Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club

Putnam replied, “We’re talking of Augustus Manning. Consider this.”

When Dr. Holmes turned away, he looked like he was swallowing a globe. Putnam often wondered why all men did not wear beards. He was cheerful, even on the bumpy ride back into Cambridge, for he knew that Dr. Manning would be highly pleased with his report.

Artemus Prescott Healey, b. 1804, d. 1865, was placed into a large family plot, one of the first purchased on the main hillside of Mount Auburn Cemetery years earlier.

There were still many among the Brahmins who begrudged Healey his cowardly decisions before the war. But it was agreed by all that only the most extreme former radical would offend the memory of their state’s chief justice by spurning his final ceremonies.

Dr. Holmes leaned over to his wife. “Only four years’ difference, ‘Melia.”

She requested elaboration with a brief purr.

“Justice Healey’s sixty,” Holmes continued in his whisper. “Or would be. Only four years older than I am, dear, almost to the day!” Really almost to the month; nonetheless, Dr. Holmes genuinely appreciated the proximity of dead persons to his own age. Amelia Holmes, by a shift in her eyes, told him to stay silent during the eulogies. Holmes settled his mouth and looked ahead over the quiet acres.

Holmes could not claim to have been an intimate of the deceased; few men could, even among the Brahmins. Chief Justice Healey had served on the Harvard Board of Overseers, so Dr. Holmes had enjoyed some routine interaction with the judge in Healey’s capacity as administrator. Holmes also had known Healey through the doctor’s membership in Phi Beta Kappa, for Healey had presided for a time over that proud society. Dr. Holmes kept his PBK key on his watch chain, an item with which his fingers now wrestled as Healey’s body settled into its new bed. At least, Holmes thought with a doctor’s special sympathy for dying, poor Healey never suffered.

Dr. Holmes’s most prolonged contact with the judge had come at the courthouse, at a time that shook Holmes, that made him want to retreat fully into a world of poetry. The defense in the Webster trial, presided over, as all capital crimes, by a three-judge panel chaired by the chief justice, had requested Dr. Holmes’s testimony as a character witness for John W. Webster. It was during the heat of the trial so many years before that Wendell Holmes witnessed the ponderous, grueling style of speech by which Artemus Healey surrendered his legal opinions.

“Harvard professors do not commit murder.” That was what the then-president of Harvard, taking the stand shortly before Dr. Holmes, testified on behalf of Webster.

The murder of Dr. Parkman had transpired in the laboratory below Holmes’s lecture room, while Holmes was lecturing. It was hard enough that Holmes had been friends with both murderer and victim—not knowing whom to lament more. At least the customary rolling laughter of Holmes’s students had drowned out Professor Webster’s hacking of the body into pieces.

“A devout man, and one that feared God with all his house…”

The preacher’s shrill promises of Heaven, with his chief-mourner expression, did not sit well with Holmes. As a matter of principle, few ornaments of religious ceremony ever had sat well with Dr. Holmes, son of one of those stalwart ministers whose Calvinism had remained hard and fast in the face of the Unitarian upheaval. Oliver Wendell Holmes and his shy younger brother, John, had been reared with that awful bosh that still buzzed in the doctor’s ears: “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” Fortunately, they were sheltered by the quick wit of their mother, who whispered witty asides while the Reverend Holmes and his guest ministers preached advance damnation and inborn sin. She would promise them that new ideas would come, particularly to Wendell when he was shaken by some story of the devil’s control over their souls. And so did the new ideas arrive, for Boston and for Oliver Wendell Holmes. Only Unitarians could have built Mount Auburn Cemetery, a burial place that was also a garden.

While Holmes took stock of the many notables in attendance to occupy himself, many others were tilting their heads in Dr. Holmes’s direction, for he was part of a pocket of celebrities known by various names—the New England Saints or the Fireside Poets. Whatever their name, they were the top literary contingent of the country. Near the Holmeses stood James Russell Lowell, poet, professor, and editor, idly twisting the long tusk of his mustache until Fanny Lowell would pull at his sleeve; to the other side, J. T. Fields, publisher of New England’s greatest poets, his head and beard pointed downward in a perfect triangle of serious contemplation, a striking figure to be juxtaposed with the angelic pink cheeks and perfect poise of his young wife. Lowell and Fields were no more intimate with Chief Justice Healey than was Holmes, but they had attended the service out of respect for Healey’s position and family (to whom the Lowells, in addition, happened to be cousins in some fashion or another).

Those attendees viewing this trio of litterateurs looked in vain for the most illustrious of their company. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had, as a matter of fact, prepared to accompany his friends to Mount Auburn, which was no more than a stroll from his house, but as usual had kept to his fireside instead. There was little in the world outside Craigie House that would presume to draw out Longfellow. After so many years dedicated to this project, the reality of pending publication brought full concentration. Besides, Longfellow feared (and rightly so) that had he come to Mount Auburn, his fame would have drawn the mourners’ attention away from the Healey family. Whenever Longfellow walked through the streets of Cambridge, people whispered, children threw themselves into his arms, hats were lifted in such great numbers that it seemed all of Middlesex County had simultaneously entered a chapel.

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.