THE LIGHT OF THE IDEAL
Stoddard was lucky to have a job at all. He understood that, and tried to be grateful. There were worse things a man could be forced to do; that he knew as a fact. At least this wasn’t the foundry, which had bent his frame and broken his spirit beyond anything that might happen to him as an Inspector of Customs for the Port of New York. The poetry had been all that kept him going back then. It was really all that kept him going now. His wife Lizzie would scoff at such a statement, just as she had too often scoffed at his poetry, but it was true.
Thank God Hawthorne had understood, despite his enormous success—or perhaps because of it. It was Hawthorne’s letter to his old college chum Pierce, conveniently President of the United States at the time, that had gotten Stoddard the job in the first place. It was not difficult to be grateful for that. Such generosity of spirit was hard to come by in this fallen world.
He scribbled his signature across the bottom of the paper which lay on his desk, put it on top of the others, initialed the copy below it, put that on top of the one he had signed. He looked over at the corner table where the package sat that he had brought back from his trip down to the Battery that afternoon. There were more papers left, but instead of signing them he pushed away from his desk and walked over to his office’s only window.
Nassau Street lay below him, shadowed and unclean. Almost dark. The street lamps were being lit and the traffic was beginning to thicken; the carriage horses bumped their noses against the vehicles in front of them. As the distant figures scurried by three stories below him, they moved out of the shadows into the small pools of lamplight and back into the dark again. Stoddard wanted nothing so much at that moment as to go down onto the sidewalk and stand under one of the lamps and let the light surround him, illuminate him.
The lamp directly across the street from his office came on, and Stoddard saw a man and a woman standing under it. The man was well-dressed and held himself with dignity; the woman’s skirts were soiled and her hat lay crooked on her head. The woman was talking and the man stood silently, listening. Her breath clouded the air between them; despite the cold, she had no gloves. Stoddard couldn’t see their faces from here, but he knew the hard look he would find on the woman, the coarse features and cunning eyes. He knew also of the desperation the man so carefully hid: the desperation that sent otherwise good and noble men into the street for comfort. He turned away from the window in disgust, looked at his piled desk with even more disgust, and decided to go home. Perhaps Lizzie would have dinner waiting if she hadn’t gotten lost in the composition of her new story.
While putting on his overcoat, he looked again at the package from the docks. It seemed insubstantial in the dim glow from the street that eased through the window, seemed to hover, mute and unreadable. He walked over to it, stopped before he reached it, turned around, and went out the door. He would deal with it tomorrow.
As he walked the seven blocks to his home, though, his thoughts returned to the box. His position in the Debenture Office of the Custom House did not call for him to go out into the city too often, a circumstance for which he was ever grateful. Nonetheless, from time to time he had to go see to business himself. His office was responsible for sending inspecting officers to all incoming vessels with cargoes from other countries; the ships’ berths extended from the Battery to the foot of Twelfth Street on East River and to Gansevoort Street on North River, and so the staff was kept busy. Sometimes there simply were not enough men, and Stoddard would be forced to put on his hat and overcoat and go down to the shipping district and conduct an inspection himself, or clean up some subordinate’s mistake. He was employed at an asylum for mediocrities; everyone who was fit for nothing elsewhere thought he deserved a job in the Custom-House, and so there were mistakes aplenty to go around.
That was what had happened this afternoon. Word had come that one of the inspecting officers had had a confrontation with the captain of the Belle Amie, a schooner just in from the Sandwich Islands. The outraged captain claimed the cargo was overestimated by the young clerk, who was in fear of bodily harm should the fees run greater than the captain thought just. Could Mr. Stoddard please come down to the dock and help facilitate the matter?
When he reached the shipping district he was struck, as always, by the spectacle. The waterfront of New York or any other great city was the opposite of beauty. Its grime and commotion reminded him of the foundry; all that was missing was the extreme heat. But there were elements of it that were undeniably picturesque. The bowsprits of the ships sometimes extended halfway across the street toward the warehouses, like medieval lancers ready to attack. Much of the cargo was prosaic, but much was of exotic appearance and even scent; a few of the poems in his volume Book of the East had arisen from these visits. And while the men of the foundry were gray haunts beneath their burdens, the inhabitants of the riverfront were a swirling patchwork of the world. He saw few of the ships’ crew—no true sailor would remain near salt water once he was ashore—but the longshoremen surged continuously from the ships to the docks to the warehouses and back, clad in garments as outlandish as strolling players, their mouths full of strange pipes and strange words. Stoddard was never quite sure if it was the lure of the antipodes which appealed to him, or simply the fact that, although he was in a place he did not want to be, at least he was no longer a slightly-built youth carrying forty-pound ladles of molten iron in each hand.
He arrived at the Belle Amie’s berth to find his clerk sitting on the edge of the dock, staring gloomily into the water. Behind the clerk stood a tremendous man in a coal-black greatcoat which hung down to the dock. The man stood impassively and puffed on a bamboo pipe half as long as his arm. The breeze from the water tossed his great flowing gray hair and beard. He looked a bit like Whitman, which, to Stoddard, was no recommendation.
