Ghost Town (8 page)

Julius was now ripe for that experience without which no sentimental education is complete, and with the appearance of a girl called Annie Kelly it begins. She was the spark, the match tossed idly into the tinder of Julius’ destiny, for with her arrival the fervor so recently aroused in Julius found its outlet. It happened in the studio. There was the usual din of noisy chatter, those boisterous boys waiting to be told what they were to do that day, for no pieces of plaster statuary had been set up for them to work from. They all assumed the room at the back was empty, when suddenly, in the doorway, appeared—a girl. There was an immediate silence. She was clad only in a bed-sheet, which she clutched to her breast. She stood gazing at them as though surprised to find them there. Jerome Brook Franklin at once crossed the studio and led her to the platform.

Annie Kelly was not modest, how could she be, given her line of work? The lack of modesty of artists’ models was well known in those days, and gave rise to the popular belief that the morals of such females left much to be desired. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were considered little better than whores, and not a
few of them were in fact whores. Annie Kelly was tall and fair, and on the platform, divested of her bed-sheet, she displayed to the astonished youths a pale body perfect in all its proportions. Jerome Brook Franklin arranged her so she stood with one slim hand on her hip and the other at her brow, her face lifted as though to a distant horizon, and one leg bent at the knee: Diana, the huntress. When he was satisfied he turned to the silent, gaping students.

—What is the matter with you all? he cried. Go to work!

It seems they had all been warmly anticipating the coming of the life model, but the reality had taken them very much by surprise. There was some shuffling and coughing, some scraping of chair-legs on floorboards as the shy boys went to their places and prepared to work. Julius sat at his easel staring at the girl. By now he had been working for two months in my grandfather’s studio. He had come far, I do not mean as an artist—as an artist he had barely begun—I mean as a sentient being, a creature emerging from the misty innocence of childhood and into mature self-awareness; but for this he was not prepared. Around him his fellows scratched away with their pencils, and after a
while he did manage to lift his own, but for a few moments only. Then he set it down again, and looked about him helplessly, suddenly unsure what was happening to him.

I believe that after he left the studio Julius spent the rest of the day on the streets of New York indulging the emotion which had sprung to life in him as he sat gazing at that naked body. At what point he returned home to Waverley Place I do not know, but it seems he had had time enough to decide that what he was experiencing was, in fact, love. When he told Charlotte the extraordinary news, rather than talk carefully to her brother, perhaps advise him to go slow, and be prudent, instead she apparently clapped her hands together, gave out a small scream, cried “Oh,
Julius
!” then flung her arms around him and told him how proud she was.

Then she insisted he tell her everything. In this way Julius’ folly was given validity by one who should have know better, for Charlotte was not a child, indeed Charlotte was herself engaged in some related negotiation, though in a spirit altogether different from that of her brother.

Max Rinder was a man who apparently had “no warmth, no heart, no passion, no nothing.” What he did have, it seems, was a swift and devious intelligence and an ability to get what he wanted regardless of what to any other mortal might seem insurmountable obstacles. This utter ruthlessness was a quality he shared with Noah, and it accounted in large measure for the continuing expansion of the House of van Horn. But if he was in some ways like the father, he was as different from the son as he could possibly be, being a wary, cynical sort of a man. Julius by contrast was spontaneous and open, his conversation frequently punctuated by cries of laughter, his body rarely still, and a wide grin overspreading his face as he pushed his fingers through a tumble of unruly curls and adjusted the spectacles forever threatening to fall off his nose.

Over the course of a long New York winter Max Rinder, dressed in his black suit and derby, the collar of his shirt as stiff and starched as the man himself, and those licks of hair as black as bat’s wings plastered so close to his skull they might have been painted on it, appeared several times a week at the house on Waverley Place with a judiciously chosen bunch of dried flowers.
The object of his attentions was Charlotte van Horn.

Charlotte was now twenty-four and as yet unmarried. She was becoming a cause of some concern to her father. She was not an unattractive girl, as I can attest from a daguerreotype of 1855, but she was difficult. She had frightened off at least two young men who were showing an interest because she was not sufficiently feminine. She was too intense, too loud. Too many opinions. Her father lost sleep over her, for in his gruff way he had a great tenderness for his firstborn child and wanted to see her safely settled in the world.

None of which escaped Max Rinder. He had seen from the very outset that a man of property like Noah van Horn, with his three unmarried daughters, could provide the means of fulfilment of all his ambitions. He recognized Charlotte’s predicament, and he also recognized the depths of her father’s feelings for her even if no one else did, including Charlotte herself. He began to woo her. Not hard to conceive what a very odd wooing it was, not least because despite being at first rebuffed with some hilarity, he continued earnestly to insist upon the sincerity of his intentions until slowly his presence in
the house became accepted. In his pinched way he actually seemed to enjoy Charlotte’s extravagant talk, her smoking of cigarettes and her dangerous ideas. Charlotte was an abolitionist, and she believed in free love.

Noah van Horn watched the courtship with quiet amusement and also with keen interest. He knew Max Rinder’s worth, and if, as I suspect, at root he thoroughly disliked him, that had no bearing on the younger man’s genius in the field of business. So the idea of binding him closer to the House of van Horn by bringing him into the family was one of which Noah shrewdly approved. From his point of view, at one stroke the futures both of his daughter and of the firm would be secured. So his partner’s visits to Waverley Place were discreetly encouraged, with the result that after some weeks the younger sisters abandoned the parlor to the couple. They would press their ears to the door but they heard nothing, and what went on in there remained a mystery. The very idea of Rinder expressing the contents of a brimming heart was enough to send them all into fits of laughter.

