Assassination Vacation (15 page)

After reminding the Republican Party of its past, collaborative glories —
we
ended slavery,
we
saved the Union — Garfield encouraged his fellow Republicans to look past the present hubbub and think about their common goal, the election, an election that, months away, would be won or lost “in the quiet melancholy days of November.”

While Conkling complained that Garfield’s emotional oceanography had made him “sea-sick,” most of the other delegates considered Garfield dry land. They were relieved to agree on something, someone.

So, the Half-Breeds and Stalwarts compromised on Garfield. For the rest of his soon-to-end life, Garfield would be trapped in the middle of the two factions, an Archie forever whiplashed between the Veronica of Conkling and the Betty of Blaine. Blaine’s Half-Breeds cringed at Garfield’s letter accepting the nomination because, referring to political appointments, Garfield pledged to “seek and receive the information and assistance of those whose knowledge of the communities in which the duties are to be performed best qualifies them to aid in making the wisest choice.” The Blainiacs, as they were called, saw this as an endorsement of the spoils system and thus a score for Conkling, the boss of New York. A fear they already harbored given Garfield’s vice-presidential choice — Conkling’s friend, former New York customs collector Chester Alan Arthur, the most infamous spoilsman of all, a man who celebrated his lofty new place in American history by doing what he did best — shopping.

Nominee Garfield went back to his Ohio farm in Mentor. The National Park Service has since restored his gray clapboard home, including the front porch he used in his front porch campaign. At the time, on-the-road glad-handing and stump speeches were considered beneath a presidential candidate’s dignity, and so the voters came to Garfield. They loitered in his yard, waiting for the candidate to come in from his fields to say a few words. Such as, “Ladies and gentlemen, all the doors of my house are open to you. The hand of every member of my family is outstretched to you. Our hearts greet you, and we ask you to come in.” Notice he doesn’t ask them to sit down — Mrs. Garfield fed visitors standing up so they wouldn’t linger.

Allison Sharaba, the Garfield home’s operations manager, shows me around, pointing at quaint Victorian rooms and spidery blue wallpaper. In the library, I spot eleven volumes of
The Works of Charles Sumner.
Sumner, the Massachusetts senator, was famously beaten up on the Senate floor in 1856 by a pro-slavery South Carolinian driven mad by Sumner’s abolitionist rhetoric. Not that Sumner’s fellow Republicans didn’t also ponder punching him over the years. Sumner was everything Garfield was not — a brilliant, bitchy, righteous and self-righteous blabbermouth, the pepper jack to Garfield’s cream cheese. As Sumner lay dying in 1874, Garfield wrote in his diary that “Sumner was the most scholarly man in public life,” remarking, “Sumner was my friend; though I have never been blind to his follies yet I have believed in him as an honest and faithful man.”

Garfield and Sumner were known as the most voracious readers on Capitol Hill, frequently bumping into each other in the stacks of the Library of Congress while their fellow legislators were probably side by side at bordellos and bars. The sad thing about Garfield’s eleven volumes of Sumner’s
Works
is that it’s a fifteen-volume set; the final book in the series wasn’t published until two years after Garfield’s death. Garfield’s assassination meant he would miss out on so much, from the double wedding of his children held in this very library, to finishing out his first presidential term. But I would imagine he would also have mourned all the books he never got to read.
Huckleberry Finn,
for starters, wasn’t published until 1884.

Garfield’s diaries are low-key; I doubt even he would have read them, and he read everything. What passes for dramatic conflict is witnessing him, during his tenure in the House, fidget through congressional committee meetings when the only place he wants to be is holed up with his new twenty-six-volume shipment of the complete works of Goethe. He tries to cheer himself up about the political and personal hassles keeping him from German poetry, writing, “Perhaps that study of literature is fullest which we steal from daily duties.”

If there is a recurring theme in Garfield’s diaries it’s this:
I’d rather be reading.
That might sound dull and perfunctory, but Garfield’s book fever was a sickness. Take, for example, the commencement address he delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880. Traditionally, these pep talks to college graduates are supposed to shove young people into the future with a briefcase bulging with infinitive verbs: to make, to produce, to do. Mr. Loner McBookworm, on the other hand, stands up and breaks it to his audience, the future achievers of America, that the price of the supposedly fulfilling attainment of one’s personal and professional dream is the irritating way it cuts into one’s free time. He tells them,

It has occurred to me that the thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure — the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below.

The only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker parable is the absence of the word “dude.” Keep in mind that at that moment Garfield was a presidential candidate. The guy who theoretically wants the country’s most demanding, hectic, brain-dive-denying job stands before these potential gross national product producers advising them to treat leisure “as your gold, as your wealth, as your treasure.” As Garfield left the podium, every scared kid in the room could probably hear the sound of the stock market crashing him back to his old room at his parents’ house where he’d have plenty of free time to contemplate hanging himself with his boyhood bedsheets.

As for me, coming across that downbeat commencement speech was the first time I really liked Garfield. It’s hard to have strong feelings about him. Before, I didn’t mind him, and of course I sympathized with his bum luck of a death. But I find his book addiction endearing, even a little titillating considering that he would sneak away from the house and the House to carry on a love affair with Jane Austen. In his diary he raves about an afternoon spent rearranging his library in a way that reminds me of the druggy glow you can hear in Lou Reed’s voice on “Heroin.”

