The Whale

by Mark Beauregard

  Herman removed the letter from between the pages of Hawthorne’s book and read it again. He knew that he was becoming carried away, interpreting secret messages where nothing but commonplace statements existed. The fevers were simply biographical coincidences, and Hawthorne was thinking less of mad fathers and more of the fact that both Herman and Hawthorne’s own father had been mariners—the letter, in fact, said nothing deeper than that, and perhaps the apothecary was holding foot powder. No, there was nothing cryptic here or even interesting, Herman thought. And to close the letter, Hawthorne must have mentioned Julian because it was simply true that Julian had interrupted him at just that moment with a childish remark about the trees. Nothing could have been more banal. Yet Hawthorne had revealed that he had been eavesdropping on Herman’s conversation during that hike up the mountain!

  Was it all a code? Oh, what did it all mean? He turned the letter over and wished more writing would appear on the opposite side, but the statement was complete as he had read it. He returned it to its sacred envelope, replaced it between the pages of Hawthorne’s book, and slipped the book once again behind the dresser clock, which ticked infernally.

  Herman resumed washing his face. Malcolm stirred. Lizzie sat up in bed and stretched and yawned.

  • • •

  Herman and Lizzie descended the stairs, Lizzie bouncing Malcolm against her chest. When they reached the dining room, they found a package waiting for Herman on the table, and his heart leapt yet again. The dominoes of fate tumbled so quickly once the first had fallen. The package was addressed to the “Literary Lion of Lenox,” in care of “Admiral Herman Melville” at Broad Hall, and it was rather larger than Herman had expected, a hefty cube wrapped in brown paper and twine. The twine crisscrossed the bundle in helter-skelter patterns, as if a mad spider had spent all its silk in a fit of drunken pique, and knots abounded, five times more knots than were required—butterfly knots, bowline loops, figure eights, constrictors, sheepshanks, square knots, and half hitches. The absurd configurations were Duyckinck’s joke, a way of poking fun at Herman’s ceaseless aggrandizements of the “ways of the sailor,” and Herman fingered the loops and cinches appreciatively, all neatly and expertly tied: he admired nothing more than an elaborate and carefully executed joke. He hefted the package by the twine and it held together splendidly, even while the individual books shifted and strained against their paper wrapping.

  On the table beneath the package, Herman discovered two copies of the latest Literary World; he set Hawthorne’s books aside and flipped to his own review of Mosses, which he scanned for typographical errors. It was remarkably clean, considering how quickly Duyckinck had rushed it to press, and the rest of the issue was similarly of the moment—he must have assembled it on the train, Herman thought, and stayed up all that night setting it. His heart swelled with pride.

  Lizzie went into the kitchen and fanned the fire in the stove. “Would you like oats or eggs, Herman?”

  “I believe I’ll head out to Lenox,” Herman said. “I promised to deliver these books as soon as they came.”

  “Without breakfast?”

  “I’ll have a crust of bread and then saddle Lollie. Robert won’t mind. I’ll post our letter to your father on the way.”

  “I have been thinking about that letter,” Lizzie said. “I don’t think we ought to send it.”

  “But surely the next thing to do is ask your father for an advance,” said Herman, panicking. “How else could we even begin to look for a house, without knowing the means available to purchase one?”

  “I agree. But I think the letter is dishonest.”

  “Dishonest?” Herman cried.

  “Maybe not dishonest, precisely. When we wrote it, I thought the idea of taking on more debt was utterly foolish, and I feel that the version we’ve written reflects my prejudice against the idea. I wrote it just to please you. But it is the wrong approach, because we have told him only the benefits of such a move to us and Malcolm. I believe we ought rather to explain how it might help our whole family—both of our families.”

  “Oh.” Herman was perplexed, and pleased. “You sound more favorably disposed.”

  “Let me make you a cup of tea.”

