by Norman Lock
I left the room, only to find darkness, particulate and writhing, in the corridor. I felt my way like a blind woman through twisting passages that, in their form, resembled tripe, until I found an unlocked door. I staggered onto First Avenue and blinked in the blessed light of day. The pavement heaved and then fell flat like a blanket shaken to rid it of leftover dreams.
I was distraught, as anyone would be after having escaped a nightmare of uncommon terror. So vivid had it been, I could not believe, at first, that I was not still caught in its toils, no matter how furiously I shook my head to clear it of the remnant fear. Not even in Edgar Poe’s horrors had I read anything to equal what I’d experienced at Bellevue. I walked the hospital’s frontage and the riverside esplanade, but Riis and the two suffragists were nowhere to be seen. Passersby kept their distance. When I saw myself reflected in a store window, I understood their caution. My hat was gone, my hair had come undone, and my shirtwaist was ripped, my skirt bedraggled. I could easily have been mistaken for a heroine in a sensational novel or an escaped lunatic clutching a yellow primrose in her hand.
I walked down Avenue A to Tompkins Square, where the draft riots of 1863 had started. Weary to the bone, I chose a bench shaded by poplar trees and made myself presentable. Thirsty, I drank from the fountain beside a horse trough. Beside me, a horse noisily sucked up water. I turned in time to see a splendid woman giving her arm to a gentleman, the snowy egret feather of her hat dazzling in the noonday sun. Somewhat revived, I took a ’bus to the Brooklyn Bridge, which had opened five months earlier. I felt a sudden need to visit the house of my childhood across the river on Vinegar Hill.
The Memorial Day panic on the roadway of the bridge a week after its inauguration was fresh in the minds of citizens on both sides of the East River. That October afternoon, I crossed it for the first time. I was too preoccupied by the strange occurrences at Bellevue to worry about the integrity of Roebling’s colossus, which, at the outset of his thirteen-year Herculean labor, had been called his “folly.”
The smell of New York Bay, arriving on a northerly breeze, recalled the People’s Day, when Franklin and I had stood on a rooftop in Printing House Square. We were in mourning for the death of his brother, Martin, who had “met an untimely end,” as scribblers for the two-penny papers like to say. We’d gone up on the roof in the hope of giving grief the slip—at least for the afternoon. We watched President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, and their frock-coated entourage step from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, across the street from Madison Square, into a blaze of bunting, banners, shiny commemorative medals, and madly waving flags. On Broadway, down which the illustrious would ride to the bridge’s Chatham Street entrance, Old Glory hung at every window. The citizens of Manhattan and Brooklyn were choked to maudlin tears with a patriotic sentiment not felt to this degree since the opening of the Erie Canal. Not even Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House had ignited civic enthusiasm to equal the bridge’s grand inaugural day.
Nearby our aerie, a mob of “sporting men” soused to the gills were pouring champagne down their throats from hundreds of bottles, breaking chairs for firewood, and roasting an ox on the roof of the Police Gazette Building. From midtown to the Battery, Manhattan was overrun by fifty thousand gawkers who had arrived by steamers and milk trains. Rural swains in old-fashioned cutaways and green ties, assorted rubes, hayseeds, and country bumpkins were buying five-cent souvenirs and scratching their chins in wonder. The streets surrounding Chatham Square—Bowery, East Broadway, St. James Place, Oliver, Mott, and Worth—were packed past all hope of unpacking till the next day. Franklin and I were stunned by the shrill uproar of steam whistles, calliopes, and regimental bands and by the clamor of a multitude thick as the masts of ships crowding the river from Red Hook to the Navy Yard. At midnight, Thomas Edison threw a switch at the Pearl Street generating station, and the great bridge blazed forth—a new constellation heralding the “American Century” to come and our inexorable destiny. Fourteen tons of rockets hissed and wheezed in a bombardment sufficient to crack the walls of a citadel. We stuffed our fingers in our ears and shouted “Hooray” like children. Martin was absent from our thoughts—no memory could survive the din—and afterward, we were ashamed.
