The Square Pegs (40 page)

Deeply affronted, Dexter withdrew to the bosom of his family. Here, too, there was lack of hospitality. At his hearth he found small solace and certainly no peace. His wife, Elizabeth, of uneven temper and unending verbosity, was a thorn in his flesh. From the day of his first absurd speculation in depreciated currency, she had opposed his gambles. That he was proved right and she wrong made matters no better. Resenting his manner of investments, his mode of living, his grandiose schemes, his predilection for pretty young wenches, and, eventually, his affection for the improbable servants and friends who were to enrich his later years, she descended into the role of senior nag.

From the day of their invasion of the Tracy residence, the Dexters were permanently embattled. Dexter stood his wife’s insults so long, and then stood them no more. Did he leave her or divorce her or eliminate her by violence, as any normal man might have done? No, for Dexter possessed a creative turn of mind. On the day of decision he simply turned Elizabeth Frothingham Dexter, mate, into a ghost. Henceforth, for the most part, he would ignore her actual existence as a person and treat her as an apparition. To strangers he would refer to her as “Mrs. Dexter, the ghost that was my wife.” It must be remarked that the wraithlike Mrs. Dexter was the most vocal shade in the annals of the supernatural and possibly, the most vigorous in a long line of ghosts, for she continued to haunt her husband’s residences until he passed into the phantom world to which he had relegated her. With unblushing heartiness, she managed to outlive him by three years.

Dexter’s male heir, Samuel, was no less disappointing. But Dexter never gave up on his son, who was generously permitted to retain his corporeal existence. As a youngster pampered and spoiled, Samuel tried to buy the friendship and protection of schoolmates with favors. Exposed to education at home and abroad, he remained ignorant. His head, according to one who observed him, was “stored with nothing that was useful or ornamental.” In maturity he was possessed of impressive physique, but little wit. He spent money with reckless abandon, and after he discovered the pleasures of the bottle, his life became one lingering dissipation. The fault was not his, of course, as Knapp has sternly pointed out. “If he had been fortunate enough to have a sober and discreet father … feeble as he was, something might have been made of him.”

Dexter made one effort to introduce his son to the world of commerce. He charged Samuel with the transport and disposal of a shipment to Europe. Upon arrival at his port of call Samuel indulged in drink and games of chance and was forced to give up the entire shipment to pay his debts. This was the end of Samuel’s business career. Thereafter he was confined to quarters in Newburyport and spent much of his time keeping his father company in the wine cellar. Once, a year or two before Dexter’s death, when father, son, and the ghost that was Mrs. Dexter lived in a finer home in Newburyport, the two men emerged from an alcoholic bout to find a tourist on the street staring up at their residence. Usually Dexter had no objections to voyeurism. But on this occasion, possibly, he had drunk too much and was in an ugly mood. He grabbed a musket, shoved it at Samuel, and ordered his son to prove himself. Samuel for once displayed good sense: he objected. His father darkly threatened him. Still Samuel refused to play sniper. In a rage Dexter took back the rifle, aimed it shakily, and fired. The bullet missed. The tourist, more furious than frightened, sped off to the Ipswich jail some twelve miles distant, and summoned the law. Dexter and son were brought before a magistrate. While Samuel was exonerated of attempted murder, Dexter was heavily fined. He refused to pay the fine. He was immediately clapped into the Ipswich jail. There he sat brooding for two months, martyred and stubborn, while his heir had the wine cellar to himself. When martyrdom wore thin, Dexter paid his fine and rejoined his son.

If Samuel was Dexter’s pride only in conviviality, his younger daughter Nancy was his fondest hope in every way. She was comely, docile, and mentally retarded. “She blossomed for a while, a pretty but entirely vapid child with none of the mental adornments one anticipates in a nice young lady,” wrote Knapp. She was the apple of Dexter’s eye and his one domestic comfort. He dreaded the day she would depart his house for one of her own. For she was much courted. Young gentlemen came calling regularly, no doubt attracted by her beauty as well as by her father’s widely advertised wealth. But suitors rarely returned for a second look. Her good prospects apparently could not overcome her lack of intellect. Dexter was not dissatisfied. The disembodied Mrs. Dexter, however, was much annoyed. She wanted a good match. Nancy wanted nothing. She was Still Life incarnate.

