The Wreckage of Eden

by Norman Lock

  “When Thoreau first saw them lit in Amherst, he complained that they dimmed the stars, ‘which are more glorious than they.’” Austin paused a moment to smile. “Henry is that way.”

  I thought he must be a crank. Later, when I said as much to you, you replied, “Henry’s boots are too big for the parlor.”

  After Austin and I returned to Amherst, I went to visit you at the Homestead. It had snowed again. Did it always snow when we were together?

  Do you recall that evening, Emily? The sun was low down in the west, its fires belittled by gaslight caught in the nets of winter branches, while candles illuminating the windows of the houses along the street throbbed with a coppery gleam more wonderful than gold. The light fell in pale oblongs onto the snow, and the mansion seemed a world apart, which it was. A sleigh was waiting on the snowy path—the coachman nearly hidden under a blanket. The horse snorted plumes of smoke and fitfully pawed the icebound earth, causing the harness bells to ring out its misery with each shake of its heavy head. Weighted down by snow, the spruce trees leaned.

  When I arrived, your new friend Kate was just leaving. I caught a glimpse of her as she turned to kiss your cheek in the entrance hall. She was darkly attractive, perhaps even beautiful; her hair dark beneath a black hat, her eyes dark behind a black veil, her elegant figure unabashed by dark furs. I gave her my arm—glad of the night, which hid the flush of warmth I could feel spreading across my cheeks—and helped her—gallantly, I hoped—into the sleigh. Her hands lay inside a fur muff; I covered her lap with a rug, embarrassed by the intimacy. She thanked me, I nodded to the driver, who touched the horse’s sodden flank with the whip, and the sleigh drove off into the snow-illumined night. Turning, I thought I saw Sue scowling at a window behind the hedge.

  I watched you nervously fixing your hair—a strand of which had come undone—like an actress about to walk onstage. You’d taken to dressing it “after the fashion of Elizabeth Barrett, whose husband also writes poems.” For a moment, we regarded each other in mutual confusion and puzzlement. Then you led me into the parlor.

  “Forgive me for not introducing my friend,” you said, wrapping your shawl around your thin shoulders. “The snow and the hour did not wish it.”

  “I could not help noticing her black veil.”

  “She is recently widowed,” you replied, and then with something like a blush, you let me know that you did not wish to speak of her.

  Although I was intrigued—entranced is the better word—I let the matter drop. Without any real interest and with little coherence, I related my trip to Boston, Austin’s meeting with Ticknor, and my own happenstance encounter with Samuel Long. I did not refer to our brief exchange concerning John Brown, to whom I found myself giving increasing thought. I knew you did not share my fascination for the abolitionist, and, suddenly feeling tired and absurd, I wished you good night.

  Lying in bed, I grew peevish at the thought of how frivolous the tribe of scribblers can be. You are the poet of the divided self. Poe recorded, in prose, the depravity of lives diverted from the commonplace. Abraham Lincoln, however, was the prophet of a disintegrating nation—an eventuality far more terrible in its consequences than “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the minor tragedies played out inside the Homestead.

  In Utah, I’d read about Abe’s nomination at the convention in Springfield as the Republican candidate for the United States Senate. I could picture his oddly fashioned but kindly face—clean-shaven then—as he stood—all the length and lank of him—to accept his party’s blessing. I saw, in my mind’s eye, resoluteness, sadness, and misgiving on that face. He would lose the seat to Stephen Douglas, author of the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which had created a proslavery empire from Indian Territory, the Territory of New Mexico, and Texas. Douglas campaigned against Lincoln on a platform of popular sovereignty, or rule by the people, even if they cast their votes for slavery and murder. I fear this issue will be with us always—a stone the union cannot pass. Lincoln was not then an abolitionist, but he detested slavery because of what it threatened: the destruction of the United States, an end made inevitable by Dred Scott v. Sanford. The infamous Supreme Court decision declared that a negro—freedman or slave—could not, by law, be a citizen and that the federal government had no authority to forbid slavery in the territories.

