Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Ben glanced at Skaggs, who nodded discreetly. After the stranger left, Skaggs explained that these soirees were “famous for the good champagne and excellent pizzle-holders. I believe certain people attend only to partake of the pizzle-holding. Shall I call the boy back to attend to you?”

  “You jest, sir.”

  In fact, the caped man was from a prominent family, a lieutenant with New York’s Second Regiment who had lost his eye and both arms in Mexico. The young man assisting him was employed by his family.

  “Not at all,” Skaggs replied, giving no hint that he was joking. “Do you mean to tell me that none of the London clubs staff their water closets with…intimate hautboys? These days they are practically de rigueur in all the fashionable New York places.”

  Skaggs sat down on the precipice, his legs hanging over the side, and idly kicked his heels against the bricks. Again, Ben joined him, and accepted a cigar.

  Before long they were alone on the roof. Skaggs pointed toward the rim of gray and periwinkle on the eastern horizon beyond Brooklyn. “Dawn,” he said. “Damn. The universe becomes invisible for another day. Farewell, Alpha Centauri. Farewell, Neptune.”

  “Neptune is visible? With the naked eye?” The newest planet had been observed for the first time only two years before.

  “Alas, no. One needs a telescope. A quite expensive telescope.”

  “You are an astronomer as well?”

  Skaggs fixed him with a guileless and hopeful look.

  “If only that were true. I have wondered if astronomy is perhaps the true and proper…my destiny.”

  The sudden sincerity surprised Ben.

  Skaggs continued. “Do you know the writer Poe?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “He delivered a lecture this winter, about the stars and galaxies and the beginnings of existence, and I—I was tantalized and moved by his remarks. Which I understood only intermittently. But…he spoke of time and space as ‘precisely analogous’ to one another. He suggested that time and space constitute a single entity—as I imagine it, like water and steam, or clouds and rain, different forms of the same substance.”

  “Science, at that exalted philosophical level, baffles me, I am afraid.”

  “Yes, of course—as it does all of us. It’s more akin to religion than to chemistry or electromagnetism. (Of which I am also ignorant, by the way.) But this is my first fuzzy glimpse of a sort of religion that I have ever found…not only beautiful but wholly plausible. My idea is to fit my camera to a telescope and make lunar and stellar daguerreotypes.”

  “Is that possible?”

  Skaggs shrugged. “I believe so. Although it has never been done.”

  Their faces were faintly bathed in pink light. Only a few stars and Venus remained in the sky.

  Skaggs stood, groaning with the exertion, and offered his arm. “Shall we walk? Before the shipbuilders arrive and thwack us?” He suggested they go to Buttercake Dick’s for some doughnuts or peach pie and cream.

  As they waited for a cab, Skaggs plucked one of Polly’s pink daffodil petals from the collar of Ben’s coat and displayed it to him between thumb and forefinger. “‘The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,’” he said, and let it flutter to the ground.

  26

  May 26, 1848

  New York City

  JUST BEYOND A group of willows that waved and shook in the breezes, a short allée of elms led to a short pier. The setting sun gave the dark red sandstone walls of the theater at the end of the pier a golden glaze, a shimmer magnified by the reflection from the water.

  As he stepped off the tip of Manhattan he heard the new bronze bells of Trinity Church chiming half five. Walking the planks now toward the little stone island, what Mary Ann Lucking had called a “concert saloon,” Ben recalled playing pirate as a boy with the cook’s sons in Kent, brandishing real swords borrowed from his father’s library mantel, climbing the mizzenmasts and yardarms of the oak trees that lined the river embankment.

  “Yes sir?” said an older man behind a counter in a yellow gatehouse. The man did not remove the cigar from his lips as he spoke. “What can we do you for?”

  “I would like to buy two tickets, please.”

  The man stared at Ben for a long moment. “Balcony tables dollar and a quarter. Pit’s fifty cents. I expect you’ll be wanting up.”

  “You ‘expect’ I will be wanting…? I don’t understand.”

  The man reached across the counter and pressed a pair of tickets into Ben’s palm. “One dollar and twenty-five cents for a table upstairs.”

