Henry and Clara (36 page)

T
HREE YEARS LATER
, on March 3, 1873, Henry stepped off the Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar at a point slightly beyond Lafayette Square. He was returning from an afternoon spent reading Carlyle in the Library of Congress. Entering the square on the Madison Place side, he began a slow counterclockwise circuit toward home. As always, the houses surrounding the park excited familiar reflections and long-held resentments. He walked over the spot where fourteen years ago Dan Sickles had shot his wife’s lover, and he thought of Clara, advancing toward forty and, after three children, still beautiful — though too eager to be reminded, by every congressional clerk and Tuscan fop, of just how lovely and spirited she was.

No house in the square was more potent to Henry than Mr. Seward’s place, as he would always think of it, even though it had belonged for some time to Speaker Blaine. Seward had died last fall, and Clara’s slow recovery from the birth of their third child and first daughter, Clara Pauline, had given them an excuse not to travel up to Auburn for the funeral. Judge Harris (as everyone once more called him) had sent them an account by letter, his handwriting still more quavery after a second stroke. Even so, he’d managed all the telling details, including Mr. Weed’s attempt at pallbearing amidst a flood of tears. The description was friendly, even heartfelt: the judge was content with teaching law and being chairman of the American Baptist Missionary Union, a position that provided Pauline with the small bit of social recognition she still craved, though it was nothing, of course, to the road show of lionization that Seward traveled, from Mexico City to Shanghai, after leaving office and Lafayette Square in ’69.

Nobody, thought Henry, was where they had been just a couple of years before. All the army men had quit, not just himself and Will, but even Jared, who’d left Schofield’s staff and gone out to California to raise horses. He’d make a success of it, too, just as the noble Will was doing with the Tolling Bell Company. But their western ventures left Henry without any desire to compete. The more he heard of them at family holidays up in Loudonville, the more inclined he was to live off his money like a gentleman, adding to it by investment, spinning paper from paper in the speculative spirit of the Age of Ulysses. His brothers could hew and haul; the precise numerical manipulations he plotted in his own library let him feel like an artist. In this town, to his satisfaction, the accumulation of money set him apart from all the men accumulating power. It was true that he hadn’t yet increased his fortune — in fact, he’d so far lost more than he’d made — but he knew a good return would soon come his way. If it was so important for Clara to stay here, fine; but he would carve out a separate existence for himself, and she would have to agree to a few months in Europe each year, when he could shed Americans like his itchy winter coat.

It would all have turned out differently, he thought — passing the great house where McClellan had quartered himself during the war — if preposterous Little Mac had managed to beat Lincoln in ’64. But he hadn’t, and it had come out the way it had, and at just this moment Henry would not allow himself to think about it, would put one foot in front of the other as he turned the corner onto H. He would not look down toward the old house at Fifteenth. He’d look instead toward the Wormley Hotel, wondering if one of the diplomats nested there was planning a party that would interfere with Clara’s tonight.

Well, good luck to her. He wouldn’t be staying to the end of it anyway. After an hour he would slip out to gamble at John Chamberlain’s or dine at Welcker’s, where he could sit amidst walnut panels instead of the floral wallpaper that now filled his house. At Welcker’s he could look at women, not wives, and converse with some honest bookmaker instead of the politicians who, except for the odd poet, would make up Clara’s whole guest list. At Welcker’s the crowd changed from night to night,
and he could sit there without having to make friends, without getting to know anyone well enough that they’d dare ask him anything he didn’t wish to be asked.

He was passing Senator Sumner’s house now. And wouldn’t you know, the old gentleman was out in front, his neck tilted backward, the better to warm his face in the fading afternoon sun. As he heard Henry’s walking stick approach, without even opening his eyes, he asked, “How is your father progressing, Colonel Rathbone?”

“My father-in-law does very well, sir. He walked the length of Mr. Seward’s funeral procession and came home to write us all the details.”

“Well, that’s one good piece of news to come out of such a sad occasion.” The old man brought his head down and looked at Henry. “No matter how many years go by, I still miss having Ira Harris at my ‘evenings.’ Though your wife’s presence is a beauteous substitute.”