The clerk, an underfed young man who had half the captain’s size and a fifth of his hair, scrambled to his feet at Stoddard’s approach. “Mr. Stoddard! I am very glad to see you, sir. I have done my level best to reason with this gentleman—”
“Be you this pissant’s superior?” the gray-haired man asked. His voice was harsh and slurred, the voice of a man not used to talking below a shout.
“I am, sir,” Stoddard replied. “Richard Henry Stoddard, Inspector of Customs for the Port of New York. Are you the captain of this vessel?”
“I am, Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard.” He came up to Stoddard and the clerk but kept one hand in his pocket and the other on his pipe. He stank of sweat and brine. “Mardonius Cantrell, captain of the good ship Belle Amie and an honest man. An honest man, Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard,” Cantrell said, his voice rising to its accustomed volume, “one who’s never cheated another man on a game of chance or a load of cargo. There’s 487 tons aboard this ship and not a pound more.”
“If you please, Mr. Stoddard,” the clerk said, “my estimates clearly indicate that 488 tons is a much more accurate figure. If you’ll examine my report—”
“Quiet, you God-damned maggot!” Cantrell roared. “I’ll have your balls for breakfast before you call me a liar!”
“Do you have proper documentation for your cargo, Captain Cantrell?” Stoddard asked wearily. He should be in a sylvan glade, reclining comfortably beneath a tree. The Muses should be breathing poetry into him while Lizzie feeds him grapes.
“Paper. Paper and words.” Cantrell reached into his coat and pulled out a wad of parchment. “I take the sorriest crew the company ever purchased, drag them around the Cape by their cocks, arrive in port three days ahead with only two men and no cargo lost, and what greets me? A company man with a bonus for my efforts? A fat whore with a jug of whiskey? No. Sniveling she-men with words on paper.”
Stoddard examined the documentation, compared it with the clerk’s estimate. “You’re right, Mr. Van Ness,” Stoddard said to the clerk. “There is most certainly a discrepancy here. Unfortunately, that is owing to your counting a dozen barrels of sugar twice.” He pulled a metal stamp out of his pocket and pressed it to Cantrell’s papers. “Please be on your way, Captain, and accept my apologies for the confusion.”
“Apologies?” Cantrell spat on the dock. “All the whores will be taken in the time I’ve wasted here.” He looked over at Van Ness. “If you had your manhood between your legs instead of a quill pen, maybe you could count higher than your fingers and you could count my cargo right.”
“I’ll—I’ll not—” Van Ness began.
“You’ll shit blood and be grateful! Out of my way.” He pushed past the speechless clerk and went back aboard his ship.
Van Ness proceeded to beg Stoddard’s pardon at some length, but Stoddard cut him off and sent him back to the office. Rather than following, he stood at the edge of the dock and stared down at the water. A thin oily film floated on the surface from where the ships had flushed their wastes. He felt profoundly depressed. It was not the captain’s obscene tirade, or the clerk’s incompetence. It was all of that and none of that. What could he hope for in such a place? What ideality was here?
He looked up from the polluted water and turned to walk back to the office. A group of Negroes had gathered on the shoreline; they whooped and laughed as they looked out at the water at something Stoddard could not see. During the draft riots the good citizens of New York had hanged them from lampposts. What had they to smile about?
“Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard!”
Stoddard turned around. Cantrell had emerged from the ship and was walking toward him carrying a package. He came up to Stoddard and thrust it at him. “Here. Take this.”
Stoddard looked at the package uncertainly. “Is this a bribe, sir?”
“A bribe? Christ, no!” Cantrell laughed, a harsh sound that betrayed no mirth. “If I’d wanted to bribe you, you damned fool, I’d’ve done it before you figured out that I was right and your ass-licking clerk was wrong. Go on, take it.”
Stoddard hesitated, then reached out and took the package. It was unwieldy but light; it bore no outside marks.
“It’s no bribe, man,” Cantrell repeated. “I’ve seen your look in other men’s eyes. I’ve been around the world too many times not to recognize it.” He leaned in toward Stoddard, removed his pipe. His teeth were made of wood. “It’s the look of a crewman who realizes too late what a mistake he’s made signing on. The look of a man desperate not to be where he is.”
Stoddard remained impassive, determined not to acknowledge the truth of what the captain said. “I am quite content with where I am, sir. But even if I weren’t, what would this box have to do with that?”
“I don’t rightly know, Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard. Maybe nothing. The man who passed it on to me didn’t live long enough to tell me all its history. All I know is that it’s for men like you, and I’m damned glad to be rid of it.”
“What exactly is its history?” Stoddard asked, curious despite himself.
“For the love of God, man! I’ve wasted enough time here already. There won’t be a whore left in New York by the time I get into town.” He moved toward the street. “Throw it in the river for all I care. It’s yours just the same.”
That was how he had gotten the package. As he approached the entrance to his home, a grimy-faced boy stepped out of a doorway, emptied a slop bucket into the gutter, and retreated back into the shadows whistling a Yankee marching song. Stoddard breathed through his mouth as he turned his key in the doorlatch, trying to ignore the stench. He had outlived Shelley and Keats for this?
Stoddard found Lizzie sitting at the dining table, head resting in the crook of her arms on the tabletop, sound asleep.
“Lizzie,” Stoddard said, gently shaking her shoulders. “Lizzie, dear. Wake up.”
