Burndy was about to refute this, but hesitated. “Why should I trust a moke?”
“I want you to look at something,” Rey said, watching carefully. “It may help you, if you can understand.” He passed a sealed envelope across the table.
Despite his shackles, Burndy managed to tear open the envelope with his teeth and unfold the thrice-folded fine-quality stationery. He examined it for a few seconds before ripping it in two in wild frustration, kicking wildly and banging his head against the wall and table in a pendulum motion.
Oliver Wendell Holmes watched the newsprint curl up at the corners, slowly yielding its edges before caving into the flames.
. . . ustice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court found stripped with insects and m . . .
The doctor fed in another article. The flames rose in appreciation.
He thought about the outburst from Lowell, who was not precisely right about Holmes’s blind belief in Professor Webster fifteen years ago. True, Boston had gradually lost its faith in the disgraced medical professor, but Holmes had reason not to. He had seen Webster the day after George Parkman’s disappearance and had spoken to him about the mystery. There wasn’t the least sign of deceit in Webster’s amiable face. And Webster’s story as it later emerged was entirely consistent with the facts: Parkman had come to collect on his outstanding debt, Webster paid him, Parkman canceled the note, and Parkman departed. Holmes sent contributions to help pay for Webster’s defense team, enfolding the money in reassuring letters addressed to Mrs. Webster. Holmes testified to Webster’s sterling character and the absolute implausibility of his involvement in such a crime. He also explained to the jury that there was no method to positively say that the human remains found in Webster’s rooms belonged to Dr. Parkman—they could belong to him, yes, but they could as easily not.
It was not that Holmes lacked sympathy for the Parkmans. After all, George had been the Medical College’s greatest patron, funding its facilities on North Grove Street and even endowing the Parkman Professorship of Anatomy and Physiology, the very chair that Dr. Holmes held. Holmes had even performed a eulogy at Parkman’s memorial service. But Parkman could well have gone mad, wandering away in a fit of confusion. The man could still be alive, and here they were ready to hang one of their own on the most fantastic circumstantial evidence! Could not the janitor, fearful of losing his job after poor Webster caught him gambling, have secured bone fragments from the Medical College’s large supply and positioned them throughout Webster’s rooms to appear hidden?
Like Holmes, Webster had grown up in comfortable surroundings before attending Harvard College. The two medical men had never been particularly close. Yet from the day of Webster’s arrest, when the poor man tried to swallow poison in distress over the disgrace to his family, there was no one with whom Dr. Holmes felt a closer bond. Could it not as easily have been he who had found himself in the middle of damaging circumstances? With their short statures, full sideburns, and clean-shaven faces, the two professors were physically similar. Holmes had been certain that he would yet play some small but noteworthy role in the inevitable exoneration of his fellow lecturer.
But then they had all found themselves at the gallows. That day had seemed so remote, so impossible, so alterable during months of testimony and appeals. Most of polite Boston had remained at home, ashamed for their neighbor. Teamsters and stevedores and factory workers and launderers: They were most publicly enthused by the Brahmin’s demise and humiliation.
A heavily perspiring J. T. Fields slipped through a ring of these bystanders to reach Holmes.
“I have a driver waiting, Wendell,” said Fields. “Come home to Amelia, sit with the children.”
“Fields, don’t you see what this has come to?”
“Wendell,” Fields said, putting his hands on his author’s shoulders. “The evidence.”
The police tried closing off the area but hadn’t brought long enough ropes. Every roof and every window in the buildings crowding the Leverett Street Jail yard showed the single-minded overflow. Holmes had at that moment felt the most paralyzing urge to do more than watch. He would address the mob. Yes, he would improvise a poem proclaiming the city’s great folly. After all, was not Wendell Holmes the most celebrated toastmaster in Boston? Verses extolling Dr. Webster’s virtues began to meet piecemeal in his head. At the same time, Holmes pushed up on his toes to keep an eye on the carriage path behind Fields so that he might be the first to see the clemency papers arrive or George Parkman, the supposed murder victim, stroll into view.