  Herman set Duyckinck’s magazine back on the table. The Sirens were singing celestial odes of Hawthorne in Herman’s ears, piercingly beautiful songs beckoning him to Lenox; but he saw the possibility of crashing against the rocks, as well, and he recognized that it would be better to lash himself to the mast for the duration of a breakfast than destroy himself through foolish haste. Destroying oneself, he thought ruefully, should always be done at a deliberate pace.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Herman. “Forgive me—how foolish. Tea!” With superhuman effort, he sat down at the table and resigned himself to breakfast and an hour’s delay, a most melancholy hour set against the projected joy of seeing Hawthorne’s face again—but as anguished as he felt at this suspension of pleasure, he knew that the hour before him would ultimately provide richer happiness than he had ever known before, if Lizzie had decided to supplicate her father earnestly for help.

  “I believe your next book could be successful—there is no reason it should not be—but we must think about something of lasting benefit that our entire family could count on, in proposing such a new expense, in the event that people do not buy your book in great quantities.”

  The idea offended Herman’s vanity, but he saw the wisdom in it: what might Judge Shaw receive in this bargain, if Herman bankrupted himself as Robert had? “Well, if we bought a farm—”

  “Yes, I know,” Lizzie said. “You could plant us each a row of corn.”

  “What did you have in mind, then?”

  “What if we offered our home as a place for my father to retire? When he’s ready, he and my stepmother might come to live with us, and we could care for them in the same way we care for your mother now. Might we not find a home spacious enough for my parents to have a room of their own, just as you said each of the other family members might have?”

  “Yes,” he cried, with triumphant relief. How crazily his emotions whirled and pounded. “Let it be so!”

  “And I could offer to bring our best heirlooms, our antiques, to the Berkshires, to furnish our home—we would have them for our practical use now, and my father could still enjoy them on visits and then when he retires.”

  “Indeed,” Herman cried again. “Very sensible!” He pounded the table.

  Lizzie said, “I thought that, after breakfast, we could rewrite the letter together, and I know my father would think much more favorably of it than the letter we wrote before.”

  “Wonderful, thank you, Lizzie.” He stood up and kissed her cheek. “But you should not worry yourself about the prospects of my next book. It will be such a success that we’ll build a whole wing on our new house for your parents.”

  Lizzie poured them each a cup of tea and gave him plates to set on the table. He sat down again and placed his hand on Hawthorne’s package. The morning air blistered Herman’s skin with happiness.

  “Eggs or oats, then?”

  “Eggs.”

  Herman’s mother would soon be down, and when they told her that they were thinking of buying a house here, a predictable battle of wills would begin between Lizzie and Maria, especially when Maria learned that Judge Shaw might tip the balance of power in their household toward Lizzie—but none of that mattered now. Lizzie fried eggs and made oats for Malcolm and tried out different phrases that they might use in their letter; and Herman waxed poetic about the beauty of the Berkshires, thinking of botanicals in the woods roundabout that might especially please the judge. He ate quickly and then fed Malcolm while Lizzie wrote a new letter to her father, and in no time at all, he was out in the barn saddling Robert’s horse.

  • • •

  At the Pittsfield Post Office, Herman pressed the letter to Judg
e Shaw between his hands in a gesture of prayer and then handed it reverentially to the clerk. Once it was out of his hands, he felt giddy and light. He stopped at the apothecary’s and collected the small box that awaited Hawthorne there—an extraordinarily heavy white box that fit in the palm of Herman’s hand—and then set off at a canter for Lenox. An occasional cool breeze relieved the oppressive swelter of summer; but the bluebottles and mosquitoes that pestered Robert’s horse found Herman, as well, and he swatted and smacked his own skin, balancing Hawthorne’s package precariously in front of him, a loop of its crazy twine lassoed around the saddle horn. He tried to absorb all the details of the landscape between Broad Hall and Lenox afresh, using a sailor’s trick that he had learned from a Tahitian harpooner: instead of looking—actively directing his gaze to various points around him—he simply opened his eyes and saw, allowing the natural functioning of his orbs to convey images to his mind. In this manner, concentrating on removing all judgment from his impressions, he prevented himself from becoming anxious about his journey to Hawthorne and instead made a passive, moment-by-moment record of the sights and sounds of the day. This trick had always proved especially useful when, after many weeks on the high seas, out of sight of land, a ship’s captain would announce that they were bound for a port yet many days away, and to check the painful impatience of anticipation, it became necessary to live entirely in the moment. Herman now blanked his mind and trotted along as if he had many leagues yet to travel.

