by Peter Quinn
Foster listened: flatware clanging against dishes, dishes clanking against countertops, glasses clinking against glasses, a roar of voices echoing against marble walls and plaster ceilings. He rubbed his hands on his pants, blew on his fingers, and put them back into his pockets. He dug past the two nickels he knew were there, down to where a folded banknote could escape the touch of his benumbed fingers.
Nothing. Only the coins.
Most mornings, he groped his way out of the New England Hotel, out of his cold bed, the sheets and blanket too thin to warm his blood, down the Bowery to Catherine, into Mike Manning’s Saloon, home to the cheapest whiskey outside of the Five Points. He sat as close as he could to the cast-iron stove, the coal-fired warmth pungent and piercing, going up his arms and legs, into his bones, a penetrating warmth. But it was against the house rules to sit there without a drink, so he put a nickel on the counter for two shots of what the patrons called “Mike Manning’s Revenge,” colored camphine or rectified oil of turpentine, whichever was selling cheaper, diluted, with a touch of beef broth to give it the soft brown hue of real whiskey. Swill. But it let him sit there. Manning would follow Foster back to his table by the stove, put the shot glasses in front of him. Foster would lower his face almost to the level of the tabletop, tip the liquid into his mouth, close his eyes, and swallow. A fire would start in his throat and fall into his stomach. The warm glow would spread, kill the thumping in his head, and still the tremble in his hand.
Money well spent, and Foster didn’t begrudge Mike Manning his nickel. Today he had gotten out of bed late and skipped his visit to Manning’s. He decided he would find refreshment elsewhere, in more convivial surroundings. But here, in the rotunda of the Astor House, a nickel would buy only a glass of beer. Access to the trays of food, too, yet two glasses of beer weren’t much to hold a man until evening, when the bar of the New England Hotel would fill up and Jack Mulcahey or some other soul, recognizing the nation’s debt to America’s first original musical voice, would advance him a loan and throw in a drink to boot.
He was too wet and cold to think about going back out into the rain. And if he didn’t buy a drink and have something to eat, one of the somber clerks would soon be over inquiring if he had a room here or was waiting for a guest or required directions to any of the city’s numerous cultural and architectural points of interest. No thanks. Two glasses of beer would have to do. Some dry crackers. A slice of ham. Nothing too heavy. His stomach rejected anything in bulk except beer or whiskey or Mike Manning’s Revenge.
He stood and ate. He lifted the beer with both hands and licked the foam from the inner rim of the glass. The chorus of lunch continued around him. He walked straight ahead, past the potted ferns and the mahogany, marble-topped reception desk with its stern-faced clerks scribbling like music critics in the ledgers opened before them: A Treatise on the Distemper of Current Popular Lyrics. By Calliope. They loved anonymity. Clerks and critics. You rarely knew their names.
He sat in a lounge chair by the fire, stretching out his feet so close to the coals that the wet leather of his shoes hissed and steamed. He took out a pad of paper from his jacket pocket. It was soggy from the rain. He put it down by the side of the chair, facing the fire. Tomorrow morning he was scheduled to meet Daly at his publishing office on Grand Street with the song he had already been paid for. Something about summer and love. No, he had sold that one to Daly two years ago. “Our Bright Summer Days Are Gone.” He printed the word “GONE” in large letters at the top of the page. Underneath he began to write, quickly, “doo-dah, doo-dah, doo-dah.” He drew a line through it. Daly was a sympathetic type. Bumped into him by accident about a month ago. Hadn’t seen him in over a year. Daly was waiting to catch the horsecar across Canal Street to the Hoboken ferry. Stepped into Sardmeister’s. A glistening German place. Smell of beer and pickled meat. Bought dinner and put a twenty-dollar gold piece on the table. Bring me a song. Something happy.
Foster put the pencil tip on the paper. Nothing. Forget the war. Nobody wants to hear about it anymore. Tried that already. “We Are Coming, Father Abraam, 300,000 More.” Music composed by Stephen C. Foster. Bad verse turned into bad lyrics. They wanted the music to save it. They paid for it, then said it sounded “too funereal.” But they paid. He tapped the pencil tip on the paper. Morse code. H-A-P-P-Y.
