Brewster described the property he had come to offer for sale: the house dated from the Revolutionary War, when it had been the main tavern in Pittsfield. Brewster had commissioned its barn from the Shakers in Hancock; and its one hundred sixty acres of land included forest, streams, grazing pastures, and berry patches, in addition to farmland that produced thirty bushels of oats per acre and forty bushels of beans.
“And you have walked through my property many times, my dear Herman, and taken a good many fish from my streams in years past, with your uncle and cousin, so you would have the advantage of already knowing the estate.”
“Of course, the house is smaller than Broad Hall by a good deal,” Robert said. “And Broad Hall has two hundred fifty acres.”
“Yes, yes, it’s smaller,” Dr. Brewster cackled. “But size isn’t everything, whether in houses or in whales.” Brewster winked. “Dr. Holmes told me that you were writing about your whaling adventures, Herman. Well, if it interests you at all, come by tomorrow and I’ll show you inside the house—we’ve expanded the parlor since you’ve seen it and added a porch—and we’ll take a walk around the whole property, so I can show you its legal boundaries.”
Robert said, “I had no idea you were even thinking of selling, John.”
“We’ve been talking of moving to Boston for some time now, and I’m thinking of teaching a class at Harvard, since Dr. Holmes has recommended me for faculty.” The doctor winked again at Herman and stood up. “To be honest, I wouldn’t think of selling it now, Robert, if it weren’t a relation of yours, and I’ve known Herman since he was a boy, so I could feel good about it. The hand of fate sometimes nudges us along.”
“Fate,” Herman said.
“Maybe if we can come to terms quickly, it will serve all of our interests. A bit of serendipity, one might say.”
“Serendipity,” said Herman.
“Yes, some coincidences are more than mere chance.”
“Yes, chance. Coincidence!” Herman leapt to his feet. “Destiny!” He shook the doctor’s hand.
“Well, come by around ten o’clock tomorrow, and we’ll talk some more.” He walked with a quick, purposeful gait off the porch, around the corner, and back down the road to his farm.
“Be careful, Herman,” said Robert. “Dr. Brewster is a good man and a family friend, but he’s shrewd, and his price often has more to do with what he wants than what things are worth. His property is mostly swamps and forest, you’ll remember.”
“Of course,” Herman blustered, thinking, contrarily, that the doctor’s estate—which he knew like a half-remembered dream from his boyhood—was so ideal that the price barely weighed into the bargain. “Swamps and forests!”
Robert said, “I sold Broad Hall for six thousand dollars, Herman—a fair price, but lower than I would have accepted under more propitious circumstances—and I want you to remember that figure, because Dr. Brewster’s farm is far less desirable. Do you understand?”
“Mortgages,” Herman said, “are the devil’s own contracts and must be calculated in souls and not sovereigns, so I will certainly take care.”
As he said this, though, Herman was estimating the number of steps from Dr. Brewster’s house to Hawthorne’s front porch, and he immediately launched into a rhapsody on the many advantages of Brewster’s farm, beginning with the solidity of the home itself and taking in everything from the blackberry brambles to the barn to the streams he had fished as a boy. And it was already a working farm, capable of providing income from crops and animals: the estate could solve many problems at once.
Robert looked at Herman with disgust. “Do you take nothing I say to heart? Brewster sees you as an opportunity for profit! He has never talked of selling before and would not do so now if you didn’t seem such an easy mark.”
“Of course, Robert, of course,” Herman said. “I have negotiated with cannibals in foreign tongues and Arabian sea captains and French criminals. I have bartered with demons and angels! I am not about to let a country doctor take advantage of me. But would it not be fanciful to move in next door? Is that stream that runs near the Methodist church the same one that goes through Dr. Brewster’s property?” Robert reluctantly confirmed that it was. “And do you remember that gnarled oak that we used to swing from when we were children, when your father took us hunting? Is that not the very one at the edge of Dr. Brewster’s patch today?” Robert nodded. “It will be almost like being a child again.”
“Need I remind you, Herman,” Robert said, “that this very home, whose porch you sit on, is my actual childhood home, and that being like a child again is the most painful thing I can imagine right now, when I am about to leave my home forever?”
Robert jumped up from his chair and stormed across the porch, leapt over the steps, and ran down the road toward town.
Herman felt as if a pleasant dream he had been having had unexpectedly turned foul. He looked without recognition at the faces of his family, and then he looked at his own hands, which he held up to his eyes as if they were covered with blood. He got down on one knee, grabbed two fistfuls of his own beard and said, seemingly to the air, “I’m so very sorry. Please forgive me. I’ve been a fool. I’m sorry!” Then he leapt up and ran into the dark after his cousin.
He sprinted flat out for a quarter of a mile before he spied Robert bent at the waist, breathing heavily, in the coal-dark shadow of a stately elm. The half-moon’s dim light only intensified the gloom beneath the boughs of the tree. He rushed up to his cousin and grabbed him by the shoulders, and Robert spun around with his fists up, ready to fight. They panted at each other in pugilistic stances, until Robert saw that Herman was not merely winded but also weeping.
“I’m so sorry, Robert, so so sorry. Please forgive me. I am beside myself!”
