Just as he was emerging from the tub, he heard the distant nickering of horses and the muffled clamor of male voices outside the cabin.
In the kitchen, the famished Frank and Jesse were about to take their places at the table. Announcing in German that he feared the dreaded robber gang might be approaching, Frank got up and hustled the old couple out the back door and into the woodshed behind the shack “for their own safety.” Meanwhile, Jesse dashed into the bedroom and ordered Henry to slip into a faded gingham housedress belonging to the old woman, while he himself threw on a pair of her husband’s patched denim overalls. To complete his disguise, Henry knotted a kerchief around his balding pate as the men outside began knocking insistently on the door.
Concerned that they might still be recognizable, the brothers scrambled into the kitchen and hastily applied a layer of sooty grease from the stove as blackface. Henry’s entire experience of the colored race had been limited to accepting hors d’oeuvres from the occasional servant and listening to the orations of Frederick Douglass, but Jesse told him not to worry. Citing his deeper familiarity with the Negro dialect and mannerisms from his stint with the Massachusetts 55th, the former Union officer insisted on doing all the talking.
“I’se a’comin’, I’se a’comin’!” he muttered, shuffling toward the door. The pounding of gloved knuckles was now accompanied by the ominous ostinato of a heavy boot or rifle butt. Jesse opened it to reveal four men wearing glistening rubber rain slickers and carrying lanterns and carbines.
“Yassuh, massuh?” he greeted the leader, a deputy sheriff named Seward Bovell from the town of New Ulm, to the west. (Fortunately for the Jameses, the posse included no local residents, who might have been familiar with the proper inhabitants of the shanty.)
“Evening,” said Bovell. “We’re looking for some men. Have you seen any strangers in the vicinity?”
“Ah ain’ neva bin to no city,” Jesse replied.
“The vicinity. The area. Have you seen any strange men around these parts?”
“Oh, yassuh! Ah do believe dey wuz some dat come by a wile b’fo, but dey be long gone now.”
The deputy peered over Jesse’s shoulder into the kitchen, which was lit only by a flickering oil lamp. The table, he could see, had been set for more than a couple. “What’s your name, boy?” Bovell inquired.
“Dey calls me Juicy, suh,” Jesse replied with a wide ingratiating smile. “An’ dis heah be my woman…Saliva.”
Henry looked askance at his brother.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the deputy. “Expecting company, are you, Juicy?”
“Oh, yassuh, we is,” Jesse extemporized. “De chilluns a-gwyne be comin’ by fo’ suppah dis ebenin’. Ain’ dat so, Sal?” He took Henry’s hand and gazed into his brother’s eyes in a touching pantomime of parental pride, which apparently failed to mollify the lawman.
“Hmmmm. Mind if we just take a little look around?”
Without waiting for a response, Bovell and his men barged in and began inspecting the shack, flinging open closets and peering under beds and behind doors while Jesse and Henry, who had secreted their revolvers in the vegetable bin, stood helplessly by. At last, seemingly satisfied that there were no signs of their quarry, the intruders snatched a few biscuits off the kitchen table and headed for the door. “Now, if you see those fellows coming back around here, you’d best be real careful,” cautioned the deputy. “They robbed the bank at Northfield last week and shot two men dead.”
“Lawsy me!” ejaculated Henry in a cracking falsetto, his eyes widening in a grotesque burlesque of fear.
Jesse shot his brother an irritated glance. “Well, I sho’ hopes you be ketchin’ dem ebil mens!” he called out after the posse as they withdrew back into the night.
As soon as the interlopers were safely out of hearing, Henry and Jesse pointed at each other’s outlandish appearance and burst into hysterical laughter. It was not simply a release of the tension that set them off, nor even the minstrel-show silliness of their getups. At some level the brothers must have recognized that the “literary transvestite” and the “nigger of the James family” had managed to effect a transformation into avatars of their shadow selves.
Without even bothering to sample what was left on the kitchen table, the exhausted Henry staggered into the bedroom to collapse into a profound and dreamless sleep.
