Emily & Herman Page 4

  5

  DURING THE JOURNEY BY STAGE AND TRAIN TO BOSTON the men did most of the talking. Emily was seated next to her brother and the two authors sat opposite. She passed the time listening to them and looking at the scenery. She was impressed by Austin’s ability to hold his own with such distinguished minds and she marveled at his confidence in expressing opinions one or the other of his listeners were not always in agreement with. In passing, she also learned that he was far better read than she had assumed.

  After stopping for a meal and a chance to refresh themselves, Melville spoke less and less, ceding the floor to Hawthorne and Austin Dickinson who continued their conversation with renewed vigor. Melville alternated between napping and observing Emily. She was tired as well, for she had slept little the night before and she would have gladly shut her eyes too. But the fear of falling asleep and appearing unbecoming kept her sitting ram-rod straight and she was determined to remain that way until they reached their destination. She did not permit her eyes to meet with Melville’s although she was keenly aware of his gaze. She did not know what to make of it. She did not feel there was anything vulgar in it. She had had limited experience with that sort of thing and the discomfort she felt at present was different from that provoked by caddish ogling. But neither was the gaze akin to furtive glances she had been subjected to now and again by some of her more hopelessly shy and tongue-tied suitors at Mt. Holyoke and in Amherst.

  What was most salient for her was not so much his age, but rather the fact that he was married and that he was the father of almost two children. He was also a man who had consorted no doubt with various brown-skinned maidens on the other side of the world, women who had never touched a book in their life and he had then written about it under a thin guise of fiction in works far more scandalous than anything she had as yet been able to smuggle into her room at home. Whenever Melville’s name came up in literary conversation he was deemed a figure doomed by his excess of exoticism. Yet in person he seemed familiar to her. And then, as she set her dark eyes upon a splendid looking farm with not one but two bright red barns, lost in thought about the sort of gentleman he might really be, he in turn took advantage of a particularly agitated exchange between Hawthorne and Austin to break his silence and in subdued tones, to address her.

  “Is it normal in Amherst for young men and women to be as well read as you and your brother?”

  So accustomed had she grown to being left to her own reveries, the question came as a shock. She froze. It was not so much the question itself that startled her, but rather the fact that he was addressing her at all.

  “I’d like to think, Mr. Melville, that in Amherst, all manner of people are well bred.”

  ‘“Well read,’ I said, not ‘well bred’. What do you take me for Miss Dickinson?” he asked her with a smile.

  In that second of time, without warning, she could not recall having thought a man as handsome as he looked to her then, leaning slightly forward, amused and grinning, even as she blushed and attempted to banish her embarrassment.

  When they arrived in Boston, Hawthorne and Melville went off on their own leaving Austin and Emily to visit with relatives and friends of their family. Austin suggested they spend the night at a hotel but Emily insisted on his taking her to see the flat where he lived, and by the time he overcame his reticence and guided her there it was too late to sleep anywhere else. She was not disappointed. It was a luxury unto itself to get out of her clothes, bathe with a hot damp cloth, put on her night dress, and crawl under one of her brother’s moth-eaten blankets taken from his room at home.

  Austin, who had spent no small portion of the long day talking, was at it still, as if gripped by a fever. Though somewhat concerned about his state, the sound of his voice also consoled her and enabled her to lie there relaxed and snug as he enumerated his complaints to her about teaching young Irish ruffians. And then, just as sleep was overtaking her, she was stirred awake again by the following…

  “I have a terrible confession to make, one I ought not to burden you with, but then again you are the only other person in the world I can trust and the torment seething within me is pushing me toward a precipice.”

  “Oh, Austin.”

  “You know I have strong feelings for Susan Gilbert.”

  “I do.”

  “And that it seems we are all but engaged to be married.”

  “It has seemed that way to all of us.”

  “And yet I find my affections distracted by someone else.”

  “Ah.”

  “That shocks you?”

  “Do I appear shocked?”

  “Well, I, for one, am shocked.”

  “At least half of my life thus far has been consumed by literature, which is a reflection of life, and a significant bulk of its content might be summed up in just such a way.”

  “So, there you have it.”

  “I have the essential perhaps, but it is very little. Are you in love with one or the other?”

  “I should be in love with Susan.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we are practically engaged. Because we suit each other. Because our families know each other and approve of it all. Because we come from a similar milieu.”

  “Those may be excellent reasons to hope for a successful marriage, but it does not answer my question.”

  “I don’t know. I go back and forth, like an idiot.”

  “Does Susan know or suspect anything?”

  “No. And it must remain that way.”

  “Unless and until…”

  “It’s all more complicated than that. This other young woman …”

  “Do I know her?”

  “No. Her name is Fiona.”

  “She lives here? In Boston?”

  “She works here. With me. Teaches at the same school. She’s Irish you see and from a humble background.”

  “Not the sort of match the almighty Dickinsons would favor?”

  “Not at all.”

  “She must have great qualities to recommend her to do battle with all of that.”

