by Norman Lock
“She would have been . . .”
I looked at him closely, waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Well?”
“If she had not had another of her spells,” he said hesitantly.
“What kind of spell?” I asked skeptically, for I knew you to be as flighty as a shuttlecock.
“Nervous fits.” He stubbed out his cigar in a broken piece of pottery. “It’s a family secret, Robert, which I trust you will keep.”
His tone was one of admonishment, accompanied by a stern gaze that pierced mine to the quick, or whatever in the eyes resembles that most tender of flesh. With his moody, handsome face, he might have been a fiery-haired Heathcliff come from the Yorkshire Moors, or from the pages of Emily Brontë’s novel. When words engulf and sting, they are as fearsome as fens and nettles.
“I had no idea.”
“I thought it right that you should know.”
“I am sorry for her.”
“In a previous century, she would have been burned at the stake for consorting with the devil. In our enlightened age, she’d only be shut up in an asylum. We have made progress,” he said with an irony whose intention, I supposed, was to make me an accomplice in the family’s shame.
I had grown tolerant during my descent from the childlike innocence of the seminarian. Experience broadens the mind, as they never tire of saying. It also makes the moral high ground shrink beneath one’s feet. By now, I had little left to stand on, while, all around me, the choirs of the righteous and the anathemas of the lily-white vied in raucousness with the stokers of hellfire and the howling of the damned.
“Emily became very much agitated last night and has kept to her bed all day.”
Was I to blame? If so, I’m sorry.
“She sent her good wishes by Carlo.”
Carlo had, indeed, carried a small scroll fastened to his collar, which Austin took from his pocket and gave me to read.
Forgive—as Friends must always do each other—my absence. My Volcano was uncorked last night, & I have yet to emerge fully from its lava, whose heat has left me flushed. We exchanged Farewells enough yesterday, & when my hand is again tractable, I will write you—if you’ll only let me know the place.
Yours with a good will,
Emily
P.S. By now you must be sick of oysters & whist—necessities at Brother’s table.
“Despite her illness, she’s not so weak as most suppose,” said Austin, having finished his whiskey.
“She’s a catamount,” I said, “that meows to dissemble its ferocity.”
“Sometimes I think the Homestead is a cockpit where she and Father are fighting for their lives.”
“They hate——”
“Not hate.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it is, they require it—it is their atmosphere. They must feel a tightening in the chest to assure themselves that they’re alive.”
He might have been describing my own grappling with the Father of us all.
We fell silent, and I heard Charlotte’s young voice piping in the other room.
“Are you happy being a lawyer in your father’s firm?”
I couldn’t have said what had motivated my question: spite, sympathetic curiosity, or a mixture of the two—more than likely that.
“I wanted to paint landscapes,” admitted Austin. “I fancied myself another Church or George Bingham. I dreamed of a studio in New York City or Chicago. But Father got his way, and I have only moved next door.”
Of the two, I thought the law the better trade.
“I should not have told you about Emily,” said Austin abruptly. “But you’re a clergyman and can be entrusted with a secret.”
“Will you tell her that I know?”
He acknowledged our complicity with a nod of his head, while I remembered Manzanero.
Your brother’s parting words to me that night were, “You are wrong if you believe Father to be entirely at fault where Emily is concerned: He protects her.”
While we walked home to Aunt Tess’s, I held Charlotte’s small hand in mine and tried to say something by which I would be remembered, as Hector had spoken to Andromache and his son before leaving for Troy, where a spear whose sole purpose was to kill him awaited. Destiny, if not a Divinity, does shape our ends, rough-hew them how we will. My end, when it comes, will be unheroic and unworthy of a classic age. Ours is the age of lead, and I will fall in some sordid place far from grace and any affectionate heart.
“The snow looks pretty in the moonlight.”
“Yes, it does, Father,” replied Charlotte, picking up and setting down one foot after another in its drifts, like a Red Indian stalking his prey.
“When you were a baby,” I said, “I carried you to the Lincolns’ house, in Springfield. The snow lay deep around me, and I was scared that I might drop you into it and you’d be lost until the spring.”