“I shall pass the compliment on to her, sir.”

“Please do that. We always hope to have you join us yourself, Colonel.”

“It’s always good of you to ask,” Henry responded with a tip of his high hat. He continued walking west, past St. John’s and then old Montholon’s place. Clara’s own parties must seem inexpensive to her, he thought, given the way she could remember the French minister’s famous ball every time she looked out her windows.

It was only four-thirty, and he didn’t want to go home yet, so he went into the park and sat on a bench that afforded him, through the now bare magnolia branches, a sight of both the White House and Seward’s old home. He thought, as always, of the gigantic Lewis Payne crashing up the steps of the latter just as Booth was doing his work at Ford’s. Doing his work right in front of Henry himself. Carlyle maintained that all history depended on the will of great individual men. Nowhere did he acknowledge what resulted from one man’s doing something he had neither planned nor understood. This, Henry felt sure, was the other mainspring of history, the second one, which he would
someday, after many more volumes and much more reflection, figure out. At that point he would have his peace, and the rest of the world a new parcel of enlightenment.

It was quite dark before he got up and crossed Jackson Place toward number 8. Reaching the door, he could hear Gerald’s wailing and Riggs’s chattering. The nurse, who had Clara Pauline in her arms, let him in. He handed her his hat and went into the main parlor, where Clara was sitting on the carpet, finishing a romp with the boys and soothing a freshly raised bump on Gerald’s forehead. They were both their mother’s creatures. They had little affection or curiosity, and she no mothering, left over for him. She had a peculiar way — admirable, he thought at times; embarrassing, he believed at others — of entering their world completely, of making herself their equal. This was one of those moments; it was only his entrance that caused her smile to fade. She looked up while replacing a hairpin.

“It’s six o’clock, Henry. Six o’clock at least.
You
should be larking about with my darlings. I have a dozen things yet to oversee.” She rose from the carpet and wiped the dust off her dress. She offered him her cheek, which he kissed, before asking, “At what hour may we expect the rush of peacock feathers?”

“Eight o’clock,” she answered.

“And for what fare?”

“Chicken cutlets, sweetbreads, charlottes, two wines — no, three, but only three. Oh, Henry, I can’t remember it all. Ask cook, if you must.”

Henry, who prided himself on his dining discipline, and whose stomach was as hard as it had been at Union College, smiled. “I trust the wines will be good ones. Their luncheon oysters will barely have traveled south from their gullets; they’ll need something fine to slide them on their way.”

“The wines are quite modest, actually. And I haven’t stuck a diamond in my bonnet, like Mrs. Sprague.”

“You know I want you to do things in style, dear.”

“Yes,” she said, straightening some ferns. “I do know. And I trust you’ll tell me when I’ve begun to spend our capital.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” he said, accepting the rolled-up
Evening
Star
from Riggs, who had manfully toddled in with it from the hall.

“The secretary of war is coming,” she said, attempting a playful, wheedling tone. “I should think, with the President’s second term getting under way, that thirty-five is just the right age for a new undersecretary.”

“Not interested,” said Henry as he allowed Gerald’s tiny fingers to explore his boot buckle. “I made
them
what they are, in any case.” He opened the paper and sat down on the sofa. Clara shook her head over this one more cryptic bit of self-assurance. “You exasperate me, Henry. Mind that Gerald doesn’t hit his head again. Betty! There you are. Come in, please. Tell cook to set out a punch bowl in the library. And tell Edwin not to let the gawkers get too close to the front steps when the guests are arriving.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And take Riggs in for his dinner, please.”

Now she could get dressed. She made one last glance toward Henry, who had quite forgotten Gerald at his feet. “I’m counting on you to be here from beginning to end,” she said, and left the room, envying Kate Chase Sprague, who, with or without a diamond in her bonnet, had only a husband’s drunkenness to worry about.

