The Whale

by Mark Beauregard

  Julian was the first to see Herman, and his mouth and eyes became as round as the snow minister’s. A thin, high-pitched whistle, like a boiling kettle, steamed out of his mouth, and he ran as fast as his little legs could carry him through the deep snow right up to Melville, where he threw his arms around both of Herman’s legs. Hawthorne watched, at first amazed at Herman’s unexpected appearance and then, as Julian clung to Herman and continued screaming, increasingly amused; until suddenly Una shouted, as well, almost a seal’s bark, which Melville found somewhat bizarre issuing from the little girl, and she also began running, but toward the house, where she dashed inside and slammed the door shut, barking all the while. He thought, Hawthorne is raising a brood of heathen.

  Herman was still breathing hard from his walk, so the fact that he began nearly hyperventilating with anxiety now that he was in Hawthorne’s presence passed unnoticed. “Does young Master Julian always fling his arms around your visitors’ legs,” Herman panted, “or have I been granted special privilege?”

  Hawthorne smiled, betraying no sign of displeasure or alarm. “It is a habit we’ve been trying to break.”

  He wore a red shirt unbuttoned to the sternum and no coat, and he had worked up a healthy lather helping his children engineer their snowmen. Perspiration ran down his chest and, just as in Herman’s fantasy, strands of his chestnut hair clung to his neck. His only concessions to the cold were his knee-high black boots and a black scarf that he had tied around his waist, but which now he unwound and wrapped dashingly around his neck—mostly but not completely covering the bare flesh of his exposed chest. He did it so self-consciously that Herman suspected for a moment that he might be flaunting himself: he was even more beautiful and sexual than Herman’s wood-chopping fantasy had been. He strode up and shook Herman’s hand warmly, as if they were simply old friends meeting at a lively public house. After the many weeks of silence, his aplomb shocked Herman. “Don’t tell me you’ve walked all the way from Pittsfield?”

  “My horse did most of the walking, in fact, but the road was blocked outside of Lenox, and I couldn’t allow the prospect of a little Eskimo stroll to scare me back to my hovel.”

  “Always the adventurer, eh?”

  Julian’s maniacal whistling shout had wound down into a barely audible rasp, and now Hawthorne took Julian’s head in both hands and forcibly shut his mouth. He peeled his son off Herman’s legs and told him to go inside and get dry, and the boy whirled and ran into the house.

  “What have you brought?” Hawthorne pointed at the sack in Melville’s white-knuckled fist. “Yule gifts?”

  “You might say.” Herman was beginning to catch his breath, but he felt somewhat light-headed and continued to pant with stress, like a frightened dog. How could Hawthorne be so casual? Had his obstinate silence these many weeks meant nothing? Herman withdrew the bottle of brandy and cigars from the bag. “Since you cannot be bothered to jot a simple note to a friend, I thought I would play Saint Nicholas and come to you.”

  Hawthorne laughed a holiday ho-ho-ho. “Sophia may not consider brandy and cigars an appropriately Christian sort of Christmas gift, but she might receive them more kindly if you say they’re in celebration of the baby. It’s even traditional, cigars and babies!” He turned and motioned Herman toward the house. “Come in, in any event.”

  “Baby?” Herman asked. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. I had thought you might have heard the news from Holmes by now. She’s expecting our third child, my dear Melville.” He opened the cottage door and stood aside so that Herman could enter, and he clapped Herman hard on the back when he did. The feeling of Nathaniel’s palm remained stingingly imprinted between his shoulder blades. “She’s not feeling her best just now,” Hawthorne continued, “but perhaps we could induce her to sit up in bed and say hello.”

