BARNUM & THE ELEPHANTS
TWO YEARS HAVE PASSED since we were together in this room. You finished your work and went home to Trenton. I finished mine and went to prison. Much has happened, but I dare say we are much the same as before. The rise and fall—of a man or an empire—takes time to accomplish. Rome wasn’t built—nor did it end—in a day. I expect to go on awhile longer.
Melville? He goes on as always. He’s the rock on which he dashes himself to pieces.
In my cell, I read his adventure stories, Typee, Omoo, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick. I’ll read them again on lonely, damp winter nights with the coal stove roaring like Ahab’s own ocean or curses. I’m no Ahab, Roebling, except in the immensity of the hatred I conceived for John Gibbs. It had been simmering for months, but the boiling over seems to have taken hardly any time at all. Three weeks … four. When it did rise up in me, it was scalding.
Ahab. A man with such a name could never be a cringer, a worrier after his virtue and his purse, a petitioner whose whimper has turned hoarse in supplication, whose trouser knees are worn, whose head is bowed and back is bent, whose element is a slurry of cinders, wet ash, and horses’ stale staining the winter snow through which he tramps resignedly from almshouse to poorhouse until he is carried to his last and smallest house, a plain coffin in a pauper’s grave. Not that I’m any of those things, mind you; I never once begged the judge for mercy. But my fury did not last, and, like a pot taken off the boil, the hatred subsided when the cause was removed.
What a name is Ahab! To be called thus must sever a boy from dependency, put iron in his marrow, and make a cold forge of the heart. It is a name to blow him out of childhood into the fullness of life, never mind the cost. Only a man of uncommon strength of will can bear the name of the seventh king of Israel and the ruler of Moab, whose corpse was defiled by dogs and swine, according to the prophecy of Isaiah, and whom God hated.
I shouldn’t mind being hated by Him if I could be in the company of such a man, even if he was laid waste in Gilead and buried in a sty. King Ahab roared his defiance, as I would wish to do mine when the time comes. Melville’s famous captain did the same, although I’d sooner have been in the retinue of the Israelite than aboard the Pequod with its crazed master and crew. Ahab—raised in the Holy Land or in Nantucket—was accursed by God. Sometimes I think I am, as well, although my Christian name would suit an effete poet or a parlor snake.
We all come at last to our story’s end, and I don’t give a damn if my husk, after the great winnowing, molders in the ground on Ward’s Island or in my father’s crypt at Green-Wood Cemetery—a pleasure park for cast-off flesh soon to be no more. Our bones are none the worse for common dirt, so long as they danced when the body was quick. That was the philosophy of my father, who began life a poor boy and ended it in the handsome tomb of a merchant prince. Having been rich for a time, he’d had the foresight to buy a vault in which he and his heirs could dwell “in perpetuity”—a condition existing nowhere except in the deed to a cemetery allotment.
In prison, I had two years to ponder the Wheel of Fortune’s having turned against me. In my fancy, I chose to think of them as a sojourn on one of the Heliades, the seven islands in the Ocean Stream, where the people of the sun still live amid grape and fig vines, pear and apple trees. Some good came of my classical education after all! In my story, I owed my escape to Melville, who rowed me across the harbor to a waiting ship, just as the grown Pip had done for Magwitch. He was taken and drowned, but in my daydreams I fared better. I embarked on the Highlander, captained by a saintly man, which carried me, as in a dream, to the ocean between India and Ethiopia, called the Arabian Sea. I know why we tell one another stories. The reason is not, as Martin claimed, to console us for having only one life to call our own; stories help us to endure it.
You’re a good listener, Roebling, if a laconic one. Your confinement makes you hungry for tales having nothing to do with metallurgy, mathematics, and catenary curves. And what in hell is a catenary curve? Never mind—I’m certain not to understand it. But what a magnificent thing your mind has wrought, my friend! And we both have lived to see it.
I’m glad you let me visit you again. I was afraid you’d shun me. We’re much alike, I think. We are Isolatos—you, by reason of your sickness, and I, well, because I’m a bankrupt whose tastes are too elevated for his purse, which is too meager for the requirements of polite society. The patricians disdain my penury far more than the fact of my imprisonment. Why, some of the wealthiest men have been crooks: Boss Tweed, Thomas Durant, the rascal behind the Crédit Mobilier scandal and the Union Pacific “con,” Gould and Frick—and your contractor J. Lloyd Haigh, who is now breaking rocks at Sing Sing for having sold you inferior wire for the cables. The whole shebang could have fallen down like “London Bridge” had the fraud not come to light! Crooks, one and all, and yet they were accounted men of eminence and rank.
I called Durant a “rascal.” The words we use for villainy are, like villain itself, ridiculous to modern ears. Reprobate. Scoundrel. Ruffian. Roughneck. Rogue. I might just as well have called him a “whoreson dog” or a “jacksauce,” as in Shakespeare’s day—or a memorable phrase by Alexander Pope, which Melville used when he disparaged Collector of Customs Caruthers as a “mere white curd of Ass’s milk!” The wickedness of this century has outrun our vocabulary, and I suppose it will be left to the future to say what we truly were in our time. What will evil mean, I wonder, in the twentieth century? What range, resources, and ruthlessness will it imply?
In this city, which the world calls “great,” there are those who will not be swayed by sentiment or suffer their purposes to be altered, who recoil at human frailty, and chafe at the restraints imposed by lawmakers and churchmen. They would give the Devil title to their soul and sign all requisite conveyances in their own blood before they’d see their schemes come to naught. They won’t blandish or fawn—no, not even at Doomsday, when, dressed in silken shrouds, they demand to be let in through heaven’s gate. I once fancied myself one of them. I might have been one still had circumstances not humbled me—had not ironed me flat. If only there were a drawing salve we could smear on our breast and be rid of all the poisons that waste us, body and soul! I wish He had made me other than I was.
I recall reading in the Herald the early stories on the bends, which struck the diggers inside the second caisson. Caisson sickness nearly finished you. Having escaped burning and drowning, you became disabled by the very air you breathed inside that ghastly tomb. Your invalidism could have spelled disaster for the project—in the tabloids at any rate, those stew pots of hearsay and scandal. But the bridge stands, complete and miraculous, and has only to await Barnum’s stunt to allay the public’s fear that it will collapse. If only we could do the same for the airy structures our minds create out of nothing but desire and on which we raise our lives as though on bedrock! How reassuring it would be if Barnum’s elephants could march across our schemes and prove their worthiness, if only to ourselves!
Yes, I read it in the papers at the time: The Manhattan tower rests on sand. You stopped thirty feet short of bedrock, knowing the bridge would be upheld by mathematics. It was a gamble, and one we all must take eventually: to hazard “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” on an uncertain foundation. Barnum is for Barnum, and it’s a silly business to rely on pachyderms for proof! But they will prove you correct, Roebling, once they’ve plodded across the river from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Your bridge will still be standing.
If you like, I’ll finish the story I began two years ago. I’ll tell you how my life slipped out from under me.
The Slide at 157 Bleecker Street, the Bowery, April 24, 1882
I didn’t visit Martin for a week after the accident. There was no reason I should have gone sooner. What purpose would have been served? We were not bound like the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, whom I once saw at Barnum’s circus. Would you call them twins, or being indivisible, did they constitute a single person? In any case, Martin and I were no more than friends, and only once have I felt the attachment for another that surpasses all the rest.
In his absence, Gibbs and I worked together, and as he’d done previously, he acted as if nothing extraordinary had passed between us. He was downright amiable and behaved toward me in a manner he must have thought charming. He was all smiles and pleasantries and would bring me small treats to savor: a jar of oysters, a slab of gammon, a cold meat pie, and once a sea cucumber from the chink’s doggery on Mott Street, which I couldn’t stomach. Each night when we parted, he’d pat my shoulder and wish me a safe journey home. He appeared to be a changed man, but I never trusted him. I don’t believe in the reformation of churches or of men. God and His creatures are immutable, or else the world would unravel into nothing, like a ball of wool.
I recall one afternoon in particular: We had gone down into the hold of a Dutch merchant ship to weigh and appraise a shipment of woolen cloth from Leyden.
“How is friend Martin?” asked Gibbs solicitously. “I hope his foot is mending.”
We had paused to smoke a cigar.
“Why should I know or care what’s become of Martin Finch?” I replied waspishly. It was a foolish question—the reflex action, say, of a starfish, one of whose arms has been poked with a stick.
“Why, isn’t he your friend?” asked Gibbs, amazed. “Before the poor fellow’s accident, you two were thick as thieves.”
“We are acquaintances.”
He sniffed and his nostrils flared. Had he been a bloodhound, he’d have bayed at the scent of a discovery worth the hunt and worthy of being torn apart.
“We have interests in common.”
Had he followed us to the library?
“We enjoy a yarn,” I said with the air of a man who likes to sit around a barrel of corn whiskey and guffaw over a vicious tale with his fellow good-for-nothings.
“We all do!” said Gibbs, and laughed. “A good yarn beats diddling a woman’s cunny. Am I right, Shelby?”
I could feel my face redden. “I don’t know about that!” I said, accompanied by what I judged to be an indecent wink.
“Ha! There’s the lad!” He smoked his cigar thoughtfully and then said, “Let’s you and me go see what the world of men is really like.”
He noted my hesitation.
“Come on, man! I’ll show you the sights of the city you missed when you were a big bug uptown. Unless you’d rather visit an injured friend,” he simpered tenderly. “Were you planning to see poor Martin Finch tonight?”
“No,” I snapped. “Why would I be?”
“Then you’ll let me take you on a trip to the Bowery, the pesthole where I grew up.”
I agreed. What else could I have done?
WE RODE A HORSECAR DOWN HUDSON STREET to Bleecker and then walked to a disreputable-looking house at number 157. It was like any other house in the street, save that through its windows I could see men and women behaving as though the curtains were not open to the inspection of the curious.
“Welcome to the Slide, Shelby!” said Gibbs, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Had they been wooden instead of flesh, they’d have burst into flame. “Though we frequenters of the place call it ‘the Palace of Aladdin,’ in view of its manifold delights.”
We went inside the vestibule and, pushing through a beaded curtain, stepped into a large room infernally illuminated by gas fixtures, where every manner of vice was on display. I won’t bore you with a catalogue, Roebling, which would be varied and sordid. Suffice it to say, I’d never before encountered such depraved goings-on, except in the pages of The Pearl, which I threw into the fire in disgust.
A particularly wicked image is engraved on my memory: A woman was kneeling before a rowdy, who looked never to have bathed. Roebling, you are a man of the world and know that sometimes we will stumble on a forbidden scene and cannot tear our eyes away. I’m ashamed to have stood there openmouthed and watched as all around me men and women were behaving with equal shamelessness. But the worst was yet to come. Gibbs went to the kneeling woman, whispered in her ear something that made her smile, and then pulled quickly at her hair, which came away in his hands! It was then I realized that the woman was a man!
The viperous congregation turned to me while, one by one, the women changed their gender as easily as you doff your hat. They regarded me with amusement, their faces sweaty and evil-looking, paint and rouge smeared, their wigs clutched in hands whose fingernails were long and lacquered. I could have vomited on the Turkish rug, where damascene pillows suggested to my overheated fancy the languid attitudes of vice. I was overcome by nausea. I pinched my arm like a child, hoping to find that I was dreaming. Roebling, I did not know where to set my eyes! So this is Whitman’s “manly attachments” and “athletic love!” I said to myself, feeling revulsion for the old man. Then they came at me, slithering on all fours like snakes. I was sinking into the delirium experienced by drunkards at the frothy frontier of madness.
You may think that I made too much of it, Roebling; that I had only to turn on my heels to put the scene behind me. But I was gripped by a debility—what you and the sandhogs would have felt when oppressed by the malady of men out of their depth. Had the house—a house such as Edgar Poe would have lovingly described—been set afire by the torches of an outraged mob gathered in the street, I could not have moved—no, not even to save myself from burning.
I stood, immobile and oddly impassive, while the savages pulled me to the floor and ate me—faces turned to masks of greedy appetite, and their hands and mouths turned bloodred by the ruby-shaded lamps.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this story, of all the stories that constitute my life. It feels as though it never happened, or happened to somebody else. Even now I look back on that night in disbelief, like a man who caught his reflection doing something shameful in a mirror. That’s the way of stories, and why we’re right to fear them.
While I lay upon the floor, my mind passed in and out of darkness like a leaf moving in a breeze from light into shade and back again. At times, the room was black as pitch; at others, it was lighted by the lamps’ lurid shades. Awakened, I longed for darkness and insensibility, but no sooner had I lapsed into stupefaction than I would be roughly brought to consciousness by a jarring noise or rude handling and would feel, upon emerging from my “caisson,” a gnawing on my bones.
Was I imagining it?
I don’t know; I might have been. I was beside myself. A nice expression—don’t you think? It draws a picture of me standing next to some other me. A Chang and Eng! I saw, or thought I did, the hideous Gibbs. He seemed to be everywhere in the room—more goatish satyr than a man. He was the image and definition of depravity. The worst of it was, I knew that I’d struck a bargain with him, whose terms had yet to be disclosed.
The Finches’ House in Maiden Lane, April 25, 1882
The following day, I sent word to Melville that I’d taken sick. I did not say that the trouble lay within my soul. Maybe I should have; few others could have understood that organ and its maladies better than he. I wanted to be by myself awhile and worry the sharp tooth of guilt. I had done nothing worse at the Slide than to succumb to inertia. What others may have done to me cannot be charged to my account by an earthly or a heavenly tribunal. But conscience can be perverse, assigning guilt where none is deserved.
I wanted to atone!
I say again, Roebling, that I had nothing for which to atone. In any case, I felt guilty that I had not yet paid Martin a visit. He’d been charming company, and we’d grown close enough in spirit to speak frankly in a world where candor is seldom possible and rarely welcomed. Damn it, I had valued Martin as a friend and saw no reason why I shouldn’t visit him!
I rode an omnibus down Eighth as far as Greenwich Lane, then walked east to Broadway. The marvelous air and light and many scenes of contentment along the great thoroughfare were tonic for one whose mind was in turmoil. The locusts were already blooming, and the chestnuts seemed impatient to show their blossoms. On such a day, the world rediscovers its instinctual leaning toward spring and clemency. I studied the shop windows, thinking that I ought to buy a gift for Martin after having neglected him. In a bookseller’s on Broome Street, I hunted among volumes of poetry for one whose gift would not be misconstrued. Tennyson, perhaps, or Keats. And then my eyes lighted on a book by Melville: Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. I bought it at once, persuaded by its subtitle, although I was ignorant of its contents.
In Canal Street, I bought three cigars—for Martin, Franklin, and me. There are few places as pleasant as a tobacconist’s. One can stand and dream amid the humidors of the fragrant ends of the earth.
Arriving at the Finches’ house in Maiden Lane, I knocked and was shown inside by Franklin’s wife, whom I hadn’t met during my first visit. She’s a pretty woman, no older, I would guess, than thirty. She has an Irish colleen’s face, fair and lightly freckled; her eyes are green and flecked with gold; her smile is warm, her hair russet. She’d been in the kitchen when I knocked, and was apologizing for her hand, which felt moist and floury as I took it in greeting. Her smile was frank, her laugh delightful, and I thought that any man could easily be bewitched by her.
“Martin’s in his room. Why don’t you go up and visit?”
I hesitated.
“Martin!” she called up the staircase.
“Well?”
“You’ve a visitor!” Her voice, although raised, lost none of its sweetness. “Shelby Ross is here to see you.”
“Send him up!” Martin shouted in response.
“You’ll stay for supper!” she said peremptorily.
Her name is Ellen, by the way, and if one were liable to falling in love, she would be a likely object of affection.
“Hello, Shelby!” cried Martin as I walked into his room. “I’m glad you stopped!”
I had been afraid of finding him morose or, worse, angry for my not having come to see him sooner. His expression, however, conveyed only a genuine pleasure at my visit.
“How are you?” I asked, determined to put behind me the upheaval of the previous night. “You look well.”
“I feel well!”
I was unprepared for his jubilation; his mood could be called by no other name.
“Sit down!” he said. In his excitement, he spoke in the imperative.
I sat in a straight-backed chair by the window, through which I could see your bridge, Roebling, towering above the rooftops. It is the presiding muse and judge of all who beetle about in the streets of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
“You seem uncommonly cheerful,” I said, “for a man who’s lost his toes.”
