The Trouble with Tom (17 page)

A long dark rattling: we are crossing over the water, and stare blindly out at the night. These are the same waters that Moncure Conway glided down in 1863, standing on the deck of the
City
of
Wahington
as he left his old country for a new life in London. There was nothing in America, really, for a man who preached emancipation to the South and pacifism to the North. He'd left a White House meeting with Abraham Lincoln exasperated by the president's diffidence toward the fate of blacks, and angered by Lincoln's resort to violence against the South. Conway had seen his family's Virginia manor half ruined and turned into a field hospital; he'd witnessed his old Washington church converted into a Union armory. His own brothers were Confederate officers, and they were fighting Union soldiers led by his best friends and classmates from Harvard.

There was nothing to do but leave.

Conway kept among his belongings a memento of just about the only literary titan he had
not
met before leaving the United States: it was Emerson's copy of
Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Conway's fondness for Fuller was no surprise to anyone who had seen the minister stalking the streets of Cincinnati to gather information on local wages for clerks and teachers; comparing the men's and women's wages, he complained loudly in print that the two were paid unequally. The more Conway pondered slaves, and violence, and the freedoms written about by Thomas Paine, the more he had found that he could not avert his eyes from the plight of women in American society—and the more he turned to Margaret Fuller.

Inside the book's cover were three initials—
M.F. O.
—Margaret Fuller Ossoli. This was
her
book that he held. And below that, another name in a different hand: "Ralph Waldo Emerson—3 May 1853." It was Fuller's own copy of her masterpiece, sent to her preceptor Emerson—and Emerson, in turn, had given it to his new protege the first day they met. Held in her own hands, then in Emerson's, and now in his own. It was as close to her as Conway could ever hope to get, for three years before the young Virginian arrived in Concord, Fuller and her husband and newborn child were lost within sight of New York, as the boat
Elizabeth
sank in the frigid waters of Long Island Sound. It had been carrying a cargo of 150 tons of Italian statuary marble; when the vessel struck a sandbar, the blocks shifted and tore out the bottom of the boat. Fuller sang to her baby as water flooded into the holds and over the tombstone marble—they sank with their own fatal monument—and her husband led the other doomed passengers in a final prayer. Thoreau rushed to New York to seek her among the few survivors, and was left an utterly stricken man; he went searching again and again, inconsolably, along the beaches of Fire Island for any trace of her or her last manuscript. It is one of the saddest stories of American literature.

But. . .

I draw out from the back of my copy of Vale's life of Paine a single folded photocopy: an old newspaper article. You find the most curious items in old papers. This one—from the
New
York
Herald
of May 28, 1893—has a story picked up by a roving reporter from an aged fisherman. The old salt had, in his younger days, been on the nearby beach when the
Elizabeth
foundered. A few days later, as submerged bodies swelled with putrescence, floated, and then washed ashore, the fisherman witnessed Fuller's friends—possibly Thoreau, or even her editors Horace Greeley and Orson Fowler—coming to make their somber visit to view the victims:

Among these was a woman's corpse, hideously disfigured, wave beaten, fish eaten, a grisly horror to the eye. But it had two very curiously shaped teeth, stopped with gold in a peculiar fashion, which were known to have characterized Margaret Fuller. And besides she had been the only woman on the bark. When her friends came down to look, as soon as the report of the bodies washed ashore reached New York, and they saw the a d thing vomited up from the jaws of the ocean, they recoiled shuddering, and utterly refused to admit that it could be Margaret Fuller . . . So, dishonoured and rejected of all, the sea-battered remains of what had probably been Margaret Fuller were sent to New York and buried in Potter's Field among paupers, tramps, and outcasts.

I fold the paper and slide it back into my old book. Fuller died an Italian revolutionary, and she may well have been buried with the poor and the forgotten. It's the grave she herself might have picked.

