Grandmaw Hand was being outrageously charming, chuckling girlishly with Alice Herpitude, recalling the old days, remembering the Chinese laundry and Pierce's Shoe Store and the meat-market with the carcasses hanging out back. "Ooh, I used to be so scared to go back there," said Grandmaw. "Remember, Alice?"
"Well, no, Florence dear. Don't forget, I'm practically a newcomer. I've only been here twenty-five years this fall."
"Oh, of course, I was forgetting."
Someone was sitting down in the empty chair on the other side of Mary. "Oh, hello, Teddy," said Mary.
Teddy Staples started to say hello, then he changed it halfway to how are you, and it came out, "Hew, hew! How, how!" One of the staples that held his shirt together popped into Mary's lap. Mary liked Teddy, and she put her hand affectionately on his arm.
"Have you seen any more of Henry's birds?" she said.
"I-I-I-I saw a pied-bill g-grebe the other day," said Teddy, his melancholy face brightening. Then it fell again. "But I've seen plenty of them before. There's just one I've really got to-to..." He started to cough, and couldn't stop. Mary slapped him on the back. Poor Teddy. His life was a simple, rounded eccentricity, a charming obsession, founded on two facts. One fact was that Teddy was the remote descendant of that same Samuel Staples who had locked up Henry Thoreau in the Town Jail. The other was the oddity that he had been born on the same day in 1917 that Thoreau had been born in 1817. Adding these two giant facts together, Teddy had come to believe that his life must be dedicated to Henry Thoreau's memory, and to the reliving of Henry's life as far as he was able. By some absurd sense of fitness, Teddy Staples mended his clothes with a Woolworth stapler, ka-snap, ka-snap. His one set of loose garments was a sort of masterpiece or tour de force of stapling, glittering at stress points with little silver dashes. Like Thoreau at Walden Pond, Teddy lived alone on the shores of the Sudbury River, where it opened out into Fairhaven Bay. Thoreau had made pencils and surveyed lot lines—Teddy won a narrow living as a stonemason. "M-M-Mary," he said, "I wonder if I-I-I..." Then the meeting was called to order.
Howard Swan did it with his usual grace. He was an all-round good fellow, and aside from Miss Herpitude and Mary and Teddy Staples, the only member of the Alcott Association remotely resembling a scholar. The rest were Louisa Alcott enthusiasts, proud of their responsibility for preserving the shrine to the memory of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Howard stood up tall with the candlelight reflecting softly from his head (so nobly bald, with a light fringe of hair like Bronson Alcott's) and begged the officers of the association to be brief. The officers tried heroically, but failed. Old Mr. Pusey was already asleep on Jo's bolster. Mary glanced at Ernest Goss, sitting beside Mr. Pusey on the sofa. He was anything but sleepy, nervously drumming his fingers on his briefcase. What was he impatient for? The speaker?
Homer Kelly was introduced at last. He reared up in front of the niche Bronson had built for his bust of Socrates and put his notes on the table beside the plaster Rogers Group ("Taking the Oath"). His cowlick grazed the ceiling and the butterflies shone crassly on his tie. He began to talk about Margaret Fuller.
Mary listened soberly, smiling slightly when he was witty at poor Margaret's expense, disagreeing inside. Poor wretched Margaret. Mary had to admit that there was something vaguely repellent about the miserable woman, but this was hardly fair. She was too easy and quivering a target, and Homer Kelly wasn't the first to take pot-shots at her. "Bulgy-eyed spinster"—oh, that was mean. He diagrammed cleverly the greasy little pigtails Margaret had looped in front of her ears. He imitated hilariously the famous serpentine motions of her long neck. He sneered at her belief in animal magnetism and mesmerism. He pictured her reclining on a sofa and crying, "Let women be sea-captains if they will!" Then he stopped being funny and began to talk about her study of Goethe, the influence of her periodical The Dial on American letters, and the mutual inspiration she and Emerson had been to each other. Grudgingly Mary had to admit that he knew what he was talking about. But she hated him. He was one of those condescending professors who will amuse a class any time by destroying the dignity of some illustrious name with gleeful exposes of old privacies, old scandals and senilities. Homer Kelly finished by returning to the attack. With a pyrotechnical flashing of his snickersnee he skewered old Margaret to the wall. Then he sat down, while his audience tittered and clapped. (It was all right. After all, Margaret Fuller wasn't really Concord.)
Howard Swan called for questions. Alice Herpitude asked one timidly. Homer Kelly answered it carefully. Then Mary heard herself speaking up. "Don't you think it's a little unfair to judge the manners of one time by the standards of another?" Everyone turned to look at her, and she hurried on, explaining. "I mean, what might be neurotic or even psychotic now doesn't seem to have bothered her contemporaries at all. She was courageous, really, and a sympathetic friend to younger people, and of course she was one of the first to speak up for women's rights. It's easy to laugh at p-prophets..." Now she was stuttering like Teddy. She stopped. Homer Kelly looked at her with a broad smile, a kindly delighted look (as though a pet dog had rolled over or a horse talked.) Everyone was looking at her the same way. "Dear Mary," she knew they were thinking, "such a sweet girl."
Homer Kelly opened his mouth to speak. But before he could get a word out, Ernest Goss was on his feet. He got up off the sofa so quickly he bounced old Mr. Pusey, who snorted and rolled his head about. Ernest was waving some papers over his head. "I have something," he said, "of the most profound..." He brushed importantly past Alice Herpitude and then tripped on the braided rug and lunged against the piano, smashing his way up the keyboard in a series of accidental arpeggios. The papers in his hand spilled all over the floor. Mary leaned forward to pick up one that had drifted under her chair. It was an old letter, the paper thin and yellow, the ink brown and faded, the writing bold. Across the top there was a crude drawing of a daisy. Then Ernest Goss snatched the letter from her. He gathered the rest hastily and stood up in the small crowded parlor right in front of Homer Kelly, who had no choice but to sit down.
Howard Swan frowned. "The Chair recognizes you, Ernest," he said.
Ernest had collected himself. He lifted his papers and began to make a speech. "Here in my hand I have the most amazing transcendental documents that have come to light since the death of Emerson. The only word to describe them is sensational. After they have been published, not one shred of present-day scholarship, no matter how eminent its authorship, will remain valid." He gave a meaningful glance at Homer Kelly, who politely looked stupid. "These letters, which I intend to call the Ernest Goss Collection, will demand a completely new look at the nature of transcendental friendship and the relations between the sexes in what we used to regard as proper and puritanical New England..."
Mrs. Hand looked big-eyed at Mary and whispered at her. "Did he say the relations between the sexes?"
Teddy Staples leaned forward, bursting a seam across the back of his coat. "What in God's name are you g-g-getting at, Ernie?"
"Just listen to this," said Ernest Goss. He put on his glasses and began to read, hemming and hawing a little at first, for effect. The letter was a shocker.
My dear Waldo,
Oh, thou, other half of my thought, other chamber of my heart! Thou the castle's King, I the Queen! Long have I waited in the dust to behold thy golden litter! At first I feared thou wert cold, but now thou hast raised me to reign in full-orbed glory beside thy infinite majesty! That thou shouldst have worshipped poor Mignon's body as well as her soul transports her humanity to heaven's height. O, what rapture in Mrs. O'Flannigan's back sitting-room! O, divine divan! I am chosen among women! And thou, O sage, hast a Queen for thy Soul-wife!