The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (6 page)

I promised to help her. As I was swearing fealty, one of the beautiful scarlet birds splattered Madame’s shoulder with pale guano. Unaware of the benediction, she allowed me to escort her back to the golden carriage.

En route Sam Swartwout greeted us. He is the collector of the port of New York, appointed by President Jackson to the surprise of many since he is a devoted Burrite.

Madame greeted Swartwout with delight. The collector, too, was all smiles and compliments; and earthy bluntness. “So you finally landed the old boy.”

“What a way to talk, Sam! He landed me. And why not? Ain’t I a rich widow?” For a moment I had a glimpse of the fun that Eliza Bowen must have been for a whole generation. Gone were the French pretensions, the mannered hardness: she giggled like a girl just out of convent, meeting her first beau. As best he could, Swartwout played the part of roaring boy, despite whisky voice, round glazed eyes, thin hair combed forward like an ancient Roman. “When will you have me to the mansion?”

“Name the day, dear Sam. What a good friend!” She used me for this declaration, like a sounding brass. “And loyal to the Colonel through thick and thin.”

“Certainly through thin, Liza. But now that it’s thick, I’m not sure which way to jump.” They roared with laughter at things unknown to me—to anyone not of their bawdy amoral generation. Swartwout often comes to the office to chat with the Colonel behind closed doors. They have so many secrets, these ancient adventurers.

Swartwout turned to me. “My respects to the Colonel. Tell him I’ll see him soon. Tell him I don’t like Clay as much as he may have heard. He’ll know what that means. So when are you going to qualify yourself for the law?”

I gave my usual answer. “Soon, I think.”

“You have the best teacher in the world, Charlie. Fact, if the Colonel had only had the luck to have been his own teacher, he would’ve been emperor of Mexico by now and the world a whole lot better place—at least for you and me, Liza.” With a flourish, the aged satyr kissed Madame’s hand and made his way to the apple-seller on the quay.

“He is loyal, loyal, loyal!” Madame was in a better mood; her husband temporarily forgiven. “But then except for
l’Empereur
no man of our time has commanded and
kept
the loyalty of so many as Colonel Burr.”

As we got into the carriage, I knew what it felt like to be the president: everyone gaped at us.

“I wonder,” said Madame, happily aware of the effect her carriage was having on the people, “if I should paint the vice-president’s seal on the doors. And
is
there a seal for the vice-president?”

I said I thought it unlikely a former vice-president would be allowed to employ the emblem of his lost rank. But Madame paid no attention to me; talked instead of the carriage the Emperor had given her at La Rochelle. Apparently the imperial coat-of-arms on the door made France’s police her footmen, France’s army her body-guard.

“He was gallant, no doubt of that.” I thought she meant Bonaparte but it was Burr she had in mind.

“Certainly he worships you, Madame.” I saw no harm in making peace. The bird’s dropping had dried on her silken shoulder.

Madame—no, Eliza Bowen—chuckled. “He don’t worship nobody, Charlie. He don’t love nobody either. Never did. Except Theodosia ...”

“His first wife?”

“No, not that old woman, hollowed out by the cancer. The
girl
Theodosia. She’s the one he loved—his daughter, and no one else!”

Madame suddenly looked grim, awed, puzzled. “Strange business, Aaron Burr and his daughter, and
no
business of ours. After all, what’s dead is finished. Poor Aaron, I think sometimes he drowned along with her, and all we’ve got of him now—all that’s left—is his ghost that floated to shore.”

AT MIDNIGHT the Five Points is like mid-day. Every week I make up my mind not to go there, ever again, and of course I cannot stay away. This time, however, I have come for a purpose. Rosanna Townsend was born in the Hudson Valley, not far from Kinderhook. She could very well know all about Colonel Burr and Van Buren. But I am lying as I write these lines. All day I have been thinking of muslin dresses on the Battery. Could not care less about Van Buren.

Where the five streets come together the world’s worst people can be found—drunks, whores, thieves, gamblers, murderers-for-hire. I cannot think any city on earth has such a squalid district. Of course, I have seen no other city, except Albany, and maybe the Sultan’s Sublime Porte is wickeder than Cross Street at midnight but I doubt it.

