by Peter Quinn
He showed up at Ward’s home excited, with a sense of the importance this day would hold in his life. As soon as the carriage pulled up, Ward came out the door and down the steps. They shook hands. “Well, I’ve been looking forward to this,” said Ward.
“I too.”
Ward motioned to the carriage. “Shall we?”
“What about Sarah?”
Ward’s face showed his surprise. “Sarah? Sarah left for England three days ago.”
They got into the carriage. Afterward, Charles would remember little of the hours that followed, only the drone of the old man’s voice. He resolved to be through with Ward. He would notify him that his account could no longer be handled by Stark and Evans. He would forget Sarah. New York teemed with women. He threw himself into his work. The task of making money seemed a kind of revenge. It comforted him. And three weeks later, before he could get around to discontinuing Ward’s account, the panic struck. He was in the office from morning to the late evening, calling in his chips, tallying up his victory.
The train stations were filled with brokers and investors returning from the country in the hope that they could salvage a part of their fortunes. Americans streamed home from abroad, entire families on European tour discovering that in their absence their quickly accumulated wealth, the privilege and position they had obtained almost overnight, was gone. The sellers’ market was now a buyers’ one. New money replaced by the still newer. The pages of the Tribune devoted to “Houses for Sale/To Let” doubled and trebled. One day Ward appeared in the offices of Stark and Evans, and Charles supposed he was there to offer thanks for the salvation of his property. But Ward was glum. “Some of the oldest and finest families in the city are ruined. A terrible thing to see. They come to me for help or advice. Some even come right out and ask for money.”
“The poor usually do.”
“Where will all this lead?”
Charles opened the Tribune across his desk and waved his hand over the long columns of real estate notices. “It will lead wherever you wish it to. My advice is to have your present home subdivided into three or four flats and rent them. It will be a nice source of additional income. You are now in a position to buy a fine new house in a rising part of the city. The market is over-whelmed with such bargains. Mr. Ward, you should be celebrating. You have survived the Flood. The tide that has sent other men to the bottom has lifted you up. You are a true son of Noah. Multiply your holdings in real estate as fast as you can.”
“I shall consider it. But real estate is not what brings me here. Sarah has returned from England. She thought perhaps you might wish to renew your generous invitation to escort us into the country for a day’s excursion. It would be salubrious for all of us, I should think.”
More than mere happenstance, luck is the result of patiently striving to put the odds in one’s own favor. Stark’s formulation. Charles felt the truth of it. It was luck that he hadn’t gotten around to closing Ward’s account. But the victory he now felt on the verge of winning flowed out of the time and care he had invested in cultivating his relationship with Ward. A long time since the night he had run into Ward and Sarah at the lecture by Charles Loring Brace. He barely knew Sarah. Their conversations had hardly gone beyond the tritest pleasantries. Except for the electricity he had felt between them that day they went to the High Bridge, she had never given any indication of her feeling toward him. But the pull he felt toward her wasn’t something that yielded to reason. It was something he felt in his gut. An absolute confidence that what was about to happen had to happen. He had been patient. She was his now. He felt it was a certainty.
When he knocked on the door, Sarah answered. He greeted her stiffly and stood silently by the stairs. She was as beautiful as he had remembered.
“I have bad news,” she said.
Charles felt his chest contract. Could he be wrong about what must happen? “What is it?”
“Uncle is feeling unwell and shan’t be able to accompany us.”
“But you still wish to go?”
“Of course.”
They drove up Fifth Avenue in Charles’s new coach, a London-made brougham bought for a song from a distressed broker. Charles sat across from Sarah. He asked her a few questions about England but not about with whom she had stayed or whether she had been entertaining the proposition of some wealthy young Englishman whose fortune had disappeared when the panic crossed the Atlantic. He suspected this might be the case but no longer cared. What he cared about was having her.
The conversation died. Their silence filled the coach. He couldn’t wait any longer. He rose from his place and sat again, beside her. “Sarah, I missed you.”
