Sir Archibald would return from shooting the following week, Drumont learned from his talkative confidential secretary at the office in King William Street, when an audience might be arranged, but young Mr. Knowles had indeed visited Paris during the February disturbances, and had the most awful adventures there…
And so as Drumont talked haltingly with the secretary, aided after a while by a Monsieur Cecil Shufflebotham who spoke French badly, he altered his masquerade, posing no longer as a tradesman collecting a debt but as an officer of the Sûreté investigating the senseless murder of a young woman in Paris who was reported to have been…quite friendly with the young Monsieur Knowles before she was killed. The two Englishmen told Drumont they were certain that Mr. Benjamin Knowles would wish to assist the police inquiry in any way he could, but that he would need to do so by transatlantic post, since he had sailed for New York a month ago…perhaps, Shufflebotham suggested, Drumont might wish to write to Knowles fils in care of their associated New York firm of Prime, Ward & King?
The secretary wrote down the particulars and, as Drumont prepared to leave, Shufflebotham asked if the authorities in France had made any headway in finding “le cadavre absent de Monsieur Lloyd Ashby.” Drumont had no idea who or what on earth he was asking about. A corpse? What would Inspector Vidocq do now? Drumont thought it best to shrug and refer, vaguely but sympathetically, to “les affaires confidentielles de la police.” Which seemed to satisfy the English idiot completely.
22
May 7, 1848
New York City
NOT SINCE HIS university days had Ben been deprived of entirely private hygiene. And he did not, to be honest, enjoy this aspect of his new democratic life. Although a girl came around each morning to empty the chamber pot and bring water for the sink, all three sets of tenants (eleven people in all, including four children and a servant) shared one necessary in the rear garden, which the adults called “the backhouse” and the children “the gong.” The landlord, a professor of chemistry at New York University who lived nearby, promised Ben that he planned “as soon as feasible to equip each household with a patent dry-earth commode—a handsome oaken chair, really—so that everyone’s excrementitious affairs may be managed more comfortably and privately indoors.”
In addition, all the other places where Ben had lived by himself—at Cambridge, in Bonn, in Manchester, in London—had been furnished for him before he took up residence. He had enjoyed his New York furniture-buying expedition, however, and found himself quite satisfied with his secondhand chairs and bed and somewhat stark living quarters. He’d never realized before how many dozens of inessential objects had cluttered his house and every fine house in London. Here in his plain whitewashed flat above Sullivan Street there were no end tables, no tea tables or card tables, no butler’s tray table, bill-paying table, or secretaire. A tattered trunk with broken hinges left by the previous tenant served as his nightstand. The building was equipped with gas, so he didn’t require lamps, or tables for them. His new home looked to him not empty or impoverished but spartan and serene. Given that he spent most of his waking hours immersed in the foreign excess and clutter of the streets and shops and markets and theaters, he found himself relieved to return every evening to his private oasis of austerity, like a cool swim at the end of a hot summer’s afternoon.
Not that he didn’t still adore the foreign excess. He devoured a dozen large round sweet American oysters each day—an entirely different breed from the puny, brackish English variety. He had discovered during his first evening walks that a district of concert saloons and bordellos lay just south and east of his neighborhood. And now he understood what the real estate broker had meant by a “black-and-tan zone”—every nearby block of Sullivan Street and the next street over was filled with colored people. Ben had never seen so many Negroes in one place.
He walked and walked for hours every day across the city. On the afternoon of his second Sunday, he set out to post a letter to his sister, pick up any mail that might have arrived for him at the Astor House, and amble in the neighborhoods east of Broadway. When he crossed Lafayette and came into Delancey Street for the first time, he might as well have been back in Bonn on the Pisternenstrasse. He had known nothing of New York’s Kleindeutschland, and this “Little Germany” was not little at all. Streets with German shop signs and conversation continued for blocks to the east, and for even more blocks, he found, after he turned down into the Bowery. And notwithstanding the Christian Sabbath, the streets were alive with people and commerce, and smelled of bread and burnt sugar, coffee and beer, tobacco and shoe leather and varnish. Every second shop was a baker or cabinetmaker. Indeed, it seemed that everything brown and fragrant and pleasantly bittersweet in the city was sold by Germans.
