The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  Oh. I repeated it to myself and thought, Maybe this is a test. There would be no further explanation of why she wanted to be here unless I understood how her full name was relevant. That I knew what it signified, and didn’t simply offer our names in return.

  “Pole.” I took a slow breath. “As in Cassie Pole?”

  “Cousin on my father’s side, five generations back.” As Katie spoke, I felt a presence brush up against my side. Beverly, I realized after a jolting heartbeat.

  “Who was Cassie Pole?” she asked.

  Katie turned to us, her voice now much softer. “She was a ladies’ maid, a butler’s daughter, and, well, she was also Thomas Hardy’s sweetheart for a good while. He called her ‘one I had rated rare’ in a poem he wrote after she died. Said she was someone he ‘loved as a lass.’ In my family, they always said he’d bought her a ring. The same ring he eventually gave to his wife, Emma. But his family disapproved of him marrying Cassie because she was a servant, and he jilted her.”

  “Then,” I said, “he showed up for dinner at the rector’s house, where the butler happened to be Cassie Pole’s father. It was one of those notorious only-in-Thomas-Hardy’s-world moments of coincidence. The butler having to wait upon a stonemason’s son who’d spurned his sweet daughter now that he was a famous writer.”

  Katie shrugged. “There are quite a few families around Dorset with stories like ours. I’ve heard of at least three who also claim they received the same ring. Hardy fell in love a lot.”

  “And apparently out a lot too,” Beverly said. “Quickly.”

  “It’s not the first thing people think of when they think of Thomas Hardy as a man. But the odd thing is, I feel glad to be here. You know, I think he really loved Cassie for a time, loved her intensely, and sometimes I feel his energy here around me. It’s kinder than I would have guessed, and gentle, tender. Also a little sad.”

  “The music,” Beverly said.

  “I think so.” Katie smiled. “It stirs the air. Also seems to calm things, sometimes. I never know for sure. After the previous visitor left, I thought it would be really good to play something.”

  The man in red.

  It felt like time for us to make our way to the upper floor. But there was one more thing I wanted to ask.

  “Do you spend much time out on the land?”

  “Like Eustacia Vye roaming Egdon Heath, you mean?” She chuckled, and shook her head. “You know, the whole thing was turned into a Christmas tree plantation a hundred years ago. Afforestation, that’s what it was called. Conifers as far as you could see.” I hadn’t known about this, as Katie could tell from my face. “There’s more. The military took over big chunks of the heath to use for firing ranges. One can’t go near those areas. Then later, when the dual carriageway was being built, all the paths heading north from the heath were just chopped off right there at the edge where they met the new road.”

  “So the heath isn’t really the heath anymore and you don’t spend much time out on it.”

  “Exactly. But about twenty-five years ago, they started clearing some of the trees and rhododendron. Not too long ago they reintroduced heath-ponies to graze the scrub and keep it down. So it’s better than it was. Should continue to recover, too. A few hundred years, maybe it’ll be the way it was when Eustacia Vye lived here.”

  I thanked her and she told me to be careful on the steep staircase and uneven floors above.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude about your question,” she said as we began to walk through Hardy’s father’s office beyond the living room. “I understand what you were asking. There is a mood to the heath some nights, for sure. It’s still a restless, unsettled place for humans to be.”

  The stairs led to the room where Hardy’s sisters had lived. On the mantle over the fireplace I found a typed information sheet in a plastic sleeve, but there was little need to explain what we saw beyond the faux furnishings, framed embroidery, raggedy quilted blanket spread on the narrow bed, and thin rug at its edge. Though the cottage’s spaces may have been considered ample by Victorian standards, life here was dense and privacy rare.

  Being in this compressed room with its odd angles and bleak shadows made me aware of how wrong I was ever to think of our yurt as small. My writing space there had been quirkily shaped, and fitting square-edged desks and bookcases into a room with curved walls had been a challenge, but that room was as big as this, and this was sleeping and working and living and dreaming space for two: Mary, Hardy’s affectionate, close companion throughout childhood, his confidante—only a year and a half younger—and Katharine, born when Hardy was sixteen. Neither ever married, living here or nearby for most of their long years.