  Herman was flabbergasted: Sophia pregnant? He felt astonished that Hawthorne could still be having marital relations with his wife, and then he felt embarrassed and ashamed at his own surprise. Of course Hawthorne was having relations with his wife! Had Hawthorne not declared that he wished to preserve the sanctity of his marriage? Herman had not realized until this very moment that he had unconsciously developed the belief that he and Hawthorne were playing out a lovers’ contest of wills, in total isolation from everyone else around them; he thought only and always of Hawthorne and somehow, in this obsession, he had discounted the reality of Sophia as a flesh and blood woman, and of Hawthorne as a husband. My God, he thought! The idea was so appalling to Herman that he felt as if he had surprised them in the act. He almost reached out to touch Hawthorne’s arm—to comfort him even, for having to copulate with his own wife—and then he felt supremely ridiculous. Hawthorne’s silence all these weeks, and his easy composure now, became not just diabolical but deeply insulting to the core of Herman’s being. Hawthorne had not been thinking of him at all! How could I have been so wrong, Herman thought. How could I be making such a fool of myself? Not for the first time, nor the last, he heard Jeanie Field’s voice in his head: “Hawthorne is a Puritan.”

  “Mine ownest dear,” Hawthorne called up the stairs. Herman thought he might be sick. Is this how the profound Nathaniel Hawthorne, possessed of a soul ten times black, addressed his wife? Was this the man so tormented by his past, so beholden to duty that he had been forced to cast Melville cruelly aside—so that he could blandish his sick wife with grammatical lollipops? Ownest dear? Sophia answered unintelligibly from upstairs. Hawthorne again called up to her: “Mr. Omoo has trekked across the frozen tundra to pay us a visit.” Mr. Omoo, Herman thought, is that what he thinks of me?

  No answer came from Sophia now. Hawthorne asked Herman to wait while he went up and ascertained his wife’s state of being.

  Herman walked into the parlor. A mostly exhausted fire shimmered through the iron slats in the door of the potbellied stove. The warmth in the room stung his ears. The dining table had been pulled out into the center of the room, and manuscript pages were strewn across it. He picked up a page and started to read: a confrontation between a Judge Pyncheon and a Hepzibah. He thumbed the whole sheaf of written pages and then realized that little stacks of tidy manuscript piles lay all around the room—on the table, on nearly all of the chairs, on the low bookcase. He read a page here and there from different stacks: they all concerned Hepzibah, and a character named Phoebe, and the Pyncheon family, and it became clear that Hawthorne was well into the writing of a new novel. So that’s it, Herman thought: all this while, I’ve been worrying what Hawthorne thinks of me, and he’s been writing a novel and impregnating his wife.

  Presently, Hawthorne descended the stairs and said, “Unfortunately, Mrs. Hawthorne has asked me to give you her regards and say that she will try to trundle herself downstairs to say hello, but she makes no promises.” He lowered his voice and said, with a twinkle in his eye, “That leaves us to enjoy the brandy and cigars somewhat more liberally.” A wave of confusion washed violently over the bowsprit of Herman’s mind. “Ah, I see you’ve found my new novel.”

  Herman held up some pages. “You seem well into it.”

  “I’m almost finished, my dear Melville—most of the fair copy is already with the publisher—and I blame you. You’ve been on my mind constantly this autumn.”

  Herman blanched. He had been on Hawthorne’s mind constantly? Yet he couldn’t be bothered to write even a polite note, choosing instead to let Melville hang in an agony of silence, like a criminal’s corpse gibbeted on the edge of town?

  “How have I been on your mind?”

  “It can be no secret how much more productive you are than I,” Hawthorne said. “Why, you’re writing novels faster than I can write epigrams. So I set myself the task to develop habits a bit more like yours, to write roguishly and with abandon, and see! I’ve nearly finished a novel in just a few weeks, where previously it had taken me twice as long to write even a short story.” />
  Hawthorne took the bottle of brandy and poured two glasses. They heard Una and Julian upstairs running from one room to another, shouting happily to their mother. Hawthorne handed Herman a glass and clinked it.

  “Really, Melville, I have you to thank for this productivity, and I don’t think the narrative is half bad, either. My publisher told me that I should carry on following your example—in every particular!”

  Herman sipped the brandy. What did Hawthorne mean by “every particular”? What could he have said about Herman to James Fields that would have inspired such a comment, when Fields himself had just come to Herman’s house to censure him? “Did you not receive my letters?” Herman asked.

