Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  The side streets, in which Marcus originally erected 243 terraced houses (there are about 600 now, most of which were added in a second wave of construction in the 1850s), were graded with similar care to ensure that all of his workers, whose rent was deducted from their wages (which were, at any rate, paid in scrip), knew to whom they owed the luxury of a home with four rooms on two floors, plus space for a kitchen garden in back, just by looking outside—or, for that matter, at the shadow that the colossal edifice atop the hill cast on their south-facing windows. Stammers Hall eschews the Greek Revival aesthetic of the era for a cooler Georgian style reminiscent of Edinburgh’s New Town. The sheer size of the building renders it less elegant than monumental: three stories of local bluestone polished to a high sheen and crowned by a massive hipped roof of slate diamonds beneath which lived the three families of slaves who saw to the mansion’s upkeep, including the ancestors of the bakers Brown. With the exception of the rusticated quoins of the first and second floors and the fluted pilasters that segment the north and south faces into five equal bays, the alternating peaked and arched lintels over the building’s 120 windows and French doors (forty-five in front and back, fifteen more on each side), the three-foot-long conch-shaped corbels supporting the soapstone gutters hidden in the copper cornice and, finally, the scrim, also copper, and worked in a tight Greek key, that screens the attic windows (although to the attic’s occupants, who were responsible for making sure the railing was tinted by not even a fleck of verdigris, the scrim must have looked rather more like what it was, namely, the bars of a cage), the building’s facade is unadorned save for four friezes in the pediments of the massive faux gables that were tacked onto each of the house’s exposures almost a decade after the original structure was completed: allegories of mining, commerce, education, and service each carved in situ from fifteen tons of anthracite. The masters regularly denounce the friezes as sentimental claptrap and refuse to clear the ravens’ nests from them, not to mention the raven shit, so it looks as though the various miners, misers, masters, and slaves are all scarecrows losing their stuffing, and suffering from acute cases of vitiligo to boot.

  But the mansion was, in many ways, the least impressive aspect of Marcus’s estate. Behind it, on Inverna’s southern slope, more than four hundred acres of sculptured gardens cascade down the mountainside like a courtesan’s hooped panniers. Combining the older French formalism of André Le Nôtre with Gertrude Jekyll’s Victorian mania for “nature, perfected,” the gardens are almost always referred to in the plural (even in the Dog Latin name preferred by the novices, the Botanica Balbi). The upper levels are a patchwork of the kind of overwrought horticultural brocades associated with Versailles or Kensington: cherry, peach, olive, and myrtle parterres; boxing ring–sized mandalas woven from pleached roses; a yew labyrinth the size of a football field at whose center lies a second maze, itself the size of a squash court, cultivated from lavender and rosemary, whose lines mirror those of the outer maze, though the open and closed passages are reversed. Everything reeks of an overeager, almost hysterical quality, not just to make an impression but to impress: from the eleven fountains, each adorned with a statue originally executed in the classical mold but which, because they were carved from anthracite, gradually eroded to, first, an amorphous Henry Moore–like bulbousness and thence to Giacomettiesque emaciation, to the massive gravel field dotted with 512 eighteen-inch boxwood balls planted in quincunx pattern. Even the lawns, greens, and parks feel overdetermined, starting with the fact that some are called lawns, others greens, and still others parks, depending upon the type of grass they’re made of, how short it’s cut and whether it’s meant for tennis, croquet, bowls, or simply taking in a well-planned vista. But the pièce de résistance is undoubtedly the Parrot Pagoda. Named ex post facto for the colony of monk parakeets that settled in its upper reaches sometime between the first and second world wars (which is to say, Mom, about fifty years after the mines closed and the last canary was set free), the eight-sided, eight-story tapering tower, eighty feet wide at it base and eighteen at its apex, is fashioned entirely from flowering or fruiting trees, shrubs, and vines, a fugacious floral arrangement that’s as much Vegas casino as it is Zen temple. The foliage tends to peak in late April or early May, so you can just imagine the number of brides-to-be who’ve asked to be married within it (including, according to my mother, her mother). But unless you’re familiar with the Academy, you’d probably be surprised at the malicious glee with which the masters turn down every single request.

