Emily & Herman Page 7

  Thus it falls upon me to tell you, urge you, to order you (!) to return to Amherst. Having come this far I will allow you both to have a look around the City of New York, but you must stay at this, my hotel, no longer than two nights, in the adjacent rooms already reserved for you. You are to take all of your meals here as well. I have already paid for such a plan and I am leaving you some extra monies to be spent wisely. I do expect you to take advantage of this opportunity in a diligent and judicious manner—in a manner far more judicious than the one you have thus far demonstrated.

  I have written to your mother of all this and she will expect you back home no later than Friday afternoon. I entrust the safety and honor of your sister to you Austin—need I say more?

  Your disappointed, but still affectionate father

  “Oh dear,” said Emily reading it over her brother’s shoulder, “Mr. Hawthorne will be most vexed.”

  “No more vexed than I,” said Austin, stuffing the letter into his coat pocket without taking the trouble to refold it. “I refuse to be treated this way, as if I were a boy of ten.”

  “Don’t take it to heart. That is how they still see us, I’m afraid. And frankly, I’m a bit relieved he is not here.”

  Leaving her brother to recover from his sulk, Emily asked for pen and paper and wrote forthwith to both their parents employing only the most respectful and saccharine terms. She had never had a hotel room to herself before and found the prospect exciting. Austin washed up and offered to escort her around the neighborhood but Emily set him loose upon his own devices, preferring to recuperate the sleep she had lost the night before, and arranged to meet him in the Everett House lobby in time for tea with their travel companions.

  Left alone, she undressed and put on a nightgown and sat by her fourth floor window looking down at the park. There was a fine fountain at its center and there were luxurious private houses constructed at either side and tall leafy trees were in full bloom, covering paths and gardens and banquettes for strollers-by. Carriages clip-clopped to and fro and from the dizzying height of her perch it all appeared to her like some painting in the sort of grand museum she had read about but never visited.

  As she continued to look, replaying the events that took place upon the weather deck of the steamer that dawn, free at last from interruption, the leaves of the trees gracing the retinas of her eyes began to rustle. Clouds appeared, large and dark, and in the distance, a rumbling. The downy hairs on her forearms stood up and her nipples tensed as the light upon that urban landscape changed from clear and unrelentingly bright to more somber hues, cooler, charged, and textured. And as the clouds drew closer and bore down bringing moist breezes and dropping temperatures, the leaves began to turn over, ceding their green backs to the fluttering silvery undersides just before it began to pour. As some of the rain splattered against the windowpane, ricocheting against her face and neck and dampening the thin cotton of her gown, she realized she was happy. It caught her by surprise. She consecrated the moment—and held on to it. How could a kiss do such a thing? What manner of creature were we?

  She sat there transfixed and wondered whether it might be a further reflection upon what she feared to be a declining sense of her morality, that she was entertaining the thought, all of a sudden, as the rain came down, that her father’s exquisitely timed and continuing absence might have another explanation. “Venerable duties” had been the official excuse proffered. But “venerable” she knew came from “venerate,” which came from the Latin “venerari” that, in turn, had its root in the goddess Venus, from “vener” … to love … to desire. What traces of flesh and blood dwelled beneath the well-pressed clothing her father wore? It was not the first time she had pondered his sensuality, kept so restrained. Would her mother still be receptive to him? Such a thing was hard indeed to imagine. Lavinia had been born eighteen years ago. Their house was too crowded, every and all noises painfully evident through the papered planked pine. But her father was a man, a man like his own sinning son, a man like the married authors, both of them fathers too, and one of whom had actively flirted with her and the other had kissed her!

  Could it be true? Who might such a woman be, to pull her father away from Amherst? Was it another man’s daughter? … obviously … or maybe a woman of dubious character … an actress … a dancer!

  Hawthorne and Melville waited out the worst of the downpour at the Duyckinck residence on Clinton Place before taking their leave, promising to attend a supper party that evening at the mansion of Rowland and Sarah Morewood. The rain had dwindled to an intermittent drizzle as the two men took a small detour on their way to Union Square and the Everett House. What had been ten acres of farmland with a stream running through it when the Dutch first colonized Manhattan was now a public park. Once it had been sublet to freed slaves in exchange for their agreeing to keep Native Americans at bay. Then it became a potter’s field and place of execution. Its penultimate use had been to serve as the Washington Military Parade Ground where local militias trained and exhibited their finery. This most recent renovation was just two years old. Fine homes had been built about the perimeter and neither Melville nor Hawthorne had seen it yet. It was here, wandering through its walks and gardens, a more intimate version of what had been done at Union Square, that Hawthorne got up the necessary nerve to broach the topic that had been nagging at him since early morning.

  “Do you remember our conversation the other evening at the Inn at Amherst?”

  “Why?”

  “Well it seemed to me then we were both a bit stirred, surprised, and a bit wary as well by the invitation we had just made to the young Dickinsons.”

  “I remember.”

  “What I most vividly recall was an owning up to the realization that we were, neither of us, eager to let our spouses in on it.”

