“Do you really expect me to travel in that?”
“I do.”
“Is it safe?”
“It is with me at the helm. It is not the most comfortable craft and you will have to sit very still, but the journey is not long and I expect you will enjoy it. Come.”
With one hand he held the canoe fast against the end of the dock and with the other he guided Emily onto the forward seat, a flattened spar. Then he grabbed the paddle and his saddlebag and sat down on the rear seat and used the paddle to shove off and away.
The truth was that many years had passed since he had last commandeered a canoe and it had been a much larger one than this back when he had spent his time in the South Pacific. But he took to it right off and took pleasure in moving them into the middle of the lake. The wide blade of the paddle moved through the water smoothly, providing the light craft with impressive propulsion. She sat as instructed, very still and very straight and it was a source of delight for him staring at her back and posture and at the graceful way she moved her head to take in the view and to turn and speak to him. But after a few minutes, the leaves of the trees along the shore turned over and the water’s surface began to ripple from a characteristic breeze and rain began to fall.
“What a nuisance,” he said, “and of all the days.”
“I suppose,” she said, “but the truth is I don’t mind it at all.”
She raised her face up to the lowering clouds, closing her eyes, meeting the rain coming down that moistened her forehead and cheeks. She smiled, unseen to him, at the thought that each time they met some journey upon water intervened. Looking down to her right at the water she observed fish near the surface, brought up by the rain, swimming along with them, the water a mixture of blue and gray and the Northern Pikes dark brown and spotted on top with silvery speckles underneath.
“Who is your friend—the owner of this cabin?”
Melville prayed for the rain to stop. Though clearly not his fault it felt to him as if it was, as if the fates were already vying to see which one could ruin this day more for him. “He is the son of a wealthy landowner from these parts, a family not unlike mine except for the crucial difference that they knew and know how to make money with their money rather than just spend it all away, a practice my father in his day and his brother to this day and I myself excel at. The fellow introduced himself to me after reading Typee and fancies himself a gentleman naturalist with a great interest in Native Americans. This canoe of his is authentic down to the last detail, and the cabin—I’ve only been to it once before with him—resembles a small and somewhat ramshackle museum dedicated to local fauna.”
“Does he know you are taking me there?”
“Lord, no. He is in Boston and thinks I have come to use it as a hideaway where I can finish my book. The idea gave him great satisfaction.”
“And is it terribly far?”
“No.” He could see that her dress was drenched with rain about the shoulders. “If my memory serves me correctly we are just a few minutes away—up around the next bend. I’m so sorry about the rain.”
“Don’t be. I am most thoroughly enjoying it, and besides, too much sunshine can be a bore.”
Her words relaxed him and filled him with a degree of admiration that excited him. What manner of woman was this? He recognized that comparisons were odious but he could not help but stack her up—she who at first glance seemed so delicate and in need of pampering, only to demonstrate time and again a character much the opposite—against his spouse and sisters. Emily seemed to possess an adventuresome spirit kept quietly simmering within an encasement of decorum and drawing room, Puritan civility. He wondered to what extent she was unique. Might this surprising blend of qualities be generational? Perhaps there existed a vast number of young American women in their twenties out there still dressing and serving tea like their mothers, but filled with wanderlust and grit. But he doubted it—or if such a trend was there—it was not yet developed to this extent. What he saw in his own younger sisters and nieces, what he saw in cities and towns told him otherwise, told him that conformity still reigned supreme, conformity made duller still by an air of self satisfaction that so often engulfed it.
Pleased he had remembered the terrain correctly he saw the cabin as they pulled around the bend. Some fifty yards ahead and toward the right great boulders rose up out of the water extending onto shore and on the other side of them he could make out the narrow beach and in the woods just up from it partly hidden by birch and pine, the two-story wooden retreat.
“There it is.”
It was raining steadily now and the two of them were soaking wet. Unlike Melville, Emily was in no hurry for the canoe ride to end. She knew it was impossible to get soaked any further and thus the damage—sans importance—was already done—whereas the sensation of mystery she was feeling from this adventure, so out of her ordinary—making their way in the rain to what would be their sanctuary—was intensely pleasurable. She placed her hands at either side of the canoe and leaned slightly forward, studying the little house in the woods. Then she looked to the side and back a bit, not focusing on Melville as much as on the paddle he was pulling through the water. She made a point of memorizing its flat blade of blond wood and how it gleamed under the water’s surface, making its own little eddy, and she memorized the curved wooden sprats that strengthened the delicate hull. She dipped her right hand into the water and was surprised to find it warmer than she had expected.
“There is no dock or landing, I’m afraid, so I am going to have to run us onto the sand as best I can.” And he thought—what was I thinking bringing her here? This is a place that, selfishly, works for me, and the dear girl is doing her best to not be difficult or to show her disappointment, but what a terrible and inconsiderate blunder. He had envisioned the day, all during the past week, with sunshine.
