Emily & Herman Page 19

  “You cried, upstairs,” he went on, hoping to clear this sudden shoal.

  “Yes.”

  “Did I hurt you?”

  “No. At first a trifle, then quite the contrary.”

  “Were your tears then just from passion?”

  “Having never done such a thing before, I would not know.”

  Coral dug into his hull. He felt ashamed, thrown off the pedestal so recently erected to celebrate the wiser, older man.

  “It was only the thought,” she said, “that this is what happens. This is what throbs beneath the nave of that baroque cathedral of worry, ritual, and prohibition—this tender, violent, animal thing.”

  “Animals we are.”

  “You’ve often said so.”

  “Have I?”

  “Yes, and I agree.” Why, she wondered, was he vexing her so?

  He thought perhaps he should have stayed swimming out in the lake longer. “I do love you, Emily. I have never felt like this.”

  “Nor I.”

  “So there.”

  And there, she thought, was where the discussion should be left. But she was unable to do so. “And do you not love your wife as well?”

  He paused.

  “You know I do.”

  She tossed a stone into the water.

  “Then what is this we have between us?”

  “This is different.”

  She threw another stone. “Why?”

  “I have tried to explain all of this to you in my letters.”

  She paused as well and wished to be back upstairs with him just as he rolled off of her, but something pushed hard, pushed back, within her.

  “It is almost autumn. The leaves awaken drier each morning. Squirrels harvest acorns to store. Birds contemplate their southern journeys. Sap slows within all of these trees. And you, as you so often insist, are an animal too, a heathen in Christian garb who has lived with cannibals and their concubines.”

  “Please, do not turn me into a caricature, not that one at least. I have fallen in love with you.”

  “You barely know me—really.”

  “I know you more than you think. I had hoped and even assumed, perhaps foolishly, that to be evident by now.”

  A breeze blew suddenly across the water, sending ripples along its surface. It caused their skin to chill.

  “Your wife is about to have your second child. She is in a foul temper, as well she might be, and you are frustrated by it, and there I was teetering to fall for Mr. Hawthorne’s Buccaneering friend. I think I prefer to view all of this as passion and discovery. I can live with that—understand that. Love is too complicated—for me, a hank of yarn all a-tangle. We have no future and well you know it.”

  How was it possible, he thought, to go from such joy to such dread in so short a time? “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Why are you saying these things? We have been honest with each other from the start. I am not a complete fool, a complete animal. I have lived long enough to know that regardless of whatever “future” we may or may not have, I am in love with you, heathen or not, in my own heart. Perhaps it is only passion for you.”

  His last words went out across the lake. They sat there as the afternoon deepened and as the waning sun reddened their upper backs, their bare feet in the clean water, their genitals tight, the dense woods and rocky shore on the lake’s other side reflected with a tender clarity. A fish jumped and startled her and she began to cry. She leaned into him, and he put his arm around her, and kissed the top of her head.

  “Forgive me,” she said.

  “I hope you can forgive me.”

  They did not eat the food he brought and both felt too affected from their conversation to make love again. Emily dressed upstairs and stripped the bed while Melville tidied the hearth. She tied her shoes and did her best to straighten the stiff wrinkles in her dress and to fix her hair. On an impulse she took a miniature copy of Dante’s Inferno, published in the original, slipping it into her purse before going downstairs.

  He paddled them back. The sun had descended behind the western forest, but still hovered unseen above the horizon, casting a denser, richer light upon the entire landscape they were part of. Dining needles and gnats flew in erratic swirls over the water, and fish rose to feed. All that had been rained upon and blown about was purified and dry again and still. It was as if the whole late afternoon had dedicated itself to a final celebration of the dying season.

  Emily sat facing him. Over his shoulder she watched the cabin disappear behind the bend. Just as she had feared hours earlier during their arrival in the downpour when Melville had been so irritated, the blissful grace of that approach was now a thing of the past, replaced by the penance of departure. She imagined the little house still there, quiet again, its walls and furnishings rid of their presences. The fox above the hearth, the brass knobs atop the bedposts, the chair backs where their clothing had dried, the mirror she had looked upon, the books in that dusty shelf, all but one, closed, their pages so filled with history and wisdom pressed against each other in a darkness that might last for years. That place where they had loved and argued, caressed and been alone with each other would someday burn down or simply fall into disuse, eaten up by nature and neglect. Perhaps the room at the inn in Connecticut would last longer, but it too would someday be replaced with something else as the decades went by. Nothing lasted. There was some comfort in that for her. Time would smooth all of life’s current furrows into a seamless story. The worries and burdens that had impinged upon them, that had threatened to wear them down as a bull is diminished by the overweight picador, would be lost and forgotten as the years wore on. This she knew and treasured. The happiness she had known that day, that he had given her, would stay with her. All the rest was but another squall. Tears returned to her eyes, just as Melville saw the dock coming into view behind her.

