The Rags of Time (28 page)

There is something biblical about Olmsted marrying his dead brother’s wife. Or mythic—it’s the way the gods behave. All is ordained—failure, death, transformation—afterlife granted. Frederick Law Olmsted limped. Trying out a new horse, he was thrown from the buggy, not the first accident in a life of recoveries. Mary and the baby were not injured. For many weeks he must heal, watch the workmen pry rocks from the soil of Pigtown, where the Irish squatters had lived in mud and pestilence before the territory was declared parkland. He watches the work in the Park from a window in the old Mount St. Vincent Convent, now split into offices and apartments for his family and his partner’s, Calvert Vaux. He has recently been appointed (1859), with Vaux, Landscape Architects and Designers of The Central Park.

Directly across the avenue, the outcropping of rock is massive. It cannot be moved, must not be blasted. The Designers have figured it into the Park as God’s gift, or Nature’s, to wall out the city, though the city with its noise and congestion has not yet moved this far uptown. Olmsted is a moralist, not a religious man; God is assigned to his peripheral vision. When he was a youngster, he suffered some problem with his eyes, sumac poisoning suggested in the biographies, or maybe Fred did not want to study up like his brother, toe the line at Yale, where he dropped in for a semester to study chemistry. He is thirty-eight, a self-confessed dilettante, has left several careers behind—dry-goods salesman in the family store, seaman, farmer. Journalist and publisher were more to his liking. He had begged money from his father so that he might belong to the gentlemen’s club of a “Literary Republic.” An autodidact—man of letters, God help him, as many of his class hoped to be, though now he is a Landscape Architect, a title never figured, not even when he worked long hours with Vaux on
The Greensward Proposal,
designating Play and Parade Grounds, Lake, Terrace and woodland clusters of trees.

 

 

 

Mary Olmsted stands in the doorway of his room. He is bedridden, can’t move to a draft man’s perch to study the transverse route at 96th Street, one of Vaux’s many inspired plans to keep the Park free of traffic. It is steamy August, no breeze from the ravaged land across the way. Fred can’t turn to see his wife, though he knows she is there. He frets about absence from his duties. The crew clearing the devastated land should be working in the lower regions, where development is further under way. Mary comes to stand by his side. She is girlish, pretty in a white dressing gown, though remarkably pale. Before John Olmsted died, he had written to his brother,
Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive.
Early this summer she has borne Fred a son. Now he is a family man for sure. Though not experienced at this job of creation, he is confident the Park will be born of rich soil excavated where ponds are intended. All carefully planned with Vaux:
The deepening of the soil in all parts of the park is highly necessary, and the sub-soil must be loosed and fertilizing material mingled with it.
He sees that the men prying rocks out of the ground have wrapped their heads in bandannas so sweat tears of their labor will not blind them. Mary brings him accounts just delivered: Shrubs have come in beyond the estimate of 16 cents per, exceeding the $50,000 for trees at an average price of 33½ cents per. Care of trees now planted has mounted beyond the

$10,000 allotted. When pain streaks from thigh to knee to ankle, Olmsted reaches for his wife’s hand. Their son will die of cholera the next week, end of August.

I turn back to his floundering youth. Fred was underwritten by his father in experimental farming. In Connecticut, later Staten Island. A farmer with literary aspirations. Like Jefferson and Thoreau, he cultivated. Like Virgil, for God’s sake, in his story of a gentleman farmer who, while at war, wrote home about the planting of trees, the breeding of his cattle, of his crops and the care of bees:

Turn back to the farm on Staten Island, family property we’re told. Fred often crossed to the city, a clubman with influential friends, men with connections. Olmsted declared himself a journalist, assigned the farm to his brother, traveled to the South, territory unknown. Politically provocative, his journalism was a hit up North and in abolitionist England.

In
Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,
fault him for Cracker and Negro dialect, but his travels were read as powerful news of “the economic mistake of slavery.” Fault him for his paternalism, bringing along the blacks who, according to his plan, could buy their way out of slavery on the installment plan.
Free labor
, a lofty phrase avoiding the racial and physical brutality he observed when writing from the South. He understood the South as another country.

I’m not a fit biographer for FLO, can’t come up with a dark underside or portray him as a flawed hero yet more than a superb grounds-man notable for manipulating the live stuff of nature. His touch of moral arrogance—share that with him, I’m told. His dedication to modest living, book learning, the persuasive power of civility, I might call upon as a corrective to our greed, our embrace of schlock culture. My gentility is a crock; his was real.

