by Norman Lock
If you have the price of a loaf of bread, you needn’t go hungry. If you have the price of a bottle of whiskey, you needn’t be sober when the spur pricks. And in wartime, if you have three hundred dollars, you can buy another man to do your fighting—dying, too, if it comes to that—or your son’s if you covet immortality by perpetuating your lineage or business. These lessons were taught me by my father, who, thanks to shrewd dealings and an occasional sharp practice, managed to organize the world around him in a way satisfactory to himself.
Father saw himself as a merchant prince, but he was only a carpetbagger rolling a small fortune made during the War of Secession into a large one after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. A New Englander, by nature sensitive and by inclination upright and humorless, Mother was not a suitable consort for a New York swank and sometime cutthroat sporting the gaudy fobs and garish waistcoats of an upstart and the ruthlessness of a marauder. Her heart gave out in February 1864, at the beginning of her husband’s ascension. My brother, Charles junior, had died in the Draft Riots, a victim of his snobbish curiosity and of an Irishman beside himself with liquor chased by a hatred more bitter than hops. After Father’s death in 1874, only I was left to carry on the Ross name and mercantile business, which had thrived on margins, fraud, if it could not be avoided, and the disregard of certain of the lesser commandments.
I proved an able steward of Charles’s money, meaning I did not merely preserve the firm’s capital, but enlarged it. My transgressions were readily overlooked by the stalwarts of capitalism: bankers, traders, financiers, and utilitarian philosophers, who were happy to leave ethical considerations to the theologians. Before the depression that followed the panic of ’73 beggared me, my company had been the pride of investors and a plum of speculators.
Were I to publish the story of my life, literary critics would condemn me as an untrustworthy witness to events and a most unattractive character to boot. But as Emerson once said, “No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts.” I’m not of a metaphysical bent and haven’t read much by Emerson or those of his ilk. Their sensibilities are too refined for my taste. But Melville reads them, and I’ve spent enough time in his company to become acquainted with the Transcendentalists. I don’t begrudge him his intellect any more than he does me the fortune I once possessed, nor does he vilify me for having once set aside as childish many of the scruples on which a righteous man preens himself.
Roebling, you seem restless. Do my revelations distress you? Or is it dyspepsia? You’ve been making a sour face. Are you certain the bridge is progressing as it should? Give me the glass, and I’ll see for myself. The Dutch still make excellent lenses, though I can’t see a thing through your dirty windows. You’d think that the New York Bridge Company could hire a man to keep them clean. How do they expect you to direct the work from this distant vantage if you cannot properly see? It’s warm today. Shall I open a window?
There. The world is a little less occult with the sash thrown open. Let me see … The men are working. God Almighty, I would rather jump off the pier in desperation than climb those towers! There’re two little fellows standing on top of the Brooklyn-side tower, though I suppose that, in actuality, they’re a pair of strapping camerados such as Walt Whitman loves. They say his poems are obscene. I wouldn’t know. Melville often has his nose in them. I don’t recall having read much modern verse, save for Whittier’s Snow-Bound and Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha.
Like most fathers of the upstart aristocracy, mine wanted a classical education for his sons. I saw no reason to object, so I enrolled in Manhattan College and was dosed with dead languages, ancient literature, and natural history, as well as enough law to circumvent it in the pursuit of my commercial interests. I came to know more about the Caesars and their high jinks than Boss Tweed and his villainies or about the comedies of Aristophanes than the farce being played daily in Tammany Hall. I could’ve told you more about the mastodon than the Mormons.
Despite such useless erudition, I learned what made a business hum. I read Chitty’s A Practical Treatise on Bills of Exchange, Checks on Bankers, Promissory Notes, Bankers’ Cash Notes, and Bank Notes; Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine; Stevens’s Commercial History of the City of New York; Bradstreet’s; and the Commercial Bulletin. I pored over Burnham’s A Hundred Thousand Dollars in Gold: How to Make It but found it as impracticable as Emerson’s essay “Success.” For pleasure, I read a number of Charles Dickens’s novels, admittedly with more sympathy for Mr. Murdstone than David Copperfield and for Scrooge than his put-upon and cringing clerk.
