Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “Wagner, our bit of German opera at Castle Garden.”

  “Yes, Tannhäuser, Wagner, exactly,” Ben said. Now his member was swollen. His face flushed as well.

  A few minutes later, when he told her he had never visited a panorama, she was amazed, and he in turn suggested that they find one right now.

  They entered the sanctum sanctorum of the Minerva Room through a narrow, dim tunnel into a darkened room the size of a large parlor. The viewing platform on which they stood was cantilevered six feet above the floor, and a young mother and daughter joined them just before the show began.

  From an invisible alcove, a pianist played one of Beethoven’s sonatas. Above them, skylights inched open by means of pulleys and gears to simulate dawn, gradually illuminating the panorama. Beneath them was revealed the entire city of New York, from the Battery to Fiftieth Street, every pavement reproduced in gray plaster, the parks made of moss, every house and church and bank and pier carved and painted at impeccable pixie scale. A huge painting that circled round the miniature city depicted Brooklyn and all the suburban towns. Ben felt drugged.

  Polly found each of the places that shone brightest on her mental map—the schoolhouse she’d attended for five years in Elizabeth Street; Chrystie between Hester and Canal, where the family had lived; her building in Third Street. Gas lanterns high on the wall lit an overhead canopy covered with a hundred paintings of well-known New York sites. Polly recalled Skaggs asking her to paint a mural of the moon and stars on the ceiling of his bedroom; Ben thought of his visit to the Sistine Chapel, where Lydia Winslow had whined about the pain in her neck from looking upward. The girl beside them on the platform whispered elaborate descriptions of everything she saw to her mother, who Ben and Polly realized was blind.

  The lights dimmed, the skylights rumbled shut, the music finished, and the girl led her mother away. Polly paused for a last look at her tiny, enormous city—and finally let herself find Mercer Street just above Spring, Mrs. Stanhope’s—before taking Ben’s arm to leave.

  Two paces into the dark tunnel, he paused and faced her and, raising his fingertips to each of her cheeks, kissed her on the lips. She smelled of lavender. He tasted of plums.

  As he started to break away, she reached up with one hand to touch the back of his head with something more than a caress and less than a push, keeping his mouth pressed against hers for an extra moment, and then another. Soon he was encircling her with both arms as he had never done any respectable woman, fondling her shoulders and hair and neck, pressing her whole body, from bosom to hips, against himself. He shivered, she breathed sharply, he made a quick sound combining a hum and a moan, she dropped her bonnet, they kissed again, and didn’t stop kissing. A minute passed in a blink.

  When they finally separated and took a step toward the light at the end of the tunnel, they found themselves facing two boys on their way in for the next show, standing still and staring, one sucking a lollipop and the other a cigar.

  As Ben and Polly walked out into Broadway, grateful for the air, chatting about what they had seen, she said she would like sometime to try drawing a picture of New York from a certain middle distance—far enough to see a whole swath of the city in a single glimpse, but close enough to make out barrels on a wharf or a particular window of a house. “Something like the scene,” she said, “at the Minerva Room.”

  And so not an hour later they were sitting in a dinghy, rented for fifty cents from an old man who may or may not have been its owner, putting into the river. The picnic gear, his coat, and her sketchbook and box of pencils lay on the seat next to her in the bow. A folded wool blanket served as her cushion.

  The oarlocks wiggled and creaked noisily as Ben rowed. Polly faced Ben, looking alternately from his eyes squinting against the six o’clock sun, to his straining arms and shirtsleeves streaked with perspiration, to the receding city, the stone and brick all luminescent and coppery. Her legs extended straight out before her, and she lifted her feet an inch every few seconds, the rhythm timed to keep the hems of her skirts out of the little bilgewater waves that washed across the bottom as the boat pitched and yawed. When they were a hundred yards out, he paused and looked at her.

  “This should do perfectly,” she said.

  He stowed the oars, dropped anchor, pulled his hat low on his head, and leaned back, elbows propped on the gunwale. The traffic in the river was thin at this hour. The air was still. As she drew, he stared at her face for a few minutes (such fierce concentration), then shut his eyes, then stared again, daydreamed, back and forth.