“Not all of them, Shelby; I’ve enough left to be getting on with.”
“Here. I bought you something.”
I gave him Clarel. He glanced at it and offered a perfunctory “Thank you” before putting it aside. I was offended by his lack of interest in the gift but believed that I deserved no better. I realize now that my mind had been stained by the horrors of the Palace of Aladdin; its memory was a stain, which took the shape in my fancy of everything we consider monstrous.
“What’s got you so excited, Martin?”
“While lying here, I thought of the most extraordinary plan!”
“What might that be?”
To leave—”
“Leave?”
“—and go out west! I couldn’t wait to tell you.”
I should have realized that what he really hoped to leave was Gibbs, but I didn’t then.
“And what will you do there? Dig for gold? Carry the Word into the wilderness and convert the savages? Join the cavalry and murder them? Or do you want to be a cowboy—or a cardsharp on a Mississippi riverboat?”
In the intoxication of his idea, he did not notice my mockery. I couldn’t see it, Roebling. He was too damned slender and refined. Why, he seemed to be verging on frailty! I still could not picture him in a native canoe on the Río de la Plata, where he’d been stricken with malaria.
“Martin, you were pulling my leg!”
“I’m perfectly serious.”
“It takes money to emigrate, unless you intend to walk across the continent and live off the land like one of Sherman’s ‘bummers.’”
“I’ve got money saved,” he said, unwilling to be put off by a joke. “I was saving for a trip to Italy to see the frescoes and whatnot. It was always my dream, Shelby, to travel for a while in the Old World. But I’ve decided to go west, young man! And you, my not-so-young friend, are going with me!”
He had spoken grandly and with such flourish that I could picture a cartouche in the air enclosing his fervent words—each sentence finishing in an exclamation mark.
“You must’ve lost your last wit lying here. Or did the sack hit you on the head after all?”
“If you’ll be serious a moment, you’ll see the beauty of it. We’ll take the transcontinental to Frisco. I have an uncle there. He owns a small newspaper. I telegraphed him two days ago, and he immediately replied, ‘Yes.’”
“‘Yes’ to what, exactly?”
“To our going out to work for him! You’re not following very well, Shelby. You look like raw liver, by the way.”
“I don’t know anything about a newspaper, except how to read it, preferably with gloves on to keep my fingers clean.”
“I’m going to be a reporter—I can write as well as the next man. And you, Shelby, are going to manage the circulation. Any damn fool can do it!”
In his enthusiasm, he’d managed once again to offend me.
“The man whom you’ll be replacing had a seizure last week and died.”
“Undoubtedly from poor circulation.”
He ignored my flippancy. “Don’t you see? It was meant to be!”
I fell silent, picturing myself in San Francisco, managing the circulation. I admit the idea was not so preposterous as I’d first believed. Why not start again someplace new?
“We’ll leave as soon as my foot’s healed. What do you say?” He put out his hand. “Partners?”
I found myself clasping Martin’s hand and saying, “I see nothing to stop us!” I had been swept away by the “beauty of it.” Then I remembered that my means were slender, my savings nonexistent. “But I have no money of my own to speak of.”
“I’ve enough to get us started. We’ll need to be frugal—no Pullman car, champagne, buffalo tongue, and oysters.”
No trousseau or wedding supper, I said to myself, and immediately shook my head to rid it of the thought. The “Imp of the Perverse” was thumbing its nose at me.
“We’ll pack a few things and vamoose. Uncle Myer is sending tickets. He’s even found a cheap hotel near the Presidio where we can flop till we get on our feet.”
“Minus a few toes.”
“Reporters don’t write or type with their feet,” he said, laughing.
“They think it’s a grand idea! In fact, I promised to look around to see if I can find a typesetter’s berth for Franklin. This city’s going to the dogs.”
After they had brought Boss Tweed home in handcuffs from Spain and locked him in Ludlow Street Jail, where he had the good sense to die of pneumonia, we thought to have seen the last of Tammany Hall and its henchmen. It didn’t take Tweed’s old cronies long to crown “Honest John” Kelly the new king of the dunghill. Not dogs, but rats have taken over the town, and the pickings are choice.
“Out there, we can make something of ourselves! We can make ourselves over.”
“And Ellen?” I asked.
“She’s the sort who can find a job anywhere.”
“What does she do?”
In the space of the family’s foyer and in the briefest of durations, she had captivated me. And why not? I’m a man like any other.
“She operates a Sholes typewriter.”
That explained her hands, which were smooth and attractive, with nicely shaped nails. On the Eighth Avenue ’bus, I’d watched a young conductor flirt with another Irish girl. Her face, like Ellen’s, was fair, and her hair ginger. She’d replied to his impertinences in a sweetly lilting voice, which nonetheless was capable of paying him back in kind. She was pretty, save for her hands, which looked boiled. I recognized them as belonging to a laundress.
“That is a highly desirable skill,” I said earnestly.
“She’s very good at her job. She works for a stenographic bureau. She’s been typing manuscripts for Henry James while he’s staying in New York.”
The name Henry James meant nothing to me.
That evening with Ellen, Franklin, and Martin was one of the happiest in memory. My supper with the Melvilles could not hold a candle to it—no, not even if Herman in a temper had set fire to the tablecloth. Unlike that night, which had ended in rancor and, after too much drink, in stupefaction, the conversation on Maiden Lane was lively and amiable. The Finches were charming, and in that I can be charming, as well, I was able to hold my own. But they were far more cultivated than I, and when they got onto books, the theater, or the opera, I’d fiddle with my fork or tap my nose thoughtfully with a spoon.
Ellen noticed my discomfort and changed the subject to—of all things—baseball. The Finches were fanciers of this democratic pastime, which Walt Whitman praised. I marveled at them as they argued in the vernacular of the sport the merits of the new Metropolitan Club, the legality of the Reserve Clause, and the morality of Candy Cummings’s skewball. On Saturday afternoons, in season, the three of them would ride the elevated train to 110th Street to watch the Metropolitans play the Gothams at the new Polo Grounds.
I handed round cigars—Ellen pretended to be hurt that I had not thought to bring her one—and we began to discuss our remove to San Francisco.
“Martin tells me you’re in favor of it,” I said, careful to blow my cigar smoke toward the open window for fear of offending her.
“Very much so,” she said, turning serious. “It will be good for him to get away from the city. We know he’s been unhappy at the pier.” She stopped and looked at me. I held her gaze, and she went on. “Uncle Myer will help him get started—and you, also, if you decide to go.”
“We hope to join you as soon as we’re able,” said Franklin, holding his cigar at arm’s length and squinting at the ember. “We’re all eager to start a new life out there.”
“Out there.” He could have been talking about Outer Mongolia or one of Saturn’s moons.
Martin beamed at one and then the other, and then all three of them turned their faces to me.
“I’ve made up my mind to go,” I said, as if I were Napoléon announcing the invasion of Russia to his field marshals.
“Hooray!” cried Ellen.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Franklin. “I wouldn’t feel right about letting my little brother go alone.”
So I am to be a chaperone, I said to myself, watching Martin’s face struggle between pleasure and embarrassment.
“Didn’t I tell you?” asked Martin of them both. What he’d told them, he didn’t say, but I guessed it had to do with our being friends.
Franklin poured four small glasses of brandy. We drank to one another; then he corked the bottle and returned it to the sideboard. There would be no drunken carousal that night.
ON THE OMNIBUS HOME to Mrs. McFadden’s boarding-house, I became excited by the prospect of leaving everything behind me. In the Finches’ kitchen, I had felt as if I were already becoming someone else—felt as devout Christians must after gnawing on the body of Christ. I could sense something clean and sweet beginning to transpire in me, as if a spring, long blocked by debris, had been made to flow again. Twice on the ’bus, I surprised myself and the other passengers with a bark of laughter, so very buoyant was my mood.
Lying in bed, I became aware, as if for the first time, of the odor of Mrs. McFadden’s greasy cooking, the stink stealing into the room from the privy, and the sour smell of men who wash infrequently. My gut griped in protest. Soon, I told myself, you’ll be standing in Golden Gate Park and breathing salt air born on the winds from the Pacific Ocean. In a month, we’ll have put a continent between New York City and ourselves.” Startled by my use of the most intimate of pronouns, I shook my head like a dog with a flea in its ear and waited for sleep to come. When it did, I was on board an opulent Pullman car, on a transcontinental train, which seemed to have no need of tracks. I was rushing toward the Mississippi and thence across the vast and unknowable American continent toward San Francisco, where the Orient begins and John Gibbs would hold no sway.
U. S. Grant’s Home at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street, Near the Central Park, April 30, 1882
I was shown into the front room by the Irish housekeeper, whose insolent manner proclaimed her superiority to anyone who had business with a former president chiefly remembered for Black Friday, the Salary Grab, the Delano Affair, the Whiskey Ring, and other scandals that flourished during his administration, though not with his consent or knowledge. Grant had failed at almost everything he’d turned his hand to, except war, which chooses heroes and casualties according to the same eccentric law by which a fatal bullet finds one man and not another.
Everything in that room appears now with the stark clarity that memory will sometimes confer on the past. As he had during my previous visit, Grant sat slouched on a horsehair sofa, as if he were again astride his old warhorse Cincinnati. In the light of the window, I could see dust motes and wreathes of smoke rising from a cigar clamped in the mouth of a visitor who’d arrived before me. He was carelessly dressed in a white serge suit; his vest bore charred traces of tobacco embers. Around his neck, the general wore a piece of flannel smelling of liniment and camphor. He was suffering from a sore throat. He had an unlit cigar between his teeth and gave every indication of enjoying the stranger’s tobacco smoke vicariously, and now and again, he would sniff deeply to give his nose the pleasure denied his mouth. I could see that it pained him to talk.
“General Grant.”
“I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Not at all.” Grant turned to his other visitor and said, “Mr. Ross works for the Custom Service, alongside Melville.”
“Glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Ross,” said the gentleman, who seemed more like an impersonator of one than the real McCoy.
“Please call me Shelby.”
“Shelby, I wonder if you know Sam Clemens,” said Grant, gesturing toward the other man, who was eyeing me shrewdly, as if estimating his chances of beating me at Indian arm wrestling. “He’s better known to the public as Mark Twain.”
“It’s a pleasure, Mr. Twain—or Mr. Clemens, I should say,” I replied, flustered. “A very great pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
I had read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and had seen in Tom something of my own youthful cunning and love of flimflam.
“Likewise,” the author replied—gruffly, I thought. He blew more smoke into the room, so that my eyes began to water, and said, “Back before the war, I knew a man from Jackson County, Mississippi, who shared your Christian name.”
“Is that a fact?” I asked, not interested in the coincidence, which was hardly remarkable.
I was there to see Grant, and although I admired the famous writer, I was impatient for him to leave. He showed no intention of doing so, however; instead, he settled in the arm chair and told a story whose preposterousness I considered a waste of the general’s time and mine.
“He was a cardsharp on the Cotton Blossom. Curious fellow—not my sort of man at all. He affected an air of a gentleman gone to seed, who consoled himself with drink. He favored checkered waistcoats, yellow shoes, and bourbon muddled with bitters and sugar. In a pinch, he’d settle for a bottle of cheap rye just to show that, while he might have once belonged to a fine old family of the southern aristocracy, he had lately sunk down into the muck, where the common people live. He was a wizard at cards—none could beat him—and was universally despised for his luck at the table.
“During a game of faro, a man named Dolan, a coarse, ill-mannered type of person from Arkansas, pulled a bowie knife on Shelby and, faster than a ferret inside a lady’s skirt, lopped off both his hands.
“Shelby scarcely turned a hair, and after the blood had been staunched with beefsteaks and his wrists tied off with fancy garters belonging to one of the ‘soiled doves,’ he took off his yellow shoes and socks and proceeded to deal with his toes. Damned if he didn’t win the next three hands, though he hadn’t any! The boys at the table commenced to grumble, and before Shelby knew it, he’d lost his toes to a small hatchet one of the gents had been hiding inside his coat. It didn’t matter a particle to Shelby. The following night, he had himself wheeled into the card room by one of his lady friends. His face split wide open in a grin, he started to play cards with his teeth.
“Shelby cleaned out those gents—red-faced and bilious in defeat—about as quick as a plate of oysters disappears down the necks of visitors to a house of ill repute or pennies from a collection plate passed among Bowery Boys. The mood at the table grew tense, like a frog in the vicinity of a python or a negro at a Klan convention. A feller who’d lost his pants, so to speak, happened to be a traveling dentist. He kept his instruments close to his vest, and in the time it takes to say good-bye, he’d pulled Shelby’s teeth right out of his head. Witnesses to the atrocity claimed they made a sound like a keel scraping over a gravelly shoal or else lake ice cracking in a thaw. I’ve got one of Shelby’s gold-filled molars on my watch chain; it makes an interesting fob and a provocative topic when conversation stalls.” Clemens hauled his watch out of his vest pocket by the chain, whose fob was a tiny riverboat carved in ivory. “It must be on my other chain.”
“What did he do next?” I asked politely, for I saw that Grant was enjoying the yarn.
“Who?” Scratching his chin, Clemens pretended to have lost the thread.
“Shelby the cardsharp!” barked Grant, causing the flannel wrap to give up an aromatic ghost of liniment to the rancid atmosphere.
“He quit cards and became a Transcendentalist.”
I didn’t see the joke, but Grant guffawed.
“Somebody open the goddamn window!” he croaked. “It stinks like dirty feet in here.”
I jumped up and opened the window. On Sixty-sixth Street, a teamster was beating his horse.
“Thank you kindly, Shelby.”
“A name can mark a man. Like Ulysses here, who has arrived home at last to the patient Julia, his Penelope, after the wars and strife of public life. Do you find it burdensome to carry a name fit for an allegory, Mr. President, sir?”
“Horseshit!” whinnied Grant.
“I’m not so sure about that, U.S. If a man has a handle, such as you’d encounter in a made-up story, he might come to think of himself as a figment of some damned storyteller’s imagination. He might believe he doesn’t exist in the real world at all.”
Clemens ground his spent cigar into the dirt of the fernery beside his chair and then gave me a look such as an owl would give a mouse. “Now take his moniker.” He cocked a thumb at me. “It could only belong to a cardsharp or an ephebe.”
“You’ve poked enough fun at Shelby for one afternoon!” admonished Grant.
“There’s something prophetic about it,” said Clemens, ignoring his friend.
“I don’t follow you.” I was getting more and more irritated.
Ignoring my vexation, Clemens snuffled, took out a handkerchief, snuffled again for good measure, and said, “Shelby—” He sneezed, blew his nose emphatically, examined his handkerchief, and, like a bad actor playing the blind soothsayer Tiresias, finished his thought: “Shall be—what? Another panic? Another civil war? Certainly not an age of peace.”
“I doubt it,” said Grant, speaking with curious solemnity, as though he had glimpsed the future and found it a cold and desolated place.
“It makes me feel kind of jumpy being in the same room with you, Shelby,” said Clemens, combing his scraggly mustache. “I’d hate to get tangled in one of your prophecies. What a man can’t see won’t hurt him, but I’ve a feeling that if I were to peer into your bloodshot eyes, I’d see myself in a place where the only smoking a man gets to do is when he’s roasting his backside over hellfire.”
“Shelby, what have you to say for yourself?” wheezed Grant, who was again amused.
“General, I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
I didn’t care for Clemens, who was as cruel to me as Huck Finn had been to Jim.
“Friend of Melville’s, you say?” asked Clemens.
“We work together in the West Street customs office.”
“Hmmm. You’re sure you’re not a literary fellow?” he asked suspiciously.
“Heaven forbid!”
“Heaven doesn’t seem to have much say in the matter. Seems like we’re up to our eyes in literary types, not to mention literati, lyceums, and critics. Hardly anybody’s taking up an honest profession these days. Even the old-time gunfighters are selling their memoirs to the penny dreadfuls.” He glanced sharply at Grant, who ignored him.
“I’ve tried honest professions and dishonest ones,” I said flippantly. “But I’d rather shovel shit with a fork than be a writer.”
Clemens nodded, as if I’d said something wise. “I’ve been trying all afternoon to get Grant to let me publish his memoirs. He’s not a writer; therefore, he’s a man whom we can safely turn loose with pen and paper.”
“I don’t have a memoir to publish!” growled the old man.
