Henry and Clara (12 page)

Now the three of them were prowling the dark aisles of Saint Sulpice. Each ecclesiastical pillar rested on a huge block of streaked marble resembling the great slabs of fatty beef they’d seen at the market, and as she passed them Clara thought she would be sick. She hurried ahead, keeping her eyes on the plain straw chairs, as if this bland visual food might settle her stomach. In the first row, just before the altar, she sat down. Papa would never forgive her if she knelt in this popish place, but she wished she could pray to the sculpture before her: the Virgin Mary, standing upon a stone globe over some stone clouds, her Infant in her arms. Clara longed to ask for an end to the confusion she was feeling, but no matter how sweet the carved face, her Baptist soul would not permit her to petition this graven surrogate.

What she truly needed was the light of day, an escape from history and the dead and all this obligatory looking at them. She rose from her seat, intent on fleeing, and reached the nave after skirting the complexities of the floor by the altar, a series of wooden trap doors and hinges leading farther into the violent past. As her heels clicked across the marble toward the sunlight, she closed her eyes and imagined her father’s apple trees in Loudonville — a sight Parisians ought to be crossing the ocean to see.

Outside in the square she sat on a ledge of the fountain, wondering if Henry and Lina had taken notice of her absence and if she might be able to find her way back to the hotel, halfway across the city, without them.

“Eh bien. La poupée.”

A loud American accent coming from the church steps made her look up. It was Henry, waving off Lina, giving her permission to visit the dollmaker’s shop they’d passed on their way to the church, the one whose front window was filled by the figure of Marie Antoinette wearing a bell-shaped gown the dollmaker had fashioned entirely from starched doilies. As Lina ran off, Henry strode toward the fountain. The last thing Clara now wanted was what she’d wished for all morning, to be alone with him. Even so, she could feel the frustration drain from her all at once, as if her body were a lock on the Erie Canal; what rushed in to refill it was the excitement she remembered from the ship.

Suddenly she had the courage to stand up and fling questions at him: “Why are you treating me this way? Why are you being so horrible to me, after …” She couldn’t finish.

“After what?” asked Henry, smiling at her.

“After all that’s happened,” she answered.

“All that’s happened?”

“On the ship!” she cried.

“Nothing’s happened,” said Henry, as if trying to soothe some childish misapprehension.

“Nothing!” shouted Clara.

“Nothing yet,” said Henry.

She fell quiet, until his laughter brought her back to angry life. “
Yet?
Does that mean something is supposed to
follow
all this indifference? Why are you testing me! And what are you testing? My strength? My discretion?”

“
Our
strength,” he whispered, creating new hope in her tired face. “
Our
discretion.”

Sensing she might let herself collapse in a tearful heap on the fountain’s ledge, Henry swept his arm around her waist and projected her into the square. “Come,” he said, getting her feet to scamper across the cobblestones. “Let’s go buy Lina the decapitated queen.”

“I
T
’
S JUST LIKE
the Pitti Palace,” said Mrs. Alexander Stafford, pointing to the Königsbau. “You’ll realize that as soon as you get down to Florence. Mark my words.”

“I’m sure,” said Pauline. The Staffords and their two plain daughters had run into the Harrises an hour ago at the cathedral and agreed to join forces in exploring the old city of Munich. The Königsbau having been dismissed as a replica, the combined group went on to the small theatre nearby, where the Staffords’ hotelkeeper had assured them small parties of tourists were, during the noon hour, welcome to stand at the back and glimpse the players in rehearsal.

“The costliness of that victory at Solferino was nothing short of astonishing,” declaimed Mr. Stafford, clapping Judge Harris’s back as they mounted the steps together.

“From what I read,” replied the judge, “even beyond what he paid at Magenta.” The appearance of Mr. Stafford, a bluff Alabama planter, had contributed to a rise in the judge’s spirits that had been perceptible since crossing the Rhine. The Hartung fiasco had at last begun to fade, and he was finally taking an interest in their sightseeing and the news of the day, which this month consisted chiefly of Napoleon III’s victories over the Austrians down in Italy.

“Wait until the political conversation turns to matters domestic,” Henry said to Clara as the two of them followed behind. “You can wager the bonhomie won’t last when yo’ pa heahs about Massa Stafford’s chained-up Negroes — of whom I suspect there are plenty.” Pauline, walking arm in arm with Mrs. Stafford, looked over her shoulder to give Henry a cautioning
glance. She wanted nothing to confound the morning’s pleasant turn of events. Whatever the reason Mr. Stafford acted as a tonic to the judge’s spirits — perhaps the amiable Southerner buoyed his belief in the chances of preserving the Union — Pauline wanted nothing to dilute its effect; she only wished there were enough of it left over to dose Clara, who during the past few weeks of travel had been terribly glum.

Laertes was making his first-act goodbyes to Ophelia — in German — when the Harrises and Staffords were startled by some incomprehensible barking from a man standing near them at the back of the auditorium. He was apparently the director and, as nearly as one of the Stafford girls could figure out from her pre-travel language lessons, he was trying to indicate that this whole exercise in Bavarian bardolatry would collapse if Laertes couldn’t manage to talk to Ophelia like a brother instead of a householder scolding a servant.
Dummkopf!
The object, he assured the actor, was to get her to stay away from Hamlet, not to dust more assiduously.

“This is our cue,” whispered Henry to Clara, easing her through a red velvet curtain, back into the lobby and out to the street, where he showed the driver of an empty diligence a city map with an X penciled on the outskirts. The driver nodded and helped the two Americans to their seats before clattering off with them in the direction of the Isar River.

“All right, Henry,” said Clara, determined to be calm, even hopeful. “Tell me where we’ll be while Papa spends the rest of the afternoon worrying himself sick.”

