Ghost Town (7 page)

An odd choice, as I say, and it must have saddened Noah to take on this clever young man from Long Island in place of his own son. As for Julius, whom his father had already put to work in his counting-house, no sadness there, none at all—he was delighted at his imminent release from what had become an irksome captivity at a narrow, inky desk and a most tedious set of duties involving the keeping of accounts of bills of lading and cargo manifests and the like. Julius had difficulty with any task involving numbers, indeed with any application of reason to an abstract problem, and this was not his only deficiency, far from it. By all accounts he was a cheerful, friendly boy but he was profoundly disorganized. He was late for his appointments, often lost his money, his house-key, on one occasion his
shoes
, even, and his memory for names was that of an old person suffering from dementia. As to his appearance he was a long-limbed, lanky youth with a chaotic tumble of yellow curls. He grinned wildly when he was pleased or embarrassed and was forever having trouble with his clothing, buttons coming undone, shirt-tails escaping their confinement within his trousers, studs and pins going astray and with them the cuffs and cravats
and such which they were intended to secure. His eyesight was poor, and he wore spectacles.

It was Charlotte who saw in him something more than an unkempt buffoon. She watched closely as he amused himself in the sisters’ parlor, running off pencil sketches of the girls and their friends and then springing to the piano, where he would invent a tune with a lyric to accompany what he had sketched. Charlotte saw these spontaneous effusions as the froth or spume atop a rising wave of artistic genius, and was determined that her brother not waste it. She was convinced he had the makings of an artist, and it was certainly undeniable that with his wild hair and disheveled aspect he presented the appearance of an artistic
type
, and to artistic
types
the sisters were particularly sensitive.

Without telling anybody what she was doing Charlotte began to look for a teacher for Julius. She visited a dozen studios in New York, most of which housed painters with established reputations. She conducted interviews with each of them. None to her seemed right. She felt that these men were too much like her father in the importance they placed on technique and discipline and industry and the like. Julius would
do as he was told, she knew, but there seemed no passion—no “sweet inward burning,” as the saying is—until, that is, she met Jerome Brook Franklin. Now here was a man, she felt, for whom art was about more than technique. Here was a man for whom art was life itself.

At that time Jerome Brook Franklin was an impoverished painter of twenty-six whose true calling was the landscape. He had once attended a lecture of Thomas Cole’s and come away with the fiery conviction that his life’s work lay with the movement to establish a unique American art, an art that did not ape the art of Europe, but assimilated it, rather.
Transcended
it. A new nation, Cole had said—and it was this idea which seared the heart of the young Brook Franklin—required an artistic tradition which reflected its own true spirit, and the true spirit of America lay in the vast sublimities of her boundless unspoiled wilderness. He quoted Emerson: “There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving my eyes), which nature cannot repair …”

I know very little about art but I have it on good authority that until Thomas Cole arrived, American painters had largely been busy with
ships
, and that it was the merchants who drove the market. At one time Noah van Horn had hanging on his walls a painting of every ship he owned, and this was apparently what art meant to men like him: the precise, impersonal, ostentatious display of one’s material property. Handsome enough I suppose if what you like is
rigging
, or the exact color of a
hull
, but hardly the stuff of an emergent civilization. As for Thomas Cole, I remember as a child reading this exchange in a novel. Two men are talking about the wilderness.

—What do you see when you get there? says one.

—Creation! cries the other.

It was to paint pictures of Creation that Jerome Brook Franklin made expeditions into the American wilderness. His canvases displayed sweeping vistas of such scenes of natural beauty as the lakes of northwestern New York in the fall. By that time there was a healthy demand for such paintings, but he had not yet established himself among the more popular artists, and so had to give instruction to young men in order to subsidize his expeditions.

On the day of her appointment Charlotte mounted a narrow flight of stairs to the top
floor of a building on West Tenth Street. There was a landing with a banister on one side which overlooked the stairwell all the way down to the lobby. A door stood open and she peered in. What she found was a studio the size of a small ballroom with a bare, uneven wood floor and grimy skylights high overhead. It was empty. The windows were open and from the street below drifted the faint sounds of men, women, horses, and bells. There was a chalky smell in the air with a faint undertone of what she knew to be oil paint. The place was underfurnished. She saw a small stove at the far end, a few rickety tables, a low wooden platform with a number of mismatched cane chairs arranged around it and a wall of shelves holding dusty fragments of the human form in plaster. Else-where on the walls were pinned students’ sketches of figures in classical poses along with more detailed studies of the human form, and beside a closed door at the back were stacked what she assumed must be the artist’s own canvases. Like a throne in the middle of the studio stood a paint-spattered wooden easel with two tall upright arms.

The door at the back swung open and Jerome Brook Franklin emerged. He was burly and fullbearded,
with fierce blue eyes, and he wore a checkered suit in a loud pattern of autumnal browns and reds. He advanced upon Charlotte like a bear, took her gloved hand in his own great paw then led her the length of the studio to the back, where they sat close to the stove on a pair of cane chairs. Charlotte said later that he stared at her with a most peculiar intensity, and she experienced some discomfort. She said she liked that. He felt dangerous, she said. To Charlotte this meant he must be a proper artist, and so she told him what she was looking for and what she was prepared to pay. She had brought with her a portfolio of Julius’ work, and now she handed it over.

With an air of profound boredom the painter rapidly leafed through Julius’ sketches, returned the portfolio, and agreed to take him on. He told her when the new course of classes would be starting, and that seemed to be it. He accepted a part of his fee in advance and stuffed the dollars into the pocket of his vest. Nothing more to be said. Not a man for small talk. Only when she was leaving did it occur to Charlotte to ask him if she might see an example of his own work.

