“Mr. Knowles of London, I would like you to know Mr. Skaggs, of New York City. And vice versa, please.”
“Please forgive me in advance for waylaying you this morning. I am a paid curioso. How do you do, Mr. Knowles?”
The hard twang of a real American! Uttering a real American how do you do! Yet from that improbable face. “Good morning, sir,” Ben finally managed to say.
“Have we been introduced before?” asked Skaggs. “I was a week in London a year ago, and perhaps—”
“No, sir, I do not believe we have been, I—forgive my groggy state.” Ben motioned both men to sit and took the seat next to Skaggs.
“What information of any use at all to you, sir,” Ben asked Skaggs, “might I possibly have?”
Memmo explained to Skaggs that Ben had been in Paris “upon a business trip, as l’entrepreneur” during February’s revolution, saw the fighting break out “with both his own two eyes,” that his “dear and oldest friend” was shot dead, and that he had been stalked around Paris and then even to London by “a dog-mad French sorehead.” And then Ben retold the tale himself, in detail, which Skaggs scribbled down between sips of coffee, since he knew—well-to-do Englishman, acquaintance of revolutionists (make it “an intimate of”), eyewitness to history, tragic young death of an artist, et cetera—it would suit Greeley and the Tribune perfectly.
Ben made Skaggs laugh with his descriptions of the stuffed penguin and the girl with the bomb. Skaggs made Ben smile when he asked if his father’s firm “was Knowles, Miter, Newcastle & Shafflebottom,” and made him chuckle when he explained that he had read about the firm in the newspaper when “they became hooked up with Prime, Ward & King of this city in the Chinese opium and Peruvian bird-dung businesses.”
A half hour later, Skaggs was nearly finished.
“May I know your given names, Mr. Knowles, for my little article?”
Ben took a breath. “I am Benjamin Motley Mactier Knowles.”
Skaggs wrote, then suddenly looked up. “Motley…Are you therefore, perhaps, kin of the wife of America’s second favorite Frenchman?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No need to beg my pardon, sir,” Skaggs replied. “I was asking if one of your Motley relatives—so to speak—is married to the Count de Tocqueville.”
Ben was heart-struck with surprise. How could this random, smiling American stranger know of his relatives? His mind groped for an explanation. Was Skaggs a deceiver of some kind, a thief who had ransacked his cabin and found the letter from Tocqueville? But why? Or perhaps he was a hireling of his father’s, engaged from London by Sir Archibald to spy on Ben in America? Or, worse, an ally of the French sergeant’s…who bore some grudge against Tocqueville…? No. Ridiculous.
“I apologize, sir,” Skaggs said, “if I have unsettled you with my question. It was intrusive of me to inquire. It was, I am afraid, as you shall discover, quite American of me.”
Ben took a breath. “My cousin Mary Motley is indeed married to the Count de Tocqueville. But how did you possibly know that?”
“I am blessed and cursed with a knack for recalling stray and trivial facts. Some years ago I wrote a review of the books of your cousin-in-law (the very great books, may I say) and in the course of my research discovered that the count had—and let me apologize for this in advance—discomforted his family by marrying an English commoner called Miss Motley. The rest of it, connecting you to her, was my lucky guess.”
“Congratulations, sir. And may I ask you—which Frenchman ranks first in the affections of your countrymen?”
“The savior of our revolution, of course, General Lafayette—or, if you please, the Marquis de La Fayette.” Skaggs returned to his notes. “And finally, sir, may I ask your business in this country?”
“No business at all, apart from…adventuring, I suppose.”
“I shall describe you as, quote, ‘a refugee former London merchant banker and cosmopolite of independent means.’”
Ben snorted and returned Skaggs’s smile, pleased as could be by this American’s jolly familiarity. He enjoyed the idea that he was a refugee.
“Well, I must write something—‘traveler’? Or ‘immigrant’?”
Ben thought for a moment. “Perhaps both. Probational immigrant. Permanent traveler, possibly. You may say I am embarked on an expedition, but one with no particular goal as yet.”
