by Norman Lock
“There’s an eating house not far from here, which serves German food at a reasonable price. What do you say, Mr. Ross? Shall we have an early supper in Brooklyn?”
Feeling hungry and well-disposed toward Melville, I agreed.
ARRIVING AT THE CORNER of Fulton and Sands streets, we went inside a white-framed tavern named the Schwarzwald, redolent of onions and tobacco smoke. We sat at a table marred by countless arms and elbows belonging to corpulent Herrs and their ample Fraus, steins of lager beer, and china plates, which had been scarred by madly sawing knives and scorched by briar pipes. We ate heartily from a platter heaped with smoked tongue, chops, brown mustard, and dark bread, drank our fill of German beer, and when we were done and nearly dead with eating, we sat back heavily in our ancient chairs and groaned.
Well-preserved specimens of Herr and Frau crossed the timbered room, their heavy feet shod in brogans, followed by a Fraulein displaying the “Grecian bend”—the old fashioned bearing of ladies obliged to lean forward elegantly, if unnaturally, by their whaleboned clothes. A smart-aleck correspondent at one of the rags had noticed the resemblance of the bend to the bent backs of stricken sandhogs. The name stuck, as names will when set, like barbed hooks, in columns of type to catch the eyes of jaded readers. Thereafter, caisson sickness would be called “the bends.”
I know, but I feel as if I were talking to posterity. We’re living in an age of marvels—Edison’s incandescent bulb, Brunel’s colossal ship, Great Eastern, Bazalgette’s London sewers, the Suez Canal, the transatlantic cable, and now the Brooklyn Bridge—perhaps the greatest of them all. Your bridge, Roebling, now that it is strung and tuned, seems shaped for transmitting voices down through ages hence and, further still, into the ear of God. Is it really so far-fetched when a voice can be laid down on a waxed cylinder and played back a year, ten years—who knows—a century later? And that cylinder is made of cardboard and not fifteen thousand tons of wire and stone! In a time like ours, when the most startling notions become commonplace, fancies are no longer necessarily follies.
Melville nudged me with his foot and asked, “Would you care to stick your harpoon in that girl’s bustle?” I attributed his coarseness to the beer, whose foam was still clinging to his mustache.
“She’s not my ideal,” I replied, my face warming in a blush.
“And what might your ideal woman be?”
“One not partial to pigs’ feet and dumplings.”
Melville smiled peculiarly. Who can guess what goes on in that brain of his, whose color, if we were to peek inside, would be black like a flag of lost hope. And then he began to laugh deeply, so that his eyes disappeared behind his cheekbones.
“I feel my old good humor returning,” he said, picking up his beer stein, shaped like the head of a man, complete with a burgher’s mustache and a green alpine hat topped with a feather plucked, I supposed, from a clay-fired pheasant. A pretty conceit, don’t you think, Roebling—or have I belabored the obvious again?
“Are you always unkind to your wife?” I think I meant to antagonize him the way a man, even a small man, will sometimes provoke another when his better sense yields to recklessness. “I was embarrassed for her last night.”
If a man could—in an instant—change into a beast, Melville did before my eyes.
“Shut your pan, cunt!”
His words both frightened and thrilled me. I searched my mind for an equally scurrilous riposte, but I could think of nothing more insulting than “you scalawag prick!”
He glared and then suddenly laughed. “Shelby, you’re quite a desperado!”
I expect that I appeared ashamed by my impertinence and my insult, however laughable, because he softened toward me.
“You ought to know better than interfere in something that’s none of your concern. I’ve known men to have their ears cut off or their nostrils slit for less.”
Involuntarily, I touched my ears and nose.
“Lizzie and I rub along well together, although fifteen years ago, she nearly left me.” He stood up from his chair. “And there’s an end to it! It’s time we were getting back to Manhattan, before we grow commodious like these Germans.”
During the ferry’s return to the Manhattan depot, a man stood at the taffrail. Dressed in a workman’s blue serge coat and slouch hat, he was peering through a camera at the Brooklyn tower behind us.
“There’s Thomas Edison,” said Melville. “Men like him will make the novel seem a paltry thing.”
