Free Henry and Clara by Thomas Mallon Page B

two young people had grown up with him barely noticing it, and was growing still stronger, though he hoped Henry’s appetite for female conquest, and Clara’s desirability to other beaux, would eventually lead them away from each other. For the moment, however, Ira Harris welcomed his daughter’s sharp remarks as a sort of smelling salt. She took his arm as they left the hall, but it was really his beleaguered spirit that was leaning on her vitality. Pauline had taken the free arm of the masterly Joel Rathbone, who had his wife Emeline on the other. All the young people and their friends formed a gay convoy around the parents — even shy Mary Hall had been swept into it — and after a fast walk through the chilly February air, the whole party, more than a dozen strong, arrived at 3 Elk Street.
    Though less grand in size and decoration than Kenwood, the Rathbones’ mansion south of the city, this townhouse had a sumptuousness that made Mary Hall’s modest jaw drop. She had never seen its equal in New York City, and as her eyes raced from Venetian bottles to Swiss clocks to German crystal, she supposed there wasn’t its like in any one country of Europe — so many different countries had been necessary to furnish it!
    The increasing frequency of the Rathbones’ grand tours was a sore point with Pauline Harris, and it pained the judge that his wife now had to listen with polite impatience as Emeline Rathbone regaled her with tales of recent destinations and acquisitions. No, Pauline hadn’t seen those Meissen jars before tonight, and yes, it was fascinating to think that they’d been in a shipping crate somewhere on the ocean between Hamburg and New York when everyone was sipping coffee here on New Year’s morning. Ira Harris winced anew at the thought of how his wife’s ambitions, social and material, were rubbing themselves raw in the rut she walked between Albany and Loudonville, with only rare escapes to Newport and New York.
    Frustrated by watching Emeline propel Pauline from painting to bibelot to drapery, he shifted his eyes to their usual source of comfort and pride: the face of his Clara. But it was only a profile he was seeing now, the left side of a face whose attention was in the full possession of Henry Rathbone, as the two of them delighted in each other’s skill at teasing Mary Hall. Behind him and to the right, the judge could hear Howard Rathbone talking to his latest sweetheart in a low voice about the Hartung trial, speculating upon what had been in the murderous lovers’ minds, and what now went on in the jurors’. Were Howard to ask what lay inside the magistrate’s, Ira Harris could tell him about a tumult of uncertainty. He had always been a “cold water” man, in politics and by his pledge to the Pearl Street Baptist Church, but he had just taken a second cup of hard cider to fortify his mood against the melancholy that was sapping it. He loved his city, loved his work and wife and family, but how he longed to lay down the burden of daily judiciousness, to escape the disappointed expressions that Pauline wore, and to remove his daughter from the gaze of his stepson.
    It was a collection of small events — the taking of a third cup of cider; the sight of Pauline as Emeline Rathbone held some Limoges porcelain a few inches from her face; and the sound of one of Henry Rathbone’s whisperings to his daughter, detected during a momentary drop in the noise filling the room — that made Ira Harris, before he fully knew what he was doing, tapthe side of his cup with a spoon and declare, with a gaiety more nervous than real, that he had an announcement to make. “As we stand amidst all these treasures of the Old World, I realize that the time has come for the Harrises to walk in the footsteps of the Rathbones who have preceded them — or, more literally, to follow in their wake. I hope that these two tribes can gather again a few months from now, sometime in the early summer, so that one of