“To think it could have been Greeley!” shouted Congressman Roundtree, thinking ahead to tomorrow morning, March 4, 1873, and Ulysses S. Grant’s second inaugural. Clara’s guests, Republicans to a man (and to an unenfranchised woman), were raising their goblets of Madeira in a toast to the reelected President.

“Let’s thank God he took his own advice and went west, young man!” cried Mr. Ralph Eaglesfield, a representative of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Washington, who reached clear around Mrs. Hannibal Hamlin to slap the back of Congressman Roundtree, two seats farther down Clara’s big Eastlake table. A few feet away there was a second table just like it, whose diners brought the total in the room to sixteen.

Clara was discomfited to realize that a clear majority of them
were laughing at Mr. Eaglesfield’s remark. Would they not let the defeated Democrat rest in his grave? She looked around for some decently pursed lips or averted eyes, and could find only those belonging to Mary Hall, old Mr. Hamlin, and his wife. “Poor Mr. Greeley,” said the latter, with a gentle bipartisanship that Mr. Eaglesfield and Congressman Roundtree must be finding quaintly obsolete. “To lose his wife, his newspaper, the presidency, and his own life — in the space of a few weeks! I think we should toast his memory,” said Mrs. Hamlin.

Gratefully, Clara raised her glass and thought something kind about Mr. Greeley. In fact, though it was twelve years too late, she wished that the New York legislature had chosen him instead of Papa for the Senate seat. How different everything would have been.

“Well, I’ve still got some malice toward one,” said Mr. Eaglesfield — another good one that Congressman Roundtree would appreciate, and which a back number like Mrs. Hamlin could be counted on to recognize.

The congressman was not the only one in Clara Rathbone’s dining room caught up in the Crédit Mobilier scandal. His name, she knew, had appeared on the
Sun
’s list of those given Union Pacific shares by Massachusetts’s Oakes Ames. Nothing can stop them, thought Clara, not even a scandal as big as this one. In November, the Republicans had made huge gains in the House, including the two new men at the next table, the kind of men who, even ten years ago, her papa would have had trouble bidding a good morning to. She did not like the unstirrable mixture of her own guests: crude, green buccaneers and white-haired relics. (Dear old Vice President Hamlin, back in the Senate since ’69, had shown up tonight in his black swallow-tailed coat.) The old ones were mostly true friends; the new ones would chew on any leg of mutton or hand extended in their direction. The people in between, the ones who really made things happen in Washington, were, with the exception of the secretary of war, absent. She was finding them harder to attract than she’d expected when they bought the house three years ago. Curiosity drew her first-time guests; was it Henry’s peculiarities that kept many of them from coming back?

Oh, dear. Mary, bless her true-blue heart, was about to say something. Couldn’t she be stopped? Apparently not. A look from Clara failed to close her friend’s lips, which were trembling on the verge of utterance.

“That’s not the spirit of
my
Republican Party, Congressman.”

Roundtree moved his gaze to her. “And what spirit would that be, ma’am?”

Mary searched her mind for a moment and declared brightly, “Why, the spirit of men like William E. Gray and John Ray Lynch.”

Oh, she
would
, thought Clara. Naming two of the Negroes who’d actually been allowed to address the convention last summer. Roundtree and Eaglesfield were now leaning across Mrs. Hamlin to roll their eyes at each other. At the other end of the table, Henry seemed amused, wondering how Mary would, as always, dig herself in deeper.

“Anyone else?” asked Mr. Eaglesfield.

“Well,” said Mary, sputtering a bit, “Senator Hamlin, of course.” He bowed his head gratefully. To Mary’s mind, he had been a bit late in coming to the abolitionist cause (she could always tell you just what year in the 1850s any Northern politician had “turned”), but as Mr. Lincoln’s Vice President he had safe conduct into her pantheon. Even so, her heart really longed for the moment when the other guests would all be gone and she could slip across the square to Senator Sumner’s house, bringing that grand old radical a leftover cake and her own most humble good wishes. She made this pilgrimage every time she came to visit Clara in Washington, her awe never diminishing a jot.