Dante Club Read online

  Holmes could remember one time jouncing along with Lowell in a hackney cab, years earlier, before the war. They passed the window of Craigie House that framed Fanny and Henry Longfellow at their fireside, surrounded by their five beautiful children at the piano. Back then, Longfellow’s face still was open for the world to see.

  “I tremble to look at Longfellow’s house,” Holmes had said.

  Lowell, who had been complaining about a defective Thoreau essay he was editing, responded with a light laugh that detached him from Holmes’s tone.

  “Their happiness is so perfect,” Holmes had continued, “that no change, of the changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse.”

  As the oration of Reverend Young came to a close and solemn whispering commenced on the cemetery’s quiet acres, as Holmes brushed small yellow leaves from his velvet collar and let his eyes travel over the engraved faces of the mourners, he noticed that Reverend Elisha Talbot, Cambridge’s most prominent minister, appeared openly irritated by the warm reception Young’s oration had produced; no doubt, he was rehearsing what he would have delivered had he been Healey’s minister. Holmes admired the Widow Healey’s restrained expression. Easy-crying widows always took new husbands soonest. Holmes also happened to linger on the sight of Mr. Kurtz, for the chief of police had inserted himself assertively next to Widow Healey and pulled her aside, apparently attempting to persuade her of something—but in such abbreviated fashion that their exchange must have been a recapitulation of some earlier talk; Chief Kurtz was not making an argument but rather tendering a reminder to Widow Healey. The widow nodded deferentially; oh, but how very tightly, thought Holmes. Chief Kurtz ended with a sigh of relief that Aeolus might have envied.

  Supper that night at 21 Charles Street was quieter than usual, though it was never quiet. Guests to the house always departed flabbergasted by the rate, not to mention the sheer volume, of the Holmeses’ talk, wondering whether any of these family members ever listened to one another at all. It was a tradition started by the doctor to award an extra serving of marmalade to the best conversationalist of the evening. Today, Dr. Holmes’s daughter, “little” Amelia, was chattering more than usual, telling of the latest engagement, of Miss B______ to Colonel F______, and of what her sewing circle had been making for wedding gifts.

  “Why, Father,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, hero, with a small grin. “I believe you’ll be deprived of the marmalade this evening.” Junior was out of place at the Holmes table: Not only was he six feet tall in a household of quick, little persons, but he was stoically deliberate in speech and movement.

  Holmes smiled thoughtfully over his roast. “But, Wendy, I haven’t heard much from you tonight.”

  Junior hated when his father called him that. “Oh, I won’t win the helping. But neither will you, Father.” He turned to his younger brother, Edward, who was home only occasionally now that he boarded at the College. “They say they are raising a subscription to name a chair after poor Healey at the law school. Do you believe it, Neddie? After he ducked the Fugitive Slave Act, too, for all those years. Dying’s the only way Boston will pardon your past, for aught I know.”

  On his after-supper walk, Dr. Holmes stopped to give some children playing marbles a handful of pennies with which to spell a word on the sidewalk. He chose knot (why not?), and when they formed the copper letters correctly, he let them keep the coins. He was glad the Boston summer was winding down, and with it the parching heat, which inflamed his asthma.

  Holmes sat under the tall trees behind his house thinking of “the finest literary minds of New England” from Fields’s newspaper puff in the New York Tribune. Their Dante Club: It had importance for Lowell’s mission to introduce Dante’s poetry to America, for Fields’s publishing plans. Yes, there were the academic and the business stakes. But for Holmes the triumph of the club was its union of interests of that group of friends whom he felt most fortunate to have. He loved more than anything the free chatter and brilliant spark that were brought out when they were unlocking the poetry. The Dante Club was a healing association—for these last years that had suddenly aged them all—uniting Holmes and Lowell after their rifts over the war, uniting Fields with his best authors in his first year without his partner William Ticknor to provide security, uniting Longfellow with the outside world, or at least with some of its more literarily inclined ambassadors.

