Henry and Clara (7 page)

Everyone was silent as she exited the room. When she’d crossed the threshold of the parlor, she turned around and said, “Clara, you are to stay inside tonight.”

Clara appealed to Ira Harris with a look, but before his wife was out of earshot he said, “You must do what your mother says.”

Henry got up and gestured for Howard to come with him. “I suppose we should apologize. Then we can head out.”

The three Harrises finished eating. “I’m sorry, Papa,” said Clara at last. “I do love you.” She walked around to the head of the table and gave him a kiss before going upstairs to the room she usually shared with Louise. She was sulky about the lonely evening she had to look forward to, while Henry and Howard got to carry torches through the streets of Albany. From her reading, Clara was aware of melancholy’s pleasures, so she took down Tennyson’s
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
from its place on the shelf beside bundles of Henry’s and Will’s letters. She opened to “Mariana” and tried to puff up her own plight into something worthy of verse six:

Too cranky to achieve the grander depths of despair, Clara put the book aside and spent the next two hours fidgeting and sewing and sketching, until she went to sleep from sheer boredom, without getting up from the window seat. Except for the kitchen maid tidying up downstairs, the house was soundless.

Then, around ten o’clock, with her sleeping face still turned toward the window, Clara began to hear a distant roar of voices, just loud enough to make her open her eyes and see a hundred orange tufts of flame, like a sea of marigolds, a half block away. The torchlight parade for Mr. Fillmore was coming up Eagle Street. Its sight and sound were suddenly as desirable as the lover Mariana sighed for. Swinging her legs down from the
window seat, she put on her shoes, did up her laces, and tiptoed to the door. Satisfied that her stepmother and father were asleep, and that Will was in his room, absorbed by a book, she hurried down the stairs and out of the house. She ran up the street, smiling, as the torchlights brightened and the voices swelled. Reaching the crowd, she squeezed through row after row of it, excusing herself as politely as she could, until she had a clear view of the man standing atop the ship’s crate and holding forth for Mr. Fillmore in Mr. Fillmore’s own words: “ ‘If there be those either North or South who desire an administration for the North as against the South, or for the South as against the North, they are not the men who should give their suffrages to me. For my own part, I know only my country, my whole country, and nothing but my country!’ ”

There wasn’t anything in this speech to give a fright to the Harrises’ Irish maids, and as the crowd realized it wouldn’t be thrown the red meat of nativism, its members quieted down. But since the speaker was warning them against national breakup — something far more perilous than the peculiar habits of new arrivals to the American shore — they remained attentive, and Clara took advantage of everyone’s fixed position to make an orderly scan for Henry and Howard. She spotted the latter with his arm around a pretty girl and Henry on the other side of him. After pushing toward them, she tapped Henry on the shoulder from behind and said, “I see who gets Howard’s support.”

Henry turned around, delighted. “What a surprise, Cous’! Have you run away from the familial tomb, or have you converted Judge Harris to the hopeless cause of the Know-Nothings? I must say you were well spoken at the table tonight.” He took hold of her arm and gracefully parted the crowd around them, two by two, until he had steered her back to its edges.

Clara could remember only a handful of occasions in the last eight years when she’d been truly alone with Henry, and though she was hardly alone with him now, the lack of Harrises and Rathbones in the immediate vicinity gave this moment, lit by torches and the moon, such a complete feeling of privacy that she had trouble speaking.

“Must you provoke Papa so?” she finally asked. “You know that he was much more upset than your mother, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, Cous’.” He raised her chin with his hand so her gaze met his. “I also know that he’s
your
papa. And as for
my
mama, she can take care of herself.” Seeing he had not yet made her smile, he argued: “Haven’t I pleased him? Spending two years at bloody Union?” A cheer rose behind him as one speaker finished and another took his place. Henry glanced over his shoulder and then, with a smile, back at Clara. “It will soon enough be the only Union left.”

“You don’t really believe that,” she said.

“Oh, yes. It will all go up in flames.” He took his torch and held it under his chin and made a scary face, all bared teeth and flaring eyes. Clara remembered the night with the jack-o’-lantern, years before, and she laughed.

“But what will happen to us?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But more than silly dining room arguments and silly elections like this one. The terrible time of our lives.” His face took on a certain sadness. But he immediately cleared it, like a slate being wiped with a sponge, and put on a joking expression. He stripped off his Fillmore rosette and offered it to Clara like a bouquet.

A
YEAR LATER
, on the hot morning of July 22, 1857, Clara watched as Henry was graduated from Union College. She sat between Pauline and Will in the front row of spectators, a position accorded them not because of any distinction Henry had achieved during his three years in Schenectady, but as befitting the family of Judge Ira Harris, distinguished member of the class of 1824, who was on the dais and soon to make remarks.

As Pauline looked at the sea of black-robed graduates, she was aware of being on almost the exact spot where twelve years before she had set her widow’s cap for Ira Harris. Their amalgamated sets of children, who took up nearly this entire row, had since grown into adolescence and beyond, and their own Lina was now seven. But how little everything else had changed! Dr. Nott, who had just finished speaking on the wonders of the transatlantic cable, looked just as he had in 1845, neither more nor less ancient. Ira himself was heavier, his hair now completely silver, but he was otherwise much less transformed than she would have imagined a dozen years ago: he was soon scheduled to serve a brief term on the court of appeals — a step above the state supreme court, though it sounded a step below — before resuming his usual seat and the settlement of such dull disputes as managed to get started in Albany County.