I went from bar-room to bar-room, drinking very little but—well, observing, listening to political gossip, perversely putting off pleasure. At the corner of Anthony Street, I made a dinner of clams. As always I was dazzled by the noise, the smells, the lighted tavern windows—muslin dresses.

At midnight, I made my way to 41 Thomas Street (just writing the address in this copy-book makes me short of breath: I don’t know how I was able to endure my largely celibate life before I made the acquaintance of that old brick house with its flaking green shutters and Dutch front).

I rapped on the door. A pause. A woman’s shout from somewhere deep in the house. The door opened, a black face. “Oh, it’s you.” I slipped into the foyer. The Negro maid shut and bolted the door.

“Is Mrs. Townsend free?”

“Don’t you want to go straight up and see what we got?” Of course I did, could hardly wait. But I was on a mission. This was not simply a voluptuous errand. I have—now—given up that sort of thing, and never again shall set foot in 41 Thomas Street. That is a solemn vow.

Convinced that I was perverse enough to want to pass some time with the mistress of the house, the Negress showed me into the downstairs parlour where Mrs. Townsend and her teapot were arranged on a comfortable
chaise-longue
.
She drinks tea constantly: “Coffee rots you, tea dries you out,” she likes to say.

As usual, she was reading a heavy book. “Something frivolous, I fear, Mr. Schuyler.” She put down the book and raised her hand in greeting. “
Pilgrim’s Progress
.”
Usually she reads works of philosophy, collections of sermons. “It is not that I am religious, perish the thought. But there must be some meaning to all this. Some great design.” And she made a spiral in the air with a long yellow hand. “I search for clues.”

Mrs. Townsend motioned for me to sit beside her on a straight chair, the gas-light in my face. She is most aristocratic-looking with a long nose and a bright startled expression. Her hair has been dyed an unconvincing red—
pro forma
obeisance to a profession of which she is neither ashamed nor proud. “Mr. Bunyan is deeply depressing but I assume—by the end of his book—I shall
see
the City of God, or at least its water frontage. Light reading, I admit, but a relief after Thomas Aquinas.”

She offered me tea. I shook my head. She poured herself a cup. “You must marry, Mr. Schuyler. You are much too young—or too old—for this kind of thing.” She frowned as she indicated the upstairs part of her house.

“Twenty-five is the best age, I would’ve thought, to visit you.”

Mrs. Townsend shook her head. “Twenty-five is the best age for marriage. My establishment exists as a refuge for the old married man or as a training ground for the young inexperienced boy. It is simply
not
a fitting place for a young man in his prime who should be starting his family, laying the keel, as it were, to the vessel of his mature life.” Mrs. Townsend’s discourse is often lofty, and though it does not reproduce too well on my page, it falls most resonantly upon the ear.

“I’m too poor to marry.”

“Then marry an heiress.”

We have had this conversation before. I changed the subject. Asked if there were any new-comers to Thomas Street. There was. “A treasure come to me from Connecticut, where pretty girls grow like onions. I can’t think why. It must be the air. She is—she says—seventeen. I would suspect younger. She is—she says—a virgin as of this morning. I would suspect that in her modesty she exaggerates, but not by much.”

As Mrs. Townsend spoke, I was more and more excited. I must be deeply depraved for I am drawn to the very young, girls just
en fleur
,
as Colonel Burr would say: his taste, too—at least in old age; as a young man he was notoriously attracted to women older than he.

“Will you present me to this—Connecticut onion?”

Mrs. Townsend made a price. I made a counter-price. We haggled as we often do when there is something special.

Price agreed and paid, I did not immediately rush upstairs, to her amazement. “But, go to it, Mr. Schuyler. Her name is Helen Jewett. The back bedroom on the left. Or do you want me to present you formally?”

To her further amazement I requested tea. As she poured it, I asked her if she knows Colonel Burr (she has no idea where I work or even what I do). A smile revealed perfect dentures, of genuine Indian (from India) ivory. “Colonel Burr! There was a man! I think the handsomest in the city when I was a girl. Those black eyes! And how he loved the ladies! Really loved them. Why, he would
talk
to them by the hour, busy as he was. Not like General Hamilton who was always much too busy to talk to anyone who didn’t matter. Too busy for almost everything. Why, he would leap upon a girl and before she knew what was happening he was pulling up his breeches and out the door. A handsome man, too, General Hamilton, but
foxy
.
You know what I mean? He had that curious orangey hair and freckled skin, which some people like and some don’t. I don’t.” The elegant nostrils flared a moment. “And he had a sharp foxy smell to him I never could bear.”

