Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

“A hybrid spore.”

  “Yes, exactly, America is England made new and improved—heartier, healthier.”

  They were approaching the priory, which was ablaze with candlelight.

  “Mr. Knowles,” Darwin continued, “may I ask how old you are?”

  “I am twenty-six for a few more months.”

  “When I was younger than you, I was dead set on leaving England, on wayfaring through terra incognita, on having adventures. And while indulging that impulse seemed rash at the time, in retrospect, from my fortieth year, it appears to have been the wisest decision of my life.”

  Ben was feeling very fond of Darwin. He pointed to the birch grove. “Look—the fog has lifted in just these few minutes.”

  They arrived at the priory. As he stepped inside, Ben saw the great auk, as tall as a child, standing alone between two sconces in the vestibule, reflections of the fluttering candle flames twinkling in its glass eyes. He stopped and stared as Darwin walked ahead of him. The bird was turned to face the front door, its mouth set in a permanent welcoming smile, as if it—he? she?—were the runty master of the house greeting all visitors, happy to have migrated for eternity to the south of England, now safe forever from hungry sharks and nasty Icelandic weather.

  Have you come from Paris with my African cousin? the auk squeaked, with heartbreaking cheerfulness, in Ben’s wine-fueled imagination. And Mr. Ashby—where is Mr. Ashby?

  New York City

  DUFF HAD DECIDED to stay in his rooms the rest of the evening to finish Old Hicks, the Guide. He could feel the book changing his life as he read. But to exactly which unspoiled tract should he decamp? How should he remake himself? Would that he could become a Texas Ranger like the heroes of the novel. But after all that had happened in Mexico, that was certainly not in the cards.

  When New York’s police department was organized the summer before he enlisted, Duff considered its military charge and demeanor—deliverers of justice—as honorable and alluring. But the b’hoys and sometimes even respectable people jeered the police and the copper stars they wore. And Skaggs had persuaded him that he would find the rules of the new department burdensome—officers were prohibited from chatting with one another in the street, and from leaving the city without permission of the chief. “Why not commit a crime and let them board you at Sing-Sing instead?” Skaggs had said. “It sounds about the same to me.”

  But all of that discussion and banter had happened before the war. His experience in Mexico had narrowed Duff ’s prospects. He returned to Old Hicks and its fabulous, sunny Peaceful Valley.

  SKAGGS HAD PUT away the exposed plate and was dismantling his tripod. The Blue Man plucked at the crumbs of dirt and muck covering his trousers.

  “Hey, look,” somebody shouted from up Nassau Street, “it’s the famous Skaggs!”

  Timothy’s eyes glanced up the street eagerly, looking for his fan. He was not Dickens or Thackeray, perhaps, not even Mathew Brady, but evidently his own name was known to some bit of the public…

  But then he saw it was only young Dudley Thone, a Herald reporter who had worked at the Evening Mirror with him. Thone was leaving T. W. Strong’s bookshop with an even younger man, heading back toward the Herald.

  “Hallo, Mr. Mercury,” Thone said as he approached, and added, as if to his young companion: “Until he drowned our poor dear editor, Mr. Mercury here was a real top-drawer newspaperman.”

  The nickname “Mr. Mercury,” which Thone invented, was a triple-edged jibe—a reference to the mercury Skaggs used to develop daguerreotypes; to mercury poisoning, the symptoms of which were premature aging and madness; and to mercury’s more common connotation, as a medicine for syphilitic sores. “Your proprietor Bobo has you making portraits of freaks on the pavement now, does he?” Thone teased. “Leave all the true celebrities to Brady, is that his idea?”

  “Dry up and blow away.”

  The boy with Thone held up a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “We’re out collecting scenes of Mexico—research for Mr. Bennett, for the Sunday takeout, our victory souvenir edition.” James Bennett was the owner and editor of the Herald.

  Skaggs looked up from his work.

  “We’ve won, officially,” Thone said. “‘Firm and universal peace between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic.’ The war’s all over.”

  The Blue Man, hearing this, saluted Skaggs and started marching away, gaily singing another familiar tune as he bounced off. “‘And shouting freedom’s holy songs, / Strike for your rights, avenge your wrongs, / Upon the Rio Gran-dee!”