  “Herman,” she said, smiling at him. He looked at her, calmly resigned to bear whatever it was she wished to proclaim. Given her state it was difficult for her to get the words out. She looked down, composing herself, and looked up at him, speaking in a hoarse whisper, “I love you so that I fear I shall break.”

  He lay the paddle down letting the canoe carry on by itself, and reached out to her with both hands, and she took them into her own.

  15

  ONE MONTH LATER TO THE DAY, STANWIX GANSEVOORT Melville was born. Elizabeth suffered tearing during the delivery that required stitching and though she was able to nurse the baby from her right side, her left nipple became occluded, engorging the breast. She traversed numerous episodes of great pain for a number of weeks and Melville was mired in guilt because of it—guilt from his hidden transgressions and guilt from the extent to which his romantic affections had been conferred upon another. The latter state was one he had no control over, but it did not interfere with the compassion he experienced and the devotion he paid to his wife. He did all that was within his power to help her. Well attended, thanks to the bevy of capable women in the house, she encouraged him to continue work on his new project and to get out and about. He swam each day in the lake even as the temperatures dropped. He chopped wood daily, organized and took active part in the apple harvest, orchestrated the cider pressing, and spent the early mornings working on the new manuscript.

  Since the day spent with Emily at Lake Warner, not an hour went by he when he did not recall it in great detail, regretting many moments but treasuring many more. What most tortured and consumed him was the extent to which he schemed and wracked his brain to try to bring about a second rendezvous. On a number of occasions, when immersed in a plot for seeing her again that might succeed, imagining how that might be, giving free rein to fantasies in which neither of them had further cause for worry or restraint, he would hear the new baby cry, or, worse, hear his wife cry out in pain. His reveries, oftentimes lascivious, would evaporate into the cold air as he plunged himself into a cauldron of self-loathing. And Emily did not cooperate, did not reciprocate or s
how anything but a minimal amount of understanding or empathy toward his repeated complaints. Once news reached her of the new boy’s arrival, he noted a distinct alteration in the general tone of her letters that arrived less often. It was as if she had decided to take all that had passed between them into the inner sanctum of her room where she might protect it.

  Thus it was that when word arrived from New York announcing a definitive publication date for Moby-Dick, he grabbed hold of it as if it were a Kisbie Ring. On November 11, he took possession of four copies. Before leaving the post office he penned a note in one of them for Emily and sent it straight off to her. Then on Friday, November 14, he drove his wagon over to the Hawthornes and invited Nathaniel to supper at the Curtis Hotel in Lenox. Sophia, still nursing Rose and busy preparing for their move away from the Berkshires, was glad to get her husband out of the house. Melville timed it in such a way so that the meal would commence later than was usual. By the time their last course was dispensed with, they had the hotel’s dining room to themselves.

  “I feel compelled to say again how very saddened I am to see you leave the area.”

  Hawthorne lit up a cigar, taking his time.

  “We shall not be all that far away, and we can strike up a grand correspondence. Sophia and I will be sad to lose your company too, and Julian, but I, for one, look forward to leaving Lenox.”

  “How so?”

  “Have you not noticed the people gawking at us since we arrived, and how they are now gaping in from the bar?”

  “Really? No. I haven’t.”

  He looked about and did indeed quickly see red and whiskered faces, some with pipes, some with their mouths open, staring at them.

  “This is the first time they have seen me in the village in the two years I have lived here, and they are wondering why. I have fame as a recluse and a snob—you, too.”

  “Me? Nobody knows me here.”

  “Some do—Sophia tells me all the local gossip. But it is I they are most perturbed by, I who live so nearby in a house owned by one of the local elite, I who have never attended a single church service or any public celebration since my arrival.”

  In the adjacent bar and sitting room, the locals were, in fact, talking of little else. What might it be that has drawn the elusive Hawthorne to town today, to dine like this in public view with the even more eccentric recluse from Pittsfield? What might they be plotting? How long have they known each other? Is this, perhaps, their first introduction? Why would the distinguished author who has never paid the village any mind, come to supper with Melville, known for little more than his dangerous wagon driving habits, his odd dress, and the fact that his uncle Thomas spent so many months imprisoned for debt in the local jail? Those more in the know were perplexed because the older author, who dressed like a real gentleman, was famous for his dark Puritan tales while the other, who sometimes resembled a scarecrow, was known for books rumored to invite their readers to licentiousness.

  “I wanted to thank you for sending A Wonder Book over to Malcolm. He will be very touched when he is old enough to appreciate it, and I was very moved for him.”

