by Norman Lock
He has intelligent blue eyes, amused and even a little contemptuous, set in an oval face. His complexion is fair; the features are regular and fine; his hair and beard, once brown, have turned gray. A noble brow crowns a head such as Rodin could, without reservation, sculpt and set beside his Saint John. He has something of Robert E. Lee about him—not the face, but the military bearing, despite the rheumatism that pains him. You’d think he’d been to the academy at West Point, although he must sometimes depend upon a cane.
Tired of being kept waiting, I cleared my throat.
Melville went on a little farther down the page and then put down his pen.
“The streets round about are as thick with cutthroats as fleas on a dog. They’ll have you, liver and lights, to get those fancy studs.” He had sized me up as if I were an item of contraband.
Embarrassed, I tried to make a joke of it, and failed, not having an aptitude for humor.
He leaned back in his chair. “I was told to expect Mr. Ross, the new appraiser for Gansevoort Pier—a position secured, no doubt, by a friend’s influence, a bribe, a dodge, or other shady dealings. Would you be the gent?”
“I am,” I said, half amused and half abashed.
“Good,” he said with a nod, whose tenor I could not guess. “Please excuse an excess of caution, but you can appreciate my wariness when, expecting a lowly customs ‘coney catcher,’ I see standing before me a man dressed for a Freemasons’ ball or a gathering of Tammany henchmen.”
He sensed my annoyance and relaxed his small mouth into a grin.
“I had Henry Smythe to grease the ways for me. He ended by sliding ignominiously down the slippery slope of corruption, from the collector of customs to an impeached embezzler. My name is Melville, district inspector of knavery and chicanery, both abundant in the great city of Babylon on the Hudson. Welcome to the asylum of nonentities.” He opened a drawer and took out a tin badge like his, except for the word appraiser stamped into the metal. “Your aegis,” he said. “In the closet, you’ll find the blue jacket of our fraternal order.”
I exchanged my frock coat for the jacket and felt, all at once, disgraced as the reality of my new situation struck me. I pinned on the customs badge and understood that I had cast off, like a snake its skin, an old self no longer fitting or useful. Tomorrow, I told myself, I’ll pawn the studs.
“You’d better put on a pair of sea boots while you’re at it,” he called from his desk. “The leftover snow will spoil your fine gaiters.”
I looked at my shoes and saw that they had already been ruined by my preposterous stroll along Gansevoort Pier.
“You’ll be outdoors a good part of the day.”
“My predecessor had big feet,” I said, returning to my chair.
“He did, though in every other way he was a little man. He was sacked for taking bribes, which are ubiquitous in our service. You’ll be offered the Devil’s own temptations, and it takes a Jesus Christ sometimes to resist them.”
I felt my lips compress in mockery.
“Believe me, Mr. Ross, I am not He. I’m simply afraid, and fear is as good a stick to beat the Devil as a cross. Honesty does not belong exclusively to the virtuous.”
“You might call me by my Christian name,” I said, “if we’re to be cribbed together.”
“Which might be what?”
“Shelby.”
“An unusual name for a man, although I knew a Shelby in Atlanta before the war.”
I shrugged my shoulders as if to say, I’ve heard it all before.
“Call me Herman.” He glanced at me, as if expecting me to smirk, but at the time, I was deaf to the echo of his famous sentence concerning Ishmael.
Do you see, Roebling, how soured life in the modern age has become that irony should be our frequent response to it? But as I said, the name Herman Melville meant nothing to me then, nor had I heard of his novels. Moby-Dick, remember, had been published in 1851, and by 1880, it had fairly sunk from view.
“What is it that an appraiser does?”
Melville found the question comical. “Why, appraise!”
“It’s an honest question!” I replied irritably.
“As befits an honest man,” he said with a smile, which threatened to become a sneer. “The appraiser verifies that a merchant has not undervalued his goods in order to reduce the duty due upon delivery—in our case, at the Port of New York.”
He glanced through the dirty window at the sky, which was lowering.