  Thone nodded toward the Herald building. “Senate ratified the secret treaty not an hour ago—got the news on our telegraph. And our fellow in Washington got a copy of the treaty we’ll publish.” The Herald had been pro-war from the start.

  “Hip hip hooray for our universal Yankee Nation,” Skaggs said in a tone of pointedly fake enthusiasm. He had not been much opposed to the war against Mexico. But patriotic hoopla annoyed him, as did the spurious argument that Polk was obliged to attack Mexico before Mexico turned its weapons against the United States.

  “Today, California,” Skaggs continued, adopting an oratorical tone, “and tomorrow the South Sea Islands, as we fulfill ‘our divine mission to’—what was it?—‘to own for ourselves that spicy little nation and bully its millions of starving Catholic half niggers’…?”

  “No, no,” said the boy with Thone, “it was this.” He paused earnestly, as if he were about to swear some solemn oath.

  “Dickie…” Thone growled softly.

  “Ah,” Skaggs said, “so this is Dickie Shepherd, our famous ‘professional peer.’”

  Cockeyed, patriotic, and apparently now famous as well, Dickie would not be deterred, and slowly declaimed the line in question from a Herald editorial. “‘We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.’”

  “Why, thank you, Tiny Tim,” Skaggs said. Twenty-year-old Dickie Shepherd had recently published a manifesto announcing his determination to “reform, single-handedly if necessary, the slovenly and misleading ways in which the journalistic arts of this city and nation are often practiced.” He refused to invent or even embellish scenes and quotations for his articles in the Herald, habits he had declared were exacerbated by “the taste for liquor among my professional peers.”

  Skaggs stood, lifting the camera by its handle. “I cannot imagine how I mangled Mr. Bennett’s immortal and glorious words. Slovenly and misleading of me.” He wrapped his other arm around the tripod. “A good evening to you both.”

  Twilight was descending. As he walked past the Express, the Post, the Commercial Advertiser, the Journal of Commerce, the Courier and Enquirer— down one of the principal newspaper lanes in…Journalismville—the wind whipping from the east felt like the beginning of a winter blow. The equipment had become a burden by the time he turned toward his studio. He reminded himself to end the casual self-deception: not his studio, Ninian Bobo’s studio, where Skaggs worked as a kind of tenant farmer, required to sell half his monthly crop of portraits for the owner.

  It was not the gathering darkness and cold disheartening him, nor even his annoying arrangement with Bobo. Rather, it was the letter from New Hampshire in his pocket. What rankled most were the final lines:

  Your mother and I understand that you are unsuited to a prosperous, productive, and respectable life like that of your brother Jonah. You write your squibs and stories. So be it.

  However, we both pray fervently that from the vantage point of your thirty-sixth year you might finally begin to sight land in the distance, and make for it with all due haste. Do you understand? I will no longer chastise you for your blasphemer’s wastrel life, nor repeat that New York is too much of a good thing. But none of our journeys is endless, Timothy—death takes us when it wishes, whether or not we have reached our chosen destinations. Choose!

  As ever, your loving father

  Have a happy birthday, son—and don’t forget for a momen
t that death lurks. “Blasphemer”? Yes. But “wastrel”? Bunk! His bank account never exceeded fifty dollars, but he was not, as his father seemed determined to believe, a lounger, a player, a New York City sporting man—he did not frolic during the day, did not play bowls and billiards or attend shooting galleries and poker dens and cockfight pits, seldom idled away afternoons in taverns complaining about the scrofulous, dirty, stinking, stupid, thieving, willful, drunken Irish. He had spent a morning last winter, on one of his final days as a reporter, watching all the passengers of the HMS Sir Henry Pottinger, one of the first Famine Ships from Belfast, creep and stumble onto Pier 27—the whole scrofulous, dirty, stinking, weeping, freezing, wheezing, skinny, dazed, pale, half-naked lot of them. Like every other New Yorker, he was accustomed to ignoring everyday misery, but his hour spent studying and counting those 423 Irish men, women, and children had shocked him into a kind of reverent despair.