“Then you
knew
them both?”

Mrs. Townsend gave a low laugh. “Yes, even—or especially—in the Biblical sense I knew them both. Between the two they must’ve gone through every gay girl in the town, and I was one of the gayest then. Now let me ring ...”

“Like Madame Jumel?”

“Eliza Bowen?” The elegant head shook with disdain. “Never could bear that tart! Always being kept by Frenchmen. I don’t know if that was her taste or theirs. She lived with a sea captain for a long time in William Street and tried to pretend she didn’t know ladies like me existed, but of course we knew all about her. Our sorority is not that large, you know, or at least it wasn’t thirty years ago when all the world was young. But Liza’s done well, they tell me. She wanted money and a place in society. She got the money. I don’t think the other is possible. Not in New York, thank God. There are some things money cannot buy.”

I steered her back to Colonel Burr. But she had not known him for many years. “I never leave Thomas Street and he never comes here. I
think
I saw him once at the theatre, after he came back from Europe, that must’ve been in twelve or thirteen. But maybe it was someone else. He was a hero of mine. Even though I am still a Federalist at heart.”

“Didn’t you come from Kinderhook originally?”

Mrs. Townsend looked more than usually startled. “Did I tell you that?” But she was not interested in my reply; she forgave herself the indiscretion. “No, Claverack. Not too far away.”

“You must have known the Van Buren family.”

Obviously she wanted to find some sequential link but refused to humble herself by asking a question. She is a woman of answers only. “I was once or twice in their tavern. But I don’t remember the son. I suspect he was already in New York. Then when I was seventeen I came to the city, too, eager to take my place in Sodom and Gomorrah. Like Milton’s Satan, I would rather reign in Thomas Street than serve in Claverack.”

“Did you ever hear that Colonel Burr was the father of Martin Van Buren?”

“One
hears
everything. But I tend to believe nothing. I do know that Colonel Burr has at least one son born beneath the rose, as they say, a silversmith, who lives in the Bowery. Aaron Columbus Burr he is called. His mother was French and he was conceived while the Colonel was in Paris. A charming youth. He came here once as a customer—and remained to take a dent out of a silver tray that I had, uncharitably, flung at the head of a certain poxy girl. If I were younger and so inclined, I might have served Monsieur Columbus Burr myself for he is a beautiful young man, or was. I haven’t seen him in years either.”

MUFFLED CRIES from upstairs.

A door slams loudly.

A man coughs.

Mrs. Townsend picks up
Pilgrim’s Progress
.
“Go to Miss Jewett,” she commands.

Miss Jewett stands in front of an open window; behind her I can see by moonlight the bedraggled back yard whose rickety fence keeps in Mrs. Townsend’s cow. I am in the room I like best. In fact, it was in this room that I first enjoyed Mrs. Townsend’s hospitality.

Helen Jewett shakes hands. She does not seem nervous, only grave ...

I AM IN THE OFFICE making notes; it is the next morning and I am obliged to record that I have never been so well pleased as with this girl. Gray eyes, perfect skin, clean body—none of that drenching in cheap perfume that makes love-making with so many girls seem like a wrestling match in a chemist’s shop.

We talked for some time. “I should like to be a dressmaker.” She did not have a country accent. “But, you see, there was no place in New Haven. Two Frenchwomen do everything, and very jealous they are of anybody else. So I came here and met a girl who knew Mrs. Townsend, and here I am.” She smiled; she is very straightforward.

“In a few years I should have enough money saved to open a shop. You don’t need much, you know. And Mrs. Townsend says I can dress her and all the girls here.”

I did not make the obvious remark that the girls seldom wear more than a shift (they are not often let out of the house) while Rosanna Townsend’s only costume is a rusty, green-black bombasine shroud.

“Did you enjoy that?” The girl seemed really curious to know.

“Yes, very much.”

“I’m glad.”

“Were you a virgin when you came here?”

She smiled again, shook her head. “No. But I never kept company with a stranger, like this.”