The Trouble with Tom (27 page)

"Right," she laughs. "Right."

"Well, who knows what she'll remember."

Mrs. McNeil comes back out and explains that she has to get back to her puppies, who will now be merrily shredding the inside of her ranch home.

"They get into so much trouble at this age," she says, and adds abruptly: 'Think about what I said about the writing on that stone."

"I will," I promise.

I get into the car and look over my papers while Olivia checks Elena's child seat in the back.

"Are we okay on time to make your train?"

"Sure."

"So"—Olivia snaps the buckle again—"
do
you know where Paine is?"

"Maybe." I drum a newspaper article under my fingers. "I've got one clue left."

I'm still tapping my finger against the date
1905
when Josephine dashes out of her house, struck by a final thought about the tombstone.

"You find anyone who's interested," she calls down the driveway as Olivia's car starts, "
tell them I'll sell it
."

Eternity in a Box

THEY WERE AN unlucky bunch. Well, they
should
have been unlucky: thirteen men apiece at thirteen tables, all seated themselves for a dinner at Mills Hotel on February 13, at 7:13 sharp in the evening. A flag with the original thirteen states hung above them, and as they dined upon a thirteen-course meal that cost them thirteen cents each—Irish stew, boiled potatoes, and rice pudding all being wolfed down with gusto—the master of ceremonies addressed the doomed crowd.

"Thirteen!"
he bellowed. 'This banquet is held at M i s Hotel No. 1, because there are thirteen letters in the name. This will be the most prosperous year in history. Reason: 1898 is divisible by thirteen."

"Hurrah!" yelled the crowd, puffing vigorously on thirteen-cent stogies. "Bravo!"

He was followed by the landlord of the hotel.

"We furnish you tonight," he said, "with a dinner for thirteen cents which you could not get at the Waldorf-Astoria, the New Netherlands, or the Holland House for thirteen dollars."

"Hurrah! Hurrah!" they yelled, and walked under ladders and spilled some salt for good measure. But just to keep things from getting
too
uproarious, there was also a policeman at hand—Captain O'Reilly, badge number 13 from Brooklyn's Thirteenth Precinct.

Presiding grandly over this latest meeting of the Thirteen Club, dedicated one and all to laughing at superstition, was the eccentric and appropriately named train promoter George Francis Train. After running disastrously for President, he'd famously set a record by traveling around the world in eighty days. He still hadn't forgiven Jules Verne for immediately swiping his story—"
I'm
Phileas Fogg!" he'd say, banging the table—but at least here Train was in good company. Joining him at the head table were Manhattan's greatest rationalists, all dedicated to banishing superstitious fears and traditions. Most prominent among them was an elderly man that any liberal in Manhattan would immediately recognize: the good doctor himself, Edward Bliss Foote.

Times were changing as the century came to a close, and Foote had changed along with them. His books were still selling as well as ever, but a careful reader would notice that his love of phrenology was much diminished—it didn't seem very
rational
anymore, and surely not a fit subject for a member of the Thirteen Club.

Well, maybe it was all Tom Paine's fault: in his posthumous "memoir"
Light From the Spirit World
, as popular as it was, one could glimpse the downfall of the House of Fowler. Even as phrenology overran a credulous public, it fought a rearguard action with increasingly doubtful medical professionals. "Its professors do not pursue a course calculated to elevate it to the public esteem," the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle
had warned as the Thomas Paine memoirs first emerged. "Unless Phrenology is speedily rescued from its present position, it soon will take its place beside spirit rapping, mesmerism and the other follies of the day." And that is indeed what had happened. Its idealism soon curdled; it turned from prescriptive medicine to descriptive ethnology, from a progressive vision of brain improvement to a conservative assumption of racial and genetic predestination. Phrenology became the province of carnies and charlatans, of eugenicists and racists, and by the 1890s Foote was warning that phrenology needed to shed its "crude teachings."

The host of the dinner stood up again.

"We have with us tonight," Train noted grandly, "Mr. Charles A. Montgomery, president of the Vegetarian Club."

There were approving nods. Not only were there vegetarians in attendance, but the dinner itself was a teetotaling one. These were men dedicated to rationality and
progress.

