The Ice Harp, page 13
I rub my hand over my jaw.
“I don’t have another of those odious carbuncles, do I?”
“You look as handsome as ever, Waldo dear, and the set of your jaw is as brave.”
How brave she was to have gone abroad not as Americans grandly do to view the frescoes and the ruins! She was taken up by Carlyle and George Sand and heard Sand’s lover Chopin play in her Paris apartments. Her letters brimmed with passion and praise for France and Florence.
“‘Et quae tanta fuit Romam tibi causa videndi?’” I ask her, quoting Virgil. What was the urgent business that took you to Rome?
“Libertas.”
The French crushed the infant Roman Republic and restored the House of Savoy and the Pope to their former glory. General Garibaldi and his four thousand legionnaires withdrew to the Apennines, Margaret and Ossoli to Florence, where she wrote a history of the revolution. In May of 1850, having grown weary of the Old World and hankering for the New, she, the marquis, and their two-year-old son, Nino, sailed from Livorno aboard a merchantman brig. They came within sixty rods of the shore—nine hundred paces—fewer than Bush is from the post office and the shops! A convulsion of wind and waves flung them all into the sea, careless of her brilliance and poetry, while the Sage of Concord pondered fate on Nagog Hill.
I take my hat off to her.
“Margaret, regardless of its brevity, you lived a splendid life!”
Would that you, too, could have walked on water!
“Your life, Waldo, which is tapering toward its end, is still being measured.”
“Like a corpse for its coffin.”
“To speak without adornment, yes.”
“Then you’re aware of my dilemma.”
“Just now I overheard one of your harshest critics.”
“Brown thinks I play at philosophy, when I should act.”
“The earth is drenched in blood spilled by those who act. I saw as much in Rome. But yes, those who shed it were magnificent!”
I take the devil’s part. “They acted blindly.”
“Who of you isn’t being spun around in a game of blindman’s buff?”
I shout to my sleeping village neighbors, “Is there no one who can tell me what I must do?”
Margaret laughs, since she has passed the need to endure, to think, to act, even to be. Although her body was never found, her life is aptly summarized on a stone in Mount Auburn Cemetery:
BY BIRTH A CHILD OF NEW ENGLAND
BY ADOPTION A CITIZEN OF ROME
BY GENIUS BELONGING TO THE WORLD
“Is there anything you would like to know before I go?”
“Was Bishop Ussher correct, after all, when, in his Annals, he declared that creation commenced at the beginning of the night that preceded the twenty-third of October in the year 4004 B.C.? Or does Charles Darwin grasp the truth of the matter?”
“Tsk, tsk! What a foolish mortal you can be, for a sage!”
“I grant you that.”
“Good-bye, Waldo.”
“Must you go? Wait, at least, until the sun comes up. It’ll warm our ancient bones.”
“Each night I walk the beach in the hope that the sea will give up its dead and I shall be reunited with my son and my beloved Giovanni.”
I twiddle my stick; I scratch runes in the dirt road with it; I fling it into the hedges for the hedgehogs to gnaw.
“Remind me, Margaret, were we ever in love?”
In her eyes, which are lighted from within, as if they had absorbed the flames of the bonfires set by the wreck pickers on Fire Island, I see pity, sadness, tenderness, and spite.
“Is love so important, Waldo?”
“I think it must be, for me to ask.”
“Then you don’t remember having told me that love is only phenomenal, a contrivance of nature?”
“If I’m to eat my words at this late hour in my history, I’ll go on tour with Barnum as the world’s fattest-headed man, if I don’t die first of dyspepsia.”
“Arrivederci, fratello.”
Margaret goes, leaving me to carry on in an unfinished play in which I’ve been given the leading role against my will and whose final pages I have not read.
By the bell tolling solemnly from the spire of First Parish Meeting House, the time is a quarter past, although I can’t tell to what hour night has advanced. Has October 21 been almost drained from the barrel, or has a new day already been tapped?
Or has the hour of my Gethsemane come round at last?
Even now, Emerson, your arrogance is staggering!
