Feast Day of the Cannibals

by Norman Lock

  Men moved about, encircling me like trash eddying on a dirty river. Their mouths were slashes, their eyes embers, their lips snakes writhing around a hole. Where was God in all this wreckage? I would have asked myself had I had my wits about me. As if in answer to my unspoken and scarcely formulated question, I felt a hand inside my vest, and thinking it was Gibbs, I shoved him off his stool.

  “Goddamn you, Ross! I’ll make you sorry you were ever born!” A fury mounted in him, like fire in dry tinder.

  “Somebody had his hand inside my coat,” I said. My words staggered drunkenly.

  “The place is famous for pickpockets,” replied Gibbs, my answer having satisfied him. “Has someone lifted your purse?”

  I patted my vest, felt the wallet’s bulge, and said, “I have it.”

  Gibbs gathered up our drinks and elbowed me toward an empty table at the back.

  “We can talk in private here,” he said, setting down our glasses.

  I knew enough not to drink any more. Intent on his tête-à-tête, Gibbs didn’t notice my abstinence.

  “What do you want?” I asked, planting my elbows on the table to keep my head from falling forward. Someone else had asked me that question. Who could it have been?

  “Tonight you’ve seen the world,” he said. “Believe it or not, Shelby, this is your world—you belong to it. I’ve studied you, and I know you—know your heart. You are one of us.”

  His words came at me. They enveloped me like drizzle—a yellow rain. What does he mean? I asked myself.

  “I must go,” I said, feeling caught like a minnow in a net. I tried to stand but fell back in my chair. Gibbs took my hand, and once again I shuddered. He ignored the tremor, or else he misinterpreted it. I attempted to stand again.

  “Sit!” he commanded.

  I tried to focus my eyes on his face, but they refused to stay put, searching the dark corners of the room instead.

  “You are not going to California,” he said softly.

  “No?”

  “No. Your place is here.”

  I had no idea what “here” meant to him, unless it was this odious barroom.

  “I know what you’ve been up to with your friend.”

  “My friend?”

  I couldn’t make any sense of it, Roebling.

  “Martin Finch, or should I call him Mary Finch?”

  Before I could gather my thoughts in order to protest, he had gone on. “In some men, it is an abomination, in others not. You have a womanish temperament, Shelby. It’s true—you know it is—deny it as much as you like.” His voice was sad. “No, you cannot go to California with Martin Finch.”

  “You don’t understand,” I blurted. “Martin and I are—”

  He leaned toward me and hissed, “Sodomites!”

  I jerked back in my chair, appalled.

  “It’s not true!”

  The trouble lies in words, Roebling. There is none for what Walt Whitman, unashamed and innocent, gloried in. We call it “sodomy,” “bestiality,” and “abomination” because we have no others, and what we call it prejudices the mind and strikes balefire against a flinty heart; in conflagrations like that are books and witches burned.

  “Martin is a cannibal. And as surely as Eliza Donner ate the arm of Samuel Shoemaker by Alder Creek, he will have you.”

  I looked on him aghast and completely sobered, though my legs still balked.

  “You’re wrong about him!”

  “Let’s say you were unaware of Martin’s unnatural interest in you.”

  Again I started to object, but he would not brook interruption.

  “If you aren’t guilty of gross indecency, then he must be. Is he?”

  I struggled to find words to make a suitable reply and put an end to this absurdity, but his voice, modulating from irritability to patient sympathy, went on and on.

  “Is he? Is he? Is he?”

  “No! No! No!”

  “Are you unnatural?”

  “I am not!” I shouted.

  “Of course not, Shelby! It’s Martin who’s the bugger.”

  I shook my head wearily. I wanted to lay my head on the tabletop. I thought of the long way home to bed. However will I get there? I wondered. It’s miles and miles from here, and the hour is late. The effort it would take to get up from the chair, walk out onto the street, find a horsecar, and ride to McFadden’s boardinghouse seemed immense. The journey home would be as exhausting as a trip to California, or China. No, I couldn’t do it, couldn’t move my legs in my weariness. I felt as you must have, Roebling, when the bends took you and made you bedfast.

