The Banished Children of Eve (22 page)

“I have my last paragraphs,” Ward said.

Bedford went back to his food. “Your what?”

“My
last paragraphs for tonight's lecture. They've just come to me.”

Bedford took a drink of wine, wiped his lips with his napkin. “Where did you find them? In your wine?”

Ward walked toward the foyer, down the length of the old oak table where two centuries before Dutch burghers had discussed how to secure their city against the designs of the English. He looked at the portrait as he went, and almost crashed into the maid as she entered the room with a dish of pudding.

“Pardon me, sir,” she said.

“I found them there.” Ward pointed at the portrait. “Behind my grandmother.”

Bedford turned once more in the chair. Anne Vandervort Holcomb looked down at him, scowling.

“A formidable source of stimulation, your grandmother.” Bedford returned the scowl with a smile. He admired the bulk of her body, the plump contours beneath the dress, solid and sensual, like the two stone goddesses that supported the pediment of the building where he had his office. Caryatids of commerce and prosperity. Their arms above their heads, their full breasts pressing prominently against the folds of their robes. Some days he had been tempted to reach up and rub those breasts, round and round, gently, two at a time, just for luck. It couldn't have done any harm. Maybe he should have. He straightened himself in his chair. Sarah had breasts like her grandmother's. Firm, voluptuous. When she straddled him in bed, a knee on each side, he pushed her nightgown up slowly, navel, stomach, the ascending curve, the hard nipples, round and round he rubbed. Not much left between Sarah and him now, but occasionally, like the night before she left for England, he tried her door to see if it was unlocked. It swung open noiselessly. They didn't speak. Each knew what to give the other, and what to take. Bedford pushed his spoon around the pudding in his dish. It quivered when he touched it. He ran the spoon around its surface, as if to caress it.

Ward waited a moment by the door, He watched Bedford toy with his pudding and supposed he was enjoying a merchant's reverie: the mental abacus never stopping, the counters sliding eternally along their rods. He crossed the hallway to the stairs and went up slowly, stopping at the first landing to catch his breath. A weak heart, another Vandervort inheritance, like the table and the portrait. At the second floor, he paused again before he went down the hallway, past the child's room that had never been occupied, to the back of the house. Entering his room, he lit the paraffin lamp on the table by the door and carried it over to the desk. He noticed that the wick hadn't been trimmed or the reservoir filled, another sign of the incorrigible inattentiveness of the servants, a chronic problem that seemed only to grow worse. He sat, picked up his pen, hesitated a moment, and began to write rapidly, stopping only to dip the pen into the inkwell, the blackened metal point scratching across the surface of the paper.

Long
before the Revolution, the Indians had a settlement near where the Holcomb farm would be. From this village of Rechtauk, on the East River, there was a sylvan trail that led to Werpoes, the chief settlement of the savages, on the western shore of the Collect Pond, where the city prison, the Tombs, now stands. Rechtauk was situated between the river and a small sweet-water lake. The trail to Werpoes began in the high-grass fields near the river. Somewhere below Grand Street it entered a wood and moved in a straight line until the vicinity of Canal Street, when it meandered eastward, in true Indian fashion, toward Werpoes.

For centuries this trail was barely more than a faint imprint upon the grass and the forest bed, a slight presence on the land, like the Indians themselves. When the white man came, he trod the savage's forest path in boots rather than in bare feet. Instead of a leather quiver on his back, he carried his implements, guns, plows, clocks, in heavy-wheeled carts pulled by oxen or horses. He cleared the trees and planted wheat in the fields where the savages had grazed on blackberries and wild onions. Eventually, the trail became a country road, the road a city thoroughfare, Division Street, as it is now called.

By the time of my grandmother's childhood, the savages were long gone. But though Rechtauk had disappeared and the forest been hewn down, the land was still soft and undulating, still green. The steeples in the city rose in the distance. This is where Anne Vandervort Holcomb came that September morn when she first heard the report of heavy musketry from across the river. A servant hitched up a wagon and drove her the short distance to Mount Pitt. She scaled its steep side in breathless haste. Her husband of four months was over there somewhere, and now the British assault on Brooklyn Heights was under way. The smoke and sound told her the day of reckoning had begun.

