The James Boys

by Richard Liebmann-Smith

  Miss Gibbens’s contribution to the evening’s entertainment was a selection of lieder composed by her former vocal coach, opening with Frau Schumann’s elegant setting of the poet Friedrich Rückert’s “Liebst du um Schönheit” (“If You Love for Beauty”), her Opus 12 no. 4.

  Liebst du um Schönheit,

  o nicht mich liebe!

  Liebe die Sonne,

  sie trägt ein gold’nes Haar!

  Liebst du um Jugend,

  o nicht mich liebe!

  Liebe den Frühling,

  der jung ist jedes Jahr!

  Liebst du um Schätze,

  o nicht mich liebe!

  Liebe die Meerfrau,

  sie hat viel Perlen klar.

  Liebst du um Liebe,

  o ja, mich liebe!

  Liebe mich immer,

  dich lieb’ ich immerdar.

  As she warbled this paean to true love, Miss Gibbens kept anxiously scanning the audience to catch a glimpse of her intended’s admiring visage, only to gradually twig to the distressing realization that William and his pretty patient were no longer in the parlor. Peering out toward the hallway, she was appalled to spy the shameless couple beginning to make their way up the staircase toward the private chambers of the president’s residence.

  After rushing through her next number—Clara Schumann’s haunting setting of Heinrich Heine’s “Lorelei”—at a breakneck tempo that would have thoroughly nauseated the composer, the flustered singer abandoned her place by the piano and bustled across the room to consult with William’s parents and sister over the scandalous disappearance of the man of the hour and his benefactor’s captivating daughter. Miss James, never a great admirer of her brother’s “other” Alice, merely smirked and shrugged, while Henry Sr., who had become increasingly hard of hearing with age, impatiently shushed the distraught diva, the better to follow the next announcement from the podium. “We are honored this evening,” President Eliot was proclaiming, “to have with us not only Dr. William James, the distinguished founding director of our new Hite Laboratory of Experimental Psychology here at Harvard, but also his no less accomplished brother, the author Henry James, Jr., upon whom I would like to take the liberty of imposing at this time to favor us with a reading from one of his marvelous tales.”

  Henry’s cover was thus effectively blown. Earlier in the week he had graciously consented to participating in the evening’s entertainment, but that was before he had been aware that William Pinkerton and his men would be in the audience. Desperately attempting to maintain a low profile, the author kept his head down, hemming and hawing. His work, he stammered, was not actually meant for oral presentation; furthermore, he was a sorry reader, and in addition, he had no manuscript at hand from which to recite. President Eliot, in what was probably one of his nearest approximations to the deportment of a party animal, smiled broadly and waved a copy of The Atlantic Monthly, jovially cajoling the recalcitrant scribe to take the floor.

  To Henry’s anguish, the crowd, led by a paternally beaming Henry Sr., began vociferously encouraging him to come forward. The beleaguered novelist, feeling he had no option but to oblige, shambled up to the podium. There President Eliot handed him the journal containing the first installment of The American, from which he commenced to read in a nearly inaudible voice—as if somehow not to be heard might magically keep him from being seen as well:

  On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre. This commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts; but the gentleman in question had taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Madonna in profound enjoyment of his posture….

  William Pinkerton, of course, had no trouble recognizing the fugitive writer. The moment Henry started to read, the detective alerted his uniformed guards to the presence of a major felon in the room; yet with his every lawmanly instinct screaming for him to storm the lectern and make an arrest, he grudgingly refrained from taking such drastic action, realizing that to do so would be to risk spoiling his star client’s moment of glory, and recalling what had recently transpired chez Flaubert—a bitter memory that rendered him fearful of being similarly set upon and ignominiously dispatched by, perhaps, an outraged Harvard English department.

  Pinkerton was not the only one in the parlor struggling to suppress an itch for action: Positioned at either side of the room and edging their way inconspicuously toward the back, Frank and Jesse James were keeping close eyes on the detective and his men, poised to spring to the defense of their literary brother in the event that any of the lawmen made the slightest false move.