  Holmes’s talent for translating was not extraordinary. He had the imagination needed but did not have that quality possessed by Longfellow, which allowed one poet to open fully to another poet’s voice. Still, in a nation with little free trade in thought with foreign countries, Oliver Wendell Holmes was happy to consider himself well versed in Dante: a Dantean more than Dante scholar. When Holmes was in college, Professor George Ticknor, the aristocratic litterateur, was nearing the end of his tolerance for the Harvard Corporation’s constant obstruction of his post as the first Smith Professor. Wendell Holmes, meanwhile, having mastered Greek and Latin at the age of twelve, was strangled by boredom in the required recitation hours of rote memorizing and repeating verses of Euripides’ Hecuba that had long ago been pummeled of meaning.

  When they met in the Holmes family drawing room, Professor Ticknor’s steady black eyes took in the collegian, who was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Never still for a moment,” Oliver Wendell Holmes’s father, the Reverend Holmes, sighed. Ticknor suggested that Italian could discipline him. At the time, the department’s resources were too strained to formally offer the language. But Holmes soon received a loan of grammar and vocabulary instruction prepared by Ticknor, along with an edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia, a poem divided into “canticles” called Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

  Holmes feared now that the swells at Harvard had hit on something about Dante from the insightful position of ignorance. In medical school, the sciences had allowed Oliver Wendell Holmes to discover how nature operated when freed from superstition and fear. He believed that just as astronomy had replaced astrology, so would “theonomy” rise up one day over its slow-witted twin. With this faith, Holmes prospered as a poet and a professor.

  Then the war ambushed Dr. Holmes, and so did Dante Alighieri.

  It began one evening in the winter of 1861. Holmes was sitting in Elmwood, Lowell’s mansion, fidgeting at the news of Wendell Junior’s departure with the 25th Massachusetts Regiment. Lowell was the right antidote for his nerves: brash and loudly confident that the world was at all times exactly as he said it was; derisive, if necessary, if one’s concerns were too dominant.

  Since that summer, society had sorely missed the soothing presence of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow wrote his friends notes declining all invitations that would have compelled him to leave Craigie House, explaining that he was occupied. He had begun translating Dante, he said, and did not plan to stop: I have done this work when I can do nothing else.

  Coming from the reticent Longfellow, these notes were screaming laments. He was outwardly calm but inwardly bleeding to death.

  So Lowell, planted on Longfellow’s doorstep, insisted on helping. Lowell had long bemoaned the fact that Americans, ill-trained in modern languages, hadn’t access even to the few regrettable British translations that existed.

  “I need a poet’s name to sell such a book to the donkey public!” Fields would say to Lowell’s apocalyptic warnings about America’s blindness to Dante. Whenever Fields wished to discourage his authors from a risky project, he pointed out the stupidity of the reading public.

  Lowell had bothered Longfellow to translate the tripartite poem many times over the years, even once threatening to do it himself—something for which he did not have the inner strength. Now he couldn’t not help. After all, Lowell was one of the few American scholars to know anything of Dante; indeed, he seemed to know everything.

  Lowell detailed for Holmes how remarkably Longfellow was capturing Dante, from the cantos Longfellow had shown him. “He was born
for the task, I rather think, Wendell.” Longfellow was starting with Paradiso and then would turn to Purgatorio and finally Inferno.

  “Moving backwards?” Holmes asked, intrigued.

  Lowell nodded and grinned. “I daresay dear Longfellow wants to make sure of Heaven before committing himself to Hell.”

  “I never can go all the way through to Lucifer,” Holmes said, commenting on Inferno. “Purgatory and Paradise are all music and hope, and you feel you are floating toward God. But the hideousness, the savagery, of that medieval nightmare! Alexander the Great ought to have slept with it under the pillow.”

  “Dante’s Hell is part of our world as much as part of the underworld, and shouldn’t be avoided,” Lowell said, “but rather confronted. We sound the depths of Hell very often in this life.”

