The Whale (4 page)

Herman climbed down from the hayloft and walked out of the barn at Broad Hall, his cousin's bed-and-breakfast. His jacket was covered in golden dust, and bits of hay stuck comically out of his auburn hair. He held the book he had been reading—
Mosses from an Old Manse
, a story collection that Hawthorne had written several years before—close to his breast.

The picnic at Monument Mountain was a few days behind him, and he had barely slept or eaten. He seemed not to need mere physical sustenance anymore, surviving instead on a spiritual alchemy of memory and desire.

The evening sky was milky with haze; toward the horizon, it became a dull ivory, the color of a tortoise egg. Herman felt as if the whiteness might crack and God himself might hatch into the landscape. The idea of God as an immense tortoise—deliberate, reptilian, silent, and hard shelled—cheered him. Bees buzzed in the meadow, and he took a full breath of the cool air and smelled the bright dusty hay on his coat and the sweet sap of clover at his feet. He felt a wave of optimism lift him up, a renewed faith that the world could deliver unanticipated wonders.

Hawthorne!

No name could be more apt to this man than Hawthorne, Herman thought: the soft ravishments of his beauty had been spun like a web of dreams from the clustered white blossoms of the intoxicatingly sweet hawthorn tree, whose flowers yet hid dangerous thorns.
Yes, Hawthorne the man, from hawthorn the tree, the wild haw, whose gossamer veins entwined its scaled and dusky bark with lobed and serrated leaves, a small wonder of symmetry cragged at the trunk and heartbreakingly delicate at the tips of its crown, shooting deep and tangling roots into the soil of Herman's soul. A whole taxonomy of Hawthorne could be written from his namesake tree, which perfectly embodied the qualities of the man.

He clutched Hawthorne's book tighter and felt the man's words bathing his soul, outlining the distinctive hue of every towering hill and far-winding vale in Herman's heart: it was as if Hawthorne, in his person and through his writing, had mapped Herman's internal geography before Herman had fully explored it himself. As if he had made an atlas of Herman's soul that traced every river of love, every freshet and cataract of wonder, every fetid pool of despair, and that, by the celestial mechanisms of this divinely inspired cartographer, the map of his soul
was
the territory.

He looked up at Broad Hall. His family would have to leave here soon—Robert reminded him daily that they had overstayed their welcome—but the thought had become intolerable! How could he return to that apartment in Manhattan, now that he knew Hawthorne awaited him here? Even Herman's mother had suggested they move to Pittsfield, as if she had been speaking for the Fates themselves. All Herman had to do was find the means to buy a house in the Berkshires . . . but his literary career seemed to have added up to nothing, just when he needed it most.

He was suddenly aware of voices. Duyckinck and Mathews strolled around the corner of Broad Hall, carrying suitcases. Duyckinck's black derby hat perched jauntily atop his head, and Mathews wore his oval spectacles on the end of his nose. They looked like a traveling minstrel act.

“Ah, Melville,” Duyckinck said. “Thank you for finishing your
review so quickly, but I can't possibly publish it—at least, not the way it's written right now.”

When Duyckinck had seen how Melville and Hawthorne had hit it off at the picnic, he had proposed that Herman write an article for the next edition of
Literary World
magazine, comparing
The Scarlet Letter
to Thackeray's latest novel,
Pendennis
. Duyckinck believed that American readers preferred well-established English authors to relatively unknown Americans, and his new strategy for overcoming this prejudice was to compare local writers favorably to their British counterparts. However, no one had had a copy of
The Scarlet Letter
on hand, so they had decided that Herman should, instead, write a retrospective about
Mosses from an Old Manse
—which they had found on Robert's shelves.
Mosses
had been a commercial flop, but Duyckinck thought that a new review might excite new interest, especially now that Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter
had been condemned from so many pulpits. “Remember,” Duyckinck had told Melville, “mention a well-regarded English author in your review—someone respectable.”

“Did Lizzie not give you the fair copy?” Herman said.

“She did.” Duyckinck opened his valise and withdrew a sheaf of papers. He waved them in Herman's face. “Look, Melville, when I suggested you compare Hawthorne to a well-regarded Englishman, I meant someone like Dickens or Thackeray or Walter Scott—not Shakespeare!”

Herman brushed hay from his hair. He opened his copy of
Mosses from an Old Manse
and read aloud: “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.” He looked up. “What do you suppose Hawthorne means by that?”

“Seems obvious,” Mathews said. “Following the simplicity of pure emotion saves one from the complicated thoughts that can lead to damnation.”

“But what about where he says simple emotions,
dark or bright
? If one felt a simple emotion of malice and followed it, how would that
not
lead to the infernal regions? He seems to be saying that simplicity is more valuable than morality.”

