The Dante Club Page 0,45

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