Woodsburner (34 page)

Eliot is not entirely certain what he will do when he reaches the fire. The stupendous clouds of smoke confirm what the quiet man at the watering trough has just told him: the fire is surely too large for a single man to inhibit its progress. But Eliot wants to stand alone in front of the maelstrom, to let its heat and thunder wash over him, before the other men interfere. After today, he will understand what it means to confront this most elemental force of nature.

Eliot thinks of his play as he tramps through the woods; he envies DeMonte. His hero will lose everything to the flames, but he will gain the opportunity to start anew. Eliot imagines himself standing next to Margaret and their children, watching the house on Beacon Street crumble to ash, and suddenly another possible ending for
The House of Many Windows
comes to him. Eliot stops walking, drops the shovel, and pulls out his pocket memorandum and pencil. DeMonte, he decides, will announce his transformation through a courageous soliloquy. Eliot writes quickly, with the taste of smoke at the back of his throat:
“I am a man simplified! Through the accident of the purging flame, I have discovered the benefit of reducing life to elemental wonders. Simplify! What other men see as tragedy, I view as a miracle.”

This fire in the Concord Woods is more than an accident, Eliot thinks; it is evidence of the Fates in action, and he knows he is meant to take a lesson from it. Eliot has spent too many hours studying his ledgers, paying bills, filling invoices, satisfying one need only to create new ones. He wonders if he might convince Margaret that they really do not need the large house on Beacon Street. At the very least, perhaps he can make her see that they do not need so many servants. He thinks he could surrender his carriage, or purchase a smaller one. If he cannot render his life as simple as DeMonte s, then he will strive to make it less complicated. He will find a way. The fire will show him how to rework the final scenes of the
The House of Many Windows
. Once he faces the heat and smoke, he will better understand what DeMonte should feel, what he should say and do. Eliot knows that Moses Kimball is impatient for the finished manuscript, but once he has seen the revision he will understand why it has taken so long.

Eliot had always intended that
The House of Many Windows
would reach its climax with the burning of DeMonte's home, but he had
thought the effect might be achieved simply through a combination of foot lamps and undulating scrims of painted flames. He had not considered setting the entire stage aflame, not until he had spoken to Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts.

Eliot had not set foot in the Boston Museum until the day he met with Mr. Kimball. In fact, he had avoided the place since its opening in 1841. Eliot had heard enough about the cheap entertainments to be found inside. Aside from the occasional operetta or tableau vivant, the venue mostly offered diversions of a nontheatrical sort, but by 1843 Mr. Kimball had decided to begin showing full-length plays. Eliot had reason to be hopeful. It seemed a likely possibility that a new theater looking to establish a regular audience might be open to the work of an untested playwright.

The museum inhabited a large building at the corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets. On the day that Eliot brought the pages of his unfinished manuscript to Mr. Kimball, he found the entrance to the museum plastered with faded placards advertising past appearances by “Mary Gannon the Juvenile Delineator,” “Wyff Kloff the Russian Giant,” and “P. T. Barnum's Japanese Mermaid.” Eliot understood why Mr. Kimball might need to rely on such attractions to underwrite his theatrical productions, and he could find no fault with a man who sought to turn a profit. A sign above the entrance to the museum announced:

Art must make concessions to commerce, Eliot thought. He took another look at the crude drawing of the simian mermaid, stuffed his play resolutely under his arm, and stepped through the doors.

There were no visitors to the museum this early in the day, and
Eliot's footsteps echoed off the high ceiling. In the foyer, a twelve-foot-tall giraffe greeted him with an embalmed smirk. The vast space was crammed with cages, each promising a curiosity more astounding than the last. Glass cases bore rows of greasy smudges: at bottom, smears of little palms and flattened noses; higher up, the demonstrative prints of large fingertips. Behind the glass prowled lifeless beasts featuring exotic colors and strange deformities: an orang-outang, a grounded flock of dodoes, a dog with an extra foreleg, a cat with two heads. Shelves and pedestals held jars of cloudy brine in which floated pickled creatures one would never encounter in the forests or rivers of New England.

And there were humans on display as well, figures cast in wax. A kneeling woman pleaded for her life with a trio of red-skinned savages, all of whom shared the same drooping, glass-eyed indifference. Next to this, a more grisly scene of madmen drenched in gore: “The Pirates' Cabin—A lesson to discourage the young lads of Boston who would play at being pirates on the river Charles.” Between these displays sat a replica of a pneumatic railroad and a functioning model of the gigantic cataract at Niagara.

Eliot sidestepped the spears of sunlight reaching from the tall windows near the ceiling; motes of dust eddied around him as he made his way to the back office. His knock went unanswered, and when he looked around the edge of the half-opened door he caught his breath and nearly dropped his manuscript. At the desk slumped a man, his head lolling back at an impossible angle, his throat cut from ear to ear, eyes white, shirt soaked through with blood. A whiskey bottle protruded from his coat pocket, and his lifeless hand still clutched a bloody knife.

Eliot jumped away from the door and stumbled into Moses Kimball himself. The man laughed and slapped him roughly on the back.

“Our newest display!” Kimball said proudly. “We're calling it
‘The Drunken Reward; or The Deadly Fruits of Dissipation.’ Church folks love this kind of thing. Can't get a penny from them for a play but dress up a moral lesson and they'll gladly give over a silver eagle to look on the bloodiest predicaments. You must be the man with the new play Calvert, is it?”