  “She does. Can I be frank with you?”

  “You appear to be the very portrait of frankness this evening.”

  “I mean franker still.”

  She grabbed the pillow and curled her head around it silently rejoicing in the company of her brother. There was a time that did not seem so long ago when she had observed him bestirred in just the same manner over a kitten that had escaped from his room. He had cried then and implored her to help him. Now he was imploring her again, to listen to his girl trouble.

  “Susan’s romantic notions, Susan’s passion, is all in her head and sweetly expressed in letters and such. Her ideas of love seem to be just that, ideas. There is nothing unusual in this within the society you and I have been born into. It’s all very proper and decorous and as it should be. But we are animals you know.”

  “I know.”

  “God made us so.”

  “He did.”

  “That does not shock you either?”

  “I had the very same thought myself the other day.”

  “It does me good to be able to speak with you about this Emily.”

  “And me.”

  “Fiona, who was born into a different sort of society, one in many ways even more morally restricted than ours, is nevertheless a different sort of person. She is, shall we say, more at home with her physicality. And as a result she has awakened my own, in a manner most potent.”

  Animals indeed, she thought. Contrary to every ballad and poem about love she knew, no one ever mentioned love’s reliance upon happenstance, its thoughtless collusion with proximity and chance. When looked at dispassionately it was hard to believe that the person who all of a sudden was transformed from a perfect stranger into the “one and only.” The “angel that the gods in their wisdom have caused destiny to bring to me” was invariably the girl next door, an acquaintance’s friend, some geographically positioned creature upon
whom—when the chemicals did their dance—the same dance surely one observed in those cats that sometimes howl through the night—became miraculously and uniquely suited.

  “You fancy her more than you do Susan.”

  “One opens my mind to the merits of self-criticism, the other boils my blood.”

  “I see.”

  “But do you?”

  “I think so.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “What boils cools.”

  “Meaning what exactly.”

  “I know Susan Gilbert, Fiona no.”

  “You are talking about reason. I am talking about something else.”

  “You want to possess this other girl, disrobe her, sate yourself with her. Am I getting closer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever kissed Susan, I mean truly kissed her?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “She never made such an inclination clear to me, and I have never felt bold or compelled enough to go at it on my own initiative. We just write each other about it as something sitting out there like some sugary vision of heaven.”

  “But you’ve kissed Fiona.”

  “Yes.”

  “And more.”

  “Yes.”

  “Assuming she is not a woman of the night …”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then what made it so much easier with her?”

  “This is what I have been trying to tell you. It just happened. There we were talking about one thing while our eyes were clearly bent upon a different purpose—and then we just reached out to each other as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which I expect it is.”

  “You dazzle me brother. Of the urges you speak I know very little. I only appreciate their strength by inference. It seems society, ours at least, is hell-bent against them, lives in constant fear of them, organizes and lays out its norms for the express purpose of containing them. And yet here we are, we and all of God’s creatures, because of them. So I fear I am a poor judge of what ails you. I don’t pretend to understand it. I only know that our physical demise is just as real as the urges that brought it forth and that it comes upon us with scant regard for our worldly plans. And so to insist on living one’s life exclusively in line with what our worldly plans demand is often a folly.”

  “We might be gone tomorrow.”

  “Yes. I think of it often.”

  “Do you really believe in an afterlife, Emily, in a heavenly judgment of our deeds here on earth? I’ve often observed you in rapture during sermons.”

  “I like the words and how some men of the cloth string them together. An afterlife—I do not know. In truth, it is hard to imagine despite how blasphemous that must sound.”

  Herman and Nathaniel paid evening calls accompanying each other to their respective in-laws, the Shaws and the Peabodys. In each of the two households it proved difficult to keep the visit short without offending, and by the time they returned to their hotel, plied with meats, cakes, sweets, and aperitifs neither had any appetite for even the lightest of suppers. Hawthorne retired to his room to write Sophia an account of the day’s events. Melville, a man accustomed to walking five or six miles a day, went back out into the Boston summer night and strolled down to the docks.

  There were taverns by the wharves and wooden piers, still open and filled with seamen. Two or three of the newer large steamers held the favored moorings, but he went further along to take a gander at the large sailing ships and at a pair of whalers put in for repairs. The smell impregnating the night air, a mixture of dead fish and oily salt water, of tar pitch and ocean brine, brought tears to his eyes. He knew very well that his insomnia was due to the young Dickinson girl. Part of him scoffed at the notion and he assured himself that in the glare of daylight reason would prevail. But he was living the night just then and another corresponding part of him sought temptation and upheaval.

  It was here, only some years ago, that he had waited aboard ship, for over a month, had waited to be released from duty after sailing back from the Pacific. And when the day finally came and he stood once again upon America’s firmament he had gone directly to call upon the Shaws. He would like to feel that way again about his Lizzie. But time had passed—strange ungraspable time—and now it was someone else he wished to kiss, without knowing why exactly, for the girl was not especially pretty or accomplished at anything he could perceive. And yet he wanted her. All of the symptoms were there. He could not recall having met anyone even vaguely like her.

