by Norman Lock
Martin mumbled his name.
“What’s that?” asked Gibbs, shaping his hand into a hearing trumpet. “You’ll have to speak up. I don’t hear so well as I used to when I was a boy. It’s the goddamn wharf! A noisy, stinking place—don’t you fellows find it so? Of course, Shelby has the old man’s ear. He’s the inspector’s pet. Lucky for him. But you, boy.” He turned to poor Martin again. “You, with the pretty face. You’re not under anybody’s wing. You could disappear, and nobody’d be the wiser. Your place in the Customs Service is the lowliest of all. First, there’s the chief crook, President Chester A. Arthur; then there are the collector of customs for the Port of New York and the naval officer, both of whom excel in graft; next come the surveyor, the deputy surveyor, and our own District Inspector Melville; then we come to Mr. Ross, appraiser, then me, and, finally, we get to you, Martin, assistant weigher. At two dollars a day, you’re lower than whale shit! Well, I seem to have known your name after all!”
I could hear Martin’s muffled groans and felt contemptuous of his lack of manliness. But was that fair? He was out of his element. I doubt there’s a man living in the marble houses of Fifth Avenue or Bond and Great Jones streets who could thrash Gibbs, a bully and a brawler. Gentlemen can be brutal, though they conceal the fact beneath their fine clothes and patronage of charity hospitals and opera houses, but they couldn’t have stood up to Gibbs, no more than a pedigree dog can fight a tenement rat. Martin might have been poor and plebian, but he hadn’t the mean streak of a street ruffian. Emboldened by rage, I struck our tormentor’s face. The blow sent him reeling.
“Goddamn it!” he shouted, wiping blood on the back of his hand.
Now it was he who drew a knife. I glared at him; we glared at each other; and in each other’s eyes, there was nothing to see except hatred. We were drawn by the force of its attraction and equally repelled by it like two magnets whirling in one of Edison’s dynamos. We wanted to hurl ourselves at each other and simultaneously felt that such an action would be impossible and contrary to some law of the universe governing the interactions of men. The moment passed too quickly for me to have parsed it, nor could I have had a notion of what went on inside Gibbs’s mind; the thoughts of a degenerate brain are impossible to guess. Since that night on the Battery, however, I’ve imagined them as they raced like sharks beneath his consciousness.
Gibbs folded his knife and put it in his pocket, and then he did a most astounding thing: He put his arms around us and, like a father who’d lost his temper over some trifling matter, he apologized first to Martin and then to me.
“I’ll say good night,” he said, and in a moment, he was gone, leaving us in perplexity.
I didn’t feel like talking, and apparently neither did Martin. Without a word, we walked back the way we’d come. I glanced behind me toward the bridge, but there was nothing to be seen of it.
West Street Customs Office, April 17, 1882
“My father sold French silks, Canadian furs, and California ostrich feathers at New York City auction houses, and by his fifties, he managed to ruin himself and his health in spite of his brother-in-law Gansevoort’s financial assistance, which, as far as Father could see, had no bottom. He died in ’32, a disgraced bankrupt.”
Melville was in a talkative mood as we sat eating lunch in our West Street office.
“Bankruptcy is not an exclusive club; it is one to which even I used to belong,” I said—drolly, I hoped. “If this were one of Dickens’s novels”—my hand took in our office and, by extension, the city of New York—“we’d be coughing up blood in the Tombs.”
“We’re surrounded by the world’s riches like two pashas and not a pair of disgruntled, underpaid civil servants,” he said, cutting the loaf of dark brown bread he favored. “Awaiting our pleasure, according to the bills of lading, are cotton and perique from St. James Parish, porcelain and silk from Canton, rosewood, mahogany, and teak from Papua, rum from the West Indies, cocoa beans from Maracaibo, sugar and salt from Curaçao, tea and spices from Calcutta, coffee beans from Java, cheeses from Marseilles, fancy lacework from Flanders, and fine linens from Belgium. The world comes to us, Shelby; we’ve only to sit and wait and, when it arrives, weigh, count, and appraise its commodities. And of course tax them.” He divided a sausage with his knife and concluded his paean to international trade: “We’re living in a storybook, my friend.”
