The True Account
Page 4
At this he pulled me off down the crowded street—though not before he had pressed a shilling into the woman’s hand. And though he continued to look for the sooty old lad he had expelled from Vermont, peering into every alleyway to see if he might catch a glimpse of him, he said that New York was “a real metropolis, not”—casting a scornful glance northward, in the direction of Boston—“a warren of tight-fisted, literal-minded, pedantical naysayers who wouldn’t know a great adventure if it were to bite them in the hinderquarters.”
In the meantime, the private was giving away our few remaining shillings to the beggars, orphans, and crippled people in the street at an alarming rate. Tears started to his eyes at the sight of these unfortunates, who were now flocking after us as if we were leading a ragamuffin crusade. One of their rank, a little chimney sweep of about ten, thrust into my uncle’s hand a circular advertising the Circus of Grotesqueries, at the Orpheus Theater on Broadway and 35th Street.
There, for a penny apiece, we were treated to a peep-show featuring a giant named Joseph Hall from Auburn, New York, a sword-swallower, a fire-eater, and a genuine Seneca Indian princess. For another penny each we were permitted to interview the celebrated Mrs. Peg O’Shaye of Dublin, Ireland, who had enjoyed earlier existences as Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, and William Penn. I loved seeing these walking wonders, whom my uncle straightaway recruited for the cast of his Tragical History of Ethan Allen, which he then arranged to perform at the Orpheus that evening at ten o’clock, after the circus had closed.
During the luncheon hour, while he rehearsed with his recently acquired players, I wrote a letter to my parents, informing them of our whereabouts and bringing them up to date on my uncle’s lecture in Boston and his plan to present his Tragical History in New York that evening. When I returned from posting the note, he said the rehearsal had gone exceedingly well. Indeed, he doubted whether such a varied company of players had ever been assembled under one roof before, an observation with which I could only agree.
That afternoon we went to a printer’s and had five hundred handbills run off announcing the New York debut of the play. Afterward we repaired to the office of the Times of New York to visit Editor Tobias Flynt. When we arrived, Editor Flynt, a bespectacled man with a sharp nose, was composing one of his famous Federalist tracts—for he was a fierce supporter of Hamilton and adamantly opposed to President Jefferson. No sooner had my uncle announced that he was that very evening presenting a play to raise money to guide an expedition to the Pacific than he and Flynt fell into an argument. Flynt declared that the country would have absolutely no use for the great desert of Louisiana, which he repeatedly called “Jefferson’s Folly” and which, in his estimation, was a pig in a poke. My uncle countered that Louisiana was no desert but a land of milk and honey, and the most important acquisition in our Republic’s history. Flynt said that giving money, of which we had too little, for land, of which we already had too much, would bankrupt the government. Why, no one even knew the boundaries of the territory we had purchased. No American had ever been there.
“What, sir,” demanded my uncle, “can you possibly mean? I, and my nephew, too, just last year came through Louisiana from the Pacific. We know every foot of the way as well as we know our dooryard in Vermont.”
At this news Flynt seemed to change his tune. He inquired how long our trip had taken; and seemed most interested to learn that we had accomplished the odyssey in a single day. Flynt asked to see the manuscript of my uncle’s play. I was afraid he might not find it up to the mark. But looking it over with a knowing eye, he praised the work for its originality, faithfulness to reality, vigorous language, and justness of character. My uncle replied that though he and Flynt might disagree on some few minor political matters, he was glad that those differences had not clouded the editor’s artistic judgment; and he hoped Flynt would attend the performance that night and give it good play in the next morning’s edition. Flynt assured him that he would be honored to do so and that he would mention our forthcoming journey to the Pacific as well.
Later we rejoined the grotesqueries at the Orpheus, where the play began at ten sharp to a rather sparse audience of about six, including the crew of the Lord Baltimore and Editor Flynt. The performance ran very long, with just the representation of Colonel Allen’s regiment rowing across the lake to Fort Ti taking more than an hour. When my uncle, in the role of Allen, demanded that the British general, as played by the giant, surrender the fort in the name of the Great Jehovah and the First Continental Congress, the three or four people remaining in the audience laughed heartily. All in all, he counted the night a huge success.