“You’d be surprised how quickly you’d have one if only you’d make a start. Writing is nothing more than knitting—one strand is truth, the other embellishment.”
Grant snorted and chewed his unlit cigar.
“Only great men and women can be forgiven their immodesty in having written their memoirs.” Clemens turned to me and asked, “Did you happen to see our friend’s piece on Shiloh in Century Magazine?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“The facts were illuminating, even if the literary style was dry as hardtack. If you set your mind to it, I know damned well you can write me the story of your life, Hiram. If you could take Vicksburg while you were drunk, you can write a picayune reminiscence.”
“I wasn’t drunk!” said Grant peevishly. “I had a migraine.”
A man with a headache ain’t half so interesting to the public as an old army soak!”
“What brings you here, Mr. Ross?” asked Grant, hoping to change the subject.
I had gone to see the general for obscure reasons. I told myself I would tell him of my decision to emigrate and ask his advice. But there was no reason why he should care to give it. We’d spoken only once before, and that briefly. Then suddenly I realized that I’d gone there to set the record straight. I needed to unburden myself of the lie I’d told for so long, I had come at last to believe it. During my stay in Sing Sing, I would have time to ponder the meaning of my visit to East Sixty-sixth Street and recognize it as the stirring of conscience, which had lain dormant in whatever bodily organ it resides. I wanted to square myself with my fellow men and—an even more self-important notion—with history, which Grant represented as well as any other Caliban of our ignoble age. I wanted to make a clean break with New York City and the past.
“General, I want to apologize.”
He appeared perplexed by my declaration and even more by the earnestness with which I had uttered it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Clemens lean forward expectantly. “Apologize for what, Shelby?” he asked. His unruly mustache twitched in anticipation of a shameful admission.
I ignored him and spoke directly to the general.
“The last time I was here, I lied about having fought in the war. I did no such thing. My father hired a substitute.”
“You’re damned lucky to have been kept out of it!” barked Grant hoarsely. “‘Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars’ is what Thoreau had to say on the subject of patriotism, which he called ‘a maggot in the brain.’”
“‘If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon’s mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty,’” remarked Clemens, quoting himself with a saturnine air, which would send paying audiences into fits of laughter.
“If everybody who claims to have fought at Gettysburg had truly done so, there’d have been hardly room to swing a cat. Men would have been packed into the real estate like pickles in a jar or herring in a barrel.”
“Hiram, that’s the kind of salt to flavor a tasteless dish of reminiscence!” cried Clemens approvingly.
“Goddamn it, Sam, don’t call me ‘Hiram!’” Incensed, Grant’s ragged voice had nearly formed itself into a shout, such as had hectored the Union troops at the Cumberland to take Fort Donelson from the rebels. Overnight, he’d become the darling of the Union newspapers, which gave him the nickname “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.
He’d been christened “Hiram Ulysses,” Melville said after our March visit, but an Ohio congressman mistook the name when he nominated him for admission to West Point. “U.S. Grant” stuck for the remainder of his life. And by this name, acquired by a misunderstanding, he became identified, personally, with the Union he fought to preserve and unwittingly betrayed.
“Will you get off your high horse, Hiram, and give me some meat to publish? I invested my shirt and my back teeth in Paige’s infernal typesetting machine. It’s got more parts than a mule and is just as stubborn. I doubt the good Lord Himself could have managed, in twice the time He spent on His creation, to contrive a more complicated piece of machinery, not excepting Eve. I’ve lost so much money on that goddamn compositor, I’ve had to go into the publishing business to keep it fed, and my family starved. Publishing is only a little higher in the scheme of things than a flea circus, and a publisher is held in the same esteem as a congressmen or a floosy, both of whom will turn a man’s pockets inside out the minute his eyes are closed.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” replied Grant, who looked as if he’d been run over twice by a brewery wagon. “Now, gentlemen, if you’ll forgive me, it’s time for my nap.”
“I’ll be back to bully you some more,” said Clemens kindly.
“Get the hell out of here, you no-good son of a bitch Johnny Reb!”
Clemens had spent two weeks in the Confederate army before lighting out for Nevada Territory to prospect for silver, which he didn’t find.
“Shelby,” said Grant as I was preparing to leave. “I wouldn’t waste time thinking about that other matter if I were you. Give my regards to Melville. Tell him I’m enjoying his poems.”
The old man put his feet up on the sofa and shut his eyes. We left him to his nap.
“He’s right,” said Clemens. “The pangs of conscience are no worse than hunger, which can be appeased with a twenty-five-cent piece.” He broke into a boyish grin, and his mordancy was dissipated, like Angostura bitters stirred in a glass of gin. “Mr. Ross, I happen to have a pocketful of quarters—a grubstake for liquor and a free lunch at McSorley’s.”
I decided to accompany Clemens. If the ale house had once served to quench Abraham Lincoln’s thirst, it could mine, as well. As we walked down Lexington, I wondered what I had hoped to accomplish by visiting the general.
McSorley’s Ale House at 15 East Seventh Street, April 30, 1882
Clemens wanted to have a drink among the Irish, so that he could count his lucky stars he’d had the good sense to be born with scotch running though his veins.
“Mostly, my ancestors were Cornish, who drank whatever they could smuggle or was washed up on the beach from a ship they’d wrecked,” he said after wiping beer foam from his shaggy mustache. “Terrible lot of sinners come from Cornwall!”
“You were hard on the general,” I said brusquely. I had felt a grievance coming out like a rash during the elevated ride to the Lower East Side.
“You mustn’t mind what I said. God and Grant know what I think of him. The poor man has always had a hard-scrabble life. He was a fine president: He outlawed the Klan, came down on the carpetbaggers, and pushed the Fifteenth Amendment through a congress of jackasses. He fought for freedmen’s rights at a time when one half of the population wanted to lynch the other. And contrary to public opinion, which comes as near the truth about as often as Halley’s Comet does earth, he was not a drunkard. The soldiers loved him, and soldiers won’t follow a drunkard into the Valley of the Shadow of Death—leastwise not when they’re sober.”
He picked at a tooth with his fingernail and said, “My mouth tastes of smoke and cinders. I’m not sure God meant us to ride in trains two stories above the street, although the view was breathtaking. I could count the number of Chinese cigar rollers and Hebrew rag pickers that can fit in a tiny tenement-house room.”
He downed his beer, as if to flush the modern world from his system, including James Paige’s diabolical typesetter, which was ruining him. He banged his empty schooner on the bar and called for another.
“How is life in the customhouse?”
“Not much of one,” I replied. “I’m moving to San Francisco.”
“Frisco will be the making of you. Broad, wholesome, and charitable views of human beings cannot be acquired by vegetating in a corner all one’s life,” he declared, fixing an eye on the proceedings behind the bar.
The landlord, an oily man whose nearly identical height and girth made him tend toward the spherical, had just sliced the foam from a beer glass with a paddle and was setting it proudly before Clemens as if he’d cut the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Having embarked on a third whiskey, I was beginning to grow fond of the curmudgeon, whose obstreperous hair looked like the snakes of Medusa.
“I’m worried about that throat of his,” said Clemens, showing genuine concern for his friend.
“Too many cigars.”
“The trouble with Grant is his heart! You wouldn’t know it to look at him, Shelby, but he’s a sweet old crust. I’ve known him to be downright sentimental when he’s drunk—though he is not a drunkard! Not every man who drinks is a sot, any more than every man who fiddles is Nero or one of them Strauss fellas.”
Clemens dipped a finger in his beer and, revolving it on the rim of his glass, produced a note, weird and sostenuto, which was once thought to drive women mad. It reminded me of the sound of a fingernail on slate or a tune played on a saw. A dog lying on the sawdust floor began to whine pitiably.
“That’ll be enough of that, gent, or I’ll stick that glass where you’ll never see it again!” growled a big burly fellow with pig’s bristles on his chin—a stevedore or a carter by the look of him.
“I’m sorry you have no ear for music, sir.”
Infuriated, the man leaned across me and grabbed Clemens by the lapel of his white suit.
Clemens called to the landlord, who was gathering up bottles in his beefy arms, as if they were his children. “Mr. McSorley, I presume.”
“The name’s Hannigan,” said the man with the bottles.
“Mr. Shenanigans, is this not the amateur musical society, and haven’t I been invited to entertain with my glass harmonica?”
“It is not, and you have not!” replied an indignant Hannigan.
“It seems, then, that I have made a mistake—not the first, nor in all likelihood the last. My apologies, and God’s blessing on you all! Good sir, if you will let go of my lapel, I’ll stand you to a drink of Jameson or the noble Bushmills. I would also like a dish of ale drawn for the dog, whose ears I have unwittingly offended.”
The man let go. Clemens smoothed the rumpled fabric of his coat.
“A great pity that I left my Ancient Order of Hibernians pin on my other coat. It would have prevented this misunderstanding between friends, not forgetting man’s best friend, whose slumbers I disturbed.”
The Irishman thought it better to accept the whiskey and remove himself to the other end of the bar rather than prolong a discussion with a lunatic.
“One for me and for my friend,” said the imperturbable comedian to the landlord, who by now had returned the bottles to the shelf, above which lolled a painted lady dressed in feathers.
Roebling, I couldn’t decide whether I ought to be afraid or amused.
“You baited a man who could have cracked your skull.”
“It’s a terrible bully I am!” replied Clemens with a comical lilt to a voice that, as a rule, tended southerly in its intonation. “Sitting here among the mackerel snappers, I’m reminded of one of Nast’s lampoons, entitled ‘The Usual Irish Way of Doing Things.’ He’d drawn a soused Paddy lighting a cigar while he sits on a powder keg. Nast’s pen is sharp enough to draw blood from an elephant.”
I started at a muffled explosion, but it was only a cork being pulled from a bottle.
The barroom quieted as each man drank toward forgetfulness, insofar as the coins in his pockets allowed.
“Grant’s broke,” said Clemens. “That son of a bitch Ward cleaned him out.”
The general had had the misfortune or naïveté to surround himself with crooks. Now in his old age, he’d sunk $100,000 into his son’s brokerage firm. In collusion with the bank, Ferdinand Ward, his son’s partner, had bought a small fortune in stocks, putting up as collateral not only the firm’s assets but also its clients’ securities—identical securities for multiple purchases. Grant had reached the end of the rope with which a man will pull himself out of the quicksand or hang himself.
“Being an honorable cuss, he’s determined to repay every last debt.”
“Can his memoirs save him?” I asked, with the humility of someone whose mistrust in a fellow human has proved false.
“I don’t see any other way for Julia to escape a poverty that wouldn’t even qualify as genteel.”
“And the general?”
Clemens shook his head sadly. “Not long for this world. But I’ll be damned if he leaves it from a bed in the poorhouse!”
Clemens tapped thoughtfully on the bar with his nail. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am: Sam Clemens, Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, or an invention of Charles Dickens—Wilkins Micawber, with a Missouri drawl and a habit of irritating his fellow man.”
He fell silent, and I noticed how the noise of the world outside on the crowded street and pavement flooded into the taproom, like the roar of an ocean slamming into a stone jetty. I had an intimation of something—a premonition—an inkling of dread. I couldn’t guess its cause, but I felt it all the same.
“The tide of humanity will drown us all,” I said with the tentativeness of a man who has told a dubious joke. Clemens ignored it, and I felt my face flush in embarrassment. Well, I had been guilty of worse folly. I’d been to the school of humiliation and had learned to eat my words and humble pie. I laughed queerly to give my mouth something to do.
“Who are you?” asked Clemens, looking askance at me. “Do you even know yourself?”
I gazed into a mirror hanging between the nude woman, whose throat had been painted in the rosy tones of typhoid fever, and a foxed and fly-specked calendar, where time had stopped for the Irish on March 5, 1867, the day of the Fenian Rising. I wondered at the stranger whose face I saw reflected there.
“So you’re lighting out for the territories. Well, I wish you luck.”
“I’m going to be a newspaperman.”
“God help us!”
Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, May 17, 1884
You’d have thought I was a boy impatient for Saturday afternoon, when, having finished my chores, I could go out into the street and play cowboys and Indians. As I waited for Martin’s foot to mend, I felt happier than I’d been since the panic pulled the rug out from under me. Needless to say, the rug had been hand-knotted in Persia; its replacement was made of rags stitched to old sacking. Each time I visited Martin, I would take a small gift for Ellen: a lace handkerchief; a card of whalebone buttons; an African totem carved from ebony, found in the hold of a Portuguese merchant ship; a Waterman pen bought in a moment of extravagance at a stationer’s on University Place; and a packet of seeds with which to grow forget-me-nots, about which Thoreau had observed that “even flowers must be modest.”
“I do believe that you are courting me, Mr. Ross!” she said, her pretty eyes glinting with mischief.
I denied it, my cheeks flaming.
“Yes, you are!” she teased. “I’m flattered by your attentiveness nearly enough to run away with you. But then who would cook Franklin’s dinner, and, more important, who would type Mr. James’s novels? You may care nothing for a husband’s broken heart, but you mustn’t think to deprive an illustrious novelist of a neatly typed manuscript!”
I sighed—romantically, I hoped.
Why shouldn’t I flirt with her? My experience with women may have been slight, but I’m as interested as the next man in what hides beneath a woman’s skirts! Ellen didn’t take me seriously, but neither did she take me for a fool.
I returned the copy of Redburn to the Mercantile Library for Martin and borrowed Mark Twain’s Roughing It, a book with Bret Harte’s story “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” and Ambrose Bierce’s Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California. The temporary invalid feasted on these western tales and loved to recount them, as he had told me Melville’s sea stories, until I grew sick of them. His feelings hurt, he would sulk when I grumbled or dozed in the chair. For the most part, I shared his excitement, and we’d spend hours making lists of “bare necessities,” drawing up itineraries, and talking about our life at the other end of America. Tired and restless, I would go home to bed and count the days until I could leave it and Gansevoort Pier for good. Neither Martin nor I mentioned John Gibbs.
I had intended to keep our plan a secret but succumbed to an overmastering desire to disclose it not only to Melville, who cheered us, but also to Gibbs, the chief reason for our wish to leave New York. The most inexplicable perversity is that a man will sometimes put his own head into the noose. To my surprise, Gibbs shook my hand, clapped me on the back, and wished me luck. He’s glad to be getting rid of me, I thought, so as not to be constantly reminded of his disgrace by a witness to it.
“To celebrate your fresh start in California, I want to give you a treat tonight—something to remember me by,” he said, smiling broadly enough to make me wince at the sight of his black gums and rotted teeth. He had all the appurtenances of a stage villain in a melodrama except the waxed mustache.
I shuddered, and he evidently mistook the cause of my repulsion. Even now, two years later, I wonder how a man of such obvious depravity could have worked me. In prison, I sometimes felt a strange sensation, as though the world were dissolving. Then I would think—I could easily think it now—that you and I, John Gibbs, Martin Finch, Ellen, Franklin, the bridge outside the window are figments! Of Melville’s! He has the brain for such fantasies.
“I promise, Shelby, the treat I have in mind is nothing like the Slide!” He laughed. “You must have been shocked! But don’t worry; your secret is safe with me.” He winked in that lewd way of his. “What I propose for this evening is a trip to West Houston Street to see the fights.”
I had no wish to go.
“You must let me do this!” he said insistently. “To make up for that unfortunate night.” He could sense my reluctance and began to press the matter artfully. “Unless blood sports make you squeamish.”
I did not want him to think me lacking in manliness, which in our time is measured by the strength of a man’s passion for cock- and dogfights and the gory sight of blood spurting from another man’s battered nose.
I agreed to accompany him. What else could I have done? I promised myself that it would be the last night I’d ever spend in his company.
Harry Hill’s Saloon in West Houston Street, the Bowery, May 5, 1882
Harry Hill is celebrated for his wealth and notorious for the manner of its accumulation. Horse dealer, brawler, gambler, unsavory entrepreneur, and bare-knuckle boxing promoter, he counted among his friends both criminals and politicians, who patronized his saloons. His barroom in the Bowery was a den of iniquity—forgive the worn phrase; it’s the only one in my glossary that is apt. As I’d soon discover, bare-knuckle boxing is a far cry from fisticuffs between gentlemen. It is—Have you ever seen a match, Roebling?
You’ve missed nothing that can’t be seen when a butcher feeds pig meat into a sausage grinder.
