The American Chronicle 1 - Burr (65 page)

“You, Mr. Schuyler, have an excellent bump of Constructiveness, as do I.”

The Professor touched himself midway between eyebrow and side whiskers. “You know, the meaning of that bump was discovered by Professor Gall of Antwerp, in a most interesting way. He went one day with his wife to the leading milliner of Antwerp and noticed that the lady was highly developed in that region. Since her head was in no other way unusual, he logically ascribed this development to her celebrated talent for hat-making. But of course in science one specimen is never enough. He needed confirmation. It finally came years later when on a trip to Italy Professor Gall was allowed to examine what is reputed to be the skull of the painter Raphael and lo and behold! there was the
same
bump.”

From the next room I could hear the sound of Helen being sick. Since this was not unusual, I paid no attention; listened instead to the Professor who was oblivious to everything save his own voice.

“I should now like to confide to you my plan.” The Professor delicately mopped his bright cranium with a handkerchief, stimulating, caressing the bumps of his genius.

“Since the beginning of history, man has dreamed of being like the gods.” I feared that I was in for a lecture, and I was, as Old Patroon will soon record for the readers of the
Evening Post
.

“Well, Mr. Schuyler, it is now possible for us to become gods. Do we want Shakespeare born again? Yes? We do? Good! Then simply provide me with a healthy male infant and I shall fit him out with
this
!”

Professor Fuller took from the hat-box a curious mesh of leather thongs and wooden disks. “I will fasten this patented machine upon the child’s soft still-unformed skull and gently, gently, as the child grows, the bump of Ideality, the bump of Constructiveness will grow, responding obediently to these gentle but firm pressures. By the time the head is full grown, its owner will have the capacity of Shakespeare
without
the Bard of Avon’s immorality ...”

At that moment, Helen screamed.

When I got to her she was sprawled on the floor beside our bed, legs spread wide like a marionette when the strings are broken.

“I’m sorry,” she said, staring at her white skirt which was slowly turning scarlet. First a few pretty drops, like a scattering of rose-buds; then, as I stared foolishly, the full awful tide.

It was I who screamed next. Sent Professor Fuller running for a doctor. Called in a woman neighbour who has had nine children and, thank God, knew what to do.

Helen sleeps, heavily drugged by the doctor who came too late to be of any other use.

“It should never have happened,” he kept repeating. “Your wife is quite normal. I cannot think what went wrong.” He was good enough to take away in an old pillow-case the body of our son.

I HAVE MADE Professor George Orson Fuller happy even though I was obliged to anticipate the expected outcry from those who disapprove of moulding heads. After all, as Old Patroon so wisely remarked: Suppose one of the straps got loose and instead of Constructiveness. Destructiveness was over-developed? And a future architect became Attila the Hun?

Leggett and I were together this morning in his office. “Drunkenness. That’s your next theme.” Leggett sat with his feet up on Mr. Bryant’s desk. Washington Irving’s book is still in its place, and still unread. Leggett looks like death but affects to be in the best of health. He is certainly cheerful, though I cannot think why. Every day he is threatened in the streets by the Anti-Abolitionists while every window of the
Evening Post
has been broken at least once.

“You think I have exhausted phrenology?”

“You have exhausted me. Here.” Leggett gave me a number of pamphlets. “Apparently there are a half-million hopeless drunkards in the United States. The result of sin, according to a reformed wine merchant who should know. But according to me the result of the unhealthy life we lead in the cities.” A fit of coughing ... to demonstrate the unhealthiness of New York City’s air.

“So examine the city man. Describe the classic Yankee type: the lean, leathery-skinned, long-jawed, small-headed conqueror of the wilderness. Show how he is being replaced by a sickly, pasty creature with sunken chest and a soft belly from too much spirits.”

“I prefer the replacement.”

“Is that the view of Old Patroon? Or of Dutch Charlie.”

“Both.” Like all the Dutch, I was born resenting the clever, ruthless Yankees who took our country from us. It is hard for me not to be proud of Van Buren, and hope that he will be the first Dutch president.

