I walked down Avenue A to Tompkins Square, where the draft riots of 1863 had started. Weary to the bone, I chose a bench shaded by poplar trees and made myself presentable. Thirsty, I drank from the fountain beside a horse trough. Beside me, a horse noisily sucked up water. I turned in time to see a splendid woman giving her arm to a gentleman, the snowy egret feather of her hat dazzling in the noonday sun. Somewhat revived, I took a ’bus to the Brooklyn Bridge, which had opened five months earlier. I felt a sudden need to visit the house of my childhood across the river on Vinegar Hill.
The Memorial Day panic on the roadway of the bridge a week after its inauguration was fresh in the minds of citizens on both sides of the East River. That October afternoon, I crossed it for the first time. I was too preoccupied by the strange occurrences at Bellevue to worry about the integrity of Roebling’s colossus, which, at the outset of his thirteen-year Herculean labor, had been called his “folly.”
The smell of New York Bay, arriving on a northerly breeze, recalled the People’s Day, when Franklin and I had stood on a rooftop in Printing House Square. We were in mourning for the death of his brother, Martin, who had “met an untimely end,” as scribblers for the two-penny papers like to say. We’d gone up on the roof in the hope of giving grief the slip—at least for the afternoon. We watched President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, and their frock-coated entourage step from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, across the street from Madison Square, into a blaze of bunting, banners, shiny commemorative medals, and madly waving flags. On Broadway, down which the illustrious would ride to the bridge’s Chatham Street entrance, Old Glory hung at every window. The citizens of Manhattan and Brooklyn were choked to maudlin tears with a patriotic sentiment not felt to this degree since the opening of the Erie Canal. Not even Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House had ignited civic enthusiasm to equal the bridge’s grand inaugural day.
Nearby our aerie, a mob of “sporting men” soused to the gills were pouring champagne down their throats from hundreds of bottles, breaking chairs for firewood, and roasting an ox on the roof of the Police Gazette Building. From midtown to the Battery, Manhattan was overrun by fifty thousand gawkers who had arrived by steamers and milk trains. Rural swains in old-fashioned cutaways and green ties, assorted rubes, hayseeds, and country bumpkins were buying five-cent souvenirs and scratching their chins in wonder. The streets surrounding Chatham Square—Bowery, East Broadway, St. James Place, Oliver, Mott, and Worth—were packed past all hope of unpacking till the next day. Franklin and I were stunned by the shrill uproar of steam whistles, calliopes, and regimental bands and by the clamor of a multitude thick as the masts of ships crowding the river from Red Hook to the Navy Yard. At midnight, Thomas Edison threw a switch at the Pearl Street generating station, and the great bridge blazed forth—a new constellation heralding the “American Century” to come and our inexorable destiny. Fourteen tons of rockets hissed and wheezed in a bombardment sufficient to crack the walls of a citadel. We stuffed our fingers in our ears and shouted “Hooray” like children. Martin was absent from our thoughts—no memory could survive the din—and afterward, we were ashamed.
Vinegar Hill
I CROSSED THE BRIDGE TO BROOKLYN, my mind oppressed by thoughts of Martin, the dead girl, the sight and smell of the tenement house, my wandering womb, and the morning’s hysteria when I could not find my way out of the hospital, as if its staircases and corridors had been copied from the twists and turns of a human brain disordered by lesions beyond Dr. Garmany’s surgical skill. I recalled with fondness Martin’s friend Shelby Ross and our summer picnic in the Central Park, where he and I had played innocently at being a shepherd and a shepherdess, while Franklin had walked to the refreshment stand in the Ramble to eat ice cream. I’d been happy then. Martin had not yet died, nor Shelby gone to prison for avenging his murder. Franklin was still in New York City, and I was not carrying a child conceived by “fornicating” with my own husband. You see how things stood.
Tomorrow I will take the train to Sing Sing and visit Shelby, I promised myself.
I went north along the heights to Vinegar Hill, a short distance from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I had last walked that way on the day that Franklin and I were married. There had been a small wedding party at Mother and Father’s house. For all his great size, Franklin was shy. I, too, was shy, afraid of his hands and the muscles visible under his shirt sleeves. I knew him to be a gentle man; his gentleness was one of the reasons I’d fallen in love with him. But I also knew, as every woman does, that a man can sometimes forget himself. I was afraid—he was such a big man! In time, I grew to love the strength of his hands and arms and the power of his body, which, more often than not, he held in check to please me. Sometimes I wonder if it did, in fact, please me to have been handled like a china cup. I did love him—I do so still, despite love’s complexity.
On Vinegar Hill, I gazed across the river at Manhattan, where the Trinity Church spire would later turn pink as the afternoon grew into evening, and at Wallabout Bay, where ships of the North Atlantic Squadron were docked. Father had been a carpenter at the yard till he came down with yellow jack and died. Afterward, Mother went to live with a widowed sister in Michigan. When I was a girl, I would walk down Columbia Heights to stare at the second-floor window behind which Washington Roebling, the famous invalid, sat by the hour and watched his prodigy slowly taking shape until, at last, the granite towers were strung with steel cables and the bridge resembled the Irish giant’s magic harp, on which the winds used to play their ancient airs.
I turned off Fulton and walked in the direction of the city park. Charred timber and fallen stones marked the place where my house had once stood at the corner of Pearl Street and Nassau. After Mother left, a tramp acquired the property, claiming that his manifest destiny demanded it. Later, he fell into a drunkard’s sleep, leaving his tobacco pipe unquenched. I walked to the post office on Washington. Megan, a childhood friend, lived nearby, together with a loutish husband and a sickly infant. When she answered my knock on the door, I was surprised at how she had aged; she was only three years older than I, but her expression was hangdog and careworn. Her chestnut hair was dull; dull, too, were her eyes. Had I not known they were blue, I would have said they were gray.
“Hello, Meg!” I said with a cheerfulness I didn’t feel. I knew at once my visit was a mistake. She needed jollying, and in my present mood, I was not the one to do it. She let me inside, and I sat on a threadbare couch in a gloomy room and felt dampness working its way into my bones, though the October day was warm. I studied a face that had once known the bright and buoyant loveliness of a girl in bloom, but at the time of my visit, the bones of her cheeks and jaws were sharp beneath the yellowish skin. I wondered if she, too, was sick. I’d heard that her husband, a layabout and a drunk, sometimes showed her the back of his hand, as the Irish say, without the sting of rebuke abuse deserves. I discreetly searched her face for bruises and was glad to find none.
“It’s been some time,” she said, as if she had been counting the days since we were girls and played on the Heights and the gravel shore of the river below. “You look well, Ellen.” Had she spoken grudgingly?
Not meaning to, I blurted, “I’m expecting!” We had never kept secrets from each other, and I suppose the intimacy that can, in women especially, override embarrassment, even shame, reasserted itself, although five years had passed since we had been in each other’s company.