  Henry, having observed Pinkerton in animated consultation with his security detail, terminated his reading only a few sentences into the story. Without so much as a word of explanation or apology to President Eliot, the frightened author handed his host the copy of The Atlantic and ducked swiftly into the butler’s pantry, from which he scurried out the servants’ entrance and back across chilly Quincy Street to the refuge of No. 20.

  President Eliot, with his notoriously limited tolerance for the unforeseen, stood momentarily bemused. There being no further performances scheduled for the evening, he had little alternative but to move directly to the main event. Frantically cuing the resident pianist to sound a dramatic fanfare, Eliot called upon Asa Hite and William James to come forward for the presentation of Mr. Hite’s handsome donation to the university. Pinkerton signaled his men to lug the heavy mahogany bullion box to the front of the room, where the security detail, flanking the chest, ceremoniously lifted its lid to reveal the gleaming array of gold bars within. The sight elicited a startled gasp from the guests, which Asa Hite took as evidence of their awe at the magnitude of his munificence; whereas most of them, more likely, were appalled by such a blatant and vulgar display of wealth. It was a spectacle, they no doubt felt, that might have played quite prettily down in New York and perhaps even in provincial Hartford, but which up in proper Boston could only be taken as an egregious exhibition of reprehensible taste.

  Oblivious to the true significance of the crowd’s reaction, Mr. Hite proudly took his place to one side of the mahogany chest. As President Eliot went into his introductory remarks, it became rapidly apparent that William James, who was to have bookended the bullion on the other side, was no longer in the parlor. Eliot became visibly perturbed by the professor’s absence, which he doubtless perceived as yet another example of his former student’s congenital fecklessness. His testy inquiry as to whether anyone knew the whereabouts of Professor James evoked a confused low murmur that rippled through the room, until Alice Gibbens came forward and whispered into Eliot’s ear her suspicion that the missing celebrant had ascended to the upper chambers of the residence. It being entirely unfitting for anyone but the master of the manse to venture into that sacrosanct private domain, it fell upon President Eliot himself to go looking for the “proud son of Harvard.” Excusing himself momentarily, he asked if any of the previous performers would be so kind as to furnish an encore during his absence, but none volunteered. (Frank James, having precious little desire to share the podium with William Pinkerton, naturally demurred, and the overwrought Miss Gibbens apologized that she no longer felt herself to be “in voice.”) This left Hite, Pinkerton, and his security guards standing silently staring out at the guests while the conservatory pianist nobly essayed to fill the embarrassing void by tinkling out a Schubert sonata. His musical efforts, however, did little to ameliorate the general sense of unease in the parlor.

  Into this yawning breach in the evening’s amusements strode—or, more accurately, staggered—Jesse James. Reckless and impulsive under the best of circumstances, the outlaw, besides being thoroughly soused and seething with animosity toward Billy Pinkerton, was also doub
tless jealous of all the attention being lavished on his older brothers—not to mention on the fabled scourge of Sherwood Forest, whose legendary exploits, he believed, paled in comparison to his own. Taking his place by the piano, Professor Jessup launched into a tipsy recitation of a poem that he introduced as a work of his own composition in the grand tradition of Francis Child’s troubadour ballads:

  You may sing about your Robin Hood

  And other famous names,

  But the greatest outlaws of them all

  Are Frank and Jesse James.

  These bold marauders of the plains,

  The bravest in all history

  Strike fear into the banks and trains

  With deeds becloaked in mystery.

  Never having seen Jesse in the light—or with his pants on—William Pinkerton took a while to appreciate the extraordinary import of what he was observing. But whatever initial uncertainty he may have harbored as to the true identity of the poet, what he heard next was more than sufficient to remove any lingering shadow of a doubt: Jesse’s rhyme turned out to be a lurid fantasy of the James brothers wreaking revenge upon the Pinkertons, a dreadful piece of doggerel in which Frank, Jesse, and a trio of unnamed accomplices staged a bloody ambush on their sworn enemies:

  The Pinkerton detective clan

  (Those craven railroad dicks)

  Tracked the James Gang everywhere

  And thought they knew their tricks.

