Wilky covered his face with his hands and began to cry uncontrollably, but he could shape no more words. His crying grew louder, more hysterical, until he shook in the bed, his father and his brother watching him helplessly. Once his mother came, she held him and calmed him and spoke softly to all three of them.
‘When Wilky was a baby,’ she said when Wilky had finally fallen asleep, ‘and in his crib, he always seemed to be smiling. I tried to find out if he was smiling all the time, or if he heard me coming and began to smile only then. But I never could find out. That’s what I’d like now, that’s what I’m waiting for – that he will start to smile again.’
WILLIAM RETURNED to Harvard that September to continue his studies, but Henry did not follow him. His parents remained preoccupied with Wilky but were much relieved when, on a further assault on Fort Wagner which, fortunately, had been evacuated just before the attack, Bob survived unscathed.
Henry remained in his room as Wilky recovered and Bob stayed with his regiment. His mother’s response to his seclusion and his silence became sweeter once Wilky began to declare that he wished to return to the army as soon as he himself rather than his doctors felt that he could. His mother at mealtimes talked a great deal about the sacrifice and bravery of her two younger sons, but her tone was bitter rather than proud.
‘They have both seen things which no one of their age should see. They have both witnessed horrors and felt horrors, and I do not know now how they will ever settle down without being haunted by sights that none of us will ever be able to imagine. I wish they hadn’t joined. That’s all I can say. And I wish the war had never started.’
Aunt Kate nodded, but Henry senior stared passively and vaguely into the distance, as though his wife had made some mild observation. As soon as each meal was over, Henry returned to his room. His mother began, once more, to worry about his back, bringing him cushions and making him lie down rather than sit when he was reading.
He did not know what to tell them when his first story, written in the French style about an adulterous woman, was accepted by the Continental Monthly in New York. It would be published anonymously, so he knew that he could keep the news from them if he wished. He waited for a day or two, but then, on finding his father in the library alone, he decided to reveal his secret. Within an hour his father had read the story and expressed his disapproval of its contents, less than uplifting, he thought, and dramatizing the baser motives. Then his father wrote to William, who sent Henry a note mocking him and wondering how he came by his knowledge of adulterous French ladies. Finally, his father moved around Newport spreading the news of his son who was about to publish a story in the French style.
WILKY WENT back to his regiment, but was judged too unwell to continue, and so he returned home once more, determined on improving so that he could see the war out and be there for the victory. Nothing dimmed his enthusiasm. It became Henry’s habit, in this interlude as Wilky waited to rejoin his regiment, to sit with him silently reading while Wilky dozed or lay still without speaking. One night as he quietly prepared to return to his own room, leaving Wilky peaceful, he was confronted in the corridor by his Aunt Kate. She whispered to Henry that she had left some sweet-cake and some milk for him in the kitchen. Just as he was about to tell her that he did not want any cake or milk, he noticed her face darkening and her brow furrowing, and he understood that she wanted him to follow her to the kitchen.
On tiptoe the two of them moved down through the house. In the kitchen, she began to whisper something about Wilky’s recovery until she closed the door and then could talk out loud.
‘He’s mad to go back to the war,’ she said. ‘As though he didn’t have enough injuries, enough suffering.’
‘He remains idealistic about the cause,’ Henry said.
Aunt Kate pursed her lips disapprovingly.
‘He’ll never settle now, once this war is over. He is like all of the Jameses, except for you,’ she went on. ‘Headstrong, full of foolish enthusiasm.’
She studied his face to see if she had gone too far, but he smiled at her, amused, signalling that she could say more if she wished.
‘They were all the same, your father’s family. If they had one drink, then they had thousands of drinks. One night’s gambling led to them losing every penny. One page of theology and then…’ She stopped and shook her head and sighed.
‘And half of them died young, you know, leaving your cousins orphans, the Temple girls and poor Gus Barker. Of course, the old father, old William James of Albany, was as rich at that time as Mr Astor, but the Astors were all good at business, level-headed people, and the Jameses, once the father was dead, were good at gambling and drinking and dying young and running headlong towards foolish causes. Every time I listen to Wilky talking about going back to fight, I see the Jameses writ large, always ready to do something foolish. And William wanting to be a painter one day and a doctor the next. You’re the only one who takes after our side of the family, you’re the only solid one.’
‘But I studied law last year and changed my mind,’ Henry said.
‘You had no enthusiasm for the law. You did it to get away from here and with all the war madness going on, you were right. If you had stayed, they’d have joined you up and you would be limping around here with half of you amputated.’
Her voice was harsh now, and her eyes sharp, almost wild. In the dim lamplight she resembled a drawing of an old woman, both wise and mad. She stopped speaking and let her mouth and jaw settle. She watched him, waiting for a response. When he did not speak, she began again.
‘You’re the consistent one, the one who’ll know how to mind himself. At least we have you.’
BY THE TIME his son’s first story had appeared in print, Henry senior had grown restless once more and decided, he said, to move his family definitively to Boston. Henry was happy to leave Newport. He kept his stories secret now, letting his family see only the reviews he was writing for the periodicals – the Atlantic Monthly, the North American Review, the Nation. Without any of them knowing, he worked slowly and carefully every day on the story of a boy who goes to war, leaving his mother and his swee heart behind. When he began he was involved in a pure and artful invention, as though he were writing a ballad which Professor Child might collect. He established the difficult, proud and ambitious mother; John, her courageous and light-hearted son; and Lizzie, the sweetheart, innocent and pretty and flirtatious. He created each scene with deliberation, reading over each morning what he had written the previous day, constantly erasing and adding. He tried to work quickly so that there would be speed and flow to the narrative and, on one of these days, in the family’s new rented quarters on Beacon Hill, something occurred to him which shocked him but did not cause him to stop.
‘On the fourth evening, at twilight, John Ford,’ he wrote, ‘was borne up to the door on his stretcher, with his mother stalking beside him in rigid grief, and kind, silent friends pressing about with helping hands.’
John was too ill to be moved, and his injuries were too severe for him to be visited by his sweetheart Lizzie. As he wrote, Henry felt that he was closest to what concerned him in his waking life and most of his dreams: the fate of his injured brother. His father could not blame him for immorality nor William mock him for writing about a world he did not know. Suddenly an image came to him and he held his breath for worry that he might lose it: ‘When Lizzie was turned from John’s door, she took a covering from a heap of draperies that had been hurriedly tossed down in the halclass="underline" it was an old army blanket. She wrapped it round her and went out onto the veranda.’