Theophilus North

by Thornton Wilder

  Mrs. Vanwinkle had turned as white as a sheet. She was speechless.

  “Shall I get you a drink of water?”

  “Yes, please do.”

  When I returned from the kitchen, Rip had climbed out of the fiddlers’ gallery, descended the stairs, and was pounding on the locked door. I opened it.

  Husband and wife stared at one another in silence. She accepted the glass from my hand without taking her eyes off Rip. Finally she said, “Nicholas, will you ask this dreadful man to leave the room?”

  “This is my German professor, Pam. I’m driving him back to Newport in a few minutes. Ted, will you go upstairs and wait until I call you?”

  “I’ll start walking into town, Rip. You can pick me up on the road. Good morning, ma’am.”

  And I went out the front door. As I passed the threshold I heard Mrs. Vanwinkle break into a convulsion of weeping.

  It was a beautiful day. I walked for a quarter of an hour. Soon after I passed Tiverton I saw Mrs. Vanwinkle’s car go by. She had lowered her veil but her head was held high. Not long after Rip stopped for me. I climbed into the car.

  “You were very tough, Ted. . . . You were very tough.” He started the car. After a few minutes he said, “You were very tough.”

  “I know I went too far, Rip, and I apologize.”

  We drove in silence for a while.

  Ten miles in silence. Then he said, “I told her you were an old joker way back in college days and that all that about Mrs. Venable was just horse-feathers. . . . But how the hell did you know about Mrs. Temple’s goddamned feather?”

  “I won’t tell.”

  He stopped the car and cracked my skull against his.

  “Oh, you’re an old son-of-a-bitch, Ted—but I got a thousand dollars to go to Berlin!”

  “Well, you gave me a wonderful lunch at the Café de Paris—when you were low in funds, remember?”

  At Mrs. Keefe’s

  The events that led to my obtaining an apartment occurred during my sixth week in Newport, perhaps later. I was living at the “Y,” contentedly enough; my relations there were impersonal and left me time to prepare for my classes. I was on good terms with the superintendent—unjustly called “Holy Joe,” for he was not at all sanctimonious. From time to time, for a change, I would descend to the “library” where card games of the family type, like hearts and three jacks, were permitted and desultory conversation tolerated.

  It was in this library that I met a remarkable young man whose portrait and unhappy predicaments I find recorded in my Journal. Elbert Hughes was a reedy youth, barely twenty-five, belonging to that often wearisome category of human beings known as “sensitive.” This adjective once meant intensely aware of aesthetic and spiritual values; then it took on a sense of someone quick to resent slights; recently it has become a euphemism for someone incapable of coping with even the smaller demands of our daily practical life. Elbert chiefly fulfilled the third description. He was short but delicately proportioned. His eyes were deeply set under a protruding forehead, lending an intensity to his gaze. His fingers were much occupied with a tentative mustache. He was something of a dandy and on cool evenings wore a black velveteen jacket and a flowing black tie, recalling the students I had seen near the Beaux-Arts Academy when I lived in Paris. Elbert gave me a partial account of his life and I presently discovered that he was a sort of genius—subdivision, calligraphic mimicry. He was a Bostonian and had followed courses in a technical high school there, devoting himself passionately to copperplate writing and to lettering, with a particular interest in tombstone inscriptions.

  By the age of twenty he had secured a profitable job at a leading jeweler’s establishment where he furnished the models for engraved inscriptions on presentation silver, for formal invitations and calling cards. For another firm he wrote diplomas on parchment and honorary tributes to retiring bank presidents. He made no claims to originality; he imitated scripts from standard “style books” or from admired early English and American “plate” in museums and private collections. But that was not all. He could copy any signature or individual penmanship after a moment’s profound “absorption” in a model before him. He could furnish a receipt in the hand of almost any signer of the Declaration of Independence at a moment’s notice. He was a wonder.

