Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Young Gus Barker was the first of their close circle of family and friends to die in the Civil War, cut down by some Confederate sniper’s bullet in Virginia. For decades after that, Henry James could not think of his first shock of admiring the naked male form without thinking of that very form—the copper stippling of Gus’s pubic hair, the veins on his muscled forearms, the strange power of his pale thighs—lying and rotting under the loam in some unknown Virginia field.

After Henry James’s youngest brother Wilkie was badly wounded during the Massachusetts 54th black regiment’s ill-planned and disastrous attack on South Carolina’s Fort Wagner, he had been in such terrible condition when he’d been brought home—found among the dying in an open army surgical station in South Carolina and saved purely by the coincidence of family friend Cabot Russell there looking for his missing dead son on the battlefield—that they’d had to leave Wilkie on his filthy stretcher in the hallway entrance by the door for weeks. James had been with both his father and mother when they’d bathed their mutilated youngest child, and Wilkie’s naked body was a different sort of revelation for young Henry James, Jr.: a terrible wound in the back from which the Confederate ball had not yet been removed and a sickening wound to the foot—they’d roughly operated on the boat bringing Wilkie north to remove that ball—that showed both decay and the early conditions of gangrene.

The first time Henry had watched his brother naked on the cot, being turned and touched so gingerly by his mother after Wilkie’s filthy-smelling uniform had been cut off, he had marveled at how absolutely vulnerable the male human body was to metal, fire, the blade, disease. In many ways, especially when turned—screaming—onto his stomach so that they could bathe his back and legs, with both wounds now visible, Wilkie James looked more like a week-old corpse than like a living man. Than like a brother.

Then there was the other “Holmes” whom James had seen naked. Near the end of the war, James’s childhood friend—only two years older than Henry but now aged decades by his war experiences—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had come to visit James in Boston and then traveled with him to North Conway, where James’s cousin Minnie Temple and her sisters had lived. For the first night of that North Conway visit, this other Holmes and young James had been forced to share an absurdly spartan room and single sagging bed—before they found a more suitable rental the next day—and James, already in his pajamas and under the covers, had seen Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., standing naked in the lamplight in front of a wash basin and mirror just as Sherlock Holmes was this night somewhere in the tossing North Atlantic on the Paris .

The young James had once again marveled at the beauty of the lean and muscled male body when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had stood there in the lamplight that night, but once again there had been the all-too-visible connection with Death: terrible scars radiating like white spiderwebs across Oliver’s back and sides and upper leg. Indeed, that other Holmes—James’s Holmes—had also been terribly wounded in the war and was so proud of the fact that he would talk about it, in detail not usually allowed in front of ladies, for decades afterwards. That other Holmes, eventually to be the famous jurist, insisted on keeping his torn and bloody Union uniform, still smelling of gunpowder and blood and filth just as Wilkie’s cot and blanket and cut-away uniform had, in his wardrobe for all these decades to follow. He would take it out upon occasion of cigars and conversation with his fellow men of name and fortune and show them the blood long dried-brown and the ragged holes that so paralleled the white-webbed ragged holes James had glimpsed scarring his childhood friend’s bare body.

For James, it had been another glimpse not only at the beauty of the naked male form but at the mutilating graffiti of Death trying to claim the mortality of that form.

So, even in his shock, Henry James was not surprised to see in the stateroom’s dim lamplight that Mr. Sherlock Holmes—leaner even than Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been at an age fifteen years Sherlock’s junior—also had scars across his back. These looked as raw as the bullet wounds James had seen in Wilkie’s and Oliver’s flesh, but those wounds radiated outward like some zealot flagellant’s self-inflicted lashes that had cut through skin and flesh.

“Excuse me,” James had said, still standing in the open door to the stateroom. “I did not . . .” He did not know what he “did not” so he stopped there.

Holmes turned and looked at him. There were more white scars on his pale chest. James had time to note that despite the tall man’s extreme thinness—his flanks were all but hollowed in the way of some runners and other athletes whom James had seen compete—Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whose flesh in the lamplight glowed almost as white as James’s cousin Gus Barker’s had been, was a mass of corded muscles which seemed just waiting to be flexed and used in some urgent circumstance.

“Excuse me,” James had said again and had gone back out through the door. He stayed in the First Class Lounge that night, smoking and reading some irrelevant magazine, until he was certain that Holmes would be in bed asleep before he himself returned to the stateroom.

The Paris , far behind its own rather unambitious schedule, came into New York Harbor in early evening when part of the city’s oldest skyline was backlit by the setting sun. Most of the transatlantic liners James had taken back from Europe over the years, if arriving in New York, did so early in the morning. He realized that this evening arrival was not only more aesthetically pleasing—although James could no longer tolerate the aesthetics of New York City—but also seemed somehow more appropriate to their covert mission.

Holmes had joined him, uninvited, at the railing where James had been watching the scurry of tug boats and flurry of harbor traffic, listening to the hoots and bells and shouts of one of the world’s busiest harbors.

“Interesting city, is it not?” asked Holmes.

“Yes,” was James’s only response. When he’d left New York and America ten years earlier in 1883, he’d vowed never to return. Safely back in Kensington, he had written essays about his American and New York impressions. The city itself—where James had enjoyed years of what he thought was a happy childhood in their home near Washington Square Park—had changed, James observed, beyond all recognition. Between the 1840’s and the 1880’s, he said, New York had become a city of immigrants and strangers. The civilities and certainties of the semi-rural yet still pleasantly urban Washington Square years had been replaced by these hurtling verticalities, these infusions of strange-smelling, strange-speaking foreigners.

At one point, James had compared the Jews in their ghettoes of the Lower East Side to rats and other vermin—scurrying around the feet of their distracted and outnumbered proper Anglo-Saxon predecessors—but he also admired the fact that these . . . immigrants . . . put out more daily newspapers in Hebrew than appeared in the city in English; that they had created a series of Yiddish theaters that entertained more people nightly—however boorishly and barbarically—than did the Broadway theaters; that the Jews—and the Italians and other lower orders of immigrants, including most of the Irish—had made such a niche for themselves in the new New York that Henry James was certain that they could never, having attached themselves like limpets to that proud Dream of America shared by so many of its inhabitants, be displaced.