Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Ever since his mother moved the family to Long Island and then into the city at the end of 1837, Duff had never traveled even as far up the island as Yorkville. Indeed, until he sailed for Mexico from Governors Island, he had left the city exactly once, when he was seventeen, to spend the day across the river in New Jersey with thirty thousand others watching a staged buffalo hunt. (The show took on an unintended verisimilitude when the animals broke free and stampeded through the streets of Hoboken.)

  In a city, people somehow always find any new spectacle—like the maggots, Duff thought, that appear on an animal’s carcass as soon as it dies. A good fraction of those gathering this afternoon were neighbors from the shanties around Dutch Hill, dirty Germans and dirtier Irish who slept and ate (and milked their sorry goats and whittled their piles of splinters for the match makers) inside rough cabins built from scavenged tree limbs and billboards. Another score of the spectators—those wearing self-satisfied smirks and snarls, the ones with cherry-handled whips tucked under their arms—were sporting men who every afternoon raced their two-wheeled gigs and chunky landaus up and down the Third Avenue dirt to 125th Street and back. Little boys and girls darted among the crowd, giggling and crying and pointing toward a crashing joist here or the sound of a screaming animal there.

  The rest were curious citizens of every station, white-smocked medical students from the Bellevue Hospital, Kips Bay fishermen carrying baskets vibrating with bass and eels, bookbinders and lawyers and cigar makers and the usual New York quota of no-accounts, all of them predisposed to ride or walk a mile every now and then to watch a great fire.

  A big blaze in the afternoon, like the one roaring today through the barns and sheds of the Granville & Sons Distillery and Dairy, always drew a big crowd. They watched the men of Engine Company 25 and Hose Company 39 as they ran to and fro, sweating and hollering, looking in vain for a Croton water stopcock this far east, then struggling to punch a hole in one of the underground pinewood water lines, then to keep their fifty-foot lengths of leather hose coupled, and finally to aim their geysers at the spreading hell across the First Avenue. It was a good show, and it was warm on a chilly day.

  Timothy Skaggs’s and Duff Lucking’s interests in the fire, however, were professional.

  Duff was a gas fitter and billsticker by trade, but down in the Tenth Ward he was known as a fireman. Beginning ten years ago this very month, just after Mrs. Lucking and her children took their apartment in the top floor of the house on Chrystie Street, Duff was spending all his free time down the block at the firehouse of Engine 15, volunteering to do whatever chores needed doing. And the chores were always plentiful. New York was perpetually ablaze, particularly Engine 15’s piece of it. Just around the corner and across Canal, within a few weeks of Duff ’s arrival, the Bowery Theatre burned down. Before he turned thirteen he had become a signal-lamp boy, carrying the lantern to fires.

  Even as a greenhorn he had had a knack for hearing the alarm bell before any of the experienced men, nearly before it started ringing. He knew by some instinct, sometimes as soon as they heard the first bells, whether the carriage ought to run north or south out of the shed. Did his country nose have a special sensitivity to smoke? Could his young eyes detect in the distance some faint corona invisible to grown men? The company also came to rely on young Duff to divine the speed and direction of the flames as they spread. After he turned fifteen and became the oldest boy in school, he stopped attending classes and devoted those recaptured hours not to additional paid labor plastering posters in the streets off Broadway, but to running with the machine, a fully fledged fireman.

  This Granville & Sons fire was way beyond his bailiwick, of course. But some of the most spectacular blazes broke out up here, where nearly every building was wood. Duff knew a few of these boys from No. 25 and No. 39, and he could have told them, here and now, where he reckoned the thing had started and in which directions the flames were moving the fastest. But etiquette required that Duff offer no unsolicited advice. It was not his fire to fight; he had come to watch, and to help Skaggs take photographs.

  Whenever a new acquaintance asked his occupation, Timothy Skaggs replied “unfinished physician,” “ex-westerner,” “retired newspaper libeler and slangmonger,” or “undercompensated writer-for-hire of screamers and second-rate sensation novels.” All of which were accurate.

