Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  But, of course, old Archie Knowles would never admit his delight or his misery that his son was such a different species of Englishman than he.

  “Then apprise me, Benjamin, of the details of your magnificent American plan.”

  “I have no details,” he said. “I wish only to become the architect of my own fortune…”

  His father was an instant away from interjecting a disparagement—How very grand! or The poet speaks!—before Ben added:

  “…the same as you have done, sir.”

  More tears seeped into Archibald Knowles’s eyes.

  “America,” he said, shaking his head, disguising his soup of emotions as mere disapproval. “Why must it be America for you?”

  “America is the next stage.”

  “The ‘next stage’? Stage of what?”

  “Of social development. England is the zebra, and America is the horse that the zebra becomes. I want to ride the horse.”

  “The zebra and the horse? What rubbish! Is this science, according to your farting friend Darwin? America is the newer model, is that it? A carriage with a rubberized hood? A dress with an extra inch of padding on the hips?”

  “Yes, a better mode. A more advanced model.”

  “Because in America every idiot can pretend he is nobody’s inferior? Unless, of course, he has the rotten luck to be a nigger…I trust you do know that your beloved America has its own classes of men in society, from very high to horribly low. Oh, the hypocrites! Did you not read Dickens’s accounts of the place?”

  Archibald Knowles citing literature! “Do you refer to American Notes, Father, or Martin Chuzzlewit?”

  His father ignored the quiz, since he had never read a word of Dickens. “The country teems with brutishness and poverty.”

  “The country teems with possibility. Here we grip the illusion of permanence. The Yanks delight in change. America is a place in flux, perpetually in flux, by design…”

  “‘Flux,’ yes, precisely, flux, as when a man with the dysentery shoots bloody shit from his arse.”

  “…which means that in America, no dream is deemed impossible—”

  “You sound like an overexcited vicar.”

  “—not even the impossible ones!”

  “A boozy vicar inventing riddles.”

  Each was enjoying this duel, the universal and eternal struggle of father versus son, generation versus generation.

  “And every American is an inventor,” said Ben, now unstoppable, “if not of some electrical gimcrack or new tool to clean corn, then an inventor of new customs, new ways of speaking—or, I daresay, of himself.”

  “There it is! A demented improvisation in the forests and deserts, a million square miles of schemers and impostors who piously believe every one of their frauds.”

  “Yes, there it is—a nation of improvisers.”

  “Where everything was forged the day before yesterday and nothing lasts longer than a season.”

  “Yes.”

  “The half-baked nation,” Sir Archibald said, “where speed trumps all.”

  “Yes.”

  His father shook his head again, sat back down at his desk, and shut his eyes. Sir Archibald had grown fatigued by his own inexpressible confusions. Did he sincerely wish his son to capitulate, and abandon his dreams of America? He did not. But did he want the boy to leave England for years, or forever? He did not.

  “Father?”

  The old man opened his eyes. “Who will”—he waved a hand—“remove and clean your soiled boots? Who will heat the bathwater? Dennis and Rose will not be accompanying you.”

  Ben had to admit—to himself—that while his imaginary picture of life in America did not specifically exclude servants, his bold scheme had not yet extended to such details.

  “I can order coal, and light a fire. And perhaps I’ll even learn to undress myself.”

  “You mock…”

  “I mock only the mocker,” Ben replied.

  “But how do you propose to pay for the necessities in America? Surely no fancy-free young American expects an income from his retrograde English father…Maybe you will make a shilling a day selling tobacco and biscuits in the street. Or—I know!—you should construct railways—yes, you and ten thousand Irishmen can cut pine trees and lay the tracks through the wilderness…and wipe your arse with leaves…and hunt grizzly bears with your bow and arrow.”

  “You are a comedian, Father.”

  “No, I am a practical man wondering how his second son will survive. What money will you use?”