“Melville,” Duyckinck cried. “This is all gibberish. You simply can't compare Hawthorne to Shakespeare. And what about this?” He shuffled the pages of Herman's review until he found a passage that he read aloud. “‘To what infinite height of loving wonder and admiration I may yet be borne, when, by repeatedly banqueting on these Mosses, I shall have thoroughly incorporated their whole stuff into my being—that, I cannot tell. But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul.' Really? Germinous seeds into your soul?”

“Edit that out, if you don't like it,” Herman snapped. “Have you read the story called ‘Rappaccini's Daughter'?”

Mathews said, “Is that the one where original sin, as represented by a birthmark on the woman's face, is the price of human existence?”

“No, that's a story called ‘The Birth-Mark,'” Herman said sarcastically. “In ‘Rappaccini's Daughter,' a man discovers a beautiful girl in a kind of Garden of Eden, but the girl turns out to be poisonous.”

“Garden of Eden?” Mathews said. “Poisonous girl? That's original sin, too.”

“Original sin is a very commercial idea,” said Duyckinck. “How do you think the Bible stays in print year after year?”

“I thought Jesus sold all those copies.”

Herman ignored them. “What is Hawthorne trying to say? So many of these stories seem to have hidden sexual meanings. For instance, the mark on the woman's face in ‘The Birth-Mark,' which the husband, Aylmer, tries desperately to remove, seems a symbol of menstruation. Literally, a
birth
mark. After all, the mark is red, the color of blood, and Aylmer says it is ‘the only defect' in his wife's
perfection. And Rappaccini's poisoned garden is clearly a metaphor for women: everything in the garden is heartbreakingly beautiful but deadly poisonous, including Rappaccini's daughter, a beautiful flower that you enter through a secret gate and that destroys anything it touches. Does she have syphilis?”

Duyckinck's face soured. “For God's sake, Melville, what are you talking about? We have to catch the evening train back to New York.” He put the pages back in his suitcase. “Incidentally, I had a letter from Hawthorne this morning, concerning you. Perhaps you should discuss his views on the flowering of women directly with him.”

“A letter?” Herman said as casually as he could, while his heart nearly leapt out of his mouth.

“He wrote to ask me to send him some books from New York, and he wanted me to ask you if you would be willing to receive them and take them to his cottage. Apparently, the Lenox postmaster is unreliable, and he'd heard that the Pittsfield office was better. Would you mind taking some novels to him?”

“Not at all,” said Herman, overjoyed. Hawthorne was engineering their next meeting covertly through Duyckinck! “I've never had any problems with the Pittsfield Post Office,” he said nonchalantly.

“Good,” Duyckinck said. “You know, Melville, I've known Hawthorne for ten years, and he hasn't invited me to visit him once, for
any
reason.”

“That's right,” Mathews added. “I never even saw Hawthorne's children until they were talking, and I've known him longer than Evert has. He's a true recluse! But he seemed almost breezy the other day at the picnic, didn't he, Evert?”

Herman beamed. “Well, send along whatever books he'd like. I'll ride them over to Lenox straightaway.”

“And when are you and your family returning to Manhattan?” said Duyckinck.

The kitchen door opened, and Lizzie appeared. She was a small woman with a kindly, pale, oval face, a pudgy nose, and black hair parted down the middle; she held Malcolm on her hip. “Would you gentlemen like a morsel to eat on the train?” she said.

“Thank you, but we must be going,” said Duyckinck. He strode over, shook Lizzie's hand warmly, and thanked her for translating Herman's nearly illegible review of
Mosses from an Old Manse
into a readable copy so quickly.

“It was nothing,” she said.

Mathews gallantly kissed Lizzie's hand. “On the contrary, were it not for your excellent penmanship and, even more importantly, your almost occult ability to descry your husband's meanings, Herman would have no career at all.” He then invited the whole Melville family to dine at his home when they returned to New York.

They waved goodbye and were off to the train station.

Lizzie walked into Broad Hall's well-appointed kitchen and deposited the docile Malcolm in a Shaker high chair. Herman came in behind her and opened the potbellied stove, poking broken embers in the fuel box with the end of a fresh log. When the cinders glowed hellish, he tossed the log onto the grate, sending a little spray of ash and char out into the kitchen. He waited till flames licked up around the new wood and then clanked the stove door closed.

“Lizzie,” said Herman, “I want to speak to you about something important.”

“You don't really think that Hawthorne's book is as good as Shakespeare?” she asked. “Like you said in your review?”

“It doesn't matter what you say in a review. They're like advertisements.”

“So you
don't
think Hawthorne is the American Shakespeare?” Herman waved the question away. “Well, did Mr. Duyckinck at least pay you for it?”

“Duyckinck will pay me by having Hawthorne review my next book.”

“I see. You and the American Shakespeare will write advertisements for each other's work in
Literary World
. How does that pay anyone but Mr. Duyckinck? I would also remind you that the fair copy did not write itself.”