  “I did, thank you.” Again, he lowered his voice confidentially. “Considering how we had parted, I was not sure what to say to your invitations. It all seems silly, now, of course, seeing you here. I had nothing to worry about, clearly; but between the imagining and the doing, sometimes a great chasm opens in one’s heart, and the blackness in between seems to threaten life itself. I did not know how to cross that chasm to you. Do you understand?” Hawthorne drank off his brandy and turned to the stove, where he opened the door, placed a new log in its belly, and blew on it till it caught.

  “Of course,” Herman said. “I tried to be as friendly as possible in the letters, as you seemed to want.”

  “Yes, I see. Well, it was not a very good book I sent you, Melville, I apologize for that. Coleridge is such a pedant; but between you and me, I often do not have much to say and prefer to say nothing at all, and the situation was confounding. I sent the book more as an impulse, since I thought I had to say something, after all. It seemed ridiculous that we should not be friends.”

  Herman was astonished at Hawthorne’s confessional tone and gregariousness. It seemed that he had been waiting all this time just for Herman to visit so that he could say to him in person what he had not been able to say in a letter. “But you believe we should be friends, then?” Herman asked. “Real friends, who speak to one another and occasionally write each other notes?”

  “I said we should be friends before, if you’ll recall, when we parted by the lake.” Hawthorne shrugged. “All the same, difficulties remain, of course.”

  Herman wondered what difficulties exactly Hawthorne had in mind—he could not help hearing this as an admission that Hawthorne felt more for him than friendship—but he did not wish to ruin the moment by asking. He turned back to the manuscript. “Won’t you tell me about your new novel, then, since it owes so much to my influence?” He had intended the comment to be a light joke, but it caught hoarsely in the back of his throat and came out ironic. He looked directly into Nathaniel’s eyes and felt more confused and vulnerable than ever. Hawthorne smiled and took the pages from him.

  “I’m superstitious. I’ll let you read it when it’s published.”

  Herman could hardly believe his ears: while he had been hunting his whale for months without so much as darting a line into it, Hawthorne had already sailed around the world and was coming into port with his hold full of oil. Herman drank off his brandy and waved for Hawthorne to refill it. He topped up both their glasses.

  “I will tell you that it’s the romance I wrote to you about,” said Hawthorne merrily, “the legend of a curse that besets a family. It’s a story that has been haunting me for some years and has now come pouring out like a lake that suddenly bursts its dam. It’s called The House of the Seven Gables. Quite fanciful, I think, and I feel more optimistic than ever because of it—it has rather a sunny ending, even. And now Sophia is with child again, and all seems right with the world. Really, Melville, I’ve rarely felt so sanguine. Shall we smoke?” He motioned toward the front door. “And thank you, incidentally, for these cordial gifts, and for coming all this way. If you had left it up to me, we might never have seen one another again, but I feel quite glad that you’re here and quite foolish that I made so much of it.”

  Herman followed him out to the front porch, where the cold air now seemed shocking and unpleasant. He immediately bundled and buttoned himself back into his clothes and smelled the clamminess of his sweat turning sour. Somehow, Herman felt, he and Hawthorne had changed positions: now Herman was the sullen, quiet, slow-moving observer, and Hawthorne had become the zealous bon vivant, full of light and life.

  “May I ask you a rather indelicate question?” Herman cleared his throat and stared sheepishly at his boots. “I have just had a visit from Holmes and Fields—they say there is a rumor that Jeanie Field and I are having an affair, and that you told them so. Is that true?”

  “No. Holmes said that Dudley had told him about the rumor, and I said that I had heard the same—but I meant only that Dudley had expressed concern about his sister’s deportment to me, as well. I thought nothing of it—Jeanie has been fomenting revolution at New Lebanon, and Dudley is trying to return us all to the witch trials, and they are waging their family battles in public.”

