THAT AFTERNOON IN Broadway they had only rumors and hopeful hunches about the revolutions fevering through Europe like a contagion. They knew for certain only what had happened in France a month before. They had no idea that news of those events had been transmitted by telegraph to every capital in Europe. Spring arrived on the Continent unusually wet and warm and stormy, and with the extreme weather were coming imitations of Paris in dozens of different cities and towns—uprisings, revolts, and revolutions, undertakings variously heroic and madcap, sometimes both at once. Even on the rustic edges of the Continent, in places like Spain and Ireland and Romania, republicans and socialists and rioters of no particular creed were shouting and burning, shooting at the kings’ men.
No one in New York yet knew that two weeks before, the Austrian monarchy had ended press censorship, granted a constitution, and forced its chancellor, Prince Metternich—Metternich, old Europe’s presiding genius and tyrant—to resign and leave Vienna. They had no idea that those events in Vienna had in turn inspired crowds in Berlin to stage their own protests at the palace of the Prussian king, who had capitulated the previous Sunday; or that on Monday in Munich, Bavaria’s King Ludwig had abdicated, just as radicals in Milan had launched an insurrection that by Wednesday was entirely victorious; or that on Wednesday in Venice a group of liberals had taken the arsenal and declared a republic; or that at this very hour in his Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Czar Nicholas was writing a proclamation that Russia would resist forever this evil of revolution.
People all over Europe were sobbing and babbling, shuddering at what might happen next. Others, maybe fewer or maybe more, were laughing and singing over what had happened already. The people arise and kings quake, monarchies defeated and republics born, voilà.
IN NEW YORK CITY, at the edge of the New World at the dawn of the new age, there were no soldiers aiming muskets, no desperate rulers. On the platform in the Park near City Hall, geysers of oratory spouted from some of the city’s most powerful politicians. A few spoke in German or Gaelic as well as English. In speech after speech, the proposition that provoked the loudest and most general acclaim was for a ten-hour working day, although three of the listeners applauded only politely, since Skaggs and Polly worked fewer than ten hours a day already, and Duff voluntarily worked many more.
Finally, as the bells of St. Paul’s and Trinity chimed four, Skaggs decided he had eaten as many hot yams and cold sausages and listened to as many harangues as he could stomach.
“May we take our leave?” he asked Duff and Polly. “My old legs are sore.”
“But they say the Hutchinson Family is to appear,” Duff replied.
“As an ensemble, or each of the hundred of them, one at a time, performing one of the hits?”
“They say just the three brothers and Abby,” Duff replied. A few years ago, before they were the most popular musical artists in America, thirteen Hutchinson siblings had sung and played together with their parents onstage. “And I do aim to see Abby.”
“Well, I guess we must be approaching the finale now,” Skaggs said. “The Fourteenth Ward’s most celebrated debtor is taking the stage.”
“Mad Mike” Walsh walked to the front of the scaffold slowly, so that applause would have time to break out and build before he reached the podium to speak. After Walsh had lost a libel case the previous year, his paper, The Subterranean, shut down—owing Timothy seven dollars for two book reviews. Skaggs was still peeved about the debt. But for the rest of this crowd of shoemakers and bookbinders and tailors and porters and students and even the odd clerk—and for Duff—Mad Mike was a beloved rabble-rouser, a Democrat who ranted in the state assembly the same way he ranted in the saloons of Mulberry Street and the Bowery.
“He looks old,” said Polly, seeing him for the first time.
Skaggs knew that Walsh was only thirty-eight. “Perhaps hoeing the socialists’ beans and tomatoes,” he said, “aged the Irish scoundrel.”
“The struggle that our victorious brothers across the sea have heroically begun,” Walsh shouted, the accent of County Cork still thick, “is only just the beginning! It is time now for this country truly to become, as the song says, ‘the land of the free’!”
Duff and the thousands were clapping again. Skaggs had to admit it: Walsh had a knack for stirring passions.