“It gives me small satisfaction to be no more than a conduit through which abundance flows; it might as well be sewage for all the good it does me,” I commented rudely.
“When I was a boy, my mother read to me The Travels of Marco Polo. My mind was filled with voyages, and my walks with Father and my brother Gansevoort along the piers made my head spin. I longed to be a tattooed sailor. There were plenty of them about to frighten and enthrall a boy whose head was lost in the clouds above Tierra del Fuego and whose young heart beat like a ship’s drum calling men to quarters. What a life! I could taste it.” He took a bite of bread and another of sausage. “For a while, I lived it and relished every bit of it!” He chewed and swallowed as though he’d bitten off a piece of life itself, substantial as coarse German bread and savory as wurst. “Too soon, I gave it up.”
“I wanted to be a merchant prince.”
“Why?”
My aspiration appeared to have baffled him. But he might as well have asked a bird why it flies, a worm why it crawls, or a child why he’s dying of cholera.
“Why would you have wished for such a small thing? To spend your days in auction houses and countinghouses, in stock exchanges and traders’ pits, in bourses and banks, where men always sell themselves short. It was an ignoble dream, Shelby!”
“It was mine and my father’s!” I said, annoyed by his rebuke. “We can’t all get tattooed, tar our pigtails, and go to sea.” Or write books that no one bothers to read, I added silently.
“Shelby, I’m afraid you have no imagination.”
“Imagination is not among the qualities of a good businessman, Herman.”
During one of our earlier conversations, Martin had said that I had “a poetical strain,” an idea that pleased and also frightened me. I would not have wished to look into my glass and see a poet instead of a man. And yet I had once tried to be a gentleman and had purchased the latest works by Elizabeth Browning, Coventry Patmore, and our own John Greenleaf Whittier. (I couldn’t stomach Whitman.) Now here I was once more, declaring my mind to be prosaic, as if by undervaluing it, I hoped to pay a lesser tax.
Melville might have retorted that I had shown myself to be a poor businessman, but he said, “In my imagination, earth is covered by ocean.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger, a gesture denoting wisdom or madness. “Dry land was one of God’s earliest mistakes: He should have stopped at the great whales.” He cast an eye on the harpoon leaning against the wall. “I swear there is nothing on this earth so godlike as the sea and that I was never so happy as when I went down to it in ships!”
“The sea is a graveyard, an obstacle to trade, and, at best, a source of food for those who eat mackerel on Fridays,” I said, intending to be contrary.
“Spoken like a true landsman,” he said, shaking his head in disapproval.
“I am a landsman!”
“No need to raise your voice!” he shouted, as if he were on the quarterdeck and I aloft among thunderously flapping sails.
“You seem bent on belittling me today,” I retorted, with something like—God help me!—hurt feelings.
“If I have done, I apologize,” he said with a charming smile. “Caruthers was Christ’s own centurion last night.”
I supposed I had given him a look of bafflement, because he clarified his allusion: “The irreligious Roman with the spear. Caruthers seemed to enjoy twisting it between my ribs.”
“Will he get what he wants?” Now it was he who was baffled. “Caruthers.”
“Once a man has everything he needs, there seems to be nothing to stop him from getting all that he want
s.”
We fell silent, each entertaining his own thoughts.
“And how was your evening?” asked Melville after he had finished his lunch and swept the crumbs from his desk into the palm of his hand.
“Uneventful,” I replied, having already decided I would lie to him. “I went home and to bed.”
“You’re a lucky man. I’d rather have slept with a cannibal than had brandy and cigars with the collector of customs, Herr Caruthers. Havana cigars and French cognac, mind you. The duty on the spirits, I recall, was appraised at eighty cents a gallon. The cigars had been seized as contraband. The big bugs of our service are only slightly less dishonest than was Boss Tweed.”
