Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  They looked at each other for an extended, somewhat uneasy moment.

  She had never so baldly expressed to him a wish to abandon the brothel. Indeed, she and Skaggs had never discussed any particulars of her professional occupations apart from acting.

  She had always felt comfortable in his company. And for this last year, she had enjoyed their intimacies, despite the beard and his fondness for brandy. Indeed, it was in the fall of ’46, when she started spending two or three evenings each week at Mrs. Stanhope’s, that she’d decided she required a Skaggs—that is, one worthy, congenial man to whom she would give herself without charge.

  He had enjoyed her company even when she was Duff Lucking’s quiet and intelligent sister, before she’d ripened into this strong-minded woman. When Duff left for Mexico, perhaps never to return, Skaggs’s scruples concerning Miss Lucking diminished—he had started calling her Polly almost as soon as her brother sailed. And once he discovered she had become an associate of Mrs. Stanhope’s, his reticence toward her disappeared entirely.

  They were playmates, not soul mates.

  He had been worried that her new utopian, quasi-vegetarian, Greeleyite ardor might lead her to some extreme and inconvenient doctrine. Some weeks ago, in her maternal tut-tutting about the girl Priscilla, she had quoted lines from a new book, The Origin of Life and Process of Reproduction, which had left him dumbstruck. “‘A child cannot walk out,’” she’d read aloud, “‘but his eyes and ears are assailed with sights and sounds all bearing on this subject,’” this subject being sexual intercourse. What next? Would she be persuaded by the lunatic masochism of “spermatic economy,” which prescribed a maximum of one ejaculation per month? Skaggs fretted that the fine ideas of “free love” that Polly was picking up might lead to less love for him. But for now, like every wise man who wants what Skaggs presently wanted, he was the picture of discretion.

  “Congratulations, my dear,” he said as he guided her to the sofa. “I have been offered a new part as well—in Mr. Greeley’s troupe.” As he poured himself a thimble of brandy, he held the bottle toward her and raised his eyebrows as a matter of courtesy only, since Polly never indulged during the day. He sat down close to her and told her about the proposal from the Tribune, how Greeley had very flatteringly recalled his article last year about the coffin ship disgorging its load of starving Irish into South Street; how he had not disabused Greeley of his mistaken notion that he, Skaggs, was fluent in European languages (“Is not Latin a language of Europe?”); and how the editor thought he was “ideally suited to seek out and report, with the correct mixture of sympathy and skepticism, travelers’ stories of the spreading revolution.”

  Polly appreciated the hard exigencies of work for wages. But Skaggs’s Tribune news distressed her a little. Only a few hours a week, as he said, and plenty of fresh air…but wasn’t he too old and too qualified a man to become a sort of glorified errand boy?

  “Would you row out each time into the harbor to meet the ships?” she asked, her voice all earnest and curious girl.

  Row? Skaggs disguised his wounded feelings. “Greeley and the other news titans, my dear, have leased a little steamer to make the trip every day out to Sandy Hook.”

  She was surprised. “The newspapers have joined their forces? But aren’t they meant to compete against one another?”

  “Modern times,” he said, shrugging. He changed the subject again, hoping that with enough detours in the conversation the true purpose of her drop-in, their violation of the seventh commandment together, would somehow naturally…present itself. The word fornicate had formed itself in his brain like a monk’s chant.

  “Astor has died!” he said abruptly.

  “So I’ve heard. From Mr. Burton this morning.”

  “I think the specter of revolution smote the bastard. He saw history moving against him and chose to make a strategic retreat.”

  Skaggs lifted Polly’s left hand and lightly brushed his lips against her knuckles.

  She was not yet in the mood.

  “Skaggs,” she said, removing her hand from his, “what did you mean the other day, about Walsh, his ‘socialist beans and tomatoes’?”

  He was sensing that Polly and he would not be gamboling together beneath the linens anytime soon.

