The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (23 page)

“You’re mad! They’ll burn the city now! They’re capable of anything if they think they’re losing the election.” Noah was trembling.

“Most unlikely.” Mr. Davis assembled the fragments of window glass into a neat pile. Then he put Burr’s message into his coat pocket; turned to me. “The Colonel thinks I should give you any notes I might have.”

“I don’t want you to give me anything if you really believe that I intend to ...”

“Charlie, Charlie! Whatever you want to read you can. I shall send you what I have.” Mr. Davis was now on his feet. “Try to publish as soon as you can.”

I thanked Mr. Davis. He is remarkably kind. But then he cannot publish his own book for several years at least and perhaps he thinks my effort will whet the public’s appetite for the entire story. My effort? What am I writing about?

I now act even to myself as if I were writing the full story of the Colonel’s life when, actually, I am only on the track of one small portion of it which Leggett assures me will change history. Though I sometimes wonder how different history will be if the president is Clay rather than Van Buren. Also, do I want to be the key that opens such a door? Odd situation to be in for someone who dislikes politics and politicians. It is my secret dream to live in Spain or Italy and write stories like Washington Irving. I am counting on this work to bring me the money to travel. I only hope that the Colonel is dead when I publish. No. I cannot hope or want that. But I must publish within the next year and a half.
Before
the presidential election. It is a hard business I have got myself into.

VERPLANCK WAS DEFEATED for mayor by 179 votes out of some 35,000 cast. Tammany Hall is victorious but shaken, for the Whigs have taken the city’s common council. Mr. Davis must be happy. Colonel Burr is happy—no, amused. “It’s the new people, Charlie. They’re going to take it all one of these days.”

“Mr. Davis thinks Clay will be the next president.”

“Poor Matt! He lacks judgement in the big things but is a master of the small. Van Buren will be nominated and he will defeat Clay or any other National Republican—no, no,
Whig
,
I must get used to calling them that. How topsy-turvy it is! Those of us who were for the Revolution were Whigs. Those for Britain were Tories. Then there was the fight over the federal Constitution. In our state Governor Clinton wanted a weak federal government. So some of the Whigs became anti-Federalist, and some like Hamilton became Federalist. Then the-Tory-Federalists became Republican. Now Tory-Federalist-Republicans call themselves Whig though they are anti-Whig while the anti-Federalist Republicans are now Jacksonian Democrats. Oh, names are magic here!”

“What were you, after the Revolution?”

“Neutral. I inclined to the anti-Federalists, but I took no part in the long debate. I do recall my first reading of the Constitution. ‘It will not last fifty years,’ I said. Obviously I was wrong—about the fifty years. But I am right in principle. The Constitution is much too brittle a document for a country like ours. By the way, I saw a dead man on West Street when I got off the boat this morning. He was killed last night at the polling-place, and no one has thought to take away the corpse. “Thy hand great Anarch lets the curtain fall and universal darkness buries all.’ ” I know the quotation by heart because Burr so often quotes it.

 
“Do
you
favour Van Buren?” I asked. A single drop of sweat trickled down the centre of my spine. It is a warm day.

“Yes, I do.”

“Because of your old connection?”

The eyes were shut now; small feet on the edge of the grate. “I am old and therefore moderate. The only old man I know who loves danger and surprise is Andrew Jackson. But then I think there must be a medical explanation. Too much blood in the brain. At least I prefer the decorous way Matty Van does things. He is without ferocity, while Clay is unstable and corrupt.”

“Does Mr. Davis know you prefer Van Buren?”

“Oh, yes. He pays no attention to me. He knows that Aaron Burr—what’s left of him—is not a Burrite.”

THE CITY IS A WRECK from the rioting. In some streets every window is broken. But who cares? The day is beautiful, the militia have been withdrawn, the Irish are sick with sore heads, and I go with Helen Jewett to the Vauxhall Gardens.

We took a coach up the Bowery to the point where it meets Broadway. Helen was like a child. Since she joined Mrs. Townsend’s establishment she has never been beyond a block or two of Thomas Street. She wore a high-necked dress, and looked as much a lady as ever drank tea in the Ladies Dining Room of the City Hotel.

