by Norman Lock
Melville was spent of whatever emotion had driven him to fulminate against mankind, as Jonathan Edwards had done against the ungodly of New England. Millennia before him, Elijah had railed against Baal, and the Lord of Hosts against the Sodomites. In this world, there is no shortage of evildoers nor those who wish them otherwise. And should they prove intractable, there are plenty of good souls who will gladly help them into the next, if the villains don’t cut their throats first.
I said nothing in response to his tirade. What was there for me to say?
Melville swept up the plaster dust his harpoon had caused.
“I gave you a fright, my friend,” he said. “Fear can be as good for a man as a purge or a nose full of snuff.”
I WENT TO THE SCALE HOUSE on Gansevoort Pier, where several customs men were engaged in weighing and measuring sacks of grain, raw sugar, and cocoa beans. Martin was laying iron weights in the pan of a scale. I watched as a sack slowly ascended until the balance beam was level with the floor. A shyness came over me, and I turned to leave, when he called to me.
“Hello, Mr. Ross.”
“Mr. Finch,” I nodded in reply.
We had addressed each other by our surnames, a formality seldom observed on the river, unless one of the customhouse trinity—the collector, naval officer, or surveyor—happened to be there. “Is everything as it should be?” The question was fatuous and impertinent, and the other men—Pintard, Cannon, Stephen Bowditch, Thomas Foote, and the Hebrew Isaac Gutman—had raised their heads from their work and were regarding me curiously.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” I said gruffly as I left them to their tasks.
I was standing at the edge of the pier, watching an old-fashioned brig being warped into a slip, when Martin came up behind me.
“I wanted to apologize,” he said hesitantly, “for having shirked last night. John Gibbs is the kind of bullying roughneck I—I don’t know how to deal with such men. I was humiliated. I’m useless in a fight. I’m very sorry, Shelby, for having let you down.”
“I would no more have expected you to fight Gibbs than I would Ralph Waldo Emerson to take off his coat, roll up his sleeves, and put up his fists against a gin-stoked squarehead from the Bowery. I hit him because I’ve a temper, which often overrides common sense. What I can’t fathom is why he didn’t use his knife on me.”
“And that ghastly moment when he put his arms around us …”
I could’ve sworn that Martin blushed, but maybe I was wrong.
“No, I can’t fathom him at all. I’ll tell you this, Martin: There was hatred in his eyes—they fairly glittered with it. Hatred and wickedness. Gibbs is a dangerous man, and you should be careful of him.”
We stood and watched the river hurrying over the tidal strait from Long Island Sound to Upper New York Bay. So it has always done, and so, I suppose, will it ever do, in spite of us and our misdeeds. Martin spat into the water with a carelessness that made me shiver.
“I wanted to ask you about Melville.”
“What about him?”
“The kind of novels that he writes.”
My ignorance surprised Martin, who was bookish. “As far as I know, he writes only poetry now. But in the fifties, he rivaled Hawthorne as the greatest American writer of romances. I recall reading a review written long before I was born of Moby-Dick that asked, ‘Who knows the terrors of the sea like Herman Melville?’”
“Who or what is Moby Dick?”
“A great white whale, which bit off Captain Ahab’s leg and left him with an everlasting rage. It’s a stupendous book!”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Well, it did sink into the graveyard of forgotten novels. I suppose there’s not a man on this pier, except Melville and myself, who’s read it. When he hired me, I shook his hand and told him how much the book had meant to me. He thanked me brusquely and said that his past was his own affair. He appeared to be embarrassed by it.”
“I’d like to read it.”
“I had a first edition, but sadly, I left it behind in Argentina. I gave it to a friend.”
That Martin Finch should have lived, however briefly, in South America amazed me. In his physique and temperament, he seemed unsuited to an adventure abroad.
“I’d never have believed you were the sort to rough it.”
Three years before, Martin and his brother, Franklin, had gone to Buenos Aires to establish an import business at a time when the gold peso was strong and the Argentinian economy thriving. They’d failed because of ineptitude, while American merchants who had managed things better prospered. Here are two more bankrupts for the club, I told myself.
