Wherever That Great Heart May Be
Part 1
My grandfather Donald Buskirk deserves a footnote in America's literary history and this is it: he once offered a bribe to Herman Melville.
This would have been Melville of the 1870s, Herman Melville the customs inspector, with the walks from 23rd Street every morning to the fog-dampened North River docks. Coffee first, then a look at the manifest to see which ship was his today. The Blue Coral, as it turns out, West Indian out of Martinique, a stumpy remnant of a forgotten clipper kept afloat by her pumps. But no matter. A walk around her deck to see her cargo (turtles for the high rollers at Delmonico's, trussed and gagged like slaves), a chat with her captain, then the papers signed to clear her in. Disappointment? Of course. The publishers with their treacheries, the uncomprehending critics, the public with its whims. There were days when bitterness must have choked him, but there would have been other times, sunny mornings when the air was bright from the Catskills, the tide racing out beneath pilings, that he must have spat, slapped his hands together and decided he was well out of it.
And, to match him, the Donald Buskirk of the same era, my grandfather, a clever red-headed boy of eighteen employed as an apprentice in the noted maritime law firm of Wimpole and Bem. One day--it was winter, he remembered the ice, the way wagons lay overturned on South Street--Mr. Wimpole, the senior partner, called him into his office and handed him a key.
"Do you know the fastest way to Pier Nineteen, Donald? North River this time, none of your little East River jaunts. The Queen of Fundy in from Halifax. Take this and give it to the inspector there, Mr. Melville, and explain the captain's been taken sick."
"Melville? Yes sir."
"Aye, Mr. Melville. Good Dutch ancestry in the maternal line. General Ganesvoort? Hero of Fort Stanwix? Know your history, Donald. Know your history! Now take this key to him and apologize for being late and help him in any way you can."
No sooner had Donald left Wimpole's office than he was stopped on the landing by the firm's junior partner, Mr. Bem. Where Wimpole was fat, avuncular, and honest, Bem was thin, avaricious, and cruel, and even then was showing signs of the mental instability that would lead to his breakdown and the dissolution of the firm.
"Here, boy, and quick. See this envelope? Never mind what it contains. You take that key there and wedge it inside and when that customs snoop gets to the aft hold, you hand it to him and see he doesn't open the hatch."
"But Mr. Wimpole--"
"Never mind Mr. Wimpole. Mr. Wimpole is not a business man, sir. Mr. Wimpole is not having his living stolen by tariffs. Mr. Wimpole"--he curled his lip up and brought his finger across it, as if wiping off spit--"is a sentimental old fool."
Donald hurried off on his errand, thoroughly confused. He liked Mr. Wimpole, even worshipped him, but he was frightened of Mr. Bem, and couldn't afford as an apprentice to disobey either man. Up South Street he ran, vaulting gritty patches where the salt spray had frozen, dodging through Wall Street past the excited crowds, coming to Houston where the pavement tilted ever so imperceptibly toward the river, allowing him to cover the remaining blocks in one exuberant slide.
"Mr. Melville?" one of the stevedores said when Donald stopped him. "Look for a brown overcoat, you'll find Mr. Melville."
At first, Donald thought the man must be daft. There were dozens of brown overcoats around that busy pier, and there didn't seem to be anything to differentiate them. He was about to ask someone else when he noticed a brown overcoat that was different--there on the furthest edge of the pier beside a steam-powered winch. While the other coats were cocoa-colored and dull, this one was rich and auburn, so glossy it could have been the pelt of something living. That a man inhabited it wasn't obvious, not at first, but then the coat moved away from the winch and Donald saw above its collar a beard that was the same rich texture as the fur.
"Mr. Melville?"
The beard made an up and down motion that, communicated to the coat, caused it to ripple. "Wimpole's boy?" he said gruffly. When Donald nodded, he motioned for him to follow, stepped lightly over the Queen of Fundy's side, then started forward toward the first hatch.