  It was not new to me that these “sensitives” are an unhappy mixture of humility and boldness. One evening he asked me to write a sentiment and to sign it. I wrote (in French, of which he did not know a word) a maxime of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld and signed it with my own name. He studied it gravely for a few minutes and then wrote: Mr. Theodore Theophilus North regrets that he will be unable to accept the kind invitation of the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and of Mrs. So-and-so for such-and-such an evening.” It was in my own hand, staggeringly in my own hand. Then he wrote it again and passed it over to me, saying lightly, “That is how Edgar Allan Poe would have written it. I like to do his handwriting best. When I do his handwriting I feel him moving my hand. People say I look like him. Can you see that I look like him?”

  “Yes. But I never heard that he was much of a draughtsman.”

  “We’re a lot alike though. We were both born in Boston. . . . The thing I like to draw best is the lettering on tombstones. There’s a lot about graves and tombs in Poe’s writings. He’s my favorite writer that ever lived.”

  “What are you doing in Newport?” I asked.

  “Much the same kind of work I did in Boston. A man named Forsythe saw some presentation copies I had made on vellum of a poem by Edgar A. Poe in Poe’s handwriting, and some alphabets I had drawn up in several styles. He said he was an architect and building contractor with an office in Newport. He offered me a pretty good salary to come down here and work for him. I do lettering for the fronts of buildings—post offices, town halls, things like that. I do gravestones for masons too. I like that best.”

  I had been staring at our (mine and Poe’s) replies to the Governor.

  “I’ll show you something else,” he said. He extracted from a portfolio beside him a leaf of the Governor’s personal stationery—seal embossed—and wrote the invitation for which he had twice written the reply.

  “Is that the Governor’s own handwriting?”

  “I’ve done lots of work for both his office and his mansion. I’ve worked for all the best stationers and I collect samples. I’ve got a trunk full of the best stuff. There are collectors all over the world, you know—they keep it secret. I trade duplicates.” He laid before me: “The White House,” “L’Ambassade de France,” “John Pierpont Morgan,” “The Foreign Office,” Enrico Caruso’s cartoon of himself as a letterhead, a bookplate by Stanford White. . . .

  “Are you doing that kind of work for Forsythe here in Newport?”

  “Not very much,” he answered, evasively, returning the “samples” to their portfolio. “We do something like it.”

  He changed the subject.

  Elbert Hughes might have been, should have been, good company, but he wasn’t. He suffered like many of his kind from alternations of vitality and depletion. He would launch forth on a subject with enthusiasm only to fall silent in a short time like a deflated bellows. He was engaged to be married. Abigail was a wonderful woman; she was (he whispered) divorced; she was six years older than he was and had two children. He added, with abated enthusiasm, that he had saved up three thousand dollars to buy a house (where they would presumably live gloomily ever after). One couldn’t help admiring and even liking Elbert, but I began losing interest in him; I tend to avoid the disconsolate. I am indebted to him, however, for awakening my interest in an aspect of Newport that I had neglected. Elbert took to bringing down to our little library the work he was doing; he said that the light was better than that provided in our rooms upstairs, as indeed it was. I would occasionally use the library for my own “homework,” when it was not also occupied by a conversational gathering. One evening I asked permission to see what he was engaged upon. He
answered confusedly that it was just “some nonsense he was doing for fun.” It was a letter from the eminent historian George Bancroft inviting the equally eminent Louis Agassiz to an evening of “punch and good talk.” Elbert seemed to have given himself the enjoyment of writing Agassiz’s reply to this attractive invitation.

  “Where are the originals of these letters?” I asked.

  “Mr. Forsythe has a big collection. He says he advertises for them and buys them from the owners.”

  Entirely apart from Elbert’s “fun” with such documents, I was delighted with them. That was Newport’s Fifth City—the city that had disappeared leaving little trace behind it—the Newport of the mid-nineteenth-century intellectuals. My various jobs were nourishing my interest in the Second City, the Sixth City, and the Seventh City; I was living in the Ninth City. In my early twenties I had fancied myself as an archaeologist. Here was a field for excavation. Dr. Schliemann had possessed a large private fortune; I had not a dollar to spare. I reminded myself of an old saying I had read somewhere: “To the impassioned will nothing is impossible.”