“And what will the future make of this? I wonder.”
I meant your bridge; at that moment, I took no interest in Edison and his genius.
“The future will have advanced at such a pace that Roebling’s bridge impresses no more than one of Columbus’s antique ships—unless the world will have once again slid backward into a dark age, in which the benighted will either worship or fear it.”
I thought the latter case the more likely.
“We would do well to remind ourselves that progress marches on hobnailed boots over those who are out of step.” I could not decide whether he had spoken with acrimony or regret.
“Herman, what sort of novels do you write?” I asked the question that had been on my mind since his brief exchange of words with Emily.
“Indifferent ones, by all accounts.”
He turned his back on me, and in that gesture, I saw his repudiation of the world, which had forgotten him.
Martin Finch’s House in Maiden Lane, Lower Manhattan, April 16, 1882
Disembarking at the Fulton Street slip on the Manhattan side of the river, Melville and I parted company. He’d been asked—commanded was the word he used—to meet that evening with the collector of customs, who lived in the neighborhood of Gansevoort Pier. He’d been appointed to the sinecure by President Arthur, a plum for his support during the uncertain days when Garfield lay dying in Washington from two bullets fired by the frustrated office seeker Charles Guiteau.
“Caruthers is an old stickleback and a bore to boot, but in the hierarchy of the Customs Service, he is my lord, and I am his vassal. And don’t think he lets me forget it! He wants to inveigle Chester Arthur into visiting his old boneyard. That charming crook lined his pockets here. Caruthers wants to be seen shaking the new president’s hand. I suppose he hopes some money will stick to it.”
Melville and I wished each other good night and went our separate ways. During the ferry ride home, I had been thinking of paying Martin Finch a visit. He lived on Maiden Lane, not far from the Manhattan depot, along with his brother, Franklin, and a sister-in-law. It isn’t late, I told myself while dithering at the curb. It’s only gone half-past six, and I did promise Martin I’d visit if I was ever in the neighborhood.
His brother answered my knock and let me inside the house built of brick in the Federal style of the previous century. Its run-down appearance spoke more of the reduced circumstances of the tenants than their neglect. Martin earned even less than I. Franklin worked as a typesetter in Newspaper Row, on Chatham Street. He was a large, burly man with a reddish beard and a straightforward manner. After calling upstairs to Martin, he questioned me briefly, as though I were the subject of a newspaper story. I answered him without resentment because I understood that curiosity was the disease of his tribe—from copyboy to editor in chief. What stories have passed through his ink-stained hands? I asked myself. What manifold experiences might have seeped into his skin and into his blood and marrow, if it were possible for a man to absorb life through his pores, as well as his senses!
Martin came downstairs and gave me his hand in greeting. Compared to his brother’s sturdy frame, the younger man’s slightness was all the more apparent. I wondered if he’d been a sickly child or had had a difficult time at birth. A man like Martin would not have had the grit, as an infant, to fight his way into being. This, one knew at a glance. He would have to make his way through life by the charity and goodwill of others.
“Hello, Shelby!” he said with a becoming smile. �
�I see that you’ve met my brother.”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Ross and I sometimes work together on Gansevoort Pier,” explained Martin. Franklin made a remark I don’t recall.
“I’m glad you came,” said Martin. “I noticed you and Mr. Melville outside St. Paul’s this morning. I looked for you in church, but you seemed not to have gone inside after all.”
“It was a whim of Melville’s,” I said. “We ended up at Roebling’s rooming house in Brooklyn Heights.”
If Franklin had been a dog, his ears would have stood up on hearing your name.
“Did you see him?” he asked eagerly.
I told him we hadn’t, and his disappointment was evident. “Many believe Roebling is a complete invalid, deprived of the use of his limbs and speech.”
Many also think you’re a “complete idiot”? Well, there’s no shortage of cynical and mean-spirited people abroad in the world. Pygmies will always outnumber giants.
MARTIN AND I STROLLED DOWN BROADWAY toward the Battery. We spoke of this and that, as people do whose purpose in conversation is not so much an exchange of opinions as of feelings. I was amazed by how readily the other man was able to draw me out and might have resented it had the evening not been so pleasant.
