Ghost Town

by Patrick Mcgrath

  I have often tried to imagine what that interview was like. I know it occurred in the library, a dark, wood-paneled room on the second floor of the house. There were armchairs grouped around a fireplace and a desk made of black mahogany, and bookshelves that rose on every side from floor to ceiling so high that a ladder was required to reach the volumes at the top. The pelt of a bear lay on the floor in front of the fire, the two glass eyes in the massive head staring unblinking into the flames. It was from one of the armchairs beside the fire that Noah barked out the command to enter when Charlotte knocked on the library door that evening.

  —Father, we have come to see you on a matter of grave importance to us, she said.

  The three girls stood trembling in the light of the gas-lamps as Noah sat with his feet planted wide apart and his hands resting on the arms of his chair, the fingers of one hand lightly curled about the stem of a glass of cut crystal which glittered in the firelight. He wore his smoking jacket, a long, skirted garment of red silk with gleaming dragons emblazoned upon it in gold thread. He wore leather slippers from Morocco. His eyes were hooded, his lip was damp.

  —Of grave importance to you.

  —To us all, said Hester, modest Hester, by far the mildest of the three. The poor girl was so frightened that no words came when she first spoke, and she had to start again. But like her sisters she gazed with firm resolve into her father’s face. Noah crossed his legs at the ankles and set his feet upon the head of the bear.

  —I am listening, he said.

  Charlotte then took one step forward and still with her hands behind her back she began to tell her father why the beating of Julius must stop. I do not know exactly what was said, but I imagine that as she warmed to her theme her arms grew restive and soon were put to work in service of her argument, and that she became flushed in the face and her voice rose in pitch. Her father, meanwhile, would soon lose the repose he had been enjoying, and the slippered feet came off the head of the bear, the broad brow creased and furrowed—he sprang to his feet and stood over the fire, the color in his cheeks growing ever redder and his hand slapping at his thigh with irritation. The younger girls, emboldened by Charlotte’s impassioned plea, were bold enough to cry “Yes!” when their sister grew especially persuasive, and although the entire event took no longer than perhaps ten minutes, by the time Charlotte was finished her father was in a state of some turmoil. He had begun with the simple conviction that Julius required discipline, and plenty of it, and that is what he had believed until Charlotte told him flatly that the boy could not help it that he was what he was.

  This idea, strangely, had a profound effect on Noah van Horn, I mean the idea that his son “could not help it that he was what he was.” Almost at once, it seems, his feelings toward the boy changed. He saw as though in a blinding revelation that he had been punishing Julius not in order to improve his character but rather to discharge the anger that came with his recognition that the boy would never be as he wished him to be. That he had deceived himself into believing he was preparing Julius for life, when in truth he was indulging his own feelings of frustration and perhaps, too, his widower’s grief, which was, as I say, intense—it affected him deeply, and he sank into a state of such despondency that for some days the atmosphere in the house began to affect even Julius’ spirits. But at all events, the beatings came to a halt.

  The sisters had good cause to feel pleased with themselves. Charlotte was especially gratified that their intervention had proved effective, although in her father’s presence she showed nothing of this and for the first and only time in her life behaved as the demure and modest creature she was expected to be, passing through the household and going about her tasks with lowered eyes, and speaking in a voice so quiet as barely to be audible. Her father could not know it, but Charlotte had plans for Julius.

  So Noah was forced to abandon his long-held hope that his son would inherit the House of van Horn, and began to look for some young man he could groom as his successor. It was not difficult. New York in those days, as indeed today, did not lack for clever men eager to seize an opportunity to work every hour of the day and night so as to establish their name and their fortune.

  It was in many ways an odd choice he made. Where he found Max Rinder I do not know for sure, but although his family came from Bavaria they were not part of that great tide of Europeans which came pouring into New York hot on the heels of the Irish and settled north of the Five Points all the way to Fourteenth Street, so creating a city within the city that had more Germans in it than any other place save Berlin and Vienna!

  But that was not Max Rinder. His family had been on Long Island for two generations, where by all accounts they were contented and industrious, the elder Rinder being something in a brewery. Max, however, had ambition. It may be that he was already a clerk in the van Horn warehouse on Old Slip when he first came to Noah’s attention, probably through a display of the kind of qualities Noah would approve—initiative, enterprise, punctuality, deference, or maybe not deference, maybe rather an independence of thought and a readiness to speak up boldly even at the risk of arousing the awful displeasure of the master. He was a sallow young man, above medium height although somewhat stooped, for he had a bony deformity at the top of his spine which is apparent in all the photographs. He had a large sloping brow with a Napoleonic lick of jet-black hair at peak and temple and pale, deep-set eyes—hypnotic eyes, like a snake-charmer or a preacher, which he would fasten unblinking upon whomever he was talking to, the effect unsettling. He was quick in all his movements and even quicker in his thinking, a characteristic particularly esteemed by Noah van Horn, who yielded to no man in his estimate of his own brains when it came to matters of business.

