The Trouble with Tom (15 page)

Run the footage of the life of any literary luminary of the nineteenth century, and sooner or later, the grave and bearded form of Moncure Conway will invariably walk in from one side of the frame, tip his hat, and then quietly exit from the other side. Even the first day of Conway's very firstjob as a teenager, penning brief satirical items for his cousin's newspaper in Richmond, he'd run into another young author leaving the newspaper office . . . Edgar Allan Poe. It might seem like a noteworthy encounter, except that his entire life was l i e that.

I lay out the other photos of box 46 like the cards of a royal flush. Moncure Conway, sitting in a shady grove with a child, chatting amiably with a bearded man: Bronson Alcott, the caption reveals. Another photo: snaps of a pleasant home and writing room, sent by a good friend—Helen Hunt Jackson. Next is a portrait of Mark Twain's children, posing outside their home in Hartford, grinning for Uncle Moncure. Then there are the photos of Conway's own children; one of these is of a frowning, blond-haired baby: ELECTRO- PHOTOGRAPH declares the red ink on the back. Another photo of the baby, now dressed in plaid, the back simply reading: "Our little Emerson Conway." It is poignant, and it has the feel of a posthumous note-for the baby died just months later. Our little child: what else can one say? But for a man who lives out the term of his life, there is much, too much to say: so much that it gets lost in the tonnage of archival memory. Whole people can get lost. People like Moncure Conway.

I set aside the photos, and turn to my little array of boxes. Deep inside an archival box of personal effects I feel another item—not photos at all. It is wrapped in gauze and tied with a thin red ribbon; it is solid and heavy. My fingers against it detect a rounded edge through the fabric.

Could it be—could it
be?
—a bone of Thomas Paine's?

"
Queeny!
" Emerson shouted from his library door.

Moncure, nervously sitting in the philosopher's library, watched upon by wall portraits of Swedenborg and Goethe, observed Mrs. Emerson gliding into the room. Emerson was clearly touched by the great theological and geographical distance that his young protege had traveled. My young correspondent, he informed her, has come all the way to Concord just to meet m e l e t us prepare the house so that he may stay a few days.

Who knows the effect one person may have on another? A simple gesture, an offhand word, an essay knocked out on a deadline: these may send a life ricocheting in a new direction, and the instigator will hardly ever know it. But maybe it did not have to be
that
gesture,
that
word-maybe someone has been waiting for anything at all to send them off. And so, as Conway earnestly recounted how profoundly he'd been moved by Emerson's essay in
Blackwood's Magazine
, the author was duly modest about it.

"When the mind has reached a certain stage," Emerson assured him, "it may sometimes be crystallized by a slight touch."

But there was something kindred in their spirits: Emerson immediately took to the exiled Southerner. When Conway ex-pressed deep admiration for a book by the late Margaret Fuller, the philosopher immediately entrusted his young admirer with the signed copy of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
that Fuller herself had given him. After dinner, the two men went for a stroll around Walden Pond. Conway found his mentor had reached a fairly pragmatic view of religion—a minister, Emerson supposed, was still moderately useful in the world. Not for saving souls, but "to have a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at town meetings, to attend the sick and the dead." As Conway mused over the fine points of Divinity School curriculum, Emerson cleared away the undergrowth of conversation with one sentence:
"An actually existentfly is more important than a possibly
existent angel."

They passed a bush, and Emerson halted.

"Ah! There is one of the gods of the wood!"

Moncure looked disconcertedly into the thicket, and saw nothing.

"Where?" he asked.

"Did you see it?"

"No, I saw nothing—what was it?"

"NO matter."

"What was it?"

"Never mind," Emerson smiled, "if you did not see it."

Puzzled—had it been a squirrel? A wood sprite?—Moncure walked on with the grinning philosopher until they stopped to rest by the ruins of an old shanty. It had been built and lived in a couple of years earlier by another student of Emerson's, a pencilmaker in the village. He was, apparently, writing a book about the experience, and they decided to pay the fellow a visit.