Since my bankruptcy, the belief in economic imperialism is no longer salient in my character, and I now find myself sentimentally inclined toward the “surplus population,” of which, in my present circumstances, I am one. I was in the same leaky boat as an out-of-print author named Melville and an out-of-luck former president named Grant. The three of us were bobbing together like old wine corks in a rains-wollen gutter. To keep one’s head above water is the constant preoccupation of anybody who has sunk into the dark and treacherous depths where piranhas lurk.
Melville and I visited Grant when he was living on the Upper East Side, his time run out and fire nearly quenched. I admired him, and his insolvency was a comfort to me in mine. If the life of a former commanding general of the Union army and chief executive of the United States could be written in red ink, a merchant could pardon himself for his own embarrassment. Melville presented him with a copy of his book Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. On the frontispiece, he’d written:
To General U.S. Grant,
“A good man’s fortune may grow out at heels;
Give you good morrow!”
—Kent to King Lear
HERMAN MELVILLE
March 21, 1882
I don’t know why Melville asked me to go with him, unless he wanted to show off his connections. I have his Civil War poems, although I’ve yet to read them. The inscription falls far short of the genuinely tragic sentiment he penned for Grant. Mine, in fact, is downright farcical. I suppose I deserved no better than he gave.
To Shelby Ross, Former Gent,
Who Shares My Chain
In Chester Arthur’s Leaky Galley.
HERMAN MELVILLE
New York City, March 15, 1882
One thing I know, Roebling: Your bridge is magnificent and deserving of universal praise, though the naysayers and skeptics decry it. One day it will be your cenotaph. It ought to be called “Roebling Bridge,” but perhaps you lack the vainglory of the scribbler who must affix his name to every scrap of paper dirtied by his hand. I wonder if, in ages hence, your bridge will be this country’s pyramid and sphinx. Strung like a harp, it would be the perfect instrument for one of Whitman’s rhapsodies, but he prefers the Brooklyn ferry, where he can loaf at the rail and confab with this man and that woman, breathing them in, their scent, their atmosphere, while winding his arms about them. I can see it steaming toward the Fulton slip, although not as he would, if he were here with us, crowding the room with his democratic enthusiasm, his sheer animalism. Whitman looks with other eyes than those of a customhouse appraiser or an engineer.
Take the glass. Do you see the ferryboat nearing the Manhattan tower? What an infernal thing it is, throwing acres of crepe into the air behind it as it goes! The steam age is not a golden one, I fear. It’s as romantic as a boiler and as unpleasant to the ear as a jaw harp or a “circus screamer.”
Are you comfortable? I can’t imagine being anchored to a chair and obliged to watch your greatest work raised up by others through a telescope. I admire your courage. Standing beside you, I feel like one of Louisa May’s “little men” after all. You are Jonah, stricken with misfortune and thrust into the belly of a great fish. So, too, is Melville, who labors in a darkness of his own—barred from life by the enormous teeth of a cruel engine that gins him fine. Unless he gnaws on himself, like a dry biscuit. Roebling, we are all Jonases—shut up inside our own tho
ughts, as if in rooms needing to be aired. I’m the frightened one who prays to be let out of his caisson into the air and light of day. One minute I curse God as Ahab did Moby Dick; the next I beseech Him.
What’s that you say?
No, I’m not Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego. My fiery furnace is cold, and I suspect Melville’s is, too. I almost envy you. Your work is far more important than enforcing the excise tax. You look out through the window and see a bridge being knit out of cables, as surely as a woman plying her needles watches a garment taking shape before her eyes, while I make rows of numbers in a ledger. Melville has his stanzas and paragraphs, which add up to something, I suppose. For me, life—what’s left of it to call my own—consists of subtraction. Self-pity is delicious, is it not? Even you must succumb to it now and then. I know Melville does, though he tries to keep it to himself like a bittersweet confection one would rather not share. Adversity will make a man as hard as an oyster shell or as tender as the animal inside it.
