Emily & Herman

by John J. Healey

  “I do not. But I believe Austin does.”

  “I have to catch the very first steamer back to Fall River at dawn tomorrow, in a matter of hours from now.”

  Melville could judge by his tone and demeanor that the boy’s mind was unmovable, and he began to turn down Whitman’s suggestion, but then Austin intervened. “But Emily is in good hands with you gentlemen, and we could meet in North Hadley the day after tomorrow, so that she and I might arrive home together.”

  Emily’s first instinct was to protest and to insist that they travel together, if only for decorum’s sake, but, in an instant, reading his face that she knew so well, she saw that he preferred to go alone—that the prospect she be taken off his hands was for him a distinctive advantage. And so she said, “We could do that. I shall be in no shape tomorrow to rise at dawn.”

  Melville dispatched an additional pair of oysters. Though fascinated by his brutish technique of slurping them down directly from the shell, she continued to follow a daintier approach aided by a small fork, the likes of which she had never seen.

  “Well that’s settled then,” said Melville, hoping to hide the satisfaction he felt, wiping his lips with a broad white napkin. “I’m always available to try something new.”

  “This wine is good,” said Whitman, pleased his suggestion had been accepted.

  “Very good,” said Emily. “Though it is the last thing I need now.”

  “Have you ever been to France, Miss Dickinson?”

  “Not only have I not been to France, Mr. Whitman, this is the first time I have left Massachusetts.”

  “Good grief!”

  “I expect that makes me a lady sans imagination in your eyes.”

  “Touché!”

  The conversation about craftsmanship and the evolving definition of art and artists that had been interrupted by the dinner party was rejoined and a fine time was had by all. But the high point for Emily in this labyrinthine day filled with agitation and novel sensations—with the exception of the pre-dawn kiss—came when the restaurant’s piano player, a thin black man in evening attire, approached their table to see if they had any special requests. The question, put kindly, was met at first with a polite and awkward silence until Emily meekly said, “Are you familiar with the sonatas of Johann Sebastian Bach?”

  The musician, who spent his professional life banging out Stephen Foster tunes and songs with titles such as “Molly Do You Love Me?” and “Nelly Bly,” looked at the thin, somberly dressed girl with particular interest.

  “Why yes, madam, I am. They were written, however, for the violin and the flute. But if you’d like, I can try my hands at one of the Goldberg Variations he wrote for the harpsichord. It’s so late now, my normal clients won’t even notice.”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  But notice they did, and it was at this hour that Melville, watching Emily as she responded to the music, sensed himself ascending into another sphere, one in which his own writing felt stale, one in which the only thing that mattered was being able to watch her eyes. As the pianist played a careful and heartfelt version of the Canon of the Fifth, a silence gradually took hold of the restaurant, bar, and kitchens until, toward the end, the only extraneous sound heard was the occasional cough. When he finished the room broke out in raucous applause coinciding with Melville and Emily and Austin’s departure. The pianist gave her a respectful nod and a smile that she returned in kind.

  William Johnson heard the impromptu Bach recital as well. From his hiding place in a ventilated corner of the basement between stacked oyster barrels broken and unused for a decade he took the remarkable change of noise above—from a ribald revelry so constant he had almost become numb to it, into an ecclesiastical state of musical grace—as a positive omen blessing his departure scheduled for the following day. Born on a plantation in Carolina, a grandchild to a man from the banks of the Gambia River and a Chickasaw squaw, he had been on the move for a month. He had passed from safe house to safe house until taken under George Downing’s wing three days earlier. They had fed him well, but the strong briny odor that clung to him closed up in the dark coolness where two fat calico cats waged war on intrusive vermin had proved difficult. He had yet to try on the new clothes Downing’s son had brought him yesterday. They remained folded next to his Bible and his treasured copy of a Canadian textbook of geography that espoused the “natural theology” of William Paley. Johnson enjoyed impressing white folk with one of the book’s key phrases: Everywhere in Nature there is design and there cannot be design without a designer. The book had been a gift from his master’s wife, a kindly woman exquisitely adept at turning a blind eye to her husband’s penchant for perversity.

  There were times when he was homesick for the plantation, for his friends there, the cornbread, the chicory brew, even for the sex he had with Master Mitchell. But the recollection of the young foreman’s envy, insults, and whippings, and the constant drudge of the work, could be relied upon to toss a bucket of water on such nostalgic embers.

  Arriving under the cover of night, he had seen very little of New York. What most impressed him was that a man of his own race, Mr. Downing, had risen here to become the owner of a profitable business and that his son had gone to college. If he could just achieve a quarter of that before he died he would consider his life to have been a fine and wondrous thing. The Lord God Almighty clearly helped those who helped themselves, and tomorrow’s journey would be his last, getting him to where he could try to live as a free man.

