But Duff did not delude himself. He knew that this would not be the kind of destruction that cleared the path for some act of creation. He was enabling no cycle of life. He was simply executing some righteous punishment, doing a small bit of the Lord’s work. He prayed that the Lord would agree and, despite his promise to Bishop Hughes, forgive him this one last little fire.
FOR THE EIGHTH straight night, Fatty Freeborn, Charlie Strausbaugh, Toby Warfield, Bill Boyce, and Dick Owen had gone to sleep on pallets at the firehouse. For the last seven nights, their scouts had spotted no groups of Negroes anywhere near the intersection of Greene and Spring streets, apart from tubmen and carters and some parlor-house musicians leaving work late. Charlie had talked to one of the brokers who worked with Aetna and New-York Life, and learned that the insurance companies paid $250 for any returned slave on whom they held a policy. But among Fatty and the other fellows, enthusiasm for the blackbirding scheme was on the wane.
“Hey, wake up, Fatty, wake up!”
It was one of the lantern boys, breathing hard and pounding on the wall.
“It’s your penthouse, Fatty, over on Avenue D,” he said, still breathless, “burning like a bonfire, it is! I could see it from my window in Sheriff Street.”
BEN AND SKAGGS had left the Rumpfs’ and walked east on Fourteenth Street, past the last of the upper-class shops and tradesmen, past stables and chandlers and lime kilns, past a workingman’s tavern blaring with the sound of guitars and tambourines and fists pounding on tables in time to the music. But now they heard only their own steps. The gaslight had ended two blocks before, and the East River was two blocks ahead. The buildings grew larger, the chimneys taller, the brick walls higher. The chance that they were actually about to meet up with some of Skaggs’s acquaintances for a “special midnight soiree,” as he had promised, seemed to Ben increasingly remote.
“Sir,” he asked with a smile, “I hesitate to ask, but given the neighborhood, are you certain that we are—”
“Shhhhh! In this bleak wilderness, I am the pathfinder. You must trust that I know where—” He stopped and turned to Ben with a serious expression. “Do you trust that I know where I am going?”
“Why, yes, I do. Of course.”
“You do? You do? Well!” He resumed walking, now at a ridiculously fast clip, and swung right. “Such a reckless innocent skylarking fool you are, Mr. Knowles.” Ben practically leapt to keep up. “I am very fond of that in a man, particularly in one who has something to lose.”
They raced along for another block, then another. It seemed as if Skaggs might be about to break into a run. The odd spirit of intimacy and urgency decided Ben to find out, here and now, the meaning of Skaggs’s quick kiss with Mary Ann Lucking at the party.
“Sir, may I make a personal inquiry?” he asked.
“If my choice is either that or some technical, professional, or political inquiry, by all means, yes.”
“Mr. Skaggs, are you—do you court Miss Lucking?”
“A very personal inquiry.”
“I apologize, but I must know the nature of your affections for her, and of hers for you. You see, I find myself—”
Skaggs abruptly stopped at a tall iron gate near a small sign—BROWN & BELL—and turned to Ben. “Polly and I are on familiar terms,” he said briskly. “We are good and intimate friends, as I am with Duff as well.”
“I see, but do I therefore understand you correctly to suggest that I might make—”
Skaggs turned away and said “Rumpelstiltskin” into the darkness.
A tall, burly man in a leather cap stepped from the shadows behind the gate. “No, sir.”
“I meant von Münchausen.”
“That is a no-go, sir,” said the guard. “That was for the last one.”
“Ah yes, right, damn,” Skaggs said. “What is it? The tip of my tongue …Cosmopolitan? No. Suburban…it’s suburbanism! No? Hell…Wait! Yes! Metropolis? Metropolis!”
“Afraid that ain’t quite it either, sir.”
“Ain’t quite it?” Skaggs pleaded. “But surely close enough.”
“Megalopolis?” Ben guessed, having finally understood that a certain polysyllabic password was being sought.
The man threw the bolt and pulled open the heavy gate. “Good evening to you, gentlemen,” he said.