Ah, Orson should have been here! But he never would be, nor could be. If Foote's old friends at Fowler &Wells seemed to have wandered far from their moral bearings, it was in no small part because Orson Fowler himself was no longer around. Aging, perpetually broke, and hopelessly idealistic, Foote's hero had enthusiastically taken up what he believed was the next stage in bodily reform and healthy families: sex education. But where Foote succeeded, Fowler failed. The phrenologist's
Private Lectures
sold well, but his controversial lecture tours on the subject were an embarrassment to the Fowler clan: portraits of Fowler circulated with the caption "The Foulest Man on Earth." Orson was nudged out of the running of Fowler &Wells, left to wander the U.S. on his lonely crusade: at one point, he was spotted mournfully clambering around the abandoned ruins of his Octagon House. When he died in 1887, the relieved family buried him in an unmarked Brooklyn grave. The man who had spent a lifetime studying human bodies now had his own buried and lost, never to be found again.

Well, that was the past. But as he dined on the thirteenth course of stewed prunes, Foote could sit back and look over the room with some satisfaction at a new generation of liberals. He'd been cajoling them into raising a couple thousand dollars to place a commemorative bronze bust at Paine's long-emptied gravesite up in New Rochelle. It was a project he was reminded of nearly every day, for though he still kept his offices on Lexington Avenue, his son Edward Jr. was doing much of the work now; the old man liked to relax at the mansion they'd built right next to Paine's old farm. When guests came up to visit, he and Junior would immediately take them on a jaunt around the property, showing off Paine's old cottage and the long-emptied grave.

There
. They'd point.
Someday we'llget him back.

North Avenue begins as a dreary succession of hair salons, KFCs, and broken pay phones. It was along here that General Gage and British troops once marched; and after the war, it's where a seventy-year-old man used to make the long and painful walk into town from his farm. But I don't think Paine would recognize a single block of the New Rochelle of today.

The avenue curves and the houses slowly begin to fall away eventually bare trees and a lake appear, and the air itself starts becoming a little cleaner as I watch my breath whiten the cold air before me.

Blam!

What?

A cloud of blue smoke disperses as a couple of kids whoop and laugh hysterically their beagle is jumping and barking wildly at a Minuteman in full uniform as he reloads. Ah, I see. They're firing off muskets by Tom Paine's cottage again. The rifleman nods and smiles at me as I walk past.

"Loud, isn't it?" He beams.

"Yeah!
Yeah
!" the boys yell. "Louder!''

Aside from the occasional musket blast, and the cars shushing by on North Avenue, it's actually pretty quiet around here. There are no other tourists in sight; in fact, you could drive right past this tilly shingle-sided home with its bright blue shutters without realizing it. Many people do. The old cottage has always been a little bit overlooked; until about a hundred years ago it wasn't even in this spot, but much farther back from the road, and so neglected that at one point the property's owner was going to demolish it for firewood. He was just barely stopped by the local Huguenot society—not because it was Tom Paine's house, but because when it was built in 1720 it was one of the earliest Huguenot refugee homes in the area. If it had been a little less unique, and built a few years later, Paine's old home would have gone up the chimneys of New Rochelle, reduced to Colonial soot.

Out at the roadside is a rather ungainly obelisk to Paine. It started out in 1839 as a column erected by Paine's followers, and was duly defaced by locals; and then, in 1899, the bronze bust that Foote lobbied for finally got cast, and stuck atop the obelisk like an architectural afterthought. But the monument is as close as you can get to a grave site, I suppose, since you can't see Thomas Paine's original plot anymore. It's now under this bit of sidewalk, right by where steps descended toward Paine's cottage—which, of course, is itself no longer where it used to be. Come to think of it, even the memorial has moved around a bit: soon after the bust went up, another road-building project meant that the whole thing had to be dragged away, stuck in storage for years, and then put out here by the road.

Just up a small rise from the cottage is a 1920s colonial with oversized columns absurdly dominating its entrance. It doesn't quite look like a home, and yet . . . it sort of is. I can't even tell, walking up to it, whether it's inhabited at all until I see that a young boy, maybe nine years old, is in the vestibule. He is industriously yanking his boots off. He's missing the musket demonstration next door, but somehow I have the feeling he's seen quite a few of those by now.