Vinegar Hill
I CROSSED THE BRIDGE TO BROOKLYN, my mind oppressed by thoughts of Martin, the dead girl, the sight and smell of the tenement house, my wandering womb, and the morning’s hysteria when I could not find my way out of the hospital, as if its staircases and corridors had been copied from the twists and turns of a human brain disordered by lesions beyond Dr. Garmany’s surgical skill. I recalled with fondness Martin’s friend Shelby Ross and our summer picnic in the Central Park, where he and I had played innocently at being a shepherd and a shepherdess, while Franklin had walked to the refreshment stand in the Ramble to eat ice cream. I’d been happy then. Martin had not yet died, nor Shelby gone to prison for avenging his murder. Franklin was still in New York City, and I was not carrying a child conceived by “fornicating” with my own husband. You see how things stood.
Tomorrow I will take the train to Sing Sing and visit Shelby, I promised myself.
I went north along the heights to Vinegar Hill, a short distance from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I had last walked that way on the day that Franklin and I were married. There had been a small wedding party at Mother and Father’s house. For all his great size, Franklin was shy. I, too, was shy, afraid of his hands and the muscles visible under his shirt sleeves. I knew him to be a gentle man; his gentleness was one of the reasons I’d fallen in love with him. But I also knew, as every woman does, that a man can sometimes forget himself. I was afraid—he was such a big man! In time, I grew to love the strength of his hands and arms and the power of his body, which, more often than not, he held in check to please me. Sometimes I wonder if it did, in fact, please me to have been handled like a china cup. I did love him—I do so still, despite love’s complexity.
On Vinegar Hill, I gazed across the river at Manhattan, where the Trinity Church spire would later turn pink as the afternoon grew into evening, and at Wallabout Bay, where ships of the North Atlantic Squadron were docked. Father had been a carpenter at the yard till he came down with yellow jack and died. Afterward, Mother went to live with a widowed sister in Michigan. When I was a girl, I would walk down Columbia Heights to stare at the second-floor window behind which Washington Roebling, the famous invalid, sat by the hour and watched his prodigy slowly taking shape until, at last, the granite towers were strung with steel cables and the bridge resembled the Irish giant’s magic harp, on which the winds used to play their ancient airs.
I turned off Fulton and walked in the direction of the city park. Charred timber and fallen stones marked the place where my house had once stood at the corner of Pearl Street and Nassau. After Mother left, a tramp acquired the property, claiming that his manifest destiny demanded it. Later, he fell into a drunkard’s sleep, leaving his tobacco pipe unquenched. I walked to the post office on Washington. Megan, a childhood friend, lived nearby, together with a loutish husband and a sickly infant. When she answered my knock on the door, I was surprised at how she had aged; she was only three years older than I, but her expression was hangdog and careworn. Her chestnut hair was dull; dull, too, were her eyes. Had I not known they were blue, I would have said they were gray.
“Hello, Meg!” I said with a cheerfulness I didn’t feel. I knew at once my visit was a mistake. She needed jollying, and in my present mood, I was not the one to do it. She let me inside, and I sat on a threadbare couch in a gloomy room and felt dampness working its way into my bones, though the October day was warm. I studied a face that had once known the bright and buoyant loveliness of a girl in bloom, but at the time of my visit, the bones of her cheeks and jaws were sharp beneath the yellowish skin. I wondered if she, too, was sick. I’d heard that her husband, a layabout and a drunk, sometimes showed her the back of his hand, as the Irish say, without the sting of rebuke abuse deserves. I disc
reetly searched her face for bruises and was glad to find none.
“It’s been some time,” she said, as if she had been counting the days since we were girls and played on the Heights and the gravel shore of the river below. “You look well, Ellen.” Had she spoken grudgingly?
Not meaning to, I blurted, “I’m expecting!” We had never kept secrets from each other, and I suppose the intimacy that can, in women especially, override embarrassment, even shame, reasserted itself, although five years had passed since we had been in each other’s company.
She smiled wanly and tried to find the proper tone for congratulations, but it rang false. It occurred to me that she was lucky to have only one child, and I could have prayed, then and there, that she would have no others, because, by the look of her, she could not bear it.
“And Tom?” I asked for form’s sake.