Paine and Fuller alike—these two heroes of Conway's, these idealistic parents of American free though—both had disappeared in death, so that only their ideas remained. I wonder, as he sailed out of New York Harbor, if the minister thought of Fuller dying within sight of land: whether he pondered his own death someday: whether he clasped that book a little tighter with the very hands that one day would also hold the final remains of Thomas Paine. Whether he knew where
he
would wind up. Whether he could ever have guessed at that terrible last viewing of Fuller. But our effects are preserved—those that are deemed meaningful, at least. The rest is thrown away, it is buried, and it is altered beyond any recognition.

Comfort for the Ruptured

"YEAH? " HE SAYS.

It's bitter cold out on Twenty-eighth Street, and the Chinese truck driver stops and looks warily at his overloaded produce truck, and then at me next to it; I am leaning against the No Parking sign and jotting into my little notebook. He is trying to decide if I'm some sort of plainclothes meter maid.

I smile as blandly as I can and move on. I need a better look into this building anyway. The windows of 120 Lexington Avenue are pretty well obscured by signs—paper and neon alike—shiiing for the warren of different businesses wedged into the premises. There is a 110/220 volt appliance store, a
dry
cleaners, a newly opened restaurant bearing the puzzling name Chinese Mirch, and atop all this an Indian video store. The latter features a dotted damsel's come-hither poster advertising
The Return
of
the Kaanta Mix
—a title which, at first glance, I mistook for the appetizer of the day at Chinese Mirch.

It was an afternoon in 1879—cold and shivery, much like this one—when a scrawny young man stood here as well, and ventured into the 120 Lexington entranceway. There was only one business for him to call upon back then, one outspoken man whose prosperity had made this address the byword of innumerable books, flyers, and newspaper ads across the country. He was here, the nervous visitor told the doorboy, to see the famed physician and author Dr. Edward B. Foote.

The visitor—he had identified himself as J. Peters, of Newark—was shown into the doctor's office, where a stenographer and a secretary both sat at the ready for dictation from the Great Man. Working from his elegant offices, E. B. Foote ran a business that was a marvel of vertical integration: he was the author and publisher of his medical theories, the doctor who prescribed his own remedies, and the manufacturer and mail-order distributor of those very same medicines. One floor of his headquarters was largely occupied by secretarial staff answering bags of mail from beseeching elderly invalids, young married couples, and book agents in London and Berlin. On another floor his botanical laboratories hummed along, fed by a hydraulic freight elevator that ferried herbs up and elixirs back down; toiling inside rooms fireproofed by six inches of concrete, medical assistants churned out priceless miracle cures to be shipped around the country and around the world.

But where was the doctor himself? The fidgeting visitor had to be kept waiting for a while. Foote was nowhere to be found within his offices: he was upstairs, in his own tastefully appointed quarters. Rather than dictating his newest medical guide for the masses, the fiftyyear-old physician was dutifully reading to his aged mother. But at length a hale, mustachioed man came down the stairs, and seeing that there was little privacy in the office with his staff amanuenses hurrying about, he led his new patient into a back office. Foote pulled a sliding door closed on the private consultation room, settled down and motioned his patient to take a seat.

His visitor glared at him.

"Do you recognize me?"

No, the doctor replied. No, he didn't know him at all.

What happened next came in a blur: the patient drew out a .38- caliber revolver from his coat, and leveled it at the doctor's chest. Foote sprang across the room; doctor and patient went crashing to the floor, struggling for the weapon, as the would-be victim jammed a finger in front of the hammer to try to keep it from firing.

"Give me the pistol!" the doctor yelled.

Bang
.

The physician staggered away, and the mysterious gunman fled through a back balcony, over a fence, and down Twenty-eighth Street. Doctor Foote collapsed into a nearby sofa. Blood was spattered across the carpet and furniture of the future headquarters of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association—in its consultation rooms, on the file cabinets, and smeared upon the balcony windows.

Now, here's a question that probably forms in the head of any man not long after a gun has been fired at him: how did I get here? To this particular place, I mean. I started as a child running around a backyard and climbing trees, and sifting the dirt and pine needles through my fingers in the summertime: what happened?
What am I doing here with this bullet?

