1876 (5 page)

On a table in front of the marble fireplace was a stack of letters and telegrams. I could not wait to open them, but politeness required that I wait until the Colonel demonstrated for us the many conveniences of the suite, including the new calcium or lime lights that cast a rather lurid glow over everything, though they make reading particularly easy for one who is developing, as I am, cataracts.

“Mrs. Paran Stevens has invited you to her next Sunday.” The Colonel indicated one of the envelopes. “She always has music. Usually someone from the opera. She hopes you will come.”

“You are too kind,” Emma murmured, removing furs (her mother’s, I fear).

“She’ll want to see you, too, Mr. Apgar.” The Colonel was casually agreeable, and John blushed and said that he would be honoured.

After a demonstration of the mysterious speaking tubes that connect the suite with those bowels of the hotel where dwell valets and maids and waiters, the Colonel withdrew.

“We’re really here.” Emma ran to the window to look out onto the square filled with omnibuses and carriages and telegraph poles and goats (actually the goats were now trotting down East Twenty-fourth Street).

A large sign on a building just opposite implores one and all to drink Old Jacob Thompson’s Sarsaparilla.

Since I still felt I was aboard ship and the floor appeared to be heaving in a most unnatural way, I sat down beside the fire and began to open telegrams whilst John showed Emma those sights of the town that are visible from the window.

“That’s the Union Club over there. It’s quite nice. We’re all members,” said John. Apparently the Apgars move in a herd up, down and all around the island.

But Emma was more concerned with the beggars.

“Why don’t you do something with them?”

“Like what?”

“The Emperor would have started a war.” Emma laughed. She was, however, quite serious.

“But we’ve just had a war.”

“Well, you need another one. And very soon.”

I found the invitation from Mr. Paran Stevens for Sunday night, to hear the tenor Mario. Also, an invitation to be guest of honour at the Lotos Club any Saturday of my choosing, to give an impromptu chat. A note from Mr. Hartman, wanting to know if I would be interested in a lecture tour. A message from William Cullen Bryant (the whole name spelled out) to say that he would be happy to have me for breakfast any day, before 8:30 a.m.

I’ve just been counting on my fingers and my old editor at the
Evening Post
—who is still the editor of the paper—is now eighty-one years old. Everyone else from my New York youth is dead except for Bryant, whom I thought of even then as being the oldest person I knew.

There
 
was
 
a welcome from my publisher,
 
Mr. Dutton, and a note delivered by hand from Richard Watson Gilder, editor of
Scribner’s Monthly
, where I publish when I cannot get a decent price elsewhere; he proposes an early meeting at my convenience; he, too, wants me to address the Lotos Club. There was nothing, however, from Bonner of the
Ledger
or from Frank Leslie, whose monthly pays the best of all the magazines—I had written both men that I would be in New York on the fourth.

I was also disappointed to find no welcome from what has been for years a principal source of revenue, the New York
Herald
. But then young James Gordon Bennett is but a pale (and drunken) version of his father. Even so, he might have had the courtesy to have left at least a card.

But I found what I most wanted to find amongst the telegrams: an invitation to take tea tomorrow with John Bigelow. He is the key to my good fortune ... if that fortune is to be good.

Words now begin to blur agreeably on the page. The opiate takes effect. In spite of the night’s approach, I feel optimistic. Young. No, not young but comfortable within this carapace of old flesh as I prepare to make one last effort to place myself in such a manner that for me the setting of the sun will be the best time of my long day and Emma’s noon.

NOON, and I am exhausted.

The opiate worked marvellously until four in the morning. Then I was wide-awake. Could not fall asleep.

I dressed. Watched the dawn. Worked for a time on my Empress Eugénie; ordered tea; made sure that the waiter was very quiet, for Emma is a light sleeper and needs all the rest she can get. New York will be a siege for her. No, a triumphant progress.

If Mr. John Day Apgar is able to support her in decent style, then I shall be reasonably pleased to have him for a son-in-law. Of course, he is a year or two younger than Emma but that hardly matters, since her beauty should have a long life whilst he has no beauty at all.

