The Banished Children of Eve (7 page)

He tapped out the letters of her name on the pad. A telegraph to nowhere. From outside he could hear the rumble of traffic on Broadway. Wheels, chains, horses, voices, peddlers, newsboys. Maybe a song about New York. No. New York had too much of its own music. It couldn't carry one tune. It would drown a single song, smother it. New York gave you freedom, indulged tastes and vices that could get you hanged somewhere else, but at a price. Silence. An inability to concentrate. And when you could no longer pay that price, what then?

Last night, he had walked with Mulcahey from the hotel, across the Bowery, down Catherine Street, to the ferry slip. They stood in the mist by the river. What did Mulcahey call it? The Swine-nee River. Sympathetic but sarcastic. As if he had a grudge against the whole world. A note of bitterness. All the Irish seemed to have it. Mulcahey sang in his tenor voice, “Way down upon the Swine-nee River, far, far from Rome.” The stench of low tide hung over the entire area, from the river all the way over to the Five Points. It was always low tide in the Five Points. Muck and rot, the odor of lives left behind by a receding tide. But there was solace as well as squalor. Solace for everyone, for darkies and Paddies, for gentlemen and knaves, even for Stephen Foster: grandson of James Foster, one of Washington's soldiers at York-town; connected, through his sister's marriage, to the family of James Buchanan, former president of the United States; brother of William Foster, a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He had been born on the same day that Jefferson and Adams died, the fourth of July, a real live Yankee Doodle, born to write America's songs. Stephen Foster: wife-deserter; occupant of the attic room in a third-rate hotel; borrower extraordinaire from a host of Bowery habitués; musical has-been; drunk, cadger of drinks, swiller of Mike
Manning's Revenge; indulger of unspeakable desires. In the Five Points, amid the tumbledown buildings, the alleys, the basement beer places, the attics and back rooms, there was a vice for every taste. The only question was price.

Foster had been in New York three years now, paying the price for his freedom. Six songs in 1860, the year he came for good, fifteen in 1861, seventeen in 1862, twenty-three so far this year. Most were swill. The musical equivalent of two shots of five-cent whiskey. The price kept going down, but there was always somebody willing to buy the name of Stephen C. Foster to print on music sheets. The world still waited for the songs. The people in the streets and in the armies, the men and women in the wagons pushing west, the bargemen, the fishermen, the firemen, they still expected a new tune, notes that would echo in their collective throat, the same song sung from coast to coast. It was only the snobs who hated his music. Workmen whistled it, they said. It had taken hold of the popular mind, particularly the young, repeated without musical emotion so as to persecute and haunt the acute, sensitive nerves of deeply musical persons. Such tunes were hummed and whistled involuntarily, they said, traveling through the populace like a mild form of the pox, breaking out like a morbid irritation of the skin.

He scratched his head. He dug his fingernails into the raw itchiness along his part. Lice. It could be. A gift of Dolan's New England Hotel. He ran both his hands over his hair, swept it back from his face. He propped his head in his right hand, the elbow resting on the chair, his fingers digging beneath his hair and playing against his skull,
tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.
Nothing.

He felt a bump. Which one was this? His fingers ran over it, measuring. Dr. Mordowner, a friend of his father's and a leading Pittsburgh phrenologist, had felt his head when he was a child. Dr. Mordowner had pressed the palms of his hands into Stephen's forehead, run them back atop the boy's ears to the base of the neck, stepped back, and looked Stephen in the face. “Amazing!” he shouted. He put his right hand back on Stephen's head, the palm resting on his
brow. He pushed down so hard Stephen had to close his eyes. “My good man,” Dr. Mordowner said to Stephen's father, “the frontal ridges on this child's head are the most prestigious external disclosure of the Organ of Tune that I have ever encountered!” The palm of Dr. Mordowner's hand felt hot. The heat seemed to grow more intense. Dr. Mordowner pressed harder. He had his other hand at the back of Stephen's head. The vise of prophecy. Stephen sensed something melting in his brain. River ice in springtime, breaking, a force of nature coming alive, rising, sweeping everything before it. An industry was being born. Minstrels in every city strumming his music, schoolchildren memorizing it, lovers serenading each other, even pious congregations borrowing it to praise the God of their manifest destiny, all their rhythms indebted to the boy whose head is held so tightly by Dr. Mordowner.

