The Whale (10 page)

Hawthorne was walking several paces ahead of Herman, slowly and deliberately hacking a path through the tangled undergrowth along Lake Mahkeenac, half a mile or so from his cottage. Here, the buckthorns and hemlock trees grew right down to the water's edge, and, in their shade, mountain laurels and azaleas created a dense, prickly thicket; on such an unbearably warm, late summer day, the canopy of leaves overhead provided shelter from the sun but no respite from the heat, which lacquered the men's shirts to their bodies.

“You know how it is, Melville, when you create a dramatic story out of historical events that everyone thinks they already understand. People are likely to mistake fancy for fact in your story, and fact for fancy, if facts can be discerned at all anymore. The truth, in a fictional work based upon real incidents, speaks as much to the heart as to the head.”

As they progressed around the lake, they walked more and more in the shallows of the water, their pantlegs rolled up to let the gentle waves baptize their knees. Herman felt like a young man again, watching the sun sparkle off the ripples across the water, while ducks dived for fish and herons circled the pine-choked island in the distance. Hawthorne had spotted a distant beaver freighting twigs across the lake, though Herman could not confirm the sighting with his aching eyes, which were strained past the dazzling point by his all-night rereading of
The Scarlet Letter
, which they were now discussing.

“While it's true,” Nathaniel continued, “that my own great-great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, appears often in the court records of old Salem—even personally whipping a woman named Hester, for adultery, in 1668—these facts are not the most important real-life analogs to my tale. They have little relevance to the emotions or truth of
The Scarlet Letter
. Yes, my family was personally involved in the fornication trials during the early settlement of Salem, but what of it? I was not writing history, and the historical truth of William Hathorne did not interest me foremost.”

“Are you saying ‘Hathorne'? Pronounced like ‘math,' instead of like ‘awe'?”

“I added the ‘w' later, to distance the pronunciation of my own name from that of my ancestors.”

“That is a curious coincidence,” Herman said. “I added the final ‘e' to my name, because I thought it looked better when written. My ancestors, and most of my living relations, are Melvill, without the silent ‘e.' Strange what a difference a single letter may make.”

“Especially when that letter is scarlet,” said Hawthorne, with a wry glance. “It can also make a tremendous difference which of the letters turns out to be scarlet, if you follow my meaning.”

Herman thought of the ‘w' in Hawthorne's name and his own silent ‘e,' turning each scarlet with various potential sins; but he could think of no great crime against God or man that began with either letter. “Your own scarlet A in the book stands for adultery, of course,” Herman said. “Though I could not help noticing that you never actually name that sin in the pages of your romance.”

Herman saw a patch of wild strawberries among the underbrush, plucked an especially ripe one, and popped it into his mouth, stem and all; then he found a juicy-looking one for Hawthorne. He picked it and then caught up to the older author, tapped him on the shoulder,
and handed it to him; and he watched with great relish as Hawthorne also ate the entire strawberry, in one bite.

“Many sexual sins were committed in the early days of New England,” Hawthorne said. “All of them were well enough known to be shortened to their initials. The letter A was the most popular, or sometimes the magistrates sewed AD onto the clothes of sinners. They distinguished between adultery and fornication, though they did not use the letter F. A scarlet F would have been too close to another F word that also means fornication—that old Anglo-Saxon word that the Puritans could not even suggest without imperiling their souls. They also found a fair number of occasions to use R, I, and S.”

“An alphabet of sin!” Herman exclaimed. He leafed through his moral encyclopedia and quickly located “incest” for the letter I and “rape” for R. He was stumped for the moment about S. “Did you find, in your researches, that Puritans were concerned with sexual sins primarily?”

“No, but I would say that the Puritans punished sexual sins most viciously because sins of the flesh demonstrate the animal nature in man. They wished to behave as if they were angelic spirits who merely had the misfortune of inhabiting the earth, temporarily: taking the Lord's name in vain is rather an easy sin for an angel to resist, even if he's trapped in human form, and the punishment was correspondingly light; but having relations with your neighbor's lonely wife meant that you were more body than angel, and the body could not be admitted into the community of angels.”

