“It certainly is.”
We left Syracuse at midnight, bound for Troy in a close-packed sleeping car. I nursed my finger with arnica and frequent sips from a tall bottle of Mrs. Sloan’s Soothing Sirup. Soothing indeed! The patent medicine blended laudanum—tincture of opium—with a 30 percent alcohol solution; it sent an aggressive glow from my belly to outlying regions. If I couldn’t sleep with this stuff, forget it.
Andy had humored me—I was positive he regarded my injury as trivial—by helping me find a druggist. While he investigated “Proprietary Remedies,” I roamed the rest of the store, boggling at the weirdest bottles, jars, and vials I’d ever seen.
I bent to examine labels, fascinated. Most left specific ingredients to the imagination, but were hardly bashful about promising results. Sufferers of “rheumatism, contracted cords, asthma, deafness, neuralgia, sore throat, piles, and afflictions of the spine” would be “permanently cured” with Dr. Park’s Macedonian Oil—an amazing bargain at fifty cents. Another boasted: “People who vomit at the very thought of pills actually relish Minerva’s Liver and Stomach Lozenges,” which “act like a charm in dyspepsia, bowel complaints, liver diseases, and general debility.” I was startled to see bottles of something called Burnett’s Cocoaine. They turned out to contain “the Best and Cheapest Hairdressing in the World.”
Andy beckoned me to the cash boy’s station. Cash registers didn’t exist; businesses hired kids to spirit payments off to secret niches where cashiers made change. As I pulled out my wallet, my eye fastened on a card tacked to the counter. In Italianate script it read:
CLAIRVOYANT AND PHYSICIAN
Mme Clara Antonia
Business and Medical Clairvoyant
A correct diagnosis given of all diseases, without one question asked of the patient. Consultation in English, French, and German, and has her diploma. Spiritual guidance in sickness and health.
Jesus, I thought, I wouldn’t want medical problems in this century.
“What’re you studyin’?” Andy said.
I showed him. His lips slowly formed the words. “I know her,” he said. “Clara Antonia lectures all around the country. My mother turns out, gives her money.”
“Your mother? Why?”
“You’d say it was like believing in the wee folk,” he said. “An’ you don’t hold with that, remember?”
He was teasing, I think.
Andy stirred in the berth below. I gazed out the window as we churned through the dark city. Unaccountably, the New York Central had put tracks in Syracuse at street level; now we rolled along a main thoroughfare. I stared up at occasional glowing windows that glided by like ornaments in the night. Who lived behind those curtains? Why weren’t they asleep? I pictured Hope and Susy in the illuminated rooms, imagining that I had just turned on the light to look down at their sweet slumbering faces. Oh, lord.
Somewhere inside my drug-induced torpor lay a terrible ache, a void. I desperately missed the world I had left. What was I doing here?
The loneliness of the night seemed limitless. I imagined a woman’s softness touching me, comforting me. A woman to love. I felt even sorrier for myself. Miles farther on into the darkness and into the soporific charms of Mrs. Sloan’s Soothing Sirup, I finally stopped feeling anything.
Chapter 5
We arrived in West Troy with the rising sun at six in the morning. Eyes sagging, brain woolly, body aching, I paraded with the others onto the platform, where we stood huddled in the crisp air for over an hour. Nobody from the Haymakers showed up.
Champion paced fretfully. “A deliberate insult!”
“They acknowledged our telegram?” Harry asked.
Champion nodded, mouth pinched.
We boarded the first scheduled streetcar this hushed Sunday. A conductor in natty gold braid stood on the rear platform beside the brake and took our two-cent fares. As I faced him, my mind suddenly filled with the ghostly figure I’d glimpsed as I collapsed on the station dock. Suddenly I seemed to be stepping up simultaneously into a bright yellow horsecar and a dark green cable car—with twentieth-century San Francisco bustling all around me, vivid and real even as an overlay on the Troy surroundings. The illusion faded almost at once, but I had felt the first hints of the milkiness: it was like peering through a wall suddenly grown translucent. Too much Mrs. Sloan’s, I thought—and hoped that was all there was to it.
Out on the front platform the driver slapped leather reins against the horses’ haunches—a sharp, fleshy sound—and we set off along the broad street. My hands trembled all the way to the Troy ferry building, an elongated wooden labyrinth. Another fare put us aboard a skiff rigged with a light sail; oars were secured below the gunwales.
“Yez can row, for speed,” the skipper said.
We ignored the oars, drifting leisurely on the Hudson’s calm gray surface. I began to relax again. Mist rose around us. To our right, the massive Watervliet Arsenal bristled with cannon. Directly ahead, the low forested hills of Troy City looked under attack by phalanxes of brick buildings swarming up from the water’s edge.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a huge new structure.
“Ironworks, I think,” Waterman said. “Ask George.”
I did. And got my ears filled. In the twenties, George said, a Troy housewife snipped the soiled collar from her husband’s shirt to avoid washing the entire garment—and thereby created a new industry. Detachable cloth collars, later celluloid, had poured forth to an eagerly waiting nation.
Now Troy was a booming steel-manufacturing center, not yet superseded by Pittsburgh. The city’s flood of wartime manufactures had included the metal plates that girded the Monitor.
The smokestacks were quiet this morning, but as we drew close I saw them looming everywhere, thrusting above the factories like black fingers.
We checked into the Mansion House, a small inn near the river that boasted a fine table and comfortable beds. I lay down on mine, took out my Mrs. Sloan’s, and had a healthy pull.
“What are you doin’?” Andy demanded.
“Hair of the dog.”
“I don’t want you drinkin’.”
I was silent.
He stood over me. “I mean it.”
“For Chrissakes, Andy—”
“It was runnin’ your life, wasn’t it, Sam?”
“I don’t believe that’s any of your—”
“It is my concern.” His
