Emily & Herman

by John J. Healey

  “For what is the span of a man’s life compared with eternity? As my mama once described it—pretend she said—that a dove flies by the highest mountain once every ten years and with its wing grazes its peak or a boulder, knocking off a piece of it no bigger than a grain of sand. By the time the entire mountain has eroded by virtue of this process, the entire mountain reduced to sand upon a plain—not one second of eternity would have elapsed.”

  His eyes were sparkling now with fervor from this remembered metaphor of maternal origin while the glasses of champagne were beginning to weigh upon the raised wrists of his captive audience—Melville intuiting a fine career ahead for Johnson as a preacher—when mercy intervened—Johnson bowing his handsome head and saying, “Amen.”

  All four of them drained their glasses. What impressed Emily was the contrast between Johnson’s tone of remorse for his actions and Whitman’s seeming indifference, an impression that only served to confirm her often-felt belief that she still had much to learn about human behavior.

  “William,” she said, “I fervently hope you do not think I ever made light of your religious vocation.”

  “No, ma’am. You know the scriptures forwards and backwards.”

  “He was referring to me,” Melville said with a grin. “Am I right, Mr. Johnson?”

  The freed slave just smiled and looked down.

  “You must pray for me, William,” Melville added, “Just, and at the request of my dear mother, as the ministers do in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.”

  “I pray for all of you.”

  Monsieur Miron had had his fill of Christian banter and somewhat blamed himself for perhaps starting it all with his spirited defense of Le Eminence Rouge. Reaching for a bottle of Mercurey Premier Cru and summoning in the meat with a nod of his head, he turned to his favored guest. “Have you been to Montreal, Mr. Melville?”

  After the dinner of roasted lamb and new corn and apple crumble, René Miron belching unabashedly excused himself to attend to other guests. Melville and Emily decided to take a postprandial stroll, and Whitman, yawning in a somewhat theatrical fashion, pleaded exhaustion and announced he was going to sleep. William Johnson followed suit. And thus it was the two couples said goodbye to each other in the inn’s lobby at the foot of the stairs promising to write and to see each other again. Melville made a special point of telling Johnson that he should not hesitate to contact him were he to ever find himself in trouble.

  “I shall be forever grateful, Mr. Melville. May God bless you and protect you and your family and may you do your best to learn from Miss Emily’s wisdom.”

  “That I shall, William.”

  Emily shook his hand with tears in her eyes. Whitman took some folded pages of yellowed newspaper from his pocket, torn a month earlier from the New York Daily Tribune and handed them to Melville.

  “Here is a copy of a recent poem, Mr. Melville. I would be very much obliged if you might take the time to read it.”

  Melville looked at the title “Resurgemus.” “I assure you I will.”

  “And I will send you and Mr. Hawthorne copies of the interview once I get that published as well.”

  “We both look forward to it.”

  Outside it was a damp July night. Dew adorned the grass. Lightning bugs were hovering and twinkling low over the ground and the smell of salt water permeated the air. The moon, fuller now than when last seen in New York, provided just the right amount of light needed to make their way along the dockside section of Pequot Avenue and then along the country lane it turned into. Upon seeing the street sign, Melville was taken aback, for he had bastardized the same word taken from what had been the name of the local Indian tribe to name his ship in Moby-Dick! He seized upon it as an initial theme of conversation until the increasing darkness and distance from the inn imposed a rich silence upon them.

  Although framed differently in each of them, the thought uppermost in both their minds, one that wound its way through their blood, creating a collective state of nervous tension, was the knowledge they were alone—alone together for what might be the only time in their lives. Austin and Hawthorne were many miles away. The elder Dickinsons as well. And now, even Whitman and William Johnson had retired for the night. They were alone and walking together in the summer night where no one knew them or could see them. Rather than give voice to this obvious and startling fact—and for the moment struggling to avoid it altogether—Emily resorted to a declaration she had earlier decided not to share with anyone.

  “I witnessed the most extraordinary thing today when you were off swimming.”

  “It has been an extraordinary day.”

  “I’m not certain how to put this with any delicacy … I saw Mr. Whitman and Mr. Johnson engaged in—speaking most kindly and metaphorically—amorous activity.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of amorous activity?”

  She covered her mouth with one of her hands. He began to laugh.

  “Shhh. You mustn’t make light of it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am still recovering from it.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, taking advantage of the moment to touch her gently on her back and savoring the sensation, “you are a dramatist of the highest order, Emily. What were they doing?”

  “Touching each other.”

  “Where?”

  “You know perfectly well where.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. The two of them naked as your beloved savages.”

  “Where were they?”

  “Down at the very end of that empty beach, while you were swimming and when I was supposedly sound asleep.”

  “I looked back at one point and could not see them. I suppose the sloop was in the way.”

  “You looked back?”

  “Yes,” he said smiling to himself. “I did.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Why?” He managed to inflect the question with believable innocence.

  “Nothing.”

  “Poor Emily.”