  “I found this among his things,” said Gibbs, solemnly producing evidence in the trial of poor Martin.

  He set a disgusting photograph in front of me.

  “Among—his—things?” I stammered. It was beyond belief. “You’re a liar!”

  “Am I?”

  I glared at him.

  He shrugged. Roebling, the man shrugged his shoulders lightly, as if he’d lost a half-dollar in a game of three-card monte!

  He got up from the table and left. Without another word! I stared for a moment at the photograph, then angrily tore it up.

  Why have I become the object of such inhuman attention? I asked myself. Is it Gibbs’s revenge for my having struck him or for any airs and graces that I might have retained from my better days? Is he enraged by the thought of guileless affections between men—or does he crave them? Is it desire or shame that goads him? Or is he Iago after all, whose motives were pure—that is, unadulterated by either reason or unreason. Iago was Iago because he could be no other; likewise, Gibbs must be Gibbs.

  The Central Park, May 7, 1882

  On Sunday, I felt obliged to visit Martin.

  No, not to confront him with Gibbs’s accusation, which I didn’t believe. The reason had nothing to do with Gibbs. Martin and I had things to discuss about our remove to San Francisco. His foot was nearly healed; we could leave New York within the week. There were a few details to finalize, and then we could be off.

  “Hello, Franklin,” I said when he answered my knock on the door.

  “Morning, Shelby! Come in.”

  He is a genial and good-natured man, as brawny and awkward as his younger brother was lithe.

  “I need to talk to Martin,” I said.

  “He’s asleep. He had a visitor last night who appeared to upset him. After the fellow left, I could hear Martin moving about his room till daylight.”

  The compass needle in my head swung round, until it stopped at the image of John Gibbs, a human lodestone that could attract by his loathsomeness. The compulsion is shared by dogs, which will sniff delicately at their own filth, and by readers whose finer feelings are overcome by morbid curiosity about stories like those by Edgar Poe. I’ve had the same unwholesome feeling when gazing at a poor freak of nature in a sideshow tent. I recall a mermaid on display in Hester Street, near East Broadway, purported to have been hauled up from the depths of the Tyrrhenian Sea by Corsican fishermen. Melville took me to see it—or her; the gender of pronouns can be misleading when fantastic beings are concerned.

  “What did he look like?” I asked Franklin, fairly certain of his answer.

  “Squat and well built; looked to be fifty or so. He said he works with Martin on the pier.”

  Gibbs!

  “I’ll just have a word with Martin.”

  “Let him sleep, Shelby.”

  “Yes,” I said, checking an impulse to hurry up the stairs.

  Ellen sailed into the front room, a favorable wind at her back, so to speak.

  “Good morning, Mr. Ross!” she greeted me brightly. “We’re off to the Central Park. Why don’t you come with us?”

  “There’s a thought!” said Franklin agreeably.

  You wouldn’t be agreeable, Franklin, if you knew I coveted your wife! (The penitent, who has the hairy ear of a priest to fill, finds that his minor sins are easily remembered, whereas matters of grave consequence to the s
oul are told reluctantly, if at all.)

  “I’d love to!” I said, happy to forget Gibbs—and Martin—for an afternoon.

  Franklin took the wicker hamper Ellen had packed, and we walked to Battery Place station to take the Ninth Avenue elevated. Boarding a northbound train, I was in high spirits and admitted to myself without a shred of guilt that I was happier in Ellen and Franklin’s company than I would have been in Martin’s.

  RIDING ABOVE NINTH AVENUE, I glimpsed the Elysian Fields, next to the river in Hoboken, where the Metropolitans play.

  “A splendid name for a baseball field!” said Ellen. “And to think that when it was one of the Fortunate Isles, at the western edge of the earth, it belonged to Cronos and not New Jersey!”

  The house and building fronts below the tracks had also become vulgarized by cast-iron facades painted in imitation of building stone.

  I know you despise them, Roebling. Lies are detestable, whether expressed in words, paint, iron, brick, or stone.