  Around Christmas 1839, some complicated business (involving a jar of chloroform, an alleged marriage proposal in Hoboken, and the auction of a stolen Assyrian bronze) had led to his very sudden emigration from the city. His friend Tom Nichols—like Skaggs a New Hampshire refugee, medical college failure, and New York journalist—had gone out to Buffalo to launch a funny, scurrilous newspaper called The Buffalonian. Skaggs spent half of 1840 in that city helping to publish it while Nichols was in the county jail, having been convicted of libeling some local leaders by calling them “hypocrites” and “Christian fiends.” After Buffalo, Skaggs had continued west, taking a job with the Illinois State Register in the city of Springfield, where he remained until 1844.

  Since his return to New York he’d held a number of different jobs. While working as a reporter and critic for the Evening Mirror, he persuaded the editor, a deaf and terribly nearsighted man, to join him for a private evening tour of the “shocking” concert saloons and “immoral” gaming houses tucked along Manhattan’s far west side. Unfortunately, Skaggs arrived at their rendezvous thirty minutes late, by which time the editor had wandered off alone in the dark, stepped from a pier, and drowned. He now preferred contributing to new publications, unburdened by conventions or corruption—papers like Mad Mike Walsh’s Subterranean and satirical magazines like the new weekly John-Donkey. For money, under a pseudonym, he wrote pamphlet novels, such as Passions Down South, or, The Secret Adventures of a Famous Bluestocking Lady.

  Only days ago he was asked to discuss becoming editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but he declined. Walter Whitman, the recently sacked editor of the paper, was a friend, and Whitman’s dismissal over the Negro question was a small cause célèbre among New York newspapermen. Neither did Skaggs wish to ride the ferry to work and back every day—nor, God forbid, to live in Brooklyn.

  Besides, Skaggs’s abiding new enthusiasm was photography. He had easily resisted all the other modern fevers—for canals, for railways, for the telegraph, for extreme physical fitness—but daguerreotypomania hit Skaggs hard. At the age of thirty-three, he had decided to become a daguerreian. With the eighty dollars he earned last year to write Ruined by a Nunnery, he had acquired a large camera for portraits and his portable rosewood model to use in the streets. He even kept a studio in a building owned by the publisher of his little novels, Ninian Bobo. Skaggs had begun recruiting New York celebrities of the second and third ranks to sit for portraits (“the folks too interesting to interest the grand Mathew Brady”), which he would present to them without charge—and then make a few dollars selling salt-print paper copies to the Bowery printshops. So far he had resisted Bobo’s suggestions that he become a regular Portrait-in-Ten-Minutes huckster, open to the public. He lacked the spare time, for he also spent endless hours making daguerreotypes with no prospect of profit—street scenes in knife-sharp detail, blurry pictures of acquaintances in “natural” poses (laughing, eating a mutton cutlet, buttoning an undershirt), unromantic still-life assemblages of postage stamps and broken wine bottles and antivermin tweezers.

  And, since Duff ’s return from Mexico, pictures of fires. Of these there were plenty.

  Duff and Skaggs had met in 1844 during a theater fire. Skaggs had been trapped in a backstage closet with a half-dressed English actress, and it was eighteen-year-old Duff, as a member of Engine 15, who had chopped open the door and saved the two of them. The night of his rescue Skaggs insisted on taking his savior to Delmonico’s to celebrate. It was the first time Duff had ever been to a real restaurant, and the two became chums. The friendship was unlikely—“the bohemian and the boy,” people called them—but
Skaggs enjoyed his protégé’s earnest curiosity, and Duff regarded Skaggs as a worldly, mischievous uncle.

  One evening not long ago, Duff had suddenly announced, “I’ve got a brainstorm!”

  “My goodness, really?” Skaggs teased, as he often did when Duff contrived to utter whatever bit of new slang he had collected. “Have you spoken to a physician? I would recommend an hourly dose of laudanum until it passes.”