She fell silent, contemplating my morbid fancy, I suppose, and then she said in the serious manner of a child, “I am much taller now, Father, so you needn’t worry.”
In the morning, I took the train to Boston and, from there, a coastal schooner south on the Atlantic to Chesapeake Bay, and thence up the Potomac to Washington City, where I arrived at my new posting on March 21, 1859.
I wrote you with my new address, and you wrote in return.
Robert——
Now that you know ALL, I hope you will soon forget your Witch, who must bear her Demons as she may. They feed me savories—even as they gnaw heart & vitals. It is—I suppose—a fair exchange. They are like the worm, which eats common dirt and—in gratitude for its supper—casts a rich loam that gardeners prize for their anemones. Or they are like the grit that rubs the Oyster’s silken lining into Pearl. Pythia must be housebound to serve the god that puts words in her mouth.
Carlo sends his love.
Emily
P.S. Father will never allow me to stray far from the Homestead, lest I suffer the Ducking Stool, Pillory, or Stake. We will see each other again, Robert, if fairy tales are true. Until then—or in lieu of Perpetuity—please make do with my Image, which Alchemy has caused to appear on base metal. I have sat only twice before for a portrait—the wren is too shy to sit for long.
With the letter, you had included a daguerreotype taken by Mr. J. C. Spooner, of Springfield, Massachusetts. Your eyes betrayed a nervousness, as if the wren were, indeed, about to take flight.
I carried your portrait during the drama at Harper’s Ferry and, later, through the endless night of civil war, when all the house lights went out. It wasn’t love that would not let me part with it. When I was a small boy, I became afraid to leave the house after having seen a runaway horse trample a woman in the street. Although Aunt Tess wasn’t a Catholic, she gave me a Saint Christopher medal to wear around my neck. “It will keep you safe,” she said. I wore it like an amulet against evil, which has been loose in the world since the first couple’s final notice and eviction, when Adam got his stoop, and Eve her stain. I don’t believe anymore in a saintly intercessor, but I do believe in the existence of EVIL. (You would capitalize it thus, and you’d be right to acknowledge its supremacy even within the world in miniature of the printed page.) I carried the daguerreotype for the same absurd reason that I wore the holy medal. We’re a superstitious race, afraid, like children, of being in a world where we are often alone.
At the seminary, I was fascinated by an icon that had once hung in an Eastern Orthodox church. The artist had given the image of Saint Christopher the head of a dog. Carlo, whom you have called your “demon dog,” may be a watchful saint, protecting you from the martyrdom you seem bent on achieving.
Ripped from Radiance into common day,
Then, by a midwife’s slap, made to rid
My lungs of atoms drawn in the dustless
Atmosphere of Heaven—where the lead
For the Bullet that will one day bless
Me poured—ardent—into the mold—
My iron christening cup—
What bullet did you fear, Emily? Do you fear it still, or have you found a way to live without terror, in spite of your conviction that you’re standing in its path? The resolve to go on regardless of misgivings was one of Lincoln’s strengths. It carried him into Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865. Would I have had the courage, belief, and love to have stood in the bullet’s path the instant John Wilkes Booth fired his derringer? Would I be as brave as Giles Corey and reply to my inquisitor, “More weight”?
–7–
QUARTERED AT THE WASHINGTON NAVY YARD, on the Potomac’s eastern branch, I performed the duties of chaplain for sixty men assigned to army ordinance and a detachment of marines stationed at the I Street barracks. My arrival coincided with the thaw of winter’s frozen mud augmented by March rain. The dreary city’s inhabitants were either dispirited or else half mad with visions of patronage as they traipsed the unpaved streets in search of government contracts, appointments, and military commissions. There were more swine rooting in the sloughs and gutters than statesmen sitting in the halls of Congress. At the ragged end of winter 1859, Washington may have been the dirtiest capital on earth, excepting that of the Hottentots.