“It took us a year to realize we’d never make a go of it. I came home with nothing to show for my time and effort, except malaria. Franklin took up his trade again, and I, who had none, cast about for a time until I was taken on at the pier.”
“You must have brought back a few stories of your own.”
“I suppose,” he replied thoughtfully. “But you needn’t go all the way to Buenos Aires to have an adventure. You’ve only to walk down to the Battery.”
He had spoken like a conspirator—or so it seemed to me—and I chose not to take his meaning, if indeed he had meant anything by his remark.
“Melville said we have only to wait, and the world will come to us.”
“If you want to read Moby-Dick, the Mercantile Library is sure to own a copy.”
“Where would that be?”
“Lafayette Street, near Astor Place. If you want, we can go there together.”
I agreed, and in his excitement, he told me the story of Ishmael on board the Pequod.
The Mercantile Library at East Eighth Street, Lafayette Street, and Astor Place, April 17, 1882
Having finished our work for the day, Martin and I walked toward Lafayette Street, stopping in Greenwich Lane to appease our hunger at a Jews’ eating house with pickled herring, bread, and a soup made of rendered chicken fat. Shortly afterward, we were mounting the granite steps of the Mercantile Library. The pamphlet describes it in glorious terms. I’ll read you the preamble:
Designed by Isaiah Rogers in the Greek Revivalist style espoused by Thomas Jefferson, the building known today as the Mercantile Library of New York features classical arcades, columns and pilasters in the Doric mode, chaste entablatures, and imposing gables characteristic of our nation’s grand civic architecture. In its frank and forthright manner and its lofty dignity, this architectural ideal is the perfect expression in wood and stone of our democracy. The building was commissioned by the Astor Place Opera, whose first performance, on November 22, 1847, was Giuseppe Verdi’s Ernani.
You may have the pamphlet to kindle your stove.
As an opera house, the building would have been imposing—perhaps too much so for an expression of democracy in wood and stone, which no poor man or woman could enter unless it was to clean the marble floors. And what could Ernani have meant to Michael Flagherty of shantytown, although, if he’d known Ernani had been a bandit, he might have been curious to hear his story shrieked and bellowed from the stage. The city’s down-and-out have far less exclusive places in which to hear the songs of laundresses, their voices coarsened by steam, and the comic patter of porters and road menders.
The pamphlet also summarizes the Astor Place Riot, of May 1849, when the opera house became known as the “Massacre Opera House at Dis-Astor Place.” In 1854, the building was resurrected as the Mercantile Library. Like a resourceful storyteller, history knits an endless yarn.
Do you know the story of the riot? It’s delicious in its way, and who knows, but there might be some truth in it?
A mob of Irish immigrants and lawless Bowery Boys gutted the opera house during a performance of Macbeth. Had they gotten their hands on him, they’d have filleted William Macready, the English actor playing the Scottish usurper, as well as the English-loving ladies and gents in their evening clothes. The rioters marched up Broadway, breakin
g windows with brickbats and paving stones and looting the palaces of the nouveau riche. The reason for the mayhem was the common people’s hatred of all things British, incorporated in Macready. The people’s man, the American Edwin Forrest, who’d begun his career on the makeshift stages of the Lower East Side, happened to be playing Macbeth at the Broadway Theatre. The rabble would have crowned him king of New York had the coup de théâtre succeeded, but the infantry and hussars of the Seventh Regiment put down the bloody riot most bloodily. With the help of John Jacob Astor and Washington Irving, Macready escaped harm. According to the pamphlet, New York City policemen would henceforth walk their beats armed.
Have you been inside the library? There’s a landscape by Frederic Church. As a young man, he went on voyages in search of subject matter. The same could be said of Melville. In El Río de Luz, Church recalled in oil paint what his eyes had seen in South America in 1857. The painting is three times removed from the scene it depicts, which may be the Amazon or else a composite of lesser rivers. First, there is the river itself, then Church’s memory of it altered by twenty years of recollection, and finally the painting in the Mercantile Library.