  “I have never been so astonished in all my life. And I had never expected Mr. Whitman to be so inclined. So at first I suspected the very worst.”

  “Being …”

  “That Mr. Whitman’s interest in William’s ‘freedom’ was so that he might exploit the poor man like the fellow’s ‘master’ had down South.”

  “But Mr. Johnson had already confessed to us all his … his predilection—one he seems quite resigned to despite his somewhat melodramatic religious aims.”

  “Yes. I did come to realize that. I suppose I am hopelessly naïve.”

  He could not recall feeling happier than he did at that moment. Walking with her like this as if it were the most natural thing in the world, engaging her mind and her wit, her particular sensibility, here on this exemplary geographic extension of their home environs. “To the extent you might be considered naïve it becomes you most graciously. On the other hand, you are not all that naïve. My very first impression of you was of someone very quick, very alert, whose mind never ceased observing.”

  “I imagine you know that you can be dangerously charming sometimes.”

  “It is not a pose. I am simply reporting my genuine impressions.”

  “That day we first saw each other, it feels like weeks ago, does it not?”

  “Months.”

  “And yet only a few days have transpired. Time is a great mystery.”

  “It may be the great mystery.”

  “I feel quite bad about Mr. Hawthorne. The two of you were in such good spirits together that day.”

  “And so shall we be again.”

  “I am gladdened to hear it. Did you suspect Mr. Whitman?”

  “Of being a sodomite?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. I mean I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other. Some of them are easy to identify, of course, but many others can appear to be quite normal.”

  “The way they are is normal for
them.”

  “Now there’s a point not often made. Aboard ship, at sea for months and months at a time, one sees all manner of behavior.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. More naïveté!”

  “I suppose it is a bit like what I hear goes on in prisons.”

  “How appalling.”

  “Of course one is sent to prison. No one goes voluntarily, whereas almost everyone who goes to sea does so of his own accord, which begs the question—do they do so because a number of them are already of the sodomite persuasion, knowing they will encounter others of their ilk, living in close quarters with hardly any privacy at all, or do the conditions themselves cause certain men to behave in such a manner, men who revert to being with women and wives once they are back in port? I expect it is a mixture.”

  “You were at sea a very long time, no?”

  “Yes. But I never resorted to such a thing.”

  “You had your native women …”

  “Neither did half of the crew at the very least and none of the officers that I was aware of. There was a common activity among those seamen I was referring to known as taking ‘chaw for chaw,’ resembling scenes one sometimes must suffer at the monkey house in a zoo.”

  “This is what they were doing.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Ah! Poor Emily. I expect you felt a long way from Amherst.”

  “I did.”

  “And how do you feel now?”

  “Closer. And I wish you would desist from referring to me as ‘poor’ Emily.”

  “I shall never do so again—and tomorrow I shall deliver you back to the family homestead.”

  She did not say anything to this and they walked along for half a minute in silence. He regretted the conversation so riddled with sexual content of a nature virtually designed to put one off physical contact of any description for a good while. But she was not nearly as perturbed about it as he imagined. In some odd and unexpected way it even stimulated her. She was more aware that she had brought the topic up in the first place so as to have something to say at all, and the topic in question, this unbeknownst to her, was chosen as a substitute for her own sexual stirrings that, unnamed, had never been more present than they were that evening.

  “Where were we today?” she asked him. “Where was that beach?”

  He was relieved to have a new path of conversation. “It was the western end of Fisher’s Island, some seven miles south of here. It was Whitman, of course, who suggested we stop for a rest. You were already asleep.”

  “It was very beautiful. It felt like some place very far away, for me at least, or like a place preserved in a state akin to what it must have been like before any European blood arrived here.”

  “I had the very same thought. The same feeling.”

  “I felt absurdly overdressed and resented the freedom you men had to so affix yourselves with Nature there, some of you in different ways of course.”

  “You could have joined me in my swim.”

  “I do not know how, nor did you think to awaken me to ask.”

  “I would love to teach you how to swim.”

  “You know that will never happen.”

  “So much could happen if we would just allow it.”

  “Who is the naïve one now? For a man your age who has been through so much and who is such a keen observer of society, these statements you make surprise me.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that precisely due to my age and experience and power of observation that what I am suggesting may not be that outlandish?”

  “No. And what are you suggesting, really? That, based on a three day flirtation you are prepared to leave your child and your pregnant wife and to ask for my hand in the Dickinson household? Are you completely mad?”

  “Is that what this is to you? A flirtation?”

  “How else could I define it?”

  He stopped, and took hold of her, and turned her to him, and kissed her. In an instant they realized, in a manner that made a mockery of words and intellectual reasoning, that this is what they had both been wanting, and fiercely, since their predawn embrace upon the deck of the steamer. Their timidity and practiced decorum vanished as their hearts raced and as their tongues intertwined. Supporting her back with one arm he lifted her from the ground with the other and brought the two of them down upon the wet grass where they continued to kiss ferociously. He placed a hand against her breast and through the layers of linen and cotton felt the nipple harden as he himself felt a craven need to burst into her. She could feel him pushing upon her as he lay on top of her and she did not care. The thin sliver of sense that remained in her mind gone feverish told her that this, in all likelihood, would be a moment like no other that she would reenact until the day she died. It was only when his hand cupped her garments between her legs and when he began to lift the hem of her dress that her father’s daughter regained possession of her.

