The Trouble with Tom (2 page)

Yes, they'd made quite a pair back then. Paine, a failed grocer and customs officer who had moved to America and overthrown the monarchy, and Stewart, who paraded through Piccadilly in Armenian garb, his mannerisms mixed with those of all the exotic lands he'd walked through, and his speech and accent now a melange from the innumerable languages he'd learned. It was muttered among onlookers that Paine had become some sort of inventor, going about trying to sell iron bridges—and Stewart, well, nobody knew quite what to make of him at all. The man wouldn't talk of his fantastic travels; instead, he was always distributing bizarre pamphlets he'd privately printed, bearing titles like
The Roll of a Tennis Ball Through the Moral World
. The few who could read past their strange diction and publication date—for Stewart had invented his own calendar—found all sorts of curious ideas inside. Stewart found it incompre-hensible that women put up with child care, and believed the state should establish daytime nurseries so that mothers and fathers might work or improve their minds. He saw nothing wrong with prostitution, and considered it a typical city business like lamplighting or driving a taxi, indeed, he saw little wrong with sex, and so believed that there should be "promiscuous intercourse . . . that the population might not become redundant."

And now, as they sat aged in Manhattan, Paine and his old friend still warmly disagreed on many issues: Walking Stewart had always been dubious of Paine's cries for overthrowing kings, and he thought Paine's support for voting rights was absurd.
What would it come to
, Stewart scoffed—
giving the vote to women and apprentices as well?
And while Stewart was a confirmed atheist, Paine still believed in a God—in an animating moral force, if you will—he just didn't believe in the Bible or in clergy.

But they were both misunderstood geniuses of a sort; Paine found his books banned in England and despised in America, and Stewart brooded over the fate of his own pamphlets as well. He had a notion, he said, of preserving them for posterity. Stewart bid his readers, when done reading him, to bury his books in their gardens at a depth of seven or eight feet. They were to tell no one else of the location; but then, on their deathbeds, they were to breathe the secret to a trusted few. These fellows would keep the secret burial place until their deathbeds years later, and would communicate it again-down through the centuries, and the millennia, a secret society of philosophers passing down at death the sacred memory of the locations of Stewart's writings.
Oh
—the Circumambulator then feared—
but what if someday my works prove unreadable because the
English language itself has moldered away by then?
He thereupon decided that first his readers should translate the works into Latin,
then
bury them.

Paine watched his strange friend return to England. Poor John! A traveling ascetic whose only real pleasure had been in music—the man was going deaf now. Their times were drawing near . . . too near, in fact. Word came back from across the ocean months later that Stewart's ship had been dashed to pieces on its way to Liverpool. It sounded like he hadn't survived, hadn't even had the chance to pass on his secret burial spots to his brotherhood.

Paine waited and gazed out the windows of Cedar Street.
When?
When would it be his turn? He had his usual modest supper of bread and butter, and then climbed the weary stairs yet again, when . . . when . . . he had the sensation of a bullet passing through his head: his body crumpled and toppled down the stairs, and he lay lifeless on the floor, with neither pulse nor breath.

Not yet.

Death came: but then it went away. He resumed breathing, and his brain—struck not by a bullet, but by a stroke—began to register sights and sounds again. What was curious about the whole experience, Paine marveled afterward, was how calm he felt.

His host felt rather less philosophical about it all. Instead of dying like a gentleman, Paine was lingering on and on. By the time the old rebel left in November 1806, his former friend was so irritated that he dunned Paine for twenty-two weeks of back rent.

If you wanted to transport yourself back to a precise time and place for the birth of American culture—that is, of North American art distinct from that of Europe—you might find yourself passing the ailing Paine on these streets one cold Saturday afternoon in 1807. On January 24 of that year, the first issue of a brilliantly insouciant new magazine hit the streets of Manhattan:
Salmagundi,
its title page read. It immediately declared on its first page that it would give no hint of its staff's identity. "It is nobody's business," it proclaimed, snapping its fingers in readers' faces. No matter: few had heard of the puckish young Washington Irving anyway. His subscribers read delightedly about the doings and sayings of nearly everyone of note in Manhattan, and the first number wasted no time in skewering the fashions of the season. "I was, however, much pleased to see that red maintained its ground against all other colors," the fashion column dryly commented, before wickedly explaining:
"because red is the color of Mr. Jefmson's
^*****
,
Tom Paine's nose, and my slippers."