  “A few years ago, Mad Mike lived for a stretch at Brook Farm.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Was—one of the utopian colonies, editors and writers living together at a plantation outside Boston growing their own food. Another folly…another failed fanatical Fourierist phalanx folly. The place went bust last year.”

  Polly was intrigued. She had read about the socialist colonies sprouting up across America, many of them “phalanxes” organized according to the principles of a Frenchman, Fourier, whom all progressive people seemed to admire.

  Skaggs, naturally, had made a sport of deriding his ideas. In a review of Fourier’s book The Social Destiny of Man, he had called the scheme “hilariously and elaborately self-satirical in the French fashion.” Each community was to assign twelve work teams to raise one of twelve different varieties of Bergamot pear. Eventually, Fourier wrote, the people of the planet would be organized into precisely 2,985,984 phalanxes. Constantinople would be the capital of the new world government, presided over by an omniarch, 48 empresses, 576 sultans, and a Chancellery of the Court of Love. Peace would prevail, the climate everywhere would become temperate, disease would disappear, wild animals would become tame, the seas would turn to lemonade, people would grow tails containing eyes, dead bodies would evaporate into fragrances that would drift forever through space, and six new moons would appear in the heavens.

  Nevertheless, the basic underlying idea—like-minded people of good will coming together to share their goods and labor, all for one and one for all—sounded right and sensible to Polly.

  “But perhaps the time has become ripe only now,” she said. “The revolutions in Europe did not occur last year, they are occurring this year. Now.”

  He nodded, but he could not hide his doubt. Polly was growing angry.

  “You speak,” she said, “of ‘living one’s life as a perpetual experiment,’ yet you invariably ridicule such experiments as these.”

  Again! Did the young Luckings, brother and sister together, rehearse their attacks on his hypocrisy? Should he simply let her rail, decline to thrust or parry in reply?

  Polly continued. “The people engaged in projects like the Book Farm—”

  “Brook Farm.”

  “—are surely driven by the finest intentions, even when their schemes are flawed.”

  “Ah,” he said, unable to restrain himself, “the finest intentions! I suppose those pave the very depths of hell.”

  “You sneer. You mock Astor and the factory owners and upper-tens, but you also mock their enemies, like Walsh, and all those who would dig the rot from society to reform it. On which side do you stand, Skaggs?”

  He smiled and took her hand again. She jerked it away.

  “Which?”

  “Why must I enlist on either side? I mistrust parties and pigeonholes. Am I a journalist or a photographer? Am I witty or ridiculous? Why must I choose one or the other?” He paused. “Are you a good woman, or a bad one? Which?”

  At last she smiled a little, and relaxed against the arm of the sofa.

  “Evidently neither,” she said.

  Again he kissed her hand. This time as he released it she let it rest on Skaggs’s knee.

  “You are acquainted with Mr. Burton?” she asked softly.

  “Barely so. And years ago. I doubt he remembers me—and if he did, I am certain that our friendship, mine with you, would be unhelpful in your ambitions.”

  His answer was chillier than he wished.

  “Which is to say, my dear Miss Lucking, that your talent alone shall win you the part in his production of Dombey and Son.”

  Polly blushed.

  SKAGGS HAD NEVER used the lightning line. Therefore he had
not known, until it was explained to him by the agent at the telegraph office in Exchange Place, that the minimum charge to send a message was seventy-seven cents, for which one purchased the right to send fifteen words. Therefore, the insanely concise message to Herman Swarr he had composed this morning—ASTOR DEAD! YOU LOSE—was wasteful, since he would be paying for eleven unused words. As a professional paid by the word, Skaggs was accustomed to padding prose on command. But it struck him as unjust that he had to do so now, when he was the one paying. And he had only a half-dollar in his pocket. So after getting the agent to agree that “seventy-seven” was a single word, and persuading the man to extend credit of twenty-seven cents, he completed his message at precisely the correct length.

  ASTOR DEAD! IF YOU AREN’T,

  YOU OWE $1. PLUS SEVENTY-SEVEN CENTS?