“Our European brothers and sisters are burnin’ the thrones, refusin’ to remain as serfs—and so must you! Your bosses and their elected apologists tell you that your labor is a-buildin’ America. But it is a-buildin’ only their fortunes! They tell you that you are creatin’ a new city on a hill here. Well, I tell you this—that sometimes creation must be preceded by good, clean, righteous destruction.”
The audience clapped and whooped. A claque of young men in the back of the crowd, members of Walsh’s political club, the Spartan Association, chanted “Walsh, Walsh, Walsh, Walsh” until the applause subsided.
Duff put his lips close to Polly’s ear. “‘Destruction and creation, the cycle of life,’” he told her, “just as Daddy said.”
Walsh resumed. “Do not believe the dogtricks and sharkings and friendly falsehoods handed to you daily by the demagogues.”
Skaggs smiled and shook his head. Was there a more titanic demagogue in New York than Mad Mike Walsh?
“The demagogues tell you that you are free men. But they lie! You are slaves! You are slaves, and none are better aware of that fact than the heathenish dogs who call you free men. No workin’man is free! Everything he buys, every step he turns, he is robbed by some worthless…wealthy …drone.”
This time, Polly joined in the applause. Skaggs, however, was stunned, not by Walsh’s sentiments but by how he had expressed them. “Worthless wealthy drone” was Skaggs’s, a phrase he had coined last year to describe the elderly author Washington Irving—in one of his unpaid articles for Walsh’s Subterranean.
“Thief!” Skaggs shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Thief!” he shouted a second time. People nearby smiled encouragingly and nodded as they clapped harder. They thought he was affirming Walsh’s attack on their capitalist oppressors.
“Amazing,” Skaggs said. “On top of everything else, the man is a barefaced plagiarist.”
“Plagiarist?” Duff asked.
“He filched my phrase!”
When Walsh finished, but before the Hutchinsons took the stage, Duff carefully wrote down P-L-A-Y-J-R-I-S-T in his journal.
The applause and shouts for the Hutchinsons were even more rapturous than that for Walsh, like the glee of children when Christmas candies are handed out. And as the four siblings began to play and sing, the sounds of their violin and violoncello drew scores of passersby off the streets to watch and listen, people who didn’t care much about upheaval in Europe or the prospects for democracy. Asa, John, Judson, and Abby Hutchinson were young celebrities.
Skaggs was so pleased that they did not perform “King Alcohol” he declined to point out that Mike Walsh, a defender of Negro slavery, remained onstage tapping his foot as Abby sang her solo on “The Slave’s Appeal,” one of the Hutchinsons’ abolitionist tunes. And near the end of the rally, while they fiddled and sang the final verse of “There’s a Good Time Coming”—
“In the good time coming
Nations shall not quarrel then,
To prove which is the stronger;
Nor slaughter men for glory’s sake—
Wait a little longer.”
…Skaggs held his tongue again. As he glanced over at the smiles of his young blond friends—Duff mouthing the lyrics, Slaughter men for glory’s sake—/Wait a little longer—he did not see fit to remind them that Walsh’s political power was enforced entirely by the brutal shoulder-hitters of his Spartan Association, young men such as Fatty Freeborn who lived for quarrels, slaughter, and glory. Hypocrisies be damned. The day was fine.
11
March 30, 1848
New York City
YOU ARE GIVING me the sack on account of
that goddamned toady bootlick Mathew Brady?” Skaggs had said to Ninian Bobo twelve hours earlier. He regretted his public whining, but it was the publisher who had chosen to announce his decision at Shakespeare’s at the end of a night of drinking.
“Brady and the hundred others who have set up shop a stone’s throw from here,” Bobo had replied. “What choice do we have, Timothy? These days I could hire my own camera operator and assistant, full-time, for fifteen a week.” He had gone on for another half hour as if he were being pinched, not caressed, by the market’s invisible hand, until Skaggs had abruptly stood and walked out.
He was now considering the implications more coolly. On the one hand, the end of his barter arrangement with Bobo would let Skaggs devote himself to his own pictures instead of Bobo’s paper carte de visite portraits of the pseudofamous, and give him more time as well to contribute to The John-Donkey, maybe grind out another eighty-dollar novel or two, and finish the essay about time.
