Henry and Clara (39 page)

The next morning Henry rose before everyone but the kitchen girl. When Clara came down she found him in the dining room reading the newspaper. “There’s nothing in the
Argus
,” he informed her, “but Dr. Crane has gotten the word round. A memorial photographer was here to ask if we wanted a picture of your father’s corpse. I told him no. I’ve taken the liberty of opening up his letters. I know the one on top will interest you.”

“From Springfield,” said Henry. “I was unaware that they’d unlocked the asylum in Batavia and let the widder-woman out. ‘Ow, yes, Mister Ratboon,’ ” he continued in the Irish accent of the servant girl, “ ‘the dair thing’s been allowed ’oom since September.’ ”

Clara put the letter into the pocket of her dress and reached for the next one on the pile.

I see I’ve even begun to write my dates like a European — that’s how long and often we’ve been over here. The children, bundled onto train after train, week after week in country after country, look up at me perplexed when their ears realize it’s a
different
unintelligible language they’re now hearing. Henry promises to get us home by January, in time for the season, but it won’t make up for all I’ve missed this year, especially the election (the result is even now in doubt). To read Uncle Hamilton’s accounts of warring Stalwarts, Half-Breeds and Carpetbaggers, you would think he was writing from the Dakota Territory instead of his desk in the state legislature
.

I am sick unto death of Europe, heartily and forever sick of holding the chain of my children’s hands as we rush for the next ferry or coach or streetcar. There are mornings when I would rather drown them all like kittens than get them ready for another day of touring. I would also rather go out my own front door and look ten times a day at Washington’s silly monument, still unfinished, than have one more glance at a perfect Saint-Cloud. I want to hear Riggs sliding his bare feet across the linoleum in the kitchen; here he’s squeezed into little leather shoes that go clicking across the marble corridors of whatever museum is in Henry’s plan for the day. We have missed the Philadelphia Exhibition, which Amanda and Tom say they went twice from Ohio to see: we read their accounts of machines that “type” and ones that sew after we’ve spent hours looking at glass-encased crossbows. But it isn’t only novelty and sleekness I crave; it’s also the familiar shabbiness of home — the Negroes and the mud, the very stench upon the District’s summer air
.

Henry and I had a great discussion (I mean, of course, a ferocious fight) last night. I think we have a compromise, though what he chooses to remember of it will no doubt change by Christmas. I told him I would not come over here again without a fixed abode and the chance for my children to spend time, much of it and regularly, with their own countrymen; and since the best way to achieve such an end would be a diplomatic posting, I have declared that that is what we must seek for Henry once we get home. I am beyond being fed up with his investing and scribbling, and am determined that my sons shall observe their father in some posture other than angry idleness
.

I have, for what it’s worth, his word. Perhaps he will keep it; perhaps he finds appeal in the idea of being some charge who gets to tyrannize baffled American travelers and would-be emigrants. Either way, I told him it is the only circumstance that will get me once more across the ocean
.

How difficult will it be to find such a position? (I have no doubt that the finding of it will be left to me.) The Harris family’s political connections are not what they used to be, but I think I have made enough friends of my own to do the trick, assuming the State Department proves to be President Hayes’s and not President Tilden’s. If the Republicans remain, I will talk to Hal Tomkins about the possibilities. I already suspect — to my shame — that what will motivate him on my behalf is pity
.

Rutherford B. Hayes — “His Fraudulency” to Henry Rathbone and millions of others — was sworn in on March 5, 1877, after the Electoral Commission declared he’d won the presidential election with fewer popular votes than Governor Tilden had received. “Mr. Evarts’s silver tongue serves some peculiar causes,” said Henry. “But he does seem to get his way.” The man Thurlow Weed had had to ditch for Ira Harris back in ’61 won the day for the Republicans with his argument before the commission, just as two years ago his speech to a Brooklyn jury had saved Henry Ward Beecher from conviction. There had been jokes in ’75 about how he might expect eternal salvation as his
fee, but there was nothing speculative about the reward this time: William Evarts was the new secretary of state.

The atmosphere in Washington had been made so tense by the election dispute that there was no inaugural ball, just a reception at Willard’s to which Clara could not secure an invitation — a circumstance that left her feeling apprehensive about the campaign for office she was ready to begin. But her spirits lifted within a week of the swearing-in, when Hal Tomkins, her versifying friend at State, returned one afternoon to his widowed mother’s house in J Street, which Clara had taken to visiting each day, and told her there was an opening that just might suit Henry: chargé d’affaires in Copenhagen.

Clara thought back ten years, to her honeymoon, to the two of them reading in the late summer light at Tivoli, and to two other visits they had made to the city during their endless European treks, before she replied, “I think Denmark will suit my lord Hamlet very well.”

She began her work that night, telling Lillian, the children’s nurse, that she would be unable to read them a story. She went into the sewing room, at the back of the house, taking with her a bottle of the brightest blue ink she had: the letters needed a feminine appeal, a sort of exuberant helplessness that would make their male recipients eager to assist. The tiny room had a strong lamp, and though the March wind came through the poorly sashed window, within a few minutes of starting, Clara had so warmed to her task that she scarcely noticed the temperature. Within an hour she had drafted a half-dozen witty, imploring letters to everyone from Uncle Hamilton and Bishop Doane in Albany to General Schofield at West Point and Governor Hartranft in Pennsylvania. She made a list of the names on the back of an envelope containing one of Mary Hall’s letters (could Mary enlist the mayor of New York? Her father had been a friend of his) and vowed to add another dozen to it by March 20. Before she was finished, she would pull out more stops than Papa had for any postmaster or customhouse controller.