Finding no place more convenient, Melville stowed the bread crumbs in his pocket.
“How is Finch doing?” I asked, and immediately regretted it.
“Finch?”
“Martin Finch.” I felt sweat start out on my forehead.
“The slight fellow we saw yesterday going into St. Paul’s?” I nodded.
“I’ve heard nothing against him.” He paused, then said, “You sometimes work together in the holds or in the scale house.”
“We do,” I replied, as though I’d been found guilty of colluding.
“Then you ought to know better than I how he’s doing.”
I stammered something in reply.
“Does he show the proper diligence in the performance of his duties?” asked Melville, imitating the sniffy pomposity of collector Caruthers.
“His work is more than adequate,” I replied blandly.
“He seemed a bright lad when I hired him.”
“He has a good mind,” I said.
“A good mind is hardly necessary here, as far as that goes. Still, it can’t do any harm. If nothing else, he’s someone you can talk to as you go about your business among the philistines. A good mind, you say? Perhaps I should avail myself of it. God knows, it’s a rarity on the pier.”
I smiled involuntarily at hearing my protégé praised, for so I was determined to think of him.
Melville studied his fingernails and then said, “You seem to take an interest in the boy.”
His remark had been casually made, yet it troubled me. I shrugged without comment.
“Well, he’s a likable young man,” said Melville. “No harm in it.”
The wind seemed to have gone out of our sails. Melville blew his nose energetically into a handkerchief large enough to rig a toy boat. I picked a loose thread from my cuff. He cleared his throat. We shifted in our chairs, creak answering creak. Our gazes roved about the room like flies unwilling to settle. A silence ensued that seemed an adjournment in a conversation waiting to be taken up again.
“How is Mrs. Melville?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.
“She’s well.”
“Please tell her I was asking for her.”
“I’ll do that, Shelby, and she’ll no doubt be pleased by your interest,” he replied with a particle of meanness in his expression.
“Tell her how much I enjoyed supper the other night.”
I was fumbling—don’t you see?—uncertain of myself and of how to proceed.
“I’ll be sure to do that also.”
He was looking intently at me.
“If there’s any way I can be of—”
“Of what?”
He had brought me abruptly to a halt, from which I recovered with the grace of a lassoed steer.
“Assistance!” Having spoken too emphatically, I felt the guilt we sometimes do even though we’re innocent. I tried again. “If I can ever do her a service, I’ll do it gladly.”
“Are you hoping to ingratiate yourself, Shelby? Do you find my wife so attractive that you’d court her under my very nose?”
I laughed nervously.
“Did I say something comical?” His gaze was scorching.
“I thought—”
“What did you think?”
“I must say, Herman, that your needling—”
Abruptly, he stood and took the harpoon in his hands.
“What?”
I was terrified, Roebling.
“You’re hiding something.”
“I—”
Before I could continue, he had heaved the harpoon at the wall opposite, where it bit deeply into the plaster.
I screamed, although the thing had not been aimed at me.
Melville laughed—you won’t credit this, Roebling—he laughed good humoredly.
“I had you worried. Admit it: I had you heeling in the wind.”
His moods, I knew by now, were variable. But this …
“It does a man good to be taken out of himself. Were you?”
“I was, yes; I was taken clear out of myself.”
“Good!” he shouted, clapping me on the back. “We’ve arranged things too nicely, you and I and most other beneficiaries of the machine. We’ll leave the poor aside, since they are the beneficiaries of naught, except what Christ promised them. We’ve smoothed the rough, ironed the rucks, graveled the dirt, and bricked over the gravel. We’ve glazed out the wind and cold and erased the sea’s dragons painted on ancient maps and tamed its casual cruelties, so that Vanderbilt, Gould, and Morgan can enjoy pleasure cruises in steam yachts. Why, a man can put himself and his luggage on board a train at Grand Central Depot and, in less time than it took God to finish His universe, disembark at San Francisco! It’s unnatural, Shelby; it’s not the life for which men were fashioned. We pretend we’re higher than the animals and lower than the angels, when all the time we’re partly one and partly the other. But mostly, we are beasts.”