No sooner had we sat down at a table ringed with the sticky imprints of beer glasses than Gibbs grew excited. The atmosphere of that suffocating room seemed to send him into a rapture. He nosed it, as if a fragrant vintage had been placed before him. Momentarily, he forgot me, and I considered sidling out from the table and getting away. The stink of the West Street holding pens and slaughterhouses would have been preferable to that foul hole. For a second time, I had let myself be brought to a place where men debase themselves. I had put myself into the hands of my mortal enemy, who wanted only to humiliate me. Thus do some men seem bent on self-destruction.
Harry Hill took the stage, which doubled for a ring, to raucous applause, hoots, and gibes in the colorful vernacular of the Five Points and Sailors Town. He announced the first act in the night’s brutal comedy—an “Irish Stand Down” fought between square-jawed Colin O’Neil and a square-headed Prussian, whose name was lost in a gust of anti-German sentiments.
You’re not familiar with the term?
That speaks well of you. An Irish Stand Down, I was informed by my escort through the underworld, sweating beside me in a rabid heat of anticipation, is a contest between two men in which they punch each other, turn by turn again, accepting the blows without moving their feet, which soon become mired in blood and human slurry.
“I was at the fight when Ben Haight went eight hours in the ring against Bill Murphy before he quit,” said Gibbs, licking his lips. “What a mess they made of each other!”
Two men entered from the wings, to use a theatrical metaphor, as if words could alter the hideous actuality of the spectacle. They were as unlike the pugilists I had watched at Madison Square Garden as mongrels are from the fancy dogs at the Westminster Kennel Club.
The men were brutishly built and moved without grace or efficiency. Their prowess lay solely in their ability to stand and absorb blows to the face and abdomen. That they could do so for hours only confirmed the impression one had that they were of an order of being akin to a granite column or a sack of feed. It was difficult for me to watch and nearly impossible to pity them—although I knew poverty had made them fight—any more than I could pity a stone I’d kicked in frustration.
Gibbs appeared on the verge of unconsciousness, so enthralled was he by the combat. The fighters wore only loincloths in the style of ancient Greek wrestlers, and in the glare of the limelight, their flesh shone. We were sitting close enough to smell the mingled odors of blood and sweat, which Gibbs savored as a gourmand would sweetbreads or a calf’s brain sautéed in black butter. Revolted, I shut my eyes on the jellied faces of the Irishman and the German and, worse, on the shiny faces of the other spectators. I’d seen them before in theaters where women undressed, as if for human sacrifice, while men leaned expectantly toward the little stage, their countenances transmogrified by lust.
The Irishman and the German continued to exchange blows, until I could no longer stand the sight of them.
“I’m feeling sick,” I told Gibbs. “I need air.”
He turned his face to mine and scowled; at the same time, he grabbed my arm to stay me. He said something, but his words were lost in a din punctuated rhythmically by the unspeakable sound of bare fists on flesh. For a moment, I thought I saw hatred in his smoke-reddened eyes, and I grew afraid. He smiled—because he saw my fear? Who can say? But he relented and let go of my arm and, bringing his lips close to my ear, said, “So you’re squeamish after all.” He patted the back of my hand and nodded toward the door to the street. As I was making my way through the jostling crowd of onlookers, I glanced back at the ring in time to see the German fall.
Gibbs took my arm and led me down the street until the air revived me. We stopped at a taproom that gave every appearance of being a favorite haunt of stevedores, road menders, and sailors caught on land and waiting to return again to their natural element. Gibbs was clearly in his element, while I felt like a mouse dropped by the tail into a snake pit for the amusement of the public.
We drank a whiskey each, and then Gibbs urged a glass of absinthe on me. I rarely drink it, not caring for the taste of anise and sweet fennel, but once again, I seemed to be in thrall to strange impulses.
“Some call it ‘the green fairy,’” he said, licking his spoon after having dissolved a sugar cube in the pale green spirit. “It makes me forget myself.”
I could guess what there was in him that needed to be forgotten.
The room tilted to starboard and then, having briefly righted itself, listed in the opposite direction. Melville had walked on decks lurching like this floor—filthy beyond belief—as he sailed toward the cannibal isles. I was pleased with myself and hoped to remember the comparison in the morning so that I could impress him with my cleverness.
Men moved about, encircling me like trash eddying on a dirty river. Their mouths were slashes, their eyes embers, their lips snakes writhing around a hole. Where was God in all this wreckage? I would have asked myself had I had my wits about me. As if in answer to my unspoken and scarcely formulated question, I felt a hand inside my vest, and thinking it was Gibbs, I shoved him off his stool.
“Goddamn you, Ross! I’ll make you sorry you were ever born!” A fury mounted in him, like fire in dry tinder.
“Somebody had his hand inside my coat,” I said. My words staggered drunkenly.
“The place is famous for pickpockets,” replied Gibbs, my answer having satisfied him. “Has someone lifted your purse?”
I patted my vest, felt the wallet’s bulge, and said, “I have it.”
Gibbs gathered up our drinks and elbowed me toward an empty table at the back.
“We can talk in private here,” he said, setting down our glasses.
I knew enough not to drink any more. Intent on his tête-à-tête, Gibbs didn’t notice my abstinence.
“What do you want?” I asked, planting my elbows on the table to keep my head from falling forward. Someone else had asked me that question. Who could it have been?
“Tonight you’ve seen the world,” he said. “Believe it or not, Shelby, this is your world—you belong to it. I’ve studied you, and I know you—know your heart. You are one of us.”
His words came at me. They enveloped me like drizzle—a yellow rain. What does he mean? I asked myself.
“I must go,” I said, feeling caught like a minnow in a net. I tried to stand but fell back in my chair. Gibbs took my hand, and once again I shuddered. He ignored the tremor, or else he misinterpreted it. I attempted to stand again.
“Sit!” he commanded.
I tried to focus my eyes on his face, but they refused to stay put, searching the dark corners of the room instead.
“You are not going to California,” he said softly.
“No?”
“No. Your place is here.”
I had no idea what “here” meant to him, unless it was this odious barroom.
“I know what you’ve been up to with your friend.”
“My friend?”
I couldn’t make any sense of it, Roebling.
“Martin Finch, or should I call him Mary Finch?”
Before I could gather my thoughts in order to protest, he had gone on. “In some men, it is an abomination, in others not. You have a womanish temperament, Shelby. It’s true—you know it is—deny it as much as you like.” His voice was sad. “No, you cannot go to California with Martin Finch.”
“You don’t understand,” I blurted. “Martin and I are—”
He leaned toward me and hissed, “Sodomites!”
I jerked back in my chair, appalled.
“It’s not true!”
The trouble lies in words, Roebling. There is none for what Walt Whitman, unashamed and innocent, gloried in. We call it “sodomy,” “bestiality,” and “abomination” because we have no others, and what we call it prejudices the mind and strikes balefire against a flinty heart; in conflagrations like that are books and witches burned.
“Martin is a cannibal. And as surely as Eliza Donner ate the arm of Samuel Shoemaker by Alder Creek, he will have you.”
I looked on him aghast and completely sobered, though my legs still balked.
“You’re wrong about him!”
“Let’s say you were unaware of Martin’s unnatural interest in you.”
Again I started to object, but he would not brook interruption.
“If you aren’t guilty of gross indecency, then he must be. Is he?”
I struggled to find words to make a suitable reply and put an end to this absurdity, but his voice, modulating from irritability to patient sympathy, went on and on.
“Is he? Is he? Is he?”
“No! No! No!”
“Are you unnatural?”
“I am not!” I shouted.
“Of course not, Shelby! It’s Martin who’s the bugger.”
I shook my head wearily. I wanted to lay my head on the tabletop. I thought of the long way home to bed. However will I get there? I wondered. It’s miles and miles from here, and the hour is late. The effort it would take to get up from the chair, walk out onto the street, find a horsecar, and ride to McFadden’s boardinghouse seemed immense. The journey home would be as exhausting as a trip to California, or China. No, I couldn’t do it, couldn’t move my legs in my weariness. I felt as you must have, Roebling, when the bends took you and made you bedfast.
“I found this among his things,” said Gibbs, solemnly producing evidence in the trial of poor Martin.
He set a disgusting photograph in front of me.
“Among—his—things?” I stammered. It was beyond belief. “You’re a liar!”
“Am I?”
I glared at him.
He shrugged. Roebling, the man shrugged his shoulders lightly, as if he’d lost a half-dollar in a game of three-card monte!
He got up from the table and left. Without another word! I stared for a moment at the photograph, then angrily tore it up.
Why have I become the object of such inhuman attention? I asked myself. Is it Gibbs’s revenge for my having struck him or for any airs and graces that I might have retained from my better days? Is he enraged by the thought of guileless affections between men—or does he crave them? Is it desire or shame that goads him? Or is he Iago after all, whose motives were pure—that is, unadulterated by either reason or unreason. Iago was Iago because he could be no other; likewise, Gibbs must be Gibbs.
The Central Park, May 7, 1882
On Sunday, I felt obliged to visit Martin.
No, not to confront him with Gibbs’s accusation, which I didn’t believe. The reason had nothing to do with Gibbs. Martin and I had things to discuss about our remove to San Francisco. His foot was nearly healed; we could leave New York within the week. There were a few details to finalize, and then we could be off.
“Hello, Franklin,” I said when he answered my knock on the door.
“Morning, Shelby! Come in.”
He is a genial and good-natured man, as brawny and awkward as his younger brother was lithe.
“I need to talk to Martin,” I said.
“He’s asleep. He had a visitor last night who appeared to upset him. After the fellow left, I could hear Martin moving about his room till daylight.”
The compass needle in my head swung round, until it stopped at the image of John Gibbs, a human lodestone that could attract by his loathsomeness. The compulsion is shared by dogs, which will sniff delicately at their own filth, and by readers whose finer feelings are overcome by morbid curiosity about stories like those by Edgar Poe. I’ve had the same unwholesome feeling when gazing at a poor freak of nature in a sideshow tent. I recall a mermaid on display in Hester Street, near East Broadway, purported to have been hauled up from the depths of the Tyrrhenian Sea by Corsican fishermen. Melville took me to see it—or her; the gender of pronouns can be misleading when fantastic beings are concerned.
“What did he look like?” I asked Franklin, fairly certain of his answer.
“Squat and well built; looked to be fifty or so. He said he works with Martin on the pier.”
Gibbs!
“I’ll just have a word with Martin.”
“Let him sleep, Shelby.”
“Yes,” I said, checking an impulse to hurry up the stairs.
Ellen sailed into the front room, a favorable wind at her back, so to speak.
“Good morning, Mr. Ross!” she greeted me brightly. “We’re off to the Central Park. Why don’t you come with us?”
“There’s a thought!” said Franklin agreeably.
You wouldn’t be agreeable, Franklin, if you knew I coveted your wife! (The penitent, who has the hairy ear of a priest to fill, finds that his minor sins are easily remembered, whereas matters of grave consequence to the soul are told reluctantly, if at all.)
“I’d love to!” I said, happy to forget Gibbs—and Martin—for an afternoon.
Franklin took the wicker hamper Ellen had packed, and we walked to Battery Place station to take the Ninth Avenue elevated. Boarding a northbound train, I was in high spirits and admitted to myself without a shred of guilt that I was happier in Ellen and Franklin’s company than I would have been in Martin’s.
RIDING ABOVE NINTH AVENUE, I glimpsed the Elysian Fields, next to the river in Hoboken, where the Metropolitans play.
“A splendid name for a baseball field!” said Ellen. “And to think that when it was one of the Fortunate Isles, at the western edge of the earth, it belonged to Cronos and not New Jersey!”
The house and building fronts below the tracks had also become vulgarized by cast-iron facades painted in imitation of building stone.
I know you despise them, Roebling. Lies are detestable, whether expressed in words, paint, iron, brick, or stone.
We left the steam train at the Eighty-sixth Street station and walked to the park entrance known as Mariner’s Gate. We strolled amid flowering dogwood and tulip trees across the green sward to the lake at Seventy-eighth. A few blocks to the south, the city’s impoverished folk found respite from their drudgery in Sheep Meadow, if they had scraped together the pennies for the horsecar or el ride from the foul tenements, where the water is not so clean as it was in the old Piggery. Harsenville and the Piggery District had been home to poor negro, Irish, and German families, until they were evicted to make way for Olmstead’s democratic Eden. (Eminent domain is only Manifest Destiny in miniature.) The sheep were happier, as they grazed on the meadow’s rich grass, unaware of their privileged life inside the park, safe from the knife of Abraham or a West Street market butcher.
While Franklin and I lounged on a tartan blanket, which smelled faintly of camphor flakes, Ellen unpacked the hamper of bread, cheese, and wine and talked about Paris because, she said, the picture we three made reminded her of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass, which she had seen in a book belonging to Henry James. She smiled coyly and asked me if I’d ever seen a reproduction of the painting.
“I don’t believe so.”
“It’s one you would remember, Mr. Ross!”
She laughed, as pleased as a child who has said something naughty.
“I don’t much care for the French,” I said with a patrician sniff of disdain.
“Mr. James would be shocked to hear it!” said Ellen, pretending to be horrified.
Although there were no sheep to be seen in the better purlieu of the park, she recited a poem about a shepherd. Franklin, the tip of his tongue showing, whittled a stick. I lay on my back and chewed a stem of sweet grass. Unwittingly, we’d assembled into a pastoral tableau of three rustics on a holiday.
Amidst her cheeks the rose and lily strive, Lily snow-white:
When their contend doth make their colour thrive, Colour too bright
For shepherd’s eyes.
“What fun to be picnicking with two handsome swains!” she then said, taking off her straw hat.
Again I marveled at her hair, whose color and fineness resembled strands of copper wire.
On such a day as this, I told myself, twenty-year-old Herman Melville began his first sea voyage, as a cabin boy sailing from Coenties Slip to Liverpool aboard the St. Lawrence. Could he have foreseen the disaster of his second voyage on the whaleship Acushnet, his desertion, his badly infected leg, his convalescence among the “roistering blades of savages,” the menace of the cannibals, the fear and hunger, would he have left in a carefree mood or done the sensible thing and gone into business, like his everlastingly debt-ridden father?
Would your father, Roebling, have begun the bridge had he known that, by a chance concatenation of events, it would kill him? Would you have taken on his work knowing what suffering would befall you? And if that afternoon in the Central Park, I had foreseen the coming disaster, would I have hurried to the nearest train and fled the city? Sometimes I wonder if the story had not already been written.
By Melville, yes. When I finished his novel Redburn, I could imagine myself having been trapped in a lurid story with John Gibbs.
“Shelby, where will you be next month this time?” asked Ellen thoughtfully.
Martin and I had often plotted our new beginning, and I could reply without hesitation. “In a rooming house at the top of Russian Hill, with a view of San Francisco Bay. The windows are open. I’m lying on my bed after managing Uncle Myer’s circulation. Seen distantly through the window, a steamer is bound for the Galápagos, where tortoises lie sleeping inside an ancient dream.”
Ellen looked at me appreciatively, and for a moment, I imagined her with me in that room. Each of us is architect and chief engineer of our dreams, Roebling, and they can be as difficult to build, the materials as refractory, the reasons against them as sound, the risks as great, and their realization as well-nigh impossible as they are in a feat of civil engineering.
Ellen and I walked along the lake, and she told me of her happiness. The words came easily as though she were describing an outing on Coney Island. I envied her, and I envied Franklin for having had the good fortune to marry her. I was dreaming, don’t you see? I could have been a shepherd, and she a shepherdess in a pastoral poem by Theocritus.
We sat on a rustic bench conceived in the mind of Frederick Law Olmstead and not in an ancient Greek’s. We looked at the water, where a stately pair of swans was gliding for no other reason than to confirm our Sunday’s idyll. A collie dog ran into the water, attracted by the magnetic force of a stick thrown by a boy; the imperturbable swans moved just beyond reach of the dog’s commotion.
“Isn’t it wonderful, Shelby?” asked Ellen, squeezing my hand.
Phoebe, I said to myself; I am your Silvius. How wonderful a dream can sometimes be! And how very terrible.
I had boarded an el train in lower Manhattan, only to step out into a play or an opera. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ellen had begun to sing an aria to the trumpeting of the swans and the barking of the dog and the bewilderment of the boy. For the space of the afternoon, the world and all its sordidness had fallen away, leaving only the park, two of the three Finches, and me. If only it could have continued!
