by Norman Lock
“I’d have done better feeding my crumbs of knowledge to the ducks rather than to those hellions.”
“You fathered four children—”
“One of whom died.”
In that very house on East Twenty-sixth Street.
“—and you wrote books.”
“Which the majority of reviewers chewed to pieces and spat out!”
He had recited the history of the family’s misfortunes. Whether it was to punish her or himself or to embarrass me, I couldn’t have said. Perhaps it was only the bleak, sad story of a life spent together, which husbands and wives will sometimes tell each other before falling to sleep. “We’re neglecting out guest.”
“Oh, Shelby doesn’t mind. He’s also a man who has failed to make good.” He turned to me and said in a hushed voice, like one careful of another man’s sleep, “They speak of me, when they speak of me at all, as the ‘buried author.’ Shelby understands failure well enough.”
I felt a prickling sensation on the skin of my neck, as if chafed by a slowly tightening cord.
“I’m sure that isn’t so,” she said, glancing sympathetically in my direction.
“What did you do today, Lizzie, while Shelby and I were at Delmonico’s, drinking claret with a pinch of ambergris for spice, together with President Chester Arthur, who as collector of the Port of New York enriched himself beyond the dreams of avarice—or what passes for them in the civil service?”
“I blacked the stove, swept the house from top to bottom, and did the shopping for tonight’s dinner.” She had replied simply to Melville’s hectoring and not like a woman with a grievance.
“A veritable feast!” he cried, smacking the table with the flat of his hand.
“It was very tasty, Mrs. Melville,” I said. The supper had been peppered and embittered by her husband’s black mood. I hoped to propitiate her before Melville’s goading brought her to a boil.
“Let’s drink a toast to the ragged heart of men. ‘Men hunt men as beasts of prey, in the woods and on the way.’”
“Is that one of your verses, Herman?” she asked. “I’m not familiar with it.”
He scowled and then said jovially, “‘Mrs. Cratchit’! Fetch a bottle of Madeira. Mr. Ross and I intend to drink a toast in honor of the Feast Day of the Cannibals, for surely this is it.”
Sighing without ostentation, Lizzie got a bottle of cheap whiskey from the cupboard and set it, together with two small glasses, on the table.
“Never mind those,” said Melville, tossing the remains of his beer “down his neck,” as the ruffians on the docks like to say.
“What’re you waiting for, Shelby?” he asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Drink up!”
I drank the rest of my beer in a single gulp and belched.
“Coarse manners for an erstwhile merchant prince of New York!” He filled the glasses webbed by “Belgian lace” with whiskey and slapped the table once again. “We’ll drink till our backstays snap and we’re dismasted.”
“Mind your nerves don’t come undone,” said Lizzie with gentle admonition.
Melville ignored her. “To cannibals everywhere! Because who is there who is not one?”
“Well, I’m sure I’m not,” said Lizzie. “I can hardly stand at the butcher’s counter without growing faint at the sight of his apron spattered with blood.”
“To anthropophagy!” shouted Melville, who’d soon be staggering over words of more than two syllables.
“To the Donner Party!” I cried, having entered a kind of maelstrom stirred by my host’s dark enthusiasm.
“To the men of the whale ship Essex, who ate one another in their lifeboats!”
“To meat!” I shouted in a rapture that rightly belonged to someone else.
“To the flesh lovers of the world and to their unappeasable appetites!”
He picked up a remnant ham bone from the greasy platter and began to gnaw on it. In disgust, I felt my stomach flip and gripe.
“Cannibalism runs in the blood of mankind,” he said almost in a whisper. “A taint more vicious than the Spanish pox. Why did God give us His son to eat and drink? The world baffles me, Shelby—baffles and defeats me!”
By the fourth whiskey, the sweat had come out on Melville’s face. He regarded his wife in silence and then said with a cruelty nourished by intoxication, “Lizzie’s quite a busy woman. Perhaps not so busy as Washington Roebling’s wife, who ever since her husband took sick has been supervising the construction of the world’s greatest bridge.”
He was speaking with the nonchalance of a tightrope walker, a facility that comes, now and then, to drunkards. I wondered how long he could continue before his sentences fell apart.
“Did you know, Shelby, that Roebling initiated his able lady into arcane matters such as structural analysis, cable construction, and catenary curves? Only the Roeblings and God know what they might be.”