When he awoke the next morning, he discovered that Frank and Jesse were nowhere on the premises. He looked around the shack, calling out their names, at first tentatively, then with increasing volume and urgency. Nothing. No one. They were gone—their clothing, their guns, every trace of them. Still, it was not until he came upon a generous wad of high-denomination banknotes thoughtfully tucked into one of his boots that it fully dawned on Henry that his brothers had actually deserted him. He secreted the bills down the bosom of his gingham dress and stepped outside the shack. The old German couple’s only horse, an ancient half-blind draft animal, was also gone, apparently expropriated by the outlaw pair. They must have skedaddled riding double on the old plug, he surmised.
For the first time in months, Henry James was totally alone. He stood by the front door with the rain gently pitter-pattering on the leaves around him, breathing in the fresh, cool air of freedom.
Shortly, he became aware that his solitude was not quite so absolute as he had supposed. Hearing muffled sniffling from behind the cabin, he went around back to the woodshed, where he discovered the old immigrants, whom Frank had taken the precaution of binding and gagging for the night. They were tied back to back, wide-eyed with fear, and seeing Henry approach in his gingham getup and greasy blackface only compounded their manifest distress.
Henry stepped forward to release them but then thought better of the idea, realizing that by doing so he might be sorely jeopardizing his chances of escape: If he freed the couple before departing, there would be little to stop them from siccing the law on him the moment he was out of sight. Leaving his hosts tied up was, to be sure, unspeakably discourteous, especially in light of their generous hospitality of the previous evening, but Henry’s standards of politesse had deteriorated precipitously over the past few weeks, and at least, as he may have consoled himself, he wasn’t about to shoot them, as the boorish Cole Younger might well have done.
During the week following his consultations with Elena Hite, William James became morbidly preoccupied with the manhunt for what The Boston Daily Globe called “the Minnesota Brigands.” He believed he had managed to get through his final session with Elena without tipping his hand regarding his relationship to the robbers. (On that score, he and his patient had arrived at a Mexican standoff, neither revealing to the other the extent of their connections to the western Jameses, both only lamenting that whatever had transpired out in Northfield seemed a sorry commentary on the state of morality and public order in these United States.) As further details emerged about the holdup and its aftermath, it became increasingly apparent that the infamous Frank and Jesse James were indeed among the fugitive suspects, although there was no mention of Henry. In fact, it remained unclear how many outlaws had taken part in the crime, with some eyewitnesses confidently claiming to have counted eight, while others were equally certain there had been nine. William, always the man of two minds, found himself torn between an upstanding desire to see justice righteously rendered and a furtive fraternal loyalty that kept him rooting for the perpetrators to make a clean getaway.
Despite being on tenterhooks over the fate of his brothers, the doctor dutifully reported back to Asa Hite on his daughter’s condition, noting in his best clinical deadpan that Elena appeared to be “a very interesting young lady of abundant charm and high intelligence,” who was clearly distraught but not, in his considered medical opinion, seriously ill. (She seemed to be suffering, William informally diagnosed, “more from a broken heart than a broken nervous system.”) Under the circumstances, the only treatment he could recommend—which he offered somewhat apologetically—was th
at conventional Victorian therapy for youthful malaise, a European Grand Tour. (“Europe,” wrote Jean Strouse, “had always served as the ultimate James family panacea.”) But Mr. Hite, not surprisingly, was worried that his daughter, left unchaperoned on that wicked and worldly continent, might revert to what he indelicately termed her “wild ways.” He therefore sought to arrange—also following the conventional wisdom of the age—that she be accompanied on her therapeutic sojourn by a more mature female companion, for which position Dr. James shamelessly proposed his sister, Alice.