  But, alas, the reproofs in his father’s letter were only a magnified version of Timothy’s own accumulating doubts. His life was indeed something of a pleasant waste, diverting but pointless, like a puzzle or game of cards. His wit and his knowledge of a great many subjects—such a plentitude of facts, as if (his father would say) to compensate for his paucity of faith—made him skillful at games of all kinds. But the games of writing for newspapers and cheap book publishers had become too easy and comfortable. Photography was still novel and strange, to Skaggs and to the rest of the world. No one was fluent with chemical picture-making the way they were with pens and paintbrushes; for the moment, everyone was an amateur. Photography was a science and craft consisting entirely of immense possibility. Skaggs’s strange pictures of firemen and tramps and harlots seemed oblique and mysterious to him, as if something profound and unknowable was being suggested by the images’ very exactitude.

  Two newsboys, their arms full of papers, ran past him, interrupting his thoughts, the first one slowing down to shout in his face: “Herald, sir? Latest news from Washington!” “Mexico is ours!” squealed the other.

  “Already know that news, boys,” he said, sending them on their way.

  Mexico may be ours, but what on earth is mine, precisely?

  Perhaps his bit of dejection about turning thirty-five was no epiphany, just a whiff of the blues on a late-winter breeze. But it was also, he knew, a definite foretaste of something more bitter and poisonous. As he pushed open the front door with his shoulder and stepped into the darkness, he formed a clear-eyed thought: If my life remains unchanged when I turn forty, or forty-five—and why should it not?—then I will count myself a failure. Given his distrust of most sorts of success, that put Timothy Skaggs in a very hard place.

  Kent, England

  THE PRINT ROOM of Great Chislington Manor contained 133 woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs, nearly every one pasted directly to the walls. The only sounds were the hiss and pop of the coal in the fireplace and the scratch and inkwell clink of Sir Archibald’s pen. He sat at his desk, carefully dipping and furiously writing, composing his account of the events of the day, as he did every day.

  His son stood at the entrance, unseen, watching his father scribble away, the top of the white feather flicking. Would he never switch from goose quill to steel?

  Ben rapped on the door. “Father?”

  “Nearly ready,” he said. “Sit. What are Darwin’s islands called? In Spanish America?”

  “The Galápagos,” Ben said as he removed his coat and lowered himself into one of the stuffed chairs near the fire.

  Some seconds later, Sir Archie finished writing, waved his hand over the page to fan the words dry, stood, and walked to the fire. “Friday, the tenth of March, 1848, is done.”

  “He seems intelligent and interesting, Mr. Darwin. I was most pleased to meet and talk with him.”

  “Of course he is ‘intelligent’ and ‘interesting.’ He’s Charles Darwin! He is also very industrious for a man of his type. As well as a father already of five.” Sir Archie was fussing with the fire as he spoke, jabbing and beating the red-hot coal with a poker to make sparks fly. He sat down across from his son, brass rod still in hand. “Did the professor convey any…anxiety about the family’s financial situation?”

  Ben never failed to startle at his father’s perspicacity. “A little, yes, actually, he did.”

  In the firelight the corners of Sir Archie’s mouth tweaked upward, suggesting a smile. “A flatulent man,” he announced, “is an anxious man.”

  As Ben wondered whether The Diary of Archibald Knowles was filled with such aphorisms, the author turned to face him.

  “What is the awfully important business that we’ve convened in the middle of the night to discuss?”

  Ben sat forward and leaned his forearms against his knees. “Father, I have decided to take leave of here soon. Very soon.”

  “Of Kent? So shall I—on Monday I am off for Malvern to try Dr. Gulley’s cure—cold springs, sweathouse, Indian hemp smoke…they say Her Royal Highness the queen swears by Dr. Gulley.”

  “No, I mean that I shall be quitting the firm, sir. And, in fact, quitting—”

  Sir Archibald tossed his poker onto the marble hearth slab, where it slammed with a clang against the fender.

  “Quitting the firm.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Benjamin, I understand how Ashby’s death has upset your good sense, but the frogs’ revolution is a war of blacksmiths and swinkers and paupers against the likes of Ashby—and every bit as much against you, my boy.”

