“Really — ?” the young man asked, conveying more surprise than was reasonable.
“That’s right.”
“In May it was — since you’re being so particular — the very month we’re in: on the twenty-fourth, that’s when they started to roll and stroll across. Though your plaque doesn’t say that! Nor does it say how, on the first day, when they opened the walkway here to the curious hordes, going down those steps there a woman tripped and screamed — and the crowds, thinking the whole structure was collapsing, stampeded. Twelve people were trampled to death. It’s a strange bridge, a dangerous bridge in its way; things happen here. I mean things in your mind — ” a wicked smile behind his glasses gave way to a warm one — “that you wouldn’t ordinarily think of.” The man held out his hand. “My name’s Harold. Harold Hart. People call me Hart. A few folks — especially in the family — call me Harry. But I’m becoming Hart more and more these days.”
Sam seized the hand to shake — in his own hand with their nails like helmets curving the tops of the enlarged first joints, their forward rims like visors. “Sam.” He shook vigorously — let go, and put his hands down beside him. “My name is Sam.” No, the man was not particularly looking at them. “My birthday’s just coming up — ” he felt suddenly expansive — “and it happens during the transit of Mercury.”
“Does it now? And the last year of construction on this bridge, here — in 1882—took place under the last transit of Venus! A fascinating man,” the man said, leaving Sam for a moment confused. “When you live in the same room as someone, realize when you go to the bathroom, or leave by the front door, or simply stop to gaze out the window, you’re doubtless doing exactly what he did, walking the same distances, seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt, it gives you an access to the bodily reality of a fellow you could never get at any other way — unless, of course, you went out in a boat on the river yourself, and, underneath, stood up, pulled down your pants, and let fly into the flood!” Playfully the man hit at Sam’s shoulder once more, then turned to the water, sniggering.
At contact, realizing what the man was referring to, Sam felt the anxiety from the bridge’s Brooklyn end flood back. Perhaps, he thought, he should excuse himself and go.
But the man said, snigger now a smile and face gone thoughtfuclass="underline" “Sam — now that’s the name of a poet. There’s the biography I should really write.”
A tug pulled out from under the traffic way’s edge — as the dinghy had floated out when Sam had been nearer Brooklyn.
“Pardon?”
“A marvelous, wonderful, immensely exciting poet — named Sam. Another kraut. Roebling — John Augustus — was born in Prussia — Mühlhausen!” He pronounced it with a crisp, German accent, like some vaudeville comic (Mr. Horstein?) taking off Kaiser Wilhelm. “But Sam was born in Vienna. His parents brought him here when he was seven or eight. No grammar, no spelling, and scarcely any form, but a quality to his work that’s unspeakably eerie — and the most convincing gusto. Still, by the time he was your age, Sam was as American as advertising or apple pie. He died about seven years ago — I never met him. But — do you know Woodstock?”
“Pardon?” Sam repeated.
“Amazing little town, in upstate New York — full of anarchists and artists and — ” he leaned closer to whisper, the snigger back — “free lovers!” He sat back again. “It’s full of all the things that make life really fine in this fatuous age. It’s a place to learn the measurement of art and to what extent it’s an imposition — a fulcrum of shifted energy! It’s a town where, on Christmas Eve morning, leaves blow in a wailing, sunny wind, all about outside the house, over the snow patches. It’s a good place to roast turkeys and dance till dawn. A good place to climb mountains, or to curl up with a volume of the Bough — though you can get bored there, sweeping, drawing pictures, masturbating the cat… Well, that’s where I spent this past winter. That’s where I discovered Sam — somewhere between making heaps of apple sauce and cooking the turkey in front of an open fire in a cast-iron pig! I’ve been growing this mustache since about then. How do you think it looks?”
“It looks fine.” It looked rather thin for all that time — certainly thinner than Hubert’s. “You found Sam’s books?”
“Alas, poor Sam never had a book. But I found his notebooks and his manuscripts — a friend of mine had them. He let me borrow them so I could copy some of them out.”
“He lived in Woodstock?”
“Sam? No, he lived right here in the city — within walking distance of the bridge.” This time he gestured toward Manhattan. “Oh, Sam was very much a city poet. He lived just on the Lower East Side, there. Went to P. S. One-sixty at Suffolk and Rivington Street. Worked in the sweatshops — stole what time he could to go to the Metropolitan Museum, take piano lessons. He played piano just beautifully — that’s what my friend said. And drew his pictures; and wrote his poems. He wrote a poem once, right here, while he was walking across the bridge with his oldest brother, Daniel — there were eight boys in the family, I believe.” Again the man spread his arms along the bench back; one hand went behind Sam’s shoulder. “Late in November — just a month before Christmas — they were walking across, from Brooklyn, talking, like you and me, when Sam pulled out his notebook and started writing.” He closed his eyes, lifted his chin: “ ‘Is this the river “East”, I heard? / Where the ferry’s, tugs, and sailboats stirred / And the reaching wharves from the inner land / Outstretched like the harmless receiving hand … / But look! at the depths of the dripling tide / That dripples, re-ripples like locusts astride / As the boat turns upon the silvery spread / It leaves strange — a shadow — dead
Through the cables, the dark, flat, and — yes — dead green spread behind the tug. Ripples crawled to the wake’s rim, like silver beetles, to quiver and glitter at, though unable to cross, the widening borders.
“The river’s very beautiful,” Sam said, because beauty was the aspect of nature and poetry it seemed safest to speak of.
“Oh, not for Sam the poet. If anything, for him it was terrifying. He was to die, looking out at it, from a window of the Manhattan Hospital for the Destitute, up on Ward’s Island. They keep the dying there — and the insane. It’s only an island away from Brother’s, where the General Slocum beached after it burned up a thousand krauts and drenched them till they drowned, back in ’aught-four — makes you wonder what we needed a war for. It was the dust and the airless walls of his brother Adolf’s leather shop where he worked that first seated in the floor of Sam’s breath that terrible, spiritual, stinking illness — have you ever visited anyone dying of TB? They do stink, you know? Here in the city, you learn to recognize the stench — if you hang out in the slums. Nobody ever talks about that, but — Lord! — they smell. The lungs bleed and die and rot in their chests; and their breath and their bodies erupt with the putrefaction of it — in a way it’s a purification too, I suppose. But before he was nineteen, Sam had already learned the rustle of nurses around his bed, like the husks of summer locusts. All the nuns — and he’d been reading Poe, the ghoul-haunted woodlands, that sort of stuff — once made our rogue tanton bolt St. Anthony’s at Woodhaven, in terror for his life. That’s where they first packed him off to die. For a while after that he stayed in New Jersey — Paterson — with Morris, another brother. But a few months later, he was back in another hospital — Sea View this time, on Staten Island.” Without closing his eyes, again the man recited: “‘And the silvery tinge that sparkles aloud / Like brilliant white demons, which a tide has towed / From the rays of the morning sun / Which it doth ceaselessly shine upon.’ But that was written some years before, when he was well — walking across the bridge here with Daniel. Stilclass="underline" ‘loud, brilliant white demons…’? He had a very excitable poetic apprehension — like any true poet would want to or — really — must have. Don’t you think?”