Authors: Thomas Mallon
S
HE WAS
without him tonight, alone in the parlor on Jackson Place, the children and Lillian playing upstairs. He had gone to New York to talk to Jack Barnes about his investments, and right now, at nine in the evening on January 15, 1880, she expected he was patronizing some red-lit brownstone off Union Square, along with a lot of other sporting males, the sort he would, a dozen years ago, have scorned for being beneath him in education, breeding, and money in the bank. When he arrived home tomorrow, he might admit having gone to a concert saloon, and leave her to infer the rest, from telltale observations and the rumors that came from friends insisting on their good intentions. She didn’t care. His dalliances were the least of her worries, inspiring more relief than competitiveness. She had no more illusions about her own charms, no need to look in the mahogany mirror to know that, at forty-five, she was growing heavier, had gray hairs, and signs of untidiness in her dress. She was overly fond of gaudy jewelry and looked too old, too eccentric, to be the mother of the small children playing upstairs.
But she was devoted to them, determined they should survive all the frights and uncertainty surrounding them. Little Clara had, at seven, just learned to mimic her papa, to hold up the newspaper and say “Traitors and scum.” When her mother first heard the imitation, she begged that she never do it again, only, of course, to hear her perform it two days later in front of Henry himself. Clara had stood in the next room with her heart in her mouth, ready to fly to the aid of her girl — but Henry decided to roar with laughter and crush his daughter in a delighted embrace. He might just as likely have decided (if his faultily wired brain were truly capable of “deciding” anything) to give
the girl a dose of verbal terror and some grotesquely inventive punishment.
Yes, she loved her children, but they gave her as much fear as delight, and for all her attentiveness toward them, she found herself drifting, more and more, as the years of her marriage passed, into memories and long blank reveries. She had no more desire to feed her mind than to care for this house, so infrequently was it occupied between forced marches through Europe. The wallpaper had faded and the family furniture grown shabby, any new items having no more style than what they found in all the hotel suites that were more truly their home. She knew it was only a matter of time before they left here altogether, after selling the house to a new Cabinet officer or tiny country, to serve as its embassy. They would stash themselves up in Loudonville during the shorter and shorter periods Henry permitted them to come home. And when they had left Washington, she knew she would not care; she would find whatever peace she could in the shade of her father’s apple and cherry trees. The “lust for limelight” — what Henry sometimes still called it in mid-tirade — had long since been driven out of her. They had no more friends, and few acquaintances, absence and the dread of “scenes” having driven everyone away.
In fact, right now, when the front doorbell rang, she almost didn’t recognize its sound. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard any but the one on the back door, when the grocer or iceman tried to summon the maid to deliveries. Her heart pounded with surprise and exasperation: it could only be Henry, and he wasn’t supposed to be here. She was entitled to one more night by herself. He’d either forgotten that, along with his key, or had deliberately decided to deny her this evening of peace. For all she knew, he had developed another jealous fantasy this afternoon, and raced back to put a stop to one more imagined tryst between his wife and all the handsome gentlemen he claimed she summoned into his home and bed.
But it
was
a handsome gentleman — two of them, she discovered to her astonishment when Maggie (the latest housemaid in the dozen they’d had) opened the door and showed them in.
“Nope, not a day older,” said the first of them, the one with
the close-set brown eyes and long mustache. “You were quite right, Cameron. She’s not a day older.”
Clara rose from her chair and squinted, until she realized who the speaker was and went over to hug him. “Johnny Hay, you wonderful liar. You good old friend!” It was
he
who looked no older than in Mr. Lincoln’s time. He was finally past forty, but his tiny features still seemed more a boy’s than a man’s, his long brown hair falling from a part near the middle of his head, and the long mustache, that would-be walrus, just two long pampered wisps.
“Dear Don,” she said, releasing Hay and taking both the hands of James Donald Cameron, who had not long ago replaced his father, the Harris family’s long-time friend from Pennsylvania, in the Senate. It had been a year since she’d seen him.
“Is Henry around?” he asked.
“No, he’s away in New York until tomorrow. On business,” she said, making the phrase sound proudly normal, even while she was embarrassed to see Cameron and Hay’s relief at the news.