  “He is going to be a fine boy. And now you’ve another. We must take good care of our sons, Herman. You and I, who lost our fathers at so young an age, know that better than most. They are our great gifts to the world, far more so than anything we might write. But there was no need to invite me to this extravagant meal for such a thing.”

  “I thought we should meet and celebrate our friendship one more time before you and Sophia depart—and I have another motive as well.”

  Hawthorne raised an eyebrow. His cigar had gone out and Melville leaned forward with a candle to help him relight it.

  “I’ve a book for you as well.”

  “No.”

  Melville smiled. “Yes.” And then he leaned down and removed a copy of Moby-Dick from his satchel that rested on the floor near his chair.

  “At last.”

  “At last. It is being published in New York this very day.” He handed it to him. “And I wanted you to see the dedication before anyone else did.”

  Putting his cigar down, Hawthorne took the volume in his hands and then put on his spectacles. He moved his plate aside to make room for the book, opened it at the middle and stuck his nose deep into the pages for a good smell. Then he went to the beginning and found the words dedicated to him that Emily had composed. Underneath Melville had written his name, the place and the date in ink. Hawthorne read it over a few times and then closed the book, hesitating before looking up.

  “I do not know what to say.”

  “Are you pleased?”

  “I am more than pleased. No one has ever dedicated a book to me before, Herman—and what a book it is. It is I, now, who am profoundly touched. You shouldn’t have—there being Lizzie, or your mother, your children, your late brother or father.”

  “All of them worthy in their own way I suppose, but none more than you. I do not use the word genius lightly.”

  He thought of Emily as he spoke, the sole person in all the world he truly had wanted to inscribe it to. “And though I do love and did love all you just mentioned, none were writers, capable of understanding what it is we do, none had the heft to guide me through this book like you.’”

  “I did very little.”

  “You may genuinely think so. But I know better.”

  By the time Melville dropped Hawthorne back at the little red house for the last time, the air was cold and the day’s light fast diminishing. All in all it had been a grand and special day. The leisurely manner in which they had eaten their meal and the modest amounts of alcohol imbibed sat well within him as gathering clouds and a dropping temperature cleared his head.

  The book would be all over New York on the morrow and at last his myriad debts would be repaid, paving the way for a far better life for he and his family. As he coaxed his horses to pull the wagon along that lonely country road in deep New England with no one, not even a fox about, an anonymous man returning home, he sensed that fame would soon embrace him and that he would have to resist its clutches with steadfast guile. Lizzie would improve. The new boy would grow. Malcolm would cease being called Barney as he inched his way toward the adventure of adolescence. His mother would remain the great smooth keel keeping their frigate afloat with the wind behind them. His sisters would marry. The new book he had started would further solidify his place in the emerging world of American letters. And he and Emily would find a way.

  Surely, he would find a way for them, starting, it just occurred to him, with a journey back to Europe. He envisioned a book tour through England and France, through Italy and Spain that he would invite Emily and Austin to accompany him on. Perhaps the Whitman fellow could join them as well. Surely, a way would be found to tie it fast, to plot a course that would convince her family and his own of the little group’s impeccable propriety. As snowflakes began to fall upon him, he imagined he and Emily strolling in spring along the Seine, imagined them waking together in a modest but well-appointed palazzo astride a Venetian canal, imagined them walking through Andalusian hills awash in olive trees, embracing each other upon plowed red earth with a noble, white-washed finca belonging to the duquesa barely in view.

  As autumn deepened that evening, giving way to another Berkshire winter beginning to take hold, it is perhaps as good a place as any to leave him—content in the frigid twilight, under the season’s first snowfall, heading back to the hearths of Arrowhead, thirty-two, in love, and on the verge of literary fulfillment. Life itself will take care of the rest, doing what it does, to him and to all, paying little heed to storytellers.

  So, let us end our tale here and place a final period below, preserving this version of that now distant time. Biographers and literary critics can write down their own gleanings. No need here to push on and chronicle the humiliating failure that Moby-Dick shall be for him. No need to take us through the searing Civil War approaching, or the terrible deaths he shall hav
e to bear—his mother’s, Malcolm’s suicide, Stanwix’s after a long illness, and then the demise of his secret love in Amherst. I will not paint the old age that came his way and then his own death one September, back in the city, not four blocks from where he was born. Many of his last days, to Lizzie’s bewilderment, were spent seated upon a park bench in Union Square contemplating The Everett House. Of all the possibilities that ran through his excited brain that evening as the wagon wheels creaked and spun atop the snowy route home, one that never occurred to him was the leaden fact that he would never again set eyes upon Emily Dickinson.

  Paris, Madrid, Corrubedo