by John Pipkin
The other boys found him amusing, for all the wrong reasons. Oddmund did not understand why they snickered whenever his name was called, and it perplexed him that their sneering did not diminish even after he had learned enough English to be able to explain the significance of his name. The other boys, brutish and dull, found his name immeasurably funny, and Oddmund learned his first lesson in the New World: one must never underestimate the persistent convictions of the ignorant.
Oddmund held on to the smooth gray stone that he had rescued from the deck of the Sovereign of the Seas. Aside from his tattered clothes, this was the only possession that survived with him. One afternoon, wandering alone along the edge of the island, Oddmund found two short wooden tubes half buried in the sand. The tubes were so arranged that the smaller slid into the larger, and he decided that this may very well have been the spyglass used by the captain of the Sovereign of the Seas. Though the lenses had fallen out and the brass rings at either end were missing, Oddmund clutched the useless spyglass as if it held forbidden secrets, and looked through its empty tunnel, comforted by the confined perspective it offered. He carried it everywhere, hidden in his pocket with the stones he collected from the grounds around the asylum. From the window of the dormitory, he surveyed the harbor, the masts of the tall ships at the wharf, the steeples of the churches of Boston, and, when he dared, he scanned the dark surface of the water where, to the best of his knowledge, the Sovereign of the Seas had disappeared. His nightly searches with the useless spyglass only added to the mirth of the other boys, who believed his puzzling behavior confirmed the meaning of his peculiar name.
For almost three years, Oddmund remained at the asylum on Thompson Island while his Unitarian caretakers circulated his name through the surrounding counties. They had reunited other families. They printed his name in newspapers. They posted bills. They wrote letters and knocked on doors in search of a Hus who might take him in. There was a Hoss family in Connecticut. There were Hooses in Vermont. There were Hesses in the Berkshires and Hasses in the Appalachians. But these settlers were not included on the family tree that Lars Hus burned on board the Sovereign of the Seas. The Hosses and the Hooses ignored the letters. The Hesses and the Hasses turned away inquiring visitors. Those who did respond swore ardently that they were not related to the poor boy's family; they insisted they had never heard of the father; they said they already had children enough, and some confessed that they wanted nothing to do with an orphaned Hus from the Old World.
But it was only a matter of time before someone retrieved him. Oddmund might eventually have found himself alone, to fend for himself on the streets of Boston, had it not been for the well-dressed man with hard sweets in his coat pocket who drifted up the orphanage steps one day and knocked gently on its doors. The man conferred with the ministers in hushed tones; he said he came as soon as he learned of the possibility, and one look at Oddmund told him that his suspicions were correct. When he smiled—a mouthful of white, even teeth—his bottom lip contracted into an inverted V at its middle.
“You must be Master Oddmund,” the man said. “How delightful.” He presented Oddmund with a peppermint lozenge in his open palm. “I am your uncle, Søren Mikkel Hus. I have long hoped someone would come.”
Thus did something discarded and forgotten by the family Hus reappear, washed up by the inexplicable undercurrents of fate.
8
Eliot
Eliot squints through his spectacles at the fat pillar of smoke rising in the distance and wonders if there is cause for concern. It is possible, he thinks, that his heavy glass lenses are making the plume appear larger than it really is. No one else on Main Street seems to take notice. He slips the spectacles into a coat pocket, then pulls a key from another pocket and works it in the lock of the shop's door. He has heard stories of men who thought they had purchased a property only to learn that they had procured nothing more than a counterfeit deed and a phony key, and he is relieved when the bolt reluctantly gives way. Of course, he will need to replace the lock with something more modern, he thinks, and the cracked pane of glass in the door will need fixing as well. Once inside, he is disappointed to find the space smaller than he expected, narrower and darker than his Boston shop. And the smell surprises him. It will take some effort to expel the pungent aroma of boot polish and mildew and rotted stockings. But here, at least, he will not find himself in daily contest with the Old Corner Bookstore, will not have to compete for the attention of the customers who frequent Ticknor's cluttered rooms, which, as Eliot recollects with some consolation, are not without their own malodorous history.
The building in which William Davis Ticknor runs his bookstore has stood at the corner of School and Washington Streets since 1718, when it began as Thomas Crease's Apothecary, and patrons of the Old Corner Bookstore can still smell the abrasive chemical perfume beneath the more alluring scent of leather bindings and ink and slowly moldering paper stored in the printing house on the second floor. But the stink does not keep the eminent writers of New England from gathering there for readings and conversation. Eliot knows his Boston shop will never become a meetinghouse for the likes of Longfellow and Holmes and the other literati who lounge about Ticknor's as if it were a public drawing room. But he also knows that a customer with a full purse wants something more than the privilege of mixing in famous company; he desires items that cannot be found anywhere else, and Eliot has become proficient at attending to these needs. He would happily open his doors for a lone, paying customer before letting in a hoard of poets with empty pockets. Still, he cannot help believing that things should have turned out otherwise, that the Old Corner Bookstore should, rightfully, be his.