“Well, we’ll have to see him another time,” said Hay. “But tonight we can still see you, dear Clara. I was having supper at Wormley’s with Cameron here, and he suggested we take a chance and drop by.”
“I hope we’re not intruding,” said Cameron, who now realized that they couldn’t have picked a better time.
“Not at all,” said Clara. “You’re making me so happy. Maggie, please bring us some coffee and some cake — do we have any? Good. Sit down, Johnny. You too, Senator Don. We’re going to have a lovely visit, and then I’ll have my three darlings come downstairs to shatter your ears.”
Hay had returned to Washington two months before as assistant secretary of state, before which he’d been living in Cleveland. The first thing he told Clara, as they settled themselves in the parlor, was that he’d gotten used to running into Will Harris at his club.
“I know,” she replied. “He’s told me in his letters. He also tells me you’ve got a Clara of your own.”
“Indeed I do,” said Hay, as charmingly eager to talk about himself as he’d been during the war. “For the past five years. My company has probably aged her ten, but she’s getting a good respite from me right now. She’s not going to join me here until I can find us someplace suitable to live. Meanwhile, I mail her all the calling cards I pick up on my social round — all those powerful names foreign and domestic — and she dazzles our Ohio friends with them.”
“What houses have you looked at?” asked Clara.
“Dozens, alas.” Hay sighed as he took a chipped coffee cup from the maid. “But nothing seems right. If I were sure I was staying longer than a year, I’d have a mind to build one of my own, right here in the square. Everything I’ve seen scares me off for one reason or another. My friend de Hegerman offered to rent me his, but he warned me of one small drawback: rats. Or, as he trilled it, ‘
Wrrats!
I meet dem on de stairrs and efry vere.’ He tried to solve the problem by dressing one of them up in a red flannel cape, a sight he was told could be counted on to scare the others to death.”
“With no success,” chimed in Cameron, who had already heard this three or four times.
“The other rats are probably just clamoring for little red coats of their own,” Clara speculated. “Doesn’t the Washington winter seem colder than the ones you remember?”
“Yes,” said Hay, “but on the other hand, the whole place seems so plush and paved now. I’m constantly aware of all the changes since the war. I can’t help being so, because half of me is still living in those old days.”
“You mean for your book?”
“Yes,” said Hay. He and John Nicolay had been at their Lincoln biography since 1875. “We’ve got years and volumes to go. I’d contemplated running for Congress, but then I thought better of it. Even this little stint under Mr. Evarts is more distraction than I ought to be allowing myself.”
Clara nodded uncomfortably. “And what is that like?”
“Well,” said Hay, “times may be less tumultuous, but I think I appreciate these men of power more than I did back in Mr.
Lincoln’s time. I was too young and blinkered then to feel half the awe I feel now. I tell you, Evarts is a phenomenon. He has every detail in his grip, but never loses sight of the big things sweeping through the sky, never fails to notice what’s behind and ahead of the present moment.”
“Give me an instance,” said Clara, who still had the skills of a belle in flattering the male talker.
“Take the current men of the South,” said Hay. “Evarts only wishes they knew how much better off they’d be had Mr. Lincoln been left alive. He’d have eased them back onto their local thrones much more quickly; as it is, they were left to wait and fear the future, and while they did, the shadow of Negro suffrage just paralyzed them with fright. Maybe permanently. ‘The fear of the suffrage is the weak point of all public men in an educated and intelligent democracy.’ That’s what Evarts told me one night before Christmas. He says a man’s better off fearing a lion, for at least he can measure one. He’s
very
bright, Clara, a pleasure to work for, not just another credential collector. Most of the people in this city care nothing for history, even as they’re making it. I suppose that was also true in the days we shared. But he’s got a steady, long view of the whole thing.”
Don Cameron watched Clara’s careworn face politely nodding up and down. He was pretty sure Hay knew nothing about Evarts’s refusal to give her husband a job (both Cameron and his father had joined the letter-writing campaign), and certain he had no idea of the great “history” Rathbone was always rumored to be writing — a subject of sadness or snickers among those in the District who knew him. Still, the conversation was making poor Clara uncomfortable, and he wished Hay would ramble toward some other topic.
