The Whale (22 page)

For an instant, Herman was tempted to reveal that he planned to dedicate the work to Hawthorne, but thought better of it. “I will say only this: that, among other things,
The Whale
is still white. And frightful.”

Herman followed Hawthorne into his parlor, where they placed the vegetables on the table. Hawthorne opened a box of Havana cigars and offered it up for Herman's selection. They each took one and walked outside again.

“Insofar as I think about such things as I write,” said Hawthorne,
“I try to exemplify in fiction those spaces in human society where the actual and the imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other, whether those pairings be religious or aesthetic or what have you. To me, that is the whole purpose of fiction, to provide us occasions of meditation in which we may find the intersection of the timeless with time. The idea of original sin, for instance, is useful not because it may literally be true but because it provides an occasion for discourse about the mysteries that lie beyond the power of the human mind to encompass.”

“You do love original sin, don't you?”

“Original sin is not merely a moral conundrum but includes the idea of origination itself; or, I should say, it allows us a way to discuss the question: what is society's proper relationship to that which came before it and lies beyond it?”

Hawthorne lit their cigars, and they stood in the shade of the oak tree beside the cottage and puffed contentedly for a while. Julian walked up, holding, in his cupped hands, an earthworm, vivisected into three pieces, each of which writhed unpleasantly in search of the others. Julian offered this prize as a mute question.

“Do you know the story of Jonah, Master Julian?” asked Herman. Julian shook his head no. “It is from the Bible, and in it, a man is swallowed by a whale; but your worm reminds me of it, because a worm also appears in that story.”

“What
doesn't
remind you of whales, Melville?”

Herman ignored Hawthorne's ribbing and began telling Julian about Jonah—how God had commanded him to go preach against the city of Nineveh, but Jonah didn't want to go and instead fled to Joppa, where he got on a boat headed for Tarshish; but God caused a terrible storm to threaten the boat, and the crew discovered that God was angry at Jonah, and they threw him overboard, where he was swallowed by a whale.

Hawthorne clapped Herman on the shoulder. “But where is the worm in Jonah's tale?”

“After the whale vomits up Jonah, he goes to Nineveh and preaches as God had commanded, but everyone ignores him,” said Herman. “So he leaves the city and curses God and finds some plants out in the desert to shelter him, and God sends a worm to eat the plants.”

First one, then another of the pieces of the worm in Julian's hands stopped struggling, until only one third seemed at all alive. He flung the pieces as far as he could, scattering them in the grass. “God hates worms and so do I,” he said.

“I am not sure that that is the moral of the story,” said Hawthorne.

“I want a whale,” his son shouted.

Hawthorne ushered his son inside and told him to clean his hands and face; then he returned to Herman out in the meadow, and they strolled aimlessly around the cottage, circling back and crossing and crisscrossing the paths that they made through the grasses, smoking and chatting. Impudently, Herman slipped his arm through Hawthorne's as they strolled, and Hawthorne, instead of protesting or resisting, walked closer to Herman.

Herman wished he could exchange all the tomorrows that would ever come for this instant, for this closeness, for this knowingness and being known—but wish though he might, they did not pass into eternity. The breeze fluttered the leaves overhead and bent the goldenrods, and the low white clouds shuttled fleeting shadows across the face of the earth, and voices from the faraway sea murmured indecipherable secrets in Herman's ears.

 • • • 

After their cigars, they went inside to find Julian playing with a lively little snow-white bunny, which Hawthorne explained had come to them rather recently and had become Julian's captive playmate. Julian introduced him as Hindlegs, and the little rabbit went hopping
up to meet Herman. True to his name, the bunny stood up on his hind legs and twitched his pink nose.

“He wants food,” said Julian.

Hawthorne said, “He eats constantly but turns up his nose at any leaves or grass that aren't entirely fresh.” Julian grabbed a jackknife from the corner table and ran outside, while Herman patted the bunny. “When he first came to us,” Hawthorne went on, “he seemed to pass his life switching rapidly between torpid slumber and quick apprehensiveness and no state in between. Something about how easily startled he was, and how lifeless he seemed most of the time, made me want to eat him. Now, there is the influence of the Evil One! But he has grown quite familiar to us now and hops to meet us whenever we come in and likes to inspect our clothing for the smells we bring home. He gnaws at Julian's shoes when we are sitting quietly—I believe it is his way of drawing attention to himself—and always contrives to hop into Julian's lap. It is odd to speculate what he thinks of human company and how he manages to quell his fear of us, since we must be so peculiar to him—so big and frightening and yet so amiable and always bringing him food.”

