They spent the next two hours drinking gin and slurping oysters. Ben was happy to learn that his friend’s dark, spleeny mood had no connection to his own courtship of Polly Lucking.
At the beginning of the week, Skaggs explained, he had delivered a eulogy at the Greenwich Village funeral of his dear bachelor uncle Gaster Skaggs, in which he had marveled that Gaster had been among the last of that New York generation “who remembered a field of golden wheat growing at Broadway and Fulton Street.” After the service at St. Luke-in-the-Fields he had strolled through what he imagined would soon be his neighborhood—noting the new houses at the bend in Grove Street and the cluster of cottages under construction in a cul-de-sac off West Tenth.
But the next day he’d learned from his uncle’s lawyer that Gaster Skaggs’s house at 36 Barrow had been bequeathed to something called the Greenwich Village Asylum and School of the Arts for Unfortunate Boys. The legacy to Timothy consisted of two hundred dollars, the old man’s parrot, and a first edition of William Blake’s poems. A minute after he’d left the lawyer’s office, having disclaimed the bird, he had been assaulted in the street—struck with an umbrella, hard, three times, on his neck, elbow, and buttocks—by a rich brewer-turned-novelist whose first book Skaggs had reviewed harshly. When he’d arrived home that afternoon, a bill collector was waiting in the hallway, dunning him for sixty-eight dollars the man insisted Skaggs owed the Brevoort House Hotel for a room and a week of meals last summer—a week of which Skaggs had no memory at all.
“My poor dear fellow,” said Ben after Skaggs asked the bartender to replenish his ice and leave the bottle of gin in front of them. “You have had a wretched time of it.”
“A wretched time? Oh, but it goes on, sir, it goes on. Today, my so-called career as a penny-a-liner winked out completely.”
In the morning mail he had learned that The John-Donkey, the satirical magazine that had been paying him a few dollars a month, was going out of business.
Then at midday his essay about time had been turned down by two editors, its third and fourth rejections. The fellow at The Knickerbocker was baffled by what Skaggs called the piece’s “original and disturbing new scientific epiphany”—that the maximum speed of printing presses had precisely doubled during each half decade since the beginning of the century, and that this acceleration might proceed without end. The editor of The Living Age not only turned down the essay but had lectured him. “‘As an old pal,’ the little pickthank had the brass to tell me straight to my face, ‘let me explain—Timothy Skaggs is a humorous writer, a fine jester, from whom such sentiments and ideas as these are like being served a glass of beet juice when one is expecting a refreshing beer.’”
And then later in the afternoon, when Skaggs had dragged himself over to the Tribune to ask Greeley if he might read the piece as a favor, he’d learned that his services as a three-dollar-a-trip harbor journalist would no longer be required.
“And do you know the very worst of that?” he asked Ben as he poured more gin into both their glasses. “The profound melancholy? That they are not sacking me. ‘I am certainly not displeased with your articles, my dear Brat,’ Horace said with that horrible smile of his, ‘you are simply an unfortunate victim of progress.’” He gulped his gin. “A victim,” he repeated bitterly, “of progress! Of his shitty cartel, I am the victim.” Greeley and the Sun and the owners of four other New York dailies had organized what Skaggs called “this monstrous ‘Associated Press,’” which would soon employ its own harbor reporters whose work would be shared by all the member papers.
Skaggs spotted a burly man with a battered-looking face coming into the saloon. “Why, look here—another good fellow of the old school they want to make a victim of progress.” He lifted his glass and shouted, “To Young America!”
Heads turned, and more than a smattering of hurrahs and applause broke out. Skaggs had shouted a nickname of Tom Hyer, the champion prizefighter and neighborhood fixture. Hyer smiled and nodded, acknowledging the acclamation.
“After the Christian busybodies finally do away with his occupation,” Skaggs said to Ben, “at least Tom can still earn an income from selling liquor.” Tom Hyer’s, his saloon, was just up the Bowery. “Until they manage to outlaw drink, of course. Why, sir, must we let the new and soulless always replace the natural and sinful?”
