Ghost Town (6 page)

I remember that when I returned to Canvas Town and told Lizzie I had seen her she did not properly understand me. She took me to mean that our mama’s death had caused me such profound distress that I was unable to thrust her memory from me. But I did not mean that. All that was true but there was something more.

—What more?

She gazed at me with dull eyes red from weeping. Lizzie as I say lost something of her spirit the day my mother was hanged, she ceased to be young. I never again heard her laugh. She never married. And although she lived into the new century she sank into illness during the Madison administration and at the end I believe she was glad to be leaving us, indeed she spoke of joining our parents very soon. She said there was a better place than America and she hoped to reach it. Those were her last words.

—A nightmare, no more than that, she said.

—No, I said. In the light of day.

—Your imagination!

—It does not matter.
I have seen her
.

She said later she would never forget the chill sensation she felt at those words of mine. Many times that summer and fall she came into the town with me. She did not believe me but her need was greater than her doubt. We would go at twilight. I was alert to all movement in the gloom, each footfall in the empty streets, each flickering shape in the glow of a campfire in the places made desolate by war.

—There! Do you see her?

I would seize her sleeve and sink to my knees to stare with trembling, outstretched finger at some shadow, some nothing moving about by the river or down an alley in the quiet parts of the town. She would look where I directed her but saw only rats. Then I would go swiftly forward to pursue whatever it was and she followed me but there was never anything there, not when Lizzie was with me. What was it that I wanted from my dead mama? I do not exaggerate when I say that this question has consumed me down all the wasted years of my life and I believe now that at last I have the answer. I believe that Death, who is very close to me, for we have an appointment a few hours hence—
and is that not Death at my door even now?—Death whispered the answer to me while I slept this afternoon. I pursued my dead mama not because I wanted to
release
her from her coffin, but because I wanted to be
in
her coffin
with her
.

There is little left to tell. Half a century has passed since the Year of the Gibbet, and the war has been transformed in the minds of my countrymen such that it now resembles nothing so much as the glorious enterprise of a small host of heroes and martyrs sustained by the idea of Liberty and bound for that reason to prevail in the end.

But I am haunted. I have lived out my days as a working hack, a lonely little man to be found with his pipe and bottle in the back parts of the Rising Sun or some such establishment over by the East River docks. I have never been free of my mama. She has shown herself to me on the shores of Manhattan Island in the hour before the dawn, it may be, or at dusk, when the light begins to go. These times, the border times, the middling uncertain hours when it is neither day nor night, it was at these times that I would come upon her as she stood on some abandoned wharf and I always knew that one day she
would come for me. And this, now, is the time. She is here.

She stands in my doorway with her empty eyes, her soiled clothing open at the seams and her teeth loose in her skull. The noisome odor of the grave is strong upon her. She lifts her pulpy, rotten fingers, and in the street below I hear the death-cart rumble over the cobblestones and come to a halt outside the house. In the back of that death-cart her coffin awaits us and now, at last, as I take my mama’s hand, and we move together to the staircase, I know that the contagion is truly upon me.

It is no more than I deserve.

Noah van Horn was a ruddy, raw-boned man with a will of iron, and nobody ever got the better of him in argument except perhaps his daughter Charlotte. To judge from his portrait, which first hung over the mantel in his townhouse on Barclay Street, he must have been a quite alarming character in the flesh. Bullish, loud, domineering, impatient—possessed of an ungovernable temper—it is all there in the face, and I say this because the picture is now in my possession and I spend far too much time in front of it. For with his grizzled whiskers and wild black eyes he looks more like an Old Testament prophet than a merchant who spent his days on the South Street wharves—he seems literally about to
burst
from the canvas and lay about the viewer with a stick!

