by Norman Lock
I haven’t the slightest doubt that you’re a principled man, Roebling; but can you honestly say that if the East River Bridge depended on the free labor of slaves for its completion, you’d give it up for a principle? There is always an unanswerable question, or one whose answer will turn the world upside down. It’s the job of fools and philosophers to ask it.
Me? More fool than philosopher, although a plausible one. I’ve always had the silver tongue of a pulpit crooner or a confidence man.
The rain shows no sign of letting up. It must raise hell with your timetable. It makes working on the docks a sodden misery. But water is the primary and unconquerable element, as those who end up drowning find out. It douses fire, turns earth to mud and air to mist. “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” What fish, I wonder, can swim in the waters above the firmament? Moby Dick. Not that I believe the Bible stories, mind you. But I’d sooner wear studs of diamond or pearl than bone and read Genesis instead of Darwin or Charles Lyell. Our contemporaries’ accounts of creation might well be the truth, but damn it if they’re not as dry as the Host in the mouth of a communicant kneeling at the altar rail!
My father bought a choice pew in the old Cedar Street Presbyterian Church as he would have a seat on the stock exchange. The doctrines of predestination and election confirmed his self-interest. He could do nothing, he said, on behalf of the unfortunates, because God had forecast his every move, as if life were a horoscope and we were obedient to planetary aspects and conjunctions. I can see him even now, taking his ease in an upholstered chair—his coat off and waistcoat unbuttoned, revealing a paunch and a gold watch chain, and puffing at a fat cigar, the image of complacency. Father was not entirely a liar or a thief except as a man of business will sometimes be for the good of his shareholders and confederates. They propped one another up, and not a man among them could have foreseen the day when the props would be kicked out from under them. Father was no more evil than Ahab, although they sometimes did evil things in their separate wars against fatality. Madness and Calvinism are difficult burdens to bear, and both an offense to reasonable men.
Am I? Well, hairs are meant to be split. That’s another thing I’ve learned. Didn’t Polk fuddle the line between the purchase of Mexican territory and its theft? Disgruntled Americans living in another sovereign nation have only to complain that their lives and property are at risk to cause a battalion of marines to sally forth in defense of their interests. One man’s robbery is another’s brilliant coup, just as surely as “spotted dick” is another name for suet pudding.
What will you do, Roebling, when the bridge is done? It’s been your abiding concern since your father, dying of tetanus, left you to finish it. You were both casualties to ambition—or perhaps retribution. The Almighty might not have cared to have His works rivaled by one of His creatures. What can you turn your hand to next that won’t be the death of you? You look played out, like a mine after its ore has been picked clean. Well, we have that much in common—you, Melville, Grant, and I. Pity we don’t play whist; we’d make a dour foursome.
When I was a boy of seven or eight, I watched my father being sick. It was just an ordinary cold on the stomach or griping of the guts, such as you and I have suffered a hundred times in our lives. I remember being surprised that he should have been changed in an instant from a crusty, capable man, who each morning dressed and took a horsecar to his office in Greenwich Street and who sat on the Board of Brokers and the Alms House Hospital, into a puking, groaning infant. He lay helplessly on the floor of his bedchamber, heaving his guts into a chamber pot while I gazed in fascination at his abasement. Afterward, when he was able to stand and wipe the vomit from his lips and had changed into clean clothes, he said to me, “We are made sick to remind us of what we were and are and will be.” A boy, I did not understand. I knew only that I had seen my father humiliated, as Ham had seen his father, Noah, naked and asleep after having drunk too much wine. What I could not have put into words—not then and hardly now—was the sense of giddiness I felt. The world had been stood on its head. I’d seen my father lying on the floor, careless of his dignity.
Roebling, you must have seen the like when your father died in agony, after his foot had been crushed by a Fulton Street ferry and the gangrene had done its dreadful work. Now here you sit, as you have done for a dozen years and more, a shut-in on your quarterdeck, where you are hobbled like Captain Ahab by his ivory leg—an “Isolato,” as Melville, in his book, called a man who occupies his own separate continent.