On the other hand, he had never laid out cash for the studio. Could he bear to take some ordinary scribbler’s job to subsidize his photography? Just how much humbling was he willing to endure in order to pay the rent Bobo was demanding? Could he consent to work as one of Greeley’s “news collectors,” a Tribune harbor-crawler, a glorified errand boy? Even at the rather lucrative wage of three dollars per four-hour errand?
Yet the end of his photographic hackwork for Bobo was already paying Skaggs in the currency of time, affording him the freedom to laze at home. Which he was doing this gray morning, wearing his tattered blue and orange Turkish slippers, purple velvet smoking cap, and paisley dressing gown as he walked downstairs from his apartment on the third floor to fetch his morning papers. He tended to act the part of a raffish swell when he was hard up, and his little stretch of West Broadway from White to Walker, lately teeming with French picture-painters and wood-carvers, lent itself nicely to Skaggs’s ruined-aristocrat illusion. He wondered if all the local cheese eaters and cigarette smokers would return home to their revolutionary republic now, or if instead more of their kind would join them here.
He wondered also, crouching in the drizzle to scoop up his papers, whether his eighty-one-year-old great-uncle Gaster would make good on his (drunken, late-at-night, onetime) promise to bequeath his favorite nephew his house in Greenwich Village. From two blocks west, Skaggs heard the chorus of sledges slamming iron for the Hudson River Railroad, under construction along Hudson Street. When dear old Gaster does finally succumb and I take up residence in Barrow Street, Skaggs thought, I could make the trip downtown in ten minutes once they’ve finished laying the tracks from Christopher to Chambers… He sighed.
Back up in his parlor-library-study-dining room, he made his way to his one comfortable chair and glanced at the Tribune—his eye moving directly, as if guided by God, to the great story of the day, of the week, of the month, a piece of news that excited him as much as any European revolution. His spirits lifted. To hell with Bobo and earning a living!
John Jacob Astor had pegged out, fallen dead, finally, at age eighty-four.
Skaggs had once written in the Mirror that hatred of Astor, more than any other thing, provided a common bond for New Yorkers of every class, every race, every language, every creed, every age. He was the richest man in the city, in the nation, perhaps among all billion humans in the whole world, kings and queens aside. The official reckoning was $3 million, but Astor’s total wealth—the value of half the ground in Manhattan and Lord only knows how many millions of acres of the western wilderness—must be ten or twenty times that. Yet it was not simply the size of his fortune that fueled Skaggs’s and others’ loathing. Astor was hated because he was New York’s first great landlord. Despising landlords had become an obligatory sentiment.
Astor was also despised because he was both rich and well known, and yet unlike other celebrated men of wealth (such as Barnum), he never made any concessions at all to popular sentiment, or displays of magnanimity. Astor was the ultimate democratic product, a foreign pauper (Johann Jakob Ashdor) who had declared himself an American and scrabbled a fortune from nothing. Yet he never stepped up to his obligations as America’s first famous rich man. His public performance was always that of the peevish antidemocrat, crabbed and miserly and by every appearance contemptuous of the moaning mob of paupers and hustlers who dreamed of moving in and up like him.
He was resented by some because he remained so very foreign, and by all, whether they knew it or not, because he seemed immortal and unchanging. Every other thing in America was new. Some Americans (such as Skaggs) were unsettled by the pace of change, but their own hopefulness depended upon the fact of ceaseless, shocking change. Astor, however, had been rich and famous forever. Astor had arrived as a young man in America before it was the United States, and yet he was still enlarging his fortune, still buying up swaths of Manhattan, still building mansions, still, impossibly, alive.
But now dead.
Hooray! Skaggs smiled recalling the anti-Astor rants of his Buffalo friend Herman Swarr, and the dollar wager they’d made one night on whether either of them would outlive Old Skinflint.