“If Webster must die today,” Holmes said to his publisher, “he shan’t die without praise.” He pressed forward toward the scaffold. But as he took in the hangman’s noose, he stopped cold and emitted a choking wheeze. This was the first time he had been in sight of that unearthly loop since boyhood, when Holmes had snuck his younger brother John to Gallows Hill in Cambridge just as a condemned man was writhing in his final suffering. It was this sight, Holmes always believed, that had made him both doctor and poet.
A hush swept the crowd. Holmes locked eyes with Webster, who was ascending the platform with a wobbly step, his arm held tightly by a jailer.
As Holmes took a step backward, one of the Webster daughters appeared before him clutching an envelope to her chest.
“Oh, Marianne!” Holmes said, and hugged the little angel tight. “From the governor?”
Marianne Webster held out her delivery at arm’s length. “Father wished you to have this before he’s gone, Dr. Holmes.”
Holmes turned back to the gallows. A black hood was being fitted over Webster’s head. Holmes opened the flap of the envelope.
My dearest Wendell,
How dare I strive to express my gratitude with mere sentences for all you have done? You have believed in me without a shadow of doubt on your mind, and I shall always have that feeling to support me. You alone have remained true to my character since the police snatched me from my home, when others have one by one fallen away from my side. Imagine how it feels when those of your own society, with whom you have banqueted at table and prayed at chapel, stare at you with awful dread. When even the eyes of my own sweet daughters unwillingly reveal second thoughts about their poor Papa’s honor.
Yet for all this I am beholden to tell you, dear Holmes, that I did it. I killed Parkman and hacked up his body, then incinerated it in my laboratory furnace. Understand, I was an only child, much indulged, and I have never secured the control over my passions that I ought to have acquired early; and the consequence is—all this! All the proceedings in my case have been just, as it is just that I should die upon the scaffold in accordance with that sentence. Everybody is right and I am wrong, and I have this morning sent full and true accounts of the murder to the several newspapers and to the brave janitor whom I so shamefully accused. If the yielding up of my life to the injured law will atone, even in part, that is a consolation.
Tear this up directly without another look. You have come to watch my time pass in peace, so do not dwell on what I write so tremblingly, for I have lived with a lie in my mouth.
As the note floated down from Holmes’s hands, the metallic platform supporting the black-hooded man dropped away, hitting the scaffold with a clang. It was not so much that Holmes had no longer believed in Webster’s innocence at that moment, but rather that he knew they could have all been guilty if put in the same circumstance of desperation. As a doctor, Holmes had never stopped appreciating how roundly defective was the design of humankind.
Besides, could not there be a crime that was not a sin?
Amelia stepped into the room, smoothing her dress. She called her husband. “Wendell Holmes! I’m talking to you. I can’t understand what’s come over you lately.”
“Do you know the things put in my mind as a boy, ’Melia?” Holmes said as he flung into the fire a set of proof sheets he had saved from Longfellow’s Dante Club meetings.
He had kept a box of all documents related to the club: Longfello
w’s proofs, his own annotations, Longfellow’s reminders for him to be there on Wednesday evenings. Holmes had thought that one day he might write a memoir of their meetings. He had mentioned this in passing once to Fields, who immediately began planning who might write a puff for Holmes’s work. Once a publisher, always a publisher. Holmes now threw another batch into the fire. “Our country-bred kitchen servants would tell me that our shed was full of demons and black devils. Another bucolic lad informed me that if I wrote my name in my own blood, the prowling agent of Satan, if not the Evil One himself, would pocket it, and from that day forth I’d become his servant.” Holmes chuckled humorlessly. “However much you educate a man out of his superstitions, he will always think as the Frenchwoman did about ghosts: Je n’y crois pas, mais je les crains—I don’t believe in them, but I fear them, nevertheless.”
“You have said that men are tattooed with their special beliefs, like a South Sea Islander.”
“Did I say that, ’Melia?” Holmes asked, then repeated it to himself. “Graphic kind of phrase. I must have said it. Not at all the kind of phrase a woman would invent.”
