Caroline carefully blotted from her memory two other lines from that eerie poem.
And all who heard should see them there.
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
SIX
“HOW COULD YOU DO IT?” John Sladen raged. “How could you let him capture you with the clanking clatter of a million dollars’ worth of cheap cotton cloth? Did you ask that old bastard how much he paid his workers? Most of them are women, you know. Poor farm girls like yourself, herded into those airless sheds from sunup to sundown. That’s where your million dollars came from. That’s what paid for Bowood’s silver salvers and marble mantelpieces and Turkey carpets!”
Caroline was descending Broadway on her way home from Miss Carter’s school. In a month she would graduate. A month later she would marry George Stapleton at Bowood. John Sladen seemed oblivious to these realities. He stalked beside her, ranting, almost shouting at her, his eyes raw with pain. Day after day he met her on upper Broadway and berated her all the way down to Beekman Street.
Caroline told no one about it. She let Sladen lash her verbally for an hour each day. In her room at 19 Beekman Street, she lay on her bed and wept for another hour. Why was she letting him do this to her? She asked herself the question a hundred times. She had no answer.
George Stapleton would have pounded John Sladen to jelly if he knew about it. Jeremy Biddle would have dragged him to the nearest tavern for a long not very friendly lecture. But all they knew was Sladen’s extreme dismay when he heard the news of Caroline’s engagement. He lost all the laboriously learned manners of a gentleman and called George a scheming son of a bitch and a dozen other names he had learned growing up in New York’s back streets. He had moved out of their Columbia rooms to a nearby boardinghouse, where he spent most of the day drunk. Various professors warned him that he was endangering his prospects of graduation. He ignored them.
Jeremy went to see John several times to try to talk some sense into his head. Sladen called him a toady, a buttsuck and other picturesque names and mocked his plans to marry Sally Stapleton as more of the same worship of the rich that had seduced Caroline. Jeremy was so offended he ceased all communication with him.
At times, as Caroline lay in her room after enduring a Sladen tirade, she pondered Hannah Stapleton’s ring on her left hand. Was this the reason for her submission? Was she accepting this abuse like a Quaker saint, trying by her refusal to defend herself to tell John that she loved him in a part of her soul, even though she did not choose to marry him?
On weekends she journeyed to Bowood to see the Congressman, who was overjoyed by the news that she had accepted George. He was even more pleased by George’s announcement that he was going to run for Congress. George’s mother, Angelica, on the other hand, was anything but pleased. She tried to persuade Caroline to change George’s mind and was not a little dismayed to learn her future daughter-in-law thoroughly approved of it. Caroline soon realized there was considerable tension between Angelica and the Congressman.
“My dear,” Angelica said, “do you realize you’ll have to live in New Jersey?”
“I’ve lived in Ohio and survived it,” Caroline said.
“But you’ll have to live with that domineering old man!” Angelica cried.
“I happen to love him.”
None of these triumphs large and small seemed to give Caroline the slightest power to resist John Sladen’s abuse. She had almost begun to tolerate it—even to like it in some strange way—when it suddenly ceased. For two days there was no trace of that lean, disheveled figure, that ragged voice, those tormented eyes, on Broadway. On the third day a boy of about ten, with the dirtiest face she had ever seen, approached her.
“Is youse Caroline Kemble?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“There’s a man named Johnny in me mudder’s house that wants to see youse.”
She followed the boy down side streets to a narrow cul-de-sac off Chambers Street. The three-story house sagged so seriously, it looked ready to collapse at any moment. This was a not unrealistic possibility in New York, where buildings were built quickly on the cheap and frequently came crashing down on their unlucky inhabitants. Caroline found John Sladen in a smelly basement room that reeked of rum. He looked more like a specter than a living man.
“John!” she said. “Are you ill?”
“It’s terminal, I assure you. I won’t be around to disrupt your wedding. I entertained a fantasy of going to the church and rising to the occasion when the parson asked if anyone had an objection. But it was never more than a pathetic dream.”
