinthian columns and checking his pocket watch, 1:35
P.M.
, and figuring he’d be back at the
Star
in another hour.

He filled out the form and showed the silver-haired clerk his press card, which didn’t speed things up. Even so, the file appeared in ten minutes, and Bill put out his hand to receive it.

“Can’t do that,” said the old man in a Mainer’s accent.

“How so?” asked Bill.

“Living pensioner. Private file.”

“Living?”

“Living. Which is to say none of your business.”

“Where is the man?” asked Bill, his tone more respectful, even a bit hushed.

“Can’t tell you.”

“Oh, come on. He was a famous man in his day. I’m here on newspaper business. Historical interest.”

“You kin of his?”

“No,” admitted Bill.

“Then I can’t help you.”