The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  Nan, with a voice like Julia Childs and a smile like Julia Roberts, had confessed right away that having her Anthony home all the time was a blessing, except when it wasn’t, and they’d both laughed at that. “Not much for the hoover or the omelet pan, our Anthony, but ask him about Dorset history or literature or the best places to walk, and he’ll go on forever.”

  It had been Anthony who’d told us that we mustn’t miss the coast walk to Durdle Door. “Just down the road a bit, then walk across the field along Hambury Tout, and when you run out of land you’ll catch sight of the thing down below.” He’d said it was a limestone arch left when the sea drilled through the softer rock—“That’s how it got its name, Durdle being the Old English word for drill”—and the footpath between Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door was far and away the busiest in all southwest England because people flocked to see that thing. “Jurassic Coast. Unspoiled. Except where it’s spoiled.”

  When I’d said I knew Thomas Hardy had included a key scene at Lulworth Cove in Far from the Madding Crowd, and I wanted to see the spot, Anthony had actually applauded. “A Hardy man! I knew it. They shot scenes right out there when they made the film. Julie Christie stayed here, you know. Before we owned it. At least that’s what they told us.”

  “So,” Anthony said now, when we joined them in the dining room, “any Hardy sightings?”

  Beverly and I looked at each other. Holy cow! No way I was going to tell him about what had happened in Dorchester’s South Street and the Hardy cottage. I wondered if Anthony’s phrasing was just a local expression for Hardy sites, and not literally about sighting Hardy. Or who knows, maybe I wasn’t the only one who saw him. Maybe there was a Zombie Hardy at large.

  “After Dorchester and Higher Bockhampton,” I said, “we went over to Wareham for lunch and cream tea at a shop where they serve gluten-free.”

  As Beverly and I had just done, Anthony and Nan looked at each as though saying Holy cow! Then Anthony sat back down and said, “So you’ve met our Sharon Taylor, then?”

  “She was very gracious.”

  “And told you all about appearing in the Tess film,” Nan said, and chuckled.

  I nodded. “We loved seeing all the memorabilia.”

  “And then she somehow got around to Mr. Hardy and his cousin Tryphena, am I right?” Anthony said.

  “And baby Randall,” Nan added. “Let’s not forget Randy.”

  “Named perhaps for his alleged father’s alleged lustfulness, eh?”

  “So you don’t buy it?” Beverly asked.

  “No one’s ever found a shred of evidence. Just gossip and ‘proof ’ drawn out of various bits in the poems and such. Rubbish, that’s what it is. Do you know where the rumor comes from?”

  “I just know the biographies I’ve read thought it was spurious.”

  Anthony nodded. “Spurious indeed. The ‘source’ is Tryphena’s demented daughter Nellie when the poor thing was almost ninety and being led on to say all sorts of silliness by some Hardy crackpot.”

  “Tryphena had a daughter?”

  “She did. And three sons. Married a pub owner from Devon named Bromell. Died at thirty-nine, poor girl.”

  “But not a child with Hardy?”

  “As I said, no evidence whatsoever. No records, documents, family lore. And people in the villages were chatty, all right, knew everyone’s story and told it widely. Just like today. Couldn’t hush a thing like that up.”

  “We feel it’s our duty,” Nan said, “to protect Mr. Hardy’s reputation from people like that. If you go back to her shop, I guarantee Sharon will offer another tidbit. Hardy abandoned Randy, or if she’s feeling especially feisty, Hardy murdered his child.”

  “And then show you a poem that proves it.”

  “Or a passage in the Tess novel,” Nan said. She reached for her husband’s drained teacup and placed it beside her own, ready to get back to work but not ready to leave the conversation. “Anthony’s done a lot of research on Mr. Hardy since guests are always asking after him.”

  Anthony shook his head. “There are a lot of Hardy cranks out there.”

  “Daft. We want to be sure you know what’s true.”

  “I appreciate that.” Beverly and I stood up to leave. But there was something I needed to get clear. “Anthony, a little while ago you asked if we’d had any Hardy sightings. What did you mean by ‘sightings’?”

  He blinked, exchanged a quick glance with Nan, smiled, and said, “Why, what did you think I meant? A ghost?”