  “I have a question for you, sir, if I may,” Ben said as he handed over the coins.

  “Free country.”

  “Why was the theater built in this manner?” Ben asked, nodding toward the wall to which the ticket shed was attached. “As if it’s a military fortress, in miniature? Even the door—iron, isn’t it? And there at the top, running all round beneath the upper tier,” he said, pointing past the big letters spelling CASTLE GARDEN, “appears to be a parapet. It’s a very authentic-looking simulation. But why was the military theme chosen?” This seemed to be a New York fashion—the Negro doormen portraying hussars outside a store, now a concert hall built to resemble a garrison.

  “This theme?” As before, the man paused a few seconds, puffed, then spoke. “This is the Battery, mister. This is a fort—the Southwest Battery. Built for our second war against your King George. The last time, in eighteen and twelve.”

  “Ah,” Ben said. “Yes, of course. I see.”

  “Your navy never did attack New York.”

  “No.”

  The ticket clerk puffed again. “The fort did its job fine, I guess.”

  Passing through the door, Ben saw that the walls were eight feet thick. Every ten paces around the circumference were holes for cannon. The ceiling, decorated with yellow stars and crescent moons against a mauve field, and the balcony level, reached by cast-iron stairways, were recent additions. Castle Garden was plainly a real fort, now given over to entertainment.

  Such a shameless freak, America.

  In the lavatory, Ben was surprised to find that he was alone at the urinal, although a young man stood nearby at the washbasin. He exchanged a glance with the fellow and smiled—the American way—and then proceeded with his business. The man stepped closer, put one hand on Ben’s shoulder, and softly said, “Yes?”

  Ben assumed he was a pissing attendant, one of America’s pizzle-holding hautboys Skaggs had told him about.

  “No, I’m nearly finished, actually, but thank you very much. Perhaps another time.”

  Only when the bewildered fellow turned and scuttled quickly from the room did Ben understand that he had been the victim of a joke by Skaggs. Stupidly, he had never imagined the United States having sodomites. The practice seemed somehow antique, arcane, un-American.

  Back at the main entrance, waiting, he watched a procession of cabs discharge passengers. As a loud, swaggering group of young men entered the fort close to where Ben stood, he felt a sudden spot of wetness on his skin, like a large raindrop. He lifted his hand to look—a teaspoon of brown jelly, one of the rowdies’ tobacco spittle, clung to his knuckle.

  And then she approached, smiling, only a few paces away.

  He whipped his hand toward the ground. The brown phlegm, now a strand, clung to his finger, and he finally wiped it on the sandstone behind him. He removed his hat with his left hand, a little awkwardly, and bowed.

  “Mr. Knowles,” she said. “Are you…well?”

  “Miss Lucking! No, I am sorry, it seems, I—an insect, or something, on my hand, but I—I am very pleased to see you again.”

  She put her arm through his.

  Both found themselves more nervous than they had expected to be.

  “Beautiful summer evening,” she said, regretting her triteness.

  “Yes, it is indeed! Almost.” Idiot. “Almost summer, I mean.” He grabbed at a new thought randomly. “On my walk down Bro
adway just now, I stepped over a lovely illuminated sidewalk. Have you seen it? It was made of glass coins set within an iron grid.”

  “Yes, there are quite a few now.” He had walked? They were miles south of Sullivan Street. Maybe he was not rich. “But they are not decorations for our benefit—the glass allows daylight to shine underground. In order that cigar makers and tailors can be put to work in cellars.”

  “Ah.” He was head over heels for her strong-minded manner. And her eyes, and neck, and the curve of her hips.

  “But I do agree, they are very pretty,” she added.

  As Ben led her to the stairs, Polly was relieved; they would not be sitting in the pit on a crowded bench. And as they ascended the top step, they were both struck by the impossible beauty of the moment—by the view of the harbor (empty market boats racing home, a steamer thundering into its Hudson pier, a brig gliding toward the East River) and the gust that rustled Polly’s yards of bombazine and blew her beribboned hair away from her face.