Who knows just when our youthful predilections and impressions throw out those filaments that will attach the playing child to the working man? What chance event, out of all the millions that occur in half-remembered days, will later cause an adult to look back and say: "Here.
That
is where I started." A historian may guess, but that is all it really is—a guess. We ourselves barely remember our own origins: how can anyone else hope to divine them? So
perhaps
—I say perhaps—it had all begun when the future wealthy doctor of Manhattan was growing up in the 1830s outside Cleveland, and his father hosted three of the famous Beecher clan in his house one Sunday.

Herschel Foote was a prosperous local merchant and town postmaster, and so all curious and learned strangers passing through were liable to meet him: the Foote household was "literally a free hotel for ministers, school teachers, and singing masters." Even as the strict Presbyterian father imbued the young Edward with a sense that reformers like Thomas Paine were little short of an instrument of Satan, it would be hard not to sense the currents of change in respectable visitors like the Beechers, especially now that Henry Ward Beecher and his sister Harriet had both moved nearby. And perhaps the father's exhortations were a lost cause in any case, for Edward was an odd child who nursed some rather strange hobbies. "Pill-making entered conspicuously into the diversions in which I indulged," he later recalled, "and facetious neighbors dignified the contents of my juvenile waistcoat with title of 'Doctor.'"

At the age of twelve a copy of Franklin's
Autobiography
fell into the would-be doctor's hands. Foote was fascinated by it. Paine's old mentor was not just a self-made man, he was
the
self-made man of all time: a runaway boy turned Founding Father. His autobiography was like an epistle from the past to boys stranded in pious and sleepy American towns, transporting them to the far shores of Humanism as surely as Franklin's letter tucked into Paine's pocket had once transported that bankrupt grocer to the shores of the New World. And young Edward took Franklin's message to heart. As he grew to be a teenager and was charged with finding himself a profession, he decided to become a printer's devil in Cleveland. He might as well have announced that he had become the
Devil's
devil. But his parents' disapproval could only make the job more appealing to his independent turn of mind.

It was there at the print shop, amid the presses and worn trays of type, that he came across a book by the very man his father had warned him against:
Common Sense
, its cover proclaimed. As he read, he saw Paine sweep away tradition and precedence with a wave of the hand: new politics for a new world, Paine said. The young man who had filled his pockets with homemade pills sat in Cleveland and pondered this inquisitive mind that would not defer to any self-proclaimed authority. New politics for the new world . . . why not new medicine? And so Edward did what one always expects in any incipient American writer and radical—yes—it is inevitable, isn't it? He moved to New York.

But then, so had his assassin.

The man who called himself J. Peters, of Newark, stood in a newly rented room of his Fourth Avenue walk-up. His name was not Peters; he was not from Newark. And he had not come to live in this boardinghouse. He was deciding whether to kill himself. He'd meant to do it yesterday, or the day before, but he kept putting it off.

It had taken two days to even get out of bed after the attack. His hand kept bleeding and bleeding. It was not fair that his hand should keep bleeding like this: he had come to commit the straightforward act of emptying every chamber of his brand-new .38, which he just had paid good money for, into Dr. E. B. Foote. But the revolver fired off only once; it was his own blood that had been smeared all over Foote's office.

New York papers that breathlessly recounted the strange attack simply mentioned the victim as the "eclectic physician." Foote needed no introduction to the newspaper's readers: his story had already been immortalized in innumerable pamphlets, popular encyclopedias, and
Who's Who
entries. They always noted how his road to medicine had passed through the print shop first—and how, after becoming the precocious twenty-year-old editor of the
Brooklyn Morning Journal
, Foote fatefully undertook the study of medicine. In those years, if you saw a bearded and bohemian Brooklyn newspaper editor walking down Ryerton Street, absorbed in reading a volume of Fowler's
Practical Phrenology
, you'd have been forgiven for calling out the wrong name in greeting. It could have been one of two men—Walt Whitman, or E. B. Foote.