“How very mysterious and gnomical you are, sir.” Skaggs closed his notebook. “Particularly, if I may be impertinent, for a person of your race.”
Ben laughed out loud. The man joked like Ashby as well.
And if Skaggs was not already fond of Ben, that laugh confirmed the bond.
“Ha!” Memmo interjected.
They chatted a little more, and Skaggs mentioned that Astor’s recent death was “giving our local celebrations of this Springtime of the Peoples their own special mirth and sense of progress.”
“Astor,” Memmo noted, “he was the immigrant, like Mr. Knowles and yours truly.”
“Are you joking with us?” Ben asked Skaggs. “Are Americans truly taking a close interest in the European uprisings?”
“Why do you suppose I’m sitting here on behalf of the New York Tribune, begging to serve as your amanuensis, sir? Why is the Herald paying for steamship shipments of La Presse from Paris? We are avidly curious here—cracked with pleasure over the disgrace of foreign kings and princes. It proves the point of America, does it not, of our own grandfathers’ rebellion against George III? It feeds our great conceit concerning our own special greatness.”
Memmo was nodding. “America is best, you will surely come to agree, Mr. Knowles.”
I do agree, Ben thought, and I have not yet set foot there.
“Come to think of it,” Skaggs said, “there would be a tidy income for you on this account, in this country, if you could bear it. Not that you require…money.”
“An income?” Ben and Memmo asked at once.
“Yes indeed, by means of the lecture racket. You can speak to audiences here about the revolutions there…eyewitness to the dramatic and violent events themselves…expert on the forthcoming, well, Americanization of free republican Europe, and so forth.”
Memmo was excited by such an idea. “And he is paid how many dollars to make his speech?”
From outside came the sound of very loud, watery gurgling and convulsive mechanical bleats.
“Good God, man, I know people, not remotely celebrated or accomplished people—former drunkards, newspaper hacks who exchanged a few words with General Scott on his way to Vera Cruz…Transcendentalists…mesmerists…in one instance, actually, a combination of all four of those—these sharpers are paid fifty dollars for a lecture, the lucky fools.”
“Eleven pounds nine shillings!” Memmo calculated for Ben’s benefit.
“For a speech only? Incredible! America!”
“And there are some at the top rank,” Skaggs continued, “who earn one hundred and two hundred dollars a night.”
“I appreciate your good thoughts on my behalf, sir,” Ben said to Skaggs, “but I am no expert. As I say, I was present in France for only two days, and for a good part of that time I was asleep.”
“Ah, but you had the good luck to be in Paris, and to be there during the crucial days! You participated in the very beginning of the revolution and witnessed its triumph! You may be imperfectly learned in the politics, but—”
“Entirely ignorant.”
“—but you have a ripping good tale to tell, sir. Americans demand nothing more than that. And nothing less.”
“Two hundred dollars,” Memmo said, nearly giggling, “to speak!”
The America’s steam whistle finished clearing the water from its pipes and finally blew a long, honking blast. The pilot had come aboard, and was ready to steer its two thousand tons into the harbor, through the bay, up the river, and into its pier. Before the whistle ended, Memmo had started vocalizing the note loudly.
Skaggs ap
plauded. “Excellent—Duet in C-flat for Alien and Steam Engine,” he said. “And you should know that I am a former professional reviewer.”
“B-flat!” Memmo corrected. And then: “I am no alien, by your way. A citizen, naturalized since before last year. I am your fellow American.”
Skaggs stood and handed Ben a strip of paper from his notebook. On it he had scribbled his full name—Timothy Bailey Skaggs—and his addresses at home and the studio. “My card, if you please. When I am not engaged in one or another vice or folly, you may find me in those places.”
“You are most kind, Mr. Skaggs. I am fortunate to have met you this morning.”
“The good fortune and lucky timing are all mine. May I ask where you will reside in New York?”
“Until I get my bearings, I shall be at the Astor House.”
“I shall forgive you that, since the owner is now dead.”
