Longfellow had been at his standing desk in the study, throwing some black sand on a newly inked poem to blot it. Fanny ran in screaming from the adjoining room. Her dress was now all flames, hugging her body like tailored Oriental silk. Longfellow bundled her in a rug and laid her on the floor.
With the fire out, he carried the trembling body upstairs to the bedroom. Later that night, the doctors put her to rest with ether, in the morning, assuring Longfellow in a bold whisper that she could feel very little pain, she took some coffee and then drifted into a coma. The funeral service in the Craigie House library fell on their eighteenth wedding anniversary. Her head was the only part of her the fire had spared, and on her beautiful hair was laid a wreath of orange blossoms.
The poet was confined to his bed that day by his own burns, but he could hear the unrestrained weeping of his friends, women and men, down in the parlor, weeping for him, he knew, as well as for Fanny. He found, in his delusional but alert state of mind, that he could make out individuals by their crying. His facial burns would necessitate his growing a full and heavy beard—not only to conceal the scars, but also because he could no longer shave. The orange discoloring on the palms of his limp hands would last painfully long, reminding him of his failure, before whitening away.
Longfellow, recuperating in his bedchamber, raised his bandaged hands upward. For nearly a week, the children could hear delirious words float into the hall whenever they passed by. Little Annie, thankfully, was too young to understand.
“Why could I not save her? Why could I not save her?”
After Fanny’s death had become real to him, after he could look at his little girls again without breaking down, Longfellow unlocked his notepaper drawer where he had once deposited fragments of Dante translations. Most of what he had done as class exercises in lighter times would be of no use. It was food for the fire. It was not the poetry of Dante Alighieri; it was the poetry of Henry Longfellow—the language, the style, the rhythm—the poetry of one content with his own life. As he started again, beginning with Paradiso, he was not chasing after a fitting style to render Dante’s words this time. He was chasing after Dante. Longfellow tucked himself away at his desk, watched over by his three young daughters, the children’s governess, his patient sons—now restless men—his hired help, and Dante. Longfellow found he could barely write a word of his own poetry, yet he could not stop himself from working on Dante. The pen felt like a sledgehammer in his hand. Difficult to wield nimbly, but what volatile power.
Soon Longfellow found reinforcements around his table: first Lowell, then Holmes, Fields, and Greene. Longfellow often said they had formed the Dante Club to amuse themselves during bleak New England winters. This was the diffident way he expressed its importance to him. The attention to defects and deficiencies was sometimes not the most agreeable interaction for Longfellow, but when critiques were harsh, the supper afterward made amends.
Resuming his editing of these latest Inferno cantos, Longfellow heard a hollow thud come from outside Craigie House. Trap let out a sharp bark.
“Master Trap? What is it, old fellow?”
But Trap, finding no source for the disturbance, yawned and burrowed back into the warm straw lining of his champagne basket. Longfellow peered outside his unlit dining room but saw nothing. Then a pair of eyes jumped out from the darkness, followed by what seemed a blinding flash of light. Longfellow’s heart leapt, not so much at the sight of a face appearing but at the sight of the face, if that is what it was, suddenly vanishing after locking eyes with him, the glass misting under Longfellow’s gasp. Longfellow stumbled backward, knocking into a cabinet and sending headlong onto the floor an entire set of Appleton family dishes (a wedding gift, as was Craigie House itself, from Fanny’s father). The cumulative shattering that followed echoed riotously, causing Longfellow to throw forth an irrational scream of distress.
Trap pounced and yapped with his entire diminutive might. Longfellow escaped from the dining room to the parlor, and then to the lazy wood fire of the library, where he examined the windows for any further sign of the eyes. He was hoping Jamey Lowell or Wendell Holmes would appear at the door and apologize for the unintended fright and the late hour. But as Longfellow’s writing hand trembled, all he could discern out his window was blackness.
As Longfellow’s scream rang down Brattle Street, James Russell Lowell’s ears were half submerged in his tub. He was listening to the hollow skip of the water, letting his eyelids droop shut, wondering where life had gone. The small window overhead was propped open and the night was cool. If Fanny came in, she would no doubt command him to the warm bed at once.
Lowell had risen to fame when most of the celebrated poets were significantly older than he, including Longfellow and Holmes, who were both around ten years his senior. He had grown so content with the title Young Poet that it had seemed at forty-eight he had done something wrong to lose it.
He puffed indifferently on his fourth cigar of the day, carelessly letting the ashes defile his water. He could recall times only a few years earlier when the tub had seemed much roomier for his body. He wondered at the spare razor blades, now missing, that he had hidden years earlier on the shelf above. Had Fanny or Mab, more perceptive than he allowed himself to believe, surmised the black thoughts that often tingled as he soaked? In his youth, before meeting his first wife, Lowell had carried strychnine in his waistcoat pocket. He said he inherited his drop of black blood from his poor mother. Around the same time, Lowell had put a cocked pistol to his forehead but was too afraid to pull the trigger, a fact of which he was still heartily ashamed. He had only been flattering himself that he could be responsible for so conclusive an act.
When Maria White Lowell died, her husband of nine years felt old for the first time, felt as if he suddenly had a past, something alien to his present life, from which he was now exiled. Lowell consulted Dr. Holmes in a professional capacity about his dark emotions. Holmes recommended punctual retirement by ten-thirty at night and cold water rather than coffee in the morning. It was for the best, Lowell now thought, that Wendell had turned in the stethoscope for the professor’s lectern; he did not have the patience to see suffering through to the end.
Fanny Dunlap had been little Mabel’s governess after Maria’s death, and perhaps someone outside his life would have known it was inevitable that she would assume a position as Maria’s substitute in Lowell’s eyes. The transition to a new, plainer wife was not so difficult as Lowell had feared, and for this many friends blamed him. But he would not wear grief on his sleeve. Lowell abhorred sentimentality from the bottom of his soul. Besides, the truth was that Maria no longer felt real to him most of the time. She was a vision, an idea, a faint gleam in the sky like the stars fading out before sunset. “My Beatrice,” Lowell had written in his journal. But even that doctrine demanded all the energy of the soul to believe in, and before long only the most vague specter of Maria occupied his thoughts.
Besides Mabel, Lowell had fathered three children with Maria, the healthiest of whom lived two years. The death of this last child, Walter, preceded Maria’s by a year. Fanny had a miscarriage soon after their marriage and was left incapable of bearing children. So James Russell Lowell had one living child, a daughter, raised forthrightly by a barren second wife.
When she was young, Lowell thought it would be enough to hope Mabel would be a great, strong, vulgar, mud pudding-baking, tree-climbing little wench. He taught her to swim, to skate, and to walk twenty miles a day, as he could.