Emily & Herman Read online

  The dog rolled over on its back with its front paws flipped down, completely at ease. The boy made gentle spitting noises, peeing upon himself. Herman resolved that during his trip down to the city and back he would read a good book or two from those he had brought back with him from England. He had read Dante and Darwin simultaneously that year—the blend of a sublime literature of antiquity with a revolutionary modernity based on the careful observation of simple animal life, the carapaces of turtles, the beaks of birds. He felt blessed and invigorated to be living in such a time when the most basic tenets of human belief and faith were being challenged at their core and damn the clerics who talked about him behind his back, the ones his mother still tried to convince him to pray with. What better prayer could there be than the untrammeled utterances coming from his little boy’s lips?

  He reached the house sunburned and sweaty and he handed the sleeping boy to Augusta, dressed in black as always, who handed him a letter. He caught a glimpse of Mary the maid who gave him a smile and a look that made him conclude his appearance was that of a wild man. He took the letter to his room where he refreshed himself and changed for dinner. Then he broke the seal, recognizing the careful script of Hawthorne.

  My Dear Melville,

  Perhaps by the time your eyes peruse this most hastily composed missive you will have impaled, slaughtered, and sold off your massive albino cetacean! I do hope so for I have a proposal to toss your way.

  He concluded his fears of having made an ass of himself the other night were unfounded.

  There is a gentleman in Amherst well positioned in the excellent college there I am beholden to visit in order to explore the possibility of departing classes in said institution and to thus avail myself of some income. I assure you this somewhat unorthodox manner of seeking remuneration has not originated in my brain! Tiz Sophia who is the culprit in this scheme and who has put the bayonet to my back. Whomever the imbecile was that deemed womanhood the meeker and fairer sex must have had a steel edge placed against him as well.

  The long and the short of it is that I am setting out for Amherst this coming Sunday and it is my fervent desire to pay a call on you and Elizabeth to enlist you to accompany me on the rest of the journey… .

  He read it aloud to Elizabeth, his mother, and sisters at dinner. As the peach cobbler was served, he wrote a rapid reply so that it might go out with that afternoon’s post giving his neighbor time enough to make an alternate plan. They would of course be pleased to receive him at their home on his way east to Amherst, but Melville, in spite of his devotion to Hawthorne, had no desire to traipse around Massachusetts and had already made his plans to visit Manhattan.

  2

  My Dear Melville,

  As I have informed you, no doubt on numerous occasions, my father and grandfather were sea captains who spent far more time riding swells than tending the hearth in Salem. If the yellow fever had not sent him to a saline grave somewhere north of Surinam when I was just a lad, my father and namesake would surely have encouraged me to enter his realm of endeavor, as indeed I often dreamed about as a much younger and more fanciful fellow than I am at present. I risk repeating these observations to you because it occurs to me that one of the sources of our friendship, with respect to myself, is the life you have led—managing to combine a profession part of me always dreamed about but never had the gumption to pursue, in addition to your current life of letters. While I was wallowing through the dark and sorrowful homes, spirits, and copses of Salem in my Scarlet Letter, there you were spinning yarns describing the sensual and sinful nether regions of God’s splendid orb! And now I learn you are close to finishing “The Whale”—for which you have my and Sophia’s heartiest congratulations.

  So I say unto you, nay, I order you as your superior officer (in years at least!), to embark upon this journey with me. Let us have our voyage together, be it only upon land, while time, so fickle and unpredictable, permits! I should mention that Sophia and I are looking to move. My Tappan landlords have insulted me of late and I do not think I could bear another summer in the Berkshires. With our newest child Rose just two months old the house has become a glorified nursery, something you too will have the pleasure of navigating once dear Lizzie comes to term this autumn! I, who have never ventured onto the sea, now feel a need to at least live aside it once again. Perhaps your present contentment in these hilly woods has something to do with an opposing set of circumstances. Be that as it may—this could very well be the last time we shall be living in such proximity to each other.

  So let me repeat my bid and up the ante! Come with me to Amherst and afterward, posthaste, I shall accompany you to the Isle of Manna-Hata where I too have some overdue publishing business I should attend to…

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, forty-seven years of age, still very handsome and as always wearing a Westcott and cravat, finished his letter upon the clean mahogany desk that had once belonged to Sophia’s brother George. Having suffered the early humiliation of being left penniless and without an estate along with his mother and siblings after the untimely death of his father at sea, he made a point of always appearing respectable. As his publisher once said to him, ‘You are a walking contradiction Hawthorne—the heart and pen of a relentless probing bohemian with the manner and dress of a Bürgermeister!’