“What’s wrong with you? I’ll tell George or Jeremy. They’ll get a doctor.”
“They’d like nothing more than to prop me up for a month or two so they can gloat over the walking corpse. I’m not going to give them the pleasure. I have the only physician I need. Dr. Laudanum.” He gestured to a bottle full of greenish fluid on his night table.
“No!”
“I wanted to see you one more time—to tell you I forgive you. You had no idea you were dealing with such a frail creature. A man playacting at being a hero out of Byron—with nothing inside him but vapor and the stink of the gutter. You made me imagine I could attempt something magnificent with you beside me. When you turned away, you forced me to face what a joke, a fake, I am.”
“You will do something magnificent, John. You don’t need me. You have the mind, the spirit, the knowledge. You have a voice that must be heard.”
He shook his head. “The only person I wanted to hear it is no longer interested.”
“Not true, John. Not true. I’ll always be interested. I’ll always respect—honor—what we felt for each other, what you shared with me about your hopes for this country.”
“That must be Falstaff’s honor you’re talking about. The honor I imagined was stronger than the iron bars the Stapletons make at Principia Forge. Stronger than the strongboxes full of banknotes in their vaults—”
“John, please!”
Pity was mingling with subterranean desire in Caroline’s soul. She wanted to soothe this man’s pain, the pain she had caused—she wanted to resurrect the democratic warrior she had broken. She wanted to save , him from the oblivion he seemed to be courting in her name. The new century’s shift from thought to feeling, from reason to passion, had exposed millions of souls to spiritual earthquakes. One was heaving in Caroline’s heart now.
She sank down beside him on the bed. “How can I prove to you that I care?”
There was no need for an answer. His lips were on her mouth. The bed was closer than close. She was a child of Mary Wollstonecraft. Sin was no barrier to the desire those visionary flashes had revealed at Bowood. There was only the faint voice of calculation, dismissed in the maelstrom that was engulfing her. The imagery of the underground river in “Kubla Khan” leaped in her soul:
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing
Underground, it was all happening underground. Above on the civilized earth paraded naive George and jealous Jeremy and haughty Angelica and her pious little niece Sally. Yes, and strutting Fenimore Gardiner and a hundred other gentlemen just like him, pumped full of gaseous pride by their money and bloodlines. On they paraded in the indulgent spring sunlight, convinced of their knowledge of the higher truths while down here in the cellar of the soul another truth was being discovered. A truth that lay voiceless until the agile tongue awoke it, that was as insubstantial as air until caresses gave it flesh and pulse and heartbeat. Would it become another monster, like the one Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley concocted for Dr. Frankenstein?
Caroline Kemble did not care. She did not care. She did not care. She was beyond any and all calculation, judgment, prediction. She was a woman in love with grief, with pity, with despair. John Sladen was above her now in the stillness, thrusting, there was a sweet, tearing pain—she welcomed it, treasured it, wanted pain as much as she wanted John Sladen, as much as
she wanted love, as much as she wanted proof of her honor, as strong as any man’s, as any woman’s, this love that consumed and subsumed, that joined her to the women of history and myth, from Helen of Troy to Virgil’s Dido to Dante’s Beatrice to Abelard’s Héloïse, love and the world well lost, she did not care care care.
It was over. The pale blood of her maidenhead speckled the grimy sheets. They lay silent for a long time, their lips, their naked bodies, touching. “I want to marry you,” John Sladen said.
“Impossible,” Caroline said. “The engagement has been published in the newspapers. George will kill you.”
“More likely I’ll kill him. I can use a gun. He’s a bigger target.”
“Insane! Don’t you remember what happened to your hero, Colonel Burr? To your father? What do you think your future would be if you killed Angelica Van Rensselaer Stapleton’s only son? You’d be a pariah. I’d be something even worse.”
