Henry and Clara (31 page)

Why, Clara wondered, her anger rising, must any of this be gone into? Booth was dead. The question of his cohorts’ guilt depended on what dealings they had had with him
before
he entered the box. What transpired once he went in was now moot. Could no one else see that?

Colonel Clendenin brought a bowie knife over for Henry’s inspection. Even from where she sat, Clara could see that its long blade still held Henry’s bloodstains. Surely, she thought, this would animate him; but he just continued droning: “This knife might have made a wound similar to the one I received.
The assassin held the blade in a horizontal position, I think, and the nature of the wound would indicate it; it came down with a sweeping blow from above.”

Colonel Clendenin entered the knife in evidence, and Henry was permitted to step down. A buzz of conversation resumed at the reporters’ table, and the judges’ as well, everywhere but in the row of conspirators. As Clara closed her fan and straightened the black silk flower on her hat, she heard one newspaperman say to another, in a hiss of sarcasm, “ ‘Stop that man.’ For Christ’s sake, why didn’t
he
stop that man?”

Clara stared at the two of them in disbelief.

“ ‘Intently observing the proceedings upon the stage,’ ” mimicked the second one. “What a fine idea a week after Appomattox! Couldn’t imagine there’d be trouble!”

“The man’s a fool,” said the first one.

“Or worse,” his companion replied.

Nine days later, his arm still in a sling, Henry stood with Clara on Pennsylvania Avenue and watched 150,000 soldiers parade by in the Union’s official victory celebration. The Twelfth New York was marching, and Clara, Ira Harris, and Pauline had all urged Henry to march with it. “You are a
hero
,” his mother had insisted. “From Antietam to Petersburg. You should be with your comrades. You should not be leaving the field to Will.” But he did not relent. He had come to realize, in the weeks after Ford’s, that many of those who read the newspapers and talked endlessly of the assassination had formed a very different view of him than the heroic one held at Fifteenth and H streets. The monstrous injustice of the whispering — the absurdity of the idea that Henry might somehow have prevented the killing of the President — was never discussed by anyone in the Harris house. Its members tried to ascribe his refusal to join the parade to anything — physical pain; modesty; perversity; just being Henry, the
old
Henry — except the shame they feared he was feeling. What he actually thought remained unclear. He spoke little to anyone, including Clara; the two of them avoided the only topic on their minds.

So there they stood, on the sidelines of a city still crazily split between celebration and grief. The hotels were full, and visitors who couldn’t get into them were once more sleeping on porches and bathing in the fountains, as they had before Mr. Lincoln’s first inaugural. As the troops marched by to screaming huzzahs, the Capitol remained hung with crepe, and the Treasury Building decorated with the flag torn by Wilkes Booth’s spur. The parade went on and on, regiment after regiment, from dashing Zouaves to colored troops shouldering pickaxes, all of them moving between the White House, where Johnson and Grant and the Cabinet occupied a reviewing stand, and the Capitol, on whose steps a vast, disparate choir sang everything from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.”

Soldiers from the Twelfth passed Henry without recognizing him. Clara looked at the laces of her shoes and thought of the conspirators’ trial, which was still going on in the penitentiary. She was so cheated by fate that she might as well be wearing one of the plotters’ hoods, with no one to recognize or care about her. “Let’s go,” she said to Henry after twenty minutes at the avenue’s edge. “It’s time.” They walked in silence back to the corner of Fifteenth and H and climbed into the carriage they had told to wait. The driver now asked if the circuitous route he had in mind for getting to the station would do, and Henry said yes, anything that would get them around the parade. The terminal was bound to be chaotic, but their seats to New York were reserved. Papa and Pauline and the girls would follow tomorrow, and they would all be back in Albany in time for Amanda’s wedding.

