by Norman Lock
Franklin picked up the hamper, and we left the park and caught a southbound train. A return ticket reminds us that life on earth is a to-and-fro business. But there is no coming back from eternity or the bottomless pit of time.
The Brooklyn Bridge’s Manhattan Tower, May 9, 1882
I awoke at the Brooklyn Bridge, or so it seemed to me. I’d left Gansevoort Pier at the end of the day, only to find myself transported to the bottom of Fulton Street, in sight of the East River. By what conveyance I had arrived there—whether an omnibus, elevated train, or aeronaut’s balloon—I could not have said. Like a man coming out of a mesmeric trance or an ether sleep, I looked about me in dismay at the iron doors leading to the stone vault inside the Manhattan anchorage, where wine merchants lay down expensive bottles of European vintage as if it were the niter-encrusted crypt in which Poe caused Fortunato to be walled up. The “Amontillado” that had lured me against my will—no, my will was in abeyance—was the impulse that had also caused Melville’s Ishmael to “pause before coffin warehouses,” and, from what I know of his life’s story, had brought Melville himself to the brink of annihilation.
You must’ve contemplated it, as well. Sometime during your own entombment while you struggled with the intractable materials of granite, steel, and human flesh, you must have thought and thrilled to the idea of suicide. I prefer Hamlet’s word: self-slaughter. I picture—forgive a ghoulish imagination alien to your own—a man, as might be you, me, or Melville, cutting his own throat and then the ardent blood pumping into a basin, or, say, eviscerating and roasting his own bowels. Nothing surpasses the medieval mind for ingenious tortures. Modern man, prosaic to the last, contents himself with a rope end or drop of arsenic. Roebling, it’s butchery that I think of when I whisper that grisly compound noun from Hamlet’s soliloquy, which—each in his own way—we all will utter.
I raised my eyes to the bridge, your monument to human ambition and resolve, and saw, in its granite towers, which soared into air once ruled by eagles, not cathedrals, but guillotines awaiting the heads of giants to lop off. Thus can the meaning of symbols change according to the mind’s well-being or disease. I gazed at your bridge and imagined, in years to come, bodies dropping like stones into the river below. If the time comes when life cannot be endured a moment longer, I think that such a dying fall would be … I have no word to say what it would be. But it is better to jump from a sublime height than put a bullet through one’s brain or nibble poison like cheese. I think that to jump from one element into another—there to have one’s fire put out—is a more pleasing end than any offered by knife, rope, or rat bane. It was the death reserved for fallen angels, though the infernal lake was one of fire instead of the kindly water—kindly to accept us without demur, as a mother does the child at her breast.
My father took his own life. I rarely speak of it. When the panic and depression ruined him, the fire went out, and nothing I could say or do rekindled it. Like most men of business, he couldn’t conceive of himself without one. I found him in his study, his Colt Walker in a lifeless hand, his finger caught in the trigger guard. He left no note behind him except for an ironic gibe on the frontispiece of his first edition of Barrett’s The Old Merchants of New York City: “Gone to sell ice to the damned.”
What would you be, Roebling, without your stones and cables, your tables and diagrams, formulae and the mathematics of your trade? Nothing. And it is in protest against this nothing that you’ve suffered martyrdom in this room to see the work completed. Melville, too, fears the nothing a man can become when his work is taken from him. He writes like a man possessed—desperately throwing his voice into the abyss and waiting to hear its echo.
I almost wish that I could walk onto the bridge and, stopping midway between Manhattan and Brooklyn, above the river belonging to them both, step off into eternity like a man poised on the gallows between heaven and earth, neither of which belong to him any longer. At the cost of a moment’s terror, I’d be washed clean by the everlasting water instead of by strangers arrived to wash my corpse. I would die without the shame of a second infancy. If only I could give myself to the river, and, later, if my body be not found, to the ocean, where I would circumnavigate the globe, rolling in the deeps, at play with the calves, until my atoms merged with the water’s and with theirs! What stays my hand? Is it the Dane’s fear of violating “the canon ’gainst self-slaughter”? I doubt my reason is as pure as that. No, I’m afraid of the instant of pain, which, like the shattering of a stained-glass window, would admit me to an oft-imagined realm, where my damnation awaits. (According to the Calvinists, my end was determined long before my beginning.)
