by Norman Lock
Meanwhile, Melville had, in a manner of speaking, lain abaft the church door. “I seldom go inside,” he confided. “The Calvinism I was made to swallow acted on me like an emetic or like the castor oil Miss Watson spooned down Huck Finn’s gullet. It wrung me dry of faith.”
He leaned against a black iron railing enclosing the chapel cemetery.
“Backward and forward, eternity is the same; already we have been the nothing we dread to be.”
The church bell began to toll, as though in mourning for us all.
A young married couple—he, dressed in a stovepipe hat and white bow tie at his winged collar, she, a pretty thing, in a long jacket and skirt, which she had boldly shed of her mother’s bustle—looked askance at us as they hurried into church.
According to my watch, it had gone ten o’clock, and in a moment, the morning hymn was taken up by those inside. I pictured the young woman, her hat perched jauntily on her pretty head, and Martin Finch, his clear voice ascending toward his God, like smoke from an offering—incense coiling upward from the priest’s gold thurible. Melville seemed to have forgotten our purpose in coming to the chapel. He spoke like a curator or guide conducting a walking tour of lower Manhattan.
“The Chapel used to be Anglican when the British were masters here—a faith as far removed from the Dutch Reformed Church of my father as the North Pole is from the South.” He lit a cigar, which seemed irreligious on the Sabbath, when the priest’s solemn voice could be heard through the windows. “They call it a ‘chapel of ease.’ Sailors come here—those who haven’t gone to the devil—who wouldn’t set foot in Trinity Church or other fancy palace of worship. The chapel is what passes in Manhattan for the Seamen’s Bethel, the whalers’ church in New Bedford.”
I let him talk, not caring if we spent the hour in the fresh air of Broadway instead of the stale air and staler sentiments I imagined were putting the congregation to sleep on a warm April day.
“George Washington prayed here when New York was the capital city. I can imagine him tortured by self-doubt like any other man, on his knees, bargaining with the Almighty. In the end, the world is arranged according to the laws of business and the principle of the survival of the fittest.” He spat a loose tobacco shred onto the pavement and concluded by saying, “Dog does not eat dog, but men will when they’re hungry.”
A lumbering wagon jolting over the cobblestones awoke Melville from his reverie. The teamster cracked his whip over the backs of the poor beasts and shouted a tremendous oath into the sedate street. The congregation seemed to reply with the singing of a hymn, whose words I could not catch.
“It hurts no one—not even me—to come here on occasion and sing the old hymns,” said Melville. He sang a few verses from one of the Psalms—for my benefit, as I supposed.
For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also.
The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry land.
“Are you a religious man, Shelby?”
“Not especially.”
“God and I have agreed to ignore each other. I hope never to backslide into religious mania, which can turn a man’s wits as readily as gin. The spirit in the bottle—Jinn or distilled grain—is all a man needs for consolation.”
“I can’t make out whether you’re a Christian or—”
“An infidel?” He spoke now like a boy who had behaved naughtily and wanted the world to know it.
“An unbeliever,” I replied.
“I don’t think God particularly wants our adoration, or our fear, either.”
“What then?”
“Maybe He wants our sympathy or our forgiveness for having made us so inadequately. If we are, as is said, fashioned in His likeness, He must be a curious deity—perhaps a helpless one. Or like Hephaestus, a lame and imperfect god. He might, as literary critics put it, have only limited omniscience. In this, He would be only slightly better off than His creatures.”
“It’s too late to go inside,” I said, showing him the time as it is kept by men.
“What do you say we take a look at Roebling’s bridge? I’d like to assure myself it is there; that it hasn’t been an illusion meant to deceive us into thinking we are masters of the universe.”
“Do you believe in anything, Herman?”
“Yes. It’s better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”
WE WALKED ON BEEKMAN TOWARD PECK SLIP. The day might have belonged to God elsewhere in the city, but here, amid warehouses and foundries, the streets were noisy with the ruck and riot of men whose house of worship had moist sawdust on the floor and a dented spittoon instead of a collection plate. We stopped to buy oysters from a man whose face looked like weathered stone and whose gnarled fingers bore the scars of his trade. We ate them off newspapers that had, like the oysters, been fresh the previous day. Mine, the Brooklyn Eagle, carried a story concerning an architect named William Graul, “Accused of Taking Bribes.” The front page of the New-York Tribune wrapping Melville’s oysters included a curious notice regarding the “grave of serious literature,” as Melville called it after having read it aloud.
LITERATURE AS A LAST RESORT.
Among the unredeemed pledges exposed in a city pawnshop window, books of a religious nature (the Bible, “Lives of the Saints,” &c.) are predominant. Dictionaries stand next in order, followed by works of the modern novelists.
“Lizzie uses Noah Webster as a doorstop when the house is drafty.”