Upstairs at the house in Mentor, Allison shows me Garfield’s private office. She says, “This is where he liked to retreat, maybe at the end of the day, when he needed to get away from the campaign life and children and everything. He would come in here and read.”

She points at a lopsided armchair, says Garfield had it “specially made for him. He would lean his back up against the high side of the chair and flip his legs over the low side.” It’s an appealing image, our respectable presidential paragon slouched in a posture with all the decorum of a teenager plopped on top a beanbag.

“That’s John Brown, isn’t it?” I ask, about a portrait hanging on the wall.

“Yes,” she answers, “that’s John Brown. The story behind it is just strange.” She says that during the museum’s renovation, in order to restore the office to its Garfield-era appearance, period photographs of the room were consulted. “Apparently,” she continues, “there was a portrait about the same size and shape and we didn’t really know who it was, so the decision was made to put that up there. John Brown was, I think, too much of a radical for James Garfield to actually have his portrait in his office, but I don’t know if there’s another reason other than they just needed to fill the space.”

According to his diaries, Garfield had a friend in Mentor and when he stopped by the man’s house they would make a point of singing “John Brown’s Body” together, a song that Garfield’s assassin also enjoyed. During his murder trial, one of Charles Guiteau’s many bizarre outbursts was singing “John Brown’s Body” to the court, claiming that if he was executed for killing the president, his soul would also, like John Brown’s in the song, march on.

Charles J. Guiteau is James A. Garfield’s cracked mirror image. Both men were raised in the Midwest (Garfield in Ohio, Guiteau in Illinois) by a single, widowed parent (Garfield’s father died when he was not quite two and Guiteau lost his mother). Both men were devout Christians who dabbled in preaching. Both men were born poor but longed for education and a better life. Both were ardent Republicans. And yet Garfield — dependable, industrious, and loved — was everything Guiteau was not.

Guiteau’s father, Luther Guiteau, was as bizarre and remote as Garfield’s mom was encouraging and ever-present. And so, after dropping out of the University of Michigan after one lonesome, miserable year, Guiteau, most likely to impress his hard-to-impress dad, moved in with the religious cult his father admired.

O
ne winter night in my kitchen, as I poured peppermint tea into my friend Lisa’s cup, she said that she liked my teapot. I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed “Bible communists” before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield.

It goes without saying that in order for me to buy my teapot on the cheap at the Oneida, Ltd., outlet store at the Sherrill Shopping Plaza, the second coming of Jesus Christ had to have taken place in the year
70 A.D.
To the Oneida Community,
70 A.D.
, the year the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, marks the beginning of the New Jerusalem. Which means we’ve all been living in heaven on earth for nearly two thousand years. Everyone knows there is no marriage in heaven (though one suspects there’s no shortage of it in hell). So, the Oneidans said, we’re here in heaven, already saved and perfect in the eyes of God, so let’s move upstate and sleep around. (I’m paraphrasing.)

John Humphrey Noyes, the founder, leader, and guru of the utopian Oneida Community, wrote in 1837, “In a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restricted by law, than why eating and drinking should be — and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other.”

Any theologian who assured his fellow Victorians that fondling one’s neighbor’s wife is as ordinary as frying an egg was bound to attract a following. In 1848, Noyes and forty-five cohorts moved to Oneida to pursue what they called “group marriage,” eventually building the three-story brick mansion house that remains today as a combination museum, apartment building, and hotel. My sister Amy, three-year-old nephew Owen, and I spent a night there.

Owen recognized the mansard-roofed mansion straightaway — not as an old religious commune, but as a building he’d seen on
Scooby-Doo.
“Haunted house,” he whispered as Amy yanked him from his car seat, oohing like a cartoon ghost all the way through check-in. After dinner at a nearby steakhouse, in which my sister pleads, “Owen, please,
please
don’t use your hair as a napkin,” Amy eventually returns to our room to wash the ketchup off her sticky son while I sneak around the dark and quiet halls, vainly hoping to bump into fornicating specters, or, if this really were
Scooby-Doo,
high school kids dressed up like spooks to scare away nosy interlopers like me. I sit at a desk in the comfortable library, perusing the complete works of Dickens and an old book about China by an American advertising man entitled
Four Hundred Million Customers.
“It probably never occurred to you,” he wrote, “that banditry around the head waters of the Yangtsze would affect the quality of an English toothbrush.” He’s right.

The next morning, Joe Valesky, a retired Oneida native who taught high school American history for thirty-six years, gives me a guided tour. Someday, I hope to be just like him. There are people who look forward to spending their sunset years in the sunshine; it is my own retirement dream to await my death indoors, dragging strangers up dusty staircases while coughing up one of the most thrilling phrases in the English language: “It was on this spot…” My fantasy is to one day become a docent.

Valesky points to a yellowing photograph of John Humphrey Noyes hanging on the wall. On paper, Noyes resembles a bearded old-fashioned everyman, your great-grandfather or mine. Seems unthinkable that the head poking out of that starched collar was coming up with dogma about ejaculation. The same thing could be said about this house we traipse around: it looks like the past, which is to say upstanding and chaste, even though its small, clean chambers witnessed more nooky than all the bedrooms on
MTV Cribs
combined.

A corridor of polished woodwork opens onto a courtyard that boasts, I’m told, “the oldest tulip tree in the state of New York.” Back inside, I’m shown an antique cabinet in which members of the community, famous for their homegrown produce, dried herbs.