I was at Seventy-second Street, and I would have a good night’s walk in which to think. I had been fascinated by Jessie’s tranquillity — not a word about the children until I referred to them, when I said only that I had an eye on an opportunity and that I must devote time to developing it, and hearing in return only her assurance that she knew me well enough to exercise patience. Of course, there was little about Jessie that did not fascinate me: her form, her face, the delicate tattoos and their location, and her ability to work for Mrs. Hess and keep herself fresh and somehow inviolate.
I said, “Ba!” A man carrying a heavy burlap sack came abreast and went faster as I spoke. I had addressed not him but myself. I was becoming foolish — inviolate, indeed! — and it occurred to me that I must see her less, or not at all, if I was to remain strong enough to survive in this city, and in my profession, and in, as a matter of fact, my own flesh. When I realized at once that I would not forsake seeing Jessie, and that I felt as if I could not, I also realized that something like my life was now at stake. I walked faster, as if to outrun my thoughts.
That pace, and the sound of my harsh, rapid breathing against the inside of the mask, reminded me of a story M had told me. I could not remember where it was set, or what the ship was called, but it concerned a man from the Isle of Man. I did recall how, as he said it to me, I reminded myself that I was hearing a tale from the man who had written perhaps the greatest story told by an American about American industry. His Whale was a hymn to the catching of enormous creatures and using them, blubber and ambergris, for the manufacture of oily light and the perfumed scent on golden breasts and dark brown nipples I had just recently left. How the owners failed to hire a captain who would serve their will was a lesson to every man of capital, and how they lost a ship laden with oil was the story’s moraclass="underline" If you have a plan, you must see it through, and if you have none, you have no business; hire slackly and lose your investment; do not risk your money with a man who covets none.
The fishing vessel had been caught by a freeze in a cove off Lyme Regis, and the crew had actually watched the salt water thicken, first on the rigging and on the nets, and then on the bowsprit, and then in the sea that slapped, more and more slowly, against the hull itself. Within hours, as M told the story, the ship was halted, ringed with ice that lay tight against her, and the masts were like the limbs of trees in winter — bone-white, glinting. “It made the Ancient Mariner seem like a passenger on a pleasure craft,” he told me, sitting forward to lean his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands as if against the cold that came blowing into the room from out of his story.
“The captain pitched over dead,” he said, “frozen on the spot. He fell out of his shoes, in fact, and they remained adhered to the deck by inches of ice that now lay over everything. This was — did I tell you? — the winter of 1832, famous for its killing chill. The frail were culled, and only the hearty survived the year, especially along the English coast.
“That left a first mate who was too drunk, whether with fear or gin I cannot say, and a second mate who was barely old enough to tell himself what to do, much less a crew of a dozen tars who had long before that, I daresay, considered catching and eating him.”
“They were cannibals?” I remembered saying, gullible as a lamb in an abattoir.
“Shipmate, there’s more than one way to devour a boy on a boat,” he told me. “But to the inclemencies, then, shall we? Here they are: worse than becalmed because a ship with no wind can send a cutter out to tow her an inch at a time if needs must. And there’s always the hope of a sudden gust of wind. But this was the dead of winter, mind. And the ship as fixed in the ice as a glass eye in a stuffed and mounted Muscovy duck. And the temperature falling, and night coming on, and the captain dead, the first mate incapacitated and soon enough to freeze to death.
“ ‘What shall we do, sir?’ calls the cabin boy to the second mate. The men fall about grunting — it would have been laughter in a fairer clime — at the sight of the little fellow thus questioning the fellow not much larger or older.
“ ‘We’ll make a fire!’ pipes the second mate, intent on doing his duty, and on seeing the crew through the fray.
“ ‘What shall we burn, then, lad,’ groans an able-bodied, ‘fish in blocks of ice?’
“ ‘Charts, the log, and every book on board,’ cries the second mate.
