Silences (21 page)

            
“Call me Hetty, Daniel, I’d like to think that name belonged to me yet.”

She gets up, brings him his slippers, kneels to put them on:

                  
Another of the old foolish tricks gone long ago. There was a look on his face which had not been there this
many a day. He had such a credulous heart, so easy to waken into happiness. I took his wrist in my bony hands, to raise myself; the muscles were like steel, the
cording veins throbbing with health; there was an indescribable rest in the touch.

                  
“Daniel,” I said, looking him full in the face, “I’d like to have no mission in God’s world. I’d like to give up my soul, and forget
everything but you.”

“Yes,” she says later. “It’s a fever . . . In the blood.”

Each hardening of determination comes out of situations of drudgery (“Was [it] for this in reality God had made me?”) or out of reinvolvement with her music,

            
the work of my life. . . . I got it [the score of an opera] out now by stealth, at night, putting my pen to it here and there, with the controlled
fever with which a man might lay his hand on a dear dead face, if he knew the touch would bring it back to life. Was there any waking that dead life of mine?

Her final decision—to accept an offer for her opera to be produced, and to sing in it herself—is made as she sits mending the weekly heap of the boys’ half-washed, leather-stained socks after a long exhausting day of making-do:

       
     
The actual dignity and beauty of [this family] life, God’s truth itself, may have grown dim to me, behind a faint body and tired fingers; but let the hard-worked woman who is without that sin throw the first stone at me.

Each hardening is followed by acts of love; renewal of responsibility; magnified sensitivity to others’ feelings; and terrible longing not to have the conflict:

       
     
To nestle down into this man’s heart and life. To make his last years that warm Indian-summer day! I could do it! I! What utter rest there were in that!

                  
Yet was this power within me to rot and waste?

The movement of the story is that of
David Gaunt:
the back and forth embracing of the chimera with her brain, and the thrusting it aside with her heart—until the resolution.

The happy ending is what Rebecca, big with child, must
have believed those last few months, sitting beside a bleak stove thinking of “the great talking fires at home.” She wrote to Annie:

            
The air is warmer and the sunshine clearer. We read and walk and I sew a little. . . . The time has been full of a deep breath of content and waiting.

                  
All good things lie in the
future.

Richard Harding Davis was born on April 18, 1864. He was named after Rebecca’s father, whose death three weeks before had been kept secret from her until her mother could come and tell her. The telling coincided with the onset of labor. For a month she was very ill, kept to her bed. When Annie wanted to come and visit, Rebecca asked her not to until she was stronger and the baby had had
“a chance to grow fat and better pleased with the new world he has found. Just now he is the smallest tiredest little thing, and homely too, only with big dark eyes.”

Clarke found a cheap rooming house in Point Pleasant near the sea for the summer, and in fall they moved at last from Carrie’s into a place by themselves—a rented yardless Philadelphia row house, “not a scrap of growing green anywhere
in sight,” one of several hundred others exactly like it for streets around. They christened it “Centre of the Universe,” a name to be attached to wherever they lived.

In December she took her baby to Wheeling, where Clarke—building a law practice, immersed in political activities, editing, and working at the post office part time—wrote her: “Dearest Pet, will you help your old Boy a little”
with some writing?

Dearest Pet helped her “old Boy” and herself a lot in those next months. Five
Atlantic
stories and
Haunted Manor House,
a book-length mystery for
Peterson’s:
writing very fast and from the surface, nothing she really cared about, not stopping to rewrite or revise. She wanted help in the house and a yard and vista and to live by the sea that in the one summer she had come so
dearly to love.

She got help with the baby and another summer by the sea. She was pregnant again, and after a while the writing raveled
off. It was just as well; in that seaside time she was dreaming up a new book. It would be a major work. She would write it carefully, take her time, not as with those potboilers she had spun off.