  Ben glanced away, and found himself staring at the portrait near the door of eight-year-old Philip, six-year-old Isabel, three-year-old Benjamin, and the infant Caroline in profile, smiling wide-eyed at their unseen mother. Ben’s living memory of Caroline, who died only a year after Mr. Haydon painted the portrait, was now faint, and merged entirely with this picture of her.

  “Are you quite finished gathering wool? Do you care to give an answer?”

  “I have some savings. As well as Mother’s bequest.”

  “Her Scottish pin money? Am I meant to laugh or cry?”

  When Ada Knowles died, Isabel found deep in the drawer of her dressing table a yellowed envelope containing forty-four £5 Scottish banknotes issued thirty-odd years earlier, in the year of her marriage to Archie Knowles. Packaged with this secret cache was a recent note explaining the money’s origins (a confidential bridal gift from her father intended as a hedge against matrimonial disaster) and her wish that upon her death it be shared equally by her two younger children, “preferably in the exercise of some noble, interesting & hopeless indulgence.”

  On the £28 a week Ben earned from Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham, he lived well—indeed, lived more or less oblivious to money. But he had no other income, and without the job at the firm, he knew, he would need a fortune to generate an equivalent sum. His half of his mother’s bequest had grown to £120, which would throw off an income of…two shillings a week—a fraction of what he paid his servants. But in America, he would not need four new suits of clothes and ten new shirts and two new pairs of boots each year, nor two servants, nor clubs, nor a whole house to live in. In America, he would wear a plain American costume and find some gainful occupation and live like other Americans, by his wits. He figured that his mother’s money and his £82 in savings could last him a year.

  “You are, I suppose,” Ben told his father, “meant to admire my determination to survive without your assistance, and without any rich wife, by my own efforts.”

  “Yes, yes, so you say, the architect of your own fortune…” But instead of continuing to shout about Ben’s improvident, quixotic ways, Sir Archie decided in that instant to surprise him. “Well, I should think your mother in heaven, bless her large liberal heart, will be pleased. ‘Interesting and hopeless’ were her words, were they not?”

  Ben was shocked. In fact, he had been so certain of the response that he was now silently reciting his father’s actual words to be sure that they contained no trap. And then, given the void he suddenly faced, he stumbled into an argument with himself.

  “And ‘noble’ as well,” Ben said. “‘Noble, interesting, and hopeless.’ To tell the truth, my American ambitions are far more selfish than noble.”

  “Like all ambition. All sensible ambition.”

  “But perhaps Mother meant for us to use the money to build a…refuge for prostitutes in Shepherd’s Bush or…or a parsonage in Belize.”

  Sir Archibald shook his head, then turned and started toward the door. “Come with me to the gun room, Benjamin,” he said, limping heavily. “As long as you are bound for the frontier…”

  “I am bound for New York, Father…Your wound seems especially vexing tonight.”

  “Admiral Nelson won at Trafalgar with one arm and one eye,” he said quickly, as he always said when anyone expressed concern about his bad leg.

  “If you are headed for America, you had better be prepared to shoot, and you mi
ght as well take your ten-gauge. I believe it is still in the gun room closet.”

  Sir Archibald was confident, without turning around to see, that he had surprised Ben again. He was pleased that his younger son no longer seemed frightened of The Game.

  Ben felt dizzy. His check rein had been unfastened, the whole bit jerked from his mouth, the harness suddenly pulled off and tossed away. He had control of his own destiny, and the fear and joy were indistinguishable. As he followed his father out of the print room, he turned and glanced once again, for a passing instant, at the portrait on the wall of little Benjamin. How strangely hungry I appear, Ben Knowles thought. And then he was gone.

  8

  March 16, 1848

  Paris

  PARIS WAS A chaos.

  A month into the new republic, almost every last wisp of exuberance had disappeared, replaced by a dour nausea, like a drunkard’s the day after a binge. The stock exchange had reopened, but share prices sank. Banks were collapsing. Businesses remained closed. No one had money to spend.

  Three weeks to the day after the monarchy fell, thousands of national guardsmen had gathered in the streets to protest their own official disgrace as well as the socialist drift of the new government.