The force of Herman’s regret demolished Robert’s resistance; he even started to wave away the need for an apology, but Herman’s speech had not ended, and Robert was much more surprised by what came next. “I have completely forgotten myself—my mind is so clouded with confusion.” Herman cried harder. “I did not mean to be inconsiderate of your feelings, I never have—I am so sorry—but I have met someone who makes me think that life can be different, and I have not been able to tell a soul. And yet I have not been able to hide my joy! I have been so selfish. You must forgive me. But don’t you see?”
Until that moment, even Herman had not known that he’d wanted to confide in his cousin, but, in the sudden awareness of how much pain he was causing Robert, Herman had recognized his own despair at the impossibility of his love for Hawthorne: his true motives, his true joy, had to be veiled in the wretchedness of secrecy, when all he really wanted to do was shout his love to the heavens. He suddenly thought that, if Robert only knew the truth, he would understand and forgive his thoughtlessness, and then they would both be relieved of the exaggerated and unnecessary disquiet that Herman’s otherwise inexplicable emotions had created all around him. Perhaps Robert would even be happy for him.
“What do you mean, met someone?” Robert said. “Who?”
“You and I have known one another since childhood, have we not?”
“Of course.”
“Then I trust you to know what I mean when I say I’ve found a person who makes the world seem new, who truly understands me. That person lives here in the Berkshires, and that’s why I need to be here. That’s why. I have the feeling that I have not yet begun to unfold the inner flower of myself, but I believe I can do so now, with the help of this special person.”
“The inner flower of yourself? Are you mad?”
“No. I am completely sane for the first time in my life.”
“You’re having an affair!”
“No!” said Herman. In the wan moonlight, he looked deeply into Robert’s eyes and saw the dark kaleidoscope of his mind combining and recombining thoughts into colorfully useless patterns.
&n
bsp; “Who is it? Does Lizzie know?”
“I haven’t been able to tell a soul until now. I thought I would open my heart to you, so you would know why I’ve been so thoughtless. Selfish and thoughtless! Wrapped up in my own feelings. I’m very sorry. I wanted you to know the reason.” Herman’s pleading face betrayed equal parts faith and fear, like a whipped dog that still hopes for love.
“And the reason is that you’ve met someone and you’re having an affair?”
Hearing Robert’s disgusted, judgmental tone, Herman realized with dismay that a confession would not do, that he had been rash even to broach the truth. No, Robert did not understand him at all. Robert could never understand him. If he confessed his love for Hawthorne, Robert might even have him arrested. “No, I’m not having an affair! I’ve met someone who can help me, I believe, with my new book.”
“What in the name of all that’s holy are you talking about?”
Herman could not hide his disappointment in Robert for not discerning his true meaning, for not letting him unburden his secret. “I’ve met a new editor. A mentor.”
“And that’s why you’re moving your family to Pittsfield and taking loans you cannot possibly repay?”
“Yes,” said Herman. “Please forgive me for my callousness.” He felt like an unlit jack-o’-lantern.
“Well, I suppose I don’t understand the importance of a mentor to a writer such as yourself.”
Tears continued to roll down Herman’s face. In spite of Robert’s bewilderment, he gave Herman a tremendous bear hug, and Herman leaned heavily into him. Robert said, “There, there. It will be all right,” and he patted his cousin on the back and made little circles between his shoulder blades.
“On a whaleship, I was beset by danger and made to suffer daily indignities, which I weathered like a stoic; now, on dry land, I brim constantly with tears.”
Herman stood upright again on his own two feet. He wished he could extinguish the monotonous moon.
“Do you remember when we used to go down to the pond behind old man Cooper’s farm and catch tadpoles?” Robert asked.
“Of course.”
“Do you want to walk there now?”
“Yes.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “But we should tell our wives first. I’ve been inconsiderate enough for one evening. For one lifetime, perhaps.”
“All right.”
“Thank you, Robert.” They walked back toward Broad Hall, their arms around each other’s shoulders. “Please don’t mention this to anyone. They would laugh at me.”
“Because you cried? Or because you need a mentor?”
“Because I am not made of sterner stuff.”
“But tell me, Herman, why must you take such drastic action, if it brings you such heartache? Why could you not mail your manuscripts back and forth to your new mentor from New York?”
“That is not the kind of help I need.”
Herman could see his cousin mentally adjudicating their long history together, deciding how he would fit this episode into Herman’s many “outlandish” outbursts in the past. Will Robert ever admit to himself what he must always have known about me? Herman thought. He searched Robert’s eyes for a glimmer of true sympathy but found only a resigned capitulation to life as a Melville—a family of eccentrics, outcasts, and bankrupts.
“Tell no one,” said Herman. “I beg of you.”
“Very well. I promise I won’t.”
“I truly am sorry.”
Herman continued to apologize for another minute until Robert finally insisted that he stop, and then Herman apologized for continuing to apologize. As they crested a little knoll and the yellow lamplight of Broad Hall’s wide porch appeared below them, Herman stopped. The whole family was still outside, enjoying the evening, his mother knitting and rocking and saying something just at the edge of hearing. He would apologize to Robert’s wife, and Lizzie, and his mother; he would apologize to everyone, as he always did eventually, but he longed for a time when he could stop being sorry—when he could be understood plainly. He stared past Broad Hall, into the dark night, toward Lenox.
