A Bloodsmoor Romance (69 page)

 

SO BEGAN ADAM
P. Watkins's famous essay for the
Atlantic,
in which unstinting enthusiasm for his subject and patriotism for his country were subtly blended, to produce a highly gratifying paean to the lives and works of four “unknown” Americans, in whom, it would not be remiss to charge, true genius did flower. Our own John Quincy Zinn was, of course, the primary concern of the author, and it was to his life, with its numerous vicissitudes, that Mr. Watkins devoted most of his well-chosen words; but he spoke most generously of three other “unsung” Americans—the poetess Amelia Fairleigh of Elmhurst, Massachusetts, of whose voluminous outpourings since the early Fifties a scant dozen sonnets had seen print, the which situation had not evidently discouraged the spinster toiler, but inspired her all the more; the lawyer-elocutionist Stanley Gummidge of Hawthorne, Illinois, whose “life-project,” as he called it, was to see the United States of America annex Canada and Mexico to its “rightful” territory; and the notable physician Dr. Benjamin Rush, who had discovered, by treating a Negro male diagnosed by other doctors as suffering from
leprosy,
the astonishing, and equally loathsome, disease
Negritude!
—which disease is evidently a skin condition whereby great patches of the natural white skin become discolored, and even blackened, resulting eventually in
Negritude,
for which, the good doctor fervently believed, he would one day discover the cure, and thereby restore the suffering “blacks” to their original, and natural, whiteness.

Young Mr. Watkins, wishing not only to formally interview his subject, but to quietly observe him “at his daily labors,” so impressed Mrs. Zinn with his earnestness, that she invited him to stay at the Octagonal House, for as long as he might require: this duration of time being, all told, some six days. The journalist's manner was sunny and ebullient, his questions steady and unrelenting, and his “indefatigability as to trivia,” as Mr. Zinn amusèdly phrased it, remarkable. The Zinns soon grasped that the journalistic profession was one which saw, and seized, and exclaimed, and expanded upon, with both a childlike wonderment, and a curious cynicism. For tho' Mr. Watkins's praise of Mr. Zinn's endeavors was so fulsome as to frequently embarrass his subject, his vituperative denunciation of other persons was startling: the more so, that by his own admission, he had not a
precise
knowledge of all he denounced, but was “going by what he had gathered,” from the newspapers, or “confidential” conversations with knowledgeable individuals. (Mr. Watkins's mocking scorn of the Wizard of Menlo Park, gratifying to the Zinns at first, soon became troubling, when the young man let drop, quite inadvertently, that he had once applied for an audience with Edison, so as to do a “humane study” for one of the New York papers, but had been rudely rebuffed: the inventor being so “swollen with pride” as to suggest that he had not
time
for the project! “As if,” Mr. Watkins observed with both anger and merriment, “
I myself
were not daily pressed for time!”)

Yet the young man was an agreeable presence in the household, and did not disturb the workshop activities so greatly as one might anticipate. In fact, the questions he addressed to Mr. Zinn himself were fewer in number than those addressed to Mrs. Zinn: for it was from her he sought his “humane interest,” greedily accumulating all the “idiosyncratic facts” she could recall, pertaining to Mr. Zinn's earlier life, and their marriage of upward of three decades. He evinced a flattering curiosity about Mrs. Zinn—the Prudence Kidde­master of old, who had forged a substantial career for herself, as a schoolmistress in an excellent Philadelphia academy; he was naturally interested in the Kidde­masters, whom he did not fail to call “an historic American family”—tho', for the purposes of his article, as he scrupled to explain, he would
minimize,
or
edit out,
most references to John Quincy Zinn's powerful in-laws: this alliance provoking, in the general reader, the wrong sort of inference. (“I cannot allow it to be speculated, that Mr. Zinn's in-laws have financed his projects,” Mr. Watkins said vehemently, “for that would quite distort the meaning of all that John Quincy Zinn symbolizes: and, moreover, I am confident that it is not true.” To which assertion, Mrs. Zinn, cutting the young man another slice of white fruitcake, did not strenuously object.)

