Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Stewart’s was a new kind of store—gigantic and comprehensive, a dry-goods emporium as grand as a palace but also unashamedly popular. And Polly Lucking was devoted to it, inspired by the hired salesmen standing behind their tables and display cases, smiling silently, encouraging her to stroll at will among all the merchandise, awaiting her choice, as if they were her own servants; and by the platoon of matrons in gray gabardines fluttering around the dressing rooms, ready to hold smocks or tie corsets or fetch a cup of Croton. Fresh running Croton water, free and unlimited!

  As she paused to scrape the porridge of mud and shit and slush and lime from the sole of each boot, she looked up at No. 280 and felt something like pride—for the five stories of white marble as rich as a meringue and the plate-glass windows, each fifteen feet wide and nine feet tall, more windows than wall.

  Her love of Stewart’s derived most of all from the fact that it was entirely new. There were no foul-smelling oil lamps, no sooty streaks on the walls, no creaky floors, no chipped wainscoting, no cracked panes, no mysterious and capricious prices, no starchy crone or pinchpenny storekeeper giving her the eye. It was headquarters for the fellowship of the new, the most modern and democratic club on earth.

  Yes, precisely, Polly imagined as she approached the entrance, the left corner of her mouth just curling into a smile, I’ve arrived at my club. She amused herself with this whimsy of a club that admitted women—let alone an actress, let alone a Mercer Street strumpet. An actress, Polly amended, who did appear last year in The School for Scandal and The Hunchback and the Dumb Belle, and was only a part-of-the-time harlot, a ten-dollar parlor-house whore attired in a beaver-fur coat trimmed with swansdown and an excellent dragonfly-green cashmere dress…and carrying a sketchbook and pencils and The Knickerbocker magazine in her satinet handbag…

  “Welcome back to Stewart’s, Miss Lucking.”

  Bliss.

  As the doorman touched his hat and heaved open one of the eleven-foot doors, she touched a fluted column with one hand to steady herself and then inhaled deeply, the way she always did upon entering: clean dry stone, expensive varnish, Oriental rugs, cut flowers, linen writing papers, lavender water, the latest crinolines fluffy as French pastries, hundreds of pristine calicoes, damasks, and ginghams—the tonic aroma of so many good things all brand new. And that invisible cloud of warm air, luxurious and heavenly, so unlike the harsh heat of mere stoves. She shivered with pleasure. The store’s two dozen clocks, with two dozen slightly different bells and rhythms, began striking three. The cheerful and nervous discord of the chimes pleased her.

  Down the whole Broadway side of the store, big buttery shafts of afternoon sun poured through the windows. Polly walked along the western aisle, leaning over a glass cabinet to examine a Chinese ivory comb, then an India rubber umbrella, then muffs (of mink and ermine and monkey) and gloves (of cow and doe and rat). She waded in and out of the sun. She wanted to bask in this light, to let it warm her face and hands and make her hair even more perfectly golden.

  She found the chemise she needed and paid for it, but decided to climb the stairs to the mezzanine. She lingered in the mourning department, where she had made a purchase a couple of years earlier—the fifteen pairs of black gloves for her mother’s funeral—and more than once had pictured herself in the metal casket with the plate-glass window at the head end, like the maiden in “The Glass Coffin” by the Brothers Grimm. Today there was a new model on display, a Mr. Trump’s Patent Corpse Refrigerator, with a false bottom that was to be filled with ice for the funeral—but filled now with hundreds of beautiful, clear glass marbles.

  Finally pausing, both hands gripping the brazilwood railing, and looking out on the selling floor twenty feet below, at the acre of colored boxes and bottles and blankets and gowns and shawls, Polly assumed the air of the lady of this immense and up-to-date house. The things were not like ordinary merchandise for sale, stacked thoughtlessly on shelves or hidden in drawers, but arranged artfully, in the open, as if to suggest lives lived, as on a theater stage. Coming to Stewart’s was for her a little like stepping into a play in which new characters and objects appeared each time she returned; a play in which she was the wealthy but fair and charming but strong-willed heroine. “You haven’t the sense God gave a goose,” her mother would say if she were able right now to divine her daughter’s thoughts.