“There are other cities. It’s a big country.”
“I wanted to show you how much I loved you.”
“And you discovered the real meaning of the word. Caroline, we can’t turn our faces away from this truth without becoming hypocrites forever. An American Dante would consign us to the deepest pit of hell, infinitely below Paolo and Francesca. Can’t you hear Virgil telling the tale of Caroline and John, the lovers who denied their love, the morbid details of their hollow lives?”
Frantically, Caroline struggled against the current that was sweeping her headlong into a sunless sea. “I must think,” she said. “Think and think. In the meantime, you must pour that laudanum into the gutter and return to college. We’ll meet here in two days to discuss this—this …”
“Truth.”
“Yes.” Her voice tolled like a funeral bell in her ears. “Truth.”
Caroline spent the next two days in torment. Thought seemed impossible. Her broken sleep was full of images of desire. A letter from the Congressman, inviting her and George to join him for an eighty-sixth birthday celebration at Bowood, only multiplied her anguish. She sat through her classes at Miss Carter’s school in a daze. She lost track of conversations at the Stapleton dinner table. Sally Stapleton joked about letting love befuddle her.
On the second afternoon, Caroline wound her way back to John Sladen’s basement room. She found the place cleaned and almost fragrant. John had shaved and found some decent clothes. Somehow that only made him more irresistible. The bed loomed in the corner, a deceptive expanse of snowy purity.
“Have you thought?” he asked.
“Have you?”
“Only of you. Nothing but you.”
“You haven’t gone back to college?”
He shook his head. She felt a lurch toward despair. Had she hoped that confronting his friend George Stapleton might change his mind? Or the stern voice of reason that prevailed in Columbia’s halls might dissipate his madness?
“You promised me!”
“I only promised to throw away the laudanum.”
He drew her to him for a violent, authoritative kiss. “I begin to think we must revise our ideas about happiness,” he said. “Our intellects are puny pygmy creatures compared to our passions. They’re the true gods. They have to be propitiated or they’ll destroy us.”
He began to undress her. She could stop him with a word, a look. But she let him do it. “I thought there were no gods or goddesses,” she said.
“Except the ones we create,” John said. “We’re creating one here. A god of love that will guarantee us happiness for the rest of our lives.”
It made no sense. He had no money—and no prospects of making money if he became involved in an ugly breach-of-promise lawsuit or a duel or both. She would be stigmatized as a slut—even if there were no eyewitnesses to her visits to this basement room. Caroline saw these realities with incandescent clarity. But they did not matter compared to her desire for this man, to the wish to be held and to hold, to possess his dark presence and simultaneously surrender to it. Why why why?
The question clanged in her mind like a runaway fire bell, but it was much too late. They were in bed again, naked, kissing, entwined. The alarm bell dwindled to a distant tinkle as the waters of Alph rolled over them and they sank into its sunless depths.
For the rest of the week, Caroline came to John Sladen’s room every day. She thought of nothing but what would happen and what had happened there, in the underground world of their love. Each day she felt doom swirling around the sagging house. It oozed down the stairs like the fog that sometimes prowled New York’s streets. They were both doomed, but it did not matter. . Their god of love was an underground deity, as blind as a mole to the disaster creeping toward them on the earth’s malign surface.
Had she become two persons? The underground Caroline who loved John Sladen in those forbidden afternoons and the surface Caroline who dutifully accompanied her future mother-in-law to shop for her bridal trousseau, who discussed her honeymoon in Europe with George Stapleton on weekend visits to Bowood, who listened to the Congressman’s advice on cities to see and others to avoid in Italy and France? It was madness of a sort she had never imagined she could perpetrate—and she did not know how to stop it. Only doom could rescue her—and simultaneously destroy her.
Doom finally arrived, late the following week. As the lovers lay in their subterranean bed toward the end of another passionate afternoon, a hand knocked on the door. Jeremy Biddle called, “Are you in there, Sladen? I’ve got some bad news from college.”
