The handsome sailor, p.21
The Handsome Sailor, page 21
He can hope it is only a case of nerves. Certainly, Mackey has made them vulnerable. But how many times has Herman stood on the small iron balcony at night, silent among the chimney-pots and roof-gardens, and wondered if his son was in fact alive? For of course he could so easily be dead—one such night he would be dead—and they would never know for weeks, or months.
If word came slow—death in April, no word until May—would the gap in time help soften the shock? Is a present truth disarmed when relegated to the past in a distant future? A tragedy can be so long-since true that in a sense it is no longer true, or is by now a different truth, as last week’s hurricane may leave behind it crippled lives and shattered houses, yet no longer hits at one hundred miles an hour, ripping the coat from your back as it goes.
Saturday night. Shreds of cloud, as thin as steam, file past the half a moon. A cold damp night on the balcony, just the sort of air to keynote a disease, according to Doctor Lizzie. She will not step out to join him.
But free of all wifes for the moment, Herman charges his pipe and puzzles why a man would wish for two of them. More happily subtract a wife than add one, no? And double the odds whenever you crave the silent grass-growing mood about your ears—or when all passion’s spent. (Oh we’ll go no more a-roving, down to the fiddler’s green.)
You store your life in boxes, some in this one and some in that. Have I uttered three sentences of hearth or home over my long career on the wharves? Conversely, how many tales of those scalawag crews have I brought back inside the family-circle? Very few, as I have lately rationalized. Hoadley likes to ask, and Evert just loved the stuff; oh he soaked it up with glee. Excavated each rough gem of chicanery as if he planned to exposé it, muck-rake style.
A bigamist has his two repositories, so to speak: one here, one there, and never the contents to mingle. He could take two trips to church and hall, two Catskill Mountain honeymoons, and bring two litters into this lamed and catastrophied world. A Kate and Harry here, a Kate and Harry there, and never the twain. Does this entice a man, though, or does it sound more like hell-fire on a damned short faggot?
Possible, yes. Murder is possible too, so long as you do not mind your guilt, and your happy victim favors an early seat in Heaven. And so long as you don’t get nabbed.
In the ashes of Agatha’s tale resides your sole exception: that man whose habits are formed at sea, and who retains the foundation of a sea-faring life. Like Max the Dutchman, he may have a wife in every port, and mostly no wife at all, living on the brine. He can find a clean bundle waiting for him on both sides of the broad Atlantic, and old Jenny Brown in London town need never meet young Jenny Gray in Sheepshead Bay. There are always two sides to the moon.
The wondrous part is that Cora Stevenson sees me eligible. Glory be to her for that, for to be seen differently is to become different, sometimes. But the rules of thumb apply: never lie to a wife, and never tell her the whole truth. Who can begin to math out the exponent of complexity in telling such different half-a-truths to two of them? Who can point to his bowl of milk and declare it not shot through with poison? The case is sad, to be sure, but at least it is clear.
Time to move this meeting along—and maybe move it indoors to some warmth. What’s the next order of business, though? What else can we resolve, under this chilly moon of resolution? The Stanwix letter is next, if we are up to it. Remember, it must be cut as careful and artful as any verse. It must say everything there is to say of love, while seeming to say nothing at all, beyond hail and farewell. Tis a chore that calls for more strong coffee, and another charge of roughcut barley.
My dear boy Stanwix,
We undertook today the short sea-voyage over Hudson’s chopped and shining waters to Nouveau Jersey—for the purpose of lifting and weighing your pretty niece Eleanor, and trying out a rough thumb on her rose-petal cheek. She has a face and a will to make the boys cry. What Eleanor wants she wants, as is maybe the case with us all, before it gets hammered out in the cause of Civilization (which be Greek for “Do what we say and we’ll stamp yr. papers”).
The arguments fly back and forth. She looks like her mother, she looks like her father, she looks like her father’s mother. To this old mariner’s eye, she looks like you did, lad, at the same tender age, before you went and waxed your moustaches.
