I CROSSED THE bridge to the upper village and took the road north. Nearly a week had passed since my arrival in Honesdale, and I had yet to find a room for my school. Now I was following Mr. Blandin’s directions to a glass factory in a stone building that was to be found on the flats below the village of Bethany. It all seemed rather unlikely, but I walked on till I came to the described building, covered with the veins of creeper vine. A man in a leather apron was waiting by the door.
“John Stevenson,” he said, offering a scarred hand.
I took the hand and looked into his weathered face. “Joseph Lobdell.”
Mr. Stevenson had talked to Daniel Blandin and knew I was there to see his upstairs hall. Without another word, we passed through the door and into a large room that looked like Satan’s kitchen. Teams of sweating, shirtless men were working a row of furnaces. We stopped before one and watched as the headman dipped a pipe into a cauldron and gathered a molten ball. This he shaped by turning and blowing while his assistant fed the fire. The two exchanged only looks as they passed each other with red-hot irons and glowing glass, the ball slowly taking the shape of a heavy mug, like those used every night at Blandin’s. I had always seen men as clumsy to the bone, but standing there I marveled at how graceful they can be when there’s a purpose to it.
At the end of the room, a hall held a set of stairs. I asked Mr. Stevenson if there was another route in—the way we had come wouldn’t be suitable for young students. Mr. Stevenson laughed and pointed to the clutter at the hall’s end behind which I could now see a door. “Somewhere in my office there’s a key.”
I had been told that the second floor had once been a meeting room, so its condition surprised me. There was debris everywhere—broken crates, an odd assortment of chairs, and some sort of workbench. Dirt and sawdust covered the floor, and the windows were so grimy that one would have to guess at the weather. I knelt down and pushed aside the dust. The planks were smooth and tightly fit.
“Maple,” said Mr. Stevenson proudly.
I gave a nod. “So I see.”
I asked about the rent, and Mr. Stevenson replied with a modest sum. I tried not to act like I thought it low, but he saw my face. “I’m glad to do what I can,” he said, “for any friend of Daniel Blandin.” We shook hands again, and I left quite pleased. I had, it seemed, stumbled upon a great secret society—a world in which everything is accomplished by a wink and a nod.
I walked back to town and went to the offices of the Honesdale Democrat, where I placed a small advertisement that would appear the following Tuesday.
Joseph I. Lobdell, Professor of Dance, announces the formation of classes in dance, voice, and violin for Students of all ages. Those interested should come at four in the afternoon on Thursday to the meeting room at the Dyberry Glass Factory.
I was back at the glass factory the next day. I had given myself only a week, so I had no time to burn. Instead, I burned rubbish. After that, I swept the floor and cleaned the windows. On Monday, I borrowed a mop from the tavern and washed the floor three times. The next two days I spent on my hands and knees, putting wax on the maple. The wood glowed yellow, and the wax put a civilized smell into the room. It also put dirt under my fingernails. I thought about leaving some to roughen my appearance as it would aid in my deception at the tavern, but I didn’t, because it wouldn’t help me as a music teacher. I was looking over one shoulder, then the other.
I had, of course, started my journey with a greater fear of men—that I would do or say the wrong thing. So far that hadn’t happened, but men are not known for noticing things. Women, on the other hand, notice near everything. My fear began to grow that one of them might catch some detail that a man would never see—a book held to the breast, a button unfastened with two fingers, an eyebrow lifted in doubt. But in spite of that fear, I stopped along Dyberry Creek on the advertised day and picked a bouquet of purple phlox that ended up on the table by the door.
At the appointed hour, eight or nine mothers arrived, coming in twos and threes. There were children of various ages. I was formal with the mothers but did my best to make them feel at ease, speaking with humor and not condescension. I think I charmed a few.
Some older girls arrived. They put their names on the list but did not engage me in conversation. Instead, they stood off in a corner, whispering and casting glances in my direction. I wondered if they thought me handsome.
* * *
My room upstairs at Blandin’s was adequate but not more than that—just a place to sleep. I might on occasion sit there and read the Democrat, but usually I would do that downstairs. And there was little to see out the window except for the piles of coal and the privies in the alley. From my bed I could hear their doors creak at all hours. I didn’t feel any danger when I went there. Aside from the drunks who piss into the canal, men and women do their business in private, and visitors don’t come calling. And it’s not a comfortable seat whoever you are, what with the cold drafts and smells that ain’t lilacs.
As far as washing, I would do that in my room with a bucket of water made warm in the kitchen below. I would use the same water to wash things that could not go to the woman down the street, picking a day when the sun was coming through the window and the cotton would dry on the back of the chair.
