Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “‘They shall run like the lightnings.’”

  “What’s that?” Fargis asked, pausing, a smile on his face, as he stepped from the building, the very instant before a chunk of carved, painted black cypress collided with his head and shoulders, smashing him to the sidewalk. The shower of bricks, a ton of them, slammed down like cannon shot.

  DIVERTED FROM HIS work by the sounds in the street, ready as usual to surrender to any interruption, Skaggs laid down his pencil and walked to the window. An unblemished white fire engine was barreling down West Broadway. The engine was bright in the moonlight, a big four-wheel carriage with a dozen running men pulling the rope on each side and a huge 40 painted in gold on its rear. The bell ringer was doing his job, but unnecessarily—not much traffic was in the street so late at night. As the engine rolled south, a sow and her four piglets feeding at the corner scrambled to their feet and ran away for dear life, and a pair of boys shot out from North Moore Street, running after Engine Company No. 40 and the terrified swine family.

  Skaggs had nearly finished his lampoon about two children communicating by Morse’s code with the ghost of John Jacob Astor. He ought to have been writing his philosophical essay on time, the piece that might in one stroke transform his reputation from scabrous jester to visionary sage.

  But for now he needed to earn his bed and board as a jester. He knew The Spirit of the Times would want his ghost-of-Astor piece immediately—even more so as soon as the New York papers published the news of the actual spirit-talking children upstate. People around Rochester were all atwitter, Herman Swarr had written him today, over two little girls, sisters named Fox, who claimed to converse with a ghost in their house by means of knocks on walls and bedposts.

  Meanwhile, a bit farther west, in Buffalo and the surrounding towns, the churches had been holding special services, according to the Sunday papers: the Christians of western New York considered this week’s forty-hour-long cessation of Niagara Falls a sign of the Lord’s displeasure at heathenish modern life, a portent of the imminent apocalypse.

  Whereas here in the capital of heathendom, the men in charge of the newspapers had at first disbelieved the very fact of the Niagara marvel. Skaggs, flushed with excitement and breathless after his run uptown from the telegraph office, had barged into the Tribune with the news. They were convinced he was playing a prank. It was almost April 1. Greeley would not stop smiling, and the fact that Skaggs was waving an actual message sheet from the New York, Albany & Buffalo Telegraph Company only entertained him more. “Getting started on your All Fools’ Day shenanigans early this year, eh, Brat?” At the Herald, Dickie Shepherd, sniffing a bit of Skaggs’s lunchtime brandy, had loudly suggested that he was intoxicated. At the Mirror, where he had not set foot since the night three years ago he had let the sainted editor step into the river and drown, they’d considered his excited shouts—“I swear it, the Niagara has stopped, the Falls are no more!”—the hallucination of a sorry, guilt-racked madman.

  And at the Sun, they had accused him of “trying to pull a Poe.” The Sun had not lived down its publication of an extra by Edgar Allan Poe featuring the news that a famous aeronaut had completed the first transatlantic balloon trip. The story was pure fiction. And unfortunately, it had been published “four years ago practically to the day,” a subeditor at the Sun noted as he shooed Skaggs away. “Nip your fifty dollars elsewhere, man.” The next morning’s papers were about to be put to press, and Skaggs, rebuffed four times, decided to give up. “You paid Poe fifty dollars?” he said to the Sun editor on his way out. “My God, you fools did get sucked!”

  The next day, the Herald received the story itself by wire from Buffalo, and on Saturday—April 1—it published an excited two-column “exclusive.” A queer sequence of weathers—high temperatures, gales, sudden freezing temperatures—had formed a solid ice dam at the end of Lake Erie where it emptied into the Niagara River. And the Falls had disappeared. A wonder of the world had for two days and a night become an even greater wonder, a supernatural place.