“Mr. Skaggs,” Ben said, “you are a conservative in bohemian’s clothing. A radical beset by nostalgia.”
Skaggs sighed. “You know, that was a true disease—nostalgia. The diagnosis and coinage of a medical man, a Swiss, once upon a time.”
“But, Skaggs, you are a daguerreian. The epitome of the new. And the ‘unnatural.’”
“Yes, and I am nostalgic already for the early days, five or six years since, when people were shocked and unnerved by photographs. When my mother saw a daguerreotype for the first time, a portrait of my brother’s infant daughter, she called it ‘obscene.’” He cracked a smile at the memory.
“I am afraid,” Ben said, “that I pine for the renaissance of no bygone age at all. Not merry old England. Not ancient Greece or Rome. I have no real faith in the superiority of yesteryear.”
“Callow youth.” Skaggs emptied his glass. “Although nor do I, to be honest.” He chewed his ice dregs and stared at his hand. “Yet even if I don’t wish actually to return to the past, I am vexed as the very recent past disappears before my blinkard’s eyes. The pull-down-and-build-over-again spirit saddens me. One day I counted the demolitions of thirty-three buildings on Broadway. I do not gainsay real progress,” he concluded. “But I mourn all the victims of progress.”
By the time Duff arrived, Skaggs had downed a pint of gin and was juggling hard-boiled eggs from the basket on the bar. As he juggled, he recited the Lord’s Prayer to welcome Duff, and then asked if “your great entertainer Jesus” could perform tricks such as this.
“Don’t, Skaggs,” Duff said. Skaggs’s blaspheming always distressed him.
“Your priests should take up juggling, right at the altar, at the end of Mass, amuse the Irish…”
Duff ignored him, turning to Ben to ask if they had enjoyed his firemen friends’ new play.
But Skaggs continued the patter as his gaze flickered from the flying eggs to Duff to the eggs—and then to the door, through which another famous local character had just tottered. It was the Irish prizefighter and neighborhood saloonkeeper known as Yankee Sullivan.
“Speak of the devil,” said Skaggs, still juggling. “…The Irishman in Ireland, you know, starves himself trading his chickens’ eggs for tobacco…
“Then happily smokes his pipe in his hovel…his hovel, already thick with peat smoke…so Irish…
“Then instead of building a chimney, he builds a special chair…low to the ground, to keep his lounging head beneath the peat haze…so Irish— adjust to the squalor instead of fixing the problem…”
“Enough, Skaggs,” Duff said.
Ben stood. “Shall we go and find a real meal somewhere?” he proposed. “As my treat.”
Skaggs continued juggling—four eggs at once now. “My own Irish grandpa said they cultivate their misery…gives them a reason to drink…Do you know half the arrests in the city now are Irishmen…? And half those for drunkenness…needless to say…”
“Yes,” Duff said to Ben, “let’s go.”
“Was it the strong drink, Duff, damn”—an egg had dropped to the floor—“the liquor that caused such a number of your Irish brothers to desert the fight in Mexico…?”
Duff snatched one of the airborne eggs out of the air and crushed it in his hand. “Stop,” he said.
And Skaggs did, but not because his friend was angry. On the other side of the room, Tom Hyer and Yankee Sullivan were suddenly all over each other, punching and kicking, knocking over benches and glasses. Everyone in the place gathered around to cheer them on. Sullivan was bigger, but Hyer, with the advantage of sobriety, quickly got the upper hand. Within a few minutes, it was no longer much
of a fight. Hyer had Sullivan bent over, one arm locked around his neck while with the other he punched his face like a sledgeman hammering, a blow a second. Finally he finished, shoved Sullivan away, wiped his own wet hand on his pants, and coolly pulled a pistol from his coat pocket and began to prime it.
“No, Tom,” Skaggs said, “that’s a foul, no guns permitted by the London Prize Ring rules.” Hyer smiled, but before he replied, a policeman pushed his way to the front of the crowd.
“Put up the pistol.” He showed his copper star.
