The Whale (7 page)

“Let's see if Duyckinck found all the books I wanted,” Hawthorne said with an easy smile.

Herman saw, in the older man's angelic face and blithe manner, a battlefield where anguish had once contended with beauty and—neither proving victorious—each had lain down its arms and declared peace together. He felt Hawthorne's hard-won serenity spreading into his own soul, and his abiding social discomfort evaporated like fog in the morning sun. For the first time in his life he felt perfectly at ease just standing and doing nothing; and he thought he could stay that way forever, as long as Hawthorne continued to smile at him.

Hawthorne took out a pocketknife. “Are the knots a joke on you or by you?”

“Duyckinck is the jester, in this case.”

He cut a perfectly constructed butterfly knot away from the rest of the twine and placed it behind his ear for a garland; then he ripped away a section of the wrapping paper and began withdrawing volumes from the packet one by one, handing them to Herman as he read the titles aloud. “
Mardi
, excellent.
Typee
.
Redburn
, yes.
Omoo
.
White-Jacket
, tremendous.” Herman found himself standing in the middle of Hawthorne's parlor holding a copy of every book he had ever written. “And finally a copy of
Pendennis
. I hope you don't mind being lumped together with Thackeray.”

“You ordered every one of my books!”

Hawthorne looked commandingly at him. “I had to know what it was all about,” he said.

“What
what
was all about?”

“The picnic. What kind of person had such insight about me that he could make me feel known just by talking to me!”

“But these books,” Herman said, despairing. “Please do not judge me by them. They are not me. They were the best I could do at the time.”

“I have read
Typee
already, of course,” Hawthorne said, unconcerned. “I wrote a review of it, for the Salem
Advertiser
, when it first came out.” He put his hand on Herman's shoulder. “No one knows the relative value of one's own previous work better than I do. I have not asked for these books in order to judge you by them, but in order to learn about you.”

Herman's mouth had gone completely dry. He tried to formulate a thought suitable to be spoken, but even had one occurred to him, he doubted whether his brain still had any control over his tongue. Una's and Julian's light footsteps rat-a-tatted overhead, and Herman looked around, alarmed that Sophia might see them inclined toward one another so intimately.

“You know, Herman, I'm not convinced of this blackness ten times black that you see in me, that you talked about in your review. That's how you put it, isn't it?”

“Yes,” he said, feeling foolish now for every word he had written in
Literary World
—for every word he had ever written. The easy philosophical banter that they had shared when they'd first met seemed a childish memory; Hawthorne had reduced him to mere reverence. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps I should have said that, in your stories, blackness competes with blackness, which would have been a better way to put it.” He swallowed hard and willed his composure to come back. “Because, in your stories, you seem to understand that true dramatic moments come not when a character must choose between right and wrong but when he must choose between two wrongs.”

Hawthorne looked quizzically at his younger companion and said, almost to himself, “Two wrongs. Indeed.” He finally took his hand from Herman's shoulder as Sophia's footsteps pounded down the stairs. As she entered, Hawthorne asked, “What was that business about the Virginian spending July in Vermont?”

“I don't know, really.”

Hawthorne took the stack of novels out of Herman's hands and set them on the table. Then he reached into his pocket and counted out a dollar and fifty cents in coins and placed them in Herman's palm. “Thank you again. Won't you have some wine and stay for lunch?” Herman looked from Nathaniel to Sophia, both of their faces eager and open.

“Yes,” said Sophia. “We don't have much in the house at the moment, but I can send Una to Mrs. Tappan's for a loaf, and we'll pick some vegetables from the garden.”

“I'm afraid I must be going.” The words surprised Herman even as they came out of his mouth; but the moment he uttered them, he recognized their truth. He could not simultaneously remain here in this cottage and also stay in his own body: he felt as if his heart might burst out of his chest and scurry bleeding across the floor.

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Hawthorne. “You've only just arrived.”

Herman found that he was bathed in sweat. He felt strangely indignant, though he could find no reason to be. He seemed exotic to himself, and he wanted to be showered in sunlight and covered in dirt and have a bird's nest built in his hair, where newly hatched chicks could screech out the thoughts in his head. He certainly could not sit and make polite conversation over lunch, no matter how much wine they poured, and he knew that the moment he began talking of his review or Hawthorne's writing or God forbid Hawthorne himself, he would sacrifice himself on the altar of indiscretion and love.
Could not Sophia read, even now, his great affection for her husband, written in such large letters across his face?

“You see,” Herman said, “we have just decided to move to the Berkshires, and my wife and I are looking for a house today.”

“Why, how exciting,” said Sophia.