Lizzie started awake, looked up at her husband, and put her head back down on the table. “Lorry’s asleep,” she said. “He’s been needing me all day. I had Millie put some supper on before she left.”
“Good,” said Stoddard, who was all too aware that their housekeeper was a much better cook than Lizzie. “Has the fever come back?”
“No,” she said, and sat up. Stoddard sat down across the table from her. Lizzie had never been a great beauty, and the energy and wit that had always carried her through had been diminished in recent times. It had been almost five years since the death of their son Willy; Lorry’s arrival two years later had helped considerably, but Stoddard knew full well his wife had never really recovered from the death of their second child. The first one had almost finished her off as it was. Night after night of the deformed creature lying silent in the cradle and Lizzie staring past it at something only she could see. . . . Better not to think of it. At least Willy had been born whole, and had lived long enough to warrant a name.
She asked him about his day, and as she laid the supper out he told her of the papers that had crossed his desk, and the many more that had arrived and stayed. She smiled and even managed a laugh at his tale of the inspecting officer who had complained about a procedural matter and whom he had referred to Jim Benedict, knowing that Benedict would dispatch the complainer with language coarser than anything Stoddard had ever heard on the docks. It was good to hear Lizzie laugh; there had been so little of that lately.
“You should have seen the look on the fellow’s face,” Stoddard said, smiling himself at the recollection. “It was as if he had just stepped off a curb and been splashed with mud by a garbage wagon.”
“Did he tell you what Benedict said?” Lizzie asked.
“He did not, and I shouldn’t repeat it if he had.”
“Nonsense, Dick. Benedict is a classic study. I might be able to use it in my new story.”
“Shush, Lizzie!” He pretended to be shocked, but he was used to her fancies. “As if any worthy magazine would print such a work.”
“Shush yourself, Dick,” she said pleasantly, biting into the last of her chicken. She chewed methodically and swallowed. “When Millie came back from the market today she said she had seen a boy with no legs who moved on a slab of wood with wheels under it. He propelled himself by pushing on the street with his hands, down to the ground like an ape.” She poured herself another cup of tea. “There are worse things in the world than the words that come out of people’s mouths.”
“Indeed there are,” he replied, holding his teacup halfway across the table while she poured. “All the more reason we should strive for the most beautiful words possible, arranged in an ideal fashion.”
“Save your sermons for the choir,” she said abruptly, rising and gathering the dishes. Her momentary good humor had vanished. “Boker is supposed to be up next week, isn’t he? Talk to him of Beauty and Truth and Greece and Rome. Or go have lunch with Ned Stedman and pay homage to the Muse while he tries to sell you railroad shares.”
Stoddard sipped his tea and said nothing. Millie should have known better that to come back to the house bearing stories of cripples; she knew Lizzie’s dread of such things after the first child. He would fire her, except that she was such a good cook. He started to tell Lizzie the story of the package which sat in his office, but he decided not to. No reason to stir her up any further.
After dinner they sat in their chairs by the fire. Lizzie had sorted the mail earlier in the day, and Stoddard went through it while she scribbled at her story. A review copy of the first book of poetry by a young woman “whose excellent moral character is reflected in the purity and fragile beauty of her verse,” according to the accompanying publisher’s note. No doubt. A letter from Taylor complaining about bills and trumpeting his translation of Faust, which would be ready by summer—and which, Stoddard thought wearily, would no more pay the bills than any other poem, Goethe or no. More review copies, a handful of magazines, and several bills of his own.
Shining through the pile, however, was the letter of acceptance from Harper’s for his latest sonnet. The enclosed check floated free of the envelope; Stoddard snatched it out of the air before it drifted toward the fire. He had published plenty of poetry by now, four books of it, but the thrill of achievement, however slight, still ran through him when he placed a poem. He looked at the check for fifteen dollars. A week’s salary. If only he could write more and sell them; if only there were more Harper’s to go around. If only wishes were horses, so beggars such as he could ride.
He passed one of the new books to Lizzie. “Look, my dear. It’s the new Tennyson.”
Lizzie took the volume and laid it aside without looking up from her writing. “Send it to Taylor. Show him what a real poet can do.”
He started to respond, thought better of it, leaned his head back against the chair, and sighed. Tennyson had England. What had he and Taylor and the rest? New York was many things, but it was no place for poets. New York was a denser America, and America had no use for ideality. A nation of shopkeepers and engineers who wanted physical objects they could touch and, preferably, sell. That was why he had refused to support the war, a stance Boker and Taylor and young Stedman and the rest never understood. He had no use for the slaving South, concealing its brutality beneath a veneer of charm, but it was right about the North. It was not a culture worth defending; it was no culture at all.
Besides, Boker had his family money. Taylor had his travel books and lecture tours and still had to do the labor of three men to keep up that huge Pennsylvania house of his. And Stedman—Stedman worked on Wall Street during the day and wrote poetry at night, and actually seemed to prefer it that way. They all had money, but none of it had come from their poetry. And why should it, when the old boys whose coattails they kept grabbing for couldn’t earn a living from their Muse, either? Holmes and Lowell had their professorships; Emerson and Longfellow had their wives’ money; Whittier seemed content to exist on air and Quaker certitude.
