Chev knew that Longfellow had been to the house several times to go over pages with Julia, but he had not stepped into the office once, not even for a greeting. It was clear that Longo, one of his oldest and dearest and his friend long before he became Julia’s, was avoiding him. He knew why, of course, but what kind of man would he be if he did not confront it? Longo was being weak, a puny snake in the grass, and so he called him out, sending a letter asking him to the club for a Saturday night, the way they’d done a hundred times, with others, or alone. Thank God, the poet was still upright enough to agree to meet.
The main room of the club was glutted with overstuffed sofas and chairs, but Chev preferred the smaller smoking room, where the furniture was burnished mahogany leather, the walls wood-paneled, and the lights low. Longo hurried in late, as was his habit, but his dark eyes were lit with their usual intensity and curiosity. He must know why his friend had asked to meet, so Chev got to it after the cordialities and a requisite amount of hobnobbing.
“You have been avoiding me, sir?” he asked.
Longo looked down, fingering the ivory buttons on his fine bespoke jacket—he’d had an excellent year for a poet, been able to retire from teaching at last—then met his gaze square on. “I know you well enough, Chev, to know that you are nettled by me, and that’s putting it mildly, for my support and encouragement of Julia.”
“You are as wise as you are wise.” Long sips of brandy on both sides.
“She is a delightful poet, a natural lyric sensibility and a tether between the earthly and the divine, which is unusual, especially in a woman.”
“I stand informed that my wife is a very unusual woman.”
“Yes, and I thank God that I am wed to a more usual one. Fanny is as simple and well-serving as they come.”
“And you have the six to show for it, while I merit only four.”
“Well, my friend, the stallion must do his part as well.”
This was his old friend, the old teasing, the challenge of tightrope-walking between high and low humor. And it was true that Fanny was his second, after his first had died of a miscarriage, and Fanny Appleton had taken seven years of courting to secure! How he had poked Longo mercilessly about that. Seven years’ worth of barbed pleasure, but always with the undertow of empathy, something that he also felt from his dear friend in the moment.
“So the poems are really so good that they merit a book?”
“Yes, the title one particularly.”
“Ah, yes, ‘Passionate Flowers.’ I heard.”
“Sumner’s mouth is as wide as his feet. But it’s ‘Passion-Flowers.’”
“A significant difference, I’m certain.”
Longo leaned forward, earnest for the first time. “She told me she has agreed to publish anonymously to placate you, and I believe that is all you can ask, even of a woman.”
“You would allow yours to do as much?”
“Mine cannot rhyme hot with pot, for which I thank my Benefactor every day.”
“You are a lucky sot.” Chev waited. “Rhymes with…”
“Ah, the wit entire.” Longo’s saber sharp as ever.
“You don’t think that any of the poems are of such an unguarded nature that they might lash me outright to the mast?”
“Will the wags guess her identity? I don’t know, Chev. I can’t say for sure.”
“Then there is cause for concern, you admit.”
“The truth is that under the dire emotional circumstances she suffers, I believe that you should allow her this one thing.”
“What circumstances? Surely she does not report her return to life with me as that horrendous.”
“I thought you knew. I thought Charlie surely would have…or Julia herself…”
“What?”
“Wallace, her friend. He committed suicide in Paris a month after her return. Slit his throat. Grisly business.”
For once, Chev was speechless. He reeled with possibilities. “Did he…Did the man do it because of Julia?”
Longfellow patted his arm. “How can one discern that deepy within a stranger’s heart? I have no idea.”
“So he left no note? Nothing to tie her to the scandal?”
“Not that I have been told. Wallace was known to have a melancholic nature. I believe you have nothing to worry about.”
“No,” said Chev, but he didn’t meet Longo’s eyes. “I suppose not.” Should he tell his dear friend the truth, that she wept all hours, both in his arms and out?