“Oh, it took me hours and hours to convince her that I did have an aunt who lived here and that one of the—one of our guests knew her and told me that she often wondered where I was and so I said, ‘Mrs. Townsend, I must tell my aunt I’m alive and well because suppose she asks the police about me?’ ” Helen has a smile like an isosceles triangle long side down. “So she let me off for the day, very put out she was, too, and told me that God punished liars. Do you think this is true?”

I said I doubted it. But assured her that if there is a Hell, it would one day include a marvellously learned lady, able to drive Satan mad with scripture and theology.

The evening was warm and the gardens crowded with couples. No one seemed aware that we are living through what Leggett terms a revolution.

After a promenade beneath coloured lanterns, dutifully breathing in and out of the country air, scented with hyacinth, we found ourselves in a bower close enough to the band to hear the music but not so close as to be forced to shout at one another. A Negro waiter brought us vanilla ice-cream and cake. I have never been so nervous, and I cannot think why.

Helen was not at all what I expected—or
she
expected? At first she had been like a dog unchained from a gate. She could not get enough of the sights and the sounds the rest of us take for granted. The Gingerbread Man on Broadway particularly intrigued her as he ran by, coat-tails streaming in the wind, pockets bulging with gingerbread, his only food. No one knows who he is or where he lives because he never speaks, just runs, eats gingerbread, sips water at the public pumps.

By the time we were seated in the bower, listening to the band play marches, Helen had grown very quiet, even sullen. “What’s the good of coming out like this when I must go back to-night?”

I suppose from the beginning I knew what I was doing. It was not possible to show freedom to that unchained dog and expect it to want to be leashed again to the gate. Was I deliberately cruel in showing her this much of the world beyond her room in Thomas Street? Or simply stupid? Both, I suppose.

“I thought you—well, didn’t dislike it, where you are.”

“I hate it.” She crumbled cake disagreeably. I hoped I would not have to touch her hand and feel the stickiness of sugar. Once I got honey on my neck as a child. My mother said that I screamed for an hour.

“There is never hot water.” Helen frowned. “The Negro woman doesn’t like me. The others get hot water twice a day. Most days I get this barely warm water, only
once
.
And in the winter it’s ice cold. I tell Mrs. Townsend this is no way to live. She speaks to me of
moral
courage and promises to tell the Negro woman but it’s the same thing the next day, and the woman—she just smiles at me when I say where is my hot water? Just smiles and looks happy and shoves the tin at me, slopping water on the floor.” Helen swept the fragments of the cake onto the ground. “You see? I have nothing to talk to you about.”

I told her I liked her whether or not she talked. I was sincere. She was indifferent. The evening was going all wrong. “What do you talk to the others about?”

Helen shrugged. “Everything. Nothing. We talk about the customers. They say shocking things—the girls.”

“Such as?”

“Shocking, I said.” She would not indulge me. What, I wonder, do they say of me? “Then we talk about clothes, and I like that best. I sew for them. I like sewing. Do people come here
every
night?” She looked about her, eyes dazzled by the pink and yellow of lanterns. The music was slow now; a single fiddle played a mournful solo off-key. Yet the whole effect was ravishing: hyacinths, coloured lights, the half-shadowed sullen pretty face of a prisoner made free for a single evening by me. It was like a fairy-tale, particularly the ending when she must return at midnight to Thomas Street and its guardian witch Rosanna Townsend, nevermore free again. Though why should I not set her free permanently? I could, with some effort, rent a room for her. And she could earn money by sewing. I proposed the matter to her.

Helen smiled at last, looked happy. “Oh, good!”

I was alarmed. It is one thing to talk like this during a fiddler’s off-key aria, and another to wake up in the morning and find another person lying beside you forever, and no more choice.

Either Helen sensed my fear or she is truly unusual. “But that would be wrong. I could never live with a man I wasn’t married to.” This was breath-taking but she meant it. “I’m not like that.”

“What about—what you do at Mrs. Townsend’s?”

“That’s different.” Helen was firm. “You wouldn’t want to marry me, would you?” She laughed before I could think of anything to say. “No, you wouldn’t. Besides, I’d be a bad wife. I’m not good with children. They frighten me. That’s why living at Mrs. Townsend’s is really not bad, most of the time. If there were a different maid ...” The face became heavy with resentment, an ugly expression which made her all the more appealing to me. “But you will remember to find me work where I can be paid as much as I get now and start a business of my own, though where I shall get a hundred dollars I don’t know. I try to save but it all goes. I don’t know where. My mother said I would die in the poorhouse which is where she is, poor thing.”

