The Banished Children of Eve (23 page)

There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” Ward said. Another of the maids. Face a mass of freckles, wisps of red hair sticking out from underneath her cap.

“Beggin' ya pardon, but Mister Bedford told me to inform ya dat da coach will be at da dour in a minute, sir.”

“Yes,
Bridget, I shall be down in a moment.” He put the papers into a cardboard folder and tied it with a red ribbon. He still needed a flourish for the ending. One or two lines. Perhaps he would think of something in the coach. The maid was still at his door. “I shall be down shortly. You needn't wait.” He smiled at her.

“Margaret, sir.”

“What?”

“Me name's Margaret. You called me Bridget.”

“Margaret, yes. Go ahead. Tell the coachman I'm on my way.”

T
HE HOUSE WAS QUIET
. Bedford went into the library. A coal fire made the room stuffy, the way he liked it. As in so many other things, Sarah liked the English style of living, in this case rooms with a slight chill to them. Bedford loved the heat. Even with the furnace on, he had the servants put coal in the grates of most of the rooms. Sarah had complained, “It is unnatural to live in such a temperature.”

“Comfort is unnatural,” he told her in reply. “It is an achievement, a victory over nature. The denizens of Shantytown live in a natural way. Their bodies are cooled by the winds that blow through the ill-fitted boards that serve as the walls of their homes. Unable to afford coal, they sit and stare at an empty grate. And so, they fall sick and die, naturally. God save us from nature.”

Bedford had a special contempt for nature, the obsession of so many of Sarah's English friends as they went west or north into the American continent. Nature as the Prince of Wales had seen it on his trip to the United States, through the windows of a railway car, roast beef and whiskey on the damask-clothed table before him; nature as Mr. Olmsted had contrived it in his Central Park, undulating lawns and picturesque rocks, a plaything for city dwellers, its naturalness the unnatural creation of crews of sweating, mud-splattered Paddies set to work on a project vaster than the Pyramids.

He picked
up the
Tribune,
went into the hallway and up the stairs. He stopped on the first landing and opened the paper to check the gold prices. Steady. That told him all he needed to know about the war: no movement anywhere. Hooker wasn't stirring, nor Lee. When they did, gold would move: up with a Union defeat, down with a victory. He put the paper underneath his arm and went up the stairs to his room. Another point of difference with Ward, whose resemblance to Greeley didn't go beyond the physical. “Mr. Greeley is absurd, and his paper is the gospel of fools,” Ward said. Bedford spent little time on the fine points of that gospel, but he felt a bond with Greeley, enjoyed the pervasiveness of the vision that filled his paper, the country on the move, the unfolding of a people across a continent, wild land yielding new wealth, the glories of a second Eden, idle and improvident tribes and classes disappearing, a new race appearing, nobler and happier, moving steadily forward, every man capable of forging his own success, nature itself chained and tamed, and put to some productive purpose.

Greeley made money. The
Tribune
was read in Washington, in the Army, on the frontier. It was carried by trains and steamboats, its circulation expanding, new presses being added, facts, statistics, and opinions made into a commodity as valuable as coal or cotton, the demand continually rising. Greeley had come east to grow up with his country, walking along the banks of the Erie Canal, against the rush of westward traffic, away from the hard-scrabble existence of his father's Pennsylvania farm. In ten years, he was editor and publisher of the
Tribune,
and a rich man. Charles Bedford, a boy in the village of East Hampton, walked behind his father's plow in the scorched, sandy soil of Long Island. Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, in the long, empty space between the morning and evening church services, he loitered in the office of the New York–Montauk stagecoach. The men sat in chairs by the wall. Taciturn men, faces like old leather, cracked and brittle from lifetimes in the sun and salt air, they worshiped the God of the Old Covenant, God the Punisher, His displeasure made continually manifest in the weather: one year too much sun, the next too much rain, great gales from the north, hurricanes from the south; crops ruined, boats overturned, steeples blown down, trees uprooted, men drowned. Judgment Day eternally hovered above them in the Atlantic sky. When they talked, it was foremost about the weather, their animals, their aches and pains, the price of everything. A boy of sixteen, Charles sat on the bench by the window. He turned the pages of the
Tribune.
He heard the thunder in the distance. Squalls moving up the coast. The air was electric. His mind raced as he read of the uprisings in Europe, the fall of kings and dynasties, the news from California, gold, changes everywhere, the roar of great winds, the rush of water as it reshaped the shoreline, nations disappearing, new ones being built, and gold, big nuggets of it, there for the taking, wealth in unlimited supply.