He rammed the canoe as deep into the sand as he could, but even so, Emily had to put her shoe into a bit of water stepping out. She made as if she did not notice and Melville, seeing everything and further appalled, attempted to mask his misery with activity. He jumped out of the canoe, water up to the midcalf of his riding boots, slinging the saddlebag back over his shoulder, and then he shoved the much lighter craft further up onto the beach.
“Go stand on the porch, Emily, before you catch pneumonia. I will only be a minute.”
She turned and did as she was told and he cursed the rain gods for their cynical cruelty. He pulled the canoe up to the very edge of the narrow beach, as far from the lake as possible, then turned it over and stuck the paddle underneath it.
Emily was shaking from the chill spreading through her and from nerves. She watched him wrestle with the narrow Indian boat. She could not imagine seeing her father, nor her brother, nor even Mr. Hawthorne ever doing such a thing. She realized she had never seen any of them do anything remotely physical apart, perhaps, from saddling a horse. Melville, she recalled, fed his cows. Melville sailed ships and sloops and boats. Melville chopped wood and had harpooned whales at sea. She found his physicality, and the grace with which he exercised it, healthy and masculine, unaffected. Even upon occasion when he might seem to do something impulsive or rough, it did not deter her admiration. Compared to the prevailing gentleman’s code that left manual work and any tiring activity to underlings his style seemed to her a paragon of what in her romantic imagination it meant to be American. Even when she pictured him writing in that barn he had often described to her in his letters, the image she formed always took on an energetic tremor.
He joined her on the porch, found the key in its appointed spot and opened the front door.
“I will light us a fire straight away.”
To his great relief no field mice or raccoons darted out the opened door. The cabin’s interior was reasonably neat and well cared for. A stuffed fox lurked upon the mantle above the hearth. Two Navaho Indian rugs ran parallel to each other in front of the fireplace stepped on by two comfortable chairs. A fi
ne table with straight-back chairs was placed near the rudimentary kitchen. There was a slight musty smell in the house that, with the rain, was not unpleasant. He lay the saddlebag upon the table and took off his coat, draping it over the back of a chair. “I’ve brought some food and drink. Lets find some blankets and I will build a fire to dry our clothing.”
Too agitated to stop moving about, he went back outside and piled up dried splits of beech and oak from the woodshed, flicking away beetles and spiders. Emily climbed the narrow stairs and found a rustic but charming boudoir. A brass bed with a quilted coverlet, a chest of drawers, even a mirror, and a small bookshelf well populated with a peculiar mixture of beautifully bound classics—Ovid, Dante, Homer, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Marcus Aurelius—and leather-bound oddities devoted to trout fishing in Scotland, the early tribes of North America, the seals of Antarctica, an introduction to Algonquin grammar. One blanket was folded at the foot of the bed and she found another in the chest of drawers. Quickly she undressed down to her camisole and petticoat, wrapped one of the blankets around her and then regarded herself in the mirror. Her hair was a mess, a damp auburn swirl of rain induced curls she detested. But she had only her fingers with which to try to attend to it and she quickly abandoned the endeavor with a small moan of frustration. Going back downstairs—carrying her clothing and shoes and the other blanket—she found Melville in his shirtsleeves feeding an impressive blaze. Some of the wood cracked and the smell of singed bark and evaporating dampness along with the heat emanating from the stone hearth was comforting and cozy.
“Well done,” she said.
He turned and looked at her, rising to help her with the blanket and her shoes, admiring her spunk yet again for having disrobed so matter of factly. He pulled a wooden chair from the table up near the fire for her to arrange her dress over.
She freed a bare arm from the blanket around her while making sure to keep herself decent. The slightness of her, forgotten since their last encounter in New London, provoked him even as he found it endearing. They sat in front of the fire, in silence at first, until Emily took the situation in hand.
“I have but one wish today, an infantile one.”
“And what is that?”
“That we might stay here forever.”
He thought perhaps she was going to say something else, that she wished the weather had been better, that they had met upon another day, in another place, that they had never met at all. He took her hand in both of his.
“Emily.”
“I know it is not fair, to you, to your family, to my family. Thus its infantilism. But I wish it fervently. Can I not do that for just a moment?”
“Of course you can.”
“It is a sweet little house you have brought me to on a lake long part of my world. I could clean it and make it snug and hospitable for us. You could work, and catch us fish, and we would only see other people when we wanted to, in very small doses.”
“I had forgotten, in my way, the why and the how and the extent of my feelings toward you.”
“You should be ashamed.”
“Ashamed I am. Perhaps it is a writer’s curse. After the four days we spent together, weeks went by and until today the physical you, the real you, has been supplanted by a literary version locked within the confines of my head.”
“And was she very dull this literary me?”
He laughed. “Not in the least. But she was my creation and subject to the limitations of my stunted imagination.”
“Am I so different from how you remembered?”
“Yes. The real you is far more original, far more stimulating. I felt shy at first when I saw you with your sister. Then it all came rushing back.”
“When you took my hand.”
“Yes. You felt it then too.”
“At the very same moment.”
Then her smile faded and a wistful expression took its place.
“I realize this has to be difficult for you. Perhaps seeing each other again was not the wisest decision.”