  Did you read Abe’s speech, Emily? It thrilled me, and it scared me when I read it in The Deseret News, whose motto is “Truth and Liberty,” published by the Mormons in Salt Lake City.

  “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.

  With the shrewdness of a Yankee lawyer, Abe likely foresaw the division of the house, the legatees at loggerheads—its fall a judgment on them both for having failed to arbitrate their differences. War was inevitable, for neither side would concede. Did he look across the years and see himself as the man who would save the house from ruin? Did he hear an overture of disaster played to the wistful tune of “Dixie”? Did he smell—the instant before he closed his eyes forever—the stink of martyrdom in the gunpowder wafting from a theater balcony? When John Wilkes Booth had shaken a warning finger at him two years earlier, during a performance, in Washington, of The Marble Heart, did the president’s own heart turn momentarily cold?

  –5–

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, I RETURNED to the Homestead to ask you about the mysterious widow. No sooner had I broached the subject, however, than you flared and insisted that I mind my own business, which was my daughter, Charlotte, and not “Mrs. Kate,” as you called her.

  “I won’t mention her again,” I said peevishly.

  “How was your trip to Boston?” You’d meant to be conciliatory, but my back was up.

  “I told you last night!”

  “Did you? I don’t recall. I was not myself last night.”

  I served you Samuel Long’s words with vinegar. “‘We cannot always be ourselves.’”

  “That is very true and very wise, Robert,” you agreed with a warmth that checked the falling barometer of my spirits.

  I followed you into the conservatory.

  “My favorite room of all,” you said happily. “I call it mine even if I have no deed to it except as use and enjoyment grant. My demons don’t pursue me here, and Father does only occasionally, to see the yellow ox-eyed daisies.”

  “He is master of the house, nonetheless.”

  “He is not my Master,” you replied with a glance that could’ve been mistaken either for coyness or a dampened ferocity. As a rule, you concealed your anger like a snarled thread inside the bosom of your dress.

  Startled by the peculiar emphasis that had fallen on the word master, I asked, “Who, then, is he?”

  “‘He maketh me to lie down . . .’” you replied distractedly.

  “Is Christ your Master?” I asked doubtfully.

  “Not He, though he wore a beard and bore his wounds in silence.”

  My patience was at an end. “Who, then?”

  You would not say, and I was left to wonder if it might not be Sam Bowles, the bearded “Arabian” editor of the Springfield Republican, whom you favored with letters and poems; the pale, but beardless, Reverend Wadsworth of Philadelphia; your muse; or—no, the idea was appalling! Emily, forgive me for having entertained it. Like Poe and Hawthorne, I’m too ready to believe that the monstrous and impossible must be the case when the truth is hidden. Is there something dark and unnatural—an unspeakable strain—in American literature?

  “See how the sky come
s in at the windows? We might be standing in a glass house such as angels live in.”

  The conservatory was cheerful and did indeed seem to enclose an otherworldly air and light. You sat on a cane chair, and I on another, staring out at the vast azure wastes.

  “The Sun is not a gentleman,” you said. “His temper’s hot, his clothing garish, and he is indifferent to the thirsty cattle lowing in the withered grass. I much prefer the Moon, who creeps in at night and, motherly, comforts me with a silver touch upon my cheek. But no sooner has she left the room than demons come to vex me and nightmares nicker in the corners.”

  You rose from the chair and paced the room in agitation.

  “What is the matter now, Emily?”

  “Why, nothing. Nothing is the matter.”

  You took your seat again.

  “Or say, instead, that ‘nothing is the natter,’ for I have been nattering about nothing at all. Dangling from the edge of a precipice can make one giddy with talk.”

  I let it go, too tired to keep up with you. I remarked on the cactus plants, looking out of place in dour, wintry Amherst.

  “They are what I know of Mexico, and all I need of it.”