As for Charlotte, she told her sisters that once they got to know Rinder—she always referred to
him by his surname, as though such a man could have no other, and pronounced it RYN-der—they would come to like him as much as she did. She allowed that there was at times a certain
chill
in his manner, but assured them it would disappear when he grew more familiar with the family, and it with him. In fact what Charlotte had to her surprise discovered in this complicated young man was, I believe, of all things—vulnerability. An intense sensitivity to pain which he concealed from everybody except her. For he had suffered much in his dramatic rise in the world of trade and commerce, and he was not thick-skinned. Every insult, every slight drew blood and caused deep hurt, and he was unable to forget such wounds. He schemed and brooded, and did not see that this was a sickness.

But Charlotte did. Charlotte was moved by Rinder’s pride and his private suffering, and she pitied him. She offered him sympathy, and tried to deflect him from his fantasies of revenge. Rinder was not a stupid man and he responded at once to Charlotte’s overtures, for he had never known intimacy before and had no notion of the power of a woman’s comfort, his own mother having provided him none. In this he was oddly like Julius, and I believe it is probable
that Charlotte recognized in Rinder the same deep need she saw in her brother, so that in a way Rinder now became the boy’s rival, in fact his replacement. Julius did not realize this. He felt only joy that his sister should be finding happiness in love, and he welcomed his rival into the house with unfeigned warmth.

The couple was married in the early spring of 1857. Noah escorted his daughter into the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue, Charlotte in a white satin dress with a long train and a tulle veil which fell like a mist from a headpiece of daisies and lilies. She was transformed from the Charlotte they all knew, the restless, excitable young woman so quick to argument, so intemperate in her enthusiasms. Instead she seemed demure, at peace—in love, even. Rinder himself achieved a kind of brooding glamour, for no one had ever glimpsed in him anything remotely approaching happiness before and it rendered him almost handsome, in a saturnine sort of a way. Charlotte’s sisters were her bridesmaids and the best man was a brother of Rinder’s from Long Island; there is a daguerreotype of this group too.

Back at Waverley Place the happy couple attended a reception with family and friends
before leaving for a short honeymoon in Florida. As the carriage drove away one of the guests was heard to say that “poor Charlotte doesn’t realize that her doll is stuffed with sawdust.” I personally think Charlotte was quite well aware that her doll was stuffed with sawdust, but she also knew that that was not all he was stuffed with. The point, though, was that he was
her
doll, and as far as that went neither Hester nor her younger sister Sarah had a doll to call her own, sawdust-filled or otherwise.

By the time they had returned and settled into a house in the West Twenties life in Waverley Place had changed forever. Without Charlotte the house lacked a certain feverishness. Charlotte had made the sisters’ parlor a place where gossip and laughter and lively conversation about subjects artistic and political were encouraged, but in her absence the house became almost somber. The girls read more, chattered less, and plied their needles as they never had before. Julius barely noticed. In fact Julius, obsessed as he was with Annie Kelly, contributed significantly to the subdued atmosphere, and without Charlotte he wandered about, a lovesick youth, absorbed in the eruption of a volcanic passion but with nobody to talk to about it.

But what exactly had passed between him and the girl? It seems that without Charlotte to confide in, Julius became secretive, and later no one could be sure how much contact he had actually had with her. But the next time the girl worked in the West Tenth studio I feel sure that this lanky, grinning art student actually attempted to shake her hand as she took her place on the platform. To general amusement Jerome Brook Franklin at once came stamping across the floor, clapping his hands and crying out that that was enough, there was to be no nonsense, they were here to
work
!

When the class was over and the other students had dispersed he waited for her outside the building. Her hair was pinned up now in a large heap at the back of her neck, and she wore a straw bonnet with a broad brim. About her shoulders was thrown a lace shawl and her skirt was unencumbered by hoops or petticoats or any of the other clutter that respectable girls wore in those days. She was shod in scuffed black boots with buttons up the side and on her arm she carried a basket. She was a tall, jaunty, handsome girl and Julius fell in beside her as she strode east on Tenth Street. She affected to ignore him but
he was so persistent that she at last relented and told him her name.

She then climbed aboard a horse-car going south on Broadway. But having seated herself she saw that he was hanging on the platform at the back of the carriage and she rolled her eyes to heaven, for she was no stranger to importunate youths like this. Then he was pushing through the standing passengers with copious apologies until he stood in front of her, clinging to the pole and grinning at her. She knew he was a rich boy and she was wary of him, but all the same he did amuse her a little. With every lurch of the carriage he was flung this way and that, but still he hung over her, and she consented to talk to him.

I see them descend from the horse-car somewhere in the vicinity of City Hall, where she sat with him on a bench in the park. She told him a little about herself, that her mother had a boarding-house on Nassau Street, and then they spoke about Jerome Brook Franklin. After a few minutes the bells of St. Paul’s reminded the girl that she had duties at home, and away she went. She paused at the gate of the park. Julius stood by the bench with his hand outstretched and a blissful smile on his foolish face.

Then see the love-struck youth make his slow way back up Broadway! He had, yes, properly fallen in love. He had not however fallen in love wisely, but why should he? Who falls in love wisely? He could not guess that the thing would end in tragedy. I almost think his feet were a few inches above the sidewalk, and as the crowds swept by him he barely heard the tumult of voices, the wagons and carriages, the fruit-sellers and cigar-sellers and the newsboys with their penny papers crying out the latest murder—none of it touched Julius. He walked home in a kind of sanctified silence.