The Ice Harp, page 6
Jeoffry comes near to Muir but neither stops nor sidles. Because he takes no notice of my sylvan friend, my skepticism rears once more.
“And you are here with me, John?”
“Here, and in the ice mountains by Glacier Bay.”
I shudder, but not with cold. I’m a mariner who, all his life, has navigated by the stars, only to find at the end of it that the stars are tumbling from their orbits. Just as gravity holds matter in place, so memory keeps the constructed world from falling into a lump of porridge.
Confusion would be written on my face, because Muir holds out a hand and, with a nod, invites me to touch it, as Jesus did Thomas. I still can’t bring myself to do it, afraid I will find it no more substantial than Samuel Long’s missing hand. I hear the Sirens trilling. I feel my life slipping through my fingers like raw silk. As we humans often do, I hide behind bravado.
“I’m not like the disciple Thomas, who had need of touching the hole in the Lord’s palm to prove His resurrected presence. I’m not a man vexed by doubt.”
As though in mockery, the sun slips behind a cloud. Muir trembles like someone standing behind a veil of shimmering heat, and then he disappears. Truly, all things unfix, disport, flee.
Illusion works impenetrable,
Weaving webs innumerable,
Her gay pictures never fail,
Crowds each on other, veil on veil,
Charmer who will be believed
By man who thirsts to be deceived.
Thirsts and pays to be gulled, as P. T. Barnum will attest, having made his fortune from the credulous who will, and must, believe in the Feejee Mermaid and Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy.
Unnoticed, Lidian has crept up behind me. She touches my arm. I turn and grit my teeth in advance of her reproaches.
“I’m sorry, Queenie; I’ve been an ass.”
“You have indeed, Mr. Emerson. But I can no more upbraid you for being one than I could if you’d been so imprudent as to allow yourself to be struck by lightning.”
The analogy is apt, for I suppose that one whose mind has been galvanized would feel as disorganized as mine does.
“I’ve tried to will myself completely in the world again.”
“It’s not for you to will it; only God can.”
“He appears to be indifferent to His creation, Lidian.”
“He is as you wished Him to be in your youth when you argued for self-reliance.”
As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Muir speaks to me from out of his Alaska: “God is, and He lives in the wilderness.”
And is happy to be rid of the tribe of foolish Adam and his inquisitive mate!
“I’m no longer young, Queenie. The sky is closing in.”
“Then ‘Contract thy firmament / To compass of a tent’ and be satisfied.”
“It’s unfair to turn my words against me.”
Lidian walks around the backyard like a picket watchful of a foe’s approach. Her jaw is set; her lips are compressed. All of her has thinned to gauntness. While I rambled on behalf of humanity’s causes, my sick wife had the care of our house and children. She was never right after the scarlet fever ravaged her. Ever since, she’s complained of feeling hot all over, as if the fever were allayed but never quenched. I should have burned her copy of the Venetian Cornaro’s book! She took its gospel of starvation as a recipe for good health and longevity—a regime that, in Lidian’s zeal, turned her into a living skeleton.
“Queenie, forgive me.”
She did not hear me or chooses to ignore my feeble atonement. She pokes the ashes with a stick, taking stock of the aftermath of my folly. The ashes still retain a modicum of warmth—as do we two, as do we yet.
Lidian, I forget the warmth you show me, and often give you chilliness in return. We once knew the heat of passion. Or do I mistake?
Wanting to be kind, she says, “Seeing it now through eyes that don’t sting from smoke, I’d say the damage is far less than I’d imagined. A petty inferno—nothing more—in contrast to the fire that leaped up onto the roof and brought the slates crashing into the garret.”
The Great Fire of July 24, 1872! Our neighbors managed to rescue almost everything. The burly Gregory boys carried Lidian’s piano to their parlor. Louisa and her sister May saved nearly all my manuscripts, which, dampened by the fire brigade, they dried on their kitchen stove. I’d have given up the pen for good and gone voluntarily to the asylum had my journals and indices gone up in smoke. They are the organ and refreshment of my memory. When I am stripped of my faculties, like a disgraced general of his decorations, I will be remembered by my leavings.