Julian returned with fresh-cut pigweed and lettuce and swept a few crumbs of bread off the dining table into his hand, all of which the bunny devoured greedily. He kept up a running conversation with Hindlegs, mainly about local dragons and the location of their lairs and the times of day when they came out. When Hindlegs had consumed all the greens, he hopped under the table, and Julian immediately forgot about him and demanded to have his hair curled.

To Herman's surprise, Hawthorne handed Julian a basin and told him to go outside and fill it with water from the pump. Herman followed Hawthorne out in the opposite direction, up the hill in front of the cottage, and they gathered sticks of various thicknesses and brought them back into the parlor. Herman sat by and watched while
Hawthorne washed and rinsed his son's hair and then screwed lockets of it around the sticks rather poorly, catching it constantly and nearly pulling the hair out of the boy's head. Julian squealed and laughed all the while. Herman would never have thought to carry on in such a supplicating way with Malcolm, and he thought of Lizzie's question again: what did he love about Malcolm? He considered asking Hawthorne what he loved about Julian—he suspected he would receive a fuller answer than Herman could provide about his own son. Julian babbled on and on; and though Hawthorne seemed to tire of the lad's prattle, Herman believed that he, in fact, was enjoying himself as much as his son was. It had never occurred to Herman that a father and son might enjoy each other as people, beyond their family roles. His own father had taken little interest in him beyond telling him constantly what to do and how poorly he was doing it, and Herman recognized with a start that he had always been just as indifferent toward Malcolm as his own father had been toward him. The bunny withdrew into the darkest corner beneath a chair on the opposite side of the parlor and huddled into itself, seemingly fearfully, reminding Herman disturbingly of Malcolm; and the whiteness of the rabbit conferred, in Herman's imagination, a special poignance on the scene, lending it the power of milky Jove himself.

They passed the afternoon with Hawthorne at Julian's beck and call and the three of them exchanging nonsense at Julian's lead, until dinner. Melville thought they could almost have been a family, the three of them, and to blazes with tradition and even biology. Perhaps, he thought, even Malcolm could be happy in their impossible family, and they would all flourish in the care of Hawthorne's fatherly love.

 • • • 

Dinner consisted of lettuce, boiled string beans and asparagus, raw tomatoes, and a cucumber, accompanied by slices of black bread with butter. The bunny partook of most of the dishes and seemed to
relish them more than anyone. Herman was rather astonished at this fare: his own evening meals nearly always featured meat and a great deal of wine.

“Do you always eat like this?” he asked.

“We would normally not have cucumber
and
asparagus in the same meal, but your presence here makes it a special occasion,” said Hawthorne.

After dinner, as the sun dipped below the horizon, Hawthorne lit a lamp and Julian corralled Hindlegs and carried him upstairs. Hawthorne washed the dinner dishes in a basin and then rinsed and refilled the basin outside at the pump. Father and son met again at the foot of the stairs, Julian dressed now in a loose white bedshirt; and Julian kissed his father on the cheek and threw his arms around Herman's legs, after which he ran upstairs without looking back, calling “good night good night good night” all the way into his room, until his door shut with a dry wooden snap.

“He wakes up talking and falls asleep in midsentence,” said Hawthorne. “But he occasionally says things that are accidentally wise.”

“Or perhaps not accidentally.”

“Spend a few days here, and you will see that almost everything with Julian is accidental,” Hawthorne said, with affection.

Because Herman was a very different sort of father than Hawthorne, and because Julian seemed so much happier than Malcolm, Herman found that this gentle, fatherly talk opened his heart to Nathaniel even more than everything else that had come before. Herman's own childhood had been filled with incomprehension, high expectations, secret failure, and seething anger, and he wondered how his life might have turned out differently had he been raised in such an atmosphere of tolerance and good humor.