Ben stopped in Chrystie Street to watch some men on ladders removing the cross from the top of a church, and inquired of another bystander, a young man wearing a derby and a jacket of bright red and yellow checks, what they were doing.
“Changing that old church they bought from the Methodists into their sinny-gogue,” the young man said with a wink as he puffed on his cigar. “They’re makin’ it into their own”—he pronounced this slowly—“Temple Emanu-El.”
They? Their? Was this fellow not a Jew himself? Ben had seen sidelocks like his in London, in Houndsditch Street and at the Rag Fair, on Jewish tailors and peddlers. And a church turned into a synagogue? On a Sunday? Ben suspected he was being teased.
But in fact, the fellow was telling the truth—and he was not a Jew at all, but simply wore his hair in the fashion of the b’hoys, with long, thick curls flopping around his ears.
“Strange days, eh?” the b’hoy said, shaking his head. “Who needs to go abroad? America turnin’ into a foreign country here before our very eyes.” Then, recalling that Britons were foreigners too, he added, “Not meaning to give offense to you yourself.”
As Ben watched, the cross descended on a rope, swinging and twisting as it went; he noticed that one of the men on the ground reaching up to catch it wore a skullcap.
Around the Bowery’s intersection with Canal Street, the distinctly German character became just one racial strand among many. Now, Ben thought, he had arrived in the heart of mongrel America. Paddy Worden’s Worden House was across from White’s Ethiopian Opera House (NIGGA MELODIES! the billboard over the doors announced), which was adjacent to Toby Hoffman’s saloon, where he stopped to eat a plate of deviled eggs and, for the first time in his life, pickled cucumbers.
One whole block, on both sides of the street, consisted of nothing but a pair of beer gardens, both already filled with men and women at this hour, lounging, laughing, drinking, and listening to a musical hodgepodge. He tried to pick out the different tunes as he passed—a polka, a Negro song, an imitation of a Negro song, a Haydn divertimento, and some Teutonic dirge, all played simultaneously by five different bands on trumpets, castanets, violins, harmonicas, oboes, tubas, accordions, and drums. Scattered around the gardens he saw two jugglers, a team of three acrobats, and a plate-spinner, and for a few minutes watched a Punch-and-Judy show featuring a marionette which, at the finale, appeared to snip its own strings and walk off the stage under its own power.
He ate some shreds of grilled beef from a cart, then turned right to make his way toward the Astor House, passing into a zone of increasingly gamy saloons. A boy in front of Big Jerry Tappen’s offered Ben a card advertising that night’s boxing matches. And then he was in a neighborhood of back slums. It was revolting, but no more wretched or dense with humanity than Whitechapel. The houses tended to be smaller than in London’s poor quarters, almost all one or two stories, and of a hastier, more recent construction. Cracks and holes in windows were stuffed with rags and wadded newspaper pages.
There were nearly as many Negroes in these streets as in his own neighborhood. And he heard Irish voices all around.
He saw a girl and a boy sitting cross-legged on a stoop with a pile of potatoes between them, peeling off t
he skins with their fingernails.
He saw two boys at the side of a hovel, standing on their tiptoes and staring inside. (He could not see what they saw—a stranger, still wearing his waistcoat and trousers, shogging himself against the boys’ aunt, lying half naked on a pallet of gunnysacks and straw.)
Half a block farther on, a barefoot, bareheaded woman standing in the doorway of a grocery caught Ben’s glance. She poked her tongue out of her bruised, unsmiling mouth and slowly licked the full circumference of her lips, paused, then licked again.
On one block he counted fourteen saloons and grog shops and liquor groceries. He turned left down a little side street, and a few paces later passed into an enveloping stench—no mere smelly breeze but an oppressive atmosphere of putrefaction, human excrement as well as that of horses and hogs, old beer, fresh vomit, decomposing rats, plus the steamy fumes of fat renderers. In the shadows on his right, a little flood of wastewater suddenly coursed down the gutter…and as it flowed into an area of sunlight and pooled, Ben saw that it was blood, gallons of it. His stomach fluttered, but he regained his composure and turned back to the main road, called Orange.