Hawthorne took a great breath and exhaled it completely before offering his hand to Herman, all the while holding his gaze. They shook hands awkwardly at first, out of rhythm with one another, and they kept on shaking until their hands made a few simple oscillations together.

“It's lovely, this area, isn't it?” Nathaniel said. Now he placed his other hand over Herman's and simply held it. Herman glanced sidelong at Sophia, who smiled as if she remarked nothing at all inappropriate.

“Beyond lovely,” Herman said.

“Well, thank you for taking the trouble to come all this way, then, when you are so busy,” said Hawthorne. He finally let go of Herman's hand. “When you have found a place to live and settled yourself, please come back and stay for a day or two. Maybe by then I will have finished reading your books, and we'll have a great deal more to talk about.”

Herman said that he would do so and started for the door. Sophia stopped him and handed him the copy of
The Scarlet Letter
that she had given him before, and Hawthorne made a show of taking the butterfly knot from behind his ear and placing it in the front of the book. The tenderness with which he made this gesture seemed absolutely shameless to Herman, but Sophia seemed barely even to notice it.

Herman was soon back upon Robert's horse and waving goodbye to Una and Julian, who watched him go from their upstairs window.
Nathaniel and Sophia stood by their white picket fence, arm in arm, and watched him go, watched him all the way up the path to the crest of the hill above the lake. As he turned and waved a last goodbye, he saw the children running out of the house to join their parents in front of the cottage, and he heard them yell three “Hip! Hip! Hoorays!” and wave at him in frantic celebration, as if he were a newly christened ship pushing out to sea.

When he was out of sight, he dismounted and sat by the roadside for a long time, light-headedly replaying every moment that had just passed at Hawthorne's cottage. How he wished he hadn't insisted on leaving. Why had he done that? How he wished he could feel the warmth of Hawthorne's smile on his face right then. Could he return now? No, there would be time yet, time to channel all of the indiscreet emotions crashing through his soul, time to become accustomed to being in Hawthorne's presence without the constant airy distress of exaltation. What a buffoon he felt. They seemed so happy together, Nathaniel and Sophia, and yet Hawthorne was probably sitting alone in his parlor at that very moment reading Melville's books. What clearer signal could Hawthorne have given him?

Herman stared up at his cousin's horse in a maelstrom of joy and confusion. Lollie flicked her mane.

Two days later, Herman and Lizzie received a letter from Judge Shaw approving their plan, along with bank drafts in the amount of three thousand dollars as an advance on Lizzie's inheritance.

Herman's first reaction was unadulterated joy: the four winds of the world sounded a melody so sublime in his ears, with harmonies so rich and sonorous, that he knew the angels themselves were singing the hosannas of his love for Hawthorne, and he heard a thousand sprites take up the tune and relay it through the woods and thickets to Lenox. He felt regal and happy. They would soon be living in the Berkshires. Lizzie waved her father's letter giddily at Malcolm, a few feet away in his crib, and Malcolm caught their enthusiasm and waved back. Herman felt acutely aware of his own mortality in a way that made him delirious with joy.

His second reaction was panic. His manuscript was no more commercial or finished than it had been before, he had no other prospects for income, and almost all of the money in his bank account had already been loaned to him by Judge Shaw. He was grateful that the judge felt favorably inclined toward the prospect of having a Berkshires manse in the family, but unless Shaw planned to retire to it in the next six months, Herman would still have to pay its keep.

Herman and Lizzie spent the next few days making inquiries into available properties, following up advertisements in the Pittsfield
Sun
, spreading the word among Robert's neighbors; and Herman kept his mother busy writing letters to the rest of the family to announce the
news of their move. Herman's brother Allan, with whom they shared their apartment in Manhattan, was shocked. In his letters responding to this sudden announcement, he criticized Herman for not informing him before the decision had been made, since the move so clearly affected the entire family; and he worried that he would not be able to afford the apartment on his own income once Herman left. Moreover, they had no plan for dividing the household items they shared, and Allan noted rather caustically that his wife had just had a baby and that they had been counting on their mother's help. Why was Herman upending their family so rashly, and with no increase in his income or prospects? Allan's anger showed even in the slant of his handwriting.

In every conversation with home sellers, lawyers, and agents, Herman negotiated terms as if he were an ancient Persian shah with dynastic treasures to trade. He buried his fears beneath his bluster and made long speeches about the nobility of becoming a gentleman farmer, and he became lighthearted with his entire family and solicitous toward Lizzie; only Robert remained unpersuaded by Herman's optimistic rhetoric, having just failed at exactly the enterprise Herman now proposed for himself. Herman, as usual, failed to notice Robert's sadness and mystification.