  One of the angry men marching down the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle—“Good News Boulevard”—was Gabriel Drumont, a forty-seven-year-old former sergeant of the former Municipal Guard. He was, like half of Paris, without work. He had been a member of the guard for sixteen of its eighteen years of existence, the only job he ever held after the army, and now the service had been declared defunct by the radicals. Yet because he was from la Garde Municipale—the Municipal Guard, a mere gendarme in the view of the men of the Garde Nationale who’d organized the demonstration—Drumont had been instructed to march near the end of the parade. For sentimental reasons, he brought along a paper parcel containing the bloody private’s cap and blouse in which his brother Michel had died.

  Among those lining the sidewalk, watching the soldiers’ parade, was Marie Brasseaux, a twenty-year-old daughter of a bookseller who had been a member of an underground political club before the February Revolution. She stood on the curb with a few of her young comrades, watching and heckling the contre-révolutionnaires. And as it happened, she was wearing the same maroon dress she had worn a month before, the evening the Drumont brothers had arrested her for making bombs.

  Because some of the soldiers were chanting—“Nous sommes des hommes fidèles!” We are loyal men! We are loyal men!—the sidewalk hecklers raised a chant of their own. “Le peuple dit non!” Marie and her chums shouted. The people say no! The people say no!

  Gabriel Drumont was on Marie’s side of the boulevard. She spotted him just as she snarled a final “…non,” and for a few seconds she was stunned into silence. His hair was now short and he wore a mustache, but it was he, no question, the sergeant of the Garde Municipale who had grabbed her a few blocks from this very spot, threatened to let his men have their way with her, promised to lock her in a cage in Sainte-Pélagie along with the other subversive vermin, and whose underling had bruised her neck and wrists.

  She pointed at him and shouted, “C’est vous! Brute! Criminel!”

  One of her friends grabbed Marie’s arm, but she jerked from his grasp and strode into the boulevard to confront this brute, this criminal who had abused her, who had resisted the people’s will at the crucial moment on the night of February 23.

  Gabriel Drumont didn’t remember Marie until she was close to him, walking alongside him, jabbing her finger toward his face like an angry lover or wife.

  He did not stop walking, which fed her anger.

  The heat of her rage and this public contretemps had in one stroke improved Drumont’s mood.

  “Où est l’arme de mon grand-père?” she demanded. “Je la veux tout de suite!”

  Now Drumont looked her straight in the eye.

  The audacity of these radicals—especially the bourgeois radical brats, like this girl. You want your pistol returned immediately—your grandpa’s “antique” pistol and dagger with which you would have happily killed me?

  He grinned at her, saying nothing.

  The sergeant’s smile made Marie Brasseaux want to snap his neck then and there. When she swatted his hand, his parcel, Michel’s uniform, fell to the pavement, and he lunged down to retrieve it from the grime.

  She had succeeded in making his smile go away. He met her glare. He knew what honor and decency required him to do. He forced his face to relax and stepped up on the curb.

  “D’accord, mademoiselle,” he said as her friends gathered around protectively, you must forgive my surprise, I am very sorry, not yet accustomed to the new order. Your old P-P, the dagger and pistol, shall be returned to you tomorrow, if you would kindly provide the address.

  In the Latin Quarter, she told him. Number 7 Rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, above the Brasseaux bookshop, the door at the back.

  “Très bien,” Drumont said. “Demain?”

  Marie, now feeling very pleased with herself, amended her instruction. If it’s to be tomorrow, she said, have it sent in the morning—before I leave to join our great march in defense of the revolution…

  She was showing off for her friends. Tomorrow they and tens of thousands of other democrats would be in the streets, not on the sidewalk, endorsing the socialist drift of the new regime and protesting today’s protest—a counter-counter-revolutionary demonstration.

  Tomorrow morning? Why not? “Demain matin, oui, mademoiselle,” he replied with a mask of courtesy as he turned back toward his march.