Elizabeth stood and began to clear the table.
“Let the damn dishes be!”
She did as she was told, her mouth frozen in a tight-lipped smile.
“Think of it, Shelby! Today while Lizzie was blackening the stove, Mrs. Roebling was calculating catenary curves! Naturally, I wasn’t there to see her. I must take it on trust and without the evidence of my eyes, which are, in any case, bad. I was in our money pit, as well as in and out of the holds of sailing ships, which—in my dreams—could carry me to the China Sea or the Galápagos, where emperor penguins feed on little fish. In actuality, the Panama had just arrived with potash from Liverpool, and the Vlissingen with salted herring from Vlissingen. You can smell them on my hand.”
He thrust it under my nose so that I could verify the piquant fact, although I had only to sniff my own, which stank of fish, regardless of the scrubbing I’d given them.
“What great novels will be written about such inglorious voyages and cargos of herring and potash?” he asked. “None fit to print except in the shipping news!” Gazing into his glass, as if he might discover the future there, he grew thoughtful and said, “Commerce has always been an enemy of literature, and the writer forced to rely on patronage, even if his name was William Shakespeare. Let’s drink to him.”
“To Shakespeare!” I cried. By this time, the drunken boat was making for the blessed isles of forgetfulness.
“Tomorrow being Sunday and a day of rest, you, Mr. Ross, will accompany me to church.” Looking defiantly into Lizzie’s eyes, which did not waver, Melville tore a button from his shirt. “My shirt seems to have lost a button.”
“I’ll sew it back on before you leave tomorrow,” she said impassively.
“Thank you, my dear. I wouldn’t dream of venturing into the house of the Lord dressed like a sloven or a beggar. Think of it, Shelby! Young ladies used to come near to swooning at the sight of me! I was a handsome, virile, rough-and-ready fellow after four years at sea! Why, at a ball at the Russian embassy, I succeeded in fascinating one of the prettiest girls in Bond Street!” His voice had rung out merrily, his subsequent defeat momentarily forgotten.
“You’ve had enough to drink for one night, Herman,” she said, her eyes boring into his.
“Bollocks!” he grunted, turning away from her.
“When he was a younger man, Herman lost his wits,” she said, as if it had been a box of toy soldiers that had gone missing. “Until they returned, I was frightened for the children.”
“Yes, I came close to wearing a camisole,” he replied with an inscrutable smile.
“He’s much better now that he no longer tortures himself by writing novels.” She took the glass from his hand and delivered the coup de grâce matter-of-factly: “Which nobody reads.”
It was the first I’d heard of Melville the novelist.
He sank back in his chair and said, “Don’t think for a moment, Shelby, that I pity myself any more than a whale does for having its back turned into a pincushion. It feels only an anger as large as the universe.”
He pushed ba
ck his chair and staggered upstairs to bed.
I stood and instantly sat down again, too drunk to walk.
“You can sleep on the sofa, Mr. Ross.”
Again, I attempted to get to my feet, but I’d completely lost my bearings now that the compass needle inside my head was swinging crazily.
“I should not try it if I were you,” she said gently. “Herman is not always this way. He shouldn’t drink, you know, and for the most part, he is careful.”
She helped me into the other room and onto a shabby sofa. Trying to kiss her hand in gratitude for her kindness, I kissed my own instead. She left and appeared again with a blanket and a tatty-looking pillow needlepointed with the image of the great whale Moby Dick, which she had made for Melville at the peak of his writing career, before it was his turn to tumble down into obscurity. She quenched the lights efficiently and went upstairs to join her husband, leaving me to turn in a fitful sleep, like a dolphin gamboling in the sea. I remember having dreamed that I was sick, and when I awoke sometime in the night, I touched my beard and the blanket under my chin, afraid that I’d vomited on myself. I was glad to find that I had not, although my head still spun and my gut twisted in dry spasms.
It was then that I heard a voice speaking low, as if to a child weeping inconsolably in the night. I strained to hear while the voice went on softly. In time, the crying became less, until it ceased altogether, and then I heard Elizabeth say, “It’s all right, Herman. You mustn’t torment yourself.” Melville muttered something I did not catch. “I understand,” she replied, “although you do sometimes make my life a misery.”