Skaggs led them across a gravel-covered yard, and then through ten-foot-high stacks of milled lumber. Ben could smell the cedar. They crossed railway tracks and turned down a long, barrel-vaulted passageway. Finally, Skaggs heaved open a tall, heavy sliding door.
They stepped into an empty hall a hundred yards square, every surface painted white. The space shone with the glow of the full moon through the skylights. Hundreds of boards cut to different lengths leaned against the walls all the way around the perimeter. On the floor just to their right was the word ORIENTAL, eight feet long and a foot high, written in green chalk. The rest of the floor was covered with huge geometric drawings in half a dozen different-colored chalks.
“Forgive my detour,” Skaggs said. His voice sounded tiny. The sound wanted to echo, but instead disappeared as if into the void. “My cathedral.”
Was Skaggs crazy? “What is this place?” Ben asked.
“Where clippers are dreamt and born. Yankee clippers, China clippers, coffee clippers, tea clippers, extreme clippers, all clippers, faster, faster, faster still.”
Ben stared at him quizzically, making no reply.
“We are in a shipyard,” Skaggs said.
“They—they draw the ships on the floor?”
“Think of a ship’s hull as a giant potato.”
“A giant potato?”
“A half of a potato, I should say, two hundred feet long, cut lengthwise—the shape of a ship.” He held out one cupped hand. “This imaginary new ship’s hull is sliced, like the potato half, into a stack of horizontal slices.” With his other hand he performed a potato-slicing pantomime. “Do you understand? Each of these great ovoids chalked on the floor is one of those slices of hull, drawn at actual size. They call this a mold loft. It is the pattern book for Brown & Bell’s next new clipper…” He pointed to Ben’s feet. “The Oriental.”
They stepped through another doorway into a smaller attached building. In the center was an open tank sixty by forty, and four feet deep. The moonlit surface of the water was perfectly still. Here, Skaggs explained, the engineers performed tests of scale-model clippers.
“Extraordinary,” Ben said. “Otherworldly. Sublime.” A cloud passed over the moon, and the glowing space at once went dark. “Thank you for bringing me here, sir. This is a special midnight soiree.”
“What? This? You misjudge me, you poor dreamy man. I am the crassest sort of literalist.” He turned for the door and beckoned.
He led Ben to another side of the shipyard, and into a building that smelled new, where Skaggs repeated “megalopolis” to a second guard. They were in a warehouse, each of the first three floors filled with shelves and tables crammed with matériel—ropes, sailcloth, hooks, screws, pipe. But as they ascended the stairs, Ben could hear music and laughter.
At the top story, Skaggs stopped to catch his breath, stepped aside to wave Ben through the open doorway, and announced: “A genuine New York blowout.”
The space, illuminated by candles, was a storeroom empty of all fixtures and devoid of decoration. Waiters were passing and pouring glasses of water and champagne. Ben had never attended or even imagined a party in such a place. Nor had he ever seen a more colorful mishmash of people gathered together. Half the crowd looked rich, and half of those were the sort of rich men who wore gold waistcoats and striped blue neckties and large emerald shirt studs. A few were accompanied by wives or fiancées. There were some ship’s officers in full-dress uniform, including a captain. But there were also publishing clerks and watchmakers and painters, tavernkeepers and actors, even truckers and stonecutters. At each end of the loft were two clarinetists, one pair playing Chopin études, the other popu
lar tunes.
“Who are our hosts?” Ben asked.
“Ah, the great riddle—one does not know. For a time, I spread the fiction that Astor was the secret patron of these affairs—that his agents in attendance chronicled these goings-on as a means of blackmailing the old man’s business associates. They are held every second month, more or less, each one at some highly improbable location, never announced but rather…feverishly rumored among certain circles.”
On the nearer side of the room sat four men hunched over a table, one of them a Negro wearing a fine suit. On the tabletop were two oil lamps and a chessboard with 160 squares and two complete sets of pieces.