I join Lidian at the fence and find that, contrary to my expectation, the white pickets are unscorched. Dumbly, I finger the pointed end of one. Is she thinking of the English tea roses that she transplanted from her Plymouth yard? They didn’t take to Concord dirt.
“It’s easy to imagine an evil agency behind this small desolation.”
Laughing good-naturedly, she forbears to say that it was not by any malign intent that the hedge caught fire but, rather, by her husband’s befuddlement.
I regard her tenderly. “My mind’s bedeviled, old girl.”
“The wheel has turned, husband, and we find ourselves—”
“About to be ground to bits.”
“Is there no truth in your poems, then? Were you dishonest with yourself when you wrote, ‘So nigh is grandeur to our dust, / So near is God to man …’?”
“When I went to California with Edith, my mind was already uncertainly arranged.”
“Nonsense!”
“I took my hoariest lectures to read at the lyceums in Oakland and San Francisco, in the hope that I’d be less likely to lose my way amid the snakes and ladders of thought. At one given by the ‘celebrated natural philosopher R. W. Emerson,’ I knocked over a vase of Indian pinks decorating the platform while I was sawing the air, as if I’d never read Hamlet’s advice to the players.”
Memory is the thread on which the beads of a human life are strung, one by one. Mine snapped, and the beads lay scattered.
“And what did the celebrated Mr. Emerson do to save the situation?”
“He picked up the flowers, stuck them in the vase, and went on, in the way of an old man who, out for a walk in the woods, trips over a Virginia creeper.”
“And how did the audience respond?”
“They clapped.”
“There!”
“Not in appreciation for the essay. My voice having modulated toward inaudibility, I doubt anyone sitting beyond the first two rows could hear it. No, they clapped because they wished to spare an old man shame and, perhaps, tears.”
“Mr. Emerson, I don’t care for self-pity!”
“‘ The things which I have seen I can now see no more.’ Wordsworth.”
She has rounded on me and gives my frail shoulders a shake. So much fire, I think, for a small old woman, who is seldom without a pain, to remind her that the world is far from ideal.
“When self-reliance is no longer possible, Queenie, self-pity is sure to follow.”
“Husband, I won’t hear such talk! You’ve been lucky. The poverty you knew as a young man at Harvard was not the wretched thing I bore as an orphan. You may have dined too often on salt fish and pork scraps; your bowels may have griped you; but you didn’t die of lockjaw like poor John Thoreau or lose two legs to Confederate cannonballs like Charles Latham.”
“I waged war like a parlor abolitionist—on lecture platforms and with petitions.”
“Pity them, not yourself! And you can thank the Lord that age and a bad hip kept you out of that dreadful business.”
The angel caught Jacob on his hip and threw him.
“I admit that you suffered a terrible loss—”
Dear Ellen!
“—when your first wife died.”
Our bereavements bring us no nearer to God.
“I’m well aware that you spent your allotment of conjugal passion on her.”
I pretend to be incensed. “Now who’s talking nonsense?”
“I know, I’m plain and sickly.”
“Not plain, never plain!”
Margaret Fuller was plain, but one had only to listen awhile to her conversation to think her beautiful. She had an overabundance of animal spirits.
“It seems to me, Queenie, that ever since you took up your poetry again, you’ve begun to bloom. Nell said the same.”
How I wish that the death mask you’ve worn so long would crack and fall away and I would see you young and fair again!
Lidian ignores the compliment, though I meant it in earnest.
“I hadn’t your Ellen’s beauty or gaiety.”
I dare not accuse Lidian of self-pity, although her voice betrays an emotion that I can’t recall ever having sensed in her.
“Ellen had gifts that are sometimes granted to fugitive things,” I say, studying my nails. In them, I see the awful truth of our humanity.
