American Follies

by Norman Lock

  “It is a punishment, an extreme one, judging by the number of men who die from it.”

  With a stick of chalk, Lilian sketched the apparatus, which would have gladdened the heart of Torquemada, on a slate. (The house was furnished with chalkboards for Fred to use.) “Picture a fairground booth like one where a fortune-teller sits turning over cards. Bound hand and foot and pilloried by a wooden collar, the prisoner sits inside it on a stool. From a large funnel, a torrent of water pours onto his head with such force, he can hardly breathe.

  “Now imagine the poor man showered with ice-cold water for a half an hour or more. It’s not unheard of for prisoners to drown or die afterward in their unheated cells of pneumonia or the inhuman strain on their bodies. Christ didn’t die of His wounds, but from His struggle to draw breath.” Careless of the dust, Lilian erased the slate with her sleeve. “The shower bath is a refinement of the ducking stool once reserved for women, but I take no joy in the fact that men are made to suffer it.”

  “Do you know Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony?” I asked.

  “I know them well. Are you a suffragist, Ellen?”

  I waited for an answer to emerge from the mind’s darkroom, like a photographer for an image to bloom in the developer bath. “Yes,” I replied, although the image was blurred.

  “I’m so glad to hear it!” With a joy of recognition, she embraced me like a Jew finding another of the tribe in a dungeon beneath the Vatican. When I told her of my arrangement with Elizabeth and Susan, I sensed that her enthusiasm became cooled, if not chilled, by something she preferred to leave unsaid.

  “I ought to be getting back to New York.”

  “I’m going to the Tarrytown Lyceum this evening to hear Emma Hall speak on the reformation of criminal girls. Why not come with me? Tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, you can take the boat back to the city.”

  Although I was not tempted by the opportunity to sit through a lecture on “an important issue of the day,” I was by the thought of awakening in Louisa’s cheerful room to the piquant odors of river water and gardens gone to seed and to a breakfast such as I had envied when I came downstairs and saw Mr. Heigold finishing his. So I agreed.

  “You must let Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony know you’re here. They’re sure to be worried.”

  We walked to the Western Union office, on Palisade Street, and I composed a telegram with the laudatory terseness preferred by God for His pronouncements and by merchants for theirs, if not by writers who are paid all too meagerly by the word.

  CAUGHT CHILL STAYING WITH LILIAN HEIGOLD DOBBS FERRY RETURN TOMORROW (STOP) = ELLEN

  Not since news of Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn had hissed over the wires from the Crow Agency in Montana to the far corners of the American Empire had a finger tapped at so frantic a rate as the one, stained yellow by tobacco, belonging to the crusty telegraph operator at Dobbs Ferry. I pictured him at a spirit table, rapping out messages to the bereaved from their dearly departed, who had left Earth without so much as an overnight bag. For thus it is written: “As he came forth of his mother’s womb, naked shall he return to go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labor, which he may carry away in his hand.” And don’t think, ladies, that the masculine pronoun he used by the holy scribblers exempts you from the laws governing property in the afterlife. Thou shalt not take so much as a thimble with you! As a woman is on Earth, so shall she be in Heaven—owning not even the shift in which she was buried. (In The Woman’s Bible, Elizabeth granted our sex pronomial equality; suffrage, however, still waits for the coming of a more enlightened age.)

  I exaggerate and exaggerate until I begin to see a truth emerge.

  In the afternoon, Lilian and I rambled to North Brook in the shadow of the Croton Aqueduct whose route she sketched in the dirt with the stick she carried. The great iron pipe begins at the Croton River Dam near Sing Sing, skirts the Tappan Zee, crosses the Yonkers River into Yorkville, veers toward Manhattan, and empties into the Murray Hill Reservoir, at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, decorated in the style of the pharaohs. The forty-one-mile gravity-fed works had been the marvel of our modern age till the Roeblings—father, son, and the son’s wife, Emily—erected their own colossus.