  The clocks chimed again, the higher-pitched shattering-icicle sound of half past. It was time to go. She had a busy afternoon and evening ahead—one of her occasional meetings with Timothy Skaggs at his studio in Ann Street (what he called her “pro bono episodes”) and her regular weekly dinner with her dear Duff. Now that she could afford restaurants, she seldom ate anywhere else. Her stubborn refusal as a child to study cooking, so maddening to her mother, had been vindicated.

  But first she would take a minute to glance at the baubles on display in the windows of Tiffany’s new store across Broadway. Even from a hundred feet away, she could see the glitter of gold. She was not one of those women mad for jewelry—indeed, she imagined that she could disavow fine living after she had enjoyed it a while longer—but she did enjoy looking at gold.

  Paris

  AS BEN RAN, his handkerchief slipped from his pocket and fluttered to the street. His hat flew from his head. He had no idea that a street sweeper’s helpful cry—“Votre chapeau!”—was directed at him. He made turns up and down entirely unfamiliar streets and stinking, misty alleys, not for an instant considering why he was going one way or another.

  He had never run so fast, even when he was young and had raced around Hyde Park for sport.

  The main sport he and his brother had shared was ferreting, which Ben grew to hate as he got older. In the gardens in Kent they would release a ferret underground into a rabbit warren. As each terrified rabbit leapt toward the light at the end of a tunnel, imagining it was about to escape, it would be trapped in netting arranged over every hole and then shot. Here was justice: Ben was an English hare scrambling madly to flee the French ferrets.

  Were the soldiers behind him, ahead of him, to his left, his right? He had no idea.

  He became aware as he ran that he had never in his life made so many choices of such consequence so hastily and arbitrarily. Until this moment, his adult life had consisted of making a few, mostly trivial decisions with elaborate deliberation. Now he was flying along, terrified and excited, feeling powerful in his powerlessness, as in one of his aeronautical dreams.

  He could not recall the last time he had panted. I am running for my life. I am embarked on a real adventure.

  In front of a large deserted public building he stopped to catch his breath—he watched the little steam-engine clouds of his own exhalations appear and disappear in the cold air—and to form some plan. Tiny letters cut into the façade of the building spelled Théâtre de l’Académie Royale de Musique, the Paris Opera. A poster advertised Jérusalem by Giuseppe Verdi—L’opéra, it explained, des Croisades, notre guerre pour la Palestine. A small metal placard hanging from an iron stanchion beneath a gas lamp announced: à l’intérieur la lumière électrique la plus fantastique et plus nouvelle. And a hand-painted paper sign tacked to the door announced the cancellation of the opera—Performance finale ce soir, notre grande CRISE! Our Crusades, our fantastic new electrical lighting, our grand crisis. A country throbbing with operatic pride.

  Ben was encouraged by his new ability to make out the basics of French: perhaps the prospect of dying had concentrated his mind. He wished Ashby were with him to share the moment. By now, he imagined, Ashby was already snug in his studio with a hot French cognac and warm French girl.

  He peered into the bright lobby through the glass in the door, through his own harum-scarum reflection (hair wild, necktie askew, collar separating from shirt), and spotted only a porter picking up discarded papers. He turned away.

  He heard another chanting crowd, as if the last hour had looped back upon itself.

  The chant was growing louder. It so
unded like a monster chorus singing Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson… His thoughts raced crazily. Had the Garde Municipale men heard Ashby call him by that nickname?

  And then down a street to the right he saw several men heading in his direction. Behind them was a cloud of smoke and dust, illuminated by the flickering of torchlight.

  No, not Ben Jonson—“Ven-geance!” he realized the crowd was shouting, “Ven-geance!” The sounds of wheels and horses’ shoes filled the beats between the words, growing louder each time. “Ven-geance!”

  Surely, Ben told himself, this crowd was not seeking vengeance against him, the stray Englishman, for stabbing the sergeant in the hand with the beak of a stuffed penguin and causing the young soldier to be shot by his commander. But that one act of recklessness tonight had been enough. He darted into the shadows, back to the theater. Ben Knowles knew he was too ignorant of too much to remain in the open.

  He did not know about the massacre, even though he had heard it.

