American Follies Read online

  SELECT PRAISE FOR

  Norman Lock’s American Novels Series

  On The Boy in His Winter

  “Brilliant…. The Boy in His Winter is a glorious meditation on justice, truth, loyalty, story, and the alchemical effects of love, a reminder of our capacity to be changed by the continuously evolving world ‘when it strikes fire against the mind’s flint,’ and by profoundly moving novels like this.” —NPR

  “[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there. This time, he re-imagines Huck Finn’s journeys, transporting the iconic character deep into America’s past—and future.” —Reader’s Digest

  “To call [The Boy in His Winter] a work of fiction is to tell only part of the story. This book is as much a treatise on memory and time and the nature of storytelling and our collective national conscience…. Much of it wildly funny and extremely intelligent.” —Star Tribune

  On American Meteor

  “Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion…. [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream, from its portrait of the young wounded soldier in the beginning to its powerful rendering of Crazy Horse’s prophecy for life on earth at the end.” —NPR

  “[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain’s spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter…. Like all Mr. Lock’s books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield.” —Wall Street Journal

  “American Meteor is, at its core, a spiritual treatise that forces its readers to examine their own role in history’s unceasing march forward [and] casts new and lyrical light on our nation’s violent past.” —Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review)

  On The Port-Wine Stain

  “Lock’s novel engages not merely with [Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter] but with decadent fin de siècle art and modernist literature that raised philosophical and moral questions about the metaphysical relations among art, science and human consciousness. The reader is just as spellbound by Lock’s story as [his novel’s narrator] is by Poe’s…. Echoes of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Freud’s theory of the uncanny abound in this mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.” —New York Times Book Review

  “As polished as its predecessors, The Boy in His Winter and American Meteor…. An enthralling and believable picture of the descent into madness, told in chillingly beautiful prose that Poe might envy.” —Library Journal (starred review)

  “This chilling and layered story of obsession succeeds both as a moody period piece and as an effective and memorable homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.” —Kirkus Reviews

  On A Fugitive in Walden Woods

  “A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now…. This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day.” —Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling

  “Bold and enlightening…. An important novel that creates a vivid social context for the masterpieces of such writers as Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne and also offers valuable insights about our current conscious and unconscious racism.” —Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife and The Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

  “Bursts with intellectual energy, with moral urgency, and with human feeling…. Achieves the alchemy of good fiction through which philosophy takes on all the flaws and ennoblements of real, embodied life.” —Millions

  On The Wreckage of Eden

  “Perceptive and contemplative…. Bring[s] the 1840–60s to life with shimmering prose.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “The lively passages of Emily’s letters are so evocative of her poetry that it becomes easy to see why Robert finds her so captivating. The book also expands and deepens themes of moral hypocrisy around racism and slavery…. Lyrically written but unafraid of the ugliness of the time, Lock’s thought-provoking series continues to impress.” —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] consistently excellent series…. Lock has an impressive ear for the musicality of language, and his characteristic lush prose brings vitality and poetic authenticity to the dialogue.” —Booklist

  On Feast Day of the Cannibals

  “Lock does not merely imitate 19th-century prose; he makes it his own, with verbal flourishes worthy of Melville.” —Gay & Lesbian Review

  “This spectacular work will delight and awe readers with Lock’s magisterial wordsmithing.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Transfixing…. This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history past and is another impressive entry in Lock’s dissection of America’s past.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  AMERICAN FOLLIES

  Other Books in the American Novels Series

  Feast Day of the Cannibals

  The Wreckage of Eden

  A Fugitive in Walden Woods

  The Port-Wine Stain

  American Meteor

  The Boy in His Winter

  Also by Norman Lock

  Love Among the Particles (stories)

  AMERICAN FOLLIES

  Norman Lock

  First published in the United States in 2020 by

  Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  90 Broad Street

  Suite 2100

  New York, NY 10004

  www.blpress.org

  © 2020 by Norman Lock

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lock, Norman, 1950– author.

  Title: American follies / Norman Lock.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2020. | Series: The American novels

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019030396 (print) | LCCN 2019030397 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942658481 (paperback) | ISBN 9781942658498 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—Social life and customs—19th century—Fiction. | United States—History—19th century—Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.O218 A83 2020 (print) | LCC PS3562.O218 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030396

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030397

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.

