31 Bond Street. Ellen Horan

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СКАЧАТЬ wasn’t to keep up with the wealthy that had prompted Elisabeth to insist they move. She had argued for it because their old home was walking distance to his office on Chambers Street and the courts, allowing Clinton to rush back and forth at all times of day and night, never sitting still long enough to eat a proper meal. Now his ride downtown took half an hour on the Bowery omnibus, the distance allowing, Elisabeth had hoped, for a fuller domestic life. In fact, the long commute aggravated him, and his longer absences made her nervous. Now, she was always traveling downtown to visit him and to deliver him food.

      Putting on his jacket and fixing his cravat, he entered the breakfast room. Out the high windows, wisteria vines hung bare with icicles and snow drifted deep across the garden from the weekend storm. The aroma of fresh muffins came from the kitchen below. The cook was at it again, making batches of baked goods for his office. His wife fretted about his nourishment and believed that if pies and cakes accompanied him downtown, they would buffer him from the harsh world of the prison and the courts.

      The New York Times was folded next to his plate. Elisabeth entered, and as she passed his chair, she kissed him on the head. She sat down at the opposite end of the table, fluttering her napkin to her lap. She had a blooming complexion even in the deep of winter.

      “Did you sleep well?” he asked, snapping his newspaper open.

      Elisabeth eyed him warily. “Just fine. I dreamt that newsboys entered the bedroom and wouldn’t leave until I got my purse.”

      “That wasn’t a dream, dear, it is the spectral presence of the press.” Just an hour earlier her auburn hair had been a tousle of silk, curling across her pillow as she slept; now it was expertly pinned and caught the morning light. He had met his wife after he had finished his law degree at Harvard and come to New York to work as a junior counsel for a pair of septuagenarians on Battery Place. A classmate, a New Yorker, invited him to meet some girls. Unfamiliar with the social rites of ambitious mothers and their unmarried daughters, Clinton was pulled along to an afternoon tea, which featured a roster of pretty girls taking turns at a piano, each attempting to play music that was beyond their reach. Elisabeth sat on a chair at the edge of the parlor, the loveliest in the room. Irritated by the music, he eyed the chair next to her, and whispered, “How do you do, I am Henry Clinton. I am afraid I am a bit tin-eared.”

      “I am, too,” she whispered back.

      “Tin-eared?” he asked,

      “No, a Clinton,” she replied. “Elisabeth Clinton.” It turned out that she was indeed a Clinton, but unlike his family, who were from a small town in Connecticut, she was descended from the illustrious Clintons of New York. Her grandfather DeWitt, a Mayor, a Governor, and a candidate for President, had used political office to plow through the end of the eighteenth century and reshape the continent. He had spearheaded the construction of the Erie Canal, allowing the riches of the West to flow into the ports of New York, and then forced the streets of Manhattan into a grid to absorb the backsplash of commerce. At present, the logjam of vehicles on the city streets was so fierce as to convince its inhabitants that New York was the capital of the world.

      During the course of that afternoon tea, Clinton was smitten by Elisabeth, and in a matter of weeks he had fallen in love. He wooed her with his small salary, his best wit, and invitations to entertainments that they never reached, instead walking the streets of New York, lost in conversation until the moon shone through the quiet elms and it was time to take her home. She had a passion for the Romantic poets and had devoured Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill. Without much resistance, she had married him, making her Elisabeth Clinton Clinton. Had there ever been a woman lawyer, she would have been a superior one, and he often imagined their partnership, with twin names painted on a door.

      He glanced at her from across the table. Now, nearly thirty to his thirty-six, there was not a moment of their habitual domestic life that failed to suit him. They had not been blessed with children, a circumstance that had once filled them with melancholy. Sometimes he still found her alone in the sitting room, paused over a book, looking sadly out past the lilac bushes, but as the years passed, each of them seemed to have eased their own personal wound of regret.

      “I see you have already read the paper,” he said. The newspaper showed evidence that his wife and the maids had been picking through it in the kitchen for news of the murder.

      “The cook fears that the murderer has satisfied his revenge for dentists, and lawyers are next,” said Elisabeth.

      “Well, if an assassin is lurking in our alley, she will take good care of him. She wields a fierce knife. I have seen her butterfly a lamb,” he replied, scanning the many pages of bold headlines.

      “Do you remember you visited him once?” asked Elisabeth. “You had an abscess, and he removed it,”

      “Dr. Burdell?” said Clinton. “He persecuted me mercilessly, with clamps around my head and steel calipers in my jaw. It appears he had his throat sliced from ear to ear—a just retribution for a dental surgeon, I’d say.”

      “Henry, please,” said Elisabeth. Inured to the cruelties of life, Elisabeth could be happy if only everyone would eat a full breakfast every day.

      A maid entered and passed biscuits with dried apples and nut breads thick with walnuts, crocks of butter, honey, and peach preserves and a stack of corn cakes drowned in syrup. She carried a pot of tea back and forth from the sideboard.

      ‘“Intense excitement in Bond Street!’” Clinton read from the paper, piercing a breakfast sausage with his fork and waving it for emphasis. “My dear, I know you had hoped we’d escaped the intense excitement of my profession by moving uptown, but here we have it, practically at our doorstep.”

      “They’ve locked everyone up in the house, even the cook. The police have turned the parlor into an interviewing room. No one has been permitted to speak to a lawyer,” said Elisabeth.

      Clinton flipped through the pages. “Do you know why the editors are trumpeting this crime, when there are murders in the poorer wards every day?”

      Elisabeth said, “Because, Henry, as you like to tell me ceaselessly, our illustrious, but corrupt mayor, Fernando Wood, has so polluted our metropolis, that this city is going to hell.”

      “Precisely,” said Clinton waving his sausage in the air and taking a bite, for he loved to spar with her at breakfast. “However, as much as I enjoy blaming everything on Mayor Wood, I sense other motives afoot. Politics and crime make comfortable bedfellows and the District Attorney is about to throw his hat into the ring. A population roused to a fearful state by a frenzied press will be easy to deliver at the next mayoral election.” He stuffed the sausage in his mouth.

      “Henry— “

      “Don’t you agree, darling,” he said, interrupting her, “that if this murder had occurred in the poorer wards, we would not be supping on it for breakfast?”

      “Listen to me,” she urged. “There is someone in the front parlor, to see you.”

      “Here? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

      “I was sure he could wait until you’d finished your meal. It is a messenger with a packet from your office.” Messengers were often sent from his office to deliver urgent news.

      “Well, excuse me, my dear, while I attend to the man. He is, no doubt, wondering why I am dallying over sausage.” He pulled his napkin from his lap and dropped it on the table.

      Clinton СКАЧАТЬ