Henry and Clara (29 page)

“I’ve got one! Now!” cried Major Potter’s helper, rushing back into the house and urging that Henry be hurried into the waiting carriage. As the two men hoisted his insensible form out the door, Clara kissed its white forehead, recoiling at the small blood smear her own cheek left on it. She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief, and another soldier, or a policeman, she wasn’t sure, asked her to help calm Mrs. Lincoln, who had at last sat down on a sofa. Clara took a place on the cushion next to her and tried to put her arms around the First Lady, but this succeeded only in agitating her again. “It’s the blood,” said Clara to one of the soldiers, pointing to her dress as the source of Mrs. Lincoln’s new cries. Helpless, Clara gave way to sobs for the second time since the gun had been fired.

She now knew that that was what the loud crack and blue smoke had been, just as she knew, from bits of rushed, overheard conversation among all the doctors and politicians streaming in and out of the house, that one of the President’s pupils was wildly dilated, that his heart was functioning at only forty-four beats per minute, and that the catastrophe was thought to have
been perpetrated by Edwin Booth’s younger brother, who had apparently escaped. Senator Sumner had arrived, and Robert Lincoln came in with Secretary Stanton, who insisted the President’s wife be kept from his bedside, which was now littered with mustard plasters, hot water bottles, and dried blood. The doctors were trying to keep the tiny puncture behind his ear from clotting; the pillow, Clara heard Stanton tell Sumner much too loudly, was a terrible sight.

It was the middle of the night before Clara heard the tick of the front parlor’s clock above the diminishing roar in the street. The crowd had been pushed back, but until two
A.M
. its sound came through the window like the noise of the ocean each summer in Newport. She was exhausted and her mind kept wandering, back to Albany and the days of her childhood, before returning to this time and this room, which had come to feel like eternity. By three
A.M
. it seemed as if they were no longer waiting to see when Mr. Lincoln would cross the border into another world; it was as if all of them already had crossed over, and this was it, a world in which they would forever reel, growing always more sore and exhausted. At one point Mr. Stanton came out from a back parlor, where he seemed to be running the whole government, to ask Clara what she had observed in the box. She made an effort to tell him, but he became impatient with her imprecision and went back to his business like a storekeeper who had a richer customer to see. Sometimes Mrs. Lincoln seemed as unconscious as her husband, but no one considered moving Clara from her side, not even when Miss Keene took up a plaintive position, on her knees, in front of the First Lady.

Nor did Clara herself think of moving, though at any moment she might have asked one of her father’s colleagues, who continued tramping through the house, to take her home. She was afraid that if she returned there, she would find Henry dead, or that she herself would be murdered en route: the statesmen shuttling between the bedroom in which the President lay and the room in which Mr. Stanton worked talked as much of Mr. Seward as Mr. Lincoln, of how he had been stabbed in his bed
at home in Lafayette Square, and would probably die with the President. A strange feeling that she had been painted into history, inserted into a tableau, also kept her from moving. It was a terrible feeling, though at moments exhilarating — this sense that she would forever be as she was now, arrested, like the play across the street, which would never move beyond the second scene of act 3. If she tried to leave, the tableau would come to life and move toward an even more terrible climax, some dramatic revelation that would destroy her. And so she stayed.

More than an hour after Clara first heard the clock, Mrs. Lincoln succeeded in her demands to see her husband. Clara and Miss Keene were asked to assist her in the bedroom. The First Lady proved silent, even stoic, at the sight of the President’s head, with its blackening right eye. She put her cheek against his, tenderly, without agitation or theatrics, until he let out a long, tormented breath that startled her into shrieks. Mr. Stanton became furious, and she was not allowed back in until long after dawn, after the newsboys could be heard screaming in the streets. Robert Lincoln escorted his mother into the bedroom, while out in the parlor Clara listened to the last minutes of the waiting, which ended with the First Lady’s terrible cry — “O my God! I have given my husband to die!” — and the murmuring of prayers by the Lincolns’ family pastor, the Reverend Phineas Densmore Gurley, who had been busily introducing himself in the parlor, announcing his ridiculous name over and over, like one of the characters in the play.