Then a more persistent visitor came calling. He attended Nancy once, and then a second time, and then again and again, until he asked for her hand. His name was Abraham Bishop. He was a university graduate, a Connecticut judge, a cosmopolite who had visited the Far East, and a Mason. Dexter has left us a picture of Abraham Bishop or A b, as he was wont to call him a picture that may be highly colored by a father’s distaste. “A b is the beast or Greater two leged Conekett boull short Neck boull head thik hare big sholders black Corlley hare he wants to be A god …” But the beastly, bullish, hairy, and self-assured Bishop presented a more attractive visage to vacant Nancy. Awed by his scholarship and glib tongue, prodded by her mother, she was eager to marry him. Only her father objected. Dexter suspected that Bishop was less interested in his “babey” than in his “tuns” of silver. “He being A fox and A old fox, he was after the graps…

In the end the ladies won. But the marriage was a disaster, “I have bin in hell all the time more so sence Abraham bishup got in to my house …” the wretched Dexter wrote. Bishop took his bride to New Haven to live. His income was such that he required his father-in-law’s help. After two years Dexter complained that Bishop, as well as son Samuel and “my wife that was” had cost him $10,000. Bishop, impatient with his wife’s feeble mentality, cuffed her about continually. Once, while brutally beating her, he so injured her side that she was compelled to wear plasters on her body for three years. In despair, she began to drink, and finally lost her reason. She bore Bishop a child. When she had given way fully to alcoholism and insanity Bishop demanded a divorce. He obtained it, but not until he had cost his angry father-in-law “one tun of silver.” Pitiful Nancy, bruised, addicted to “likker,” and “Crasey,” returned with her offspring to Newburyport and became the charge of her distressed parent for the rest of his life.

It is not inconceivable that Timothy Dexter, so beset, might have gone “Crasey,” too, had he not at this moment in his life found an outlet for his troubled brain. He was almost fifty when he took up his pen in earnest and became an author.

Of course, motives other than mere escape brought him into literature. He still sought the respect of Newburyport society and thought to dazzle its members by his creative outpourings. More important, he had cast his eye, at last, on immortality. “Nearly every act of his apparent folly may be traced to one overpowering passion, uncontrolled by any natural or cultivated taste, though combined with considerable shrewdness: this passion was vanity,” Mrs. E. Vale Smith has stated.

In earlier years, Dexter had enlightened Newburyport with an occasional letter to the editor. But by now he had lived much and suffered deeply, and he had wisdom in excess to impart. It is unfortunate that his style, original and uninhibited from the first, was marred in the beginning by the vandals who edited the
Newburyport Impartial Herald
and other journals. Actually, the
Impartial Herald
was published for a time by a friend and admirer, Edmund Blunt, who had raised its circulation from 70 to 700 in two years. Perhaps veneration for his forty-dollar printing press, which had once served Benjamin Franklin, convinced Blunt that he must punctuate and rewrite Dexter’s earliest ungrammatical effusions. Perhaps, too, Blunt did not wish to make an old friend appear the object of ridicule in the community though later, in Salem, Blunt would agree to print Dexter’s “unimitated and inimitable” master work, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, without tampering with the text.

There was some reticence in Dexter’s first offering to the
Impartial Herald
. “Mr. Printers, I hope my weak brothers won’t be disturbed about my scratching a little in the newspaper. I do it to learn myself to write and spell which I never knew how; I am now at leisure and a man of pleasure. I mean no hurt I let you know what I know without reading what I know only by experience Clear Nature has been my schoolmaster.” At various times Dexter discoursed on brotherly love, the human soul, a seven-foot African lion he was displaying in his back yard, the perfidy of Abraham Bishop, the wisdom of appointing Dexter the Emperor of the United States, female fashions, and the folly of entrusting public offices to men without means.

Then suddenly, without warning, like a bolt from the blue, was published in the
Impartial Herald
what appeared to be Timothy Dexter’s valedictory to Newburyport:

“It costs eight hundred dollars a year to support a watch in this town, and yet gentlemen’s windows are broken, fences pulled down and Cellars broken open, and much other misdemeanors done at night. Are the watch asleep, or are they afraid to detect those who are guilty of such practices? Boast not of it, if you call this Liberty and Equality… .

“Now fellow citizens is it wisdom, is it policy, to use a man or men so shocking bad as to oblige them to leave the town where they paid one Dollar a day to support government?