  Beverly lingered in the sisters’ room, but I was glad to leave it and head for the central bedroom where Hardy had been born 172 years and 2 days ago. Except I turned the wrong way and walked nearly to the staircase before realizing what I’d done. I turned back and entered the parents’ bedroom. In many ways, this was the spot I’d come to Dorset to find, Hardy’s headwaters, little suspecting that by the time I got here Hardy would have already touched and spoken to me.

  This was the room, that was the bed (well, maybe not the bed), that was the chestnut wood floor where he’d been thrown aside as dead and then saved by Lizzie Downing in the morning light streaming through that window. I felt a surge of emotion—sympathy, gratitude, relief—and reflexively blurted out the words “Kine Ahoara,” an old Yiddish magical phrase meant to ward off the evil eye and protect a child or loved one. A blessing steeped in fear of the worst.

  It surprised me. It surprised Thomas Hardy too, because I felt him lurch from the corner of the room and heard him gasp.

  If he’d said “Something I missed” again, I think I would have guessed that the whole thing—the Dorchester episode, the sound of movement through Thorncombe Woods’ underbrush, and now this—had been a gag, somebody’s idea of a prank to play on the old guy from the States with his pretty wife. After all, at breakfast that morning back in Lulworth, I detected an ironic glance pass between the two young couples sitting at a nearby table. They’d overheard me babble about finally seeing Hardy’s Wessex heartland, and suffered through my reading of excerpts to Beverly as she ate her eggs. Maybe they’d had enough of all the besotted literary tourists, or didn’t like something I’d said about Hardy’s use of rustic folk in The Woodlanders, their dialect and superstitious ways, and hired an actor to taunt me.

  But Hardy didn’t speak. Once he found his balance, he scrutinized my face and I tried to hold his gaze, but this second close-up and intimate contact with Hardy was unsettling for me. It didn’t feel like the Visitations I’d experienced when we lived in the yurt, with so much space around me. He was making yet another kind of contact, too, with his stare rather than his hand. It felt direct and purposeful, though I couldn’t figure out what that purpose was. After a few seconds, he bowed his head as though approving my use of ancient spells, took a quick look around the room, and disappeared.

  I remembered my father speaking Yiddish with his brothers and occasionally with my mother when there were discussions I wasn’t supposed to understand. One of the few times I can remember him laughing was when he listened to Yiddish jokes on the car radio while driving to our Sunday morning breakfasts. He had to pull over because his eyes had filled with tears. Yiddish was the language of his humor and for expressing his warmest, deepest, and most private family feelings. For release. It was a language I only spoke a few words of. But I remembered how to use it for protecting someone close.

  I thought I’d blurted out “Kine Ahoara” to somehow bless and protect the infant Hardy, or the phantom Hardy who was not at rest. But maybe I used the phrase, without being aware of it, to bless and protect myself as this journey of homage grew more focused and weird, became more of a search.

  Guessing Hardy might have gone to his own bedroom, I followed. But it was empty except for the furnishings and bric-a-brac, and a breeze that stirred the curta
ins. I knew Hardy was no longer present. The view was west toward Black Down and the heath, and I sat on the window seat to see what he would have seen as he worked. I heard Beverly’s footsteps in the hall. She stopped for a visit to the parents’ room.

  One of the most enduring images I have of Hardy—of the writer in his breakthrough years as a novelist—is the image of him observing, examining, watching. Mostly by himself, quiet, apart even in company, vigilant, noticing the world in its details. And this spot was where that habit had begun. I sat where he’d sat, and as I regarded what he’d grown up seeing, what he saw as he wrote his early books and found his way into the first great story, the tellingly titled Far from the Madding Crowd, I could see myself reflected in the windowpane. Graying hair and grizzled beard, a touch of wattle under the chin.