At least half the businesses in Orange Street sold old things (watches, guns, umbrellas, hand mirrors, chairs, jackets, hats, dishes, and more, on and on), and every shop bore an Irish name (Hart, Buckley, O’Breck, McBride, Costello) until he was south of Cross Street, after which every shop had a Jewish name (Seixas, Noah, Gratz, Myers, Judah). As he came to a weedy green, he stopped to read a sign nailed to the door of a shed called Paradise Grocery that advertised BEER OR CROTON 1 PENNY A GLASS, PRINTED SCENES & OTHER SOUVENIRS OF THE FIVE POINTS FROM 5 CENTS. Of course—he had stumbled into the Five Points, New York’s most celebrated stretch of geography, an international synonym for urban poverty.
“It ain’t the actual Croton water, mister,” a boy on the sidewalk half whispered to him. His accent was Irish. “If you were considerin’ spendin’ the penny.”
“I beg your—excuse me?”
“There ain’t a stopcock between here and the Bowery south of Walker Street—none of the pipes come over into the Points at all, of course.” He gave Ben a moment to absorb the information. “Clean and polish for three cents, sir? Make it two. Best blacking in the Sixth Ward.”
The boy made a show of taking his cleanest rag from his box and began wiping Ben’s boots as if his hands were cams on an engine. Directly across the street, Ben saw a pair of identical signs that said DICKENS’S PLACE, each painted with a green arrow that pointed down to a bright pink door below grade.
Again, the bootblack caught Ben’s glance and anticipated his question. “Yes, sir, that is Pete Williams’s famous drinking and dancing place, the very one Mr. Dickens writes about in his book.”
The book was American Notes, which Ben had read as soon as it was published a few years earlier. Its scene in the cellar saloon in the Five Points was the most memorable—whites and Negroes packed together watching the impossibly talented young black man Juba dancing like an imp. He had intended to visit.
“But in Mr. Dickens’s Notes,” Ben said to the bootblack, “it was called Almack’s, was it not?”
“An English gentleman, I hear now!” He spit on the toe of each boot and continued wiping. “So it was, sir, and our Mr. Williams across the way is a colored man with a genius for business, which is why he’s changed the name of his place to Dickens’s.”
“Is that so?”
“Sure! To inveigle visitors like yourself to pay their shillings to stop and watch the reels and heel-and-toe tappers. Back when I was young,” said the boy, no older than fourteen, “Almack’s was for the locals only. Now they get mostly foo-foos, sir, Bostonians and foreigners and upper-tens down for the night from the Fifth Avenue and that like.”
Ben lost all interest in paying a visit to the former Almack’s. He was reminded of his family’s holiday stop one summer in Cornwall at “King Arthur’s Castle.” When an actor dressed in a Merlin costume and speaking in pseudo-Chaucerian rhymes had accosted them, his brother shoved the man away—“Leave us alone, you ridiculous fraud”—and it had been the one time in his life Ben remembered being grateful for Philip’s easy cruelty.
Now the Irish boy was about to inveigle Ben. “I can take you there, sir, as a special guest of Pete Williams—or just down Cross Street for a personal tour of the Old Brewery.” Ben knew of the Old Brewery, renowned as the world’s worst tenement, a hundred jerry-built flats housing a thousand of the unluckiest New Yorkers. “I can show you the green slime, the piss-drip ceilings, the murder rooms…I can show you everything. Andy Kelly is my name.”
“Thank you, no.”
Ben’s boots were clean.
“Are you here in New York for some time, sir?”
“Yes, I believe I am. I’ve let a flat.”
“Ah! You’ll need a girl to clean and wash for you, then, eh? Perhaps shop for your food and so on as well?”
As Ben considered the suggestion, the boy half turned his head and shouted—“Oona!”—then resumed his patter. “My cousin is just now over from Balbriggan, a country girl, all by herself, and she’s honest and healthy and hardworking and never takes a sip of liquor. Oona! Come!”