In prescribing Alice James as a duenna for Elena, William may not have been acting solely in the interest of his patient. As we have noted, he had ample reason to be concerned about his sister—a woman who once wrote, “I was born bad, and I have never recovered.” After a long summer of helping to nurse her ailing father through the recuperation from his stroke, Alice was beginning to show the signs of strain that often heralded one of her nervous attacks. Especially troubling to William was the apparent negative effect upon his sister of his burgeoning romance with—and potential marriage to—his “other” Alice, Miss Gibbens. Within the James family, William and his sister had always enjoyed a unique relationship: As Alice was growing up, her oldest brother had developed a teasing, flirtatious mode of dealing with her, lavishing facetiously fulsome praise on her feminine charms and graces, addressing her by such provocative epithets as “Chérie Charmante de Bal,” “Charmante Jeune Fille,” “Sweetlet” and even “You lovely babe.” This playfully seductive tone had both pleased and confused the maturing girl, but with the arrival of the redoubtable Alice Gibbens upon the scene, their special bond was threatening to unravel. As Jean Strouse observed: “Whatever agitation William’s flirtatious attentions caused his sister, they also flattered and excited her—and they were the only consistent, overt, amorous attentions she ever received from a man…. She returned his mocking banter, and undoubtedly, in a suppressed way, his sexual curiosity. His engagement to a paragon of health and virtue was a profound betrayal.”
Indeed, William’s “engagement,” though not yet formalized, threatened to deal a double blow to his high-strung sister: Not only did it represent the definitive dashing of whatever hopes Alice may have entertained that he would always be there for her, it also increased the likelihood that she would be left alone to care for their aging parents, setting in stone her incipient status as a spinster. “While friend after friend became engaged and married,” wrote Linda Simon, “Alice…was convinced that she would never marry, that she was not the pretty, winsome, flirtatious young woman her brother had invented, but one among the ‘depressed & gloomy females’ doomed to become old maids.”
By way of compensation for his “betrayal,” William no doubt hoped that an all-expenses-paid trip abroad might have as much of a salutary effect upon his sister as upon Asa Hite’s distressed daughter. Fortunately, in spite of her manifold afflictions, Alice James presented socially as a thoroughly sober—indeed, somewhat dour—lady of impeccable breeding. Seven years Elena’s senior, painfully plain of feature and impeccably proper (not to say rigid) of demeanor, she must have struck Asa Hite as the ideal governess for the unruly engine of his errant daughter’s impulsivity.
Elena, for her part, was exhilarated by the prospect of going abroad—of being able to experience, at long last, “a Paris of her own.” That she would be accompanied to the storied city by yet another member of the endlessly intriguing James clan rendered her anticipation all the more delectable. And while Alice James, long familiar with the treasures and pleasures of old Europe, took her assignment in stride, William frequently found himself unprofessionally obsessed with imagining how it all would register in Elena’s unseasoned yet uniquely acute perceptions. By now, in addition to their mutual interest in painting, the grand conundrum of free will, and an abiding curiosity concerning current events out in Minnesota, the doctor and his patient had something else in common: They were both entranced with Elena Hite.
Chapter Eight
Henry James set sail for Europe from New York Harbor aboard the Cunarder Bothnia on October 1, 1876. It was a rough autumn crossing; the capricious currents of the North Atlantic played relentless havoc upon the always delicate Jamesian digestive apparatus. Though the luxury liner, built only two years earlier, boasted the world’s first shipboard library, the fugitive author was barely able to read, let alone write, and spent most of the voyage sequestered in his cabin. But his gastric discomforts on this long final leg of his flight from Minnesota were mitigated by the heady exhilaration of escape as the powerful steamer put thousands of watery miles between himself and the law.
From the little shack near Lake Crystal, he had made his way to St. Peter, where, having scrubbed the kitchen grease off his face and swapped his kerchief and gingham frock for more conventionally masculine attire, he had boarded a train for Minneapolis, from whence he had traveled on to Chicago and ultimately to New York. Throughout his journey east, like William in Cambridge, he had kept anxiously scouring the papers for news of the Minnesota manhunt. Thankfully, he had come upon no accounts of any old German couple being found dead in their woodshed in the vicinity of Lake Crystal. But according to widely published reports, on September 21, a posse from Madelia, under the command of Sheriff James Glispin of Watonwan County, had cornered the Younger brothers and Charlie Pitts in a desolate swamp called Hanska Slough. During the ensuing gun battle, Pitts had been killed and the Youngers—badly shot up—had been forced to surrender. They were currently being held awaiting trial in the jail at Faribault, where, to Henry’s immense relief, despite whatever animosity or disdain they may have felt toward him, Cole and his brothers were apparently keeping faith with the outlaw code of silence by refusing to divulge the identities of their accomplices in the Northfield robbery. (“Be true to your friends if the Heavens fall,” Cole Younger was reported to have scrawled in a note to Sheriff Glispin.)