  The force of Dante’s poetry resonated most in those who did not confess the Catholic faith, for believers inevitably would have quibbles with Dante’s theology. But for those most distant theologically, Dante’s faith was so perfect, so unyielding, that a reader found himself compelled by the poetry to take it all to heart. This is why Holmes feared the Dante Club: He feared that it would usher in a new Hell, one empowered by the poets’ sheer literary genius. And, worse yet, he feared that he himself, after a life spent running away from the devil preached by his father, would be partially to blame.

  In the Elmwood study that night in 1861, a messenger interrupted the poets’ tea. Dr. Holmes knew quite definitively that it would be a telegram that had been elaborately redirected from his own house, informing him of poor Wendell Junior’s death on some frozen battlefield, probably from exhaustion—of all the explanations on the casualty lists, Holmes found “died of exhaustion” the most frightening and vivid. But instead, it was a servant sent by Henry Longfellow, whose Craigie House estate was around the corner: a simple note requesting Lowell’s help with some more translated cantos. Lowell persuaded Holmes to accompany him. “I have so many irons in the fire already that I dread a new temptation,” Holmes said, laughing it off at first. “I fear I will catch your Dante mania.”

  Lowell convinced Fields to take up Dante, too. Though no Italianist, the publisher had a workable amount of the language at his disposal from traveling for business (this business traveling was mostly for his pleasure and Annie’s, since there was little trade of books between Rome and Boston), and now he immersed himself in dictionaries and commentaries. Fields’s interest, his wife liked to say, was what interested others. And old George Washington Greene, who had given Longfellow his first copy of Dante while they were touring the Italian countryside together thirty years earlier, began stopping by whenever he was in town from Rhode Island, offering wide-eyed assessments of the labor. It was Fields, most in need of schedules, who suggested Wednesday evenings for their Dante gatherings at the Craigie House study, and it was Dr. Holmes, a consummate namer, who christened the enterprise the Dante Club, though Holmes himself usually referred to them as their “séances”—insisting that if you looked hard enough, you could meet Dante face-to-face at Longfellow’s fireside.

  Holmes’s new novel would stand his own name right side up again for the public. It would be the American Story readers awaited at every bookseller and library—the one Hawthorne had failed to find before his death; the one promising spirits, like Herman Melville, muddled out of peculiarity on the way to anonymity and isolation. Dante dared to make himself into an almost divine hero, transforming his own defective personality through the swagger of the poetry. But for this the Florentine sacrificed his home, his life with his wife and children, his place in the crooked city he loved. In impoverished solitude he defined his nation; only in his imagination could he experience peace. Dr. Holmes, in his usual fashion, would accomplish everything, all at once.

  And after his novel garnered the nation’s loyalty, then let Dr. Manning and the other vultures of the world try picking at his reputation! On the crest of redoubled adoration, Oliver Wendell Holmes could single-handedly shield Dante from attackers and assure Longfellow’s triumph. But if the Dante translation too hastily opened a battle that deepened the scars already cutting into his name, then his American Story could come and go unnoticed, or worse.

  Holmes saw with the clarity of a courtroom verdict what had to be done. He had to slow them down just enough to finish his novel before the translation was complete. This was not just Dante business; this was Oliver Wendell Holmes business, his literary fate. Besides, Dante had plaintively bided his time for several hundred years before appearing to the New World. What could a few extra weeks bring?

  In the lobby of the police station in Court Square, Nicholas Rey looked up from his notepad, squinting at the gaslight after a long engagement with a sheet of paper. A hefty bear of an indigoed uniformed man, swaying a small paper parcel as if it were an infant, waited in front of his desk.

  “You’re Patrolman Rey, right? Sergeant Stoneweather. Don’t want to interrupt.” The man advanced and extended his impressive paw. “I think it takes a man of nerve to be the first Negro policeman, whatever some of the others say. What you writing there, Rey?”

  “Might I be of some help, Sergeant?” Rey asked.

  “I might, just might. You’re the one been asking around the stations ’bout that devilish beggar who jumped out the window, aren’t you? It was me that brung him in for the show-up.”