When Emerson and his Conway arrived at the Thoreau family residence, the gawking young student was struck by the contrast in the family. The son Henry David clearly resembled his father John Thoreau, "a kindly and silent pencil-maker," and mother Cynthia, and yet "neither parent impressed me as possessing mental qualities that could account for such a rare spirit as Henry." Perhaps, as Emerson did, the student should have been carefully examining the ground during their walk around Walden. For he would have found that there are very tenacious plants that will grow in the cracks of rocks, and in the worst sorts of soil: there is no accounting for this unless you closely examine their roots. But in mature creations these are well buried; all you can see is the bloom.

What, asked Thoreau, are you studying at Harvard?

"The Scriptures," his earnest visitor replied.

"Which?"

A bemused Emerson saw how this would befuddle the young Christian. 'You will find our Thoreau a sad pagan," he explained.

Thoreau showed the visitor his collection of Asian theology, which he had studied assiduously. And perusing what he once would have dismissed as heathen texts, here in a New England pencilmaker's home, the ardent young Southern preacher had come to a place far from his old orthodoxy. But just how far, he would not discover until the next morning.

The man was trembling, hiding, terrified: he was hunted.

Henry David Thoreau ushered Moncure inside his house; their talk the day before of a pleasant morning walk was gone now. All was urgency and guardedness inside the Thoreau house, for in the next room, being tended by Henry's sister Sophia, was human contraband. A
servant
, in the parlance of Conway's genteel homestead: an escaped slave, in everyone else's.

The fugitive looked up at Conway and recoiled in horror.
He was from Conway's home county
. And here, in his room, was the secretary of the Southern Rights Association. He had been betrayed!-his masters had come to take him back! It was only with much reassurance that Thoreau and Conway finally convinced the trembling man that he was among friends. The runaway had shown up at Thoreau's door at dawn, seeking his stop on the Underground Railroad. By the next morning he was on his way to Canada. And Moncure Conway had, for perhaps the first time in his life, witnessed a federal crime—indeed, had quietly aided and abetted it.

Finally taking their promised stroll together, Thoreau gave his visitor his own tour around Walden Pond. Their walk was filled with long silences punctuated by extraordinary lectures on—on anything, really—rocks, grass, the varieties of pine needles and the sound the wind made in them.
Walden
the book was not yet published: here, in Walden itself, Thoreau was thinking paragraphs aloud in front of an amazed Conway, and then conjuring natural magic. The sly naturalist had discovered that the female bream, quite unusually, would stay to defend its eggs: it would never flee. If your walking companion hadn't seen the fish, you could perform a seeming miracle. The woodsman, reaching nonchalantly into the water, would pull out a wriggling fish with his bare hand.

Clank
.

Everyone in the rare book room looks up: I look down. Unwrapping the gauze clumsily, this is what slid out: not bones, not teeth, not even another framed photograph of Paine's hair. No, it's—well-It's
something-from the hardware store
.

I heft them in my hand, my brow furrowed: the pieces of metal are cold to the touch, and tarnished with age. They are a bundle of old iron keyhole plate covers, the sort of rectangular flourish you'd find screwed into the wood around the doorknob in a Victorian home. What, exactly, they are doing among the personal effects of a dead man is . . .

Nope. Haven't a clue.

I examine the plates carefully, and fish out the thick magnifying glass from my pocket. It's one of those massy glass lenses they sell with the compact edition of the OED, in order to read the microscopic print, and it's an absurd thing to carry around in your pants-but you'd be surprised how often it can come in handy in a place like this. I move the lens up and down until the smooth iron surface comes into focus. There are no fingerprint tarnishes visible on the metal; perhaps I am the first in many years, in decades even, to unwrap this piece of gauze. And there are no scratches in the metal either: you would expect stray key scratches on a doorplate, perhaps a clumsy scuff mark from a signet ring. But no: these are, or were, brand-new. They just happened to be sitting in Moncure Conway's desk when he died.

