Emily & Herman Read online

  To think that I, too, was at sea—not only on the massive steamer—but in that minuscule skiff as well! All I can say is that it was your company and presence in both instances that calmed all fears and made me feel—in spite of those potentially perilous events—as safe as I do when I stroll to our First Congregational Church each Sunday.

  And there you have it—I do feel better now and for that I thank you as well.

  I hope and trust all is well with your beloved spouse and family.

  Your friend, E

  Pittsfield

  Dear Emily,

  It was a delight to receive your letter on this day, although I am saddened to learn of the Irish girl’s untimely death. For those of us who have lived extensively at sea, death by drowning, whether it be self-inflicted or accidental, is much talked about and seen. Though difficult to imagine, there is a general consensus amongst mariners that, as final moments go, drowning has its merits—the lore stating that, once the struggle ceases, great peace fills the body and spirit before it departs this Earth.

  As long as I am dwelling on this gloomy theme—and it was not at all the manner in which I had envisioned writing my first letter to you—I must confess to another death of sorts that saddens me as well. Generally it is me who collects the mail here at Arrowhead, driving my horse and carriage into town at a pace that frightens any of the women folk from accompanying me, and though the contents of your letter to me are beyond reproach, I deem it best that this correspondence remain private, and I only hope my replies to you reach your eyes only. If you could assure me of such a thing, I will rest easier. It is for this reason, following a Hindu funeral ritual as it was described to me by an old harpooner far more widely traveled than I, that after reading your letter various times, I proceeded to my own “Shmashana” by the bank of a nearby stream and conducted a cremation.

  Your description of the affects these recent events have had upon your brother is of great interest to me. I have a tale I intend to work on, once The Whale has been put to rest, that would chronicle the evolution of a young man’s passage through the storms one inevitably encounters. The last time I saw Austin, he had the appearance of someone who had already ceded to the inclination to withdraw to harbor. The gaiety and gameness displayed throughout the first few days we spent together had abandoned him. Clearly his encounter with the Siren of Seville had, for reasons we shall perhaps never learn, primed him with solemnity. Then to receive such news so soon afterward must indeed have been extremely difficult to bear.

  Being the oldest son, or, as in this case, the only son as well, is never easy, even with the privileges of primogeniture. Though it pains me to say so, I sometimes wonder—to myself only—if my life would have been more conflictive and confusing had my father not passed away when I was still a young man. It was always upon my oldest brother Ganesvoort where the heaviest burdens and pressures fell and it took a terrible toll, so terrible that I truly feel it brought about his most unfortunate and cruel death—at which point the “title” passed on to me!

  All this being said and though I hold your brother in high esteem, it is your own well being and state of mind that most concerns, interests, and compels me—and on this account you have been customarily unforthcoming.

  The picnic with Nathaniel and his son and the Morewoods and the Duyckinck brothers, all of whom you have met and charmed, was a mighty romp of Berkshirean exploration and a great success. The only thing lacking was your company, an absence I felt throughout and with an oftentimes acute intensity.

  Now it is the next day and early in the morning. The household is still abed and I am here at my grandfather’s desk that I long ago placed in the unused barn and upon which rests my manuscript to which I must now return.

  H.

  Amherst

  Capitaine Armand de la Mer Pacifique,

  The postman in this busy house is Austin who, despite his recent armistice with the venerable values of the Amherst and Dickinson world views, deftly handed me your letter with a friendly wink. Lest I draw too much from his co-conspirator’s ocular twitch, he immediately counseled me in his older brother fashion to “be careful.” I assured him I would while doing my best to appear sufficiently grave and then proceeded directly to the privacy of my room to read your news.

  Although Christian by birth and conviction and thus under no obligation—and in fact prohibited from the observation of any Hindu rites—I nevertheless concur with your modus operandi and have obtained a box of phosphorus sticks. But it pains me greatly.

  Perhaps you omitted further details of the Berkshire excursion because you had already tired of describing it for other correspondents, or because your writing day was upon you—so I shall have to suffice with the abbreviated crumbs tossed my way. There is one particular you failed to mention. I wonder if Elizabeth, your spouse, was able to join you in her current state? Because of the closeness I feel to you I think about her—the heat of the season—the weight of the child—the allergies you mentioned that she is prone to. Please do not circumvent the topic for my sake.

  My room is oppressively warm and still. The sky is heavy. A powerful rain would be the thing to cut through it. One yearns for summer all winter and then for the arrival of autumn on afternoons like this.

  I think often of our Cardinal’s Deck.

  E.

  Arrowhead/Pittsfield

  Dear Emily,

  Elizabeth is a fine woman and a loving mother and a wise wife to her husband. For many if not all of the reasons you enumerated, she was unable to accompany us on the Berkshire Excursion.