As the founding smartasses of American literature came gloriously alive that winter day, the elderly subject of their derision was slowly dying. His nose grew ever more red and disfigured with a skin condition that gossips ascribed, only half unfairly, to brandy. Local children running underfoot sang:

Tom Paine is coming from far, from far;
His nose is like a blazing star!

But Irving could hardly resist having a bit of fun at the old fellow's expense. Their orbits were not far removed now, since that winter Paine had moved into the bachelor digs at 85 Church Street of portraitist John Wesley Jarvis, an impeccably bohemian acquaintance of Irving's. Paine had already known Jarvis for a while-but then, there was hardly a fashionable or artistic person in the city who didn't know Jarvis. You couldn't miss him: sweeping down Manhattan streets dressed "in a long coat trimmed with furs like a Russian prince," and walking two enormous dogs at his side, he seemed the very personification of the dashing artist. Naturally, he was delighted to have the most vilified writer in America sleeping in his art studio; it was a great lark. But the young painter had a genuinely tender feeling for the old man's needs; his guest was, he explained, "perfectly manageable by art, patiently and assiduously applied." If Paine woke up troubled with gout, and inclined to eat without first washing up, the dapper Jarvis would gently nudge him into keeping up his appearances via indirect instructions to the house servant.

"Take the coffee away," he'd gently remonstrate, "give Mr. Paine a little time; he is a gentleman; he wants to wash himself bring him some soap and water."

Jarvis just wanted Paine to buck up and look good, and he generously preserved him at his most handsome by painting a portrait of his new guest. It was all in a day's work for Jarvis-literally, as he was in such demand that he and his assistant Joseph Wood often cranked out six oil portraits a week—though he did cut corners slightly by leaving Paine's hands out of the painting. Well, that would have been too generous. For anyone else he'd have charged $40 for just such a portrait from the neck up; hands were damned tricky work and cost an extra $20.

Paine felt at ease among the art studio's productive chaos of brush jars, easels, and lacquer. Jarvis would paint the portrait subject on canvas, while his indefatigable Wood painted darkly haunting backgrounds; at other times they'd switch to delicate watercolor miniatures upon ivory or card stock. Paine and the artists were all archetypal self-made New Yorkers; misfits who all hailed from somewhere else, each had found a city where they could speak freely, create freely, and reinvent themselves. Wood had been an untutored farmboy in Clarkstown obsessed with art, and ran away from home at fifteen to the big city with the dream of becoming a painter; he was now quickly becoming one of the best miniaturists in the country. And John Wesley Jarvis—a brilliant raconteur and a devotee of good wine, a man whose natural curiosity extended into scientific experimentation and anatomy—he, of all people, had been raised in his youth by his uncle John Wesley, the famously dour founder of Methodism.

Sometimes the old pieties were still visited upon them. Hearing that Paine was ailing, ministers and well-meaning folk were forever stopping by to pester him, hoping to get him to recant his heresies and to accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Jarvis was usually able to keep them out of the studio, but on one occasion let his guard down when a knock came at the door shortly after dinner. Jarvis opened it to find a very old woman, wrapped in a large scarlet cloak, and asking piteously to meet Thomas Paine.

He's asleep
, Jarvis explained—
he always takes his nap after dinner
.

"I am very sorry for that," she said, "for I wanted to see him very particularly."

It seemed a shame to force a frail and elderly lady to make the trip a second time, and Jarvis relented. Leading her inside and back to Paine's room, the painter woke up the slumbering infidel.

"He rose on one elbow"—it was recalled soon afterward with some mirth-"with an expression of eye that staggered the old woman."

"What do you want?"
he demanded.

"Is your name Paine?" the old woman asked solicitously.

