Henry and Clara (9 page)

Howard shook his head and smiled. “You make Clara sound rather like yourself. Do you think she
makes
herself different from the rest of them?”

“You mean, to please me?”

“Yes. And you still haven’t told me what you think of the problem.”

“I don’t think it
is
a problem. I think it’s a pleasure.”

“Maybe that’s what it was for her once. She had a face to picture and moon over when she read all those poems to herself. But she’s getting ready to turn twenty-four. If her feelings for you persist, how much of a pleasure will they be for her? When —”

“For
me
, Howard. I think it’s a pleasure for me.”

“Basking in her hopeless love? A cruel sort of entertainment, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you. But since you keep on asking me, I’ll tell you that the pleasure it gives me is not a matter of ‘entertainment.’ It’s a matter of serious satisfaction.”

“You can’t persist in this, Cousin. The two of you were raised as brother and sister from the time she was thirteen.”

“And now, as you say, she’s nearly twenty-four.” Henry looked at Howard, his gaze still level.

Howard was embarrassed. “I can’t see any good coming from it,” he said, lifting his wine glass to signal the waiter. “Maybe we ought to talk about something else.”

Which is what they did for another hour or two, over another couple of bottles, before walking out into the summer night, a warm one that made the two young men seek whatever breeze would be coming off the Hudson. As they strolled eastward, the gaslights, which had replaced the old whale-oil ones the year
Henry’s father died, began to come on. Henry pointed to one that had just flared into life at the end of the lamplighter’s pole. “I know a street where some of these lights have a pleasant reddish hue. Care to venture there with me? I’ve got lots of money left to spend.”

“Another time,” said Howard. He was eager to go to the girl he’d been steadily courting the past few weeks. “I’ll leave the night to you.”

Henry clapped him on the back and said he didn’t know what he was missing. They parted with a handshake and went in opposite directions, but before they were separated by twenty paces, Howard Rathbone, still disturbed by their conversation at the Delavan, and hoping to sound more generous than he had, called out, “Henry?”

His cousin turned around.

“Wouldn’t it be better to spend the rest of the evening with Clara?”

Henry just waved before continuing off into the night. It
would
be better to spend the evening with Clara, his true home, in whose presence he could be his truest self. But tonight, as on half the nights of his life, it seemed, he wanted to lose that self, to take it off with his clothes, and think no more of it ’til morning.

E
ACH NEW YEAR
’
S DAY
at their home on Elk Street, Mr. and Mrs. Joel Rathbone received the cards of over a hundred callers, Albany revelers who would drop by after visiting the Eagle Street residence of Judge and Mrs. Ira Harris. In 1859, the New Year’s rounds left many of the Rathbones and Harrises so sated with sociability that it was February 10 before the families once again commingled. The occasion was an evening sermon in Tweddle Hall by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church. The house was packed, abuzz with anticipation, when Howard Rathbone noticed his cousin Henry far down the aisle, which set the Rathbone party, just come from dinner at the Albion, waving to the Harris one. Clara raised her arm in response, though she was busy renewing an old acquaintance: Mary Hall, whom she’d not seen since two summers ago at Newport, had just spotted her and come running up from the back of the auditorium. It seemed that Mary’s father, the Reverend William T. Hall, had come from Manhattan to join abolitionist forces with Reverend Beecher at a string of upstate rallies. As the audience awaited a thrilling oratorical display, Clara and Mary clasped each other’s hands like pairs of reins and hurried through a conversation that dealt in large part with news of the impossible Sybil Bashford of South Carolina.

The young women were only a little more agitated than the rest of the audience. Rumors were everywhere that John Brown, who had come back east to raise money from the radical abolitionists, was planning to finance a slave rebellion. These days Pauline Harris was so swept up by national events that she neglected to test each one’s relevance to the political career of
her husband. Reverend Beecher was, of course, Horace Greeley’s chosen preacher, not something to please Mr. Weed, but lately the Dictator himself seemed a small thing, just one more perplexed politician trying to ride the tide of news. Pauline was determined to hear Beecher no matter whose protégé he was.

