The Whale (19 page)

“I am not as steady as I may appear,” said Hawthorne. “And things do change. Since last summer, I have started and finished writing a new book, and that always alters me. Perhaps I have simply gained a new sympathy for your position, upon long reflection. I have thought of you a great deal. Perhaps,” Hawthorne swallowed hard. “Perhaps, I have just missed you more than I thought myself capable, these last few months.”

Herman's heart beat wildly, but he managed, like a ship's captain standing steady in a gale, to speak calmly. Nathaniel's openness allowed Herman, for the first time, really, to consider the situation from his friend's point of view. “Admitting a fondness for another man would sully you and mark you, just like Hester Prynne was marked.”

“Worse than Hester. I don't know how it is aboard a ship in the
South Seas, but you know as well as I do that they don't merely brand you with a scarlet S for such an offense in New England—they beat you bloody, or tar and feather you, or hang you. You might rather sell yourself into slavery than admit you love another man.”

“But you don't have to admit it to anyone but me!”

“Melville, I am not trying to be merely respectable—but to be honorable. Not just for my own sake but for Sophia's, as well—and yours. We have been through this already, have we not? Don't let my sympathy now persuade you that I am any less committed to my wife than I was before. I want to make room in my heart for your friendship, and I believe a friendly affection for you can coexist with an honorable and true love for my wife; but please do not press the issue. Must I recant every honest thing I say because of your insistence on the impossible?”

They heard Una shouting orders outside, directing some sort of game, and the women were laughing along with her. They were having such joyous fun in the snow! Herman felt chagrined: he knew that his work and his moods tormented his sisters and his mother and his wife, and he wished he could find some peace with them, or at least provide some peace
for
them. But he was not convinced, as Hawthorne seemed to be, that happiness in such a life could really exist, either for him or his family.

“Very well,” said Herman. “Thank you for the book. And thank you for your loving words. I will treasure them both.”

He hesitated for some moments before yielding to the temptation to walk over to Hawthorne and take him in his arms. Nathaniel embraced him warmly, and Herman was careful not to press too firmly against him. He recorded every impression, every feeling, every smell, so that he could return to them later; until, finally, Hawthorne broke their embrace and stepped away.

A knock came at the door. “
Philios
, then,” Herman announced. “Friendship.” Una pushed the barn door open.

“Come play, Papa, come play!”

They followed Una outside, where the snow-dusted women stood beckoning and calling them. Una dragged her father by the hand until he gave in and ran to join them. Una threw herself into Helen's arms, and Helen lifted the girl up and awkwardly installed her on top of a snowman.

Herman met Lizzie's happy gaze, and her face reminded him of the days when they had first been courting, when she had been vivacious and not yet resigned to eternal days of idle unhappiness. The sadness and regret in Herman's heart burbled up into his throat, and he thought he might cry again. Oh, why can't I be happy? he thought. Lizzie waved to him, inviting him to join in the fun. A look of hope appeared on her face. Herman sprinted out to join them, as well.

 • • • 

After lunch, Hawthorne announced that they were off, back to Lenox. Over Melville's objections, Hawthorne said, “It's but a short tramp into Pittsfield, and we'll catch the evening train home. This much snow will not bother a steam engine.”

“I thought you disliked trains,” said Herman.

“I promised Sophia that I would not be away long.”

The Melvilles expressed their concern for Hawthorne's wife, whose generally sickly condition and particular difficulties with pregnancy Hawthorne had confided to them in surprising detail over lunch. As they parted on the doorstep, Herman clasped Hawthorne's hand between both of his and fixed him with a look as full of meaning and affection as he could make it. “Thank you for the book,” he said. “It means the world to me.”

“I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have,” Hawthorne said warmly.

He and Una walked as briskly as they could through the snow toward Pittsfield. The Melvilles watched them until they were completely out of sight.

“What a lovely man and a delightful little girl,” said Herman's mother.

