She found no rest, except through reading the book of Numbers, where at every turn secondary dictates back up the principal dictates. She loved the part about the building of the Temple, and the details of the treasures assembled to fashion the Ark of the Covenant. She had eight children, like entries in an order book. With each one, she felt ashamed of the bitter, brutal springtime that inflated her hips, and of the nursling hanging from her breast like a comma dangling from a figure eight. Nevertheless, she would return right away, with intense joy, to being the icy-veined mistress of the Melville family’s purse strings. Herman, number three of the eight, was given his mother’s father’s first name. As if he’d been suckled on horseback through chinks in the steel armor of one of Ariosto’s female warriors, Herman retained only a stinging and distasteful memory of that extraordinary, tactile delight of childhood: the fondling of his mother’s breasts. Oh no, not for him! All the same, he’d always taken the milk when it flowed. Then, as now, a drop on steel was still a drop.

From his infancy, boats and the sea had drawn him powerfully, like all potent drafts that lead to potent disorders. He was barely ten years old when, from New York, he wrote to his father at his shipshape home:

On this wintery afternoon they took me right out to the end of the jetty that goes the farthest out to sea. There were gigantic waves, higher than mountains. The masts of the ships were lashing the water all around, like whips. And they told me they were lashing the water this way across the whole wide world: at Le Havre, at Liverpool, and right in the port of London.

His childhood was perfectly normal, but his father would say, “He’s very late to start talking and he seems to be a bit slow-witted.” Yes, true, when it came to numbers. West, his teacher at the Albany Classical School, would later say, “I remember him well. He was my favorite student. He was completely useless at mathematics, but very strong at translation and composition. He loved to dream things up and write them down, even though, by and large, the majority of his fellow students detested this assignment and looked for any way to avoid it, in spite of all the penalties.” By the time West says this about him, Herman, having died in 1891, will already have a head full of earth.

But for the moment, it’s full of balm, and May is blossoming in his eyes. His memories are kings: the islands crowned by foaming sunshine; the unbroken silence of the waters crowned by atolls; and the monstrous, erratic crowns of typhoons, like the crowns of Shakespeare’s monarchs, rolling through collapsing monsoons. The balm, however, came from a simple crown of thorns. They placed it over his head one day. It sank right down to those unruly wings of crow-black hair that cover his temples. When he was taking it off, he scratched his forehead with a thin, red thorn. He looks at himself in the mirror. There’s no longer any trace left on his forehead, but if he touches the spot with his finger, it’s still sticky and soft, as though he were touching a honey cake.