Henry had sailed alone for New York and when the boat docked he discovered that the funeral had taken place that very day. He was too late now to do anything other than listen to accounts of how his father had died peacefully and easily, inhabit the house so recently the house of the dead and read his father’s will. In the years that followed, he never allowed himself to brood on the date of his father’s burial and on their decision to consign Henry senior to the winter earth without Henry there to witness the burial or touch his father’s dead face before the lid was placed on the coffin, though he was so close.
He came to understand that this decision had been firmly made by his sister Alice and he found himself too fascinated by her sudden brisk grasping of the reins of decision, in a family where she had never been allowed to decide anything, to be bruised by his strange exclusion. And in the weeks after the funeral he came to understand as well his sister’s desperate need to keep William in England, to insist that Wilky, too ill to travel, stayed in Milwaukee and that Bob returned there. With William present, Alice James could not have been as deliberately rude to and impatient with Aunt Kate as she now was, since William would have stood between them, since his presence would have held everyone’s attention, thus ensuring that Alice’s efforts to belittle her aunt could not be as starkly successful. Nor would she have felt as free to cling so openly to Miss Loring, nor would Miss Loring, with the entire family present, have taken the same liberties in the James household before moving Alice into her own house.
Henry did nothing, once in Boston, to encourage William to return. William, without speaking or lifting a finger, would have replaced their father. Henry could not have had the silence of the house to himself, with only his Aunt Kate, whom he loved, for company. He could not have slept in his father’s bed, feeling it his duty somehow to do so, nor come to possess the house in all its aura of absence waiting to be filled with as open a heart as he did now that William was so far away.
The fact that he, rather than William, had been made executor of his father’s estate could not have pleased William. And that he could make the details of his father’s last days known to William and the wishes and the kind condolences of old friends such as Francis Child and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and that he had placed himself in control without seeking advice, could not, he knew, have improved William’s temper.
ABOUT A WEEK after his father was buried, a letter came in William’s hand addressed to Henry James. Since Henry was awaiting news of William, it did not occur to him that the letter had been written to his father and that he should not open it. He had read the first paragraph before he realized his mistake, even though, as he subsequently noticed, the letter had begun ‘Dear Father’. He held the letter for several days, telling no one about it, and then on a Sunday morning, the last day of the year, when it was quiet, the snow deep and the light scarce, he made his way to the cemetery where his parents lay close together.He was alone and he made sure as he approached the grave that no one was watching him. He hoped that his presence now might help his parents to feel the great ease he wished for them, to know how grateful he was to them and how raw with sadness he remained at their departure from the earth. He took William’s letter out of his pocket and in a voice clear and audible he began to read it to the old ghost for whom it had been intended. But gradually, as the tears came, he reduced his voice to a whisper and several times he had to stop and put his hand over his face as these words, meant so tenderly, moved him more than any of his own words, or any words about his father he had heard since he arrived. He forced himself to continue:
‘As for the other side, and Mother, and all our possible meeting I can’t say anything. More than ever at this moment do I feel that if that were true, all would be solved and justified. And it comes strongly over me in bidding you good-bye how life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the art of bidding an ordinary good-night. Good night my sacred old Father! If I don’t see you again – Farewell! A blessed farewell!’
Somewhere in the depths of the cold earth, Henry felt, his father’s spirit lingered, enough for Henry to long for the letter to last, so that he would not have to walk away in silence, leaving his parents there in a place he now viewed as the most sacred and forgiving. He hated the barrenness of the winter season and the sounds of his own footsteps on the ice as he moved away.
He walked from the graveyard to the house where his sister-in-law was staying to find that William was, once more, threatening to come home. Alice showed him their sparse accommodation. In deep despair she explained that she was exhausted by caring for her father-in-law in his last days, when she had joined Alice and Aunt Kate beside his bed. Her children were also becoming a great toll on her energy, she said, and explained further that having a husband in a state of desolation in these few small rooms was something she desperately wished to avoid. Henry said that he would write once again to William. He almost told her that he understood what a burden William’s idle and distressed presence could be in any household, but, since the intensity of her feeling on the matter struck him as somewhat odd, and so different from the way his own mother had dealt with his father, he did not speak.
That evening, Henry sat at his father’s desk and told William what he had done in the cemetery, trying to bring to life for his brother how his final words to his father had been solemnly offered to the old man’s spirit. He added his belief that William coming home would be an idle step and begged him to let the interest subside. But even as he did so, he knew that William, on hearing what Henry had done with his private and heartfelt letter, would resent such liberties being taken, no matter how solemnly.
He awaited his brother’s reply and when it came it was full of hatred for the London he was being forced, almost against his will, to inhabit. William wrote of the filthy, smeary, smoky fog and the universal stupidity of the population whose like did not exist, he believed, anywhere else under the sun.
HENRY WAS BUSY. As the executor he had many meetings with the lawyers. He had been appalled by his father’s decision to leave Wilky out of the will, his father having believed that Wilky had been given enough in his lifetime. Henry presumed that his siblings agreed that this was not to be tolerated and he set about correcting it by asking each of them to offer a portion of their legacy to Wilky, enough to make his legacy equal to theirs. He planned to travel to Milwaukee to see both Wilky and Bob and made further arrangements to go to Syracuse to see at first hand his father’s properties there and consider whether it would be wiser to dispose of them or keep them and arrange for the dividends from the rents to be disbursed as the rents came in.
As he organized these matters, with much discussion of share value and income, percentages and bonds, William’s regular missives from London, displaying self-pity and containing threats to return, made him impatient. His sister-in-law seemed increasingly agitated at the possibility of her husband’s sudden and precipitous return. She showed him each letter William wrote, sighing at their tone.
Although he remained uneasy about having read these letters, and wondered about the state of his brother’s marriage, Henry had no difficulty writing to William once more, demanding that he see reason. As he finished the letter late at night, adding many details arising from his role as executor, he felt a strange power which increased in the morning as he realized how hurt and infuriated William would be on reading it. He experienced a sense of lightness at that prospect coupled with a distinct feeling of being fully in the right and acting for the best.