Jane was working as a telegrapher at the Greenburg station of the Pennsylvania Railroad, a few miles outside of Pittsburgh. Couldn’t say he missed her. The pain he felt was not from absence but regret. He had put her through a decade of hell. At least for the first few years of their marriage, there had been money. And fame. Mrs. Stephen C. Foster, wife of America’s minstrel genius. Those first days of their honeymoon in New York, the music publishers had fallen over themselves to entertain the couple. The reporters had written about them. At night, when they came back to the hotel, the clerk brought them to a small room behind the desk. It was filled with flowers, bottles of wine and liquor, gaily wrapped presents. “People have been dropping them off all day,” the clerk said. “They read you were here in the papers.” Foster picked up a small, bulky envelope. He opened it. Inside was a woman’s black silk stocking with an address pinned to it. He and the clerk laughed. Jane blushed.
For the first two nights, he pretended to be so tired and filled with whiskey that he fell asleep. She lay with her breasts pressed against his back and her arm over his. He didn’t move for what felt like hours. At dawn, he rose and went downstairs and ordered breakfast sent up. On the third night, she went up ahead while he uncorked a bottle and shared it with the desk clerk. He stayed longer than he should have. When he opened the door to the room, she was in bed with the quilt pulled up to her neck. Close the door, she said. She pushed down the quilt and knelt on the bed. She was naked. She cupped her breasts in her hands so that the nipples stuck out between her fingers. “Come to bed, my love,” she said. She lay back on the bed, her legs open wide. In almost a whisper she sang, “Open thy lattice, love, listen to me! While the moon’s in the sky and the breeze on the sea!”
Had she really sung that? The first song he ever published. The year before he left Pittsburgh. She had sung it to him once, but maybe not that night, maybe he was confusing that night with another time. What did it matter? Song or no song, he had dropped down on the bed beside her and put his hand over hers. What had he said? I’m sorry, Jane. His mouth was so dry his tongue felt as if it were made of cotton. He fell asleep. He tried many times after that. Usually after drinking heavily. A few times successfully. They made a daughter. But he came to their bed much as he had gone to milk the cow his father kept behind their house in Pittsburgh. Something to be avoided, if possible. A cloud that hung over you, a duty, a chore, another impediment to happiness. Stephen, Jane said, what is it you want? Name it. He had no answer. At least none he could speak.
He tapped out the letters of her name on the pad. A telegraph to nowhere. From outside he could hear the rumble of traffic on Broadway. Wheels, chains, horses, voices, peddlers, newsboys. Maybe a song about New York. No. New York had too much of its own music. It couldn’t carry one tune. It would drown a single song, smother it. New York gave you freedom, indulged tastes and vices that could get you hanged somewhere else, but at a price. Silence. An inability to concentrate. And when you could no longer pay that price, what then?
Last night, he had walked with Mulcahey from the hotel, across the Bowery, down Catherine Street, to the ferry slip. They stood in the mist by the river. What did Mulcahey call it? The Swine-nee River. Sympathetic but sarcastic. As if he had a grudge against the whole world. A note of bitterness. All the Irish seemed to have it. Mulcahey sang in his tenor voice, “Way down upon the Swine-nee River, far, far from Rome.” The stench of low tide hung over the entire area, from the river all the way over to the Five Points. It was always low tide in the Five Points. Muck and rot, the odor of lives left behind by a receding tide. But there was solace as well as squalor. Solace for everyone, for darkies and Padd
ies, for gentlemen and knaves, even for Stephen Foster: grandson of James Foster, one of Washington’s soldiers at York-town; connected, through his sister’s marriage, to the family of James Buchanan, former president of the United States; brother of William Foster, a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He had been born on the same day that Jefferson and Adams died, the fourth of July, a real live Yankee Doodle, born to write America’s songs. Stephen Foster: wife-deserter; occupant of the attic room in a third-rate hotel; borrower extraordinaire from a host of Bowery habitués; musical has-been; drunk, cadger of drinks, swiller of Mike Manning’s Revenge; indulger of unspeakable desires. In the Five Points, amid the tumbledown buildings, the alleys, the basement beer places, the attics and back rooms, there was a vice for every taste. The only question was price.