Do you see how I’ve changed? Two years in prison will either make a man or break him. I have Melville to thank for my having survived it. He stood by me. He didn’t arrange passage on an outbound ship so that I could escape punishment, for he knew better than I did at the time that a stateless, vagrant life is none at all. Melville is loyal—say what you like about him.
“Martin is a sensitive young man,” said Ellen after a lengthy pause in the conversation, during which she’d been pursuing her own thoughts.
I wanted nothing to do with sensitive young men.
“Your friendship has done him good.”
Feeling uncomfortable, I made no reply.
“Franklin and I have worried that he would get into some scrape he couldn’t get out of. You can’t imagine how vulnerable he is.”
Oh, but I can!
“He has a good mind and heart, but I fear those qualities make him unsuitable for the Bowery. We would have moved to Staten Island if Franklin and Martin’s father had not left them the house free and clear.…” Her voice trailed off, and what was unspeakable was left unspoken, or so I imagined.
I resented Martin for having drawn a pall over the sunlit afternoon, taking the luster from Ellen’s hair and the brightness from her eyes. The lake water blackened, and the swans turned gray. The dream was nearly over, the opera at an end. Before the curtain rang down—possibly forever—I took Ellen’s wrist and held it—too hard, by the pained look on her face. Having taken it, I could not let it go. If only you and I were going to San Francisco! If only life were otherwise! Ellen, you are my last hope. I wanted to say this and more, but I said nothing. In her wide-eyed look, I saw confusion, apprehension, and—I swear—curiosity. I let go of her hand. Without a word being said, we made up our minds to treat what had passed as a joke. She must have done so, because she laughed—not nervously, but lightly. And so I was saved from embarrassment and explanation. The Central Park was no more Arcadia than I was Silvius, or she Phoebe.
She stood and said it was time to be getting back. We found Franklin leaning against Oak Bridge, which spans Bank Rock Bay at the entrance to the Ramble. He was eating ice cream and, at our approach, smiled shamefacedly, like a boy caught committing mischief.
“Did you enjoy your walk?”
“We did until Shelby took advantage of me in front of the swans.”
The color must have drained from my face, because Franklin took a step toward me as though he meant to crack my jaw. But then he broke into a laugh, and Ellen joined him, and I knew that they had been making sport of me and that I could have no significance to them other than as poor Martin’s friend.
“I hope they didn’t blush,” he said, smiling.
“The swans are married, and nothing can shock them,” she replied.
Now it was Franklin’s face that reddened.
Ellen took her handkerchief and wiped ice cream from his mouth. “I declare my husband is a child! I dare not let him out of my sight!”
“My wife belongs to the National Woman Suffrage Association. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton are frequent guests at Maiden Lane.”
Ellen humphed humorously.
“I’ve been typing early drafts of a novel for Henry James, The Bostonians. In it, a character named Olive appears to be in love with Verena Tarrant, a proponent of the woman’s movement. Mr. James seems not to have made up his mind whether to admire suffragists and sympathize with women who find themselves in a ‘Boston marriage’ or frown on them.”
“I expect any day to hear that Ellen has been arrested for conduct unbecoming a Christian gentlewoman and a professional typist.”
“The Fiji islanders manage these things better,” she countered.
Franklin picked up the hamper, and we left the park and caught a southbound train. A return ticket reminds us that life on earth is a to-and-fro business. But there is no coming back from eternity or the bottomless pit of time.
The Brooklyn Bridge’s Manhattan Tower, May 9, 1882
I awoke at the Brooklyn Bridge, or so it seemed to me. I’d left Gansevoort Pier at the end of the day, only to find myself transported to the bottom of Fulton Street, in sight of the East River. By what conveyance I had arrived there—whether an omnibus, elevated train, or aeronaut’s balloon—I could not have said. Like a man coming out of a mesmeric trance or an ether sleep, I looked about me in dismay at the iron doors leading to the stone vault inside the Manhattan anchorage, where wine merchants lay down expensive bottles of European vintage as if it were the niter-encrusted crypt in which Poe caused Fortunato to be walled up. The “Amontillado” that had lured me against my will—no, my will was in abeyance—was the impulse that had also caused Melville’s Ishmael to “pause before coffin warehouses,” and, from what I know of his life’s story, had brought Melville himself to the brink of annihilation.
You must’ve contemplated it, as well. Sometime during your own entombment while you struggled with the intractable materials of granite, steel, and human flesh, you must have thought and thrilled to the idea of suicide. I prefer Hamlet’s word: self-slaughter. I picture—forgive a ghoulish imagination alien to your own—a man, as might be you, me, or Melville, cutting his own throat and then the ardent blood pumping into a basin, or, say, eviscerating and roasting his own bowels. Nothing surpasses the medieval mind for ingenious tortures. Modern man, prosaic to the last, contents himself with a rope end or drop of arsenic. Roebling, it’s butchery that I think of when I whisper that grisly compound noun from Hamlet’s soliloquy, which—each in his own way—we all will utter.
I raised my eyes to the bridge, your monument to human ambition and resolve, and saw, in its granite towers, which soared into air once ruled by eagles, not cathedrals, but guillotines awaiting the heads of giants to lop off. Thus can the meaning of symbols change according to the mind’s well-being or disease. I gazed at your bridge and imagined, in years to come, bodies dropping like stones into the river below. If the time comes when life cannot be endured a moment longer, I think that such a dying fall would be … I have no word to say what it would be. But it is better to jump from a sublime height than put a bullet through one’s brain or nibble poison like cheese. I think that to jump from one element into another—there to have one’s fire put out—is a more pleasing end than any offered by knife, rope, or rat bane. It was the death reserved for fallen angels, though the infernal lake was one of fire instead of the kindly water—kindly to accept us without demur, as a mother does the child at her breast.
My father took his own life. I rarely speak of it. When the panic and depression ruined him, the fire went out, and nothing I could say or do rekindled it. Like most men of business, he couldn’t conceive of himself without one. I found him in his study, his Colt Walker in a lifeless hand, his finger caught in the trigger guard. He left no note behind him except for an ironic gibe on the frontispiece of his first edition of Barrett’s The Old Merchants of New York City: “Gone to sell ice to the damned.”
What would you be, Roebling, without your stones and cables, your tables and diagrams, formulae and the mathematics of your trade? Nothing. And it is in protest against this nothing that you’ve suffered martyrdom in this room to see the work completed. Melville, too, fears the nothing a man can become when his work is taken from him. He writes like a man possessed—desperately throwing his voice into the abyss and waiting to hear its echo.
I almost wish that I could walk onto the bridge and, stopping midway between Manhattan and Brooklyn, above the river belonging to them both, step off into eternity like a man poised on the gallows between heaven and earth, neither of which belong to him any longer. At the cost of a moment’s terror, I’d be washed clean by the everlasting water instead of by strangers arrived to wash my corpse. I would die without the shame of a second infancy. If only I could give myself to the river, and, later, if my body be not found, to the ocean, where I would circumnavigate the globe, rolling in the deeps, at play with the calves, until my atoms merged with the water’s and with theirs! What stays my hand? Is it the Dane’s fear of violating “the canon ’gainst self-slaughter”? I doubt my reason is as pure as that. No, I’m afraid of the instant of pain, which, like the shattering of a stained-glass window, would admit me to an oft-imagined realm, where my damnation awaits. (According to the Calvinists, my end was determined long before my beginning.)
I’m not Hamlet or Ahab or even Melville. My passions are sized to the dimensions of a stock exchange, a trading pit, or a customs office on West Street, near the North River, where fraudulent men are exposed with the jubilation of Shylock sharpening his knife to take from bankrupt Antonio a pound of flesh. Once upon a time, I was a businessman in New York who hoped to become a merchant prince. The ambition having been a tawdry one, the failure cannot be considered tragic.
Do you really think I judge myself too harshly?
You’re right, of course. A person is neither all one thing nor another. For an artist to claim he has caught his subject is a lie: The human essence eludes delineation and description. You might as well attempt to coax a cloud of smoke into a bottle as capture a person in words or paint. I suspect that my tale has not done Melville justice in the telling. To try to tell the story of a man is inevitably to fail and to make him smaller than life, which is, and must be, always larger than any one person’s comprehension of it. Humans are not cattle to be shown and judged at a county fair. And yet, knowing this, we still pretend it is otherwise.
I foresee an unintended use for your bridge: a jumping-off point between this world and the next, at a place where two cities will either claim or deny jurisdiction, according to the fame or notoriety of the deceased. I agree that such an eventuality lies outside geometry, catenary curves, and structural analysis. I’d like to see an arithmetic that could account for it as well as other instances of passion and unreason. Such formulae, which rule over exceptions and singularities, nightmares and the dark motives of the heart, have yet to be devised. We can only shudder to think what might be done with them by the unscrupulous. Neither you nor your father is in any way to blame, Roebling, for the suicides that will surely come. Ideas once conceived cannot be unconceived. The Brooklyn Bridge exists not only in the space it occupies but also in the minds of men and women and—perhaps even more tenaciously and ineradicably—in their imaginations. Just so do Ahab and the White Whale exist beyond anyone’s power to annul them.
Chapel of the Christ in Pike Street, near the Brooklyn Bridge, May 9, 1882
Returning from the bridge and my contemplation of eternity, I paused at a chapel on Pike Street. I could see that it had once been a confectionary, but in place of sweetmeats, a shabby manger cradling a baby made of fired clay occupied the store window, together with a lamb missing a leg, which was nosing the holy infant with its woolly muzzle. By the yellowing handkerchief swaddling the child, the dust, and a bleached velvet drape behind the Nativity, I supposed that it had been put out at Christmas and then overlooked or forgotten. I pressed my nose to the glass and peered through the imperfectly drawn drapes, but I could see nothing of the room, though a light was burning within. I almost knocked at the window but hesitated, feeling afraid, as I had felt as a young boy made to sit in an empty church so that I would feel God’s eyes on me and understand that no one can escape His notice or punishment, regardless of the darkness in which he hopes to hide. I was about to walk on, when the door opened and a man stepped outside onto the pavement.
“What do you want?”
I thought it was a question more fitting for a confectioner to ask than a minister of God, for so I saw him to be, although like the manger and the woolly lamb on the little stage behind the window, his appearance was shabby. His hair and beard wanted cutting, and his coat mending. He looked to be an old man, but I might have been deceived by his stoop and his drawn, pallid face.
“I’m not sure what I want!” I replied honestly. At that moment, I realized that I had been struggling with uncertainty, but as to its cause, I could not have said—not to him, not to myself. To say that I was “struggling” and to say “with uncertainty” was to understate both my struggle and my uncertainty, which had earlier in the day brought me to the edge of insensibility, beyond which lay madness or death.
Yes, I do sound like a character in a gothic novel. Underneath the gaudy language, one can find truth even there.
The man turned his back, and I understood that I was free to follow him inside the chapel or to continue on my way. It was not for him to encourage or discourage those who were washed up on his doorstep.
I followed him into a room where a dozen chairs faced a makeshift altar on which a cross bearing a gnarled-looking Christ, two tarnished candlesticks, a silver chalice, and a salver for the Host were arranged. Otherwise, the room was unadorned and as cheerless as the scale house on Gansevoort Pier. If God had ever inhabited this place, He’d fled from it long ago. Despite the man’s neglect of himself and his show window, he was not unattractive. He possessed a magnetic quality, which drew me to him and, strange to say, to—Roebling, I must admit, however preposterous it sounds, that I sensed God in him. His coat—a U.S. Army chaplain’s from the War of the Rebellion—had an unpleasant sour odor, and his hair and beard were rank with stale tobacco smoke, but in that squalid chapel, they could have served as frankincense. Had I been the impressionable sort, I might have dropped to my knees before him—so moved was I. Yet he seemed an ordinary man—less than that because the light in his eyes appeared to be going out. Maybe this is what finally determines our ordinariness: the deadness of our eyes. He was a man who had suffered—that much was obvious. I had the impression that he had suffered for his God—or possibly because of Him.
“It is weakness in a man not to know what he wants,” said Winter. He also bore a name suitable to an allegory. He was leaning against the altar in a way that struck me as natural rather than irreligious. “It is, however, almost universal in our kind. Men who know their desires and obey them are to be feared. They are fanatical. To pretend to know God’s and act upon them is the most dangerous and fanatical presumption of all.”
“I know that I am not happy—”
“Happiness is beside the point,” he retorted.
I asked him, indignantly, if he did not believe that a man or a woman was entitled to happiness. I might have been asking whether or not we were entitled to eat our neighbor because we happened to be starving. He was a strange man and a stranger minister, yet I felt compelled to remain in his stuffy room and listen to his sad commentary. If only he would have raised his hand and smote the altar or raised his voice and chastised me, I could have laughed and left him to his thunderation!
He seemed to forget I was there. He talked as if to himself. When the candles guttered and went out, he went on talking in the dark. He’d been a Lutheran chaplain in Grant’s army and before that had served in the war with Mexico and in the Utah War, when “doughface” Buchanan sent an army against Brigham Young and his Mormon militia. Winter had seen much, and what he had seen had marked his countenance, his voice, and doubtless his soul. John Brown especially had affected him. Winter had been with him on the night before the abolitionist was hanged for treason and murders committed at Harper’s Ferry. He had not been able to forget Brown or his injunction: “Even if you can no longer believe in the efficacy of Grace, in divine Providence, in salvation and last judgment, in the words of your calling, in goodness and mercy, you must act as if you do believe in them.”
At last, he fell silent, and I roused myself and asked, “Have you no faith, then?” I was appalled to hear a minister of God speak as this man had spoken, even in that tiny room, with its tatty wares displayed in an unwashed window. I am not a religious man. In matters of faith as in economics, my attitude has always been laissez-faire. But his words had offended my sense of decorum. We were in the house of God, and it did not matter that the house was mean. Perhaps I felt His eyes on me again, sitting in the dark—the same dark as that of my childhood, because darkness is one and indivisible, whereas the light seldom arrives unaccompanied by shadows. “Have you no faith at all?” I repeated.
“Not as a child does,” he replied calmly, “but as a man sometimes will for whom Christ has been worn to a splinter—or a matchstick, which he is saving for a night colder than he can bare, but whose ultimate efficacy he cannot verify without destroying it. My faith is a chill and doubtful possibility of salvation.”
Winter had nearly let the fire go out in him.
“Not for an hour since that night have I forgotten John Brown or his words to me.”
He talked about the aftermath of the late war, his disappointment in love, a daughter whom he had not seen in years, his itinerant ministry in the western territories, his loneliness, and his constant wrestling with God, who he wished would show Himself, even if he were to be struck down and damned by Him.
“I’ve often wondered if Old Brown was correct in what he said to me. To do wrong in the name of one’s notion of right may be contrary to God’s wishes. I believed in John Brown and the rightness of his cause. Robert E. Lee, who was in charge of the execution, believed in the rightness of his. Both were good and honorable men; both acted with conviction, though in pursuit of opposite ends. One of them, however, must have been wrong, since not even God can reconcile moral contradictions. I fear I may have been wrong to have praised a faith I myself lacked.”
He was lost in his own bewilderment, and I realized that he could not help me. I was not even certain of my reason in having followed him inside the chapel. What had I wanted there? To confess? If so, to what? I ought to have sensed without needing to step inside God’s hovel that whoever ministered to the souls of men in such a place would suffer his own torment.
Union Beach, New Jersey, on Raritan Bay, May 10, 1882
On Wednesday, Melville and I boarded the Armenia and steamed down the North River and onto Upper New York Bay. Castle Garden, where Jenny Lind had sung, and the Battery fell behind us as the ferry traveled through a stretch of water between Ellis Island and Governor’s Island, menacing with the ramparts of Fort Gibson and Fort Columbus. Passing though the neck separating Brooklyn and Staten Island, I saw the highlands of the Navesink rise above the distant New Jersey coast. There in another age—thought savage by many, golden by others—Lenni-Lenape Indians had raked up oysters big as dinner plates and fished for blues or winter flounder, according to their season.
The steamer crossed into the sovereign state of New Jersey’s territorial waters, named the Raritan, composed of the same atoms as New York Bay, as well as the Atlantic, whose salt mingles with them both. Annexation, possession, and division are the delight and raison d’être of governments, politicians, and cartographers. They are also qualities of men and women who seek, by addition or subtraction, to redraw the boundaries of themselves. To conquer and to be conquered by another’s stronger will are two sides of the same penny.
