by John Pipkin
After all, Henry thinks, it was John who had come to his rescue when it seemed that his Concord Academy would fail, and together they made a success of the little school for almost three years. Henry still considers it one of his happiest periods, among his few real contributions to the world, though he knows the students always preferred John to him. Henry was not jealous of his brother in this regard. John was warm and encouraging where Henry could sometimes be stern and demanding. Henry was content in the knowledge that their students respected him, even if it was John whom they loved. Another tree crashes to the ground, and it makes Henry wonder what his brother would do in this predicament. Nothing like this would be happening if John were here, he thinks.
But John Thoreau is dead.
Two years have already passed since John's death, and Henry's loneliness, far from dissipating, has grown deeper. Henry thinks that the only remedy for the loss of his brother's love is to love more, but neither new acquaintances nor the companionship of old friends can fill the absence. Together, Henry and John had dared swift-moving waters, hiked trails where a single misstep might have sent them tumbling. Together they had slept out of doors, exposing themselves to cold and rain, taunting illnesses that preyed on human carelessness. They had fired guns, swung axes, climbed unreliable trees, mounted unruly horses, ridden carriages over uncertain roadways. They had offered misfortune a thousand opportunities to seize them.
Then, on New Year's Day, 1842, John cut himself while stropping his razor and died of lockjaw ten days later. Might today's events, Henry wonders, be blamed on a rusted edge of steel? How quickly, how easily, a man moves from one state of being to the next. The language cannot keep up. “My brother John is dead,” Henry shouts at the distant flames. The present tense of the verb invites him to think of his brother inhabiting a different state, lying cramped in a pine box, staring at the lid, bored and lonely, as if the tragedy of dying were simply that one must tolerate conditions considerably less pleasant than those enjoyed by the living.
John is dead. It is a fact so difficult to grasp that shortly after John's death Henry began experiencing the same symptoms. Some inquiring part of his brain—the part dedicated to the acquisition of impossible facts—determined that only by experiencing the same condition as his brother could he claim the requisite information. Henry had not cut himself; for days after his brother's accident Henry would not go near his razor. His mourning kept him confined to his room, away from the pencil works, far from the garden and the woodshed and the river and the forest, far from any setting where he might encounter a sharp edge. Nonetheless, Henry began suffering the unmistakable symptoms that had delivered his brother to the grave. He knew he was not truly ill, but there was no denying his condition. He awoke feeling miserable, he complained of uncertain pains, a stiff neck, and a spreading numbness in his limbs.
The doctor was perplexed. He could find no cause, no visible wound or mortified flesh. Henry sank deeper into the vague malaise. His flesh grew cold. Days passed, and he could not rise from his bed. He found it difficult to speak; his words came out slurred and stupid. His jaw went slack in open-mouthed astonishment at its own capitulation to a phantom affliction. The doctor recommended they trickle water onto his tongue, enough to quench thirst, but not too much, lest he drown in his bed. For days, Henry's grieving mother squeezed a sponge over his open mouth. She changed his bedclothes and rearranged his pillows. Henry rolled his eyes in panicked submission, fearful that he would soon be joining his brother in death's semiconscious prison.
But Henry's sympathetic lockjaw did not outlive his sorrow. The symptoms passed on, but he did not. One morning his jaw swung shut, and he found himself returned to the living world. The doctor could explain neither the illness nor the cure and blamed Henry's overly sensitive disposition. Henry emerged from his ordeal without the satisfaction of having conquered a real disease. And John was dead, still.
Henry knows that his brother would have stopped him from committing so tragic an error as striking a match on such a day as this, but his brother will never again travel with him down any of the rivers of New England. It is almost unbelievable to Henry that he still cannot determine what to make of the long years stretching before him, when none remain for his brother. After twenty-six years, Henry has accomplished little, and the burden of his empty history weighs heavily on him. He cannot determine how to order the life that still feels as new to him as a stiff pair of boots. Yet his brother's life is complete. John has already become all that he will ever be.
Henry no longer expects to find a love that might take the place of what he felt for his brother. They had once even proposed marriage to the same woman, Ellen Sewall, within days of each other, and afterward they commiserated in their rejection. Henry has felt admiration for other women, but not having a wife is not something he regards as a loss. He knows there is a divergence between love and the entanglements of wedlock, though sometimes the two concur. He knows that the insatiable yearning for physical touch so confounds heart and mind as to reduce a man to animal bewilderment, a dog chasing its tail. He has come to prefer the love he finds in nature, and in this he has never been disappointed. He has been moved to soft tears by the generosity of spring and the unexpected gifts of autumn. He has taken comfort in the embrace of dappled moonlight beneath a crown of oaks. The woods are full of more varied personalities than he could ever hope to find in Concord. He observes now how every tree burns with a signature distinctly its own as the intense heat releases saps and resins hoarded in its concentric heart. A pine bursts into flame from trunk to crown, a gigantic matchstick with a blue-white fist of heat at its center. Trees hiss and whistle at different pitches, some burn like coal, blackening and crumbling beneath a thin aurora, some flare like lanterns filled with oil.