  (WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!)

  He watched the agent tap away in Morse’s code. When telegraph keys were common appliances, as the Wall Street promoters insisted they would someday become, installed in every house and shop from Maine to Texas, might this funny new telegraphic style become the ordinary way of writing and even of speech, every document and conversation pared and crushed and minimized? A minute later, the last of his fifteen words was turned into electric pulses and sent in one five-hundredths of a second over 397 miles of copper wire into Swarr’s offices at the Buffalo Republic.

  According to Skaggs’s receipt, the message had been sent at precisely “3:16 P.M.” Outside, the rain had diminished to a mist, so he walked up to his studio to find the money he owed the agent. He made himself a meal from the still life he had photographed the day before—a half cheese, an onion, an apple, brandy—and after taking the shortcut through Jews’ Alley, he was back at the telegraph office by four. The agent took his two dimes and seven pennies and passed back a folded paper.

  “Your reply, sir.”

  He thought the man was joking. But there was not even the slightest smile on his sallow face.

  Skaggs looked at the dateline of the message he had been handed—“March 30 Buffalo 3:09 P.M.”

  He had discovered a ruse, some capitalist’s secret grand sham! The telegraph wizards were charlatans, humbugs, thieves!

  He still had his receipt, which he pulled from his coat pocket and held in front of the agent, side by side with the new paper.

  “Sent at sixteen minutes past three,” Skaggs said, “and answered by my friend at nine minutes past three? I think not, sir.”

  Skaggs tossed the paper to the counter. His tight, angry smile twitched in triumph.

  But the agent did not blink. He took a deep breath and said, very evenly:

  “Buffalo is one half hour earlier than we are here, sir.”

  “What? What?”

  “When it is twelve o’clock in New York, it is half past eleven in Buffalo. And ten past eleven in the city of Detroit. And ten minutes before eleven in the city of Chicago. And et cetera.”

  Had Skaggs ever felt quite so undone?

  “Your Mr. Swarr,” the man continued, “received our message before three on his time, and sent his reply immediately.”

  Of course. Skaggs had never thought about the existence of such small time differences. As a schoolboy he had learned that when it was night in Europe it was daytime in America, but this had been a merely theoretical truth, a fact he’d taken on faith. Now he had the hard evidence in hand.

  “Ah,” Skaggs said, “I see. Yes. Thank you.”

  What hath God wrought? And what was the need of opium now? The world was strange enough. His unfinished essay on the nature of time, filled with half-baked intuitions, suddenly seemed sensible and pertinent. He must finish it.

  Wishing to escape the gaze of the telegraph agent, Skaggs waited until he was outside to read the message from Buffalo.

  WILL YOU TAKE $1 WORTH OF NEW NEWS?

  NIAGARA FALLS FROZEN SOLID.

  ALL-TIME MOST AWESOME SHOW.

  THOUSANDS GATHERING. CAVALRY COMING.

  He read the sheet again. He hadn’t seen Herman Swarr in eight years, but he was a man of great natural rectitude who never fabricated stories or played pranks.

  He read the message a third time, then looked up, considering his options. In the sky, a rainbow stretched from above the Greek temple front of the Merchants’ Exchange toward the Battery. An omen, Polly would say. Swarr’s incredible dispatch was certainly worth a dollar, quite possibly more. Skaggs hurried up Nassau Street to find a buyer while the news was still fresh.

  12

  April 2, 1848

  New York City

  THE SUGARHOUSE, ONE of a dozen in Duane Street near the East River, was called Collins’s because an old sugarman named Collins managed it. But Duff Lucking thought of the place as Prime’s. Months ago he had read in the paper it was owned by a cabal of London and Wall Street merchant bankers that included Prime, Ward & King. This group’s fleet shipped opium from Bombay to Shanghai, South Pacific cane from the Sandwich Islands to Chile, guano from Chile to New Orleans, cotton from New Orleans to Liverpool, and Caribbean cane from Nevis to New York. At Collins’s the cane from Nevis was boiled into sugar. Sugar packed in barrels makes an excellent fuel, so when sugarhouses burned they tended to go for a long time, and this place was big, rigged up with gas-fired cookers.