The crowd settled itself while an usher filled the water glass at the platform. Howard Rathbone, who had gone down to his cousin Henry’s aisle seat, thought he’d better now double back to his own. He took just enough time to say, “Perhaps you
are
a great prognosticator, Cousin. The crowd seems worked up for Armageddon.”

When Henry Ward Beecher at last took the stage, he struck Clara as a compressed version of her handsome father. Though quite a bit younger, and wearing long hair that had not gone so gray, the minister had a broad face and chest that might have belonged to a shorter Ira Harris. There was power in Beecher’s form, the suggestion of great energy too long pent up and needing loud, immediate release. He flung his first words at the audience like a lightning bolt, punctuating them with a stomped foot: “Did I, when I became a minister, cease to be a man or a citizen? No! A thousand times no! Have I not as much interest in our government as though I were a lawyer, a ditch digger, or a wood sawyer?” He was soon pounding his fists and throwing back his hair, and when he came to utter the name of John Brown, it was with a force that shook even the Rathbones at the back of the hall: “I may disapprove of his bloody forays and of those feeble schemes we hear rumored, and I may shrink likewise from the judicial bloodshed that doubtless would follow them.” He paused and stood stock still. Not a cough interrupted the silence.
“But if such schemes unfold, let no man pray that Brown be spared!”
Raising his clenched fists heavenward, Beecher cried, “Let the South make him a martyr! His work will have been miserable. But a cord and a gibbet will redeem all that and round up his failure with heroic success!”

The crowd was too stunned even to applaud.

When it came to Brown’s feeble schemes and bloody forays, Henry Rathbone realized he felt no disapproval at all. Neither,
he knew, did Beecher. Passion was passion, and Beecher had it, a lust for drama and catastrophe and redemption that he might have satisfied equally as a stage tragedian. So long as the action was spectacular, its moral end was beside the point. John Brown, Henry felt sure, was the same: after fomenting an insurrection, he would be the perfect man to lead the avenging mob against himself. They were, Henry thought unhappily, three of a kind, himself and Brown and Beecher.

Beecher dropped his voice to a hush. “If an enslaved man, acting from the yearnings of his own heart, desires to run away, who shall forbid him? I stand on the outside of this great cordon of darkness, and every man that escapes from it, running for his life, shall have some help from me.” He trailed off into complete silence, which was soon broken by clapping at the back of the auditorium, a smattering that gathered noise and gusto as it rolled forward toward the stage. Listening to its full thunder, Beecher cast his eyes modestly downward.

No hands contributed more fervently to the ovation than the small gloved ones belonging to Mary Hall, who was imagining how eagerly she would help any slave found tapping at her family’s door on a cold night like this. She had already had her gentle heart impassioned by the novel Beecher’s sister had written, and only wished there were some way to stop the sufferings of gentle souls like Topsy. The thought of one of them showing up to seek her aid, right on Beekman Place, was almost unbearably affecting.

Clara certainly had no sympathy for any institution that permitted the likes of Sybil Bashford to own other human beings, but she could not help seeing the comic side of Reverend Beecher’s exertions. The man’s vanity coated every syllable he coddled from his throat, and all the foot-stomping and arm-flailing reminded her of some Indian dance in one of Mr. Cooper’s novels. She leaned forward and looked leftward, and when she succeeded in catching Henry’s eye, she did a quick imitation of the preacher, rolling her eyes and clenching her fists. Henry laughed hard enough to make Ira Harris cast a perplexed glance toward each of them.