Your sister Bess stood home
Your mother is very well, and Bessie much improved by
All home are feeling well, and all most glad to hear that you are stronger. Since you asked for advice As to the issue of seeking new work As to occupations, my conclusion (from having hauled to sea and hauled to deskwork indoors) is that life in a chair is twice as debilitating as the strenuous life. It may prove to be the case that life at twenty versus life at sixty is more the crux of it—in which case a man of thirty-two (which you to our shocked amaze do speedily approach!) might want to steer a middle passage, some sort of half-and-half.
Shall we run a contest together, you and I, back and forth across the Great Plains? Objective: to shape the perfect life, and then perhaps together go off and live it, whether building bridges or vagabondizing in the shade beneath them. When I remember.
Herman lifts his pen and leans back, closing his sore eyes. Ink on the heels of both hands; all his energy siphoned out. Tomorrow is another day, and a good one to have another go at this letter-writing.
He pours himself a sip of brandy, then shuts his eyes again. It is almost impossible for him to picture Stanwix as a grown man. Sometimes Stannie is four years old and sometimes fourteen, but he is never thirty-two—unless he is standing there.
Last week, Herman had asked Cora about her nephew, a fair-skinned lad, glimpsed one time from duelling distance. He was looking for a fact or two, just his idle curiosity at work, and Cora said, “You must meet him. It would be a treat for both of you.”
Meet him for a day in Central Park, take him to the Zoo. Show him the hippopotami, with their big peg-teeth grown up like stumps from the foothills of the lower jaw. Hippos, Patrick, escaped from the Hippodrome!—where they were poorly attended, by hippocrites. Herman racing with his joke, Cora persisting in earnest: “We should plan to do it.”
Could he manage that trick? Would Master Patrick stay inside his designated box? Because things become so tangled now, as provinces must come tangled at the boundary line. Hippo jokes and ice cream treats for Master Pat, when Stannie’s portion seems so small? Everything under your roof is related, as the upstairs pipes may overflow onto the carpet downstairs—may and will, though admittedly it is a bathetic metaphor.
Perhaps he should lecture on this topic. On Boxes, and the failure to box or be boxed. So much of the human comedy is contained, as it were, in this theme. They will need to know about it, to know the whole truth, in windy Cleveland and chill Milwaukee!
Sunday morning. For an hour or so, Herman has leafed through Balzac’s correspondence, inattentively. Turning pages.
He is fed up with his own company. How good it would be to walk down to Duyckinck’s, and have a fine old-fashioned Sunday there. The day was manufactured for idling and reflection, and there was such a ripening in him on those long-ago Sundays on Clinton Street, under the sacred basement stair. Dialogues and trialogues, and maple logs for the glowing hearth.
There were later Sundays, to be sure—the two of them surviving like old club men, or dinosaurs outlasting the Mesozoic times. There was pipesmoke and punch and the sort of tall talk that could only go with Evert, could only be placed in the Duyckinck Box. No place to place it now. Sunday now is a day when you pass yourself a few times too many in the mirror.
A day for marking absences. Earlier, he had stood at Mackey’s door, remembering every detail, not going in. The guest room! And was it last year or the year before that he drafted up four thousand words to Hawthorne, a weighty tome to that long vanished sound-post, as to him alone it could form and be framed? (Then saved on postage, for it could not be sent, or not successfully, to under the sod.)
Unless a whole new genre, letters to the dead! Why not? Attempting his letter to Stannie last night, Herman had again and again seen Mackey’s face, had sighed for all the volumes he would say to Mackey. Why not say them? Draft a letter to the dead and buried; poor Mackey is in his box, no doubt.
Sunday afternoon. Herman is still upstairs, and bored, whether from without or within. Stale. Is sleep a genre? Dreaming is. It’s either sleep away these endless hours, or flee outside to sip a toddy on the Square, under the newly raw autumnal sky. Better a thumbnail of Barbados rum than another pot of this coldish Souchong tea.
Lizzie, though. His guardian angel ranges below, guarding his health after the putative strain of a day in East Orange. She guards it by guarding his coat, in case he would put it on. Will a body at rest stay at rest, or become a body in motion?