Today
it is still possible to stand where she once stood. But Mount Pitt has been shaved away. It is now nothing more than a small rise in Pitt Street as it proceeds from Delancey to Grand. If you look to the east, you may catch a glimpse of the river, but the landscape my grandmother saw on a late summer's day in 1776 has disappeared as completely as Rechtauk or Werpoes. The street makers have torn down the past. They have left nothing in their way.

All that is left to connect us to the past is the imagination. With it, we may try to banish the dirt and the confusion that surrounds us as we stand on the busy corner of a street not very different from the streets all around it. In our minds we may recreate a vanished dignity and grace. We may dismiss the ugly, peeling facades of these immigrant barracks. We may raise again the hillocks and dig the vales. We may envision a sole farmhouse built of stone in the Dutch fashion where now there is only crowded shabbiness.

If we wish, we may take out a small map and draw upon it. We may mark Indian villages. We may pencil in the forest and the ponds. We may imagine the route of the stout settler as he set out into the woods, an apostle of civilization in a continent of savagery. We may close our eyes tightly against the ramshackle buildings all about and transpose ourselves to the top of Mount Pitt. A young woman stands next to us. Together we look across open fields to the heights of Brooklyn, where the smoke of cannons and muskets lifts above the trees. In the, river, the oarsmen of Massachusetts strain to row boats top-heavy with retreating American soldiers to the safety of the Manhattan shore.

Alas,
we may try. But be careful of the Hebrew who will come out of the door we are standing in front of and demand we stand aside and not block the way of those who wish to enter his store Or if it is a Sunday, prepare to withstand the mob pouring out of the church behind us, a communion of foreign drudges swarming to the plethora of whiskey dispensers that line the street.

He put down his pen. He read what he had written. Once. Twice. There was no time for editing or rewriting. Rain struck the window, first softly, then harshly. It had been raining intermittently all day. In the late afternoon there had been a crashing thunderstorm—rare for the cold beginning of April, but a suitable orchestration for the second anniversary of the surrender of Fort Sumter. The rain would keep the audience small this evening. And the topic of war, even the Revolution, was no longer as popular as it had once been.

The rain grew louder. Ward gathered his papers, inserted what he had written at the back, carefully numbering each page. He stood and went to the window to draw the curtain. He stared at the darkness. Two years before, in the spring the war began, he had glanced out this window as two washerwomen brought the laundry out to the yard behind the kitchen. Both of them were large women, hips and bosoms swollen from years of childbearing; hair drawn back in buns, faces and arms red and flushed from the hot water they had been working over. Each of them carried a tub of wash, the steam rising out of the clothes up into their faces so that they had their heads angled to the side, and the veins and muscles in their necks stood out.

Ward had almost turned away. It was a scene he had witnessed many times before. But some instinct had told him to stay. He watched them as they worked. Unaware they were being observed, the women giggled and laughed. He couldn't hear precisely what they were saying, but he could catch the rise and fall of their Irish voices. They strung the wash out on the wire, pressed clothespins at the end of each piece. When they had it done, each picked up a pole of about seven feet in length and, catching the wash line in the small notches at the ends of the poles, lifted the wash into the April sky, bracing one pole against the yard wall, the other against the house. They handled the poles easily, picking them up and lifting the line in one motion, wielding them like weapons, not gracefully but with assurance and purpose, each acting in concert.

He kept
watching. He was filled with the sense that he was gazing down Godlike on more than some insignificant, isolated moment in a familiar routine. He was above history. He was seeing the process of history, the past, present, and future, all as one simultaneous event. The women stood and talked for a moment with the wash flapping above their heads, their faces still red. They bent over, picked up the empty tubs, held them by one handle, the other handle touching the ground. Shields, Ward thought. First they used their poles like the
poissardes
of revolutionary Paris waiting to march on Versailles. Now they have taken up their shields and moved further back in history, a tribe of viragoes readying for the hunt. In a moment they shall get down upon their hands and knees and yap and snarl at each other like animals.

