by Colm Toibin
As his father turned away once more and began walking towards home, he sounded out of breath and did not speak. Henry wanted to find an excuse to run ahead and get away from him, but then his father turned again, the expression on his face vivid, the skin blotched and the eyes sharp as though he were angry. His father was now standing on the shore, trembling, watching the swimmer who had her back to him, her costume clinging to her. His father made no further effort to seem casual. His stare was deliberate and pointed, but no one else noticed it. The woman did not look behind, and her companion had moved away. It was important, Henry knew, for him to pretend that this was nothing; there was no question that this could be mentioned or commented on. His father did not move, and seemed unaware of his presence, but he must have known he was there, Henry thought, and whatever this was, this keen-eyed drinking in of the woman bather, it was enough to make his father not care about Henry’s presence. Finally, as he turned and set out on the journey home, his father stared back regularly with the look of someone who had been hunted down and defeated. The woman, once more, swam out to sea.
HENRY LOVED the softness of the colours on the beach near Rye, the changing light, the creamy clouds moving across the sky as though with a purpose. He had spent the last few summers here, and this summer in particular, as he walked briskly, trying for once to enjoy the day without making plans, he could not stop asking himself what he wished for now, and answering that he wanted only more of this – calm work, calm days, a beautiful small house and this soft summer light. Before he left London, he had purchased the bicycle which now lay waiting for him in the lane that led to the beach. He realized that he did not even want the past back, that he had learned not to ask for that. His dead would not return. Being freed of the fear of their going gave him this strange contentment, the feeling that he wanted nothing more now but for time to move slowly.
He wished every morning when he stood on his terrace that he could find some way to catch this picture of beauty and keep it close to him. The terrace was paved and curved like the prow of a ship and it overhung a view both as pure and as full of change as an expanse of sea. And below was Rye, the most un-English of English places, red-roofed with meandering streets and clustered buildings, an Italian hill town with cobbled streets, its atmosphere sensuous, but reticent also and austere. He walked the streets of Rye almost every day now, studying the houses, the old shops with small-paned windows, the square church tower, the weathered beauty of the brick. Back home, his terrace was his opera box, from where he could survey all the kingdoms of the earth. His terrace, he thought, was as amiable as a person, perhaps even more so. He wished he could buy this house; he knew that he had already begun to resent the owner’s plans to retake the cottage at the end of July.
In June there was hardly any night at all. He lingered on the terrace as a slow mist came over the valley and a mild, gauzed darkness fell. Within a few hours there would be hints of the beginning of dawn. His only visitor in these days of industry and indolence wrote once again to confirm his arrival and departure. Oliver Wendell Holmes junior was an old friend, become now a distant one, part of a group of associates, young men he had known in Newport and Boston, who had become eminent in their thirties and were now leading influences on the age. When they came to England, they appeared mysterious to him, so confident, so adept at finishing their sentences, so used to being listened to, and yet they seemed to him, compared with men of their kind in England and France, oddly raw and boyish, their brashness a kind of innocence. His brother William had all of that too, but it was only one half of him; the other half was made up of a deep self-consciousness where all his rawness and freshness had been buried in irony. William knew the effect which his own deliberate and complex personality could have, but this was something that their contemporaries, who held power in the literary world in the United States, or in the law, knew nothing about. They remained natural, and this, for Henry, was a matter of enormous interest.
Thus William Dean Howells could fall for Paris, having built no defences against the sensuous world, defences that any European man of his age would assiduously and carefully have developed. Howells was ready to be seduced by beauty and prepared to feel deep regret that beauty had passed him by in Boston. Henry loved the yearning openness of Americans, their readiness for experience, their eyes bright with expectation and promise. As he worked on his novels of English morals and manners, he felt the dry nature of the English experience – sure of its own place and unready for change, steeped in the solid and the social, a system of manners developed without much interruption for a thousand years. On the other hand, these educated and powerful American visitors seemed so shiny, so ready to be new, so sure that their moment had come that now, as he sat on his terrace in the twilight, he felt their force, how much could still be done with them, how little attention he had paid them in recent years. He was glad then that he had invited Oliver Wendell Holmes to stay at Point Hill and he vowed that he would see him in London also if he could. He who had come to dread these interruptions found himself rather interested in this one.
When he began to picture Holmes, to place him against the background of when he had first known him, he remembered the aura of certainty and dependability which lay about his friend. Even at twenty-two Holmes had believed that the world he inhabited was a world in which he would thrive. He was formed like a planing machine to gorge a deep self-beneficial groove through life. He made sure that when fresh experience came his way it was rich and rewarding and gave him pleasure. As he learned to think, however, his mind became like a stiff spring. He was caught thus between the venal and the exacting and it made his presence nervous and exciting. He had found a public voice, a way of holding himself and forming sentences and formulating policy and judgement, to ensure that the personal and the carnal would be held in check and not have to be on parade. He could be pompous and intimidating when he pleased. Henry had known him too well to be affected by this, yet, at William’s instigation, he had paid enough attention to Holmes’s role as a judge to be deeply impressed by him at the same time.