“I’m a brute!” he replied, his voice rising, so that I could hear it without needing to hold my breath. “I should have died outright the day Joe Smith’s horse bolted on the way to Backus block.”
“You mustn’t say that.”
“Why? Will God strike me dead with a bolt of lightning? I’d rather that than a harpoon with an iron head. Poor beasts!”
“Close your eyes, Herman.”
“I miss our farm in Pittsfield, Lizzie. We were happy then, when Hawthorne was among us. The fire’s out.”
“Shall I sing you to sleep?”
“Yes, please!” He sounded as eager and grateful as a boy accepting a currant bun.
Elizabeth began to sing, but her voice would sometimes fall away, as if the wind had snatched it from her lips.
Come shake your dull Noddles, ye Pumpkins, and bawl,
And own you are.…
In Folly you’re born, and in Folly you’ll live …
The song ended, and silence returned to the room upstairs. My eyes having been wide open, I could make out, here and there, certain objects in the darkness by the little light that fell through the curtained window. On the wall above the hearth was a large picture, which I’d only glanced at as I walked through the sitting room into the dining room. It was, I recalled, an oil painting of a coastal schooner endangered by a rocky headland. On the wall opposite, a musket rested on two brackets. I wondered if it had once belonged to Thomas Melvill, who might have shouldered it on North Bridge against the redcoats. Melville’s rolltop desk sat hunched in a corner with the sullen mystery of a dwarf. Next to it was the cabinet in which the works of his friend Hawthorne rested in state. I swear to you, Roebling, that a ray of light was falling onto his likeness burned onto an ambrotype, as implausibly as though I were not in a room on East Twenty-sixth Street, but one in a gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe.
I recall nothing more of that night until I was awakened by Melville at eight o’clock. He was neatly dressed in a black sackcloth coat and trousers, a shirt—with all its buttons—and a clean starched collar. He gestured toward a chair and said that Lizzie had aired and brushed my clothes.
“Come into the dining room when you’re dressed. Lizzie made us a breakfast fit for an admiral. She awoke at six bells and went to the butcher’s for a piece of gammon.”
My nostrils flared involuntarily as I took in the incomparable odors of coffee, fried ham and potatoes. I dressed and polished my boots on the blanket’s satin hem. Recalling the misery of the night, I thought I was entitled to the liberty.
At the table, I hesitated to begin on the meat and potatoes, afraid my gorge would rise, but only for a moment. The bile and sway of a landsman’s version of seasickness had passed.
“Lizzie’s gone to church with a friend. She said to tell you good-bye and that you must come again when we’re more ourselves.”
I promised myself that I would not endure another such night. Melville was all smiles and pleasantries, however, and I began to doubt my recollection of the ghastly supper and of having overheard his childish tears. I’d drunk a good deal of whiskey—more than I could hold—and possibly my memory was colored by distemper. Memory is a tattered cloth, full of holes and little better than a rag to clean away the dust laid down by time. Little by little, I began to warm to Melville as I had not done during the three months I’d known him.
He’s not a bad sort, I said to myself. It’s not easy to be brave when the cards turn against you, and much that passes for bravery among us is mere bravado. I haven’t always acquitted myself with dignity after fortune no longer smiled.
“Shall we go and pay our respects to the Almighty?” he asked.
St. Paul’s Chapel at 209 Broadway, Lower Manhattan, April 16, 1882
Melville and I walked to Union Square, where we boarded a southbound Bowery-Harlem car. The day was fine, the clear sky one that would have given Thoreau or Whitman fits of ecstasy. The elms, buttonwoods, poplars, and chestnuts on either side of the thoroughfare shone with the polished brightwork of new leaves. The car rocked on its springs as the locomotive tugged it over the rails, and I gave myself up to the sights and sounds of the city on the Sabbath and to the tonic river smell stirred by a quickening breeze. We were soon rid of whatever vapors had been left us by the night’s debauch. Melville was cheerful—even charming—and I was glad to be in his company. The traffic moved leisurely, but the pavements were jammed with people, their state of grace or the errors of their way concealed beneath Sunday finery. The vicious and the drunks who had not perished during the night were asleep in their beds or in some filthy alley. Everywhere bells rang out a time different from those tolling wearily for sailors aboard ships headed for Patagonia, Zanzibar—or Red Hook, where the Stony Creek granite blocks for your bridge had once been stored. What dank mineral dreams had been theirs? I wonder. And will they come to dream of something rapturous in their aerie above the slate gray river?