He built the foundations of his fortune in the
Atlantic trade, running raw cotton out of Savannah, Georgia, carrying it to London then working his way down the eastern seaboard, turning a profit in every port—this would be the early 1800s and him barely twenty years old. In the decades that followed his wealth rapidly accumulated as he ploughed his profits into shipbuilding, real estate, construction and the like. He may not have been one of the old-money elite, and he was certainly not as devoted as some to the Presbyterian virtues thought conducive to a useful, godly life—sobriety and frugality, to name two—but he had a powerful commitment to aggressive enterprise and the getting of money. In 1832 he married a girl called Ann Griswold who was more than twenty years his junior and the daughter of a Yankee merchant with whom he did business. Over the next years she bore him three daughters, Charlotte being the eldest.

In his domestic life Noah now found some measure of tranquility. He gave up what he thought of as the manly pleasure of drinking brandy with his fellows in the hotels of lower Broadway, and cultivated an interest in the history of ancient civilizations, accumulating a library of some two thousand volumes. In business
he continued to prosper, and with him the city. Often he spoke of the day when New York would surpass even London as the greatest port and marketplace in the world, and he said it with the confidence of a man who could expect to pocket a large share of the profits when that day came. But what he did not possess, and for this he would have paid any price at all, was a son.

After the birth of Charlotte, Noah decided to move his young family to a more salubrious location, the business quarter of Manhattan having become increasingly susceptible to the diseases which according to him came in through the port with the Irish and found fertile breeding grounds in the narrow filthy streets and fetid courtyards where they lived. He secured a plot in Waverley Place and set an architect to designing him a house in the Greek manner, all fluted columns, heavy cornices, and triangular pediments—an ugly building which to my eye looked more like a mausoleum than a house. The work was completed in the winter of 1835 and the family moved in. A week later one of the worst disasters ever to befall the city occurred. A fire in a Pearl Street warehouse
spread through the downtown business area and in two days destroyed nearly seven hundred buildings, along with tens of millions of dollarsworth of merchandise. Among the private houses burnt to the ground was the recently vacated van Horn residence on Barclay Street. Noah gave thanks. He considered himself blessed.

It was in the house on Waverley Place that Ann van Horn gave birth to the last of her children, and to his great relief Noah finally had a boy. He was christened Julius.

It was a prosperous, established family into which the child was born, but his way would not be easy. When he was an infant his mother died, exhausted by this last delivery; and despite the attention of his sisters, Charlotte in particular, from then on Julius’ upbringing lacked the maternal influence which might have tempered his father’s unbending severity. For Noah was devastated by the loss of his wife, and in his grief he imposed impossibly high standards on his son. In later life Julius’ sisters spoke often of how Noah would beat the little boy for the smallest infractions of the rules of the household. They heard his cries from behind the door
of their father’s library, and suffered for him, and hated their father. But curiously Julius never seemed to grow bitter at this treatment, for as soon as his tears were dry he would come back as cheerful as before and ask his dear papa if there was anything he might do to be of service to him; and even Noah van Horn, that grim, turbulent man, could not help but be moved by the happy innocence of this gentle child of his.

Noah’s intention had always been to educate Julius to take over the House of van Horn when the time came. But he realized before the boy was ten years old that he possessed no sort of a head for business, although what he did possess a head for was not at all clear. In his disappointment he became for a while still more brutal to the child, to the point that Julius emerged weeping from his father’s library on one occasion with blood running down his legs, and his daughters could tolerate it no longer. They went in a body, led by Charlotte, and with no little trepidation, to beg their father to desist.

I have often tried to imagine what that interview was like. I know it occurred in the library, a dark, wood-paneled room on the second floor of the house. There were armchairs grouped
around a fireplace and a desk made of black mahogany, and bookshelves that rose on every side from floor to ceiling so high that a ladder was required to reach the volumes at the top. The pelt of a bear lay on the floor in front of the fire, the two glass eyes in the massive head staring unblinking into the flames. It was from one of the armchairs beside the fire that Noah barked out the command to enter when Charlotte knocked on the library door that evening.

—Father, we have come to see you on a matter of grave importance to us, she said.

The three girls stood trembling in the light of the gas-lamps as Noah sat with his feet planted wide apart and his hands resting on the arms of his chair, the fingers of one hand lightly curled about the stem of a glass of cut crystal which glittered in the firelight. He wore his smoking jacket, a long, skirted garment of red silk with gleaming dragons emblazoned upon it in gold thread. He wore leather slippers from Morocco. His eyes were hooded, his lip was damp.