  “I was struck by the word.”

  “Only a figure of speech, I assure you. But it is true that we’ve had more than one guest who claimed they saw an apparition of Thomas Hardy during their time in Dorset.”

  “Especially around Max Gate,” Nan said. “In the grove of trees Mr. Hardy planted—the Nut Walk—or over by the little cemetery where he and Mrs. Hardy buried their dear pets. How Mr. Hardy loved that dreary place!”

  “On the heath, too, don’t forget,” Anthony said. “People see Hardy there as well. And Stinsford Churchyard. Really, where hasn’t the phantom of Thomas Hardy been sighted?”

  “Thing is, people want to see him so badly they somehow manage to succeed. And we’ve just gotten used to opening the way for them to talk about it if we know they’re into Mr. Hardy.”

  “Hospitality,” Anthony said. “We want our guests to be comfortable.”

  “And properly informed.”

  “Yes, properly informed.” Now Anthony stood and picked up the teapot along with the cups Nan had gathered. “So what about it, then? Any Hardy sightings?”

  Were Anthony and Nan right, was that what I’d done? Conjured up Hardy because I needed to see him after all the years of reading and having a feeling for his work, of imagining and in some respects of loving him? I hadn’t thought so, given my long history with Visitations, including Visits from people for whom I felt no love (Rasputin, or Tsar Nicholas II of Russia) or whose work I admired but didn’t keep returning to as I did to Hardy’s (Ezra Pound, Paul Gauguin, the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh). I seldom thought about the Visitors before they arrived, was always taken by surprise. What the hell was the Tsar doing at the edge of our garden picking mushrooms! This was the guy who drove my grandparents out of their homes. Why did I need Robert Frost to tell me to chop more pine for the woodpile? Today’s Visitation from Hardy felt like those in the way it seemed to come from outside myself, not from me. If that wasn’t true, then it came from a place in me that I wasn’t in touch with.

  But maybe that was changing now. As Beverly had suggested, maybe something in me was prompting Hardy’s Visitations. Was there, in fact, something I missed that only he could lead me to? Well, to discover that, I knew I still had to find out what Hardy missed.

  Anthony had been honest, so I said, “Yes, a Hardy sighting. Two sightings, actually. And a tap on my shoulder. And he spoke to me.”

  “Spoke to you?” Anthony glanced at Nan and raised his eyebrows.

  “What I think he said was ‘Something I missed.’”

  “Well, what do you make of that!”

  “I’m asking myself the same thing.”

  We closed the curtains, but despite the softened light and my exhaustion I couldn’t fall asleep. Might have been because of all the PG Tips I’d drunk at lunch, or the conversation we’d just had with our hosts. Might have been because I kept seeing Hardy’s image on various signs along the road, and fingerposts pointing to Thomas Hardy’s cottage or Thomas Hardy’s Max Gate or a footpath called the Hardy Way, and was waiting for the man himself to make another Visitation. Or because of all the information about him I was trying to absorb, coming at me from so many angles.

  Beverly, usually more sensitive to caffeine than I am, slept beside me, lips slightly parted, eyes slightly open, and I tried to imagine her dreaming of the gardens we’d been to in England. I thought of walking with her through the Botanical Gardens in Oxford and in Wales, Hidcote in the Cotswolds, Lanhydrock in Cornwall. We
couldn’t get to every garden she’d hoped to visit, but what we saw was nourishing to her spirit. The gardens made her happy the way bird-watching did, and I could see—actually see—the outpouring of love in her eyes. I know: first he sees Visitors, now he claims to see love flow. When imagining Beverly’s dreams and her joy didn’t get me to sleep, and neither did memories of soaking together in our wood-burning hot tub in the years before the well went dry, I tried to match her steady breathing. But I still couldn’t relax, couldn’t stop my racing thoughts.