“Wendell.” Amelia stamped a foot on the rug in front of her husband, who was roughly her height when stripped of his hat and boots. “If you would only explain what’s upset you, I could help you. Let me hear, dear Wendell.”
Holmes fidgeted. He did not respond.
“Have you written any new verses then? I’m waiting for more of yours to read at night, you know.”
“With all the books on our library shelves,” Holmes replied, “with Milton and Donne and Keats in all their fullness, why wait for me to do anything, my dear ’Melia?”
She leaned forward and smiled. “I like my poets better alive than dead, Wendell.” She took his hand in hers. “Now will you tell me your troubles? Please.”
“Pardon the interruption, ma’am.” Holmes’s redheaded maid stepped to the door. She announced Dr. Holmes’s visitor. Holmes nodded hesitantly. The maid departed and brought up the new arrival.
“He’s been in his old den all day. Well, he’s in your hands now, sir!” Amelia Holmes threw up her own hands and closed the study door behind her.
“Professor Lowell.”
“Dr. Holmes.” James Russell Lowell removed his hat. “I cannot stop for very long. I just wanted to thank you for all the help you’ve given us. My apologies, Holmes, for growing warm with you. And for not helping you up when you fell on the floor. And for saying what I did . . .”
“No need, no need.” The doctor tossed another batch of proofs into the fire.
Lowell watched the Dante papers fight and dance against the flames, spitting out sparks as they incinerated verses.
Holmes waited halfheartedly for Lowell to shout at the spectacle, but he did not. “If I know anything, Wendell,” Lowell said, and bowed his head at the pyre, “I know it was the Comedy that lured me into whatever little learning I possess. Dante was the first poet who ever thought to make a poem wholly out of the fabric of himself—to think that not only might the story of some heroic person be epical but also that of any man, and that the way to Heaven was not outside the world but through it. Wendell, there is something I’ve always meant to say since we’ve been helping Longfellow.”
Holmes arched his unruly eyebrows.
“When I came to know you, so many years ago, perhaps my very first thought was how much you reminded me of Dante.”
“I?” Holmes asked, mocking humility. “I and Dante?” But he saw that Lowell was very serious.
“Yes, Wendell. Dante was schooled in every field of science of his day, a master of astronomy, philosophy, law, theology, and poetry. Some, you know, have even said he went through medical school and that is how he could think so much of how the human body suffers. Like you, he did everything well. Too well, as far as other people were concerned.”
“I’ve always thought I had drawn a prize, a five-dollar one at least, in the intellectual sweepstakes of life.” Holmes turned his back on the hearthstone and placed some translation proofs on his bookcase, feeling the weight of Lowell’s errand. “I may be lazy, Jamey, or indifferent or timid, but I am by no means one of those men . . . it is just that I believe at present we cannot prevent anything.”
“The lively pop of the cork has so much power over the imagination at first.” Lowell said, and laughed with subdued pensiveness. “I suppose for a few blessed hours in all this I forgot that I was a professor and felt as if I were something real. I confess that ‘do right though the heavens fall’ is an admirable precept until the heavens take you at your word. I know what it is to doubt, my dearest friend. But for you to give up on Dante is for all of us to do so.”
“If you could only know how Phineas Jennison remains planted in my mind’s eye . . . shredded and broken and. . . . The consequences of failing this . . .”
“It could be the greatest calamity but one, Wendell. And that is being afraid of it,” Lowell said, and headed solemnly for the study door. “Well, I chiefly wanted to send my apologies, and Fields, of course, insisted I should. It is my happiest thought that with all the drawbacks of my temperament, I have yet to lose a real friend.” Lowell paused as he reached for the door and turned back. “And I like your lyrics. You know that, my dear Holmes.”
“Yes? Well, I thank you, but perhaps there is something too hopping about them. I suppose my nature is to snatch at all the fruits of knowledge and take a good bite out of the sunny side—and after that, let in the pigs. I am a pendulum with a very short range of oscillation.” Holmes’s gaze met his friend’s large and open eyes. “How have you been these days, Lowell?”
Lowell gave a half shrug in response.
Holmes did not let his question pass. “I won’t say to you, ‘Be of good courage,’ because men of ideas are not put down by accidents of a day or a year.”