Mr. Sedwick appeared at the door to say that an advertiser was in the outer office.

Leggett swung his legs off the table. “They come to the office as advertisers. They depart as
former
advertisers.” We both rose. “Helen?” he asked.

“In good health.”

“Her spirits?”

“She has made a good recovery.” This was true. But her character is much altered. Where before she wanted only to hide at home, now she wants to go out all the time, to meet new people, to be amused. I cannot say I find this change in her agreeable. I work most of the day and often into the night. When I don’t work, I read, and until lately I thought she enjoyed our silent communion—each at work in his own way. But now silence of any kind makes her sullen. She fidgets. Complains. I cannot wait to get us both out of New York.

I asked Leggett about the consulship. Until today I have not mentioned it to anyone. I am even reluctant to make any reference to it here. Superstition.

“The machinery turns. Van Buren knows what you have done, and he is grateful for your heroic restraint.”

“He’s certain to be elected, isn’t he?”

“As certain as it is that that last window-pane over there will be broken.” Leggett then asked me about the publisher Reginald Gower “and the unsavoury Matt Davis.”

I told him that I had paid Gower what I owed him. “I think they were both rather surprised.” Gower had also been angry while Mr. Davis had been deeply—and correctly—suspicious. Fearing a rival offer, he suggested to Gower that he pay me a bit more than the price agreed on but I said that I simply could not bring myself to betray the Colonel’s confidence and Gower said that even if I was so minded he was damned if he would give me a penny more than we had agreed upon. Mr. Davis then said it was a tragic waste of “material” and did I not want to protect the United States from Van Buren? and I said—with perfect truth—that I did not care
who
was president, and so I lost their interest, earned their contempt.

I left Leggett, carrying with me a dozen indictments of whiskey.

In Broadway, I suddenly found myself face to face with William de la Touche Clancey.

“Well!” A long drawn-out syllable, in which fear and condescension were unpleasantly mingled. “What is the young Old Patroon about to turn his hand to next?”

“The Vauxhall Gardens, I should think.” My dislike of Clancey is almost physical. Yet I stare at him with fascination; note that his protuberant eyes are yellowish; that he scratches himself compulsively; that his tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a lizard’s catching flies.

“Of the delicious nymphs you disport with there?”

“Of the delicious fauns, too—and their goatish friends.”

“Uh-huh ...” A long drawn-out attempt at sounding amused failed of its object. “I hope you realize that your editor’s unholy passion for the Negro grows more embarrassing each day. If I were he I should beware. He might simply
vanish
one dark night.”

“Murdered? Or sold into slavery?” Clancey recently delighted his admirers by proposing that since the institution of slavery has been an integral part of every high civilisation (and peculiarly well-adapted to those nations that follow the word as well as the spirit of Old and New Testaments), poor whites should be bought and sold as well as blacks.

“I don’t believe that poor sick Mr. Leggett would command a high price in the
bazaar
.
Only his
diseased
mind would have a certain morbid interest to the special collector. You, on the other hand, ought to fetch a pretty price.”

“More than the usual two dollars you pay?” Two dollars is the current rate for a male prostitute.

“Much more! Why, just for those pink Dutch cheeks alone!” It would be nice to record that I thought of something terminal to say but in my rage I could think of absolutely nothing and so left him with the last word.

Noted in a bookstore window: Colonel Crockett’s new book will be on sale this summer. As yet, there is no title.

COLD FOR JULY. Today I visited the Colonel for the first time in some weeks (guiltily reminded of him by this morning’s newspapers with their long obituaries of John Marshall).

“Fortunately I am able to bear up under the calamitous news.” The
Colonel gave a sly and, I fear, almost toothless smile. Saving the splendid eyes, there is nothing left of Burr’s legendary dark angelic beauty.