“Are you not landing in New York along with us?” Ben asked.
“I regret to inform you that you shall be putting into port elsewhere.”
“Quarantine, is it?” Ben asked.
“New Jersey,” Memmo said.
“The medical inspectors will undoubtedly permit a non-Hibernian gentleman such as you to escape the detour to Staten Island”—the immigrants’ quarantine hospital—“but Cunard has built his docks across the river, in Jersey City. My employer’s foul little boat is scheduled to snatch me off this vessel at half past eight.”
From some distance away, the Newsboy’s nasal steam whistle sounded twice.
“Speak of the devil,” Skaggs said. “Mr. Benjamin Motley Mactier Knowles, welcome to the United States of America.”
20
April 29, 1848
New York City
EVEN IF HE had not had his rash cupid’s moment on his first night in the United States—imagining that he had fallen in love with a stranger across a public dining room—Ben Knowles would have spent his first hundred American hours in a permanently roused state, wandering and looking and listening. He walked up and down and back and forth through New York, miles and miles.
All day every day, most of the city was as noisy and bright as the West End on a Saturday night. As nearly as Ben could tell, no quiet quarter existed south of Fourteenth Street. Practically every shop stayed open for business past six, and even some respectable-looking places did business at midnight. The taverns and bowling saloons seemed never to close.
American buildings were as bright and wide-eyed as the people, every façade filled with as many windows as it could contain. What’s more, glaziers walked the streets everywhere, crying, in German accents, “Glaz put in, glaz put in, glaz put in.”
A few days had fully confirmed the London caricatures of tobacco-loving Americans chewing and spitting, chewing and spitting, in every place and circumstance, heedless. He bought a cake, bit off a tiny piece to chew, and spat it out after a few horrid seconds.
The riot of advertising was not, as it turned out, a peculiarity of the wharves. The city was painted and plastered with words and words and more words in a hundred different fonts. The bombast was ubiquitous. Broadsides as big as the biggest newspaper sheets covered walls and fences, and on some busy streets the sandwich-board men outnumbered the ordinary pedestrians. As an experiment, walking up Broadway his first time, he had accepted every handbill and trade card thrust at him. At the end of twenty minutes, the stack of paper and pasteboard was thick as a book.
Although in unfamiliar cities he had a knack for losing his way, he found himself unable to become lost in New York. He had known, of course, that the city was on an island and growing straight up, like a trained shrub in a hothouse box. And he knew that it organized itself nowadays according to a strict grid. But during his first full day on land, as he roamed north, he was astounded to discover that after a couple of miles, apart from Broadway and the Bowery and Madison Avenue, New York abandoned street names altogether, in favor of numbers—not merely the Fourth Avenue, the Fifth Avenue and the Sixth Avenue, but First Street, Second Street, Third Street, Fourth Street, Fifth Street…and evidently on and on, up into the suburbs, the exurbs, namelessly toward infinity. It was like a Punch lampoon, the American worship of the efficient and practical extended to the point of absurdity. But after a little while his reflexive English sniffiness passed—Eleventh Street, Twelfth Street, Thirteenth Street—and he began to relish the plain audacity of the system. It was the famous American confidence and directness. If civilization was sprawling forward in a particular direction, presume that it would never stop, let the empty land ahead of settlement be plotted and stamped by the simple rules. Abandon the arbitrary and sentimental residue of history—of Church streets and Market streets and the rest; history be damned. Numbered streets would permit the blank slate of this new city and new land to remain fundamentally blank as a blackboard, even as the lines—Twenty-third, Twenty-fourth, Twenty-fifth—were filled by the quick provisional scrawls of people and buildings and lives.