When a life ends prematurely or horrifically, we call it a “tragedy,” whether the victim is Oedipus the king or a woman who falls down a flight of stairs and breaks her neck. Just so, we have to make do with the word slaughter to describe the killing of ten thousand men in battle or a chicken in the dooryard. Is our language so poor that we cannot find a word to distinguish the magnitude of death or sin? What an old-fashioned word is sin! It doesn’t seem to belong to the modern world of transatlantic steamers and telegraph cables, elevated trains and the Roebling bridge. Whenever I say sin to myself, I think of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown.” Sin was real to him. At one time, Melville was very much attached to Hawthorne. The attachment may have been the most profound of his life. The friendship was short-lived, although Melville still thinks of the older man, dead these twenty years or so. Inside his house, he gives Hawthorne’s books pride of place in a cabinet, along with his hand-tinted ambrotype. An accidental friendship is either an alloy that strengthens character or else a corrosive that destroys it.
In time, of course, all things erode, rot, molder, or rust, according to the material. Your bridge has already started on the process of disintegration. Many hands will be kept busy in the future, chipping and painting—labor for a modern Sisyphus and a monument to futility. You wonder why the stars have not worn out their orbits’ grooves when—according to the town of Rawlins, Wyoming, the gates of Paradise would rust were it not for the Rawlins Red oxide paint on them. And still the East River flows everlastingly onward into the bay, and the bay carries its atoms to the ocean.
What do you think, Roebling? Will the river one day dry up and with it the bay? Will the oceans shrink and unearth continents of mud? Or will the polar regions melt, and the rising seas sweep us back to creation’s fifth day, when God created great whales?
The Melvilles’ House at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, April 15, 1882
Last week, Melville, who had been reserved, even distant, invited me home to dinner. At six o’clock, having finished the day’s work, we walked east on Thirteenth Street to Fifth Avenue, then north to Madison Square Park, where federal troops had once bivouacked during the Draft Riots of 1863.
“My elder brother, Charles, was murdered in the riots,” I said. “The mob dragged him from a horsecar and beat him to death with paving stones.”
“The Town was taken by its rats!” snarled Melville.
“A mick wrote an insulting squib on the wall next to Charles’s body: ‘For sale. Three hundred dollars’ worth of prime meat.’”
We sat on an iron bench in the park. Melville seemed reluctant to go home. He’s a taciturn man, embittered by ill fortune and lost fame. Yet you could almost say he enjoys his failure as some people do the burning of a gum rubbed with salt. Night was drawing near, and the darkness had begun to sprawl. Edison’s incandescent lamps had yet to light the city, which, until that time, would shelter what flourishes in the shadows.
Edison, Westinghouse, Charles Brush, and you, Roebling, and your father before you—where does it come from, the inspiration, genius, gift—call it what you will—that gives into your hands the lever by which to move the world? Why you and not some others? And why should Melville fail and Samuel Clemens thrive? Why should Grant become a pauper when the war’s great joke, George McClellan, became chief engineer of the New York City Docks and then the governor of New Jersey?
And while I’m asking God to justify his nepotism, why am I a three-dollar-a-day clerk swallowed up by the cold or stifling holds of ships? I’m in the belly of a whale, and it intends to keep me there. My pain is nothing next to yours, Roebling. But by God, there is nothing so salutary as the tears we shed for ourselves! They are the brine in which our aborted plans and failures are pickled.
In the park, a night bird spoke to me in Bird of the bitterness of winter snows. Thus is a happy moment buried under past regrets.
“Do you know what a ‘gam’ is?” asked Melville.
“No.”
“It’s a kind of church social for whaling men when two ships chance upon each other. It relieves the boredom of a long sea voyage. Boredom is the worst of it. A sailor will sooner tolerate lice and fleas, hardtack and rancid pork, cockroaches in the molasses, the slimy black walls, stench, and heat of the fo’c’sle. When men are shut up together for three or four years, their spirits can droop like their ship’s own sails. When they’re bored, men are at their most dangerous.”