Your bridge will be diminished by photographs and stereopticon cards, postcards and engravings, paintings and poems. With each new rendering, it will grow smaller, until one day it will be no more than a symbol and a souvenir. I’ve seen the Great Pyramid at Giza reproduced in colored inks in an advertisement for a burial fund society. Even pharaohs become as common as dust.
Am I being overly philosophic? Well, success has nothing to teach; it’s our failures that turn us into philosophers, or liars. And I have had my share of failure. Forgive my pedantry and self-pity; they are unattractive qualities.
The library’s collection runs to two hundred thousand books—an order of magnitude appropriate to astronomy or to the fourteen thousand miles of steel wire holding up your bridge. I felt insignificant, walking through its marbled rooms to the sound of my footsteps echoing in the vaulted ceiling. Pedestrians will feel the same humbling as they walk high above the East River, like aerialists in Barnum’s circus—at a penny a crossing.
Martin and I were pacing an aisle that began with Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and ended with Erasmus’s Praise of Folly.
“I come here frequently. I feel …”
“What do you feel, Martin?”
“It might sound foolish, but I feel safe and nourished.”
Like a rat in a granary, I thought at the time.
“As if I were standing behind heavy iron doors locked from the inside.”
Like those at the Harper’s Ferry engine house, before the marines battered them down and took John Brown captive.
“Here we are,” he said as we came athwart the shelf where Herman Melville’s books lay.
“So many!” I exclaimed, running a finger across the spines. “I’d never have guessed that he had written so many. Nor that there would be so much dust,” I said, showing Martin my gray-felted finger.
“He’s gone out of fashion. Here’s the book you want: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.” He hauled out a thick volume published in 1851 by Harper & Brothers, New York, bound in green cloth.
“I wish he’d been briefer. There must be enough wind inside to fill a mainsail.”
“Not a word but what is necessary,” said Martin with slight umbrage, I thought. “He wasn’t writing a bill of lading.”
“I’ll borrow it and tell you what I think.”
“I’ve been wanting to read Redburn again,” said Martin, taking down the first of that novel’s two volumes. “Melville created a character named Harry Bolton, whom I’ve not been able to forget.”
Weighing Moby-Dick in my hand, I wondered how long it would take to get through it.
“Redburn, an American sailor, takes a guide book that belonged to his father on a voyage to Liverpool, wanting to retrace his dead sire’s footsteps,” explained Martin. “But the book was sadly out-of-date, and the ghost of Redburn’s father nowhere to be found.” Martin glanced at me. “There’s a meaning there,” he said, with a rising inflection, like a teacher prodding a lazy pupil. “An unpleasant truth.”
I gave him a flippant reply. “Stories seldom have much to do with the real world, and they come as close to the truth of their subject as Griffith’s Street Directory of Brooklyn does to Brooklyn.”
Martin regarded me skeptically. “If we weren’t shut up in our own petty selves, there would be no need for other people’s stories.” He’d spoken like someone minting an epigram. Well, I’ve launched more than a few of my own. Vanity—by the pinch or the pound—is mixed into the dough and leaven of us all.
He tucked Redburn under his arm and started toward the clerk who would note its loan to him as well as that of Moby-Dick to me. At a reading table, beneath a green-shaded lamp, an old man wearing sleeve protectors had fallen asleep over a portfolio of antique maps, his old-fashioned Burnside whiskers crushed against the Iberian Peninsula during the reign of Augustus.
The door leading to the street seemed heavier than it had, as though its wood and brass had been replaced by stone.
NIGHT HAD FALLEN ON THE FINE HOUSES of the rich in Astor Place and Broadway and on the hovels of the Five Points, though we were not near the latter to verify the fact. “Facts,” Melville had said, “are verifiable by the scale and by the measuring stick, but what the heart desires and what thoughts the mind entertains can only be conjectured.” “I’d have thought that was obvious,” I replied, a remark that left him scowling at his paperwork. I know now—and have already said as much—that sometimes the obvious hides truths that can be as profound as those we hunt for in obscurity.
