Herman smoothed his hair and stepped out onto the landing.
“What’s the meaning of this, Melville?” Holmes said, when he caught sight of the disheveled author above him.
“The meaning of what?”
“We must speak to you confidentially,” said Fields.
Herman shrugged. “Very well. In honor of your tropical appearance, Fields, I will offer you a sunny beverage against the chill. What do you say to a brandy?” Herman descended the stairs.
Fields replied, “My doctor has advised me never to drink brandy without also smoking a cigar.”
“I’m your doctor,” Holmes said, “and I never said any such thing.”
“Brandy and cigars, then!” Herman announced.
“But it’s only eleven o’clock in the morning,” said Holmes.
Herman scoffed. “Why must you object to everything?” He led the way into the parlor, where he threw two new logs onto the embers in the fireplace and blew the blaze noisily to life. He excused himself and returned with a bottle of brandy, three snifters, and three cigars. When he had poured everyone a glass and they had puffed their Havanas ablaze, Fields asked, “May we close the doors, Melville? We have something rather confidential to discuss.”
“The ladies will spend the next week railing against the evils of cigar smoke, but as you wish.” He closed both doors to the parlor and sat back down, and the smoke immediately began accumulating above them. Herman thought of the smoking cauldron of the three witches from Macbeth, and he thought of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, smoking bodily in the Babylonian furnace; and his mind seethed with historical and mythical groups of threes: the Wise Men from the New Testament, the Roman Triumverates, the Great Schism of the Catholic Church and the Avignon popes, the Three Fates, the Christian Trinity, Buddhism’s Three Jewels. He realized that he had left his writing desk too quickly, and that his brain was laboring to make the three of them sitting there by his fire mean something, connect to something, symbolize something, and he suddenly saw the enterprise of literature as essentially mad. Here were two gentlemen in his parlor on a social visit, and he was thinking of ancient kings and popes. He became aware that Holmes and Fields were staring at him, and he suddenly wondered how long he had been lost in his own thoughts.
Holmes pulled his chair closer to Herman and puffed his cigar at him. “There’s no point hemming and hawing,” he said. “Dudley is hopping mad and demands that you discontinue your ridiculous affair with his sister. He sent us to tell you, so that he wouldn’t have to come himself and challenge you.”
“Challenge?” Herman was still thinking about the Avignon popes.
“To a duel.”
Fields cleared his throat. “Everyone knows that your wife has left you, and you’re throwing your life away on Jeanie. It’s unseemly. She’s pretty and smart, yes, but this is no way for a family man to behave. Not to mention that you’re the son-in-law of the most prominent jurist in Massachusetts. Truly, we have your best interests at heart. We have come to save you from yourself and spare you further embarrassment. Stop this nonsense!”
It took Herman a few seconds to comprehend completely what they were saying. When he finally did, he nearly laughed, but Fields and Holmes were so solemn that all of his incredulity got stuck in a sideways grin: Herman suddenly looked like an extra in an opera buffa. Try as he might, he could not wipe the smile from his face. He drew on his cigar and took a long drink of brandy: fire and brimstone, he thought, strong drink and the burning of leaves and the thick smoke that catches in your throat. He spied a piece of gray lint on Holmes’s white collar, and the texture of it seemed hideous. Everything was too real, all of a sudden. He could not bring his mind down from its writing frenzy, and he vowed never to let himself be interrupted in the middle of writing a sentence again. He felt sweat seeping from his scalp and oozing in slow drops around his hair follicles like worms slithering out from the inside of his head.
“Do you have nothing to say, Melville?”
The two gentlemen were looking at him with both concern and moral censure. So this was the literary community of the Berkshires, Herman thought, outwardly sophisticated and broad-minded but privately priggish and reactionary.
“I’m sorry to disappoint such a well-intentioned social call, but Lizzie hasn’t left me, and I’m not having an affair with Jeanie Field.”
“Come, come, Melville,” said Holmes. “Everyone knows that Mrs. Melville has gone to live with her parents.”
“My wife is spending the holidays in Boston, as she always does, while I remain here to finish my novel. I am working against deadline, Holmes, an idea you might be familiar with, and Jeanie Field has made exactly one visit to our house, while my wife and mother were both here. I have not even laid eyes on the girl in more than a month now.”
“Don’t obscure the issue, Melville,” said Fields. “Even Hawthorne says you’re having an affair, and Hawthorne is no gossip!”
“Hawthorne?” Herman’s heart raced. “What has Hawthorne got to do with it?”
“Well, nothing,” said Fields. “But we were there yesterday, and it happened to come up. If even Hawthorne mentions a rumor, it’s probably true.”
Herman puzzled over this new bit of innuendo. Why would Hawthorne profess to believe a scandalous rumor about him and Jeanie, when Hawthorne himself had trusted Jeanie to privately convey a message to him?
“Stop being obstinate, Melville,” said Holmes. “We are doing you a favor, and you sit there grinning like a jackanapes.”