We stopped in Pearl Street to watch workmen at the Edison Illumination Company’s new generating station. Although it was Sunday night, they were busily unloading machinery from a wagon emblazoned with PORTER-ALLEN ENGINE CO., manufacturers of the steam engines that would drive the dynamos. The indefatigable Edison was calmly directing the work. He had on the blue serge jacket, disreputable-looking shoes, and slouch hat he’d worn on the ferry that afternoon. I was struck by his ordinariness; he didn’t look like a man who had already invented the phonograph, multiplexing telegraph, and incandescent lightbulb. You and your father when he was alive resemble the picture in our heads evoked by the phrase “great men of science and technology.” Edison might have been mistaken for a night watchman.
The scene fascinated Martin. “Think of it, Shelby! This fall, Edison’s machinery will begin to banish darkness from New York City. Someday the entire country will be illuminated. In time, people will forget there ever was such a thing as a pitch-black night.”
I considered his remark poetical but replied stolidly, “A pity for Edgar Poe and the storytellers of terror and gloom.”
“‘It was a dark and stormy night,’” intoned Martin lugubriously.
We continued south on Pearl and into Battery Park, where we beheld the confluence of the Hudson and the East River. A mile out in New York Harbor stood Fort Columbus, where Confederate prisoners had been interned. To the east, the towers of your bridge ascended into “twilight’s last gleaming”—to steal from Francis Scott Key, who’s well past caring. Do you know the feeling, Roebling, that can come at twilight, when the world seems to hold its breath? Of course you do; your windows face the dying sky. I felt something out of the ordinary stir in me.
“Isn’t it sublime?” asked Martin, who also felt it.
Moved by the sight of your handiwork, which God might envy were He imbued with the less honorable of human emotions, I almost said something grand, but I didn’t want to appear sensitive. Instead, I concealed my emotions in facts.
“The Brooklyn tower reaches three hundred and sixteen feet above the riverbed; the Manhattan tower, three hundred and forty-nine feet.” I was being deliberately pedantic, don’t you see.
“But that’s not what moves us!” cried Martin, exasperated by my obtuseness.
I persisted in being obnoxious. “The magnitude of its construction is sufficient reason to be amazed.”
“I am interested in infinitude, which—”
“The bridge is a convenience!” I said, rudely interrupting him. “Anything else is beside the point.”
I had hurt his feelings, and for a time he was silent.
We sat on a low stone wall and looked at the slowly blackening harbor. Martin started chattering again—about what, I couldn’t have said. As the sun lowered behind the Staten Island hills, I seemed to fall asleep, yet my eyes took in the flight of a seagull across the harbor—its wings flashing in semaphore a message I couldn’t read. At the north end of Governor’s Island, the red sandstone walls of Castle Williams took fire before turning black and dead, like a cigar ember dropped into the lightless ocean. You could have persuaded yourself that you’d heard its circular walls hiss in the rushing tide of night.
Martin recovered his childlike sense of wonder. “Isn’t it marvelous to be living in an age such as this?”
“Yes,” I replied, and to myself, I said, The astrolabe was once considered a marvel, and the wheel before it.
I felt a sudden antagonism toward him. He’s hardly more than a boy, I told myself; naïve to a fault and absurdly foolish in his enthusiasm. What am I doing here, sitting on a stone wall, which, since night had come on, had turned cold like a marble grave? I was nearly twice his age, and I had passed through the mill and been ground fine as buffalo bones on their way to fertilize a rich woman’s roses. My scorn for the boy passed through me like a chill, and I found myself trembling.
“You’re a damned fool!” I shouted at him with enough feeling to make the last of the day’s pigeons jump and shrug off to wherever pigeons roost, accompanied by the whirring of their wings.
He turned on me the most appalled face, and—can you believe it?—tears appeared in his eyes. “Did I say something stupid?” he asked. I glowered at him for good measure. “I do tend to get carried away. I beg your pardon, Mr. Ross, if I have said anything amiss.”
Roebling, he was sulking like a girl! I wanted to hit him in the worst way. (Is there a best way?)
