The Ice Harp, page 2
“I did enjoy your mad capering.”
“In livelier days, I was said to cut a clownish figure.”
He does so now for my amusement.
“You danced as though you’d caught fire.”
“Not quite the thing for the parlors of Scituate.”
He shows his leg, tendu, like the foppish Osric of the Danish court.
“Did you never get over your Miss Sewall?”
“She’s safely married.”
“Safely for her?”
“For me, old philosopher. I wear my dirty boots in the house as I please.”
“Sing me your soles.”
“Being nothing stingy, I’ll sing you an entire scale: Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la—”
“Henry, show me the bottom of your clodhoppers!”
Treating me once again to the boyish smile of his former days, he tucks one leg up behind him for my inspection of the article in question, sets it down, and, with the other, does the same. I think that he resembles a scarlet ibis gawking by the river Nile and congratulate myself on the metaphor.
“Hallelujah! You remembered to use the boot scraper. I’d have been given the fatal asp by the Concord Cleopatra had you muddied her floor.”
“Mr. Emerson, what are you staring at?”
“The floor, Queenie. It’s vermiculate.”
I say nothing of the crumbs of toast, lest she turn her broom on me.
“You mean immaculate.”
“I do indeed. Why, I’m no better than Mrs….”
“Malaprop.”
“The same. Remember, Queenie, the night we saw Macready play Captain Jack at the Melodeon?”
Henry takes a straw from his mouth, with which he has been picking his teeth.
“I prefer the ‘tongue slippers’ of Constable Dogberry. Sheridan can’t hold a candle to the divine Will.”
“It was at the Boston Theatre, on Washington Street, where we saw The Rivals, but Mr. Macready had no part in it. He played the Danish prince in Hamlet. I remember his performance vividly, since you sneezed just as he discovered Gertrude at her prayers. The poor man forgot himself and glowered across the footlights to see who could have been so outré as to honk at such a moment.”
“Sometimes, Lidian, you make me feel like a schoolboy waiting for the knuckle rapper for having misconstrued his Latin.”
Henry cracks his. I fume. Lidian bites her tongue, as the saying goes.
“Mr. Emerson, do you feel able to set down your thoughts this morning?”
Her voice is kind, but my thoughts lie helterskelter, like bricks spilled from a hod. To think that straw should have been the binding part!
I address myself to my lanky friend: “I suppose you find the next life dull.”
“I was given a bean field to hoe, although for the life of me, I don’t know why, since we neither hunger nor thirst.”
“You mustn’t grumble. God knows men, and men, even dead ones, need to be occupied.”
“Punished, more likely, as I am denied the harvest. My beans ripen and cannot rot on the vine, nor can I pick them—no, not a single blessed one. It’s considered a great sin to interfere in perfection.”
“So there is sin in heaven, too.”
“It exists in potentia, as it did for Lucifer before his headlong fall over the banister of heaven. How I detest the idea of eternal life!”
“Eternity is a human idea, and time is what passes in the mind.”
“Good Lord, Waldo, didn’t my mind have enough of beans, and beans of it? It would rather that I played my flute or took soundings of the ponds.”
“Ponds, you say! How nice for you. How’s the fishing?”
“Not ideal, because the fish disdain the worm.”
“Queenie, I would like a fish for supper.”
“What kind of fish?”
She is wiping her soapy hands on her apron.
“Oh, you know, one that swims, or did swim when it was in its native element.”
Memory, hither come,
And tune your merry notes;
And, while upon the wind,
Your music floats,
I’ll pore upon the stream,
Where sighing lovers dream,
And fish for fancies as they pass
Within the watery glass.
“I think you’d finish your breakfast before worrying about supper!”
Henry fingers the Adam’s apple underneath his beard.
“We hook ourselves, as we did in life.”
“It may be hell after all—the place, old friend, where you fetched up, though I’d hate to have the priggish Calvinists proved right.”