He grew thoughtful, and as I waited for him to continue, I opened a folded copy of the Tribune someone had left and let my eyes fall where they might. Illuminated by a nearby gaslight, I read:
BANKRUPT STORE.
No. 81 William Street.
All kinds of Lace and White & Colored
Embroideries cheaper than any other house in the country.
Large line of Carpets & Oilcloths at less than manufacturer’s cost.
Calicoes & Lawn Remnants at 3 cents per yard.
S. SHIREK.
“Do you believe in God?” asked Melville, prompted by some private musing. Thoughts lie penned up in a room, clamorous as cattle in a slaughterhouse, wanting to be let out.
Although I was not sure I did believe in Him, I replied, “Yes.”
“But does He believe in you?”
I shrugged and, folding the paper, put it in my coat pocket. I waited for him to say more, but he had lapsed into the silence, which for him was habitual.
“What made you miserable?” I asked, barely concealing my impatience.
At the time, I didn’t know that his son Malcolm had shot himself in 1867, that Melville was considered another author whose mature work had failed to live up to its youthful promise, and that he felt like a shipwrecked sailor in the Land of Nod. I had mistaken a melancholia as profound as Edgar Poe’s for sullenness. I regretted having agreed to dine with him. A greasy chop and a glass of porter would have been preferable to what now seemed like an inquisition by an inquisitor too weary or withdrawn to question me. I wished that I were elsewhere instead of feeling that I had gone to sleep and awakened inside a gloomy novel set on the English moors.
Unseen within the leafing branches of a poplar tree, a squirrel began to chitter at the approach, no doubt, of a predator with a taste for squirrel. “Cannibalism is more common than the world supposes,” I’d heard Melville mutter, upon hearing that a stevedore on the Pearl Street Pier had killed a merchant seaman in a fight over a negro woman and would shortly go to Sing Sing for it. “What is cannibalism if not the spilling of blood to satisfy appetite?” In the animal kingdom, one species serves as another’s supper. According to Charles Darwin, it must be so.
Am I being obvious?
I’ll tell you what I think, Roebling: The obvious is what, in time, becomes unseen, like a crack in the sidewalk on which one walks each day or a mole on the cheek of someone kissed every morning and night. The obvious can also kill.
Amid the leaves, the squirrel screeched—a weird, unholy sound, which abruptly ceased.
It is a bleak house we live in, and sitting in the park while the first shadows began their sly encroachment on the daylit world, I shivered as if with cold.
“You’ll want a drink,” said Melville, with something like sympathy in his voice. “And Lizzie will have supper waiting. She’s just back from Orange, after seeing to our Fanny’s baby.”
Waiting, waiting, waiting! The world is consumed by waiting. For the ship to come in, for the tide to go out, for opportunity to knock, for a rich old man to die, for a child to be born, for peace or the outbreak of war, for death or the raising of the dead. The squirrel hidden in the poplar tree cried out in panic, and I grew sad, as if, sitting beside Melville, I had caught his soul’s disease.
I followed him through the park and on to Twenty-sixth Street, in which his house stood.
ELIZABETH MELVILLE SHOULD HAVE BEEN HAPPY, but as we sat at the dining table, eating boiled potatoes, green beans, and what—when quick—had been one of the more loathsome parts of a pig, I saw that she was a harried and belittled soul. By the time we had started on the pudding, I’d come to pity her. Despite her seeming abasement, her face—broad and pleasingly arranged—had a formidable aspect even in her middle age. One eye seemed almost closed, as though sight had become oppressive; however, the other eye confronted the world with surety, even defiance. The meal finished, Melville smoked a cigar, his long, square-cut beard trailing in his dirty plate as his head became heavy with drink. I admit to having felt disgust for him, but her admiration was apparent.