I would often visit the “Castle,” as the Smithsonian Institution’s red sandstone edifice was called, mostly to see the canvases of John Mix Stanley. I admired his paintings of the western frontier and California, through which he’d traveled with General Kearny’s expedition at the time of the Mexican War. I felt an affinity for Stanley, as well as envy of his artistry. I wished I had been called to be a painter of what the eye can see instead of a spy on the souls of men. His landscapes contain an atmospheric light—the luminosity evident in the Hudson River School of artists; in Stanley’s work, however, the land is untamed. His paintings are to theirs as a headland is to a hummock, a mountain gorge to a sylvan grotto, or a torrent to a brook.
At the navy yard, I became acquainted with an army surgeon by the name of Edward Fenzil. In many ways, he was charming, even fascinating. He’d been a friend of Edgar Poe, in the winter of ’44, when the writer was living in Philadelphia. There was, in Fenzil, a grotesque strain that precluded intimacy. He was given to brooding, interrupted by a manic intensity that alarmed me. He was strange, as a man might well have become in the presence of a macabre nature such as Poe’s. Fenzil’s imaginative faculty was highly developed, and he enjoyed telling outrageous stories of his winter as a protégé of the gothic master. Fenzil also drank and took ether. In spite of my aversion for the man, he was an unusually skillful surgeon.
Fenzil had an appreciation for painting, which served us as common ground. I could not help being infuriated, however, by his criticism of John Stanley’s pictures. During a visit to the Castle one May afternoon, he called Stanley’s landscapes banal and affectless. The light that I considered splendid in them he thought “too optimistic.” He preferred the dark horrors of Goya, Jacques-Fabian Gautier d’Agoty, and Hieronymus Bosch. In Fenzil’s opinion, those artists had caught the germ of human nature, which no school of polite dabblers could ever hope to do. Returning to our quarters, he begged me to take ether with him, so that I might enjoy a respite from “the monsters.” Ether, he claimed, produced a dreamless sleep, undisturbed by night terrors detained behind a cordon sanitaire, the name given by the French to the quarantine of those sickened by the Black Death. He likened the anodyne to the holy water of an exorcist.
“I will do no such thing!” I shouted, frightened by his words. Strong drink was one thing, ether or opiates quite another.
“Then you must resign yourself to an ordinary life,” he said with a sigh.
After that, I kept my distance from him insofar as it was possible. The surgeon and the chaplain are comrades in sickness and in death; in war, the sickbed too often is succeeded by the deathbed and the grave.
Could he read your mind, Emily, even Fenzil would be shocked by the grotesque fancies that writhe there like Medusa’s snakes. Pardon an extravagant turn of phrase; his dark imagination—fretted by his master Edgar Poe’s—must have rubbed off on me. I am susceptible to stronger wills and larger minds—such as yours, Emily. Austin was right when he said you are not the harmless spinster you pretend to be.
In Washington, I became fond of a likable private of marines named Luke Quinn, an Irish immigrant who had enlisted in ’55. He’d worked as a drencher and pickler at a Brooklyn tannery near “the Swamp,” and, keen on baseball, would go to Red Hook on Sunday afternoons to watch the Excelsior Club play. When the men garrisoned at the marine barracks played a game of ball, they would insist on my being umpire, though they swallowed my Sunday-morning sermons like ipecac, because, in Luke’s words, “If you can’t trust a padre, who can you trust?”
Who, indeed?
“Thanks, Reverend,” Luke would say politely after the game was finished or the ball hopelessly lost in the marsh bordering the west side of the yard, as impenetrable as the morass that mired the pilgrim Christian for his sins in Bunyan’s allegory.
“De nada,” I would reply, as Manzanero had done after I had shriven him.
Nada means “nothing,” Emily, and if you listen closely when the word is pronounced—solemnly, as it begs to be heard—you can hear a deep bell toll, as if for the end of days.
Na-da! Na-da! According to John Donne, it rings for us all.