I tap at the door, and he looks up calmly, not in the least bit startled.

"Hi," I say hesitantly. "Ahh . . . I'm looking for the Thomas Paine National Historical Association."

He nods nonchalantly, as if this was a question that every growing American boy gets asked by strangers at their doorstep.

"Okay." He starts up a staircase. "I'll go get my dad."

The spade sits in a corner of the room, still waiting its next use—for another building, perhaps, or for digging a sewage ditch out in Tivoli.

"That's Edison's shovel," explains Brian McCartin, gesturing around the exhibit hall that we stand in. 'When they broke ground for this building in 1925, they had Edison break ground for it. He was the vice president of the association by then."

I nod as he keeps talking; there's an old black-and-white photo of the inventor leaning on the shovel, probably standing just a few feet from where we are now.

"Anyway, what I was saying before is, Paine was the connection between the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century Progressives . . ." McCartin continues.

Brian's got the build of a linebacker, and speaks with a Bronx accent. He actually
lives
in this museum, in quarters with his wife and son up on the second floor. The house has always been something of a refuge for New Yorkers, I guess; for a long time the tenant was Robert Emmet Owen, an American Impressionist painter who back in 1941 simply up and sold his Madison Avenue gallery and moved in here to guard Paine's legacy. Every decade or two, another keeper of the Paine relics takes a turn living and growing old here, waiting to pass it on to the next guardian.

Here is the inkwell Paine used to write
Common Sense;
over there are his spectacles, stylishly thin and back in fashion after two centuries; here is his tattered wallet and some change. It's stuff you might expect to have found on the nightstand as he died, or perhaps left atop clothes folded for the morning.

". . . And he remained probably the most important reformer of the time, at least until Marx . . ." Brian keeps talking.

I occasionally take a step backward as he talks, and McCartin takes a step forward; and in this manner we complete nearly an entire orbit around the exhibit hall, past an exhibit of Paine's design for smokeless wax candles—bought many years later by Moncure Conway—near the pieces of Paine's tombstone found in Mrs. Badeau's tavern wall, and past the time-blackened death mask that Jarvis once molded with his fingers across Paine's unseeing face. The nose is crooked, like a boxer's: the weight of the plaster, they say. But the effect is to make him look every bit as pugnacious in his person as he was in his writing.

"Now, the common rap against Paine is that he was atheist. He was in fact a Theist . . ." Brian monologues. I keep nodding. We pass a display of Conder tokens, coins minted by British businesses in the late 1700s,because their government was too broke and stingy to issue its own metal currency, citizens could design them however they liked, and amused themselves by issuing currency showing Paine dangling from a gallows over the legend "The End of Pain." Imagine traveling back to Britain and finding the very coins in your pocket calling for your death.

". . . and so . . . ,"Brian is finishing his speech, and then pauses to cough and sneeze. "Sorry. Ugh. Ahh . . . What, what was your question again?"

I think back, and realize my question had been: "Hi, my name is Pad "

He breathes in to start another disquisition on eighteenth-century economics, and I blurt out: "I'm here about E. B. Foote."

His eyebrows go up.

"Dr. Foote?"

"Yes." I nod vigorously, suddenly excited. There is
another living person
who knows about this man. "Dr. Foote. And Moncure Conway. See . . . I'm actually here about the early history of the Association itself."

"Really?"

"Very much so."

His volubility is suddenly gone. He is looking at me as if realizing that he has no idea who on earth has walked into his museum.

"Maybe . . . maybe we should have a seat." He motions me to a table at the back of the exhibition hall. 'What can I tell you?"

I look at the table a moment. It might well have come from Foote's old mansion. I wonder if this is where Foote and Conway themselves once sat? Where Foote unwrapped the package that . . .

"Well, I've been researching Conway and Foote." I pull some of their books and notes out of my bag, and riffle through them. "Following them around. I went to Foote's old mansion on Lexington Avenue, which I gather is where the Association's first meetings were held . . ."