Two weeks later she spent every afternoon in Mrs. Tomkins’s parlor, sympathizing with the old lady’s neuralgia and joining in
criticism of her married sons, none of them attentive like her darling Hal. Like many other young Washington men, the skinny, sparsely mustached Hal Tomkins showed a tendency to crush upon the beautiful Mrs. Rathbone — so clever, so teasing, so self-assured, and yet, surely, somewhere inside, so sad? — and each day, when he came home just before five, out of the sight of his mother, he showed Clara the testimonials that had begun to arrive on the Department of State’s mahogany desktops.

The first round were from the Harris family, whose enthusiasm for Clara’s undertaking had already been expressed in notes addressed solely to Mrs. Henry Rathbone at her home address. The letters they wrote to State were more professional in tone, but they beat the drum unflaggingly. From Columbus, Amanda’s husband Tom Miller noted that he would also be appealing directly to the President, a fellow Buckeye, on behalf of this model brother-in-law, “a gentleman of high culture and stainless character, a good soldier, a staunch Republican always reliable and of prepossessing manners.” He was about half right, Clara thought, grateful that Henry still put money into Republican coffers in Albany and New York, if only to help his investments. There was no need, she thought, for the Buckeye in the White House to know that the subject of these letters of tribute had not actually voted in the past two presidential elections, not when Tom Miller went on to say that “he adds to a kind heart and amiable address an excellent collegiate education and knowledge of the French.” Well, maybe Henry would now be thankful to old Union, and perhaps she could count those European hours, when he strained to converse with potted old veterans at the Invalides, to have been not entirely wasted.

“He is a warm friend of mine,” wrote Uncle Hamilton, who was still giving him the benefit of the doubt, twenty years after he’d extended it at his law office. “And Mrs. R. is my niece. Hence I have a personal interest in his procuring such a position. Aside from that, however, I believe his appointment would be highly reputable and strengthening.” Strengthening? The word seemed to betray an awareness of Henry’s unhealthy situation, or her own. So much of what was written seemed telltale, to
have a text beneath it in invisible ink, a hidden charge ready to backfire as soon as the phrase was properly decoded. When letters from the generals began arriving, she wondered, for instance, if Schofield’s, saying “Col. Rathbone is too well known in Washington to need any endorsement from me,” might be taken as evidence of notoriety instead of approbation. No, surely what counted was the general’s declaration that Henry was “precisely the character of man whom those Americans who are jealous of their country’s good name would most desire to meet abroad as the representatives of the intelligence and refinement of their countrymen.” And yes, General Sherman might be stretching things — bless him — in saying, “I have known him since the war intimately,” but what counted was the fact — it
was
a fact, she decided — that Henry would “worthily represent the better elements of American character abroad.”

Walking home on these first afternoons of spring, looking at the crocuses already up in the park, she rehearsed favorite passages from the letters swinging inside her reticule, and tried to imagine a life in Copenhagen. They would be respected, enviable, with Henry made social and useful, not to mention grateful for the part she would have played in the transformation. Hadn’t Bishop Doane written that the colonel’s wife “is a most charming lady, and while the interests of the Government would be more left in his hands, the best social and personal traits of a people will be represented in Mr.
& Mrs
. Rathbone”?

Each afternoon her fantasy held until the time she would mount the stairs to the second floor of the house and pass her husband, who had fallen asleep over a book and a tumbler of whiskey in his library, the vein on the left side of his head, like an extension of the scar on his arm, throbbing angrily through his unquiet nap. She would hear Lillian through closed doors, warning the children — who instantly heeded the warning — that they mustn’t disturb their father; and it was then that Clara admitted to herself the real reason she’d asked Hal Tomkins for copies of the incoming testimonials. It was not to keep track of the progress of her campaign; it was for the flickering illusion that the man discussed in them was the
real
Colonel Rathbone,
the true adult aspect of the boy she had fallen in love with thirty years ago. As the weeks went by, she stored the letters not in the top drawer of her writing desk, but in the wicker box at the bottom of her closet, the one that contained such ancient treasures as letters from Howard, handkerchiefs her real mother had embroidered, and a small wooden decoy that she and Will had carved for a birdhouse in Loudonville.

After two months, she finally summoned the courage to ask Hal if he didn’t think there should be some hint of a response by now, and in the nervous blink of his eyes, before he could even mumble about the slow pace of things at State, she realized the truth. Secretary Evarts wasn’t trying to balance the surface endorsements against the subliminal hints of trouble, wasn’t attempting to square Henry’s war record with the whispers of failure and unreliability that had trailed him in the years since. No, it was all too painfully obvious, as it should have been from the start. Evarts was simply ignoring them, for why should he take any trouble to think about doing a favor for Ira Harris’s son-in-law — or was it his son? — sixteen years after the judge and the Dictator had cheated him out of the Senate seat that should have been his to occupy all through the war, with real purpose and distinction, not just as a lock in the canal of patronage. Hal needn’t have troubled to write out copies of the letters; for all the attention they were getting, he might as well have given her the originals. She thought back to that afternoon in ’61 when Mr. Weed came huffing and puffing up Eagle Street ahead of the newspapermen, and Pauline sat in her parlor like Queen Victoria, and Uncle Hamilton nearly wept at the news of his brother’s elevation. She was the only one to have seen it as trouble, the sudden undertow that would sweep them all too far out, as it had. But even she could not have foreseen such petty little ripples as this, sixteen years later, spraying her like cold rain.