&
nbsp; This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Manufactured in the United States of America First Edition

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-48-1

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-49-8

  To Carol Edwards & Jerome Charyn

  Contents

  Cakewalk

  Intermission

  Olio

  One Last Shuffle & Good Night

  A Note to Readers

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Gentlemen, be seated. We will commence with the overture.

  —Mr. Interlocutor to Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones

  Overture

  We live in hard and stirring times, Too sad for mirth, too rough for rhymes.

  —Stephen Foster

  WHY, DR. GARMANY, just look at the state of your hands! And you have blood and cigar ash on your coat.

  Yellow primroses! Mr. James, you are too kind. And in this rain! For goodness sake, water is dripping from your hat! Put it in the bedpan, please; I have not used it. They say my womb is wandering, but they will not tell me where. Mr. James, please be acquainted with Dr. Garmany, who will be presiding. You have time to buy a ticket, but only just, for he has already called for the overture. Do say you will! I shall be performing a tragic farce on the Sholes & Glidden. My husband, Franklin, you know. He was grateful for the shaving mug you sent him at Christmas—all the way from London, where the queen is in mourning for us all.

  The bedsheet is white, the nurse no taller than a girl. Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, O, how you shuffle! On, off. Just look at the horses’ fancy plumes! Gentlemen, I am dying underneath the heavy odor of chloroform. Black night is falling fast. Franklin, do not let go of my hand!

  Cakewalk

  SEPTEMBER 1883–APRIL 1884

  … how small the sons of Adam are!

  —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Declaration of Sentiments

  MRS. LANG’S SECRETARIAL BUREAU had arranged for me to stay with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at their boardinghouse in Murray Hill. They were in New York City to collaborate on the third volume of their monumental History of Woman Suffrage. Miss Anthony had traveled from her home in Rochester for the purpose, Mrs. Stanton from hers in Tenafly. They required a stenographer and typist. I arrived in a hackney driven by an Irishman with a put-upon expression and a grizzled beard stained by tobacco juice. As I entered the ladies’ sitting room, followed by the cabman, who had grunted and grumbled up the stairs with the bulk of my Sholes & Glidden in his arms, I was struck by its cheerfulness. Aware of their militant reputation, I had expected to find Spartan quarters devoid of the follies that often encrust the rooms of elderly ladies. But my suffragists, as I would come to think of them, did not scorn a so-called feminine weakness if the indulgence pleased them. They were as likely to meet an expectation based on gender as they were to defy it. Had I not been prejudiced by accounts of their warlike humor published in the sensational papers of the day, I wouldn’t have been surprised by the scent of violets emanating from Mrs. Stanton’s ample bosom or by the Henry Maillard bonbons they nibbled from a plate, as if the two most formidable women of the age were a pair of schoolmistresses whose delight was to needlepoint sentimental mottoes on fine linen for the adornment of walls papered in the color of dried blood. I was glad no such homely artifacts were displayed and that the walls were enlivened by a pattern of tea roses. A Persian carpet lay on the shellacked floor. Strings of glass beads hung from a gasolier, unlighted at that hour, and the walnut cornices were free of the dust that swayed from the ceilings of my own rooms like tiny trapezes. The apartment declared Mrs. Cady Stanton’s Dutch ancestry and Miss Anthony’s Quaker devotion to cleanliness. (Later, I would be introduced to Miss McGinty, who came on Tuesdays to do the actual cleaning.)

  “I presume you’re acquainted with our work,” said Mrs. Stanton. She was the plump one of the two, whose white hair was dressed in ringlets.

  “I am,” I said brazenly.

  I knew the story, in its outline, of their long, tempestuous life together more than the particulars of their work, which was denounced by clerics as impious and by politicians as contrary to the self-evident truths announced in the Declaration of Independence. At the time, I had no opinion on woman’s suffrage. Had I operated a sewing machine in the Garment District instead of a typewriter, I would have been more mindful of the cause to which the two women were devoted. As it was, I considered myself fortunate in having a profession and did not think my situation could be improved by the election of this man or that one, even if I had had a ballot to cast for either. One can find Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln on a map of the United States, in the names of its towns and streets, but men of their sort are scarce in the seats of government.

  “Would you have any reservations about aiding us in our work?” asked Mrs. Stanton.

  “I would not—ahem.” I had let the sentence “hang fire,” as Henry James would put it, uncertain as I was of how to address a suffragist who at one time in her long life had worn pants.

  “Ellen, would you like a glass of water?” she asked solicitously.