  It was poignant, but also gloomy and predictable—Hardyesque—to see how his desperate secretiveness merely kindled gossip and rumors like those about his lovers, his sexuality, his fathering of a child. He would have been, and perhaps still was, horrified at the intrusion into his privacy, the provocative, scandalous insinuations. Particularly if they were true and he hadn’t succeeded in containing their spread. Maybe that’s what he missed: how to remain hidden. But surely Hardy had known, in that cunning mind of his, that what he’d hoped to conceal would eventually be revealed. Or that even worse matters would be fabricated. Because central to his beliefs was the idea that man’s deepest desires were fated to be thwarted. And secrets revealed. “All her shining keys will be took from her,” he’d written about a woman who had just died, “and her cupboards opened; and little things ‘a didn’t wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!”

  A poem of Hardy’s was on my mind, the early, gnarled sonnet about love with the bitter title “Revulsion.” This was the poem, written in his midtwenties, where he said it would be better not to love, better “to fail obtaining love,” because love was certain to fail. By winning love we win the risk of losing it. And, in Hardy’s view, losing love hurts more than he can bear, hurts like a violent gash, like being torn apart, its pain worse than whatever pleasure might come from loving.

  What makes a man, even a young man posing as world-weary or love-savvy, think this way? I’d recently read a commencement address given at Kenyon College by the novelist Jonathan Franzen in which he said, “The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love.” But while Franzen knows love is worth the risk, he also understands what that risk truly is: “To love a specific person, and to identify with their struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.” This—surrendering himself—may be precisely the thing Thomas Hardy couldn’t bring himself to do. The thing he feared to chance.

  What I was learning about Hardy was whirling around itself and tangling with what I’d already known, with my memories of his work, my feeling of his imminence. Since there were so many gaps in the record, sorting rumor and fact wasn’t going to be enough, even if it were possible, even if my cognitive powers were up to the task. The Truth about Hardy and what he may have missed, such as it was, might yet be Hardy’s to reveal.

  I began to think about the most clear-headed, rigorous, demanding investigator I knew, and how she might approach untangling these elements to see how Hardy’s story fit together. I’m certainly no reporter or literary journalist, but my daughter is. Rebecca is forty, and after the publication of her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a best seller for three years now, she seemed like an overnight success. But my God, how long and hard she’d worked. She’d thought about the story of Henrietta Lacks and the Lacks family since she was a teenager, studied biological science in college, and devoted ten years to researching and writing the book, overcoming the resistance and misdirection of her subjects, always going deeper, following leads, interviewing, checking and rechecking facts. There were times when she didn’t let me know where the story led her, the backroads in the South, wrecked slave shacks, snake- and tick-infested graveyards and tobacco fields, or alone at night on the streets of inner-city Baltimore. She knew I’d be wild with worry over the risks she took, the pain she absorbed, the angry and sometimes dangerous people she met with, eventually calming and winning them over. To find the truth about an unknown black tobacco farmer, whose cancerous cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of medicine’s most essential and lucrative tools even though her family remained unable to afford health care, Rebecca had to earn the trust of the family as well as the scientists involved. It was grueling, sometimes disheartening work, but she understood its value and power, and never wavered, never rushed. It was an inspiring model for solving the kind of jumbled mystery of what happened . . . She had been chasing phantoms . . . Everywhere and nowhere . . . We were colleagues, we were friends, I was extraordinarily lucky . . . When she was a toddler I remember Becka pursuing a squirrel in the backyard, falling and getting back up, not crying, not stopping, chasing falling getting up . . .

  Thomas Hardy was pedaling a bicycle on the narrow road ahead as we drove around a curve. I recognized his costly Rover Cobb bike from photos taken of Hardy in his sixties. He wore a wide straw hat, knee-length cycling pants from which long black socks descended into thick black shoes, and a jacket that flapped in the wind. Though I could only see him from behind, I knew he had on a vest and tie. The bike was red and so was our car, vivid as cardinals in the landscape.

  A woman was riding beside him at the margin of the road. As Hardy gestured to her, his balance wavered but held. I couldn’t distinguish the woman’s features, but she was tall and thin and from the way she moved, the way she sat, seemed youthful. High-spirited. She looked straight ahead, focused, poised. Her passage scattered thrushes from the bordering trees.

