The American Chronicle 1 - Burr by Gore Vidal Read Free Book Online

ghost that floated to shore.”

Five
    AT MIDNIGHT the Five Points is like mid-day. Every week I make up my mind not to go there, ever again, and of course I cannot stay away. This time, however, I have come for a purpose. Rosanna Townsend was born in the Hudson Valley, not far from Kinderhook. She could very well know all about Colonel Burr and Van Buren. But I am lying as I write these lines. All day I have been thinking of muslin dresses on the Battery. Could not care less about Van Buren.
    Where the five streets come together the world’s worst people can be found—drunks, whores, thieves, gamblers, murderers-for-hire. I cannot think any city on earth has such a squalid district. Of course, I have seen no other city, except Albany, and maybe the Sultan’s Sublime Porte is wickeder than Cross Street at midnight but I doubt it.
    I went from bar-room to bar-room, drinking very little but—well, observing, listening to political gossip, perversely putting off pleasure. At the corner of Anthony Street, I made a dinner of clams. As always I was dazzled by the noise, the smells, the lighted tavern windows—muslin dresses.
    At midnight, I made my way to 41 Thomas Street (just writing the address in this copy-book makes me short of breath: I don’t know how I was able to endure my largely celibate life before I made the acquaintance of that old brick house with its flaking green shutters and Dutch front).
    I rapped on the door. A pause. A woman’s shout from somewhere deep in the house. The door opened, a black face. “Oh, it’s you.” I slipped into the foyer. The Negro maid shut and bolted the door.
    “Is Mrs. Townsend free?”
    “Don’t you want to go straight up and see what we got?” Of course I did, could hardly wait. But I was on a mission. This was not simply a voluptuous errand. I have—now—given up that sort of thing, and never again shall set foot in 41 Thomas Street. That is a solemn vow.
    Convinced that I was perverse enough to want to pass some time with the mistress of the house, the Negress showed me into the downstairs parlour where Mrs. Townsend and her teapot were arranged on a comfortable chaise-longue .She drinks tea constantly: “Coffee rots you, tea dries you out,” she likes to say.
    As usual, she was reading a heavy book. “Something frivolous, I fear, Mr. Schuyler.” She put down the book and raised her hand in greeting. “ Pilgrim’s Progress .”Usually she reads works of philosophy, collections of sermons. “It is not that I am religious, perish the thought. But there must be some meaning to all this. Some great design.” And she made a spiral in the air with a long yellow hand. “I search for clues.”
    Mrs. Townsend motioned for me to sit beside her on a straight chair, the gas-light in my face. She is most aristocratic-looking with a long nose and a bright startled expression. Her hair has been dyed an unconvincing red— pro forma obeisance to a profession of which she is neither ashamed nor proud. “Mr. Bunyan is deeply depressing but I assume—by the end of his book—I shall see the City of God, or at least its water frontage. Light reading, I admit, but a relief after Thomas Aquinas.”
    She offered me tea. I shook my head. She poured herself a cup. “You must marry, Mr. Schuyler. You are much too young—or too old—for this kind of thing.” She frowned as she indicated the upstairs part of her house.
    “Twenty-five is the best age, I would’ve thought, to visit you.”
    Mrs. Townsend shook her head. “Twenty-five is the best age for marriage. My establishment exists as a refuge for the old married man or as a training ground for the young inexperienced boy. It is simply not a fitting place for a young man in his prime who should be starting his family, laying the keel, as it were, to the vessel of his mature life.” Mrs. Townsend’s discourse is often lofty, and though it does not reproduce too well on my page, it falls most resonantly upon the