by Colm Toibin
Dr Richardson’s face was illuminated with a sharp little smile, and with this smile playing in his clear eyes and on his neatly shaved lips he looked at his patient. He then became silent as Henry senior began to talk, explaining the length of their journey, the number of his offspring, their situation and his hopes for a new America. The doctor, as he contemplated Henry senior, replaced his smile with a scowl. His eyes became cold as he waited for him to finish. And when it was clear that his father had no real intention of finishing, the doctor simply sprang up and moved towards his patient. With his two hands he motioned him to remove the upper parts of his clothing. As Henry began to undress, his father faltered for a moment until the doctor fetched him a chair and motioned him to sit on it. By the time Henry had stripped to the waist, the doctor still had not spoken. He made Henry raise his arms above his head and then slowly, painstakingly, he began to study his frame, the bones in his arms, his shoulders, his rib cage. He then began meticulously to finger his spine. Eventually, he made him lie facedown on the couch as he repeated each exercise. Then, having indicated to Henry that he should remove all his clothing save his undershorts, he ran his hand clinically along his hip bones and pelvis, repeating the earlier exercise on his spine and arms and shoulders, pressing hard until Henry winced.
Henry had presumed that he would be asked where the pain centred and what sort of pain it was, and he was ready to answer this, but Dr Richardson asked him nothing, merely probed and studied, his hands hard, his examination slow and thorough and methodical, his silence dry. Finally, he went to the basin and poured some water over his hands and washed them with soap and then dried them with a towel. He handed Henry his clothes and nodded as Henry began to dress. He stood up to his full height and stretched.
‘There’s nothing the matter a good day’s work wouldn’t cure,’ he said. ‘Plenty of exercise. Up early, out early, that’s not the best cure for most things but it’s the best cure for this young man. He is in perfect condition, his whole life ahead of him. I’ll have to charge you, sir, for telling you this good news. There’s nothing at all wrong with your son. And I don’t make up my mind easily. What I tell you is the result of thirty years of observation.’
As Henry leaned over to pick up his jacket, Dr Richardson gripped his neck with his thumb and forefinger, pressing hard until Henry, his face contorted with pain, tried to wrench his hand away, but the doctor merely tightened his grip. His hand was strong.
‘Up early, out early,’ he said. ‘You won’t get better advice in many a long day. Home with you now.’
Even still, all these years later, he thought, he hated doctors, and had drawn a portrait of a most unpleasant member of the profession with much relish in Washington Square, using some of Dr Richardson’s more obnoxious mannerisms in his description of his Dr Sloper’s professional habits. He wondered indeed if the visit itself, in all its humiliation and roughness, had not in fact caused a genuine, serious backache that was with him to this day. He had suffered a great deal from constipation as well, and often blamed it on Dr Richardson, and made sure to keep away from others of his profession lest they should cause some new malady.
SEVERAL TIMES a day Henry looked at the photographs which William had sent him, having left them on a table in one of the downstairs rooms at Lamb House, and noted with more and more interest the place of honour which the monument had on Boston Common. His own name could have easily been among the dead, or the maimed, and he would have been a proud memory now to his brother and those who had survived.
As he explored the area around Rye, delighting in his new life, working on a new novel, feeling at home as though for the first time, he wondered at how easily it could have been otherwise. He was not cut out to be a soldier, he thought, but neither were most of the young men of his class and acquaintance who went to fight. It was not wisdom which kept him away, he believed, but something closer to cowardice, and as he walked the cobbled streets of his new town, he almost thanked God for it. He wished this gladness had been simple, but it came back to him, as much else, with guilt at its core and regret and memories of what had happened to his brother Wilky which these photographs made sharp and clear.
He remembered that he put on his jacket that day in Boston, and having watched his father pay the doctor, accompanied him to the street. Their silence on the return journey had a different tone. Now his father was deep in melancholy contemplation. Neither of them, Henry thought, would know what to say to his mother.
When they met her at the door of their house in Newport, he recalled that they both remained so solemn and their expressions were so worried that she believed, she told them later, that the news could not be worse. She suspected, she said, that Henry had a terminal illness. And now she was relieved to hear that the prognosis had been good, the injury to his back was not dangerous, not part of some wider ailment.
‘Rest,’ she said. ‘Rest will be enough. You’ll need to rest for the next few days after your long journey.’
Henry remembered that he watched his father and wondered if he was going to tell her the true prognosis but his father just then seemed to be having difficulty taking off his coat and had to be assisted. As soon as his coat was hanging in the hallway, his father found a book and settled down to read it. Henry guessed that even in the privacy of the night his father would not reveal what the doctor had really said. Yet there was no conspiracy between Henry and his father to deceive his mother. Henry felt now that his father had never told her that her son was perfectly healthy because it would have involved such a clear rebuttal of her own judgement, and implied a criticism of her. It would also have forced her to face the possibility that Henry’s weakness and disability had been a search for attention and sympathy. This would undermine Henry’s moral character in a household where illness was too serious a matter for such games not to be a sort of sacrilege, and this would be too unsettling for everyone, including his father.