“And I you, Charles.”
He put his hand on her breast. She put her hand over his and pressed it. He took off his hat and threw it onto the opposite seat. He kissed her on the cheek. She turned her mouth to him and he kissed it. She unbuttoned his shirt and put her hand inside. He pulled away.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing.” He knelt on the forward seat and slipped back the panel that fronted on the driver’s seat. He knocked on the roof, and the driver’s face appeared. “No interruptions. Drive on until I tell you to stop, and go slowly.”
He put his hands on the inside wall of the coach to steady himself. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pulled him down on top of her as she spread her body across the length of the seat. He sat back onto his knees and undid her bodice. She unloosened his belt and opened the buttons of his fly. He knelt on the floor and pulled off her petticoat. He got back on top of her, the rhythm of their rise and fall conforming with the motion of the carriage. He ran his tongue down her neck. She sighed. He put his face beside hers and said softly in her ear, “Let us be fruitful and multiply.”
A few weeks later, Charles asked Ward and Sarah to join him for a ride up to see the work on Central Park. Since a new superintendent, Mr. Olmsted, was now overseeing the construction, a real park had finally begun to emerge from the swamps and squatters’ settlements that the city government had acquired for over five million dollars.
They went up Fifth Avenue until Charles suddenly directed the driver to turn left. The driver stopped the brougham in the middle of the block without having to be told. Charles got out. He asked Ward and Sarah to follow. As Sarah stepped down and looked at the monumental brown façade, she seemed to know immediately what this detour meant. The house was his gift to her. Built in the latest Italianate style, five stories tall, clad in close-grained Triassic sandstone—lately known as brownstone—it was barely two years old, the former home of one of the panic’s many victims.
She held a hand over her mouth, and with the other took Charles’s arm. Ward looked around, puzzled. “A whole new quarter of the city, and I haven’t even been aware of its existence.” He stood behind Charles and Sarah. “You know, I can remember walking up to the top of the steeple of the new Trinity Church the year it was completed and taking in the view of the entire city, a neat, well-ordered, redbrick town dotted with green; nothing imperial or decadent about it, an American place, modest, sensible, hardworking, ambitious, filled with hope, the prosperous merchant living next to the industrious mechanic. That was just four years after the Croton Water Works were finished. Such a sense of the future, of what our city would become. Who would have thought that in barely more than a decade we would come to rival the Romans in our taste for the monstrous?”
Sarah and Charles went up the imposing stone stoop, her arm on top of his. He opened the unlocked door to a vestibule with rosewood paneling and a burgundy tiled floor. Ward followed, still unsure of what was happening.
“Do you know the proprietor?” Ward asked.
“Exceedingly well,” said Charles.
They entered the hallway and peered up the stairs. Far above there was a skylight of stained glass, its reds and yellows on fire with sunlight. To the right was a parlor with more rosewood paneling. They could see their reflections in th
e polished hardwood floors. Between two floor-length windows that opened onto the street was a piano covered with a sheet. Charles threw back the sheet and lifted the ebony cover on the keyboard. He bent over the keys and ran his fingers over them. He pounded one or two keys with his index finger. “Someday I will learn to play,” he said. He stood with his hand on the top of the piano and sang in a loud, off-key voice:
’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary:
Hard Times, Hard Times, come again no more:
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.
Sarah and Ward continued to look around as Charles sang. His voice echoed through the empty room. Sarah clapped abstractedly when he finished and took him by the arm. They wandered each floor. Sarah touched every wall, ran her hand over the woodwork, examined the closets and looked out the windows. Ward, aware at last that this was more than a visit to the house of an acquaintance of Charles’s, complained of the effect the stairs had on his heart.
Charles went into the water closet on the second floor and closed the door behind him. He turned a brass handle above the sink and hot water came out. He pulled the chain above the commode and there was a rush of water. In the boarding house he had lived in there was a privy in the backyard. Ward’s house had a hand pump in the kitchen, and though there was a small, recently added toilet under the staircase, there were still chamber pots in the bedrooms. In East Hampton they had gone in the fields, whatever the weather. Here was privacy, warmth, comfort—everywhere.