I’m waiting till death do us part. He’s too large, you see, yet too near. I walk in his Park most every day. Fred’s not up for caricature like dear old Columbus, nor a CliffsNotes romp, life and times—Raleigh. She was right, George Eliot, the grand lady novelist who disliked biography:
the best history of a writer is contained in his writing
. FLO’s urgent news written on the road from the South, his many letters, lengthy proposals, that’s his best bio. At the end, his mind shattered; still, he wrote a plea that his gentle namesake, the Fred who survived, must get his fair share of the landscape business.

We’re a pair,
Dancing with the Stars,
not likely, me with the cha-cha heart, Fred with that gimpy leg. When the time came, he couldn’t sign up for the war. His infirmity consigned him to the pressing trials of his job in the Park. In
The Official Papers,
he is honest and direct, elegant as in
The Greensward Proposal
, chatty in his letters to Mary. He’s entitled to lose his cool in a resignation letter, long and very angry:
To the Board of the Commissioners of The Central Park,
January 22, 1861. Politics—should have known—money and authority withheld from the grand project under construction, withheld by the Comptroller of the Park Commission, Andrew Green.

Cut back in job and title, he directs good works of the Sanitary Commission, just founded to heal the diseased and wounded, bury the Union dead. The name of the Commission is accurate; the circumstances on battlefields, troop trains and ships, unspeakable. Begging for funds, he knocks on doors in the Capital. The battlefields are littered with soldiers dying of dysentery, diphtheria, cholera. Wounded lie on the streets of Washington. Troops in the field are poorly outfitted for whatever the season. He appeals to the Union League Club, to women sewing shirts for soldiers, strong-minded women who founded the relief committee. After the defeat at Bull Run, he writes to Mary:

Meanwhile, the elms on the Mall are settling into their second year. The Seasons are coming to life in the design of Jacob Mould, artist and engineer. Plump grapes, pecking birds, bees in their honeycombs will adorn the steps of Calvert Vaux’s Bethesda Terrace. The artisans Italian, I presume.

The Park is ever on his mind. When, or if, Olmsted goes back full time, it will be to oversee finishing touches—drainage systems, a stream, a gorge. He hangs in with his Park appointment, demoted to less than half pay. The Sanitary Commission—commendable, poorly paid. He writes to Mary of the deserters,
spoiled for soldiers at Bull Run,
then adds
: Write to me and make the best of our affairs. I could not flinch from this now if it starved us all to stay.
Noble thought, yet Fred’s war work is abandoned for money. Here’s a cut of his life I’d like to give a swift pass (biographers not allowed):
We’ll be two thousand down
, he writes Mary. In a misreading of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” he signs on to be the Superintendent of the Mariposa Mining Corporation, 1863. The Gold Rush back in ’49: now all that glitters is schist (Columbus and Raleigh redux). The company’s books are
beyond artifice in trade—
now ya see it, now ya don’t—a shell game. He’s out in California on his own, makes the best of it. It’s El Dorado time.

Fred’s better prospects lie with the natural world. He had gone West by way of the Panama Canal, where the flora, strange to him, was heavenly indeed. San Francisco is a rowdy port; its magisterial cliffs hover over the Pacific, bleak and uncultivated. In Mariposa he resists, then is stunned by primordial wilderness, the magnificent scale of Yo-semite, the violent cut of canyons, their towering heights, broad sweep of its valleys, the giant Sequoias.

Grandeur before fruited trees.

Mary is spending the summer in Litchfield, Connecticut, settling into the customs of her New England family. He writes from Bear Valley:
I would much prefer that the children never heard a sermon, if they could attend worship of a decorous character without it. And among sermons, the dullest and least impressive, the better.
Often as I read FLO, he comes across as
lonely,
the word bleating through news of his days, urgent requests for tents and haversacks for camping, or a pause in the flow of geographic detail, lets Mary know he is forsaken. Now she’s with the children on Staten Island. Fred sends her word of tasks that must be accomplished before the winter back home. He writes to Ignaz Pilat, Gardener in Chief of the Park, describing in detail the tropics observed as he traveled through Panama. Then, as though he has quite forgotten that the Park is no longer in his care, he speaks of the pictorial and emotional use of light and shade, the tropical density of undergrowth:
There are parts of the ramble where you will have this result, in a considerable degree, after a few years—the lower stratum being a few shrubs that will endure the shade and the upper low-spreading-topped or artificially dwarfed trees, assisted by vines.

An amateur gardener, I count this my favorite letter, not a biographer’s choice, the only time he writes a personal letter as a horticulturist, plant by plant observed.
Of course, it is the very reverse of the emotion sought to be produced in the Mall and playground region—rest, tranquility, deliberation and maturity.
As to how it is caused—I mean how the intensity of it which I yesterday experienced is occasioned—it is unnecessary to ask. . . .
Because it is unspeakable. All the landscaper’s vernacular of harmony, effect, the sublime is no use. In a show-don’t-tell moment, he draws a little tree, vines streaming off its canopy to the ground.