“You and I will both be paid through the sales of my next book,
which the good reviews in
Literary World
will generate. You know as well as I do how books are sold.”

“I'm growing more familiar with how they're not sold.”

She poured water from a clay jug into a pan, for Malcolm's evening porridge. The stove hissed as droplets kissed the hot steel.

Herman went into the dining room and brought back two chairs, which he set next to Malcolm's high chair. “I've been thinking about something much more important than reviews.” He sat down and invited Lizzie to do the same. When they were all seated together as a family, he leaned forward, almost in a crouch at the edge of his chair. He took Lizzie's hand and stared deeply into her eyes. “I have been thinking about how much you dislike Manhattan, my dear.” She had often praised her family's home in Boston over the rougher, dirtier New York. “And I've been thinking that the city is no good for Malcolm. So I think we should buy a house in the Berkshires.”

Lizzie stiffened. “But how could we afford it? On what income?”

Malcolm burbled and spit.

“If you're willing to borrow from your father against your inheritance, as you've said you might, then whatever house we buy will be yours.”

“I've said I would borrow small sums in emergencies, to keep food on the table.” Lizzie stood up and turned toward the stove. She touched her forehead and then her breastbone and spread her fingers out over her heart. “I had never thought of using it to buy a house!” She scooped dry oats and barley into the water on the stove. Malcolm stuck his left middle finger far up his right nostril. “And we are already deeply in debt to my father.” Lizzie's father, Lemuel Shaw, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, had been subsidizing Herman's income with loans ever since his writing career had faltered.

“Those are personal loans he has made to me,” said Herman. “I'm talking about the inheritance that will rightly be yours one day, no matter what.”

“But how would we pay for the daily expenses of our own house, Herman? With Mr. Duyckinck's reviews? You're not writing
Typee
anymore.”

“My next book will make
Typee
look like a suffragist pamphlet. You'll see! With Duyckinck's help, it will sell.”

Lizzie stirred Malcolm's porridge vigorously, even though it had not yet begun to boil. Water and oats splashed out onto the stove.

“You can choose which house we buy,” Herman continued. “You can do with it whatever you like, decorate it however you want. It will be
your
house. Not mine. Not my mother's. You'll make the down payment on it with your inheritance, and it will be your house—no one else's but yours—and I'll pay our expenses and upkeep with my writing. You can run the household as you see fit. And my mother will be our guest in your home.”

Lizzie stopped stirring the thin gruel and sat back down. Herman's mother, Maria, was constantly nagging her to do things differently around their apartment in Manhattan, which they shared with Herman's sisters Augusta and Helen, his younger brother Allan, and Allan's wife and daughter.

“
My
home?” She looked longingly out the window, where the leaves of a maple tree fluttered in the pale evening sunshine. “But it just isn't possible, Herman. You barely earn enough now to pay half the expenses in the apartment we
share
with your brother. And there would be so many mouths to feed!” Since Herman's father and older brother had both died, Herman had become the eldest Melville and hence the head of their family; as such, he was obliged to keep his mother and his unmarried sisters under his roof. If they split up the household in Manhattan, Maria, Helen, and Augusta
would almost certainly follow him to the Berkshires. “And I'll remind you that your mother is not exactly thrifty. She's downtown right now getting to know every shop in Pittsfield, and you never say a word to dissuade her. What would happen if you moved her to a house in the country and she felt restored to her ‘proper station,' as she would put it?”

“A whole house here would cost less to maintain than half of that apartment in Manhattan. Look at how Holmes and Dudley Field and Hawthorne live out here, in such natural splendor and at such small expense, and their reputations grow and grow. And what better place for Malcolm to grow up? I could do it. We could do it.”

“But if you're tired of Manhattan, it would be more prudent to move to Boston, near my own family.”

“Boston is not the Berkshires,” Herman said. “Let's make some inquiries about properties. If only to learn what the cost might be.”

“Oh, Herman.” Lizzie burst into tears. “I know you're frustrated with your book, but the solution is not to make the rest of your life harder.”

Herman took her hand. “But this will make our lives easier! And Duyckinck and the Harper brothers will make my next book a great success. You'll see!”

The oats that had splattered onto the stove top began to burn; the acrid smell filled the kitchen. Malcolm bawled and flapped his arms.

Herman looked into Lizzie's eyes and tried to hide his shame about what he was really feeling: all he could think about was walking down the road to Hawthorne's house, imagining that, if he owned a home here, he could make that walk every single day.

How would Hawthorne feel when he learned that Herman was moving to the Berkshires? They had only just met. At the very least, he told himself, he would create the circumstances to find out how much admiration Hawthorne truly felt for him. Whatever happened
in the end—however well or poorly his next book sold—Lizzie and Malcolm would still have a nice home in the Berkshires, and Judge Shaw could, in reality, afford to pay for everything. It was all fine, he told himself as he looked into his wife's eyes: it was for Lizzie's good, too, and Malcolm's.