  The waterwheels stopped, so mills and factories emptied. Thousands of townspeople and tourists made their way down into the suddenly naked rocky gorge to wander in awe, each of them wearing an expression—dumb, smiling, a bit worried about what might happen next—like a soul newly arrived in heaven. Fish lay flapping by the thousands in the riverbed, tons of catfish and bass available for the taking to anyone with a basket. People filled boxes and baskets with souvenirs that had been underwater—bayonets, musket barrels, tomahawks. And Swarr had been right about the cavalry: a squadron from Fort Niagara rode grandly down and back up the American half of the empty riverbed as a display of order in the face of the astounding. On Friday evening, after the temperature rose to 64 degrees, today’s newspaper reported, “a great wall of water roared and gushed back into its customary place, like the Red Sea after Moses and his Hebrews had passed.” Skaggs hoped that some fugitive slaves had used the opportunity to walk across to freedom in Canada.

  Looking out his window, he watched Engine 40 turn east into Franklin Street and disappear. He checked his watch—twenty past three in the morning—and returned to his desk and the children’s-séance-with-Astor’s-phantom story, resisting the impulse to go downstairs for a refreshment at the French café on Lispenard Street. However, he wrote only one sentence before pausing again. He stared vaguely across the room toward his cold stove, thinking. Ever since his brain had been invaded by Poe’s remarks on the creation and destiny of the universe—“Within the original unity of all matter and energy in the universe lies the germ of their inevitable annihilation”—the familiar contours of life seemed as warped and wavy as an opium moment. Had a cosmic whimple turned the world upside down? Every day’s news was a fresh stanza in some deranged epic poem. Kings tipping over like china dolls, free America suddenly a conquering empire stretching coast to coast, Astor dead, Niagara Falls gone, the telegraph reversing time, little girls speaking in knock-knock code to spirits…

  As he forced his gaze back toward the page, he spotted a shelled walnut on the floor a few feet away, leaned down, and grabbed it. Still just as tasty as this morning; the small, rude pleasures of living by oneself.

  DAWN WAS A few minutes from breaking. Shortly the sun’s rays would tint the cloud of smoke that hovered around the ruins of the sugarhouse.

  The Old Dutchman paced the sidewalk, preaching at the final fifty tired, disconsolate firemen who remained. But he was no longer shouting.

  “‘If we say that we have no sin,’” he said to them, “‘we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

  Had he chosen his New Testament verses this morning in light of the terrible circumstance? Or were they the random church memories of a confused old wretch?

  “‘Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.’”

  The sharp, chalky miasma of charcoal and dust and water, the familiar smells after a fire, were mingled with a strong caramel aroma, dreamy and luscious, the smell of twenty tons of burned sugar.

  Duff laid his ax in the box on the back of 15’s carriage, then crouched to pull the lead bags blocking each wheel.

  “‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’”

  The Old Dutchman was directly behind Duff now. The wagon that had come for Fargis and the other dead fireman, Kerr, was rolling away.

  “‘If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.’”

  “Tad?” Duff called softly to his lantern carrier, a boy of thirteen who was staring at the undertaker’s black wagon. “Come on now and gather your things, and your wits.”

  The boy wiped the tears from his cheeks with a coat sleeve. “No one had died since before the Old Dutchman started coming around, had they?”

  “Lots of people have died since then,” Duff replied. “Off now, Tad, go run and get Gray and Jim and th
e rest.” Most of Engine 15’s men had wandered off to a grocery for a drink of something strong. “It’s time to push off.”

  “No, no,” the boy said. He regarded Duff with a dreadful curiosity. “The Great Fire, in ’45, Duff. And that was the last time.”

  “The last time what, Tad?”

  “The last time a fireman died.”

  “‘I tell you,’” said the Dutchman, very quietly now, as if saying words he had never heard or spoken before, “‘there will be the same kind of joy before the angels of God over one repentant sinner.’”

  13

  April 7, 1848

  New York City

  WHEN DUFF, AT age five, had asked his father why Ma forced them to eat eels for supper every Friday, Zeno Lucking answered, “She believes it’s penitential for you, son.” For years afterward, Duff believed that if he ever dared to eat pork or lamb on a Friday, his mother would send him to the penitentiary, which he imagined was operated by angry, armed priests. When he finally summoned the courage one morning in the woods to ask his father if Ma would really send him down the river to Sing-Sing if he stopped eating fish on Fridays, Zeno Lucking laughed so hard and long he had to lean against a tree.