I’m not Hamlet or Ahab or even Melville. My passions are sized to the dimensions of a stock exchange, a trading pit, or a customs office on West Street, near the North River, where fraudulent men are exposed with the jubilation of Shylock sharpening his knife to take from bankrupt Antonio a pound of flesh. Once upon a time, I was a businessman in New York who hoped to become a merchant prince. The ambition having been a tawdry one, the failure cannot be considered tragic.
Do you really think I judge myself too harshly?
You’re right, of course. A person is neither all one thing nor another. For an artist to claim he has caught his subject is a lie: The human essence eludes delineation and description. You might as well attempt to coax a cloud of smoke into a bottle as capture a person in words or paint. I suspect that my tale has not done Melville justice in the telling. To try to tell the story of a man is inevitably to fail and to make him smaller than life, which is, and must be, always larger than any one person’s comprehension of it. Humans are not cattle to be shown and judged at a county fair. And yet, knowing this, we still pretend it is otherwise.
I foresee an unintended use for your bridge: a jumping-off point between this world and the next, at a place where two cities will either claim or deny jurisdiction, according to the fame or notoriety of the deceased. I agree that such an eventuality lies outside geometry, catenary curves, and structural analysis. I’d like to see an arithmetic that could account for it as well as other instances of passion and unreason. Such formulae, which rule over exceptions and singularities, nightmares and the dark motives of the heart, have yet to be devised. We can only shudder to think what might be done with them by the unscrupulous. Neither you nor your father is in any way to blame, Roebling, for the suicides that will surely come. Ideas once conceived cannot be unconceived. The Brooklyn Bridge exists not only in the space it occupies but also in the minds of men and women and—perhaps even more tenaciously and ineradicably—in their imaginations. Just so do Ahab and the White Whale exist beyond anyone’s power to annul them.
Chapel of the Christ in Pike Street, near the Brooklyn Bridge, May 9, 1882
Returning from the bridge and my contemplation of eternity, I paused at a chapel on Pike Street. I could see that it had once been a confectionary, but in place of sweetmeats, a shabby manger cradling a baby made of fired clay occupied the store window, together with a lamb missing a leg, which was nosing the holy infant with its woolly muzzle. By the yellowing handkerchief swaddling the child, the dust, and a bleached velvet drape behind the Nativity, I supposed that it had been put out at Christmas and then overlooked or forgotten. I pressed my nose to the glass and peered through the imperfectly drawn drapes, but I could see nothing of the room, though a light was burning within. I almost knocked at the window but hesitated, feeling afraid, as I had felt as a young boy made to sit in an empty church so that I would feel God’s eyes on me and understand that no one can escape His notice or punishment, regardless of the darkness in which he hopes to hide. I was about to walk on, when the door opened and a man stepped outside onto the pavement.
“What do you want?”
I thought it was a question more fitting for a confectioner to ask than a minister of God, for so I saw him to be, although like the manger and the woolly lamb on the little stage behind the window, his appearance was shabby. His hair a
nd beard wanted cutting, and his coat mending. He looked to be an old man, but I might have been deceived by his stoop and his drawn, pallid face.
“I’m not sure what I want!” I replied honestly. At that moment, I realized that I had been struggling with uncertainty, but as to its cause, I could not have said—not to him, not to myself. To say that I was “struggling” and to say “with uncertainty” was to understate both my struggle and my uncertainty, which had earlier in the day brought me to the edge of insensibility, beyond which lay madness or death.
Yes, I do sound like a character in a gothic novel. Underneath the gaudy language, one can find truth even there.
The man turned his back, and I understood that I was free to follow him inside the chapel or to continue on my way. It was not for him to encourage or discourage those who were washed up on his doorstep.
