The Whale (16 page)

After a moment in which Hawthorne let him stand helplessly in front of him, weeping, he embraced Herman, who sobbed all the more and went limp in Hawthorne's arms. He did the best he could to quickly snuffle back his tears and regain his composure, while Hawthorne continued rubbing his back. When he had finally stopped crying, Herman felt himself becoming aroused, and he gasped and backed out of Nathaniel's arms.

They heard little footsteps on the landing above. “Daddy,” Una called. “Mama wants you to bring her some water.”

“Thank you,” said Herman, clutching Hawthorne's books to his chest. “I will read them straightaway.” They walked together to the
front door. “Please give my best wishes to Sophia, and congratulations on the newest Hawthorne on the way.”

Hawthorne opened the door, and Herman stepped outside. “Thank you again, Melville, and Merry Christmas.”

“Yes,” Herman agreed. “Merry Christmas.”

Hawthorne closed the door. Once again, Herman stood alone in the snow. He looked up at the second level of the cottage, where the pregnant Sophia Hawthorne lay infirm. Nathaniel was finishing books and making children and doting on his wife, while the only thing Herman had been doing all autumn was alienating his own wife and family and fruitlessly churning at his own novel, which was long overdue and still far from its end. He wiped the tears from his eyes and started the long, cold trek home.

Fierce blizzards continued through New Year's Day and beyond, trapping Lizzie and Malcolm in Boston, so that they could not have come home even if they had wanted to; and the snow effectively imprisoned the rest of the Melvilles at Arrowhead. By the end of the first week of January, with the weather so bad that they dared not even go into Pittsfield, and the stores in Pittsfield likely empty anyway, they had consumed all of the food in Arrowhead's larder but some salted beef and jars of preserves. Except for the few eggs that Herman's pampered chickens continued to lay, their meals reminded Herman of the fare aboard a whaler. The ladies began desperately to miss Lizzie and Malcolm at table, since their presence provided a buttress against Herman's baleful, disparaging silence and his nameless gloom about
The Whale
; and every negative feeling seemed magnified by the fact that they could not move about freely because of the incessant snow.

Now that Herman knew that Hawthorne had industriously started and finished an entire novel in the time that Herman had wasted, he felt a pressure so great that he could barely breathe when he was not sitting at his desk: pressure to write a
better
novel than Hawthorne had written, to earn enough money to pay back his debts, to impress Hawthorne and communicate his love for him in a way that Hawthorne would understand. And now came an entirely new feeling: as he poured all of his longing for Hawthorne into
Captain Ahab's mad quest for Moby Dick, he found himself gripped by an obsession even grander and crazier than Ahab's—to turn his novel into an epic that revealed the truth of God himself, to give shape to the impossible and therefore reveal its possibilities. Hawthorne was always writing allegories of good and evil, observing the evil closely in order to reaffirm the good; and so Herman now conceived an answer to Hawthorne's work and to the whole Christian tradition that had caused Hawthorne to deny his love for Melville—he would write an allegory to show that God was, in reality, on the side of evil. He saw clearly, through Ahab's eyes, that the vengeful and capricious God of the Israelites was a deep Cosmic Shadow that had created light only in order to see its own darkness. He began to feel his love for Hawthorne as a hatred of God, because that supposedly loving God had made Herman capable of an all-consuming love that was forbidden and reviled, a love whose very nature condemned him to hell.

Dwelling on Hawthorne's indecipherable intentions became as infuriating to Herman as dwelling on the whereabouts of Moby Dick proved to Ahab. He worked tirelessly, producing page after page of increasingly livid and abstract prose—even simple digressions into the plain facts of whaling, such as the average amount of hard cheese stocked in Dutch whalers, took on mythic and philosophical dimensions—and all the while, with every word he wrote, he imagined Hawthorne reading the book and feeling the immensity of Herman's love. He grew weary of his yearning, yet his only response, as Ahab's, was to sail the watery globe of his mind, always just skimming the surface of meaning but with eyes peeled toward the depths.

Herman's mind became paradoxical to itself: on the one hand filled with boundless love, through which he felt a sublime benevolence
toward the whole world and everything in it; and on the other hand consumed by the violence of loneliness and longing.

