The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  Seeing Beverly there, her face now half in light and half in darkness, I remembered her moving through a yoga routine in the yurt on an early spring afternoon. This must have been six years ago, shortly after we’d made the decision to move back to the city. She stood on one leg like a heron, then segued into a deep bend and settled down to the floor. As I’d watched, light from the arc of windows in front of her and from the skylight above her seemed also to be emanating from within her, all meeting at a point just above her head. She was a being who charged herself with light, and who in turn charged the world around her with it. We would move to a place by the river and filled with light from the south and the east, but it would be a different kind of light altogether. What I’d seen in our yurt was seared into memory. I would carry within me the sight of my wife as the nexus of inner and outer light, her skin glowing.

  Beverly ran her fingers across the base of the sewing machine. “She needed to get away, but she got the scruff. Doing the work she liked, her sewing and painting and writing, needs light. It’s so sad.”

  Jason, who’d stayed on the first floor to check his e-mail and take care of some Max Gate paperwork, was now coming up to rejoin us. “Questions?” he said from the stairwell. When he saw us, he stopped. “Interrupting, I see. Sorry.”

  “I was just thinking about how hard it must have been for Emma to climb up here,” I said. “I mean, at her age and with her lame leg.”

  “And I was thinking about how hard it must have been for Emma to endure the winters up here.” Beverly pointed to the fireplace. “Even with some heat.”

  Jason nodded, and let the quiet settle, still not sure if he should retreat. Instead, compromising, he looked down and said, “I don’t come to the attic much. You know, Emma used to fire off letters to the editors of various newspapers. Wrote them here. Full of optimism, they were. Spirit. Not what you’d expect. In one she wrote that ‘in one or two generations nearly every person would in some way or other be a maker of happiness.’ Try to think about that whenever I’m in this room.”

  “What do you think she meant by that?” I asked.

  “She’d become deeply religious by then. Very Christian. Faith in the future. Goodness of people. As Hardy drifted further from religion and from her.”

  “So she was expressing hope,” Beverly said. “Despite everything. It’s remarkable.”

  “It is. And quite moving. Hardy was hardly a maker of happiness.” Jason hesitated, then added, “Not in his personal life and not in his books. Emma began to think of him as evil.”

  “The Wicked Man,” I said. “But it wasn’t wickedness in him, or evil. Maybe Hardy couldn’t be a maker of happiness because he couldn’t bring himself to risk it. Closed himself off, hid himself away, didn’t believe in it anymore.”

  “Perhaps that’s so.”

  “Do I remember right—that this is where she died?”

  “Quite suddenly. Early morning in November.” Jason pointed to the other attic room. “Dolly Gale was in there, came through here as usual around eight o’clock. Found Emma moaning. Terribly ill. Ran down to interrupt Hardy in his study. Dolly told people that he ordered her to straighten her collar before he left the room. Climbed the stairs, found Emma unconscious. She died as he was saying ‘Em, Em, don’t you know me?’” Jason looked at us with real sorrow in his eyes. “I always wondered if that was the first time Hardy had been in this room since she’d moved up.”

  The bare bones recital of Emma’s death made it all the more haunting. Beverly and I took one last look around the room and headed down behind Jason.

  Beverly said she’d meet me in Hardy’s Nut Walk after taking a rest- room break. I went outside and paused on the small porch, aware of traffic sounds from the A35 nearby but thinking about the Hardys’ final moments together. The shock, Hardy’s futile attempt to keep his distance by sustaining formality and order (straighten your collar!), and his outcry focused not quite on Emma but on whether she recognized him. Em, Em, don’t you know me?

  This sad, sudden scene—“Never to bid good-bye,” Hardy had written in the first of his mourning poems for Emma—confirmed for me one answer to the question of what Hardy had missed. He longed to be known, and feared he never was. He’d felt it from the very first, cast aside as dead, the life inside him invisible to those in charge of it. He was driven to hide himself, yet terrified of not being recognized. Frantic for love, he couldn’t do the one thing most necessary to love: reveal himself, give himself. Or as Beverly had said before we went for our walk yesterday, could he be lost now because he could never lose himself when alive? Though he always felt compelled to hide, what terrified him as the Hardys’ life together ended was that the person with whom he’d spent forty-two years didn’t—couldn’t—know him. Who, then, could? It tormented his spirit still.