  An hour passed before either of them spoke. The sun was just splashing into the horizon. Polly put her pencils away.

  “May I look?” he asked, sitting upright.

  She had not, after all, sketched the western edge of the city in detail—no candlelit windows, no cargo stacked on wharves, only the outlines and shadows of big buildings, the spire of Trinity Church, the busy smudge of the Washington Market. A meticulously rendered human figure dominated the foreground of the picture, a man in shirtsleeves lounging in the stern of a rowboat with his hat nearly covering his eyes. She had drawn a portrait of Ben. He felt a gratitude and longing not simply greater than he had known before, but altogether different in kind.

  Will you be my wife?

  “The hat, I know, appears rather comical,” she said. “And your hands look like sheep’s hooves. I simply cannot draw hands properly.”

  “It is extraordinary.” He looked up. “You, Miss Lucking, are extraordinary.”

  Must I tell what sort of woman I have been, who I truly am?

  “You, sir, are buttering me terribly.”

  The wake of a schooner slapped against the boat. Ben rowed them closer to shore and dropped anchor again. Polly moved to the stern, carrying the blanket so they could sit together and watch the western sky. It was a deep, blazing orange.

  “Even the sunsets in this country,” he said, “seem grander and wilder.”

  “The colors are still more spectacular in the West, so they say. According to Timothy, the main redeeming feature of life on the prairie was the setting sun.”

  “When I was small, we had a nanny,” said Ben, thinking of the woman hauled off to Newgate when he was ten for stealing two of the Knowleses’ silver serving spoons, “who taught us that a spectacular sunset meant that God or the Holy Ghost had a nasty fever, and that we should pray for them to survive.”

  “How frightening for a child!”

  “No, it was quite gratifying, actually, because it flattered us that our prayers were effectual—since the ‘fevers’ always passed, and the Lord always recovered completely.”

  They talked on and on, meandering from topic to topic and recollection to recollection as the boat bobbed on the leash of its anchor rope. During the hours they talked, eating the bread and cherries from the picnic basket, the rising tide lifted them two feet, twilight became night, and one by one the city’s million flames were lit.

  She shivered. He offered his coat, and irresistibly his decorous tugs and smoothings of fabric around her shoulders gave way to strokes, pets, squeezes…and at the same moment they seized each other. The boat tipped and rocked, then righted itself, and then both blanket and lovers were spread on the bottom of the boat in a wet, twisted dishabille.

  Ben had never before put his fingers and palms on breasts and buttocks and legs and belly through layers of silk and linen and cotton; every prostitute had undressed before he’d touched them; and with Lydia Winslow and the three other girls he had courted, his hands had never moved beyond the tops of their backs, shoulders, and arms.

  Polly and Ben breathlessly plucked and pulled at buttons and straps and strings. Their elbows and shod feet rattled the oars and knocked against the hull, each resonant thump sending the curious underwater loiterers—fluke, whiting, shad, bass—darting away.

  Bliss was it in that night to be alive, and to be young was very heaven!

  Ben knew she was an actress, a modern gi
rl, a freethinker, even a radical, and so he had suspected that her chastity was not intact. Now he felt certain. And that knowledge, in this delirious moment, did not disturb him. After a while he sat up and took a deep breath.

  “I love you, Polly Lucking.” Filthy water dribbled from one of his cuffs.

  “Oh, and I, I think—you are very flattering to say so.” She was back in her seat at the bow, rebuttoned and relaced and now reshaping her bonnet in her lap, which had been crushed in the excitement. She was flustered. She had abandoned the whore’s life, yet she had never before indulged in a copulation as whorish as this—in a swampy boat bottom, bedraggled and grunting and banging away in the open air. Although now, at least, he knew half the truth: Polly Lucking was a fornicatress. “And if I may add, you are rash to say such a thing. You needn’t say it.”

  “I love you better than I have ever loved anyone. I think better than I ever shall love anyone.”