Foster had been in New York three years now, paying the price for his freedom. Six songs in 1860, the year he came for good, fifteen in 1861, seventeen in 1862, twenty-three so far this year. Most were swill. The musical equivalent of two shots of five-cent whiskey. The price kept going down, but there was always somebody willing to buy the name of Stephen C. Foster to print on music sheets. The world still waited for the songs. The people in the streets and in the armies, the men and women in the wagons pushing west, the bargemen, the fishermen, the firemen, they still expected a new tune, notes that would echo in their collective throat, the same song sung from coast to coast. It was only the snobs who hated his music. Workmen whistled it, they said. It had taken hold of the popular mind, particularly the young, repeated without musical emotion so as to persecute and haunt the acute, sensitive nerves of deeply musical persons. Such tunes were hummed and whistled involuntarily, they said, traveling through the populace like a mild form of the pox, breaking out like a morbid irritation of the skin.
He scratched his head. He dug his fingernails into the raw itchiness along his part. Lice. It could be. A gift of Dolan’s New England Hotel. He ran both his hands over his hair, swept it back from his face. He propped his head in his right hand, the elbow resting on the chair, his fingers digging beneath his hair and playing against his skull, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. Nothing.
He felt a bump. Which one was this? His fingers ran over it, measuring. Dr. Mordowner, a friend of his father’s and a leading Pittsburgh phrenologist, had felt his head when he was a child. Dr. Mordowner had pressed the palms of his hands into Stephen’s forehead, run them back atop the boy’s ears to the base of the neck, stepped back, and looked Stephen in the face. “Amazing!” he shouted. He put his right hand back on Stephen’s head, the palm resting on his brow. He pushed down so hard Stephen had to close his eyes. “My good man,” Dr. Mordowner said to Stephen’s father, “the frontal ridges on this child’s head are the most prestigious external disclosure of the Organ of Tune that I have ever encountered!” The palm of Dr. Mordowner’s hand felt hot. The heat seemed to grow more intense. Dr. Mordowner pressed harder. He had his other hand at the back of Stephen’s head. The vise of prophecy. Stephen sensed something melting in his brain. River ice in springtime, breaking, a force of nature coming alive, rising, sweeping everything before it. An industry was being born. Minstrels in every city strumming his music, schoolchildren memorizing it, lovers serenading each other, even pious congregations borrowing it to praise the God of their manifest destiny, all their rhythms indebted to the boy whose head is held so tightly by Dr. Mordowner.
Foster fingered the bump again. It was right on top of his head. It was sore, probably from the other night. A soldier did it. Having gotten drunk in McSorley’s, across from the Seventh Regiment Armory, Foster reverted to the southern accent that he used whenever he was sufficiently under the influence. The cadences of a southern gentleman. An affectation from his days in Cincinnati. His minstrel songs led many people to insist he must be a southerner. He obliged, especially when liquor slowed his mind to a crawl. He wasn’t talking politics, he never did, but this bear of a soldier came from behind, lifted him up, turned him upside down, and banged his head into the floor. He lay on the floor. The soldier stood above him. “Goddamn cracker,” he said. “Go back where you came from.”
Foster rubbed his head. He pushed more hair aside, ran his fingers down above his ear. Another convexity. Was this what the phrenologists called Matrimony, Desire to Marry? It was a very small bump. Next to it was a slight depression. More likely this was Matrimony. He moved his hand to the back of his head. A large bump. Dr. Mordowner had called this Amativeness, Sexual Love. “Unnaturally large in a boy this size,” Dr. Mordowner told his father. “Make sure he is occupied in healthful activities and does not spend a great deal of time by himself. The dimension of these amative proclivities could lead the boy into danger.”
A great deal of time by himself. Then and now. Lonely. George Cooper had joined the Army, their partnership dissolved, all their songs sold outright, no claim on royalties, or on each other. Daly the music publisher was nice enough, but hardly a friend. The diminutive Mr. Dunne, who lived on the second floor of the hotel, was cordial in his way. Offered his umbrella and was good for the occasional loan. But a secretive type. Very young, very quiet: an odd marriage of attributes. Like Mulcahey, he seemed animated by resentment. Mulcahey at least was talkative and attentive. Tall, slim, long-legged, with the body of a dancer, he was generous with his encouragement and his money. Foster felt affection for him. He could afford far better than the New England Hotel. But there between the Bowery and the Five Points, Mulcahey was safe to do what would be dangerous elsewhere. He shared a room with his mulatto mistress, Eliza. They paraded the hotel arm in arm. She was almond-eyed and beautiful, coffee-colored, with a deep wave in her hair. The fullness of her lips made her face look as if she were pouting. But she was sweet-tempered.
