Mark Dunn - American Decameron

Interspersed among the addresses were the following musical selections performed by MRS. GLADYS LIVERGOOD ROUSE of Norwich, Connecticut, with accompaniment by MISS ADA POGUE on the piano-forte: “Please, Mother, Buy Me a Baby,” “I’m on the Water Wagon Now” (for the abstainers), and “On the Banks of the Rhine with a Stein” (for the imbibers).

MRS. MEDORA LIVERGOOD MARKHAM delivered the treasurer’s report.

MRS. BEDELIA MCQUIRK LIVERGOOD read greetings from association members who were unable to attend this year’s reunion. Some were comical, others poignant, one was posthumously delivered, and one was written in Chinese characters and left everyone wondering if it was, in fact, a greeting at all.

THE FINAL ADDRESS OF THE AFTERNOON was delivered by PROFESSOR ELISHA LIVERGOOD, who charged us all to perpetuate the name Livergood with pride, and to honor our fine heritage and the memory of our common ancestor Cockchase Livergood. Professor Livergood also reminded us all to purchase our subscriptions for the third edition of the Livergood Family Genealogy, and then quieted the room to speak from his heart about his long but ultimately successful battle to end his addiction to opium cough syrup.

Before the valedictory prayer was offered by REV. ABNER HOADLEY, DD, all those present joined hands and together recited the motto of the LIVERGOOD FAMILY ASSOCIATION OF WARWICK, RHODE ISLAND: “Head good. Heart good. Livergood. All good. Peace of God be with you until we meet again.”

A booklet is being printed as a keepsake of the event. It will include photographs of those of you in the male lines who posed for Mr. Cleary from Providence Plantations Photography. We regret that there was neither time nor room within the publication for the inclusion of photographic likenesses of those in the female branches.

Signed this day, September 30, 1905,

Mrs. Bedelia McQuirk Livergood, Cincinnati, Ohio

Secretary, The Livergood Family Association of Warwick, Rhode Island

The older brother, Randall, lived in Philadelphia. He installed skylight glass for the Benjamin H. Shoemaker Glass Company. The younger brother, Elijah, lived in New York City. He was a sculptor. The brothers hadn’t seen each other for over two and a half years. Randall didn’t approve of Elijah’s bohemian lifestyle. Randall imagined opium-clouded assignations with Rubenesque models.

And Elijah drank.

The brothers’ father had had an unquenchable thirst for spirits. A piano-forte instructor at the Philadelphia Music Academy, Randall Broddick Sr. had ended his employ at the school when his two sons were in their teens, and had ended it with a theatrical flourish. He arrived to perform at a faculty recital, highball in hand, dressed in the livery of a chauffeur: frock coat, striped trousers, patent leathers, rolled-brim derby, and butterfly bow, having traded clothes with the cab driver who had brought him that night to the academy. He had paid the driver well for the waggish exchange, but Randall was the only one who found it funny.

It appeared to Randall Jr. that his brother Elijah was following in their father’s staggering footsteps. It was good that the two brothers kept to themselves and cities apart, though Randall’s wife Elise wondered if the two would ever be close again and tutted over the tragedy of fraternal estrangement.

Randall and Elise had just bought a row house on Pine Street from one of Randall’s coworkers at Benjamin H. Shoemaker. Although the windows were new and snuggly fitted, everything else about the house seemed in need of repair. The pipes leaked. The baseboards were rotted. The roof was falling apart and the furnace in the basement rattled and groaned through the night. Men would need to come and fix these things.

Elise had been sick. The three children needed attention. All was at sixes and sevens. It simply was not a good time for Randall to see his younger brother.

And yet the brother was coming down. That evening, in fact. The reason for the visit was an appointment set up by a sculptor whom Elijah had befriended in New York by the name of Samuel Murray. Mr. Murray had seen one of Elijah’s pieces in bronze in a Bowery shop and had been quite impressed. After meeting its creator, Murray expressed his wish that the talented sculptor should come to Philadelphia and meet his friend, Thomas Eakins. “Eakins is a very good man for a young man of your talent to know,” Murray had said.

This made Elijah laugh. “You flatter me, sir,” he had said, “to think that I am that good and to think me so young. I’m certain that I’m almost as old as you .”

“I’m thirty-seven,” Murray had replied, snapping his finger for the waiter. The two men were dining on oyster cocktails and potato salad at a table d’hote establishment where Elijah took most of his meals (avoiding whenever possible the bland boardinghouse fare that came with his lodgings). “You are good, whatever your age, and I have every confidence that Tom will appreciate your talent.”

“I’m laughing for another reason as well, Mr. Murray. I am no stranger to Philadelphia. I was born there, you see, and my brother lives there still.”

“Is that a fact? You’ll see your brother when you come?”

“There is a rent between us, but perhaps it can be mended. Especially if I’m finally to make something of my talent, which heretofore has only marginally sustained me.”

Elijah had sent a wire informing Randall that he was coming. After discussing the impending visit, Randall and Elise agreed that it was only right that the two brothers should see one another. Accordingly, there was orchestrated an embrace upon the doorstep and an exchange of warm fraternal smiles that betokened reconciliation.

After seeing his sister-in-law and his two nieces and one nephew, and after marveling aloud at how the little ones had grown and how the wife had aged not a single day since his last visit, Elijah accepted his brother’s invitation to take a leisurely stroll to talk frankly of the separate courses of their lives.

“I’m happy to hear that Eakins could help you win commissions here,” said Randall. “If things go as you wish, will you be moving back to Philadelphia?”

Elijah shrugged. He stopped at the street corner to pull a couple of pepsin tablets from a roll he kept in his pocket. The meal he had taken on the train trip from New York that morning was giving him dyspepsia, although Randall wondered privately if their meeting again after so long an absence had contributed to Elijah’s gastric discomfort. “I haven’t thought of just what I’ll do.”

“Just like our sainted father. Never thinking more than a day or even an hour ahead. Life lived in the recklessness of the moment.”

“The spontaneity of the moment, brother,” replied Elijah, parrying his brother’s jab with a smile.

“Elise would like you to have dinner with us tonight, and I’d like you to stay with us while you’re in the city. There are workmen and repairmen coming and going throughout the day, which may be of some inconvenience to you, but at least you’ll sleep well before your meeting with Mr. Eakins on Friday. Elise convinced me of the need for a good bed in our new guest room, so you’ll be the first to lie upon this downy cloud and tell us how it feels.”

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.