Afterward, Flynt went straight to his office to write his notice, which he assured us would be read by every literate resident of New York in the morning. My uncle, the cast, and I repaired to a nearby ale-house, where he treated the actors and himself to rum. Finally we made our way back down Broadway, which seemed as crowded at two in the morning as it had been at two that afternoon—my having first borrowed from the tavern owner a blue potato barrow in which to wheel the private back to our lodgings. “Hoist, hoist your flagons, roisterers all,” he sang from the confines of the barrow. “For if summer be arrived, soon come the withering rimes of fall. Tooleree, toolera, tooleroo!”
9
THE NEXT MORNING the private awoke with a throbbing head and a tongue, as he put it, “as large as a full-grown buffalo’s.” But his expectations of being lionized in Flynt’s Times of New York precipitated him from bed. He rousted me out and inquired how, in my estimation, his presentation of The Tragical History had gone.
“Splendidly,” I said. “No question, uncle. You put on an exhibition to be remembered.”
He said he was certain of it, and that however unappreciative of his lecture the haughty academical intelligentsia of Boston town had been, and however undiscerning, good Editor Flynt and the Times would see him right and vindicate his reputation as an artist and a gentleman.
All this while he was shaving. But when he opened the door and stepped outside, all besoaped, to take in the morning air, he tripped over the potato barrow and was obliged to perform a very intricate fandango to keep from slitting his throat with his own razor.
“Why, Ticonderoga, is this plebeian conveyance blocking the way?”
“I brought your honor home from the play in it last evening—or rather this morning,” I said.
“Well, for the love of Jehovah, Ti, trundle it down to the Times and bring back as many copies of today’s paper as it will hold. I shall order us a celebratory breakfast.”
When I arrived back at the Tipsy Argonaut with the papers, my uncle was dressed in his full knight’s gear, and the captain of the Lord Baltimore was with him. I sat down at their table. My uncle clapped me on the back and cried up coffee with sweet cream, hot glazed rolls, and clay pipes all around for a smoke of hemp. Then, leaning back in his chair like a sultan, he bade me read his notice aloud to the assemblage, which, apart from myself and the ship’s captain, consisted mainly of fishmongers, sailors, and ladies of the evening just arriving from their employment.
“Uncle, are you certain—?”
“Yes, yes, Ti, read on.”
Clearing my throat several times, I began to read aloud from the Times, as follows. “‘Last evening, our city was treated to an exhibition of sovereign entertainment, a play from the pen of one Private True T. Kinneson, recently arrived in New York from Vermont.’”
“‘Sovereign entertainment,’” my uncle exclaimed. “Jesu, that’s good. Did you hear that, my dear ladies and gentlemen? I must write a public apology in the Times to the excellent people of New York for ever supposing that the Dev—that the Gentleman from Vermont, ha ha—would be allowed to dwell for one hour in their fair city. Read on, Ticonderoga.”
“Please, uncle, you must not break in on me,” I said. “To continue. ‘The play, which we shall come to presently, was performed at the stately old Orpheus Theater, a landmark of our noble city, though
recently reduced to providing quarters for a circus of curiosities, with the design of raising funds for the author to lead an expedition to the Pacific Ocean.’”
“That’s good,” my uncle said. “That can only help our greater purpose. But come to the matter here, nephew. What says Mr. Flynt of my Tragical History?”
“Well, uncle, since you seem bent on hearing the rest, I won’t try to dissuade you. ‘The play itself, insofar as this commentator is fit to judge, is the greatest farce ever written. Juvenile in conception, violent in execution, puerile, nay, prurient, in its attempts at humor, and in the most vile taste, Ethan Allen violates all known principles of composition. Characters are thinly drawn, nor do their actions flow from human nature, but rather from the diseased imagination and self-conscious extravagancies of the author, who fancies himself a kind of American Quixote and has no more sense than his Andalusian prototype. And we add only, for the amusement of our readers, that in a wonderful epilogue to this hilarious masterpiece its bumpkin hero reportedly had to be trundled back to his lodging in a potato barrow after a drinking bout following the production.’”