We got off the train at City Hall Park and walked down Broadway to Cortlandt Street—two blocks south of Fulton and four blocks north of Wall Street and the U.S. Custom House. We went along Cortlandt until we came to a house at number fifty-five.
“When I was a very young boy, I lived here, together with my brothers, Gansevoort and Allan, and my sisters Helen and Augusta,” he said. “I would listen to my Gansevoort relations and my father’s merchant friends tell old Dutch tales of Batavia, called “Het kerkhof der Europeanen,” the cemetery of the Europeans, of Chinezenmoord, the murder of ten thousand Chinese, and of the Java War, which followed. I heard stories of the mutiny at Mindanao; of New Guinea, Shark Bay, and Arnhem Land; of Rottenest, named for the multitude of rats’ nests found on the island; of Mauritius and India; of smallpox, measles, and fevers more fatal to the natives than an army of Dutch soldiers. Father’s visitors would smoke clay pipes with the stolid self-importance of burghers or drink Holland gin as though they were sitting in their fathers’ or grandfathers’ houses in Amsterdam or Leyden, warming themselves at a hearth tiled in blue-and-white Delft. They would dream of exploration and conquest, commercial rivalries, treason and betrayals, the black swans of Australia, the rara avises, of gum trees, parrots, nautilus shells like Gothic turrets hiding a tiny Minotaur, and the exotic bêche-de-mer, a delicacy for the Chinese, though inedible to the Dutch.
“In this house, my sister and I came down with scarlet f
ever. No, I’m wrong. That was just after our remove to Bleecker Street. My hearing was never the same again, and even now I enter a kind of twilight of sound, which muffles the world, as though my ears were packed with flannel or musket wadding.”
“Were you happy as a child?”
“I would like to think so,” he replied equivocally.
I let it go. A man’s childhood is his own business, so, too, his marriage. I glanced sharply at Melville, and for an instant, I thought I could see a boy terrified inside the man. The sound of his weeping during the night came to mind, and I felt sorry for him.
He took my arm and led me up Broadway to Fulton and Vesey streets, where St. Paul’s Chapel stands. A statue of the apostle, roughly carved in oak, overlooks the busy road from its niche beneath a gable roof.
Roebling, you don’t need me to remind you of our city’s monuments. According to the Times, your bridge will stand among the greatest of any devoted to “the secular ideal.”
Just as we arrived, a young man was going in at the church door. I thought I recognized him as one of the weighers on Gansevoort Pier.
“Isn’t that Martin Finch?” I asked.
“That’s he. He sings in the choir. He has a voice that hasn’t broken for all his twenty years and won’t break glass like a castrato’s, whose manhood was taken by the goddamn priests. Voice like a lark. I heard it once while I was standing here and debating with myself whether I ought to go inside. He’s a timid sort, not what we’re used to on the docks. But he’s honest and, unlike some I could name, civil.”
I knew he meant John Gibbs, who had been several times admonished for his insolence.
“Gibbs knows his business, I’ll say that much, or I’d have had his bollocks long ago.”
“He’s a brute,” I said absently.
“His face looks as if it’d been holystoned, and he’s got the telltale nose of a boozer.”
I made a guttural noise, signifying both assent and attentiveness, but Melville made no additional comment.
On several occasions, I had spoken to Martin Finch and thought him agreeable and uncommonly frank. He liked, he’d said, to look at pictures and to attend, whenever he could, musical evenings or lectures at the lyceums in Brooklyn and on Staten Island. Although few men would have thought it worth the waste of breath, he had boasted of having heard Emerson deliver an address at the Cooper Institute called the “Conduct of Life,” and, afterward, of having shaken hands with his idol. Martin also admitted shyly that he read verse, especially that by Swinburne and the Rossettis. These pastimes constituted his secret world, which he hid even from his brother, although they shared a small house in Maiden Lane, not far from St. Paul’s. I wondered that such a bright and winning creature could brave the shadows and pestilential curses of “Sailors Town.” I wondered even more that he had chosen to show me, a stranger, the gentle aspect of his character. Had I been a man like John Gibbs, his life would have been henceforth hell’s own misery and torment. Gibbs would have picked him clean of his angelic pinfeathers and then roasted him alive.