After a week of searching, Herman and Lizzie had visited every one of the properties that had been advertised in the most recent
Sun
and a few others that had reached them through the grapevine, and they had found nothing suitable. Most of the houses in their price range were too small or too near the train depot or too decrepit, with structural problems that were all too easy to discern. Their ideal was Broad Hall itself, though Judge Shaw had agreed to advance them only three thousand dollars total, which would be nothing more than a down payment on such an estate—not to mention that they would
have to live off the money that was left over from the purchase at least until Herman finished his book, reducing their options even further. Just when they were expanding their search to nearby towns (Herman's heart thrilled when he saw a notice for a hundred-acre farm in Stockbridge, directly over the hill from Lenox), they unexpectedly discovered that the property immediately adjacent to Broad Hall was for sale.

John Brewster, a doctor whose family had lived next door to the Robert Melvilles for decades, had heard that Herman was in the market for a house. He called on them one evening, just after dinner, as a pewter half-moon was rising in the sky; and he found most of the family enjoying the evening breeze on Broad Hall's front porch.

Dr. Brewster was a wiry, gray-headed man in middle age, with seemingly too little skin for his face—it stretched tightly over his skull, like a mummy's. He wore unfashionably roomy tan riding pants and spoke with a flinty, nasal voice and clipped vowels, so that even his everyday pleasantries sounded unsympathetic. Herman remembered Brewster from his visits to Broad Hall in his youth, when Herman and Robert would skim stones on his pond and catch his chickens for sport. After greeting the Melville family and making polite inquiries about everyone's health, Brewster said, “You must come see my farm again, Herman,” and he took a seat on the porch.

Brewster described the property he had come to offer for sale: the house dated from the Revolutionary War, when it had been the main tavern in Pittsfield. Brewster had commissioned its barn from the Shakers in Hancock; and its one hundred sixty acres of land included forest, streams, grazing pastures, and berry patches, in addition to farmland that produced thirty bushels of oats per acre and forty bushels of beans.

“And you have walked through my property many times, my
dear Herman, and taken a good many fish from my streams in years past, with your uncle and cousin, so you would have the advantage of already knowing the estate.”

“Of course, the house is smaller than Broad Hall by a good deal,” Robert said. “And Broad Hall has two hundred fifty acres.”

“Yes, yes, it's smaller,” Dr. Brewster cackled. “But size isn't everything, whether in houses or in whales.” Brewster winked. “Dr. Holmes told me that you were writing about your whaling adventures, Herman. Well, if it interests you at all, come by tomorrow and I'll show you inside the house—we've expanded the parlor since you've seen it and added a porch—and we'll take a walk around the whole property, so I can show you its legal boundaries.”

Robert said, “I had no idea you were even thinking of selling, John.”

“We've been talking of moving to Boston for some time now, and I'm thinking of teaching a class at Harvard, since Dr. Holmes has recommended me for faculty.” The doctor winked again at Herman and stood up. “To be honest, I wouldn't think of selling it now, Robert, if it weren't a relation of yours, and I've known Herman since he was a boy, so I could feel good about it. The hand of fate sometimes nudges us along.”

“Fate,” Herman said.

“Maybe if we can come to terms quickly, it will serve all of our interests. A bit of serendipity, one might say.”

“Serendipity,” said Herman.

“Yes, some coincidences are more than mere chance.”

“Yes, chance. Coincidence!” Herman leapt to his feet. “Destiny!” He shook the doctor's hand.

“Well, come by around ten o'clock tomorrow, and we'll talk some more.” He walked with a quick, purposeful gait off the porch, around the corner, and back down the road to his farm.

“Be careful, Herman,” said Robert. “Dr. Brewster is a good man
and a family friend, but he's shrewd, and his price often has more to do with what he wants than what things are worth. His property is mostly swamps and forest, you'll remember.”

“Of course,” Herman blustered, thinking, contrarily, that the doctor's estate—which he knew like a half-remembered dream from his boyhood—was so ideal that the price barely weighed into the bargain. “Swamps and forests!”

Robert said, “I sold Broad Hall for six thousand dollars, Herman—a fair price, but lower than I would have accepted under more propitious circumstances—and I want you to remember that figure, because Dr. Brewster's farm is far less desirable. Do you understand?”

“Mortgages,” Herman said, “are the devil's own contracts and must be calculated in souls and not sovereigns, so I will certainly take care.”

As he said this, though, Herman was estimating the number of steps from Dr. Brewster's house to Hawthorne's front porch, and he immediately launched into a rhapsody on the many advantages of Brewster's farm, beginning with the solidity of the home itself and taking in everything from the blackberry brambles to the barn to the streams he had fished as a boy. And it was already a working farm, capable of providing income from crops and animals: the estate could solve many problems at once.