“Simply a worldly lady’s chats with a worldly man. Now an otherworldly man.” Longo was notorious for his puns, even at the worst of times, something that Julia enjoyed, but Chev fairly loathed. “Let’s move on to port and toast to your wife’s book. Can you manage that?”
Chev raised his hand for the waiter. “I can as long as she is never known as my wife.”
“To the private heart of a public woman.” Longo raised his glass and Doctor clinked a bit too heartily.
“That would be a far better title than Passion-Flowers,” he said.
“Ah, well, chalk that up to Mr. Wallace.”
“He gave her that?”
“If that’s all he gave her, we’ll be of good cheer. Now drink up, my man. I have a wife to get home to.”
They walked along the Charles, the road to the bridge over the dark river goldened by streetlamps every fifty yards. At the bridge, they embraced and parted, Longfellow across the river to Cambridge, that delightful house on Brattle Street, bubbling with domestic warmth and affection; Chev rambling, a bit drunkenly, toward South Boston, wondering what he would say to Julia when he returned, if anything. Maybe he would swing round the Back Bay to Sumner’s for a late-night shot of comfort. Charlie was always and ever on his side.
When he arrived home just before dawn, she was sleeping, this stranger, this woman, this wife, her hair wild, undone, both arms flung over her face as if in self-defense. He watched her from the door of her bedroom for a moment, the bile rising in his craw. He would not be bothering the lady tonight. Chev didn’t know if he could sleep, but he damn sure wasn’t going to try it in her mourning bed. Let her wake and wonder why, if she had offended or displeased him. Let her lie and dream of her poet, reciting gibberish through the bloody gash in his throat.
The next day he thought about mentioning his conversation with Longo, but couldn’t figure out how to bring it up. Then a week passed and she seemed to be getting better, a little gayer, a little warmer toward the children. He only caught her weeping once, as she climbed the stairs to their rooms. Her coming up, him coming down, and his eyes searched hers for any sign of the truth: had she really been in love with Wallace? It was not unheard of for a woman to cry over a friend’s passing for months, and Julia was a more sensitive flower than most. She never offered any explanation for her tears, nor did she acknowledge that he had suddenly left her bed. He tried very hard not to return, but that resolve melted within the month, and a bit sheepishly, he appeared in his dressing gown at her doorway one night after they’d thrown a small dinner party. He said nothing, his hand on the doorsill, until she looked up from writing in her journal and nodded, such a small movement that it was almost imperceptible. But it was enough for him.
He realized, of course, that he could simply read her journal; he knew where she secreted it, in the smallest hatbox on the top shelf of her closet. Yes, he had found it—that was long ago when she had banned him from her quarters the first time during the weaning—and yes, he had retrieved it again, actually three times, each time exploring its red-and-gold brocaded cover, fingering the tight slew of pages, flipping the tiny lock, which he knew he could break and then repair in an instant. Would it be worth it? What if he found the evidence of her love for another man that would throw their marriage into eternal damnation? What if the threat of divorce were forced to be made real? In the pit of his stomach, which irritated him more and more these days, he felt that Julia had not been physically unfaithful to him and decided tha
t would have to be enough to soldier on with her. He himself had crossed that bridge long ago, and she was none the wiser for it, or at least he thought. If she had shared her heart, however briefly, with another man, then he would take that, must take that, and spend the rest of his life with a woman with only half a heart to offer him. And from Laura, regardless of how she sulked at him now, he would always have the other half. Many had fared far worse.
Chapter 24
Laura, 1852
Doctor holds the spoon to my lips, and I open just enough to allow it. The first offering is heavy, sticky, familiar. I tongue the residue from my front teeth. Enduring sweetness.
“Honey, of course,” I write on the pad Doctor has set in front of me for the benefit of Dr. Combe, whom he has invited to witness. Too easy.
Doctor pats my hand and offers me a sip of water. Then another spoonful, this time like grains of sand. I remember this, the sensation of the sea upon my tongue.
“Salt!” I write and hold my glass out for Doctor to fill it again.
Twice more, he feeds me, and then I wait as he and Dr. Combe confer.