  “Don’t,” she said, pulling her mouth away from him. “Please.”

  He stopped at once—looked at her—came to his own senses and rolled off of her onto his back beside her. They lay like that in silence until he finally spoke.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She felt for his hand, found and squeezed it, and kept it in hers.

  “I believe I am much sorrier than you,” she said.

  He rose and helped her to her feet. The combined and contradictory emotions of elation and frustration were so present in the night air between them that they both chose to remain silent, heading back, hand in hand, in the direction of the inn. He saw her to her room, bid her goodnight kissing her hand, and retired to his quarters overlooking the harbor convinced his intimacies with Emily Dickinson had come to an end. He went to sleep preparing himself for the following day’s return to Arrowhead.

  But a summer squall blew in that night and Emily awakened in her bed entranced by the thunder and lightning about her and by the noise of the heavy rain beating down upon the wooden shingles of the roof above her. The effects of the champagne and the burgundy had worn off and she felt cozy and safe and relieved to be less than a day’s journey from Amherst. She wondered how Austin had fared and whether he would be there to meet her tomorrow evening at the appointed spot so that they could successfully complete their mad ruse returning to the house together. She wondered how her mother and Lavinia were, and her father still in Washington. What had become of the Spanish Duchess? Fiona? Might William Johnson be in Whitman’s room tonight hearing the rain, and what would become of him set on his own at last in Boston? She perused these thoughts in a leisurely but thorough fashion because she already knew what she was going to do and felt the need to “clean the slate” first.

  A minute later in her nightgown and barefeet she was opening the unlocked door to Melville’s room. He stirred as she got into his bed. They looked at each other, lying on their sides facing each other in the dark, and then kissed.

  “I could not bear to spend this last night apart from you.”

  He embraced her and squeezed her tight. “Bless you,” he said.

  “And I know I can trust you,” she said.

  “That you can.”

  And so they lay there like that, like lovers, in the dark near a large window opened a crack so that the rain smell and the thunder noise were with them. Eventually their hands wandered, as hands are wont to do in such moments of grace, and their lips found each other again and though Emily remained a virgin, she experienced an orgasm that caused her to cry out in wonder. And shortly afterward, holding him the way she had seen William Johnson and Whitman holding each other earlier that day, she heard her lover’s own muffled groan and felt warm sticky alkaline drops of his semen covering her hands and bodice. They fell asleep together before the rain ceased, smiling and sated and filled with a conspirator’s contentment.

  She left him snoring around five and met William Johnson in the corridor as he emerged from Whitman’s door. A simultaneou
s rush of embarrassment and affection coursed through them and they merely nodded to each other before retiring toward their own rooms. Then William Johnson stopped, and turned and walked back to her just as she was about to close her door.

  “We are all God’s children,” he said in a whisper.

  “Amen,” she answered in kind.

  “Have mercy on me Oh God in your great kindness: in the fullness of your mercy blot out my offenses,” he said.

  She smiled and replied, “Wash away all my guilt: and cleanse me from my sin.”

  “For I acknowledge my faults: and my sin is always before me.”

  “Against you only have I sinned,” she said.

  “Evil have I been from my birth: sinner I am from the time of my conception.”

  She kissed him on the cheek before closing her door definitively. “But you desire truth in our inward being,” she said, “therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.”

  11

  THE EARTH CONTINUED ITS JOURNEY ABOUT THE SUN spinning about its own axis, atilt in such a manner that an hour later dawn appeared along the coast of Newfoundland and New England. The village of New London began to stir. Many of the elderly were already up and dressed. Kettles were on the boil as eggs were retrieved from backyard hencoops. Infants cried out for succor and fishing boats prepared to cast off for the day. Overfed summer residents and guests in bed at the local inns still fluttered their eyes beneath closed lids enrapt in dreams. Back on the western tip of Fisher’s Island, bluefish were running, frothing the gray-blue surface of the water, all trace of human prints having disappeared overnight. Horseshoe crabs crawled upon the damp sand.

  As the day broke and they awakened, both Melville and Emily fought any obligation to rise from their respective beds. They knew full well that once the process began, this final day of traveling would take on its own hue and clamor and get about its work of obliterating the treasured sense of calm and intimacy still there under the covers. They listened to the birds outside, smelling tides and honeysuckle.

  Although she had not given herself to him completely, she certainly had given enough to be disqualified from continuing to maintain her moral high ground, protesting his advances, or admonishing him with references to his wife and family. He, in turn, was reluctant to push any harder. In the humid glaze of that July morning, after devouring an excessively rich French breakfast, he was painfully aware of the fact that each of them would be spending that night away from the other, their journey over and done.