Foster fingered the bump again. It was right on top of his head. It was sore, probably from the other night. A soldier did it. Having gotten drunk in McSorley's, across from the Seventh Regiment Armory, Foster reverted to the southern accent that he used whenever he was sufficiently under the influence. The cadences of a southern gentleman. An affectation from his days in Cincinnati. His minstrel songs led many people to insist he must be a southerner. He obliged, especially when liquor slowed his mind to a crawl. He wasn't talking politics, he never did, but this bear of a soldier came from behind, lifted him up, turned him upside down, and banged his head into the floor. He lay on the floor. The soldier stood above him. “Goddamn cracker,” he said. “Go back where you came from.”

Foster rubbed his head. He pushed more hair aside, ran his fingers down above his ear. Another convexity. Was this what the phrenologists called Matrimony, Desire to Marry? It was a very small bump. Next to it was a slight depression. More likely this was Matrimony. He moved his hand to the back of his head. A large bump. Dr. Mordowner had called this Amativeness, Sexual Love. “Unnaturally large in a boy this size,” Dr. Mordowner told his father. “Make sure he is occupied in healthful activities and does not spend a great deal of time
by himself. The dimension of these amative proclivities could lead the boy into danger.”

A great deal of time by himself. Then and now. Lonely. George Cooper had joined the Army, their partnership dissolved, all their songs sold outright, no claim on royalties, or on each other. Daly the music publisher was nice enough, but hardly a friend. The diminutive Mr. Dunne, who lived on the second floor of the hotel, was cordial in his way. Offered his umbrella and was good for the occasional loan. But a secretive type. Very young, very quiet: an odd marriage of attributes. Like Mulcahey, he seemed animated by resentment. Mulcahey at least was talkative and attentive. Tall, slim, long-legged, with the body of a dancer, he was generous with his encouragement and his money. Foster felt affection for him. He could afford far better than the New England Hotel. But there between the Bowery and the Five Points, Mulcahey was safe to do what would be dangerous elsewhere. He shared a room with his mulatto mistress, Eliza. They paraded the hotel arm in arm. She was almond-eyed and beautiful, coffee-colored, with a deep wave in her hair. The fullness of her lips made her face look as if she were pouting. But she was sweet-tempered.

Sometimes, when Eliza sat in the small chair by the desk in the lobby waiting for Mulcahey, Foster would stand at the far end of the hotel barroom and stare at her. She was unaware he was looking at her. How much she resembled Olivia. Even the way she sat, with her hands folded on her lap. Olivia sat that way when she put him to bed at night. Her lovely face in the candlelight, the soft pitch of her voice as she sang him to sleep. He was four when his father brought her home, a colored girl of twelve to help his mother. Amid the tedious decline from respectability that his father's drinking inflicted on the family, amid the stifling respectability of their house in Pittsburgh, she was like a purple flower, luxuriant and exotic, wildly out of place, as if an orchid from Africa had been placed in the window of their austere, wood-framed house, its white curtains always stiff and starched and disapproving.

She chased him through
the high grass by the river, her laughter a kind of music. On Sunday afternoons, without his parents' knowledge, she took him to the Negro church. He watched through the rear door. The people swayed and danced. He had never heard the human voice make such sounds. She never talked about her past, and he never thought to ask. When he grew older and went to school, her chores became cooking and cleaning. She slept in the shed behind the house, in a tiny room above the cow stall. He sold his first song for three dollars and gave her one. On the day he left to work in Cincinnati, his parents stood straight and formal on the porch. Oh, how Olivia cried and carried on.
Oh, don't you cry for me.
Dear Olivia. A long time since anyone had cried for Stephen Foster.

Suicide? Was there a convexity for that? He felt around his head. You had to think about it, alone in a hotel attic when the wind rattled the window, a continuous noise: the point in the night when the knowledge struck you suddenly, as if for the first time, that you'd sold the rights and royalties to most of a life's work for $1,800, all of it long gone. You had to regard the instantaneous solution offered by the symmetry of the razor across the windpipe, a neat line.