"Yes."

"Well, then," she began kindly.
"I come from Almighty God to tell
you that if you do not repent of your sins and believe in our blessed Savior
Jesus Christ, you will be damned and—

"Pooh! Pooh!" Paine stopped her cold. "It is not true. You were not sent with any such impertinent message."

". . ."

"Jarvis," Paine sighed, "make her go away. Pshaw. God would not send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with his message. Go away. Go back." And then, preparing to return to sleep, he added,
"Shut the door."

The old lady left thunderstruck. Jarvis was enough of a gentleman that he probably withheld his laughter until the woman was out of earshot of his house. He was not unsympathetic to her piety; he had been raised in a strict religious family himself, and though he had little use for them now, he thought churches served a worthy purpose for the rest of society. But as for himself—well, he was busy. He had paintings to paint and wine to drink. Late in the evenings, after Paine had had his nap, the two would philosophize over a bottle; once after a long conversation deep into the night at Jarvis's table, the painter retired for a while, only upon returning at four A.M. to find Paine still at table—or rather, underneath it.

"I have the vertigo, the vertigo," moaned Paine from the floor.

"Yes," Jarvis cracked, raising an eyebrow at the remains of the bottle. 'You have it deep-deep!"

Perhaps; but to Paine it felt like another stroke. Lying there on Jarvis's floor, staring up at the ceiling, at the wooden legs and underside of the table, Paine turned thoughtful for a moment. Here he was, he wondered aloud, his mind strong and yet his body fallen.

Does it not put one in mind of the immortality of the soul?
he blearily mused to the painter.
Surely
. . .
surely we continue to exist in a state
beyond life itself.
. .

Old pop music jangles out of an unseen speaker somewhere in the dreadful fluorescence of a supermarket on Bleecker Street—"I'm a Believer"—and the couple in front of me is arguing about orange juice.

"We don't need the fancy kind," she insists.

"It's better." He shakes the little bottle for emphasis.

"No it's not."

"It," shake,
"is."

Is— is not— is . The clerk is waiting at the register with obligatory unsmiling indifference, and I look away in the middle distance of frozen foods, into this space with the same weary feel as most every Manhattan grocery. For a supermarket named Strawberry Fields, the place is kind of a bad trip, and you would not want to be here Forever. But this is where Paine lay waiting for Forever to come—over
there,
let's say, right where the chunky peanut butter is on sale. You can't tell now, of course: it's all brick and linoleum and drywall, a squat sixty-three feet of frontage that keeps changing identity. Ten years before this it was a Gristede's; a hundred and ten years before that it was a different building altogether, two stories and wooden, and housing a billiard saloon; before then, it was the Gilded Age home of a button and trimmings importer. Go back further still, and you find a workshop for making screen windows. And perhaps next year it will be something new yet again, for the space is once again up for lease.

Jarvis had to move to a new studio in the spring of 1807, and for the rest of that year Paine lived with a baker down on Broome Street. After his rent went up, Paine moved into a miserable lodging house on Partition Street. All along he kept attacking Federalist conservatives in the
New York Public Advertiser
, but few were listening anymore; by 1808, the once-tireless pen was laid down, and he simply stopped publishing altogether.

So he packed up his trunks one more time and came here to die. His newest lodgings were on what was called Herring Street back then, and Paine struggled to pay his new landlords. A deal to sell his farm in New Rochelle fell through, and a pitiful request to Congress for reimbursement of some of his expenses during the Revolution was met with crushing indifference, then with a final no.

When? When?
The end would come soon: it had to. In the dead of winter, as 1808 ground forward into 1809, Paine sat down and wrote out his will. The fate of his body troubled him, though; he fretted over it for months. He'd become acquainted with a local watchmaker and Quaker minister, Willet Hicks, and when the Friend paid a visit to Herring Street in March, Paine cut immediately to the matter at hand.

"I wish to be buried in your burying ground," he said plainly. His father, Paine explained, had been a Quaker, and he himself had been raised a Quaker: now he simply wished to return to its soil.