  “I hope Carlo still enjoys the serape,” I said unkindly. “Or did it long ago fall to pieces?”

  The serape was apparently too trivial a subject for discussion.

  “I love the cactus; It’s been, as Sir Walter Raleigh said of his tobacco pouch, ‘Comes meus fuit in illo miserrimo tempore.’ He was my companion at that most miserable time.”

  I studied the freckles on your face and once again decided that I liked them.

  “Do you want to hear a story, Robert?”

  “If you tell it plainly.”

  “There once was a porcupine. It grew tired at last of its wanderings. It stopped where it happened to be and stood there—stock-still—for what, to a porcupine, was an eternity. At long last, it took root and became a cactus. Ever since, it has given generously of its sharpened quills and has also kept the curious at a distance. I could ask for no better friend.”

  Abe Lincoln might have enjoyed your fable. I did not.

  “It was not plain enough.”

  You made a face. I shifted restlessly in my chair.

  “Would you like tea or coffee? Some toast and marmalade? I’ve been impolite not to have asked before this.”

  “No, thank you.”

  You fell silent and then abruptly asked, “Robert, can we pretend there is a wall between us like Bottom’s loamy, roughcast wall pierced by an imaginary cranny through which Pyramus and Thisbe whispered?” You peered quizzically at me through an aperture made by your thumbs and fingers.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I would like you to hear my confession,” you said in all seriousness.

  “I’m not a priest!”

  “And I am not contrite!”

  “Emily, what is it you want from me?”

  “To air my mind. I do as much for the quilts and blankets, but for all that I am a gnome, I’m still too large for the airing cupboard.”

  “I won’t hear your confession,” I said. I had done as much for the murderer Manzanero, then why not you?

  “Mr. Emerson says that ‘all friendship is confession.’”

  “Then I will listen to what you have to say as a friend.”

  You seemed ready to speak your mind, then apparently changed it.

  “No, Robert, it is not as a friend that I would speak to you now.”

  “If you are neither penitent nor friend now, what are you?”

  “A woman ravished by an alien god.”

  I shivered at the thought of Mictlantecuhtli, his body clamped to yours.

  Sensing my horror, you recanted savagery for ordinary Christian despair. “A woman in the wilderness to whom He has turned a deaf ear, if you like.”

  I did not like it at all. Though I had lost my sense of a vocation, I could still shudder at impiety.

  “Is the casting out of demons beyond your strength?” You seemed pitiable, but only for a moment, for your next question irked me. “Are you a man of little faith, or is it merely that you are a little man?”

  I shook my head with the solemnity of a self-righteous man withholding mercy. I could have heard your confession and offered absolution, if reluctantly; the Lutheran church favors public penance and forgiveness above a private grant, which appears too like the Roman sacrament to be encouraged. But something gnawed at me—a thing I did not wish to know. A secret. The thought of its revelation frightened me. It whispered like a draft in an unused room while, outside, snow was freshly mortaring the Homestead’s mustard-colored bricks.

  Carlo came into the conservatory. He walked like the old man he was in dog years. He licked my hands kindly, and I was grateful to him for his unfeigned and uncalculating affection.

  “I’ll tell Carlo, then,” you said as he went over to your side and rested his chin on your knee. “He has been my constant confessor and can be counted on not to break the seal.”

  Did you glare at me, Emily? I think you did. In spite of it, I foolishly asked, “Won’t you let me marry you, at least?” (Strange to have said “at least.”) I was as astonished as you were by my absurd proposal, after what had passed between us. Had I set myself on fire, I could not have given you more reason to be shocked. I waited to be scolded and sent away, but you laughed so hard, the dog cowered.

  “Robert, I will not be ‘bridaled.’”

  I stood and nearly leaped at you. I held you by the wrist. It was all I could do not to take you by the throat. At that moment, I hated you. You must have known; you must have seen it in my eyes and heard it in the rasp of my quickened breath.