  “New Yorkers owe their drinking water to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the great fire of 1835, which turned seventeen city blocks into charred ruins,” said Lilian, poking a jack-in-the-pulpit with her stick in a manner that made me shiver. “Property owners demanded an adequate water supply to safeguard their real estate, and temperance crusaders clean water for New Yorkers relying on ardent spirits to quench their thirsts. What cholera and yellow fever stewing in dirty water couldn’t accomplish, fire and liquor did: The city’s noxious springs, wells, and cisterns were condemned and bricked up.”

  The previous day’s storm was visiting its miseries on some other place. The grass and the remaining red chestnut leaves had dried in the high noon sun. The leaves at our feet spoke of copper and bronze amulets like those Martin and I had once seen among the Egyptian antiquities displayed at the Mercantile Library. I was tired of causes, regardless of how noble. You mustn’t think me insensitive. I’m sorry for the sick and needy and for those wounded in body, mind, and spirit. My compassion takes in the elephant and also the gnat, to speak fancifully, as my brother-in-law used to do. But my heart was bruised by his death, by Shelby’s imprisonment, by the loneliness I had felt ever since Franklin left, and by the cup that Elizabeth embittered each time she complained that she was “as deserving of the vote as any ignorant negro man or nativist lout.” I missed the suave words of Mr. James, which, in the tobacco haze between us, would gather into an edifice as grand as the brick and iron arches of the Croton Aqueduct. How that dumpling of a man can sing!

  I regretted having agreed to go to Tarrytown. I couldn’t fan the least ember into a flame of enthusiasm for prison reform. The more Lilian went on about it, the more irritated I became. I did admire her courage; she needed it to walk among cutthroats and murderers. At Sing Sing, I’d been terrified as I followed the guard down a brick corridor pierced by iron doors. I nearly jumped out of my skin when his heavy keys clanged against one another in that narrow place, a cave of echoes that could have unmanned Hercules—or unsexed an Amazon.

  “What do you think?” asked Lilian.

  She’d stopped beside one of the masonry ventilation towers that draw fresh air into the pipe to sweeten the water and keep it flowing toward the distant city, where it slakes the thirsts of good men and bad alike. In water, we flourish or drown. It’s careless of our kind and obedient to no law save gravity, which neither governments nor engineering geniuses can annul.

  “Ellen, you’re miles away,” said Lilian, thankfully without reproach.

  “Forgive me,” I replied, jerking my head as I would to break a spider’s web touching my face. If only the snares of the wicked were gossamer! “I was thinking of something else.”

  “Your friend Mr. Ross?”

  “Yes.” She was welcome to believe that Shelby and I shared an attachment. In a way, we did, though not the sort relished by vulgar minds. Call it a “virtuous” one, as Mr. James does in his novels. Most of us measure our happiness by the number of friends we make and keep; the vicious, however, do so by the number of people they shun.

  “Would you like to rest your feet?” Lilian pointed her stick at a fallen tree. “I should like to rest mine.”

  “Do they trouble you?” I asked, glancing at her walking stick.

  “I turned my ankle, helping you from the train.”

  “Oh, I am sorry!” I said, regretting my previous annoyance with her.

  “It will soon mend.”

  We sat in silence. Studying her face and figure, I decided she was pretty. The years of controversy had neither coarsened nor unduly aged her.

  “I’m a lucky woman to have married the man I did. Fred has always treated me as an equal partner in a marriage that brings us both joy despite the sor
rows that beset every living soul. He lets me do what I must. I hope you will marry as well as I did.” She glanced at me slyly. “When will the baby arrive?”

  “At the end of December.” I stroked the gravid hill. I’d decided to be faithful to the lie that I was unmarried. I didn’t want Elizabeth and Susan to think less of me for being other than the unwed mother they supposed. The distance from their cheerful apartment to the fetid cellar at 79 Baxter Street was less than it appears on a street map of Manhattan. A woman could fall out of a feather bed and land in a nest of torn newspapers in the time it takes to unlace her shoes.

  “You should not have been traipsing through the streets of Sing Sing in the rain!”

  “It was foolish of me,” I admitted contritely.

  “It certainly was, young woman!” Her disapproval silenced me. She dug a furrow in the dirt with her stick, cutting an inchworm in two. A jay squawked; a squirrel rustled in the rusty leaves; the wind shook the tassels of timothy grass at our feet, as though nature were censuring me for a carelessness shown toward her priceless gift.

