Henry and Clara (51 page)

“Well, who can, then?”

The old man squinted through his glasses at the handwritten notes on the file’s jacket. “Pensioner’s nearest kin is his son, Henry Riggs Rathbone. Least he’s the one getting the checks, at Sixty-seven West Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois. The Land of Lincoln,” the old man added in a little flourish, before frowning at the sight of another notation.

“What are you looking at?” asked Bill.

“Unfortunate,” said the clerk.

“What’s unfortunate?”

“Oh, suit yourself,” said the old man, either tired of Curtis’s manner or unable not to be the bearer of bad news. He pointed with his immaculate index fingernail to the designation “
LUNATIC
,” before retracting the file once more. “The man is confined to an asylum in Hildesheim” — he pronounced it, slowly, as
Hildy-shame
— “Germany. He’s certified, according to the act of June 27, 1890, as possessing ‘a permanent physical disability not due to vicious habits.’ His son administers the pension and has since the death of the man’s brother-in-law, one William Hamilton Harris, in 1895. And that’s all I’m going to tell you, son. It’s far more than I’m supposed to.” With that, he took the jacket of papers away with him, back into the vaults where the Union dead took their official, statistical rest.

Six months later, Bill Curtis turned up the collar of his alpaca coat and walked up the hill to the gates of the old Benedictine monastery in Hildesheim. He showed his letter of introduction, stamped by the American consul, to the gatekeeper, whose scrutiny of it was interrupted by the shouted greeting of Dr. Israel, the provincial asylum’s director, a genial bald man bounding down the path from the main building and instructing the guard to let the young American in. “Yes, yes,” said Dr. Israel, shaking Bill’s gloved hand, “I know all about you. You’re here to write about our colonel. We got your editor’s letter,” he said in his fluent English. “We’re all ready for you. And so pleased you’ve traveled all this way to see him.”

“Actually,” said Curtis, trying to keep up with Dr. Israel’s fast pace, “I’m over here to write about the German army, but since last summer I haven’t quite been able to get the colonel out of my mind. My editor thought it might be worth taking a side trip to come see him.”

“Excellent,” said Dr. Israel. “Your editor writes that you have just received a promotion.”

“Undeserved,” said Bill with a smile. Getting shifted to the foreign desk, away from Hammersmith, had been a gift horse whose mouth he hadn’t looked into.

“I’m sure it’s otherwise,” said Dr. Israel, leading Curtis into the building and instructing a woman in white — a secretary or nurse, Bill wasn’t sure — to bring them some tea and cake. “Come, sit down,” he said, laying Bill’s coat over a heavy wooden table. “Despite its current function, we owe this great building to Ludwig the Pious, son of Charlemagne, not the
mad
King Ludwig of later days.”

“Has he really been here the whole time?” asked Curtis, eager to get on with what had occasioned this long detour. “Colonel Rathbone, I mean. I’ve had no cooperation from his son, and I don’t know much more than I found out from my visit to the army’s pension office.”

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Israel. “The local authorities agreed with your State Department to discontinue criminal proceedings if the colonel were confined to St. Michael’s. The sister sailed home
with the children. The brother from Ohio, a model of a man by all accounts, brought them up. The colonel, had he been in his right mind, could not have asked for more. All this was taken care of early in 1884. It happened very quickly, given modern communications. Did you know, by the way, that your President Arthur got the news as he came out of church on Christmas day — right on the steps, I was told — less than two days after the incident?” Dr. Israel, who seemed proud of being not merely the colonel’s physician but a historian of his case, explained that he had heard all the details years ago, when he first came to St. Michael’s, from old Dr. Rosenbach, the royal Prussian district physician.

“Where is the colonel?” asked Bill.

“He is out,” said Dr. Israel, reaching for his meerschaum pipe.

“Out?”

“Yes, on a drive. He keeps a carriage.”

Bill laughed incredulously. “He keeps a carriage? A lunatic on a soldier’s pension?”