  But when they rode the Iron Horse

  On express cars and their engines

  The James boys laid in wait for them

  And vowed to take their vengeance.

  It went on to describe in brutal detail the demise of Allan, William, and Robert Pinkerton at the hands of the James brothers et al.:

  Then from out of the woods

  With a fierce rebel yell

  These bold desperadoes

  Sent those cowards to hell.

  Made them swallow hot lead

  And then dine on the dust

  As they ended up dead

  Like all railroad dicks must.

  No one in the audience knew what to make of this outlandish performance, although most were either too polite or too flabbergasted to give voice to their consternation. Billy Pinkerton was chafing to collar the felonious versifier. He looked over to Mr. Hite with a furrowed brow, clenched teeth, and an angry shake of his head, all of which his employer took as an indication that something had to be done immediately to put a stop to the travesty. The foolhardy railroad magnate thus took it upon himself to step forward and grab the offending poetaster by the arm, unaware that this was the selfsame Jesse James who had an “Arkansas toothpick” strapped to his calf and who, according to T. J. Stiles, may once have employed such a utensil to slice the penis off one of his victims and stuff it into his mouth (the “his” in this instance presumably referring to the victim’s mouth and not to the outlaw’s own).

  “Professor Jessup!” bellowed Hite. “This is entirely unfitting! You must desist immediately!”

  Jesse shook free of the older man’s grasp and shoved his portly assailant aside, sending him slamming headlong back against the bullion box with a resounding crash that knocked him unconscious. As Pinkerton and his men advanced to restrain the outlaw, he drew a revolver from beneath his waistcoat and brandished the weapon shakily at his attackers, commanding the detective and his henchmen to drop their holsters and spread-eagle themselves across the top of the piano. As the pianist hastily deserted his bench, the horrified guests, already disturbed by the fact that the poet was so obviously in his cups and “making little sense,” flew into an absolute panic. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had seen abundant action during the Civil War—in which he had been thrice wounded—was shaken by the flash of a firearm in the Harvard president’s parlor. In response to the commotion, the drunken gunman wheeled and waved his pistol at the crowd, sending them screaming and crying toward the rear of the room amid a clatter of overturning tables and shattering glassware.

  Meanwhile, upstairs in President Eliot’s master bedroom, Elena Hite was treating William James to a delectable demonstration of her recently acquired proficiency in the gamahuchic arts. This was undoubtedly a novel sensation for the chaste psychologist, who, even in his wildest masturbatory fantasies, might never have imagined himself the object of such exotic ministrations. Yet as his biographer Robert D. Richardson pointed out: “James possessed what has been called ‘a great experiencing nature’ he was astonishingly, even alarmingly, open to new experiences…. This risk-taking, this avidity for the widest possible range of conscious experience, predisposed him to embrace things that many of us might find unsettling.” (It is also not unlikely that the psychologist’s exhilaration was being enhanced by the effects of another vial of amyl nitrite he had uncorked to get himself “up” for the illicit interlude.) Amazed and thrilled by Elena’s brazen flouting of all conceivable correctitude, William breathlessly asked her how she could dare to perform such a louche act with so many proper people so close at hand. Elena reminded him of what she had once told him about the folly of living for the good report of others: Having scandalized all of Hartford and most of Paris, she professed that mere Harvard was hardly of concern to her.

  “Paris?” he asked. “How did you manage to scandalize most of Paris?”

  William must have felt himself on the verge of penetrating the mystery of Elena’s premature return from the continent, but before she could respond to his charged query, the bedroom door flew open to reveal Charles W. Eliot looming at the threshold.

  Despite his wretched eyesight and the darkness of the chamber, the president of Harvard had no difficulty discerning what was transpiring on his Chippendale four-poster. His face turned such a bright scarlet that the shocking hue of his nevus was momentarily eclipsed. “James!” he shouted. “What the devil are you up to?”

