I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild
apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the
apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an
appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place,
it fixes me back and seems the less lost--not to my consciousness, for
that is nothing, but to its own--by my stopping however idly for it. The
day of the daguerreotype, the August afternoon, what was it if not one
of the days when we went to Union Square for luncheon and for more
ice-cream and more peaches and even more, even most, enjoyment of ease
accompanied by stimulation of wonder? It may have been indeed that a
visit to Mrs. Cannon rather on that occasion engaged us--memory selects
a little confusedly from such a wealth of experience. For the wonder was
the experience, and that was everywhere, even if I didn't so much find
it as take it with me, to be sure of not falling short. Mrs. Cannon
lurked near Fourth Street--_that_ I abundantly grasp, not more
definitely placing her than in what seemed to me a labyrinth of grave
bye-streets westwardly "back of" Broadway, yet at no great distance
from it, where she must have occupied a house at a corner, since we
reached her not by steps that went up to a front door but by others that
went slightly down and formed clearly an independent side access, a
feature that affected me as rich and strange. What the steps went down
to was a spacious room, light and friendly, so that it couldn't have
been compromised by an "area," which offered the brave mystification,
amid other mystifications, of being at once a parlour and a shop, a shop
in particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of
pockethandkerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw-covered
bottles of the essence known in old New York as "Cullone"--with a very
long and big O. Mrs. Cannon was always seated at some delicate white or
other needlework, as if she herself made the collars and the neckties
and hemmed the pockethandkerchiefs, though the air of this conflicts
with the sense of importation from remoter centres of fashion breathed
by some of the more thrilling of the remarks I heard exchanged, at the
same time that it quickened the oddity of the place. For the oddity was
in many things--above all perhaps in there being no counter, no rows of
shelves and no vulgar till for Mrs. Cannon's commerce; the parlour
clearly dissimulated the shop--and positively to that extent that I
might uncannily have wondered what the shop dissimulated. It
represented, honestly, I made out in the course of visits that seem to
me to have been delightfully repeated, the more informal of the
approaches to our friend's brave background or hinterland, the realm of
her main industry, the array of the furnished apartments for
gentlemen--gentlemen largely for whom she imported the Eau de Cologne
and the neckties and who struck me as principally consisting of the ever
remarkable Uncles, desirous at times, on their restless returns from
Albany or wherever, of an intimacy of comfort that the New York Hotel
couldn't yield. Fascinating thus the implications of Mrs. Cannon's
establishment, where the talk took the turn, in particular, of Mr. John
and Mr. Edward and Mr. Howard, and where Miss Maggie or Miss Susie, who
were on the spot in other rocking chairs and with other poised needles,
made their points as well as the rest of us. The interest of the place
was that the uncles were somehow always under discussion--as to where
they at the moment might be, or as to when they were expected, or above
all as to how (the "how" was the great matter and the fine emphasis)
they had last appeared and might be conceived as carrying themselves;
and that their consumption of neckties and Eau de Cologne was somehow
inordinate: I might have been judging it in my innocence as their only
_consommation_. I refer to those sources, I say, the charm of the
scene, the finer part of which must yet have been that it didn't, as it
regularly lapsed, dispose of _all_ mystifications. If I didn't
understand, however, the beauty was that Mrs. Cannon understood (that
was what she did most of all, even more than hem pockethandkerchiefs and
collars) and my father understood, and each understood that the other
did, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie being no whit behind. It was only I who
didn't understand--save in so far as I understood _that_, which was a
kind of pale joy; and meanwhile there would be more to come from uncles
so attachingly, so almost portentously, discussable. The vision at any
rate was to stick by me as through its old-world friendly grace, its
light on the elder amenity; the prettier manners, the tender personal
note in the good lady's importations and anxieties, that of the
hand-made fabric and the discriminating service. Fit to figure as a
value anywhere--by which I meant in the right corner of any social
picture, I afterwards said to myself--that refined and composed
significance of Mrs. Cannon's scene.
Union Square was a different matter, though with the element there also
that I made out that I _didn't_ make out (my sense of drama was in this
case, I think, rather more frightened off than led on;) a drawback for
which, however, I consoled myself by baked apples and custards, an
inveterate feature of our Sunday luncheon there (those of weekdays
being various and casual) and by a study of a great store, as it seemed
to me, of steel-plated volumes, devoted mainly to the heroines of
Romance, with one in particular, presenting those of Shakespeare, in
which the plates were so artfully coloured and varnished, and complexion
and dress thereby so endeared to memory, that it was for long afterwards
a shock to me at the theatre not to see just those bright images, with
their peculiar toggeries, come on. I was able but the other day,
moreover, to renew almost on the very spot the continuity of
contemplation; large lumpish presences, precarious creations of a day,
seemed to have elbowed out of the Square all but one or two of the minor
monuments, pleasant appreciable things, of the other time; yet close to
University Place the old house of the picture-books and the custards and
the domestic situation had, though disfigured and overscored, not quite
received its death-stroke; I disengaged, by a mere identification of
obscured window and profaned portico, a whole chapter of history; which
fact should indeed be a warning to penetration, a practical plea here
for the superficial--by its exhibition of the rate at which the
relations of any gage of experience multiply and ramify from the moment
the mind begins to handle it. I pursued a swarm of such relations, on
the occasion I speak of, up and down West Fourteenth Street and over to
Seventh Avenue, running most of them to earth with difficulty, but
finding them at half a dozen points quite confess to a queer stale
sameness. The gage of experience, as I say, had in these cases been
strangely spared--the sameness had in two or three of them held out as
with conscious craft. But these are impressions I shall presently find
it impossible not to take up again at any cost.