Other than the coat, only a few details managed to survive seventy years. Mr. Melville had a hard, rasping cough and sucked lozenges. Mr. Melville was a fast, thorough inspector. Mr. Melville knew his way around a ship. As they worked their way aft, Donald became increasingly nervous, and there was a frantic moment when he decided to drop the envelope overboard. But it was too late for that. When they came to the last hold (which probably contained nothing worse than contraband whiskey), Melville reached down to open the hatch, felt the tug of the lock, then--like a hunter reaching toward his gunbearer--stretched back his hand.
"Key, boy."
Nothing happened.
"Key!"
Donald's hand was shaking now, but he took the envelope from his pocket and handed it over. Melville shot him a quick, questioning glance, then tore off the envelope's top--not abruptly, but slowly and tentatively, like a child unwrapping a gift.
It was dark in the hold and Donald couldn't see all that well, but Melville's hand must have touched the folded edges of the money before he actually saw what the envelope contained.
And then?
"He was startled, I think." Grandfather thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "Yes, startled. He didn't expect a bribe, not there, not from a boy, not in that weather. Standing that close to him I could smell the tobacco on his breath, and it became ranker now, as if he had let the air out of his chest all at once. He looked at me and the key and the money and then moved his beard stiffly from side to side. In agony, I suppose it was. That it should have at last come to this."
Grandfather was eighty-five when he told me this story, and yet his face shaped itself to each word like a boy's. It was just after the war--I had taken the subway down from Columbia for our weekly lunch at the old Cranborne Oyster House back of the Battery. Like Melville, his life had entered something of a twilight phase then; after his apprenticeship, he had become a lawyer, and a good one, specializing in marine litigation, the rights of salvage, and--as something of a hobby--the law of mutiny. In 1946, with the world having just demonstrated what it thought of legality, with the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, for the ocean liners he represented, he could no longer summon up any enthusiasm for his practice, even though he was still mentally vigorous and strong. We met for lunch, he questioned me about my studies (architecture--for him a solid New York profession), and then he took me for walks around the harborside, where each landmark held a memory for him and was the beginning of another tale.
He was a good walker, better than me, and there were times I had to skip to keep up. As I said, his health was still excellent, though there was nothing left of his red hair except some freckles and a tendency to sunburn. He knew an amazing number of people from all walks of downtown life, and a good percentage of them would doff their hats as he walked by--the last man in the city, I would expect, to whom this privilege was extended.
Did the walks have a purpose? Sometimes, I think. I was discouraged about my drafting course, Grandfather must take me to see the Flatiron, rave on and on about its proud spirit. I complained about having to wait on tables at night, Grandfather took me to the old Triangle building site, described what it had been like during the infamous fire when women and girls had leapt from the flames. When these homilies concerned history, he would point and gesture like a tour guide, but when the story was more personal, he had the endearing habit of taking up my hand, as if he wanted to communicate the past directly up my arm and not depend on sound waves or any intermediary that wasn't flesh.
I liked the personal best, those autobiographical demonstrations. This was hard on him in certain ways, and many of his stories, just when they became most interesting and revealing, petered out into "When you're older." As earthy as his language could be, he was curiously reticent when it came to anything relating to sex. I remember the day I told him I was in love with a woman and we were moving into an apartment together. "That's wonderful, Alan," he said. "Wonderful!" but he looked at me a little worriedly as he said it, as if his grandson had suddenly revealed himself to be a monster of unrestrained passion.
Passion is not a subject I would have thought he knew much about. My grandmother, judging by what I'd heard, had all but died of over-primness--her pictures showed a woman who was anaemic and frail. Grandfather himself was a splendidly balanced man, the twin influences of Wimpole for good and Bem for bad having struck in him a perfect medium--too perfect at times. He was, to be honest, a bit on the prim side himself, as if something in life had given him a bad scare. He only touched upon the subject once, and in such a manner I still can't decide whether it was meant as a lesson for my cocksure assumptions or as another elliptical character in his autobiography.
