Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“Well,” said James, still disappointed that his American Venice turned out to be so much marzipan, “I guess the future of the White City is not our problem.”

“No,” agreed Holmes. “One way or the other, all our problems will be over by the end of May first.”

Three days before James’s boat tour to the White City and the day after he’d left his friends in Washington, the author stood at the family cemetery plot in Cambridge. He’d last visited this spot a little more than a decade earlier when he’d rushed to America to be by his dying father’s side only to learn when his feet touched the Boston pier that his father had died an hour earlier. On the day of New Year’s Eve 1882, James had walked alone up the snowy hillside to his father’s grave that had been filled in with the frozen earth only ten days earlier. William, unable to return from Europe in time, had sent a most personal letter to his father but the letter, like Henry, had arrived after the awful fact of death. It had been a very cold day—although with a clear Massachusetts winter sky—and James remembered both the ghost-smoke of his breath in the air as he read the long letter and the growing numbness in his freezing toes. William’s long letter had begun “Darling old Father” and had passed through several pages of metaphysical speculation that seemed to Henry much like the continuation of debates and outright arguments William had been having with their father for decades. The letter had ended with “Good-night, my sacred old Father. If I don’t see you again—Farewell!! a blessed farewell!” James was sure he had not wept that day a decade earlier because, if he had, the tears would have frozen to his cheeks.

This April day was the antithesis of the last time he was here. In the winter then he’d been able to see the whiteness of a distant field beyond the Charles River, but now leaves blocked most of that view and as they shifted in the warm April breeze, James caught glimpses of homes and shops that hadn’t been there in 1882.

A year earlier, when William was in Italy, he’d had a marble urn engraved for sister Alice’s ashes. Henry read the words that William had chosen:

ed essa da martiro

e da essilio venne a questa pace

James had recognized the passage at once—from the Tenth Book of the Paradiso in the Divine Comedy —and his translation from the Italian was roughly—“and from martyrdom and banishment it came unto this peace.” It seemed appropriate for Alice’s pain-filled and largely bedridden life. She had indeed embraced death as an escape for the final decades of her life, although James knew—better than anyone else in the family—that the pain and death-welcoming was, until very near the end, leavened by Alice’s mischievous sense of humor and penchant for parody. When William had ordered her diary published, just for the family members, without asking Henry’s opinion, Henry had been shocked by the names named and ridiculed. He would have edited the diary severely to avoid such insults to the living (and some recent dead), but perhaps older brother William was right . . . perhaps Alice defied editing.

In one hand James held the elegant snuffbox containing the small amount of his sister’s ashes he’d pilfered after the cremation in England, while in the other hand he held the small gardening trowel he’d purchased in a hardware store not far from their old home on Bolton Street. But James had been as good as his vow not to go look at the now empty-of-family Bolton Street home, or to walk past the impressive home of William and his Alice—Alice the wife and mother—on the corner at 95 Irving Street here in Cambridge.

James felt like he’d failed his sister. His plan had been honorable enough—to have one of the brothers (himself, as it had to be) rather than Miss Katharine Loring help spread Alice’s ashes, but spread them somewhere Alice had been truly happy. James had simply failed to find such a spot—at least one where the happiness hadn’t been dependent upon his sister’s Boston Marriage to Miss Loring, such as at the two’s Newport home. James knew that he was being foolish and selfish with this after-the-fact jealousy of Katharine Loring. He’d never felt that way while Alice was alive—he’d simply been happy that someone could bring a smile to his sister’s face or coax a laugh out of her—but since sister Alice’s death and Miss Loring’s monopoly in bringing the ashes back here to this sacred spot, the Jameses’ burial ground, the jealousy and sense of stubbornness about finding a spot for these ashes had grown rather than diminished.

But in the end he had surrendered. There had always been a certain unique oneness about his sister Alice James, and her ashes should be together . . . or at least in close proximity. James wasn’t about to try to pry open the sealed marble urn.

Making certain that no one was watching him, James knelt and dug a small grave for the snuffbox. The jade and porcelain box had been given to James as a gift in the late 1870’s by Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, a friend of Henry James, Sr. His father had described Houghton as energetic and fun-filled—Henry Adams back then had told young James that Houghton was “the first wit of London and the maker of men . . . a great many men”, but the lord was 68 or 69 when Henry, Jr., finally met him and was given to using elaborate breakfasts and dinners to “capture” famous artists and writers as if they were so many butterflies.

The ivory snuffbox, for which James had no use save to own it as an object of art, was of the finest Delft porcelain interset with tiny and delicately carved androgynous human figures which, in their flowing and blowing robes, seemed to be saints or cherubs descended from some 17th Century painting. There was something spiritual in this little box and it was made infinitely more so now by holding his beloved sister’s ashes.

As James set the little snuffbox into the small but deep little hole and began troweling dirt back into place, he recalled an early dinner he’d had with Lord Houghton where the fellow diners had included Tennyson, Gladstone, and Dr. Heinrich Schliemann, the fellow who had found and excavated Troy.

Finished with his own excavation and filling-in, Henry stood—feeling the sudden pang of pain in his always-aching back—and brushed off his trousers at the knees. He realized that he should say a little prayer, but there was no prayer in his heart or mind at the moment. He’d already said his good-byes to Alice—she was the only member of the family whose deathbed and long, difficult dying he’d actually attended. He took one last glance at the urn to fulfill any ceremony required.

ed essa da martiro

e da essilio venne a questa pace

In the hansom cab he’d kept waiting for him in the cemetery, James knew that he’d have to decide what he was going to do. There was only one sane and sensible course of action: the train for New York, for which he had a first class ticket, left from Boston’s old central station in one hour. He’d made arrangements with the German steamship company to go aboard the Spree with all his baggage this very evening, as soon as he arrived in New York. He would have an excellent dinner and a good night’s sleep in his first-class cabin aboard the elegant ocean liner and the Spree would depart for Southampton (then London by rail, then home!) in the morning. James would not even have to get dressed to go to the deck to watch the departure since no one was seeing him off; he’d simply sleep late and enjoy breakfasting in his cabin.