“At work,” she replied. I knew that she had lied. I hoped he was not in the other room, sleeping off a spree. I began to grow anxious that he would awaken and find me there, “putting ideas” into his wife’s head. I grew more anxious still that he would come strolling through the front door on his long legs, in his big boots, and shout down the house for his supper. I wanted to make some excuse and go, but I stayed awhile longer for Megan’s sake. She may have wished me gone as much as I did. We sat, each with her heart in her mouth, trying not to chew the tender thing to pieces. Regardless of how bruised and hardened it can become, at the heart of the heart, there will always be a morsel of tenderness—a foolish thought, perhaps.
“How is Franklin?” she asked when the silence had grown too loud.
“He’s in California, looking for work.”
She nodded indifferently, as if I’d said he’d gone down the street to buy a cigar. Five years have done for her, I thought. Five years or a little less and the light had died in her eyes and in her heart, and I did not have the heart to see if I could find a vestige of innocence there.
“How is Little Tom?” I asked, to have something to say.
“He’s been poorly. He’s asleep. The doctor came yesterday.”
“What did he say?”
“Some kind of fever.”
“Well, I hope Little Tom will feel better soon.”
Megan made a face and shrugged her shoulders, and in that face, I saw her helplessness, and in that shrug, I understood that her helplessness extended throughout the universe, which she did not understand.
My only thought was how to take my leave without hurting her feelings, assuming she had any left to hurt. That was unkind. But nerves can become raw, till they eventually grow calloused. How could we go on otherwise? She must have seen the thought in my eyes or in the nervousness of my hands, because she stood and said, “I best get Tom’s supper on the table.”
Relieved, I could reply cheerfully, “It was good to see you again, Meg!”
Only then did I realize that I was holding a yellow flower in my hand. I’d carried it all the way from Bellevue. I handed it to Meg. She regarded it rather stupidly, I thought.
“You must look in again,” she said. “It was nice to catch up.”
I nodded cordially, knowing that I would not look in again and that catching up had been a torture neither of us would wish to repeat. I left the house, trying not to hurry. When I turned the corner onto Myrtle Street, I began to breathe freely. I put Megan out of my mind, since there was nothing I could do for her.
By this time, I was hungry. I walked to a German eating house at Fulton and Sands. Franklin and I had gone there during our courtship to eat chops and dark bread and drink the bitter German beer. The table was scarred by heavy knives, cigars, and long-stemmed pipes called “Lesepfeife” wielded by generations of emigrants who had found, inside the tobacco-darkened walls, the tastes, smells, and guttural sounds of Prussia and Saxony. I recalled the pleasure we had taken in that place where the language sounded like gravel. Afterward, we’d walk up Vinegar Hill to watch the sun set on the far shore of the Hudson and, in a recessional as inexorable as it was majestic, redden the waters of the Hackensack, Passaic, Delaware, Lehigh, Susquehanna, Allegheny, Ohio, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, and Colorado until, having sunk below the trembling rim of the Pacific Ocean, it swam up into someone else’s day.
I ordered blood sausage and potatoes, which I ate with relish between gulps of lager beer.
“Mrs. Finch?” I had not seen the man approach my table, but I now recognized him as Herman Melville. He had been Martin’s and Shelby’s superior at the Customs office on Gansevoort Pier. “It is Mrs. Finch, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“We met at your brother-in-law’s viewing.”
“I remember you, Mr. Melville.”
“May I join you?”
I had not wished for company, but his handsome face and kindly manner overruled my reluctance. “Please do.”
He sat and looked me squarely in the face. His gaze was neither shameless nor intended to satisfy a man’s curiosity. He looked at me with a sympathy so quick and genuine, it could only be habitual.
“Martin was a fine young man,” he said without preliminary. “Now and again, I would stand outside St. Paul’s Chapel just to hear him sing. He had the voice of an angel. No, he had the voice of someone who could discover the godliness in us, of which only a few are aware.”
It was my turn to look deeply into Melville’s eyes, and I did so gratefully.
“He was a sweet person,” I said. “Franklin and I are lost without him.”
“I’m in touch with Shelby Ross. I understand you and he were friends.”
“And Franklin!” I said with unnecessary emphasis. “Mr. Ross visited us at our house on Maiden Lane. I said nothing about Shelby and my fête champêtre in the Central Park.
“He has behaved admirably. I have nothing but good things to say about him.”