  We left the steam train at the Eighty-sixth Street station and walked to the park entrance known as Mariner’s Gate. We strolled amid flowering dogwood and tulip trees across the green sward to the lake at Seventy-eighth. A few blocks to the south, the city’s impoverished folk found respite from their drudgery in Sheep Meadow, if they had scraped together the pennies for the horsecar or el ride from the foul tenements, where the water is not so clean as it was in the old Piggery. Harsenville and the Piggery District had been home to poor negro, Irish, and German families, until they were evicted to make way for Olmstead’s democratic Eden. (Eminent domain is only Manifest Destiny in miniature.) The sheep were happier, as they grazed on the meadow’s rich grass, unaware of their privileged life inside the park, safe from the knife of Abraham or a West Street market butcher.

  While Franklin and I lounged on a tartan blanket, which smelled faintly of camphor flakes, Ellen unpacked the hamper of bread, cheese, and wine and talked about Paris because, she said, the picture we three made reminded her of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass, which she had seen in a book belonging to Henry James. She smiled coyly and asked me if I’d ever seen a reproduction of the painting.

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “It’s one you would remember, Mr. Ross!”

  She laughed, as pleased as a child who has said something naughty.

  “I don’t much care for the French,” I said with a patrician sniff of disdain.

  “Mr. James would be shocked to hear it!” said Ellen, pretending to be horrified.

  Although there were no sheep to be seen in the better purlieu of the park, she recited a poem about a shepherd. Franklin, the tip of his tongue showing, whittled a stick. I lay on my back and chewed a stem of sweet grass. Unwittingly, we’d assembled into a pastoral tableau of three rustics on a holiday.

  Amidst her cheeks the rose and lily strive, Lily snow-white:

  When their contend doth make their colour thrive, Colour too bright

  For shepherd’s eyes.

  “What fun to be picnicking with two handsome swains!” she then said, taking off her straw hat.

  Again I marveled at her hair, whose color and fineness resembled strands of copper wire.

  On such a day as this, I told myself, twenty-year-old Herman Melville began his first sea voyage, as a cabin boy sailing from Coenties Slip to Liverpool aboard the St. Lawrence. Could he have foreseen the disaster of his second voyage on the whaleship Acushnet, his desertion, his badly infected leg, his convalescence among the “roistering blades of savages,” the menace of the cannibals, the fear and hunger, would he have left in a carefree mood or done the sensible thing and gone into business, like his everlastingly debt-ridden father?

  Would your father, Roebling, have begun the bridge had he known that, by a chance concatenation of events, it would kill him? Would you have taken on his work knowing what suffering would befall you? And if that afternoon in the Central Park, I had foreseen the coming disaster, would I have hurried to the nearest train and fled the city? Sometimes I wonder if the story had not already been written.

  By Melville, yes. When I finished his novel Redburn, I could imagine myself having been trapped in a lurid story with John Gibbs.

  “Shelby, where will you be next month this time?” asked Ellen thoughtfully.

  Martin and I had often plotted our new beginning, and I could reply without hesitation. “In a rooming house at the top of Russian Hill, with a view of San Francisco Bay. The windows are open. I’m lying on my bed after managing Uncle Myer’s circulation. Seen distantly through the window, a steamer is bound for the Galápagos, where tortoises lie sleeping inside an ancient dream.”

  Ellen looked at me appreciatively, and for a moment, I imagined her with me in that room. Each of us is architect and chief engineer of our dreams, Roebling, and they can be as difficult to build, the materials as refractory, the reasons against them as sound, the risks as great, and their realization as well-nigh impossible as they are in a feat of civil engineering.

  Ellen and I walked along the lake, and she told me of her happiness. The words came easily as though she were describing an outing on Coney Island. I envied her, and I envied Franklin for having had the good fortune to marry her. I was dreaming, don’t you see? I could have been a shepherd, and she a shepherdess in a pastoral poem by Theocritus.

