Henry and Clara (42 page)

“Think about it, brother. Leland has his finger in a dozen different pies, not just horses and railroads. He’d know a hundred men who could use you to do law for them. Or anything else you’d enjoy doing. It’s a place where people
make
things, Henry. It’s the place to fulfill the Rathbone in you. It’s a shame things didn’t work out with that consular post, but put it behind you. You’ve been in Washington too long. Come out to San Francisco and make a fresh start. It’s a beautiful city —”

“I couldn’t,” said Henry, as if stating something as factually evident as the temperature. “There’s no fresh start for me.” He
continued looking at the shelves, all of them filled with histories, huge tomes about civilization from the Incas to the industrial age. Half a minute passed in silence.

“Henry?”

He turned around to face Jared. He again wore the distressed expression he’d had when reading Eller Browning’s letter. “Those Indian mothers and their children,” he murmured. “They’re probably better off dead, better off than if they’d awakened to what was left of that camp.”

“Henry —”

“And the worst of it is, Jared, that if I’d been there with the Twelfth, I’d have made the loudest noise and come away with the bloodiest hatchet.” He sat back down at the desk, tired out, it seemed, from his own imagining.

“Nonsense,” said Jared, who went quickly back downstairs, where he found Clara still in the kitchen.

“Something in that letter upset him. I left him looking as if he were somewhere else entirely.”

“He
is
somewhere else, Jared. Whether it’s the Crater, or Chancellorsville, or Ford’s, I don’t know. He goes deeper into his memories every month.”

“Does he have delusions?” asked Jared, not sure that was the right word for what he had in mind.

“No,” said Clara as she put some coasters into a stack. “I don’t think so. I think he just suffers from his real memories. Although,” she said, her reluctance to speak breaking up, “lately he hasn’t seemed quite …”

“Clara,” said Jared, “sit down with me.” He took her hand and tried to lure her to the table. She would not budge, so he stood next to her as he spoke. “I know I’ve been too occupied by my own ambitions these past ten years to pay enough attention to even the Rathbones in my family, let alone the Harrises. But I want to try to amend that. That’s one of the reasons I’ve made this trip. Maria is right in what she’s told me: without children of our own, what else have we but the families we’ve come from? I know my own letters have been poor things, with intervals too long between them, but I’ve read your own attentively,
and I’ve read Henry’s, too, and I know from them that Henry is not right. I know that he is in the grip of some affliction that is making you suffer, too.”

She turned away. She was not ready to discuss this. “Jared, some things cannot be avoided. Whatever our fates, whatever our crosses —”

“But fates can be undone, Clara. Crosses can be lifted.” He went over to her at the sideboard. “Clara,” he said, turning her around to face him. “I was in London only recently, selling Stanford’s horses. There are streets there being lit with electricity. They’ve managed to move Cleopatra’s Needle there from Egypt, and a block away from it people are eating beef that was shipped frozen all the way from the Argentine.”

She smiled. “You sound like Dr. Nott again.”

“But these things are true, Clara. Not just visions. Do you know there are doctors looking at strains of bacteria, magnifying them to look like insects in a garden? Doctors who are trying new means to cure afflictions, even ones inside the brain? There are doctors who might be able to help Henry.”

She pushed him away. “We have a doctor just blocks away, Jared.”

“I’m not talking about some purveyor of bromides and laxatives, Clara.”

“Jared, Henry is not one of your racehorses. He’s not going to yield up his sorrows and secrets to somebody who comes at him with a measuring tape and a camera, if that’s the kind of thing you’re thinking of.”

“No, Clara, not —”

“There is only one thing that can help him, and that is love. No matter how useless it may seem. I am the only one who can give it to him. That is my duty, Jared. You know,” she said — her voice breaking, her face collapsing like a flower in the rain — “I still love your brother. With all my broken heart.” She reached for a tea cloth and wiped her face.

“Henry,” she cried, heading out of the kitchen to stand at the foot of the stairs. “Won’t you play teatime with little Clara Pauline? She wants you to, I know she does.”

“Yes, darling,” he called back. “I’ll try to come down.”

I
T WASN
’
T A CITY
, it was a city-sized sanitarium. And at that, she thought, looking out the waiting room window at the plumes of steam curling through the pine trees, the whole place looked more infernal than healthy. They had come to Carlsbad four days ago, on the train from Prague, to find this medicinal resort that seemed more like Lourdes, which she’d seen, than her idea of Hot Springs, which, despite its being in her native land, she hadn’t. Down below her, the town was a jumble of stage sets, the granite pillars of the new Mühlbrunnen Colonnade appearing to have been set up for the production of a Roman tragedy, while the gabled gingerbread houses looked ready for someone’s dramatization of a fairy tale.

This almost
was
the seacoast of Bohemia. The town’s two parts, on each bank of the river moving through it, supported all kinds of strangeness and contradiction: the old and sometimes twisted bodies of the guests, wrapped in bathing costumes, climbed paths from one spring to another, as all the bubbling hot water they craved lay in sight of snow-covered peaks. These restorative pools for soaking and drinking actually contained, she was told, traces of arsenic, the magical secret perhaps, working with the topsy-turvy logic of inoculation. At this moment she knew Henry was inside the new iron-and-glass Sprudel Colonnade, being blasted with a jet from the 164-degree geyser beneath — as if whatever fluids running inside him needed heating up instead of freezing.

It had been Henry’s idea to come. The waters, he had decided, would be good for the maintenance of his forty-two-year-old physique, of which he was still justifiably vain. The mineral springs might also help the dyspepsia he claimed to suffer from.
The discomfort was nothing remarkable, he insisted, but why not see if, incidentally, the waters might relieve it? For once the children would be home in Washington with Lillian, so he and Clara could “pamper themselves”: that is what he’d said upon unfolding the itinerary he’d devised for this, their third trip abroad since the chargé d’affaires fiasco two years ago.