  There were still a few half-mornings and half-afternoons free in my schedule. I prepared myself by visiting the “People’s Library,” and “reading up” on the period. Then I visited the antiquaries and second-hand stores. I nursed the hope that I might come upon things that no one else had spotted. I concentrated on letters and manuscripts—diaries, correspondences, job-lots of books and papers from old houses, family photograph albums, the emptyings of attics. . . . The James family, the Agassiz families (the great father and the great son), the Bancrofts, Longfellow. Longfellow spent his summers at Nahant, but he often visited his friend George Washington Greene at West Greenwich near Narragansett Bay and Greene’s parents who lived in Newport. Two of his best-known poems show his interest in our First City, “The Skeleton in Armor” and “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.”

  The “antique shops” were still selling objects from the First and Second Cities. The vogue for taking a half-condescending pleasure in the furniture and decoration of the Victorian age was still twenty years in the future. Here and there I found collections of daguerreotypes, framed letters or poems signed by the notable men of the time; but these had already been discovered and were beyond my means. I descended to the second-hand stores and received permission to climb ladders with a flashlight, to poke in old barrels and open old dressers, the flotsam and jetsam of the years: here a clergyman’s wife had sold a lifetime of her husband’s sermons for rag paper, a thrifty merchant’s family their father’s account books, and so on.

  Almost at once I made a small discovery. It was a schoolgirl’s “memory book,” bound in coral velvet, moth-eaten, mouldy. There were faded blue photographs of picnics and birthday parties, dance cards and autographs. On one page H. W. Longfellow had copied out “The Children’s Hour,” “for my dear young friend Faith Somerville.” With a show of casual interest I bought the book for two dollars; the following autumn I sold it in New York for thirty. I found bundles of Somerville papers and bought them for forty cents a pound. My idea was that somehow I might penetrate that magic world (my father used to call it “plain living and high thinking”) and glimpse those enchanted late afternoons in Newport when professors played croquet with their children until fireflies hovered over the wickets and a voice called, “Come in, children, and wash your hands before supper.”

  I knew that any first edition of a work by Edgar Allan Poe was among the greatest prizes in all American book-collecting and that any letter from his pen was eagerly sought. Poe had paid an extensive visit to Providence, only thirty miles away; but there was no record of his having visited Newport. If I could discover a bundle of Poe’s letters—what a lively interest for me and, later, what an addition to my capital savings! (No biographer had yet drawn up the wide spectrum of that boyhood’s ambitions: poet, detective, gentleman, actor perhaps [like his mother], metaphysician [“Eureka!”], cryptographer, landscape gardener, interior decorator, tormented lover—too great and diverse a load for any American to carry. )

  I found no Poe letters, but his name was brought to my attention repeatedly. One evening I found under my door a copy of his poem “Ulalume,” signed by the poet and a triumph of Elbert Hughes’s art. Meeting Hughes by chance in the hall I thanked him; but I tore the counterfeit up.

  There was no night watchman prowling the corridors of the “Y,” but a night clerk, Maury Flynn, tended the front desk. Maury was a cheerless old man in poor health. Like many night attendants in hotels and clubs he was a retired policeman. One night toward three in the morning I was awakened by a knock at my door. It was Maury.

  “Ted, are you a partickler friend of Hughes in 32?”

  “I know him, Maury. What’s the matter?”

  “Fellow in the next room says he’s been having nightmares. Groaning like. Falling out of bed. This fellow telephoned me. Would you go in and see if you could calm him down, sort of?”

  I threw on a bathrobe and got into some slippers and went down to Room 32. Maury had left the door ajar and the light on. Elbert was sitting on the edge of his bed, his head bent over his knees.

  “Elbert! Elbert! What’s the matter?”

  He raised his head, gazed at me vacantly, and resumed his former position. I shook him brusquely but he made no response. I looked about the room. On the center table lay an unfinished example of his accomplished art. It was the opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” On the bedside table stood a half-empty bottle of “Dr. Quimby’s Sleeping Syrup.” I sat down and watched him for a while, repeating his name in a low insistent voice. Then I went to the washstand, dipped a washrag in cold water, and applied it to his face, the nape of his neck, and to his wrists—as I used to do to drunken companions in Paris in 1921. I now did this several times.