Sometimes, when Eliza sat in the small chair by the desk in the lobby waiting for Mulcahey, Foster would stand at the far end of the hotel barroom and stare at her. She was unaware he was looking at her. How much she resembled Olivia. Even the way she sat, with her hands folded on her lap. Olivia sat that way when she put him to bed at night. Her lovely face in the candlelight, the soft pitch of her voice as she sang him to sleep. He was four when his father brought her home, a colored girl of twelve to help his mother. Amid the tedious decline from respectability that his father’s drinking inflicted on the family, amid the stifling respectability of their house in Pittsburgh, she was like a purple flower, luxuriant and exotic, wildly out of place, as if an orchid from Africa had been placed in the window of their austere, wood-framed house, its white curtains always stiff and starched and disapproving.
She chased him through the high grass by the river, her laughter a kind of music. On Sunday afternoons, without his parents’ knowledge, she took him to the Negro church. He watched through the rear door. The people swayed and danced. He had never heard the human voice make such sounds. She never talked about her past, and he never thought to ask. When he grew older and went to school, her chores became cooking and cleaning. She slept in the shed behind the house, in a tiny room above the cow stall. He sold his first song for three dollars and gave her one. On the day he left to work in Cincinnati, his parents stood straight and formal on the porch. Oh, how Olivia cried and carried on. Oh, don’t you cry for me. Dear Olivia. A long time since anyone had cried for Stephen Foster.
Suicide? Was there a convexity for that? He felt around his head. You had to think about it, alone in a hotel attic when the wind rattled the window, a continuous noise: the point in the night when the knowledge struck you suddenly, as if for the first time, that you’d sold the rights and royalties to most of a life’s work for $1,800, all of it long gone. You had to regard the instantaneous solution offered by the symmetry of the razor across the windpipe, a neat line.
The line between a songwriter and a hack? Where was it? Or, to be more honest, where had it been? Foster pulled his legs back from the fire. The ragged threads on the cuffs of his pants were singed and smoldering. He held his hands close to the low, intense flam
e of the coals, which had a heavy layer of ash on top of them, holding down the heat. He picked up his pad from beside the chair. The pages were wrinkled from the heat. He fanned the coals with the pad till the ashes rose up the chimney and the flames jumped. He threw the pad onto the fire and it turned black, smoking, crumpling, consuming itself in a hum of combustion.
Ten-line musical verse in which nine lines are identical. Simple harmony. Simple melody. Music in three chords. Music that set people singing, that for all its clichés was new, music to work by, to travel by, to pan for gold by, to load a gun by, to run a machine by, to go to war by, music for the people, and if not of the people, then at least an echo in their heads of some older tradition they no longer had time to cultivate, new music for a new way of life, a new industry for an America of cities and railroads, America in a hurry, with Stephen Foster stoking the engine of progress.
For “Old Folks at Home,” Firth, Pond & Co. had kept two presses running all day, but even that hadn’t been enough. They had to add a third, then a fourth. Up till that point, three thousand copies of an instrumental piece and five thousand of a song had been considered a great sale. “Old Folks” hit ten thousand in a month. Gwine to run all day. It raced ahead of “Oh! Susanna!” for which he’d received a flat payment of one hundred dollars. “Camptown Races” had sold more than five thousand copies at two cents a copy, and earned him just over one hundred dollars. I keeps my money in an old tow bag. The publishers were staggered by the success of “Old Folks.” Desperate for money at the time, he sold the title space to E. P. Christy for fifteen dollars. “Old Folks at Home, an Ethiopian Melody as sung by the Christy Minstrels/Written and Composed by E. P. Christy.” Still, Foster got the royalties. One hundred thousand copies at two cents a sheet. The Sutter’s Mill of American popular music.
You write, a composer of operas once told him, in words of one syllable, with harmonic textures as naïve as the melodies. Your musical vocabulary is so impoverished that you repeat yourself over and over again. Foster stared into the grate. The pad became bloated with fire and began to collapse in on itself. Never claimed to be a composer of operas. Only said the songs were what people would want to sing. And that’s what they did. Naïve melodies in ten million throats. You better listen. The people are telling you something. All de world am sad and dreary, ebrywhere I roam.