Charles Belmont was born in January 1866. It was nearly a year
more before Rebecca got to her book. In a cooped-up winter and spring, the babies, then Clarke, were sick. She wrote about Holmes again, his disillusionment with Rapp’s Harmonist commune (an actual commune) in Pennsylvania. That was a lead piece in the
Atlantic
too (in May 1866), her last. The money managed Point Pleasant for a third vivifying summer, and in the fall, with the noises of new neighbors
from the adjoining houses in her ears (Clarke had moved them to another row house without telling her) and her toddlers in healthy voice, Rebecca started her planned major novel.

Her intention was to “publish it in book form, after giving it care and time,” but as usual there were money problems. An offer from a new magazine,
Galaxy,
to serialize it was too tempting: she earned $3,600 for the
serial rights alone.

From the beginning, the situation was nightmarish. Often there were only exhausted tag-ends of herself in tag-ends of time left over after the house, Clarke, the babies, for a book that demanded all her powers, all her concentration. Sometimes she had to send off great chunks, unread, unworked, to meet the inexorable monthly deadline.

Editorial problems developed.
Galaxy
was changing its format, wanted the installments cut. “It was only at your request that I gave it to Galaxy to publish serially,” Rebecca protested in a tone different from the shaken Rebecca to Fields six years before. “You must allow me the feeling which the humblest workman has for his work. . . . Whether it mutilates the story or not [seems] a secondary consideration to you.”

But primary
to her. To no avail. Her situation as contracted-for employee was made clear. They cut, and sometimes she cut. Yet the pages poured on and on—868 printed pages.

Waiting for the Verdict,
finished in 1868, was intended to pose what Rebecca considered the basic question of the time: how was the nation going to redress the wrong of slavery? Were the freed
slaves to have work, education, respect,
freedom?
^*
The blacks, the nation, the future, were waiting for the verdict.

Her black characters would show the full human spectrum, the “as they might be”; her white characters would show the reasons for hope—and for hopelessness. The best and worst of the South would be juxtaposed with what was best and worst in the North.

The Civil War is still going on. Nathan (Nat), a slave, makes his hazardous
escape to freedom, involving many black and white lives with his own, learning all the way, and instructing others by example and words.

He puts the horrors of insurrection into perspective:

            
De white people in de Souf, dey want der own guver’ment, an’ dey fights for it wid artillery an’ Parrott guns, an’ kills tousands, an’ dey calls it war; an’ Nat Turner, he want his freedom, an’
he fights wid knives an’ pikes, an’ sech wepons as he gets, an’ kills fifty odd, an dey calls it murder.

Unprepossessing outwardly and in his own esteem, with surface slave manners, Nat is a mover, deep observer, prophet, resourceful hero, whose dedication to freedom and opportunity for his people is unshakable.

A Randolph of Virginia falls in love with Rosslyn, a Northern girl, for qualities
the Southern belles do not possess. She converts him to her Northern practices of “democracy and energy and practicality and opening fields of work . . . where help is needed.” He accepts her background: abolitionist, working class—”the
class which you place on a par with your slaves”—accepts even the secret of her birth: she is illegitimate.

His cousin, Margaret, also a Randolph though raised
in the North,
^*
is wooed and won by a brooding, immensely cultured, eminent Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Broderip, who has cured her father. The doctor too has a birth secret—he is part black. Strongly affected by Nat—who turns out to be his half brother, not seen since early childhood—and through Nat by a new sense of the black situation, Dr. Broderip tells his fiancée
his
birth secret.

“The negro
blood is abhorrent” to her. She lets the truth about him be known. He is excluded from his hospital, spurned by his patients, and ostracized by “polite society.” “The knowledge and skill acquired in all those patient years lay dead weight in his hands to-day.” Margaret’s Northern father, however, not only keeps his door open to the doctor, but organizes patients to fight for Broderip’s right to
continue practicing.