Herman had stopped listening. Was it possible that Hawthorne genuinely thought he was having an affair with Jeanie, and that was why he hadn’t responded to Herman’s letters? Could Hawthorne be not merely aloof and protective of his own wife’s honor but also jealous? Herman knew that he had to see him immediately—a potentially catastrophic misunderstanding had happened, and he had to set things right!
“Are you going to give up the affair or not?” Fields said.
“Of course not!” Herman answered. “Since there is no affair to give up.” He could no longer even talk to these two gentlemen, so fully was his mind consumed with Hawthorne and the untoward possibility that rumormongers were interfering with the actual affair he wanted to have. Hawthorne must know the truth—that he and he alone held the key to Herman’s heart. He drained off his brandy and stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll thank you for coming and bid you good day. I have rather pressing business to attend to.”
Fields and Holmes looked at one another. Holmes said, “Don’t you remember what happened with Poe’s affair and all of that nonsense in New York? And Dudley is a frightfully good shot. You don’t want a duel with him.”
“I certainly will not fight a duel over a fictional matter of fictional honor. I should challenge you to a duel for besmirching my honor, Holmes. Really, to be taken in by scurrilous gossip.”
“I am merely trying to keep the peace, Melville. As your neighbor, I have an interest in seeing that you don’t stain my fields with your blood.”
“Please smoke your cigars on the walk back to your own estates. Good day!”
They stood up. Herman showed them to the front door. Fields remantled himself with flare, and Herman practically shoved them out the door.
During their brief conference in the parlor, a new blizzard had swirled to life outside, and now heavy snowflakes were falling fast, filling the frigid air with thick blots of fluffy whiteness. Herman watched Fields and Holmes walk all the way to the main road, where the snow swallowed them up, and then he turned back inside to get his coat. He had to go to Lenox immediately. It was one thing for Hawthorne to be reticent about Herman’s love, but it was another matter entirely if their relationship had been derailed by unfounded and ridiculous rumors of an affair with Jeanie Field. Perhaps Hawthorne loved him but felt betrayed by how inconstant and unsubstantial Herman’s affections might see
m.
For some reason, he thought again of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and the three popes, and the Three Fates. His mind was stuck in a novel, but the novel had become his life. He had the unsettling thought that nothing in his head was real, that nothing he thought or felt or remembered was real, and for a moment, he wondered if he himself were real. What is this love that I feel, Hawthorne? And he realized with a shock that he needed to see Hawthorne not to dispel the rumors of Jeanie Field and not to confirm his most ardently felt emotions: he needed to see Hawthorne because only Hawthorne could make him real.
• • •
Herman put a salami and a loaf of bread in a canvas bag, along with a bottle of brandy and a pair of cigars; then he put on his coat and went out to hitch his cart to his horse. The snow was falling in great, downy flakes that clung to Herman’s hair and beard and coat. Seemingly insubstantial objects bobbed eerily on the white surface of the world—shrubs and posts, the ghostly outline of a bench—all pure white forms, dreamed into being by God in a vacant, unconscious reverie at the beginning of time, surrounding the invisible souls of the living with meaningless matter. What was matter but the dream life of God, and what was time but the dream itself, and how could one govern oneself according to the illogical rules of a sleeping deity’s dreamworld? The only thing that was real was that thing that seemed least substantial to the senses: love. That was the grandeur of humankind—that one could willingly throw off the hard-won developments of logic and science and philosophy and religion and history and everything that had made human beings exceptional in the world—throw off everything in order to return to the dreamy insensibility of love, the one thing that could not be defined in material terms and therefore escaped the relentless negative calculus of entropy. Love and love alone was eternal.
Herman stared up at the falling snow and thought about how his father had caught his death, traveling through a winter storm similar to this one. Creditors had been pursuing him in Manhattan, so he had taken the entire Melville family and all of their belongings in secret to Albany; when he had returned to negotiate a settlement of the claims against him, his steamboat had become stranded in ice on the Hudson. In a state of irrational agitation and urgency, he had decided that he could not afford to wait for the ice to clear, so he’d arranged passage by land in an open wagon, for which he was not properly dressed. During the trip, he became ill with a fever, from which he never recovered. He had died raving mad, leaving Herman and his family destitute.
Was a trip to Lenox through the frosty snow worth the risk of death, Herman asked himself. Yes, because a trip to Lenox through the snow expressed something greater than death, greater than life, and to transcend life and death, one had to be willing to sacrifice everything. That was the home truth of all religions, he thought—that life itself was insufficient. He threw his own canvas bag and a bag of oats for the horse into his buggy, hopped in, and snapped the reins.
Despite the heavy snow of the previous night, a narrow path had been cleared down the center of the road, and the current snow had only just begun to cover it. He wondered who could have been so industrious on the morning after such a blizzard, even while snow was still falling; the romantic futility of such work appealed to him deeply. He soon encountered an older gentleman driving the opposite way in a barouche, and after much negotiating of horses and wagons so that they could pass one another, Melville asked the stranger who might be responsible for the excellent state of the road.