I first "realised" Fourteenth Street at a very tender age, and I
perfectly recall that flush of initiation, consisting as it did of an
afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an
already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Sixth Avenue.
It was as "our" house, just acquired by us, that he thus invited my
approval of it--heaping as that does once more the measure of my small
adhesiveness. I thoroughly approved--quite as if I had foreseen that the
place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of
anchorage of the spirit, being at the hour as well a fascination for the
eyes, since it was there I first fondly gaped at the process of
"decorating." I saw charming men in little caps ingeniously formed of
folded newspaper--where in the roaring city are those quaint badges of
the handicrafts now?--mounted on platforms and casting plaster into
moulds; I saw them in particular paste long strips of yellowish grained
paper upon walls, and I vividly remember thinking the grain and the
pattern (for there was a pattern from waist-high down, a complication of
dragons and sphinxes and scrolls and other fine flourishes) a wonderful
and sumptuous thing. I would give much, I protest, to recover its lost
secret, to see what it really was--so interesting ever to retrace, and
sometimes so difficult of belief, in a community of one's own knowing,
is the general aesthetic adventure, are the dangers and delusions, the
all but fatal accidents and mortal ailments, that Taste has smilingly
survived and after which the fickle creature may still quite brazenly
look one in the face. Our quarter must have bristled in those years with
the very worst of the danger-signals--though indeed they figured but as
coarse complacencies; the age of "brown stone" had just been ushered in,
and that material, in deplorable, in monstrous form, over all the vacant
spaces and eligible sites then numerous between the Fifth and Sixth
Avenues, more and more affronted the day. We seemed to have come up from
a world of quieter harmonies, the world of Washington Square and
thereabouts, so decent in its dignity, so instinctively unpretentious.
There were even there spots of shabbiness that I recall, such as the
charmless void reaching westward from the two houses that formed the
Fifth Avenue corner to our grandfather's, our New York grandfather's
house, itself built by him, with the happiest judgment, not so long
before, and at no distant time in truth to be solidly but much less
pleasingly neighboured. The ancient name of the Parade-ground still hung
about the central space, and the ancient wooden palings, then so
generally accounted proper for central spaces--the whole image
infinitely recedes--affected even my innocent childhood as rustic and
mean. Union Square, at the top of the Avenue--or what practically then
counted for the top--was encased, more smartly, in iron rails and
further adorned with a fountain and an aged amateur-looking constable,
awful to my generation in virtue of his star and his switch. I associate
less elegance with the Parade-ground, into which we turned for
recreation from my neighbouring dame's-school and where the parades
deployed on no scale to check our own evolutions; though indeed the
switch of office abounded there, for what I best recover in the
connection is a sense and smell of perpetual autumn, with the ground so
muffled in the leaves and twigs of the now long defunct ailanthus-tree
that most of our own motions were a kicking of them up--the semi-sweet
rankness of the plant was all in the air--and small boys pranced about
as cavaliers whacking their steeds. There were bigger boys, bolder
still, to whom this vegetation, or something kindred that escapes me,
yielded long black beanlike slips which they lighted and smoked, the
smaller ones staring and impressed; I at any rate think of the small one
I can best speak for as constantly wading through an Indian summer of
these _disjecta_, fascinated by the leaf-kicking process, the joy of
lonely trudges, over a course in which those parts and the slightly more
northward pleasantly confound themselves. These were the homely joys of
the nobler neighbourhood, elements that had their match, and more, hard
by the Fourteenth Street home, in the poplars, the pigs, the poultry,
and the "Irish houses," two or three in number, exclusive of a very fine
Dutch one, seated then, this last, almost as among gardens and groves--a
breadth of territory still apparent, on the spot, in that marginal ease,
that spread of occupation, to the nearly complete absence of which New
York aspects owe their general failure of "style."
But there were finer vibrations as well--for the safely-prowling infant,
though none perhaps so fine as when he stood long and drank deep at
those founts of romance that gushed from the huge placards of the
theatre. These announcements, at a day when advertisement was
contentedly but information, had very much the form of magnified
playbills; they consisted of vast oblong sheets, yellow or white, pasted
upon tall wooden screens or into hollow sockets, and acquainting the
possible playgoer with every circumstance that might seriously interest
him. These screens rested sociably against trees and lamp-posts as well
as against walls and fences, to all of which they were, I suppose,
familiarly attached; but the sweetest note of their confidence was that,
in parallel lines and the good old way, characters facing performers,
they gave the whole cast, which in the "palmy days" of the drama often
involved many names. I catch myself again in the fact of endless
stations in Fifth Avenue near the southwest corner of Ninth Street, as I
think it must have been, since the dull long "run" didn't exist then for
the young _badaud_ and the poster there was constantly and bravely
renewed. It engaged my attention, whenever I passed, as the canvas of a
great master in a great gallery holds that of the pious tourist, and
even though I can't at this day be sure of its special reference I was
with precocious passion "at home" among the theatres--thanks to our
parents' fond interest in them (as from this distance I see it flourish
for the time) and to the liberal law and happy view under which the
addiction was shared with us, they never caring much for things we
couldn't care for and generally holding that what was good to them would
be also good for their children. It had the effect certainly of
preparing for these, so far as we should incline to cherish it, a
strange little fund of theatrical reminiscence, a small hoard of
memories maintaining itself in my own case for a lifetime and causing
me to wonder to-day, before its abundance, on how many evenings of the
month, or perhaps even of the week, we were torn from the pursuits of
home.