Brookland (76 page)

—May I have your attention? Governor Clinton called out. The crowd quieted, but his voice could not have carried more than ten or twelve heads deep into the assembly. —Ladies and gentlemen, he went on. Today marks a great occasion for our state, the fair city of New-York, & the village of Brookland. Not only does the day commemorate twenty-seven years of freedom from the tyranny of British rule; but it marks New-York's ascendancy as the foremost city of this nation, & Brookland's as a vibrant port and place of manufacture in her own right.

At this last, the cheers were deafening. He continued:

—No other state has yet financed a public work of such magnitude or importance. If it has been alleged by men of the Old World that the New has no wonders of which to boast, we give them the lie today.

Mr. Clinton acknowledged Ben & the workers; & Mr. Clinton his nephew gave also an eloquent speech; and I thought back ruefully on the simple words Will Severn had spoken when we'd dug up the first spadeful for the Brookland foundation. He stood in the crowd that day,—his head bare,—and although I harboured profound anger against him for his role in my sister's disappearance, his expression tore at me. By then his physiognomy had congealed into an attitude of resignation that could have melted the heart of a much colder woman than I. Within the year he would receive a calling from a church in the Carolinas, and go forth from amongst us.

When the speeches were done, Ben handed our governor a pair of scissors polished to a glinting sheen; & with all due ceremony, Mr. Clinton cut the ribbon stretched across the accessway to the bridge. A great shout went up all round & hats were tossed in the air; a moment later, one could see and hear a similar cheer reverberating across the water. The newsmen scribbled on their books. As the whooping continued, Mr. Clinton & his nephew began to process across. The assemblymen followed, as did we; & behind us, the whole crowd began to surge through the archway in the Gothic abutment. I half feared we should be swarmed & trampled, but for all their excitement & their great numbers, people remained in line. On the New-York side, the crowd jumped, hollered, & waved their flags at us with gusto; they could
not cross in the opposite direction until our group arrived and Mr. Clinton cut their ribbon as well.

We spent that hot, bright day reveling among the New-Yorkers; and none could have been more awed than I at how wonderful it was to traverse the East River in so novel a fashion. It took four hours to cross in either direction, so many times was your father stopped for congratulations. When at last we were safe home in Brookland, long past sunset, your father, Aunt Tem, & I were all burned red as sour cherries by the sun. As I rubbed the sliced end of a cucumber over Tem's burned nape, I thought of how freckled Pearl had grown, her last summer among us,—and I prayed to God that if my sister yet lived, she would hear news of the bridge's compleation, forgive me my trespass, & come home.

The New-York & Brookland papers gave varying estimates of the crowds that day, but none less than five thousand souls. Only the
New-York Journal
printed doomful prognostications about the bridge's future; and when I complained of this to Isaiah, he promised me the piece had been written by some foolish old Luddite, & would be little attended to. C. Mather Harrison wrote of nothing but the bridge's beauty.

It was a good year for the bridge. However many thousands of people had crossed it that first day,—and however subtle our adjustments to the structure itself, to make its two levers meet,—it had held true; & henceforward, people seemed to have no fear of it. The charge to cross, after that first day, was but a penny, so th'inhabitants of our village and her sister city used it not just for commerce but for sport; and I wondered if I would have to retire my trusty barges, now it was so easy to load gin onto wagons and whisk it across. Ben & I knew years would elapse before the state recouped her investment, we erased our debts, & anyone saw a dollar in profit; but I felt safe in hoping this would not take too
many
years.

The winter of 1803 and aught four proved milder than the previous one. It began to seem your father's subterfuge, sanctioned by Mr. Pope, had safeguarded the bridge against further settling. You were a sleepy dumpling of a baby, & I strapped you in a shawl to my back so that in all kinds of weather your father and I might travel out to measure the bridge & check its solidity in plan and elevation. We began to think we had been spared the worst possible fate; and the
New-York
Journal's
attacks upon the bridge subsided to mere grumblings & whispers.