  “Lilian?”

  “Well?”

  “Have you ever lost a baby?”

  “A boy to diphtheria. Why do you ask?”

  “What did you do?”

  “Cried, cursed God, and then I clung to Him, whom I was sure did not exist.”

  “My husband’s in San Francisco!” I blurted, afraid that God, even a nonexistent one, might rebuff a wife who disavows her spouse. God’s a man, after all, if an exceptionally tall one. (I pictured Henry Dode.)

  “And your Mr. Ross?” Her tone was neutral, and I could not guess its meaning.

  “A friend of the family.”

  “It’s no business of mine in any case,” she said, getting to her feet.

  “No, it isn’t,” I replied with an insolence I immediately regretted. She glanced sharply at me. “I beg your pardon, Lilian.”

  “It is usual for the nerves of an expectant mother to be finely strung.” Flailing her stick, she rid a burdock of its leaves, a plant country people call “beggar’s-lice,” and I understood that the subject of my pregnancy, whether sanctified by marriage or not, was closed. “Shall we walk on?”

  Grief is a complicated emotion, whose course and outcome can baffle us.

  At Palisade Street, we left the road that continued along the aqueduct. I went inside the Western Union office, where a telegram awaited me.

  EXPECTING YOU TOMORROW REGARDS TO MRS H (STOP) = E.C.S.

  “You won’t tell them I’m married,” I said hopefully.

  “I do not tattle!” she replied indignantly.

  I felt she deserved an explanation for my unusual request. “They would not have hired me otherwise.”

  “They move in mysterious ways.”

  At the ferry slip, deckhands unloaded trunks from a steam packet just arrived from Castle Garden, located off the Battery, where immigrants stepped into America before Ellis Island was opened in 1892. Three families, whose lilt betrayed their potato-famished origins, were getting off the boat. A pair of good-for-nothings jeered at the newcomers while hooligans recited a singsong piece of doggerel about cat-licks and mackerel snappers.

  “Not all my neighbors agree that a stock is made richer by variety,” said Lilian. “They look down their noses at an Irish stew.” She harried the brats with her stick and stared down the two loafers until they turned and left, but not before shouting “Green niggers!” at the bewildered families on the dock.

  I listened to the river lapping over gravel, its soughing among the reeds. I wrinkled my nose at the odor of a rat rotting on the boggy shore. I remembered the stench at the bottom of the cellar stairs where the wretched young woman had gone to die.

  “Mrs. Stanton is devoted to the cause, but her privileged childhood blinkers her. We fell out after the war, when she declared that the right to vote should be given to ‘educated women first, ignorant men afterward.’”

  I stood near enough to see the face the rat had made at Death. Was that what passes in a rat for fear? I wondered. The fierce eyes, the bared teeth I’d seen in one as my father poked it with a broom to drive it from the shed weren’t there. Perhaps despair is felt by creeping things, as well as by those who kneel at altar rails or shout “Green niggers” at their fellows.

  “Don’t imagine for a minute that workingwomen can afford to leave the mill, factory, or sweatshop to sit in a schoolroom and be educated!”

  I should have gone to California with Franklin. I was sick of the clamor of principles. I longed for the days when the house in Maiden Lane was noisy with two good-natured men and Franklin and I could fall to sleep with a clear conscience.

  “What is it, Ellen? You look white as a sheet.”

  “I feel sick,” I replied, and said no more about it.

  “You need a tonic and a digestive biscuit.” She led me home, an arm around my waist.

  I rested on the sofa while she made beef tea. I heard the mantel clock tick out its slow measure of domestic tranquillity and sighed.

  “I don’t think you should attend tonight’s lecture,” said Lilian, eyeing me with motherly concern.

  “But I was looking forward to it!” I said, feeling relieved. I was quite the dissembler in those days.

  “You need to think of the baby; your moral education can wait till after it’s born.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” Fanny Kemble could not have been more convincing as a delicate creature on the verge of a swoon. She was a great friend of Mr. James.