Dr. Israel held a lit match to the pipe’s bowl and sucked it to life. “Even though the colonel remains rather wealthy in his own right, the family have always taken the pension. That’s how the rich stay rich. The colonel is a gentleman, so we let him live like one. The ‘servants’ in his dining hall are really guards, but what harm, after all —”

“His
own
dining hall?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Curtis. Come, I’ll show you his apartment. I see you’re too impatient for my chatter. All you young American men have the energy of your Mr. Roosevelt. Well, more power to you!” Dr. Israel smiled and led his guest out of the office, through two long halls, to another wing of the building, where they entered a small library with British and American magazines on a table. From there, with the help of the doctor’s key, they entered a small bedroom, sparsely furnished and militarily neat.

“Is that a picture of Mrs. Rathbone?” Bill asked nervously, pointing to the dresser. An oval frame contained the photograph of a gray-haired woman.

“Yes,” said Dr. Israel. “But of the preceding Mrs. Rathbone. The colonel’s mother. Later Mrs. Ira Harris.”

“I see,” said Curtis, noticing the absence of other photographs. “Are there no pictures of his children?”

“The colonel has no curiosity about them. His brother, Jared, who became the American consul in Paris twenty years ago, would visit him from time to time, but most everyone has lost interest by now. Miss Harris, the sister, an old lady, still sometimes writes with news of his grown children, as does an elderly lady in New York, a Miss Hall, but he ignores the communications. It is cold in here. Let us go back to the office and have out tea.”

Over plates of chocolate cake, Dr. Israel explained the colonel’s initial symptoms, in 1884, to his visitor, who took notes. “When he came here, he was entirely under the influence of hallucinations and the mania of being persecuted. He believed himself to be surrounded by enemies who made him drink liquids through the wall. He thought poison was being given him in his medicine and victuals, and refused to take any food which had not been tasted before his eyes.”

“Does he hear voices now?” asked Curtis.

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Israel. “And sees specters. But ones that have grown familiar to him. His early fears were much worse. The hallucinations were manifold. At times he believed himself to be persecuted by other patients in the asylum; he thought the ceiling would come down on him; he feared people would go to his rooms during his walks in the garden and injure his clothes; he feared he would get a yellow complexion from drinking the water. And he believed that he was kept in the asylum to be experimented on.”

“How is he physically?”

“For a seventy-three-year-old man, his condition is satisfactory, though it is always hard to keep him eating adequately. He complains of pain, but that is in his mind. The pupil of his right eye is slightly dilated, always. But that is irrelevant. The cause of his difficulties is not physiological. In most respects the Romantic writers were correct. You see —”

The woman in white had come in. She spoke softly to Dr. Israel and exited with a sociable smile in Curtis’s direction.

“The colonel has returned,” said the doctor. “Shall I take you to him?”

“Yes, please,” said Bill.

“Ignore any strange requests,” the doctor suggested as they went back down the hall to Henry’s apartment. “Treat them matter-of-factly.”

Trying to imagine what these requests could be, Bill remained silent. They strode past the monastery’s old stone walls.

“Colonel,” Dr. Israel called into the library. “You have a visitor from Washington.”

Henry stood up very straight, extending his hand as he lowered his head. Bill noticed that the American colonel’s manners were more formal than those of his European physician. He was thin to the point of gauntness, and his hair, what was left of it, had gone white. The enlarged pupil of the right eye was noticeable, and disconcerting, as was the slightly throbbing vein at the left temple.

“I’ll leave you,” said Dr. Israel, startling Bill. The doctor discreetly nodded to indicate that things would be all right, and he exited.

“Sit down, Mr. Curtis.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

“ ‘Mister’ is fine. I retired from the army more than forty years ago.”

“Of course.”

“Would you examine one of these?” Henry passed him a plate of biscuits. “They are trying to kill me with them, I’m sure.”

“After twenty-seven years here, sir? It seems unlikely.” Bill politely declined to take anything from the dish. “I just had cake in the doctor’s office.”

“May I ask you something?” said Henry.

“Certainly.”

“Would you kill me with that knife?”