The entire coffeehouse was now in a paroxysm of laughter. But I feared the very worst as my uncle clapped his hand to his wooden sword, leaped to his feet, and roared, “Where is this man Flynt? He and I have a pressing appointment.”
“Oh, uncle,” I cried. “Aren’t you delighted?”
“Delighted? This is an outrage to me and to all other playwrights in the universe. But vindication is near, Ti. Retribution is at hand. Go out and cut me a stout cudgel about as thick as my wrist—”
“Why, sir,” I interrupted, pretending to be astonished. “What can you possibly mean? Don’t you see? ‘Greatest farce.’ ‘Wonderful epilogue.’ ‘Hilarious masterpiece.’ Critic Flynt is praising you to all New York not for your supposed tragedy but for your great comedy.”
I quickly turned to the ship’s captain. “Isn’t that so, sir?”
“Why, I suppose it is, for I laughed all the way through it,” he said.
My uncle stared at the captain. He stared at me. Snatching up the paper, he scanned the offending passage through his tin ear trumpet and then stared at the trumpet. He took off his red flannel night-stocking, folded it neatly in twain and in twain again, and very vigorously began to polish his copper crown until his headpiece shone like the sun.
“Eureka!” he cried at last. “Gentlemen and ladies, my nephew has set me right again. As Ti says, Critic Flynt, bless his good heart, has seen through to the heart of my play. He—ha ha—knows it better than I do. As of this moment I call it a tragical history no more but The Most Comical History of Ethan Allen.”
And declaring that since he had taken the great literary bastion of New York by storm, as it were, with his new commedia, we would rejoin the crew of the Lord Baltimore, bound that morning for the city of its name, and from there flare out to Washington and plead our cause directly to the President. So although I had prevented my uncle from killing Flynt or being killed himself, in the end I had succeeded only in sweeping us farther along on a mad journey from which, I feared, there would be no turning back. And what might lie ahead was as blank and unknowable as the vast white space on my uncle’s old “Chart of the Interior of North America.”
MONTICELLO
10
YOU WOULD SUPPOSE we were waiting for an audience with an Oriental despot, Ti. I can’t say I like this. I can’t say that I quite approve of standing on all this formality, President or no. Particularly when the fate of America may well depend on our meeting.”
Having found the President not in Washington but at his famous home in Virginia, after three hard days by coach and hired wagon we were at last standing in the great rotunda at Monticello. Finally, the inner door to the President’s study opened, and there stood Thomas Jefferson himself, wearing his house slippers and a dressing gown, though it was late afternoon. With no hesitation my uncle said to the President, “I tell you, sir, the fate of the United States, and whether those states are to be one strong unbroken nation from coast to coast or a parcel of squabbling little hegemonies like rotten old Europe, may well depend on the next hour. And in particular, on whether you appoint as leader of your expedition to the Pacific Private True Teague Kinneson.” He swept off his stocking cap and made a deep bow, in the process striking the bewildered President’s outstretched hand with the metal plate in his head.
Then, with yet another flourish in my direction, “And my squire and nephew, Ticonderoga Kinneson.”
Without further ceremony my uncle announced that though he respected no living man more than Tom Jefferson, he would, by the Great Jehovah, pay fealty to no one; nor suppress his opinion in regard to what he believed right; nor dance attendance on any man in the world. The President seemed very surprised but also amused at the figure of my uncle, looming up in his knight-errant’s habiliments as he pushed brusquely past into the study. Mr. Jefferson shook hands with me. “I like your name, sir,” he said. “Ticonderoga. I imagine there’s a story there.”
“There is, Mr. President. My uncle named me. It’s Ti for short.”