  I walked past the conservatory and Middle Lawn toward the hedge-covered brick wall at the perimeter of the property. At the lawn’s edge, there was a hexagonal table, bare except for a ceramic shoe meant to contain flowers. I imagined Jason drank his morning tea there while sitting on the single folding chair and working on the problem of love’s geometry in Hardy’s novels, thinking about Miss Petherwin choosing among her three suitors in The Hand of Ethelberta.

  In an alcove within the overgrowth Hardy had placed his Druid stone. It “broods in the garden white and lone,” and marks the start of the Nut Walk. He loved strolling here morning and evening between the rows of beech trees he’d planted. “I set every tree in my June time, and now they obscure the sky.” Hardy felt so attached to his trees that, like young Jude Fawley, he couldn’t trim them, thereby imagining he was sparing them pain.

  Entering the Nut Walk changed the entire feel of being at Max Gate. It was darker inside, cooler, thick with the smells of nature left to its own ways. I remembered such dank presence of growth and death from our years in the woods, especially in early June when the unseen life hidden around us seemed even more riotous than the life thriving before our eyes.

  Traffic hushed and I could hear the rich phrases of a song thrush’s music, the lush throaty song of a blackbird. The thick foliage was sprinkled with wood anemone. A narrow footworn path led through shadows toward bursts of sunlight farther down. Alone here, it was easy to believe that Hardy—as he’d written after Emma’s death—thought he’d seen her standing at the end of this “alley of bending boughs.” It felt like a place where specters would thrive. Looking as deeply into it as I could, I saw the perspective shrink toward a point of darkness like the mouth of a cave.

  And there was Thomas Hardy.

  All I could do at first was stare. His form wavered a bit, as though backlit by fire. Then I realized it was because my eyes were watering—whether from not blinking, from the odd breeze at the mouth of the Nut Walk, or from emotion, I couldn’t say for sure. I shut and rubbed my eyes. When I opened them again Hardy hadn’t vanished. So this was, I understood, another Visitation.

  I felt dizzy and took a few steps backward to regain balance. I’d never had a cluster of Visitations before or repeated Visits by the same figure. I felt confused, for the first time in my world of Visitations, about who was Visiting whom. Was Hardy the Visitor or was I?

  He was now bent at the waist and seemed to be digging, or turning over loose soil. I wasn’t sure if I should approach him. After watching for a moment, I noticed that the more he worked, the barer the area around him became. Trees were disappearing. Light began flowing in around him. That’s when I realized Hardy was taking us backward in time. The trees were ungrowing. And, if I was correct, we’d soon be at the point where he’d begun planting them in 1885. I saw the windswept ridge where Hardy stood surveying his land, the thousands of small Austrian pines and beeches he’d bought to plant, the house slowly taking shape, then his figure in an upstairs window looking north over the valley and seeing Stinsford Church, where all of this would eventually lead, his deepest wishes about Home made manifest.

  I’d been holding my breat
h. As I exhaled, Hardy straightened up, put his boot on the shovel blade’s foot rest, and seemed to stare at me. The wind picked up. “Wish it,” I thought he said. Wish it? Missed? Then, spoken more slowly, I thought I heard “as you wish it.” The light in the Nut Walk changed again, began darkening, and Hardy’s rustling whispery voice filled the space between us. This time, what it said was clear. “Nothing is as you wish it.”

  As he had done in his parents’ bedroom yesterday, Hardy held my gaze. His features coalesced as though to provide me with certainty about what I saw, and thus about what I’d heard. I could even make out the waxed, delicately curled tips of his gray moustache. Hardy in his early sixties, around the time Emma died. I lifted my hand but he was already gone.