  “I am not—”

  “You are an industrialist, Ben. Despite your costly upbringing, as you shouted tonight at dinner, you enjoy the steam and the machine tools and our workingmen lined up on the floor.”

  “Indeed I did, but—”

  “An ‘everyday opera,’ you once called the Manchester works. Why in God’s name would you pretend sympathy for the loom-smashers? It is those clods and half-wits who want to return to the old days and repeal our modern ways. With more passion than any monarchist.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Ben told his father. “It is not street battles against kings in which I am inspired to enlist. It is the American revolution into which I intend to throw myself.”

  Sir Archibald regarded his baffling son for a long moment. “How drunk are you? The American Rebellion finished fifty years ago! What sort of joke are you attempting?”

  “Sixty-five years ago, and no joke at all, sir. I am sailing for New York.” Ben was relieved to hear himself finally say it out loud. He felt gooseflesh rise on his arms and neck. “I am emigrating. To America.” Emigration: he had never gone quite this far in his own mind.

  Archibald Knowles guffawed, a horselaugh that after a few seconds devolved into a cackle. His eyes glistened in the firelight. My wafting romantic boy, he thought as he looked at his earnest child in shirtsleeves, my beautiful contrary baby Benjamin. Why are the cosseted children of this supremely fortunate generation not content with their golden lots?

  “Ben,” he said, shaking his head, “life does not resemble one of your storybook tales. The real America is not the same as your pretty pictures of free Yankee backwoodsmen and wild red Indians and big whopper locomotives steaming alongside four-hundred-mile canals.” He turned and pointed up to John James Audubon’s paintings of a bald eagle and a golden eagle that hung above the door to the gun room. “I have no doubt that my pictures of the place are far nobler than the place itself. There is no business that a gentleman of your sort has in that strange, scruffy roughcast of a country.”

  “The strange roughcast is what I want! This country I find all too well finished and furbished.”

  “Your love of America was a lad’s hobby, Ben. You are well nigh twenty-seven now. Your salad days are nearly past. You are a grown man.”

  “Yes! Precisely! I have been a dawdler these last ten years, a truant, and now I haven’t a minute to waste.”

  His father made a short, sharp, puffing sigh and stood, wincing as always. H
e began to pace the Chinese carpet between the fireplace and his desk. Whenever events threatened to slip beyond his control, he paced. He had paced for hours at a time during the weeks his wife was dying.

  “If it is an adventure you’re after, we could have Philip find you a situation with the Colonial Office…”

  “Father…”

  “…or I might speak to the gentlemen at the East India Company. A year in the Punjab gunning for Sikhs should be plenty strange and rough for you.”

  “No. I am headed west.”

  “Sir Henry is running things in Madras now, and I believe if your brother and I asked him—”

  “I am going to America, Father.”

  But what good father would not endeavor to outflank his rash child? Mr. Knowles was quiet for a moment as he formed an idea.

  “All right. I see that you are determined. But allow me to propose a plan. The firm is joining with Spencer and Company to extend their guano fertilizer business into the United States. We need a man to serve as our director general of the enterprise.”

  “You wish me to become a jobber of puffin shit? To sell heaps of bird dung to the Americans?”

  Ben’s father stopped walking, grabbed the back of his chair with both hands, lifted the weight of his gimpy left leg from the floor, and, feeling every one of his fifty-nine years, looked over at his son with excruciatingly mixed feelings of pain and pleasure. He had raised a son who scoffed at his stratagems and accomplishments, who looked with disdain or pity at both the swamps from which Archie Knowles ascended and the fine hill on which Sir Archibald Knowles now stood. Yet Knowles the elder felt that he had thereby won the game. He had succeeded in producing offspring of such sensibility and refinement that they did not merely affect indifference to trade and profit, but were filled with a real, visceral contempt for the ordinary work of the world. And Ben’s tongue was no less glib and insolent—a jobber of puffin shit!—than any young earl’s. Ben Knowles, mocker of aristocrats, was himself an aristocrat in everything but title.