“You cannot mean that.”
“I am thinking of you.”
“It was I who suggested and planned it.”
“And I who acceded without a second thought.”
“Is that true?”
“Almost.”
“It is difficult for you as well.”
“But less so. I hide my feelings from Austin and my parents, from Lavinia until the other day. But I have no further commitments, no one else lays claim to my affections. My ‘loneliness’ is not without its advantages. I have no cause for regret.”
“Never have I understood so well the meaning of that word,” he said.
She gazed into the fire and then looked at him. Her hair was still damp, one of her shoulders, gamine and smooth, was bare, exposing the thin white cotton strap of her camisole. Her dark eyes glistened and her lips were partly open. He kissed her. He grabbed both her shoulders, turning her to him as the blanket fell away and continued to kiss her. When her tongue entered into his mouth he felt himself invincible. Overwhelmed he drew away from her and kissed her forehead, the sides of her face, the back of her neck.
“Emily.”
She put her arms around him, embraced him and, looking away, spoke in a whispery tone, “What are we to do?”
“We will be fine.”
“Are you certain? I leave it to you. I was better until I saw you again today, and now I fear I shall be lost without you, and I do not understand it.”
An hour later, the sun was out and a tide of fresh air entered in through the bedroom windows. Melville was asleep and Emily leaned up on her elbow to look at her man. His mouth was slightly open and he made an occasional snoring noise. His shoulders were broad and muscular, the hair on his chest slight and dark. His manhood rested in a gentle arc between his legs. Regardless of what the future would bring, this was the man fate and then her own will and appetite had chosen—and she was pleased.
She rose from the bed taking care not to wake him. Of the fire only fragments of wood remained transformed into glowing embers. She opened the door and let herself out onto the porch. After looking and listening in all directions and satisfied there was no one else about she proceeded down to the shore, walking carefully upon the path. She had never been naked outdoors before and found its novelty exhilarating. Once free of the trees, the sun shone down upon her body, warming her with a clarity and freshness particular to September. She passed the overturned canoe and stepped upon the sand and waded into the water and kneeled down.
She had read a digression in a botany text at the Amherst library that described how some species of animals and birds mated for life. The human species was not mentioned. But that, she supposed, was what the scriptures were for. She realized too, and not without a smile, that she on that day was living proof Melville was not among the faithful. But perhaps she was.
She admitted the possibility that, owing to her youth such a radical conclusion might come to her more easily than when she was older. Perhaps she would want children someday with the sort of man her father approved of. But she considered this possibility there very briefly, as a nod toward objectivity, a gesture whose real purpose was to bolster the sensation captivating her at that moment. She could not imagine wanting to be with anyone else, could not imagine sharing such a degree of intimacy with another body and spirit distinct from his. She could identify with the gray wolf and the pen. He would return to his home and family and, for all she knew, perhaps sail off again to some distant corner of the globe to revel with yet another gam of native women. She did not care. What she cared about was how his large life had intersected with her little one.
Melville awakened and saw her, Emily as water nymph, from the bedroom window. As he took the blanket she had used and wrapped it around himself and hastened down the stairs to join her, he too sensed with a pointed certainty that he had found the woman of his life. But he had found her too late. This thin and nervous girl, raised on his own soil with her
singular mind, who could never be his. Her young body he had just possessed that played before him naked in the water, something his own wife would never, ever willingly do, would remain elusive. He had married and had his children too soon, and now it was too late. Perhaps it had been necessary, he thought, opening the door and going outside, for him to go through all that he had, including his marriage to Elizabeth, in order to have reached this place, in order to have attained this appreciation for Emily that so cruelly overwhelmed him then. Why, he asked himself, why was life so often like this?
Determined to put it out of his mind, to not pollute the hours left to them that day, he ran the rest of the way down to the narrow beach, howling like a madman, causing her to turn and smile at his adolescent antic, as he cast off the blanket and ran into the water, diving down under it as soon as it was deep enough. He swam out, taking deep, aggressive strokes. She watched him with just the sort of adoration he hoped for. You have been so far away, she thought, a stranger, a man, and I your latest conquest. May God not permit me to conceive this day—or I shall die—I shall join Fiona without a second thought.
He swam about, cleansing his spirit and attempting to empty his mind, and then swam back to her, standing and walking toward her. He fought an urge to cover himself concerned he might appear shameful or foolish and so he quickened his pace and sat down next to where she had moved, seated on the sand with her feet still resting in the small lapping waves. He leaned over and kissed her.
“You see what power love has?” he asked.
“Which is that?”
“It has driven the rain and clouds away and brought the sun back to us.”
“Is it love that did all that?”
“What else?”
“Passion perhaps …”
“That too. They go hand in hand.”
“Not always.”
“No. Not always. But in this instance, absolutely.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Very. Why? Are you not?”
Her knees were raised and she leaned forward and rested her chin between them. The little knots of her vertebra stood out under her pale skin. She had only meant to tease. The repartee had begun in a spirit of jest. But something shifted. For reasons she would never be able to satisfactorily explain, his question irked her.
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