  I stayed where I was. Maybe Hardy planned to return yet again. But then maybe he’d show up next by the Pet Cemetery or before the carriage house, in the garden, under the sundial on the east turret. As that thought occurred, the world outside the Nut Walk reasserted itself. I heard a car horn, a trash truck, voices in the neighborhood. Then I recognized the whistling call of a meadowlark, which was how Beverly always let me know she was looking for me, and a moment later saw her appear at the entrance to the Nut Walk.

  When I started telling her what had happened, she stopped me and suggested that we walk through the Nut Walk together as I spoke. We took a few steps and I pointed out where I’d been standing when Hardy appeared. Then I began to cry. Beverly embraced me, and that made my crying intensify.

  I mentioned earlier that I’m still learning to accommodate the ongoing, persistent results of the lesions that have damaged my neurological functioning. As my cognitive powers had been altered (all right: diminished), my emotional responses had become less repressed. Over time, it has seemed like an even trade, the 20 percent drop in IQ compensated for by a 20 percent rise in emotional disinhibition. So I cry. A lot. And suddenly. Like young Tom Hardy weeping at traditional folk song lyrics, I cry when I hear classic Broadway show tunes. Sometimes all it takes is the first two or three notes of the melody, even before the lyrics begin. I also cry at old standards like “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” or “Fever,” at doo-wop and early rock ’n’ roll (I’ve even cried hearing Bobby Darin’s 1958 hit “Splish Splash”). The soaring notes of a cello solo or the falling notes of a string quartet. Harry Belafonte makes me cry! And it’s not just about music. I can cry when Ichiro Suzuki makes a gorgeous catch and throw from right field or when a great blue heron lands on the top of a cottonwood tree. Or, combining music and movement, when Apolo Anton Ohno does the samba with Julianne Hough to “I Like to Move It” on Dancing with the Stars. When I entered the newly remodeled attic office in my daughter’s Chicago home and saw its array of purple walls, its abundance of family photos, the sun pouring through its skylights—its essential Beckaness—I burst into tears. Later that day, I also cried while telling her the story of how my uncle had helped with my college expenses when scholarships and work-study payments weren’t adequate, and while listening to the “Cooking with Papa” playlist of songs she’d assembled for our times together in the kitchen. She’s used to it by now, and so is Beverly. I can get all teary sometimes just seeing my wife’s smile, or hearing her sweet alto voice join in on a song I didn’t even realize I was singing out loud. And by her sweet embrace. This is not the way I used to be. But this is who I am and it’s pointless to resist or deny it.

  As she held me, and the emotional storm that had welled up began to subside, I remembered going to Robert Russell’s office one spring afternoon in 1969 and announcing, “Love is a maelstrom of fire!” I’d felt certain I’d found the key to understanding Thomas Hardy and his novels. All his stormy, fiery, explosive characters—unpredictable, fervid, ultimately destructive in the grip of love and desire. Love made life possible, sure, but it also had the power to obliterate, and that part was Hardy’s fixation. Couldn’t stop writing about it. The phrase “a maelstrom of fire” came from a scene early in Two on a Tower, his ninth novel. Lovers studying “a cyclone in the sun” through a telescope see the blazing globe as “a maelstrom of fire.” There it was! I’d read enough Hardy by then to realize that this was the perfect metaphor for love as he understood it. A maelstrom of fire, hypnotizing, life-giving, but self-immolating, a mortal danger. Russell rocked back in his chair as I spoke, leaned forward to feel around his desk and locate his pipe, went through his customary lighting ceremony, and said, “Leave it to Hardy to give it to us twice: a cyclone in the sun and a maelstrom of fire.”

  In Beverly’s arms, the phrase “love is a maelstrom of fire” came together for me with “Nothing is as you wish it” and “Something I missed,” and I felt Hardy’s despair settle like a deepening shadow around us in the Nut Walk. It had not been Hardy’s appearance that triggered my crying. It had been Beverly’s return, her willingness to share my experience, the reality of her touch after Hardy’s Visitation. Because of her, I didn’t miss love. Because of her, what I wished for has happened. And I knew how fortunate I was.

