1876 (14 page)

“But surely, Mr. Schuyler, you admire the vigour of his short stories ...”

“He is a nice comedian and I would pay to see him on a stage. But if I could burn every copy of
The Innocents Abroad
I would.”

My dislike for Twain is inevitable. The professional vulgarian wandering amongst the ruins and splendours of Europe, making his jokes, displaying his contempt for civilization, in order to reassure the people back home that in their ignorance, bigotry and meanness they are like gods and if they ever should (Heaven forbid) look about them and notice the hideousness of their cities and towns and the meagreness of their lives, why, there’s good old Mark to tell them that they are the best people that ever lived in the best country in the world, so let’s go out and buy his book! I will say one thing for him: he is read almost entirely by people who ordinarily read no books at all. This helps us all. As everyone knows, the President’s favourite (only?) book in all the world is
The Innocents Abroad
.

Gilder did his successful best to soothe me; remarked that Twain’s sole attempt at writing a novel in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner had been a failure, though a play based on one of the characters in
The Gilded Age
is still being performed.

“Now he seems to have failed again.” Despite Gilder’s liking for Twain, he is too much the man of letters not to take joy in the failure of another writer. “He has just this month published what appears to be a boys’ book. At Brentano’s they say hardly anyone has asked for it.”

After lunch I proposed that we stroll about the Five Points.

My companion was shocked. “You’re not serious, Mr. Schuyler?”

“But we must make some concession to the realists. In France the writers haunt such places.”

Gilder was grim. “I’ve
read
those writers and they are—unclean.”

But finally he agreed to go with me as protection. In Broadway we boarded a bright Yellow Bird horse-car bound for City Square Park.

The day was not cold and it was most agreeable to take the air, bad though the air was downtown; and see the sights, grim as they proved to be.

At first glance, the Five Points have not changed much. As many streets converge on a dismal acre or two of bare earth. Since the melting of the snow, all is now mud and human excrement in that triangle known with some bitterness to the inhabitants as Paradise Square. A broken fence encloses the area, as if to protect the two spindly trees that are its only decoration. Chestnut vendors ply their trade in a desultory manner whilst old women of foreign stock sit on the front stoops of tenements, grating horseradish with filthy hands. Two young ragged tramps sit in a doorway, swigging from a long black gin bottle. Here and there gamblers have set up tables on the sidewalk, and despite the cold a number of customers play three-card monte.

When I was young I used to enjoy the sense of danger, of seduction, even of violence in this quarter. But all that is changed. Not gone but changed, swelled by the immigrants who live jammed in the cellars, the attics, the tiny rooms of those ramshackle tenements that make up the sides of the triangle. Largest of the buildings is a one-time brewery recently turned by good church ladies into a Mission House. On either side of this lopsided building are narrow lanes: one is known as Murderers’ Alley.

“Dickens was horrified when he saw this.” Gilder indicated the alley in which dark figures could be seen hurrying on terrible missions.

Numerous beggars approached us. Fortunately, there are police on hand; at sundown, however, they sensibly vanish, and there is no law in the Five Points but that of the fist, the knife, the gun.

At the corner of Worth Street a black figure—literally black in clothes, face, hands (but not a Negro)—blocked our passage. “We’ve got the dogs for you, sirs. They’re just startin’ in the pit now. Down there, sirs. In the alleyway.”

Gilder said we were not interested, although I must say that I’d like very much to see this new, dreadful, illegal sport. A specially trained terrier is placed in a small zinc-lined enclosure filled with rats. The terrier invariably kills each rat but also suffers horribly in the process. Meanwhile bets are placed: how many rats will the dog kill and how long will it take? Sometimes as many as a hundred rats are dispatched in a single contest.

“Most popular sport.” Gilder was disapproving.

“With the poor?”

“With the rich, too. Shameful.”

A number of prostitutes tried to entice us but they would not have interested anyone other than a blind-drunk sailor, for not only were they plain to look at and filthy in person but disease seemed to emanate from their every rag. I who have liked prostitutes all my life fled almost as precipitately as did the refined Gilder; it was as if even a glance from one of those poor creatures would be sufficient to make one burn and drip for a year despite the good god Mercury’s best offices.

