Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  ANOTHER THREE WEEKS would pass before eyewitness accounts of the counter-revolution reached New York City—the same date that news of the original, February upheaval would finally make its way to San Francisco, thereby inspiring the editor of The Californian to publish an extra under the headline THE WHOLE WORLD AT WAR. In fact, it wasn’t properly an extra edition; by then The Californian hadn’t published at all for a month, because almost every man in San Francisco had quit work and headed for the hills to hunt gold. And that news—gold by the ton, gold sand and gold pebbles and hefty gold rocks, glittering in the water and dirt and all free for the grabbing by anyone with the luck or pluck to get himself to the California hills right now—would not reach New York until the late summer.

  30

  June 26, 1848

  New York City

  SKAGGS HAD INSISTED on the dinner at Shakespeare’s to celebrate Ben’s twenty-seventh birthday—his treat. Polly and Ben sat together on the bench across from him.

  “Just look at you nubiles,” Skaggs said. “Like a happy married couple.” He put up his fingers to form a frame in front of his face. “Portrait of young love.”

  “Please,” Ben pleaded, “she will flee if you suggest she resembles a wife.”

  “Ah yes, well,” Skaggs said to Ben as if Polly were not present, “now that she has fallen under the influence of these Tribune Crazyites and Mrs. Mary Gove, she will be an ultra by the fall, a regular come-outer, cutting and stitching all her French dresses into pants.”

  Polly sipped her gin and rolled her eyes.

  From the bag at his side Skaggs lifted a stack of little books he had tied together with a red ribbon. “A happy birthday to you, Ben.”

  Ben untied the bow and briefly examined the paper covers—all seven were by T. Bailey. “Thank you very much, Skaggs—I take it this Mr. Bailey is a great favorite?”

  “Mr. Skaggs,” Polly said, “is this Mr. Bailey.”

  “A pen name,” confessed the author.

  “You are a novelist as well! What a remarkable secret to have kept.”

  “Alas, a quite unremarkable one,” Skaggs replied, “a mere scribbler of lurid tales that require a week to write, two bits to buy, and a day to read. You now own my oeuvres complètes.”

  The titles were Passions Down South, Satan’s Romp on the Hartford and New Haven Railroad, The Moonrakers of Capitol Hill, A Private History of a Certain Shocking Donnybrook, The Fancymonger and the Maniac, Too Much of a Good Thing, and Ruined by a Nunnery.

  “Pulp pamphlets,” Skaggs said as Ben looked at each one, “smutty trifles, a mangy literature of the epithumetical.”

  Ben chuckled and looked up. “Of the what?”

  “Epithumetical? Embracing the animal passions. From the Greek.” Skaggs pushed his face across the table toward Polly and whispered loudly, “Shocking what a Cambridge man doesn’t know these days, eh?”

  “Timothy,” she explained to Ben, “has made and memorized an index of every word in the dictionary with a definition that includes the word ‘lust.’ I’m surprised you’re unfamiliar with the recitation.”

  “Well,” Skaggs said, “since your chaste baby brother has not yet arrived…” He stood, teetered, and cleared his throat. “Bawdy,” he said. “Brothel. Carnality. Concupiscence, corruption, cupidity, debauchery, enslave—”

  “Wait,” Polly interrupted, “what of ‘desire’?”

  “Damn! Yes.” Skaggs sat. “I defer to my understudy, Miss Mary Ann Lucking.”

  Ordinarily she would have smiled and shaken her head in more or less ladylike fashion. But with the blush of gin in her cheeks mingling with the blushes of embarrassment and glee, she accepted his challenge. She remained seated but began reciting, counting off each on her fingers: “Debauchery, desire, enslave, entice—”

  “Go, hussy, go,” Skaggs said.

  “…flagrancy, inflame, lasciviousness, lechery, lewd, lewdster, libertine, libidinous, loose, pander, pimp…uhh, provocative.”