Lizzie, as he called her, made polite inquiries concerning my rooming house—the view from the window, the color of the paint, the pattern on the washbowl, the state of the carpet and the bedclothes, the quality of Mrs. McFadden’s cooking, the size of the dining table—as well as my pastimes and amusements. Did I enjoy good music, and, if so, had I attended the New York Symphony Society’s performance of “Mignon’s Lied,” by Franz Liszt? Lizzie had not, I suspected. I doubted there was money for such treats in the Melville household. Did I care for contemporary art? What did I think of Winslow Homer? She had read of the recent exhibition of his English watercolors at the Metropolitan. She’d seen a reproduction of one that pictured a young woman, her face hidden by her hair as she leans forward to wring out her dress. Her legs are naked to her knees. A frightened dog is about to flinch, as if at a threat we cannot see.
“I must say, Mr. Ross, I thought the forceful way Mr. Homer painted the headland behind the little group of bathers was grand!”
Melville grunted. “Not half so grand as the sight of a Tahitian girl showing her brown breasts as you would two loaves of bread.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, Herman,” she said drily.
“Along with courthouse hacks and Calvinists, we in the Customs Service share the conviction that man is conceived in sin. Am I not right, Shelby?”
“My husband is fond of startling people with his opinions. But perhaps you’ve found that out for yourself, Mr. Ross. Is that an English name?”
“My mother came from London, my father from Manchester,” I replied.
“One of my ancestors was Abraham—”
“Not to be confused with the patriarch out of Noah,” interjected Melville.
“—Shaw.”
“Noah was a poor seaman, but an able shipwright.”
“Abraham Shaw was born in Yorkshire and settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”
“Lizzie refused to be born unless she could claim descent from a citizen of the British Isles. They have their man-eaters, as well, my dear, although they dress in evening clothes.”
“My father was a judge,” she said, ignoring her husband’s gibe.
“Lemuel Shaw, a chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, who in his day outraged the abolitionists by returning a runaway slave to his ‘ol’ massa.’”
He was openly taunting her now, and I marveled that she didn’t pick up the platter of congealed fat and bone and bring it crashing down on his head.
“Herman is indebted to my father,” she said, as if her prickly husband were in Tahiti or Timbuktu instead of sitting at the table with her in a cramped and drafty house near Kips Bay.
“Mine died raving and insolvent. My grandfather Thomas Melvill, however, dressed up one night as a Red Indian and dumped British tea into Boston Harbor. ‘Rally, Mohawks! Bring your axes, and tell King
George we’ll pay no taxes!’ A Freemason and a patriot, he was a friend of Samuel Adams, was present at the ‘shot heard round the world,’ and had his likeness painted by Copley. To be painted by Mr. Copley is to be granted immortality, according to his admirers. I had my portrait done by Asa W. Twitchell, the Lansingburgh wheelwright. I’m not so assured of eternal life as my grandfather, who is presently enjoying his.”
He ran his greasy fingers through his hair and continued his sketch of the family tree.
“My maternal grandfather, Colonel Peter Gansevoort, scorched several Mohawk villages—a deed celebrated by my illustrious, if sanguinary, family. The colonel kept slaves, you know—Sambo, Jude, and her two children.”
“I’m sure they were well treated, Herman,” said Lizzie. If she had intended sarcasm, it went undetected, at least by me. “We have a fine and honorable ancestry.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lizzie! Our fancy pedigree has done us no good at all.”
“You’re not in the forecastle now, Herman, and I’d be wonderfully obliged if you would save your oaths and blasphemies for the barroom. And whatever you may think of our families, you’re in their debt, whether you choose to acknowledge the fact or not.”
At that moment, Lizzie was magnificent—worthy of the eminent judge who had sired her and a match for the man she had married. I sensed that she had grown impatient long ago with his complaint concerning genius and thwarted destiny.
“You have done a great many things in your life, Herman,” she said sternly. I was left unsure whether she had meant to reproach him for a past waywardness or to recognize the tenacity of his struggle with his demons.
He gave her a most peculiar smile, as though inviting—no, challenging her—to go on.
“You earned an engineering degree.”
“And never built so much as a privy afterward!”
Unlike you, Roebling, who’ll be remembered long after Melville has been forgotten.
“You were a teacher.”