It happened this way. On one of our walks we went as far as Sullivan Street west of Broadway--for my grandfather, an unprecedented distant island. Wedged between an abandoned warehouse and a tobacco merchant's was an ancient three-story brownstone with a massive stoop. I say brownstone, though the stone was so grimy it was more a damp, scabby plum, and behind the web-shaped cracks in its windows there was no sign of life. My grandfather stared at it for a long time, turned to me with what I recognized as his "When you're older" expression, saw at once the absurdity of it, shrugged and pulled me away. That's the end of it, I thought, but later, as we sat sunning ourselves on a bench in Sheridan Square, he jerked his thumb over his shoulder the way we had come.
"You know that tenement back there? The one that smelled of saffron and oil?"
Saffron? "Yes?" I said, not wanting to stop him.
"I ran an errand there once. A strange thing really. . . . There's your bus."
"I'll catch the next one."
Grandfather smiled and sat back down. "I suppose I shouldn't tease you like that. Still, I've never made much sense of it. I go back often to try and puzzle things out."
It happened the same frigid winter he had tried bribing Herman Melville. One afternoon when he wished for nothing more than to finish out the day by the potbelly stove in the firm's basement, Mr. Wimpole rang him upstairs to his office. There were braziers going in each corner, a clerk assigned just to feed them, but even so Wimpole was bundled up in furs like an Eskimo, with an Eskimo's stoic grin.
"Cold, eh Donald? Never mind, I have a little expedition for you. Sullivan Street, here's the address. Up to it? Fine. Third floor, knock first, ask for Captain Flanagan. Flanagan, understand? He'll be silent at first--a proud man. But it's perishing cold there, I expect, and you ask him if he's in need of any assistance from Mr. Alexander Wimpole of Wimpole and Bem."
He pushed Donald gently out the door . . . out the door right into the arms of Mr. Bem, who was crouched outside listening. He grabbed Donald's elbow--grabbed it and squeezed.
"Did you ever hear such blathering malarky!" Bem said--his voice was high and falsetto, imitating a brogue; his shoulders dipped back and forth in a mock little jig. "Ah sure we're to be kind to them, is that it now? Kindness in lieu of rent? I'll be damned if I stand for it, sir. You go to Sullivan Street and give Flanagan Mr. Peregrine Bem's compliments and tell him he can be damned straight to hell. Rent was due last Friday, and if he doesn't give it to you this afternoon, out he goes."
The errand itself wasn't that unusual--the firm managed a number of lodgings on behalf of its clients--and it wasn't until Donald was actually to Sullivan Street, counting off the numbers, that he began feeling any doubt. Number Fourteen was a large brownstone plastered with ice--there were stalactites over the windows as gray and rigid as bars. Off the first landing was an immigrant family living in genial squalor; on the second floor it was quieter, but the air was filled with a lurid red mist that made Donald think of opium. The third, highest landing was pitch-black, and he had to feel with his hand until he found the door.
No one answered his knock. He tried again, this time harder. Carefully now, half-expecting ghosts, he turned the doorknob to the right and gently pushed.
A smell met him first. Cinnamon, saffron, a creamy oil that suggested coconut. He wasn't able to separate all the components, but the effect was so languid and tropical it was several seconds before he realized the flat was bone-chillingly cold.
There's no one here, he decided, but just as the thought formed, a match flared to his left and went out. It seemed an incredible distance away, and the voice, when he heard it, seemed distant, too, as if it came through a megaphone turned the wrong way around.
"Who's there?"
A match flared again, and a moment later it was followed by the tulip glow of a candle. On the rim of light, hunched over on a rattan mat, sat a man who even in that posture seemed block-like and immense. Thrown over his shoulders was a gray cloak or military cape; beneath it, his chest was naked, the hair across it matted and black. Donald wasn't sure, not from that distance, but his ribs seemed to heave in a difficult, spasmodic rhythm.
"Over here," he growled. "Closer!"
There was no disobeying that voice--it coiled around Donald's middle like a rope. He walked toward the candle, ready to jump back at the first untoward movement in the man's shoulders.