Lizzie put her arm through Herman's and kissed his cheek affectionately, and they all returned to the parlor, which seemed suddenly quite empty. Herman and Lizzie took chairs close to the fireplace, holding hands and staring into the flames.

“Wouldn't it be nice to have a little girl around the house?” said Lizzie dreamily.

“Perhaps it would,” Herman conceded.

By early April, it was clear that Lizzie was pregnant again and had been for several months, a condition that lightened her day-to-day mood considerably, in spite of her morning sickness. One evening, as she and Herman were climbing into bed, Lizzie said, “If it's a girl, I would like to name her Hope.”

“After your stepmother.”

“Yes, but also because that's how I feel when I think of her. Hopeful.”

“A nice idea.” He blew out the bedside candle and pulled the blanket around his shoulders. Lizzie snuggled into him.

“Herman, when we were first married, we talked of having a large family. Is that still what you want?”

Herman grunted. “I suppose.”

“Meaning that you have reconsidered some part of it?”

“I had not envisioned having my sisters with us for so long.” He yawned. “They might live with us indefinitely, so our household . . . ”

“But our own family,” Lizzie persisted. “I mean, Malcolm, and the new baby.”

“Yes?”

The night was unusually warm for April. They heard the chirping of katydids below their window.

“I would still like to have a much larger family,” Lizzie said, “but I wonder if it would satisfy you. Honestly, you hardly seem interested
in any of us anymore. I sometimes feel that you don't even know Malcolm exists.”

“Who could be in our house for an hour and not know Malcolm exists?”

“He should not always be so unhappy. None of us should.”

“Please say plainly what you are thinking, Lizzie.”

She sat up. When her dark silhouette momentarily blackened the moonlit window, Herman thought of a dolphin arcing out of a silvered sea. “What do you love about Malcolm?” she said.

He considered his son. Malcolm cried constantly and still walked as if he had just taken his first step. He was sickly and lacked curiosity. What does one love about a two-year-old, Herman thought.

“He is my son,” he finally said.

His eyes lost focus in the darkness. He became transfixed by the sky behind Lizzie's head, the crystalline looking glass of God that reflected only emptiness.

Lizzie took a deep breath. “Herman, what do you love about
me
?”

This question snapped Herman out of his exhausted reverie, and he sat bolt upright. At first, he saw an army of angry Lizzies behind his wife's eyes, marching toward him, and he scurried behind his battlements. His mind exploded in a volley of blank cannon shots, loud explosions that launched no artillery, for he had no ready answer; but when this first moment of habitual defensiveness passed, he saw that Lizzie was not attacking him but rather seriously asking about the state of their marriage, from a position of practicality and vulnerability, and he pondered the question carefully.

He remembered the early days of their courtship, when they had sat in the Shaw parlor with the whole family, and Lizzie had often asked the most insightful questions and made the most telling remarks; and though she had objected strongly in the beginning to his irreverence, she had ultimately come to accept it as a genuine
expression of his desire for the truth. He thought of her long-suffering patience with his mother and her utter dedication to Malcolm during the many nights when he himself could no longer endure his son's crying. He remembered the countless hours she had spent hunched over his manuscripts, copying his impossible script, which she did more out of love than duty. She was an admirable person, he thought, but his feelings did not amount to love in the way she meant it.

He wished that she could be happy with their marriage as a fond social compact; or that he could summon the kind of love she desired; or he wished that they could speak of the differences in their expectations honestly. But how could he honestly tell her that what he truly wanted was a man who wrote dark, quixotic fiction full of allusions to a forbidden inner life that no one else understood?

“You have a superior mind,” he finally said. “You are sympathetic, to a fault. You put up with my mother.”

“I knew your mother would find a way into it,” she said. “Though you are right that my tolerance of her is admirable. What else?”

“You have a fine sense of humor.”

“One would have to have a sense of humor to be with you.”

“I should have said an ironic one.”