They emerged from the woods onto a pebbly beach free of vegetation, and Hawthorne indicated a log at the edge of the water, where they sat down. They pushed their rolled-up trousers all the way above their knees and lolled their feet in the cool water.

This excursion was their first meeting since Herman had moved to Arrowhead. He had packed the things from his family's Manhattan
apartment and shipped them to Pittsfield and then had immediately written to Hawthorne to arrange a visit; his family's belongings were still in crates in his new home, and even now, while he lazed by this lake with Hawthorne, Lizzie and Maria, and Herman's sisters Helen and Augusta, and two servant girls were hard at work at their new estate unpacking trunks. Herman had barely even been inside his new home yet, so eager had he been to see Hawthorne again.

Herman felt that, though he and Hawthorne had not openly declared any deeper sentiment, they had certainly offered each other tokens of admiration unmistakable in their meaning; and though even their warmest embraces might have passed as the affectionate touches of friends, Hawthorne could not fail to interpret Herman's move to Pittsfield as anything but an act of devotion. And now Hawthorne had invited him out here to the lake, alone, in order to discuss “a matter of some urgency,” as Hawthorne had put it in his note.

As Herman stared at Hawthorne's lush, silken brown hair—like a Renaissance Apollo's, crowned with highlights of sun-burnished gold—a laurel leaf fluttered down from on high and caught just above his right ear. Herman reached out to pluck the leaf away but found himself instead combing Hawthorne's hair with his fingers; and then, when the leaf had dropped to the ground, he continued to run his fingers through Hawthorne's hair, first somewhat timidly and then, when Hawthorne did not stop him, with more urgency, petting his temple with the knuckle of his index finger, gently caressing some long, loose strands into place behind his ear. He felt the dampness of his beloved's perspiration, and he let his fingertips linger for a moment on Hawthorne's neck, where he felt his pulse quicken against his fingers. He looked into Hawthorne's eyes, which revealed a helplessness so deeply sad and wild that Herman caught his breath and drew his hand away.

Hawthorne took Herman's hand and guided it back to Melville's
own knee, and patted it, as he might a child's; then he took a slow, deep breath and turned away, picked up a flat stone, and skipped it across the water. It skidded three times before sinking below the surface, and when he looked back at Herman again, he seemed more composed.

“The most serious problem with sexual sins,” Hawthorne said, “is not the fornication but the betrayal of trust that those sins represent. For instance, adultery is only incidentally sexual. It is betrayal
through
a sexual act.”

“Perhaps,” said Herman. “But the point seems moot, since one cannot commit adultery without sex. Or at least some act of physical intimacy.”

“I'm not convinced that's true,” Hawthorne said. “Adultery occurs whenever a spouse develops an admiration for someone else, and attraction exists, and the admirer and the object of admiration become intimates. It is an emotional sin. Adultery might occur in the heart alone.”

“I find it difficult to believe that the Puritans would brand people, or lash them with whips, or put them in stockades, or exile them altogether merely for having feelings. How could a society that punishes every potentially sinful thought even function, and how would such thoughts and feelings come to light, except through actions?”

A pair of quacking ducks spied them and swam near. Upon ascertaining that the two authors had no morsels for them, they quacked off again toward the center of the lake. Herman ran his fingertips lightly along the edge of Hawthorne's shoulder blade, a reserved caress that Hawthorne shrugged away. It finally occurred to Herman that the Puritans' scarlet S stood for sodomy.

He said, “If I were a Puritan and I desired—merely desired, say, as a passing fancy or an unbidden dream—to have intimate relations
with a man, would I deserve an S? Would the Puritan fathers hand out scarlet A's to all the women who combed each other's hair and took a small measure of secret comfort from doing so?” Hawthorne would no longer meet his eyes, so Herman stared at the surface of the lake, as if it were a magic looking glass that might show him the darkest depths of Hawthorne's soul. “I think your standard of purity might confound even a Puritan.”