“We all revolve around God with larger or lesser orbits, I suppose, Wendell, sometimes one half of us in the light, sometimes the other. Some people seem always in the shadow. You are one of the few people I can unbutton my heart to. . . . Well.” The poet cleared his throat gruffly and lowered his voice. “I am due at an important conference at Castle Craigie.”
“Oh? And the arrest of Willard Burndy?” Holmes asked cautiously, with feigned disinterest, just before Lowell could exit.
“Patrolman Rey has rushed to look into it as we speak. Do you think it a farce?”
“Pure moonshine, no question!” declared Holmes. “Yet the papers say the prosecuting attorney shall seek to hang him.”
Lowell crowded his unruly waves of hair into his silk hat. “Then we have one more sinner to save.”
Holmes sat with his Dante box long after Lowell’s footsteps faded from the stairs. He continued to toss proof sheets into the fire, determined to finish the painful task, yet he could not stop reading Dante’s words as he went. At first he read with the indifference of manner one employs when reading proofs, noting details but not arrested by the emotions. Then he read them quickly and greedily, absorbing passages even as they blackened into nonexistence. His sense of discovery recalled the times he first heard Professor Ticknor asserting with such earnest prescience the impact Dante’s journey would one day have on America.
Dante and Virgil are approached by the Malebranche demons . . . Dante remembers, “And thus beheld I once the fearful soldiers who issued under safeguard from Caprona, seeing themselves among so many foes.”
Dante was remembering the battle of Caprona against the Pisans, in which he fought. Holmes thought of something Lowell had omitted from his list of Dante’s talents: Dante was a soldier. Like you, he did everything well. And unlike me too, thought Holmes. A soldier had to assert guilt at every step, silently and thoughtlessly. He wondered whether it had made Dante a better poet to see his friends die beside him for the soul of Florence, for some meaningless Guelf banner. Wendell Junior had been the class poet at his Harvard commencement—many said only because of the name he shared with his father—
but now Holmes wondered whether Junior could still know poetry after the war. In battle, Junior had seen something that Dante had not, and it had kicked the poetry—and the poet—right out of him, leaving it only to Dr. Holmes.
Holmes flipped through the proof sheets and read for an hour. He craved the second canto of Inferno, where Virgil convinces Dante to commence his pilgrimage, but Dante’s fears for his own safety resurface. Supreme moment of courage: to face the torment of the death of others and think with clarity how each one would feel. But Holmes had already burned Longfellow’s proof sheet for that canto. He found his Italian edition of the Commedia and read: “Lo giorno se n’andava”—“Day was departing . . .” Dante slows his deliberation as he prepares to enter the infernal realms for the first time: “. . . e io sol uno”—“and only I alone . . .”—how lonely he felt! He has to say it three times! io, sol, uno . . . “m’apparecchiava a sostener la guerra, sì del cammino e sì de la pietate.” Holmes couldn’t remember how Longfellow had translated this verse, so leaning on his mantelpiece, he did it himself, hearing the deliberative commentary of Lowell, Greene, Fields, and Longfellow in the humming fire. Encouraging him.
“And I alone, only me”—Holmes found that he had to speak aloud to translate—“made myself ready to sustain the battle . . .” No, guerra. “. . . to sustain the war . . . both of the way and likewise of the pity.”
Holmes shot up from his easy chair and raced upstairs to the third floor. “I alone, only me,” he repeated as he climbed.
Wendell Junior was debating the usefulness of metaphysics with William James, John Gray, and Minny Temple over gin toddies and cigars. It was while listening to one of James’s meandering discourses that Junior heard, faintly at first, the clip-clop of his father struggling up the stairs. Junior cringed. Father had actually seemed preoccupied with something other than himself these days—potentially something serious. James Lowell had not been around the Law School much, probably, Junior had thought, because he was involved with whatever distracted Father. At first, Junior imagined Father had ordered Lowell to keep clear of Junior, but Junior knew Lowell would not listen to his father. Nor would Father have the fire in his belly to order Lowell.
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