Emily & Herman by John J. Healey

Author:John J. Healey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2014-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

9

TO HIS SURPRISE AND DISCOMFORT, AUSTIN DICKINSON discovered that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a fellow passenger aboard the steamship Priscilla. Disinclined to explain his solitary presence, especially at so early an hour, and not at all disposed toward having to make further conversation with the esteemed author, he devoted an inordinate amount of his depleted energy aboard ship avoiding contact with the man. That Hawthorne was traveling alone also pricked his conscience. Surely, Herman Melville was a man of character, he tried to tell himself—though to what extent any man’s character was reliable when women were concerned, using himself as an example, remained in doubt. He did, he hoped, also understand that Walter Whitman would also be accompanying his sister and Melville.

Emily found Whitman’s handsome dark friend painfully shy. His presence imbued the train compartment with a faint scent of fish and lemons. Melville noticed the young man’s gnarled, calloused farmhand fingers, the new clothes that did not fit well plus the worn boots and drew a reasonable conclusion. Whitman’s query put to him the evening before regarding the abolitionists acquired new resonance. His first reaction was irritation at the notion they had been taken advantage of, that they were being used as cover to help an escaped slave flee North. He fumed to himself, feigning righteousness as Emily and Whitman and William Johnson made small talk, that if only Whitman had just asked him about it honestly they would have surely acceded. That Whitman had felt the need to lie was insulting. And what if something should go wrong? There were Blackbirders lurking about at all the major stations hoping to make an arrest and claim their bounty. How would that make him look? What would Mr. Dickinson say about the New York author who got his daughter involved in an illegal transaction? The fury within him grew and he was on the verge of interrupting the others to ask Whitman to step out into the corridor so that he might vent his anger appropriately. But precisely for that reason, he began to pay attention to the others more closely.

William Johnson sat there with them, awkward but in possession of his dignity, in that compartment with three New Englanders who, for however aware they were inside of the situation’s novelty, went out of their way externally to put the young man at ease. Would he really have said yes if Whitman had been truthful? Or might he have evinced compassion and empathy while coming up with an excuse to return north with Emily by another route? When Whitman had asked him his views on abolition, he had struck a pose of aloofness from worldly, local politics, claiming some special allegiance to an artistic dedication that somehow transcended mundane issues. He who was getting closer with each week to publishing a book with the character of Queequeg in it. He who has spent months living, sleeping, and having relations with natives in the Pacific. He whose grandfather had been an instigator at the Boston Tea Party.

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