Herman lay back again, and Lizzie snuggled in against him. She exerted a little pressure with her pelvis, which forced the growing life in her belly against Herman's side. Herman drifted in and out of sleep, while Lizzie stroked his cheeks and neck.

“You do still love me, don't you?” she asked.

“Of course,” he muttered.

“Not of course. Sometimes I can't tell. I would not want to have this baby with a father who didn't love its mother.”

“You may rest assured,” Herman said, more petulantly than he intended.

“I don't want you to feel only a sense of duty to me. I can always return to my father's house.”

He groped for Lizzie's hand under the covers. “Please don't talk nonsense when we're falling asleep. In the day, nonsense is the only kind of sense, but at night it summons demons.” He kissed her forehead.

“Why don't you ask me, Herman?”

“Ask you what?”

“Why don't you ask me what I love about you? Or do you take it so much for granted that I do?”

He woke up a little yet again, alarmed. “No. What do you love about me?”

“You are contemptuous and patronizing and ill-mannered, and you think you are better than everyone else.”

“I see. You have extremely low standards.”

“I have not said all. You are not always entirely honest, especially with yourself. Nor sensible. Nor kind. But you see things about me that no one else sees, when you bother to pay attention, and about the world, which is even more important. I know something about you that you don't know about yourself—that you could never love a single, individual person even if you wanted to, but that somehow you love all of creation in a way that is far beyond what most of us conceive as love, far beyond what they teach us from the pulpit. You are so very far from perfect, but when it comes to the world and to me, you will only accept absolute love, and that's why you always feel unsatisfied, most of all with yourself, because you are incapable of the thing you desire most. That is why it isn't easy to love you, but also why I do.”

He had never heard the term absolute love before. Unconditional love, yes—an equally impossible concept—but absolute? He turned it over in his mind: it seemed more aggressive than grace, more demanding than acceptance, the complete opposite of resignation,
something austere and grand—even literary. He kissed Lizzie on the cheek and felt a great deal more love for her than he had in a long time, an inkling that, perhaps, he was not quite as alone as he had imagined.

Lizzie said, “You know that we're running out of money again, don't you?”

Herman sighed heavily. “I will handle it.”

“How? My father won't lend us anymore.”

“I will write to the Harpers and ask them for an advance on
The Whale
.”

“The last time you wrote them, they would not give you eight dollars' worth of credit. What makes you think they will advance you money now?”

“The quality of the work itself. I will send them some chapters.”

“The Harpers don't care a fig for quality. They will print the most scandalous and indecent books if they think they will sell.”

Herman was chagrined that Lizzie had called his bluff, but she was right. The Harpers' first big success,
Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures
, told the supposedly true story of a nun forced to satisfy the sexual needs of priests at a convent hospital in Montreal. The book featured all the hallmarks of a gothic novel, down to secret tunnels and catacombs beneath the convent where the priests committed their unspeakable crimes, and it had sold more copies every year since it had appeared in 1836. Maria Monk had been exposed as a fraud several years after the book had been published—even her pen name was nothing more than a punning satire—and she had recently died in prison in New York City, where she had been jailed for thievery and prostitution; but the Harpers continued to print and sell the book exactly as it had originally been written, with no retractions or explanations. It was just one of many such salacious, wildly popular books in the Harpers' warehouse, and Herman could not imagine that an
all-male whaling voyage would inspire Fletcher Harper's confidence of similar success.

In fact, Herman had no clear idea where the money for his household's survival would come from. As Lizzie had said, Judge Shaw would not lend him more. Perhaps Richard Bentley—with whom, after all, Melville had an agreement for the publication of
The Whale
in London and who was the only person in the world really waiting for it—perhaps Bentley might advance him a few hundred pounds, especially if Herman granted him the international copyright he was always agitating for; but then, if word got out that Bentley held the copyright, the American publishers would just steal it and print their own editions, and Herman would never see another penny. He searched his mental archive for friends of his father in New York who might still think fondly of him, and he wondered for the hundredth time if any of his relatives in Lansingburgh might have the funds to see him through to the end of this novel—but soon he would have to stop wondering and actually ask. What will happen, he thought, if there is no money at all? With a horrified shudder, he imagined losing Arrowhead and having to beg Allan to accept his family into Allan's new apartment in Manhattan, after Melville had moved out so ignominiously last summer. Or could they possibly beg the Morewoods for a room at Broad Hall? He wondered momentarily how much Ticknor and Fields had paid Hawthorne for
The House of the Seven Gables
. But to ask for a loan from Hawthorne? It would be worse than death.

