Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“So much so that my publishers and literary agent all but despair,” said James with a smile.

“Did you read The Portrait of a Lady ?” Helen asked Roosevelt. “It is an amazing word-portrait of an American woman.”

“And published more than a decade ago, about the last time Mr. James was here in the United States,” said Roosevelt. “I say again—America needs its writers to come home from Europe or other decadent and comfortable hiding places and to re-learn America and its people.”

Hay leaned forward as if to intervene, but James, smiling, said, “I would wager, Mr. Roosevelt, that you did not write every word of The Winning of the West while you were in the West. Your notes and memories and research certainly prepared you to continue writing that valuable tome when you were in New York or Washington or, I would assume, even aboard a steamship bound for somewhere far away.”

“Of course,” said Roosevelt and pumped his fist in an odd gesture for dismissal. “But I had lived in the West. Hunted game in the West. Tracked and captured bad men and faced down murderous Indians in the West. I was in the West and of the West before I began writing the first page of my book about the West.”

“And I was in America and of America for many years before I went to Europe to write about many topics, but often about Americans encountering Europe,” James said softly.

“But you left thirty years ago, sir, and have returned only for visits . . .” ground on Roosevelt’s high, insistent voice.

“For more than visits, I’m afraid,” James said sadly.

“You were of age to join the army during the Civil War but you never did,” said Roosevelt with an oddly triumphant tone, a chess master moving his knight to a threatening position.

Henry James’s usually cool gray eyes flashed heat. “My younger brothers Wilkie and Bob were both wounded in that war, sir. Wilkie served under Colonel Shaw in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, mostly colored soldiers, and was terribly wounded during the attack on Fort Wagner. Terribly wounded, Mr. Roosevelt . . . he was found, by pure chance, amongst the heap of dying soldiers by our family friend William Russell, who had gone hunting for his own son—Cabot, who died at Fort Wagner—and Wilkie was not expected to live and for many weeks he had to be left on the filthy cot they brought him home on, just inside our front door. My brother Wilkie suffered the pains and disabling effects of those wounds until his death ten years ago in November of eighteen eighty-three. I knew the Civil War, Mr. Roosevelt. You were . . . what? . . . eight years old when the War ended?”

“Seven,” said Roosevelt.

“So many served and suffered in so many ways,” said John Hay. “The Civil War was a nightmare from which an entire nation—an entire people—could not awake.”

James turned to his left to look at Hay. He found the comment interesting, coming from a man who had just made a fortune co-authoring a book about Lincoln and who had been at the center of that terrible vortex of war at the age of twenty-two then for more than four years.

“I do not worry about a dearth of American writers,” said Henry Adams. “Look at this table. Almost everyone here writes for publication or aspires to and soon will . . . yes, I’m looking at you, dear Helen.”

Hay’s daughter blushed prettily.

“ I do not write nor aspire to,” said Clara Hay.

“You wrote a cookbook, my dear,” said John Hay.

“My point,” continued young Roosevelt, who simply would not be deterred, “was that America, emerging into the world’s limelight as it is, simply cannot accept or tolerate the kind of undersized man of letters—all present company excepted, of course—who flees his country because, with all his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness, he finds that he cannot play a man’s part among men, and so goes where he will be sheltered from the winds that harden stouter souls.”

There was an audible intake of breath around the table. John Hay closed his eyes for a second, touched his forehead with his long white fingers, and was about to say something when James silenced him by raising two fingers of his left hand.

“Mr. Roosevelt,” said James, his piercing gaze never leaving the younger man’s double-barreled steel-spectacled stare, “first of all, I believe that the preferred word is ‘sensitivity’, not ‘sensitiveness’. Secondly, I have to believe that the Civil Service Commission must be a truly ferocious habitat indeed to house and feed such lions as yourself. My respect for government bureaucrats has just risen exponentially.”

Roosevelt opened his mouth to respond but Henry James continued in the same smooth purr as before.

“But, alas, the value of your roars this evening, my dear sir, is impaired for any possible intelligent precept by both the truly wonderful incoherence of their observations and the puerility of their oversimplifications.”

Lizzie, Nannie, and Helen laughed. Del looked in a sort of wondrous, concerned confusion from Roosevelt to James and back again. John Hay steepled his fingers, his lips thin and white. Clara Hay looked from face to face in confusion as her beautiful dinner party was shredded like a regimental banner under heavy musket fire.

“Your sentences, Mr. James,” said Roosevelt through his huge, gritted teeth, “are as incomprehensible and unparsable in person as they are on the page.”

Henry James smiled in an almost beatific manner. “On that issue, my older brother William agrees with you, Mr. Commissioner.”

“So we’re definitely all going to the Chicago Columbian Exposition in May?” asked Helen.

“I can’t wait to see Daniel Chester French’s Statue of the Republic goddess—sixty-five feet high, I understand—right in the center of the White City and lagoons,” said Lizzie Cameron.

“I admit to being eager to see Saint-Gaudens’s statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, perched, I hear, at the very top of McKim, Mead and White’s agricultural hall,” said Nannie Lodge.

James looked to his left. As far as he knew, Henry Adams had never mentioned Clover or her death, but would he discuss Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s already famous statue overlooking her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery? Or would the mention of the sculpture bring on a long Adams silence?

Adams looked at James and, as if reading his old friend’s mind, he said, “Harry, you’ve never seen Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture at Clover’s grave in Rock Creek Cemetery, have you?”

“No, Henry. I haven’t been back since it was completed.”

“Then we must go together to look at it tomorrow,” said Adams. “Would you like to come with us, Mr. Holmes?”

“Very much.”

“It’s settled then,” said Adams, as if he were unaware of the Lodges, Camerons, and Hays staring at him in something like shock. “I’ll come for you at Mrs. Stevens’s in my open carriage around ten a.m.”

“Good,” said James, for once not knowing what else to say. He had not the slightest clue as to why Henry Adams would suddenly be willing to take two people, one of them a stranger, to see his wife’s grave and mourning sculpture.

John Hay rose. “Why don’t the ladies retire to the parlor while we gentlemen retreat to the library for brandy and cigars or cigarettes?”

“I second the motion,” said Senator Lodge. Everyone stood.

Roosevelt’s fierce gaze had never left James’s bearded face. “Overstuffed mass of emasculated inanity,” he murmured under his breath as servants pulled back chairs and the beautifully dressed men and women began to move in opposite directions.

James turned back toward Roosevelt, smiling slightly, and remained fixed as John Hay whispered something in the author’s ear. Henry James spoke in low tones but loud enough for Holmes to hear from across the table and presumably Roosevelt at the end of the table. “ . . . perhaps expecting something more than this mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.”