I don’t know why, but I blushed—perhaps because of the intensity of Melville’s gaze. He is handsome, I thought, with his broad brow and grizzled beard, and those eyes of his see right down into one. I had always been curious about the man who had written Typee and Omoo, books that decent Christians shun for their immorality. How fine it would be, I thought, to typewrite the stories of such a man! What a relief from the gentility of Mr. James’s world.
“How is Mr. Ross?” I asked, employing the tone of voice one would use to inquire after a grocer’s lumbago. “I’ve heard nothing since he went to prison.”
Melville seemed surprised. “I imagined you would have written to him, and he to you.”
Embarrassed, I shook my head.
“He’s well and in good spirits. I visit him now and then in Sing Sing. He has a job in the warden’s office, keeping the accounts. Shelby is a likable fellow. I am convinced he will make something of himself yet.”
“Franklin and I are grateful to him.”
“It would do him no end of good if you were to visit him.”
“Why, this morning, I resolved to do just that! I was unkind to him when you and he visited us in Maiden Lane to offer your condolences.”
“Excellent! If I were not otherwise engaged, I’d accompany you.” He sensed that he had presumed. “If your husband would allow me the pleasure.” I suppose he could not help himself: He smiled, but not as some men do—those, I mean, who leer.
He took a cigar case from his pocket. “Shelby is fond of cigars. Whenever I visit, I take him a box.” Causing the waiter to frown, Melville tore a linen napkin into strips and carefully wrapped each cigar. He used his teeth, and I shivered at the sight of them. “There! Just like a pair of Egyptian mummies. Unscrupulous businessmen used to grind the ancient bones into powder and hawk it as medicine, then sell the cloth windings to the paper mills. Thus were the pharaohs and the pharaonic cats resurrected not as lords and minions of the sacred reed fields, but as two-penny rags advertising Fairbank’s Fairy Soap and electric corsets.”
Melville was an amusing man when he was not a gloomy one.
�
�If we can believe Mark Twain’s account in Innocents Abroad, contemporary Egyptians buy three-thousand-year-old mummies by the carload to stoke the boilers of their locomotives. But perhaps you don’t care for history.” His glance was so sharp, one could feel like a prize moth transfixed by a pin.
“I care for it as much as the next wo—” I had meant to say “woman,” but I realized that Melville, like nearly all his sex, would take my words to mean that, like most women, I cared nothing at all for intellectual topics. I finished my sentence: “—begone prisoner of it.”
Melville smiled wryly. He did really seem to read my thoughts, which were chasing one another like children in a schoolyard or geese on a lawn. He handed me the mummified cigars. “Please give Shelby these, along with my good wishes.”
I put the cigars in my purse.
“Are you traveling back to Manhattan?” he asked. I nodded in the affirmative. “Will you allow me to ride with you?”
“Of course, Mr. Melville.” What else could I have said?
“Call me Herman.”
“If you don’t mind, I prefer to call you Mr. Melville.”
“As you like,” he replied with a smile that could only be described as inscrutable.
We walked down Sands Street to the bridge’s Brooklyn entrance, built on the site of St. Ann’s Church, in which my parents had been married and in whose yard their parents had been interred without much pomp or fuss. The dead had been uprooted and sent by wagon to Green-Wood and Evergreen cemeteries to continue their sentences, which were as long as eternity and impossible to commute. I recalled Elizabeth’s having said that her family’s church in Johnstown, where she was raised, became a mitten factory. “Better that hands should be kept warm in winter than minds frightened into sanctity.”
I was glad that Melville suggested we cross the river on one of the new bridge trains; I was nearly dropping from exhaustion. From Sands Street to the Chatham Street entrance on the opposite side of the river was more than a mile. We sat by the southward-facing windows, open to a tonic ocean breeze, and admired, as people do, the sights that passed before our eyes as if the scenery had been painted on a scroll that was being unrolled for our pleasure by unseen hands. I had the window seat. Melville sat beside me, stretching his long legs into the aisle. He talked easily of this and that, and I replied with equal cordiality. He seemed an affable man, although I recalled that Martin and Shelby had experienced a darker side of him. I thought that any man who could have written Moby-Dick would need to take a comprehensive view of human nature.