I followed him into a room where a dozen chairs faced a makeshift altar on which a cross bearing a gnarled-looking Christ, two tarnished candlesticks, a silver chalice, and a salver for the Host were arranged. Otherwise, the room was unadorned and as cheerless as the scale house on Gansevoort Pier. If God had ever inhabited this place, He’d fled from it long ago. Despite the man’s neglect of himself and his show window, he was not unattractive. He possessed a magnetic quality, which drew me to him and, strange to say, to—Roebling, I must admit, however preposterous it sounds, that I sensed God in him. His coat—a U.S. Army chaplain’s from the War of the Rebellion—had an unpleasant sour odor, and his hair and beard were rank with stale tobacco smoke, but in that squalid chapel, they could have served as frankincense. Had I been the impressionable sort, I might have dropped to my knees before him—so moved was I. Yet he seemed an ordinary man—less than that because the light in his eyes appeared to be going out. Maybe this is what finally determines our ordinariness: the deadness of our eyes. He was a man who had suffered—that much was obvious. I had the impression that he had suffered for his God—or possibly because of Him.
“It is weakness in a man not to know what he wants,” said Winter. He also bore a name suitable to an allegory. He was leaning against the altar in a way that struck me as natural rather than irreligious. “It is, however, almost universal in our kind. Men who know their desires and obey them are to be feared. They are fanatical. To pretend to know God’s and act upon them is the most dangerous and fanatical presumption of all.”
“I know that I am not happy—”
“Happiness is beside the point,” he retorted.
I asked him, indignantly, if he did not believe that a man or a woman was entitled to happiness. I might have been asking whether or not we were entitled to eat our neighbor because we happened to be starving. He was a strange man and a stranger minister, yet I felt compelled to remain in his stuffy room and listen to his sad commentary. If only he would have raised his hand and smote the altar or raised his voice and chastised me, I could have laughed and left him to his thunderation!
He seemed to forget I was there. He talked as if to himself. When the candles guttered and went out, he went on talking in the dark. He’d been a Lutheran chaplain in Grant’s army and before that had served in the war with Mexico and in the Utah War, when “doughface” Buchanan sent an army against Brigham Young and his Mormon militia. Winter had seen much, and what he had seen had marked his countenance, his voice, and doubtless his soul. John Brown especially had affected him. Winter had been with him on the night before the abolitionist was hanged for treason and murders committed at Harper’s Ferry. He had not been able to forget Brown or his injunction: “Even if you can no longer believe in the efficacy of Grace, in divine Providence, in salvation and last judgment, in the words of your calling, in goodness and mercy, you must act as if you do believe in them.”
At last, he fell silent, and I roused myself and asked, “Have you no faith, then?” I was appalled to hear a minister of God speak as this man had spoken, even in that tiny room, with its tatty wares displayed in an unwashed window. I am not a religious man. In matters of faith as in economics, my attitude has always been laissez-faire. But his words had offended my sense of decorum. We were in the house of God, and it did not matter that the house was mean. Perhaps I felt His eyes on me again, sitting in the dark—the same dark as that of my childhood, because darkness is one and indivisible, whereas the light seldom arrives unaccompanied by shadows. “Have you no faith at all?” I repeated.
“Not as a child does,” he replied calmly, “but as a man sometimes will for whom Christ has been worn to a splinter—or a matchstick, which he is saving for a night colder than he can bare, but whose ultimate efficacy he cannot verify without destroying it. My faith is a chill and doubtful possibility of salvation.”
Winter had nearly let the fire go out in him.
“Not for an hour since that night have I forgotten John Brown or his words to me.”
He talked about the aftermath of the late war, his disappointment in love, a daughter whom he had not seen in years, his itinerant ministry in the western territories, his loneliness, and his constant wrestling with God, who he wished would show Himself, even if he were to be struck down and damned by Him.
“I’ve often wondered if Old Brown was correct in what he said to me. To do wrong in the name of one’s notion of right may be contrary to God’s wishes. I believed in John Brown and the rightness of his cause. Robert E. Lee, who was in charge of the execution, believed in the rightness of his. Both were good and honorable men; both acted with conviction, though in pursuit of opposite ends. One of them, however, must have been wrong, since not even God can reconcile moral contradictions. I fear I may have been wrong to have praised a faith I myself lacked.”