“Not as well as you’d hoped,” Doctor says.
“Tell me.”
“Knew you couldn’t suddenly―”
“If you give me right food―”
“No. It is as always. You are as always.”
I stand, registering the vibration of the crack as my glass falls from the table. “I am not as always. I can taste everything.” Footsteps shake the room; he must have asked Dr. Combe to leave. He is embarrassed that I am making a scene. I hold out my arms until he takes my hand again.
“Should I lie?” he asks.
“No.” But I know that a lie to him might be the truth to me.
“Got one right. Only—”
I crush his fingers in my fist. “You want me to fail. Great Doctor wrong? Don’t know anything about me.”
“Knew you’d guess by texture, so—”
“I know what I know.”
“Used pepper jelly instead of―”
I drop my hand before he can write another word. I brush the front of my dress for crumbs and walk out the door. It was honey. Honey, I’m sure of it. The rest doesn’t matter.
Chapter 25
Chev, 1856–1860
Oh, Charlie, what have you done?” Chev changed the bandages on his friend’s head as the blood seeped through the gauze. He’d given him laudanum twice today for the headaches, but Sumner still complained. It had only been two weeks since he was beaten almost to death on the Senate floor by Representative Preston Brooks. Brooks claimed Sumner wasn’t even gentleman enough for a duel after what he’d said in his three-hour speech, raving against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which gave settlers of those territories the right to choose slavery or to abhor it. For the assault with his gold-headed gutta-percha cane, Brooks was fined a measly three hundred dollars.
“I have to go back,” Sumner said, his words slurred from the slice through his lip.
“Not now,” Chev told him, wiping the sweat from his face. “In time.” He regaled Sumner with the tenderness he usually reserved for only his youngest patients. He drifted back to sleep, woke yelling from a nightmare, his words indistinct.
“What was it?” Chev asked.
“I don’t know. Chasing me.”
He soothed him by telling of the thousands who had attended rallies in his support not only in Boston, but in Albany, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, and Providence.
“Cleveland?” he said, and for the first time since the accident, he laughed, a low, gurgling sound. Chev employed the nightstand as a podium and repeated the rousing speech that he himself had delivered at the Faneuil Hall rally, defending his friend. He reminded Sumner about the million copies of his now famous Senate speech that had been distributed all over the North, but didn’t mention the hundreds of new gold-headed canes that had been sent to Preston Brooks from all over the South to replace the one he broke on Sumner’s head.
“So I got the whole country riled?” Sumner asked, attempting a smile that looked more like a grimace.
“Yes, indeed.” Chev held his tongue regarding the repercussions he felt sure would come, and quickly, from this event. The republic had never been so polarized. Charlie had made sure of that. But slavery was an abomination, and it was probably true that there would be no other way for it to meet its end than with violence.
“Cleveland.” Sumner laughed again and closed his eyes, glad, Chev thought, at what he had wrought. Maybe that was because he’d always been a man who could only fight with words. He’d claimed he was channeling Demosthenes and Cicero, but the truth was that the “Crime Against Kansas” was three hours of vulgarity, far crasser and less noble than Charlie had ever been in his five years in Congress. His lowest note was mocking South Carolina Senator Butler’s speech and mannerisms, which all knew were the result of a stroke. Chev was disappointed in his closest friend, though of course the blight of slavery was far more disappointing. A duel would have been more manly, and God knows Sumner needed to be presented to the world as manly.
Even Julia was so concerned that she came to help out when she could spare herself from the children and the writing, and poor Laura had offered her services as well, though she’d always loathed Sumner and God knows Chev wouldn’t wish such a nurse on anyone. He recalled how she tortured Miss Wight with good intentions when she had her spells. Julia was as wound up about abolitionism as he was now—a tie that finally helped bind them—and the time had come for him to act. With the help of their dear friend, the Reverend Theodore Parker, the abolitionists, the Free-Soilers, and the former Cotton Whigs had united to supply the new band of seven hundred and fifty Kansas settlers. They’d raised almost six thousand dollars, most to go for Sharps rifles, revolvers, ammunition, and Bowie knives. Chev could not lock up his principles any longer, living in fear of contributing to the havoc; it was too late for that after Bleeding Kansas and bleeding Charlie. He had been approached by a man intimately involved in settling matters in those territories, sometimes in the direst of ways. But these were the direst of times, and so he charged forward, not daring to look back.