You are fortunate in your wife, Roebling. She has stood by you all these years after you lost your health. From what Melville has told me, Emily does more than carry your instructions to the men at work. She must be an extraordinary woman to have become far more valuable to you than a nurse or an amanuensis. She kept your bridge alive, or else there’d be nothing to see through the window but the unbroken surface of the East River, where the massive columns rise.
No, I never married.
No, there was no one. I was fascinated by business and my own sense of growing worth and power. For a time, they occupied me constantly, to borrow from Ebenezer Scrooge. I’d have made a bad husband and a worse father.
I’m almost forty—not much younger than you are, however aged our appearances. We burned the candle at both ends—mine, I’m embarrassed to say, guttered down on the altar of self-regard, first in the carelessness of youth and then in whatever mischief a man can make in his “money-changing hole,” to quote old Jacob Marley. After the war, Father converted one of his factories, in which iron-wire cradles for the limbs of wounded soldiers in Union hospitals had been made, to the manufacture of steel-caged crinolines to support a lady’s skirts. Our wallets bulged, as they had on the profits netted by four years of ghastly wounds and amputations.
Do I feel remorse?
That’s a question better left to a priest or a judge to ask. I don’t believe in a salvation granted in the nick of time. It was one thing for Jesus to tell the repentant sinner on his cross, “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise,” and a very different matter for a priest, with holy oil and viaticum, to wipe a life’s dirty slate clean. Likewise to do a stretch in prison is hardly a fair exchange for having committed some villainy.
To say what I would do, given a second chance, is speculation grounded in regret and terror of what is likely to befall me. But despite my weariness, I’m a young man still, or, if not young, then only a little way past my day’s high noon. Who knows, Roebling? I may yet make something of myself! In a gloomy hold below the waterline, I can examine my life and—to be honest, it will probably come to naught; the New York Custom House is not a place where a man can accomplish much.
I’m not cut out for a martyr’s life, or a monk’s, either; to put on sackcloth would be mere ostentation. I hope to be as Whitman is or Lincoln was: a man of the world. By that, I mean a man very much in the world, unconcerned by the raised eyebrow, the haughty, upturned nose, and the cold shoulder of disdain. My indifference to respectability is a far cry from a youthful ambition to hobnob with an Astor or a Vanderbilt.
It’s troubling to have so much wealth pass through my hands, and not a penny of it sticks. I’m paid a meager salary—three dollars for a day’s drudgery. After fifteen years in the service, Melville takes home only a dollar a day more. With cunning, I could line my pockets as Chester Arthur did his before becoming our twenty-first president. So far I’ve resisted the temptation to embezzle, as the saint did the fleshpots of Egypt, only not so readily. Meanwhile, Melville and I rub along together in mutual discontent. The customhouse, Roebling, is just another caisson in which men are shut up and left to scrabble for light, air, and a larger sense of purpose.
You could have renounced yours and left the bridge for someone else to build. But here you’ve toiled all these years, enclosed within four walls. Well, every man and woman inhabits a caisson, if it comes to that. We drag out our lives in the belief that we are not alone. I talk to God, though He has little to say to me. Sometimes I feel oppressed, as if I had the weight of the river on my chest. Life must weigh more heavily on someone like you, who was an aeronaut during the war. To have been lighter than air, suspended in a basket, high above the hills and trees! It surely was an ecstasy to see the world in miniature unrolling before you—Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia reduced to specks, to ants marching in formation toward the Union anthills. The workmen swarming over the bridge’s columns and steel webs must see humanity from the same inhuman perspective. The city shall be raised up into the sky by men, and humankind will be belittled by comparison. That is progress, my friend; that is the future being made before our very eyes.
To put one’s trust in a telescope takes a leap of faith because we can never be sure that the magnified world seen through its lens is not an illusion. Your granite towers seem real enough for birds to sit upon. Birds, which are skeptical of cats and men, have faith that an avian Providence will supply worms and crumbs when they are hungry and a stone ledge when they’re in need of rest. But what if the meager repast and the aerial perch exist nowhere except in the expectations of a bird? A frivolous question for a builder, who is, and must be, a materialist. Ah, well, Roebling. Like most of humanity, I myself have built nothing lasting.