The line between a songwriter and a hack? Where was it? Or, to be more honest, where had it been? Foster pulled his legs back from the fire. The ragged threads on the cuffs of his pants were singed and smoldering. He held his hands close to the low, intense flame of the coals, which had a heavy layer of ash on top of them, holding down the heat. He picked up his pad from beside the chair. The pages were wrinkled from the heat. He fanned the coals with the pad till the ashes rose up the chimney and the flames jumped. He threw the pad onto the fire and it turned black, smoking, crumpling, consuming itself in a hum of combustion.

Ten-line musical verse in which nine lines are identical. Simple harmony. Simple melody. Music in three chords. Music that set people singing, that for all its clichés was new, music to work by, to travel by, to pan for gold by, to load a gun by, to run a machine by, to go to war by, music for the people, and if not
of
the people, then at
least an echo in their heads of some older tradition they no longer had time to cultivate, new music for a new way of life, a new industry for an America of cities and railroads, America in a hurry, with Stephen Foster stoking the engine of progress.

For “Old Folks at Home,” Firth, Pond & Co. had kept two presses running all day, but even that hadn't been enough. They had to add a third, then a fourth. Up till that point, three thousand copies of an instrumental piece and five thousand of a song had been considered a great sale. “Old Folks” hit ten thousand in a month.
Gwine to run all day.
It raced ahead of “Oh! Susanna!” for which he'd received a flat payment of one hundred dollars. “Camptown Races” had sold more than five thousand copies at two cents a copy, and earned him just over one hundred dollars.
I keeps my money in an old tow bag.
The publishers were staggered by the success of “Old Folks.” Desperate for money at the time, he sold the title space to E. P. Christy for fifteen dollars. “Old Folks at Home, an Ethiopian Melody as sung by the Christy Minstrels/Written and Composed by E. P. Christy.” Still, Foster got the royalties. One hundred thousand copies at two cents a sheet. The Sutter's Mill of American popular music.

You write, a composer of operas once told him, in words of one syllable, with harmonic textures as naïve as the melodies. Your musical vocabulary is so impoverished that you repeat yourself over and over again. Foster stared into the grate. The pad became bloated with fire and began to collapse in on itself. Never claimed to be a composer of operas. Only said the songs were what people would want to sing. And that's what they did. Naïve melodies in ten million throats. You better listen. The people are telling you something.
All de world am sad and dreary, ebrywhere I roam.

Feel these bumps: Causality, Desire to Know Why; Comparison, Perception of Resemblance; Sublimity, Love of Grandeur. They stood out on Foster's head. Because of them he could see what nobody else could see. Sheet music and the two-cent royalty were just a beginning. When he thought about it, his brain raced so fast that he
couldn't keep up. Drink helped slow it down, but too often brought it to a halt. He sought balance. Last night, he had it—enough drink to slow rather than stop him. He told Mulcahey what he saw: a cast-iron box in every house, sound coming out of it at the turn of the tap like Croton water, song after song in succession, an unlimited profusion, beginning and ceasing at will. You pay a charge once a month, the same as for water, and you can turn the spigot on or off, at will.

They were standing at the end of a pier. River noises all around. Whistles, horns, screeching of gulls. Mulcahey dropped pebbles into the black water of the East River. It's no longer enough just to write music or to sing it, Foster said. You've got to know how to sell it, to create as well as to meet demand. Wed Hermes to Polyhymnia. Mulcahey dropped more pebbles. The circles rippled out toward infinity. The future belonged to the salesman. The country is overrun with inventions and inventors. The Patent Office can barely keep up. Machines for sawing, reaping, canning, digging ditches, cleaning streets, binding books, stitching shoes. The ones who grow rich won't be the inventors, but those with the ability to feel the bumps on the national cranium, decipher the shape of the people's desires, form those desires into a single vision of happiness, and go out and sell it.

Plug, plug, plug: That's the future. The lesson of a songwriter's career. Don't just wait for the public to decide what music it likes. Listen carefully as it hums. Measure its bumps. Anticipate the songs it wants to sing. The science of anthropometry has shown that despite all its variations, mankind comes in three basic sizes: small, medium, and large. Now all things are possible! Ready-made shirts, pants, jackets, dresses, blouses. Ready-made books, ideas, philosophies, politics, religions, music, culture. The world has become a marketplace. The same challenge for the philosopher as for the politician, the ironmonger, and the songwriter: Sell or die.