  We sat on a rustic bench conceived in the mind of Frederick Law Olmstead and not in an ancient Greek’s. We looked at the water, where a stately pair of swans was gliding for no other reason than to confirm our Sunday’s idyll. A collie dog ran into the water, attracted by the magnetic force of a stick thrown by a boy; the imperturbable swans moved just beyond reach of the dog’s commotion.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Shelby?” asked Ellen, squeezing my hand.

  Phoebe, I said to myself; I am your Silvius. How wonderful a dream can sometimes be! And how very terrible.

  I had boarded an el train in lower Manhattan, only to step out into a play or an opera. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ellen had begun to sing an aria to the trumpeting of the swans and the barking of the dog and the bewilderment of the boy. For the space of the afternoon, the world and all its sordidness had fallen away, leaving only the park, two of the three Finches, and me. If only it could have continued!

  Do you see how I’ve changed? Two years in prison will either make a man or break him. I have Melville to thank for my having survived it. He stood by me. He didn’t arrange passage on an outbound ship so that I could escape punishment, for he knew better than I did at the time that a stateless, vagrant life is none at all. Melville is loyal—say what you like about him.

  “Martin is a sensitive young man,” said Ellen after a lengthy pause in the conversation, during which she’d been pursuing her own thoughts.

  I wanted nothing to do with sensitive young men.

  “Your friendship has done him good.”

  Feeling uncomfortable, I made no reply.

  “Franklin and I have worried that he would get into some scrape he couldn’t get out of. You can’t imagine how vulnerable he is.”

  Oh, but I can!

  “He has a good mind and heart, but I fear those qualities make him unsuitable for the Bowery. We would have moved to Staten Island if Franklin and Martin’s father had not left them the house free and clear.…” Her voice trailed off, and what was unspeakable was left unspoken, or so I imagined.

  I resented Martin for having drawn a pall over the sunlit afternoon, taking the luster from Ellen’s hair and the brightness from her eyes. The lake water blackened, and the swans turned gray. The dream was nearly over, the opera at an end. Before the curtain rang down—possibly forever—I took Ellen’s wrist and held it—too hard, by the pained look on her face. Having taken it, I could not let it go. If only you and I were going to San Francisco! If only life were otherwise! Ellen, you are my last hope. I wanted to say this and more, but I said nothing. In her wide-eyed look, I saw confusion, apprehension, and—I swear—curio
sity. I let go of her hand. Without a word being said, we made up our minds to treat what had passed as a joke. She must have done so, because she laughed—not nervously, but lightly. And so I was saved from embarrassment and explanation. The Central Park was no more Arcadia than I was Silvius, or she Phoebe.

  She stood and said it was time to be getting back. We found Franklin leaning against Oak Bridge, which spans Bank Rock Bay at the entrance to the Ramble. He was eating ice cream and, at our approach, smiled shamefacedly, like a boy caught committing mischief.

  “Did you enjoy your walk?”

  “We did until Shelby took advantage of me in front of the swans.”

  The color must have drained from my face, because Franklin took a step toward me as though he meant to crack my jaw. But then he broke into a laugh, and Ellen joined him, and I knew that they had been making sport of me and that I could have no significance to them other than as poor Martin’s friend.

  “I hope they didn’t blush,” he said, smiling.

  “The swans are married, and nothing can shock them,” she replied.

  Now it was Franklin’s face that reddened.

  Ellen took her handkerchief and wiped ice cream from his mouth. “I declare my husband is a child! I dare not let him out of my sight!”

  “My wife belongs to the National Woman Suffrage Association. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton are frequent guests at Maiden Lane.”

  Ellen humphed humorously.

  “I’ve been typing early drafts of a novel for Henry James, The Bostonians. In it, a character named Olive appears to be in love with Verena Tarrant, a proponent of the woman’s movement. Mr. James seems not to have made up his mind whether to admire suffragists and sympathize with women who find themselves in a ‘Boston marriage’ or frown on them.”

  “I expect any day to hear that Ellen has been arrested for conduct unbecoming a Christian gentlewoman and a professional typist.”

  “The Fiji islanders manage these things better,” she countered.