Emma is to spend the day with John’s sister, visiting the shops—or stores, as they call them here. Did they always? Or have I forgotten? It is plain that I am no longer a New Yorker. But then this New York is no longer the New York that was.

Restless, the article finished and sealed in its envelope and addressed to
Harper’s Monthly
, I decided to take Bryant at his word and pay him a breakfast call. He lives now at 24 West Sixteenth Street.

Without delight, I entrusted myself to the perpendicular railway. “Fine morning, sir. But near to freezing,” said the operator who looked to be, at the very least, a commodore in full uniform.

The lobby was almost empty. I gave the envelope to a page who vowed he would deliver it to
Harper’s
;
then made my way amongst green shrubbery and bronze spittoons to the front door, where I was respectfully offered, as it were, the square by the uniformed chasseur, who also warned me of the cold and of the fineness of the day.

I had forgotten the brittle, dry exhilarating cold of the New York winter. The wet cold of Paris makes my ears ache. The clammy cold of London congests the lungs. But despite the fumes of anthracite, New York’s air has a polar freshness. And everything appears new, even the sun, which this morning looked like a fresh-minted double eagle as it began its climb over the island.

Even at such an early hour the city is very much alive with horsecars rattling up and down Fifth Avenue whilst the pedestrians—mostly the poor on their way to work—walk swiftly with their heads down, exhaling clouds of steam. Many of the beggars are Civil War veterans, wearing the remains of old uniforms; armless, legless, eyeless, they sell pencils, shoelaces. “Lost my arm at Chickamauga, sir.” And the dented tin cup is thrust accusingly in one’s face. Italians play hurdy-gurdies; shivering monkeys dance in the terrible cold. Homeless ragged children huddle together in doorways.

I boarded a horsecar. Although the fare is five cents, I did not have any small change in my pocket—only fragments of remarkably filthy paper, some worth ten cents, twenty-five cents, or even a dollar. In my purse I carry a few half eagles: gold coins worth ten dollars apiece (to be used sparingly!). I have not yet obtained a twenty-dollar double eagle, my beautifully apt simile for this morning’s sun. But then, if the New York sun does
not
resemble United States currency, this whole great country is not El Dorado but a fraud.

The horsecar swayed and rattled down Fifth Avenue. At the car’s center a small potbellied stove gave off insufficient heat, arid mephitic fumes. On the floor was straw as insulation. My fellow passengers were mostly men, mostly bearded, mostly potbellied like the stove. In fact, saving the desperate poor, everyone in New York is overweight: it seems to be the style. Yet when I was young (I must stop this sort of Nestorizing to myself and save it for the lecture platform and the press), the American was lean, lanky, often a bit stooped with leathery skin—and, of course, beardless. Some new race has obviously replaced the Yankees: a plump, voluptuous people, expanding gorgeously beneath their golden sun.

On the omnibus everyone was reading a newspaper. That means that the newspaper business,
my
business, is good. The headline reported the escape from prison of Boss Tweed.

I got off at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, cursing my age, for I move awkwardly. Like my countrymen, I, too, am fat, but at least have the excuse of advanced age and French cuisine.

I walked down Sixteenth Street between rows of identical brownstone houses. Irish maids swept stairs; menservants (some Negro) took in garbage pails; the knife-and-scissors-sharpener man moved jingling from house to house. Wisps of white smoke began to appear from the chimneys as this most respectable street slowly awakened.

I found William Cullen Bryant in his study, wearing a faded dressing gown and exercising with dumbbells. He did not stop, nor, I fear, did he recognize me until the maid announced my name.

“Schuyler! How good of you to come. Sit right down. I shan’t be a moment.”

So I sat in the dark study (the only light from two small coals burning in the grate) and watched Bryant do his exercises. He is as tall and spare as I remember, but his appearance has been entirely transformed by a vast beard that now circles his face like a mandala or magical bush ready at a moment’s notice to ignite, to emit the voice of God, but then I have always thought Bryant’s voice must sound not unlike that of the Deity on one of the Creator’s rare unagitated days.

“You must exercise each morning, Schuyler ...”

“I
think
about exercise almost every day.”

