'In other people’s mouths9
95
thought, how we are of one substance with the past, with countrymen, with
peerage, with all who went before us, even in the nomadism of the late twentieth
century, when families were easily sundered and people moved away from one
another” (22). His parents’ divorce affected him as divorce affects a lot of
children: it cut loose the foundation from under him and he turned inward; a shy
kid to begin with, “five different address in five years” because of the divorce did
not make his life any easier (21).
But now, in discussing a poem with his father, Moody “encountered a
guy [who he had] never been introduced to . . . whose preoccupation had always
been numbers, numbers, numbers” (21). In his discussion of Donne, his father
introduces him to Hemingway, and Moody feels that in his new role as a reader of
important literature, “that the bright light of parental affection had been turned on
[him] for the first time” (22). Shortly afterwards, his father “urges” him on to the
favorite author and book of his college years, Herman Melville and Moby-Dick.
In the ensuing conversation it is the result of a nod of recognition to Hawthorne,
Melville’s contemporary, that allows the father to add, “ . . . what was most
interesting about Hawthorne was that he had written a story about a relative o f
ours, a story about a Moody!” (23, italic in original).13 The source of that claim is
located in the footnote that Nathaniel Hawthorne added to his story “The
Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable” published in 1836: “Another clergyman in
New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of York Maine, who died about eighty years
since, made himself remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the
Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a different import.
In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved friend; and from that day till the
hour of his own death, he hid his face from men.”14
If life were like fiction, Moody’s “five-day search” would end with
certitude: the original image of the veil, confirmed. And yet life is not fiction and
the truth that they sought turns out to be a lie—a story, a tale, a fiction. After
tracking down papers, journals, diaries, odd-stories of the “clan” Moody, it
became readily apparent that there is more than one Moody family involved. As
they come to the end of the line, tracing and retracing their steps, working through
the genealogies, all the signs point to the awful conclusion: “that the Moodys of
my line had no conclusive relation to the Moodys o f Handkerchief Moody’s line,
unless I w 2v