Accustomed to defeat, she had agreed to the journey. He had not struck her since that day in ’77, but he had not apologized either. It was as if they’d made an agreement never to speak of the incident, to pretend it had never taken place — a fiction that, as the first months went by, she knew was the best she could hope for. It was only later, after more than a year had passed, that she realized, with some fright, that Henry truly believed it had never happened; he had no memory of it, and none of the incident that had “provoked” it. She had never again seen Webb Hayes, except once or twice from the bedroom window. She had not gone out to speak with him and never taken Riggs to the White House. Henry now joked about the whole office-seeking episode, recalling it the way one might a New Year’s resolution that had been made and quickly broken.

This afternoon she had lied to him, told him she was joining a group of English and American ladies for a carriage ride to Dallwitz and a tour of the porcelain factory there. She would be back by dinnertime. Fine, fine, he’d said, in a peculiar good humor as he got ready for his geyser. She’d hurried here instead, to the office of Dr. Heinrich Beierheimer, taking care not to be seen by any of the acquaintances they’d made in their four days here. She had arranged the consultation by mail three months ago, before they’d left the States, with the help of Jared. As soon as Carlsbad was on the itinerary, she’d swallowed her pride and asked him if one of these innovative doctors he’d talked to her about last year might be found amidst the spa’s bubbling springs. Henry’s brother, after calling on some of Leland Stanford’s cosmopolitan connections, replied confidentially that while there she ought to make Henry see this man Beierheimer, a disciple of Wilhelm Griesinger. This name meant nothing to her until she accompanied Henry to the Library of Congress one afternoon and, on the other side of the reading room, engaged in some
research of her own — “looking up a few things about Wordsworth,” she’d claimed.

“Frau Rathbone,” the physician now said, hitting the
t
quite hard.

“Herr Doktor.”

“Welcome to Carlsbad. I hope you have been enjoying a pleasant stay. Won’t you come inside to the consulting room?”

Jared’s letter had mentioned the doctor’s five years in London. His English was as correct and formal as his manners, and his office furniture, most of it maroon-colored leather, betrayed an Anglophilic fondness for men’s clubs. He sat her down on a sofa in front of his desk, and in the still-bright afternoon light she appraised his large head. Its thinning blond hair rested atop a protuberant brow whose skin was so fine as to seem translucent, the minimum coverage required for all the mental matter under the skull.

“Tell me about your husband,” he said. “Just, for the moment, verifiable data of his life, a sort of
curriculum vitae
.”

“He is about your age,” she began, relieved that he was making her start out in the precincts of established fact. “He was born in Albany, New York, the state capital, in 1837. His father was that city’s mayor for a time. He has one brother, a few years younger than himself. Mayor Rathbone died in 1845, and three years later the boys’ mother married my father, a widower. From the time I was thirteen and Colonel Rathbone was eleven, we were raised as brother and sister, though our families liked to call us cousins.”

Dr. Beierheimer said nothing, but made his first note.

“Colonel Rathbone was educated in a nearby city called Schenectady, at Union College, the alma mater of many public men, including my father, a United States senator, and Mr. Seward, the late secretary of state.”

“Yes,” said Dr. Beierheimer with a smile. “Seward’s Follies.”

Clara didn’t stop to correct this one solecism. “Henry briefly studied law in my Uncle Hamilton’s office, but when the war came he joined a regiment of infantry and saw two years of very brutal fighting.”

“Gettysburg?” asked the doctor.

“Nearly everything but,” replied Clara. “Antietam, Fredericksburg, the battle of the Crater.”

Beierheimer nodded sympathetically and made another note.

“As I told you in my letter, we accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln to the theatre on the night the President was killed. My husband was —”

“He was your husband then?”

“No, not yet. My fiancé. He was badly wounded by the escaping assassin, had the length of his upper arm slashed with a dagger. But he recovered, and we married two years later. That is, twelve years ago.”

“Children?”

“Three. Two boys and a girl. They’re not with us on this trip, though they usually accompany us on our travels through Europe. It has been our habit to spend some of the year in Washington and the rest of it over here.”

“Does your husband still practice the law? When you are at home?”

“No. He looks after his investments. He inherited a great deal of money before the war — the Rathbone family are very wealthy. He also writes.”

“What does he write?”

“I’m afraid he never shows it to me. But I believe he is composing a theory of world events. He spends hours each day reading the great historians, especially military ones.”

The doctor made a third note, and Clara realized she had reached the conclusion of her chronicle. As she regarded the carpet and played with one of the buttoned puckers in the upholstery, she felt ridiculous, like someone escaping a building whose interior was aflame, only to remark, to the first person she met outside, upon the structure’s handsome cornices and columns.

“Now,” said Dr. Beierheimer. “Tell me what you think is wrong with your husband.”

“He suffers from periods of melancholy,” she said, hurriedly speaking the language she had rehearsed this morning. “He is sometimes enraged, occasionally against me. From an early age
his mood was cynical — Byronic, if you will — but as the years go by it becomes —”

“Disconnected?” the doctor suggested. “From the realities of the world?”

“Yes,” said Clara with the first trace of enthusiasm she had felt.

“Frau Rathbone, you mention Byron to me. And ‘melancholy.’ Have you read Goethe as well?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Romantic nonsense,” said the doctor, putting down his pencil. “The mind’s moods do not simply descend upon it, like a witch’s curse or the morning dew. They are all manifestations of the physical. Every one of them.”

“There is nothing physically wrong with my husband,” Clara answered, more in disappointment than irritation. “Other than his war wound and the injury he suffered at the theatre —”