Melville and I sat amid mail sacks and crates bound for Keyport, a town whose small harbor was the principal coastal port for shipments of New Jersey produce to Staten Island and Brooklyn, across the water in Lower New York Bay. Arriving at the slip, we disembarked as deckhands knotted hawsers around the iron bollards’ rusty necks. The town was more populous that I had supposed. The dirt streets were lined with wood-framed stores and houses faded and peeling in the salt air. Wood lots of pine and spruce remind us moderns that Indians had once lived in the gloom of an ancient forest vanishing, sadly, into history’s airless rooms. One day, only engravings and dioramas will be left to raise the past from the grave of time.
We boarded a ’bus, which traveled the bay’s coastline between Perth Amboy and Sandy Hook, and got off at Union Beach, where the crippled steamer George E. Starr had run aground. She’d been harried by the Wolcott, a United States revenue cutter sent in pursuit from Jamaica Bay. After the Starr had foundered, the collector of customs had given Melville charge of the valuation of her cargo, which included opium. I was accompanying him as the appraiser and bearer of the necessities of our universally despised trade.
The Starr had been making for New York City when she was seen by the lighthouse keeper at Sandy Hook, which marks the Atlantic’s entrance into the bay. She had taken on contraband at Philadelphia and managed to slip out of port ahead of the revenue men. The Wolcott caught up with her off the coast of Brooklyn at Long Beach. She fired across the Starr’s bow and forced her onto the bay’s Jersey side, intending to bottle her up inside Keyport Harbor.
Copper sheaved, the Starr was an old-fashioned clipper built in Baltimore during the Civil War. She’d been hauling freight across the Gulf until a smuggling ring purchased her. Like any topsail schooner, she was fast and agile and ought to have outrun the Wolcott except that her owners had chosen the crew for reasons having more to do with criminality than ship-handling experience. When they saw the revenue cutter bearing down on them, they panicked; the ship broached and heeled. The cutter drove her, as a dog does sheep, landward, where she grounded on a gravel shoal.
All on board her were thought to have swum ashore and fled into the dense pine woods. A platoon of marines from the Brooklyn Navy Yard had arrived and were searching them. A retired warship used to train recruits was lying off the beach to guard against looters. Given the enormous value of the cargo, the Treasury Department had no wish to see it carried off and sold piecemeal to Irish roughnecks at Hell Gate and in the Bowery.
“Opium-running is something new to these waters,” said Melville as we stood on the beach and shaded our eyes against the glaring bay. “In 1816, John Jacob Astor smuggled ten tons of Turkish opium from Smyrna into Canton, enlarging the fortune he’d made in beaver skins. Since he wasn’t evading taxes here, there was nothing to prevent him from getting richer there. What the government doesn’t want to see is the Afghan trade setting up in New York City.”
Two boys were standing at the water’s edge, where exhausted waves—their energy spent by the distance they’d traveled from the ocean—dredged up pebbles and broken shells. Nothing is so interesting to boys as a shipwreck unless it be a house on fire or a dead horse in the street. I supposed that the pair of them was debating the question of how many pirates had drowned and concocting a plan to get aboard the Starr and ransack her for treasure.
A young woman, most likely their mother, had been raking clams and putting them in a basket lined with seaweed when she noticed the boys. She stood up, straightened her back, and shouted at them, “Max and Drew! Get away from there this instant!”
Naturally, the boys ignored her, and in a theatrical rage practiced by mothers of young children, she stormed after them. Holding each one by an ear, she dragged them back to the rake and basket while they screamed blue murder.
Melville laughed good-naturedly and said, “The only thing more vexing than a boy is two of them!”
Lizzie had borne him two sons. The elder, Malcolm, had shot himself before he reached nineteen in the house on Twenty-sixth Street, where I had dined a month before.
Melville grew quiet. Perhaps the memory of his dead boy was going through his mind. Or maybe he was transfixed by the glancing light on the water or the shadows of clouds grazing on Staten Island’s far hills. Or was he simply amazed at the way his luck had gone and his life turned out?
A waterman rowed us out to the Starr in his flat-bottomed boat. We stepped aboard and went down into the hold, where we discovered the illicit cargo and, crushed beneath a crate of machinery intended for a factory in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, a crewman who had not escaped.
“Leave him be,” said Melville. “It’s not so warm today that he will start to stink. Let’s do what we were sent to do, and then get the hell away from here. The marines will deal with him.”
I agreed, and we set to work inspecting the cargo, a fair portion of which was the product of the poppy.
“Strange to think that something natural and pretty should be vicious,” I said naïvely.
“The man who visited a brothel and came away with the Spanish pox probably said the same thing,” he replied ruefully.
He unstoppered a flask he sometimes carried in his pocket, and we drank to “dissembling appearances.” By the time we’d finished our work, we had also drunk to “la vida breve,” “Walt Whitman and the ‘procreant urge of the world,’” “Lucy Ann”—whether a woman or a ship, I never discovered—“Hawthorne,” “the fleshpots of the ancient world,” “Guttenberg,” and the “fallibility of Galileo, who got it wrong.”
“The world doesn’t move around the sun,” said Melville. “It revolves around each and every one of us. We are—every Jack and Jill—the center and fulcrum. And that, Shelby, is the trouble with the world and our damnable kind.”
Both of us emerged from the stuffy hold with a headache and a brain fuddled by alcohol and fumes. Making a megaphone of his hands, Melville shouted to the waterman, who had been tonging for oysters while we were doing our best not for God or king, but for the United States Customs Service.
Melville gave a convincing imitation of a drunkard, and I felt that my own two legs could not be trusted. We sat forward of the dripping oyster baskets while the waterman expertly plied the sweep oar. Shortly, the boat scraped up onto the pebbly beach.
“I need a nap,” said Melville, walking with the exaggerated fastidiousness of the besotted toward a stand of pine trees, where he flopped down, shut his eyes, and began to snore. It would have been a piece of low comedy had I not followed suit.
We awoke when the sun was setting fire to the western-facing windows of Manhattan, visible, if only to our mind’s eye, whose vision is imperfect. We were parched and famished—words ordinarily applied to draught-stricken landscapes and cattle. Our heads had cleared of vapors, and we left the beach to find an eating house in Keyport. As we rode the omnibus back the way we’d come, I watched the wind darken Raritan Bay and ruffle it to chop.
We ate at Keebees, at the foot of the Keyport and Holmdel docks, which thrust into the Raritan like two splinters. I searched my mind for something to say that would interest Melville. At such times, I felt out of my depth—a goldfish in the ocean or a plumber arrived at Emerson’s house to fix a leaky pipe during a meeting of the Transcendental Club.
“It strikes me as odd,” I hazarded to say, “that a place should change its character according to the direction from which it is approached.”
“What do you mean?” asked Melville, having pierced a fried oyster with his fork.
“I was thinking of Union Beach. It would appear to exist according to our view of it.”
He lay the fork on his plate with a clatter, an invitation for me to continue.
“When we saw it through the open window of the omnibus, it appeared ordinary. But when the waterman rowed us ashore from the Starr, it seemed somehow exotic.”
On such a beach, Robinson Crusoe began his twenty-eight-year ordeal on the “Island of Despair,” at the mouth of the Oroonoque, visited, according to the timetable governing hunger, by cannibals. On such a beach, Captain Cook came ashore at Tahiti, and by Anna Maria Bay, at Nuku Hiva, Melville entered earth’s erogenous zone, where shame was unknown to the tattooed inhabitants and the lurid colors of the birds and flowers could have brought genteel ladies to a swoon.
Viewed from land, Union Beach is no more than a cusp of sand lying against a bight of Raritan Bay. Seen from the water, it is anything you want it to be. The bridge rearing up outside the window, Roebling, is not the same one the sandhogs knew, laboring inside the caissons, or the people know who cross it. And the Herman Melville I saw across the oilcloth-covered table in Keyport was not the same man that others did. (And Gibbs? Always my thoughts return to him. I sometimes wonder if he existed apart from me, or I apart from him. Were we also Chang and Eng?)
“It is naïve to think in terms of absolutes in nature,” replied Melville. “Emerson wrote of a ‘radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts,’ whereby ‘The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.’ The universe exists only in relation to us, and our doom is to look at others and see only ourselves.” His voice and still-handsome face were fretted by regret. “On second thought, there is one absolute in nature.”
“And what might that be?” I asked.
“Evil. It is a quality inherent in nature, to which certain men and women resort. In that evil is not evenly distributed throughout living things, there must be a predisposition to it. Moby Dick was an absolute that compelled Ahab to dwell on it because he was predisposed to do so.”
Abruptly, Melville changed the subject to the excise tax, as though his mind had been caught by a contrary wind. “The tax on goods should be less than the cost of smuggling them,” he said, “or it will behoove a person of greed and recklessness to attempt to circumvent customs.”
“In an ideal world, there would be no need for an excise tax—or customs inspectors,” I said.
“Emerson can write about idealism till hell freezes over, but it won’t change the fact that our world is a fallen one. Accordingly, there are those who, unable to control their appetites, necessitate their regulation for the common good. In other words, Shelby, if bad men mean to run opium in ships, there must be a sixty-gunner to blow them to hell out of the water.”
“Emerson died last month.”
“I didn’t know. Let’s hope God is not a Calvinist after all.”
At another table, two men were arguing the dualities of their bayside village life, a tiny Manichaean universe of clams or oysters, flatboats or dories, turnips or parsnips, Baptists or Methodists, lager or stout, draft horses or mules, fat women or thin ones from which to choose—good and evil seemingly having no part in their debate. To stay here, I said to myself, would be to cut the Gordian knot and retire to a life of simplicity. I said as much to Melville.
“Everywhere there are people, it’s the same,” he replied. “Whether you go to Timbuktu, Tierra del Fuego, or San Francisco, you’ll find little difference among men, except, perhaps, for the color of their skin, their barbering, or tailoring. There is no running away from mankind, Shelby. More’s the pity!”
In San Francisco, I was bound by probability to find another vicious brute to harry me. But I’d leave my shame behind in New York City.
We left the two men to debate their contrary faiths and heresies and the village to nurse its spites and grudges. Shortly, we were on board a ferryboat headed for Manhattan as evening began its shy approach.
What became of the sojourner among cannibals who wore skirts of bright tapa cloth, put bones and feathers in their ears, and scented their brown bodies with aromatic oils? Where was the sailor who had jumped ship in the Marquesas to escape a tyrannical captain, had been locked up for mutiny in the British stockade at the end of white-graveled Broom Road, on the island of Tahiti, had set bowling pins in Honolulu, hunted wild boar and picked breadfruit in the Typee Valley, and caught the spicy scent of citron and cloves from the gardens of Río? Does he exist—this man who once sailed into Valparaíso’s horseshoe bay surrounded by twenty hills, walked through the white city of Lima rotted at the core and saw wild dogs scavenging corpses in an open pit? Does he still live within the aging man—the young one who sailed above the ruins of the former imperial city of Callao, drowned by earthquake and tidal wave a century before?
Melville was standing beside me in the bow of the ferry as the bay off Manhattan Island turned to gold, as it had for him long ago in Polynesia and in the Sandwich Islands.
Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, May 17, 1884
They’re coming, Roebling!
The elephants—all twenty-one of them, with old Jumbo, the African pachyderm, in the rear, and Barnum, the world’s most shameless showman, out in front, waving an enormous hat. They’re parading along Fulton, making for your bridge. I see he’s also brought along camels and dromedaries! The streets are mobbed. You must hate the fuss.
I never imagined it was your idea! But would you really prefer anonymity to fame, like Grant? I can’t imagine Mark Twain wishing his name could be erased from his books. Melville would be gratified if he could be one of the famous dead and, like Tom Sawyer, able to enjoy the posthumous flapdoodle. Being forgotten grieves and embitters him. The rest of us welcome the forgetfulness of others. It is their gift to us.
Will you build another bridge or retire to Trenton? You’ve earned a sabbatical.
Of course, there’s always work to be done and rivers to span! My friend, you look tired. Would you rather I left the rest of my story for another day?
“Get it over with,” said the patient to the dentist, gritting his teeth.
The last time I was here, I noticed your rock collection. Did it remind you of the world’s perdurable foundation, or its debris? Life breaks us all into pieces. If only we could be made whole with a dose of castor oil, a moral essay by Emerson, or a sip of wine at the Communion rail! The Almighty could have laid out a less fatiguing road for His creatures to follow than that of obedience. He tested Eve’s with an apple. “Shall I love God and forswear the fruit, or eat it and go my merry way?” She ate it, of course. Must we choose—always and only—between wicked indulgence and bitter renunciation? Must goodness taste like stale bread and sour wine?
I admit that, in former days, I chose indulgence, though I do not consider its having been wicked. I had a taste for parvenu society; as the son of an upstart, the upper berths of the Gilded Age were closed to me. I envied the perquisites of affluence and the confidence that only wealth can bestow. But I would stoop only so low to enjoy them. My father had been a war profiteer—a pygmy beside avaricious giants, such as Philip Armour, who made his first million by selling pork short, or Thomas Durant, who bilked the federal government by laying tracks in oxbows from Omaha to the hundredth meridian and proved that, in railroad building, the shortest distance to a fortune is not a straight line. It takes guts to climb to the top, as well as a willingness to be less than fastidious in all matters, excepting one’s haberdashery.
Before the catastrophe, I was summoned to an informal hearing at the New York Custom House. Melville accompanied me as a sort of defense attorney—not for an instant did he believe I was guilty of wrongdoing. It happened shortly after our return from Union Beach. I was accused of having falsified appraisals. Such fiddling was often and easily done. I went before a tribunal presided over by Caruthers, collector of customs. Flanking him were the naval officer and the chief surveyor, both of whom seemed no more concerned than schoolboys would be in deciding the fate of a possum cornered by a dog.
I suspected John Gibbs of being behind the summons. He could have cast doubt upon my integrity by making a jotting in the ledger; he knows my business as well as his own. Melville also thought it likely. There was nothing to be done, however, and neither Melville nor I would risk a countercharge without evidence. I submitted, therefore, to the tedious examination by the collector, who spoke for all three men.
The U.S. Custom House at 55 Wall Street, May 12, 1882
“Mr. Ross, a serious charge has been brought against you,”
“Brought by whom?”
“Melville, that is beside the point.”
“The reliability of an accuser is hardly beside the point.”
“This is an inquiry, not a trial.”
“Nevertheless, I insist on knowing the name of Mr. Ross’s accuser.”
“The charge was made anonymously.”
Melville sniffed in amusement while I examined a picture above my judges’ heads, commemorating the capture, in 1810, of the brig Chelmers of London by the French privateer Junon. The painting was a gift of General Lafayette during his American visit. At that time, the general also paid his respects to Melville’s Gansevoort relations in Albany. Thus are we caught—the illustrious, as well as the least of us—in history’s coils.
Caruthers unfolded a sheet of paper and shook it like a dirty rag. “I’ve a letter stating that Mr. Ross has been undervaluing certain shipments in collusion with their receivers in order to reduce the tariff due on them. And for his generous attitude toward some of the merchants of our city, he has been handsomely remunerated.”
“Nonsense!” said Melville. “Mr. Ross is beyond reproach.”
“Do I take it that you will vouch for his honesty?”
“Ross can be a fool, but he is never otherwise than honest. Does a dishonest man become a bankrupt?”
I thought his argument ill-advised, as did Caruthers.
“Very often,” he replied drily.
Melville swept Caruthers’s barb aside as one would a pesky hornet.
“Ross performs his duties punctiliously. His valuations are subject to my review. If you doubt him, then you must doubt me, as well.”
“We appreciate your loyalty to a subordinate, Mr. Melville.”
I hated to be called a subordinate, fool that I am.
“Not every one of my subordinates deserves my loyalty.”
“What are you insinuating?”
Caruthers leaned forward in his chair expectantly; the naval officer played with a piece of string; the chief surveyor yawned.
“Not everyone under my supervision is honest,” replied Melville matter-of-factly.
“By the law of probability. In that ours is an imperfect world and our species given to all manner of temptation and folly, it is likely that for every honest man, there is a dishonest one.”
“You are uncommonly pessimistic, Melville.”
“It’s a rare man who can pass through the land of bilk and money and not get his hands dirty.”
Caruthers cleared his throat in irritation and said, “I can see that nothing will be gained by continuing this discussion.” He cast a jaundiced eye on me. “Mr. Ross.”