He was lost in his own bewilderment, and I realized that he could not help me. I was not even certain of my reason in having followed him inside the chapel. What had I wanted there? To confess? If so, to what? I ought to have sensed without needing to step inside God’s hovel that whoever ministered to the souls of men in such a place would suffer his own torment.
Union Beach, New Jersey, on Raritan Bay, May 10, 1882
On Wednesday, Melville and I boarded the Armenia and steamed down the North River and onto Upper New York Bay. Castle Garden, where Jenny Lind had sung, and the Battery fell behind us as the ferry traveled through a stretch of water between Ellis Island and Governor’s Island, menacing with the ramparts of Fort Gibson and Fort Columbus. Passing though the neck separating Brooklyn and Staten Island, I saw the highlands of the Navesink rise above the distant New Jersey coast. There in another age—thought savage by many, golden by others—Lenni-Lenape Indians had raked up oysters big as dinner plates and fished for blues or winter flounder, according to their season.
The steamer crossed into the sovereign state of New Jersey’s territorial waters, named the Raritan, composed of the same atoms as New York Bay, as well as the Atlantic, whose salt mingles with them both. Annexation, possession, and division are the delight and raison d’être of governments, politicians, and cartographers. They are also qualities of men and women who seek, by addition or subtraction, to redraw the boundaries of themselves. To conquer and to be conquered by another’s stronger will are two sides of the same penny.
Melville and I sat amid mail sacks and crates bound for Keyport, a town whose small harbor was the principal coastal port for shipments of New Jersey produce to Staten Island and Brooklyn, across the water in Lower New York Bay. Arriving at the slip, we disembarked as deckhands knotted hawsers around the iron bollards’ rusty necks. The town was more populous that I had supposed. The dirt streets were lined with wood-framed stores and houses faded and peeling in the salt air. Wood lots of pine and spruce remind us moderns that Indians had once lived in the gloom of an ancient forest vanishing, sadly, into history’s airless rooms. One day, only engravings and dioramas will be left to raise the past from the grave of time.
We boarded a ’bus, which traveled the bay’s coastline between Perth Amboy and Sandy Hook, and got off at Union Beach, w
here the crippled steamer George E. Starr had run aground. She’d been harried by the Wolcott, a United States revenue cutter sent in pursuit from Jamaica Bay. After the Starr had foundered, the collector of customs had given Melville charge of the valuation of her cargo, which included opium. I was accompanying him as the appraiser and bearer of the necessities of our universally despised trade.
The Starr had been making for New York City when she was seen by the lighthouse keeper at Sandy Hook, which marks the Atlantic’s entrance into the bay. She had taken on contraband at Philadelphia and managed to slip out of port ahead of the revenue men. The Wolcott caught up with her off the coast of Brooklyn at Long Beach. She fired across the Starr’s bow and forced her onto the bay’s Jersey side, intending to bottle her up inside Keyport Harbor.
Copper sheaved, the Starr was an old-fashioned clipper built in Baltimore during the Civil War. She’d been hauling freight across the Gulf until a smuggling ring purchased her. Like any topsail schooner, she was fast and agile and ought to have outrun the Wolcott except that her owners had chosen the crew for reasons having more to do with criminality than ship-handling experience. When they saw the revenue cutter bearing down on them, they panicked; the ship broached and heeled. The cutter drove her, as a dog does sheep, landward, where she grounded on a gravel shoal.
All on board her were thought to have swum ashore and fled into the dense pine woods. A platoon of marines from the Brooklyn Navy Yard had arrived and were searching them. A retired warship used to train recruits was lying off the beach to guard against looters. Given the enormous value of the cargo, the Treasury Department had no wish to see it carried off and sold piecemeal to Irish roughnecks at Hell Gate and in the Bowery.
“Opium-running is something new to these waters,” said Melville as we stood on the beach and shaded our eyes against the glaring bay. “In 1816, John Jacob Astor smuggled ten tons of Turkish opium from Smyrna into Canton, enlarging the fortune he’d made in beaver skins. Since he wasn’t evading taxes here, there was nothing to prevent him from getting richer there. What the government doesn’t want to see is the Afghan trade setting up in New York City.”