  I wondered if I ought to object to the familiarity; she would not have called Mr. James by his Christian name on so short an acquaintance—or, for that matter, a lengthy one.

  “Our notoriety does not give you pause?” asked Miss Anthony in a manner I interpreted as a challenge.

  The death of my brother-in-law, whose salary earned as one of Herman Melville’s underlings in the U.S. Customs Service had been essential to keeping our small household on Maiden Lane afloat, obliged me to overlook the disapproval with which the two women were generally regarded. In truth, I would have kept the accounts for Mrs. Standly’s brothel in the Tenderloin until my husband, Franklin, could find employment in the typesetting trade out west, where I planned to join him.

  “Not at all, Miss Anthony.”

  “You may call me Susan,” she graciously allowed.

  “And you may call me Elizabeth,” said the other, inclining her venerable head toward me.

  “When would you like me to start?” I was eager to begin; I had a grocer’s bill to pay.

  “That remains to be seen,” said Susan flintily. “You haven’t been examined.”

  “I was given to understand that the matter had already been decided,” I said with what I hoped was an air of dignity and not one of indignation, which was slowly mounting in me.

  I thought I caught a glint of malice in Susan’s eyes as she went on airily. “No doubt you have stenographic and typewriting experience in business correspondence.” By the way she had pronounced business, I understood that the manufacture of tinware or galoshes could be of little consequence when compared to the “work.”

  I nodded in the affirmative, suppressing an urge to battery.

  Susan continued: “Here, however, the dictation you would be called upon to take—”

  “And the manuscripts you would be typewriting,” said Elizabeth, “putting in her oar,” as Melville might have said.

  “From handwritten notes and scribbles on foolscap or the back of butcher paper—”

  “Can be daunting.”

  Having been a long time together, the two were in the habit of collaborating on each other’s sentences whenever excitement or agitation caught them up like an outgoing tide.

  “Have you had anything to do with—Oh, homilies, for example, or treatises where the style of the prose and the difficulties of the thoughts expressed would’ve challenged you more than a feather merchant’s letter of complaint to the chickens?”

  Apropos of her friend’s remark, Susan cackled.

  “I am sometimes called upon to typewrite manuscripts for Henry James,” I said smugly.

  “We are suspicious of Mr. James’s attitude toward woman’s suffrage,” retorted Elizabeth.

  “We are indeed!” said Susan, her face having become as sharp as her tone.

  “However, in t
hat his prose is difficult—”

  “At times, tortuous.”

  “We believe you are qualified.”

  “But she has not yet given us a demonstration of her skills!” objected Susan.

  “That won’t be necessary,” concluded Elizabeth with the decisiveness of Caesar settling the vexatious question of Gaul.

  “Did Mrs. Lang mention that you will be required to stay here?” asked Susan, relaxing her jaw muscles into the faintest of smiles.

  “We do not keep regular hours,” explained Elizabeth.

  “Yes, she did,” I replied to the space between the two women, since I was beginning to find it hard to tell them apart in spite of their very different appearances. One was fat and jolly, the other thin and caustic; together, however, they made an impression as disconcerting as the plaster cast of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng in Dr. Mütter’s Museum in Philadelphia.

  “You will find the situation a pleasant one, I think,” said Susan, whose hatchet-shaped face would eventually become endearing. “Elizabeth loves to bake, you know.”

  “I have an Eccles cake in the oven right now. Do you accept?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed. Now that my heavy machine and I were comfortably installed in a sitting room fragrant with pastry and currants, it would have been a pity to have had to look elsewhere. Besides, I was feeling sleepy; I remember that I yawned in full view of my new employers. Embarrassed, I reaffirmed my joy at finding so happy a situation: “I accept with pleasure!”

  Neither woman raised an eyebrow. Consorting for so many years with those in whom ideas produce the greatest excitement would have inured them to the enthusiastic display of a professional typist—or her back teeth.

  “Good,” they remarked in unison.

  “We are pleased,” said Elizabeth, who favored the royal we. And then she astonished me by asking, “When is the baby expected?”

  If I’d been a reader of romance novels or had laced my corset too tightly, I would have required smelling salts. But I was accommodating the baby’s need for oxygen by doing without stays. I was slender to begin with, and even then, in the sixth month of my gravidity (a word I had recently encountered in one of Mr. James’s drafts), only a practiced eye—or a prying one—could have detected the immanent presence of another human being underneath my voluminous skirts.