  He was an introspective and orderly man with a fertile imagination who lived an organized life in a neatly maintained household. The wooden floors of his rented red farmhouse were regularly scrubbed and waxed. Dogs were not admitted within. His daughter Una’s cat was confined to the young lady’s chamber. Though he and his young family struggled to survive, a maid was employed, full time, in order to ensure a general state of cleanliness. A stable hand worked part time tending the horses and the carriage and was charged with keeping the barn free of cobwebs, vermin, and manure. Hawthorne himself kept the garden free of weeds. He bathed in the Stockbridge Bowl each morning regardless of the weather and took long walks each afternoon mulling over his work.

  He left his writing study and made his way to the main salon, keeping his head low so as not to bash it against the roof timbers. Sophia was there feeding little Rose. She faced the window, a white linen towel covering her naked breast. They exchanged greetings as he sat in the easy chair behind her to share the view of the mountains. Una and Julian ran about outside like wild beasts. He remembered the first time he had seen Sophia’s breasts, in the darkness of their room at the Manse in Concord. The windows had been open and it smelled of all the rain that had fallen during that day—wet pine and wet grass and wet clothing. Girlish and slight and finely shaped they had only been available to him in the dark. When he was finally permitted to touch them and to kiss them her shudders of pleasure surprised and alarmed them both. He wondered if she ever thought back to that first week they lived together almost nine years ago to the day.

  “You realize you’ll be gone for at least a week,” she said, staring straight ahead.

  Looking past her he could see a robin on the grass pulling a worm from the ground. He wondered if the worm felt anything and at the same time he passed judgment on the unappealing aspect of the robin. He had never shared in nor had he ever understood the lyrical regard assigned to them in poesy. To him they seemed a vulgar bird, lacking in subtlety and more akin to a member of a main street marching band.

  “Will you miss me?” He asked her.

  The back of her neck was still alluring. He would put his nose there at that very moment, would perch there listening to the suckling sounds of their new daughter had he any assurance she might allow him to.

  “The question,” she said, “is, will you miss me—me and the children? I somehow doubt it.”

  “That is a second question, posed before the first has been satisfied.”

  She looked at him as best she could over her shoulder.

  “Of course I will miss you. I just wish you weren’t so eager to go, I wish I were able to go with you, I wish we …”

  The
n he did go and plant his lips on the back of her neck.

  “I wish it too. You’ll be fine here. Your sister is good company. The blasted Tappans are at your beck and call. There is much to distract you.”

  “That there is.”

  “And I will miss you, you and the children. I will not lie and say the idea of wandering about on my own or talking into the night with our mad Melville or discussing work with my publisher does not call to me—I’m sure you too have moments when you would like nothing more than to be back in your room in Salem wondering what book to pick up next, what walk you might take with your sister, who might come to tea that afternoon.”

  “Never. But I do sometimes wish to be back with you at the Manse.”

  “I was just remembering our first days there.”

  “But now we are blessed with children.”

  “Blessed. And the primary reason for this trip has been at your urging remember.”

  “I know. Well it is tiresome, for the both of us, to live from month to month like this, year after year.”

  He took the baby’s foot in his hand, smooth as a pebble in a rivulet, and then reached for the hand of his wife. Her skin smelled of cologne with a tinge of ambergris and it mixed with the odor of infant vomit that emanated from the linen towel. What did couples do at this point? Was there any way to maintain the initial entrancement without having to wait until the children were all grown and gone? What might such a regained state of marital solitude feel like then with so much gray shading the strands of one’s hair? He thought with some chagrin that they would soon be on the move again—looking for yet another house—only a year and a bit after they had arrived there, overjoyed to finally have a place to themselves after almost five years of living with relatives. He truly could not grasp how Melville did it, constantly in sight of his mother and sisters. He recalled the verse he had copied out just as he and Sophia were settling in, written by Horace two score years before Christ was born, celebrating the Roman bard’s relief at being sent off from Rome to live in the country—just as he had fled the vile streets of his native Salem.

  “I prayed for this: a modest swatch of land

  where I could garden, an ever-flowing spring

  close by, and a small patch of woods above

  the house. The gods gave all I asked and more.

  I pray for nothing more, but

  that these blessings last my life’s full term.”

  On the day of his departure for Pittsfield and Amherst, fortune shone upon him. Sophia’s friend Catherine Sedgwick came to visit and shared their dinner. While the coffee was being ground, Fanny Kemble, returned from Europe, suddenly arrived on her stunning black steed to offer Una and Julian a ride into the woods. In the midst of such social commotion and vibrant femininity, he took advantage and made his goodbyes correctly suspecting his “abandonment” of house and family would provide a pretext for extended commiseration by the time he had gone but a quarter of a mile.