  An odd choice, as I say, and it must have saddened Noah to take on this clever young man from Long Island in place of his own son. As for Julius, whom his father had already put to work in his counting-house, no sadness there, none at all—he was delighted at his imminent release from what had become an irksome captivity at a narrow, inky desk and a most tedious set of duties involving the keeping of accounts of bills of lading and cargo manifests and the like. Julius had difficulty with any task involving numbers, indeed with any application of reason to an abstract problem, and this was not his only deficiency, far from it. By all accounts he was a cheerful, friendly boy but he was profoundly disorganized. He was late for his appointments, often lost his money, his house-key, on one occasion his shoes, even, and his memory for names was that of an old person suffering from dementia. As to his appearance he was a long-limbed, lanky youth with a chaotic tumble of yellow curls. He grinned wildly when he was pleased or embarrassed and was forever having trouble with his clothing, buttons coming undone, shirt-tails escaping their confinement within his trousers, studs and pins going astray and with them the cuffs and cravats and such which they were intended to secure. His eyesight was poor, and he wore spectacles.

  It was Charlotte who saw in him something more than an unkempt buffoon. She watched closely as he amused himself in the sisters’ parlor, running off pencil sketches of the girls and their friends and then springing to the piano, where he would invent a tune with a lyric to accompany what he had sketched. Charlotte saw these spontaneous effusions as the froth or spume atop a rising wave of artistic genius, and was determined that her brother not waste it. She was convinced he had the makings of an artist, and it was certainly undeniable that with his wild hair and disheveled aspect he presented the appearance of an artistic type, and to artistic types the sisters were particularly sensitive.

  Without telling anybody what she was doing Charlotte began to look for a teacher for Julius. She visited a dozen studios in New York, most of which housed painters with established reputations. She conducted interviews with each of them. None to her seemed right. She felt that these men were too much like her father in the importance they placed on technique and discipline and industry and the like. Julius would do as he was told, she knew, but there seemed no
passion—no “sweet inward burning,” as the saying is—until, that is, she met Jerome Brook Franklin. Now here was a man, she felt, for whom art was about more than technique. Here was a man for whom art was life itself.

  At that time Jerome Brook Franklin was an impoverished painter of twenty-six whose true calling was the landscape. He had once attended a lecture of Thomas Cole’s and come away with the fiery conviction that his life’s work lay with the movement to establish a unique American art, an art that did not ape the art of Europe, but assimilated it, rather. Transcended it. A new nation, Cole had said—and it was this idea which seared the heart of the young Brook Franklin—required an artistic tradition which reflected its own true spirit, and the true spirit of America lay in the vast sublimities of her boundless unspoiled wilderness. He quoted Emerson: “There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving my eyes), which nature cannot repair …”

  I know very little about art but I have it on good authority that until Thomas Cole arrived, American painters had largely been busy with ships, and that it was the merchants who drove the market. At one time Noah van Horn had hanging on his walls a painting of every ship he owned, and this was apparently what art meant to men like him: the precise, impersonal, ostentatious display of one’s material property. Handsome enough I suppose if what you like is rigging, or the exact color of a hull, but hardly the stuff of an emergent civilization. As for Thomas Cole, I remember as a child reading this exchange in a novel. Two men are talking about the wilderness.

  —What do you see when you get there? says one.

  —Creation! cries the other.

  It was to paint pictures of Creation that Jerome Brook Franklin made expeditions into the American wilderness. His canvases displayed sweeping vistas of such scenes of natural beauty as the lakes of northwestern New York in the fall. By that time there was a healthy demand for such paintings, but he had not yet established himself among the more popular artists, and so had to give instruction to young men in order to subsidize his expeditions.

  On the day of her appointment Charlotte mounted a narrow flight of stairs to the top floor of a building on West Tenth Street. There was a landing with a banister on one side which overlooked the stairwell all the way down to the lobby. A door stood open and she peered in. What she found was a studio the size of a small ballroom with a bare, uneven wood floor and grimy skylights high overhead. It was empty. The windows were open and from the street below drifted the faint sounds of men, women, horses, and bells. There was a chalky smell in the air with a faint undertone of what she knew to be oil paint. The place was underfurnished. She saw a small stove at the far end, a few rickety tables, a low wooden platform with a number of mismatched cane chairs arranged around it and a wall of shelves holding dusty fragments of the human form in plaster. Else-where on the walls were pinned students’ sketches of figures in classical poses along with more detailed studies of the human form, and beside a closed door at the back were stacked what she assumed must be the artist’s own canvases. Like a throne in the middle of the studio stood a paint-spattered wooden easel with two tall upright arms.

  The door at the back swung open and Jerome Brook Franklin emerged. He was burly and fullbearded, with fierce blue eyes, and he wore a checkered suit in a loud pattern of autumnal browns and reds. He advanced upon Charlotte like a bear, took her gloved hand in his own great paw then led her the length of the studio to the back, where they sat close to the stove on a pair of cane chairs. Charlotte said later that he stared at her with a most peculiar intensity, and she experienced some discomfort. She said she liked that. He felt dangerous, she said. To Charlotte this meant he must be a proper artist, and so she told him what she was looking for and what she was prepared to pay. She had brought with her a portfolio of Julius’ work, and now she handed it over.

