Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

James wished again that he had brought his walking stick into the carriage . . . to lean on as he thought this time. “Yes, definitely,” he replied softly, more to himself it sounded than to the detective sitting across from him. “Henry and Clover Adams—and the other three members of the Five of Hearts—would never invite someone to their inner circle because of that person’s power or notoriety. Rather, they invited artists, writers, minor politicians, and such to the dinners held after the five o’clock daily teas of the inner salon of the Five of Hearts based on that person’s ability to amuse them. I once wrote a story in which I portrayed Clover Adams in the form of a certain Mrs. Bonnycastle and . . .”

James stopped in mid-breath. He was aghast at his own lack of discretion.

“Go on,” said Sherlock Holmes.

James took a breath. Well, he had already crossed the discretionary Rubicon, as it were.

“It was in a story called ‘Pandora’,” said Henry James. “But you must understand that I never base any of my fictional characters on actual living or deceased persons. They are always . . . an amalgam . . . of experience and pure fiction.” This was as disingenuous as Henry James could get. All of his important characters—and most of his minor ones—were based exactly and precisely upon living or deceased personages from his own life and experience.

“Of course,” purred Holmes, sounding as disingenuous as Henry James felt.

“At any rate, in this short story, I described Mrs. Bonnycastle as a ‘lady of infinite mirth’ and her salon as one which ‘left out, on the whole, more than it took in’.”

“But you’ve already told me that the actual Clover Adams was not exactly a lady of infinite mirth,” interrupted Holmes. “You’ve explained that she had been, since childhood, visited by deep and frequent spells of melancholy.”

“Yes, yes,” James said impatiently. “One omits certain features of a character for a short story. Had Mrs. Bonnycastle been a central character in a novel . . . well, we would have had to explore all sides of her. Even those that seem, upon first glance, to be mutually contradictory.”

“Please go on,” said Holmes almost contritely. “You were describing your fictional treatment of Clover Ada . . . of Mrs. Bonnycastle’s salon .”

“I remember writing that the very rare senator or congressman whom they allowed to visit was invariably inspected with . . . I remember the precise words, Mr. Holmes . . . ‘with a mixture of alarm and indulgence’.”

Holmes smiled thinly. It looked as if he wanted to ask James whether the writer could remember, verbatim, large tracts from his dozens of books and hundreds of short stories, but he obviously did not want to derail the conversation again. “Go on, please,” he said.

“I know,” continued James, “that my good friend Henry Adams recognized himself in the story, ‘Pandora’, when I described Mr . Bonnycastle as having once said to his wife, in a fit of unusual broad-mindedness—‘Hang it, let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the president!’ ”

“And did they regularly invite the president?” asked Holmes.

James made an almost impolite noise. “Not that worm James Garfield,” said the writer, “although I imagine that Garfield would have galloped barefoot across Lafayette Square to the Adamses’ home should he have ever been tendered. But they did, or at least Henry did—I believe for the first time with their architect, Richardson—cross the street to visit the White House once Grover Cleveland came to power in March of eighteen eighty-five. Only a few months before Clover’s death.”

Holmes raised a single finger. “Pardon me for interrupting again, James. But this is something else about America that confuses me a trifle. It was my understanding—at least in my childhood—that unlike Her Majesty or most other royalty worldwide, American presidents were elected for a limited period of time. Four years was my hazy recollection. Yet President Cleveland was in office when Clover Adams died in eighteen eighty-five and, correct me if I am wrong, he is in office now in the spring of eighteen ninety-three. Have the Americans discovered the benefits of lifetime public service?”

Can any grown Englishman really be so ill-informed? wondered Henry James.

As if reading James’s mind, Holmes smiled and said, “During a railway voyage in a recent case set far out on distant moors, one not mentioned—so far at least!—in his published chronicles of our adventures, I had the opportunity to reveal to Dr. Watson that, until he had mentioned it in passing that day, I had no idea that the Earth went around the sun. I may have learned it at one time, I explained to Watson, but—as with all things that do not relate directly to my profession and avocation of detective work—I quickly put it out of my mind. I can, you shall find, be rather singularly focused. So you will have to make allowances for me at times, sir.”

“But for a man who brags of being set so firmly behind The Times . . .” James began and stopped. Holmes could not possibly be telling the truth here. And James wanted no argument. Not yet.

“Mr. Grover Cleveland,” he began again, “is in the unique position of being the only President of the United States who has served two non-consecutive four-year terms. He was in office between March eighteen eighty-five and March of eighteen eighty-nine. After a four-year interval where a certain Benjamin Harrison served in the office, Mr. Cleveland was elected again just last November and was sworn into office again only a few weeks ago.”

Holmes nodded briskly. “Thank you. And please return to your description of all five of the Five of Hearts.”

James looked around. “I fear that the dining car will be closing for luncheon service soon. Perhaps we could have a late lunch and continue our discussion there?”

James chose trout for lunch; he didn’t care that much for trout, but eating it always reminded him that he was “home” in the United States. Actually, nothing outside the window of the moving dining car gave him any sense of being “home”. The trees along the rail line here as they moved from New Jersey toward Baltimore were too small, too tightly clustered, and too obviously just stands of new growth where farms had spared a patch of forest. The farmhouses were of wood and often needed new coats of paint. Some of the barns sagged. It was a tapestry of American chaos overlaid on a layer of poverty; England and Italy and France had more than enough poverty, Henry James knew well enough, but it rarely manifested itself as sagging, unpainted, wildly planted chaos . In England—in most of James’s Europe—the old and poor and rundown were picturesque , including the people.

Many years earlier, in an essay on Hawthorne (who had been an early passion of his), James had made the mistake of writing to American readers that American soil and history were a sad, blank slate for any American writer, poet, or artist: New England, he had pointed out, lacked Europe’s all-important castles, ancient ruins, Roman roads, abandoned sheepherders’ cottages, and defined social classes capable of appreciating art. American artists of any sort, he’d suggested, could never achieve a real mastery of their art by reacting to the vulgar, pressing, profit-centered, and always-pressing new the way writers and artists in Europe could react romantically to the old .

Certain American reviewers, editors, and even readers had taken him to task for these less-than-praise-filled paragraphs. In their eyes, James knew, America, even without any true history, could do no wrong and the vulgar and ever-shifting “newness” that he hated so profoundly—primarily as an impediment to his and any American writer’s art—was an aphrodisiac to their Philistine and America-tuned senses.