  Backing off from a cantor to a trot and breathing in the leaden, moist, late afternoon air he had come to abhor, he thought about the striking Fanny Kemble. She was an actress born in London into a family of thespians who had come to America where she fell in love with and married a rich admirer. Her dream had been to settle down and have children, and not long after that dream had been realized, she discovered to her horror that much of her spouse’s fortune derived from plantations riddled with slaves who were treated abominably. The divorce their arguments about this issue led to had left her without support and without her two children. And so she had returned to the stage to earn her own living once more, and she kept a house, The Perch, near theirs—and of course she took great interest in Una and Julian, substitutes to help assuage her frustrated motherhood. He wondered what other frustrations might beset her. He wondered if she had a gentleman friend by now. He wondered at her offer made to him a week earlier, that they take her far roomier house rent free the following year, an offer he had been hesitant to share with Sophia. Best not to become too friendly with such a beautiful woman so capable and unattached. Discipline and denial in all things had served him well.

  As his horse lifted its tail to drop an apple basket’s fill of manure, they trotted past a tree from which a nest had fallen. He glanced down at it and perceived just enough to note that one of the chicks was dead and two others foundering. He wondered to what family of bird they belonged and what unfortunate turn of random events had brought about the nest’s dislodgement.

  He rode on in contemplation. What, in fact, could one do when faced with such a thing? The horse’s hooves were surely trampling that very moment all manner of ants and beetles and crickets put in harm’s path by the same inscrutable laws of chance. If he, a non-church-going, but still-believing Christian—and why not admit such a creed—could not bring himself to aide those much less fortunate who belonged to his own species and tribe, the beggars passed by so frequently in Boston and in New York, what in God’s name was he obliged to do about such disasters fallen upon species that had been denied souls?

  What was the verse, from Matthew? Ah yes …

  Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

  But logic dealt him another hand. The poetry of the New Testament was all well and good. These were not birds of the air, but fledglings, unable to yet take wing, who had fallen to the earth where no good would come to them. And he had seen them with his own eyes. Would he have passed an infant thus abandoned? And had not God created these creatures with a care very similar to that expended upon his own race that had been etched in God’s image? What was the Christian thing to do? Where was the verifiable spiritual line between insect and bird, bird and animal, animal and man?

  Though a good half a mile had been put between him and the broken nest, he found that the lugubrious thoughts he was apparently unable to shake were ruining an afternoon to which he had been looking forward with considerable enthusiasm.

  “Damn it!” He cried aloud to the air, stopping his horse, and turning it about. At the very first, he felt immense relief, he felt younger, and was soon enjoying the boyish image of himself this rashly chosen mission of rescue was calling forth. But then he realized he had not the faintest notion what he was going to do. Would he guard them in his hat and transport them to Melville? Would he stop at the nearest farm and risk ridicule by asking a perfect stranger to care for such helpless creatures? Might his actual motive be the pleasure he would derive from telling this tale, putting himself in a gracious light? A dark taper rose within him from a place he was in no mood to elucidate urging him to put them, and him, out of their misery with two quick blows from the heel of his boot. Thus was his all too brief respite of recovered boyishness thrown into stormy seas and bandied about until he pulled up short some twenty paces from the tree.

  Two cats had found the nest and were feasting. The chagrin he felt was of such intensity it robbed him of the energy required to chase them away. He just sat there in his saddle and watched them as they, in turn, measured his potential threat to them without ceasing their meal. Angry and feeling foolish he spurred his horse round yet again and resumed his journey.

  3

  ‘… my rebellious thoughts are many, and the friend I love and trust in has much now to forgive. I wish I were somebody else.’

  (EXCERPT FROM A LETTER OF EMILY DICKINSON TO A FRIEND, IN LATE 1850)

  EDWARD AND EMILY NORCROSS DICKINSON WERE AWAY—Edward on a train en route to New York City and Emily, his wife, just arriving with their youngest daughter Lavinia for a visit with the Norcross family in Monson. Relieved to have their son Austin home from Boston they felt comfortable leaving their middle child, Emily Elizabeth, in his company there. Both siblings were supremely pleased to have some respite from their dearly beloved “just ones” and to have their cherished white clapboard manse on North Pleasant Street to themselves. Austin, at this
moment, was asleep in the downstairs parlor, The Bride of Lammermoor resting askew upon a chest gently rising and falling with the noiseless assurance of the twenty-two-year-old lungs respiring within. His sister Emily, two years his junior, soaked in the luxurious new bathtub their forward-looking and hygienically minded father had recently installed.