  Yet at the same time there I was, age twenty-nine, driving from Springfield, Illinois, to Olympia, Washington, in my third cross-country relocation. It was July 1976, the country’s bicentennial moment, town after town decked out in celebration just as England was now, in 2012, for the Queen’s Jubilee. My daughter, nearing four years old, slept beside me on the front seat, head nodding as though in full agreement with the logic of her dream. I loved those long drives through the heartland with Becka beside me on the straight wide road. The trips were like dreams themselves. We seemed to be going nowhere at seventy miles per hour and I thought it all would never end: the road, the day, my child beside me, that fathering time in my life. On the back seat as we headed to Olympia, strapped in like another member of the family, was a huge box so stuffed that it bulged into my line of sight. What it was stuffed with were file folders—one for every poem or story I’d written, every draft, every letter of correspondence, every scrap of research—along with all the books and all the contributor’s copies of obscure literary journals I couldn’t bear to trust our movers to keep safe. At the front of the box, in the fattest folder, was a copy of my college honors thesis, a work most distinguished by its determined effort to track Hardy’s struggle, in his novels, to leave the rural past behind while not abandoning his roots. Also by the number of ofs in its title: “To Christminster: A Study of the Development of the Novels of Thomas Hardy.” There was only one other copy of the thesis, stored somewhere in the library at Franklin and Marshall College along with every other honors thesis written in the college’s long history. I had no idea why I’d kept my copy for the last seven years, why I was hauling it along with all the other excess paper, or what I would ever use it for. I hadn’t opened the thing since defending it at my oral exams.

  In the next breath, almost two years had passed and I was packing again, moving back across country and back to Springfield, Illinois. This time, though, I was being ruthless. The house we were moving into was seventy-five years old, and space for file storage and writing paraphernalia would be limited. It was time to jettison, to weed out. In the window of Thomas Hardy’s bedroom, backgrounded by Egdon Heath, I clearly saw myself in 1978, lifting the folder labeled hardy thesis, flipping the pages without really seeing them, and dumping it in a dark-green plastic trash bag along with so many other folders I would wish desperately to have back for the subsequent thirty-five years.

  Then Beverly was there behind me. “Where have you been?” she whispered, letting me know she was present before running her hand gently against my neck and letting it rest on my shoulder. I told her about seeing Hardy again, and the journeys I’d just recalled. We stood together in Hardy’s bedroom for a few minutes. I thought I heard Katie greet new visitors below, light laughter, a cough.

  “I should read a Hardy novel,” Beverly said as she looked around. “One he wrote here. One we haven’t seen a movie of.”

  “There was a copy of A Pair of Blue Eyes for sale on the table downstairs. He wrote that after meeting Emma, while he was waiting to marry her.”

  “Is it dark?”

  “Well, everybody rejects everybody else and the heroine flies in the end. I mean dies in the end.” I glanced up and noticed the smoke alarm on the bare ceiling, directly above Hardy’s bed. “But it has its lighter moments too.”

  We held hands as we walked to the hall’s south end, where Hardy’s grandmother had lived. I tried to imagine them all clomping around in this narrow corridor, parents shouting below, a storm of human need and urgency matched by winds howling off the heath. Something like that. The feeling here isn’t cozy, I thought. Isn’t easy. It’s intimate but without intimacy. Stringent. And the quiet feels temporary. I know some of this is because family life is no longer lived here, because it’s more of a museum than a home anymore. A display of life, not life itself, a stage set for a canceled play. And it’s of a different time, a largely lost way of existence. But what I felt came from deeper than all that, from a spirit or its absence that remained in the air.

  Back downstairs, Katie was busy with an elderly couple and a bored adolescent who must have been their grandson. We squeezed by them for a quick look at the kitchen and larder, then returned to the front door. I mouthed the word Thanks, and Katie waved in response. Outside, a pair of volunteers worked in the garden. A few weeks from now, the place would be gaudy with color.