He has worked through the fantasy a thousand times, and though he tries not to dwell on it, the suspicion that he was swindled out of his destiny claws at him from within, like a tiny spur of bone at the base of his skull. A decade earlier, Eliot fully expected that, in due time, he would be made a partner in Carter, Hendee & Co. He had, after all, given five years of loyal service to Timothy Carter and Charles Hendee, who then owned the Old Corner Bookstore and the publishing enterprise on its upper floors. Eliot had envisioned what he would do at the helm of the company; he made imaginary lists of the great literary works he would publish and the new authors he would discover. He never dreamed that William Davis Ticknor—a man with little experience in publishing—would take over the business with the help of Carter's older brother. When Ticknor, Allen, and Carter purchased Carter, Hendee & Co., they announced that, henceforth, they would publish books of medical interest only. Eliot foresaw a dreadful future for himself, editing the cramped scribblings of ghoulish surgeons, surrounded by tedious engravings of frog bladders and misshapen tumors. So he set out on his own, certain that Ticknor's shop would founder within a few months and that the Old Corner Bookstore would soon be placed on auction. But Eliot had been wrong.
William Davis Ticknor unexpectedly turned his attention to literature and began publishing poetry and novels, respected works by masters and new works by famous Americans. Next to the latest editions of Collins's Treatise on Midwifery, Lisfranc's Diseases of the Uterus, Bigelow's Manual of Orthopedic Surgery, and Tuson's Dissector's Guide, Ticknor crammed his shelves with handsome fifty-cent editions of Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Words worth, Leigh Hunt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bronson Alcott, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The writers whom Eliot once imagined would gather at his store—to discuss their work, to weigh the merits of the newest author venturing into print, or to hear Eliot himself read from his latest play—flocked instead to the Old Corner Bookstore.
The injustice was made complete when Ticknor promoted Eliot's former assistant to full partner in the new company; James Thomas Fields, a mere junior clerk at Carter, Hendee & Co., had shown the sheepish foresight to stay on after Eliot departed. And, if all that were not intolerable enough, Mr. Ticknor and Mr. Fields, like a pair of insufferable schoolboys on holiday, began to fancy themselves poets. Poets! The audacious
booksellers even held readings of their own work in their shop. It is all too much for Eliot to bear, to think that these men stood between him and financial liberty.
There was a time, Eliot reminds himself, when money was something that he had neither sought nor possessed in any significant quantity. In his youth, wealth held no communion with his literary ambitions. Yet now he often lies awake at night, wondering if the next day's business will be slow enough to allow him a few moments alone to work on the next scene of The House of Many Windows. During busy hours he hopes for such moments, though he knows that he will not actually use the time to write; he will sit hunched over his unfinished play worrying about the day's receipts and hoping that an increase in business the next day will compensate for the deficiency. That is the paradox of the modern age: a man needs to make a healthy sum of money in order to pretend that money does not matter to him. Some nights it surprises Eliot that his wife, sound asleep in the bedroom next to his, cannot hear the loud worries buzzing through his head. He knows it is foolish to suppose that anyone might remain unaltered by the passage of years, but he wonders if Margaret can detect the slow changes that he daily identifies with staggering disappointment.
The first time he saw her was in the old Federal Street Theater, a year before it was sold as a meeting hall to the Baptist Church. Margaret Mahoney was a dark-haired beauty then, slender and fairskinned, a warm and breathing portrait of the kind of woman Eliot thought only inhabited sonnets. He had followed her through the lobby, thinking she was an actress until he saw her take a seat in the box to the right of the stage, next to an older man with a pointed nose similar to her own. Although the stage was only partially visible from where Eliot sat, his view of the beautiful woman was unobstructed, and the flickering lamps on the stage cast enough light to illuminate her face, which shone with the spectral beauty that drove men to do ridiculous things. She did not cast her eyes about the audience like so many of the other women, looking for familiar faces in less expensive seats or checking to make sure that her dress was of the latest fashion. Her eyes, remarkably enough, remained fixed on the stage throughout the entire performance, as if she were truly engaged in the unfolding drama.
Eliot watched the forgettable play from his usual twenty-five-cent place in the gallery. He saw no need to spend more. He had learned from the example of his father's strict household economy, and he budgeted his own meager income carefully. His father was a tutor of classical languages, and though Ambrose Calvert enjoyed no small degree of respect in the community, that respect stopped short of providing him with the financial means to participate in the city's more refined pursuits. It had angered Eliot to think that his father, who spent his days deciphering the subtleties of classical drama to the dull sons of moneyed Bostonians, could ill afford to attend the theater packed with the tea merchants and bankers and other men of business whose broad backsides barely fit into the seats.