“Maybe so, Waldo, maybe so.”
Musing, he chews on his piece of straw.
“Henry, is there much talk of the future where you come from?”
“Having none ourselves, only a few of us take an interest in yours.”
He pretends to see the future through a telescope formed by the O’s of his encircling fingers. Dirty and ragged, his nails are quite out of keeping with a state of bliss, I think, until I remember that he labors in other fields than those where lilies grow. Evidently, heaven is arranged according to the principles of Marx and Engels.
My voice catching in my throat, I ask him, “Will it be as you feared?”
“Humankind’s future is a dismal place of sooty train sheds and grindstones on which human noses grow forever shorter. I don’t recommend it.”
With a clap of his hands, the make-believe telescope folds up and vanishes.
I pull my lower lip pensively before shaking off the grim forecast.
“How I miss the days when Bush was noisy with onions and controversy!”
“Strong opinions, like onions, will keep the crowd at bay. And for that reason, I like them both.”
“Henry, do you see any of the old contrarians?”
“The dead ones, mostly.”
I look at my palms, as though I might see the dear faces imprinted there: that of Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, the Ripleys, brave Margaret Fuller, whom the world deemed immoral, Jones Very, who got drunk on the Holy Ghost and spent a month, insane with God, at the McLean Asylum, writing a penetrating essay on Hamlet and his problem. Gloomy, silent, and watchful, Hawthorne would join us, on occasion, as did Henry, who preferred to listen to wind and water and birds than to the high-flown sentiments of men. What a gathering of genius that was! The Transcendental Club was the granite on which our soaring thoughts found bedrock, if only for a time.
“Do you remember the exultation of those days?” I sigh, a sound expressive of regret in all the languages of men. “This morning, in my shaving mirror, I saw a moist, cold element.”
“When I see my face reflected in a slab of polished granite, I think of Jeremiah crying for Jerusalem.”
Henry tosses his head, so that his long hair flies wildly about him.
“Your hair is spectacular!”
“It grows apace in the rarified air of what the slothful call heaven. What’s more, it does forever, or so I’m told.”
“As long as that! And do a man’s brains also grow?”
“Mine are still pickling. And for your information, Waldo, the next world is peopled by women, too.”
“I pray that God has given them the vote, for men will never do so. Have you any news of Margaret Fuller?”
Feeling my face flush, I turn my head from Henry’s gaze, forgetting that he has acquired a measure of omniscience. He can see through me to my back collar button.
“You old dog, Emerson; you ancient roué!”
I color even more, until Henry is moved to relieve me of my embarrassment.
“She’s in the neighborhood, though the self-righteous shun her.”
“She got over her drowning, then.”
“We all get over the manner of our dying, Waldo. We inhabit the next phase in perfect equanimity.”
“That ought to please the randy old cock Whitman. God spare me from an eternity of his barbaric yawping!”
“Like everything else, his Leaves will have their season till they, too, fall into obscurity.”
Thinking of the dying leaves and of the Edenic couple, which paradise shed, I sing:
We long to see Thy churches fall,
That all the chosen race
May with one voice, and heart and soul,
Sing Thy redeeming grace.
Lidian shakes a hostile finger at me. “Thy churches full.”
“I love the fall. To be abroad in it … out and about.”
“There’s plenty needs doing in the yard, Mr. Emerson. You can start by dismantling the cucumber frame; the wood is rotten.”
“I recall the afternoon Henry built it.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“It wasn’t I. Nominative case.”
“Still the same old pedant, Waldo!”
“Grammar is gravity, without which words would become nonsensical, like a clockwork planetarium gone mad.”
“It was Samuel Long, the runaway slave, who built the cucumber frame,” says Lidian, whose mind is less moth-eaten than my own. “Henry Thoreau was responsible for the Alcotts’ preposterous summerhouse.”
“‘Tumbledown Hall!’ I can smell the cedar shavings curling from his plane.”
