Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

I never thought Father mad, as he was so often later portrayed, except now and again, and especially in these matters of finance. But it was a madness that in those days he shared with most men of ability and restless intelligence. It was like a plague, this dream of growing rich by speculation, and not to become infected with it was a sign of dullness and low intelligence. My argument against Father’s scheme, then, carried very little weight. To him, it was the argument of a simple man or a man with no ambition.

Brother John, I believe, was on the Old Man’s side in this and had caught the disease himself, although he had not as extreme a case as Father’s, and while Jason seemed as immune from the plague as I, he, unlike me, appeared little bothered by the Old Man’s feverish schemes and delusions and, except when Father demanded his filial aid and comfort, tended quietly to his own affairs — his vineyards and orchards in Ohio. Jason maintained a benign independence of Father that I envied but barely understood. “Owen,” he used to say to me, with that sweet, yet slightly ironic, smile playing across his lips, “you’ve got to let it alone. The Old Man’s going to do what he wants, no matter how much you fret and fume over it. You might as well stand back, brother, and just try to enjoy the show.”

It was never that easy for me. How was it possible not to go along with the Old Man and not fail him? I could not imagine myself doing it. I was tied to him like a wife, a child, a slave, it sometimes seemed — although, of course, I well knew that the chains that bound me to him were entirely of my own making. After all, from the end of my childhood, at about the age of sixteen, Father had not once forbade me from leading any sort of life that I wanted. That I was living his life, as it appeared, or one that was a mere appendage of his, was a measure not so much of his power as of my weakness.

In Boston for the few days before our departure on the Cumbria, I trailed after the Old Man like a puppy as he attended afternoon and evening public and private meetings. Abolitionism was everywhere in Boston then. Argued and articulated with all the zeal and refined intelligence of the old Puritans’ debate over Free Will and Grace, it was, for all of that, mere talk, or so it seemed to Father and me — talk driven and framed by reckless passion, as if being right or wrong on the subject were more important to the debaters than saving people’s lives, not to mention their souls.

We were staying at the home of an abolitionist colleague of Father’s — a philanthropic friend of Mr. Gerrit Smith’s, actually, from whom Father had obtained a general-purpose letter of introduction for use in England. The gentleman was the well-known Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, and he and his pleasant, hospitable wife, the poet Julia Ward Howe, an heiress, had given us a room in their grand residence on Louisburg Square. It was a tall brick house with bow windows facing the street on every storey, so that you could stand and look down upon the busy street below, like a captain of industry surveying his shop. The city of Boston was like that then, a busy manufactory where everything, from bread and feathered hats to religious ideas and fine art, was manufactured, purveyed, distributed, consumed, and commented upon with remarkable efficiency and general alacrity, a humming machine in which every citizen was a part, from the humblest illiterate Irish newsboy or maid to the loftiest Harvard scholar or Beacon Hill theologian.

I loved the city at once and might well have run off from Father then and there and made it my permanent home, like the young Ben Franklin fleeing his home to seek his fortune in Philadelphia, had I, like Franklin, a proper trade or some other means of making my living than that of caring for sheep or homesteading northern wildernesses. If, in other words, I had not been my father’s third son. It was strange, although I did not recognize it as such then, to be so young and to be filled already with regret. It was as if, at the age of twenty-six, I viewed my daily life with a nostalgia for a life that I had never led and never would lead. I knew other young men who felt as I did, but they were men who had married too quickly and woke every morning with the vain desire to start their lives over again, youths who, every day, by the time they dressed for work and came to the table for breakfast, had to accept yet again that they were stuck with a life they did not want. But no man of my acquaintance who was my age and was not unhappily married felt as sadly trapped as I. Nor would any one of them have understood it in me. They might well have wished to be me.

I remember that we arrived in Boston from Springfield by train in the late afternoon and had no sooner set down our bags and paid our respects to Dr. and Mrs. Howe than we were off, headed down the tilted brick sidewalks of Beacon Hill to the Charles Street Meeting House to see and hear the famous Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was to speak that very evening on the wonderful subject of heroism. Dr. Howe had put Father onto this event with the observation that the Concord sage would be addressing the issue of the proper response to slavery for the modern intellectual. It was apparently a talk the Doctor and his wife had already been privileged to hear at the Concord Atheneum, where it had been delivered to an audience of skeptics, a crew of Garrisonian, non-violent abolitionists, and had swept them all over to the radical side of the debate. An inflammatory gesture, then, was what Father expected, a call to arms, a prescriptive description of a new kind of American hero.

We arrived early and sat in the third row of seats, as close to the front as possible. Soon the large hall was filled, mostly with distinguished-looking men and women whose bearing and gazes were the epitome of benevolent intelligence and whose manners bespoke, not arrogance, but simple, if well-fed, self-confidence. A more civilized collection of human beings I had never seen, and I could not keep myself from turning in my seat and craning my neck to see and admire them as they entered from the darkening street and took their places.

Father sat stiffly with his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead, as if he were alone in the audience or were in an antechamber awaiting an interview with a prospective employer. There were several people who must be famous, I thought, if only because of the way other folks, when this one or that entered and took his seat, at once stared and whispered to their companions. But I recognized no one, of course. Could that handsome, eagle-eyed man be Charles Sumner? Could that small burl of a woman next to him be the famous agitator for female rights and abolition, Lydia Maria Child? Might the sublimely intelligent Transcendentalist philosopher William Everett Channing be here amongst us?

I knew none of these illustrious people, of course, except by their marvelous reputations, and I believed that anyone who looked more distinguished than Father, as these people surely did, must be at least as distinguished as he and then some. Unlike Father, they had lived in Boston all their lives and came from wealthy old families and had been privileged by fine educations and social relations with one another: they were bound to be beacons on a height. So I believed. And Father’s light, by comparison, was a flickering candle cupped in his hand against the wind. I was, therefore, not so much ashamed of Father in this context as sorry for him, especially sitting there stock-still and stiff in his seat, red-faced and tense, his large, workingman’s hands and wrists sticking out from his sleeves, his mouth tight, his gray eyes staring straight up at the podium. In this impressive company of likeminded people, Father seemed, not enhanced, but sadly, surprisingly diminished.