  Her blithe spirit nearly dissolved a moment later when she spotted a young man she recognized from 101 Mercer. Mr. Mattson? Mr. Mathews? Mr. Mattingly?

  “Good evening, Miss Morland,” he said, touching his hat brim. She made no reply, and a moment later said to Ben that the man obviously mistook her for someone else.

  At their table, Ben looked up from a list of available drinks and asked, “Tell me, have you tasted this…Mathews?”

  She gasped. “Excuse me?”

  Ben read from the little advertisement in the menu: “‘Mathews and Company’s lively and healthful carbonated water, bottled in Manhattan exclusively from fresh Croton.’ Have you tried it? Is it like seltzer water?”

  She exhaled. “Yes, yes I have drunk it. Some evenings they make punch with it at, at my boardinghouse. My former boardinghouse.”

  “A boardinghouse serving punch to its tenants! Is America really such a gay place as that?”

  “The city of New York is gay.”

  “You remind me of Mr. Skaggs.”

  “A man too gay for his own good.”

  “Are you a volunteer in the great war against the liquor fiend?”

  She did not smile in return. “Liquor destroyed my father as surely as his gun, but no, I have enlisted in no crusade. In our late war against the Mexicans,” she said, “my brother was nearly killed. That was enough war for me.”

  The waiter returned for their orders.

  “A mint julep. And for the lady…”

  “Water, please.”

  “I’m famishing for a beefsteak,” he said. “Two?” She nodded. “And some strawberry ice cream.”

  So he was apparently not poor. Rather than look at him during the silence, she examined the brass capitals of the green iron columns that formed a sort of loggia—and then glanced back to see that he was staring at her.

  “Cast iron is remarkable these days,” she said, filling the moment. “I was admiring the…fronds on the tops. I should like to draw them.”

  “A lover of music, an artist, and an architectural savant. The Germans would call you kultiviert und Kulturschaffenden—a cultured culture-maker.”

  Was he teasing her again? “I am acquainted with an architect,” she said. “I am especially fond of one new building on Broadway…just north of the Park? Stewart’s, the big store they call the Marble Palace?” Polly turned her face toward the harbor, feeling the breeze, deciding whether to plunge forward all the way. Yes. “It is built of a dolomite marble quarried north of the city. And modeled after a certain palazzo in Florence, in Italy. They say it is done upon the London style.”

  “You truly are a student of architecture.”

  “No, no,” she said. All of that information she had learned from one of Stewart’s architects, a Mr. Snook, whom she had met in the parlor at 101 Mercer. “I attended school…my mother was determined that I become a teacher. She was appalled by my passion for acting.”

  “A badge of infamy! A blot on your escutcheon!” Ben grinned.

  She met Ben’s eyes straight on, but carefully to avoid the hint of any look that might be considered wanton. Flirtation in the regular world was a much more elliptical affair than it was at 101 Mercer. Each required its particular style of playacting.

  “Lacking an income, one must sometimes risk infamy in order to earn a decent wage,” she said, surprised by her waspishness. But why not? This was no professional engagement. She was free, free to speak sincerely.

  “As you know, I am avid for the theater,” he said, worried that his joke had insulted her. “I have tickets to the Astor Place next week, a new play, by a Russian.” Now he was being forward—proposing another evening together when their first had barely begun.

  “I should like to see it, but the Astor is a black house.”

  “Mixing with Negroes is offensive to you?”

  “No, no, a ‘black house,’” she said, smiling as she pointed at Ben’s black sleeve. “An audience consisting only of men.”

  His foolishness, he hoped, could pass as the charming idiocy of a foreigner. At least it amused her. “Have you any roles in the offing, Miss Lucking?”

  “Do you know Dombey and Son?”

  “Yes, of course—Dickens. You…you are to play Florence Dombey? I read the chapters every month these last two years, and feel as though I know Florence well. But,” he added, “I did miss the final installments. What happens in the end?”

  “Mr. Dombey ends broken and alone, but Walter did not drown, after all.”

  “Walter?”

  “Florence’s lover. The two are reunited.” After a sizzling pause, Polly asked, “And you, Mr. Knowles—you are not an enterpriser come to this country on business?”