“Eliot Calvert.” Eliot was surprised by just how deeply the bloody figure had affected him. He tried to laugh good-naturedly but succeeded only in clearing his throat.

Moses Kimball was ordinary-looking, with a high forehead and a sharp nose, but he wore his dark, thick hair unusually long, and he was dressed entirely in black: boots, breeches, coat, shirt, cravat. He stepped around his desk, pulled up an empty chair, and motioned for Eliot to take a seat across from him. Kimball's office was jammed with displays in need of repair. A giant bear spilled straw from its hindquarter, and next to this a fragile landscape of the city of Dublin rendered in paper and wood four inches high, bore the large, unruly imprint of a child's foot at its center. Eliot noticed that the naked wax figure in the corner bore a woman's head, and he hurriedly turned his eyes back to Kimball.

“Well, let's have it,” Kimball said. He flipped through the hundred-odd pages Eliot handed him and sighed. “The gist, man. The gist! I haven't time for tedium.”

Eliot gave his best summary, half wondering if he was expected to evoke some approval from the bloody figure seated next to Kimball.

“A fire, you say?” Kimball's eyes were shut, his forefingers touched at his nose.

“At the end, yes.”

“There's no language in this, is there?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Curses, man! Blasphemies. We'll have none of that at the Boston Museum. If there are objectionable ejaculations
—O, Providence!
O, Heaven! O, lud! O, paradise!—
you'll have to cut them right out.”

“Of course not.” Eliot fiddled with the buttons on his waistcoat. “So am I to take it that you are, in fact, interested?”

“What do I know of plays? But the fire you mentioned, now
that's
something!”

“It's in the last scene.”

“I've wanted to stage a conflagration for some time. Joan of Arc, or a Hindu funeral pyre. But this is better. An entire house! You don't extinguish it, do you?”

“No, well, I mean … I don't know.”

“You don't know?”

“I haven't quite finished the scene.”

“Let it burn. Right in front of the audience—we'll burn an entire house to the ground. Think of the spectacle, Calvert! We'll fill every seat in the hall.”

Kimball drummed his fingers on the manuscript, lifted it between thumb and forefinger as if trying to gauge the thickness of the paper.

“We'll need to shorten this a bit. No sense making people sit through what they haven't come to see. Once the fire is done, they'll want to leave.”

“It's at the end.”

“Then we'll shorten the beginning, but not too much. We'll make 'em wait a little bit, build the suspense.”

Eliot watched Kimball riffle the pages and divide them in half like a deck of cards.

“There's your edits. I should think that these remaining pages will provide dramatic tension enough.”

Eliot struggled against the urge to rescue his manuscript. “I'm flattered by your interest, but I'll need to mull this over before I can give you a final answer.”

Kimball returned his forefingers to the tip of his nose and studied Eliot from the apex of the little pyramid. “Let's not dally, Calvert. We both know why you've come. You've taken this play to every theater in Boston. And you've been turned down every time. I am your last resort. Am I right?”

Eliot fiddled with the chain to his watch and looked at his fingers. When he looked back at Kimball, the man was adjusting the stiff collar of the bloody wax figure seated next to him.

“Here at the Boston Museum,” Kimball said, as if speaking to the wax figure, “we paint our drop scenes in broad strokes. I know my customers. They have no curiosity for fancy speeches. We'll need a moral, a lesson. Have you got one?”

“Well, the main character is a man enslaved to his own prevarication.”

“What does that mean? You need to think Old Testament, Ten Commandments, or, better yet, Benjamin Franklin,
Poor Richard's Almanack—
you need a moral that people already know by heart. Reassure them there's nothing new they need to learn. You get the idea.”

“I'll work on it.”

“Good man. Now, let me show you something.”

Kimball leaped to his feet and led Eliot back through the foyer to the exhibition hall where the play would be performed. By the stage was a device resembling a pipe organ.

“It's called an orchestrion,” Kimball explained. “With this I can replace an entire orchestra. We'll have a score written for
The Burning House
.”

“It's called
The House of Many Windows
.”

“The Burning House
is better. I'll have lyrics written as well. People want songs. You see, Calvert, with a device like the orchestrion I need not argue with temperamental musicians. It does just what I ask. No grumbling. It cost me a fortune, but it's repaid
me time and again. I always spend wisely. Do we understand each other, Calvert?”

“Certainly.”

“We'll divide the profits fairly. Which brings us to the important matter of expenses. If you intend to burn an entire house in my museum every night, there will be considerable expenses …”

After jotting down his new thoughts for the play's conclusion, Eliot puts away the memorandum and pencil, picks up the ax, and continues his march toward the fire. He looks up through the barren branches and sees that the smoke has changed direction again, curling around itself, doubling back the way it has come. Eliot traces the new shape against the bright sky. He alters his course and picks up his pace. He knows he must be getting closer, but he feels that he is walking in a broad arc.

Certainly, he thinks, Margaret will agree to some of the small changes he has in mind, though it might require substantial effort to persuade her. He is encouraged when he thinks of the freedom he would purchase simply by reducing their expenses. Patrick Mahoney will not be pleased with his decision, but Eliot also knows that once his play is successful, once it is performed to packed houses, his father-in-law will understand, too. There are not really so many obstacles to his happiness as he once thought. All he needs is a quiet room, a chair, and a small table. He can make his life as simple as this and still count himself a man of infinite riches.