But he didn't move--he lay there with his forehead collapsed on the shelf of his knees. He seemed spent, not just tired, but spent in some essential, elemental way, and Donald could all but feel the muscular effort required to raise his great head erect. His skin, what was visible of it, was red and raw-looking, as if it had been turned inside out; his features, while regular enough, were shadowed by the down-slanting sockets of his eyes.
"Captain Flanagan?" Donald said.
The man coughed, out loud this time, and groped for another candle. "Over there by the basin. Madeira. Two glasses."
Donald stumbled his way to the sink. There was an elegant decanter there with a fluted spout, but no glasses, nothing but two crusted tin mugs.
"Put them where I can reach them," Flanagan commanded. "There. Pour them full. One near me. One . . ."--he made a tugging motion with his shoulder "near the girl."
In many ways it was as if he had pulled her from a hat. One moment there was nothing there except the stump of his torso, the next, sitting behind him and slightly to the left, was a girl who was at the same time so beautiful and so odd-looking it was all Donald could do not to gasp.
Her smallness, her darkness--these came to him first. She wasn't much bigger than a child, and her head came up only as far as Flanagan's shoulder; her forehead, smooth as brown porcelain, was pressed against his biceps like it was being forced against a tree. Forced--he remembered that distinctly. And since it was impossible to see anything that small juxtaposed against anything that large and not pity it, Donald's first emotion toward her was to somehow, in some way, shake her loose from his immensity.
There was a tattoo on her cheeks--he remembered that of her, too. It wasn't ugly, but the lightest, most delicate tracing, as if the vermilion hadn't been burned in, but stroked.
Flanagan, watching Donald eyes, shifted his position so that despite her continued closeness his shoulder hid nothing more than her arm. She wore a robe that was black and richly embroidered, of an obviously fine silk. She turned slightly, and the robe separated at her throat; for all her smallness, her breasts, with nothing constraining them beneath the silk, seemed exaggerated and arched.
"See him stare," Flanagan said, almost wearily. "The boy's never seen such mysteries before. The boy's never seen the riches of a woman's treasures. The boy's never seen a living princess."
Donald, not without effort, switched his attention back to Flanagan. The drawl surprised him--thanks to Bem, he'd been expecting a brogue. Flanagan crooked his head toward the girl, seemed about to snap an order at her, then shrugged and reached for the mug of wine--not with his closest hand, which was still bent out of sight toward the girl's robe, but with his right hand, bringing it diagonally across his chest in order to do so.
"I've come from Mr. Wimpole," Donald said, when the silence fell back again. "He wants to know if you require any help."
Flanagan's eyes narrowed into a sullen pout. "Help?"
"Assistance. He was very clear on that point."
"Help? Help? Help you say?"
Flanagan leaned his head back and laughed uproariously, the sound filling the room until the candle flame quivered and the wine spilled and the walls creaked and shivered from its force. The girl bowed her head into his shoulder as if wanting to hide in the sound's shadow, but he made a jerking movement and she sat straight again, and abruptly as it had started the laughter stopped.
"Tomorrow," he grunted.
Donald, who even at fifteen took his work seriously, bit his lip. "Mr. Bem--" he began.
Flanagan shook his head. "Tomorrow."
It was the end of it, but not the end. Flanagan, seeing Donald start toward the door, got up as if to walk him out, but the moment he did so there was a taut, snapping kind of movement near his side and he sat heavily back down again--the effect was that of a boat coming tight on its mooring. A moment later he was back in the same posture Donald had found him in, lifeless, spent, his head sunk on his knees, the girl peeking out from his shoulder toward the door with a look Donald could only think of as beseeching.
"Beseeching, I'm sure of it. At least at the end. At first she seemed curious, coquettish even--her trick of tucking her chin into her neck and nuzzling herself there above the robe. Of course the robe. I was only a boy. It was too much in its way. But yes, beseeching. It didn't seem possible, but the girl was asking for my help."
(Continued in Part 2)