  “Fred went to the county seat to fix the courthouse clock. I hate to leave you alone.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be safely abed by the time you get back.”

  She felt my forehead. “I guess it will be all right. The ferry leaves Tarrytown at nine-thirty. I’ll be home before eleven.”

  After getting me into bed and filling the pitcher with water, she went into her room to change her dress. I waited until two hoarse blasts of steam announced the Tarrytown packet’s departure and then set about to explore the house. I was not myself. What other explanation could there be for betraying my benefactors’ trust? It would also explain the odd sensation of watching myself perform like an actor in a play that might be either comical or tragic.

  As I hunted in the closets and drawers, I yielded to an emotion apart from shame—an excitement such as I’d felt when Franklin and I had kissed on the Heights above the East River. So vivid was the recollection, I sat on the stairs to catch my breath before going up to the attic, where I found a mildewed box of photographs. Sitting on a trunk by the glowering window, I studied them, as if to find a meaning larger than what was visible in the chiaroscuro dramas told in tableaux and pasted on gray rectangles of cardboard.

  In a tintype, a pretty girl was wearing a frock dress and a big bow in her hair; by her eyes and mouth, she could only have been Lilian, and by her smile, she was happy, at least on the day she’d sat for the daguerreotypist. I saw the telltale eyes and mouth again in a photograph taken on her wedding day; she sat uncomfortably in a straight-backed chair while Fred, wearing a black sack coat, stood beside her, his hat held in the crook of his arm like a small black dog. Husband and wife were stiffly posed, their heads restrained by unseen iron clamps; their faces were tense with the effort of stillness as the light slowly drew their likenesses on a pane of silver-coated glass.

  In another picture, Fred wore the uniform of a private in the Tenth New York Infantry Regiment, taken before he went to war and could still speak words of love and regret, resolution and acquiescence prompted by the mixture of desire, fear, and audacity that made Fred uniquely himself. Not so much as a thin shadow of doubt appeared in his clear and callow eyes.

  Next, a young Lilian stood defiantly on a lecture platform between Elizabeth and Susan before they fell out over politics. The three firebrands were genteelly framed by a lectern and a fernery.

  Taken by Alexander Gardener on July 7, 1865, the last photograph showed
Lincoln’s four assassins, hands and feet bound in cloth strips, poised on the brink of extinction, on a scaffold in the Washington Arsenal courtyard. Someone had drawn a circle around the head of Mary Surratt, at whose Washington City boardinghouse John Wilkes Booth and the other conspirators planned to murder the president. Her dark hair and eyes were not yet covered by the white hood. Union soldiers lined the arsenal wall to bear witness to the final reckoning. Four men held umbrellas in the lightly falling rain. On the back of the photograph’s gray cardboard mounting, someone had written:

  There are thoughts too hopelessly discordant to be harmonized, individuals too firmly disaffected to be restored to the world, & riddles too galactic in their spite to be solved by a human being.

  At the bottom of the box lay one of a thousand tickets admitting the morbidly curious to the hanging as if it were a Barnum spectacle. I couldn’t imagine why Lilian would have it or the photograph, although she was in Washington at the time, working for the Sanitary Commission, while Fred was away in the army.

  That night, I hardly slept, afraid to be alone in the house with Lilian when she returned from Tarrytown. Fred was staying in White Plains till morning. My fear was ridiculous. I could not account for it, but there it was. I locked the door to my room and listened to a distant bell toll the hours.

  I woke, ill at ease. The house was silent, though the time, by the banjo clock, was nearly ten. Having dressed, I looked into the downstairs rooms and found them empty. I went upstairs and knocked on the Heigolds’ bedroom door. The bed had not been slept in. Where can she be? I wondered. I walked to the boat landing and asked the man who sold tickets if the 9:30 boat from Tarrytown had arrived the previous night. He said it had.

  “With all passengers aboard?”

  “No way of telling,” he replied. “The Tarrytown packet is not the Grand Republic.” He did everything but spit tobacco juice to show his contempt for the packet boat or me or both.

  I went to the Western Union office and asked if there was a telegram for me.

  “Not since yesterday’s,” said the telegrapher.