Ordinarily Skaggs devoted an hour a day to reading the papers, but today he would spend two. Each morning delivery boys dropped three papers on the doorstep—the Tribune, opposed to all evils; the Herald, opposed to all celebrated individuals, but in favor of violence; and the Sun, which couldn’t decide whether or not it supported slavery, or if it would sell advertisements for condoms and abortions, or if it was in the business of publishing fact or fiction. At least one evening a week, Skaggs stopped in at the gaslit reading room of the Society Library on Broadway to skim the other half dozen half-decent dailies. For The Scorpion, The Flash, The Rake, and the rest of the sporting papers he spent his own pennies in the street. How could he resist the catalogues in The National Police Gazette of the week’s foulest seductions, rapes, and murders, entitled simply “Seductions,” “Rapes,” and “Murders”? He had stopped reading The Whip, however, after it published a list of alleged New York sodomites on the pretext of moral righteousness.
Not all of today’s tasty bits of the papers concerned Astor. A page and a half of the Herald’s eight were devoted to journalism on the subject of journalism, a dispatch under the byline “Mr. John Nugent, in the Custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms.” Nugent was a Washington correspondent, and had been charged with contempt and arrested by the Senate over the weekend because he declined to reveal which government official had slipped him the secret copy of the Mexican War treaty the Herald had published. The paper announced it was increasing Nugent’s salary by 100 percent for as long as he was confined at the Capitol. Skaggs was envious of this trick: double pay plus free room and board plus painless punishment plus the honor of martyrdom.
It was past noon. Even before the familiar knock on the door had finished—two slow, two fast—he was up and on his way to greet his visitor, letting the Tribune’s two big sheets separate and float to the floor.
He had not seen Polly Lucking since the Festival of the Peoples, nor entertained her privately for weeks. And he had never seen such an electrically blissful smile on her face.
“And to what do I owe this surprise—”
“Skaggs,” she said, “I believe my luck has turned at last!”
As he shut the door and took her shawl, she grabbed his head between her hands and kissed his forehead, astounding him.
“Good God! Evidently so has mine.”
Polly was burbling. “I have just come from Mr. Burton’s new theater in Chambers Street—”
“Burton?” Skaggs was suspicious.
“The comedian. And impresario.”
“I know Burton.”
“I sensed good tidings the moment I entered, and smelled the fresh sawdust and plaster. It’s just down the block from Stewart’s, you know.”
“Naïve child! Seduced once again by the perfume of the brand-new. And, of course, by a Brit—a low, lecherous Brit, by the way, who preys
on pretty girls like you.”
When William Evans Burton was running his Gentleman’s Magazine, he had turned down a comic story by Skaggs about life in Illinois. And some years before that, Burton had scandalously abandoned his wife and son in London for a sixteen-year-old girl.
“I am not naïve.”
She poked his belly with her umbrella. He grabbed it by the silk and dropped it in the corner.
“A Brit,” he added, “who is considerably portlier and older and gamier than even I.”
“His first production at the new theater, in the summer, will be a dramatization of Mr. Dickens’s latest!”
“Dombey and Son?”
“The first time on any stage! I read for the part of the heroine, who is called Florence Dombey. And do you know Mr. Dickens’s birthday, Skaggs?”
“I do indeed, the seventh of February in 1812—the man is more than thirteen months my senior.”
“February the seventh is also my birthday! And do you know my middle name?”
“Dickens?”
“Florence! Mary Ann Florence Lucking!”
Her eyes were bright, her nostrils flared. She was hot with hope. Polly was prone to this sort of mumbo jumbo—fortune-tellers’ cards, meaningful bumps on the skull. Skaggs attributed her lurid credulity to the votive candles and communion crackers of a Catholic childhood. It saddened him a little.
“I am extremely pleased for you, Polly.”
“According to your friend Miss Chapman, whom I also saw at Burton’s, if he invites me to join his cast, the pay would be fifteen dollars a week.” Caroline Chapman was the disrobed English actress who had been trapped in the closet with Skaggs at the burning theater when Duff rescued them. Until today, Polly had disliked her. “At that rate, and with my savings, I should be able to end my association with Mrs. Stanhope entirely.”
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