  “On what?”

  “On the fact that we had just asked a young, unmarried girl to accompany us on our journey.”

  “A young girl accompanied as well by her own brother, on a trip that had as one of its purposes a meeting with their esteemed father, a meeting we are about to consummate.”

  “Consummate you say?”

  “I fail to see what you are driving at, Nathaniel. And furthermore, what I also remember was the spirit in which you wrote that second note to me, bidding us both to enjoy an adventure together before you and Sophia move away. Well, here we are, in the thick of it, not an adventure exactly, at least by my definition, but thus far a thoroughly enjoyable sojourn, no?”

  “All true. You do have a very good point there. What I am driving at, however, and I hope you will pardon me if I seem tactless, is the state of your affections for Emily.”

  This induced Melville to stop, at the juncture just where Fifth Avenue began.

  “The state of my affections?”

  “I am no fool, man, especially when it comes to human behavior. Back at that inn we were innocents, men pretending to be rouges, playing at it if only for the simple pleasure it afforded us that went well with the idea of our mutual ‘escape’ from married life.”

  “Do get to the point, man.”

  “Do you fancy her?”

  “We both fancied her.”

  “We both fancied her, or so I thought, the way men, or women for that matter, fancy a comely stranger passing by, but certainly no more than that.”

  “I find her absolutely charming.”

  “But what are your intentions?”

  “One would think you were a close relation, Nathaniel. Are you a cousin, or the girl’s uncle by any chance?”

  “I’m thinking of you, Herman. You and Elizabeth. You and your reputation. The girl’s as well, of course, but you are my friend.”

  Melville smiled and put a hand on Hawthorne’s shoulder.

  “I fancy her. But I am not a cad. I am not a fool. I have the utmost respect for her, and for Lizzie, and I do appreciate the concern of my dearest friend and mentor. Come.”

  And on they went, marching up Fifth
Avenue.

  “I am eager to get this interview over with,” Hawthorne said, “and to get on back north.”

  “Let’s take a steamer up the Hudson this time, like I always used to, up to Albany, just the two of us.”

  “You forget we’ve left our horses in Amherst, Herman.”

  “Damn. You’re right. Well, maybe we can make arrangements. Anyway my man, you’ll be pleased to know that as I stepped off the ship this morning at Fulton Street I resolved then and there to get my adolescent bewitchment behind me.”

  “All for the best.”

  They crossed east at Fourteenth Street and then made their way through Union Square Park taking a diagonal route weaving between carriages, horse dung, and massive puddles.

  “Nathaniel, have you always stayed on the straight and narrow when it comes to the fairer sex?”

  “I’ve had my share of temptations of course, but yes. I haven’t the energy for it, and energy it requires—in vast amounts. After writing a full morning and seeing my family, sharing domestic duties with Sophia—something I have always insisted upon—all I really want to do is either sleep or take a long walk.”

  Melville found the reply honest—and disheartening—but he chose not to say so. It struck him how a man who could write such a powerful treatise against society’s oppressive norms would himself be so freely in step with the very chains and prohibitions he railed against. But then he did say something. He could not help himself.

  “What do you think of love?”

  “That there are many varieties: brotherly, paternal, maternal …”

  “I mean romance—romantic love.”

  “There’s that too.”

  “And how do you feel about it?”

  “Now what are you driving at?”

  “We’re so sorry,” said Austin, ushering them into the Salon du The. “His timing has been uncannily inconvenient for you I realize.”

  “Perhaps he has been warned as to my melancholic disposition,” said Hawthorne only half in jest.

  They found a low, round table in a corner with two plush chairs and a U-shaped banquette by a window looking out directly on the park.

  “The thing is I can see it perfectly,” said Emily. “You’d be a very valued professor.”

  “And would you move to Amherst?” said Austin.

  “I suppose we would, yes. We’re moving no matter what befalls. We have outgrown the farmhouse in Lenox, and we have been having difficulties of late with the landlord, and my original thought was to return to Salem, to be near the sea, where I might obtain employment at the Custom House.”

  “We cannot offer you an ocean view,” said Emily, “but I daresay teaching would be a worthier and more satisfying way of spending one’s time.”

  “I apologize for being so forward,” Austin continued, “but it is a topic that interests me. Might I infer then that the earnings from your books are not sufficient?”

  “We were discussing this very topic over lunch,” said Melville, studying Emily’s hands. “It is virtually impossible to earn a living with one’s pen.”

  “Really?” questioned Austin.

  “The mathematics are dismal. This is not England, or France.”

  “In any event,” said Hawthorne, “it is a dull topic and I’m sure a suitable solution shall present itself and, to put you both at ease, I can assure you that I had already agreed to accompany Herman here to the city where I need to have a chat with my publisher. So, nothing is lost and I am sure to meet up with Squire Dickinson in a not too-distant future.”

  “I do not find the topic dull in the slightest,” said Emily. “On the one hand, women know so little about how to work for remuneration and …”

  “On the other? …” Melville interjected with a sardonic grin.