  The geography book was his compass. Just following strangers about and hiding, never knowing where he was or to where he was going, save for the names white men had assigned to the land and the rivers and towns, and knowing his route to be generally north, all produced a vertigo the book becalmed. He was learning the nature of the rocks and the sediments and the families of the trees. And now this music, like none he had ever listened to. God was good—yes, sir—God was good. And may God bless my mama, he prayed, and guide her gently away from the troubled fields darkly sowed by Satan’s ungrateful angels and guide her up the mountain at a pace that shall not tire her and lead her God into the luminous carefree pastures hidden there above.

  George Downing never tired of watching the southern tip of Manhattan recede at night as the skiff made its way out toward the straight of Giovanni Verrazanno. The ships moored about the Battery, the flickering lights of the low dwellings, the summer river smell of ripening silts and drifting blossoms. His wife was fast asleep back there and his son up to God knows what, and that new boy in the basement, too handsome and too smooth he feared to avoid coming to a bad end in these northern cities. His nephew rowed well, was the best at it so far, long clean strokes that barely caused the oarlocks to creak.

  “What do you think about boy as you pull those oars?”

  “I just count, sir.”

  “Count.”

  “Yes, sir. One-two … then … three-four. Like that.”

  “And your mind does not wander?”

  “During the counting? Maybe it does—long as you’re here making sure I don’t row into something. What is it you think about, sir?”

  “About numbers as well, now that I consider it. What prices I think I can get away with. What I’m willing to spend if my more reliable oystermen tell me it’s worth it.”

  “But you’ve been at this for years now.”

  “That I have.”

  “You must know pretty much about all those numbers.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “So what do you really think about?”

  “Seems to me I was the one who asked you that question.”

  “I’ll tell you if you tell me.”

  Downing smiled at the boy’s pluck. Sometimes this son of his sister reminded him of what he had been like more than his own son did. Happens in many families he supposed.

  “You have yourself a deal, boy.”

  The boy did not pause in his rowing. The grace he employed did not a
lter. A mainsail and a jib would not have moved them along the water any faster.

  “I think about all kinds of things. I think about women mostly. And I think about how long it would take me to row this thing up to where the river gets born. I think about rowing to France. I think about having a house up by the Palisades where I could fish and grow my own vegetables and have a cute wife. I go over all the details in bits and pieces.”

  “That is a good and honest list, though I don’t recommend you try rowing to France, at least not in any skiff of mine.”

  “Yes, sir. Now, it’s your turn.”

  “Hmmm. Let’s see. I think a lot about how this city was when I first came to it and how it has changed. I worry about all of the injustice that continues to hold sway. Every time I think something good happens, I see something else that reminds me how steep and slippery the road is. I think about new recipes. I think about Sergius Orata, the first oysterman of the Roman Republic. I contemplate the wonders of crassostrea virginica. I worry about my son. I even worry about you and your sisters and your mother. I think about this earth we’re on and the oceans and the continents and how the Lord keeps it all moving no matter how mean or vile his servants behave themselves. That’s about it, I reckon.”

  “So you don’t think about women no more.”

  Downing laughed easily up into the damp evening air.

  Melville and the young Dickinsons were silent during the first half of their carriage ride uptown. He fought a powerful urge to embrace her, to kiss her again, to drag her into an empty room and lock the door. But the closest he came to any physical contact with her was to place his hand down on the seat between them, inches away from hers while Austin, already living in the future, looked out upon the empty city streets. Melville tortured himself about whether he should try to move his hand a bit closer in the hope she might allow him to come in contact with her fingers.

  She realized she was inebriated, more so than she had ever been. It was not unpleasant, and she sat there relaxed, going over the day, trying to keep her eyes open, feeling safe in the dark, vast city for having Melville next to her and her brother seated across from her. She wondered how her mother and Lavinia and her father were faring, all of them separated by such wide distances.

  Melville fixed his gaze on the three-quarter moon as they went along the east side of Washington Square and wondered about the night itself. He thought that, like the moon, it was one of those simple things that revealed realities of tremendous proportions. The reason the night arrived at all and then went away was that the world he experienced—where things were anchored to the Earth by gravity and where life took place looking ahead or behind, up or down—was in fact a massive sphere, a planet that turned in space as it revolved in kind around the Sun. It was a simple, vertiginous fact people rarely considered so disheartening were the implications and so contrary to one’s sense of the quotidian. How could a globe so large move through space so quickly while leaving the oceans and the trees and the creatures upon it so stable, so in place? A whale swimming by a ship, diving deep down through the sea, glimpsed straight ahead for a second, was in fact on its side upon the spinning world and the sea with it and yet none of it fell away and all of it was experienced as if the sky remained above and the firmament below.

  “I’ve had a lovely evening, Herman,” she said all of a sudden.

  “And I.”

  “And what a magical place that oyster den, and what a magical thing it was that happened.”

  “It happened because of you. I am sure it was and shall remain a singular event.”

  “You’ve been so kind to us.”

  He saw them to the front desk and woke up the night man who put room keys in their hands.

  “Have a safe journey, Austin. We will see you in North Hadley.”

  “Goodnight, Mr. Melville.”

  The men shook hands and Austin kissed his sister goodbye and began to climb the stairs exhausted and resolute. Melville turned to Emily.