“A friend to good order, honor to whom it belongs, to great men a friend to all good citizens and honest men good bye.”

Timothy Dexter was leaving Newburyport at last. He had been provoked to move, he said, by unrestrained youths, thieves, and ruffians who were disturbing his peace and destroying his property. Fie did not announce, though it was plainly evident, that he was tired of being ostracized by polite society and hurt by the rejection of his offer to pave the town’s main street. He had decided to go to a community where his originality and liberality might be appreciated and where his worldly goods would be protected. He purchased a vast country-estate in Chester, New Hampshire. He then disposed of the Tracy house at a profit. Early in 1796 he departed Newburyport for Chester. Early in 1797 he returned to stay. The year of absence had not been without its advantages. For the Dexter who returned was a nobler Dexter, far better equipped to fend off the disapproval of his Newburyport neighbors.

What happened in Chester to alter Dexter’s outlook? Somehow, in his new location, the leather-dresser and man of commerce acquired nobility. One day he was the plebeian Dexter, the republican Dexter, the everyman’s Dexter and the next he was Lord Timothy Dexter of Chester. The origin of his title remains a mystery. Had he knighted himself? Or had he been knighted by the circle of sycophants who courted a man of wealth? The facts are not known. All that is known is that soon, in the public prints, Dexter was referring to himself as “the first Lord in Americake the first Lord Dexter made by the voice of hamsher state my brave fellows Affirmed it they gave me the titel & so let it goue for as much as it will fetch it wonte give me Any breade but take from me …” Evidently Lord Dexter was realistic about his peerage. It would give him no bread. On the contrary, the high station would be costly. But he would not shirk the responsibility. After all, the “voise of the peopel and I cant Help it” had elevated him.

Yet even his rapid ascent to the peerage could not make him unaware of his antipathy toward Chester. A Baptist preacher in the new community directed a sermon and the threat of fire and brimstone at Dexter. Angered, Dexter walked out of the church. The tax collectors of New Hampshire, more persistent than those of Massachusetts, exacted one dollar a week from him for road improvements and twenty-four dollars for use of his carriages, and tried mightily to get their share of his “two Hundred wate of Silver.” The specter that was Mrs. Dexter was more visible and more verbal than ever. Her activity may be attributed to the knowledge that Dexter was having visitations from more earthly females. It is with difficulty that one pictures Dexter as Casanova. But there is evidence that during his New Hampshire year he reserved much of his wit, and some of his wealth, for unattached females. At Hampton Beach he once became romantically involved with an attached female, much to his regret. Her boy friend belabored Dexter with more than words. Finally, there was the unhappy altercation Dexter had with a member of the bar. According to Dexter, a lawyer-Dexter on any hurried journey, lay a supply of fireworks, a speaking trumpet, pipes and tobacco, and “a bibel to read and sum good songs.”

The most curious and best-remembered addition to his landscape was yet to come. In 1801 Dexter conceived and announced his outdoor museum. It was to be dedicated to the late George Washington and to his equals from the earliest dawn of history. It was to take the form of a series of statues of great personalities and symbolic figures, all carved of marble and life-sized. These representations would be distributed at the mansion’s entrance, on the front lawns, in the rear gardens, so that all who wished might see them plainly and appreciate being a part of the human family. “I will shoue the world one of the Grate Wonders of the world, in 15 months,” Dexter announced in the press, “if No man murders me in Dors or out of Dors.” No man murdered Dexter, and he proceeded with his plans. There would be, he said, “The 3 presidents, Doctor Franklin, John hen Cock, and Mr Hamilton and Rouffous King and John Jea, and 2 granedears on the top of the hous, 4 Lions below, I Eagel, is on the Coupulow, one Lamb to lay down with one of the Lions,—One Yonnecorne, one Dogg, Addam and Eave in the garden, one horse. The houll is not concluded on as yet Dexter’s Mouseum.”

To execute the grand design Dexter hired an admirable artist and new friend, Joseph Wilson, who had carved figureheads and other decorations on sailing ships before arriving in Newburyport Dexter had previously tested Wilson with the development of the gold eagle that turned on the cupola. The result had satisfied him, and he regarded Wilson “A fine fellow.” However, Dexter did not let sentiment cloud his business sense. Knapp has it that Wilson received $15,000 for the task, but later research proves that the sum was $4,000. An architect, Ebenezer Clifford, was retained to assist the ship-carver.