Tonight Clara’s poor papa was too preoccupied by other things to keep his mind on the lecture, let alone the mischief of his daughter and stepson. Right now even the Fugitive Slave Act troubled him less than the fate of Mrs. Mary Hartung, over whose trial he had begun presiding ten days ago. It was a dreadful business, and for the life of him he couldn’t tell who had driven whom, the wife or the paramour, to kill the wretched husband. The normal disappointments between man and wife were a sad part of our earthly existence, to be borne with charity and understanding (he was well aware of the extent to which he had disappointed Pauline these past eleven years); but violent betrayal of the sort that had sundered Mr. and Mrs. Hartung was past reckoning. What if the woman had been the one to make the plan and serve the poison? Would she not then deserve to hang, just as the man, were he the chief evildoer, surely would? Farther down the valley, his friend Matthew Vassar, the brewer, was planning to build a college for women, one that would educate them as fully as Union College educated men. Well, if men and women were to have equality in all things, should not hanging be one of them?

Onstage Reverend Beecher was talking of an equality so broad it spanned all the races and peoples of the globe: “The glory of intelligence, refinement, genius, has nothing to do with men’s rights. The rice slave, the Hottentot, are as much God’s children as Humboldt or Chalmers.”

How blessed he was, able to utter these sentiments with such confidence! The judge could appreciate their nobility, but right now their forceful expression would be beyond the capacities of his own depressed soul. Last week Will’s letter from West Point contained a story that troubled Ira Harris greatly: a cadet named Randol from down at Newburgh had a father, once a happy and prosperous man, who’d just killed himself in a fit of delirium. The elder Randol, according to Will, “was very much excited about spiritualism, or something of the sort.” One more poor, forked creature, the judge now reflected, just trying to find some wings to take him over the walls of this vale of tears. And look at the result.

There were terrible times approaching, Henry was right about that. The judge himself would be too far past his prime to play any part in the coming cataclysm, and his only impulse was to shield those he loved from it, to gather them inside the house, like the apples in his orchard, against the advance of a frost.

Reverend Beecher was gone from the stage, and the whole of Tweddle Hall was shaking with applause, before the judge even noticed that the lecture was over. As people put on their coats, chattering and arguing about what the minister had said, Harris could barely find the energy to rise from his seat. He was still in it when Clara, who already had her bonnet tied, put a loving hand on his shoulder and said, “Come, Papa. Henry’s Aunt Emeline has asked all of us back for some hot cider. It will drive out the hot air we’ve absorbed.”

Clara’s sarcasm always charmed the judge, even though he knew it was born as much from a desire to please Henry as from her own nature. The intimacy between the two young people had grown up with him barely noticing it, and was growing still stronger, though he hoped Henry’s appetite for female conquest, and Clara’s desirability to other beaux, would eventually lead them away from each other. For the moment, however, Ira Harris welcomed his daughter’s sharp remarks as a sort of smelling salt. She took his arm as they left the hall, but it was really his beleaguered spirit that was leaning on her vitality. Pauline had taken the free arm of the masterly Joel Rathbone, who had his wife Emeline on the other. All the young people and their friends formed a gay convoy around the parents — even shy Mary Hall had been swept into it — and after a fast walk through the chilly February air, the whole party, more than a dozen strong, arrived at 3 Elk Street.

Though less grand in size and decoration than Kenwood, the Rathbones’ mansion south of the city, this townhouse had a sumptuousness that made Mary Hall’s modest jaw drop. She had never seen its equal in New York City, and as her eyes raced from Venetian bottles to Swiss clocks to German crystal, she supposed there wasn’t its like in any one country of Europe — so many different countries had been necessary to furnish it!

The increasing frequency of the Rathbones’ grand tours was a sore point with Pauline Harris, and it pained the judge that his wife now had to listen with polite impatience as Emeline Rathbone regaled her with tales of recent destinations and acquisitions. No, Pauline hadn’t seen those Meissen jars before tonight, and yes, it was fascinating to think that they’d been in a shipping crate somewhere on the ocean between Hamburg and New York when everyone was sipping coffee here on New Year’s morning. Ira Harris winced anew at the thought of how his wife’s ambitions, social and material, were rubbing themselves raw in the rut she walked between Albany and Loudonville, with only rare escapes to Newport and New York.