Not that any of those old lecturers had the true gift, mind. When Stoddard had met Lowell for the first time, the elder poet had talked to him of poetry and those who wrote it. He had listened politely and then told Lowell—amazing, when he thought of it, to talk to such a figure in such a way—that poetry was more than a personal manifestation: it was the revelation of ideal truth and beauty. We must not pull the ideal down to us, but rise to the ideal. He believed that then, and he still believed.
But how to serve the Muse and Mammon, too? That young friend of Stedman’s, Tom Aldrich, had said once that when he had sold his first poem and showed the check to the uncle with whom he and his widowed mother lived, the old banker had said, “Why don’t you sell the damn fool one every week?” The first time Stoddard had seen ten dollars for a poem he had invested it in an accordion for a young girl with whom he had been infatuated. His poetic ability had improved since then, he hoped, but—judging from the bills which lay by his chair—he didn’t think he could say the same of his ability to handle money.
A sleepy but insistent child’s voice came from the back bedroom; Lizzie got up to check on Lorry. Stoddard went over to his desk and pulled out the manuscript of the sonnet Harper’s had accepted. Old habits died hard; he always reread his work when he was notified that it would be published. He stared at the second quatrain:
Thou hast the laurel, Master of my soul!
Thy name, thou saidst, was writ in water—No,
For while clouds float on high, and billows roll,
Thy name shall worshipped be. Will mine be so?
Will it indeed? Will the name of Richard Henry Stoddard be remembered? He looked across the room at Lizzie, who had returned with a fretting Lorry in her arms, then returned to his poem. I kiss thy words as I would kiss thy face,/And put thy book most reverently away. Keats. The poor brilliant boy. Better for being released from the world, but so soon, so soon! He wished he could shake the hand that had soothed that fevered brow.
Eventually Lizzie got Lorry settled back down; Stoddard went into the nursery and dutifully kissed his son goodnight. He remembered from his own youth what it was like to be a child, and sick, not knowing what it was that had felled you, or why, or how to make it go away. With adulthood came the thin satisfaction of knowing what, and why; knowing how to make it go away was quite another matter.
Shortly after they went to bed Lizzie reached over and ran her hand up his nightshirt, tracing down his chest and the flaccid mound of his belly, touching him gently below. It surprised him, knowing how exhausted she must be after the day with Lorry, but he turned to her and complied. He almost failed her when his mind drifted to the man and the prostitute he had seen from his office window, but she spoke softly to him and he was able to lose himself again in her scent and the cushion of her skin. As they finished silently his mind was blissfully clean of the world. They parted, and he rolled to his side of the bed where he slept and dreamed of the disembodied head of Keats dissolving under a torrent of filthy water.
The next morning the package was still on the table in his office, unremarkable now in the daylight. He worked steadily at his desk through the morning, but his gaze kept wandering to the table in the corner of the room. Finally he put down his pen and walked over and picked up the package. It was not heavy and had been no trouble to bring back from the docks. It should be no trouble to bring home this evening, either.
Holding the package in his hands here in his office, he wondered again what he should do with it. Any unclaimed cargo was supposed to go directly to his supervisor, but Stoddard could not bring himself to surrender it. He had never gone against Custom-House procedure before, but the look in Cantrell’s eyes, the tone of his voice, the unmistakable urgency of his message—there was no looking away.
Still holding the package, he walked over to his office window. The strong morning light poured into the room; as he moved toward it, his office receded into shadow. The details of the street below were sharp and clear. He could discern the colors of the cab drivers’ waistcoats, the kinds of merchandise on display in the store windows, the texture of the mud in the street. From this distance, in this light, it all looked so lively and clean.
Stoddard knew better. In this bright world below him, men were kept from their dreams and children died for no reason at all.
He looked down at the mysterious object in his hands and found no immediate answers. He walked away from the window and set the package back on his desk. His hands, moving as if of their own volition, reached out and began to untie the frayed hemp wrapped around the box.
“Mr. Stoddard?”
Van Ness’ troubled voice came from the other side of the door. He had not heard the clerk knock. He hastily retied the rope and replaced the package beneath his desk.
Van Ness brought another problem—someone else’s fault, of course—and as Stoddard left to repair the damage another clerk begged his intercession to correct another mistake, and the day promptly disappeared like so many others before it. He did not think of the box again until he was ready to go home. What a fool, to put credence in the obscene ravings of a ship’s captain. He would turn the package over to Jim Benedict tomorrow.
Stoddard arrived home to find Millie running in and out of the kitchen under Lizzie’s acidulous direction, setting the table for two extra people. Lizzie handed him the notes that had arrived from George Boker and Bayard Taylor. Boker would be up from Philadelphia today instead of next week; Taylor was in New York for a meeting with his publisher. Both would be at the Stoddards’ for dinner that evening.
Their visit was not unwelcome; it had been months since Stoddard had seen his two oldest friends. But Lizzie, despite her outspoken contempt for persons overconcerned with social convention, was acutely conscious of the table she presented to dinner guests and resented the short notice she had received.
“But Lizzie,” Stoddard protested, “why go to such a fuss? George and Bayard are family.”
“And it’s family who expect the most,” Lizzie replied as she refolded the napkins Millie had already laid out. “George has spent a lifetime pampered by Philadelphia society twelve-course extravaganzas, and Bayard has sat at table from New York to Persia to Japan and back. I’ll not have them returning to those wives of theirs with tales of their poor relations Dick and Lizzie.”
