In the Elmwood study that night in 1861, a messenger interrupted the poets’ tea. Dr. Holmes knew quite definitively that it would be a telegram that had been elaborately redirected from his own house, informing him of poor Wendell Junior’s death on some frozen battlefield, probably from exhaustion—of all the explanations on the casualty lists, Holmes found “died of exhaustion” the most frightening and vivid. But instead, it was a servant sent by Henry Longfellow, whose Craigie House estate was around the corner: a simple note requesting Lowell’s help with some more translated cantos. Lowell persuaded Holmes to accompany him. “I have so many irons in the fire already that I dread a new temptation,” Holmes said, laughing it off at first. “I fear I will catch your Dante mania.”
Lowell convinced Fields to take up Dante, too. Though no Italianist, the publisher had a workable amount of the language at his disposal from traveling for business (this business traveling was mostly for his pleasure and Annie’s, since there was little trade of books between Rome and Boston), and now he immersed himself in dictionaries and commentaries. Fields’s interest, his wife liked to say, was what interested others. And old George Washington Greene, who had given Longfellow his first copy of Dante while they were touring the Italian countryside together thirty years earlier, began stopping by whenever he was in town from Rhode Island, offering wide-eyed assessments of the labor. It was Fields, most in need of schedules, who suggested Wednesday evenings for their Dante gatherings at the Craigie House study, and it was Dr. Holmes, a consummate namer, who christened the enterprise the Dante Club, though Holmes himself usually referred to them as their “seances”—insisting that if you looked hard enough, you could meet Dante face-to-face at Longfellow’s fireside.
Holmes’s new novel would stand his own name right side up again for the public. It would be the American Story readers awaited at every bookseller and library—the one Hawthorne had failed to find before his death; the one promising spirits, like Herman Melville, muddled out of peculiarity on the way to anonymity and isolation. Dante dared to make himself into an almost divine hero, transforming his own defective personality through the swagger of the poetry. But for this the Florentine sacrificed his home, his life with his wife and children, his place in the crooked city he loved. In impoverished solitude he defined his nation; only in his imagination could he experience peace. Dr. Holmes, in his usual fashion, would accomplish everything, all at once.
And after his novel garnered the nation’s loyalty, then let Dr. Manning and the other vultures of the world try picking at his reputation! On the crest of redoubled adoration, Oliver Wendell Holmes could single-handedly shield Dante from attackers and assure Longfellow’s triumph. But if the Dante translation too hastily opened a battle that deepened the scars already cutting into his name, then his American Story could come and go unnoticed, or worse.
Holmes saw with the clarity of a courtroom verdict what had to be done. He had to slow them down just enough to finish his novel before the translation was complete. This was not just Dante business; this was Oliver Wendell Holmes business, his literary fate. Besides, Dante had plaintively bided his time for several hundred years before appearing to the New World. What could a few extra weeks bring?
In the lobby of the police station in Court Square, Nicholas Rey looked up from his notepad, squinting at the gaslight after a long engagement with a sheet of paper. A hefty bear of an indigoed uniformed man, swaying a small paper parcel as if it were an infant, waited in front of his desk.
“You’re Patrolman Rey, right? Sergeant Stoneweather. Don’t want to interrupt.” The man advanced and extended his impressive paw. “I think it takes a man of nerve to be the first Negro policeman, whatever some of the others say. What you writing there, Rey?”
“Might I be of some help, Sergeant?” Rey asked.
“I might, just might. You’re the one been asking around the stations ‘bout that devilish beggar who jumped out the window, aren’t you? It was me that brung him in for the show-up.”
Rey made sure Kurtz’s office door was still closed. Sergeant Stoneweather took out a blueberry pie from his parcel and nourished himself at intervals in their talk.
“Do you recall where you were when you took him in?” Rey asked.
“Aye—out looking for anyone who couldn’t account for themselves, just how we was instructed. The grogshops, the public houses. The South Boston horsecar office, that’s where I’d been at that hour, ‘cause I knew a few dips who work the pockets there. That beggar a yours was slumped over on one of the benches, half sleeping, but shaking too, like, tremulous demendous or delirious tremendous or somethin’ of that sort.”
“You know who he was?” Rey asked.
Stoneweather spoke around his chewing. “Lots of loungers and lushing-tons always coming and going by the horsecar. Didn’t look familiar to me, though. Wasn’t even of the mind to take him in, to say sooth. Seemed harmless enough.”
Rey was surprised by this. “What made you change your mind?”
“That damned beggar, that’s what!” Stoneweather blurted out, losing some piecrust in his beard. “He sees me rounding up some rogues, right, and he runs up to me, wrists held out and turned up in front of him like he wanted to be shackled and booked for bloody murder on the spot! So I thought to myself, Heaven sent him to me to take to this here show-up, I guess. The damned foolish simkin’. Everything happens for some of God’s reason, I believe that. Don’t you, Patrolman?”
Rey had trouble envisioning the leaper in any circumstance other than flight. “Did he say anything to you on the way? Was he doing anything? Speaking to someone else? Reading a newspaper maybe? A book?”
Stoneweather shrugged. “Didn’t notice.” As Stoneweather searched his coat pockets for a handkerchief to wipe his hands, Rey noticed with distracting interest the revolver peeking out from his leather belt. On the day Rey was appointed to the police by Governor Andrew, the aldermanic council had issued a resolution instituting restrictions on him. Rey could not wear a uniform, could not carry any weapon stronger than a billy club, and could not arrest a white person without the presence of another officer.
In that first month, the city stationed Nicholas Rey at the District Two ward. The captain of the station house decided Rey could only be effective on patrol in Nigger Hill. But there were enough blacks there who resented and distrusted a mulatto officer that the other patrolman in the area feared a riot. The station house was not much better. Only two or three policemen spoke with Rey at all, and the others signed a letter to Chief Kurtz recommending an end to the experiment of a colored officer.
“You really want to know what drove him to it, Patrolman?” Stoneweather asked. “Sometimes a man just can’t go on how things are, in my experience.”
“He died in this station house, Sergeant Stoneweather,” Rey said. “But in his mind, he was somewhere else—far from us, far from safety.”
This was more than Stoneweather could grasp. “I wish I knew more about the poor fellow, I do.”
That afternoon, Chief Kurtz and Deputy Chief Savage visited Beacon Hill. Rey, in the driver’s box, was even quieter than usual. When they stepped down, Kurtz said, “You still thinking of that damned vagrant, Patrolman?”
“I can find out who he was, Chief,” Rey said.
Kurtz frowned, but his eyes and voice softened. “Well, what do you know of him?”
“Sergeant Stoneweather brought him in from a horsecar office. He could have been from that area.”
“A horsecar station! He could have been coming from anywhere.”