  “…While on the other,” she continued, answering his grin with one of her own, “it is a topic that, in general, is often on many people’s minds but which they are embarrassed to articulate. Now that I think of it, it is rather similar to …”

  Here she blushed, for her words had gotten ahead of her.

  “Similar to?…” asked Melville.

  The other two men went silent and took a sudden and almost feverish interest in the tea service menu printed on cards in front of them.

  “Similar to the world’s hesitation to speak about the complicated territories pertaining to reproduction.”

  Melville gleamed, admiring her spunk. Lizzie would never have marched on like that, not even in the old days when he first met her. Hawthorne, weighing the probability that all of his friend’s assurances offered during their walk might very well have been prime examples of arch hypocrisy, was not pleased.

  “Well I do think it a dull topic,” he said. “Dull and dreary.”

  “You may have a point,” said Melville. For some reason Emily took this statement of solidarity as a rejection, one that pricked her.

  “Then what topics of discussion outshine it? Love and poetry? Politics and history?”

  “You find those topics dull, sister?”

  “I find them invariably trite and specious and above all self-serving, as a way to show-off or as a way of justifying one’s own behavior.”

  “The ‘Trite and Specious’—a fine name for a London Pub,” said Melville.

  “What would you speak about Mr. Melville?” asked Austin.

  “How about conversation itself? Its repetitiveness, its cumbersome, greasy side, proffered up to lubricate the generally awkward and nervous state found in all humans who resort to it when they congregate—as we are.”

  “What the deuce are you going on about now?” said Hawthorne.

  The waiter came and took their orders. Melville chose to ignore his friend’s irritation, one that was beginning to irritate him as well.

  “If you observe people, be they in a museum regarding a great work of art, be they in a whaling frigate beholding a gam of giant humpbacks, be they on a train or on a steamer, one hears, in ninety-nine percent of the cases, words spoken for their own sake, words spoken to make noise, words spoken to assuage the odd tension that arises when humans gather and silence reigns. You hear gibberish, benign commentaries that go nowhere …”

  “Such as?” said Austin.

  “Such as—What a beautiful sunset—or—Look at how The Whales are breeching, is it not amazing?—or—What brush strokes the painter used, what a fine sense of color.—Things to that effect, statements of the painfully obvious uttered over and over, polluting the ear and aether.”

  “What would you have people do Herman?” Hawthorne asked. “Stand about in silence with their hands in their pockets?”

  “I do think we are social animals, Mr. Melville,” said Austin.

  “Some of us quite more so than others,” Emily interjected as her brother went on.

  “… And that we have the gift of language for a reason. It forms part of our nature I think and, therefore, the exercise of language is a natural thing to do.”

  “I am not questioning that, Austin—and you have put your case very well—my complaint goes to the careless squandering of idle talk. The older I get the more I am aware of it and the more it bothers me.”

  “You say the human beast possesses the gift of language for a reason, brother—what reason might that be?”

  “To communicate—to communicate with more subtlety than other animals use.”

  “Did you just use the phrase ‘human beast,’ Miss Dickinson?” asked Melville.

  “I did.”

  “And I quote: There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”

  “I am not familiar with it.”

  “Tiz from my new book.”

  Hawthorne marshaled significant forces to restrain himself from commenting. He just rolled his eyes, making sure Emily caught it.

  “But we, too, are beasts, Mr. Melville, though we have souls and have been created in god’s image.”

  “Do you two
have plans for this evening?”

  Hawthorne then shot him a look that Emily noticed as well. Her brother answered for them.

  “No.”

  “Then you must come with Nathaniel and I to the Morewoods.”

  “The Morewoods …”

  “John Rowland Morewood and his wife Sarah. They bought my family estate in the Berkshires giving it fresh paint and new life and they own an imposing mansion just a few blocks south from here. He is British, a merchant of some sort, and she a vivacious social beast, and they are having a dinner party this evening. I am sure they would be very pleased to have the both of you join us.”

  “If you really think they would not mind, we would be very glad to attend,” said Austin. “This is just the sort of social occasion I can employ to show my father I have come of age in more ways than just one!”

  “Mr. Hawthorne does not seem quite as sure or as enthused as you, Mr. Melville,” said Emily.

  “But they are my friends,” Melville said. “He does not know them like I do.”

  Hawthorne rubbed his hands together in a gesture that suggested resignation.

  “I, of course, defer to Herman’s instincts,” he said, forcing a smile that only deepened Emily’s sense of misgiving.

  Then, all of a sudden, as if on cue, all four of them looked up and turned their heads in the same direction, taking in a healthy looking thirty-two-year-old man wearing a correct, but somewhat disheveled, suit sans cravat.

  “How do you do?” said the man. “So sorry for this interruption. My name is Walter Whitman and I write for various publications here in the City. I was wondering, hoping, that you, Mr. Hawthorne, and you, Mr. Melville, might concede to a brief interview.”

  8

  Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly,

  musical, self-sufficient,

  I see that the word of my city is that word from old,

  Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,

  Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an