When I was a boy dazzled by shells tumbling in the surf, I’d put them in my pocket, only to find, at home, when I took them out again, they had dried into nothing more entrancing than a schoolmaster’s stick of chalk.
“I would have been satisfied to live out my days in my own house at Plymouth. But you, Mr. Emerson, would have me for your wife, in spite of my utilitarian …”
She finishes her thought by a gesture of resignation to a body that has disappointed her.
A parade of ants defiles through the sere grass, singing, “When the ants come marching home again, Hurrah! Hurrah!” Are they mindless creatures or endued with a common mind? Of the two possible types, which would be the happier and more fulfilled?
“Ours was a happy meeting of the minds, Lidian.”
She produces a sound in her throat such as a sparrow would make, beating up the dust with its wings.
Again I blunder, as if, unconsciously, I intend to demolish her. “I admire your passion for reforming society and an intellect that time has not dulled.”
She turns her scalding eyes on me. Abashed, I turn mine to the ground, where a fugitive ant staggers onward to its destination, unless it has forgotten it and, withal, its raison d’être.
“You have a great soul, Queenie, and your gray eyes …”
Dimmer now.
“Appeared always to see beyond this world.”
To the colonnades of eternity, or else the scaffolds of oblivion.
“You were a commissioned spirit.”
“I was an ordinary woman—”
“By no means ‘ordinary.’”
“A woman who wanted us to live in Plymouth! But you wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Concord, also, has its rock, and modern pilgrims converge on it.”
She wrinkles her nose, as though recoiling at the smell of cabbage in a poor man’s hovel.
“I never hoped nor particularly wished to electrify you, Mr. Emerson, but now and again, I’d have liked to arouse an enthusiasm equal to your zeal for the German philosophers.”
“Do you remember how I’d sometimes call you ‘Asia’ because of the mystic continent I perceived in you and the regal manner of your sovereignty?”
I catch a glimpse of Henry walking the roof ridge like a funambulist. I glare, wishing the prat would fall. In his condition, the harm would be only to his pride. I telegraph him through the ether. “Go away, Henry!”
Lidian’s dyspeptic temper has flared at the mention of “Asia,” which I always intended as a compliment.
“I’m not a continent, Mr. Emerson! And I have no illusions regarding my sovereignty, except as it may be over the kitchen, the pantry, and the azaleas.”
“When we met, my dear wife, you were a soaring Transcendentalist!”
“My paraffin wings melted long ago. I am what you see.”
I need you, Lidian, if for no other reason than to have someone to adore. From adoration, which is reverence, religion springs. I dare not admit to my need for you, because it would only confirm my selfishness. Like a boy who has been scolded, I hang my head and scuffle the dust.
“I’m a fool.”
“This day has done much to certify you as one, and it is only half past two.”
She goes to the wounded gate.
“Wife, are you going out?”
“‘Asia’ has errands to run in town. Will you accompany me, or do you intend to hide in your study and sulk like Achilles in his tent at the gates of Troy?”
He wept for his friend Patroclus, who was robbed of his wits by Apollo and cut down by Hector with a spear. I could have wept for Henry had I been a Greek instead of a New England scholar.
“Unless you intend to fall on a sharpened paling, you should be safe left on your own for a while.”
“I’ll go with you. I can’t remember when I last walked into town.”
“Two days ago, when you took your boots to the cobbler’s.”
Henry was on his way to Tolman, the shoemaker, when Constable Staples regretfully arrested him for refusing to pay his poll tax. Henry went without a murmur, curious to see what progress our kind has made since the days of Torquemada. Afterward, he wrote, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
The Tolmans lost a daughter to the asylum. Sometimes I think madness is rampant in Concord, and that I am the maddest of all. I shudder to imagine myself shut away like Bulkeley.