Everything proved thus sound until the thaw came in March of 1804 & great cracks began to yawn along the bridge's downriver facade. Your father first hired men to pitch these, then to drive iron tie rods through the bridge as a whole, to embrace it tight with brackets. (You can surely imagine what the newssheets had to say about this.) When he took new measurements of the structure at the beginning of the summer, however, he found it was
warping
: listing so severely to southward on the Brookland end that sooner or later, it seemed, the bridge would snap in two, like a wad of dough one breaks in half by twisting. I had never seen Ben look so ashen. What could we do for it, however, but continue to pitch its cracks and pray? That July, we wrote desperately to Mr. Pope & to his colleague Mr. Avery in Boston, asking their advice; but it was too late. Early one morning in August of 1804, a farmer from Flat Bush travelled over in his ox cart, and in the wake of the conveyance, some three central feet of the roadway plummeted into the river, narrowly missing a wherry headed up toward Hell Gate. The cart slipped back over the precipice a moment & lost its bales of hay, but the driver whipped his beasts into a phrenzy to drive them onward, and two men crossing in the other direction leapt off their horses and helped pull the cart up to safety. At last all three men, the oxen, & the cart were safe, but there was pandemonium on the bridge. Within the quarter hour, both accessways were secured against further traffick; and when your father & I arrived on the scene & could make sense of the accusations & conflicting reports that greeted us, we both suspected it had been nothing less than divine intervention had prevented the farmer & the wherryman on the river being killed. When the debris later jammed in the trash rack without breaking the Luquers' mill, this seemed the working of Providence as well.

I wonder if you can imagine our terrour as we awaited word from Governor Clinton, Mr. Pope, & Mr. Avery. The bridge, to both our minds, had now thoroughly failed, and seemed unlikely to be rebuilt, & although the distillery was thus far successful in battling off John Putnam's incursions, we were mortgaged & ensured to our eyeballs, & did not know how we might pay off the debt. More awful to consider was how your father's heart was bound up in the thing, perhaps even
more than mine:—his heart, & his reputation. Mr. Pope never wrote us, though we received a letter from his secretary telling us the great bridge architect was taken ill with nervous exhaustion & the doctor had requested all unfortunate news be kept from him. Mr. Avery, however, arrived at his earliest convenience, and first thing, shook his head in pity to see the beautiful thing so ruined. He wrote his recommendation to the governor that the entire Brookland end of the structure should be torn down & rebuilt upon a deeper & sturdier foundation; the which he himself would help us design, for a moderate fee.

As I'm sure you recall, August in Brookland was always long,—pestilentially hot and foul-smelling. That year the month dragged out even more than usual, as we could do nothing but look at the broken hulk until the legislature reconvened. September, for all its beauty, likewise threatened to last an age; but in the middle of the month Ben received his letter from Governor Clinton. Though that gentleman stood in favour of the bridge & of Mr. Avery's proposal, he reported to his great sadness that the state was already far too deeply in arrears as regarded our bridge, & could not afford to invest a penny more in it. If we could raise the needed funds at home, the governor sent his blessings; if not, it was his suggestion we sell off the bridge's
materiel
& remit whatever price they brought to the state. This, he wrote, would discharge our debt, as the bridge had been a brave & noble effort, & its failure could rightly be blamed only in part upon us.

I thought your father might tear out his own hair in grief; & he boarded a boat to Albany next day to plead with the legislature; but to no avail. We could no longer afford the kinds of bribes had got us our permission in the first place. Mr. Clinton was persuaded to return your father to his post as King's County's surveyor, but no more than that. He came home to me with his hands empty, and I wondered if his misery would at last be the thing to do us all in. With his last vestige of good humour departed, our home seemed a dark, dark place. He hired as many workmen as he could muster for the demolition; but it was nowhere near so enticing or skilled a job as raising a bridge, & there were fewer volunteers.

The sale was set for the fifteenth of October, advertised in every town within a three days' journey; & with the exception of C. Mather Harrison, who remained our supporter to the end, the newssheets were
full of ridicule. Broadsides circulated featuring vitriolic cartoons of your father as a bumpkin in short pants who traced out the idea for the bridge in the dirt, and of the men building it drunk on gin, & of me as an Amazon warrioress, breaking the span with my oversized boot. Joe Loosely himself volunteered to conduct the auction for the thousands of tons of timber, iron, & stone.