“Now only Jemmy Madison and I are left. And which do you think will go first to glory? That’s a horse-race to bet on, by General Jackson!—who will probably precede the two of us, poor old man, despite,” and the Colonel held up a bottle of patent medicine labelled Matchless Sanative, “this delicious restorative. When I saw the President in New York, he told me not once but three times that he owed his health to this particular medicine. Since I have never seen a man look worse, I was not impressed. But then I thought, here is Jackson with a bullet lodged next to his heart and suffering from a dozen diseases and the fact that he is not dead may well be due to Matchless Sanative. So I take it daily, always careful to follow the instructions on the bottle. The General warned me to follow the instructions to the letter. And I will say that I find it refreshing: a combination, I should guess, of opium and apple-jack.” I record all this with a certain wonder. When two historic figures meet after thirty years their talk is of Matchless Sanative!

I told the Colonel that Leggett has read the memoirs and would like to discuss them with him. “Why not? What else can I do now but talk of the past.” The sudden bitterness was interrupted by the man-servant who announced in a low voice, “Congressman Verplanck to see the Governor,” and there was Verplanck himself, heavy and old and gouty.

“Mr. Verplanck is now the lawyer’s lawyer,” said Colonel Burr, introducing us.

“I met you, Sir, with Mr. Irving,” I began.

“I recall. You are Old Patroon, aren’t you?”

My ears went scarlet; I could feel the heat of my own blood rising. “Yes, Sir. I try to ...”

“I like Old Patroon a
good deal better than Mr. Irving’s nonsense. At least you’re a Dutchman and don’t write about us as if we were a variety of elves with our quaint wood shoes and our quaint wood noggins.”

Mr. Verplanck is trying to persuade Congress to grant Colonel Burr the money owing to him from the Revolution. He is optimistic. But then the Colonel has that effect on people.

I WRITE THIS DATE
...

START again. From the beginning.

Yesterday morning Leggett asked me to join him in the park where the Anti-Abolitionists were planning to hold a rally, with the Mayor himself presiding. In the last few days there have been riots all round the country, the work of those New England and New York lunatics who insist on immediate freedom for the slaves and so have unleashed the fury of that white majority which supports slavery and hates the blacks. The Abolitionists will not be happy until they have destroyed the United States. Yes, I am now an Anti-Abolitionist.

All in all, a terrible summer, cold and stormy and strange ... and disastrous for everyone, particularly now for me.

Helen has been odd. Yes, cold, stormy, strange ever since the death of our child. But yesterday I thought she was again her old self, loving and at ease with me. On my side, I have been making an effort to work less when I am home, to talk to her more, to take her out almost every night.

“Will there be fighting?” Helen was not in the least alarmed when I told her about the meeting.

“I hope not. The Mayor will be there.”

“Then I’ll wear the new hat.” A mountainous affair of dyed feathers, the work of some milliner’s Constructive concavity.

Leggett met us at the agreed-upon spot: a block of masonry that had recently crashed onto the side-walk in front of Astor’s unfinished hotel.

Helen gave Leggett her boldest look. “Well, what about the moon?” She pointed to the red disk just visible above the hotel’s unfinished facade. “Have you been reading what the people who live there are like, in the
Sun
?”

Leggett laughed. “It sounds a perfect hoax.”

“That’s because you’re jealous of the
Sun
,” said Helen.

She was quite right. Leggett is jealous. All New York editors are jealous of the penny paper that makes a fortune by each day giving the public some atrocious novelty. Currently the
Sun
is doing a series of articles on the way people live on the moon, as observed through the telescope of a British astronomer; absolute nonsense, accepted as gospel by the simple.

The meeting in City Hall-Park was predictably dull. One speaker after another denounced the Abolitionists on the ground that slaves are property and all property is sacred. Much praised was President Jackson’s recent order to the postmasters to destroy any abolitionist literature they deem inflammatory. Leggett has been surprisingly tolerant of the President’s abridgement of free speech. But then radicals like Leggett are as quick to surrender principle when it suits them as they are to decry the same absence of principle in others. Old Patroon seems to be taking me over. I am becoming very conservative, and intolerant of everyone.

To Helen’s disappointment, the meeting ended without a battle. “My hat’s safe, of course, but even so I’d hoped for some rioting. I’ll go back now.”

I was surprised. Hadn’t she wanted to spend the evening in company? “No, no.” Helen was decided. “You two go on.”