Lidian steps through the gate and onto the Cambridge Turnpike. Feeling momentarily unmanned, I trail after her, in the manner of Hindu wives. I stop to call down the pike to Louisa Alcott, who is chasing dropped red maple leaves in front of her house with a broom. I’d like to hear news of her sister May, the artist of the Alcotts. Ruskin praised her copies of Turner, and her painting La Négresse is hanging in the Paris Salon. She painted a panel of goldenrod for my study, which is very fine. Having waved to me and, for the moment, routed the leaves, Louisa goes back inside her house.
Another day, then.
Lidian is well out in front of me on the road to town as I dawdle at my neighbors’ horse block. The weathered stones are stained, as though with tears, though I suspect it is the result of horse piss. My brother Charles said—oh, a long time ago—“We are to go forward with freedom until we feel ourselves checked. This check we are never to contend with; when it is right for us to act, it will be removed.” What a good and original mind was lost when the poor fellow died!
“Mr. Emerson, are you coming?”
“If it’s all the same to you, Queenie, I think I’ll turn back.”
“As you wish.”
“The town will wonder who the old man is hanging on your arm.”
A bit of doggerel intended to impress the letter E on children’s memory sings mockingly in the golden aspen leaves shivering in the nearby schoolyard:
Emerson was an elephant,
Stately and wise:
He had tusks and a trunk,
And two queer little eyes.
Oh, what funny small eyes!
Lidian turns her back on me and continues down the pike toward society. She isn’t wrong in trying to drive me into communion with my kind. Society is not to be disdained, because it is nature’s ultimate form. I see vexation in Lidian’s gait, and by the sympathetic resonance of man and wife, her annoyance with me becomes mine with her. My face grows warm, and I’m aware once again that the human heart is flammable.
She calls to me over her shoulder, “Leave the gate for the yardman to fix.”
To walk with her to town and back. Why am I so churlish to refuse a small request from one who asks so little of me? An hour on the road and in the stores—what would it cost me, who has nothing to do this afternoon, except to listen to my cells complain and my blood object to its wearisome circuit?
Returning to the yard, I kick the gate and send it flying from its remaining hinge.
“There is a crack in everything!”
Leaning against a chestnut tree, Henry is carving a small horse with his jackknife.
“Remember the menagerie I made for Edward and little Edith?”
“Lidian is unhappy with me.”
“You can hardly blame her, Waldo.”
“Yet she did say that I’m not to blame for my unraveling mind.”
“As I recall, she didn’t put it quite that way.”
“Well, she said it’s not for me to will myself well.”
He squints at his creation. Isn’t it odd that an object should come into greater focus when one’s eye is nearly shut? Perhaps only then do we begin to see the thing itself.
“Philosophy is for bachelors, Waldo. Nature won’t reveal herself amid squalling babes, bleating wives, small boys playing with hoops and soldiers, and little girls scolding their dolls. The ponds and trees made no demands on me. Surrounded by them, I was free.”
He folds up his jackknife and gives me the toy horse. Even in the midst of controversy, I pause to admire it. I wonder at its solidity.
“Henry, what’s that you’re nibbling?”
“Sugared shagbark hickory meats. I helped myself to a pocketful while the Shakers were whirling, oblivious to everything but God.”
“So that’s where you went?”
Though I do love the sweet, I forbear to ask for one, fearful that it may have been altered by vapors of the afterlife shut up in Henry’s pocket. He is, I know, indubitably dead; John Muir told me so.
“Henry, if I should lose both my words and my wife, I won’t rest easy in whatever comes next.”
“Nothing comes next, save as the living wish it and words make it.”
“I thought as much.”
“My atoms, however, are ecstatic.”
“I’m afraid, Henry, and it shames me to admit it.”
“I’ve seen you face down a pro-slavery mob, which would have done to you what cruel boys do to frogs.”
“Did I? I recall Garrison’s having done so.”
“For a bantamweight, you were uncommonly brave in opposing the bullies of our race.”
“But how am I to live bereft of language, which has been my life?”
“Hasn’t a mute a life?”
“Henry, you know very well what I mean! The words are deserting by ones and twos from my brain. There may come a time when they exit in battalions. It’s an agony—and yet Lidian rebukes me for self-pity.”