In Herman's mind, his life had buckled and collapsed like bricks scattered from an earthshaken wall, each brick a separate and
unconnected aspect of himself—sailor, author, success, failure, father, brother, husband, debtor, blasphemer, adulterer, liar, son. The wall had fallen, the bricks strewn and heaped chaotically without structure or meaning; but now it all finally made sense, and he relabeled every brick in his self “Hawthorne” and rebuilt the wall, so that between him and the rest of the world was a barricade of Hawthorne, with only Nathaniel himself enclosed beside him.

“I assume you still have a taste for brandy,” said Hawthorne, motioning for Herman to follow him into the study. Hawthorne threw open the windows, and the cool night breeze seemed like the very breath of Hebe, goddess of youth, on Herman's brow. Hawthorne opened the lower drawer of the cabinet next to his desk and withdrew a clear bottle with a caramel-colored liquid inside, and red wax sealing the mouth. “My friend Pierce sent it to me during the first success of
Seven Gables
—Pierre Chabanneau Cognac, 1811. Do you know it? Means nothing to me, but I thought it might appeal to a connoisseur like yourself.”

Herman took the bottle and weighed it in his hands appreciatively. “It is eight years older than I am,” he said.

“Pierce made a special point of mentioning that it was bottled under the Great Comet that passed that year. Pierce is always searching for magic and signs.”

Hawthorne tore the wax off the top and unstoppered the cork underneath. He set the bottle on his desk and excused himself to get glasses. Herman breathed in the scent of the cognac: a green, herbaceous odor, mixed with citrusy sweetness, which lingered thickly at the back of his throat, like fat. Nathaniel returned and poured. They held their glasses up to the light, appreciating how the brandy became a tawny copper color in small volumes. Hawthorne toasted “the angels in the dark corners of our hearts,” and Herman drank and let the concoction linger on his tongue and in his nose, the
sweet taste and perfume of oranges giving way to the woody smoke of lavender and finally an acridness like coriander, the whole blending finally into something deliriously soft and faraway, the distant magnolias of childhood memories.

Hawthorne offered him another cigar, and they took their epicurean delights back into the parlor, where they opened all the windows and sat in the armchairs. “Sophia does not permit smoking indoors,” he said, lighting their Havanas. Herman contentedly puffed and sipped. He watched their smoke drift languidly around the room and then outside, where fireflies winked yellow polka dots into the dark fabric of the night. He found himself wondering if Adam had smoked in the Garden of Eden, and if Eve had made him take his cigars out among the cattle and sheep—but he could not remember if God had already given them fire before the serpent had appeared. The devil certainly had fire, he thought. Perhaps the devil had taught man to smoke. He followed this daisy chain of fanciful thoughts for a while until it led to “Rappaccini's Daughter,” Hawthorne's own story of Eden corrupted, and he remembered a notion he had long wished to discuss with him.

“I am toying with an idea,” said Herman. “A prophetic theory, or a cautionary tale, if you like. Namely: if America is the New Eden, the White Man has come to destroy it, in an act of revenge for our expulsion from the original Eden. Our entire enterprise as a nation is a violent revenge against God for tempting us into sin and heaving us out of paradise. Thus, we found a new paradise, the New World, and are destroying it, as an affront to God.”

“You are obsessed with violence, Melville.”

“No more than you are obsessed with sin, and this theory has the appeal of combining the two. So-called original sin—which is really just God's way of sabotaging man's innocence by making
knowledge inherently corrupt—sets the stage for the revenge of knowledge on paradise; or, to put it another way, the destruction of nature through technology is our way of proving that we are more powerful than God and did not need him or his magic Tree of Knowledge to acquire his secrets for ourselves. We must avenge ourselves on God by destroying what is his.”

Hawthorne said, “But the revenge will not be against God, since God does not have to reside in the New Eden. If your theory is correct, even if we destroyed the New Eden, God would remain uninjured and we ourselves would be destroyed, thus proving God's original position that we should not have been entrusted with such knowledge to begin with. And I have read nowhere that the intent of the Mayflower colonists or any of their descendants was destruction. No one wishes to destroy this paradise, if paradise it be—except you! They wish to tame it and prosper from its conquest.”