  You did not make a sound. Suddenly, your mouth relaxed its grimace, and your face was lighted by a beatific smile. Abject, I let go of your wrist and resumed my seat opposite yours.

  “Forgive me,” I said contritely. “I will never again presume to ask.”

  “I am indentured here,” you said gravely. “Fate has made me the scribe of our pettiness and misfortunes.”

  “I’ll be leaving Amherst soon,” I said, having made up my mind at that instant.

  “Will you return to the army?” Your voice bespoke a genuine interest now that you were safe from my advances. “Will you go back to Springfield?”

  “Not to Springfield. A chaplain’s post is vacant at Washington City.”

  “By the map, you will be nearer Charlotte and Tess.”

  “Yes,” I replied. To you, as well, I thought, although I knew my suit was hopeless.

  “Will there be war, Robert?”

  “I’m certain of it.” Despite the shameful compromises and bloodshed of the previous decade, I knew that war would come. “The fuse may have already been lit, or is about to be. It takes only a little powder to blow up a dam.”

  “Or to pull down a house,” you said softly, almost absently.

  Were you thinking of the “house” in Lincoln’s aphorism or the Homestead, presided over by your autocratic father? In your heart, did you wish him dead and buried beneath the rubble of your verses?

  “Rat is on the stairs,” you said.

  “I don’t understand you,” I replied wearily.

  “I’m ungraspable, like a ball of quicksilver that children love to mash under their thumbs; it disperses for an instant, only to reconvene without a particle of loss.”

  I sighed.

  “I must start dinner; I would not wish to be chastised for dereliction of kitchen duties.”

  “I’ll be going, then.”

  I followed you into the vestibule, where my coat, hat, and scarf were hanging.

  “Will you visit me tomorrow?” you asked as I stepped outside into the cold March air.

  “No, I have business to attend to before leaving for Washington. And I want to spend the remaining time with Charlotte.”

  “Of course,” you said, visibly relieved.

  “Good-bye, Emily.”

 
; I tipped my hat as I had done a dozen years before when I first met you outside North College and had nearly fled.

  “We’ll go our own way now, with our own words,” you said in parting.

  I never saw you again, though, upon my return to Amherst after Harper’s Ferry, we spoke briefly like a confessor and his penitent.

  –6–

  ON MY LAST NIGHT IN AMHERST, Charlotte and I were guests at the Evergreens. You did not come, sending Carlo as your envoy. Austin and Sue were genuinely hospitable. They cossetted Charlotte, who roughhoused with Carlo and fed him little cakes from the table until he was sick. None seemed to mind. I thought that you stayed at home because you were afraid I would force my attentions on you again. I was angry. You’re well out of it, I told myself. She is not half the woman Ruth was; I’m only sorry I didn’t realize it while she was alive—and Ruth had been alive in every atom. God forgive me those times when I was anything less than kind. Well, even Adam and Eve fell out over an apple. You and your Master are welcome to each other! I said to myself.

  “What are your plans?” asked Austin.

  We had gone into his workroom to smoke cigars, which the ladies abominated. They did not begrudge us whiskey in moderation, which we took with a little water for propriety’s sake. I was looking forward to life among rough-and-ready men, far from Amherst. I had begun to tire of it and of you. I was glad that you’d rebuffed me. I was glad to have no ties.

  Yes, there was Charlotte! But I knew by then that I could not care for her as a father should. I send her money and little gifts. Next year, I’ll see her enrolled at Amherst Academy and, afterward, at Mount Holyoke. She will follow in your wake—no, I would not wish your widow’s way on her. You are cut off from the ordinary concerns of our kind. They whirl around you, as if on a madly turning wheel.

  “You seem vexed,” said Austin, letting out a cloud of bluish smoke, which obscured a daub leaning on an easel. The painting—an empty meadow under snow—seemed tinged with gloom, as if by your father’s shadow, although Edward, disapproving of your brother’s pastime, refused to set foot inside the studio.

  “I thought that Emily would be here this evening.”