Stoddard frowned. She was getting far more agitated than the situation called for. He started to remind her that, as many times as they had had to borrow money from both Boker and Taylor, neither one was likely to be swept away by fancy napkins and elegant china, but he thought better of it and held his tongue.
He wished Stedman were visiting tonight as well. Ned always had a soothing effect on Lizzie; not only was he genuinely fond of her, but he valued her writing, which was in fairness more than Stoddard could say of the others. By the end of the evening they would be sitting in the corner of the parlor, holding hands and reciting Mrs. Browning. But it was George and Bayard this evening, and Lizzie would have to make the best of it.
Their guests arrived within minutes of each other, and for all her apprehension Lizzie seemed glad to see them. Boker kissed her hand with the familiar upper-class charm, while the ebullient Taylor favored her with the same bear-hug he accorded Stoddard. Stoddard was relieved to see that Taylor had apparently gotten over the somewhat diffident review he had given his old friend’s last collection of poems. He tried to be as supportive of his friends as he could, but Stoddard would compromise his literary standards for no one. That was one area where he and Lizzie were in full agreement, and they had both suffered the consequences of their honesty on more than one occasion.
Over dinner, as they all discussed the latest magazines and new novels, Stoddard regarded his friends. Boker was handsome as ever and still carried himself with the assurance and precision of one born to comfort—qualities that Stoddard had always envied, though he would admit it to no one but himself. But the gray in Boker’s hair was more prominent than before, and the lines in his face just a little deeper. The years of battle defending his father’s estate against the bank’s lawsuit—and, more important to Boker, defending his father’s good name from the taint of scandal—had clearly taken their toll. And the success of the hastily scribbled Poems of the War had in no way made up for the failure of his last few plays, or the oblivion into which his other, more ideal poetry had sunk. He hardly wrote at all any more, and his well-bred smile seemed a trifle strained.
Taylor, for his part, looked positively haggard. He had always driven himself harder than the rest, and for a while it had paid off. His travels writings and lectures had made him famous, almost theatrically so. Stoddard still remembered the New York lecture he had attended: as Taylor mounted the platform in the Bedouin raiment he had brought back from his latest Near East journey, the women in front of Stoddard had actually risen from their seats, straining to get a better glimpse of the exotic figure at the front of the room. “There he is,” they whispered. “That’s him!” Then the war had interrupted everything; the demand for lectures had dropped precipitously, and Taylor was now returned to journalism and translation to make ends meet. As always, the poetry brought next to nothing.
It had been so different at the beginning. They had had the shared vision of beauty to carry them through the prosaic days. Back in the ’40s, he and Taylor would spend Saturday evenings together in Taylor’s attic apartment, reading poetry to each other and pretending they were Keats and Shelley high atop Parnassus. Boker had joined them later, and for a while the three of them drew considerable notice—the New York Knickerbocker had even referred to them as a “Trinity.” After he and Lizzie were married, they had offered their home as a salon for the brightest and most gifted poets and artists and actors and musicians New York offered. Stedman had joined their circle, and Aldrich; Taylor christened their gatherings “The Shrine of Genius,” and they had believed him.
But children were born, and died; debts accrued; wives failed to get along; honest reviews went unappreciated; public taste failed to rise to the heights they had set for it. As they got up from the dinner table and retired to the parlor, Stoddard realized that his friends had simply grown old.
As the men lit their cigars, Lizzie retired to the nursery with Lorry to establish him for the evening. When she returned, Taylor was complaining about the state of the literary world. “Will we never see the end of glorified crudity in these United States?” he asked, waving his cigar and depositing a quantity of ash on the newly swept floor. “The public has become materialized. All they want is diversion and excitement. There’s no appreciative class in this country. I’d thought after we whipped the Rebels things would settle down and we’d finally have an independent, cultivated audience—”
“Guardians of the temple,” Stoddard said.
“Exactly! But no, all they want are new machines and cheap sentiment. It’s no wonder an artist gets pulled down whenever he tries to rise.”
“And what do you expect when no one appreciates or understands what we do?” Boker added. He rested his elbows on the arm of the easy chair he had sunk into after dinner and templed his fingers. “No one will believe the labor connected with all great literary achievement. It’s enough to drive any but a man of genius stark mad, but the masses are still convinced that poets write as the birds sing. It’s this false idea which robs us of half our honors.”
“Absolutely!” Taylor said. “A man who means to write poetry must know how to work!”
“If poetry were forged upon an anvil,” Boker said, “or cut out with an axe, my God! How men would marvel at the process!”
Stoddard looked over to Lizzie expecting a comment, but she had retired to the corner of the room and busied herself with sewing. Not at all like her. He grew worried. She had been lively enough at dinner. What was wrong with her?
He turned his attention back to his guests. “It’s true,” he said. “We’ve all given ourselves to the Muse, and she’s extracted a dear cost. Who’s worked harder than you, Bayard? You’ve done the labor of ten men with all your writing.”
“And for what?” Taylor said. “I achieve a life-goal in translating Faust, and who will read it? Never mind my own poetry. I wrote a sonnet last week and it had been so long since I had written in lines I barely recognized the experience.”