  Men away at sea for extended periods of time react in different ways to the deprivation of female society. Crude brutes react crudely—men of more hidden persuasions, like those of our escaped slave and our New York poet, react with indifference, although most pretend otherwise for appearance’s sake—gentlemen, a loose category, loose enough so as to permit me to include myself within it, react in a generally gentlemanly manner, with patience and forbearance, two qualities tested mightily when the ship puts in at a port where temptations—some of them risky to one’s physical and moral health—often abound. Despite my exotic and well-documented interlude upon and around the Marquesas Islands and Peru, the duration of which can seem greatly exaggerated due to their having been chronicled in my first published books—the vast majority of the time I spent far away from our shores, was spent at sea in the exclusive company of other men. When I returned to New England, to Boston, and for reasons too complicated to enumerate here, I was forced to remain aboard ship for a number of months. Being at sea, surrounded by miles of open ocean on all sides for weeks on end is trying enough—but being legally compelled to remain on a ship when only a gangway separates it from cultivated society, is more akin to being a prisoner.

  To wit … When I was finally discharged from sea duty and allowed to walk among men and women immersed in what might be called civilization, I was especially disposed to embrace that sector of society I had been sequestered from for such a lengthy span of time. During my absence, my dear sister Helen had befriended Lizzie Shaw. They had each paid numerous visits to the other’s household and had become much like sisters. The Shaws are from Boston, and it was to their salon and dining table that I was most generously invited upon setting foot on the mainland.

  I suppose that what I am doing here is an attempt to explain how it was I came to be engaged and then married. In the end, for all of the seafaring, whaling, and South Sea adventure, it may be a tale similar to many a man’s. It has been my observation that people, in general, rarely stray far from home and encounter their mate nearby, often embellishing a next-door neighbor with unique qualities perhaps more appropriate to 14th-century novels of chivalry. All in all I have been fortunate, for I have seen other couples less suited to each other’s temperaments having to forge ahead under the yoke of society’s demands. I cannot claim to be that miserable, and in the household where we live I am a virtual king, a ragged one, but still t
he sovereign.

  But, like my father and my brother, like all men, I shall die someday, perhaps sooner than later, Lizzie too, everyone here in my house, all of my children, and everyone in your house—including you. We are alive now, breathing now, and I am in love with you. I love my wife and my family. But I am not in love with them. I am in love with you. It is not a reflection of any moral weakness on anyone’s part—it is merely a fact—a fact of Nature not to be denied—thwarted perhaps—thwarted almost for sure—but there it is, like the dried dove dung stuck to the edge of this writing desk—like the watercress thriving in the cold little stream nearby—like the child whose heart beats within Lizzie’s womb.

  H.

  Amherst

  King and Sovereign,

  What is it, I ask myself, about you—even as you waste ink explaining things that require no explanation, declaring yourself the contented chieftain of your tribe—that even then I enjoy reading the words? I would like to think it so because of my feelings for you, but perhaps it is merely due to your well-known talent for writing. Furthermore, after reading this last letter, I ask myself as well whether these highly exalted sensations we claim are not just another example of the pedestrian embellishments you refer to. Given our mutual penchant for words and literature, it may be that the icing we fashion upon our humble cake is more elaborate and baroque than those of our neighbors, but made from the same “common” ingredients.

  Far be it from me to claim a particular individuality—the elements shared between me and the rest of womanhood far outweigh minor and few distinguishing traits. And of these I fear I shall someday be known more for eccentricity than for any lasting merit—and—as you point out repeatedly—what lasts at all really? Our physical selves least, a poem, a book, a sonata, longer, but what good does that afford the deceased creator?

  You make a bold assertion, a declaration worthy of Lancelot himself. But the wedded Guinevere here is you my captain, and I am incapable of doing battle with that. Thwarted, of course, it shall be—and victory, not even a Pyrrhic one, impossible. And as we both know, it is I who stands the most to lose. To Kings are allowed all manner of foibles and peccadilloes, whereas for paramours, once discovered, there is only banishment and humiliation.

  My natural disposition tends toward seclusion. Even here in this too-populated house, I endeavor to keep to myself all that I can. If I possess a genius for anything, it is for looking at all things small and drawing from them large conclusions. Tis a skill that enables me to stay put without going mad. The excursion to New York and back required of me an inhuman leap of faith, a radical, one-time departure from my normal sedentary self. I cannot conceive of doing anything like it again. The very notion of leaving the perimeters of Amherst, of our own front yard, dizzies me into vertigo. But what a glorious exception it was—one rife with treasure I shall examine for as long as I continue to breathe the sweet air of Massachusetts. And the knowledge that you, too, are inhaling the very same ether just a swallow’s flight away is more than I require.

  E.

  Arrowhead

  Emily,

  What have I done to upset you? What torpid male stumbling have I committed to vex you so? I have said too much of myself. I appear all consumed with myself. It is as if I walk about—swagger perhaps being a better word—with a full-length looking glass attached to me so that I might admire every triumph and tragedy at every moment, every act of kindness, noble thought, and every indiscretion, making of it all the most engrossing spectacle on earth. I am an actor playing to an audience of one using other beings that surround me, yourself included, as opportunities for expanding my performances to their best advantage. The whole thing is ludicrous and despicable.

  Well, I crack that looking glass here and now. I take a harpoon and a hammer to it and smash it into bits, ripping off its cumbersome harness, ignoring all of the bad luck incurred through its shattering.

