by John Pipkin
“Then perhaps we should hope for the swift maturation of both.”
“Yes, yes.” It was all he could think to say. He felt he had been bested, but he thought he detected a note of encouragement, perhaps even a compliment, in her quip. Never before had he taken such delight in being outwitted.
“I envy you, Mr. Calvert,” she said. “I should think the most delicious part of success is the moment just prior to fulfillment.”
Eliot tried to choose his words carefully. “I am confident, Miss Mahoney, that even now I stand at the very precipice of fame.” As soon as the words left his lips, he thought they sounded childish and boastful. He saw her eyes drift over the crowded lobby and feared she was seeking better conversation. It was only with great effort that he was able to keep from stammering, “I-I-I hope that I do not strike you as a braggart.”
Margaret Mahoney turned her attention back to Eliot, and the dark ringlets bounced at her ears. She looked him full in the face for several long seconds. He had not lost her, not yet.
“Mr. Calvert, I find nothing unbecoming about confidence in a man of artistic temperament. One never hears a man of business apologize for his pursuit of wealth. It is an odd measure of success, is it not, having at one's disposal a greater number of the same coin that every man carries in his pocket? I would not count hardship as an accomplishment, but the dedicated avoidance of it is an unromantic goal upon which to construct one's raison d'être. Although”—she paused and let her eyes wander again before returning to Eliot—“I suppose we women must be grateful for the men who are content to do so. We cannot all be wed to struggling artists, else who would attend the theater?”
Eliot wanted to match her sudden philosophizing with an observation of corresponding depth. He thought he might quote an appropriate passage from one of his plays, but then Margaret Mahoney sighed and he found that he could not recall a single line of his own writing. She waved her playbill at the crowded lobby, as if the room of silvered heads and glittering necks proved her point.
“I should think it far easier to instruct an artist in the ways of amassing a fortune than it would be to instill a banker with a love of poetry,” she said. “Would you not agree?”
Miraculously, a swift reply came to Eliot, and he delighted in hearing the words slide from his tongue as if their delivery required no effort at all.
“I cannot say, Miss Mahoney, as I have attempted neither.”
She laughed, and Eliot watched the lamp light play over the cluster of diamonds and gold filigree at her neck. He felt emboldened and decided to venture an observation of some complexity, one that he had come to some time ago. He brought his lips close to her ear, almost close enough to feel the silky black curls against his cheek—a daring move—and spoke softly.
“I suspect that many who attend the theater little comprehend the depth of humanity represented onstage, but they would be quick to judge the full measure of a man's worth solely by the girth of his bank account and waistcoat.”
She nodded. “Then I daresay Father's own success is easily measured by tailor and bookkeeper alike.”
Eliot jumped back and saw that her father was making his way toward them. Other men stepped aside to make room for the rotund patriarch, who pushed forward in the confidence that a path would be made for him. The man's cheeks shone with the exertion of lugging around his bulk, and the bare top of his head glistened with sweat between the crests of gray hair that tumbled over his ears. Something stuck in Eliot's throat. He had forgotten himself; he had let his wit outrun his sense.
“I meant no insult,” Eliot whispered.
She ignored him and opened her arms to greet her father. He lumbered toward her, and she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. The large man patted his cheek where the kiss landed and looked at Eliot critically.
“Father, I was beginning to fear you had abandoned me. Fortunately, Mr. Eliot Calvert has entertained me in your absence. Mr. Calvert, this is my father, Patrick Mahoney.”
Before Eliot could say a word, Margaret Mahoney winked at him and said, “Mr. Calvert is a playwright, Father.”
Eliot felt his heart race.
“A writer?” Mr. Mahoney was intentionally loud. He spoke with the confidence that anyone within earshot would want to hear what he had to say. “I hope it is none of your nonsense we are suffering tonight.”
“Father!”
“You cannot expect politeness,” Mr. Mahoney barked, “as I mourn the loss of another hour that might have been spent in the enjoyment of a good cigar.”
“Honestly.” She playfully patted his arm. “The ushers will begin turning us away at the door if you continue to play the rogue.”