“I will find the money,” he said. He had spent the day writing and the evening planting beets and radishes in the garden behind the barn, and now he could stave off sleep no longer. “Please, can we talk about this in the morning? And rest assured that I love you. And we can name our child Hope, if it's a girl. Good night.”

“Good night,” Lizzie said. “Hope is the best name in the world, because it is the best quality of the human mind.”

“Is it?”

“For me, it is. It's all I have.”

 • • • 

One morning, two magnolia warblers suddenly began singing from the elm tree near Herman's study window; and he noticed that, overnight, tiny buds of green had sprouted from every branch. Melting snow dripped from the buds in great prismatic drops that splintered the pale sunlight into warm rainbows falling to the earth. As Herman stared out his study window, a pair of white loons winged above his fields, looking for the lake they would call their summer home. He put his fingers to the windowpane, which remained frightfully cold; but the world outside had all at once returned to life. For a brief moment, he forgot the seemingly endless battle that was still raging on the pages of his manuscript, and he descended the stairs and walked out the front door to the road. Without even stopping to retrieve his jacket or hat from inside, he wandered, as if in a daze, all the way into town, enjoying the cheerful verdure of leafing shrubs and green grass pushing up through melting snow. Trilling birds filled every budding grove, and his heart sang with them.

Herman cut a bizarre figure on the streets of Pittsfield, disheveled and underdressed, next to the ladies in fox stoles and the gentlemen in light new overcoats, strolling the snow-melted streets in defiance of the lingering chill. Spring! Herman ambled half insensibly into Farley's Dry Goods and was in the process of buying a cigar when he noticed the latest
Harper's
magazine, with a review of Hawthorne's new novel. He snatched it up immediately and walked back along the road to Arrowhead, smoking and reading, not noticing that he was shivering with cold.

The review glowed with admiration, calling Hawthorne a “first-rate romancer” and the novel “as good a book as any produced in this country in the last ten years, including this self-same author's own last novel,
The Scarlet Letter
.” It said that
The House of the Seven Gables
was a product of a mind that was “American through and through,” though the reviewer went on to claim that some of Hawthorne's characters were “peculiar and marked by puzzling idiosyncrasies” but that “the lugubrious tone and subject matter were redeemed by an ending full of invention.”

Herman could not decide whether to be irritated at Hawthorne because he had not even written to let him know that the book was finally available, or to be jealous of such a good review, or to be ever more anxious to finally have his own novel finished so it could trump Hawthorne's, or to be happy for his friend that his book had been so well received. He thought of Captain Ahab storming back and forth across the deck of the
Pequod
and could not imagine any reviewer saying such flattering things about
The Whale
, and he realized that he would have to redouble his efforts in order to outshine Hawthorne's newest work. He walked faster and faster toward home.

“Melville, what the devil are you doing out half naked in the cold?” It was Dr. Holmes, strolling casually up the road toward Pittsfield. “Have you no blood in your veins?” Holmes was dressed for a polar blizzard, in a full-length beaver coat and matching hat with earflaps.

“Hawthorne has a new novel,” said Herman.

“Why should that inspire you to leave your house without a coat?”

Herman looked at himself and thought that, for once, Holmes was right: he appeared almost as frightful as if he were at sea, with a dirty, askew shirt and grease spots on his pants. He could only imagine the state of his hair and beard. He handed Holmes the magazine, opened to the review, and the doctor glanced through it.