Eliot remembers the relief that he was certain he saw flit across his father's brow when he explained that he had taken employment as a typesetter's assistant at Carter, Hendee & Co., where he intended to earn a living until his talents as a dramatist delivered him to fame's doorstep. Eliot wanted a job that left his imagination untapped for his own use. Setting type and inking plates required a good deal more effort than Eliot had at first estimated, but he managed to keep his wit untaxed, and he lost himself in the romance of assembling other men's ideas with his hands. When he returned at night to his shoddy room near Mount Vernon, his hands and face stained with ink, his clothes reeking of chemicals, he was overjoyed with the image that he cast: the struggling artist, stained with the ink of other men's writings, laboring by lamplight over the manuscript of his own unrecognized masterpiece.
At the time, his modest income more than met his needs. His lodgings were simple, as were his clothes. He kept only one good waistcoat and jacket for attending the theater, and he sat in the least expensive seats so that he might attend as many performances of as many plays as possible. When a performance enjoyed an extended run, he went to the same play several times to study how the same lines could be delivered with a different emphasis every night.
Working by candlelight late into the night, he finished his first play, The Forgotten Brother; or The Search for Light. He felt allied with his main character, Horatio Standforth, a writer whose genius went unappreciated by a callous world. Eliot was particularly proud of the play's opening speech.
HORATIO: Oh, what a confounded fretfulness is this life! I stumble in darkness tangible toward a distant light. I feel my pulse quicken at the promise of a brighter morrow, while, alas, my soul trembles behind me, lost in the shadows like a forgotten brother of my own true self. Is it by sword or pen that I shall thrust my way through this utter black world? I pronounce boldly—by pen shall I conquer this new American land!
Horatio died spectacularly, leaping from a cliff at the drama's end, but when Eliot performed all parts of the play for himself in his room he judged its theme too solemn for the stage. He determined that his second play would not rely so heavily upon soliloquies three and four pages in duration. His next effort, The Rebirth of Europa; or America Found, proved too large a theme, and he put the half-finished first act aside to begin a third play, a farce about ill-suited lovers. He thought Am I Your Husband? held great promise at first, but then he seemed to run out of things for his characters to do and say.
At Carter, Hendee & Co., he was promoted from his position as a typesetter's assistant and was no longer required to clean the type in the large vats of concentrated urine that fouled the air on the second floor. He continued working among the ink and chemicals for several months more before Mr. Hendee himself decided that his skills were put to better use behind a desk as an editor's assistant. An increase in pay came with this, but Eliot kept to his simple tastes, afraid that an improvement in the comfort of his circumstances would distract him from his mission. He bought a new suit and a box of fine writing paper, but he remained in the same lodgings, frequented the same taverns, and still bought only the cheapest tickets to the theater.
And then he met Margaret Mary Mahoney.
Eliot knows it is foolish for him to revisit his past as often as he does, rooting out mistakes and regrets that cannot be edited away. He can only assume that it is in his nature as a writer to think of his life as a story that might be endlessly revised, but today he is determined to concentrate on his future. He paces the length of the vacant shop, listening to the echo of his steps, trying to picture the quiet space crammed with books and, more important, customers. A single, feathery cobweb hangs slack from the center of the ceiling to a crooked shelf at the back. Eliot tests it with his finger and the strand drifts lazily down along the length of his arm. Yellowed slips of paper, old bills and receipts that once composed the daily details of the previous owner's life, lie curled in corners, swept into piles by fastidious drafts.
The edge of a warped floorboard catches Eliot's foot, and he prods the offending surface with his toe, adding its repair to the list of expenses he silently tallies. Eliot fumbles at his waistcoat pocket and yanks out his watch by its chain. He thinks of the book-shaped fob he spied in the shop window earlier that morning. There was at least one practical purpose that a fob would serve: it would give his blunt fingers something to grasp so that he might retrieve his timepiece more gracefully. Eliot checks the time and frowns. He slips the watch back into his pocket, rubs the smooth gold chain between his fingers, then pulls a card from his breast pocket and checks the date and time written on its obverse. He wonders if anyone in Concord knows Seymour Twine, the man he is to meet today. He would prefer that his dealings be kept discreet. Truth be told, he would rather avoid this sort of man altogether, but just such a man had provided wares that proved to be the salvation of his Boston business. Eliot can see no other way to guarantee his speedy success in Concord.
Eliot walks back outside and again tries to picture his sign hanging above the storefront. He thinks he
might have the sign cut in the shape of a stack of books, a giant version of the fob in the jeweler's window. For the second time today, Eliot examines his reflection, this time in the dirty windows of his own shop. He retrieves his spectacles and taps them, folded, against his lips. He likes what he sees—the profile of a man pondering days yet to be. He stares at his contemplative twin until they are both startled by a loud voice in the street.
“Can't get your boots mended there!”
The voice belongs to a short bald man in an unbuttoned vest. His tiny eyes are set close in his round head, and his mottled skin and rumpled clothes give him the appearance of having recently been boiled. He carries a broom and points its bristles at Eliot's shop. Although this man is not quite what he had pictured, Eliot is nonetheless relieved that he has finally arrived.
The boiled man keeps talking as he approaches, sweeping the air with the broom, and as he gets closer Eliot notices a pattern in the mottled red patches covering his bald head, shapes reminiscent of a flock of birds, or perhaps a large bat.