If John were alive, Henry thinks, this day would have turned out differently. He considers how he and his brother prepared scores of meals under the open sky, and never once had they started a fire they could not control. It is clear to him that one man's death erases not only that man's possibilities but all the possibilities that might have ensued from those, like the wake of a boat slicing through waves that might otherwise have reached the shore. Every man lives among the deaths of all who came before. What consequences would he unleash, Henry wonders, if he were to walk down the hill into the burning trees? What unforeseen series of events might his sudden demise cause or forestall, ten, twenty, a hundred years from now? How would his non-being ripple through the seasons to come?
Henry runs his open hand over his whiskers, feels the hard edge of the jawbone beneath, and decides that there is something quintessentially corporeal about the jawbone. Here is the definition of a man, he thinks. A man is a composite of bone and deed. About the first, one can do nothing, but it is through deeds that one makes oneself a man, a creature distinct from the nameless mass of jawbones.
He steps to where the downward slope begins and studies the furrows he left on his last descent. He considers walking back down, but first he listens for the whispers that chased him here. The fire is close, but its advance has slowed; the flames lash out and retreat, like a cat suspicious of the dish of milk it demanded. Henry expects the flames to take a half hour or more to reach the base of Fair Haven Hill. He knows it should not take as long as that for the men of Concord to assemble and come to his aid. And they will bring with them more than shovels and axes; they will come with angry stares, furious accusations, and thoughts of retribution. His regret, he understands, will not be so easily embraced after all. His guilt will not be so readily mastered. Henry steps back from the slope. Remorse presses down upon him heavy and full, like the lowering sky of an approaching tempest, and he admits that he is grateful, after all, to be alone here above the burning earth.
16
Eliot
Eliot checks his watch, fingers the slack chain, slips it back into his vest pocket. The small sample of Concord visible through the dirty storefront window seems half-asleep. The breeze
drifting through the open door carries the charred scent that has grown stronger since morning, and every now and then Eliot sees a passerby stop and point at the sky before continuing on, unconcerned.
It is already half past noon, well past the time Seymour Twine agreed to meet. Eliot has not communicated with him directly. He arranged their meeting through a mutual business associate, a man in whom he places only a modicum of trust. It seems to him that his life is populated by unreliable men—merchants, tradesmen, salesmen—men whom he knows only by a last name, men identified by the wares they carry. Eliot is as ignorant of their personal lives as he is of the cobbler, who, according to Otis Dickerson, died in the very shop where Eliot now paces impatiently. How, he wonders, have his days come to consist of one petty negotiation after another?
Eliot is not a diarist and has never felt the need. Those experiences worthy of recollection—food for reflection when he is working on his plays—always seem to lodge themselves in his memory. Sometimes, though, he wishes he had kept a diary as a young man, if only that he might now have a document detailing the indiscriminate decisions and digressions that have ushered him here. Eliot had thought only of love when he pursued Margaret Mahoney; he had not considered that he was wooing a father-in-law and business partner as well. He remembers the first time he ventured to take Margaret's hand, trembling at the touch of her cool, delicate fingers. He remembers their first kiss, stolen in the shadows of the Tremont Theater balcony after Mr. Mahoney was called away on an important matter of business, and he can recall other isolated moments, conversations, walks, dinners. But now, looking back, he cannot mark the incremental progression that brought him from romance to love to something more prudent, if less inspiring.
Eliot's first visit to the Mahoneys' parlor came not in the name of courtship but in response to an invitation from Mr. Mahoney himself. When Eliot arrived, he learned that Margaret was not even at home but was in Philadelphia visiting a cousin. The two men were alone, seated on facing serpentine sofas, when Mr. Mahoney made his intentions known.
“Calvert, I can see you are a man of the world, so I shall speak plainly.”
“Thank you, sir,” Eliot said, flattered.
“My daughter, as I am sure you have discerned, is a strong-minded woman, as well she should be, considering the sum I have exhausted on her schooling. But her willfulness has at times proven a frustration to those men who did not feel up to the challenge.”
“I should think such men fools.”
Mr. Mahoney grunted and tugged at his tight-fitting waistcoat. He slid back into the sofa, seeking a comfortable position on the fat green cushions, and his great stomach rose before him like an island. “The fact is that you, my boy, are not the first dog to come sniffing at our door. There have been suitors before, and most had an ample supply of the one thing you do not: money.”
Eliot sat still, uncertain whether he should take offense. In the theater, dissemblance and misdirection were the preferred paths to truth; he was not used to dealing with men who spoke bluntly.