As we started down Thomas Street (discussing the sales of books—the usual subject of the New York scribbler), I noted the whorehouse where once I used to regularly spend myself in every sense of that verb. The house is unchanged. But now it is packed from cellar to dormer windows with Italian immigrants.

As we passed, children flowed like lava from the house (the image is appropriate, since all are Neapolitan), and clustered round, begging for money. I scattered pennies; spoke to them in their own language, to their astonishment. Incidentally, I speak more French, German, and Italian in New York’s streets and restaurants than I do English. The entire working class save the Irish speak no English, and what the Irish speak is at best near-English.

Yet my taste for low life has now returned after two months of trying to make my way in the world of scribblers. Tonight, in fact, I was
absolutely
indulged.

Late though it is, I feel marvellous, despite exertions that at my age are more apt than not to end with the spirit’s swift departure from the voluptuously overburdened flesh.

Jamie came to take us first to the theatre and then to supper at Delmonico’s. I thought that he would bring his fiancée, a Baltimore belle, but he came alone, and was not entirely sober. Fortunately, after so many years, Emma is as indulgent as a sister (twenty years ago when Jamie would pull her hair she would kick his shins). So we were very much
en famille
, as he installed us in his grand victoria.

“This is going to be a rare treat.” Jamie kept repeating, but though he tried to keep secret the nature of the “rare treat,” we both knew what it would be since the newspapers had written of nothing else for some days.

Although the theatre was only a block or two from the hotel, we had to wait more than half an hour as each of the long line of carriages in front of us stopped and deposited its contents at the new Park Theatre (a mere shadow of the old, despite the blazing calcium lights and the enlarged proscenium arch).

“It’s Oakey Hall of course!” I said the moment we joined the line in front of the theatre. “It’s his opening night.”

“I read of no one else in the papers but I still don’t know
who
Oakey Hall is.” Emma reads our newspapers with a swift but often uncomprehending eye.

“Most gorgeous creature! Isn’t he, Schuyler?” Since Jamie has become sole proprietor of the
Herald
and I his special Washington observer, he has dropped the “Mister” and the “sir” with which so respectfully he addressed me all his life. Well, times change.

“He’s never come my way.” I turned to Emma. “He was mayor of New York. And a part of Tweed’s ring. For several years they’ve been trying to put him in jail, too.” Incidentally, Tweed is rumoured to be safe in Mexico.

“But Oakey stays out of the clink because he never stole so much as two bits.” Jamie is personally fond of Hall, who is, everyone agrees, a considerable charmer as well as the best-dressed man in New York (whatever
that
must be, as mayor, he not only stole money but delighted in the title “the King of Bohemia.” He has always been something of a scribbler as well as a lawyer; journalists love him as a glamourous brother.

“He has written a play. I read that much in the press.” Through the steaming glass of the carriage, the bright marquee lights illuminated the title,
The Crucible
, elsewhere identified as a play “leased and managed” (but actually written as well) by Oakey Hall, who is, also, to the delight of New York, the leading actor.

I felt the old excitement as I once again set foot in the foyer of an American theatre. My first such occasion in New York since 1837, when quite another Park Theatre played to quite a different audience, now for the most part gone to join the majority.

I was happy to see that even in the harsh glare of the calcium lights Emma looked ten years younger than her age as she made a tour of the lobby on Jamie’s arm; everyone’s eyes were upon her, although half the leading actresses of the city were at the theatre, not to mention any number of gallant ladies of fashion.

Jamie was greeted jovially by the swells; amongst them was Commodore Vanderbilt’s middle-aged heir, to whom Jamie deferred. Mr. Vanderbilt looks to be a dim sort of man, and it is said that his father (who may never die) has not much confidence in “young” William’s ability to carry on the New York Central Railroad and the rest of the old man’s huge stolen empire.