  By midnight there were a hundred and fifty firemen scrambling around the block like ants. The light from the blaze made their lanterns moot. Men from nearby had taken the front positions—hose companies from Elizabeth and Chambers streets, and 21 Hose, from just down the block. This fire was farther south and east than 15 Engine ordinarily came, but Duff knew early that it was a big one, so his crew had been among the first to arrive.

  Duff felt proud.

  Destruction and creation are the essential cycles of life. This was a big blaze, still spreading. And not a soul had been hurt or killed—Duff personally made sure the building was cleared of people.

  The Old Dutchman was already on the block. To most of the men who ran with machines below Houston, the rants of the old man with the long beard no longer registered as words, only as one more part of the discordant song of fires—running, ringing, grunting, shouting, swearing, pumping, splashing, chopping, sizzling, sputtering, crashing…and the Old Dutchman’s sermonizing. No one knew who he was or where he had come from (his accent might just as well have been Norwegian or Hungarian as Dutch or German). But during the last year he had become a regular fixture at big fires.

  As usual, he was pacing back and forth on the wet sidewalk across from the blaze, hands clutched behind his back, bellowing Scripture. At the beginning of a fire, he would recite mostly from the Old Testament—often a single verse, over and over again—and then later, once the blaze was defeated, he took most of his excerpts from the New Testament. Tonight, for now, he was the prophet Nahum.

  “‘The chariots shall rage in the streets! They shall jostle one against another in the broad ways! They shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings!’”

  Looking into a window on the first floor of the sugarhouse, Duff saw the broken gas pipe hanging cleanly away from the wall like a broken arm, and stared. As he watched a flaming splinter shoot past it from the ceiling like a falling star, he suspected what was about to happen, and immediately it did: the gas from the pipe ignited, the ball of flame blasting the glass out of the window toward him. Other men instinctively ducked, but Duff continued staring, and watched the free end of the pipe as it swayed to and fro, gushing fire like some war machine of the future.

  Duff considered himself a warrior.

  “‘The chariots shall rage in the streets! They shall jostle one against another in the broad ways!’”

  Duff had been gone, fighting in Mexico, when the Old Dutchman made his first appearance. He still listened to the words, could not resist trying to make sense of their meaning.

  The second wave of men and machines was racing onto the block now, companies from all the way north of Houston and west of the
Sixth Avenue. 35 Hose and 38 Engine came careering down Chatham Street side by side, both pulling hard left to try to make the inside turn and arrive at the fire first. Making the corner, 35 bumped hard against 38, smashing the glass in one of its lanterns.

  “Lousy goddamned bastards!”

  Duff smiled. It was his old pal Henry Fargis, 38’s assistant foreman, making the curse.

  “‘They shall seem like torches!’” the Old Dutchman yelled.

  Fifteen minutes later, Duff heard a thick, low hissing and looked up. Smoke and steam and red cinders were surging from one of the round windows in the top floor. He stepped back three paces, four, away from an assistant engineer named Kerr and the scrambling men from 35 Hose, then took yet another step back, behind 38’s engine, next to a pair of men spraying a pipe against the fire.

  “Lucking!” boomed a cheerful voice from just inside the sugarhouse. “You damned chickenhearted bystander! To work, man!”

  Duff saw only an approaching silhouette, man and ax, illuminated by the orange flames and red timbers behind him, but recognized the voice of his friend Fargis. Fargis was inside the building, thirty feet away, walking out.

  “I’m acting foreman,” Duff shouted back, “overseeing my boys.” Up above, the gush of smoke and steam pouring out the window was growing thicker and louder. “And if I were you, Henry—”

  Duff did not see the wooden cornice above the round window buckle and drop away from the wall, bringing hundreds of bricks flying out with it.

  “—I’d step lively!”