“What about your father?”

The first warm laugh, not heard by me since one of Mrs. Townsend’s customers vaulted the back fence and landed in the neighbour’s piggery. “What about my father? You tell me. I never knew him. Neither did my mother, I should think. She drank a lot when she was young, and worked as a dress-maker. Only cutting—which is all she did—not really sewing. Her eyes were too weak. She lacked the touch. You can tell me about your people, if you like.”

At last a personal exchange; the first in our seventeen encounters. I keep count, being on a strict budget.

“My father kept a bar in Greenwich Village. My mother worked there, too. I suppose he’s as much a drunkard as your mother.”

“They were rich.” A long sigh.

“No. But the bar did well.”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“All dead. Five, I think, there were. I was the only one to grow up.”

“That must’ve been hard on your mother.”

“It was. She hated my father. That was harder still.” I told Helen everything—or almost everything. She listened like a child being read a story. Ever since I was born there had been quarrels between my father and mother. He drunk, abusive; she tearful, frightened. One November night he locked her out of the house. Too proud to go to a neighbour’s, she slept in the shed at the back, got a chill, a fever, a pleurisy, a coffin and a grave. Since I was living in the city, going to classes at Columbia College, I did not know for a week that she was dead. “When I came home, we fought in the yard, my father and I. I bloodied him. And to this day I’ve not set foot in Greenwich.” Telling this story, I felt strong, masterful, a king out of legend; and what I told her was true though I did not mention that my father nearly put out one of my eyes with a stool.

“You’ve never seen him since?” There was—I shivered with pleasure—awe in her voice.

“Recently. In the street. We were polite.” Murderer, murderer, murderer, a drum beats in my head when I think of him, write of him, look at the miniature of my mother, painted on ivory by Vanderlyn—she was a pretty woman, never happy.

Together Helen and I strolled through the gardens and Helen took careful note of every dress. “See those muttonchop sleeves? They took days and days to sew! And the
material
!
French watered silk. And look at that
fichu
!
Belgian lace.” She gave me a carefully detailed report on the cut and cost of every lady’s clothes.

As we rounded a small pavilion, we nearly stepped into a pair of figures—who leapt apart. One was William de la Touche Clancey. The other was a well-made boy of perhaps sixteen, carefully got up to resemble a swell; only the red blunt hands betrayed the fact that he was a workie.

“So!” Clancey gave his accusing goose-like hiss.

The boy looked embarrassed, as well he should. There are some things that the poor ought not to do even for money.

“So how is your friend the radical Mr. Leggett?” Yes, Clancey remembered me from the Five Points.

“Very well. And how is
your
friend Mr. Edwin Forrest?” I was bland.

“I’ve seen you before, Miss.” The boy looked at Helen who stared at him with a blankness that would have done credit to an Assembly matron. “I work for Joseph Hoxie, Miss. You must know him. He’s a friend of Mrs. Townsend.”

Helen did not blink. “I think,” she said to me, “it’s time to meet our friends.”

But Clancey was eager to balance an account. “Townsend? Townsend? Surely you don’t mean the Townsends who live in Gramercy Park?”

“No, Mr. Clancey. The lady we know lives in Thomas Street.” The boy was obviously set on preparing a defence for himself if Helen was ever tempted to put it about that he, too, was a prostitute.

“I fear that I know not a soul in that colourful part of town, except for my old friend the estimable Mr. Hoxie for whom young Richard works.”

“Part-time?” I could not resist the final thrust. In the lamplight the boy’s face went dark with rage.

“I did not hear your name ...” began Clancey to Helen but by then we were gone.

To my surprise, Helen began to laugh. “I can’t wait to tell the others. Do let’s get a carriage. Quickly! I always suspected something was wrong with Mr. Hoxie. Now I know. Those handsome apprentices! And it’s true, what the boy said, I
have
seen him before. Sometimes he stops and stares up at the house for the longest time. I guess he hasn’t the money or the courage to come inside or—or he doesn’t
want
to, that’s it! To come in and visit us. Oh, what a day! You are sweet, Charlie!” She kissed my cheek like a sister.