All of that was easy enough. The evenings downstairs were less so. Mr. Blandin made it known that I was there at his request, but I still felt out of place, as one might expect. I was unpracticed at the banter, and I often found myself forcing awkward laughs a short moment after those around me. I sat at a table off to the side and soon had a chair that was considered mine. I was shy at first about playing the violin, but the men seemed to like it and began making requests. I knew many tunes, but not the canal songs with their refrains about low bridges and unruly mules. These I had to learn. One evening a scruffy coal loader named Jimmy Lawson called out for me to play “Never Take the Hindshoe.”
“Don’t know it,” I said over the din.
Jimmy rose to his feet, unsteady. “I’ll sing it fer ya.” Blandin’s became quiet.
Jimmy had been drinking and wasn’t any choirboy to start with, yet he managed to stumble his way through a song that warned against getting near a mule’s private parts, for, as it said, “the business end of a mule is mighty ticklish.” With these words, the room burst into hoots and howls—the mere mention of private parts, even those of a mule, the cause for great laughter.
But not every canal song was of low humor. The boat men also entertained a variety of romantic notions—songs about the perils of the canal and verses about tearful ladies left behind, sung plaintively as if they had set sail for China. As silly as those songs seemed to me, the men enjoyed them. Soon, I came to share their good spirits, more so after I discovered that a glass of beer made it all go a little easier. In time, stubborn mules and private parts became funny to me too.
What didn’t become funny were the cruel comments about the boatmen’s cooks or wenches, as they called them. These were unmarried women who, for pitiful wages, did the cooking and cleaning. Even after the meals were served, their duties were usually not complete until the master of the boat was fast asleep. I would feel myself flush when they were mocked, but, of course, I said nothing. Worse, I had to display some merriment, so I got good at acting amused when I wasn’t. And if I didn’t laugh heartily enough at a crude joke, it could be forgiven along with my other faults—I was slighter than most and didn’t drink whiskey or chew tobacco. But because of these shortcomings and, most surely, because I was there at the invitation of Daniel Blandin, I became, soon enough, everybody’s little brother.
* * *
I stood with my arms folded until my students realized that nothing would happen unless they were still. When all was quiet, I recited the very words that had been said to me just a few years before: “Dance is not a series of learned figures. It is a formal gesture between a man and a woman. You will learn the manners.”
And thus it began with the etiquette: the proper way to approach a lady, when to bow and when to curtsy, how to escort a partner to her seat, when to withdraw. I told my students how I had been taught at the academy by Miss Burchett, a matron who always looked like she had just eaten a lemon and who recited rules till we were saying them in our sleep. To lighten the load, I scrunched my face and imitated her nasal declarations. “A gentleman is always introduced to a lady. A lady is never introduced to a gentleman.”
My students laughed at the mimicry, but in Miss Burchett’s class we hadn’t even smiled for fear we would be made to sit in the corner. Miss Burchett acted like Moses come off the mountain—commandments for everything, and all of them designed to keep the sexes apart. “All intimacy ends with the dance!” she would proclaim at least once a week. And that, without fail, would lead to her golden rule: “It is better to be deemed prudish than indiscreet.” These rules had no good effect that I could see. For my part, I would have welcomed anything that might have even passed for indiscretion, a recollection I did not share with my students.
In the lessons that followed, I started in on the quadrille: how the couples were numbered, their positions, where the head of the hall would be. Then came a walking tour of the basic figures: right and left, ladies chain, forward two, and chassez. By the second week it was time to play the violin and call out the figures. Soon my students could perform a simple version of the quadrille. Ahead of us still were the so-called promiscuous figures, more complicated maneuvers in which partners switched for a portion of the dance.
On Monday and Wednesday I had nine students, four boys and five girls, ages twelve to fifteen. On Tuesday and Thursday I had seven young ladies. Four of them—Sarah Clemson, Jane Brower, and the Blackstone twins—were age sixteen and from the upper village of Honesdale. Dorothy Millen, Evelyn Sanders, and Lydia Watson were a year or two older and from the village of Bethany. The girls in my older class constantly exchanged looks and whispered to each other. I ignored it, though at times I felt excluded, as though I were back at school. And did they really believe I was a man? That thought continued to astonish me. It seemed that they did, but how long would they? After all, they looked and smelled like girls to me. How did I look and smell to them?
I had expected my younger students to be the more difficult to teach. They weren’t. They listened and did what they were told. My older girls were the ones who bridled. They sighed and put on bored expressions, making it clear that they were oppressed by the dreariness of the province. I had little patience for it.
“Are you too good for this?” I asked one afternoon. The silence said I was close to the truth. “Would you prefer the society of Baltimore?”
Miss Millen glanced about nervously. “I just don’t want to dance like my grandmother.”
“We would like to learn the waltz,” said Miss Watson.