“In that dishonesty is acknowledged to be a universal trait of our kind, the Customs Service has incorporated suspicion and mistrust into its machinery. Nonetheless, goods are still pilfered, and fraud is practiced. Thus do we find ourselves working inside a model of a universe, obedient to an intangible malignity, where honest dealings are the exception that proves the rule. You may have your own ideas concerning the moral nature of humankind and the harsh view the U.S. Customs Service and I take of it. But I’m obliged, by long experience, to take a dim one.”
Melville is a man of integrity, who, because of it, has eluded the new brooms of five administrations—a rarity in the service, where officers and clerks seem to be chosen for an aptitude in thievery. He could have dragged himself and his family out of everlasting debt and found time, which our occupational exhaustion denies him, to write more books. And yet he has never embezzled, winked at smuggling schemes, or taken bribes from crooked merchants and shipping firms. Not that he’s a saint. No, I would not care to spend any length of time with one, since few of us wish to be reminded of our sins.
Melville looked into my eyes with the intensity of a mesmerist. I lowered them and regarded my fingernails, which were pink and immaculate. Soon enough, they would be black and broken.
“The New York City docks and its customhouse produce half the revenue of all other United States ports combined. Money is a magnet, whose attractions few can resist. Humankind is a self-serving species, Mr. Ross, and its appetites are gargantuan.”
“Shelby,” I said with seeming irrelevance.
“Pardon?”
“Won’t you please call me by my Christian name?”
“You are a Christian, then?” Before I could reply, he said, “No matter.”
I considered Melville’s attitude toward his fellows misanthropic. As cynical as the years had made me, I had yet to wish myself a member of another species, which, according to Charles Darwin’s book, was likely to be as brutish as our own. I accept the Fall and the tatty unraveling of God’s gift. Who faults a tree for the crookedness of some of its branches? Who considers the tiger’s appetite for flesh immoral? Who fulminates against the fish, which never looks to heaven until it’s yanked up on a string? Men and women are imperfect creatures and, therefore, natural. Didn’t Emerson and Thoreau accept payment from the lyceums for extolling nature’s virtues? What were they but a pair of moral philosophers for hire? And so I admit that when five thousand crates of green oranges from the Azores arrived on the Fredonia last week, I took a crate and sold it. It’s common for a customs officer to pilfer a bottle of Barbados rum to stave off the winter chill. I’ve seen Melville take a French silk ribbon for his wife and a bottle of vintage Madeira for his lunch. To filch a ribbon or even a crate of oranges is nothing compared to stealing a hundred imperial yards of Irish linen—gold at a time when our domestic fabrics are little better than tow cloths.
Washington Roebling. You, too, must be burdened by your given name. Does it keep you honest? Did you never take something that didn’t belong to you? You know the rhyme “the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horse-shoe nail.” Surely you wouldn’t hesitate to steal a nail—or a whole horse—to finish a bridge?
“I take it you have the necessary qualifications for the post of customs appraiser?” asked Melville with a straight face.
“At one time, I owned a business of my own,” I replied—haughtily, I admit.
“What happened to it?”
“It went into receivership.”
We paused briefly to listen to the rain beating on the roof.
“Then you were either an honest man or a fool,” he said.
“Let’s say I was an honest fool and leave it at that.” In truth, I was sometimes honest and sometimes foolish.
My gaze fell on a harpoon standing in a corner of the office, next to a cabinet containing rolled-up nautical charts.
“Do whales inhabit the North River?”
“I keep it for the rats,” replied Melville, having taken no notice of my flippancy. “If ever you are called upon to descend into the hold of a ship from Canton, I recommend that you go armed; Chinese rats grow big as possums.”
The door swung open, and a boarding inspector entered the room, scattering rain from his slicker.
“Mind the wet!” admonished Melville, covering a document with his sleeve. “You’re leaking like an uncaulked skiff!”
The man grunted words—I doubt of apology. He slid a ship’s manifest across Melville’s desk and said, “The Saxony’s in port, loaded with barley and Hallertau hops for the Lispenard Brewery.”