“Yes, sir?”
I considered standing, as one does in court to hear his sentence passed, but on second thought, I did not think it worth the effort.
“Consider yourself admonished!”
I considered myself so.
“I trust there will be nothing set down against him in the record,” said Melville.
In the space of five minutes, I had come to love the man.
“As you have pointed out, there is insufficient evidence. But we will be paying strict attention to the valuations of Mr. Ross and others working on Gansevoort Pier.”
“And the author of that tattle? What do you intend to do about him?”
“As I told you, the letter is anonymous.”
The hearing concluded abruptly, without as much as the rap of a gavel.
We stood once more in the briny air blowing down Wall Street from the river. Melville said contemptuously, “For a moment, I thought Caruthers was going to put on the black cap and sentence you to hang. The ass!”
We rode the elevated up Greenwich Street as far as Gansevoort.
“Looking down upon tarred roofs is neither uplifting nor picturesque,” said Melville gloomily. “There’s no more splendid view of the world than from the topsail yard.”
Preoccupied by the morning’s unpleasantness, I merely grunted.
He must have sensed my uneasiness. “Why does Gibbs have it in for you?”
“We’ve had our differences,” I said, hoping to sound nonchalant. “I bloodied his face on two occasions.” I said nothing about the knife.
“I never took you for a brawler, Shelby!”
In spite of myself, I took pleasure in the compliment. What man wouldn’t have?
“Beginning tomorrow, I’ll make sure you two don’t work together. I thought you’d be gone by now.”
“Soon,” I said, not knowing why I hadn’t yet left the city.
“Don’t wait too long, Shelby, or the moment might pass you by.”
If it hasn’t already come and gone, I thought.
West Street Customs Office, May 12, 1882
Gibbs and I were down in the hold of the Harleem, which smelled aromatically of flaxseed oil, considered a delicacy by the Germans, who spoon it on potatoes. As on previous occasions, he behaved as if nothing were amiss between us. Naturally, I was suspicious, and as the afternoon wore on, I grew irritable, until I could no longer restrain myself.
“Why did you accuse me of defrauding the Customs Service?”
He gazed at me as though I’d denounced him for having taken a balloon ride to the moon.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he replied in astonishment.
“I was hauled before the officers of the port this morning to answer for myself. Or didn’t you know?”
By his look of amazement, you would have thought that I was an escaped lunatic.
“And what did you tell Martin Finch when you visited him last week?”
I expected him to deny the visit, but as unpredictable as always, he replied soberly, “I wanted to see how he was getting on.”
I laughed in his face. He took no offense, but, on the contrary, smiled warmly.
“His brother told me you upset him,” I said, ignoring the attempt to ingratiate himself.
“I don’t know why he would’ve said that. I stayed only a short time, and as far as I’m concerned, our meeting was amiable. Perhaps Franklin misunderstood Martin’s mood. Did he say what I’d done to upset him?”
I shook my head, suppressing the urge to strike him again.
“We’ve all been asking ourselves why you haven’t left for California—you and your friend. Has something happened to change your mind?” Had he pronounced friend in such a way that I should take offense?
I let my eyes probe his, but he was all solicitude, and I realized I could no more get the better of him than wrestle an anaconda.
“We haven’t had a chance to talk about our trip to ‘Aladdin’s,’” he said with a sly grin. “To relive it in all its choice details.”
I shivered, as though I’d been galvanized in the place where nightmares graze, appeasing their appetites on the memory of our crimes.
“I have nothing further to say to you, Gibbs!”
“I’ll never forget the sight of you lying on the Turkish rug, your clothing in the wildest disorder! I’ve been to the Slide once or twice since then, and your friends”—there it is, that sinister inflection!—“wish you would come again. You made a very favorable impression on them, my lad. I was as proud to have been your escort as I am to be your friend.”
I clenched my fists but forbore to strike him, knowing that it would give him a perverse satisfaction and stoke the fire of his enmity. The rage he had first shown, inside the hold of the Saxony, had turned inward. It lay coiled and waiting to unwind in a flash and rend his enemies. Smiling genially and talking of friendship, Gibbs had never been so dangerous as he was at that moment. Not content to insinuate, he became bolder as he worked the knife of his rancor into my vitals.
“I hope you will not blush, Shelby, if I allude to the special affection that one man will sometimes feel for another. The prudish call it ‘a sin’ and ‘an abomination,’ but we know the truth of human nature better than those hypocrites. You and I understand the love whose name cannot be spoken and, because it must remain a secret, is undying.”
Beware of the man who pledges his undying love; he can turn on you in an instant, if it profits him to do so.
“Well, Shelby?” His voice was silken. “Nothing to say?”
I turned from him and walked between the oaken casks waiting to be taxed. I would not let him see my hands shake.
The Finches’ House, May 14, 1882
At one o’clock, I left the pier and went to Maiden Lane. I found Martin in a terrible state of nerves.
“Why haven’t you been to see me?” shouted this timid man, who rarely raised his voice. “My foot is healed! We should have left already!”
“You seem in a god-awful hurry, Martin!”
“Have you changed your mind?” he demanded.
“No, I haven’t.” I paused, and then asked, “What happened the night John Gibbs came to visit you?”
Now it was Martin’s turn to be evasive. He blushed and stammered and finally managed to get the words out: “He wonders why we haven’t left for San Francisco.”
“Is that all?”
He turned ashen and began to bite a fingernail.
“What else did he say?” I spoke sternly, like a teacher interrogating a schoolboy.
He made no reply.
I pressed him. “What else, Martin?”
He wouldn’t answer. I let it go. I knew, without needing to be told, what had passed between them.
Why had Gibbs decided to go after Martin when it was me he wanted? Sitting in my cell, I had time to speculate on the whole sorry business and concluded that Gibbs’s motives might not have been clear even to himself. He wanted to destroy me—that much was clear. By ruining my reputation, he could hound me into the poorhouse or an early grave. Apparently, his revenge insisted on Martin’s destruction, as well. But was Gibbs driven by something else? I would not—could not—attempt an answer.
I managed to calm Martin with assurances that, within a week—two at most—we’d be boarding a transcontinental train at Grand Central Depot. I helped him into bed—he was as shaken as a child—and said good night.
Franklin and Ellen were waiting downstairs.
“Is he all right?” Franklin asked gruffly, in the manner of all large men whose feelings have been touched.
“Come into the kitchen, so he won’t hear us,” said Ellen.
She had made coffee, and when Franklin and I were seated, she poured three cups and joined us at the table.
“What’s the matter with him?” she asked. “Who was that man who came to see him?”
“His name is John Gibbs; he works on the pier.” I swallowed some coffee because my mouth was dry and because I wanted to postpone the lie I knew I would shortly tell. “Martin’s his helper. Gibbs wanted to know when he’d be coming back to work.”
“Doesn’t he know that you two are going west?” asked Franklin.
“No, he doesn’t.”
You know how it is. We tell lies the way we burn logs to keep the wolves at bay.
“I don’t approve of not giving proper notice,” said Franklin, frowning.
“Melville knows, and so do the collector, the naval officer, and the chief surveyor. I met with them yesterday to give my notice, as well as Martin’s, since he couldn’t be there himself.”
“Well, that’s all right, then,” said Franklin.
“I thought it better to keep Gibbs in the dark.”
“Why?” asked Ellen.
“He’s a mean-tempered so-and-so, who could make things difficult for Martin.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I’ve met his sort before,” said Franklin, nodding over his cup. “It does no good to rub his kind the wrong way.”
“Maybe he begrudges Martin his luck in getting away from the port. I know Gibbs hates his work.”
“He could do something to Martin out of spite. You did right to keep it from this Gibbs fellow, Shelby.”
I had satisfied the brother, but the sister-in-law looked doubtful. Women have an instinct for the truth, whether or not they choose to tell it.
“Are you sure that’s all there is to it?”
“That’s all there is.” I hated lying to her, but what else could I have done?
We were silent awhile, each occupied with his own thoughts.
“When do you and Martin plan on leaving?” asked Franklin, setting down his cup.
I had been running my hand over the yellow oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. The sensation was luxurious, and I’d become insensible to the drama playing out around me.
“Shelby!” said Ellen, with a sharpness in her voice I had not heard before.
“Yes?” I must have looked an absolute fool.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m tired,” I said, glad to speak the truth for once. “It’s been a long day.”
“Well, we won’t keep you,” she said—almost coldly, I thought, unless my imagination had gotten the better of me.
“Finish your coffee, then off you go!” said Franklin with his usual lack of insight into the secret motions of the heart. His question regarding Martin and my departure had been forgotten.
Are you beginning to disapprove of me, Roebling? Are you sick of this “confession,” which seems to have no end? Every story is one made by its author—clothe it in raiment or rags, as he will. If it’s any consolation, you’ll never know if what I’ve been telling you is completely true or only partly so. One has to make allowances for the plot, which has its own power and obligations. To believe that life is plotless is to deny that the stars and planets have their fixed courses as they wander through the universe.
Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, May 17, 1884
I am sorry I couldn’t have been here for the opening of your bridge. Melville forwarded the invitation to my cell in Sing Sing without comment. I’ve saved it for the sake of history and for the auction houses of the future, when the relics of our age will have acquired value. You see, Roebling, I still dream of posterity, if no longer of prosperity.
THE EAST RIVER BRIDGE
Will be opened to the public
Thursday, May 24, at two o’clock.
Col. & Mrs. Washington A. Roebling
Request the honor of your company
After the opening ceremony until seven o’clock.
110 Columbia Heights
Brooklyn
R.S.V.P.
According to the World, opening day was the most splendid celebration the city had witnessed since the inauguration of the Erie Canal in 1825 and, years later, the Confederacy’s capitulation. I heard about the great day from Melville, who would sometimes visit me while I was serving my sentence. My crime was other than conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Treasury. That affair had been settled by Melville’s defense. In actuality, it was overtaken by events.
According to the newspapers, both sides of the bridge were mobbed by the curious, in their tens of thousands, many of whom had spent the previous decade in ridiculing both it and you. Almost all our sacred institutions were closed for the day—banks, businesses, even the U.S. Custom House, which reluctantly suspended its hunt for frauds and swindles. The stock market remained open in honor of a higher purpose called “profit.” The roofs of Printing House Square, as well as those atop the Morse Building, the Temple Court Building, the Mills Building, and that owned by the Police Gazette were packed. Every window, doorway, and sidewalk was thronged, and boys were perched in trees and hanging like monkeys from the public monuments—all to watch the regiments and their bands parade through downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan. The best vantage had been appropriated by a solitary photographer sitting on top of the Manhattan tower. He was welcome to it!
The ships of the North Atlantic Squadron steamed underneath the bridge, as did the enormous excursion boat Grand Republic. The harbor bristled with masts and billowing stacks. The noise of artillery fire from the warships, answered by batteries at the navy yard, Fort Hamilton, and Governor’s Island, resounded in Manhattan’s cast-iron and granite chasms.
President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, and Mr. Edson, the mayor, led the parade across the bridge’s elevated promenade to Columbia Heights. At night, Chinese lanterns in the trees were lit, their feeble light swallowed by the illumination of seventy electric arc lamps. Only the spectacle of the fireworks could distract the crowd from its admiration of the spectacularly illuminated bridge.
Melville described the celebrations in great detail. Even now I can close my eyes and vividly picture “The People’s Day.” I’m sorry, Roebling, that you had to witness it through this window. You should have been at the head of the parade, walking beside Emily, not Chester A. Arthur, the mayor, Cleveland, and two hundred other dignitaries, who basked in the vivifying effect of public acclaim as if they had deserved it. All those high silk hats bobbing down Fifth Avenue and Broadway—I’d much rather see Barnum’s menagerie! The Irish protested. They are a pugnacious race and love rioting with a bottle or a stick of dynamite. The twenty-fourth of May also happened to be Queen Victoria’s birthday, and municipal authorities feared that the “Dynamite Patriots” would blow up the bridge in spite, regardless of how many of their own had died or sickened in building it. Revolutionaries ignore contradictions and are fond of ruins. Having lost my place at the top of the mountain, I wanted to clamber up again—not to blast it into rubble. My mountain had been no more than a termite mound beside the Alpine summits lorded over by “Diamond Jim” Fisk, Rockefeller, or Vanderbilt, but a termite mound is taller than an anthill. After a stretch in Sing Sing, my old room in Mrs. McFadden’s boardinghouse seemed like a palace, and I’d be living there now if she hadn’t let it to an Irish road mender.
My story is nearing its end. What follows may strike you as incredible. Maybe it is. We’ll leave it to the future to decide. Let us hope that the people there will be curious about us. I am pessimistic; it is easy to imagine an age that will repudiate its past, or—what is worse—not acknowledge it. The people will look at the dead without comprehension or recognition. “Who is this man?” a son will ask about the dead man who used to be his father. A young woman will come downstairs to breakfast and wonder who the old woman is, slumped over the table, her withered cheek lying in the butter dish.
The Finches’ House, May 18, 1882
In the early-morning hours after I had sat in the kitchen and lied to Franklin and Ellen, Martin went to Gansevoort Pier. Other than a watchman asleep in his shack, the dock was desolate. Once again, the earth was taking on form as the night gradually withdrew beyond the western horizon.
I don’t know why Martin would have gone alone to the pier. Whether in the hope of finding Melville and asking for his help or in obedience to Gibbs’s command, I can’t guess. He might have arranged to meet his tormentor at the scale house, with a mind to being rid of him once and for all. While I find it difficult to picture him confronting the older man on his own, fear can goad as sharply as desire, and cowards have been known to throw off their terror in desperation.
Melville opened the scale house door at eight o’clock and found Martin hanging from the balance beam. Questioned by police, the watchman stated that he hadn’t bothered to look inside, because he knew it to be empty of freight—the cotton bales recently arrived from New Orleans having been forwarded to the mill on the previous day. And so it was that the assistant weigher was himself weighed. If he was found wanting in the scale of justice, only God—the collector and appraiser of souls—knows. Once I believed in universal justice, by which men and women ultimately got what they deserved. In this Gilded Age, however, the mechanism of reward and retribution is as readily tampered with as a grocer’s scale. Ours is a time of false weights, false measures, false promises, and false hopes. In an age such as this, God will not stay the hand of Abraham, whose face is turned expectantly to heaven as he holds the flaying knife to the throat of his son Isaac, half brother of Ishmael, of whom the angel said to Hagar, his mother, “And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him.” So it has been since the days of Cain that men’s hands have been clenched into fists or about the throats of their fellows.
When I arrived later that morning, I was greeted by Melville, who stood up behind his desk—a formality unusual for him. The American aristocracy, said not to exist, except in the imaginations of reformers, anarchists, and muckraking journalists, both courts and covets the old regime, to which Herman’s father, Allan, martyred himself and his family in vainly trying to join it. His son would have none of it, preferring admittance to the society of successful writers, which insisted on excluding and finally ignoring him.
“You’re white as a sheet,” said Melville, coming from behind his desk and taking me by the arm. “Sit down.”
He had just finished giving me the news of Martin’s suicide. I was leaning against my desk, dazed and wanting to be sick. Inside the office, all was still, as if waiting for instructions, while outside a wind was rattling the window in its sill. He took the flask from his jacket pocket and gave me rum to drink, and then we waited as if for something to happen that would cut us down from the hook by which we two seemed suspended. In spite of myself, I watched Melville’s eyes turn inward, where his thoughts were revolving in their own eccentric orbits.
Finally, he broke the silence with an unsettling observation: “The horrific aspect of the case is that Finch hanged himself by degrees—piling weight upon weight in the pan at one end of the beam while the noose slowly tightened around his neck at the other end. He would have been lifted gradually up onto his toes and then beyond their reach of the ground, at which point he’d have been asphyxiated. The weights are still in the pan—the topmost one is the straw that broke poor Martin’s neck. Thus was Giles Corey crushed to death by the Salem magistrates for his refusal to admit to witchery, as stone was piled on top of stone.”
There is a sliver, a fraction, the merest hairsbreadth between the quick and the dead, I thought. If one day I were to write a story, I’d set it there—at the fatal intersection, where a remnant of life meets an intimation of death. I can’t imagine a more excruciating crisis. What happens in that instant would test every metaphysical notion our kind has entertained since the first philosopher. Such a tale, if carried to its conclusion, could shatter worlds, never mind a human breast.