The day before Sumner’s speech, the country had thundered with news of the Border Ruffians’ sack of Lawrence, and then the retaliation on the Pottawatomie by Chev’s new compatriot, John Brown. Atrocities on both sides, with Brown and his sons cutting off the arms and butchering the remains of the Ruffians they thought were responsible, though these men did not themselves hold any slaves.
By January of the next year, 1857, John Brown had arrived in Boston. He met for the first time with his most loyal New England supporters—Chev, George Stearns, young Franklin Sanborn, and the two ministers Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. But not Sumner; his psychic wounds were deep, and Chev didn’t know that he should return to the Senate at all, though he swore he would. Already his enemies were accusing him of cowardice.
With his cropped graying hair and streaked beard, Brown looked as if he’d stepped straight from the pages of the Old Testament, a prophet blessed with great self-possession and natural gravity. Everyone looked quite ordinary compared to Brown. For a man in his late fifties, how could it be that his eyes gleamed so electric, a beam as focused as the light that shone on Calvary? If Sumner was the Negroes’ greatest friend, then Brown was their deliverer. The group all agreed instantly that Brown was their man and cobbled together money for his expenses, a letter of credit, and one hundred of the Sharps rifles. Chev gave him a rifle and two pistols himself, placed them directly into those powerful hands that would wring such justice from the world. Gerrit Smith of New York joined them, putting his entire vast estate at the disposal of the abolitionists.
Chev brought Brown home to Perkins. He had told Julia all about him, and the man was so extraordinary that he wanted his family to meet him. They had had guests from Boz to the governor in this house, but he had never felt such reverence in introducing anyone. He could see in his wi
fe’s eyes that she too beheld the singular greatness in the man; Julia rarely, if ever, became flustered, but she acted like Moses himself had stepped over the threshold. She declared him a Puritan of the Puritans. Cook had outdone herself, serving up a feast of roast mutton, tortoise soup, baked doves, and a layered huckleberry cake. Chev had made a point of not inviting Laura to dine with them because he knew she would prove a distraction, and yet at the last moment, she wandered in, brought no doubt by the great preparations rocking the first floor. He couldn’t keep her away from anything. Brown eyed her, and she was the first person who had appeared to interest him.
“Laura Bridgman,” Chev said.
Brown nodded. “I have heard much of her. One of our Father’s miracles, I’d say.”
Chev tried to explain quickly to Laura just who the man was as he led her to Brown, in the hope that she would behave accordingly. Every night, the students were read the Transcript, with one teacher appointed to translate for Laura. So although she was reasonably kept up with the news and politics, so far she had displayed a disappointing lack of interest in the slave question and the civil strife it promised. She curtsied, and upon standing, offered her hand to Brown. He held it firmly but with great courtesy, and yet she suddenly jerked her hand out of his grasp. She backed away and into Chev, who shook her for her rudeness.
“What’s wrong with you?”
She spelled back in near frenzy. “Mad. He is mad.”
“Please excuse her,” he told Brown, who didn’t look concerned. “Sometimes she skitters like a frightened horse.”
“Put in the bit,” Brown said quietly and walked away.
She must have felt the immense power emanating from his hands, so that was actually a good sign. Chev trusted her to act as his barometer for the extraordinary. But he still didn’t want her at the dinner table, so he sent her back out to her cottage. For once, she seemed glad to go. Brown hardly spoke during the meal and left far earlier than the Howes had hoped. He simply wasn’t a brandy and cigars kind of fellow.
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