“And the mazurka,” said Miss Sanders.
I held back a smile. I had planned all along to teach the waltz, but now I thought to use it as a carrot. “Very well,” I said, as though a bargain were being struck. “I will teach you the waltz. And the mazurka too, perhaps. But only after you show me that you have mastered the quadrille.”
The girls brightened, and the next few lessons went quite well. Even so, during our recesses, the Bethany girls would go off by themselves, and in observing them, I noticed a curiosity. In years past, I had sometimes heard young women variously compared to dolls, angels, or fillies. I had thought the imagery insipid, if not insulting. Why couldn’t they just be young women? But now, oddly, I began to do the very same thing, at least in my thoughts. Plain and round, Evelyn Sanders was a stuffed doll that one would hug at night till the seams gave out. With skin you could see through and hair the color of wheat, Dorothy Millen was a porcelain figure with folded wings, something you would set upon a shelf. And Lydia Watson, with her sturdy frame, dark skin, and long brown hair? She was a horse running loose in a field.
* * *
While reading the Democrat one morning at Blandin’s, I came across a notice placed by the Young Men’s Literary Society. It was for a lecture titled “Bleeding Kansas” to be given at the Cornell Hall that evening. I decided to go, wishing to hear a man of the world speak on a public issue, an experience that had not been mine before.
I arrived late so I could stand out of view at the back. It was a warm night for May, and the hall was dense with smoke and the strong odor of men’s bodies. I couldn’t see the speaker, but his voice was clear. “Now we have all heard it referred to as popular sovereignty. Sounds most upright, does it not? But what do we call it when men from Missouri cross over to murder and pillage those who have settled the Kansas land with the idea of freedom? Popular sovereignty? No! Call it by its real name. Popular thuggery!”
The room exploded with cheers. When the speech was done, men went this way and that, as those wishing to exchange greetings with the speaker had to push past those trying to leave. As I waited for things to sort out, a gentleman in a tailored waistcoat came up to me. “I am Kenneth Burton,” he said with a slight bow, “former chairman of this august organization, now demoted to the reception of new members. My friends and polite enemies call me Burton.”
I gave a nod. “Joseph Lobdell.”
“The dancing teacher.”
“Yes,” I said, surprised.
“Well, Mr. Lobdell, I’m heading to the Hotel Wayne for some light supper with a couple of friends. Would you join us?”
I was unsure of what to do, but the man appeared well-intended, and saying yes seemed the easiest thing. We left the hall and set off down Main, he asking polite questions about the music school while I wondered when it would come clear that I knew nothing about political matters.
We entered the hotel and were led to a table that seemed to have been held for Mr. Burton—or Burton as I soon came to call him. The dining room was full, and there was the hum of people speaking in low voices, nothing at all like the usual noise at the tavern. Moments later we were joined by Mr. John Marbury, treasurer of the Literary Society, and Mr. Howard Chase, a banker who had a seat on the Board of Merchants.
“Well, what did you think of our little meeting?” Marbury asked, once he was seated.
“Quite lively,” I said, thinking this would be a good thing to say.
Burton snorted. “Of course you found it lively. You thought you were attending a literary convocation but found yourself in a nest of barnburners. I tried to resist, but I was deposed.”
“Burton,” said Mr. Chase, “you were not deposed. Your term had expired, and someone else was elected. You were not chairman for life.”
“Well, no thanks to you.” Burton then turned to me with mischief in his eye. “You know, there are some who believe that I am opposed to the political transformation of the literary society because I have sympathies for the South—which, of course, I do. There are even whispers that I am a spy—”
“Oh, Burton, please!” groaned Chase.
“Of course, for that to be true,” continued Burton, “you’d first have to imagine someone in Richmond actually caring to know what is happening in Honesdale, Pennsylvania.”
“As you can see,” said Marbury, “our Mr. Burton has a flair for the dramatic.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” asked Burton. “I thought I’d founded a book club, but it turns out I’ve started an ill-mannered political party. This is bitter fruit.”
Mr. Marbury rolled his eyes, and I had the sudden warm thought that I was not about to be exposed as a bumpkin, but was, instead, being fought over.
“What our good friend Mr. Burton refuses to concede,” said Chase, “is that attendance has grown tenfold since the society began political discussion.”
“Yes,” said Burton, “and if we were to start singing bawdy songs in church, I’m sure the numbers there would increase as well.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I liked this Burton. And Honesdale, I decided, was something more than I had imagined. The town, it seemed, was being run about by ideas—first, a serious and impassioned speech; then, amusing and irreverent conversation. The mixture was intoxicating, and I returned to Blandin’s tavern feeling giddy—not angry that this world was generally denied to women but excited that it was now open to me.