Luke and I used to walk the back streets and alleys and relish the iniquitous sights. Even now, I have no idea why I took pleasure in the slatterns, whores, sharps, pickpockets, cutthroats, and confidence men, which abound in every city, save the celestial. I suppose I preened myself on being a righteous man, though there was more hypocrisy in me than probity. As for Luke, I think he was afraid of what would likely come to pass and, by resisting temptation, hoped to get on the good side of the Lord. Chaste and a teetotaler, unnatural virtues in a marine, he couldn’t have accrued many sins in his young life. In the taprooms, we drank root beer and talked a good deal of horseshit. On Sunday afternoons, after I’d admonished my flock against the pleasing aspects of vice, he and I would listen to a military band perform patriotic hymns of the thrilling martial sort. We behaved like two altar boys, shoes shined, hair combed, and ears clean, to hear the trump of doom resound and cheer the Lord when He rode down the sky in His fiery chariot.
Our friendship came abruptly to an end during the siege of the engine house at Harper’s Ferry, when John Brown shot Luke through the abdomen. He did so with a “Beecher’s Bible,” the name bestowed on the rifles shipped to “Captain” Brown in crates marked bibles by the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, of New England—a ruse whose aim was slaughter, however well intentioned.
–8–
YOUR LETTERS TO ME WHILE I WAS IN WASHINGTON were as dazzling as the butterflies transfixed by pins in your father’s study. But I had to wait for Austin’s visit to hear of your attachment to Kate Scott, the dark, mysterious woman whom I’d helped into a sleigh three months before.
“They are often together,” he said after ordering a roast chicken to divide between us.
I had taken your brother to dine at the Old Ebbitt Grill, a block from the White House. Buchanan was sitting at a corner table, together with his secretary of state and a man whom the landlord identified for us as a Louisiana cotton magnate. “A lord of the lash!” he called him with such acrimony that I feared he would spit on the floor, as is the custom in saloons frequented by rude men. Heads together, they were talking in low voices, like a knot of conspirators.
Austin took a draft of his ale and said, “I’m troubled by Emily’s fascination for that woman. There is something unwholesome about it.” He repented of his remark and hurried to recant it. “I don’t mean that their friendship is in any way improper! But the woman has set tongues wagging—well, you know what Amherst is like. And she has made conquests—Sam Bowles, in particular.” As if in an aside, Austin muttered with a distracted air, “Even my own wife seems smitten by her! I wish to Go
d she would return to Cooperstown forthwith!”
I felt a cold draft on my neck, although the sweat had come out on my forehead.
“You’ve gone pale, Robert. Are you all right?”
“It’s nothing. I’m bothered sometimes by a fever I caught in Mexico.”
Austin looked at me doubtfully and then said, “Father detests her.”
A fact that makes her doubly attractive to your sister, I told myself.
“He calls her ‘Sappho.’”
Now it was Austin’s turn to shiver.
Were you conscious of the uneasiness your friendship with “that woman” caused? Or could the scandal have been spice for your daily gruel?
I hurriedly changed the subject. “Have you seen Charlotte recently?”
“I have, and she is well.” I thought he glanced disapprovingly at me, but maybe not. “Tess continues to dote on her. I’m fond of the imp myself.”
“I’m glad to hear it and very much obliged to you, Austin.”
“Not at all. When will you be home again?”
Amherst was no longer home. The Washington Navy Yard was what passed for one that spring, summer, and early fall, but I couldn’t admit my disloyalty to Austin, who was so kind to Charlotte.
“I don’t know,” I told him, and then I uttered a short sentence without embellishment, in a voice devoid of emotion, as if I were predicting rain—four words that would bear on the very idea of home for nearly three million men. “There will be war.”
“Do you think so, Robert?” he asked nervously. He was not yet the glum, determined squire whom time would anoint with thinning hair and side-whiskers.
“I am convinced of it.”
“Soon?”
“Next year or the year after.”
I looked up sharply at the others in the room, thinking I would find them leaning forward expectantly in their chairs to hear what I’d say next, but they appeared oblivious to the closet drama being played out beneath an engraved reproduction of George Munger’s watercolor The President’s House—a sobering reminder of the burning of Washington City during the British occupation in 1812. I hoped the picture was not prophetic.