Whatever compunction she might have felt
about making such a request, it was dispelled at once. The painter beamed at her through his whiskers, and without a word went to the canvases propped against the wall. He selected one and hauled it from the stack. It was a big painting, and it required the full stretch of this big man’s arms to carry it to the easel. When it was in place he stepped back and the two stood together gazing at it.
In the Catskills at Sunset
, it was called. Charlotte saw a vista of dark peaks receding to the horizon, and beyond them a sky of an intense, pale orangey-blue touched with flames of scarlet radiant against the darker sky over the mountains in the foreground, where in a valley, in utter stillness, lay a lake of what looked like burnished copper and beside it a tiny human figure in a state of rapt contemplation. She stared at it for several minutes. I believe she was genuinely moved. When she turned to the artist her eyes shone with unshed tears.

—It is magnificent, she whispered. You love the place, then?

He nodded.

—I should like to go there once.

He said nothing. She left soon afterwards in a somewhat emotional state. It is hard to imagine that Jerome Brook Franklin was anything but
gratified at such a powerful reaction to his work.

It is time, I suppose, that I declare my interest. Jerome Brook Franklin was my grandfather. I met him a few times when I was small, and himself an old man, and in due course will describe an encounter with him—one of the very few glimpses I can provide of any of the actors in this drama at first hand. He was not an easy man but I have reason to believe he was a good man, and he was certainly generous to Julius when he first came out of the insane asylum. I only wish I had known him better.

His studio made as deep an impression on Julius as it had on his sister, and the boy later confessed he was astonished that for so long he should have been unaware that such places existed in the city; and although he could not articulate what it was that excited him so profoundly, he was quite certain that it mattered more than anything he had yet experienced. It was as though a door in his soul, long closed, had been opened, and into the dark place streamed sunlight: this was how Charlotte described her brother’s state of mind.

That first morning, he walked up Sixth Avenue to Tenth Street, clutching his portfolio under his arm. He climbed the narrow stairs to the landing at the top, where he found the door was open, so he went in. He was the first to arrive, and for some minutes he wandered about in a state of dawning wonder, just as Charlotte had predicted he would. He then realized that in the room at the far end of the studio a large man in his shirtsleeves and without a collar was bent over a wash-bowl beside an unmade bed. Without turning the man shouted “Early!” and kicked the door shut with a bang. Soon other students arrived, and I can see them all too clearly, those budding young men with their freshness and enthusiasm still intact, each one no doubt privately persuaded of his own unique genius … So sad. Not one of them came from a family like Julius’, and some I am sure were shabby youths from the tenements who perhaps had to support their studies with ill-paid jobs done at odd hours of the day or night. I imagine they talked about Jerome Brook Franklin, what they had heard about him, what they thought he was like.

He came out at last. It was a brisk morning in early April, and as he walked down the studio
he rubbed his hands and cried out to the “young gentlemen” kindly to sit down. He stood on the low platform by the stove and regarded his new students. He then proceeded to talk. Even in old age my grandfather’s voice possessed that booming confidence which to impressionable youth carries the unmistakable ring of truth. That day he spoke first of the wilderness, telling them that Nature had the power to “exalt the very bowels of the soul,” a phrase that has remained current in my family. He showed them several of his own canvases, and then said that before they could even begin to
think
of painting such pictures they must first study form. They would master the drawing of classical statuary, he said, and then would come the life class. Among the young men there was some grinning and nudging at the thought of the life class, for they had heard stories about artists’ models. Only then, said Jerome Brook Franklin—pregnant pause here—only when they had achieved proficiency in the studio would he let them anywhere near a mountain. Julius was in a state of ecstasy by this point.

This was called at the time Julius’ “awakening,” at least this was what Charlotte called it, who of all the sisters was the most passionate in
her conviction of the boy’s genius. Not hard to imagine the state he was in when he got back to Waverley Place that afternoon. The three girls were waiting for him of course, and no sooner had they hurried him into the parlor and closed the door than he gazed at them with shining eyes and announced that he was a slave of art for evermore!

Now, to this point Julius’ life had been an oddly unstable affair. This was a boy who had lost his mother as an infant and then suffered years of brutality at the hands of a father who to any other child would have quickly become a hateful, terrifying figure, but whom Julius had apparently never feared or hated. Was it possible that he had simply not registered his suffering, just shaken it off? Or that the love of his sisters had in some mysterious fashion
erased
it from his memory? I think not. I believe Julius buried his pain, buried it so deep that nobody saw it, not even himself. Dutifully as a child he had gone to his lessons with his tutors, and later to work in his father’s warehouse, and always he did the best he could with such good humor—the wild grin, the flapping shirt-tails, the lost shoes—that despite his manifest limitations no one could find fault with him. But somewhere
in the recesses of his heart a mortal wound was weeping.

Charlotte watched him carefully all the while, and as she had anticipated, with this dramatic awakening to art he began to change. He became more aware of the world around him and soon he was never without his sketchbook and pencils. He drew constantly, faces, street scenes, furniture, everything. He made the servants sit for him when they had work to do. He drew his sisters and his father at table, and every afternoon he visited the picture galleries on Broadway. He repeated Jerome Brook Franklin’s opinions as though they were his own, and for the first time in his life he gave instructions to a tailor. He ordered several pairs of tight trousers and double-breasted frock coats, and when they arrived he paraded before his sisters like the most absurd peacock. He bought a top hat, a flashy vest, a pair of bright yellow gloves and an eyeglass. It was a marked departure from the republican simplicity of his father’s wardrobe—all white stocks and black broadcloth—and it gave particular pleasure to Charlotte, who had accompanied Julius to the shops; in fact Charlotte may well have initiated the whole idea in the first place.