  At last he raised his head again and mumbled, “Hello, Ted. Nothing . . . Bad dreams.”

  “Get up, Elbert. I’m going to walk you up and down the corridor a few times. Breathe, breathe deep.”

  He fell back on the bed and shut his eyes. More cold water. I slapped his face and struck his shoulder sharply. At last we were walking the corridor. We must have done a quarter of a mile. We returned to the room. “No! You remain standing. Take some more deep breaths. . . . Tell me about your dreams. . . . Yes, you can hold on to the wall.”

  “Buried alive. Can’t get out. Nobody can hear me.”

  “Do you take this syrup all the time?”

  “Don’t sleep very good. Don’t want to sleep because . . . they come. But I’ve got to sleep, because when I don’t, I make mistakes in my work. They take it off my pay.”

  “Do you know Dr. Addison?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you? He’s the ‘Y’s’ doctor. He’s in and out of the building all the time. I’m going to send him to see you tomorrow night. Talk to him; tell him everything. And don’t drink any more of this stuff. Will you give me permission to take this bottle away? . . . And, Elbert, don’t read any more Edgar Allan. Poe. He’s not right for you—all those crypts and vaults. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep calmly now? . . . Do you want me to read aloud to you for ten minutes?”

  “Yes, will you, Ted?”

  “I’m going to read to you in a language you don’t understand. All you have to know is that it’s serene and beautiful like the printing of the Elzevirs.”

  So I read him from Ariosto and he went off like a baby.

  I lost touch with Elbert for about ten days. Dr. Addison gave him some sleeping pills and some stern advice about his diet; he had been scarcely eating at all. I continued my search for the Fifth City. In another store—now down almost at the rags-bottles-and-sacks level—I had another stroke of luck: the rejected sketches of the elder Henry James’s commentary on a work of Swedenborg. They were resting in a barrel together with bundles of old letters to the family. I separated the letters from the theology and bought them for very little. I had first become interested in the writ
ing Jameses while reading ( in my earliest phase ), with mounting dissatisfaction, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience; more recently I had read a number of his brother’s novels. The James family lived in Newport throughout the Civil War. The two eldest sons had left to join the Army. William, Henry, and their sister Alice all had had nervous breakdowns in 1860 and enlistment of those brothers was out of the question. The letters had little to tell me, but I felt I was on the trail.

  Within two weeks my teaching schedule became so heavy that I had to give up those researches entirely. What little free time I had was devoted to hunting for an apartment. This was limited to opportunities within my means—among the jerry-built workmen’s homes on the streets leading up the slope from the further reach of Thames Street. I rang every doorbell whether there was an advertisement of lodging or not. I had a clear idea of what I wanted: two rooms or one large room, a bath, a cooking facility however simple. I wanted the rooms to be on the second story, entered by an outside stairway so that (yet not the only reason) I would not be required to come and go through the landlord’s residence and family. I did not object to crying babies, boisterous children, a location above a kitchen, a sloping roof, proximity to a firehouse or to a convivial fraternal organization or to church bells. This requirement of a separate entrance was not as uncommon as might appear. These old houses were beginning to be subdivided into family apartments; elderly lodgers were increasingly afraid of fires, frequent enough in this run-down area. I was shown many apartments and derived considerable enjoyment from the encounters this search involved.

  One morning I found my apartment. I had surveyed the premises and seen the exterior stairway. The mailbox said “Keefe.” The door was opened by a thin distrustful woman in her middle fifties. Her face was lined but retained the high coloring characteristic of those living by a northern sea. I learned later that on the death of her husband over twenty years ago she had opened a rooming house and raised two sturdy sons to become merchant seamen. In spite of many disappointments she had never been able to free herself of the idea that a rooming house should have the character of a home. She was distrustful but eager to trust.