Pauline had put on some matronly weight herself, and the heat made her more uncomfortable than it used to. Fanning herself with the program, which promised a long series of student orations on everything from “Modern Chivalry” to “Civil Engineering as a Science and an Art,” she wondered how she would stand it all; Henry’s short speech would not come until
almost the end of the long afternoon. She knew, though, that it would be more inspired than the one she was now hearing, her husband’s. Really just a series of quotations from the
New York Times
’s July 4 editorial — which clung to the idea of “a glowing American nationality” and disbelieved that Northerners and Southerners really hated one another — Judge Harris’s remarks provoked somnolent nods of approval from the crowd. The only man who could possibly object was the Dictator, who would not be pleased to have one of his men retailing from the
Times
sentiments he might as easily have found in the
Albany Evening Journal
. Pauline twisted this way and that to see if she could find anyone likely to report back to Mr. Weed on the judge’s performance, though at this point she had to wonder why she even bothered.

Will Harris, on the other side of Clara, nodded vigorously over each paragraph of his father’s rehashings, as if that might inspire the judge to work on his political fortunes the kind of transformation that Will had, over the past year, worked in himself: he had inflated his physique with dumbbells and pulleys, forsaken Greek and the University of Rochester, and prevailed upon the judge to prevail upon the Dictator to prevail upon a pliant congressman to get him admitted to West Point. He had been there for a month, full of new zeal and ambition that, were he Pauline’s son, might have excited her support. As it was, she rather agreed with Henry on the subject of his stepbrother’s metamorphosis: “He’s made his body as hard as his head.”

Clara knew that her papa hadn’t done very well with the crowd, but she put it down to their impatience for what was to follow, the brief appearances of their own sons and brothers. She herself was looking forward to Henry’s performance too much to think about her poor father now. If only there weren’t so many others to sit through first! As the boys went about their stiff oratorical business under the hot sun, they presented a comical aspect to Clara. They might have been a small regiment, all in black uniforms, first one and then another standing up and sitting down, like musketeers daring to fire over the top of a
trench and then be shot. The embarrassment of so many of them as they stood on gangly limbs in oversized robes, their manful attempts at whiskers hiding, or not hiding, boyish complexions, endeared them to her. But the dreariness of what they spoke made her glad of her own haphazard education, gained on the window seat in her bedroom with books carried up from her father’s library. Surely she had found more beauty and truth in that manner than these poor boys had found in three years of compulsory lectures.

At last, after a dozen more speeches and two musical interludes, it was time for Henry, who crossed the platform with the casual gait of a beau approaching a dance partner. Without breaking stride, he shook hands with Ira Harris, a gesture that touched Clara and made her wonder if Henry might somehow be ready to put away the animosities he had carried with him into the family ten years ago. He took the podium with a confident smile, and Clara noticed the sun glint off his whiskers and crown, from which his hairline had begun a slight, manly recession.

“The American Idol” was his subject, and it seemed that the object of national veneration he had in mind was, thankfully, good character. He began by quoting Mr. Emerson, surely something that would please Ira Harris and Eliphalet Nott: “We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy.” By speaking sentiments such as these, Henry was performing much like those who spoke before him, though Clara took proud note of the way his clear, piercing tenor stirred the air as his predecessors hadn’t managed to.

But within a minute she realized that Henry’s speech was something altogether different; he was bringing up Mr. Emerson not as visionary but as false prophet. By Henry’s reckoning, it was neither dawn nor noon but rather a few minutes before midnight. No recitation of American promise and plenty was forthcoming. Instead, the audience, increasingly amazed, heard the young man speak of police riots in New York City, polygamy
in the Utah Territory, and William Walker’s self-coronation in the jungles of Nicaragua. “We pretend that history is a snake charmer, a piper who will uncoil men’s individual mysteries and set them marching in a straight line toward sunlight and progress. But only at our peril do we think of ourselves as domestic creatures. When we honestly reckon the intractable stirrings within men, we will speak more humbly about the future of Man. We claim the ability to undo history’s repetitions, to turn history into civics, but if we are truthful and if we are strong, we will admit that history’s whirlwinds are not ours to tame. The American Idol is civility, and that idol is shaking in the winds that now besiege the national temple. I look out upon these rows of friends and urge them to pay less heed to the slack tongues of reason and more attention to the gusts gathering behind them: ‘Not in the air shall these my words disperse, / Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak / The deep prophetic fullness of this verse, / And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse!’ ”

It was Lord Byron himself, Clara realized, as Henry took his seat to stunned silence, angry faces, and concerted cheering from a few pockets of the graduating seniors. A quotation from the libertine bard of
Childe Harold
seemed even more brazen than Henry’s own words, which had left the gray heads on the platform looking like a Roman senate forced to witness a stabbing in the chamber. Clara strained to read the expression on her father’s face, but the distress it must be exhibiting was hidden by the young form of Mr. Abner P. Brush, who had just gotten up to follow Henry’s jeremiad with some brief remarks on “The Scholar, his Trials and Triumphs.”