In the meantime, Fields ordered Osgood to compile a list of all employees of Ticknor & Fields who had fought in the war, relying primarily on the Directory of Massachusetts Regiments in the War of Rebellion. That evening, Nicholas Rey and the others would attend the governor’s latest reception to honor Boston’s soldiers.
Messrs. Longfellow, Lowell, and Holmes dispersed themselves through the crowded reception hall. Each of them kept a watchful eye on Mr. Greene, and, in casual pretext, interviewed many veterans, searching for the soldier Greene had described.
“One might think this was the back room of a tavern rather than the State House!” Lowell complained as he waved away some fugitive smoke.
“Why, Mr. Lowell, have you not bragged of smoking ten cigars in one day, and called the sensation a Muse?” Holmes chided.
“We never like the smell of our own vices in other people, Holmes. Ah, let’s steer here for a drink or two,” Lowell suggested.
Dr. Holmes’s hands burrowed into the pockets of his moire silk waistcoat; his words poured through him as through a sieve. “Every soldier I’ve spoken to either claims never to have met anyone remotely matching the description given by Greene or has seen a man exactly of that type just the other day but doesn’t know his name or where I might find him. Perhaps Rey will have better luck.”
“Dante, my dear Wendell, was a man of great personal dignity, and one secret of his dignity was that he was never in a hurry. You will never find him in an unseemly haste—an excellent rule for us to follow.”
Holmes laughed skeptically. “And you’ve followed this rule?”
Lowell helped himself to a meditative sip of claret, then said thoughtfully, “Tell me, Holmes, have you ever had a Beatrice of your own?”
“Beg your pardon, Lowell?”
“A woman to have fired the awesome depths of your imagination.”
“Why, my Amelia!”
Lowell bellowed with laughter. “Oh, Holmes! Did you never sow your tame oats? A wife cannot be your Beatrice. You may trust my advice, for in common with Petrarch, Dante, and Byron, I was desperately in love before I was ten years old. What pangs I have suffered my own heart only knows.”
“How Fanny would enjoy such talk. Lowell!”
“Pshaw! Dante had his Gemma, who was the mother of his children but not the reach of his inspiration! You know how they met? Longfellow does not believe it, but Gemma Donati is the lady mentioned in Dante’s Vita Nuova, who comforts Dante over the loss of Beatrice. You see that young woman?”
Holmes followed Lowell’s gaze to a slender young maiden with raven hair, which was shining under the hall’s brilliant chandeliers.
“I remember it still—1839, at Allston’s Gallery. There was the most beautiful creature I had ever set eyes upon, not unlike that fair beauty enchanting her husband’s friends over there in the corner. Her features were perfectly Jewish. She had a dark complexion, but one of those clear faces where every shade of feeling floats across like the shadow of a cloud across the grass. From my position in the room, the outline of her eyes entirely merged in the shadows of her brows and the darkness of her complexion, so that you only saw a glory undefined and mysterious. But such eyes! They almost made me tremble. That one vision of her seraphic loveliness gave me more poetry…”
“Was she intelligent?”
“Heavens, I don’t know! She batted her lashes in my direction and I could not bring myself to say a word. There is only one way to go with flirtatious women, Wendell, and that is to run. Still, twenty-five years and more pass, yet I cannot banish her from my memory. I assure you we all have our own Beatrice, whether living near us or alive only in our mind.”
Lowell stopped as Rey approached. “Officer Rey, the winds have shifted in our favor—I can tell as much. We are only fortunate to have you on our side.”
“Your daughter must be thanked for that,” Rey said.
“Mabel?” Lowell turned to him, aghast.
“She came to speak with me, to persuade me to assist you gentlemen.”
“Mabel spoke with you in secret? Holmes, did you know of this?” Lowell demanded.
Holmes shook his head. “Not at all. We must toast her, though!”
“If you grow warm with her over it, Professor Lowell,” Rey warned him with a serious upward lift of his jaw, “I shall have you arrested.”
Lowell laughed heartily. “Incentive enough, Officer Rey! Now, do let us keep the pot boiling.”
Rey nodded confidentially and continued across the room.
“Can you imagine that, Wendell? Mabel going behind my back like that, thinking she could change things!”
“She is a Lowell, my dear friend.”
“Mr. Greene remains strong,” Longfellow reported as he joined Lowell and Holmes. “But I am worried that—” Longfellow broke off. “Ah, here come Mrs. Lincoln and Governor Andrew.”
Lowell rolled his eyes. Their station in society had proved bothersome for this evening’s purposes, as handshakes and lively conversations with professors, ministers, politicos, and university officials distracted from their intended purpose.
“Mr. Longfellow.”
Longfellow turned to his other side to find a trio of Beacon Hill society women.
“Why, good evening, ladies,” Longfellow said.
“I was just speaking of you, sir, while on holiday in Buffalo,” said the raven-haired beauty of the trinity.
“Is that so?” Longfellow asked.
“Indeed, with Miss Mary Frere. She speaks so tenderly of you, says you are a rare person. She had such wonderful times with you and your family at Nahant last summer, from the sound of it. And now I happen upon you here. How wonderful!”
“Oh? Well, how very kind of her to say that.” Longfellow smiled, but then quickly adjusted his gaze away. “Now, where has Professor Lowell run to? Have you met him?”
Nearby, Lowell was loudly retelling one of his vintage anecdotes to a small audience. “Then Tennyson growled from his corner of the table: ‘Yes, damn ‘em. I’d like to take a knife and rip their guts up!’ Being a true poet, King Alfred used no circumlocution—such as ‘abdominal viscera’—for that part of the body!”
Lowell’s hearers laughed and jested.
“If two men should try to look alike,” Longfellow said, turning back to the three ladies, who stood with their ears glowing bright pink and their mouths helplessly open, “they could not do it better than Lord Tennyson and Professor Lovering of our university.”
The raven-haired beauty beamed gratefully at Longfellow’s swift flight away from Lowell’s indecency.
“Why, isn’t that something to think about?” she said.
When Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior received a note from his father that Dr. Holmes, too, would be attending the soldiers’ banquet at the State House, he sighed, reread it, and then cursed. It was not a matter of minding his father’s presence as much as a matter of others demanding for their entertainment that they account for each other’s welfare. How is dear old Dad? Still tinkering with his poems while he’s at his teaching? Still tinkering with his teaching while at his poems? Is it true that the little doctor can speak________words every minute, Captain Holmes? Why should he be bothered with questions on Dr. Holmes’s favorite subject: Dr. Holmes.
In a crowd of other members of his regiment, Junior was now introduced to several Scottish gentlemen who were visiting as a delegation. At the enunciation of Junior’s full name there was the usual rehearsal of questions regarding his parentage.
“Are you the son of Oliver Wendell Holmes?” a latecomer to the exchange, a Scot around Junior’s age, asked after presenting himself as some sort of mythologist.
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t like his books.” The mythologist smiled and walked away.
In the silence that seemed to surround Junior, standing there alone amid the chatter, he felt abruptly angry at his father’s omnipresence in the world and cursed him again. Did one want to spread his reputation so indiscriminately wide that worms of men, like the one Junior had just met, could judge you? Junior turned and saw Dr. Holmes on the edge of a circle, along with the governor, and James Lowell gesticulating in the center. Dr. Holmes was on his toes, mouth drifting open; he was lying in wait for a chance to barge in. Junior tried to skirt around the group to the other side of the hall.