The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [5]
Trapped and miserable, the boy turned to anger instead. And fear. In the years to come, Henry would divide his life into the magical, sunlit childhood before God had ruined his leg with “his dread hand” and the bitter years that followed. The once happy child would grow estranged from his parents. He became a drinker, a gambler, a wealthy drifter—and a man in search of protective cover. Out there, he knew, was a deity on the prowl, in search of bloody retribution for sins. And who knew what they might be? Undue sympathy, lack of prudence, a thoughtless scramble into a burning stable? “I am sure,” he wrote once, “no childish sinews were ever more strained than mine were in wrestling with the subtle terror of His name.”
Henry James Sr. wrestled also with the demons of depression, a tendency that his children would inherit. Even after he was an established man, with a wife and family, he would describe his life as “not by any means a victory, but simply a battle.” He slowly overcame his alcoholism, and in his mid-twenties entered the Princeton Theological Seminary. He wanted to know better the mind of that vengeful God: “When the fire burns my incautious finger, I do not blame the fire, and why? Because I feel that fire acts in strict obedience.” With the Lord’s dreaded hand hovering over his, James lasted at the seminary only a year. He walked away in 1838. But during that year, he befriended the sisters of one of his classmates, and in 1840 he married the elder, Mary Walsh, after convincing her to abandon her allegiance to the Presbyterian Church.
Foreshadowing their life to come, the newlywed Jameses did not purchase a house of their own. Instead Henry and Mary moved into a hotel, the newly built Astor House. Gleaming with polished granite, with more than three hundred rooms, an interior garden, and brilliant flower beds, the five-story Astor House was among the newest and glossiest structures on South Broadway. Guests entered through a Grecian portico and stayed in rooms boasting innovations such as individual locks in doors and running water in bathrooms. The hotel, near the intersection of Broadway and Ann Street, sat across from Mathew Brady’s photo studio and P.T. Barnum’s newly opened, flag-festooned American Museum. Carriages clattered past, down a promenade designed to echo the elegant thoroughfares of Paris and London. Gas-jet lights glittered along Broadway at night, from its southern tip at the Battery Gardens to its northern boundary, where it merged into the country roads.
The Jameses lived at Astor House for more than two years. Their oldest son, William, was born in the hotel on January 11, 1842. Within the year, they moved into a house in Washington Square, and their second son, Henry Jr., was born in 1843.
To his diary, James Sr. confessed that he wished God would take Willy and Harry before they were old enough to become sinners. No one stayed untarnished for long, and the Lord’s vengeance could only be an angry breath away. As his depression and his fears rose to choke him, he sold the house and fled to England, towing his wife, sons, and sister-in-law with him.
It was there, while he attempted a water cure, a popular remedy for soaking one’s ills away, that a fellow sufferer offered comfort by describing his crisis as a rite of passage. She explained that, according to the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, James’s breakdown was merely a “vastation,” a turning point that would lead him to new health and harmony with life.
The elder James hesitated to pursue the idea; his doctors had warned him not to overtax his brain. But finally “I resolved that in spite of the doctors, that instead of standing any longer shivering on the brink, I would boldly