  Duff ’s brainstorm envisioned Skaggs becoming “the Daguerreian of Fire.” Duff could use the city’s new telegraphic alarm system to get his friend to the best blazes quickly. All the watchtowers around the city were being connected by wires to the central station, and all eighty fire companies would be wired up as well.

  So Duff had recruited a couple of the boys he knew at a firehouse near Skaggs’s studio to shout the telegraphic reports of any big fire up to Skaggs. Duff had rushed today down to Ann Street himself, however, with the news of this Granville & Sons fire so that he could gather up Timothy and his gear personally. He knew it would be a regular holocaust.

  And so it was. “You might get another twenty minutes of intense burning before she begins to snuff out,” Duff explained. “No more than thirty. You can’t see from here, but that last big shed back in the rear is full of fire, I’m sure of it.”

  Skaggs took a long look over the flaming distillery and dairy buildings, the hundred firemen in their dirty yellow costumes, the crowd, and, in the distance, steeples and roofs on Long Island. “Just a few rods further uphill,” he told Duff, who had already planted the tripod and was tightening its iron screws. “If we go higher, we can have the river as the background. I would like the river in the picture.” He winked at Duff, who started loosening the screws. “A great Stygian tableau at six and a half by eight and a half inches!”

  A moment later one of the Granville stills exploded, blasting a cloud of smoke and metal flinders and flaming whiskey-soaked chunks of wood straight up through a roof into the afternoon sky, like a shot fired from some enormous artillery piece. Almost every spectator gasped and jerked or cowered or even scurried a few paces back.

  Duff, however, stood his ground, and stroked the numb, puckered oval of skin high on his right cheek. It was his Mexican wound, the battle scar he’d received at the very end of the war, as big as a second nose. Although five months had passed since the piece of red-hot iron struck his face that morning outside Mexico City, and the bright purple had dimmed to a grayish pink, strangers in New York still looked at it. He pretended to regard those glances with patriotic pride.

  The explosion of the still was the high point of the afternoon for Duff, and he made no effort to hide his pleasure. “According to one of the 25 Engine boys,” he told Skaggs excitedly, “this all began with a blast at lunchtime.”

  “Ah,” Skaggs replied. He was concentrating on setting up his camera.

  “Might have been one of the mash cookers that blew. You know, I was an apprentice on the job rigging up their gas jets in there in ’46.”

  “So you said.”

  “We could’ve laid the pipe out further from the jet, but the owners refused to pay the extra cost of a bypass.”

  “‘Bypass’? Did you make that up?”

  “It’s a word, in the gas trade.”

  “Poetry, nearly.”

  “If the fire caught in one of the mash cookers, that’d explain why the stillhouse went to cinders so quick. Or the bone-boiling room over up there. Might have been that. There’s gas there, too.”

  “Hmm.”

  Skaggs enjoyed deciding on his picture—staring long and hard at some person or thing until he could no longer resist opening the shutter and counting one…two…three. Just now he was staring down into the rear of the camera at the ground glass, adjusting the lens knob to bring the roof peak of the burning cow barn into the sharpest possible focus. He could not take a clear picture of the flames themselves, though, not even by slathering the plates with extra bromine, which let him make exposures, in perfect light, of one second or less.

  He did capture bits of the scene. A motionless fireman, grimacing, his mouth open, pointing his nozzle with both hands. A little girl’s face dazzled by the flames. A shiny brass hose fitting in a puddle on the dirt. A half-burned distillery sign. And two blackened calves’ carcasses laid out on the ground, next to the proud posing foreman of Hose 39.

  The flames continued to rage, and the howls of dying animals were audible over the gush of hoses and the thunder and pop of the fire, the glass breaking, and the timpani beats of the engines’ pumps. But by four o’clock the light had started to dim. The photograph of the dead cattle would be his final picture of the day.