We sat awhile, my feelings vacillating between pity and contempt. I wished that I had gone home to my room on Christopher Street or accompanied Melville to Caruthers’s house. I could not see how to extricate myself. The seat of my trousers seemed glued to the stone wall, the soles of my boots to the gravel strewn at my feet. Night had arrived in earnest, and the Battery was engulfed, except for the gas lamps, which shed a maleficent light onto the paths. The upper-story windows in the Western Union Building flamed briefly in the weakening light before they, too, were quenched.
I had watched the water being drained of color. It had turned turquois, ruby, gold, pearl, lead, and finally jet. What do I care for poetry? I thought. What earthly good is a sensitive soul?
Martin coughed once and then fell silent. I swear, Roebling, if he had snuffled or given license to his tears, I would have killed him. I would have dragged his body to the water’s edge and launched it!
If not for John Gibbs, our uneasy vigil might have continued until morning. He had been drinking up his wages in a Fulton Street taproom near the ferry slip—he would later say, gloating over his stealth—when he saw me standing hesitantly on the pavement. Sensing my indecision, he thought it would be good sport to follow me when at last I set out to visit Martin. Seeing the two of us leaving his house together, Gibbs was certain of his prey. Like all of his kind, he has a knack for searching out another’s weakness.
As we walked down Broadway and into Pearl, we were stalked with the cunning of Magua, whom the French called “Le Renard Subtil,” the wily fox, in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Gibbs may be toadlike in appearance, but a reptilian strength lies coiled within him, and he relishes causing others pain. He exults in their misery, as if the musk of their fear were ambergris. He is cruel and, despite his bluster, not a man to take lightly. Whether it was the lengthening shadows in the streets, the craftiness with which he followed us, or our mutual absorption, neither Martin nor I had noticed him—not even when we stopped to watch Edison’s men at work on the Pearl Street generating station. Gibbs was there, lurking in an alleyway.
I would not call him “Iago”; Shakespeare’s villain was a winning, plausible fellow ostensibly devoted to the Moor. Gibbs is devoted to no one but himself and carries the evidence of his vices as plainly
as a venomous snake does its rattle. After the bloody business with the knife in the Saxony’s hold, I ought to have been warier.
Because our backs were turned to the city, Gibbs had managed to cross the Negro Burial Ground and the Battery, stealing among the juniper and gooseberry bushes unseen by Martin and me, despite the uncomfortable silence we were keeping. Gibbs appeared with the suddenness of an apparition, ghoulish and foul.
“I see what I see, and I know what I know!” he sneered, his face near enough mine for me to smell a vile stew of onions, beer, whiskey, and cigars on his breath.
Startled, I said nothing, while Martin yelped. Gibbs laid a finger beside his nose and repeated his insinuation, whose meaning was unclear to me. I could see his missing teeth and blackened gums, his split lips, and his bloodshot eyes. His beard was befouled by spittle, ash, and grease. His hand, when he touched my cheek, smelled of oyster brine. Never before had I encountered a more odious human being. He seemed too obvious a villain to exist apart from melodrama, and I have often wondered if he studies the part to produce an effect on his victims.
“Are you boys behaving yourselves?” he asked, his voice sleek and at the same time coarse as a piece of nubby silk.
“What do you want, Gibbs?” I was finally able to ask. I hoped that my voice conveyed defiance and declared my intention not to be cowed. I’m afraid it did neither.
“Nothing, Mr. Ross, nothing at all!” he replied merrily. “I was out walking the dog, when I saw my two friends sitting by themselves and thought the three of us could make a party. But seeing how you’re together, enjoying the moon and such, I decided to say hello and then be on my way. I must say, Mr. Ross, your tone isn’t friendly; it is, if you want my opinion, offensive. You ought to know better, having been a gentleman, if only of the codfish aristocracy. I’d have thought you’d learned some manners. And you, Mr. Finch, what do you have to say for yourself? Shocking piece of rudeness I’d say—your not having the courtesy to acknowledge me! But then you’ve always been odd—haven’t you? Moping about the pier, ogling some book or other! You’ve the look of a mooncalf, Mr. Finch. Or perhaps you’ll allow me the privilege of calling you by your Christian name. What is your given name, Mr. Finch?”