  6

  ENTERING THE LOBBY ON THE WAY TO THE DINING ROOM for breakfast, Hawthorne and Melville found Emily sitting in a plush chair placed between a potted palm and her black valise. They approached her with furrowed brows.

  “Miss Dickinson, what a pleasant surprise,” said Hawthorne, taking her hand to almost but not quite kiss it.

  “Are we late?” asked Melville, offering her a curt bow.

  “Not at all. I am unspeakably early. My brother wished to make a social call in Fall River and took the earliest train. He dropped me here at dawn and has promised to meet us at the pier by two.”

  “Please join us for breakfast.”

  “I don’t mean to intrude. I’m quite all right sitting here.”

  “I assure you sitting with us in the dining room will be more congenial.”

  At breakfast, Hawthorne, largely free of the conflicting emotions besetting his friend, was able to speak impressively and with great wit about the evening before’s visits made to the Shaws and Peabodys. As she listened, she entertained another reflection, that earlier that morning she had been seated upon a chamber pot in a small room for that purpose at the end of the hallway adjacent to Austin’s flat. Then she had been seated next to her brother on a tram. Then she had sat for two hours in the hotel lobby and now here she was seated once again in this nondescript hotel dining room. She wondered what the point of it was, the moving from one place to the next? To what end? But she was aware as well of the obsessive manner in which these thoughts marched through her head, how difficult it was to stop them and how unsettled they made her feel about further travel. But the die she knew was cast and she would have to go along with them to Fall River at the very least.

  Melville—who she observed with some fascination ate an enormous quantity of food—finally interjected some words into the discussion after wiping his lips and beard with a large napkin. “What sort of business would someone like your brother have in a place like Fall River?”

  While she did her best to answer Melville’s unknowingly awkward question, explaining her brother’s motives for seeing Fiona Flanagan that morning, in strictly professional terms, the brother in question lay upon a bare mattress within an abandoned beach cottage off Club Street facing Mt. Hope Bay, watching Fiona undress for him.

  Apart from her father who worked at the Metacomet Mill, Fiona Flanagan was the only other earner of wages in her diminished family. Her older brothers Sean and Robert Emmet had both died fighting the Great Fire of 1843. Her beauty was much commented upon in Fall River and her parents wished that as an attractive school teacher she might one day make a good marriage. This was how she justified her relationship with Austin. Having turned down many a suitor from the local mills (and a newspaper vendor she passed each morning on Park Street near Boston’s Common), and having permitted only a distant cousin visiting from Cork to kiss her once upon the lips, she had given herself completely to Austin Dickinson. He was handsome, intelligent, a teacher like herself, and the only son of the well-known and prosperous Edward Dickinson of Amherst. The only obstacle she saw in her path, for she was blind to the issue of class distinction, was Austin’s official relationship with Susan Gilbert, a woman for whom, it was clear to her, he felt no fire in his belly. His initial reticence had made her bold, and through her attempts to win him over she had discovered how compelling the pleasures of the flesh could be with the appropriate person.

  Like an infant who d
oes not tire of watching a face appear and then disappear, each time Fiona shed her clothing, letting dresses and petticoats fall that in spite of their charms had little to do with what they obscured, Austin was shocked and entranced anew upon seeing the reality of her shapely flesh. The tone and tenor of it, the red marks left by the corset stays, the sudden swelling of her breasts, the way her upper thighs, turned away from him as she was just then, blossomed into her thrilling derriere, the cracks and crevices, the mysterious animal hairs, the tenderness and bestiality of it causing his heart to race like a frightened deer. As she turned to face him, her face ablush with a sense of shame, her actions clearly contradicted, he thanked Nature itself for having granted him this shard of the present, this pulsating blood. She knelt down beside him, geisha style, her private offering disappearing between her legs, her breasts looming over him, one of her hands placing unruly strands of her long auburn hair behind an ear as the other began to unbutton his briefs, releasing his cock to the humid air. As she took him in her mouth he touched the clean skin of her back with both his hands and watched a reflection of shimmering water against a white wall facing the window stained with mildew.

  Two hours later Austin hurried under a hot sun to the Fall River Line pier where The Empire State was docked, boilers lit and taking on passengers. The tryst had ended on an awkward and troublesome note. Enthralled the two of them during his final thrusting, he slipped out of her bottom and found himself in a more customary, less controversial, but—biologically speaking—far more volatile corridor just as he began to ejaculate. Fiona arched her back in pain, suddenly a virgin no more, as he did his best to withdraw. But the damage was done and a large army of Dickinson spermatozoa had been launched, furiously struggling upstream to spawn. The couple clung to each other before dressing—swearing eternal love, putting a brave face on what might well end up becoming a disaster for the both of them. As he strolled along the shore road, now more relieved than anything else to be away from a place where he had been so happy just hours earlier, he weighed the odds for fertilization based on no practical knowledge of the matter.