I search the night sky for a sign of God’s displeasure. I could almost pray for Him to send a meteor to knock out my brains or a fire bolt to incinerate me. But the sky is uninterested in the fate of Ralph Waldo Emerson; not even the stars, which are uncommonly faint tonight, shed their influence, malign or otherwise, on me. I may as well be a blind mole, so distant am I from the Radiance, or an ancient tortoise of Galápagos, so deaf am I to universal harmony. Tonight the world seems a scaffold erected for divine vengeance. From my pocket, I take my old compass, which I’ve always thought of as evidence of the god of nature and of universal law in its unerring and incorruptible virtue, but the needle swings wildly.
A scream from the poorhouse across Mill Brook shivers night’s darkened panes; Nancy Barron is once again beset by terrors known only to the mad. I tell myself, What’s this Hecuba to me? I would shake my head to be rid of her shrill declamation, but I’m reminded that Solomon gave heed even to the plaintiff gnat. If nothing else, I must lend an ear to the woebegone. God knows, I’ve had much to do with lunatics in my life.
Now who is this hurrying toward me? I won’t stand another visitation, even if it is for my benefit. I tremble in expectation and grope for the shawl to conceal myself, but it is gone from my shoulders—snagged, perhaps, by a branch as I blundered through the woods. What will I say to Mr. Hammond tomorrow after having lost both his lamp and shawl? He will think me a senile old man—and I am. You are, Emerson! Tomorrow may find me utterly at a loss for words. I’ll attempt to convey my apologies, using the alphabet of the Chinese or, like an illiterate, sketch them in the dirt with the pointed stick. Blast me for a fool! I threw the stick away and am too weak to wrest it from the sharp teeth of the hedgehogs. I’ll take Hammond an offering of watermelon pickle—or a mince pie, if Billy Spicer has not raided the larder during my ramble.
It’s too late to dodge or hide. The man bearing down on me swings his hurricane lamp aloft to get a look at my face. His is equally illuminated by it. We greet each other with mutual surprise.
“Mr. Emerson!”
“Dr. Bartlett!” Certainty dissolves after the day’s strange events. “You are he, are you not?”
“Who else?” To confirm his identity, he produces, from beneath his hat, an uncommonly large head, bald as a pear. “Mr. Emerson, what’re you doing out of doors at this hour? With your lungs, it’s a fool’s errand!”
“We do not breathe well when infamy is in the air.”
Raising his lamp, Bartlett gives my face a second look, then shakes his head gloomily at the possibility of another deathbed visit before the night is out or my commitment to the asylum where my brother Bulkeley urgently recited the multiplication tables in the hope of attaining the infinite.
“I’ve been on a pilgrimage. By the way, what is the hour?”
He consults his hunter watch; the lamp follows his rising arm. I smell kerosene.
“Eleven thirty.”
“Strange, I thought it later. I could have sworn I heard the lark, herald of the morn.”
He glances at me as if there were indeed a carbuncle on my face, needing to be lanced.
“Put this on, Waldo. Your coat is too thin for the night air.”
He means to give me his, but I refuse it with a churlish gesture I immediately regret.
“Thank you kindly, Doctor, but I’m nearly home.”
“A pilgrimage, you say?”
“I’ve been visiting a few old haunts.”
“Couldn’t they have waited till tomorrow?”
“The past is best viewed at night, when extraneous detail is erased.”
He gives me a curious look suitable to his profession. Theologians are never curious, believing the universe is adequately explicated in the Bible, if one only cares to look, or else beyond the comprehension of mortals; in which case, curiosity is a waste of time that good churchmen can spend more profitably in writing sermons and hobnobbing with parishioners at church fetes.
“I’ll look in on you tomorrow, Waldo. I’ll give you something to settle your nerves.”
“And what was your business in the world tonight, Doctor?”
“Old Miss Greenwald died.”
“I know the lady. I assume you did your best by her.”
“There was little I could do, except to make her easy. Her heart gave out.”
“The heart almost never hesitates. It knows its mind.”