Nat slowly and successfully convinces Broderip that his place is helping to organize and lead a regiment of freed slaves:

            
“. . . dey don’t know who to trust. Dey hears dat de Yankees ’ll sell dem down inter Cuba, an’ as fur dere ole marsters—well, dey knows dem. . . . Dey’d fight like debbils under a man ob dere own cullor. . . . Dey calls M’s Linkum Moses. Moses
warn’t a white man, an’ a stranger,” deliberately. “He wur a chile ob de slave woman, an’ he went an’ stole all de learnin’ ob his masters, an’ den come back an’ took his people cross de riber inter freedom.
His own people,
suh.”

Broderip is killed in action. There are numerous other characters and situations: battle, escape, plantation, army, hospital, street scenes; life-going-on-as-usual social
scenes; bigotry, apathy, humanity, degrees of hypocrisy; action, suspense, talk, talk, talk—intense debate, “warring creeds,” dissensions; confusion, contradictions,
terror. There are surprising depths in the development of the main characters, most in Nat, Rosslyn, and the unprecedented, complex Dr. Broderip, torn between his whiteness and his blackness. There is also stereotype, slush, excess,
caricature, melodrama, and occasional racism on Rebecca’s part.

Waiting for the Verdict
never became a great book. More than anyone else, Rebecca knew that she had failed. She had conceived, intended to write, a great novel. She had failed to write it: had not given (had) the self and time (or the knowledge always) to write it. “A great hope fell, you heard no noise, the ruin was within.” She
never attempted such an ambitious book again.

She also knew that
Waiting for the Verdict
was a book of far more substance and compass than any other fiction being written—and praised—at the time; and that it alone recorded, tried to make sense of, the seething currents of the Civil War period. Partly because of the unselected unwieldiness, the first-draft character of some of the pages, partly
because of disturbing truths and portents in the book, understandings far ahead of the time, almost no one recognized this.
^*

“Sentimental propaganda for the negro dictates
Waiting for the Verdict,
” is how one reviewer dismissed it. The kindest remark
The Nation
made in a lengthy three-column review on November 21, 1867, was that,

            
As it stands, it preserves a certain American flavor.
The author has evidently seen something corresponding to a portion of what she describes, and she has disengaged herself to a much greater degree than many of the female story-tellers of our native country from heterogeneous reminiscences of English novels.

Then it went on to say:

            
Mrs. Davis has written a number of short stories, chiefly of country life in Virginia and Pennsylvania,
all distinguished by a certain severe and uncultured strength, but all disfigured by an injudicious straining after realistic effects which leave nature and reality at an infinite distance behind and beside them. The author has made herself the poet of poor people—laborers, farmers, mechanics, and factory hands. She has attempted to reproduce in dramatic form their manners and habits and woes
and wants. The intention has always been good, but the execution has, to our mind, always been monstrous. . . . She drenches the whole field beforehand with a flood of lachrymose sentimentalism, and riots in the murky vapors which rise. . . . It is enough to make one forswear for ever all decent reflection and honest compassion, and take refuge in cynical jollity and elegant pococurantism.

Pococurantism.
I looked it up. It means caring little, being indifferent, nonchalant.

            
. . . nothing is left but a crowd of ghastly, frowning, grinning automatons. The reader, exhausted by the constant strain upon his moral sensibilities, cries aloud for the good, graceful old nullities of the “fashionable novel.”
^*

It was about this time that Rebecca began her practice of ignoring reviews. Primarily
though, this was part of her rapid process of devaluing herself as a writer aspiring to art.

Never mind. She was at a time when she could say (indeed
had
to say, for it was true): “That is not all there is to life.” The almost total immersion that comes to a woman in a culture where full responsibility for home and growing new lives are hers, had engulfed Rebecca. The immediacy of Clarke, the
house, two little ones at their most demanding, absorbing, alluring, “each day a new discovery in the unfolding miracle of human life,” left little over for other intensities. She began keeping a diary—a wife and mother diary, not a writer’s diary—wishing she