  Soon the road shrank, hedges looming, expanding as though breathing. Everything darkened, and the riders entered another curve. I slowed. We passed a sign pointing in all four directions and saying “Stinsford Churchyard, Thomas Hardy’s Grave.” The road was now a rutted clay lane at dusk, like an ancient pathway for horse-drawn carts. Hardy turned his face to the right, looking directly at his companion, and I could see the swoop of his waxed mustache tip, a flash of white material above his jacket collar.

  Then I heard a roar like an approaching tornado. It was a sound I knew well from the thirteen years I’d lived in Illinois. The pea-soup sky, the electric odor, and heavy gasping air. Still the cyclists continued, oblivious, and now there was a small child riding behind Hardy. In a flash the three of them began to spiral and swirl, caught up in the storm. But the storm wasn’t a storm at all, it had transformed into an onrushing vehicle the size and shape of a giant Humvee, black, so wide it overlapped both edges of the lane. Beverly was pulling on my arm, pulling me from the car, pulling me from the dream.

  I lay there panting, unwilling to move my eyes from hers till I was sure where the dream ended and reality began. I got up and wrote in my notebook for a few minutes. It wasn’t just that the dream was so vivid, or that it reflected how fully Hardy had entered my immediate experience within the space of the few hours since he’d touched my shoulder in Dorchester. It was the sense that I felt responsible now, in ways I didn’t yet understand, for whatever had been entrusted to me by his Visitation. I felt the stakes escalating, at least for me, and maybe in some way for Hardy too, for his spirit at large in the world.

  When I finished writing about the dream, I remembered what had crossed my mind just before falling asleep. Thoughts of Becka as a child had been flooding back lately, as I neared my sixty-fifth birthday and as she moved ever more fully into the world. Most of those thoughts had to do with simple, everyday life, often food-related—nothing about the moments to suggest they would remain embedded in memory, would survive the damage to areas of my brain that control memory. But they were there, etched into the core of my self, the essence of my being, the heart of my story. My daughter standing on a stool beside me at the stove, a spatula in her hand, in charge of cooking chicken Marsala, gently testing the meat for doneness. Kneading oat bread at the age of five, looking at her gooey hands and the splatters of dough on the window beside her and saying “everything’s just fine.” Experimenting with non-traditional
coatings and shapes for the bagels she was making from scratch. Weekday mornings when she was in elementary school we’d go out for breakfast together before I dropped her off. I loved listening to her talk, how quick her mind was, how playful. Ordinary moments in the life of a father, though there wouldn’t have been such moments in my father’s life. Or in Thomas Hardy’s life. Etched into the core of himself, the essence of his being, the heart of his story.

  While I was writing those notes, Beverly opened the laptop and googled Tryphena Sparks and Randy. She read for a few minutes. “Come see this,” she said.

  My daughter’s wasn’t the only tenacious, clear-thinking, logical mind I relied on. Before Beverly was an artist or gardener or hospice social worker, she’d been a scientist—a geologist—and brought a scientist’s trained approach to making sense of the evidence. I’d tried—even before brain damage altered my cognitive powers—to do the same, but I was no match for either Beverly or Becka when it came to focused complexity of thought, memory systems, logic, abstract reasoning.

  There were about a dozen windows open on Beverly’s laptop screen and she was shaking her head. “Anthony had it right,” she said. “Looks like there’s a book we’ll have to find for you. Providence and Mr. Hardy, it’s called. Written by Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman. Deacon seems to be the one who sat down a bunch of times with Tryphena’s daughter Eleanor, or Nellie, in, let’s see, in 1965.” She switched windows and said, “Then there’s a book on Hardy by a Robert Gittings that demolishes the whole Deacon argument about Tryphena and the existence of a secret child.” She switched windows again. “Here’s a picture of Tryphena. I really wanted to see what she looked like, didn’t you?”

  I did, though I hadn’t thought of it till Beverly brought it up. She enlarged the image and we studied it. Tryphena was dressed in a ruffled white wedding gown, sitting with her right hand to her cheek, her calm face gazing directly at the camera, its expression savvy, almost wry, acknowledging but hardly overwhelmed by the gravity of the ritual and discipline of the ceremonial photograph. She looked willing to be there, but not particularly emotional about it. Like her heart and soul were elsewhere.