  An “enterpriser”? Another word he did not know. “I suppose I shall have to be one, for I have no alternative means of survival.”

  Aha: he wasn’t rich. “My father was an enterpriser,” she said.

  “So Mr. Skaggs told me—in which line of business?”

  “All lines,” she said. “Any line. An inventor. An investor. A treasure hunter. Oil was the fever dream that finally finished him.”

  “He was a whaler?”

  “He poured every last dollar he had, and some that he did not have, into a scheme to transport oil east from the Hudson River whalers to Hartford by canal and rail.”

  “A visionary.”

  Polly paused a long moment before answering.

  “He had not counted on the appearance of kerosene. Nor the credit panic, in the spring of 1837. After that, he was done for.”

  Polly didn’t know that the panic of ’37 had nearly ruined the Primes as well. The firm had been saved by the timely arrival of British gold in Wall Street that fall, a loan that Archie Knowles had helped arrange and the delivery of which Polly, as a girl, had chanced to witness during her first visit to New York City.

  “I am so sorry,” Ben said to Polly about her father’s misfortune. The same American banking crisis, he well knew, had enabled his own father to transform himself from the very prosperous manufacturer Archie Knowles into the extremely rich Sir Archibald Knowles.

  The waiter placed Ben’s julep in front of him, in a glass the shape of a globe that held more than a pint. The mint sprig floating on top had five leaves and was big as his palm. Polly could smell it across the table.

  “The julep custom,” she explained, “is to toast, sip, and pass the glass along to one’s partner.”

  He lifted the drink with both hands. “To your impending success, Miss Lucking, as Florence Dombey. A toast to my evening’s partner.” As he gulped, a bit dribbled down his chin and onto his collar. She reached for the glass.

  “You do indulge in ardent spirits.”

  “I suggested only that I know from experience how liquors debauch the weak and unwary. I hope I am neither.” She lifted the drink. “To my new friend, and his grand enterprise, whatever it may be.”

  She sipped and exchanged a long glance with him that was friendly, imp
ish, not quite demure.

  Was it a wanton look? Neither knew for sure.

  She was pleased to be with a suitor who seemed to have the heart of a boy (a different sort of boy than Timothy Skaggs) and treated her like a lady. She was pleased to be sipping a julep in the harbor breezes at twilight. And she was pleased by the preparatory disharmony of the orchestra, the sound of the instruments tuning. Perhaps, she thought, I really am a student of culture.

  The musicians stopped bowing and blowing, and the audience hushed. Down below, the conductor, an elderly Bohemian by way of Kentucky named Anthony Philip Heinrich, had stepped up to his podium. He announced that the orchestra would play, for the first time in America, the overture to the great Herr Wagner’s new opera Tannhäuser, and then, for the first time in any hall, one of Mr. Heinrich’s own works, which he called the Barbecue Divertimento.

  Ben laughed, shocking the people sitting nearby, who assumed he was drunk. “I apologize,” he whispered to Polly, “but did he actually say ‘Barbecue Divertimento’?”

  She nodded, and both smiled smiles of unabashed and unpracticed pleasure.

  27

  May 31, 1848

  New York City

  SKAGGS HAD INVITED Ben to the theater as a gesture of apology for his pizzle-holder joke, and the embarrassment it had caused him at the Castle Garden urinal. They walked up the Bowery outside the theater where they had seen New York As It Is, a new play about Mose, the carousing, plainspoken New York fire b’hoy—the sequel to A Glance at New York, following the premiere of the original by only two months.

  “You were unimpressed, I take it,” Skaggs said. “Except when the chicken bones struck me”—someone had dropped dinner scraps from the third tier onto the parquet—“I believe you did not even chuckle.”

  “And where were your great howls of delight, sir?”

  “Ah, but for you, Knowles, life is now all spring, sparkling prospects, and new vistas, your young man’s fancy lightly turning to thoughts of love—you ought to giggle at the slightest tickle. My gloom, on the other hand, has good cause.” He stopped at the door of one of the dozen noisy saloons and cellars they had passed in a few minutes’ walk. “No filthier than the others. And German, so they have chairs.”