Chapter 7
Arrowhead
The sky thundered and billowed all morning, but its promised rain still had not fallen by nine thirty, so Lizzie, Herman, and Maria set off to meet Dr. Brewster. Herman had been telling Lizzie stories of his childhood adventures on Brewster’s farm all night and morning. As they walked, she pulled Herman aside, out of earshot of his mother, and reminded him that they had only three thousand dollars, and that Robert had said the farm might be worth two thousand. She further reminded him that it would be better if they spent something like one thousand or fifteen hundred on a house, so they would have a little extra money to live on, at least until his next book was published, and that the last house they had seen in town, a very modest home behind the dry goods store that needed only a few minor repairs, cost exactly fifteen hundred and might be better suited to their needs.
“Let us keep our budget in the forefront of our minds and not be carried away by grand notions or nostalgia,” Lizzie said.
“Of course, of course,” said Herman.
“There is no urgency to our move,” she reminded Herman. “We have plenty of time to find a new home, one that is right and that we can afford. We are just visiting today.”
“You are right, my dear. You must remember, though, that my mother and I have known Dr. Brewster for many years, and I am sure he has our mutual interests at heart.”
Maria said, “Herman, you’ll remember that Dr. Brewster once whipped your cousin for stealing a rooster, and the rooster turned up the next minute in his own barn.”
“We all make mistakes. And he did apologize.”
“Remember, too, that Robert warned you to be wary of him,” said Lizzie. “And Robert has lived next door to the man for decades. You’ve only ever seen him on holiday.”
“I only mean to say that you are right, dear Lizzie, that we should not let ourselves be carried away by anything we see today. I simply dislike the idea of erecting defenses against a man who is proposing something of benefit to us, out of regard for our family. We should at least be open and hear what he proposes.”
“Why is it that even when you agree with me, it feels as if we are quarreling?” Lizzie said.
Herman kissed his wife on the cheek. “Please forgive me, my dear. You are right.”
They rounded the bend in the road above Brewster’s farm at just before ten o’clock. As they approached, they saw a solid, unpretentious, pleasant two-story house right on the road, with a covered workshop, a Shaker-style barn, and animal pens standing behind it, all painted bright yellow with red trim. This little cluster of buildings stood atop a hill that sloped steeply away to the north: below their feet, as they looked out over the estate, bean fields almost glowed green in the storm-tempered morning light, and beyond the beans, at the very bottom of the slope, a line of chestnuts and maple trees marked the path of a stream.
They found Dr. Brewster waiting for them on a broad front porch made of fresh blond planks, which ran the entire length of the house. By way of a greeting, he said, “In summer, we like to sit here of a morning and say hello to people passing on the road, and you have a beautiful view of October Mountain.” Without letting them even say good morning, the doctor launched into a history of the house, while he shook Herman’s hand and bowed to the ladies. The main house, he said, had been built in the 1780s as a pub, and he walked off the porch and around the corner of the building, still talking. They followed.
“I built that workshop last autumn,” he said, “and I added the loft window up there in the barn this summer. A Shaker gentleman from Hancock built the porch out front just a few weeks ago.”
“It seems that you have been industriously renovating, Doctor,” Maria said. “Almost as if you’d had an idea to sell the property already.�
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“On the contrary, Mrs. Melville, it’s better to keep one’s home in good repair, wouldn’t you agree? Especially if one intends to live there a long while.” The doctor’s flinty tone made his remark seem angry, though he delivered it with a smile. “You see that bramble patch just beyond the meadow, on the other side of the stream?” asked Brewster. Herman strained his eyes to see. “Those are blackberries, and just beyond that is a marshy bit of cattails and spike grass, where ducks breed in the spring. See there? That’s the edge of the property.”
Lizzie looked up at the giant oaks and elms along the north side of the house. The trees would limit the natural lighting in the lower rooms all winter. The house was much smaller than Broad Hall, but it was still large enough to need more than one fireplace—yet only one chimney pierced the roof.
Dr. Brewster followed Lizzie’s gaze up. “It’s a central chimney, which opens out onto fireplaces in every room, on each floor.” Then he pointed across the bean fields. “Normally you see Mount Greylock more clearly in that direction, but he’s hiding his head in the storm clouds today.”
They followed Brewster through an enclosed back porch and into the house. It was sturdily built and spotlessly clean, a no-nonsense colonial, with, as Brewster had promised, a grand central fireplace dominating the narrow dining room into which they now walked. A bright fire was burning. “We still use this hearth for cooking,” Dr. Brewster said. “Though we’ve been meaning to install a stove in that corner.” Lizzie looked skeptically at Herman: no stove. No proper kitchen.
Brewster led them into a well-appointed parlor, where family portraits hung on every wall, and beyond that into a more spacious sitting room. He pointed out the window to a loamy herb garden with parsley, rosemary, sage, and mint, bordered by yellow and white feverfew flowers.
The Whale Page 7