His father needed time, Henry thought, to mull over the great discrepancy between the words ‘Up early, out early’ and the treatment Henry was receiving. He was conscious that his father’s propensity for change could make itself felt at any stage; he knew how much it tended towards the irrational, if it were not controlled and channelled. He knew that idling in his room all summer, being cosseted by his mother and his aunt, could cause his father suddenly to stand up, leave his book aside, and with fire in his eyes declare that something would have to be done about Henry.
He moved carefully, consulting William about the advisability of a course at Harvard and then his friend Sargy Perry who was about to enter the college. He did not allude directly to his father’s unpredictability and the course it could take. He maintained a high tone, explaining that it was time he ceased to idle at the family’s expense and considered a career. William nodded.
‘Have you considered the ministry? There will never not be a need for you, especially if you study divinity at Harvard, where the bedside manner, with exhortation to repent, is taught with such emphasis and zeal.’
He allowed William to joke, but did not let him stray from the subject. He was young enough still to care more about his immediate circumstances than any long-term vision of his career. Thus being left alone all summer reigned supreme among his desires. And when William said ‘law’, he realized that it was the only plausible option. His family, he knew, could number among their familiars some whose sons had taken a similar route. But more than anything, the study of law sounded serious and decisive, and it was also a change of direction. It would offer their father a brief thrill, and this would prevent him from wanting another such thrill – at least as far as Henry was concerned – for some time.
His mother, perhaps as a result of a chance remark or merely because of his father’s silence on the matter, began to ask him if his back was not, in fact, much improved. She wondered one day if more exercise rather than more rest might not be the solution. He thought from her uncertainty and her vague worried air that his fa
ther had said nothing directly, but he was also aware of how close the danger was now, that he could easily have a decision made for his future without his being consulted. It would take just one night, his parents beginning their discussions before they went to bed and continuing in muffled tones until they would have a decision and it would be announced at breakfast as a fact, something which had been decided and could not be amended.
Henry waited for the moment. He would need both of them together. He would begin by discussing his own unsettled state and his urge to make a decision about his future. He would suggest that he had no clear idea what to do; but he was alert to the danger here – if he left this door open for too long, his father would be capable of closing it and locking it very quickly by proposing he join the Union forces and, having made the proposal, allowing it to become more gravely and deeply the entire focus of the discussion to the exclusion of other possibilities. He would need to move the discussion forward quickly, to say perhaps that he had spoken to William, although that would also be a risk as William went in and out of favour depending on nothing more than the vagaries of his father’s thinking. He could not say that he wished ‘to be’ a lawyer as his father would pounce on the words ‘to be’ and lecture him about his own being as a precious gift to be cultivated with energy but also with subtle wisdom and consideration. Thus, his father would say, you cannot ‘be’ a lawyer nor can you ‘become’ one. Such language, his father would insist, is a way of offering offence to the greatest gift of our Creator – life itself and the grace our Creator offers us to move on from our being and become.
No, he would have to discuss his urge to study law rather than become a lawyer, to attend lectures about law, to broaden his intellect by applying it directly to a discipline. Such words, if uttered with spontaneity and sincerity, if he could speak as though his high hopes had focussed on this solution only now, as a result of this discussion, he might fire his father with enthusiasm at this change, and his mother would nod in agreement, carefully weighing up the consequences.
He thought of going to his mother first and telling her of his plan, but he knew that things had gone too far for that. In any case, his father would suspect both of them of conspiring at his exclusion. Henry’s injured back would also have to be mentioned, but it would have to be delicately brought into the conversation, as neither a deciding factor nor an impediment, but as something that might fade from the horizon, annihilated once and for all by the force of a new decision.
He found them as he dreamed of finding them, his father reading and his mother moving quietly about the room.
‘I need to discuss with you my present circumstances,’ he said.
‘Sit down, Harry,’ his mother said, moving to a tall chair by the table and sitting there with her hands joined in front of her.
‘I know that it is time for me to make a choice, and I have given it much thought, but perhaps not enough thought, and I have come to you both to see, perhaps, if you could help me clarify how I must live my life, what I must do.’
‘Each of us needs to clarify how he must live his life,’ Henry senior said. ‘It is a matter for all of us.’
‘I am aware of that, Father,’ Henry said and then left silence. He knew that his father could not now declare a career for him or suggest that he get up early and go out early. He had left things open for discussion rather than decision. He could see his father becoming bright-eyed and excited that an ordinary morning with his family in Newport had suddenly been transformed and was awash with possibility.