“A fellow known as Button, Sterling Button, called by his shipmates either Silver or Bone, scholarly man with gold-rimmed spectacles tied round the back of his head to keep them on when he’s up in the ropes, says, in his deep voice that matches his broad, manly shape, ‘I’d rather perish, sir.’
“ ‘But you will,’ the second mate is wise enough to note.
“ ‘Then I will, but I’ll not burn my books.’
“ ‘What’s in ’em, then?’ asks one of the rugged net haulers, shivering in his boots and oilskins.
“ ‘Poetry,’ Button tells them. ‘Sweet music, hard truth, and wisdom. And a bit of sorrow, like spice in a Polynesian stew. Madness, even, though of the sane variety. And not for burning.’
“With that, he bolts, for he knows they’re soon to act. He hies himself to his hammock and his seaman’s trunk, a lovely structure of polished maple from his native New Hampshire and leather from a deer he shot when home. He opens the lid for an instant, looks in at the titles and the authors’ names, and, bidding farewell to the likes of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare and Laurence Sterne, he shuts the trunk and locks it, and he swallows the small metal key. ‘They can cut it out of me when they’ve done their worst,’ Button says. He opens his clasp knife and sits, awaiting them, perched atop his seaman’s trunk in the middle of a frozen waste like an Anchorite in the sweltering sands of the Holy Land.”
He had leaned, again, to refill our glasses, spilling a little after having drunk much.
“And there he sat.”
“But what happened? I must beg you: finish,” I said.
“No, shipmate. In the case of the tale of Button and his books, what happened matters less than Button’s decision.”
“To die for his books.”
“Exactly. Perfectly spoken. Die for his books. That, shipmate, is a reader for whom a man might decide to write something and see it through the printers and reviewers. Die for his books.”
“And that,” I remember saying, disappointed and bemused, “is all?”
“It is everything,” he said.
“You startle me with your unorthodoxy,” I ventured to say, “but you do so surely tell a tale. I dare not complain.”
“So they once said,” he told me, and turned his attention to the blue, oily gin.
His son, I thought, stepping back from the wheels of a yellow-and-white ice wagon from which trailed some of the sawdust used to insulate the great, cloudy blocks, had none of the highly flavored language, none of the easy command of one’s attention, nor any of the certainty — for all the uncertainty of M’s latter days — that made him a present public official and, once, an author to be reckoned with. His son was, in fact, a bully and a lout. He would enjoy the murder of Indians, I wagered.
I knew men, I reminded myself, who had engaged in a war’s worth of murder.
It was battle, I demurred. I was a soldier.
But the bully boy will also be a soldier, I told myself.
I could not have been more mistaken.
Outside the Five Points House of Industry that same night, I paused beside its smeared, unlighted window and its rugged wooden door. This was a refuge, I knew, for Chinese boys who wished to learn a trade other than their father’s. Women, of course, did not attend, nor were they taught how to dress like Americans and speak the language of the United States. They were drowned at birth in China, I had heard men say at the coffeehouse beneath the Equitable Building. Surely, reading of gold miners in California and Oregon — it was where Chun Ho and her people had come from: “Oh-gin.” “Where?” “Oh-gin!” “Oregon?” “Sure”—I had seen stories of the binding of women’s feet at birth, of the uselessness, to their family, of girls, who would finally be of service as breeders for the groom’s family. Chinese women rarely appeared on the streets, and I saw very few, and all of them were bulky in their silk pajamas and oval shoes, and none seemed to walk with the abrupt energy of Chun Ho or, for that matter, to sit with the profound contemplation I sensed in her. I had seen her lift filled laundry baskets, two of them, each balanced on the end of a stick, that were almost as tall as she. Somehow her mother had felt obliged to serve Chun Ho’s wish for independence. Somehow Chun Ho had felt obliged to serve her own. I knew that she had a daughter and a son, and I knew that she would feel obliged to raise the daughter as an American person — a girl strong enough to live alone.