“Melville, you cad,” the older man said. “It’s the Berkshire Agricultural Society, which you would know if you ever came to the meetings.” The gentleman turned out to be none other than the society’s president, who accepted a drink from Herman’s brandy bottle and then upbraided him for not socializing with the other farmers. “Did you not receive our housewarming gifts?”
“Possibly,” Herman conceded.
“Why did you invite none of us to your home, then? Have you no manners?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
They parted amicably, and Herman promised to drag the road down to the Housatonic with a wedge plow after the current storm. He did not mention that he had no wedge plow and was not sure where to get one or how to use it once he had it.
Herman snapped the reins hard, and his horse trotted on. Along the way, he saw sledding children, children throwing snowballs, children flopped on the ground making snow angels, and even a group of adults sitting on logs around a roaring fire, out in the middle of a field—they cheered heartily and raised a bottle to him as he passed—but all of this merry activity left him even more desolate than before. He could not imagine himself and Hawthorne making such jolly fun in the snow—everything suddenly seemed hopeless. People all around him were enjoying the winter, enjoying their families in this holiday season, while he was driving miles and miles away from his own family to declare himself to a man who wanted no such declaration, in front of the man’s wife and children. He took a long swig of brandy.
The farther outside of Pittsfield he drove, the fewer people he saw and the worse the state of the road became, until eventually he stopped seeing people altogether; and a little more than halfway to Lenox, the plowed path ended at a farmhouse. The road beyond became indistinguishable from the fields around it. He dismounted his wagon and knocked on the door of the house, but no one answered. He stared up at the sky, now nothing more than a vague grayness behind the falling blotches of white. The silence was so encompassing that he could hear snowflakes landing around him.
Herman unhitched his horse and installed him in the barn with his bag of oats. He took another drink of brandy to fortify himself; then he set off on foot across the fields.
His body quickly warmed with the exertion. By the time he came to the woods, sweat was streaming down his face, and he unbuttoned his coat and loosened his scarf. His ankles felt elastic as his boots crunched through the snow to the invisible ground below, and he took great strides with his rolling seaman’s gait. He realized that sitting at his desk for weeks on end had made him morbid, and the simple act of putting one foot in front of another across this crunchy white landscape made him feel joyful. Even after he had entered the bracken-filled undergrowth of the woods and the low-hanging branches were scratching at his face, he felt relieved and happy.
Herman became more and more sweaty and uncomfortable as he trudged on, until he opened his shirt and walked along with nothing but his flannels between him and the falling snow. In a moment of fantasy, he thought of taking all of his clothes off and walking to Lenox naked. He thought back to the lovely naked brown limbs and breasts of the island women he had known; and then he thought of Jeanie, his “island girl of the Berkshires”; then suddenly and unwontedly he imagined Hawthorne out walking behind his cottage, disrobed: he could not quite conjure the whole of Hawthorne nude in the snow, but he saw him stripped to the waist, chopping wood, sweating; saw the steam from his breath wreathe his face and neck, his chest and arms taut as he swung a massive red axe. The image acquired its own life, Hawthorne chopping and chopping, chips of wood flying up around him, sweat-soaked strands of his wavy hair flopping about his face with each swing of the axe, clinging to his dirty neck. Hawthorne looked up at him, took a long, slow breath, and leaned on the axe, and the image aroused Herman physically.
This trek was now altogether different from the journey he had originally set out on: instead of riding up to Hawthorne’s front door in his wagon on a casually adventurous holiday jaunt through dreamy virginal snow, he would now be trudging up, sweating through his clothes, his pants soaking wet with snow, his face red and his mind burning with naked images of Nathaniel. He was walking through a blizzard to pay a casual social call, after weeks and weeks of silence. It was ridiculous.
By the time he stood atop the hill overlooking Hawthorne’s home, he felt quite exhausted from his slogging walk and self-devouring emotions. He took a moment to button up his shirt and coat, a
nd then he ate a handful of snow and placed another handful on the back of his neck. He could see sled tracks and a confusion of footprints immediately in front of him—Hawthorne and his children had been sleighing—and as he tromped down the hill toward the idyllically snow-encrusted red cottage, he began to hear voices. Una first, and then Julian, and then the mellifluous tenor of Hawthorne. They were outside somewhere now, playing.
“He will catch cold without a scarf,” Hawthorne said.
“But he’s a snowman,” Una giggled. “He’s already frozen.”
“Why don’t you use your own scarf, Papa?” said Julian.
They seemed to be on the other side of the cottage from Herman, toward the lake, because he heard them clearly but saw no one. As he drew level with the picket fence in front, he saw a tiny black-clad arm swing up at the corner of the house, and then Una ran into view, with her back to Herman, utterly unaware of his presence; then she ran back around the corner of the house again, out of sight. When Herman rounded the corner himself, he came upon a cheery Christmas scene: a congregation of three snowmen, with a sort of clerical snowman at their head, who was wearing a black collar and a derby hat, apparently preaching to them with an upraised stick-arm and a shouting “O” of a mouth (made of little coal nuggets): leave it to Hawthorne, Herman thought, to turn his children’s snow scene into a morality play.
The Whale Page 13
