Johnny One-Eye

by Jerome Charyn

  I was woefully confused, a man singing with all the sweetness of a woman and the strength and coloratura of a male demon. He went through an entire opera of Handel, singing and reciting every part—shepherd, nymph, or Cyclops.

  ’T was the tale of Galatea, a tall and beautiful nymph, who is in love with Acis, a Sicilian shepherd boy. But Polyphemus, a brooding one-eyed giant, hungers for Galatea.

  “I rage—I melt—I burn!” bemoans the Cyclops. He longs for his own shepherd’s pipe, so he can breathe “Sweet Galatea’s beauty.” Yet he knows ’t will be hard to tame a nymph “fierce as storms that bluster.” He invites all the “wildings” to a feast—all the wild goats of Sicily—and Galatea. But the nymph will not have him. “Go, monster…I loathe the host, I loathe the feast.”

  The brute despairs and kills Acis with a boulder. But Galatea uses all her art as a nymph to turn Acis’ own gushing blood into a fountain that will sing to her from the rocks.

  Now I understood the costume that Feltrinelli paraded in. The slippers that he wore were a shepherd’s shoes, the tiny cap was Galatea’s, and the metal skirt and scimitar belonged to Polyphemus, as if he could isolate or combine all three characters at will, like some prodigious machine.

  Yet he was no musical engine. His ability to range from Galatea’s soft lament to Polyphemus’ deep-throated cries was not akin to magic. All his voices seemed to fly from the profound sadness of his own monstrosity—the crippling of his sex at eight or nine would grant him a godlike unbroken voice and also a terrifying “mannishness” that would soon turn his entire body into an enormous male organ.

  Feltrinelli was a false woman in a fierce man. He could have charmed a serpent out of its skin with a single note and cured every melancholic in Manhattan. I could not take my eyes off him. I was lost in his multiplicity. I imagined myself as Polyphemus, condemned to a life without Galatea.

  When the curtain lowered, I discovered Feltrinelli’s enterprise. He did not believe in subscription lists. He jumped off the stage with a wire basket to collect his fee and moved with said basket from aisle to aisle—every man and woman contributed to his welfare. God save the yob who did not.

  And while he collected, the nuns came down from “paradise” with wire baskets of their own. And they would not let me clasp them in my arms. They yelped like skittish colts when they saw me and disappeared faster than the Divil. I cared not with whom they conspired. I sat in my seat until the theatre emptied and I was left in that plush velvet void.

  Feltrinelli descended into the theatre’s bowels with his wire basket. I waited. And the castrato emerged from a little trap door in the pit—took six or seven strides with his magnificent calves and stopped at my seat, wearing his metal skirt.

  “Cavaliere John,” he said in a voice no less deep than mine.

  “Clara loves you, but you must not come here again.”

  I didn’t carry a dagger in my sleeve, like Gentle Jack. But even if I did, how could I dirk a castrato who bore me no ill will? Yet I had to hold my ground.

  “Signore, I cannot leave the premises ’til I speak with Clara.”

  “She will not speak,” said the castrato.

  “Then perhaps you might desire her to do so.”

  The nuns had crept up behind him, clung to his metal skirt—now ’t was clear to me that they had never really belonged to Gertrude. More than half the nuns were of mixed blood; superstitious creatures, they could have been casting about for their very own messiah—an octoroon with blond hair—and might have belonged to Clara from the day she arrived on Robinson Street with her rag dolls. Clara had been the sound of their own silence, stubborn and inchoate as they themselves were. Clara had puffed on a pipe with them. Gertrude did not. And ’t was as natural as song itself that they would have followed Clara to John Street once there was a battle between their two mums.

  Then I heard Clara’s voice rebound off the castrato’s back.

  “Johnny One-Eye, I will not deal with ye ’til you promise to break all ties with that witch you call a mother.”

  I’d have promised her half the world and all my holdings on Saint John, but I would not deny Gert.

  “Zounds, I will answer no woman whose visage I cannot see.”