Ward knocked on the door and entered without waiting for an answer. “I must sit a minute, please.” He used the commode as a chair. Charles opened the window.
“Are you all right?”
Ward nodded. “I merely need to gather my breath.”
“Would you like some water?”
Ward shook his head. “All I needed was a moment’s rest.” He stood. “You know, in his chapter on the Roman Empire in the age of the Antonines, Gibbon points out that the addiction of the wealthy to opulence had both good and bad effect. The good derived from the distribution of property that the patricians brought about when they lavished their money on hiring artisans and laborers to build their villas, palaces, and baths. The bad was the pervasive and inevitable corruption of morals and manners that accompanied such a compulsion for the luxurious. The age of indolence, as Gibbon called it, sucked the strength out of the noblemen and women of the Empire, erasing the last vestiges of republican Rome, so that when the barbarians pushed on the gates of the Empire, they discovered to their surprise that such a magnificent and imposing edifice was guarded by a race of moral and physical pygmies.”
“Very interesting,” Charles said. “Now let me show you your room.”
“My room?”
“If you wish. With your permission, Audley, I’m going to ask Sarah to marry me, and I expect that her dear uncle will live with us.”
It was the first time Charles had ever called the old man anything but “Mr. Ward,” and he savored the small triumph. The clerk whose name was beyond—or beneath—recall now asked for the hand of Ward’s niece and offered the old fool a room.
“Quite so,” Ward said. He seemed dazed. They went down the hall to the rear of the house.
Charles sat on the windowsill as Ward poked around the room. Down below, in the next yard, a maid was stringing white sheets on a clothesline; they snapped in the wind. Flags of surrender. The city’s surrender, and Sarah’s and fortune’s. All hail the conquering hero. The maid looked up. Charles waved. She waved back.
“One wonders if one can grow accustomed to such comfort,” Ward said.
Bedford lay on his bed for a long time. He didn’t take off his clothes. He heard Ward return from his lecture and close the door to his room. He stared at the ceiling. He should be at the Trump. He was scheduled to meet Halsey. He wasn’t up to it. He got up and put the Tribune under his arm. He went into the bathroom. Despite all the disappointments and unexpected twists of the last several years, he still drew a sense of security from this house and its comforts. Seemed like a lifetime ago that he walked up the stoop with Sarah for the first time. And the days on Gold Street, how long ago had they been? In antediluvian times.
He leaned toward the mirror above the basin. The face he saw was tired and haggard. He had allowed himself to believe that time would only add to his success, year by year, a steady accretion, a stalagmite of good fortune. But time didn’t just pass in New York, it ran like a trotter on the Harlem Lane, legs pumping, sweat and snot lathering across its face, the rider balanced on his flimsy platform trying to maintain his headlong pace so as not to be left behind and yet avoid one of those bumps in the road that would send him flying in the air to break his neck or be trampled by those close behind. Go faster or get out of the way or be trampled: the only choices.
Bedford unbuttoned his fly, slipped off his galluses, and sat down on the commode. He had fallen dangerously behind. But he must not lose his head and try to make up the distance all at once. That was a certain recipe for breaking one’s neck. The object was to gain speed at a steady pace, paying attention to the road, keeping a resolute hand on the reins, sustaining an acceleration that will pull you away from the pack into the safe open space ahead. It would be difficult but not impossible. He opened the Tribune and spread it across his lap. A great naval attack on Charleston had been made. The seat of the insurrection. But it had apparently been repulsed. Immense Strength of the Enemy, the caption said. The war had taken him by surprise. It shouldn’t have. He should have grasped that it was indeed an irrepressible conflict. But that was easier to understand now than it had been then. The southern merchants and agents had come to New York right up until the fighting began. In December, after Lincoln was elected, a group of South Carolinians had thrown a chevaliers’ ball at the St. Nicholas Hotel. The men came dressed in plumed hats, capes, and Elizabethan pantaloons. They hired the Brownlee Minstrels to entertain. The minstrels paraded across Broadway and came into the lobby singing and dancing; it was as though a crew of plantation darkies had spontaneously descended on the hotel. They performed their famous walk-around for the ball-goers, assembling in the middle of the floor and dancing in their raucous way, all the while clapping their hands or playing their instruments.
The Mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, made an appearance. His cronies went around the room telling everyone to be quiet. The Mayor stepped out into the middle of the floor. A former grocer from Rector Street, at twenty he had gone bankrupt trying to run a cigar store on Pearl Street. At twenty-eight he was a wealthy merchant and a member of Congress. Wood began his political career as a nativist True American but trimmed his sails, tacked with the wind that brought ashore the endless influx of immigrants, and was now a full-blown panderer to the Paddy vote.
A thin, elegant man with shifty eyes and a high, unpleasant voice, Wood exuded a restless, hurried air. He thanked the gentlemen from South Carolina for once again reminding New Yorkers that southern hospitality was a truth rather than a legend, and he said that he wanted his southern friends to be assured that the evening’s bonhomie wasn’t a passing emotion, a warmth generated by excessive imbibition, but a genuine expression of the deep and abiding ties between this metropolis and the South. “These ties,” the Mayor said, “are not only commercial but also moral and political. Moral because of the shared commitment of New Yorkers and southerners to protecting a man’s right to the ownership of his property and to the disposition of that property as he sees fit. Political because New Yorkers understand what it is like to see their prerogatives as a free people assaulted by an aggressive and despotic legislature.”
The Mayor said that when New York looked to find the cause of its oppression, it was to Albany, not Alabama. The crowd cheered. He promised that if war should ever come, New York would declare itself a free city rather than participate in an attack on southern liberties. There was more cheering. The minstrels paraded out in the same
boisterous way they had come in. A colonel from the militia offered a toast. Someone called for three cheers for Francis Pickens, Governor of South Carolina, and three groans for Abraham Lincoln. The chevaliers and their guests drank and danced until the early morning hours. At dawn, a group of them, still in plumed hats and capes, made a clamorous arrival at a whorehouse on Canal Street. Bedford walked arm in arm with a man he didn’t know, a big, friendly southerner with a thick drawl who sang lines that the rest of the group repeated in chorus:
Dar’s a niggar in de tent, keep ’im in, keep ’im out,
Dar’s a niggar in de tent, kick ’im in, kick ’im out,
But he ain’t paid de rent, throw ’im out, throw ’im out.
They woke up the women with their banging and singing. The madam poked her head out of one of the upper windows. “Quiet,” she said. “We’re coming.” Bedford’s companion yelled up to her, “Not yet! Wait until we get there!” They all burst out laughing. War with such men seemed an impossibility.
The square tiles on the bathroom floor were laid black next to white, like cards on a faro table. Bedford held the paper up in front of him: He didn’t need any reminders of his folly. ORDER BY GENERAL HOOKER AGAINST INCORRECT INFORMATION FROM PICKET LINES, AND LOOSE DISCIPLINE GENERALLY. Maybe Hooker would prove the man. Perhaps he would smash across the Rappahannock and take Richmond. But despite the blockade and the Confederacy’s loss of manpower, Secessiondom seemed stronger than ever. FROM CAIRO AND BELOW. Grant was still mired in the mud before impregnable Vicksburg. The Tribune tried to put the best face on it. Whether General Grant succeed or fail in the end, it must forever be acknowledged that he and his army are making heroic efforts. An unfamiliar note of fatalistic caution. Whether General Grant succeed or fail. Where was the envoi On to Richmond!? Half a page of ships captured by Rebel privateers. DEPREDATIONS ON OUR COMMERCE. Bedford read down the list. How much longer could the Union’s merchants sustain such losses?