He nearly bristles at what would sound to his professional ears like a criticism.
“She was eighty-eight!”
“When I see her, I’ll tell her that you did your best.”
“Waldo, you’re raving.” He holds the lamp near my face. “Your eyes have a strange cast in them tonight.”
“As they should after what they’ve seen and heard—my ears, it was, that did the hearing. My eyes were preoccupied. I won’t have you thinking I suffer from synesthesia! I leave the rare complaints to Lidian. There are many gnats in the air tonight. They come from the grass to speak with Solomon.”
He offers me his arm. “Let me take you home.”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Dr. Bartlett. I’m only thirty yards, more or less, from the place where I lay me down to sleep.”
In the pleated space between “more or less,” the world can end. In it, I will say again the names of the pears I love. Bartlett, being the least exotic in my orchard, I’ll save for last. Henry calls the graveyard “the bone orchard.” What a gift for the vernacular he has!
“Waldo, is Lidian at home?”
I lie to spare myself further solicitude, which can be tiresome, except for that shown by a faithful dog, whose affection never cloys.
“She is.”
“Get some rest. I’ll be by tomorrow and dose you. I’ll bleed you if I see no improvement.”
“I thought your trade considered bleeding old-fashioned.”
“It has its uses, regardless of what they say in Berlin.”
“Good night, physic.”
“Good night.”
He offers me his hand. I give him mine, thinking he means to shake it. He presses his thumb to my wrist and, with his watch, takes my pulse by lantern light.
“You’ve had a hectic night, I think.”
“Doctor, were you in church the day I resigned my pulpit?”
“You know I was raised a Methodist, and would’ve been no older than ten or eleven at the time.”
To be again the fiery young man who brazenly bid his congregation farewell, declaring, among a number of well-put blasphemies, “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.” The truth is that I wanted religion to astonish me, as much as I wanted to startle the righteous out of their starch.
Bartlett turns and walks toward town as the beam from his lamp jumps nervously on the road before him. Of a sudden, a beast charges from a stand of pines and gnashes its teeth at the moving light. But it’s only Finnegan’s dog, Wolfe Tone, named for the Irish patriot and martyr.
There was an old man named Michael Finnegan.
He grew fat and then grew thin again.
Had it been a hellhound or the three-headed Cerberus, my heart would have given out like poor Miss Greenwald’s.
Greenwald is a lovely word. Isn’t it, Henry?
“Good night, Waldo, my friend.”
His voice fades into the beech wood, like notes of a whippoorwill scattered by the wind.
I take a few halting steps toward my house. The wise man hesitates, to foil impulsiveness, that enemy of reason. I lean against the Alcotts’ fence. Through the parlor window, I see Louisa at her writing desk. Oh, to feel once more the exultation that follows the fluent lines of ink, the veins and arteries of thought itself laid down on paper for the world to see and marvel at! To write a few lines of doggerel would please me now that I’m dogged by the bitch forgetfulness. Today she granted me a reprieve, and I knew again the joy of articulate speech and thought, though my own poem continues to be recalcitrant. But the joy is a counterfeit, and I will suffer all the more for it tomorrow, or the next day, or on a day next month when I look at Queenie’s face and ask, “Who are you?”
Coleridge wrote, “Quantum scimus sumus.” We are what we know.
What will I be when I know nothing?
To confirm my mind’s disarray, the First Church bell strikes thirteen and fear in my heart, withal, that sets me quaking. Mad with terror, I rush onto the Alcotts’ porch and clap the front door, as if I would bring down the house.
* * *
“Waldo, you’re trembling! Whatever’s the matter? Come in and warm yourself. What possessed you to go outside without a hat and scarf?”
It appears that I lost the first after taking it off to Margaret in the road. I can’t think what I did with the second article, which I remember having put around my neck before I went abroad.
“Is Mr. Stokes all right?”
“He’s asleep in Margaret Fuller’s bed.”
I’m as wobbly as Humpty Dumpty before his great fall.
