It was late November. A crisp wind brushed past the two men. It carried with it the sounds and smells of a city at the zenith of its workday: the odor of hot asphalt from a street paving nearby, the clicking keys of typewriters within a second-story business school, the pungent smell of boiling turnips, the incongruity of “In the Good Old Summertime” cranked by an organ-grinder on a busy street corner. There was everything to take the two brothers’ minds from the central conflict between them that had yet to be remarked.
“I’ve booked a room at the Windsor, Randy. I didn’t want to be a burden.”
“You wouldn’t be a burden.”
“I like the Windsor. And I also like not having to join the temperance league for the next three days.”
Zing!
“You will at least try to keep yourself sober before your meeting with Mr. Eakins?”
“I have no intention of climbing upon the water wagon while I’m here, Randall. But perhaps it will comfort you to know that I intend, while in this city, to limit myself to only a couple of beers and a single pony of brandy a night. Will that help you to sleep better?”
“I sleep quite soundly as it is, Elijah, because I know that your life is your own. It’s your choice whether to pursue the path of dissolution blazed by our father, or follow the more constructive and far more sober course that engenders success. You’re very talented, Elijah. I’ve always known this. I’ve been quite proud of you, though I’ve never really had the chance to say it until now. Here’s a golden opportunity to better your situation. Embrace it, I beseech you, with an unmuddled head.”
“I’m not the man you knew three years ago, Randall. And I’m not our father.”
Randall slapped his brother upon the back. “I’ll give you what I’ve rarely given you before: the benefit of the doubt. Now let’s select something sweet and cream-filled at the bakery around the corner, a contribution to the feast Elise is busily preparing for our return.”
Three days later Elijah was introduced by his new friend Samuel Murray to the sculptor’s lifelong friend and teacher, Thomas Eakins. Elijah produced his portfolio, containing photographs of several of his most exemplary pieces. Eakins nodded and clicked his teeth ruminatively as he gave lambent consideration to the pictures in the book. And though he was momentarily taken with an art school sculpture that Elijah had created of a muscular Roman Centurion, Eakins being much more drawn to the male form than to the female, the celebrated Philadelphia artist was only moderately impressed overall and pronounced Elijah, a man who would soon be turning thirty-six, a “young artist of some promise.”
“That would mean — mean what?” asked Elijah, who had been drinking and jumbled his words a little as he spoke.
“It means that in time—”
“In time?”
“I do not wish to offend, but my assessment, Mr. Broddick, is that you have yet to reach the pinnacle of your talent. This is my opinion. My friend Sam here may think differently, but I am not inclined to recommend you or your work at the present time. And there it is.”
Elijah allowed the anger that had been kept in the bud to blossom to full furious flower. “You arrogant son of a bitch!”
“Sam, get him out of here.”
“If you had talent yourself, sir,” railed Elijah, whiskey-scented droplets of saliva atomizing from his mouth, “you’d be working in Paris or in New York. You are here in Philadelphia, sir, because you are nothing more than a journeyman portraitist, a hack sculptor, a Muybridge pretender in the field of photographic experimentation.”
Murray, his face an amalgam of shock and painful disappointment — not over the fact that Eakins had not agreed with his own more positive evaluation of Elijah’s work but at Elijah’s mortifyingly obstreperous behavior in the presence of a man whose reputation as one of America’s foremost artists was universally unassailable — took Elijah by the arm to lead him from Eakins’ atelier. But Elijah would not go easily, roughly disjoining himself from his escort and nearly striking him with wildly swinging fists — fists emboldened by the liquid courage that Elijah had found necessary for this encounter with artistic greatness. In short, the courage that Elijah had acquired in a South Philly groggery prior to his interview betrayed and disserved him, just as his brother had predicted.
All in all, there was ample mortification to go around — mortification that was relayed in abject detail by the younger brother to the older later that day.
“What difference did it make whether I’d been drinking or not? Eakins thought my work was shit!”
The parlor door was quickly latched shut by Randall’s wife Elise to keep the three children from hearing words she did not wish them to hear coming from their spiritually vanquished, profligately profane uncle.
“The difference, Elijah,” said Randall, who was pacing now, “is that had you been sober and of a composed disposition, you would have accepted Mr. Eakins’ comments with good grace, remembering that your friend Murray would gladly have remained your advocate and is not without his own influence in the art world. You have now slammed your door to both Mr. Eakins and Mr. Murray, and it is largely your love of demon rum — to put it in temperance terms — that has done you in. Change your ways, Elijah, I’m begging you. Or else you’ll end up in a premature coffin just like our ossified father.”
“And you, my sainted brother, may go directly to hell!”
With this final imprecation, Elijah fled from the house, nearly upending the man at the door who had come after a lengthy delay to repair the faulty furnace.
That night Randall spoke with his commiserating wife beneath the sheets into the early hours. Both had headaches. Even their two daughters and their son had headaches. The harsh words, the paint and varnish fumes, the sound of perpetual hammering — it all seemed to be too much for the greatly beleaguered family. Yet Randall blamed his own headache and restlessness on his brother, who had shown up after a deliberate absence of two and a half years with the express purpose, Randall now sincerely believed, of depositing the shards of his own shattered life upon the doorstep of his brother, thence to stomp them in a paroxysm of alcohol-fueled failure into much smaller and more inconvenient pieces — not so easy now to be carted away, to allow for the sound sleep of the just and meritorious sibling.
Randall took a sleeping powder.
Elijah, however, did not sleep. He was more angry this night than ever he remembered in his life. He continued to drink. In a saloon, he punched the face of a man whom he had never before met but who had cast a disdainful look in his direction. Elijah was punched back. He was ejected from the saloon, still thoroughly intoxicated, his lower lip bleeding, his mind reeling with thoughts of every grievous injustice that had ever been done to him. Why was his life such a struggle? Why was strong drink — the only thing that uplifted him, raised his spirits when the artist’s life left him so often professionally, personally, emotionally unmoored — why was this one thing, so efficacious, so invaluable in the short term, his worst enemy in the long run? He slipped into the icy bath of jealousy over all the good fortune that fate had bestowed upon his brother: a beautiful and devoted wife; three healthy, happy children; a job with a solid weekly paycheck; a new house, which, after the chinks had been filled and the pipes soldered and leaky roof patched, would be a home that any man should cherish with pride. There was nothing in Elijah’s life for which he could be proud. Even Eakins had pronounced him merely a man of some promise. And what if that promise was never to come to fruition?