“Nevertheless,” Mr. Mahoney continued, “you have advanced further than the lot of them. Most fled as soon as they realized they could not match my daughter's wit. As for the others, I refused their entreaties because they lacked what you possess: ambition. And what is ambition but a desire to be something more than what you are? Tell me that I am not mistaken.”
“You are not mistaken, sir.”
“Certainly not. I know men. It is not the having that makes a man what he is to become. It is the wanting. Young men raised on their fathers' money do not understand the necessity of wanting what they do not already have.”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Mahoney tugged at his snug waistcoat again and unfastened the lowest button, which practically jumped from its hole.
“Nothing is more important to me than my daughter's happiness.”
“Of course.”
“But”—Mr. Mahoney held up a thick finger—“she has, upon occasion, associated with men of artistic temperament—men of little or no accomplishment to speak of—and I know that she does so simply to confound my interest in seeing her settled with a husband of sound finances. She gets her rebellious spirit from her dear departed mother, and it comes as no surprise to me. But I fear she does not always act in her best interest.”
Eliot fidgeted nervously. “Am I to understand that you disapprove of my attentions?”
“Not at all. You miss my point entirely.” Mr. Mahoney struggled against the cushions for a moment and then settled back into them with a deep sigh. His immense head, with it sparse crests of gray hair, looked as though it were slowly being swallowed by his chest. “That is why I have asked you here, Calvert. Something in your nature sets you apart from the others. I wish to know more about your plans.”
Eliot held on to the armrest to keep himself afloat on the wide sofa as he studied Mr. Mahoney's face, looking for some indication of how he should reply.
“Plans for what?” Eliot asked.
Mr. Mahoney cocked an eyebrow and stared at Eliot over the rise of his stomach. “Why, for life! Your plans for life! I can tell that you are not a man content to wander aimlessly through his days.”
Eliot hesitated. “Well, I am working on a play of some merit—”
“Yes, yes. Margaret has told me as much. I have written a little poetry myself. A man of business needs recreation to sharpen the mind. But I want to know about your real work. What of your business plans? Your expectations for the future.”
“I have reason to believe,” Eliot said, trying to sound confident, “that there might yet be a place for me at Carter and Hendee, after the sale is complete.”
“You cannot expect to blacken Carter's boots forever, Calvert. Besides, we both know Carter and Hendee will be blackening Ticknor's boots soon enough.” Mr. Mahoney twisted another button on his waistcoat but could not dislodge it. He gave up and regarded Eliot with disapproval. “You strike me as a man who wants something more.”
“Well, yes, I do indeed.” Eliot watched Mr. Mahoney's hand return to the strained button at his waistcoat, and he felt an urge to leap up and unfasten it for him. “I should think there will be new opportunities for advancement once Mr. Ticknor is in charge, possibly.”
“You are aware of the type of books Ticknor intends to publish?”
Eliot nodded. “Medical books—they may prove to be a lucrative offering. There is always a demand, and such publications command no small price, especially those with engravings.”
“And you do not think that a man of your ambitions will grow weary of dissection manuals?” Mr. Mahoney abandoned his efforts at undoing the button for a second time. “And what then? When your weariness turns to desperation, what then? Will you become one of the mass of men, forgotten in middling jobs, too uninspired to advance, too debt-ridden to quit altogether? What then, Calvert?”
Eliot was not prepared for the assault. He did not relish the future Mr. Mahoney described, but he could think of no plausible alternative.
“Your concern is not unwarranted,” Eliot said, stalling for an answer that did not sound naïve. “But my position at Carter and Hendee … well, it is truly only a means to an end. As soon as I finish my play, I shall immediately strive to have it produced on the stage. All I need is one good night to attract investors, and I expect that once I leave my position I shall be able to devote all my energies to writing …”
“All your energies, you say?”
“Well, certainly—”
“Can you possibly expect your plays to generate income enough for my daughter?”
The boldness of the moment nearly struck Eliot dumb.
“I… I had not thought on it.”
“Of course you have,” Mr. Mahoney pressed. “Margaret is wholly entranced by the world of the theater and its romantic nonsense, but at the end of the day she will need to be kept in the manner to which she has grown accustomed. It is no small wonder that she has not yet found the man
who can guarantee her happiness. However, in this I believe I might offer you some assistance.”
Eliot's eyes darted about the handsomely appointed room, taking in the mahogany Hepplewhite furniture, dark paintings of stormy landscapes, ornamented corner chairs, statuettes and candlesticks and miniature portraits in tiny gilt frames. He became suddenly conscious of the close, dusty air. If he could have intuited what Mr. Mahoney wanted him to say, he would gladly have uttered it so that he might conclude the conversation and leave the suffocating parlor.