  To this, the famously articulate professor had no response other than to hastily yank up his trousers and beat a slapdash retreat out past the startled chief executive and down the stairs, where he was greeted by a scene of near-total chaos.

  With his revolver directed toward the cowering crowd, much as he would have held a bunch of overly curious onlookers at bay during a Missouri bank holdup, Jesse James was making a point of finishing up his provocative rhyme:

  Then off at a gallop

  These knights of the road

  Did ride hell-for-leather

  Until the cock crowed.

  They rode in like thunder,

  They vanished like mist,

  Back to their hideout

  Where they ate, drank, and pissed.

  This could have been one of the gravest missteps of the outlaw’s career, and not merely from a literary viewpoint. While Jesse was standing down the terrified guests, and defiantly declaiming the final stanza of his impromptu opus, Billy Pinkerton managed to slip silently away from his position splayed across the lid of the grand piano, and began stealthily moving to retrieve his cast-off holster from the floor. In another second he would have gotten the drop on the drunken Jesse James, had not the scholarly Will Franklin—much to the astonishment of his mentor Francis Child, standing right beside him—whipped out the revolver that Jesse had handed him earlier and squeezed off a shot at Pinkerton’s pudgy fingers. The crowd shrieked but, wary of Jesse’s gun trained on them, resisted the impulse to bolt en masse. As the detective rapidly withdrew his hand, Frank raced forward and jabbed the barrel of his smoking pistol into the bulging belly of the startled sleuth.

  Hearing the report of Frank’s revolver and observing Asa Hite lying prostrate beside the bullion box, William jumped to the conclusion that his brother had just killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. He shifted instantly into medical mode and rushed to his benefactor’s side, berating his brother, “My God, man, you’ve shot Mr. Hite!”

  When Frank turned to reassure William that he was responsible for no such homicidal act, Billy Pinkerton seized the opportunit
y to swat the outlaw/scholar’s pistol boldly aside and tromp down with the full force of his abundant poundage on Frank’s bad foot—the one that had been shattered by a cannister ball during the war—causing him to let out an anguished howl and drop his weapon. As Jesse spun around to see what all the screaming was about, Pinkerton’s guards sprang from the piano top and pounced on the besotted poet from behind, forcefully disarming him. In an instant the tables had turned, giving Pinkerton and his men the upper hand.

  Mr. Hite struggled to his feet just in time to greet C. W. Eliot descending the staircase with a perceptibly disheveled Elena Hite in tow. Already badly discombobulated by what had been going on in his bedroom, the Harvard president was even further appalled to witness the bizarre and violent turn of events in his parlor, which he could only have seen as better befitting the most unruly frontier saloon than America’s premier institution of higher learning. With unconcealed disgust, he remanded Elena to the custody of her father, giving the still-woozy tycoon a curt account of the compromising position in which he had discovered his daughter upstairs. This lewd news brought Mr. Hite to full consciousness as abruptly as a stiff whiff of smelling salts. He glared at Elena, then shot a nasty glance over toward William James, who, at Pinkerton’s command, had just been slammed across the piano top and, with his legs indecorously spread, was being vigorously frisked by one of the uniformed agency guards. Under vastly different circumstances, the Connecticut railroad baron might have been pleased to have entertained a proper suit from the young doctor for his daughter’s hand, but having gotten an inkling from President Eliot of what William and his erstwhile patient had been up to in the master bedroom, he found his esteem for the brilliant psychologist plummeting precipitously. He was certain that in short order everyone in the parlor would become aware of Elena’s misbehavior with the man of the hour, which they would undoubtedly view as a woeful reflection upon his own parental laxity. He was thus seized by a pressing desire to get himself and his errant daughter off the premises and back down to Hartford posthaste. “Come on, Pinkerton!” he shouted. “Pack up the damned gold, and let’s get the hell out of here!”