“The blood must flow—flow!” Then dumbbells were put away, and Bryant excused himself. Through several shut doors, I heard the sound of him splashing about in water and
knew
the water was arctic cold.

In no time at all, Bryant returned, fully clothed and the picture of, as the British say, rude health. Together we descended to the drafty downstairs dining room furnished with depressingly “sincere” Eastlake furniture.

We breakfasted alone. Bryant’s wife died ten years ago and “my daughter Julia is out of the city. So I am a bachelor.”

The maid served us hominy with milk, brown bread and butter. I waited for tea, for coffee—in vain.

Bryant was greatly affected by Tweed’s escape from prison. “Of course he paid his gaolers. They’re all alike, you know.” Who “they” were he did not specify, but I assume that he meant the lower orders, the Democrats, the Irish, the enemies of the Republican
Evening Post
, which supports the Grant Administration regardless of scandal. The radical crusading spirit is now entirely dead at the
Post
.
But Bryant is old.

Glumly I chewed brown bread whilst Bryant expressed himself at length on the hopeless corruption of New York City, until, bored, I diverted him with an inquiry about his forthcoming history of the United States.

I was favoured with a rare smile. “Unfortunately, I have done very little of the work. My collaborator is the one who toils. But I do have a book of poetry ready for publication.”

Bryant tried out a number of titles on me. We decided that
The Flood of Years
was the best. Apparently this octogenarian work is “an answer to that poem of my youth
Thanatopsis
.
It’s hard to believe that at seventeen I actually entertained certain doubts about the immortality of the Soul. But now, Schuyler, I have come to accept our immortality!”

At that instant, Bryant looked like Moses, despite a trace of hominy grit in his beard. I nodded respectfully; felt young again, callow, tongue-tied in the presence of America’s premier poet, of the city’s most distinguished newspaper editor, of the oldest man ever to exercise with dumbbells on an icy winter morning.

“But your own work has given us all much pleasure.” The deep-set eyes appeared to look at me for the first time. If the blood in my congealing veins were capable of a sudden rush to
any
part of the body, I might have blushed with pleasure at praise from the only man alive who still looks upon me as young.

“I particularly admire
Paris Under the Commune
.
What a time! What issues were joined!” To my surprise Bryant is not made panicky by the Communards—or communists—and he asked me intelligent questions. He also got the title of the book right; usually it is referred to as
Paris Under the Communists
.

Then we spoke of our dear mutual dead friend, the editor William Leggett. I write “mutual” knowing that it is a word Bryant deplores. In fact, he has written a small book of words and phrases that are never to appear in the
Post
.
Not “mutual” but “common.” Not “inaugurate” but “begin.” He has no liking for Latin-or Greek-derived words (yet called his most famous poem
Thanatopsis
).

It is curious that despite Bryant’s great good sense about language, his own prose is so perfectly ordinary that even the liveliest topic drops dead at a single prod of his (the last in all of New York) feather quill pen.

Opening the
Herald
, Bryant found me on page three. With an amused inflection he read aloud the reporter’s account of the arrival in New York of the celebrated author Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler and his daughter, the Princess Day Regent. “A Turkish title from the sound of it.”

“No. Bosnian.”

Bryant’s humour still lurks behind that awesome face he sees fit to petrify the world with. As practising journalists, we enjoyed the confident incoherence of the interviewer; and deplored the low standards of today’s journalism.

“And yet—” The maid interrupted us not with coffee or tea, as I had prayed, but with Bryant’s topcoat and beaver hat.

“—the newspaper press can take a great deal of credit for having destroyed Mr. Tweed in ’73.”

I noticed sourly that the maid did not even attempt to help me on with
my
topcoat; and due to a rheumatic shoulder, I have more difficulty than does Bryant getting in and out of clothes.

“With some aid from Governor Tilden.”

“Of course, a capital fellow. Do you know him?”

“Yes. Slightly.”

We were now in the street. School-bound children carried their books in that never-out-of-date shoulder sling whilst a ragged man pulled a sort of barrow after him on which had been placed a large tin bucket of boiling water fired from beneath by a kerosene burner.