  “And?” Skaggs said, making small, quick revolutions with one hand. “And?”

  “You may finish, sir,” Polly said. She realized that even after two gins she could not bring herself to say the next word.

  “Rut,” Skaggs shouted, “sensual, tempt, unbridled, and—most significantly in our land of the free—voluntary.”

  Ben felt slight jealousy and great affection for Skaggs, slight fear of and great desire for Polly. He had befriended a libertine. Was he also in love with a trollop?

  Ah, words, mere prim and hoary English words. He thought that in these last giddy minutes he had stumbled across some final threshold into America, that he was in any case freed from the nervous fetters of his former life, relieved of the morbid fear that his father or mother or schoolmaster or vicar was hovering nearby, disappointed and disgusted, hissing reproofs. Shockingly, Ben found himself not shocked at all by Skaggs’s and Polly’s ribaldry.

  “Bravo,” he said, applauding, “and brava as well.”

  Which is not to say he had really cast off a lifetime of propriety. He was still capable of shock, as he discovered only a few hours later, naked with Polly in his bed in Sullivan Street.

  31

  July 3, 1848

  in the Atlantic

  AS DRUMONT’S VESSEL slipped from the pier at Plymouth a week earlier, he had watched a Channel steamboat dock a hundred yards away. The boat had carried the first Paris papers with news of the weekend’s combat. By the time translations of the news of the counter-revolution had spread up and down the quay, his ship, the Ivanhoe, was outside the breakwater, nosing into the Atlantic. And so Gabriel Drumont left Europe and England unaware that General Cavaignac, his old commander in Algeria, had pacified and exterminated a whole brigade of insurrectionist scum in Paris, and now ruled France under martial law. If he had known these happy facts, perhaps he would have sailed east instead of west, returned home. If, perhaps; if, perhaps.

  On the second day out, the weather had turned squally, and so it had remained. The Ivanhoe left Plymouth with 22 passengers in cabin and second class and 373, including Drumont, crammed into three steerage holds. The count in steerage was now down to 362, a death rate—not quite two corpses a day hurled overboard—that the crew considered unremarkable. There was no priest aboard, but the sobbing and wakes and amateur funeral Masses were almost continuous, the song of steerage.

  The smell of steerage was, at best, the ordinary miasma produced by the sweat and belches and farts of several hundred unwashed people subsisting on bread and a porridge of barley and smashed peas and the occasional boiled maggot, and, at worst, the smells of mingled excrements and vomits. (A string of horses and a flock of sheep were also aboard.) Any draft of fresh air was a very occasional gift, since stormy weather required that the hatches remain shut for safety’s sake.

  Drumont was glad to be among the Irish. They were Catholics, at least, dirty and sick but people with heart, unlike the frigid English. Drumont gambled with them, winning with a game of dice drinking rights to the favored water barrel—the better cask had carried wine on the previous crossing, rather than turpentine. He also got drunk with them once, and barely restrained himself from flashing his wad of pounds sterling to prove he did not need to travel in such miserable conditions.

  Except when he was seasick, he kept to his berth. The bed was narrow, but it was the top in a stack of three (another dice game won), and it was better than perpetually stooping to stand or walk in the five-foot hold. At least he had a mattress. Which he had taken without asking from his Huguenot landlord in Pleasant Place. He also had two big books, Vidocq’s Mémoires and a new one, a guide to America lent him by the Huguenot’s wife. It was called La Démocratie en Amérique, by a count, Tocqueville. (Leave it to the aristocrats to explain democracy.)

  As the Ivanhoe pitched in a bad wind, Drumont was particularly heartened by one of the Comte de Tocqueville’s sentences, and read it a second time, his lips forming the words to be sure he understood. America is “a nat
ion of conquerors…which shuts itself up in the solitudes of America with an axe and a newspaper…a restless, calculating, adventurous race which sets coldly about the deeds that can only be explained by the fire of passion.” Les conquerors, les solitudes, une hache, froidement calculan, le feu de la passion—a country perfect for Gabriel Drumont.