He went to the wall and pulled out the harpoon; it came away with an effort. Plaster dust and horsehair clung to its barbs. I would not have been surprised to see the wall bleed, so deeply had the lance pierced it.
“I said that all we need to do is sit and wait for the world’s riches to come to us. There’s the modern age in a nutshell. We eat a pineapple or a coconut at Delmonico’s and think we have consumed the essence of Hawaii. We eat a plate of vermicelli and fancy ourselves Marco Polo. At tea, we’re offered a choice of “India” or “China,” as though a handful of leaves could stand for countries vast as continents! We fancy ourselves moguls, when, in actuality, we are scared little men.”
Picking up a sheaf of papers on his desk, he rattled them under my nose.
“Bills of lading, Shelby!” he exclaimed. “The spices of Arabia, the wood Noah and his sons used to build the ark, coffee ‘cherries’ grown in the forests of Ethiopia, on the foothills of the Andes, plantations in Java, or the volcanic slopes of Machu Picchu—the riches of the world are reduced to barely legible scrawls on bills of lading. As if I could smell the sea and feel it rolling beneath me while reading Richard Henry Dana’s book, or my own, for that matter.”
In the grip of a powerful emotion, he was speaking to someone not in the room.
“What is the whale oil we burn in our lamps or the ambergris our ladies daub at their temples and throats next to the whale itself? What would they say if they knew that their spicy perfume began as dirty bile in the tripes of a whale? It vomits ambergris, which washes up onto the coasts of Africa, Madagascar, the Maldives, the Indies, the Molucca Islands, and Japan—unless a whaleman has already ripped open its belly and scooped out the aromatic stuff. What would the ladies say if they could see that raw lump of grease and smell the putrid carcass of the dead beast from whose bowels it was mined?”
Melville had become possessed by what, in contractual law, is called force majeure: an urging beyond human control, usually malevolent. He was pacing the narrow confines of our office as a captain does his bridge, alert to whales or warships, wind or maelstroms, Saint Elmo’s fire or albatrosses.
“What is the story of a whale and its slaughter next to the animal itself and the hard and violent men who hunt it?” he asked, possibly of God, who might not have been listening. “Both commerce and literature squeeze essence from the thing itself
—one for profit, the other for—What is it that makes us ‘scorn delights and live laborious days’? God knows; I do not. It can’t be fame or money.” He laughed, as though a joke had been played on him, which, having long ago become inured to absurdity, he could appreciate. “They hunt symbols in my book, whereas Ahab hunted Moby Dick!”
I nearly asked him who Ahab was and what on earth was Moby Dick. (I had not then read the book.) But I was afraid to interrupt his oration, fueled by an increasing agitation. In such a voice, I imagined Daniel Webster delivered the eulogy for Major Melvill, Herman’s zealot of a grandfather, as well as the infamous “Seventh of March Speech,” which assured passage of the Missouri Compromise and prefigured Justice Taney and the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford confirming black people as chattel in law. Thus are linkages forged by which the world is moved and men enchained.
“There was an Ahab,” said Melville, after having paused to drink some water. “His name was Captain John Fisher, a New Bedford man. In those days, most came from New Bedford—the captains and their crews and the whaling ships. The town was Quaker, and whaling one of the most necessary trades in the world at that time. Quaker frugality and universal necessity made New Bedford the richest place in Massachusetts. Its men went down to the sea in ships and, much too often, to the bottom with them. The last anyone saw of Fisher, he was tangled in ropes and clinging to the flank of a whale.
“Nowadays, men hunt whales for bones to stiffen ladies’ corsets. How obscene that so colossal a creature should be annihilated to keep a woman trim! Do the ladies feel Leviathan underneath their dresses? Do they put on its knowledge with its power? Do they sense in their bones the nobility and prodigious force in its own? More than likely, they haven’t an inkling of where their stays come from. An elephant, perhaps, or a buffalo—or a woolly mammoth.”