Frank and Jesse remained at large. Henry perused numerous—and often wildly conflicting—accounts of his brothers being spotted, either on horseback or on foot, all across Minnesota and even into Iowa. One dispatch, from the Sioux City Daily Journal, noted: “The greatest excitement prevails, and armed squads are moving to and fro continually. The hundreds of men engaged in the chase appear to have no head or organized leaders, and consequently the chances of catching the fleeing ruffians are growing fainter and fainter each succeeding day.” Nonetheless, Henry had become convinced that he ought not to count on his brothers continuing to elude their pursuers, nor on the incarcerated Youngers to keep holding their tongues. His best chance for survival, he reckoned—in keeping with his lifelong propensity for expatriating himself—would be to skip the country as soon as possible. Immediately upon reaching Manhattan, he dispensed part of the money Frank and Jesse had left in his boot on a first-class ticket aboard the Bothnia.
Upon arriving in Paris, he nestled gratefully into the welcoming bosom of the old city, taking up lodgings on the fashionable rive droite in a furnished fourth-floor apartment at 29, rue de Luxembourg (the present-day rue Cambon). He described his new digs in a letter to his father—his first correspondence with the old man since early summer—as “a snug little troisième, with the eastern sun, two bedrooms, a parlor, an antechamber and a kitchen. Furniture clean and pretty, house irreproachable, and a gem of a portier, who waits on me.” The porter cost Henry six dollars a month; his rent was about sixty-five dollars; his woodpile was five dollars; and his linens were under two—all of which he was able to afford quite comfortably out of what remained of his “take” from the Rocky Cut swag. Safely ensconced amid the ornate clocks, graceful candelabras, and gleaming copper casseroles of his “eminently congenial” new abode, Henry doubtless would have liked nothing better than to have put the traumata of his recent western sojourn behind him; but being “one upon whom nothing is lost”—his famous prescription as the primary qualification for a novelist—he clearly had trouble shaking off his harrowing memories of the p
revious three months. By way of distraction, exorcism, and reclamation of his proper métier, he immersed himself in a frenzy of literary composition.
The novel into which he threw himself at this time, The American, has often been criticized for its overabundance of melodramatic elements, including the protagonist’s shocking discovery that the mother of his lover had murdered her husband. William Dean Howells, Henry’s editor at The Atlantic Monthly, in which the work was serialized, begged the author to tone down these Gothic flourishes, but he refused. For ample reason, family secrets—including murder—must have been very much on his mind that autumn.
Also on his mind was the plight of an American struggling to pierce the hermetic bubble of Parisian society. Fresh from his escapades on the frontier, he saw the cultural chasm between the old and new worlds—always a major Jamesian theme—as yawning far wider than he had ever imagined. It should hardly be surprising that he made Christopher Newman, the protagonist of his work in progress, not merely an American but a hardy westerner to boot, undoubtedly modeled on the physically robust specimens in whose company he had so reluctantly spent the summer. (“Exertion and action,” he wrote in describing his title character, “were as natural to him as respiration; a more completely healthy mortal had never trod the elastic soil of the West.”)
Unlike his fictional Newman, Henry James was no stranger to the City of Light. Throughout his life, from early childhood, he had been a frequent visitor to the luminous capital. His French, both spoken and written, was impeccable. He had, according to Leon Edel, “a thorough knowledge of the riches of the language and consciously cultivated gallicisms in his English, even as he liberally sowed his earlier prose and even the late with French words.” Yet it was one thing to be fluent in the language and conversant with the literature; it would be quite another to crack the rarified coterie of those who actually produced it.
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