  No more of my exploits and vanities disguised as deep thoughts. Thanks be to the gods this book I am finishing leaves me out of it. I look back upon all the others preceding it now with acute embarrassment—pages and pages of badly masqueraded braggadocio.

  You must wage war upon your tendency to seclude yourself. The young woman I was with and knew riding in the stage to Boston, sailing to New York, charming the salons and oyster bars of Manhattan, acting as first mate on our nautical adventure from Orient Point—the beautiful, independent, vivacious, intelligent, well-read, and compassionate woman I knew upon a New London evening must not to a nunnery remove herself.

  Might I at least be the one who aided and encouraged you to open your life rather than narrow it down.

  From this point forward, I pledge strict avoidance of all Armando pomposities.

  One important simple truth—I have never had a better time, felt so alive, felt such a fever of attraction to anyone, than the time I spent with you. At least upon your return to Amherst you have regained a situation of solace and comfort. Since my return to Arrowhead my life feels bleached. I go through the motions but my heart and spirit are not in it. Luckily thus far only the dog notices. And so I abandon myself to Moby-Dick. All of this said mind you without a single glance toward a looking glass!

  H.

  Amherst

  Master Melville,

  It is I, not your first but hopefully your second mate, who must beg your pardon today. It was a bad moment at a bad time for me to have written you my last letter. Though I must say it was possibly worth it for having provoked the image you conjured—of yourself tethered to a looking glass! I laughed aloud upon picturing it and caused my parents considerable concern at supper today when, without any visible reason, I burst out laughing again in the midst of our meal. At least this did not occur during our daily family prayer service!

  And speaking of bad times, I must consult you—you in your role as a man of the world.

  Austin, understandably, continues to mourn the loss of Fiona and thinks about the suicide in a most repetitive and alarming manner—I do hope you are correct regarding the merciful side to death by drowning—Last night he confessed to me his gravest fear—that the young girl’s motive for such a drastic decision may have had to do with a pregnancy. It seems such a thing was possible between them. My question to you is—and I am embarrassed to display such an ignorance—but I cannot go to my mother with such a question and Lavinia is younger than I—I can assure you I am familiar with the basics on this theme—it is only with some of the details that I suffer certain lacunae. Would it have been possible in your estimation for Fiona to have known if, in fact, she was with child after only a period of some three weeks since their last “meeting’?

  At the moment, he mourns not only the woman who so filled his spirit with Spring in a way I fear his betrothed shall never do—but a lost child as well. In private with me, he speaks of little else—tormenting himself with the image of mother and child, sodden and bestilled, washing up upon some gray and stony strand along the coast of Rhode Island. If there was an argument I might employ to rid him of the smallest of these two ghosts it might help him recover with more alacrity.

  As I have been writing this, I have watched a small spider at my window making a bad decision to spin a web in a corner, starting from the lowermost sash of the window that is raised a foot or so from the sill—for tonight I shall have to shut it closed and long before then the girl who cleans our rooms will have swept the creature’s hard-won handiwork aside without a second thought. Plucking with my fingers the single initiating silken strand the little creature started with and hung from, I leaned my arm out the window and let it drop. Surely it survived the fall without a scratch and hopefully it was not pecked at by some vile bird and now, at least, it can begin anew at some more fortuitous spot about the foundations of our house. And I wonder if there is a lesson here … before starting a great work, any great endeavor, including a romance, one must do all one can to choose the best “place” to begin!

  E.

  Arr
owhead

  Dear Emily,

  With my looking glass contraption now destroyed and without reviewing the whole sad story that got me to where I am today, suffice it to say I chose the wrong “spot” from which to spin my web and here I am stuck in the middle of it!

  On the other hand, perhaps the lesson to be learned from your spider’s fable is that we all start from where we can, some with more luck and success than others. When it is time to spin, it is time to spin, and spin we do—affixing that first strand to the nearest mooring cleat. Oh, that your much-missed fingers had been present four years ago to alter the “spot” from which I have woven my web.

  I am no physician—but having lived my life surrounded by womanhood and having been privy to many and all details concerning the female reproductive cycle, I can offer the following commentary about your brother’s dilemma. Do we know for certain that their last “meeting” took place three weeks prior to the suicide? Might there have been an earlier liaison? I seem to remember your mentioning that they had worked together in Boston at the same school. If, in fact, it was just three weeks that passed between their last meeting and her death, and if at the moment of their coupling she was at the very end of her fertile days and if her monthly effusions arrived with chronometric precision, then it would be possible that she concluded—but far too soon and rashly—that she was with child. Many “ifs”—too many for me. The cycles of some women are remarkably precise, especially in young women, but for many it is inconsistent and highly variable and subject, I have been told, to mental angst. The fear the girl surely had of being pregnant may have been the primary cause of a delay in her cycle. I wish I could tell you more or provide you with some ironclad conclusion. The one certain thing you can emphasize with your brother is that there is no way she could have been even close to certainty regarding a possible pregnancy. At least a month’s delay would have been necessary to reach such a preliminary diagnosis.

  Time will heal his wounds.