  From where he and Ashby had stood they’d had no view of the stumbling, frightened front rows of the crowd as they had tried and failed to turn away from the nervous soldiers surrounding the ministry; Ben had seen only the mob’s implacable grunting rear as it pushed forward, forward, angrily, blindly, inexorably, tragically forward.

  And Ben did not know that it was the sound of those two errant gunshots in the Rue du Helder which had sparked the fusillade a hundred yards away.

  Everyone in the Boulevard des Capucines, soldiers and rioters and spectators alike, had heard the shocking crack of the sergeant’s pistol and blast of his private’s musket, had been momentarily quieted by the shots, and then had waited…waited only a moment for the inevitable…for an infantryman in the line of regulars outside the ministry to tap the trigger of his musket, followed immediately by another, then half the troop, 237 shots in all. None of the victims had been more than a few yards from the muzzles, and most were only a foot or two away. And so, of the eighty-one struck down, forty-seven had died in the street, their blood covering their powder burns.

  As Ben stole into the theater, he was ignorant of all this—of the mass killing minutes before, of his accidental part in it, of the fact that his brave, mad assault on the two soldiers aiming at Ashby had caused Sergeant Gabriel Drumont of the Municipal Guard to kill Private Michel Drumont, his younger brother.

  Ben stepped into the theater and held his breath for a long moment. The porter was nowhere in sight. And from outside the crowd’s cry of Ven-geance! grew louder, now threading through a song for which it provided a beat, like drums. Ben bounded up the broad carpeted stairs into the darkness, two risers at a time.

  He sat on a marble windowsill and examined his hands in the moonlight. On his left palm were four shallow punctures in the shape of a diamond, each prick surrounded by a tiny smear of his own dried blood. He had wounded himself with the penguin’s claws.

  From his corner of the opera house he looked down on the procession as it moved past. Many carried axes and pikes, and some had guns. He now recognized their tune as “La Marseillaise.” Once, at Cambridge, Ashby had accompanied Ben to a Chartist rally and begun to sing it spontaneously, with astounding gusto, attempting in vain to get other students to join in. How he would relish this scene. It occurred to Ben that Ashby might even be down there among them now, singing along…

  “Contre nous, de la tyrannie/L’étendard sanglant est levé…” Against us stands tyranny/The bloody flag is raised…

  “Ven-geance… Ven-geance…”

  In the middle of the procession, Ben could see now, were five big open wagons, each pulled by two horses and laden with cargo. They rolled into the little square in front of the Opera. Each had a torch stuck in the whip-socket near the driver, with another six burning torches nailed and strapped around the sides.

  “Mugir ces féroces soldats/Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras/Egorger vos fils…” The roar of these savage soldiers/They come right into your arms/To cut the throats of your sons…

  “Ven-geance… Ven-geance…”

  The cargo in the wagons was people, all lying prone, washed in torchlight.

  “Aux armes, citoyens!/Formez vos bataillons/Marchons!” To arms, citizens!/Form up your battalions/Let us march!

  “Ven-geance… Ven-geance…”

  The singers led the march. The people walking nearest the wagons, it appeared, were the ones chanting.

  In the back of each wagon were nine or ten corpses, of the forty-seven massacred in the Boulevard des Capucines.

  Ben, staring down, saw only piles of strangers rolling slowly past. Arms and legs poked out the sides of the wagons. The huge stains and glistening trickles and drips covering the hands and faces and soaking the shirts in each wagon appeared, from his view, as one great random splatter. The distinctions among individuals were confused by the darkness, by the overlay of blood, by the torchlight, by the collective tremble of the bodies as the wagons rolled over the paving stones. The unity of these citizens was finally complete, unquestionable.

  In the back corner of the last wagon Ben spotted his father’s parcel, wedged between two bodies. The twine was untied, and the pasteboard had been torn from around the beak to expose the whole head. Unlike the human passengers, the penguin lay on its back, eyes pointed to the sky. To its right lay a woman.

  Then, beneath the penguin, Ben saw the back of a waistcoat with broad, pale stripes, soaked through with blood. The head of the man wearing the waistcoat was buried beneath a woman’s skirts. His feet and ankles hung out of the open end of the wagon.