  “I’m too ashamed,” she said. “I dishonored you—and myself. I should never have obeyed Washington and his witch. I should have drowned them in my spittle, and done worse to you, Johnny One-Eye. Because you should have kidnapped me at Yorktown, drugged me, socked me in the face, and dragged me off to Canada as your concubine.”

  “Dearest,” I said. “I do not have the means within me to sock you.”

  “But the occasion called for it.”

  “Hang the occasion! You must come closer. The seats here are too pitched. I am plagued with vertigo.”

  She stepped out from behind Feltrinelli and the nuns, her freckled face gleaming under the chandeliers. Mighty God Himself could not have made another such Galatea.

  I fell back into my seat and started to cry.

  “Forgive me, Clara. ’Tis your loveliness. I cannot bear it. I have suffered so without your face.”

  She held her freckles close to me, like some act of war.

  “Now will you promise unto God to untie yourself from your witch of a mother?”

  “Clara, I cannot. I have come to reconcile both of you…and drag you back to Holy Ground by your hair.”

  I was a fool to provoke her—perhaps I wanted to feel her anger. She leapt on top of me, straddled my velvet chair, began to flail at my arms and face. I licked my own blood, and the sheer presence of Clara stirred me while the blows landed. I could have lived with that. But then she stopped. Her body stiffened against mine and went all ashiver.

  The nuns watched us in their own silent rapture, as if Galatea had been reborn in front of their eyes, the tallest of tall nymphs, with a one-eyed pirate as her puny Cyclops, who could not even steal her from a man in a metal skirt.

  The castrato plucked her away from me with his long beautiful hands, and she sat crooked against his shoulder, the entire length of her, like a collapsed child.

  And the rub of it was that I had never been more jealous. He stroked her hair, sang Polyphemus’ song—“I rage—I melt—I burn!”—and the sound of it ended her agitation. The Angel of Bologna seemed to have a most tender streak.

  He carried her into the theatre’s dizzying decline, with the nuns still clutching his metal skirt.

  Sixty-Seven

  ’T WAS EARLY IN DECEMBER, AND I HAD BEEN ON York Island but a week, having missed the British departure by a hair—they had marched from the Bowery to Bowling Green on the tempestuous morning of November the 25th, climbed aboard their battleships in brilliant scarlet coats, as if America had been but an afterthought and meant nothing, nothing at all. And the lads who arrived in their place, arrived in rags, like some amateur army—thus my mother told me.

  At the head of this motley crew was the commander in chief astride his chestnut mare. The populace was transfixed—not an eye wandered far from Washington as he rode down Broadway, without the rat-a-tat of a single drum. There had never been such silence, not in seven years, as if no one could believe the Brits were really gone—until Washington passed in his war cape, his tricorn bobbing higher than the tallest lamplighter could ever reach with his pole.

  Did Gert hope that Washington would glance at her? He had not yet given her a Purple Heart, and she had not seen him, not touched his face, in three and a half years.

  She was standing behind a barrier, at the very edge of Robinson Street as it spilled onto Broadway, standing without her nuns, who might have captured his attention. But he did not turn to look at Holy Ground. Gert would swear that his jaw did ripple once.

  AND NOW, NINE OR TEN DAYS LATER, you could not find another general in Manhattan—officers, weary of war, were running home to the hinterlands—and Washington had to survive with a skeletal family; his lads ran to Fraunces’ Tavern at the corner of the old canal and the ne
wly named Pearl Street, to discuss the general’s farewell banquet with “Black Sam” Fraunces, who hailed from Barbados and had been the Continental Army’s official caterer.

  General Clinton had often sat at Sam’s center table—he served the best roasts, pies, and puddings in America. But Sam had also smuggled food aboard the prison ships and foiled several plots to poison Washington’s peas. And now he was preparing the last lunch the commander in chief would have in Manhattan before he returned to Virginia and a life without camp cots and war tents.