“They'll not turn me away as long as they have dollar seats in need of selling.” Mr. Mahoney jerked his head upward, indicating the balconies, before looking Eliot directly in the eyes.
“To be honest, sir,” Eliot said, “I cannot claim the title of playwright just yet—”
“Wait!” Mr. Mahoney held up a soft, thick hand and curled the fat index finger beneath the tip of his nose. “I'll warrant you're a Washington Street man, am I correct?”
“Well,” Eliot said, relieved at the tone of approval he heard in the man's voice. “Ah, yes, as a matter of fact. How did you know?”
Eliot heard Margaret Mahoney laugh, saw her roll her eyes and offer an apologetic smile, as if she knew what was to follow. He could hardly pay attention to what her father said, so entranced was he by the way she placed her splayed fingertips to her pale throat.
Mr. Mahoney grunted in satisfaction. “You see, Calvert, it is my business to know men—their motives, their ambitions, their shortcomings. I knew straight off by the cut of your coat that you were more than just a writer, though I did not doubt that you were occupied with the printed word in some fashion. The ink beneath your fingernails gave you away. Where on Washington Street do you ply your trade?”
“Carter, Hendee & Co.”
“Carter and Hendee? Ha! Then I'll wager it's Ticknor and Allen you'll be working for soon enough, once they've acquired the capital. Mark my words, Messieurs Carter and Hendee will be bought before the year is out.”
“I had not heard this,” Eliot said. There were always rumors, and he had learned to ignore the whispers that periodically sent Mr. Carter or Mr. Hendee (or sometimes both) into pencil-snapping fits; still, he found Mr. Mahoney's matter-of-factness disconcerting. “Are you certain?”
“It's no secret. Scarcely a month passes that one publisher is not swallowing another. I have reliable eyes and ears, as it were.”
“You are in the publishing business yourself, then?”
“No. Far from it,” Mr. Mahoney said. “Finance. Opportunity. I make it my business to detect opportunities. Intriguing developments in your corner of the city, so I am told.”
“Yes, well, the publishing world presents a most tumultuous drama,” Eliot replied.
“Drama indeed!” Mr. Mahoney practically bellowed as he stabbed the air with a thick forefinger. “And that is what makes any business more profound than the empty entertainments of the theater, eh? We think alike, Calvert. A man of business is a man of endless interest. I have told my daughter so a thousand times.”
“A thousand times at least,” she said, and squeezed her father's arm.
Mr. Mahoney cast his eyes upward again. “The trials we men endure, eh, Calvert? The tallest theater in Boston, and she persists in calling it her favorite.” He eyed the stairs and cleared his throat. “At the prices we pay, they should be obliged to carry us. Shall we accompany you to your box?”
“Thank you, sir, but, no, I am waiting for…” Eliot noticed Margaret Mahoney taking an interest in his response and he stumbled for a convincing conclusion. “For a colleague.”
Mr. Mahoney eyed the stairs again, as if he had forgotten they were there, and grumbled, “Well, let's get on with it, my dear. Calvert, a pleasure to meet you.”
Consumed with the thought of the task ahead, Mr. Mahoney turne
d to begin a slow, arduous waddle toward the sweeping stairs, and the crowd parted as before; then he stopped, looked over his shoulder, and called out, “Calvert, we should have a serious conversation about the hurly-burly world of publishing. I have a growing interest in things bookish.”
Margaret Mahoney smiled and shook her head. “Please excuse me, Mr. Calvert. I must accompany my father, or the stairs will utterly confound him.”
Eliot bowed, trying to remember what he had practiced saying, the perfect line to end their first meeting. But all he could think of was his inadvertent reference to Mr. Mahoney's girth.
“Miss Mahoney … your father … truly, I meant no insult.”
Margaret Mahoney dropped her chin, coyly, and looked up at him with raised eyebrows. “Mr. Calvert, not all that may be insulting to my father is necessarily insulting to his daughter.”