  Instead of going through Thorncombe Woods again, Beverly and I walked to our car on the narrow lane Hardy knew as Cherry Alley. He also knew it as Veterans’ Valley after all the retired military people who’d lived in cottages lining the way. But the buildings and most of the trees were gone, the old well that served the lane was covered over in ivy, and the look was now of a prosperous country development with farm buildings and newish homes. I turned around for a final glimpse of Hardy’s cottage. The hedge around it and the elevation of our position made it so all I could see was the very top of the central chimney and smoke being absorbed into the hazy air.

  Inoticed the wall decor as soon as we stepped into the tea room.

  There were framed book jackets from a dozen foreign-language editions of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a map of Hardy’s fictional Wessex region with Tess’s wanderings highlighted in thick black lines, pencil sketches of Stonehenge and of Hardy at fifty composing the novel, and stills from at least five film versions. The shop was named Tea Is for Tess, so I’d expected some kitschy references to the character—Tess teapots or tea towels or T-shirts, maybe a few generic paintings of Tess-related landscapes—but this was a joyous and specific riot of appreciation. I peered at a bookshelf near the front door, stacked two-deep with battered old hardback copies of the novel. Another shelf held a scale model, knit from local yarns, of the Pure Drop Inn where readers first meet the character of Tess Durbeyfield in Hardy’s pages.

  The proprietor watched my reactions and chuckled as she walked over. She stood with us and gazed around as we did. I said a solid American “Wow.”

  “That group of glossies by the long table there come from the 1979 film.” She pointed and flicked her finger each time she said a name: “Nastassja Kinski. Peter Firth. Ahh, he was a good-looking one. Next to him, John Collin. Leigh Lawson. Caught the nasty side of Alec d’Urberville, all right. One on the end is Roman Polanski.”

  She directed our attention to the back corner of the room. “That bunch by the loo are from the London Weekend Television version. Nineteen ninety-eight. Three-hour program it was, and brilliant. Not sure if you got it over in the States. Oliver Milburn, bit of a heartthrob, he played Angel Clare. Was actually a Dorset man. Played it just right, sensitive and selfish both. You see him in everything now. Wuthering Heights. Coronation Street. Almost forty—how time passes.”

  She shook her head and lifted a hand to her mouth as though trying to stanch the flow of words. Then she picked up menus, led us to a small table by the side window, and began straightening out place settings. When she was done, and saw that we were still standing to peruse the photos, she slapped her hands together in quick applause.

  “This wall are all from the BBC-TV miniseries. Hard to believe it was four years ago already. There you have Gemma Arterton, Tess. Eddie
Redmayne was Angel Clare. What a cutie. Hans Matheson was your Alec. See that May Day Parade scene in the middle? Woman in the green dress standing on Dancing Ledge with the sea frothing behind her? That would be me.”

  “You?” Beverly leaned closer to the photo, studied it, looked back. “Yes, it sure is.”

  “That was one very long day. I loved every minute of it. Didn’t feel like an Extra at all, never bored, never tired. Dream come true.”

  “But you must have been very cold.”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t feel it at all.” She pulled back Beverly’s chair and said, “By the way, I’m Sharon. My niece Chloe will serve you. But do call me if you need anything.”

  “Before you go,” Beverly said, “can you tell us which dishes are gluten-free?”

  We’d planned for this lunch six months ago. Actually, Beverly had done most of the planning—otherwise we risked ending up in Dorset Vermont or Dorset Minnesota, having gotten there by way of Acapulco and Tallahassee—and as she researched and arranged our itinerary, the central problem for each day was where to eat safely.

  Exposure to gluten wouldn’t kill her, but it would trigger a series of inflammatory reactions in her gut and throughout her musculoskeletal system that would virtually immobilize her. We’d seen the results: four years ago, she’d been a certified master gardener who’d had to give up gardening because it hurt too much to stand and bend and lift, been a painter of landscapes who’d had to give up painting because she couldn’t work at her easel anymore. When her physical therapist suggested she try eliminating gluten from her diet, she felt better so quickly that we committed ourselves to it and never wavered.