He flattens on the narrow bed, to ruminate a while. Maybe ruminate till hunger strikes, or the dinner bell tolls. He closes his eyes. Exhausted from doing nothing, he is a little too weak to tussle it out downstairs with Lizzie.
A Sunday sort of Sunday, bad enough, but now comes a Sunday sort of Monday too. Or not so bad as that, yet a morning of damp air flying under the shanty roof, and an afternoon in the filthy bowels of the Carolus. And, by prior agreement, no chance of sighting Cora.
“This is not your sunny atoll morning,” Herman says to Barclay.
“No dancing girls today, old matey.”
“How about O’Reilly’s,” McBride suggests. “Might serve to brighten up the morning.”
Herman looks askance, granting Bridey his half-a-smile.
“I’ll second the motion,” says Bridey’s running mate Will Barclay. Then, in an altered voice, falsetto: “Make it unanimous.”
“You can’t vote twice.”
“I didn’t. That was Herman’s vote I casted. Shall we go carry out policy?”
They go, and Herman stays. It is not O’Reilly’s cream stout he craves, it is Cora’s tilted, tented frown (which is only another kind of smile, as you can see in the eyes). A man may not want two wifes, true enough, but he wants a glimpse of Cora Stevenson’s face by Monday. The day is no damned use without it.
Way back on Friday, this prescribed hiatus loomed a welcome prospect. A relief from impossibility. It was welcome still on Saturday, when Herman walked the strand with baby Eleanor and Fanny, and ate baked clams at Weehawken. Saturday was fine. Then Sunday got clogged. Something always dies on the tracks of a Sunday, and here it is, still flavorish as the week begins. The hell with O’Reilly, let us all go back home and crawl in under the covers! A clear mistake that we ever crawled out, when sleep is the revolutionary genre.
The world is nothing but a tunnel now, leading him straight to Tuesday at four. This much Cora clearly knew. She knew it in tea-leaves and tarot-cards, while the sachem had to find it out. A wheelwright’s daughter, desk clerk’s wife, somebody’s mother, and nobody’s fool.
Oh, time is a toothy trap, that locks your leg like iron. Step inside the trap and you cannot step back out; someone else has got the levers. Hard to believe your watch keeps time, when all it says is 9:14, 9:14 . . . and then, at best, after numberless tasks and perambulations, 9:15, 9:15.
He had doubled the grog, to fortify sleep, then tripled the grog at midnight, when sleep was exposed as a hoax. But now, four in the morning, is when the time trap really has you. “The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox.”
Sir Thomas Browne, who knew a thing or two. What was that other pearl of his, on defeat and the keys to the city? Worth a candle to search it out, but quietly quietly, for Bessie wakes at the scratch of a branch on the glass. Dusty volume! No wonder the quotation’s forgot, it’s centuries since last we opened this tome—Like clapping erasers to open and shut its powdery gates. But here it is:
“A man may be in possession of the truth, or of a city—and yet be compelled to surrender.”
He may indeed. But to whom? To whom surrender?
“I was hoping we could walk the river path today. Do you mind?”
“It’s muddy, Cora, and very rough in spots.”
“I have come well dressed for the outback. See my muckalucks?”
Gaily swinging up a toe to show off some sort of fishing boot, Cora is in full bloom today. Her chestnut tresses fly loose of the combs, and there is a bounceful absence of reserve at play in her bright cheeks.
“’How much more doth beauty seem beauteous/ When hung with the sweet ornament of truth,’” he says. Is this the text? Does this account for a change, the disburdening? She has never seemed plain, or even middling; always pretty. But beautiful?
“Do I take that as yes, or no?” says Cora.
Herman shakes his head in wonder, and studies her from the muckalucks to her smiling lips. Full in the middle, tapered at the cheeks to a delicate crimp, those lips are never exactly still. There is something so lively inside her that it bubbles out. Her face is not an American face nor of this century; it is a portrait pulled from Boccaccio’s gallery, of a woman who wears no false reserve.