Within half a minute he had: “You know, the biggest change I’ve noticed between ’sixty-five and now is all these female clerks everywhere. State and War and Treasury — everywhere I go, I find the offices crawling with them. Poor, single, ink-stained, practically living on apples. What a lot! How did they all wash up here?”
Clara shook her head in sympathy and disbelief. Any woman with three children and a husband and a large house could not
courteously express herself otherwise. But what she was really thinking as Hay chattered on — what even Don Cameron couldn’t read on her face — was how lucky those girls were. She saw them all the time walking along Pennsylvania Avenue, knew and surmised enough about their lives to envy their impoverishment and freedom and to imagine herself as one of them, toiling away all day at an inkwell and coming home to a boarding house on Fifth Street, with nothing but some candles and the moonlight to intrude upon the perfect peace and darkness of her room.
“You haven’t said a word about the election, either one of you,” said Clara, looking from gentleman to gentleman.
Cameron, at last getting a word in, declared his desire for Grant’s return. “He’d attract a lot of Democratic votes. I think even Mr. Hayes would welcome it, if it stopped Conkling from taking over the party.”
Clara asked Hay if he agreed, but before he could make it through the second hundred words of his considered opinion, all three of them looked up toward the sound of the front door. Henry Rathbone’s boots were coming toward them, crossing the threshold of the parlor. Clara thought quickly: what did he once say about Johnny? “The President’s pipsqueak; he’d be better off as a drummer boy.” But Don’s being here will make things all right. Two men are safer than one, and he actually liked Don’s father. I shall keep calm and things will be fine, there will be no scene, if —
“Henry, you’re home!” She jumped up to kiss his whiskers and squeeze his good arm, as if some long-ago part of her might be able to signal some long-ago part of him to do something sweet for her, simply, please, to
behave
.
“My business took less time than expected,” he said, returning her kiss and dropping his muffler on a table. Maggie took his coat, and Clara thought that things might be all right. If he was agitated, he would have made the word “business” a double entendre, flicked it toward her with a cruel little snap.
“Well, I’ve been having a delightful evening. Look who’ve surprised me, Henry. John Hay and Senator Cameron. Tell these old friends they don’t need to get up.”
Henry did as he was asked, shaking their hands and gesturing
for them to resume their seats. But he appeared confused, as if trying to figure out how Hay could be so old and Cameron so young.
“Colonel,” said Hay. “It’s been too many years. I don’t believe I’ve seen you since just after the terrible events in ’sixty-five.”
Yes, thought Clara, it might be all right. He might not say anything about Johnny Hay’s being at the White House that night, studying Spanish with Bob Lincoln while she and Henry were all but being killed at the theatre. Still, she wished he’d say
something
, not just continue with that confused stare. To fill the silence, she spoke herself: “I’m going to go upstairs and see if the children are still up. They always want to see him when he’s gotten home,” she told Hay and Cameron, who both smiled nervously. “Henry, I hope you’ve remembered to bring them something.” Her gaiety was paper thin, and she knew her guests could see it.
“There’s no need for you to go, darling,” said Henry. “I’ll check on the children myself. Will you excuse me?” he asked Cameron and Hay. “I’ll join you shortly.”
“Good,” said Clara, smiling too broadly, fluttering her hands until she thought to call out to Maggie to prepare more coffee and a drink for Colonel Rathbone.
She noticed Hay and Cameron conferring with a glance, and told them, “No, you mustn’t go yet.” They couldn’t leave the house until they could take with them some happy domestic illusion, like leftover cake on a covered dish. “Johnny, you haven’t told me nearly enough about your triumphal return. I want more tales of adventure. Who’s been lucky enough to have your company? Anyone from the old days?”
“One or two,” said Hay, lowering his eyes and voice, sufficiently encouraged to launch into another party piece, this time a somber one. “Old General Holt, whom you’ll surely remember.” Clara nodded silently, wishing he had mentioned almost anyone but the judge to whose military court Henry once swore his version of the events at Ford’s, as the reporters on the chairs next to her snickered and speculated. “He’s retired now, all
alone in the world, rattling around in his big house up on Capitol Hill, like a ghost.”