From William, too, he learned about aspects of Holmes which Holmes was careful never to display to him. Holmes loved, it seemed, to talk lightly of women to his old friends. This was something which offered William considerable amusement, especially when he learned that Holmes never alluded to such matters when Henry was present. In company, William insisted, Holmes also loved to refight the battles of the Civil War and explain his wounds to the assembled listeners.
‘When it gets late,’ William said, ‘Holmes becomes like his father, the old doctor and autocrat. He enjoys his own often-told anecdotes and loves a listener.’
William expressed incredulity that Holmes, in his meetings with Henry over the previous thirty years, had never mentioned the Civil War.
‘It’s all day long and then through the night, William went on, bullets whizzing and rifles and men charging and the dead lying everywhere and the wounded beyond description. And, indeed, his own wounds, even when there are ladies present he discusses his wounds. The only wonder is that he did not die of them. Surely he has shown you his wounds?’
Henry remembered that this conversation had taken place in William’s study. He could see William enjoying his own tone, allowing himself freedoms with his brother that he normally reserved for his wife.
Henry remembered with satisfaction how the conversation had ended.
‘What then do the two of you talk about?’ William asked. He seemed to want real information, a factual response.
Henry hesitated and looked into the distance, then focussed his eyes carefully on a number of leather-bound volumes on a far shelf, and quietly responded, ‘Wendell is formed, I fear, to testify simply and solely about himself.’
HE WAITED on his terrace after supper as night came down. Holmes, he remembered now, generally spoke to him about his career, his colleagues, new cases, new developments in law and politics and then new conquests he had made
among the British aristocracy. He gossiped about old friends and boasted about new ones, speaking freely and solemnly. Henry loved his worldliness, his practised, clipped sentences and then a sudden burst of something else when he allowed himself to use words and phrases which hardly belonged to the law or the war, but more to the pulpit or the essay. Holmes loved to speculate, argue with himself, explain his own logic as though it were a side in a battle with opposing forces and much interior drama.
Henry did not mind what Holmes said. He saw him seldom and knew that what connected them was simple. They were part of an old world, fully respectable and oddly Puritan, led by the enquiring, protean minds of their fathers and the deeply cautious, watchful eyes of their mothers. They both had a sense of their destiny. More precisely, they belonged to the group of young men who had been to Harvard and who had known and loved Minny Temple, had sat at her feet and sought her approval and whom she haunted as they grew into middle age. In her company, they remembered, their experience had meant nothing, nor their innocence either, as she demanded something else from them. She elated them, and they felt a strange and insistent nostalgia when they recalled the time when they knew her.
She was Henry’s cousin, one of six Temple children, left as orphans when their parents died. For Henry and for William, the idea of the Temples not having parents made their cousins interesting and romantic. Their position seemed enviable, as all authority over them was vague and provisional. It made them appear free and loose, and it was only later, as each of them struggled in various ways, and indeed suffered, that he understood the unrecoverable nature and the deep sadness of their loss.
There was, between the time when he envied them and the time when he pitied them, a long gap. When he first reencountered Minny Temple aged seventeen, not having seen her for some years, the sentiment was still very much one of admiration, even awe. He instantly knew that she, among her sisters, would be special for him and that she would remain so. There were many words to describe her: she was light and curious and spontaneous and she was natural – that was important – and, perhaps, he felt, her lack of parenting gave her a sort of ease and freshness; she had never had to reflect anyone, or seek to become like anyone, or fight against such influences. Maybe, he later thought, in the shadow of so much death, she had developed what was her most remarkable feature – a taste for life. Her mind was restless; there was nothing she did not want to know, no matter on which she did not wish to speculate. She managed, he thought, to combine a questioning inner life with a quick sense of the social. She loved coming into a room to find people there. More than anything else, he remembered her laugh, its suddenness and its richness, but also its lightness, the strange, touching, ringing sound of it.
She had not, when she struck him first with all her moral force, appeared so ethereal. She came to Newport with one of her sisters and they seemed to him beautiful and clear-eyed and free, being looked after lightly at the time by their aunt and uncle. On that first visit Minny had argued with Henry’s father. Henry had never known a time when people did not argue with his father. As soon as he could listen, he had witnessed William and his father in deep discussion which involved raised voices and heated divergence of views. Most male visitors and some female ones too seemed to come to the house specifically to argue. Freedom of all sorts, and especially religious freedom, was his father’s great subject, but he also had many others; he did not believe in confining himself, it was one of his principles.
Minny Temple sat in the garden and at first listened silently to Henry’s father, who was addressing most of his remarks to William, nodding at times in the direction of Henry and the Temple sisters. There was a jug of lemonade and some glasses on the low garden table, and it might have been an ordinary, easy summer gathering of cousins amusing themselves at the feet of the older generation. Everything his father said had been uttered many times before, but despite this William grinned in encouragement as his father began now to discuss women and their deep inferiority and the need for them to remain not only subservient but patient.