—You know I never favoured the bridge, Prue, he told me, as we sat together at his bar. In my lap, you sucked on the yolk of a boiled egg, & spat crumbs of it onto my britches, oblivious as you were to the situation's
gravitas
. —Yet it still pains me to see my friend's daughter brought so low. It is why I wish to do it myself. Do you unnerstand?

—I do, I said. My own egg was ashes on my tongue.

Joe nodded grimly. I thought he looked old all of a sudden; & I wondered if, despite his protestation, he had felt even the slightest flicker of cold-blooded joy at our misfortune.

The auction was held on a lovely harvest moon day, very like that on which my father had died. I watched from the crowd's periphery as the Hickses, Sandses, and Whitcombes bought up wood for new houses at a dime on the dollar, & as ambassadors from New-York & Pavonia & places even farther afield acquired limestone for city halls, &c &c. No one of my neighbours would meet my eye;—so grief-filled must have been my countenance, or so thorough my disgrace. Joe was generally a lively auctioneer, but though his voice was strong that morning, I could see the work pained him. He had no smiles nor jibes to offer when his hammer came down. He would simply move on to the next lot of timber or iron, & cry it without emotion. For myself, I do not know how I managed not to weep.

That day, he sold every thing but a vestige of the Brookland anchorage, which as well you know, still mars the distillery's landscape. As, numb with sorrow, your father and I left the scene, our neighbours gave us a wide berth. I imagined this was how we would be treated if we harboured typhus in our home. By the next day, however, small gifts had begun to appear on our
stoep
: a parcel of fresh egg noodles, three pumpkins, & an apple pie so lovely, it could only have come from Peg Dufresne. We took these gifts gladly, and counted them & you our only succour. By the next week, the winning bidders had begun to send their barges & carts to take the spoils home. Neither of us could watch this. I
kept to the distillery & never once looked out the huge windows of the countinghouse. I thought if I might focus all my efforts on the business my father had left me, this might mitigate my sorrow. Your father sat round the house, wondering when someone would offer him a commission in his old employment.

Even at that sorrowful time, perhaps the oddest thing about the whole affair seemed to me how people on both sides of the river had well nigh forgotten I'd had aught to do with the disastrous bridge. I was still
Prue Winship, Distiller of Gin
; but your father, wherever he went, was the
Architect of the Folly
. Few but Ben, Isaiah, & my own two sisters had ever known that the idea, at its origin, had been mine alone; but it struck me as passing strange how even Simon Dufresne & Theunis van Vechten lamented Ben's misjudgment of the foundations, without once mentioning how I had drawn up the articles of our misfortune. When I gathered the courage to begin venturing out once more with my deliveries, I found the story every where the same: That your father was a good man, but had been deluded; & that I was lucky he had not taken down my business entire. He bore up as well as a person could under this calumny, & urged me not to seek to redress it.—It will all pass in due time, he told me, as every thing does.

You see it was not the first nor the last occasion on which it served me well to follow his advice. I think the bridge lives on in people's memories, but it seldom appears in conversation. (I believe a similar situation obtains about my sister Pearl.) It was best to leave it all unspoken. I hope you do not cast blame on me for all these years of silence, exactly as I hope you do not disapprove of me for thinking, even now, my lost sister might one day return home. But at least, if you do, we may now speak of it. At least it need not stand between us.

Dearest:—tell me of your life. Tell me how your womb grows daily, & what pleasure or trepidation it brings you. I cannot continue to live knowing you so ill.

For the nonce, I send all my love,—

Yr mother, PWH

As she closed the letter, Recompense wondered if it was wrong of her to blame her mother as she did. She had mistreated her sister Pearl, and it was almost as great a transgression to have let her own husband
carry the burden of a misfortune that had chiefly been her own doing. Recompense thought her mother had been uncivil and inhumane; and yet, Recompense's own childhood had been, if not entirely happy, then comfortable enough. She could not reconcile these opposing views. She reckoned this had something to do with how she herself could never have dreamed up a bridge.