On the far side of the room, thirty yards away, were three sofas, arranged to face the windows. Several people sat on each sofa, women as well as men, all staring at the moon and darkness and twinkling lights outside. None of them were speaking. A woman sat in one of the men’s laps, her arm around his neck and their heads leaning together as if they were at home alone. Arrayed on a table behind the sofas were several brown quart bottles, a cake on a silver plate, and two large hookahs. Five people stood close to this table, most with their eyes closed, all breathing deeply—from the hookahs or from folded handkerchiefs covering their noses. Another dozen people, grinning and yammering, awaited their turns.
Skaggs saw his friend staring at the arrangement. “The instant awe and bliss of chemistry,” he said by way of explanation. “Medicines for the super-strained American soul.”
A man in a waiter’s suit sprinkled dried rose leaves and candied sugar into the big bowl of one of the hookahs and then crumbled in a small piece of the cake.
Ben tried to sound nonchalant. “It’s opium they’re taking.”
“From the hubble-bubbles, yes, or”—he sniffed—“possibly hashish. Something balmy and Indian.”
“And the others?”
“Do I understand that your fashionable Kit-Kat Club circle in London is innocent of opium and chloroform frolics?”
“Perhaps only I am innocent,” Ben said. Once again, Ben felt as though he had been whisked out of America and returned home to some secret Soho haunt of peers’ decadent sons. “None of these…prosperous fellows works for a living, then? All of them are men of independent means?”
“Like that jack-pudding there?” Skaggs pointed to a well-dressed man sitting in a chair, jerking his head in time to “Turkey in the Straw” and attempting to spin his hat like a top on the floor. “He made his million as a dry-goods jobber. Nearly all of these nabobs are self-made men. Important ones, one or two of them.”
Ben was surprised. “Merchants, you mean? And industrialists?”
“Investors, mostly. Speculators. Capitalists of the purest kind—financial magicians, really. Businessmen who sell nothing, operate no factories, and employ no laborers or artisans. Who have somehow divined the mysterious Wall Street spells to create fortunes, by means of private conversations and the signing of papers. Would that I had the brain and stomach for it.”
“And all here dissipating on a Thursday at two-thirty in the morning in a shipyard warehouse…”
“Why do you suppose the opening bell at the Exchange doesn’t ring till half past ten?”
“This is not the usual conception of America.”
“New York is not ‘America,’ sir, not precisely, not yet.”
From near the drug table came an explosion of laughter: a man on his hands and knees with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out rubbed his head and shoulder against a woman’s red silk skirts as if he were a dog. The woman smiled and shook her head in both real and mock disapproval. Skaggs recognized her—she was one of the disorderlies-and-profligates he had photographed in Wooster Street a month ago, during the fire that drove them from their parlor house. That afternoon, wearing the same dress, she had been merely a chance subject. Tonight the bodice was removed, and she looked as tempting as the hookah.
Ben noticed him eyeing her. He was encouraged by the implication, emboldened.
“Mr. Skaggs, I—”
“‘What prodigious queer feelings will leap into the breast,/And make us feel funny in more parts than one,/If a fine girl is only transparently dressed,/And shows what would take a seraph to shun.’”
Ben chuckled. “You are a poet.”
“Alas, no. I swiped that from a deceased pal.”
Ben didn’t quite register the queer coincidence (on his last night alive, Ashby had also quoted a comic poem by a departed friend) because he was so anxious about posing his question to Skaggs. “Sir, if I may impose upon your sympathetic nature, I must ask you—”
“To initiate you into the pharmaceutical feast of wonders by yonder window? By all means, man, come along…”
“No…no, thank you, another time.”
Skaggs kept walking, and Ben left him to the smoke and vapors and the woman in the red dress. Instead, he followed another party guest up the open timber stairs to the roof of the building, where a group of men stood near the edge chatting, smoking cigars, contemplating the city. Occasionally one of them glanced at an orange flicker to the south, a burning shed down Avenue D near Sheriff Street whose immolation, from this distance, looked pretty.
Ben fell into conversation for a while with a thin, fit older fellow with gray-white hair down to his shoulders, a dancing master called Prosper Skyring, who soon sidled off to greet a man who wore a cape and a patch over one eye.