“Well, Ti, come in and make yourself comfortable—as I see your excellent uncle has done. I admire a man who doesn’t stand on ceremony.”
I loved Monticello, with its beds of multicolored tulips and stately white columns and clocks and books and pictures—grand pictures such as I had never dreamed of painting, by all the leading artists of the day. My uncle immediately conferred upon himself the full freedom of the President’s study, as if he were at home in his own Library at Alexandria. Unrolling his “Chart of the Interior,” he began to point out to the President the sources of the Missouri and the Columbia and many other hitherto unknown features from our “trip” the previous summer, at the same time declaring that he stood ready to command the expedition being assembled to penetrate the wilds of Louisiana. And to show the President how well prepared he was to undertake this great journey of discovery, he got out his Dutch clock and astrolabe and, with the further aid of a sundial with the face of Jupiter inscribed upon it, which stood in the iris bed outside the study window, determined our longitude to be exactly that of—Bombay.
The President smiled. Assuring us that he was very impressed by the chart and by the drawings I had made on it of some bison and Indians, he asked if I would make a sketch of my uncle, which he would be honored to hang in his study next to Peale’s portrait of himself. I was happy to oblige. As the private posed in his heroic gear, he reiterated his desire to lead the expedition to the Pacific. To which the President replied that, while deeply appreciative of such a kind offer, he had already appointed a young army captain named Meriwether Lewis, formerly his private secretary, to this commission, adding that Captain Lewis’s official party would be leaving from St. Louis within a very few weeks.
Seeing my uncle’s terribly disappointed expression, President Jefferson asked if he might have a word aside with me concerning my judgment of a little painting. My crestfallen uncle bowed his consent; whereupon Mr. Jefferson took me into an adjacent room and showed me a very pretty rendition of the Natural Bridge of Virginia. While I admired it, he said, “Ti, your uncle clearly has a superior imagination. Indeed, his faculties in that direction are those of a true genius. It appears to me that in his mind he really has traversed the continent, and back through time as well, and been in campaigns from Troy to Yorktown.”
“He was in fact with Ethan Allen at Fort Ticonderoga,” I said, unwilling to have the President suppose my uncle to be totally daft. “He was injured in the cranium there.”
President Jefferson nodded. After a moment’s reflection, he said, “Do you think that if I were to furnish you and your uncle with two mounts suitable for this great adventure that he believes lies ahead, and you gently trended north with him, persuading him at the same time that you were headed west—there is a somewhat similar ruse in his beloved Don Quixote—that you might get him safely home to Vermont?”
“Well, let us try and see what happens,” the President said.
He returned to my uncle and informed him that while the official expedition commanded by Captain Lewis would get under way very soon, he would not stand in our way if we wished to strike out on our own, and that he hoped the private would permit him to outfit us for our own epic journey, wherever it led. He then conducted us to some stone stables behind his house, where he presented me with a tall bay stallion named Bucephalus, after that fabled steed of Alexander’s, and my uncle with a deaf white mule called Rosinante in honor of the Knight of La Mancha’s mount. With which the private was much delighted, though he immediately rechristened the mule Ethan Allen. The President also provided us with saddles and two twenty-dollar gold pieces; and, shaking hands very warmly, wished us the best of luck in Louisiana.
Saluting our benefactor and thanking him profusely, but reminding him that he would pay no fealty to any man, or call any man liege, my uncle with all his fantastical appurtenances and I with my gun and paints and tube of canvases headed back down Mr. Jefferson’s little mountain and due west toward the Blue Ridge. A few minutes later we stopped to watch the last rays of the sun sparkle on the dome of Monticello. My uncle said that though he disagreed with the appointment of a young upstart to lead the official expedition, he was much pleased with the President’s promise not to stand in our way, which he saw as an endorsement of our own expedition. I then suggested that the route to St. Louis lay to the north, but he briskly told me that we must go due west, into the mountains, to elude any pursuers who might still be on the track of a “runaway uncle.”
THE NATCHEZ TRACE