“Any minute they’re going to bring his gang in here,” Hyer explained, “and I’m not going to let them murder me without a fight.”
But the cop persuaded Hyer to flee with him instead. And not three minutes later, a shouting, snarling pack of Sullivan’s men did indeed stomp into the saloon looking for Hyer—and found instead only their own insensible hero sprawled on a table.
Before Skaggs left for dinner, he turned to one of the angry Sullivan partisans, who was loudly demanding that the bartender pour a restorative drink for poor Yankee. “You know, sir,” Skaggs said with a smile to the Irish fellow, “it was the whiskey that did in your man. Abstaining from the national elixir might be his best course just now.”
The man’s single punch to Skaggs’s face sent him to the floor, knocked out.
28
June 2, 1848
New York City
AS SOON AS Ben learned that Polly would be leaving soon for Philadelphia with Burton and the other Dombey players, his wooing acquired an even greater urgency. He would have taken her out every afternoon and every night to plays and dinners and for walks and conversations in the Park. And she would have gone, too, had she not been required to learn and rehearse her part in Dombey. And sometimes she declined a particular invitation from Ben for what seemed to him capricious, inscrutable reasons—that is, for fear of encountering at certain pleasure gardens or theaters men she had known at 101 Mercer.
“I confess, Mr. Knowles,” she had said to him the third time they were together, “that I feel with you the way I do when I have begun to draw a picture I like.”
Both felt reborn this spring, and now hurtled toward summer together, like a pair of birds in flight. Every day seemed sunny, every tree in bloom, the very air effervescent. Neither had ever engaged in a courtship so goggled and feverish.
The fact that he had kissed her only twice during the week after their Castle Garden outing, and had so far sought nothing more, filled her with gratitude and desire. The fact that after knowing him so briefly she had permitted him to kiss her twice, on the lips, filled him with gratitude and desire.
Their affinities of mind and spirit were strong as well, and served for both to roil their passions. At the theater, they agreed about which scenes were funny, which were moving, which were mawkish. The day after Polly told Ben she had read and loved the adventure story Typee, he brought her his copy of Omoo, by the same author—and as she eagerly opened the book to read, each of them was literally hot with passion for the other. One afternoon she mentioned that she was Catholic, a fact he found faintly exciting. Sitting on a bench in the Park that evening, Ben asked Polly if she remained a believer. She shrugged, then shook her head no, and quoted a sentence she had memorized by a Protestant minister in Tennessee—“‘Eternal doom or damnation is a hideous fable of a barbaric age; a dream of the fanatic, and a curse to all who receive it.’” For Ben this was another provocation to ravish her.
For the first time in the two weeks since they had met, they planned to spend a whole day together. They would rehearse scenes from Dombey and Son, see an exhibition of paintings at the Academy of Design, and then have an early picnic dinner. In his whole adult life, the only women with whom Ben had been alone in an apartment were his sister, his mother, various housemaids, and perhaps a dozen prostitutes. Her brother aside, Polly had never been with any man alone in her rooms, not even Skaggs. And so Ben pulled the bells in the vestibule of her building when (only four blocks from Ben—more kismet), both he and she felt an excited flutter, and took deep breaths to steady themselves.
“A good morning to you, Mr. Knowles.”
“A splendid morning, Miss Lucking.” The weather was clear and cool, but that was not all he meant.
Her building was a respectable tenement house, and her sitting room was furnished sparely but fashionably—to Ben’s eye, like that that of a young don at Cambridge. Two Oriental rugs covered the floor. The tables and chest of drawers were creamy, golden maple and pine, not dark, lugubrious mahogany or walnut. Several of her drawings and watercolors were tacked to the walls, and he stepped close to look at each, one at a time, which pleased and rattled her.
“Very lovely,” he said about a view from a hilltop of a town on a river. “Such precise detail, yet drawn with such a quick hand. Is this the village where you grew up?”
“No, it’s Astoria, one of the towns across the East River…We lived nearby for a short time, before we moved into the city.”
“Astoria? Another of Mr. Astor’s property holdings…” What a tedious clod: why had he turned the discussion from flattery and art to real estate and dead millionaires?
