Work Text:
“With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.” – Washington’s farewell to his officers, the Fraunces Tavern
Though supported by less than a hundred years of Independence, and lacking the seat of national strength it once was promised, Manhattan flourishes and revels and changes its face with each decade.
You might know this alley-tavern by one name and face in 1805, but 1815 would have hidden all but its memory—perhaps in service of yet another war.
Past 1845, the Broad Street Hotel was as good a place for a stout drink as any on the Island. These young men who have lately tripped in, doffing their hats and tossing their coats over the crooks of their elbows, certainly know it. What anyone looking at them might not know—at first—is that they are scarcely men at all.
The oldest is newly eighteen. Not a one of them is bearded, or able to be.
Good tailoring can hide youth, but of course to an eye that gazes for more than a moment, it also displays it. Here is expensive linen, and here a foulard neckerchief, and here and here are hats too tall for heads already liable to strike rafters.
Should anyone arrest their progress? Should anyone question whether or not they have schoolbooks to occupy them, rather than flagons?
No chance—they are gathered around the stools, too genteel to elbow each other but too happy not to crowd, and they are calling for bourbon and gin—
“—and a little cider, Polly, if you have it.”
Polly and her neat cap run for the cider. Perhaps the youngest and smallest of their company shall be the one to drink it. He has the beginnings of a square jaw, and his eyes are very blue beneath dark brows. Polly brings him his cider as if she, too, thinks it is meant for him. She gives him a smile and the others do nudge him, at that.
Gentility is an art to the tallest. That is manifestly evident. He has red hair, curling invitingly over his open brow, brushing his collar as gently as a lady’s hand. Red hair is not in fashion. Even Polly could tell you that. But does it matter? Does it matter for the young Adonis?
Polly whisks away and does not listen to their conversation. The inn is too bustling to let her remain idle. When this was a tavern, perhaps, there was time to hear the beginnings and endings of great men.
Nonetheless, there is still conversation at the Broad Street Hotel. Whether these four shall be great men—
“I wonder,” says the young one, both hands cupped round his cider, “if it’s the same floor.”
“Renovation is sacrilege,” opines the languid one with lace as well as linen on his shirt front. Lace is not in fashion any more than is red hair, but poets violate fashion as they see fit, and this one looks like a poet. He has the properly sensitive mouth and hooded eyes, and is blessed with graceful lines of cheek and nose.
The fair-haired one with the arched brows and embroidered gloves says, “Washington didn’t think so.”
“We can’t know what he thought of Fraunces Tavern, Finrod,” retorts the poet peevishly, “because we cannot see it for ourselves.”
“Because it burned down! We wouldn’t have a pint if someone hadn’t rebuilt it.”
“Don’t squabble, my loves,” says the Adonis. His bourbon is half-gone already. “Grandfather has come here, assuredly, and though he missed the General by two years, he knows the city like the back of his hand. He’ll tell you fresh stories.”
“Grandfather goes to stuffy dinners now,” the poet sighs. “He may know his own hands, and what they did here, but he hasn’t one, anymore, on the beating heart.”
“Of what?” Finrod demands, pounding his fist on the bar—but with a grin on his face.
“I have been reading about hearts,” says the little one.
“I didn’t mean that sort of heart.” The poet sniffs. But he cheers up after he sips at his drink, and Polly comes back with another round, and in half an hour they are laughing merrily, with no squabbles among them.
That is the wonder of the Broad Street Hotel. In a few years it shall be known by yet another name, and then someday, later still, it shall return (by rehung walls and carefully varnished floorboards, and, if you can believe, more than one upper story removed) to what it was.
The Tavern where the founders stood, and the space and heart of land where schoolboys laughed: look on it a decade since or a decade prior, and wonder what you must.
But whether they should have been there so soon, or if you come too late to learn what they wanted, is a question for their ghosts.