She turned and followed the large man. She was truly the most beautiful woman who had ever spoken to Eliot, and he thought he might be happy to spend the rest of his life repaying her for this act of kindness. He watched the imagined outline of her hips sway beneath the layers of crinoline. He sighed when he saw her place her hand upon her father's arm, and in that moment Eliot believed that he had indeed become a playwright, a man for whom the drama of life unfolded beyond the confines of the stage. As Margaret Mahoney climbed the grand staircase, Eliot made his way back to the gallery and found a spot in the shadows where he would not be seen from the boxes above. In the darkness, he thought of Miss Mahoney's swaying figure on the stairs, and he decided that it might not be so great an indulgence to buy a ticket in the upper tiers from now on.
9
Caleb
Caleb Ephraim Dowdy stands alone in the lifeless yellow field, waiting. Nearby, the remains of the old farmhouse trace a jagged rectangle in the dirt. An hour earlier, his voice seemed to fill the ruined space, as if the nave of their new church already enclosed the air above them, but now the only sound he hears is the wind huffing through dry stubble. After the final prayer, the others returned to their homes and shops and farms and street corners; some paused to praise his vision, but now they, too, were gone. Caleb waits until he is certain that they are all out of sight, then he removes his black topcoat, drapes it over a corner of the farmhouse's crumbling foundations, and crawls under.
Over his black shirt and black trousers, he wears the white surplice that he has not put on since leaving his Boston congregation, and the robe spills around his feet as he crouches beneath the tent of his coat and squeezes himself into a ball. He reaches up into his coat pocket and retrieves a slender wooden box. It holds everything he needs. He flips the clasp, and the wind whips the edge of his coat against his face and scatters the contents of the box over the ground. Stiff blades of dead grass prick his fingers as he scratches in the dirt. He finds the pipe easily, but it takes him longer than it should to collect the matches, and he has to stop twice and press his hands flat on the ground to keep them from trembling. Sitting knees to chest, he strikes a match and watches the flame claim a corner of the semidarkness. The sliver of wood curls into a whisker. The flame hiccups, disappears.
This very spot is where his new church will rise—his church of bones, the old women called it. So be it, he thinks. Caleb licks his singed fingertips and selects another match. He could waste the dozen or so matches in the same way, and that would put an end to it. He allows ample opportunity for a heavenly power to intervene and drive off the demons that torture him. He strikes another match, holds it a few inches from his nose, and watches the flame crawl toward his fingertips.
These are crucial moments, each pregnant with the next, each an opportunity to expunge future remorse. The actions men regret—actions they can do nothing to change—live always among things yet to be done. At any moment, a man might forestall the conception of deeds that will later torment him with their irreversibility Caleb delivers powerful sermons about that very fact. He makes the faithful weep with his descriptions of remorse. He knows how to make them feel the mortality of their fragile bodies and fear for their souls. He makes them see the terror in a pocket watch, the merciless progression of gears, the indifferent sweep of hands, the incremental loss, second by unobserved second. He fills them with guilt for things they have done or contemplated or failed to do. He makes them regret the simple comforts they so easily enjoy in a land where their lives are inexcusably less miserable than they would be anywhere else. And whenever he speaks to his congregation he sees the haunting face, the eyes rolled back, the open mouth and distended tongue, swollen, purple, like a fat bruise. The face gives no sign of recognition. It neither accuses nor forgives; it is simply there, an indifferent, irreversible fact.
Caleb angles the match downward, coaxing the flame toward his fingers. He places his long-stemmed pipe between his teeth and waits. It is not genuine deliberation, this momentary hesitation. The flame sputters, waits for him to make up his mind. It squats into itself like a dog crouching to defecate, and the blackened matchstick glows red, then white, seeming to burn without being consumed, a modern miracle between his fingertips. He holds the match to the bowl of his pipe and then pulls it away, as if prolonged contemplation of the sin will somehow blunt the inevitable transgression. He wants a witness to his struggle, wants God to see his soul's discord played out. Again Caleb brings the flame to his pipe, and this time he inhales the hot perfume that curls off the sticky ball in the pipe's bowl.