  Marie Brasseaux had one final instruction for her former tormentor. And under no circumstance, she said, raising her voice as Drumont trotted away, send your stupid little boy on the errand, do you understand, your soldier you shot in the street that night. “Votre petit stupide garçon,” she said.

  He stopped and turned around.

  It required all of his strength not to curse her—not to kill her on the spot. No, he assured her, I shall personally return your antique to you. He didn’t have her dagger-pistol, of course, had never even touched the thing. The corporal had deposited it in a weapons closet that same night.

  Drumont made a small bow, and before he left raised his hand toward them, palm open, and said, “Fraternité, mes citoyens!”

  Two of Marie’s friends, impressed by the sergeant’s progress along the path of rehabilitation, replied in kind. “Fraternité, monsieur,” they said.

  the next morning—March 17, 1848

  MARIE BRASSEAUX WAS among the hundred thousand Parisians preparing to march on the Hôtel de Ville in support of the radicals in the new government. But before she could join them, she needed to await a delivery.

  When the Garde Municipale sergeant arrived at her apartment carrying a bundle, she let him inside. It was only as she tore away at the pasteboard that her surprise gave way to suspicion. There was only a stuffed black-and-white bird.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she asked. “Un pingouin?”

  Yes, the penguin of your English comrade, Drumont replied. I thought you might wish to return it to him.

  The Englishman? Don’t be a fool, he was not my “comrade,” I have no idea who he is, or where.

  Alas, Drumont thought. But it had been worth a try.

  “Je veux mon poignard,” she said.

  The dagger! Yes, of course, miss. Here, he said, revealing a brass scabbard under his coat and pulling out a bayonet. Before she was able to say, But that is not mine, Drumont had grabbed a handful of ringlets, yanked her head back, and sliced twice, back and forth, deep across her neck. Then, as she gurgled, and crumpled to the floor, her hands grabbing at her open, pumping throat, he jammed the knife straight into her left breast, and her heart.

  Drumont used the shredded pasteboard from the penguin to clean his hands. A mere six weeks ago, he thought, glancing down at the dead girl and pool of blood, back when everything was different, I would have been w
ithin my rights to execute her, a treasonous would-be assassin of the king caught practically in the act. He dropped the wads of paper on the floor, then wiped both hands, backs and palms, across the penguin’s smooth feathers, leaving a set of red smears on its white belly. And in any event, it’s one fewer marcher for this afternoon.

  As he turned to leave, he was startled by someone in the back of the room and reached for his bayonet—but it was merely his own reflection in a looking glass. And there on her dressing table, sitting on a velvet pad beneath the mirror, he noticed something gleam and glitter…an old gold brooch covered in pearls and diamonds. Another antique from another grandparent, no doubt, but in any case no longer of any use to Marie Brasseaux. Whereas Drumont was now embarked on an expedition of uncertain length and cost.

  By the time the revolutionists’ demonstration finished that afternoon and Marie’s friends discovered her body, he was already speeding north from Paris, 450 francs in his purse. As the train had approached Boulogne, he had released his pawn ticket for the piece of jewelry from the open coach window into the winds. And by the time the police of the fifth arrondissement had begun investigating the Brasseaux murder, Drumont was on the deck of a ship, watching steam blow from the end of its funnel into the darkening sky over the Channel.

  Though he was a native of Corsica, Drumont loathed sailing. An irony, and there it was. One or two days at sea was all he could stand—from Aiacciu to Cannes as a young man, now from Boulogne to Guernsey. At least he had managed to sleep for some of this present hell.

  He walked to the bow and pulled his collar up over his neck as he faced the wind. There was no turning back. And his way forward was clear, unambiguous. Decisions seemed to be making themselves, as if he were taking orders from a higher power. His dispatch of the girl had been an obligation, not really a choice but a matter of defending the defenseless Michel’s honor and his own. And fulfilling those duties had required him to escape his subverted city and nation, which in turn pointed him in one direction—to England, where he would avenge his brother’s death. He knew only a surname, Knowles, and the fact that this young coward Knowles was a revolutionist. But those were a beginning.