“You’ve written four novels, Bayard,” Stoddard said. “That’s four more than George or I. They were well-received. You still have a fine reputation.”
Taylor snorted dismissively. “Reputation! I wouldn’t swap the reputation earned by ten lines of good poetry for all the prose I shall ever write.” He ground out his cigar in the ashtray on the mantelpiece.
“Perhaps we shall measure up to Keats, after all,” Boker said. “Perhaps our epitaphs also shall be, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’”
Stoddard rose from his chair and raised his wine glass. Enough was enough. “Come now, George, Bayard,” he said. “Never mind such gloomy thoughts. We can take great pride in the work that we’ve done. Poetry is a flower which comes to perfection only in great minds. We can rest content. We have known that special joy which comes only to a selected few. We have served our Muse faithfully and well.” He raised his glass. “To divinest Poesy!”
Boker stood, and he and Taylor raised their own neglected glasses. “To divinest Poesy!” they echoed.
They drank solemnly, taking comfort from the wine and the steady crackle of the fire. Stoddard looked over at Lizzie, who was still busy with her needles. “Come, Madame Defarge,” he said with a cheerfulness that, despite the toast, he did not really feel. “Put your knitting aside and join us in our toast.”
“I shall not, you frauds,” Lizzie muttered.
“I beg your pardon, Lizzie?” Stoddard said, although he had heard her clearly enough.
“I shall not join in your delusions,” Lizzie said, tossing her needlework onto the divan. She rose and walked over to them. The fire turned her eyes to two sharp points of light as she addressed them. “The whole lot of you have all been dreary failures as poets. Not a one of you has won even a third-class position in the field. Not a one of you can justly lay claim to popularity, and you know it. Even that weakling Longfellow, who is a third-rater himself compared to the mass of English poets, is a more exalted figure than any of you.”
Boker and Taylor looked at her as if she had just slithered out from beneath the sofa. Stoddard’s heart sank. Why could she never hold her tongue? “That is grossly unfair, Lizzie,” he said.
“Is it? Never mind Keats. Can any of you match Tennyson, Arnold, Swinbourne, either of the Brownings? Since you lot began to write, all of them and more have arisen and secured the fame to which you aspired in vain.” Her voice shook. “It isn’t time or an audience you’ve lacked—it’s poetic ability. The world is not unappreciative of real genius, as you flatter yourselves is the case. You are just not up to the required standard.”
“The world appreciates genius, does it?” said Boker. “I trust that’s why the novels of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard have been such a rousing success.”
“I am aware of my own limitations,” Lizzie replied evenly, “and you should come of age and be aware of yours. You are all failures, and the sooner you stop writing the things that no public will read, the better for your peace of mind. Good evening, gentlemen,” she concluded, and walked out.
The three men stood in silence. Boker took another sip of his wine. “What the deuce has got into her?”
“What is it that ever gets into her?” said Taylor, picking up a poker and thrusting halfheartedly at the collapsing fire.
Neither would react further to Lizzie’s outburst, but Stoddard knew the effect her words had had. He tried to turn the conversation to other things, but it was no use. The evening was over.
After Boker and Taylor left, Stoddard went into the bedroom and found Lizzie stretched out on the bed, still fully dressed, staring at the ceiling. He went to the bed and stood over her. “And what in blue blazing hell was all that about?”
“The literary visit.”
“What?”
“The literary visit,” she repeated, not taking her eyes off the ceiling. “A finds B writing a poem. A insists on reading it. B reads and A says ‘glorious.’ Then A takes a manuscript from his pocket, which B insists shall be read. A reads and B says ‘glorious.’ A asks if B has seen his latest squib in the journal of the moment. B asks if A has seen his latest review of that book by C. They put their feet up, and then Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, and their faults are discovered.”
“I fail to see your point.”
“You fail at all sorts of things, Dick.”
He said nothing and turned to leave. There was no reasoning with her when she was like this, and he was determined she would not see how deeply he was wounded by her words. When he reached the doorway, he heard her say his name almost too softly to be heard.
He turned around. She still lay on the bed, but she held out her hand to him. The expression on her face, in different circumstances, might have passed for kindness. “Come here. Please.”
Reluctantly, he walked over and sat by her on the bed. The folds of her dress obscured her body and ran into the bedspread, which was the same rich blue. Her head against the swell of the pillow seemed attached to nothing. There were circles under her eyes, and the lines on her face stood out against her powdered skin.
“Do you think I don’t feel what you feel?” Lizzie said. “Do you think I don’t want the same things, the same success? I hear what George and Bayard and the others say behind my back. They call me ‘The Pythoness,’ they hate me so.”
“Now, Lizzie, no one hates you,” Stoddard said quickly, alarmed by her sudden turn. He never knew which was worse, her sarcasm or her sincerity.
“As if I had not merely seduced them with knowledge but were the snake itself,” she continued. “Is the truth so hard to bear? You know I’m right.”
“It isn’t a question of right or wrong. It’s just that we’ve all worked so very hard for so very little.”
“As have I!” she said, her voice rising. “I have endured fully as much as you. No one knows what an ambition I’ve had, or how my failure has broken me.”
“I do, Lizzie. I know.”