The smoke sinks into his lungs. He closes his eyes and thinks of the fallen city on the hill until he can see it hovering before him. He thinks of sin and punishment, of vengeance and condemnation, of lakes of molten ore and everlasting fire, but none of these certainties fill him with the holy dread that has kept generations of the faithful on the straight and righteous path. It is not damnation he fears. What frightens him more is the possibility that these horrific visions merely hide an unfathomable darkness. More terrible than the sentence of eternal suffering is the incomprehensibility of eternity itself, a blank, empty, measureless abyss. What if this fearful nothingness—which men so desperately cram with painted fantasies far better and far worse than the world they know—what if this void is all that awaits even the most devout?
He has spent countless dream-riddled hours staring into the darkness. No longer can he recognize the religion of his forefathers. Their one faith has shattered like a pane of glass, each narrow fragment clear and pure and edged with dangerous points—Unitarians, Trinitarians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Shakers, Baptists, and the rest, never again to be reunited into a bright whole. As if revelations fell like spring rains, the fertile soil of New England seems to sprout new faiths, each promising nourishment beyond what their corrupt fruit could ever hope to yield. Caleb finds none so poisonous as those recent heresies that seek to deify America itself, and yet, though he has awaited a fitting response to this sacrilege from heaven, he hears only silence; the profane continue to walk upon the New World with impunity. Faced with such evidence, how could one not find just cause for doubt? Caleb wants to pose this very question to the man who has shown how easily a pagan can walk without fear in God's light. If Caleb could blame one man for showing him heaven's indifference to earthly folly, it is the Unitarian minister—the ex–Unitarian minister—Ralph Waldo Emerson, who has demonstrated how carelessly one might progress from believing in Christian redemption to worshipping trees. And has heaven objected to this blasphemy? Do the old women who cursed Caleb's church also beleaguer Mister Emerson with their talk of bones? Do these witches stalk the tree worshippers of Concord and remind them that their bones will soon lie in the earth to feed the roots they venerate?
Caleb exhales, watches the bluish smoke coil like snakes into a floating pair of eyes and open-mouthed astonishment. He swats the visage away, then lifts a corner of his coat and surveys the empty field, making certain he is still alone. The old women stayed well after the others, chattering excitedly, poking through the crumbling foundations, comparing bits of brick
and mortar to the knobby joints visible beneath the flesh on their skinny arms. They are gone now, but he can still hear their voices. You will build a church of bones, yes? Yes, indeed, if that is what is required to force God's hand, then he would build a church from his own bones and place a clapper in his skull to toll loudly from the belfry. Caleb lets the corner of his coat fall, and returns his attention to the shiny black pipe with red-gold dragon lacquered along its length.
He thinks he has seen the two old women before, though he knows he has never heard them speak. He would have remembered the halting accents, the voice of the blind one like a dog's growl, the voice of the other like a wet finger on glass. Despite his fervent hope, they did not prove to be angels dispatched to cast him into the fires of perdition; they did not comport themselves like angels at all, unless, perhaps, they were agents of another rank, seraphim entrusted with gathering evidence to ensure that his damnation, once decreed, would be incontrovertible. Heaven's justice is said to be swift, but it is also said that eternity for man is but a second in the eyes of God. As far as Caleb knows, his trial might be under way this very moment, a court of angels debating his soul's fate. The thought gives him hope.
It was not unthinkable that the women came as messengers from that other place, heaven's opposite. Caleb realizes that if his plan has even the slightest chance of success, Satan himself would certainly want to interrupt its machinations before it brought forth proof. Caleb has not thought of this before. Failure or success will give him an answer—yea or nay—but if his plan goes unexecuted he will have nothing to dispel his doubts. Another thought restores Caleb's trust in his plan. In the event that the old women—if not angels, then witches to be sure—succeeded in foiling his plot, would not this intervention itself prove the existence of Satan and, therefore, the existence of eternity, of a world beyond this? At the very least, he thinks, surely it would disprove the absolute emptiness of the void.