Fortunately for the Zinns, Mr. Watkins had but a glancing interest in the Zinn girls, assuming rightly that Mr. Zinn “must have hoped for a son and heir,” yet was not “gravely disappointed” at the female issue he had sired, being, by nature, a “kindly and indulgent father,” and “hardly given to the sort of tyrannical outbursts,” characteristic of other men of genius—in whom, Mr. Watkins waxed poetically, genius and madness contend, like Indian mongoose and snake. That the Zinns had had four daughters, and adopted a fifth, was a fact to be merely noted in Mr. Watkins's article, tho' he questioned Mr. Zinn with bright, pleased eyes, and an enlivened countenance, on the subject of the
birthmark remover,
with which he had experimented, on both himself and his infant daughter Samantha, who had been afflicted at birth with a fiery, daggerlike blemish on her left temple, a miniature of her father's. (The chemical application Mr. Zinn had devised, while effective—after many experimentations—on his baby girl, was ineffective on him: and, in fact, caused extreme pain: so that he felt obliged to discontinue the applications, and lost interest, almost immediately, in the project.) Mr. Watkins dwelt upon the subject of progeny but briefly, in the written essay, not choosing to mention any of the Zinn daughters by name (tho' he did list “Nahum Hareton” as J.Q.Z.'s “disciple and assistant”), the focus of his remarks being upon the published theories of Ebenezer Gilfillan of the Royal Society, as to the correlation between the number of children of outstanding inventors and their patents. (This correlation, as advanced by Dr. Gilfillan, is necessarily controversial, and, in any case, vexingly difficult to prove. That the size of the
average
inventor's family correlates .878 ± .014 with the intensity of the patenting rate, is not helpful as regards Mr. Zinn, who made so little effort, after all, to acquire patents for himself.)

Mr. Watkins evinced more curiosity in the “gadgets” Mr. Zinn had made for household use, and the “architectural wonderment” of the Octagonal House itself—which the Zinns, having dwelt therein for so many years, had long ceased to notice (tho' Mrs. Zinn did have her complaints about the drafts and “moaning winds” that ofttimes sprang out of nowhere). He was to underscore in his essay the likelihood of the theory that an
eight-sided
domicile was salubrious as to general health, and highly stimulating as to the “higher mental faculties”—an issue that would be debated, with colorful pros and cons, in the Letters Column of the
Atlantic,
throughout much of 1888.

As it was published, Mr. Watkins's lengthy article gave as much space to the “legendary” and “oft-eccentric” mode of behavior of his subjects, as to their accomplishments. It delighted in little Pip, “his master's constant shadow,” and in the “cluttered and cobwebbed
profusion
” of the Zinn workshop; it made much of John Quincy Zinn's “charming idiosyncrasies” of dress and manner, his habit of going about in his shirt sleeves “like any honest workingman,” with his silver-hued beard “of noble proportions,” and his “dreamy saint's eyes” in which both kindliness and native Yankee shrewdness were to be found. That J.Q.Z. sometimes turned aside from his work “in a frenzy of coughing,” that he had acquired, over the years, an “ascetic,” and “much-ravaged,” and “yet childlike” countenance, and that, above all, he felt “not a
whit
” of bitterness or regret, that other inventors had so freely betaken themselves to “imbibe at his well”—all were offered as proofs of his
genius,
and his
patriotic character.
He was the living spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson's idealism; the incarnation of Benjamin Franklin's selfless sagacity; the “brother” of Abraham Lincoln in his modest birth and background, and belief in the Democracy of Mankind. “A veritable paragon of American manhood,” Mr. Watkins boldly averred, “even
apart from
his astounding intellect.”

In Mr. Watkins's discussion of J.Q.Z.'s technical accomplishments, he did not, it seems, distinguish sharply enough between those that had been emphatically Mr. Zinn's own, and patented by him or by Samantha, and those that belonged in part to other men, and those that were, at the present time, still in the planning stage—still, that is, in Mr. Zinn's fertile but not reliably pragmatic imagination. He seemed to find amusing the “quest for the Perpetual Motion mechanism,” no less than the sketch for a Thermal Suit (whereby the individual, in all weathers, might regulate his own atmospheric condition), and the machine to grind up barnyard nuisances like feathers and bones, and the various insecticides and “fly-stickers”; he declared as “infinitely significant for the future,” Mr. Zinn's present experimentations with a hydrogen-filled dirigible (built, of course, to scale, as a consequence of his workshop's severely limited resources), and his improvements in weaponry, which would one day make war “so horrific a prospect, no sane men would wish to indulge in it.” His spring-stirrup for the U.S. cavalry was a “small masterpiece” of “tinkering ingenuity”; his notion of paper (disposable) collars for men, simply brilliant. A road- or auto-locomotive would be a godsend to the American people, as would a flying machine, and a cure for snoring, and a “sun-furnace,” and waterproofing methods that were 100 percent reliable: all projects upon which Mr. Zinn had worked, with widely varying results. Mr. Watkins was particularly struck by the visionary notion of a single Great Eye, driven by electricity or some other clean power, that would exert a constant moral surveillance over the nation—“a force for good gravely needed,” the journalist intoned, “in these troubled and uncertain times.”