A life cut off in mid-sentence would, I suppose, leave a least a few unfinished thoughts—a nonsense syllable hanging in the air, detached from the last unspoken word. So: we have keyhole covers wrapped mysteriously in gauze and tied in red ribbon. "To Do," some scrap of Conway's daily journal might have once read, "get doors repaired." But that To Do was never To Be Done.

One thing
you
must
do, Emerson told Conway in 1855,
is
read
this
new
book.

It was a queer volume of poetry that Emerson had just received in the mail, from a young man that neither he nor anyone else in Concord had heard of. Visiting Emerson at his house, Conway heard him sing the praises of this mysterious Manhattan writer who had been unknown scarcely days before. As he was already about to take a steamer down to New York anyway, Conway assured Emerson that he'd visit the fellow, and serve as Concord's first emissary to this newcomer.

Moncure read the book on board the
Metropolis
, where the chug of the engine and the lap of its paddlewheel kept time with the poet's cadence and meter: and as the poet spanned over vast reaches of land, Conway could see the fertile landscape of America passing by on the shore. By the time he stepped off at New York Harbor, Conway was convinced—he had to find the man who had written this. Perusing a city directory, he saw he had a long commute before him. First he rode the Fulton Street ferry over to Brooklyn; then it was on to the Myrtle Avenue omnibus until nearly the end of the line, almost into Long Island itself. He hopped down off the bus and examined a row of small wooden houses along Ryerton Street before finally knocking on a door. An older woman answered: it was the poet's mother. He's not here, she told him—go back the way you came, to Rome's Printing Office at Fulton and Cranberry. So he made the trek back, and strode into the printer's office.

"I found him revising some proof," Conway wrote to Emerson that night. "A man you would not have marked in a thousand; a blue striped shirt, opening from a red throat; and sitting on a chair without a back, which, being the only one, he offered me, and sat down on a round of the printer's desk himself. . . He seemed very eager to hear from you and about you, and what you thought of his book."

He was blunt yet friendly—blithely informing Conway that "you think too much of books," and yet smiling when telling Conway that "he had heard of his poems being offered for sale by a vendor of obscene books." The poet jauntily accompanied him back across the East River on the Fulton Street ferry, to take a stroll around Manhattan. "He rides on the stage with the driver," Conway wrote Emerson. "Stops to talk with the old man or woman selling fruit at the street corner. And his dress etc., is consistent with that. . . He is clearly his Book."

The two men parted with a promise to meet for dinner the next day. When the poet showed up at the Metropolitan Hotel for dinner, he was dressed in a baize coat and checkered shirt—In fact," Conway reported delightedly, "just like the portrait in his book." The book was still so new that these probably were indeed the very clothes he had posed in. And if Conway was delighted with his new friend, so was the poet with the attention he was now receiving.
You see
, he told Conway,
you are the first person to visit me about this book
.

In a sense, news of his character had already preceded him. The fellow had, after all, included his entire phrenological chart in his book of poems, convinced that to understand the one you needed to read the other. 'You are in fact most too open at times and have not always enough restraint in your speech," Lorenw Fowler wrote in a chart dated July 16,1849. 'You have a good command of language especially if excited." Atop his diagnosis was inked in the name and employment of this fateful patient:

W. Whitman, Age 29, Occupation Printer

Visiting Whitman's neighborhood again, Conway wrote, "I found him at the top of a hill nearby lying on his back and gazing at the sky." The poet was now hard at work on the second edition of
Leaves
of Grass: when Whitman made pilgrimages out to 308 Broadway, it was to go over page proofs, as the newest author signed to the fearless phrenological publishing house of Fowler & Wells.

The two walked back to Whitman's house, where they were let in by the poet's apprehensive-looking mother: once inside, Conway saw the true humbleness of the place. It was a small frame house, and Whitman's room held little more than a cot and a couple of cheap engravings. "What he brought me up there to see," Conway mused, "was the barren solitude stretching from beneath his window toward the sea." And so they went to the sea—loafing for the day around Staten Island, finding empty coves where they could swim about freely, and where Conway saw the Poet of the Body's . . . well, body. He had a farmer's tan: "I perceive that the reddish tanned face and neck of the poet crowned a body of lily-like whiteness."