The Memory Palace

Distance

Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the first thirty-five years of his life learning to paint. At Andover, at Yale, in London at the Royal Academy of Arts. He studied the work of the masters. To learn how Michelangelo built bodies that seemed to pulse and shudder out of mere oil and shadow and crosshatch. To learn how Raphael summoned the spark of inner life with a single stroke of pure white in the dusky ocher of a noblewoman’s eye. To learn how to create illusions of space and distance. To learn how to conjure the ineffable through the mere aggregation of lines and dots on stretched canvas.

In 1825, Morse was living in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Lucretia, and two sons, with a third child due any day now, when a courier delivered a message. The city of New York wanted to pay him a thousand dollars to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette. The hero of the revolution was coming to Washington to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the war and he would sit for Morse, if the painter could leave right away. Morse packed his easel and his brushes and his paints, and clothes good enough to wear when meeting a great man of the age, and kissed his pregnant wife, and left that night.

A week later, Morse was in his rented studio in Washington, preparing it for the arrival of his distinguished subject the next morning, when he heard a knock on his door. Another courier, this one breathless and dirty from a hard ride on a hard road, handed him a note, five words long: “Your dear wife is convalescent.” Morse left for home that night.

He rode for six days on horseback and in the backs of juddering wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold wind of the October night, and when he made it to New Haven and ran through fallen leaves up to the house on Whitney Avenue, he learned that his wife was dead. In fact, she had died before the courier knocked on his door. In fact, she had already been buried, one morning while he was on the road. While he was racing home to be by her side. Thinking she was getting better.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the next forty-five years of his life trying to make sure no one would have to feel what he felt that night ever again. He spent the next forty-five years inventing the telegraph, to turn real space and real distance into an illusion, and inventing a code: dots and lines that could transmit the stuff of life and of dying wives.

Gigantic

She first set foot on America in November of 1795. We know this. It says so in the logbook of a trading ship called America which set sail from Calcutta a month later. We know that the ship’s captain paid $450 for her, a big investment. Add to that figure the cost of food and of revenue lost by taking up space that could have been stocked with barrels of spices and bolts of fabric and other nonperishable things, instead of using it to transport a live elephant.

The captain had big plans for her. We know this, too, from letters he wrote to his four brothers. He thought people would flip out about an elephant back home. There had never been an elephant anywhere on the continent of North America. He figured that had to be worth more than a crate of cardamom or Darjeeling tea. He bet he could turn his four hundred and fifty bucks into five thousand, easy.

We don’t know if he did. The historical record loses track of the elephant after a while. Newspapers tell us she drew crowds in New York right after America returned to America. She stood tied to a stake at the corner of Broadway and Beaver, downtown. People paid to see her stand there. We also know that the captain brought her down south when winter came, to get her out of the northern cold; the Carolinas were as close to India as he could offer. After that we don’t really know what happened to her, for a while. But we do know about Hachaliah Bailey.

Hachaliah Bailey’s family owned a farm in Somers, New York, now a bedroom community an hour and change from Manhattan on the Metro-North commuter line. In his early thirties, Hachaliah worked as a drover, bringing cattle into the city, such as it was at the start of the nineteenth century (it was a longer trip then). At some point during one of his cattle drives, Hachaliah became enthralled with one of the animals that lived at the stockyard in Manhattan. He’d talk about her all the time when he was home, and he’d go to see her every time he came to town. We don’t know how she came to live with the cattle and pigs and sheep and goats, or how long she lived there, but we know that, around 1807, Hachaliah Bailey bought an Indian elephant for one thousand dollars and brought her home to live on his farm in Somers. He called her Betty.

Hachaliah had never liked farming. It took forever for things to grow. It took forever to plow a field with a team of mules. But with an elephant? He ought to be able to cut that time in half.

We don’t know how well that went. What we do know is that an Indian elephant in rural America draws a crowd, especially in 1807, and Hachaliah Bailey soon figured out that there was more money to be made by drawing a crowd than by increasing agricultural output through elephant-based efficiencies. So Hachaliah Bailey and the elephant he now affectionately called Old Bet hit the road.

For the better part of a decade, the pair toured the Northeast, commandeering town squares and barns and charging admission. Eventually, Bailey expanded the operation, turning it into a full-on traveling circus. He added a horse and a dog and a goat, which everybody had, but an elephant? No one had an elephant.

Here were farmers and coopers and their wives and their neighbors. Here were people who hadn’t left their fields or their towns since they’d first immigrated or since they’d gotten back from the war. Here were children who’d never been anywhere, never seen anything, beyond the world of their farm and their neighbors and their woods past the wall of stones their grandfather had laid. And into that world walks this creature. Into that world walks the world.

We don’t know how much money Hachaliah Bailey made off Old Bet. We know there were times when the two of them would roll into a town and people couldn’t scrounge up even a little money, so they’d trade him farm tools and booze for a peek at the pachyderm. And we read, though we’re not sure we entirely believe, that the Indian elephant developed a taste for Jamaican rum. We know Hachaliah Bailey started walking her from town to town in the middle of the night so people wouldn’t get a free look along the way. We know he was successful enough to sell two shares of Old Bet for twelve hundred dollars apiece. We know those things.

And we know, and are sad to report, that Old Bet died in Alfred, Maine, in 1816. She was shot by a farmer who felt it was a sin to charge people to see an animal. We don’t, of course, know how Old Bet felt about anything.

But there are some things we do know

An Indian elephant in the wild can live up to seventy years. Evolution has made them fundamentally social animals. They eat, they breed, they find water, and they protect themselves and their young and one another from predators by working as a group. We know they communicate through body language, by secreting bodily fluids with decipherable odors, and by growling and stamping and trumpeting and shrieking and emitting sounds at frequencies so low they can’t be heard by humans, but which vibrate through the ground to be picked up by other elephants as far away as six miles.

We know, too, that their social order, and group and individual survival, hinge on their famous memories. Researchers have seen elephants, reunited after twenty-six years, signal that they recognize one another as family, and all elephants can remember and recognize as many as two hundred individual elephants.

So which did she remember?

Which did she look for among the cattle and hogs of the Manhattan stockyards?

And to which elephants did she send subsonic messages to radiate out through New England soil, only to fall seven thousand miles short?

What did she remember?

Of the ship’s hold?

And the salt air of the Indian Ocean?

And the Cape of Good Hope?

And the mouth of the Hudson?

Of the countless days spent tied to a stake?

Of the green hills of North Carolina?

Of the faces in crowds?

Of the nights spent walking under stars, and quarter moons, and North American elms?

On her way to yet another strange place with no elephants.