  The sight of buildings ablaze had nearly always struck Duff as beautiful, particularly when the companies’ streams first hit the fire and the clouds of steam arose with a great hiss and swaddled the flames. And what looked chaotic and terrifying to ordinary people was to him an orderly process. At a fire he had the feeling he was witness in some privileged, magical fashion to the soul of the city, urban life whipped into a frenzy, slow, unremarkable weeks and months distilled into a brief, radiant pandemonium. Fires were a price cities paid for being alive; the only cities without fires (or the cholera, or stutterers) were dead ones, the cold stone ruins of antiquity. Humanity burned. People had built the warehouses and theaters and stables and factories, and filled them with timber and cloth and hay and oil and alcohol and stoves and gas pipes; and, but for the odd lightning strike, people were responsible for starting the fires; people were responsible for putting them out; and people would rebuild.

  Before Mexico, even bad fires had been entertainments. But in Mexico the flames he saw consuming warships and forts and wailing men were not just more awful than an accidental conflagration at some Pearl Street book publisher’s—they were more significant, because they were driven by quests for justice and honor as much as by tinder and spark. In Mexico, the fires ignited by both sides had intent.

  They had meaning.

  And so did the destruction that afternoon of Granville & Sons. The firm produced bad whiskey and worse milk. Duff ’s father, a suicide, had become a drunkard at the end of his life, but Duff blamed bankers and capitalists for Zeno Lucking’s fatal misery, not the grog makers. Granville’s great sin, in his mind, was its entry into the milk trade.

  Out of the mash cookers each day they shoveled a ton of draff, corn and barley slop squeezed dry of whiskey and good for nothing but livestock feed. The big distillers had had a brainstorm of their own. Instead of selling the spent mash to dairymen, they had expanded into the milk business themselves. On this bright February afternoon, some hundreds of the several thousand dairy cattle in New York City were Granville cows in the burning barn on East Thirty-third. The beasts had lived their whole miserable lives eating the swill piped into their troughs from the distillery.

  It had been a stroke of true American genius: Granville fed its dime-a-gallon whiskey to the drunkards, the sludge of the whiskey to the cows, the milk of the cows to the babies of the drunks—who, if they survived childhood, had a good chance of growing into whiskey-buying drunkards themselves. And if the children died, it now occurred to Duff as he watched the flames flicker against the darkening sky, the surviving parents buy more whiskey to numb their grief. A perfect, vicious circle.

  Duff had first seen the Granville still-slop cows when he fit the gas pipes. They were hideous animals, ravaged by perpetual epidemics of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and fevers. Most were missing most of their teeth. Many had lost their tails. Their hides were ulcerated and oozing. But the distillers’ milk cost only four cents a quart all year round, whereas the good milk shipped in by rail from the country was a nickel in winter. And so for the savings of a penny or two a day, most families in New York bought swill milk.

  Duff remembered the first time he had encountered the stuff, another February morning—in the doorway of Chrystie Street, surrounded by other curious Luckings (the twins Grace and William,
his mother), poking his face down into the big can as the Granville milkman stirred it with his dipper. In comparison with the milk Duff had known until then in Dutchess County, it looked watery and bluish, despite the secret ingredients (chalk, plaster) added at the dairy to improve its appearance. At ten and thirteen, Duff and his older sister were no longer drinking milk, but the twins, just shy of two that winter, sucked down a quart a day.

  And, of course, he remembered the hot dawn seven months later that they found William dead, his bedclothes a marsh of bloody vomit and shit. Grace awoke spewing from both ends, and was gone the next evening. Duff had been angered by the cloud of vagueness that surrounded the twins’ deaths. He was not content with the explanation that “diarrhea” had killed them. In the examining room of the clinic in Grand Street where Grace finally expired, he had insisted on a more precise cause. “Infantile atrophy,” a nurse had replied, but the tautology of that phrase, after it was explained, only fired him up more. “Athrepsia, then,” the attending physician had finally said. The arcane word satisfied Duff. And he didn’t need to be told what had caused the athrepsia. Although his mother would never permit any discussion of causes and blame—babies die—he knew it was the swill milk that killed William and Grace.

  And so now, a decade later, the fire consuming Granville & Sons Distillers and Dairy did not strike Duff Lucking as a very terrible tragedy. The blast had started the fire well away from where any men were working. And the diseased, decrepit animals were being put out of their misery.