  Ashby. The sergeant had shot him after all.

  Ben strode across the mezzanine. At the top of the stairs, the porter emerged from a storage pantry, his arms filled with stacks of playbills, a dozen of which slid to the floor as he suddenly stopped.

  “Monsieur—il n’ya pas d’opéra ce soir.” No opera tonight.

  “Oui,” Ben said, moving as if he were being dragged downstairs by a lodestone.

  Out on the street he broke into a trot and caught up to the last wagon. LES MARTYRS had been scrawled in white foot-high letters on the side. A little stream of blood dribbled onto the rim of the rear right wheel.

  The stripes on the waistcoat of the man lying face down beneath the penguin were gold and white. Ben hadn’t noticed the silver piping earlier. Ashby, ever the fop.

  Ben cried to no one and everyone, “Where are you going? Where are you taking them?”

  A few marchers nodded sympathetically and continued chanting Ven-geance, Ven-geance.

  He grabbed onto the corner of the wagon as he walked along beside it. “This is my friend!”

  One of the marchers, a man wearing a proper coat and cravat, came over and put his hand on Ben’s shoulder.

  “Oui, camarade,” he said as they walked along, shouting to be heard over the chant and the song. “The friends of everyone. We show and now take the dead to l’Hôtel de Ville.”

  “But this man,” Ben said, turning to point at the dead man in the striped waistcoat, “is my friend. He is English. He is…mon ami.”

  “Ahhh,” the fellow said, looking Ben in the eye. He reached over and gently rubbed his cheek with a rough thumb. Among the nightmare events of the last hours, a strange man touching his face seemed a normal thing.

  From a big pocket the man took a thick red crayon and as he walked made a small x on the bottom of the dead man’s right boot. Then he offered the crayon to Ben. “Le nom? And the place of his home?”

  The wagon continued rolling, and Ben walked in a half trot just behind it, crouching down and propping his left elbow against the side, trying to hold the boot steady with his left hand as he wrote ASHBY, CADOGAN PL. LONDON on the sole from heel to toe. He stood, gently lowered the foot, and handed the crayon back to the Frenchman. The Frenchman lifted the corpse’s other foot and scribbled ANGLAIS.

  Ben glanced at the penguin. He pointed at it. “That is mine. The bird.”

  “Ah! C’est à vous?” The man gr
abbed the penguin with one hand and presented it to Ben.

  “Merci,” he said, taking it in both his hands, more gently than necessary.

  A few minutes earlier Ben had been infused with a sense of unambiguous purpose and high stakes—to escape, to survive. But what was he supposed to do now? Take up the chant on behalf of his dead friend, stagger along with these hundreds of zealous strangers, enlist in the struggle, storm a palace? And then?

  He grasped at the first alloy of sentiment and logic that came floating to mind. He would obey his friend’s final instruction. He had worked out the code Ashby had invented on the spur of the moment—Winsor & Newton was the maker of his oil paints, so Lloyd had meant for Ben to go to his studio, on the Ile Saint-Louis. He could get a few hours’ sleep there. He might have something to drink and eat. He could wash himself, and gather his wits.

  “Monsieur?” he said to the man with the crayon. “Où est la Ile Saint-Louis?”

  The man turned halfway round and pointed. “Cette direction, to there, one kilometer, more, comprenez-vous”—he made a sharp turning motion with his hand—“un kilomètre more to la Seine.”

  Ben watched his friend rumble away. At least Ashby was near the top of this hayrick of bodies—and snuggled between a woman’s legs, a fact that would have pleased him immensely.

  As the wagon made its turn onto the boulevard, Ben looked away, took a deep breath, and set out. He couldn’t recall if a kilometer was more or less than a mile. The hour was late. The sound of the crowd’s chant grew faint.

  His only moment of terror came as he turned down one narrow street and spotted, at the far end of the block, three soldiers. He jumped back, and when he peered round the corner saw that one of them was squatting and sobbing, and wore only his boots. The naked man’s confederates shoveled up water from a puddle with their hands and splashed it on his face and back. Ben could imagine no explanation; he could not have known that a minute earlier from an upper window some anonymous defender of freedom had emptied a boiling laundry pot onto the soldiers.