  He inhaled the sweet musky smell of his horse’s sweat and observed chipmunks darting beneath logs in the shade of the woods along the road. He stopped bothering about the flies buzzing their fanatical patterns around his head, even allowing mosquitoes to land on his hands and drink their fill, a blood sacrifice of thanks to the gods. By the time he crested the hill above Lake Mahkeenac and saw Hawthorne’s diminutive two-story cottage, set like a dusky ruby in the shoreside meadow, he had become as calm as Buddha staring down eternity. He clopped right up to the waist-high white picket fence and stopped, remaining mounted, taking in the scene of Hawthorne’s domicile in silence.

  A little dirt path, bordered by white stones, led to Hawthorne’s small, charming porch, which sheltered the white-painted front door. To the left of the red cottage, a garden of tomatoes and lettuces and leafy greens grew in neatly weeded rows of black loam; to the right, a single chicken pecked about in the grass below an oak, whose canopy partially shaded the cottage; and beyond the oak, toward a thick stand of tangled woods that guarded the lake, monarch butterflies flitted and danced around a patch of wintercress with wispy yellow flowers that seemed artfully and intentionally strewn in a pattern of careless beauty. A woodpecker rapped noisily from the woods, providing off-kilter rhythm for the squeaky-wheel cries of warblers. The thick, earthwormy smell of mud wafted up from the lake.

  Herman heard footsteps within the cottage, and the door opened abruptly. “Hello, it must be Mr. Melville, is it not?”

  Sophia Hawthorne, the slight, brunette wife of the Literary Lion, stepped out onto the porch and walked briskly up the path. She wore her hair in the current fashion, parted severely down the middle, where gray hairs intermixed with dark brown; with each step she took, her curls bounded below her ears like springs. She wore a plain, blue cotton dress, fringed with white lace. Herman dismounted somewhat awkwardly, due to the bulk of the books he had come to deliver, and Sophia gave him a frank, warm handshake.

  “Mr. Duyckinck sent along these books,” he said.

  “Of course, of course. We’ve been expecting you!”

  Herman had folded a copy of Literary World into the knotted twine and wrapping paper, and now he withdrew it and offered it to Sophia. “And I’ve brought along a copy of the latest Literary World, which has an article on your husband.”

  “I know, isn’t it marvelous? I’ve only just finished reading it. Mr. Longfellow gave us a copy when he came up from New York earlier today.”

  Herman was disappointed that he’d been beaten to the punch, but he nevertheless waited expectantly for Sophia to praise him for the review. They stared at one another. “Did you notice who wrote the article?” he asked.

  “Yes, and isn’t it the queerest byline you ever read? We have been puzzling over it all morning.”

  Herman fired open the magazine and found his article: indeed, the byline read not Herman Melville but rather “A Virginian Spending the Summer in Vermont.” His first feeling was blind rage; but then he realized that Duyckinck must have published it anonymously in order to leave in the bits about Shakespeare and the germinous seeds. He glanced over the article again and found every one of the wildly flattering things he had said about Hawthorne, which could not properly be called literary and could conceivably bring an unpleasant backlash from readers—an idea he had not considered when writing it. Perhaps Duyckinck was simply protecting him; then so be it, he thought. It would give him the chance to surprise Hawthorne by revealing the author’s true identity, in person.

  Herman tied Lollie to the fence, and Sophia ushered him into the little cottage. A short entrance hall offered access to a narrow, crudely constructed staircase leading to the second floor. Below the staircase, to the right, two doors opened, one into a bedroom and the other into a tiny parlor. Sophia led him to the door on the left and into the parlor. The whole building would have fit snugly into one wing of Broad Hall, and the parlor, which apparently also served as a dining room and kitchen, was smaller than the bedroom Herman and Lizzie shared.