The contagion
spread slowly at first, almost unnoticed. East Hampton was accustomed to its sons going to sea and being away for years at a time. This time it was different. The boys left pell-mell, with the cows unmilked, the kindling unbundled, the horse untethered. No forwarding address. No sign they would ever return. Coming out of the stage office, standing next to his father in the cool April dusk, Charles realized he was infected. The heat radiated from his loins. He put his hands in his pockets so that his father wouldn't see them shake. He felt the same desire as when the girl-longing seized him, the obsessive imaginings that sent him to the dark recesses of the barn, where he unbuttoned his trousers and took his secret pleasure. It could not be resisted. And although as he walked next to his father back to church he couldn't remember a solitary sentence from the
Tribune,
the single-word message couldn't stop reverberating in his head:
West!

From
the pulpit, the minister prayed for the young people of the village. Most of them are damned, he said. But it was not too late for the community to undergo the awakening that had occurred when Lyman Beecher had preached from this same spot and helped their ancestors turn away from sin. Charles watched his feet. They tapped slowly, almost imperceptibly, beyond his control, to the lyric that repeated itself incessantly in his head: Oh!
Susanna, oh, don't you cry for me; I come from Alabama, wid my banjo on my knee.

In July of 1849, Charles and two friends signed on a fishing smack bound for New York City with a cargo of porgies and blues. He didn't tell his parents. He rose in the darkness. When he closed the door behind him, he knew it was forever. He met his friends in the small wood outside the village. The three of them would go together, first west, down the coast of Long Island. When they earned enough money, they would book passage around the Horn to California.

Charles had never experienced heat of the kind that hit him the morning they tied up at South Street. It consumed the entire atmosphere, left men and animals struggling to breathe. This wasn't the heat felt in East Hampton, where relief came as soon as you stepped out of the sun into the shade, or sat in the dunes by the ocean and felt the ocean wind in your face. Here there was no wind, only a deathly stillness. And the sun was not a blazing whiteness that filled the sky, but a red disk that lurked behind clouds of smoke and dust, its presence seemingly unconnected to the choking heat.

They landed on a Sunday. They took their wages and walked away from the river. The city was dead. Shutters closed. Doors locked. They thought it was because of the Sabbath. They found a building marked
LODGINGS
on the corner of Gold Street. A good omen, they thought. The proprietor looked out a small hole in the door before he opened it. He rented them the attic, a room with sloping ceilings and unspeakable heat. They paid for two nights and said they intended to find work in the morning, when the city reopened. The proprietor laughed. “Reopen?” he said. “Boys, this city ain't closed on account of the worship of God. It's shut up because of the cholera. The Paddies have infected the whole place. Keep pouring off boats, piling on top of each other, breeding like rats in a granary, and spreading sickness wherever they go. They live like animals, and I don't ever open my door to them. This place is for Americans and them that knows how to conduct themselves like civilized men. That's why you're safe here.”

In the
morning, the streets were still empty and quiet, but the docks bustled with life. Ships came in and out. Cargo was landed. Immigrants disembarked. Men shouted and sweated beneath the blanket of unremitting heat. The three boys were hired to haul paving blocks out of the hold of a ship and toss them onto a wagon. They worked next to big, unfriendly Irishmen who spoke English with such heavy accents that the boys were barely able to understand them. For two weeks they labored like horses, rising early, walking to the docks, working all day, coming back to their room with bread and milk they bought in a corner grocery. Their clothes were soaked with sweat, their lives sustained by the thought of California. They were exhausted, drained, and then, at the beginning of the third week, Bill, the youngest of them, started to vomit violently. He held his stomach and cried out in pain. Charles went downstairs and brought up a pail of water from the pump in the backyard. In the meantime, Bill had lost control of his bowels. His pants and mattress were awash in diarrhea. By morning his face was dark and pinched, his feet and hands cold and blue. He babbled incoherently.