  We began walking through the space that had separated me from Hardy during his Visitation. It’s not that I expected to find scorched earth or overturned soil or Hardy’s bootprints, but I wanted to study the ground, embed it in memory. He had imagined and created this Nut Walk as he imagined and created The Mayor of Casterbridge or The Woodlanders, while living here. In a way it felt like I was reading him afresh by walking here with Beverly in the light of all we’d learned so far.

  We had one final stop to make before saying good-bye to Jason and leaving Max Gate: the Pet Cemetery. Beginning in 1890 when their beloved black retriever Moss died, the Hardys buried their dogs and cats, some with headstones engraved by Hardy himself, in a shady spot on the western side of the garden. There are tombstones for the dogs Moss and Wessex, after whose death Hardy could no longer bear to have dogs. The cats Chips and Comfy are memorialized there along with Hardy’s favorite cat, Kitesey, and Emma’s adored albino cat, Snowdove. A few smaller stones are scattered around the plot, under trees and beside stumps. Beverly took photos from various angles, moving carefully, respectful of what this place meant.

  The Hardys’ devotion to these animals has been seen as comical, macabre, pathetic. It’s been seen as a substitute for love they couldn’t give to each other, or to a child. They had a cat named Kiddleywinkempoops! Their dog had a terrible temper! There were saucers of milk everywhere! Their pampered cat ate Hardy’s heart!

  But I get it. I was raised without pets of any kind by a mother terrified of dirt or germs and a butcher father who slaughtered poultry for a living. My daughter, dedicated all her life to protecting and rescuing animals, taught me to see them as she did, open myself to them, begin to understand. But it wasn’t until I got together with Beverly and moved to the woods that I lost my heart altogether, in the way that Hardy seems to have lost his, to the animals who shared our life. Particularly cats. When we married, Beverly had two shelter cats, Zak and Zola, and soon we took in my daughter’s cat, Zeppo, so he could have twenty acres over which to rule. By the time Zak died at eighteen I loved him so powerfully that I dug his grave myself, dislodging boulders and using a pick and spade to gouge out the diced basalt and stone. It took hours. I was drenched in sweat and having balance problems when I bent over to dig and when I knelt to scoop with my hands, which became crusted with the dark soil where Zak would rest. But I needed to do this, and do it myself. When Zeppo died and we continued to hear his voice haunting the landscape, Beverly sought to contain her grief by writing her first haiku:

  Small cry at corner

  in rising spring vapor

  ghost cat of my heart.

  So the Pet Cemetery didn’t seem strange, just touching. It revealed an emotional expressiveness I’d been looking for in Hardy’s life, to match what I’d found in some of his most compelling characters and inspired poems. With the Nut Walk on the eastern edge of the property and the Pet Cemetery on the western edge, there seemed to be a borderland of ph
antom life, edges where—unlike the interior of Max Gate—a residue of the real and best-concealed Hardy survived. Where love and passion lived. Not long after Emma died, Hardy had written to a friend that his saddest times were at dusk when he crossed the garden and came to the place where the Nut Walk begins, and where he recalled her walking with the cat trotting faithfully behind her. And not long after Snowdove died, Hardy wrote about him in a way that anticipated the poems he’d write after Emma’s death, with genuine sorrow and regret, haunted by the small grave “showing in the autumn shade that you moulder where you played.”

  We returned to the house. Jason wasn’t in any of the ground-floor rooms, and we didn’t want to call out in case he’d begun working in his first-floor study. So we signed the guest book, left a note of thanks, and got as far as the porch before we heard him bounding down the stairs.

  “That was quick,” he said. “Saw you go into the Pet Cemetery, thought I had time to find this and copy down all the details.” He waved a sheet of paper, then turned around and stood by the desk. “Remembered something you might be interested in. Wait just half a moment. Almost done.”

  “We’re not in a rush,” Beverly said.

  “Yes. Well.” When he finished writing, he faced us again and smiled. “Backstory: After you left the attic, I thought about this show that’s on tonight. Adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. Just a few scenes, really. Outdoors, raise funds for the Hardy Theatre Company. Well and good. Over by Lulworth Cove, which figures in the action.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  Jason looked puzzled. “Why would I do that?”