  Eel had not touched Duff ’s tongue since they’d moved to the city, but he continued to eat no meat on Fridays. Lately it had been his main nod in the direction of piety, and given the price of oysters, it was very easy to keep the faith.

  Skaggs had been saying that New York this spring seemed like a permanent carnival, but to Duff the city was like an unending Mass. The night of the Mexican War celebrations, when he had sniffed the burning sulfur and then tossed his fuse into the street, he’d been an altar boy swinging his smoky censer down the nave. On Tuesday he had walked in the funeral procession for Kerr and Henry Fargis. Duff had never seen such a crowd, so large and so peaceful, tens of thousands of silent people filling the blocks from the Bowery most of the way to the East River. For a pair of dead firemen! Duff did not understand this outpouring of grief, but on top of his sadness it made him feel proud and a little envious.

  He also felt guilty, of course, about Fargis and Kerr. A sense of contrition burned in him. Duff had always scrupled to make sure, at any fire he attended, that no one was burned or killed. The puncture in the gas pipe at the sugarhouse had been an act of righteous vandalism against the property of the propertied class, part of a campaign of retribution against Wall Street (on behalf of his father) and in particular against the Primes (on behalf of his sister). But except for Nathaniel Prime himself, Duff had never taken pleasure in anyone’s death, not even in Mexico. Indeed, wasn’t his true wartime bravery his refusal to kill innocents? “Justice is a messy thing,” the major had said to the brigade last summer in Churubusco at their final assembly, “and none of us but God himself can be certain of how and when it will be meted out.” The truth of that was proved in the war: by what lottery luck had Duff survived? He was reassured by today’s papers that Fargis and the others had not died for nothing: the collapse of the wall was being blamed on the moneymen who built and owned the sugarhouse. He’d also read that the injured man from 35 Hose had succumbed to his injuries as well. Another funeral.

  And now he was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, waiting in a line of people that snaked out the front door down Mulberry to Prince Street, over to Mott and then back up toward Houston. He had arrived just before two, and he had already heard the bells strike four. His shadow on the high brick wall was now taller than he. Duff decided the long wait was a down payment on his penance.

  When he was a boy in Dutchess County, there was no Catholic church within a half day’s drive, so every two months a young French Canadian priest riding circuit out of Albany would celebrate Mass in the barn of another Catholic family eight miles from the Luckings, with a portable confession box trucked along for the occasion. The risk of fire was considered too great for burning incense, so until Duff attended a Mass in a real church for the first time at age ten, the odor of church was dried hay and corn husks and manure.

  And although the sacrament of penance had been the aspect of religion he’d liked best as a young child, he had not confessed his sins since he was thirteen—not since he’d committed his first mortal sin. And he had lied to his mother, again and again until she died, about this neglect of the sacrament, a fraud that amounted to hundreds of additional sins he had never confessed.

  But now he was contrite, truly and sincerely sorry, and with all the sincerity he could summon he was seeking God’s forgiveness.

  As for his neglect of the sacraments, for most of the year in Mexico he had been forbidden to attend Mass or confess to the ear of a priest. Practically every officer had considered any priest doubly suspicious—not just a Mexican but a soldier of Rome, apt to deliver Lord-only-knows-what secret messages in Latin to the homesick Catholic troops.

  Beginning on that final terrible day during the siege of Vera Cruz, though, Duff had found a moment of privacy to cross himself and recite the Act of Contrition. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, he’d whispered as he’d watched the gunners load their cannons with “hot shot,” big eighteen-pound balls glowing red. He’d learned that day that iron does not melt until it reaches 2,800 degrees. “Twenty-seven hundred is plenty hot to broil Mexicans,” a sergeant had explained cheerfully. I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell.