As he came to what appeared to be the northern edge of the city—Thirty-first, Thirty-second, Thirty-third—he saw a great stone building looming ahead. Was it the national bank? It had no windows. A cathedral? There was no spire. Some old fortress against the Indians? The Dutch had shoved the last of them away into the northern woods two hundred years earlier. At Thirty-seventh Street he realized that it was, of all ridiculous things, a brand-new Egyptian temple. And when he reached Fortieth Street he saw it was something more bizarre still: the Croton Distributing Reservoir, a rectangular water tank bigger and deeper than any he had ever seen or imagined, a lake constructed aboveground with granite walls as high and thick as a row of houses and a perimeter hundreds of yards long. It was filled with 20 million gallons, a man told him, pumped underground into the city from fifty miles away.
He climbed the steps and found a promenade at the top, and joined the people, scores of them, strolling along the granite walks and surveying the city. Along the western precipice he stopped to gaze at the North River, as the Hudson was called where it flowed past Manhattan. At this latitude it was not quite so jammed with boats and ships. When he finally turned to leave he found himself looking at the back of an organ-grinder, and into the face of a tiny monkey on the grinder’s shoulder. The monkey was still. Ben grinned at it and it slowly shook its head, looking away from Ben only when its master turned the crank of the grinder and began playing “Yankee Doodle.” How Sir Archie would revel in reviling this moment: a monkey dancing to a clinking machine rendition of the great patriotic American tune.
A HALF HOUR later he was in an office at the address in Fourteenth Street he had been given by one of the clerks at the hotel that morning. When he announced his business, the real estate broker, a Mr. Magoffin, smiled and lunged toward him as if they were brothers, then grabbed and shook his hand as if it were a stubborn pump handle.
“OK then!” Mr. Magoffin said.
“I beg your pardon?” Ben had never heard or read “OK.”
Instead of explaining himself, Mr. Magoffin (“Call me Jim”) began rapidly reciting the particulars of a dozen apartments available to let—“quaint but clean,” “absolutely apple-pie order with gas and water piped,” “in the stretch of the Fourth Avenue where many young professional men reside,” “in MacDougal Street, adjacent to the black-and-tan zone, but inexpensive.” Within fifteen minutes, Ben had signed a lease, and the exceedingly jovial stranger had taken several of Ben’s American banknotes as advance payment on the rent for his $180-per-year rooms in Sullivan Street.
When Mr. Magoffin—“No, Ben, I implore you, it’s Jim”—suddenly turned away and opened a book, then glanced repeatedly back and forth between the money and the pages he turned, Ben asked what he was doing.
He lifted the book up to show its binding. “Need to see if your bills are in Bicknell,” he said cheerfully. The title was Bicknell’s Counterfeit Detector and Bank Note List.
Ben had heard his father tell and retell the story of how he
had made his first true fortune in 1837 “owing to the childlike and very nearly insane financial recklessness of your heroes the Americans.” So Ben more or less understood the basic quirk of the U.S. monetary system—that paper money was printed and issued not by a central government bank, but in thousands of different colors and sizes by hundreds of different private banks in every state of the union. Faced with the real thing now, he was agog. He thought Magoffin might be one of the confidence men Memmo had warned him about.
“Do you mean, sir,” Ben asked, “that you must determine the authenticity of each and every piece of money you receive against that…entire…listing?”
Magoffin had found a description of Ben’s ten-dollar note that satisfied him, and he shut the book. He smiled and shrugged and winked all at once. “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom! Our wildcat USA, don’t you know!” He paused for a moment, then for the first time turned a little solemn. “May I ask you, Ben, for your frank impression so far of our great nation and city?”
“They have exceeded my most extravagant expectations.” He thought of Tocqueville’s unhappy feeling that the French had staged a play about radicals’ overthrow of a king, rather than conducting an actual revolution. But for Ben in America the comparable sensation was in no way dispiriting. “It seems almost,” he said to Magoffin, “as if you and all your countrymen are staging a wonderful pageant for my benefit about America.”
Magoffin did not know quite what he meant, but he laughed enthusiastically, slapped Ben on the back, and instructed him to appear no later than noon with all his belongings ready to occupy 171 Sullivan.
“But it’s well past noon already,” Ben said.
Magoffin hooted. “Noon on Moving Day—Monday. Day after tomorrow. Monday’s the first, don’t you know!”
“Ah.”
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