When the carriage came as close as it would to the Mansion, Clara thought of Mrs. Lincoln, who two days ago had left it at last. She reached her hand over the rim of the coach, as if trying to touch or signal her spirit. Then she turned her head back toward Henry, and they rode in silence until he spoke in a tone he had never used with her before this moment. “I’m surprised you didn’t spend the last six weeks in there with her,” he said, gesturing toward the Mansion. “In fact, I’m sometimes surprised you came home at all that morning.”

“Y
OUR PAPA SAID
Mr. Vassar’s hired a lady astronomer to teach the girls down at his college.” Mary Hall pointed to a bright star as she and Clara sat on the front porch of the Harris home in Loudonville on the third Friday in November.

“Yes.” Clara laughed. “And she’s going to live with
her
papa in the observatory.”

After eleven years of knowing Clara, Mary still didn’t always understand her humor — the private thought waiting behind the expressed laugh — so she paused to let her friend continue. “That would be a good life for me, Mary. Alone with Papa, just studying the moons of Jupiter through a telescope.”

They were the only two still awake in the house full of women. Amanda was living away from home with her husband, but Pauline and Louise and Lina were asleep upstairs, and all the men were gone: Will and Jared (now graduated from West Point) were away at their posts, and in the week since coming up here for “Thanksgiving” dinner — the custom revived by Mr. Lincoln two years ago, in 1863 — Ira Harris and Henry Rathbone had been back in Washington.

“Do you think a woman can really be an astronomer?” Mary asked.

“Of course,” Clara said. “You surprise me, Mary. You think the black man is the equal of the white one, but you never seem able to imagine the women of any race being equivalent to their men!”

“That’s not true. I simply don’t think
everything
should be meted out in like measure to men and women.”

“Mary,” said Clara, who had been irritable since late this morning, “don’t you dare bring up Mrs. Surratt again.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Yes, you were, and I’m not going to have another discussion of it. I’m glad they hanged her with the rest of them, just as I wish they’d hanged Mary Hartung six years ago after all the abuse and whispering Papa endured.”

“All right, all right,” said Mary. “Have you heard from Henry?”

Clara, wondering if the word “whispering” had prompted Mary to pick Henry as the change of subject, answered, “Yes, today. He’s writing an enormous end-of-the-year report, all about the dismantling of the army.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Mary.

Clara wanted to ask the question that had been on her mind all week — whether Mary had heard people in New York talk of Henry’s conduct on the night of the assassination. But she couldn’t. Instead it was Mary who screwed up the courage to ask, “Do you have a date for the wedding yet?”

“Soon,” said Clara. “But still no date.”

“A little more waiting isn’t so bad,” said Mary. “It will put the war further behind you.”

“You make the war sound like a summer in Newport or last year’s birthday, Mary. Something that will soon be completely and neatly forgotten. It’s not that convenient. Do you suppose Sybil Bashford will ever put the war behind her?”

“Yes, I rather think she will.”

The two women surprised themselves with sudden, uproarious laughter. “Oh, Clara,” said Mary. “God forgive us.”

Clara settled down, relieved. “I do love you, Mary, and I’m sorry I’ve been so grumpy. I promise to be better in the morning.” She kissed her friend good night, and the two of them went upstairs, Mary to a room at the top of the house and Clara to her old window seat, where she lit a candle and took out two letters from the pocket of her dress. The first had come from Henry:

She shook her head and set the piece of paper aside. The second letter, from Papa, had been written the same evening, three nights after his and Henry’s return to Washington, and it contained what he hadn’t been able to tell her face-to-face here in Loudonville last week:

This was the third time she had read these letters since their arrival this morning, and she was determined never to read a pair like them again. To think of these two men, alone in that house except for the servants, sitting in different rooms, neither one communicating with the other, each complaining to her — it made her furious. She loved them both, but she would not be the victim of Henry’s anger and Papa’s dithering; she would no longer be crushed between their cross purposes. So she brought the candle to her table and commenced writing two letters of her own. As she flexed her hands, squeezing the last of the late autumn cold from them, she felt herself taking control of matters once and for all.