She squeezed his hand. Her voice grew softer. “You boys and your constant prattle about Beauty. Do you not think I desire it as well? The beauty I perceive is nothing against the beauty I long for.”
He suddenly wanted to embrace her, dissolve with her and flee the world. Instead he squeezed her hand back and repeated, “I know.”
“Poor Dick,” she said, suddenly gentle. She placed his hand on her breast, pressed it down.
“This is where Beauty dwells,” he said, feeling her heartbeat.
She slid his hand down low on her abdomen; his thumb brushed the top of her thigh. “This is where Beauty is supposed to be,” she said.
“Lizzie—”
“What has Beauty’s dwelling place yielded? A monster, a corpse, and a beautiful boy. If we enjoyed as much success with our work, we would have been dining with the Brownings tonight and basking in their praise.”
Stoddard looked away from her and into the mirror above the washstand. The beard grows gray; the hair thins; the eyes droop and the lips move without words. George and Bayard weren’t the only ones who had grown old. “Try to get some sleep, dear,” he said finally, and went back into the parlor. He sat where Boker had and stared at Taylor’s ashes on the floor. The room grew cold, but he did not bother to rekindle the fire.
By the time the clock said midnight he had made his decision. He put on his hat and coat and went out to his office. He did not bother to check and see if Lizzie were still asleep.
The blocks to the Customs house were much less busy than they had been during the day, but they were far from deserted. Stoddard was surprised at the amount of traffic, the number of other people going who knew where. As he walked, he felt an odd sense of comfort. The city was all too real during the day, and in the evening the falling light and rising shadows never failed to depress him as they made the streets an imperfect print, something on the verge of being. But here in the middle of the night the darkness smoothed over the manholes and concrete and left the city seemingly at peace. The solid pools of light from the street lamps were steady and reassuring. The sky overhead was clear; what stars were not obscured by the lamps glittered distant and pure.
A block from Nassau Street someone approached him from beneath one of the streetlights. A woman, poorly dressed. “It’s a cold night, sir. Buy me a cup of something warm?”
Stoddard stared at her. Her pale gloveless hands seemed to float at the ends of her sleeves. It was the woman he had seen from his office window the previous day. For an absurd instant he wanted to talk to her, wanted to ask her questions. Where do you come from? How did you get here? Are the men dreadful? What beauty is in your life? “How—” he began, then turned and walked hurriedly away.
Once in his office he did not bother to take off his coat or light the lamp, but instead went straight to where he had left the box the Captain had given him. He placed the box on his desk, where it was fiercely lit by the moonlight through the window. His mind as empty as he could make it, he opened the box and stared inside.
Light poured from the box like a fog, surrounding him. His office went away, came back, went away again. The universal light cast no shadows. Stoddard stared into the box as if staring into the sun, but the light was soft and did not hurt his eyes.
He felt a wind, neither warm nor cool. The light moved around him like a palpable thing; he felt as if he could grab fistfuls of it if he wanted. The box dissolved, swirled and reformed in front of him. It was the figure of a woman, distinct from the light but made of it. She wore a long, full robe whose sleeves and hem disappeared into the light. A thick sea of golden hair hung loosely about her shoulders, surrounding a face of pure aching beauty. She held out her hand.
“Goddess,” Stoddard whispered. Poesy Herself, come to take him away? It could not be. He could not possibly receive something he wanted so badly. Yet there she stood, beckoning him to join her.
Stoddard rose and moved toward her, deeper into the light. He took her hand. She smiled, and the light moved inside him. He could feel himself filling up, feel the emptiness disappear, the doubts and the pains and the fears drop away like pages from an old book he no longer had to read. He stared at her and let the light seize him, certain now that the shadows in the world were his own, not nature’s. Nature herself was light. He could melt all nature in the furnace of his thoughts, and enrich the world forever. There was beauty to be celebrated, and truth to be taught. Now, at last, he could fix his eyes on heaven and sing as the stars do.
The Goddess pulled him toward her. Stoddard prepared himself to receive her, to melt into her, but rather than embrace him she leaned forward and kissed his eyes. As she withdrew her lips the light began to move again. Her hand dissolved and ran out through his fingers, and she melted back into the light. Stoddard leaned after her, but he felt no sense of loss. He knew what had happened, what he had seen and felt. Beauty Herself had accepted him, and he wept with the solace of her benediction.
As he wiped the tears from his face, his office returned. He had no idea how much time had passed. He closed the box, tucked it securely under his arm, and returned to his home. The traffic had abated; the woman beneath the street lamp was gone.
Lizzie had long since fallen asleep. He shook her awake. “Lizzie! Wake up!”
She muttered unintelligibly, stirred beneath the covers, then opened her eyes and was still. “Is Lorry all right?” she asked.
“Lorry’s fine, dear. I have something to show you. Get up.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s late, dear, very late. But please get up. You must see this.”
Eventually he coaxed her out of bed. As he led her into the parlor and sat her down, he told her an abbreviated version of how he had gotten the box. He did not tell her what was inside. The box sat on the floor in front of the fireplace, between their chairs. They sat down. Stoddard leaned forward and stared at her now fully open eyes. She seemed startled by his intensity. “I have worked so hard, Lizzie, so very hard—as have you,” he added hastily, before she could interrupt. “I have sought something outside myself, something healthier and larger, something that expressed the emotions of mankind and not my own petty feelings. But I never felt that I had attained it. I didn’t know what it looked like, what it felt like. Sometimes I was frightened that it didn’t exist at all. But now—”
He reached down between them and opened the box. “Here it is, Lizzie.”