  “And I am exceptionally fond of you. I have never enjoyed a man’s company more.” She reached down for his hand and rubbed his knuckles with her thumb. “I suppose that I am only…”

  “Abashed? Do not be.” He kissed her hand.

  “Confused. Slightly deranged.” She looked around. “We are in the middle of the river in the middle of the night. In a boat.” She splashed the toe of her boot. “A leaky boat.” Now she sounded to herself like a spoiled girl, which wasn’t what she’d meant at all.

  He hoisted himself back into his seat. “I am sorry.”

  “No, no…”

  “I have taken advantage of the situation, and of your honey-sweet temperament. And in my great impatience turned what ought to have been splendid and fine into…this…higgledy-piggledy embarrassment. But understand, Polly: if you can return my love, I shall never leave you.”

  She had never said to anyone outside her family that she loved them. She thought of the passage that she had underlined in Fanny Wright’s book, about sexual ardor being “the strongest and at the same time, if refined by mental cultivation, the noblest of the human passions.”

  “What does it gain us,” Polly asked Ben, “to call our strong feelings ‘love’?”

  “What?”

  “The great fondness and stirrings—the erotic feelings that I harbor for you, surely anyone would call these love. But love, love is—what is love? Between a man and a woman? What is it beyond a lucky affinity for a person’s character and beliefs, together with a…with the sensual hunger.”

  “Yes, I suppose you are right.” He had never expected to have this conversation with a woman he loved. Of course, he had never expected to find himself in precisely this circumstance. Astonishment built upon astonishment.

  “And I believe ‘love’ exists,” she continued, “as a means to lash those two feelings together—as a respectable word for the unspeakable half of the mixture, for our lustful feelings. So may we not call our intellectual affinity a great friendship, and our sensual affinity a passionate attraction?” She exhaled deeply. These thoughts had been boiling in her mind and heart for a long time. She was relieved to have spoken her piece.

  It took Ben a little time to collect his thoughts. “‘Love’ is prettier,” he finally said. “And simpler.”

  “It is ornery of me, I know, to refuse the ordinary word…”

  Ben shook his head. This was the moment which, forever after, he would remember as his moment of true and total capitulation. “We may use whatever language you wish.” He lifted the oars and started hoisting the anchor.

  “Truth trumps beauty,” she said.

  As they docked and he looped the line around a post, she pointed behind him. Just above the tip of Trinity’s spire was the merest sliver of a new moon.

  “Goodness,” he said as he tied the knot.

  “Shall we watch it rise?”

  And so they sat together again in the back of the boat. She snuggled into his embrace and closed her eyes.

  Ten minutes later, she was asleep against his shoulder. Had he been more contented, ever in his life? He had not. He felt as if he had been cured finally of a chronic headache or nervous tic. His craving for change and surprise and speed was gone. He was calm.

  And then he was agitated. From the river came voices and the sound of oars and banging hulls as people boarded a small boat from some larger vessel, and a moment later from the land end of the pier he heard wheels rolling onto the boards, followed by two pairs of heavy footsteps. He saw the light from a swinging lantern.

  He thought it must be men of one of New York’s famous night-roving pirate gangs—the Buckoos or Gorillas or Baxter Street Dudes—come to thieve cargo ships at anchor. But now, given the opportunity, what evil might they perpetrate on Polly? He glanced around the rowboat. He grabbed one of the anchor’s sharp flukes and hefted it; twenty-five pounds; it might pass as a weapon. But while he was willing to do anything to protect her honor and her life, could he fend off cold-blooded cutthroats with an awkward piece of iron?

  The sounds of wheels and boots grew louder. One of the murderers was whistling a tune—“O, Susanna,” rendered as clear and sweet as a nightingale’s song, here and now as black-hearted a sound as Satan himself could conceive.

  Ben decided their only chance was to remain perfectly quiet, shrink to nothingness, disappear. He slid down with Polly until they were nearly flat, athwart the bow. She wriggled into his arms and whispered a dreamer’s breathy nonsense phrase.

