Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I could not imagine her pregnant and abandoned, however — I could not imagine her becoming pregnant. Even so, there was something about her gaze and light smile that was not in the slightest virginal, that was bold and provocative, and I found myself defending Father to her, as if wanting her approval of him and, more to the point, of me as well. I told her that my father was a businessman, a wholesaler of wool. And that he was also a famous abolitionist.

“Really?” She arched her eyebrows and smiled more with pity than condescension. “A famous abolitionist? Strange that I’ve never heard of him. Although perhaps I should have.” She began suddenly to speak with surprising animation. She had thought that she knew everyone of importance who was in the movement. She and her family, she said, the Peabodys, were all deeply involved in the struggle to bring an end to slavery and had been for many years. She and her family were also active in bringing about other reforms, she said, women’s rights, education, and so on. Except for one aunt, she conceded. Not her Aunt Elizabeth, the woman with whom she was traveling to England, but another, her Aunt Sophia, who was married to an author.

“Poor Aunt Sophia, she follows the Democratic politics and principles of her husband. A fine and famous man,” she said, “who ought to know better.” She told me the author’s name, Nathaniel Hawthorne. “You no doubt have heard of him and perhaps have read some of his tales,” she said.

At that time, however, his name meant nothing to me. “I’m not much for tales,” I said. When it came to literary matters, I told her, I was an ignorant country boy, a rough shepherd, whose reading was mostly still shaped by his father’s tastes, which is to say, by religion and politics. Amongst the so-called moderns, John Bunyan was our tale-teller and John Milton our poet, and they were hardly moderns, were they? The rest, according to Father, was dross, or worse. Filth.

“Your father;’ she said. “The famous abolitionist.”

“Well, yes,”I said. “But perhaps he’s better known amongst the abolitionists in Springfield and out west in Ohio, where we used to live.” I thought for a moment to tell her of his association with Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, but realized that I would be merely bragging, and besides, it would be as indiscreet as it was vain for me to invoke the names of those fine men merely to glamorize Father’s name. Especially in the light of our recent escapades in the northcountry, adventures that neither Mr. Douglass nor Mr. Smith would care to be associated with.

“Actually, Father works pretty much alone, and with the Negroes themselves. Not so much with white people, excepting, of course, us family members. Which actually enhances his effectiveness, rather than hinders it,” I added, and my voice and phrasing sounded in my ears precisely like Father’s, as if he were speaking through me, as if, even in chatting casually with this attractive young woman, I had no voice or language of my own.

“Well, I’m sure your father is a hero;’ she said to me, and patted my hand, soothing a troubled child. “He does seem very much to have cast himself in the old-fashioned heroic mold. Like one of Cromwell’s captains, the way he presents himself. Is he a man of action, as well as a man of religion?”

I could not determine if she was serious or making fun of me, and though I grew somewhat shy, I tried nonetheless to engage her bright spirit, which drew me irresistibly towards her. “Oh, yes, certainly. Action, action, action! That’s Father’s by-word.”

“A man of action and a man of God! My goodness, what a rare combination. I don’t believe I’ve ever met such a man, at least not until now. And you, Mister Owen Brown, in matters of war are you his lieutenant, and in matters of religion his acolyte?”

“You could say that. Regarding the war against slavery, I mean.”

“Then you, too, are a man of action?”

“Well, less than he. No, not at all, in fact. I suppose I’m a follower.”

“A man of God, then?”

“Less than he there, too. Not at all there, I fear. In religion, I’m not even a follower. Although I’d like to be.”

She said to me then that she thought she and I were much alike, which surprised me, for at that moment, no one seemed less like me than this woman, and I told her so.

“But we’re both attached to people of whom we are but diminished forms,” she said, and at that point there began a most extraordinary conversation between us. Slowly, we walked the length of the ship and back again, opening ourselves to one another in a manner altogether new to me. And, as it appeared, new to her as well, for every few moments she would exclaim, “Heavens, I can’t believe I’m talking this way to a perfect stranger!”

“I guess it’s difficult to be strangers on a sea-voyage,” I said.

“Yes, and I guess I’m even more lonely than I thought. You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.

“No, no, of course not. I’m lonely, too.”

I called her by her given name, Sarah, and she addressed me familiarly, too. She confessed that she had come out onto the deck tonight filled with despondency and hatred for her life. Everything so far had ended up disappointing her, she said. Everything. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, she spoke of her illustrious family, the Peabodys of Salem, Massachusetts, with an admiration that approached awe, even including her Aunt Sophia, the woman whose politics she had previously criticized. Now she described her aunt as beautiful and kind and endlessly loyal to her husband, a man who himself was a literary genius, she conceded, in spite of his being a Democrat and anti-abolitionist.

She contrasted herself with these brilliant and famous relatives: she was ordinary, she said, without their gifts of intellect or speech. And she was in no sense as virtuous as they. Her family members and their friends and associates were, for the most part, rigorous Unitarians and well-known Transcendentalists. But for all their liberalism in religion, in terms of their public and private behavior they were still old-fashioned, upright Puritans. “In other words, they are good people” she said. “Morally upright.” Their generation had abandoned the Calvinist theology in their youth, but had kept the morality. She, on the other hand, having been encouraged by her elders since her nursery days to forsake the old Puritan forms of religion, had retained none of the Puritans’ moral uprightness and rigor. She was a sinner, she said. A sinner without the comfort of prayer and with no possibility of redemption.

“I wonder, Owen Brown, do you think that this is what it means to be all modern and up-to-date?” She gave a short, metallic laugh, and, once again, I couldn’t tell if she was serious. “Think about it,” she went on. “In spite of the fact that our lies and weaknesses and our sensualities feel to us exactly like sins, we are no longer permitted to believe in sin. It’s absurd!” she exclaimed. She went silent for a moment, when suddenly I realized that she was weeping.

“What’s wrong? Can you tell me what’s at the bottom of this, Miss Peabody?”

She didn’t answer at first, and I regretted my question. Then she sighed and said, “The simple truth is that my life has no meaning to me. It’s true, Owen Brown. None. I feel guilt, a great weight of guilt. But no shame!”

I touched her glistening cheek and said nothing. After a moment, I saw in the moonlight that she was smiling again. Though it was for me a struggle to follow the sudden twists and turns of her emotions and words, I had managed it nonetheless and believed that I understood her, at least momentarily, for I thought that I felt the same way as she — about life, about myself, about everything. Sarah Peabody’s words and her tears and her abrupt and bitter laughter had given sudden, expressive shape to my own inarticulated despair. Although despair, like a miasma, had long influenced my mind and spirit — gray, noxious, slick, and spreading into every corner of my consciousness — until now it had remained wordless, unnamed. But here, thanks to this girl, I could name it. My life, like hers, had no meaning, except as a diminished form of other lives. Father’s, in particular. And I, too, felt guilt and no shame.