Naturally, you are curious about Melville. Having nowhere to go this afternoon, I’ll tell you what I know of him—and what I know of myself, which is not so much as I like to think and more than I would care to acknowledge. The truth is too often what we hide from ourselves. Let’s leave it to our biographers to weed and prune our lives and the storytellers to shape them.
I’m in the mood to talk. The last week has been—well, disturbing. And the disease that sapped you of energy has made you an excellent audience. You don’t waste words or, as some others do, bristle with opinions of your own. I’ll begin my story on the pier where I met Melville for the first time, by the North River—or the Hudson, as it’s also called.
I know, I know, but it’ll be easier if I tell it as the words occur to me. Just pretend you’re in a Chautauqua tent, listening to a man ramble on about his life to strangers.
U.S. Customs Office at 207 West Street, Near the North River, January 3, 1882
Early in the new year, I took up my duties in a small rented office on West Street, near the North River. Had I been assigned to the U.S. Custom House itself, on Wall Street, with its twelve Ionic columns of Quincy granite and marble floors, I would not have felt so reduced by circumstances—which were beyond my control, mind you! My pride was raw after the loss of my money, business, a fine apartment, and polite society, which now shunned me. On that dismal winter morning, I had dressed carefully in order to make a good impression on my superiors. My frock coat, fancy waistcoat, and striped trousers—suitable for a Wall Street financier, though not a customhouse drudge—were elegantly cut; my snowy linen bore the diamond studs I’d not yet pawned. As I walked along Gansevoort Pier, the roughnecks busying themselves among the ships, bales, barrels, hogsheads, and swaybacked dray horses hitched to overloaded wagons could have mistaken me for a shipowner, or a man from Lloyd’s.
I had spent my remaining “capital,” accrued during prosperous times, to obtain the position of customhouse appraiser, insignificant as it was. In moneyed days, I had had an acquaintance—I’ll call him Clifford. We were not close, but more than once, each of us had witnessed the other compromising his integrity. He was related in the roundabout way of large families to Henry Clay Frick, who had recently multiplied his fortune by jo
ining his coke resources to Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills. Having read of his business coup in the papers, I asked Clifford to approach his relation on my behalf. He demurred until I reminded him of a girl in Frank Woolworth’s Great Five Cent Store in Utica. Not long after this spur, I was hired as an appraiser and assigned to the busy North River pier, where Melville served as district inspector.
When I swaggered into the customs office for the first time, Melville was poring over a grimy document. He barely acknowledged my presence in the cramped space we two would be sharing. The atmosphere was rank with his cigar smoke. I coughed gravely and deliberately to let him know I found the stink of his stogie offensive. I may even have wrinkled my patrician nose in disgust, like a monkey given something disagreeable to eat.
He looked up at me and said, “Hang your coat and hat in the closet—and mind your wet shoes. Next time, use the boot scraper.”
Having put my things in a closet containing waterproofed boots, oilskin capes, and tarpaulin hats intended for the prosecution of our official duties in rain and snow, I sat behind a desk offering a cheerless view of dirty gray sky seen through unwashed panes of glass. Melville took up his pen and returned to the document that had been occupying him. I took up a book from the desk and, to quiet my nerves, began to read the rules and regulations of my new trade. For some reason, the sound of Melville’s pen scratching on a gray sheet a lengthy paragraph of dreary, arid prose (an inventory of tonnage) disheartened me.
If I’d read his books, I might have wondered that a hand that had written of Ishmael, Ahab, and Moby Dick did not rebel against the poor use to which it had been put. That bleak morning, however, I didn’t know the history of his successes or his failures, nor how very near we were in circumstances. I saw only a handsome, if weary, man wearing a blue serge jacket, with the tin badge of a customs inspector pinned to the lapel. I gave him what I judged to be a winning smile as I waited to receive my instructions. In that he did not choose to interrupt his writing until the final period had been applied with an emphatic rap, I studied him the while with an insolent disregard for good manners.