  Meanwhile, Washington remained on our island. He’d stop and sit with a mechanic near the docks, always with a mob around him, hungry for another glimpse of the great general—his battles, won or lost, had passed into myth. His retreats were now seen as victories in waiting, every skirmish a vital piece of the grand design. No matter how often he tripped, made mistakes—this was part of some vast puzzle of war.

  I had passed him on our broken streets, had watched as mothers and babies kissed his hand; sailors and artisans got down on their knees to this tall man in the tiny hat. But I was preoccupied with my own little drama on John Street—neither the nuns nor anyone else molested me at the theatre door. I held to my seat under the chandeliers.

  The Angel of Bologna would stop and sit for a few moments while loping about the theatre with his wire basket.

  “Cavaliere,” he said, “I have pleaded your case. But she insists. You had your chance to steal her, she says. Still, she cries every night. And that is an excellent sign.”

  Consoling as he was, he did not invite me to visit his dressing closet.

  So I sat, and one night I saw that something was amiss—people were greatly agitated, as if yet another conflagration had decided to visit us. But I could not smell any smoke or glimpse a fiery curtain. Then a soldier clumped up the stairs, much out of breath, and informed me that Mr. Washington was waiting near the orchestra pit. I hurried down to meet him.

  “Johnny,” he said, his nose a trifle red. “I have a little unfinished business. Come with me.”

  And I followed him through unlit corridors where we both had to duck our heads, and into a maze that finally led to the castrato’s dressing closet. He knocked once; the door opened a crack—I could see one of Feltrinelli’s gray eyes—and Washington said, “Sir, will you have the kindness to inform Mistress Clara that General Washington seeks ten minutes of her time.”

  THE CASTRATO’S DRESSING CLOSET had become a sanctuary for the nuns’ hatboxes and shoes—such articles being piled to the ceiling on uncertain shelves that leaned like towers. I still could not grasp Feltrinelli’s hold over the nuns, including Clara. I was aware that some castratos had a strange sexual prowess, and that irate husbands of curious and emboldened wives often considered them as predatory creatures. And that is why Feltrinelli had come to Manhattan—he’d scandalized every major European village, even the minor ones, and had nowhere else to go.

  But Clara did not cling to his metal skirts.

  She was much confused by the general’s visit, her freckles rising up with a raw and red color.

  “Gen’ral, ’tis unseemly of you to come and plead Johnny’s cause.”

  “Clara, the cause I plead is none but my own.”

  That had already disarmed her. “Do sit down, Mr. Washington. We aren’t cannibals here.”

  But sit he would not. He went down on one knee. Clara put her hands over her eyes.

  “Mistress,” he said, “you must look at me.”

  “I do not have the power, sir, not whilst you kneel.”

  “You must look at me.”

  She peeked at him from betwixt her fingers.

  “Mistress Clara, you have been reckless in my behalf. You have risked your life more times than I care to remember. Not one other person has been bolder than thee. Yet I did misuse ye, child.”

  “Excellency,” Clara said, “ye did not. I am a brazen girl.”

  “Child, I misused thee. I did not honor your judgment. I forced you to be my own instrument in sending Johnny away. And thus robbed you of your power—to believe in the agency of what you were doing. I am adamant, Clara. You must forgive me.”

  “Gen’ral,” she said, removing the mask of her own hands. “I can’t even consider it ’til you get off your damn knee.”

  Washington rose up like a reeling behemoth and Clara fell into his arms with such force, I feared he would topple.

  “Gen’ral,” Clara said from within his shoulder, “where is Mad Mal, if I may be so bold to ask?”

  “In the safety of an asylum,” Washington said. And then he kissed her eyes and announced that he had urgent business elsewhere.

  I longed to remain awhile with Clara, but she looked right past me, as if I were a piece of dust in some unknown galaxy.

  THE VERY NEXT MORNING, a little before noon, I strolled down to Black Sam’s in my green sash. I walked under the fanlight and entered the Long Room, where British officers had sampled Sam’s best pudding but a few weeks ago. The floors were waxed and the tables set with decanters of wine, great platters of bread, cutlets and cold meats, and endless pies. I was startled at how few officers there were at the farewell—less than ten, and I did not recognize a one. But I did recognize Sam, who stood near the wall in a white wig and black coat. He did not have to present himself with the finicky smile of a publican. Sam did not have to smile at all. I introduced myself to him as the late Lieutenant Stocking, home from Saint John.