“X marks the spot. A little studio inhabited by my old Union friend Leander Reynolds. The great artist of my set in North College. He came here a year ago, determined to become the new Kaulbach by taking advantage of the scenery and the prices. I think he’s probably spent more time drinking beer in the Bock-keller than he has painting, but we’ll probably find one or two canvases propped up in his lair.”

“Is he expecting us?”

“I hope not, since he’s in Paris at the moment. But when I wrote to tell him I’d be over, he said I should feel free to have a
look around whether he was there or not. The door is never bolted.”

Clara remained silent, and Henry took her hand. As they drove through the old city, she told herself that she was on her way to her heart’s desire, that she could not wait another day for it, that she and Henry would now bring themselves together forever in the way they were meant to be. Their union as man and woman would now be accomplished, and be so evident to others that no one would any longer be able to look at them as brother and sister. And yet, in the back of her mind, as they drove on, she wondered if this submission were wise, and if perhaps there really wasn’t some good reason they remain apart. Yes, she would have her Lord Byron, but might people now look at Henry as they had looked at the poet, whispering about what he’d done to his sister? No, she decided, closing her eyes decisively. She and Henry were not brother and sister, and never had been. There was no blood between them, and nothing to stop them from loving each other.

Leander Reynolds’s studio was really a little cottage in sight of the river, surrounded by a fence and flowers. Henry paid the driver and helped Clara down. He waved to the
hausfrau
in the next yard, pushing open the cottage door as if he were returning home for the thousandth time.

Determined to look brave — unsure whether she was alarmed or relieved at what might finally be about to happen — Clara took off her bonnet and began exploring the little studio, which was, in fact, full of spun-sugar landscapes, so many that it seemed like one more museum on the Harris family itinerary.

“Awful, aren’t they?” asked Henry, picking up a pastel-colored oil of the Aukirche’s tower.

“Terrible,” Clara agreed, wondering what her father would be thinking when the Harrises and Staffords explored that very church this afternoon. Poor Papa. Just when he was regaining his old self, she joins with Henry in betraying him. But would they really be betraying him by doing what they might soon be … doing where? She looked into the cottage’s only other room and spotted Mr. Reynolds’s unmade bed.

“Why do you hate Papa so?” she asked, surprised at the question, at the ease with which it had escaped her lips. She was right now so anxious that Henry’s unconquerable dislike of his stepfather seemed almost a conversational matter, like Leander Reynolds’s pictures, just a way to pass the time until the moment arrived and they went into the other room.

“All right, I will tell
you
,” said Henry, recalling the day he’d come into his inheritance and told Howard over oysters at the Delavan that he would never explain his feelings for Ira Harris.

“You remember your real mother,” he began, as Clara tried keeping her eyes on one of the paintings. “And I remember mine. The way she was before my father died. She had a beauty and a brazen confidence beyond anything you can imagine. My father was mad for her, and dared anybody else not to be. He’d march all of us into the Eagle Tavern with him on Friday nights and hold court. He’d put Jared and me on his backers’ laps and sit my mother right beside him, without her hat, her curls glinting under the whale-oil lamps. She was like some cask of booty he’d flung open to make them gape. He knew they didn’t want her there, but he knew they couldn’t stop looking at her either, couldn’t stop being envious, because this was the woman who’d made him more than a grocer looking for votes, made him into something they could never be. She turned the two of them into a thing the others had to watch. And then he died.”

Henry had sat down on the edge of a paint-splattered table. Afraid he might not finish the story, Clara pulled over the stool by one of the easels and sat in front of him. She took his hand in hers.

“You never truly met her, Clara. She was transformed, shrunken, immediately after he died. I remember that summer when she took me off to Schenectady so she could be with your father at the Union commencement. I was eight years old and I watched her coquette with him. What I was most aware of was her fear. She needed him because she was afraid of being alone with only the money my father had left her. She was afraid of never again being an important man’s wife, afraid of no longer being allowed to sit and shine in the lamplight at the tavern. My
father had left her an appetite, but the men at the Eagle had no more need of her. Without someone like your father, she wouldn’t have anybody looking at her the way those men had looked at her on Friday nights.”

“Are you saying my father let her down? By not rising as high as she expected him to?” Clara kept her voice neutral, inquiring. She was trying to be Henry’s ally, not his opponent, on this unexpected journey into the past.

“No,” said Henry softly. “I don’t blame him for that.” Clara squeezed his hand encouragingly. “I blame him for being so little from the start.” She drew away as if he’d clawed her. “My mother was something magnificent, almost wild. Then fear made her small. She was afraid to look back and to remember what she was, who
he
was — my father — and what they’d been together. It would be easier if your father had been some terrible usurper. But he’s not Claudius. He’s just Polonius, asked to play Claudius’s part.” He paused to look into her astonished eyes.

“You are disgusting!” she said, pushing the stool out from under herself and slapping his face. “You ungrateful, horrible …” But she couldn’t get the words out; he’d spun her around and squeezed her waist so hard she could barely breathe. He was carrying her into the next room and onto Leander Reynolds’s bed. She was screaming now, struggling to get off the dingy linen.

“I hate you!” she cried.

“No, you don’t. You love me, and I love you, and have for years and years, watching you read in your window seat, looking at you across the dinner table as you struggled not to say all the clever things in your head because your manners told you to let your father and your brother have the floor.”

He began to unlace her dress. Her hand rose, and he thought she was about to fight him again, but before he counterattacked, he saw that she had lifted her hand only to undo the dress herself. “I’m not Ophelia,” she whispered, through tears. “And you’re not Hamlet. We’re not any of those people.”