  The old man in the next berth down blew his nose again, his snot flying onto the sleeping man below him.

  New York City

  AS ILLINOIS GLIDED past and Mrs. Banvard played “Jim Crack Corn” on the piano, Skaggs felt a little envious (the celebrated Mr. Banvard looked thirty, maybe younger) and a little foolish: why, when he had stood on the bank of the real thing four years before, had he not traveled that last half mile, across the Mississippi, to smell the air and step on the earth of the West?

  Ben had read last year about Banvard’s Grand Moving Panorama, its depiction of the whole length of the great river, and when he’d noticed one of Duff ’s posters advertising “FINAL DAYS in this City before its departure for a theatrical tour in BRITAIN & EUROPE,” he’d suggested they all go to commemorate Polly’s final days in this city before her departure for her theatrical tour in Philadelphia. As he watched the painted panorama of limestone bluffs and cottonwood forests unfurl and disappear, listening to the lively music and narration, he wondered why he had waited months to experience this marvel.

  Polly was also charmed by the pictures of dreamy, spacious western arcadia, but she tried to ignore Mrs. Banvard’s music and Mr. Banvard’s jokes and anecdotes to concentrate on his painterly technique. Her study was made difficult, however, by the constant passage of the canvas from right to left across the stage. Around the Iowa-Missouri border she concluded that the movement of the picture served two functions—to simulate the experience of traveling downriver, of course, but also to disguise the artist’s mediocre skills with brush and paint.

  Duff took notes. But he wrote down not just the unfamiliar phrases, as usual, like “stogies” for work shoes and “broad horns” for the flat-bottomed riverboats, but also shorthand highlights of what Banvard said about the enormous boils and swells in the river, about the telegraph line that was strung nearly all the way from Dubuque down to New Orleans. He stopped scribbling to stare when the scene of a burning Memphis wharf glided by.

  None knew it, but this Manhattan hour of watching a two-and-a-half-mile-long picture of the heart of the American continent—“THE LARGEST PAINTING IN THE WORLD!”—was the last they would all be together for a long while.

  On the sidewalk outside Duff bid Polly goodbye, kissed her cheek, and promised again that he would look after Priscilla Christmas and “defend her against all trouble.” Skaggs lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Travel safely, act as if you are not acting, and we await your triumphant return next month. And beware Mr. Burton’s greasy inveiglements.” She was to leave with the Dombey company the next day, the Fourth of July, for Philadelphia.

  “And thank you, brother-in-law,” Duff said to Ben, “for treating us to the excellent show.”

  “Ah, Duff,” said Skaggs, “how fortunate that neither of you is an Arab or an African, for in those regions, to address a man who is not one’s brother-in-law as ‘brother-in-law’ is a sordid insult. It would mean, in this instance, that you had enjoyed extreme intimacies with Mr. Knowles’s sister.”

  AS BEN ESCORTED Polly home, they passed a pack of boys all whistling some tune in unison and one of them drumming on the doors they passed. He saw a worried look cross her face. She sighed. He worried that Duff ’s “brother-in-law” remark had distressed her.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, using the American argot.

  She shook her head. “Nothing, I hope.”

  “Is it the conference with Mr. Burton that upsets you?” At the end of the Dombey rehearsal that morning, Burton had asked her to meet with him “to discuss privately some aspects of the production” that evening. “If you wish,” Ben said, “I should be pleased to accompany you…”

  She gripped his arm more tightly. “My fears are for Priscilla.” Polly had told Ben that the father’s rages when he drank were growing worse, and his condition when he failed to drink more dire and pathetic. But Polly’s greatest worry now, she said as she prepared to leave for Philadelphia, concerned a ruffian, an acquaintance of Duff ’s, who lurked about, insulting Priscilla in the streets and presuming familiarities, imposing familiarities…

  Ben did his best to calm her, offered to look in on Priscilla himself. By the time they’d reached Third Street, their conversation had turned to Polly’s latest drawings. She innocently invited him in for a viewing and a glass of tea, and he innocently accepted.

