"My dear, there isn't a scrap of truth in it. It's all the purest, most delectable bunk."
"Oh, no, it isn't, it isn't. I refuse to give it up. Homer, please..."
"Look, my darling, in the first place those Norcross cousins of Emily's didn't even move out of Cambridge to Concord until after Henry was dead."
"They didn't?" Mary's voice shook with disappointment. "But what about Elizabeth's secret? Where would she have got the notion that she was descended from the two of them? I mean if there was no truth in it at all? And what about the stableboy, Richard Matthews? How did he get an extra child? That one that was born only four months after one of the others? And the red hair! Did you see that, in the black box in Elizabeth's room, in the envelope that was marked Great-grandmother's? How can you explain that away?"
"Oh, the hair. Do you honestly think Emily Dickinson was the only redheaded woman in her generation? And as for the stableboy's too many babies—damned if I know. Maybe his wife was wet-nursing it along with her own for some feckless relative, and then got stuck with it. And don't bother your head about Elizabeth's secret. May I remind you that she is now confined in an institution for the insane? Pure and simple old-fashioned delusions of grandeur. She was a nut. If you don't believe me, listen to this. I looked into what I could find out about her parents and grandparents, and I discovered that her father went to his grave claiming to be the Stuart pretender to the British throne. And her grandfather, the original Henry Matthews, you know what he did? Well, first he made a fortune in carriages and buggies, and then he died. But before he died he built himself a fancy Moorish mausoleum on which were inscribed these words:
HERE LIES ALLAH BEN BUDDHA,
THE TRUE MESSIAH,
KNOWN TO THIS WORLD AS
HENRY RICHARD MATTHEWS.
You can read it yourself in the cemetery there in Amherst."
Mary shook her head, covered her face with her hands and laughed. "Oh, no, no. All that lovely romantic story going up in smoke."
"Look, all you have to do is examine Henry's journal for the last few years of his life, when this great passion was supposed to have possessed him. Does he moon in his secret heart about love and longing? Well, does he?"
"No, no, I know. He goes on and on about tree rings and skunk cabbage and the height of the rivers after a rain. Oh, I know."
"Well, I call that pretty dry stuff for a man who was supposed to have met his Fate. And look—you talk about internal evidence—do you honestly think that any of Emily's poetry expresses the experience of giving birth to and then giving up a child? It expresses some other colossal experience, sure—one can't deny her some sort of excruciating personal knowledge of both love and death. But motherhood? No. And what about guilt? Don't you think a sensitive soul like Emily would have felt some sort of complicated kind of shame if she had been forced to drop the fruit of her love for Henry Thoreau into the lap of someone else? No, no, there's nothing like that in her poetry. And another thing—if Emily Dickinson was anything, she was honest, you agree? And don't you remember that she said somewhere, 'My life has been too simple and stern to embarrass any'? What does her white dress mean, anyway, if not purity, the bride of Christ, and all that? And anyhow, all things considered, I still can't see Henry Thoreau, that stiff and rustic gentleman, dallying with Edward Dickinson's daughter among the daisies. Those times were different, after all."
But that sounded familiar. Mary looked at Homer, unbelieving. It was what she had said herself, hadn't she? She had been talking to Charley Goss, a long time ago. (How long ago!) Men and women didn't have to be lovers, she had said. In those days the restraints were so universally accepted, the two sexes could be friends with each other. And then Charley had scoffed at her. "Listen, girly, men and women have only one relation to each other, and that's all they've ever had. Don't kid yourself." But now even Homer was saying that Charley was wrong...
"Well, all right. I give up. But I'm terribly disillusioned. It would have been so beautiful. And you know you still haven't told me how a man like Howard Swan could be a murderer."
"I'm getting to that. In my own mind it goes back to Henry Thoreau again, and to the fact that a sign of his greatness is the diversity of his influence. Look at Rousseau, for instance. You might call him the father of collectivism as well as the father of democracy. For every disciple Henry Thoreau has, you'll find a different image of the man. On the one hand we've got Teddy Staples, re-creating Thoreau the harmless naturalist and village eccentric. And on the other hand you've got Howard Swan. Remember what Howard was saying that night in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery when we thought for a minute he was Henry's ghost?"
"Yes, of course I do. It was something from Civil Disobedience, that part about any man more right than his neighbors being a majority of one already. I think I'm beginning to see what you mean."
"Civil Disobedience! There's another Henry Thoreau for you! The Henry Thoreau who wrote that glorious essay, that incendiary document, that ringing call to the just citizen to refuse to obey unjust laws, setting the individual conscience above rules and decrees—that Henry Thoreau is a far cry from the one Teddy knows. If God is on your side, that's all the majority you need. Shades of Robespierre!"
"But he was writing against slavery, wasn't he? God was certainly on his side there."
"Of course. I'm not denying it. But it's like all glorious ideas: it's dangerous when perverted. What it comes down to is, who says God in on your side? Howard liked to have things his way. 'Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.' That's what Howard was, all his life, a majority of one. He was influenced by the least attractive side of Thoreau's personality—the scornful side, what Walt Whitman found so disagreeable in him, his disdain for men. Henry disdained men by withdrawing from them. Howard disdained them by exerting power over them. God was on his side, naturally. If he couldn't get things his way by simply running them, as chairman, or president or moderator, he did it by bending the rules somewhat. You saw him make a sort of personal juggernaut out of that town meeting. And God was still on his side, even when the only tactic left was murder. And so he murdered Ernie to protect his child."
"His what?"
"His child. His manuscript. His masterpiece. His thesis. His life's work, his heart's darling, his bid for immortality, his great discovery. Here it was, almost finished at last, nearly done. He could see his picture in The New York Times, he could imagine the excitement, the controversy, the praise of the scholar, the delight of the student, the enthusiasm of the popular press—all so near. And then what happened? Along came Ernie Goss, the great booby, with a screwy set of nutty letters that he swore he was going to hit the market with, right then and there."
"But what difference would that have made? Anyone could tell that Ernie's letters were forgeries. No one would have believed in them."
"That's right. No one would believe in them. Nor would anyone believe in another crackpot theory appearing on the heels of the first, invented by a close friend and colleague of the screwball—a theory attempting to establish the truth of precisely the same kind of scandal, involving some of the same parties—and with its chief evidence stemming from a statement by the wife of the donkey with the forged documents. A statement the wife would deny and disown."
"Oh, oh. Of course. Yes, I see."
"So Howard begged and pleaded with Ernie. He tried bribery. He even threatened violence. That was what you overheard the night of the dinner party. Then, when everything else failed, he thought he had no alternative but to silence Ernie by killing him. Howard was a clever fellow and he sat down and figured out an intelligent and daring crime, as intelligent and as daring in its way as the arguments in his manuscript. And then look how everything played into his hands. First of all Ernie himself misbehaved dreadfully, providing both his sons publicly with apparent motives for murder. And next morning, although Howard didn't hear about it until afterward, Philip practically killed his father himself in full view of half the town. And even the mixup about the flintlocks turned out to work in Howard's favor. There we were, too stupid to find the planted gun in the cider press, and there was Tom Hand, too stubborn to make cider with the apples Howard spirited onto the place in May. But then Charley, the poor fool, had to go and bury that musket, and Ernie himself led us all astray by gurgling 'musket' as he died."