  “Mr. Sam, I have been away from our island. Might I ask you what has happened to Little Africa?”

  He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Which Little Africa?”

  “The streets in Out Ward where the Negroes once dwelled.”

  He laughed, and I espied one gold tooth.

  “Lieutenant, the Little Africa you mention did not exist for me. It had no such name—just a jumble of streets north of the Burial Ground.”

  “And the people who dwelled there?”

  “Some died in the war, I am sad to say. Others ran from men who tried to reclaim them. Others lost out in some greedy land grab.”

  “They just vanished, Mr. Sam?”

  “Appears so—but vanishin’ means they might have a better chance of staying alive.”

  Sam didn’t have much time to speculate on a lost population. He had other guests. And I could not seem to enter into the little crop of officers that had come to Washington’s farewell before going on furlough—perhaps ’t was because I had no semblance of a uniform other than my green sash. But one captain of dragoons did shake my hand.

  “How I envy you,” he warbled.

  I wondered if riding on a horse so long had rendered him insane.

  “Lieutenant Stocking, I would give my right arm to have taken part in the capture of Redoubt Ten.”

  Another soldier drifted into Sam’s, his uniform all askew, but with the same green sash as mine. This soldier also wore an eye patch—’t was none other than Mad Mal. Had he wandered out of his asylum? He could not even butter a slice of bread, his hand shivered so. And I realized soon enough that Malcolm Treat was his own asylum.

  I would not badger him—my war with Treat was over. But he visited me, his mouth crammed with bread and butter.

  “I saw ye,” he said. “I saw ye at the thee-ayter on John Street.”

  I could not bear to watch him fumble. I wiped his mouth with a napkin.

  “The nuns captured me, Johnny, trapped me between the aisles. There I am, lyin’ prostrate, with the nuns spitting at me, attacking my face, on account of Clara, and behold, Clara comes—your Clara. She must have read my perilous condition, must have pitied poor Mal. She rocked me in her arms. Johnny, I have been Gawd-awful. But I am glad I did not kill ye.”

  He lapsed into silence and returned to the luncheon table.

  A current seemed to wash over us, like some cold wind prior to a storm. Every soldier stood at attention—except Malcolm Treat—as Washington entered the room. We stood apart from him, but Mad Mal clung to
the general, like a clown to his king.

  Where in hell was Ham? He should have been at Washington’s side, wearing my green sash. Ham had a congressman’s swagger, I was told, but he could have come up from Annapolis or wherever Congress was meeting at the moment—it was run out of Philadelphia by a gang of rebellious troops. Yet Washington did not search the Long Room for Alexander Hamilton. And I wondered if he had invited Hamilton at all. Perhaps he never felt comfortable under the awesome fire of Ham’s azure eyes. Or perhaps he missed Ham so much, the clarity and excitement Ham could bring to every encounter, that he sought a much more anonymous peace and quiet here at Sam’s, during his last hour as commander in chief.

  The Old Man put some food on his plate, but he could not eat. He set the plate down and asked that wine be served. Sam himself poured from a decanter, filled each glass; then Washington filled a glass for Sam. His hand shook as he poured.

  We raised our glasses, and Washington addressed us in a voice that seemed like a train of silence with a few syllables. With a heart full of gratitude, he said, he must take leave of us now.

  He could barely sip the wine—the emotion locked inside Washington during seven years of war must have devoured him.

  “I cannot—I cannot come to each of you but shall feel obligated if each of you will come to me and take me by the hand.”

  Mad Mal went to him first, and ’t was not a shaking of hands, but some kind of embrace. And now I recognized Major Treat’s worth to Washington. His very madness must have served as a respite for the commander in chief. Methinks Washington had much need of a clown.