From out of a narrow side yard strode a fierce-looking girl with dark circles under her eyes and tousled black hair, wiping her wet hands on a dirty apron.
“Oona, you have soap on your chin,” her cousin said, and she wiped the white foam away with the back of her hand.
Oona Kelly was shocked by the sight of the Englishman from the dock in Liverpool. She wondered for a panicky moment if he had followed her to America. But then she saw in his eyes that he had no idea they’d met before.
“This good gentleman,” her cousin Andy said, “requires a maid of all work.” He looked Ben over, calculating quickly. “Just yourself, is it? Two rooms? Maybe…two hours every second or third day. Eh, sir?”
“I haven’t much money to pay…”
“Ah, we all of us run short now and again, right? As expatriated compatriots of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, we can offer you a good discount, sir. Instead of the usual…fifty cents for six hours a week of faultless labor, instead, only for you, sir, only forty.” Ben’s face registered a jot of uncertainty. “That’s one and ten, more or less—eight shillings a month, give or take. Not even five pound for the whole year.”
“A year?” Oona said to her cousin. “Don’t get ahead of yourself and frighten the gentleman, Andy.”
Hearing the throaty Irish voice, Ben suddenly remembered her. She was smiling now, as she had refused to do in Liverpool. Ben smiled back, and nodded.
And so he walked out of the infamously filthy, depraved Five Points wearing absolutely clean boots and employing a witty housemaid. After passing by another huge new Egyptian temple (the Tombs, as they called the city jail), Ben found himself stepping directly into the familiar genteel quarter of the Park and City Hall and the Astor House and the Broadway stores. This instant transition from stinking Five Points to silken High Street made him a little dizzy. He stopped and turned around, thinking he had lost track of time and absentmindedly walked farther than he imagined…but no, behind him still in view were the ramshackle wooden buildings. Just ahead was a parade of merchants and bankers in fourteen-guinea suits and shiny beaver hats and their wives and sisters riding in fine two-horse carriages. He looked back again at the slums. It was like a trick, as if he were living inside a story, whisked capriciously and instantly from one realm to its opposite.
Up ahead, just past the Park, he saw the flags of ten nations flying atop the American Museum, and he realized he had in fact walked from one entertainment district to another and now to another still, from the Bowery to Five Points to Park Row, each one a museum of curiosities with its own character and themes. New York was a pleasure garden of many parts.
As he gave his quarter dollar to the man at Barnum’s door, the fellow said in a rushed monotone drone, “Good aftern
oon sir welcome to the American Museum our next performance of ‘Ignominy A Shocking Tragedy of the Five Points District with Music’ begins in the lecture room in ten minutes thank you.”
Although Ben had been hungrily attending the theater since arriving in New York, and while Barnum’s scenery was remarkable—a reproduction of the gutted interior of the Old Brewery constructed on three levels—the play itself was beyond dreadful. (“I may be a mere immigrant pauper girl, but not so destitute of virtue that I shall let the grog peddlers and fleshmongers soil and sell me!” ) Ben left the hall at the end of the first act, but roamed through all four stories of the museum until it closed.
In fact, he spent the better part of the next two days at Barnum’s. Such an array of amusing nonsense! He saw the jewel-encrusted yellow suit Tom Thumb had worn for his audience with Queen Victoria two years before, and a waxworks figure (“superior to those by Madame Tussaud in London”) of the queen herself. He saw a six-foot-tall magnet. He saw the late President Jackson’s actual shoes and a pair of smiling microcephalic Mexican boys called “Maximo and Bartolo, the Aztec Children.” He spent half an hour watching a score of live animals called “the Happy Family,” all locked in a great cage together—monkeys, rabbits, mice, an eagle, a South American armadillo, and an African giraffe. The two boys next to Ben visited the Happy Family frequently, he heard them say, in order to see the eagle swoop down and grab a mouse. He saw a sniffling, red-eyed child and his mother put fifty cents and a dead cat on a metal counter in front of a museum employee with a badge that read STUFFING ATTENDANT. (“She’ll be ready to go home in three hours, ma’am,” the man told her, “after lunchtime.”)
Heyday: A Novel Page 29