  “Hot honey doughnuts!” cried a woman with a basket as she walked along the line of waiting Catholics. “Hot doughnuts a penny apiece!” Duff was hungry, but in the interest of propriety as he awaited his tribunal of penance, he abstained. A man had also been up and down the queue three times offering little paper portraits. “I have excellent souvenir pictures of Dagger John,” the fellow said softly, “but only five more…The latest lithograph of the bishop, and they’re almost gone.”

  “One for myself, sir,” the old lady in front of Duff said, and handed the man her five cents.

  Dagger John was John Hughes, the bishop of New York. And it was he for whom Duff and four hundred other Catholics were standing on the sidewalk along the fortress wall of St. Patrick’s. For one day during Lent each year, on the first Friday of the month, Dagger John personally heard confessions and administered penance and gave absolution. For the last several Lents of her life, Charlotte Lucking had come home practically whistling with pride at having confessed to Bishop Hughes. Her children had always wondered what sins their mother had to confess.

  Duff had never visited St. Patrick’s before. As he walked inside, the noise of the street diminished to nothing. His glance, as always, first found the crucified Jesus. The statue was smaller than he had expected, and not as bloody as some. He dipped two fingers into the holy water and made the sign of the cross. As he touched his head he felt the scar on his cheek sting and pulse.

  Should he call him “Bishop” or “Bishop Hughes” or “Your Excellency”? Duff had not come today because he idolized Dagger John. Rather, he knew that to make a clean breast of it, he could not depend on an ordinary priest to do the job. When he was fourteen, one of the altar boys, Sponge McCain, had stolen a handful of Holy Eucharist one Sunday and eaten them like cookies with two of his friends—his Presbyterian friend and Jewish friend. A girl from Transfiguration had happened upon this sacrilege in an alley off Hester Street, the three boys laughing, their mouths full of communion wafers—and informed Sponge then and there that she knew for a fact that desecrating the Holy Eucharist was grounds for automatic excommunication, and therefore he was no longer a Catholic and bound straight for hell. When he’d gone to confess the next day, he told Duff later, Father Varela had shocked him by saying that he lacked the power to absolve Sponge for such a grave sin—that he would need to seek the bishop’s approval. So today Duff had decided to come straight to the bishop.

  He was staring at the banks of candles, wondering what had ever become of Sponge, when the old lady opened the door of the box and let it slam shut, kissing her
new picture of the bishop and making the sign of the cross before she passed by Duff on her way out. His turn had come.

  “In nomine Patris…” he said as he once again touched his head, then his heart—“et Filii”—and then each shoulder—“et Spiritus Sancti”—before kissing the tips of his fingers.

  “Bless me, Excellency, for I have sinned. It has been…eight years since my last confession.”

  Duff strained but failed to hear any reaction behind the screen—tongue clicking, lips parting, a sigh.

  And then he began listing sins he had committed. The bishop uttered only an occasional “yes” in reply. A few minutes into the recitation, which jumped and bounced forward and back through the years, he came to the pressing reason he was here.

  “I caused the big fire that burned in Duane Street, Excellency…” He decided against saying Sunday; it had been after midnight when he lit the gas. “Early last Monday morning.” He heard the bishop rearrange himself, as if he had leaned closer to hear.

  “Caused it, my son? What do you mean by that?”

  Duff found his Irish accent hopeful, reassuring. He had never in his life confessed to a native-born American.

  “I started that fire in the sugarhouse. I did it because the people who own the place ruined my father and took the most awful liberties with my sister when she was a child.”

  “Three good men died fighting the blaze there.”

  “I know that, sir, Excellency. I know that terribly well. I run with—with an engine, and one of the men who died was a friend of mine. No one was meant to die there. It was not…a murder.”

  Now Duff heard a heavy sigh.

  “I am deeply sorry for this sin and all the sins of my whole life, Excellency.”

  “And is that the all of it? Every sin you have to confess?”

  Duff took a deep breath. “There were some other fires. One at a distillery, in February, a swill-milk hell that killed my baby brother and sister. And when I was young, three others. Three other fires.”