She could use his dictionary as a footstool or a chopping block, for all I cared. The river’s damp was getting in my bones. The April sun didn’t warm those narrow streets packed with brick buildings put up during the war for the manufacture of tinware, iron chests, steam engines, rifle barrels, and barrel staves. Paint scaling, fixtures rusting, bricks in need of pointing, and, here and there, a window of glazing, the old buildings—along with their owners—had not recovered from the depression. As if in mourning for the useful past, an east wind was blowing chill ocean air into Peck Street, augmenting the briny smell of the remaining oysters in our laps. I imagined the wind playing an adagio on the harp strings of the gigantic bridge, which loomed above the rooftops.
“It’s a saurian monster about to climb out of the river and trample the city underfoot,” said Melville. “Who would have thought that mere men could have raised such a colossus?”
We boarded a steam ferry for Brooklyn. Melville appeared to be moved by the familiar scene, a miniature voyage drained of color, interest, and certainly romance. Watching the approach of the sprawling Grand Ferry Terminal, a Carpenter Gothic heap of wooden turrets and spires, fancy scrollwork, arcades, and a rooftop promenade, at the foot of Brooklyn’s Fulton Street, he muttered a few lines of verse to himself or to the choppy water lapping at the hull.
Passage to India!
Lo, soul! seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?
The earth to be spann’d, connected by network,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.
“Walt wrote those lines to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal in ’69, the year the first transcontinental railroad was finished. I wonder what he really thinks of all this?” With a sweep of his arm, Melville embraced the monumental towers strung with enough steel cables to reach Australia. “The bridge must wait, I think, for a poet of the future to sing its praises.”
Sad to think Walt Whitman will never see your bridge finished, Roebling—now that a stroke has left him housebound in Camden. You have that in common, if nothing else.
“The roadway is a mile long,” I said, descending into bathos, like the American eagle hauled down from the empyrean and stamped onto a quarter-dollar piece. Thus is spirit ever debased by commerce, Melville would have said. If he’d been lucky i
n his art, he’d probably have whistled a different tune.
I recited the weights and measures of your prodigy, Roebling, as if I were inspecting a cargo of mullet.
Ignoring my prosaic remarks, Melville said, “The bridge is important as a secular symbol of ascension and as potent as the Trinity Church steeple, which must humble itself before this feat of engineering—a sure sign that industry and not faith are uppermost in the modern mind.”
No longer the tallest structure in Manhattan, the steeple rose like a needle above the land receding behind us as the ferryboat drew Brooklyn ever nearer. To be on a boat in motion is to understand illusion. To recall that the Earth is also in motion is to understand our bewilderment before God, who, Melville, in one of his black moods, said is either a deaf-mute or a gibbering maniac.
Steam tugs, barges, hay boats, lighters, sailing ships, and packets mobbing the lower river yielded to our passage like courtiers at a royal progress or simpering civil servants.
“Whitman probably considers the bridge to be the death of something fine. The America he knows and loves, which, like the world of Cooper’s Indians or Irving’s comical Dutchmen, is fated to pass away. If it ever really existed.” He chewed a ragged nail, then said, “It’s as if a laundry boiler were soon to replace the Argo and a gaggle of Chinamen Jason’s Argonauts.”
The ferry whistle hooted in derision, and our boat having slowed, the Brooklyn depot jumped up quickly before us. He grew somber as its immense shadow fell over him, and then he said, “Why don’t we pay Washington Roebling a visit and hear what the chief engineer has to say on the subject? His opinion of the bridge’s future is bound to be sanguine, and, therefore, will be an antidote to my gloom.”
“I read that he seldom sees anyone.”
“His nervous constitution was ruined by caisson disease, but he’s not the crippled invalid and recluse most suppose.”
Forgive me, Roebling; I get so engrossed in my tales, I sometimes forget to whom I’m speaking. You’re not finding it tedious? Would you like me to stop? … Then I’ll keep talking until you tire of me and my jawing. If you fall asleep, I’ll talk to that fly crawling on that crust of bread. I wonder if it also feels its smallness in the scale of creation, or does it believe itself to be a god.
“But will he see us?” I asked Melville, as we started toward the bluffs, which rise above the river on the Brooklyn side.
“It’s true he sees very few people unconnected with the work and refuses interviews. We have nothing to lose, however, but a little time, since we’re already here. His house is up there on the heights. You can see his window glaring in the afternoon sun. The view of the bridge from his second-story room must be spectacular.”
We walked along Columbia Heights to the brownstone at number 110.
Roebling’s Second-Story Room on Brooklyn Heights, April 16, 1882
That afternoon on Brooklyn Heights, I didn’t tell Melville that you and I had known each other. Perhaps I was afraid you would choose not to see me—not because of your sickness, but because you might have heard of my disgrace. You have made something of your life, while I—well, as you can see.
Do you recall the time before the war when our fathers had business dealings? Mine owned a factory that fabricated iron fittings to your father’s specifications. It’s unlikely you remember our having played “‘Priest’ Vallon” and “Bill the Butcher” in the factory yard. Your life’s been crowded with schools, engineering projects, and the war. I read that you’d been breveted a colonel for bravery at Chancellorsville. Having little of my own, I admire those who do.