 • • • 

When the snowstorms finally subsided long enough for crews to clear the roads, Lizzie and Malcolm returned, and Melville's sisters threw an impromptu party, splurging at Farley's Dry Goods on enough sugar to make a massive gingerbread cake. Even Maria was relieved to have Lizzie back, to break the spell of Herman's increasingly blustery private misery; and the ladies passed Malcolm happily from bosom to bosom all day long. Herman surprised himself by melting into Lizzie's loving embrace when she arrived—he was genuinely happy to see her after such a long absence—and he cried sentimentally when Malcolm called him Papa and yanked his beard; but this unexpected wave of happiness crashed almost immediately into Ahab's monomania, and Herman went back to his desk. On the very evening they arrived, the snow returned heavier than ever before—almost as soon as Lizzie had set down her trunk—trapping everyone in their cramped rooms once again.

The harpoon that hung on iron hooks over the fireplace in his study now became a black magic talisman for calling forth devils: Herman paced back and forth, using the harpoon for a walking stick, so that, with every other step, he made a jarring thud into the ceiling of the parlor below, exactly as if he were walking on a peg leg. He recited improvised soliloquies in a bombastic manner; and, for the rest of the household, traversing the landing outside the study became like passing the stage door of a theater, complete with leaps, groans, and growls from inside. Herman shouted things like “tempered in blood and tempered in lightning” and “avast, I say, with your handspikes” and much longer though less comprehensible mutterings in a strange diction, punctuated by the thump of the harpoon; and then silence reigned again for hours. Occasionally, he emerged with great
urgency and said things like, “What is the Minotaur's riddle,” upon which he would disappear into his study again and pace—tock-thump-tock-thump-tock-thump-pivot and then back across the study again, and again, and again, polka-dotting divots into the center of the room. His baritone would sometimes fill the house with whaling songs, “Ho the fair wind / ho-ye, cheerly, men!” and his harpoony pacing would briefly take on the rhythm of the shanty, followed by more hours of silence.

Herman worried that he might be flattening the round earth of his imagination and sailing right off the edge.

 • • • 

The heavy snows made it impossible for Helen, Augusta, and Lizzie to make neighborly house calls or walk into Pittsfield, and no one called at Arrowhead, either; so they began gathering around the dining table in the afternoons to make fair copies for the printer. It was irksome drudgery, made worse by the fact that Herman insisted on inserting the final punctuation marks himself, meaning they had to guess exactly where to leave spaces in his often long, convoluted sentences.

Herman's cramped writing was all but illegible at the best of times, and now, in his haste, he often smudged and streaked the indigo ink, and his ideas became ever more obscure little cryptograms, all the more puzzling because of his book's bizarre vocabulary. No one relished asking the gloomy, agitated mariner for clarifications of spelling or meaning, so they passed around the most perplexing passages and made guesses.

Helen held up a page and pointed to a tiny footnote jotted below a long, blotchy line. “Wooden pigeon?”

“Piggin,” said Augusta. “The clue is bailer.” She pointed to the word “bailer” in the next clause of Melville's sentence and silently read the rest of the footnote. “Yes, he's talking about bailing water.
Remember grandmother used to say piggin for pail? Bigger than a noggin but smaller than a pitcher. It's an old Dutch word, I think.”

“Scottish,” Lizzie said. “My grandmother called a milk pail a piggin.”

They continued working in silence. Mary the maid passed from the parlor through the kitchen and out the back door, and a frigid wind ruffled their papers.

Lizzie said, “Did you know that Herman turned down a commission to write an article for
Holden's Dollar Magazine
? The Duyckinck brothers are taking it over in the spring, and they were going to print a daguerreotype of his face above the article.”

“I don't think he cares for such innovations,” said Helen. “Or for the magazines themselves, if truth be told.”

“It would have paid actual money,” said Lizzie.

“I sometimes think he doesn't care for that, either.”

Augusta held up the page she was working on. “Gambage?”

Helen squinted and mumbled the passage aloud. She shook her head no. Lizzie took the page and held it first toward the window and the pale afternoon sunlight and then toward the bright, warm flames of the fire in the hearth.

“G-a-m-b-o-g-e, I think,” said Lizzie. She handed the page to Helen.