  “Let me get you a cup of water,” said Sophia. “And would you like to wash a little? I could fill a basin. Oh, I’ve completely forgotten myself. I should tell you that Nathaniel has taken the children for a walk along the lake. They should be back any moment. He’ll be so happy to see you.”

  Herman reached into his pocket, withdrew the box he had received from the apothecary, and handed it to Sophia. “What weighs so much in such a small package, if you don’t mind my asking, Mrs. Hawthorne?”

  “Don’t let’s stand on formalities, Mr. Melville, please call me Sophia, it will make me so much more comfortable.”

  “Very well, call me Herman.”

  She opened the box and showed Herman a stack of charcoal gray magnets. “They’re for my headaches, you see. I have the most alarming headaches from time to time, and I’ve tried everything to cure them and just don’t know what else to do. Short of mesmerism, this is my last idea, and Nathaniel won’t countenance mesmerism.”

  “Have you considered opium?”

  “Yes, before I went to Cuba, I used opium, and laudanum, too, but they’re rather expensive.”

  “And what took you to Cuba?”

  “I was a governess there for a short time, but really my family sent me in the hope that the tropical sun would work a cure on my poor head. The doctors don’t know what to do with me, I’m afraid. Conoces Cuba?”

  “I’ve never been there, no, but I met some Spanish sailors from Havana on a whaler several years ago.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Sophia, with a dreamy, faraway look. “Whaling. How violent!” She went to the dining table, which was pushed up against the far wall of the parlor, and poured Herman a cup of water from a glazed white pitcher. Then she poured some more water into a wooden bowl. She held up the magnets and said, “I’ll just put these away and leave you for a moment to refresh yourself,” and she went out to the entrance hall and up the stairs.

  Herman set Hawthorne’s package on the table, drank down the entire cup of water, and then splashed his face with cool water from the bowl. He ran his wet hand up and down the back of his sweaty neck and combed his hair with his fingers, while he examined Hawthorne’s main room. Four dining chairs were pushed awkwardly under the table in the corner—he guessed that they pulled it out and rearranged the other furnishings for every meal. In the center of the north wall was a potbellied stove, and next to the stove a small cabinet contained cookware, dishe
s, cutlery, and serving plates. Across the room, below the generous front window, a pair of easy chairs faced each other; a table in between held an oil lamp. Low bookcases lined the walls on either side of the chairs. No portraits or decorations of any kind hung on the walls; it seemed the most humble and blank room in the world, a place where every emotion would have to be invented anew in order to be felt at all.

  When he had finished washing, he unconsciously reverted to the manners of a sailor and wiped his hands on his pants. Sophia descended again with steps so light that the stairs barely registered a creak.

  “So you read the review in Literary World, as well?” Sophia said.

  “I did,” said Herman. He took a moment to appraise Sophia more closely, as a rival. She was no great beauty, but her elfin ears lent her an otherworldly air, as did the oddly detached curiosity in her eyes—as if her human form were merely an instrument she had borrowed in order to convey her observations of earth to angels, spirits, and ghosts.

  “I do so wonder who it is, this so-called Virginian in Vermont. Is it some kind of joke? Who on earth could possess such a rich heart and be so fine and fearless and full of such astonishing intuitions and not wish to be known? It’s quite a mystery. And if I may say so without seeming too full of pride, I think this Virginian is the first person, in print, to say what I myself, in my secret mind, have often thought about Nathaniel’s spiritual kinship to Shakespeare. I fear that in other ways, though, this person has misapprehended Nathaniel.”

  “Misapprehended how?”

  Sophia took up a copy of Literary World, found the passage she was looking for, and unwittingly read Herman’s own words aloud to him: “‘Where Hawthorne is known, he seems to be deemed a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style—a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated—a man who means no meanings.’” She looked up. “Despite the wealth of brilliance the reviewer brings to his interpretations of Nathaniel’s stories, he seems never to have heard of him before or understand the fame and controversy that have followed his recent work. It seems a direct contradiction to compare Nathaniel with Shakespeare and then call him a pleasant writer who means no meanings. And if you ask for Nathaniel around Salem, you will find impressions of him there anything but harmless, after The Scarlet Letter.”