  The two men and their cart were now still. Their lantern light flickered down through the cracks in the dock. Ben lay face down, but he had the dreadful sense that the men were standing directly over them, staring at the rowboat’s defenseless, motionless occupants.

  And he was right. They were here to do a job—two jobs, actually, one they had done ten thousand times, the other improvised tonight on the spot.

  Neither man spoke. Ben wondered if they were aiming guns. Should he cover Polly with his body to take the shots himself? Should he spring up and challenge them? His mind was still racing, undecided, when in the next instant their big wheelbarrow tipped up and over. Gallons of stinking mud came splashing down over the side of the dock and into the rowboat and water around it.

  By the time Polly awakened and Ben stood unsteadily to look, the two men had trotted halfway back down the pier. And as he realized what had happened, he began chuckling, which alarmed Polly more. Then, as sludge trickled and dropped in chunks off his head and onto his shoulders, he started to laugh. Finally smiling herself, grudgingly, disgustedly, she wiped a thick splatter from her cheek with the edge of her palm. The two men had not been thieves at all, but night scavengers, two of the Negroes employed by the city as “necessary tubmen.” It wasn’t mud they’d dumped into the river from their night cart, but muck—400-odd pounds shoveled during the last couple of hours from the privy vaults of thirty households. Ben and Polly were drenched in a slurry of piss and shit.

  They cleaned off the worst of it with handfuls of river water and their picnic blanket, then headed toward Skaggs’s apartment, which was only a few blocks away—Timothy would be at home nursing his concussion and black eye from the other night in the Bowery, he would have soap and towels, and he would find their predicament deeply amusing.

  And so the downpour of sewage had had its intended effect: the two interlopers, the white lovers, had been driven away by what appeared to be a foul but unremarkable accident—every night, tons of excrement were dumped from riverbanks and piers by scores of tubmen. A minute or two after Ben and Polly had walked out of sight, a one-horse wagon rolled down Hubert Street to the river, and another dinghy nudged the tip of the pier. It was the boat that had alarmed Ben a few minutes earlier. The boatman was a Negro who lived close by, a cousin of one of the tubmen. His passengers were five more Negroes—three men, a woman, and a little girl—whom he had met tonight across the river in New Jersey, aboard the fruit sloop that had carried them up the coast from Washington, D.C. The five were slaves. They had crept out of a fine new bri
ck house in Georgetown a week ago, and hoped and prayed that a week from now they would be free in Canada.

  “Go on,” the boatman whispered, and the five climbed up into New York City holding their ragged satchels, then hurried along the pier, stepping lightly. “Don’t need to tiptoe,” he said after them.

  He lit a torch and waved it slowly above his head as a signal to his white confederate at the other end of the pier, the Quaker wagon driver who would take these five to their next stop, the cellar of a house on a certain block of Greene Street.

  “IT’S A WHOLE wagon of sambos coming up the street real slow, with a white man driving,” the lantern boy had said as he’d burst in the door of the firehouse this time. “Real scraggly, too, they look like.” Fatty and the other four had been awake, playing cards, so within a minute all five were armed, squeezed into the borrowed phaeton and racing north as fast as the horses could run.

  They leapt out at Spring and ran toward No. 94 Greene. Three of the Washington Negroes, two of the men and the woman, were already near the cellar door. A white man shoved them inside, slammed the door behind him, and announced to Fatty and his gang that they were “acting in clear violation of due process, as well as all of the relevant city and state laws,” and threatened to send for a police officer.

  He was ignored. The third colored man had been collecting his belongings from the wagon and minding a little girl. Charlie Strausbaugh held a pistol on him.

  “Go, Peggy, right now,” the black man commanded, “run to that house. Your daddy always loves you.”

  Toby pulled a sack over the man’s head, and Fatty pinned his arms behind his back. The girl started to cry, but did as she was told. And a minute later, the carriage was racing south back toward Anthony Street, some of its white passengers laughing and hooting as the others tied the hands of a Negro named Elmer Armstrong, late of Washington, D.C., his one week of freedom over.