The landlord shut his door and would not speak to them. On the third night, Bill died from the cholera. They wrapped his body in a sheet and carried it down to the street. They left it on the curb to be carted away to the potter's field. When Charles awoke the next morning, Bill's body was still there, the flies in a thick, noisy cloud around it. But his other friend, the third in their trio, was gone. He had quietly gathered all the money they had earned, everything Bill left, everything Charles had, and run away.

Charles wandered the streets in a daze. He was aching with hunger, alone, frightened, bewildered, without money or friends in the streets of a city polluted with foreignness and disease. His only hope was to return home, to face his father's wrath. He leaned against the side of a building for support. There beside him, tacked up on a long corkboard and framed in glass, were the familiar pages of the
Tribune.
He was on Spruce Street, outside the paper's offices. He peered inside. Men were moving quickly, with purpose. He could hear the rattle of the presses. Somewhere in the building Mr. Greeley was penning his visions of the future. Charles felt a surge of hope. He thought about going inside and asking to see Mr. Greeley. But he couldn't summon the courage. He looked at the sheets once again. In the corner, just at his eye level, was a column of notices. He began to read them. He got no further than the first one.
Wanted. A reliable Protestant boy. Able to read and write. Needs to be industrious. The firm of Stark and Evans. 51 Cortlandt Street.
He stopped a stranger and asked where Cortlandt Street was. The man pointed west. Charles ran as fast as he could. He arrived out of breath and in a lather. Mr. Stark said he liked to see such haste in a boy. He hired him on the spot.

Charles
began to dig for gold with a broom. He swept out the offices that evening, slept in an alleyway, washed in the public fountain near City Hall, and was waiting at the door when Mr. Stark appeared at eight the next morning. They set him to running errands, storing and fetching account books, making sure the inkwells were filled. He finished all his work and walked up the stairs to Stark's office and asked for more. Stark looked at Charles over his spectacles. “A commendable request, my boy,” he said. The third day, Charles asked for a key to the office so that he could start his work as soon as he arrived each morning. Stark said he would take it under consideration and went back to his work. At the end of the day, Stark called Charles over, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a long, heavy key. “A great trust is given you,” he said. “Be worthy of it.”

Charles stayed until the last clerk had put out his lamp and gone home. He swept and dusted and replaced the books. When he was sure nobody would return, he raised the trapdoor to the basement. He took a tattered piece of canvas he had found discarded by the docks, put it on the dirt floor, and used it for his bed. He knew he would have to be up by six, so he left the trapdoor open and listened for the
gong
of the big clock mounted at the bottom of the stairs next to Stark's office. The chimes reverberated through the silent building. He never overslept. With the money he saved, he bought a respectable set of secondhand clothes on Chatham Square. He lived in the basement until the middle of January. The cold in the building became so intense that he awoke one morning with feet and hands that were purplish and numb. He came down with a fever and a painful cough, and decided he had to find some appropriate lodgings. He rented a bed in a boardinghouse on West Street, three single beds in his room, the other two occupied by clerks, old men who drank too much, their entire earthly treasure stored in the beaten leather trunks at the bottom of their beds. He was still the first one in the office every day. “I couldn't expect a better record of punctuality if you resided in this building,” Stark said.

Every
morning at a few minutes before ten, Stark put on his coat and hat and left the office. On a warm, windy morning in April, he approached Charles and told him to come with him. They walked with their heads down, each with a hand on his hat, Stark one or two steps ahead. At the corner of Thames Street and Trinity Place, Stark took his watch out of his vest pocket and looked up at the clock atop Trinity Church. The chimes began to ring out ten o'clock. Stark put his watch back into his pocket and patted it. He walked down a small flight of stairs. Charles went behind him. He felt temporarily blinded as they entered a dark, low-ceilinged room whose air was thick with the smell of mutton and musty ale.