—Of grave importance to you.

—To us all, said Hester, modest Hester, by far the mildest of the three. The poor girl was so frightened that no words came when she first spoke, and she had to start again. But like her
sisters she gazed with firm resolve into her father’s face. Noah crossed his legs at the ankles and set his feet upon the head of the bear.

—I am listening, he said.

Charlotte then took one step forward and still with her hands behind her back she began to tell her father why the beating of Julius must stop. I do not know exactly what was said, but I imagine that as she warmed to her theme her arms grew restive and soon were put to work in service of her argument, and that she became flushed in the face and her voice rose in pitch. Her father, meanwhile, would soon lose the repose he had been enjoying, and the slippered feet came off the head of the bear, the broad brow creased and furrowed—he sprang to his feet and stood over the fire, the color in his cheeks growing ever redder and his hand slapping at his thigh with irritation. The younger girls, emboldened by Charlotte’s impassioned plea, were bold enough to cry “Yes!” when their sister grew especially persuasive, and although the entire event took no longer than perhaps ten minutes, by the time Charlotte was finished her father was in a state of some turmoil. He had begun with the simple conviction that Julius required discipline, and plenty of it, and that
is what he had believed until Charlotte told him flatly that the boy could not help it that he was what he was.

This idea, strangely, had a profound effect on Noah van Horn, I mean the idea that his son “could not help it that he was what he was.” Almost at once, it seems, his feelings toward the boy changed. He saw as though in a blinding revelation that he had been punishing Julius not in order to improve his character but rather to discharge the anger that came with his recognition that the boy would never be as he wished him to be. That he had deceived himself into believing he was preparing Julius for life, when in truth he was indulging his own feelings of frustration and perhaps, too, his widower’s grief, which was, as I say, intense—it affected him deeply, and he sank into a state of such despondency that for some days the atmosphere in the house began to affect even Julius’ spirits. But at all events, the beatings came to a halt.

The sisters had good cause to feel pleased with themselves. Charlotte was especially gratified that their intervention had proved effective, although in her father’s presence she showed nothing of this and for the first and only time in her life behaved as the demure and
modest creature she was expected to be, passing through the household and going about her tasks with lowered eyes, and speaking in a voice so quiet as barely to be audible. Her father could not know it, but Charlotte had plans for Julius.

So Noah was forced to abandon his long-held hope that his son would inherit the House of van Horn, and began to look for some young man he could groom as his successor. It was not difficult. New York in those days, as indeed today, did not lack for clever men eager to seize an opportunity to work every hour of the day and night so as to establish their name and their fortune.

It was in many ways an odd choice he made. Where he found Max Rinder I do not know for sure, but although his family came from Bavaria they were not part of that great tide of Europeans which came pouring into New York hot on the heels of the Irish and settled north of the Five Points all the way to Fourteenth Street, so creating a city within the city that had more Germans in it than any other place save Berlin and Vienna!

But that was not Max Rinder. His family had
been on Long Island for two generations, where by all accounts they were contented and industrious, the elder Rinder being something in a brewery. Max, however, had ambition. It may be that he was already a clerk in the van Horn warehouse on Old Slip when he first came to Noah’s attention, probably through a display of the kind of qualities Noah would approve—initiative, enterprise, punctuality, deference, or maybe not deference, maybe rather an independence of thought and a readiness to speak up boldly even at the risk of arousing the awful displeasure of the master. He was a sallow young man, above medium height although somewhat stooped, for he had a bony deformity at the top of his spine which is apparent in all the photographs. He had a large sloping brow with a Napoleonic lick of jet-black hair at peak and temple and pale, deep-set eyes—hypnotic eyes, like a snake-charmer or a preacher, which he would fasten unblinking upon whomever he was talking to, the effect unsettling. He was quick in all his movements and even quicker in his thinking, a characteristic particularly esteemed by Noah van Horn, who yielded to no man in his estimate of his own brains when it came to matters of business.