  The lower two-thirds of the mountain—more than two thousand acres—is swathed in garlands of forest and streams that empty into little lily- and lotus-covered ponds. The massive limbs of spiny-leaved live oaks writhe from their boles like kraken erupting from the brine; stands of white birch poke from bracken-covered soil like the fingers of giants buried alive at the close of the age of Titans; honey locusts brandish clusters of spikes as long and red as bloody knitting needles, through which hummingbird moths flit as cavalierly as clownfish in a coral reef. There are more than a dozen beech trees each as big as a barn, their bowered trunks etched with Theban dyads reaching back a century and a half, a dozen more magnolias the size of circus tents, their purple-tipped petals blowing across the lawns every spring like frothy wine spraying from a shook bottle, while every fall bands of aspen and sorrel and coffeewood and tupelo gird the lower third of the mountain in ribbons of russet and pink and pale yellow and bright red like a Monet landscape brought to life. More exotic specimens include blue gum eucalyptus from Tasmania, kadota fig from Turkey, and umbrella thorn acacia rarely seen outside the Serengeti. The most noticeable trees, though, are undoubtedly the two giant sequoias—the first to be planted east of the Continental Divide—which, at 224 and 198 feet respectively, are easily the tallest trees in the Atlantic states, more than twice as tall as their nearest competition, and dwarfing the alder, aquilaria, ash, banyan, baobab, beech, birch, box elder, buckeye, cedar, chestnut, cocobolo, coffeetree, cuipo, cypress, ebony, elm, fir, goldenrain, hawthorn, hazel, hemlock, hickory, horn- and hophornbeam, jacaranda, jujube, kapok, laburnum, larch, linden, locust, magnolia, mahogany, mangrove—mangrove!—maple, mimosa, oak, pagoda, persimmon, pine, plane, quebracho, redbud, rosewood, rowan, sassafras, schotia, spruce, sugi, sumac, sweetgum, sycamore, tulip, walnut, and zelkova trees like the Petronas Towers shadowing the shorter skyscrapers of Kuala Lumpur. And yes, I know, that list was excessive, but imagine how much worse it could have been: if I’d listed the trees’ species, Lebanese cedar and African baobab and Japanese zelkova and Kentucky coffeetree and London plane, yellow pine and copper beech and silver birch and red and black and white and pin and live and willow and cork and water oak; if I’d demarcated the specific cultivars, Styphnolobium japonicum “pendula,” the weeping scholar, Schotia brachypetala, the weeping boerbean, Cupressus sempervirens “pendula,” the weeping Mediterranean cypress, and of course Salix alba “Chrysoma,” the famous offspring of S. alba “Vitellina-Tristis” and S. babylonica “Babylon,” better known to Patsy Cline fans as the weeping willow, and—and, well, I’m sure you get the picture: there’re a lot of different trees (a lot of which like to cry), and which require not just distinct but conflicting environments in which to grow, which in turn requires an extraordinary degree of horticultural micromanagement.

  But perhaps the lower gardens’ greatest triumph—and greatest transgression—is that, though they appear the very picture of primeval harmony, they are in fact far more artificial than the mansion they surround, or the picture-postcard village of Marcuse or, for that matter, the megalopolis that’s grown over the Atlantic seaboard like kudzu. Because however tall its buildings grow, however wide it sprawls and however many people it houses, however great its manipulations of and impact on its local environment, the Northeastern megacity still arrived at its form by a process of evolution, of trial and error and accretion and erosion that stemmed from its citizens’ habits and, however inadequately, re
acts to their needs, and isn’t merely the sui generis expression of the will of a single man. It’s one thing to come upon a stand of swamp cypress, liveoak, loblolly pine, and Ficus aurea all bearded in Spanish moss and growing in and around the edges of a pond covered in duckweed. It’s altogether another to get a desert-growing baobab to thrive in the shadow of a dawn redwood plucked from China’s Hubei Province a stone’s throw from a pneumatophoric banyan from tropical India and a clump of Patagonian cypresses from the Andes. It involves managing the flow of water from both the ground and the sky, manipulating the composition of the soil and even the rays of the sun, and it was only with the help of 384 resident—that is to say, captive—gardeners that the Academy managed to pull it off for a century. The average Academy novice could have told you more about inosculation or lime nail gall or the habits of the fig wasp (imported before there were restrictions on this kind of thing, to make sure the kadotas bear fruit) than about the progeny of the Roman emperors; you might have stared in confusion at black-robed teenagers angling silver-painted sheets of glass at the under-canopies of baobab trees to warm them in winter, while they’d have wondered why you knew so much about the peccadilloes of horny priests—and even while they were working could reel off a complete list of the names and dates of all 261 popes through the turn of the 20th century (including the five antipopes but not the original Stephen II, who died after his election but before he was consecrated), as well as every leader of the western empire from Julius all the way through Honorius and Rome’s sack, since those are two of the Academy’s three required mnemonic tests, the third being a list (no points if you saw this coming) of the tree species represented in the lower gardens (first, second, and third formers are allowed to give their common names, but fourth, fifth, and sixth formers have to supply the Latin as well). But despite all the drama in the back of the house—and God knows there’s a lot—my favorite trees are actually in front, on the lower terrace, which is bordered by a simple colonnade of sycamores whose eczemic bark is stubbled by an infestation of Trichaptum biforme. The fungus protrudes from the trees like pancakes hurled into them by gale-force winds. They’re pancake-colored on top but on the bottom striated purple like a clamshell, like my face, and eventually they’ll kill the trees from which they grow: half the trunks were half hollow the last time I saw them, and braced with rusty steel trellises to keep them upright for a few more years.