“Gamboge ghost of a Fedallah,” Helen read aloud, raised her eyebrows and shrugged. She glanced over the rest of the page, and read again: “Doesn't the devil live for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a-wearing mourning clothes for the devil? And if the devil has a latch-key to get into the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can crawl into a port-hole?” Her eyes met Augusta's and Lizzie's in turn. “Herman is so determined to be profound that I think he outsmarts himself.” She handed the page back to Augusta. “What is a Fedallah?”

“The question is, who is Fedallah?”

They heard a series of loud thumps and bangs from Herman's study. His footsteps stomped back and forth across the room, rattling cups on the mantel shelf above the kitchen hearth; then all was silent.

“It might be more peaceful to live with a gamboge ghost,” said Augusta.

“Perhaps a gamboge ghost is a kind of poltergeist,” Helen said mirthlessly. “Shall we look it up?”

They stared at one another for a long moment, and then Helen turned toward the dictionary on its stand in the corner but did not get up. Augusta sighed. Each went back to copying her separate pages. The crackling of the fire and the scratching of their quills against parchment lent a pleasant, percussive rhythm to their work.

Half an hour passed before Augusta said, “Do you think anyone will read this book?”

“That is blasphemy,” said Lizzie. “I fervently hope so.”

“We have been copying out his novels longer than you have, Lizzie,” Helen said. “You have the zeal of a convert. We have the doubts of the clergy.”

“If this book doesn't sell, we shall all wear the rags of supplicants.”

They heard banging once again from Herman's study, and then a long, violent clattering, as if a hailstorm had erupted upstairs and marbles of ice were pelting the floors. In the parlor, Malcolm, who had been sleeping soundly, stirred and started to cry; and as the inexplicable pelting faded away, they heard Herman racing down the stairs.

He rushed past Malcolm and into the kitchen, his red face drenched in sweat, his shirt soaked and disheveled. The frightened look in Herman's wild eyes, the cascading tangles of hair clinging to his forehead, and his shortness of breath spoke of a tropical fever.

“Who has the
Rose-bud
?” Herman said.

“The what?”

“The
Pequod
meets the
Rose-bud
. Two ships!”

The three women leafed through their stacks of pages, while Herman danced in place and shook his hands with impatience. Herman's mother appeared in the doorway behind him, cradling Malcolm in her arms. Finally, Augusta said, “Here,” and held up a sheaf.

Herman rushed to her side and pawed the pages until he had found the ones he wanted. He turned to run back upstairs and ran smack into his mother, leaving them both momentarily stunned and Malcolm the worse for the collision. Malcolm cried harder. Maria shushed him.

“Easy now,” said Maria. “Easy.” She gave Herman the evil eye. “Both of you—easy!”

“I have no time, Mother!”

“There is nothing but time, Herman,” said Maria.

Herman came up short and considered this earnestly. Nothing but time? After a long moment of puffing, in which his breathing finally grew calmer, he said, “There is space.”

“Herman,” Helen said. “What is a Fedallah?”

He turned to face her. He now seemed confused rather than panicked. “It means favored by God. He's a Parsee.”

“A what?”

“A Zoroastrian.”

“What does that mean?”

“A Manichean sort of prophet.”

“I don't know what that means.”

“A gnostic. Persian.” Herman took a sharp breath in and came out of his trance. He looked at the pages in his hands. “It doesn't matter.” He shoved past his mother and nearly sprinted through the parlor.

“Your papa doesn't mean it,” Maria said to Malcolm. They heard Herman take the steps up to his study two at a time. Lizzie got up and took her inconsolable infant from her mother-in-law and sat back down at the table. Helen and Augusta exchanged dark, rankled looks.

Helen said, “I wish I could get a proper job.”

“As what?” Augusta asked.

Helen thought about it for a moment. “I see your point.”

The kitchen door swung open, and Mary came in with an armful of firewood. Both Mary and the wood were wet with melting snow, and Mary's hands were bright red with cold. She set the wood in a basket next to the hearth and looked quizzically at the screaming baby.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

From upstairs, they heard tock-thump-tock-thump-tock-thump. Lizzie felt as if she should write to her father, ask for the rest of her inheritance, and throw it directly into the fire.