Lizzie petted the back of her husband's head. “Do you remember why I married you, Herman? It's because you think differently from everyone else I've ever met. You have different dreams. But that doesn't mean all of your dreams are good.”

“Everyone could have a private room,” Herman persisted. “My mother and Augusta and Helen and even Malcolm. We could invite all of your relatives to come for the holidays. Your father will love having a Berkshire home in the family. We'll have a barn with a cow and a horse. We'll plant corn.”

“Corn? What are you even saying, Herman?”

“We will write to your father about the inheritance. We'll inquire about houses. What harm can it do to propose an idea?”

Lizzie fiddled with the whalebone cameo at her neck. Herman had bought the brooch for her the previous fall, when he had gone to London to find an English publisher for
White-Jacket
: its silhouette depicted the three graces with their arms entwined.

“You are always so fanciful, Herman,” Lizzie said sadly. Her tone brought tears to Herman's eyes—he could remember a time when she had said the same thing with admiration.

“But this will be
your
dream.” With this lie, Herman could no longer contain himself. He slid down to his knees in front of Lizzie and wept like a child.

Herman's cousin Robert walked in and took off his hat. “What's burning?” He heard the weeping before his eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the kitchen, and he nearly tripped over the sobbing Melvilles in his haste to reach the stove.

“What goes on here?” Robert asked. He found a towel and used it to grab the hot pan. “What's wrong?”

Lizzie eased herself out of Herman's embrace and stood up. “Nothing.” She snuffled. “Nothing is wrong.” She smiled at Robert, who held out the ruined porridge as evidence that something was, indeed, wrong. “We have just been talking about the future.”

“The future?”

Herman wiped tears from his eyes and stood up, as well. “Robert, we are moving to the Berkshires.”

Robert went white. “When did you decide this?”

“Just now.”

“Just now?”

“This very moment, as you were walking in. We will buy a farm somewhere near yours.”

“Well, it's far from certain,” said Lizzie. “It's just an idea that Herman has.”

“But how can you afford it?” Robert said. “Aren't your creditors even now baying at your door in Manhattan? Isn't that why you've been staying here all month
at my expense
?”

“We just love it so much here,” Herman said. “Haven't you always loved the Berkshires yourself?”

“Yes,” Robert fumed. “I have always loved the Berkshires myself. But you cannot purchase a farm by loving it. Have you learned nothing from the examples of our own fathers?” Herman's and Robert's grandfathers had been prosperous businessmen and heroes of the Revolution, but that was where the success of the Melville family had ended. Herman's father had died raving mad with a fever while negotiating to avoid debtor's prison; Robert's father had died penniless on the western frontier, after a lifetime of hapless misadventures.

“What has happened, Robert?” said Lizzie. “Has something happened?”

“I have sold Broad Hall! The farm is bankrupt. I am moving my family back to Galena.”

“Sold Broad Hall?” Herman asked. “Why?”

“Is there some nuance of the word ‘bankrupt' that escapes you, Herman?”

“But everything seems to be going so well.”

“Have you encountered a single guest at the inn since you arrived? Have you seen anyone working the fields?”

“But is it already sold then? We could not, for example, buy it ourselves?”

Robert looked at him for a moment with dumb fury before flinging the pot of burnt oatmeal at his head. Herman ducked. The pan smacked the wall and clattered across the floor, splattering gruel in its wake. Lizzie held her hands palm outward to Robert in a gesture of peace. Malcolm wailed. Robert stormed out of the kitchen and banged the front door closed behind him.

Herman lifted Malcolm out of his chair and cradled him protectively in his arms. He kissed Lizzie's head and led her up the stairs to their room. They shut the door behind them and sat together on the edge of their bed, holding Malcolm between them, shushing and comforting him, silently exchanging gentle caresses and doleful looks.

Herman began formulating an apology to Robert in his mind. He had been too preoccupied to notice his cousin's difficulties, or to notice Robert at all, really; his family always hovered just at the edge of Herman's attention—at least until a pot came flying at his head.

He thought about what Robert had said, about the example of their fathers—Herman remembered his own father's death well, because he had been with him through the delirium of his last night. Is that what I'm doing now, Herman thought, running from bad to worse like my father? But no, not all debt was the same: his father's debt had been a problem—Herman's debt would be a solution.

Half an hour passed before it seemed safe to return to the kitchen for dinner. When they did, they discovered that the oatmeal had been cleaned from the walls and floor, and the pot was once again hanging from the rack above the stove, spotless. On the table, in Robert's handwriting, they found an itemized bill for every day they had stayed at Broad Hall and every meal they had eaten.