And all this abandonment aimed at him? Doubtful of his own magnetism, highly conscious of his graybeard status (and of the long long coitus-interruptus that can mark a man inside and out), Herman does not quite believe it. Perhaps her vivacity stems from Bachelor 442, whom the widely-acquainted indefatigably matchmaking Jack has most freshly summoned to sample the pie. There has been a hiatus, remember, so there has been time enough for Number 442 to make a loud impression; to stir up this liquid in her eye, and endow her grin with ticklish nuance.
“Your cheerfulness is startling. Surely you are the most cheerful widow on earth.”
“A widow is not deceased, Herman—her husband is. Which makes a great difference.”
“Irrefutably.”
“There is an odd illusion, where I feel I have been sad for such a long time—yet I also feel that life goes by too quickly.”
“It races like the tide,” he says, if only to be in agreement. On the heels of his recent tortuous perdurable days and nights, it is nicely ironic that she should mark the speedy passage. But she is right: the days can be interminable, while the years do race away.
“I have very few illusions, really.”
“Do you know the illusion I miss the most? That it matters. How I would love to believe it matters whether you do or you don’t get out of your bed. Not that I don’t like my breakfast, mind.”
“Of course it matters,” says Cora, to whom this exchange represents nothing more or less than hesitation. Herman’s questions are not questions, and his answers are not answers; they are the boulders he likes to strew about him.
“To whom can it possibly matter?”
He is playing the child now. Cora sighs, and pampers the child with answers; touches the child’s brow with a sweet, maternal hand.
“To yourself above all, so you may continue to eat your famous soup. To me, as I have been at pains to make clear. And to your wife, of course—”
“You must not speak of her.”
“Never?”
“Please.”
“But why is that? You have occasionally spoken of Andrew.”
“Poor Mr. Stevenson, dear lady, is under the rolling seas, where he cannot feel the cold half-gale of our frivolous talk blow over him.”
“Nor can she, if she is downtown.”
“There’s a notion! The streets of Manhatto as a sort of holy rolling sea, that closes over its citizens till they are lost within its limestone waters, in a vast cold soaking oblivion. You put a good question.”
Whatever it was. Cora cannot recall the question in question, and she would be no less surprised to hear a response to the question, whatever it was, than to see Herman go sailing off the escarpment and fly up the river to Hell Gate. Her goal is to keep him in motion. She is not managing him, to her way of thinking; she only wants him to manage himself.
Negotiating extruded roots and half-buried stones, they dance the muddy path: now gentleman left, now side by side, now lady left, now donkey-file. Cora’s playfulness is in abeyance as she concentrates on where next to put her toe. Where the pathway begins to converge with the hospital fence, they execute a wordless faceabout. This too begins with footwork, or choreography, and a formal hand in the small of her back. But Cora halts the dance figure at three-quarter turn, and searches out his eyes.
The barest trace of vapor, through her parted lips. She seems as light as air, as translucent as water, and under her gaze he seems, to himself, mighty ridiculous in all his tortured study, inward and churning. Let go, let go. Does she even guess there are ten thousand loud unspoken words?
She feels him letting go, a little. “You realize,” she says, “that a man is expected to do the wooing. Or worse than that, to act the beast.”
“A gentleman, however loosely defined, would never act the beast.”
“A sailor might. Or a genius. They are expected to be irresponsible, not irresponsive.”
“You have read too much George Sand.”
Below them, through the rose and gamboge leafwork of late October, a barge is gliding past the island. Some neighborhood men are out in rowboats, to fish through the swill for dinner. On his last legs as a ratiocinator—but still churning weakly—Herman is trying to incorporate Lizzie. Would ‘bigamy’ impact Lizzie? How, exactly?
The most conspicuous impact would be providing her a cheerier husband—and soberer into the bargain, which is to say wealthier. Surely these are all benign effects, if the ends can justify the means. Can they? Perhaps they can, where they do not conflict with existing means, Lizzie-wise.
But alas, Herman has done some reading too. He has read his Voltaire, and knows that a man’s ideas, so-called, are cut ad hoc to fit his actions; that a man’s logic, so-called, is as a crab’s perambulation, backwards, from the act to its hopeful justification. That clear thinking is naught save thinking skillfully clouded.