‘By nature,’ he spoke quickly and emphatically, ‘woman is inferior to man. She is man’s inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect and his inferior in physical strength.’
‘My father has many convictions,’ William said amiably. He smiled at Minny, but she did not return his smile. Her gaze was still and serious. She sat up straight, seeming unrelaxed as if poised to speak. His father noticed her discomfort, and looked at her impatiently. For a few moments, the group was silent, waiting to see if she would say something. Her voice was low when she eventually began so that the old man had to strain to hear her.
‘Perhaps it is my very inferiority,’ she said, ‘which causes me to wonder.’
‘Wonder what?’ William asked.
‘Do you really wish to know?’ she asked. She almost laughed.
‘Say it out,’ the father said.
‘Very simply, sir, I wonder if what you are saying is true.’ Suddenly, her tone was direct and clear.
‘Do you mean you don’t agree with it?’ William asked.
‘No, I don’t mean that,’ Minny said. ‘If I had meant that I would have said it. I meant what I said. I wonder if it is true.’ A sharpness had entered her tone.
‘Of course it’s true.’ The old man’s eyes displayed his anger now. ‘A man is physically stronger than a woman. That much is clear, that much is true, if true is the word you want. And in passion a man is stronger, as I have said. And in intellect. Plato was not a woman, nor Sophocles, nor Shakespeare.’
‘How do we know Shakespeare was not a woman?’ William interjected.
‘Does what I have said satisfy you, Miss Temple?’ the father asked.
Minny did not answer him.
‘It is a woman’s job,’ he went on, ‘to be submissive. To see to her needlework and her cooking and her preparation to become the sleepless guardian of her husband’s children. We judge a woman by her obedience and her attention to duty.’
His voice had become rancorous and he was obviously annoyed.
‘Thus spake our father,’ William said.
‘Is that settled then?’ the old man asked Minny.
‘Not at all, sir. Nothing is settled.’ She smiled at him. Her expression was almost condescending as she continued. ‘Very simply, I do not know if being physically weaker than man means we understand less, or live less intelligently in the world. You see, I have the evidence close at hand which is my own weak mind, but I do not think it is weaker than anyone else’s.’
‘Women must live in Christian humility,’ Henry senior said.
‘Is that in the Bible, sir, or is it one of the Commandments, or did you learn it at school?’ Minny asked.
By suppertime the news had spread. Mrs James, Aunt Kate and Alice had been alerted to the outrage which had occurred.
‘She will not mind women cooking for her and keeping house for her,’ Henry’s mother said to him as they met in the hallway. ‘She has not been disciplined and she has not been cultivated, and we must pity her because her future will be grim.’
IN THE SUMMER of 1865, the Civil War over and his first two stories published, Henry prepared to spend the month of August with the Temples in New Hampshire. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had refused an invitation to Newport, agreed to go to North Conway, where the Temples were staying, once he discovered that there would be abundant female company. He was to travel with Henry, and John Gray, also fresh from the Civil War, was to follow. Henry wrote to Holmes to tell him that Minny Temple, after superhuman efforts, had ferreted out a single room, the only one in the area, and that the wretch who owned the room had, despite Minny’s protests and her charm, refused to furnish the room with two beds.
They would, Henry told him, pull the fellow’s own bed out from under him. In the meantime, Minny had her eye peeled for another bed, or indeed another room. Holmes seemed thrilled at the idea of an enemy who could be made to hand over his bed to his visitors. As they
travelled to North Conway, he listed the tactics they could use, mentioning several technical terms and placing himself in the foreground as leader and hero and placing Henry, two years younger than he and not a veteran of any war, merely as a decoy. He did not seem to mind when Henry fell asleep.
They were to go for supper, as invited, at the house where the Temple girls were being chaperoned by their great-aunt, who looked, in Henry’s opinion, like George Washington. But first, on arrival at North Conway, they set out to find directions to their lodgings, and, after several wrong turns, they discovered a large and surly landlord who managed instantly to express his dislike for people who were not born and bred in North Conway and its immediate surroundings. Neither Holmes’s uniform, which he was wearing, nor his moustache, seemed to impress him. The landlord did not look at Henry. One bed, he said, that’s what he had told the lady, and one bed it was, but the room had a nice clean floor and you could sleep a whole regiment there, he added insolently as he gave them the key.
The room was bare, except for a washstand, a jug and basin, a closet and a small iron-framed bed covered by a strangely beautiful coloured quilt out of keeping with the spartan decor. They left their luggage at the door, as if unsure that they were going to stay.
‘I believe we should call for reinforcements and attack him forthwith,’ Holmes said.
Henry tested the bed, which sagged in the middle.
‘Perhaps it is the sort of room which benefits from its inhabitants remaining outdoors,’ Henry said.
He picked up a small lamp from the floor.
‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that every moth in New Hampshire has visited this shrine. It looks as though it came with the founding fathers.’
‘Is your cousin Minny wise?’ Holmes asked.
‘Yes, she is,’ Henry said.
‘In that case, I am sure she has found us another room.’