“It embodied, in wood, the universal principle of impermanence.”
“Queenie, whatever happened to Samuel?”
“The last I heard, he was in Philadelphia, working for Elijah Weaver’s paper.”
“I’d forgotten all about him.”
“I’m certain he hasn’t forgotten you, husband.”
The kitchen has turned tropical; the windows drip with steam; I wipe my sweaty brow. My dear, do you imagine yourself in the hell promised by your Calvinist parents during a childhood “when every lightning seemed the beginning of the conflagration and every noise in the street the crack of doom”?
“Samuel owes you his freedom.”
“I grant you that I had something to do with his education. Carlyle, Dickens, and even the perpetually straitened Hawthorne also contributed to his tuition. As to his freedom, no man need be indebted to another for what rightfully belongs to him.”
Henry provides the needful correction: “Or her.”
“I advocated for a woman’s unquestioned right to her property in 1855, when I fell under the spell of the formidable Susan B. Anthony. And let us not forget—that is, let me not forget—that I became a suffragist at the dawn of the present decade.”
“I’ll give the cucumber frame to the cleansing fire, just as the ancient Romans did their old clothes and furniture every five years.”
Lidian points the battledore at me and scowls.
“Don’t get any ideas into that head of yours, Mr. Emerson!”
“I should be glad of an idea now and again. I’d also like a slice of pie.”
Henry pulls on his ear and chuckles.
“Do you still ponder the universe, Henry?”
“I’m more interested in the behavior of pismires.”
“Pismires. There’s another word I thought I’d lost forever. Or did he say ‘pygmies’?”
“Who said, Mr. Emerson?”
“Henry Thoreau—”
“The corridors and chambers of the ants are kingdom enough to ponder.”
“And after so many years together, I think you could call me Waldo.”
“After so many years, I would find it strange.”
“I do miss our little Waldo. He died so very young.”
“You’re likely to see him soon, the way you’ve been neglecting yourself.”
“Being pure of heart, he may not wish to see me. He may ask God to shut the gate on me, for my sins.”
“God is ‘the individual’s own soul carried out to perfection’—or so you said.”
“Then, Henry, I shall shut the gate on myself and throw away the key.”
Lidian takes off her apron and gives it a good shake, as if to send my sins flying.
“To tell the truth, Mr. Emerson, I don’t feel so near to God as I once did.”
All is rags and offal, Queenie.
“The fault is with the calomel you dose yourself. God knows, it’s killing you by inches.”
Henry leans against the sideboard, paring his nails.
“The people of the future speak of God, when they speak of Him at all, in embarrassed whispers.”
“No doubt about it: He has been a disappointment.”
“He’s getting old, Waldo, and as long in the tooth as the Cohoes Mastodon.”
“Queenie is getting old. Her cheeks are wizened, and her face is pinched.”
“Time has insulted her, as it does all of us.”
“She was never strong. When Waldo minor died, I feared she’d follow him. Ah, but by candlelight and moonlight and in the rosy light of dawn, she is still lovely!”
“You are lovely yet, my dear.”
“Mr. Emerson, you’re an old fool!”
“Just now I was talking to Thoreau about our Wallie, the little Pharisee.”
“Henry’s been in his grave these seventeen years!”
“That long? He seems much the same as always. His hands still smell of pine sap.”
“You’re getting more and more fuddled. One of these fine days you’ll be taking your breakfast in the asylum.”
I pay her no mind and ask when our little Waldo died.
“In 1842.”
“And in what year do we presently find ourselves?”
“Eighteen hundred and seventy-nine.”
“As late as that! It’s been quite some time since Jesus walked among us.”
Lidian pushes a straggle of gray hair beneath her old-fashioned mobcap.
“Henry says John Calvin’s mob is as self-righteous in heaven as it is on earth.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk to him.”
“Who, Calvin?”
“Henry David! I don’t want him in the house. His big feet did enough mischief to my carpets while he lived.”