“Those who spend their days prating of philosophy end up sitting on their brains. This, Lu, is the true meaning of pratfall.”
The look on her face is one that I have seen frequently on Queenie’s.
“When does Lidian get back from Edith’s?”
“Tomorrow, or the day after.”
“And where is Ellen?”
“Wife Ellen lies in her grave, testing her belief in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection. Daughter Ellen has gone to Boston to hear Jenny Lind sing.”
“Sit down. Let me get you a glass of sherry.”
“No sherry. I wonder, does Bronson keep something more fortifying in the house?”
She bites her lower lip in skepticism and then goes to the sideboard in the dining room. After a momentary chiming of bottles, as musical in their way as the six planets transcribed by Kepler in Harmonices Mundi, she returns with a bottle of Boodle’s British gin. I suspect not even Walden Pond’s water is so pure as this aromatic distillation of the grain.
“Thank you, dear girl.”
I pour a full four fingers’ worth of the juniper-scented elixir and drink it in one go.
“You’re becoming a sot, Emerson. I’ll report you to the Daughters of Temperance.”
“Go back to Camden, damn you, Walt!”
Whitman is a Minotaur of a man, brazen, monstrous, and terrifying. Let him prowl the dank halls of the Labyrinth while I roam the stars till their machinery creaks for want of oil.
“I’ll oil the works, if need be! Every last tooth and gear!”
“Ralph Waldo Emerson! You’ll be sick.” She takes the bottle away. “You’re not used to ardent spirits.”
“I’ve been entertaining them all day.”
“How will I explain to Lidian if Sam Staples jails you as a public nuisance?”
“Each man is a public and a nuisance unto himself, Lu.”
You were the best of them, Henry David Thoreau!
The gin has done its work. I feel atoms of tranquillity coursing through my veins. I lean my head on a tatted antimacassar and prepare to be pleasantly stupefied.
“You can’t spend the night on my sofa, Waldo! If anyone should find you here in the morning, it would spell the ruination of your career as a moral philosopher.” She is smiling agreeably.
“R-U-I-N-A-S-H. Damn it, Louisa May, how is it spelled?”
“Get up before you ruin the antimacassar.”
“Antimacassar. What an ugly congeries of sounds! Ah, but there is no lovelier word than pharaoh. P-HA-R-O, or is it A? Never mind. Elephant is also fine, as is … I can’t tell its name, but I can tell its history. Strangers take it away. Oh, well, I’ll remember tomorrow, or not. Giving the ear pleasure, as some words do, they ought to produce a wholesome effect on the soul. I shall write a letter to the archbishop of Boston, recommending that children be made to say them in lieu of the Pater Noster. For punishment, I’ll suggest antimacassar to his Excellency. The rod will be spared, but the child not spoiled.”
“You’re not the least yourself tonight.”
“Perhaps I’m most myself tonight.”
“Waldo, I hardly seem to know you.”
I would not have known you the day your father brought you home from Georgetown. Your face looked queer, thin, big-eyed. How sad we all were when they cut off all your hair, a yard and a half, and—in that marvelous expression—you “went into caps like a grandma.” You were frightened of a Spaniard wearing black velvet who popped from the closets like a jack-in-the-box.
“There’ve been times, dear Louisa, when I wished I could be somebody else—anyone other than Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom posterity will remember as a scholar and a poet, and whose wife as a distant, chilly man. Shame on him!”
She eyes me strangely, a little fearfully, as anyone sane would a madman in the house. I sometimes think a common mind is desirable; an uncommon one is a rack on which its possessor is stretched near to breaking.
I wander idly about the room. Putting on my spectacles, I glance at a sheet of paper tracked with ink on Louisa’s small desk.
“Are you writing more of Jack and Jill?”
“I’m writing to May’s husband, Ernest. My sister is very ill, and I fear the worst, although his last letter from Paris gave me some reason to hope.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You did know, Waldo. You forgot.”
“I suppose I did. What’s wrong with May?”
“A distemper of the brain.”
“She’s so very young and accomplished to …”
“Die?”