The night being mild, Martin and I walked up Broadway to Bowery Road, where George Washington sits astride his bronze horse in Union Square. We agreed that John Gibbs was vile and possibly insane.
“Do you think he means us harm?” asked Martin carefully.
“He’s a mean dog on a short chain,” I said. “So long as we keep out of his way, we’ve nothing to fear.” I hoped I had sounded convincing. I was not convinced.
“I’d feel better if he were to disappear.”
Grant would have thought the same about Lee before the Battle of Appomattox Courthouse.
A newsboy swaggered down the brick pavement as brazenly as a Tammany Hall thug. He shouted the evening headlines the way another boy would hawk his apples. “‘Treacherous Outbreak by Apaches!’ … ‘Incredible Tales of Ruin in Brownsville!’ … ‘Brilliant Auroral Display in Poughkeepsie!’ … ‘Serious Interference with Telegraphic Communication!’”
The boy could have arrived from the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, except that his teeth were rotted, a cigarette was pasted to his lower lip, and I’d likely find a jackknife in his pocket used for games more serious than mumblety-peg.
“Paper, gents?” he asked, combing back his soap locks with his fingers.
“No thank you,” I said.
“Ah, come on! Don’t be that way! Give us a penny, and I’ll give you the World.”
I gave him a penny to be rid of him.
I gave Martin the front page; I took the shipping news. We perused them under the gaslights, our inward visions lively with savages and sailing departures, respectively. For all we were aware of our surroundings, Washington could have gotten down from his high horse and gone to supper at Fraunces Tavern, where a century before, he’d bidden farewell to the officers of the Continental Army. The park had dissolved into newsprint, and words had taken the place of reality. If a penny newspaper could materialize bloodthirsty Apaches and a cyclone in Union Square, what effect could Melville’s novel have on an impressionable mind? To one like Martin’s, the Pequod could appear among the departures from the Port of New York. But I had no such mind and saw only printed columns devoted to tonnage.
What did appear before our eyes was a prostitute; by her dress and demeanor, she could have been nothing else. She sidled like a cat, only n
ot so winsomely. She was much the worse for drink, as my father often said of his brother, Thomas, who fell during the Great Skedaddle. I’ve always hoped that he was the worse for drink at the moment of his death and exhaled his boozy breath into the face of Saint Peter, who when he’d been only Simon the fisherman liked his tipple. Sobriety is a great virtue in maiden aunts, Methodist deacons, and the like, who do not go to sea or war.
“She’s as common as a barber’s chair that a troop of cavalry has mounted,” I said to Martin, recalling a colorful figure of speech heard on the docks, if not found anywhere in the New York Mercantile Library. At that moment, I wanted to sound coarse and insensitive, like a common tough.
Martin laughed, perhaps for the same reason.
And then, Roebling, as abruptly as the woman had stepped into the ring of gaslight cast onto the walk, I felt in some duct or organ a red-hot shame. I had on my lips words such as “She is to be pitied,” but I never spoke them. I can think of no other nation whose citizens do not think of it as their fatherland or motherland. Americans are fatherless and motherless and—because of it—pitiless. We’re orphans. Left on our own to make our way, we are a country of tricksters and hard scrabblers.
The night no longer seemed kind. Both Martin and I fell into a “brown study,” an expression lovelier than what it means.
I stood and wished Martin a good night. Walking home to my room, I couldn’t get out of my own shadow. “A shadow is a metaphor for the invisible and ineffable,” Melville had once said. “And a metaphor is the shadow of a truth. Those who behold it are struck blind or driven insane.” Was he talking about himself or Ahab?
West Street Customs Office, April 19, 1882
While I waited for Melville to arrive and assign me a cargo to appraise, I continued the reading I’d begun two nights before in Moby-Dick. I had reached the chapter in which Father Mapple delivers his sermon to the sailors at the New Bedford Whaleman’s Chapel. I remember these lines in particular:
… in all this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after him.