Mrs. Lincoln was brought through the hallway and led from the house. Miss Keene was suddenly nowhere in sight, and Clara realized that she herself was at last free to go, that in fact she must go. A soldier she had not seen before found a carriage for her, and she made the journey back toward Fifteenth and H alone, along the same Z-shaped route she had traveled with the others twelve hours before. Beyond the carriage’s half-covering hood, the rain fell on her absurd dress, wetting the satin and bloodstains. The bells from every church in the city swung and banged, again and again, as if pulled by the fast-moving hooves of the horses.

Lina opened the door and flung her arms around Clara.

“Don’t cry, Lina darling. You must let me get upstairs to see Henry.” She closed her eyes and clenched her fists, bracing herself, waiting for her little sister to say that Henry was dead.

But there was no terrible news. “Papa is coming” was all that Lina said. “They reached him with the telegraph.”

Clara mounted the stairs. Through the open door to Henry’s room she could see Pauline sitting at his bedside. Her stepmother rose and came toward her, stopping to say only “My son nearly died” before relinquishing Henry to his fiancée. Pauline brushed past Clara as if the younger woman had tried all their patience by staying out at a ball until morning.

Henry lay still, his white forehead furrowed with pain. Clara knelt down and softly put her hand on his chest.

“Is he dead?” he asked.

“Yes,” she whispered.

His eyes looked past her, toward the door at the edge of the room, just as she remembered them doing before the loud crack and the blue smoke.

Clara shook the blotting sand off the last sheet of the letter and reached for an envelope. Her stack of fresh ones lay atop a copy of Mr. Stanton’s latest reward poster: $50,000 for the capture of John Wilkes Booth, “
THE MURDERER OF OUR BELOVED PRESIDENT IS STILL AT LARGE!”
it proclaimed, with as much panic as vengefulness. Papa said they had lost count of the number of people arrested, with or without a reason. No other official had been struck down since the President and Mr. Seward were attacked ten days ago, but everyone in the square remained fearful. It was two
A.M
. now, actually the twenty-sixth of April, Clara realized as she glanced again at her letter to Mary Hall. Everyone else in the house was asleep, and she would not allow herself to retire without checking the bolt on the front door one more time. From her window she could see the guards puffing on their cheroots next to Congressman Hooper’s house. President Johnson must have long since gone to bed, and the only sound came from the boots of some pickets stationed farther up the street.

She no longer followed a normal human schedule. She slept whenever fear and memory let her, but even then she was awakened by Henry’s moans from the room above — either the wakeful groaning he had from his arm or the dull cries he let out during nightmares. When she was up late, as now, she relived the days since the assassination over and over in her head.

When she’d arrived home an hour after Mr. Lincoln died, and gone up to Henry’s room, he seemed on the verge of telling her something. His eyes had a despairing urgency, as if he were trying to bring himself to communicate some vital matter that had been lost in the violence and chaos. But he succeeded only in upsetting himself, and his pain and loss of blood sent him in and out of consciousness. For the rest of Saturday, on Pauline’s orders, only the army surgeon was allowed in his room.

The following day, Easter Sunday, Pauline sent Lina to church, and while she was there, Judge Olin of the District of Columbia’s supreme court showed up to take statements. That Henry was in no condition to give one counted for nothing. The judge was insistent, and Pauline, possessed by the fright that had taken hold of the city, relented. So Henry, behind a closed door, set about answering the judge’s questions as well as he could, his murmured replies interrupted at frequent intervals by louder cries of pain. Clara busied herself downstairs, putting lilies into vases and refusing to cry.

In the middle of all this, Papa finally arrived from Albany and, in a burst of decisiveness that no one in the family had seen from him in years, put a stop to the interrogation, telling Judge Olin that he himself, as a United States senator, would take statements from his daughter and stepson, and that would be the end of it. He personally handed the judge his hat.