“Very well,” said Melville.
The man left, closing the door behind him emphatically to let us know that he, too, was one of the camerados.
We put on our oilskins and went outside into the rain. The Saxony was berthed at the end of the pier, and I was already feeling miserable as we trudged along it, to an accompaniment of sounds peculiar to ports in foul weather. Winds played in the shrouds—ropes to landsmen—bells tolled, blocks clattered like wooden glockenspiels, gulls screeched, steam winches groaned, boatswains’ whistles skirled, and sheets rang against masts: an orchestra conducted by men shouting into speaking trumpets. I didn’t know it then, but Melville had heard the same raucous music in his youth, not as a minor official of the Customs Service, but as a sailor does a rousing overture to far-flung voyages. The pages of his books are loud with it, so steeped was he in the music of the piers—a clever trope, you must admit.
A WEIGHER WAS LEANING against a bollard when we arrived at the Saxony, which was riding low against the pier, in the murky water of the North River. Nests of reeds and trash bobbed alongside her hull.
“Mr. Gibbs, this is Mr. Ross, our new appraiser,” said Melville. “Mr. Gibbs is an old hand and will show you what to do.”
Gibbs scratched his hairy ear and nodded, as if Melville had just spoken of someone else.
The three of us boarded and climbed down into the hold, where a pungent odor of hops, coffee, mildewed grain, and bilge conspired to make my gorge rise.
Before the panic and ensuing depression, I hadn’t an inkling of the destitution awaiting me. None could have foreseen it, not even if he’d read the palm of the “invisible hand,” which Adam Smith called the unpredictable force that spites a planned economy, or glimpsed the future in a glass of beer. The future ruined Thomas Durant, whose Irishmen had laid the Union Pacific tracks from Council Bluffs west to Promontory Summit, where they’d met the Central Pacific’s “coolies” and hammered home the golden spike. It ruined Jay Cooke, the financier, who’d also dreamed of building a railroad—his connecting Duluth with the Great Lakes. It ruined eighteen thousand businesses, including mine, and the only outfit to profit by it was the Ku Klux Klan. Misery converts desperate men to desperate causes.
In the funereal light of the hold, the weigher Gibbs sat down against a bulkhead and chewed a twist of tobacco while Melville walked among sacks stuffed with barley and hops, idly tapping them with a pencil. Now and then, he’d slit open the burlap with his pocketknife, plunge his hands into the sweet-smelling grain or brewers’ spicy flowers, and sniff with the air of a connoisseur nosing a glass of single malt or a lady the sachet in a bureau drawer of dainties.
Gibbs is one of those men who appear to be loafing even when attending to their duties—an egalitarian pose encountered everywhere in our democracy, whose caroler is Walt Whitman.
Having finished his inspection, Melville climbed out of the hold and disappeared into a gray sky hung with rain. Each slow step upon the ladder appeared to have pained him. Gibbs spat tobacco juice after him in good riddance. Since he was in no hurry to instruct me in the priestly duties of our office, I sat down and contemplated my wet boots, which, thanks to Mr. Goodyear’s genius, had kept my socks dry.
Do I have the determination to lift myself up by my bootstraps and begin life anew? I asked myself. From where I sat on a piece of burlap at the bottom of a suffocating hole in the river, renewal seemed impossible.
The panic, which had sunk the economy seven years earlier, did not ruin me overnight. My ship took time to go down—enough for me to step into a lifeboat instead of throwing myself into the sea. I sold stock my father had purchased imprudently and bought shares in more stable concerns. I had my surviving factory, which had been producing wire implements, converted for the manufacture of Glidden’s barbed wire. I hoped to supply the farmers during their range war with the cattlemen. Unfortunately, the cattle business went to hell. By the time the country had recovered from the Gold Exchange and Jay Gould’s “corner,” I’d scuttled my ship and changed from canny businessman to bankrupt—from well-to-do to ne’er-do-well. As I told you, I kept my once-fashionable clothes and watched them grow shabby.