“Actually, no,” she said. “Just as we arrived, the town fathers renamed it in honor of Astor—with the hope that the great man might build them a lecture hall.” She glanced at her drawing. “He declined.”
Ben smiled. Wit in women had always charmed him; wit in young women, of which he had known rather little, aroused him. He moved on to the next picture, which depicted six small panes on the exterior of a greenhouse—an orchid was visible inside, through the glass, and in the foreground was the reflection of a girl’s face.
He read the title aloud—“‘Self-portrait, Conservatory at Hurlgate.’ Remarkable. And you were a mere, what…fifteen at the time? Fourteen?”
“Somewhat younger,” she answered. “It was a rich man’s greenhouse on Long Island. I adored the odors and even the feel of the dirt.” What a silly slut: why had she allowed the conversation to drift from craft and beauty to her deflowering and her plow-girl’s sensibility?
She led him to the upholstered wingback, and pulled a wooden chair alongside so that she could consult the playscript as necessary.
They rehearsed for more than two hours, Ben playing old men and young women, sea captains and countinghouse drones and governesses.
For a scene near the end of the play, on a moonlit ship’s deck, the stage directions instructed that the actress playing Florence “sit with her head laid down on his breast, arms around his neck.”
“Oh, Walter, dearest love,” Polly said, her cheek against Ben’s chest, “I am so happy!”
“‘He holds her to his heart,’ the instructions say.” He clasped her.
“As I hear the sea,” Polly read, “and sit watching it, it brings so many days into my mind. It makes me think so much—”
“Of your brother, my love. I know it does.”
The scene was finished. But for a long extra moment, neither moved. Finally Polly rose—but stopped short when she found one of her braids had snagged on his shirt button. Only after some seconds of fiddling, fingers on fingers, reddening face an inch from heaving chest, was she able to sit up.
After she retreated into her bedroom to prepare for their outing, Ben leafed through a small sketchbook on the table. The portraits and scenes were recent—the clock tower atop City Hall in winter, canaries in a cage, Timothy Skaggs grinning, a young girl with her chin in her hands, Duff Lucking asleep…He flipped to the end. On the last page were two columns of names, six female names on the left and a score of men’s names—Mr. Snook, Mr. Skyring, et cetera—on the right. From each woman’s name lines radiated, connecting it to two or three of the men’s names.
“All ready,” she chirped when she reappeared, hair back in place and bonnet tied—and then realized what Ben was examining.
“Forgive me for snooping,” he said, using a word he had learned from her, “but I cou
ld not resist the pleasure of seeing more of your work.”
She nodded.
“Is this a list of your friends—Miss Bennet and Miss Bowditch…Miss Morland? And, perhaps,” he speculated with a smile, “the matrimonial matches you hope to see them make?”
“No, no. Those names, the women are only characters. Elizabeth Bennet is from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey. Do you know Miss Austen’s books? I am very fond of them.” She knew she was prating like a fool. “And the other names are merely—are inventions, my inventions, characters I imagined writing about one day, perhaps.”
“A writer as well as an artist and actress! Your powers are promethean, Miss Lucking.”
She was breathless, and blushing bright red. “A silly game is all. Idle fancies.”
“I have the impression that none of your fancies is idle.”
THEY STOOD IN a picture gallery at the National Academy, arm in arm, admiring an enormous picture of a forested Catskill mountain gorge at sunrise.
“More heaven than earth,” he said. “Rather a fiction, I suspect.”
“I suppose,” she replied, “but captivating to my eye.”
“Beauty trumps truth?”
She made no reply for a long time, looking hard at the picture. “Perhaps truth and beauty defer each to the other, taking turns, like good friends, or partners.”
“And when both shine at the same time and place, the result is art.”
She smiled, and squeezed his hand with hers, silk on kid. Beneath his trousers, flesh rose.
“You know, it is as if the painter…” he said, leaning in close to look at the name and birth date on the frame, “…as if young Mr. Church here shares a muse with Mr.—the German…”
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