“I am trying to tell you something serious, Melville!” He lifted his legs and kicked both heels into the lake, splashing water over both of them. “The truth of
The Scarlet Letter
is my own truth—it is closely entwined with the historical facts of my ancestors, yes, and their interpretations of sin, but it touches me personally in ways that are difficult to explain, and that are not obvious, that are not
factual
, and I am trying to make you understand—but I am not talking about Puritans.”

“Then let us stop speaking of them. Tell me plainly what you mean.”

“I am talking about you and me. I am saying that, right now, sitting by this lake together, we both would earn our scarlet A's. And deserve them.”

“But we're both men.”

Hawthorne smiled mirthlessly. “That is not lost on me.”

“Adultery is a crime against
marriage
, the union of a man and a woman. How could one man's admiration of another threaten a marriage?”

“That is a dangerous and decadent attitude, Melville. And I cannot believe that even you subscribe to the opinion you've just stated.”

“We are not speaking of the vote, Nathaniel! We are talking about intimate relations, where men and women most certainly are different.”

Herman tried to understand how they had arrived at this impasse. Hawthorne had just said that he considered them to be having an adulterous affair! And yet, they had barely shared even a
single intimate caress. Even if relations between men and men were to be judged by the same moral standards as those between men and women, nothing improper had happened whatsoever.

“How could anyone consider us adulterers, Nathaniel? What have we done but exchange a few letters?”

Hawthorne blushed. “That is not all that we have done.” He seemed to be weighing something imponderable in his mind, and Herman flushed with the pounding of his own heart.

“
What
have we done?”

Hawthorne turned to study Herman's face, and he felt as if Hawthorne were trying to judge the effect of some revelation, a secret that he cherished but feared sullying through its confession. Tell me you love me, Herman thought. Is that what we have done—fallen in love? Just say it plainly.

“I want to tell you something about my wife,” said Hawthorne.

“Your wife?” Herman let his head fall back. He stared up at the streaky clouds spoiling the heavens. “Your wife.” He stood up and walked several steps into the lake, cupped his hand in the water, and splashed his face and beard and neck. He then shook his head like a golden retriever, spraying droplets of water out in every direction. “Very well,” he said. “Your wife.”

“There's no need for theatrics, Melville. I am trying to be serious.”

The feeling of youthful optimism that had invigorated Herman on their walk out to the lake vanished, and he suddenly felt as old as the stones beneath his feet. Hawthorne was about to end their friendship: he could feel it coming as clearly as a shipboard rat predicts a typhoon.

Hawthorne said, “Years ago, when I first began to write stories for the magazines, a woman named Elizabeth Peabody noticed my work and began writing me letters. She found something enigmatic in my stories, and she encouraged me to develop certain themes. I
often found her suggestions quite brilliant. I began responding to her letters, and she drew me out into a larger conversation about life and literature.

“I was quite reclusive then, Herman. I know that I have the reputation of a recluse still, but I am a veritable Ottoman sultan compared to how I used to live. My mother and two sisters and I lived together in the same house, and we survived quite poorly on a meager income from my mother's Manning relations—so I was not obliged to work, but we had no money for diversions. Except for long walks with my sister Ebe, I simply remained in the house, reading books and writing stories all day; and my mother devoted herself eternally to her grief over my father's death. It was a somber household.

“It came to pass one day that Elizabeth Peabody invited me to her house for tea. We lived a very short distance from one another, so it would have been most convenient, on any one of my walks, simply to stop in and say hello, but I was, as I say, practically a hermit, and after many refusals and invented excuses not to go, Elizabeth finally asked my sister to tea instead, and Ebe persuaded me to go along with her. That is how I met Sophia—Elizabeth Peabody's sister. Sophia was an invalid at the time. That is why I'm telling you this story.”