No one mentioned the army, but it hovered over the conversation, swooping to eye level now and then; nor did any of them mention his ailment, but it too lingered in the atmosphere. Henry was careful not to mention anything specific at first, merely his restlessness and his ambition and his need to clarify – he used the word several times – what he might do now.
‘I have become interested in America itself, Father, its traditions and history and indeed its future.’
‘Yes, but that is a subject for all Americans, we all must devote time and energy to the study of our heritage,’ his father said.
‘America is developing and changing,’ Henry said, ‘in ways which are unique and require a serious approach.’
He wondered if the word ‘serious’ had not been a mistake, if it had not suggested that his father’s approach to his chosen subject had been less than serious. His father was easily wounded, but his mind was too busy now, and his bustling confidence too complete to take offence. Henry watched him pondering the full implications of the last remark and then noticed his eyes become steely, his expression hard. He loved how his father could change like this and regretted that it occurred so seldom. He did not look at his mother.
‘What is it you wish to do then?’ his father asked.
In that moment Henry senior appeared and sounded like someone powerful, a man with a large private income at his disposal and a high puritan sternness. This, he thought, was how his father’s own father must have been when plans and money were being discussed.
‘I do not wish to become an historian,’ Henry said. ‘I want to study something with a more specific application. In short, sir, I wanted to discuss with you whether I should study law.’
‘And keep us all out of jail?’ his father asked.
‘Do you wish to join your brother at Harvard?’ his mother asked.
‘William said it is the best law school in America.’
‘William would not even know how to break a law,’ his father said.
The idea of a changing legal system as part of a changing America, however, began to interest his father the more he spoke on the subject. When he had expounded on it at some length, he seemed to abandon whatever worries he had about the narrowness of the subject and indeed the confining nature of decisions themselves. The fact that his two eldest sons would spend their time, at his expense, in libraries while a war for the very survival of American values of freedom and individual rights raged outside, may have occurred to him, but, in Henry’s presence, he did not let it cloud his new enthusiasm, and his wife, with her mild silence and her smile, also indicated her approval that he should attend Harvard to study law.
NOW HENRY had the summer free from his father’s nervous, watchful eyes and his mother’s ministrations. His case had been put to rest. His parents could occupy themselves worrying about Wilky and Bob and Alice. Henry could savour the stifling heat of his bedroom; he could work with freedom; he could read whatever he liked without the foreboding that his father would at any moment and without warning appear at his bedroom door and tell him that there was a war on, his country needed him, it was time to submit to army discipline, to wear a uniform and sleep in barracks and march in file.
In the days after his father agreed that he could go to law school, Henry discovered Hawthorne. He knew his name, of course, as he knew Emerson and Thoreau, and he had glanced at some of his stories, paying him less attention than the two essayists because of a perceived level of dullness and bareness in the work he had read. They were simple moral tales about simple moral people, light and slight and tenderly trivial. Both Henry and Sargy Perry, with whom Henry discussed these matters, had agreed that literature at its most valuable and rich and intense was written in the countries which Napoleon had reigned over and attacked; literature lay in the places where Roman coins could be found in the soil. Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales reminded him and Perry of just that, tales which could have been told by their aunt about her aunt with all the social detail and sensuous landscape absent.
This would be the fate, they felt, of anyone who tried to write about New England lives, they would have to confront the thinness of the social air, the absence of a system of manners and the presence of a stultifying system of morals. All of this, he thought, would make any novelist miserable. There was no sovereign or court, no aristocracy, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, nor castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages
, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no literature, nor novels, no museums nor pictures, no political society, nor sporting class. If these things are left out, he thought, for the novelist everything is left out. There is no flavour, no life to dramatize, merely paucity of feeling represented in paucity of tradition. Trollope and Balzac, Zola and Dickens would, he felt, have become bitter old preachers, or mad hairy schoolmasters had they been born in New England and condemned to live amongst its people.
Henry was thus surprised when Perry spoke with awe of The Scarlet Letter, which he had just finished reading. Perry insisted that Henry must read it immediately, and seemed disappointed a few days later when Henry still had not begun the book. Henry had, in fact, tried the opening pages and found them almost laughably ponderous, and then had been easily distracted by something else and left the novel aside. Now, trying once more, he believed that the semi-comic tone of the opening, with its talk of prisons and cemeteries and sweet moral blossoms, arose from the lack of a proper background, a varied social world. Hawthorne had replaced artistry with solemnity. This was, he thought, a puritan virtue, of which Henry’s grandfather, he was told, had been in full possession. He did not mind, he told Perry, reading about puritans, and he did not even mind having ancestors who embodied their virtues, but he did object somewhat to a book in which they and their virtues, if you could really call them that, had seeped into the tone, the very architecture of the work itself.