The typewriter, the zipper, the incandescent light bulb—and many another “brain-child”—had resided, in their embryonic forms, in Mr. Zinn's “great teeming mind,” only to be snatched away by “plunderers,” whose names need not be given. Most remarkable of all was Mr. Zinn's
sweetness
and
charity
toward those very personages who had stolen from him, and thereby made their fortunes!—and his continued optimistic faith in the future of his great nation, initially expressed, long ago, in his writings on educational reform (which, Mr. Watkins abash'dly confessed, he had not had time to read, prior to the preparation of his article), and his oft-reiterated hope that, in the forthcoming decades, the United States might “assume its rightful mantle” as a supreme World Power.
“Do you believe in the Utopian Ideal?” I inquired of John Quincy Zinn. His eyes flashed with a courageous, if somewhat wearied, zest of life; and his reply came without hesitation. “Indeed, Mr. Watkins, I do: its time may be the future, but its place is here, in the United States of America!”

“I do not recall having made such a statement,” Mr. Zinn said, in some perplexity, after repeated dazed perusals of Mr. Watkins's article. “Indeed—I do not recall Mr. Watkins asking that particular question.”

“No matter,” Mrs. Zinn said, her cheeks grown ruddy and warm, with what appeared now to be a permanent blush, as of maidenly shyness, or intense excitement (for the brief paragraph on
Mrs. John Quincy Zinn, née Prudence Kidde­master of Philadelphia,
with its depiction of Mrs. Zinn as “that paragon of wifehood—an uncomplaining helpmeet to her belovèd spouse,” had deeply moved her). “No matter, John Quincy: it is accomplish'd at last: your public vindication! At the end of which,” the somewhat flurried woman said, with a trilling laugh, and a flamboyant gesture of her hand, “I should like to pen, in five-inch red letters,
AMEN
.”

“Prudence, surely you exaggerate,” Mr. Zinn said, plucking nervously at his beard.

 

YET SHE DID
not; or, very little; and Mr. Watkins's generous “Unsung Americans of Genius Living Now Unknown” not only stirred much comment amongst readers of the
Atlantic,
and, indeed, caused the issue in which it appeared to be entirely sold out on the stands, but brought the name and plight of John Quincy Zinn to the Congress of the United States, where he was championed in impassioned speeches by such divers legislators as Congressman Arlin C. Cayce of Pennsylvania, and Senator Albert J. Hackett of Indiana. Debate on the floor centered less upon the advisability of easing the financial plight of an “unknown genius,” than on the specific terms of the allotment; and on the nature of the invention, or research, to be underwritten.

And so, one sunlit May morn, a servant from Kidde­master Hall delivered, to Mr. Zinn's trembling hand, a lengthy telegram from Washington, D.C., containing a message of such import that the astonished man could scarce absorb its content, but was forced to require Samantha to peruse it, in his stead. (The telegram was delivered, of course, to the workshop above the gorge, where Mr. Zinn and his two young assistants had been industriously working for some hours, before the momentous interruption.)

“Ah, Father!—what is it!—shall we all journey to Washington?” Samantha gaily cried, holding the telegram aloft.
“Special project—commiserate with the talents of—in dire need by most States—annual honorarium—research pertinent to
— Father, do my eyes decieve me? Can this figure—$15,000—be correct?
An annual honorarium of
—”

But so o'erwrought was the usually self-contained Samantha, that she allowed the wondrous yellow missive to slip from her shaking fingers; and might, indeed, have staggered in a daze, and fainted, had not young Nahum, close at her side, leapt with alacrity to steady her.