  Rey made sure Kurtz’s office door was still closed. Sergeant Stoneweather took out a blueberry pie from his parcel and nourished himself at intervals in their talk.

  “Do you recall where you were when you took him in?” Rey asked.

  “Aye—out looking for anyone who couldn’t account for themselves, just how we was instructed. The grogshops, the public houses. The South Boston horsecar office, that’s where I’d been at that hour, ’cause I knew a few dips who work the pockets there. That beggar a yours was slumped over on one of the benches, half sleeping, but shaking too, like, tremulous demendous or delirious tremendous or somethin’ of that sort.”

  “You know who he was?” Rey asked.

  Stoneweather spoke around his chewing. “Lots of loungers and lushingtons always coming and going by the horsecar. Didn’t look familiar to me, though. Wasn’t even of the mind to take him in, to say sooth. Seemed harmless enough.”

  Rey was surprised by this. “What made you change your mind?”

  “That damned beggar, that’s what!” Stoneweather blurted out, losing some piecrust in his beard. “He sees me rounding up some rogues, right, and he runs up to me, wrists held out and turned up in front of him like he wanted to be shackled and booked for bloody murder on the spot! So I thought to myself, Heaven sent him to me to take to this here show-up, I guess. The damned foolish simkin’. Everything happens for some of God’s reason, I believe that. Don’t you, Patrolman?”

  Rey had trouble envisioning the leaper in any circumstance other than flight. “Did he say anything to you on the way? Was he doing anything? Speaking to someone else? Reading a newspaper maybe? A book?”

  Stoneweather shrugged. “Didn’t notice.” As Stoneweather searched his coat pockets for a handkerchief to wipe his hands, Rey noticed with distracting interest the revolver peeking out from his leather belt. On the day Rey was appointed to the police by Governor Andrew, the aldermanic council had issued a resolution instituting restrictions on him. Rey could not wear a uniform, could not carry any weapon stronger than a billy club, and could not arrest a white person without the presence of another officer.

  In that first month, the city stationed Nicholas Rey at the District Two ward. The captain of the station house decided Rey could only be effective on patrol in Nigger Hill. But there were enough blacks there who resented and distrusted a mulatto officer that the other patrolman in the area feared a riot. The station house was not much better. Only two or three policemen spoke with Rey at all, and the others signed a letter to Chief Kurtz recommending an end to the experiment of a colored officer.

  “You really want to k
now what drove him to it, Patrolman?” Stoneweather asked. “Sometimes a man just can’t go on how things are, in my experience.”

  “He died in this station house, Sergeant Stoneweather,” Rey said. “But in his mind, he was somewhere else—far from us, far from safety.”

  This was more than Stoneweather could grasp. “I wish I knew more about the poor fellow, I do.”

  That afternoon, Chief Kurtz and Deputy Chief Savage visited Beacon Hill. Rey, in the driver’s box, was even quieter than usual. When they stepped down, Kurtz said, “You still thinking of that damned vagrant, Patrolman?”

  “I can find out who he was, Chief,” Rey said.

  Kurtz frowned, but his eyes and voice softened. “Well, what do you know of him?”

  “Sergeant Stoneweather brought him in from a horsecar office. He could have been from that area.”

  “A horsecar station! He could have been coming from anywhere.”

  Rey did not disagree and did not argue. Deputy Chief Savage, who had been listening, said noncommittally, “We also have his likeness, Chief, from just before the show-up.”

  “Listen close,” Kurtz said. “Both of you: The old Healey hen will have me by the ears if she’s not happy. And she won’t be happy, not till we give her a day as hangman. Rey, I don’t want you poking around about that leaper, you hear? We’ve got enough trouble without calling the world down on our head for a man that died at our feet.”

  The windows of the Wide Oaks mansion were draped in heavy black cloth, permitting only faint stripes of daylight along the sides. Widow Healey lifted her head from a mound of lotus-leaf pillows. “You have found the murderer, Chief Kurtz,” she stated rather than asked when Kurtz entered.