“He was a natural man, if a clodhopping one.”
“Are you going to eat your porridge?”
“I don’t care for it.”
Lumps of matter. How I’d love to taste the fragrant Hyblaean honey I ate for breakfast in Syracuse, overlooking the Ionian Sea!
“I want pie for breakfast.”
“You can’t eat pie every blessed morning!”
“Pray tell me which of the Lord’s days is this?”
“Wednesday.”
Henry leans across the table, near enough that I smell sweat, of all things! Well, better a country odor than the grave’s.
“Woden’s day.”
“Henry Thoreau, you’re a damned pagan!”
“Mr. Emerson, my patience is wearing thin!”
“Patience, patience, patience. I seem to have forgotten the meaning of that word, except as it applies to a game of cards.”
“Hand me your bowl and spoon, if you’re done eating.”
“This spoon has much to say concerning gluttony; this table talks of ten thousand meals, some eaten in conviviality, others in silence. One need only rest the fingertips lightly on it to receive messages from the spirits of our conjugal past.”
Lidian takes the spoon from my hand and the bowl of stiff porridge from between my elbows and sets them in the washing-up tub.
“To think that I have held ten thousand spoons in this kitchen! Bronson Alcott called it ‘the omphalos.’”
“He meant Concord, Massachusetts, not the Emerson kitchen.”
“The floor is oak, the rug woven of brightly colored rags. The walls are butter yellow. The almanac flutters from its nail. The lamp’s glass chimney is bleared with soot. The stove was blackened yesterday by my indefatigable daughter Ellen. The windowpanes divide inside from outside.”
“Don’t belabor the obvious. Or would you emulate Whitman?”
“I’m becoming increasingly unacquainted with subtlety. Although today my mind seems uncommonly agile. Henry, you speak as well as you ever did, despite your years in the ground. I envy you your easy manner.”
“I was always—What’s Walt Whitman’s dandified expression?”
“‘Nonchalant’?”
“More pretentious.”
“‘Me imperturbe.’”
“Loafing with his ‘camerados’ …”
“The jackass!”
“Don’t be common, Mr. Emerson!”
“Certainly not, my dear. I was thinking of Mr. Whitman.”
“Henry, is the Good Gray Poet dead?”
“Housebound in Camden, living in the home of his brother George. I visited him in his room not long ago. I pretended to be a fly too impudent to be shooed. I buzzed in his ear the suggestion that he should look in on you.”
“Two titans of the age reduced to invalids sucking their thumbs. Now there is a spectacle worthy of Barroom!”
“You mean Barnum. Phineas T.”
“To have spent my life kneading words, only to have them turn on me—you have no idea of the anguish!”
Memory is the thread on which the beads of a man’s life are strung. And a woman’s, too.
Lidian takes the corn broom and sweeps the floor. She pokes underneath my chair with it. She rattles the legs and rungs. She whisks my gaiters savagely.
“Mrs. Emerson, what do you mean by this assault?”
“I mean to drive you into the yard.”
“Am I a goose to be driven with a stick?”
“I won’t have you sitting here all day, moping!”
“I am not a moper, and the sky threatens.”
“It’s a beautiful autumn day.”
“Au–tumn. I can taste the pippins!”
Lidian takes up her broom against me. She scolds, “Out, out—”
Brief caudal.
“Fortunate are those born with a caul on their heads, for they will not die by drowning. I wonder if poor Margaret Fuller was born so.”
“I’ll ask her.”
“Please do, Henry.”
“Husband, where is your mind?”
“In the sweet by-and-by with Miss Fuller.”
“She doted on you, and you, husband, on her.”
“Did I?”
Strange fits of passion have I known.
“You liked her fair hair, perfect teeth, and vivacity.”
“I disliked her habit of fluttering her eyelids and speaking in superlatives. As if a thing could be more perfect than perfect, or made rounder than round by the addition of a degree of circumference!”