  With an air of profound boredom the painter rapidly leafed through Julius’ sketches, returned the portfolio, and agreed to take him on. He told her when the new course of classes would be starting, and that seemed to be it. He accepted a part of his fee in advance and stuffed the dollars into the pocket of his vest. Nothing more to be said. Not a man for small talk. Only when she was leaving did it occur to Charlotte to ask him if she might see an example of his own work.

  Whatever compunction she might have felt about making such a request, it was dispelled at once. The painter beamed at her through his whiskers, and without a word went to the canvases propped against the wall. He selected one and hauled it from the stack. It was a big painting, and it required the full stretch of this big man’s arms to carry it to the easel. When it was in place he stepped back and the two stood together gazing at it. In the Catskills at Sunset, it was called. Charlotte saw a vista of dark peaks receding to the horizon, and beyond them a sky of an intense, pale orangey-blue touched with flames of scarlet radiant against the darker sky over the mountains in the foreground, where in a valley, in utter stillness, lay a lake of what looked like burnished copper and beside it a tiny human figure in a state of rapt contemplation. She stared at it for several minutes. I believe she was genuinely moved. When she turned to the artist her eyes shone with unshed tears.

  —It is magnificent, she whispered. You love the place, then?

  He nodded.

  —I should like to go there once.

  He said nothing. She left soon afterwards in a somewhat emotional state. It is hard to imagine that Jerome Brook Franklin was anything but gratified at such a powerful reaction to his work.

  It is time, I suppose, that I declare my interest. Jerome Brook Franklin was my grandfather. I met him a few times when I was small, and himself an old man, and in due course will describe an encounter with him—one of the very few glimpses I can provide of any of the actors in this drama at first hand. He was not an easy man but I have reason to believe he was a good man, and he was certainly generous to Julius when he first came out of the insane asylum. I only wish I had known him better.

  His studio made as deep an impression on Julius as it had on his sister, and the boy later confessed he was astonished that for so long he should have been unaware that such places existed in the city; and although he could not articulate what it was that excited him so profoundly, he was quite certain that it mattered more than anything he had yet experienced. It was as though a door in his soul, long closed, had been opened, and into the dark place streamed sunlight: this was how Charlotte described her brother’s state of mind.

  That first morning, he walked up Sixth Avenue to Tenth Street, clutching his portfolio under his arm. He climbed the narrow stairs to the landing at the top, where he found the door was open, so he went in. He was the first to arrive, and for some minutes he wandered about in a state of dawning wonder, just as Charlotte had predicted he would. He then realized that in the room at the far end of the studio a large man in his shirtsleeves and without a collar was bent over a wash-bowl beside an unmade bed. Without turning the man shouted “Early!” and kicked the door shut with a bang. Soon other students arrived, and I can see them all too clearly, those budding young men with their freshness and enthusiasm still intact, each one no doubt privately persuaded of his own unique genius … So sad. Not one of them came from a family like Julius’, and some I am sure were shabby youths from the tenements who perhaps had to support their studies with ill-paid jobs done at odd hours of the day or night. I imagine they talked about Jerome Brook Franklin, what they had heard about him, what they thought he was like.

  He came out at last. It was a brisk morning in early April, and as he walked down the studio he rubbed his hands and cried out to the “young gentlemen” kindly to sit down. He stood on the low platform by the stove and regarded his new students. He then proceeded to talk. Even in old age my grandfather’s voice possessed that booming confidence which to impressionable youth carries the unmistakable ring of truth. That day he spoke first of the wilderness, telling them that Nature had the power to “exalt the very bowels of the soul,” a phr
ase that has remained current in my family. He showed them several of his own canvases, and then said that before they could even begin to think of painting such pictures they must first study form. They would master the drawing of classical statuary, he said, and then would come the life class. Among the young men there was some grinning and nudging at the thought of the life class, for they had heard stories about artists’ models. Only then, said Jerome Brook Franklin—pregnant pause here—only when they had achieved proficiency in the studio would he let them anywhere near a mountain. Julius was in a state of ecstasy by this point.

  This was called at the time Julius’ “awakening,” at least this was what Charlotte called it, who of all the sisters was the most passionate in her conviction of the boy’s genius. Not hard to imagine the state he was in when he got back to Waverley Place that afternoon. The three girls were waiting for him of course, and no sooner had they hurried him into the parlor and closed the door than he gazed at them with shining eyes and announced that he was a slave of art for evermore!

  Now, to this point Julius’ life had been an oddly unstable affair. This was a boy who had lost his mother as an infant and then suffered years of brutality at the hands of a father who to any other child would have quickly become a hateful, terrifying figure, but whom Julius had apparently never feared or hated. Was it possible that he had simply not registered his suffering, just shaken it off? Or that the love of his sisters had in some mysterious fashion erased it from his memory? I think not. I believe Julius buried his pain, buried it so deep that nobody saw it, not even himself. Dutifully as a child he had gone to his lessons with his tutors, and later to work in his father’s warehouse, and always he did the best he could with such good humor—the wild grin, the flapping shirt-tails, the lost shoes—that despite his manifest limitations no one could find fault with him. But somewhere in the recesses of his heart a mortal wound was weeping.