Do you feel a draft, Roebling? Let me close the window. Looks like rain in the here and now. Now back to my first dreary day on Gansevoort Pier. Having delayed as long as we dared, Gibbs weighed and I appraised the musty sacks chosen by the Captain Ahab of the customhouse.
My colleague was a squat man with surprisingly broad shoulders and large, hairy hands. I suppose he could be described as “simian.” He had a repertory of unpleasant habits in addition to chewing tobacco, which had left a brown stain on his unkempt beard. I’d turn away in disgust when he cleared his nose of smut without benefit of handkerchief. I shrank from him each time he put a hand inside his trousers and scratched with the deliberateness of a flea-bitten dog. I was afraid vermin would jump from his clothes into mine, and that first night, I fumigated them in the airing closet at Mrs. McFadden’s boardinghouse, where I lodged uncomfortably for four dollars a week, plus board. I took to smoking cheap, malodorous cigars, hoping to asphyxiate any pests acquired from the unsavory Mr. Gibbs.
Here comes the rain! You can’t see a blessed thing outside. The whole world might be flooding. A second Deluge, eh, Roebling? To wash the world clean of our sins. I’d wager a year’s pay that your bridge would have survived the Flood, along with Noah’s ark. “And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.” I don’t blame the Lord for wanting to get rid of a botched job.
Yes, a “creeping thing” is Mr. Gibbs. Bear with me, Roebling. My stories resemble a tangle of anchor cable in a ship’s chain locker, but the links are there to follow, one after the other notwithstanding.
Our work in the hold finished, Gibbs turned on me with a snarl. “By your finery, I’d say you were either a ‘Mary’ or a poet.” In his mouth, the word poet took on the unsavoriness of a hermaphrodite. “Not that I’ve anything against lavender waistcoats, but it sickens me to see the way you strut like a damned politician or a nigger at a cotillion.”
“I beg your pardon?” I could feel my cheeks flush.
“‘I beg your pardon!’” he said mockingly. “You might think you were First Lord of His Majesty’s Customs and Excise come to complain about the tea dumped into Boston Harbor by the Sons of Liberty.” He spat, and I jog-stepped to avoid the spittle. “Or David come to bushwhack Jonathan.” And then he spat at me again.
Enraged, I flailed at him absurdly, although I managed to bloody his drunkard’s nose. Stunned, he blew red snot from his nostrils, and then, bellowing in pain, or fury, or both, he swung his longshoreman’s hook at me. Had it met its mark, it would’ve pierced my skull as though it were a melon. In an instant—part impetuosity, par
t insanity—I reached for the knife Melville had left behind him—staff of office for those who risk life and limb in the pursuit of taxation—and lunged at Gibbs’s chest. Out of my wits and my element, I caught him on his sleeve. Once again he roared. Although I dropped the knife in horror, I was thrilled to have nearly killed a man. I trembled in a delirium of ire and ecstasy. So this is what men feel who finally have done with the illusion and hypocrisy of civilization! I thought.
“I’ll make you sorry you ever stuck your head out of your mother’s fucking hole!” he hissed with a savagery I had not heretofore encountered in my fellow man.
I laughed nervously and started up the ladder, the back of my neck tingling in dread that at any moment I might be felled by a belaying pin. I did not turn to look at him, afraid of the power of his malignant gaze. With fear comes irrationality, and with it the blind credulity of the religiously minded. Though an alien one, juju is just another faith. If Gibbs catches my eye, I told myself as I climbed the ladder leading upward from the miniature hell, I’ll be obliged to hang myself from the nearest beam.
Gibbs shouted another obscenity, and I knew that I had made an enemy of him.
Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, April 22, 1882
The newspapers are calling your bridge “one of the wonders of the world,” equal to anything the ancients raised for all their thousands and tens of thousands of slaves. Here’s a question to vex you: If the Union had lost the war and there’d been no emancipation, would you have used negro slaves instead of the city’s Irish?