She looked into the box. The same light that had dazzled Stoddard back at his office poured out. At first it lit only her face, giving her a ghostly aspect in the otherwise darkened room; then the light grew and spread over her, covered her, conformed to the outlines of her body and clung tight. She stared into the box, eyes wide, mouth ajar. Stoddard sat transfixed.
Without warning, she jerked her head away. Her face was out of the light, which still covered the rest of her. She threw her arms in front of her and surged out of the chair, breaking free of the light like a bather breaking the water’s surface. She ran out of the parlor and back to their bedroom. Stoddard was so stunned it took him several seconds to realize she was screaming.
He threw the lid back on the box and ran after her. “Lizzie! Lizzie, my God, what’s wrong? What’s happened?” She lay sobbing on their bed. He sat by her, reached for her, was pushed away.
“Where did you get that awful thing?” she gasped.
“Awful thing? I told you, the Captain gave it to me at the docks—”
“Evil!” she cried. “Ugly! Hateful! What does God mean by such agony?”
He did not believe what he heard. He pulled her up, seized her shoulders, stared at her. What little color her face had had was gone. “What did you see, Lizzie?” He shook her. “What did you see?”
“The child!”
“What child?”
“Ours! Our first child!” Her words came rapidly, as if she couldn’t breathe until she finished talking. “It perched on my back, grasped my shoulders, it looked down at my scribbling on the paper, on the desk, I was chained to my desk and everyone filed by, laughing, they had so much more than we, and the words disappeared as soon as I wrote them, blood, blood flowing from between my legs onto the floor, the child climbed down and lapped it up—”
“Lizzie, God Almighty—”
“—it sat on my lap and cried, and the chains hurt my wrists, I could feel the chains on my wrists—” She stopped and gasped for breath. Her whole body shuddered. “Dick, my God, where did it come from, why did you bring it here?”
Stoddard hugged her to his breast, stroked her hair. “Lizzie, Lizzie—I saw Beauty herself! There was a wind, a wind of rhythm, a divine shape, fresh from heaven—a shape of loveliness and light, oh Lizzie—” The city had vanished, the soiled bricks and concrete, the money-grubbing men and the tainted women. “It was what we’ve sought. The pure light of the Ideal. Pure beauty. Pure light.” He was sobbing now. “Lizzie, didn’t you see it? You must have seen it!”
“No, nothing . . . only blood and pain and . . .”
“What? And what?”
“The people who walked by laughing—they all held my book in their hands. I was chained and bleeding and they walked past into another room, and a woman stood and began lecturing them.”
“Your book?” For a moment, he felt wonder again, and then a twist of pain that burned him with shame.
“The child cried and cried.”
“Your book endures?” And mine does not? But he stopped himself in time.
“I was not in that room, and neither were you.”
“Beauty. . . .”
“I saw what I saw,” she said. “I saw what lies ahead, what lies inside me. Inside us.”
“Beauty,” Stoddard moaned again as he held his wife and cried for them both.
The morning found them both asleep. Lizzie roused herself to let Millie in; she came back to the bedroom with Lorry in her arms. She sat in the rocking chair by the bed and held him in her lap and sang softly to him. Lorry rested contentedly on her breast. Stoddard watched them from where he lay on the bed. He felt as if there were no floor below him, no ceiling above. Everything had been ripped away.
Millie served them a normal breakfast, which they ate in silence. On his way out the door Stoddard retrieved the box from where it still sat in front of the fireplace and carried it back to his office. He almost left it lying in the gutter, but as he approached his office building he began to feel the pavement beneath his feet and carried the box in to Jim Benedict, who received it without comment.
Later that afternoon a man of roughly Stoddard’s age walked into his office and handed him a note of introduction from Benedict. The note read, curtly in Benedict’s fashion, “He seems a good fellow, Dick, and says he knows you, though perhaps he doesn’t, but anyhow be kind to him if this infernal weather will let you be so to anybody.”
Stoddard rose, handed the note back to the man before him, and bowed slightly. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Melville. How many years has it been?”
“Too many, I’m sure,” Herman Melville replied. He did not—could not?—look Stoddard directly in the eye, but stared in the direction of the window.
“I am most pleased to have a fellow man of letters on board. I don’t know if I ever got the chance to tell you how much I admire your poetry.”
Melville said nothing and stared out the window. Stoddard had no idea what he could be looking at. Another sacrifice at the altar, Stoddard thought. Another supplicant doomed to be forgotten.
At the end of the day Stoddard went home. The sky was overcast; the streetlamps made a ceiling of the clouds. Millie prepared an excellent dinner, after which he sat with Lizzie in the parlor and went through the day’s mail. He could not tell to look at her what had happened last night, and he resolved then and there never to speak of it again. They had each seen what they had seen. They would go on from there. Lizzie put Lorry to bed and they retired for the night. Stoddard embraced his wife without making love to her, and then he turned away and slept without dreams.