Henry and Clara Read Online Free Page A

you?”
    “Yes,” said Clara, smiling up at Ira Harris’s graying head.
    “Good. I’ll find you upstairs.”
    Clara was willing to agree that Washington Irving was the greatest man the Hudson Valley had produced, because her papa said so, and she always looked forward to the tales that Ira Harris read in a fine baritone. Her own adolescence was being lived between boys who might themselves be the magnetic poles of a fairy tale. The studious, flaxen-haired Will Harris had had little to do with the dark, choleric Henry since he came into their house three years ago. Right now, in the last available daylight, Henry was out in the orchard with his cousin Howard, batting fallen apples. From her bedroom window Clara watched and listened without making a sound, smoothing the silk cover of a diary that Howard had brought her back from Germany last year, when all the Joel Rathbone family made a six-month tour of the Continent.
    Howard pitched from a supply of apples continually replenished by Henry’s little brother, Jared, who would scamper to the edges of the orchard for armfuls of fruit to lay at his cousin’s feet. Howard would throw the apples toward Henry, who swung a broom handle into them, sending the hard ones sailing high and away, and pulverizing the ones that had gone soft, exploding them into jets of pulp and water. His fourteen-year-old frame was already as strong as a man’s, and whenever he missed a swing, Clara heard the sound of the air being sliced, like the stroke of a handsaw through a block of wood.
    From the moment she saw him six years ago, on the church steps after his father’s funeral, she had wanted him to notice her; during the three years of their parents’ courtship, when thechildren were never introduced to one another, she had remembered his face, his expression, and had always asked her papa, whenever he came home from Mrs. Rathbone’s, what her eldest son had said or done. After the wedding and the decision to move the Harrises into the Rathbone house on Eagle Street, she knew that Henry looked upon their coming as an invasion. She could see him, still disapproving, when Ira Harris crossed the threshold into Mayor Rathbone’s old bedroom, or picked up a carving knife with the Rathbone monogram, or just took down one of the books in the mayor’s library. Henry had taken the arrival of Clara’s younger sisters as an irritant, a feminine smothering. Within the family this reaction was regarded as comic, just a case of a boy being a boy. But in observing Henry’s discomfort, Clara had taken pains to differentiate herself from the rest of the girls, using the chief advantage she had, her age, to treat him in a way that Louise and Amanda couldn’t. She would mother him a little, straighten his tie, smooth his cowlick, brush a speck of lint from his pretty face, ask him if he remembered to pack his paper and nibs when he went out the door to school in the morning.
    Gradually, he came to depend on her as someone who seemed to understand him, though to her he was like a magic-lantern slide she could never keep in focus very long. In the evenings, they were often wordless company to each other, sitting on opposite sides of the dining room table, she with a book and he with the string and sticks and knife he needed to make a model ship. Now that she was seventeen, the rest of the family had begun to make gentle jokes about possible suitors, which she disliked, but which Henry made thrilling one night by declaring, “Anyone who comes calling on Clara will have to have my approval.” The remark was considered funny by Will and Amanda — this boy of fourteen laying down the law — but Clara realized it was true: she wouldn’t want any beaux without his approval.
    She was thinking of all these things as she watched the ball game below her window, losing interest in it when Henry wasn’t swinging the stick. At the moment Howard was out of apples.He reached down, found none, and looked around for