Why is it that I so much admire the Bonapartes but detest these money-grubbers? Scale, I suppose. The Bonapartes wanted glory. These folk just want money for its own sake. Only lately have they begun, nervously, to spend money in what they take to be a splendid manner by accumulating works of art, by building mansions. I wonder if one of them will prove to be a new Augustus: finding New York brownstone, he will leave it marble.

I was stopped just before the curtain rose by what I took to be an actor. This bold-looking man’s fringe of hair was long at the back, whilst his moustaches would have looked appropriate attached to a Mexican general; he wore a leather frontiersman jacket like Davy Crockett and carried in one hand a Mexican cowboy hat known as a sombrero.

“Mr. Schuyler, your admirer, sir! We met in London, don’t you remember?”

The voice was resonant and resolutely Western. “Surely if we had met, I could hardly forget it, sir.” I, too, was resonant.

Of course we had never met but it made no difference. Yes, it was Joaquin Miller, one of the horde of Western writers that the English delight in showing off to one another. Socially Miller was a great success in London a few seasons ago. I am told that on occasion he would smoke three cigars simultaneously, claiming that all real Californians smoked three at a time. One memorable evening he got down on all fours and snapped at the ankles of the delighted young ladies. From time to time he publishes volumes of manly verse.

I was polite, flattered even that he would take notice of a fellow “actor” who is not only so much older but booked into (let us belabour the metaphor) an entirely different kind of theatre. Emma was also much taken with him whilst Jamie made good-natured fun of him. Apparently Miller is used to being the butt of jokes.

A number of people presented themselves to us. I was particularly taken by a tall ruddy-faced man in early middle age, elegantly dressed and with a most gracious manner. “We met for an instant at the Century, Mr. Schuyler. I’m sure you wouldn’t recall. You were with Mr. Stedman. I’m right glad to meet you again, sir.”

I pretended to remember him; was struck by his literary manner. As we took our seats (the curtain was an hour late), Jamie told me that my admirer was the collector of the port of New York, that extraordinarily powerful and lucrative post from which my long-dead friend and now glorious legend Sam Swartwout stole more than a million dollars. Let us hope that General—yes, another general—Arthur will be either bolder or more discreet.

General Arthur told me that in college he had read and particularly enjoyed my little book
Machiavelli and the Last Signori
. I was overwhelmed. In the old days collectors of the port knew nothing except how to add and subtract—mostly the latter.

The play was, for me, a perfect joy. The former mayor of New York is a dapper creature who wears—or wore—an odd drooping pince-nez, sports—or sported—a distinctive moustache. I change tenses because near the end of this astonishing play, the former mayor, in the interest of absolute realism,
shaved off his moustache
for a prison scene and left off wearing his pince-nez.

The result was disastrous. In the earlier acts Oakey Hall had been confident, even convincing. Now he lurched near-sightedly about the stage, running into furniture, whilst his voice became curiously indistinct as the tongue, attempting powerful consonants, sought in vain for the counterpressure of that thick overhang of moustache which had for so long made effective his usual speech.

I was weeping with laughter as he, poor man, wept with self-pity, wearing a Sing Sing prison uniform a size too large for him. Needless to say, the brave actor-author was given a standing ovation, and were I still Gallery Mouse for the
Post
, what a notice I might have written for tomorrow’s paper!

Delmonico’s proved to be crowded. Many of those who had been at the theatre had also made reservations for supper. In fact, we arrived at the same time as the manager, young Charles Delmonico, who respectfully greeted us outside the front door.

“Well, Charles, what did you think?” asked Jamie, perfectly willing to keep us standing on the pavement as an arctic wind roared west across Union Square. Emma gasped with cold. The polite young Delmonico hurried her inside as he answered Jamie, “I think Oakey was probably a better mayor.”

Of the three Delmonico restaurants, the one at Fourteenth Street and Union Square is certainly the most fashionable. The carpeting is thick. The lamps are richly shaded. How important it is to see the food plainly, yet not to see or to be seen too closely by those one dines with! Damask curtains comfortably contained the warmth but not the heat that one so often gets in overcrowded poorly ventilated eating places.

I would dine every day at Delmonico’s if I could afford it. But one cannot dine there for less than five dollars (four courses and a single bottle of claret).