  As an exercise in vanity Stammers Hall and its gardens isn’t quite Biltmore or Hearst Castle, nor is Marcuse nearly as big as Pullman, Illinois, or McDonald, Ohio (the former owned by the Pullman Company, the latter by—no, not McDonald’s, you history buff you—but Carnegie Steel). Then again, none of these entities existed to be outdone in Marcus’s youth, and Cornelius Vanderbilt’s private correspondence indicates that Stammers Hall was one of his inspirations—“a bit of Frippery that shall look like a Hindoo Bungaloe beside My Creation.” But it was a folly nevertheless, and Marcus’s coffers, which were never as deep as his mines, were emptied out by the endeavor. Marcus broke ground on the estate in the forties, remember, before the coal that truly made his fortune had been discovered. In fact, the original plans weren’t nearly as grand as what was ultimately built. The mansion was brick rather than stone, the workers’ houses clapboard rather than brick, High Street paved with macadam rather than its famous bluestone “Cubed Cubits.” But in the years after his accident Marcus became obsessed with building a monument whose durability would stand in permanent contrast to the physical form that had failed him so painfully. For the first two years of his convalescence he was carried by four slaves on a palanquin up and down the mountain, hopped up on laudanum and deliriously overseeing the construction of his mansion one minute, the dredging of the swamp the next. To distract himself from his pain he had full-size models of his workers’ houses built in various colors of brick of various sizes and densities and textures, ultimately settling on Norman bricks in a porous pockmarked pale yellow. He ordered two acres planted with twenty different types of grass to decide which variety best complemented the bricks (which would turn black a few years later from the soot that spewed from the razed mountain range to the north, as would, for that matter, the blue grama he planted in their yards). He even went so far as to order a twenty-foot-tall scaffold be erected so that he would know what future generations of Stammers boys (by which he meant not his sons but his slaves) would see when they swung from the wych elm he planted as the town’s hanging tree. He removed somewhere between sixty and seventy million cubic yards of earth from the bog to create the body of water that, despite Marcus’s best efforts (“Tsistuyi Bay,” “Loch Auchterarder,” etc.) has never been known by any other name than the Lake. Part of the reason he moved so much dirt was to use the fecund soil for his mountainscaping, but it was also because his engineers were unable to find the place where the White Woman entered whatever underground conduit carried its waters to wherever it carried them, and which Marcus had hoped to plug so he could divert the stream’s nutrient-rich silt to his farms south of Mt. Inverna. The bog was large, but the volume of water that flowed in the creek would’ve made a swamp a hundred times larger than the one that existed if there hadn’t been some sort of natural qanat draining it. But though the central basin was dug to a depth of 150 feet, Marcus’s men never found anything besides an increasingly treacherous soup of mud, and after excavating a twelve-acre lightning bolt–shaped cavity and stocking it with smallmouth bass, walleye, pike, alligator gar, and, just for fun (and because that’s how he rolled), giant catfish from the Mekong River and even bigger sturgeon from the Caspian Sea, Marcus called it a day.