Then he introduced himself to a man who seemed to be studying the dry docks and ironworks that stretched beneath them for a mile downriver. Carrow was a merchant officer, first mate on a clipper. Ben enjoyed looking down with him as he explained the silhouetted forest of iron trestles and cranes and half-finished hulls and masts and thirty-ton steam engines.
“That’s William Webb’s yard there,” Carrow said, adding, with a sailing man’s distaste, that the steamer at Webb’s dock was the SS California, a new mail steamship built for runs to Oregon. “She puts out tomorrow…they’ll float her just up here to get fitted out with engines.” He sighed. “Between here and Grand Street they must be laying down a dozen ships, but hardly a one being made for the wind. Nothing but these steamers,” he added in a tone other people used for saying harlots or niggers or Irish.
“What are your routes?” Ben asked.
“Bombay and Canton.”
“Tea, spices?”
“Opium,” Carrow replied.
As Ben considered whether to mention that his sister-in-law was the opium-shipping heiress Tryphena Matheson, Skaggs appeared at his side, moaning.
“Alooone, Knowles! For yet another dawn I shall be all alone! That splendid-looking girl, if you can imagine, after flirting outrageously with me for the longest time, demanded that I pay her a sum of money in return for her private company! ‘But I am not that sort of gentleman!’ I told her. ‘And I am broke besides!’ But the stony-hearted goddess was unrelenting. So here I am, come to micturate into the gloom.” He looked up. “My God, the stars are fantastic tonight, are they not? And I am pixilated tonight, am I not?”
The officer bowed. “I am Bailey Carrow, sir.”
Skaggs was about to comment on the man’s name, but a falling star caught his eye. Its long trail glittered for a second or two. “Lord, what star-shoot,” he said.
“Mr. Carrow and I were discussing the business of opium,” Ben told him.
“The business of opium, eh? As ever, the conversation returns to the late John Jacob Astor.”
“May he rest in peace,” said Carrow.
“May he burn and rot in hell,” Skaggs replied.
Mr. Carrow excused himself.
“I take it,” Ben said to Skaggs, “that Astor was in the opium trade.”
“For years I would not touch the stuff for that reason alone. By the ton the hypocritical scrooge sold it, contraband to the Chinamen, to the English, to any weakling with a dime.”
“My relations are in the same business.”
“So you are very well off,
eh? I’ve speculated on that subject since we met, and thought yes and thought no, to and fro, is he rich or is he…po’. My God! I am a poet.”
“My father is rich. My brother is rich. But not I, the second son.”
“And a black sheep as well. Well done.”
“I have no income at all. I cannot even afford to buy wine, or books.”
“I shall secure a Stranger pass for you at the Society Library, which considers me a member in good standing. You may read and read and pay not a penny. And the drinks they provide on credit.”
“Thank you. I should be very grateful. Thank you very much.”
Skaggs did not respond. He was pointing at individual stars, and very slowly turning around with his face pointed up. Ben worried that Skaggs might step off the roof, and linked arms with him to keep him safe.
“Are we walking?” Skaggs asked, a little surprised.
“Sir, I must tell you that I find myself bewitched by your friend Miss Lucking, perhaps even obsessed, but if you are in any way—”
“Polly Lucking is not my truly beloved, my betrothed, or my certified kicky-wicky. You are free to pursue her as you wish, sir. As her comrade, I welcome it. And now I must piddle.”
Skaggs pulled away and strode off. “Kicky-wicky,” he had said; Ben had heard the phrase only once before—in Ashby’s line of Shakespeare, in Paris, just before they took their turn down the Rue du Helder. Strange.
On the opposite side of the roof, Skaggs pissed off the edge of the building, his stream angled high, attempting in vain to reach the East River. Ben joined him. A moment later, a few yards away, the caped man with the eye patch stepped to the edge as well. Standing very close beside him, a young servant reached with one hand into the man’s trousers and removed his penis for him, then held it out as the master relieved himself. When the man finished, the boy shook the member dry, replaced it, and, using both hands, buttoned up the man’s trousers.
Heyday: A Novel Page 33