In due course, Martin’s body was conveyed by a freight wagon to Maiden Lane, where he was washed, dressed, combed, rouged, and put on view inside a coffin plain as a Quaker’s barn. Melville and I went and swelled a little group of mourners fitted into the parlor. Franklin stood stiffly in a new suit and starched collar, his arm protectively encircling Ellen’s small waist. She sniffled; her eyes and nose were red from weeping. God forgive me, but I felt repelled by her mask of sorrow. Lying in repose, which churchmen and morticians call “eternal,” Martin didn’t look in the least as though he were asleep—an observation often made at wakes and funerals, by way of consolation. A halibut on a bed of ice at the Fulton Fish Market could not have looked any the less dead. The thoughts that sometimes enter, unbidden and unwelcome, into one’s head are hardly Christian, though all too human. Silently, I apologized to Martin for my heartlessness and to Ellen and Franklin for my irreverence. I shuddered to think of my young protégé about to begin his tenancy in a plot of earth at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a destination that his parents and mine had already reached and to which Ellen and Franklin would one day arrive, each in turn, on board a hearse pulled by a black horse plumed with jet feathers.
Melville stood beside me, contemplating the floor. Is it the old trouble with your eyes that makes you downcast? I asked him in my mind. When I could no longer put off what the occasion demanded, I went to Ellen and Franklin and, taking their hands, mumbled condolences. Franklin appeared not to know me. Ellen took her hand away. A fly might have brushed her cheek, I told myself, or an itch have started requiring her hand’s attention. I hoped that she had not recalled the afternoon in the park when, desperate and besotted, I held her wrist much too long and hard. Melville and I each drank a glass of gin punch set out for the mourners and left the house to its sorrow. I felt certain that I would never see her again.
In this, as in so much else, I was wrong. Ellen visited me in prison one dreary afternoon. She had traveled north on the Hudson River Railroad as far as Sing Sing. She was chilled to the bone by the walk from the depot to the penitentiary in a lightly falling rain. I won’t bore you with the details of her visit, except to recall the sentence with which she left me—one that did more than a governor’s pardon could to lift my spirits: “I’m grateful to you, Shelby.”
I was certain that Martin had not done away with himself, but had been hoisted aloft on the balance beam by Gibbs, who was more than capable of murder and a grisly, ironic gesture.
“It was John Gibbs,” I said to Melville when we stopped at the end of Maiden Lane to allow a dray to pass. “He murdered Martin and dressed it as a suicide.” I had spoken abruptly, like a man for whom speaking the truth had been the furthest thing from his mind.
“What makes you think so?” asked Melville. He might have been asking why I thought the coming winter would be a hard one, he showed so little surprise.
I told him everything there was to tell: my fight with Gibbs in the Saxony’s hold, the knife, his having followed Martin and me to the Battery, his drunken insinuations, the second blow I landed on his face, the bare-knuckle contest in the Bowery, my degradation at the Slide, his threat to expose me, his visit to Martin’s house, the latter’s terror and my misgivings. I didn’t spare myself, and the odd thing was that Melville didn’t appear the least shocked. I suppose that his youthful experiences had inured him to dismaying revelations.
“I doubt it can be proved,” he said. “Gibbs is cunning, like all of his kind. There’s no evidence or witness against him. The watchman claims to have seen nothing. No, I’m afraid there’s nothing on which Auguste Dupin could chew.” Melville did as much to his bottom lip and then said with finality, “For your sake, Shelby, let it go. The public will sooner forgive a murderer than a sodomite.”
The vile word struck me like a blow, and I glared at Melville, who did not appear to notice my disgust.
“I’ll see to the Leander this afternoon,” he said brusquely. “You go home and compose yourself.”
With those parting words, he started for Gansevoort Pier.
I had no intention of composing myself. I wanted to stoke my anger—to bring it to the boil and put it, hot and piping, at the service of revenge.
Yes, good people of the future, this is one of those old-fashioned stories—a revenger’s tale worthy of Cyril Tourneur. Because I am stubbornly clinging to what is probably a foolish optimism, I’ll suppose that you find such accounts of vicious passion incomprehensible in your enlightened age.
All that remains is for me to say how it was done, which calls for another story. To tell it, I’ll try to emulate the feverish tone that Melville struck in Moby-Dick. I refer the people of the future (assuming the book survives and there are readers to read it) to the last three chapters, which Melville—in the voice of Ishmael—devoted to “The Chase.”
May 18, 1882, Gansevoort Pier (related in a heroic style)
Unseen, I followed Melville to the river, and while he was inspecting coffee bags down in the Leander’s hold, I was taking up the harpoon, which was leaning in the corner of our office. I threw it over my shoulder, as Queequeg would have done, and strode into the street. (This, the heroic chapter of my autobiography, requires a lofty diction.) On the pier, I went in search of Gibbs. To be absent so soon after Martin’s death, I reasoned, would cast suspicion on him.
“Gibbs is cunning,” Melville had said. Had there been a grain of admiration in those words?
“Why are you lugging that harpoon, friend?” asked the appraiser Toliver as I boarded the Evangelist, a Quaker ship carrying pineapples from the Caribbean.
“To kill rats.”
He laughed and said, “There’s big’uns down below, sitting quiet and waiting for the Holy Spirit to fidget them.”
“What do you mean by carrying that pigsticker?” asked a merchant sailor leaning over the quarter-deck rail of the Pelikan, in whose hold lay sixty thousand pounds of Friesland pork.
“I mean to kill an evil whale.”
The man scratched his head and looked at me as if I were mad.
I walked among the ships as Satan had among Job’s herds in the land of Uz and the Lord had asked His fallen angel, “Whence comest thou?” And Satan had replied to Him, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
I may have been touched by the madness of Ahab when I shouted at a sailor chipping rust from a Glasgow collier:
“‘Hast seen the White Whale?’” It was the same question the Pequod’s crazed captain put to the master of the Delight in Melville’s book.
The sailor stared but gave no answer. And yet I’d heard a voice reply, “‘Aye, and I never saw its like before.’”
“‘Hast killed him?’”
In prison, I would learn whole pages by heart of what I think of now as a demonic book.
“‘The harpoon is not yet forged that will ever do that!’”
“‘Not forged! … Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin, where the white whale most feels his accursed life!’”
Accursed life!
I tell you, my as yet unconceived audience, that in my mind, I had grown gigantic, until I was proportioned like the bronze statue of George Washington standing on his plinth in front of the U.S. Custom House.
Then I saw Gibbs with his back to me at the end of the pier, where it overhangs the river. I rushed toward him, careless of the noise. He spun around. A string of tobacco juice hung from his lower lip, which he’d been about to spit into the river.
“You!” he said. His tone was derisive, his lips, which he wiped on his sleeve, were curled in a sneer. “Have you come to pick my teeth with that?”
“You killed my friend!”
“Your lover, you mean.”
“You hanged Martin Finch.”
“The Elizabethans believed that the mandrake, called ‘Little Gallows Man,’ grew from a hanged man’s seed spilled on the ground in a final rapture. I might go and pick some later; it’s said to be a potent aphrodisiac. Your friends at the Palace of Aladdin would pay dearly for it.”
“Villain! Why did you kill him?” My voice betrayed incredulity, when I’d intended it to be stern.
“I knew how much he meant to you.”
He drew a knife. I threw the harpoon. It caught him between the ribs.
“‘I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool!’” Ahab’s words, or Melville’s, but for the moment, they were mine by lordly appropriation and necessity. I had become Ahab smiting the whale. (Or was I the whale avenging itself on an insane antagonist who had harried it night and day? Symbols have a potency felt by readers in their blood and bones; they are more faithful to the mind’s complexity than mere unvarnished truth.)
A jet of blood fountained from Gibbs’s mouth, turning it to a scarlet grimace. Clutching the shaft, he fell backward into the North River. Briefly, he floated, the harpoon rising from his chest like a mast. His eyes saw nothing more of earth. What they saw of the world to come, I couldn’t guess, save that his expression was one of horror. He gazed on hell or on the abyss, into which Ahab and the White Whale had plunged. Gibbs rolled over, and the weight of the harpoon dragged him down beneath the water’s roiling surface until I could see him no longer. In my exultation, I sang an old harpooner’s song:
So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail,
While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!
So is evil served, I told myself, and knew that I was lying, because good can never get the upper hand in the contest between righteousness and wickedness.
I escaped capture on board a ship bound for the Caribbees, where I lived in contentment on a golden beach, eating fish and coconuts, admiring faultless sunsets, and siring a dozen brown children. Let’s hope, Roebling, if you are awake, that the future to which my words are winging will be tolerant of differences and that our descendants will have finally found an all-embracing word for love. And let us hope—although I fear it is too fond a one—that none will abuse or be abused in the new Arcadia and murder will have become as antiquated as the flintlock musket. Well, Roebling, what did you think of my story?
Fallen fast asleep. You’re worn-out by a madness of your own. It was more madness than malady, the thing that crushed you and from which you’re not likely to recover. We pay a heavy tax to strike out on our own. Whether by ship, mathematical calculations, transcontinental railroad, or the Hudson River Railroad as far as San Francisco or Sing Sing—it scarcely matters. Must the people of the future also pay ambition’s price, or will they be the beneficiaries of humankind’s ancient struggle? Melville, you, Grant, even Sam Clemens ought never to have been allowed to fall into the pit of ruin—an arrears in Melville’s case worse than what is set down in ledgers.
I hardly matter. I aspired no higher than to imitate wealthy gentlemen who play cards in private clubrooms, dress according to the latest fashion plates, intone doxologies as though they were on familiar terms with God, sitting comfortably in reserved pews inside churches named Trinity or Grace, and marry a handsome woman of their class—or if not inclined to matrimony, to live as gentlemen bachelors, admired for their gentility, sought after for their opinions, and courted by stockbrokers, rich merchants, and young upstarts alike.
And Martin Finch? He might have mattered had he lived. Or maybe not. Probably not. The mass of men and women don’t matter except in and of themselves. Franklin was stoical in his grief; Ellen wept in hers what men deride as womanish tears. Evidently, Martin mattered to them. Did he to me? Yes, for reasons I have yet to comprehend. Let us hope that people ages hence will weep unashamedly for their dead and for the death of childish hopes.
The heroic tale of the destruction of an evil man named Gibbs is finished—told, however unsatisfactorily, in the manner of Ahab’s fatal combat with a whale, whose ancestors were Jonah’s great fish and, long before that, the great whales created by the Lord on the fifth day. God made them all, but who, I wonder, made Ahab?
Herman Melville did, one of the pygmy gods who rule the little world of books.
May 19, 1882, Gansevoort Pier (related in a prosaic style)
Now I’ll tell a more plausible conclusion to my tale.
Like a monomaniac, I hunted Gibbs on the pier and among the ships, in the scale house and sheds. I searched Gansevoort Street high and low. I went to his rooming house on Charlton Street, questioned his landlady, collared and buttonholed pedestrians passing on the pavement outside the ramshackle house. That evening, I went to see General Grant.
“What brings you here, Mr. Ross?”
I could see that he was failing. That such a small thing—mere atoms of malignancy—should fell a man who had passed unscathed through the Civil War and endured two clamorous terms of the presidency! Say what you will of Grant, his life has been large and deserves to be extinguished by a leviathan.
“General, what is the worse sin you can imagine?”
“One that does not even have a commandment condemning it: betrayal.”
Yes, I said to myself.
“Have you betrayed someone, Shelby, or been betrayed?”
“Both, sir.” I’d betrayed Martin by not standing by him until after he’d been tidied and boxed up in his coffin. John Gibbs had betrayed me and my feelings for Martin, no matter how muddled and troubling they were and continue to be. (In addition, I betrayed that good soul Franklin and, in this effusion, I am betraying Herman Melville, whose soul I have plundered in order to furnish my own tale.)
“God forgive you the one and console you for the other,” said Grant. His voice seemed to have come from a room other than that in which I stood with my hat in my hands.
Later that night, I went looking for Gibbs at the boxing ring and the Slide, where disgust nearly overwhelmed me. No one knew of his whereabouts. None cared to know. Thus are even the vicious betrayed by those who share their vice.
The next morning, I searched the pier and surrounding streets again. At noon, my mouth dry, I stopped at a taproom on Horatio Street, close by the river. There he was—Gibbs, drinking shots of whiskey with another man, a merchant sailor by the look of him, both men bound for stupefaction. Gibbs raised his face and saw me looming in the doorway (standing there—this is the prosaic version of my story). He looked surprised. Without a word—he was not worth the expense of breath—I shot him with an army revolver Melville kept in his office drawer.
The gun dropped from my hand. A woman screamed. The merchant sailor scratched his bristly chin. I heard heavy beer mugs clatter against one another in the barmaid’s beefy hands. Chairs scraped back on floorboards strewn with peanut shells. I heard a boy run out into the street and call for a policeman. I heard a gurgling sound inside Gibbs’s chest. I walked over to his body—soon to become meat—crouched, and put my ear next to his mouth. I was curious to hear his last words; he said nothing, however. In death, his mouth hung open in a foolish grin, hung open like a gate on broken hinges. His eyes—a lovely hazel—stayed open, and if they saw anything, it was only the sooty ceiling.
June 2, 1882, Trial and Aftermath
Melville advised me to accept my sentence, which would, he felt sure, be a clement one because of the notorious personality of John Gibbs, which had emerged in testimony, however much it had been scrubbed clean of gross indecency. He was shown to be a bully who had persecuted Martin for his “inadequacy” until, having reached the limit of his endurance, he hanged himself. Even a steel cable will snap when the load exceeds its tensile strength, and Martin had little steel in him. On hearing of “the unfortunate Mr. Finch’s suicide,” my lawyer argued, I had lost my wits temporarily and taken revenge on “a thoroughly despicable person.” Everyone involved in adjudicating my guilt or innocence was eager to settle the matter. The sultry atmosphere of a hot June day stifled enthusiasm for the entertaining spectacle of a man disgraced and fighting for his life. Had the torrid details of the case been made known, the trial would have dragged on until the reporters’ ink ceased to flow and newspapers to profit by the lurid drama playing in White Street at the Tombs. Melville had counseled me—wisely, I now know—to say nothing of my suspicions concerning Martin’s suicide, since the search for and discovery of evidence would have made a circus of the trial and ruined my reputation—and, more important, Martin’s—beyond any hope of saving or repair.
So it was that, late in the afternoon, the judge rapped his gavel conclusively, and I was taken in a Black Maria first to the city’s jailhouse and thence to Sing Sing to begin a three-year sentence for manslaughter, which was afterward reduced to two years because of my exemplary behavior and Melville’s persistent advocacy.
Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, May 17, 1884
By now, the elephants will have all gone home to their chains and narrow stalls. Barnum is feasting with friends. I picture him at a table surrounded by Tom Thumb, resurrected for the occasion, a bearded lady, the Feejee Mermaid, Chang and Eng, and Jenny Lind. They are eating oysters on silver plates. They are drinking champagne. The sound of corks pulled from bottles is like that made by cannons fired across the water to raise drowned men from their graves. I hear Barnum and the others laughing while the elephants trumpet in sorrow.
I wonder what Barnum and his fabulous cohort dream. Is it of the American Museum, reduced to ashes, from which it did not rise again? And the elephants—are they dreaming in their hopelessness of a green savanna beneath the African sun? And Melville. Is he dreaming in his bed of a great white whale? And what ancient dream coils like smoke in the brain of a whale? Could it be of Ahab, reckless and implacable? Or does the white whale swim though Ahab’s dream until the earth is finally rid of men?
We cling to our stories like a mountaineer the rope that separates him from the chasm, or a drowning sailor the lifeboat that is his last resort from the abyss, or a man on trial for his life, knowing that only lies told with fervor and conviction stand between him and the gallows.
Pray for me, you people of the future—pray that I, who was returned to dust a hundred or a thousand years before your time, am at peace with the world and with myself.
Could I remake me! or set free
This sexless bound in sex, then plunge
Deeper than Sappho, in a lunge
Piercing Pan’s paramount mystery!
For, Nature, in no shallow surge
Against thee either sex may urge,
Why hast thou made us but in halves—
Co-relatives? This makes us slaves.
If these co-relatives never meet
Self-hood itself seems incomplete.
And such the dicing of blind fate
Few matching halves here meet and mate.
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life’s gate?
—Herman Melville, from “After the Pleasure Party”