  The paroxysms of anxiety Herman had experienced all the while he had been driving and walking to Lenox seemed to have been completely beside the point. Indeed, most of his misgivings about Hawthorne these many weeks seemed to have missed the mark. How could two such diametrically opposed beings live simultaneously in the same Hawthorne—this casual, congenial soul standing before Herman speaking frankly about his friends and optimistically about the future; and the tortured, inward-gazing seer of doom, obsessed with his own sins and the sins of his forefathers? They bit the ends off their cigars, lit them and puffed in silence for a while, watching the smoke and the steam from their breath mingle with the still-falling snowflakes. Herman was afraid to say anything now, for fear that that other Hawthorne, the careful, morbidly fastidious family man who had condemned their affections, might return and send him on his way back into the snow, forever. Herman puffed and waited, but he didn’t have to wait long before Hawthorne was talking offhandedly again, this time about finally accepting Melville’s invitation to dine with him at Arrowhead, when Seven Gables was finished and the weather had cleared.

  “Yes,” Herman said cautiously. “Come any time. You are always welcome.”

  “Of course, I may be indisposed for a period, taking care of Sophia. These things are never easy for her.”

  “Of course.”

  “But I should very much like to see the new home that you’re so proud of. I promise I will visit.”

  They heard a skittering-scurrying on the stairs inside and then Julian burst through the door outside. “Come quick, come quick!”

  “What is it?”

  “Mother slipped trying to get out of bed.”

  Hawthorne threw his cigar into the snow and bolted up the stairs. Herman followed, lingering at the bottom of the stairwell out of propriety but ready to vault up if needed. It quickly become apparent from their voices that Mrs. Hawthorne was not seriously injured, and so Herman relaxed; but it was quite a few minutes before anyone said anything that he could make out clearly, so he closed the front door and added another log to the stove in the parlor. When a few more minutes passed and he could hear only silence from upstairs, Herman poured himself another brandy and drank it down. He stared at the manuscript pages and longed to read through them—he suddenly felt insanely competitive and wished he were sitting at his own writing desk, so he could get down to the business of bettering Hawthorne’s new effort. A quarter of an hour passed before Hawthorne came back downstairs, now wearing a heavy, blue woolen sweater.

  “Sorry, Melville.” He jerked his head toward the front door. “You understand?” It was clear that Hawthorne was not only entreating Herman’s understanding but also requesting his departure.

  Herman looked out the window. The snow had stopped, and the sun was dipping toward the horizon. There would not be much light left by the time he returned to his horse. He nodded yes, he understood, but suddenly he felt a crushing heaviness at the thought of leaving Hawth
orne so suddenly after such a short time with him, when things seemed to have been going so well—at least, in one manner of speaking. Would it always be like this, he wondered. Were they never again to sit in the sun and talk for hours and experience the true celestial kinship of brothers and bosom friends? Would Hawthorne continue to toy with his love thoughtlessly, as if it meant nothing to him? And yet, he thought, I have inspired Hawthorne in the writing of this new novel. Herman was confusion itself, and he wished he could throw his arms around Hawthorne and receive some comfort, some real understanding from him.

  “Is she well, then?”

  “Just a scare, and the pain of the headaches again. It’s hard for her, because she so wants to have a normal life.”

  Hawthorne seemed to bethink himself of an idea, and he strode to the bookcase beneath the picture window. He found a two-volume set of books, bound in matching green cloth, which he took to his table; and he opened each volume in turn and wrote something in the frontispieces and then handed them to Herman. His own Twice-Told Tales. “To keep you company until we meet again,” Hawthorne said warmly, and Herman was so befuddled by this outpouring of seemingly genuine warmth that he simply could stand no more, and he burst into tears.

  After a moment in which Hawthorne let him stand helplessly in front of him, weeping, he embraced Herman, who sobbed all the more and went limp in Hawthorne’s arms. He did the best he could to quickly snuffle back his tears and regain his composure, while Hawthorne continued rubbing his back. When he had finally stopped crying, Herman felt himself becoming aroused, and he gasped and backed out of Nathaniel’s arms.

  They heard little footsteps on the landing above. “Daddy,” Una called. “Mama wants you to bring her some water.”