Do you remember the winter of 1867, when the river froze? You can’t have forgotten it. The ferries were icebound—a situation that made it obvious to those who had fought against it that an East River Bridge was needed. New York City and Brooklyn were cut off from each other unless one were brave enough to walk across the frozen river. Do you remember the day we skated from Fulton Street, Manhattan, to Fulton Street, Brooklyn? I was twenty-four; you would have been twenty-nine, or thirty. I was enrolled at Manhattan College and studying in a desultory way. Unlike you, I had no clear end in view, no aim or ambition except that I wished to get on in life. I wanted to earn enough money to own an apartment uptown, dress fashionably, sit behind a fast horse, and fascinate pretty young ladies—the usual occupations of a young man of the Gilded Age. I had no wish to work, make my mark, or form permanent attachments. I gave as much thought to the purchase of a pair of gloves as I did to a point in Blackstone’s Commentaries. I was more fastidious about the cut of a coat than a Latin conjugation. But that winter afternoon as you and I sped across the river is fixed in my memory, like a photograph of something marvelous.
It was bitter cold, and the wind from the Atlantic ripsawed through us to the bone, no matter that we were dressed as if for an Arctic expedition. The sky was low and white and, together with the ice-clad river, seemed one vast and contiguous nullity except for a bright helter-skelter of jangling sleighs. Our mouths covered by coachmen’s scarves, we said little. When we did speak, our words escaped our mouths, like ghosts. Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, the siege of Petersburg, and Gettysburg were already behind you, as was the Cincinnati-Covington Bridge, which you and your father had built across the Ohio River. You’d married Emily and, together, you had traveled through Europe, where you studied the sickness that, in five years, would strike you down.
I don’t recall why you were in Manhattan that day. Your Emily was home in Trenton with your two-month-old boy. Business, no doubt—business, not God or sexual desire, is the prime mover and the decider of fates.
Do you remember how thrilling it was, Roebling? We might’ve been sightseeing on the moon or a polar ice cap. It was one of those extraordinary moments of clarity when the slate is erased and all we know and think we know are confounded. Perhaps you felt the same when you flew over Lee’s army at Chancellorsville in a reconnaissance balloon or went under the river for the first time inside a pinewood “coffin.” The shadows on the caisson walls would have seemed to writhe in the eerie light of the calcium lamps. The silence must have been abysmal! You could have heard the sluicing of your heart while the “sandhogs” shoveled what—at any moment—could have become their grave, and yours. “Death is terrible, tho’ borne on angels’ wings!”
Do you recall the ships and boats frozen at their moorings—hulls like iron or wooden splinters lodged in the river’s skin? We had happened upon something otherworldly, like Ahab’s White Whale, which surely had been spawned in one of the moon’s ancient seas.
Last week when Melville and I came to visit, Emily—protective of your health and well-being—would not let us inside.
“Mrs. Roebling,” said Melville, as we stood in the hallway outside your rooms.
“Can I help you?”
You have a grand and formidable wife, Roebling.
“We’ve come to see the chief engineer,” replied Melville, not in the least subdued.
“I’m sorry, but Mr. Roebling is resting. Does he know either of you gentlemen?”
“No, but we would like to congratulate him on the bridge, which, we understand, is in the final stage of construction.”
“If you leave your cards, I’ll be sure to give them to my husband when he awakes.”
Melville gave her his card, and I mine. I got up on my toes and tried to steal a look over his broad shoulders, but I could make out little more in the gloom than a coat tree, an umbrella, and a pair of rubber boots leaning exhaustedly against the wall.
“Herman Melville, the novelist?” she asked after having read his calling card. I suppose that curiosity was struggling against circumspection in her. My card had provoked neither.
“I am the man!” he replied genially. “Or should I plead guilty and offer you my head?”
“My husband reads your novels. He thinks Moby-Dick is very fine.”
The night before, Lizzie had mentioned Melville’s novels. I wonder
ed what they were about and who or what was Moby Dick.
“He’ll be sorry to have missed you and happy you called on him,” she said to Melville. She scarcely acknowledged my presence.
“This is my associate, Mr. Ross, also of the United States Customs Service. We came out from Manhattan to view the work and thought, as long as we were in Brooklyn, to visit the chief engineer. We regret we won’t have the pleasure. Please give him our regards and our hopes for his complete return to health.”
She nodded and gently closed the door on us.
“I’m disappointed that we didn’t get to see the man himself,” said Melville as we walked back the way we’d come. “She’s a handsome woman as well as a capable one.”
I admired her broad and genial face, which in her youth would have been pretty. But years of conveying your instructions to the foremen and their questions to you had worn her to the bone. You could see weariness drawn in charcoal strokes around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. I felt sorry for her, Roebling, and wondered if she believed the bridge is worth the cost that you and she have dearly paid. Perhaps it’s enough for her to have helped to rear a prodigy the like of which the world has seldom seen, and it has seen much through its tired old eyes.