“No, Mr. Rathbone,” Bill replied. “That wouldn’t be wise.”

Henry, as if long accustomed to having such favors withheld, changed the subject without any fuss. “I don’t think Taft will be nominated again, do you? I think Roosevelt is coming back.” This statement startled Bill even more than the request to kill his
host, and Henry seemed to perceive that. “I get most of the magazines and newspapers I want,” he said, “including the
Star
. It comes very late, several weeks, but Mr. Thompson, the consul, sees that it gets through.”

“I’m not sure about President Taft,” said Bill, who realized not only the preposterousness of the conversation, but also that he was probably less informed about American politics than his host. “I doubt he was encouraged by the off-year elections.” There was a short pause, and he decided to change the subject. “How are you feeling, sir?”

“I am well, for the most part, though the walls contain an apparatus that blows gas and dust into my room at night. This is what causes my headaches.”

Bill, taking a risk, said, “I believe Mrs. Lincoln had a similar complaint when she was confined.”

“I do not know the lady,” declared Henry, calmly.

“Do you eat well?” asked Bill.

“I neither like nor trust the food. I have suffered from dyspepsia for many years, and I have always disliked fleshiness, so I eat sparingly. Several months from now I plan to stop eating altogether.”

Bill noticed that the man was almost skeletal. He was afraid Rathbone would see he was staring, and take offense, but then he realized that his host was looking off into the middle distance and smiling. He decided that he had to bring himself to ask about Clara.

“Your wife —”

“Did you hear that? That gliding? That rustling out in the corridor?”

“No,” said Bill, “there’s no —”

“I had no wife,” said Henry.

“Clara?”

“Clara Harris was my sister.”

“Sister?”

“A woman of great beauty and virtue. I miss her very much.”

Bill Curtis avoided the man’s eyes, but made a quick note on his pad. He wanted to leave. Madness, he decided, was finally
uninteresting; its arbitrariness put it beyond profitable inquiry. But he had to ask about 1865. That was why he had come.

“You’ve seen so much history,” he began cautiously.

“I write about history,” said Henry.

This was something Bill had not heard from even Dr. Israel. “Really?” he asked. “May I see what you write?”

“I’m not quite ready to reveal it,” said Henry. “It is a theory of the Accidental Man. The right man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He turns the wrong place and time into the right ones. It is complicated.” He directed Curtis’s attention to a top shelf with dozens of black notebooks, presumably filled with his own words.

Bill noticed, on the same shelf, a rack of pipes and a small wooden doll. He made a note on his pad. “I’m afraid I’m baffled,” he confessed.

“You won’t be when you see it,” Henry said.

“About the history
you
saw — Mr. Lincoln —”

“I never discuss him,” Henry said quite firmly, but without losing any of his politeness.

“Not even in your writings?”

“Not one word. My own experiences have given me insight into
analogous
situations. But I do not need to discuss myself, any more than an architect needs to leave a scaffolding in front of a building he has built.”

Feeling at a dead end, Bill looked around the room.

“I think you need to go outside,” said Henry. “I’ll take you to her.”

“Her?”

“Miss Harris.”

Bill stared.

“Her grave,” said Henry.

The younger man assumed this was a delusion, and he wondered how he could conclude the visit. But Rathbone was reaching for his coat and hat, as if to go out. Was there an attendant Bill could summon before the man wandered off?

“Gunther!” cried Henry, before explaining, softly, to Curtis: “My manservant.”

Gunther, a large curly-haired youth, came in from the hall. Henry introduced him to Curtis, adroitly alternating English and German. Gunther gave Bill a knowing smile, and Henry, in German, issued Gunther an order. “ ‘To Miss Harris’s grave,’ ” Henry translated for Curtis. Gunther nodded to the patient and indicated that it was quite all right for the visitor to follow along. The three of them walked down one more stone corridor leading away from Dr. Israel’s office, and came out the back of the monastery. It was not possible, thought Bill. Surely they brought her home with the children, to be buried in Albany or Ohio.