Here was the unchangeable nexus of history, one age linked to the next by this human chain of brutes, the
levée en masse
of barbarism that burns libraries and smashes marble statuary, that beats down the thinker and tears out the heart of the philosopher, and consumes it.

Once the Republic had been an Athens. The poorest of freemen had been independent and strong. The progeny of a common ancestry, they shared with the gentry an instinct for patient industry, a sound practical sense, and an ancient love of constitutional freedom that set them apart from other races. Gentry and yeomanry alike had left their farms to secure their liberties against the mercenaries of the British king. But Athens was only a moment. The men who created the Republic had not understood this. Wise in many things, they didn't understand the barbarian, even when he raised his head in France and turned the theories of self-government into the carmagnole, a drunken orgy of bloodlust and retribution. They thought the savage had been banished to the periphery. They tore down his crude village of wattles and mud, and raised their temples and markets in its place.

From
his Godlike prominence, Ward could see the truth: Athens cannot outlast the barbarians. No frontier can withstand their infiltration. They are forever. The spirit of Rechtauk and Werpoes, of superstition, of brute ignorance, of savagery, is amongst us, growing stronger. The barbarians surround us, and we have become dependent on them; and when they raise their hands to destroy us, how shall we defend ourselves?

The rain struck hard against the window. Ward picked up the book that he had spent the afternoon reading:
The Races of the Old World,
by Charles Loring Brace, the founder and director of the Children's Aid Society. New York's noblest soul, living his life among ghastly want and depravity, faces festering with diseases of the body and soul, creatures cast out from everything but God's mercy. Brace had been leading the effort to ship the offspring of this human refuse to the West, to spread the compost festering in the city's lower wards across the prairies and mountains, where, someday, its noxiousness diluted and rendered harmless by the strength of American soil, it might nurture a thing less fearsome and repulsive than the rank corruption so rife in this city. But now even Brace had come to understand. The blindfold of noble sentiment had loosened and slipped, one eye opened finally, free of what Carlyle had called “the gossamer gauze of sentimentality.” Brace saw the true face of what he had pitied and tried to reform.

Ward opened the book to where he had left a leather marker. The paragraph he wanted was underlined: “The Negro skull, though less than the European, is within one inch as large as the Persian and the Armenian, and three square larger than the Hindoo and the Egyptian. The difference between the average English and Irish skull is nine cubic inches, and only four between the average African and the Irish.”

Cubic inches
. Brain size. The iron judgment of measurement. This wasn't the prurient delusion of the phrenologist, a theory for fools, a superstition of bumps. This was truth. Science. The mob was a race. The race was a mob, its conduct no more variable than that of an insect or a fish. Bedford did not understand that. He refused. He clung to his faith in progress. His investment in it was stronger than Brace's. It involved not philanthropy but profit. For Bedford to carry on in his work it was necessary that he believe trade would transform the world. The barbarian would be converted into a loyal purchaser of cloth, paper, glass, iron, whatever the merchant had to offer. The savage would lie down with the stockbroker. The gospel of commerce depended on the ability of all men to buy and sell the banausic trinkets of civilization. It could not entertain the notion that the barbarian's wish was deeper and more primitive, that in the very act of possessing what he wanted, the barbarian would destroy all those who created it.

Ward put his face closer to the window and peered down into the darkness. Below, the lights from the kitchen flared across the yard. The wash line swung in and out of the darkness. He understood what progress was: Progress was luck. The luck of those who lived in the interstices, in the brief moments of light between the coming and going of the barbarian, the convulsive agents of dissolution and destruction. History, the evangelists of progress preached, was a journey from one place to another, a steady sojourn from the savannas of savagery to the highlands of civilization and contentment, the air getting purer the higher one goes, the sunlight becoming perpetual. But they had forgotten the lesson the traveler learns when he climbs to the mast of a ship. Seeing another ship approaching over the curve of the horizon, he comprehends the cyclical nature of his journey, the destiny of all who travel the earth's straight lines, inch by inch circling back to where they began.