Robert looked at Herman with disgust. “Do you take nothing I say to heart? Brewster sees you as an opportunity for profit! He has never talked of selling before and would not do so now if you didn't seem such an easy mark.”

“Of course, Robert, of course,” Herman said. “I have negotiated with cannibals in foreign tongues and Arabian sea captains and French criminals. I have bartered with demons and angels! I am not about to let a country doctor take advantage of me. But would it not be fanciful to move in next door? Is that stream that runs near the
Methodist church the same one that goes through Dr. Brewster's property?” Robert reluctantly confirmed that it was. “And do you remember that gnarled oak that we used to swing from when we were children, when your father took us hunting? Is that not the very one at the edge of Dr. Brewster's patch today?” Robert nodded. “It will be almost like being a child again.”

“Need I remind you, Herman,” Robert said, “that this very home, whose porch you sit on, is my
actual
childhood home, and that being like a child again is the most painful thing I can imagine right now, when I am about to leave my home forever?”

Robert jumped up from his chair and stormed across the porch, leapt over the steps, and ran down the road toward town.

Herman felt as if a pleasant dream he had been having had unexpectedly turned foul. He looked without recognition at the faces of his family, and then he looked at his own hands, which he held up to his eyes as if they were covered with blood. He got down on one knee, grabbed two fistfuls of his own beard and said, seemingly to the air, “I'm so very sorry. Please forgive me. I've been a fool. I'm sorry!” Then he leapt up and ran into the dark after his cousin.

He sprinted flat out for a quarter of a mile before he spied Robert bent at the waist, breathing heavily, in the coal-dark shadow of a stately elm. The half-moon's dim light only intensified the gloom beneath the boughs of the tree. He rushed up to his cousin and grabbed him by the shoulders, and Robert spun around with his fists up, ready to fight. They panted at each other in pugilistic stances, until Robert saw that Herman was not merely winded but also weeping.

“I'm so sorry, Robert, so so sorry. Please forgive me. I am beside myself!”

The force of Herman's regret demolished Robert's resistance; he even started to wave away the need for an apology, but Herman's
speech had not ended, and Robert was much more surprised by what came next. “I have completely forgotten myself—my mind is so clouded with confusion.” Herman cried harder. “I did not mean to be inconsiderate of your feelings, I never have—I am so sorry—but I have met someone who makes me think that life can be different, and I have not been able to tell a soul. And yet I have not been able to hide my joy! I have been so selfish. You must forgive me. But don't you see?”

Until that moment, even Herman had not known that he'd wanted to confide in his cousin, but, in the sudden awareness of how much pain he was causing Robert, Herman had recognized his own despair at the impossibility of his love for Hawthorne: his true motives, his true joy, had to be veiled in the wretchedness of secrecy, when all he really wanted to do was shout his love to the heavens. He suddenly thought that, if Robert only knew the truth, he would understand and forgive his thoughtlessness, and then they would both be relieved of the exaggerated and unnecessary disquiet that Herman's otherwise inexplicable emotions had created all around him. Perhaps Robert would even be happy for him.

“What do you mean, met someone?” Robert said. “Who?”

“You and I have known one another since childhood, have we not?”

“Of course.”

“Then I trust you to know what I mean when I say I've found a person who makes the world seem new, who truly understands me. That person lives here in the Berkshires, and that's why I need to be here. That's why. I have the feeling that I have not yet begun to unfold the inner flower of myself, but I believe I can do so now, with the help of this special person.”

“The inner flower of yourself? Are you mad?”

“No. I am completely sane for the first time in my life.”

“You're having an affair!”

“No!” said Herman. In the wan moonlight, he looked deeply into Robert's eyes and saw the dark kaleidoscope of his mind combining and recombining thoughts into colorfully useless patterns.

“Who is it? Does Lizzie know?”

“I haven't been able to tell a soul until now. I thought I would open my heart to you, so you would know why I've been so thoughtless. Selfish and thoughtless! Wrapped up in my own feelings. I'm very sorry. I wanted you to know the reason.” Herman's pleading face betrayed equal parts faith and fear, like a whipped dog that still hopes for love.

“And the reason is that you've met someone and you're having an affair?”

Hearing Robert's disgusted, judgmental tone, Herman realized with dismay that a confession would not do, that he had been rash even to broach the truth. No, Robert did not understand him at all. Robert could never understand him. If he confessed his love for Hawthorne, Robert might even have him arrested. “No, I'm not having an affair! I've met someone who can help me, I believe, with my new book.”

“What in the name of all that's holy are you talking about?”

Herman could not hide his disappointment in Robert for not discerning his true meaning, for not letting him unburden his secret. “I've met a new editor. A mentor.”

“And that's why you're moving your family to Pittsfield and taking loans you cannot possibly repay?”