A more unlikely choice to impersonate doom could hardly be imagined. Awkward, limping Jeremy wore the face of an American everyman. Sheer accident—and the habits of a third—had thrust him into the role. John Sladen’s reckless nature made another large contribution.
Jeremy had tracked Sladen to this tenement basement out of a stubborn sense of responsibility for John’s endangered future. Several professors had announced that unless he returned to class and took the final examinations that were to begin the next week, he would not graduate. The tenement was not the boardinghouse to which he had originally retreated. But the building was well known to Columbia students. It was their favorite brothel.
Since John had resolved not to return to college, he might have remained silent behind his closed door and Jeremy would have gone away after a few more knocks. John’s choice of residence had already discouraged Jeremy. But John decided it was time to reveal his triumph to a man who would report it to George Stapleton.
With nothing more than a dressing gown around him, John flung open the door and invited Jeremy into the room. Caroline shrank under the covers of the bed. “What’s your news, Biddle?” John said.
“I begin to think it’s irrelevant,” Jeremy said. “It has to do with your graduation. From what I see here, I doubt if it will ever take place.”
“What you see here is the triumph of love over money,” Sladen said. “The victory of the truth over gilded lies.”
“I’m afraid I see something very different,” Jeremy said. “We might start with the betrayal of a friend and the ruin of a beautiful young woman. We might add the morals of a scoundrel and the seduction of a virgin. Plus the baseness of a swine and the sad folly of the uncontrolled heart. I could add to the list almost indefinitely. But I prefer to take action.”
With a decision that amazed Caroline, Jeremy strode across the room and contemplated his beautiful cousin in her bed of shame. She did not look very beautiful, her hair streeling and matted on her sweaty cheeks, the cheap bedclothes clutched to her pulsing throat. “Get out of that bed and dress yourself with all possible dispatch,” he said. “You’re returning to Beekman Street immediately.”
Jeremy was speaking out of his years of affection for George Stapleton. In some ways he was closer than a brother to him. He had spent his schooldays and almost all his summers at Bowood with George since Jeremy was fifteen and his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage had made him feel less than welcome at home in Philadelphia.
“Sladen,” Jeremy said, “this woman was placed under my protection by her mother. She’s legally still a minor. If you try to interfere in any way, I’ll put you in jail. Scum like you may be indifferent to the law, but they’re not above it.”
“This woman is my wife! In all but name.”
“Don’t say another disgusting word! If you try to stop her from leaving this room, I’ll beat you senseless.”
“How do you plan to do that?” John sneered. He was a head taller than Jeremy. He had done his share of fighting on the mean streets of his youth.
“Like this.” Jeremy sank his fist into John’s stomach. As he doubled over in agony, Jeremy hit him with an uppercut that sent him crashing into the wall. Among the many sports George Stapleton and Jeremy had enjoyed during their summers at Bowood was boxing.
Jeremy turned to a wide-eyed Caroline. “Get dressed!”
Wrapped in a sheet, she clutched her clothes and retreated to a corner. Jeremy kept his eyes on the groaning John Sladen as he dragged himself to a chair, clutching his bleeding mouth and bruised stomach. In 120 seconds by Jeremy’s watch, Caroline was dressed. He led her upstairs to the street.
“I won’t ask you why this happened,” he said as they walked downtown. “I don’t believe any explanation is possible—or needed. Here’s what you’re going to do when you get to Nineteen Beekman Street. You’ll go up to your room and write a letter to John Sladen informing him that his conduct has convinced you that he must leave New York immediately. State in the plainest terms that you do not love him. Instead, you love George Stapleton and intend to marry him on the third of June, 1828, as published in your engagement notice in the newspapers.”
“But I do love him,” Caroline sobbed.
“You don’t anymore. Your infatuation is over. You were seduced, you succumbed—but it is over.”
The Wages of Fame Page 7