  “Get a good night’s sleep, or as much as you can. I’ll come by tomorrow to get you around eight a.m.”

  She lowered her head in gratitude for his discretion, clasping the key with both hands, and then she looked at him again.

  “I shall never forget this morning,” she said in a whisper.

  “Nor I.”

  Dear Sophia,

  I am returning home tomorrow, Wednesday, and with any good fortune may arrive to you before this brief missive. Nevertheless, it does me good to put down some thoughts and impressions. I wrote a note earlier this evening to Melville informing him of my plans, then fell asleep until now.

  I regret to report my journey has been riddled with disappointment. Since I last wrote to you, what appeared to be a situation getting out of hand has only worsened in my opinion. I expect it will please you to some degree as I tell you your opinion regarding out talented neighbor now seems a more accurate one than mine had been. Perhaps it is just that he is younger than I—surely that has something to do with it—but there are questions of character as well and as we know from Heraclitus “a man’s character is his fate.”

  I will not sully this page with gossip for I still consider him a formidable writer and, yes, a friend. But we are indeed very different, and suffice it to say, I have never missed my dear sweet wife and our three special children as much as I have these past twenty-four hours. My only thoughts now are to return to you all posthaste. Though my only true desire has been to stay with you, to be a worthy husband and father, to continue my work, and to do all I can to bring about a more suitable living arrangement for us all, I feel it now with special urgency and resolve. So, though I have not succeeded in meeting with Mr. Dickinson, one could say that this strange, uneven, and stressful trip has been beneficial.

  In any event, it is late and I must blow out the candle and go back to sleep so that I might steal away from this far too populous, agitated, and disturbing city as swiftly as I can upon the morn.

  Your loving, N

  9

  TO HIS SURPRISE AND DISCOMFORT, AUSTIN DICKINSON discovered that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a fellow passenger aboard the steamship Priscilla. Disinclined to explain his solitary presence, especially at so early an hour, and not at all disposed toward having to make further conversation with the esteemed author, he devoted an inordinate amount of his depleted energy aboard ship avoiding contact with the man. That Hawthorne was traveling alone also pricked his conscience. Surely, Herman Melville was a man of character, he tried to tell himself—though to what extent any man’s character was reliable when women were concerned, using himself as an example, remained in doubt. He did, he hoped, also understand that Walter Whitman would also be accompanying his sister and Melville.

  Emily found Whitman’s handsome dark friend painfully shy. His presence imbued the train compartment with a faint scent of fish and lemons. Melville noticed the young man’s gnarled, calloused farmhand fingers, the new clothes that did not fit well plus the worn boots and drew a reasonable conclusion. Whitman’s query put to him the evening before regarding the abolitionists acquired new resonance. His first reaction was irritation at the notion they had been taken advantage of, that they were being used as cover to help an escaped slave flee North. He fumed to himself, feigning righteousness as Emily and Whitman and William Johnson made small talk, that if only Whitman had just asked him about it honestly they would have surely acceded. That Whitman had felt the need to lie was insulting. And what if something should go wrong? There were Blackbirders lurking about at all the major stations hoping to make an arrest and claim their bounty. How would that make him look? What would Mr. Dickinson say about the New York author who got his daughter involved in an illegal transaction? The fury within him grew and he was on the verge of interrupting the others to ask Whitman to step out into the corridor so that he might vent his anger appropriately. But precisely for that reason, he began to pay attention to the others more closely.

  William Johnson sat ther
e with them, awkward but in possession of his dignity, in that compartment with three New Englanders who, for however aware they were inside of the situation’s novelty, went out of their way externally to put the young man at ease. Would he really have said yes if Whitman had been truthful? Or might he have evinced compassion and empathy while coming up with an excuse to return north with Emily by another route? When Whitman had asked him his views on abolition, he had struck a pose of aloofness from worldly, local politics, claiming some special allegiance to an artistic dedication that somehow transcended mundane issues. He who was getting closer with each week to publishing a book with the character of Queequeg in it. He who has spent months living, sleeping, and having relations with natives in the Pacific. He whose grandfather had been an instigator at the Boston Tea Party. And yet he knew, in a quiet, ugly, private place within he would be pleased to seal, that he would indeed have said no to Whitman. He felt ashamed. This was not a newspaper quarrel carried out in print, nor a gentlemanly debate heating up after dinner drinks at a club, but an actual human being sitting there among them who in all likelihood had been born into and brought up within the institution of human slavery. And if he were to be completely honest, he would have to recognize as well that he was grateful for their company. Intuition advised him that being alone with emily during the journey back, even in the company of her brother, under the censorious shadow cast by Hawthorne’s absence, his chances for—for what?—for wooing her more successfully—would be severely diminished. Such a degree of forced intimacy at that juncture would be more likely to drive her away. Having company about, a foil and a distraction they might both respond to, would help keep the flame lit between them.

  Eventually Whitman and Melville fell asleep, leaving Emily and William Johnson awake. Both of them were entranced by the fine views passing by out the large window.

  “Where are you from, Mr. Johnson?”