  He picked through the sheaf of new cityscapes and portraits and complimented each, but when he reached a charcoal self-portrait of Polly at a mirror, smiling, looking more impish than angelic, he brought the picture close and inspected it carefully, longingly, almost reverently. She told him to take it with him, as a gift.

  He grasped her right hand in his, then her left, and a few minutes later, after she had run to the other room to apply a preventative syringe and returned, they were embracing and shimmying together on her bed. A week ago, during their night together after his birthday dinner, she had taken his member into her mouth, sodomized him, which until that moment he had never imagined any woman but a whore would do. And now, during their hour of play on this afternoon of their last day together, Polly once again behaved shockingly, both by initiating a second act of intercourse and then by straddling him as no whore had ever done, the open front flaps of her drawers fluttering as she huffed and twisted and heaved.

  Afterward, they lay together silently on the damp sheets, both facing the window, which despite the curtains brightened and darkened as clouds passed over the afternoon sun. He held her lightly at the waist. He was naked. The small chair in the room had almost disappeared, draped and piled higgledy-piggledy with her dress and petticoats, his coat and trousers and shirt. His undershirt and her shift formed a white linen puddle on the floor. A single fly buzzed in and out of one of his boots. They silently counted church bells striking one, two, three, four, five.

  “I must go soon,” she said.

  “I know that you must.” He hugged her, and felt her buttocks and the silk of her drawers against his thighs.

  “Will you marry me?”

  She looked down at his hands beneath her breasts and said nothing.

  “Will you marry me, Polly Lucking?”

  “I am yours already.”

  He was irritated. “Will you marry me?”

  She turned over to face him. “I love you, Ben, I will say that. I love you.” She had never said it before. His hopes blossomed. “But what bliss more would a priest’s words and a stamped paper give us?” Their faces were inches apart. “I am yours. But let us not, not”—she stammered, then remembered something she had heard in a lecture—“not put the police badge on a great passion.”

  His irritation now contained a tinge of alarm as well. “You oppose marriage as if it were a vice. And yet, yet, here, you…” He could not bring himself to say it outright. He did not wish to say it outright, but she understood his meaning.

  “I make love wholeheartedly? Would you prefer a meek, immobile girl? Or a statue? I am not that.” She had startled herself by her boldness.

  He did not want to make her angrier. He did not want to accuse her of immorality; he did not want to believe that he considered her immoral.

  He raised himself on one elbow and assumed an earnest tone he imagined to be loving. “This is a difficult matter to discuss.” He paused. “Polly, do you—are you familiar with an illness called…nymphomania?”

  She did not know the word. But she thought she suddenly understood Ben’s quixotic, almost desperate wish to marry, and for that matter his sudden, inexplicable abandonment of his family and career in England. She looked at him now with the deepest sympathy. He suffers from a fatal illness, some exotic, incur
able disease—nymphomania. He wanted to see America and now to marry before he dies.

  She reached up to put her hands on his cheeks. So young and sweet and romantic. Her eyes watered. She shook her head.

  “No? Perhaps,” he attempted, “you know the condition called ‘furor uterinus’?”

  Polly shook her head again, now struggling not to cry. He seemed so stoical to her, so heroically serene about his sickness, whatever it was…Of course she would marry him now.

  “These are true illnesses,” he continued, “medical conditions, not matters of…of sin.”

  “Oh no, my darling, certainly not.” His malady, nymphomania, was apparently some consequence of alcoholism, or drug addiction, or venereal disease…

  “And there are physicians of my acquaintance, specialists, among the most advanced men in London, who have devised treatments to cure the condition…”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “And if you wish, I might write them to inquire about your case.”