Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “Ah, l’Inspecteur Vidocq d’Amérique!” The Inspector Vidocq of America! “Mais parlez-vous…do you have English, Monsieur Drumont?”

  “Un peu. Very little. I learn.”

  “And I shall help you, if you wish. Je vous aiderai.”

  Over their second brandy Roux offered Drumont work as his night manager—to join the truckers on large evening deliveries, when necessary, and to guard the workshop until dawn, when the first woodworkers arrived. And Drumont accepted, of course.

  His previous lie—that he was a cabinetmaker from Paris in London to collect a debt—would now become a fact, more or less; another irony. And the job was ideal: he would be entirely free to hunt for Knowles during the day.

  BEN MISSED POLLY terribly, ached for her, despised himself for what he had said to her, for every scared, embarrassed, vicarish bit of pseudoscientific bunkum he had spouted.

  His trip to Connecticut to deliver another lecture on the European revolutions had helped take his mind off her temporarily, although he’d found himself insensible to the flirtations of the young women who flocked around him before and after his talk. A mere sixty-four Hartfordians had bought tickets, but at least none of them were angry Germans, mistrustful Irish, or madmen.

  Back in the city for the last week, he had hoped every day for some word from Polly. Most days he loitered in Sullivan Street until midafternoon in order to meet the postman when he arrived with the second delivery. But no letter from Philadelphia arrived. And he had repaired nearly every evening with Skaggs to a customary haunt, Budd’s or Shakespeare’s or the Belle of the Union.

  On this sweltering Saturday night they were drinking at Joe Orr’s Saloon in Greenwich Street, whose clientele was a mixture of workingmen and men of Skaggs’s type. Duff was supposed to join them, but never did; they assumed he’d been called to a fire. The front doors were propped open wide to catch any river breezes. Most of the patrons had taken their coats off, and Skaggs was wearing his collar open, with no necktie at all. A few men wore only cotton undershirts.

  Ben ordered a three-cent whiskey instead of a five-cent gin to conserve his limited funds. “Perhaps,” he said, “I shall be forced to become a guano broker for my father after all.” His career as a lecturer was probably over—Ben’s inspiring tale of the February Revolution, according to the agent who booked his engagements, had been “rendered moot by the counter-revolution.”

  “Ah,” Skaggs said, “so the audiences will now demand eyewitness accounts of the more recent slaughters. The latest, the newest, faster, faster…”

  “No—the lecture fellow said the problem is with the nature of the events in Europe. ‘It’s just too darned hard now for us to know who are the villains and who are the heroes,’” Ben said, clenching his jaw and pronouncing his r’s and vowels in the hard American fashion, “and ‘Over here we are not so interested in unhappy endings.’”

  Skaggs smiled. “Your imitation of the accent has become excellent. As has your understanding of our addiction to sunny simplicity.”

  For the next hour or so Skaggs explained American presidential politics to Ben—why President Polk was not running for reelection (“no western deserts remaining for him to invade or buy”), and why he, Skaggs, planned to vote for Zachary Taylor, the Whig, rather than Cass, the Democrat, or Van Buren, the former president and presumed candidate of the new little antislavery party.

  “Because,” Skaggs said, “number one, Cass favors the infection of the West with slavery, and number two, because he is a New Hampshirite of the most embarrassing kind. And he is ancient—as is Van Ruin, of course. ‘Van, Van, is a used-up man,’” he said, quoting the Whig slogan. “The former president is a virtual dwarf as well, and a cadger of the usual political type. Now the evil geniuses behind General Taylor are no better, of course, peddling him like a bottle of Brandreth’s Pills. In the Tribune, Horace is already retailing the humbug every day that Taylor was a yeoman, Old Rough-and-Ready, Mr. Buckwheat Bumpkin.”

  “He is, in fact, a man of means?”

  “Owning a hundred Negroes makes one a man of considerable means. Though that suggests, at least, that the prospect of twenty-five thousand a year isn’t his only reason for running. Taylor seems to me more or less sensible, and more or less honest. For better or worse he risked his life on our behalf killing Indians and Mexicans. And on the slavery question, at their convention in Philadelphia his fellow southerners loathed him but the Greeleyites disapproved as well, which together predisposes me toward him.” Skaggs slurped the last of his second whiskey. “I call myself a member of the Anti-Boredom Party, and yet now I have bored you completely. You are quiet tonight.”

  Ben had stopped listening after the word “Philadelphia.” “Today,” he said, “is the fifteenth—”

  Skaggs raised his empty glass. “Beware the ides of July.”

  “—nearly a fortnight she has been in Philadelphia, and not a single letter.”

  “Sir! The lady is making her debut in a role which, at long last, might give her real standing as an actress. Your days and nights, on the other hand, are spent dissipating with me. You, Mr. Knowles, might take the initiative yourself and write to your true love.”

  “I have—three posted to her at the theater.”

  “Ah. Hmm. Have you really?”

  “As well as a message by the telegraph this week.” Ben knew he had drunk too much the moment he started to recite the message he had sent her. “‘Am entirely sensible that I behaved like a monster July third.’”

  Skaggs was counting with his fingers. “Eleven words? Did you know they charge in units of ten, which until I—”

  “‘Beg forgiveness. Will make amends. Longing to see you.’ And still no reply.”

  “Well. Hmm.” Just then, behind Ben, Skaggs was surprised to see a certain man he knew coming through Orr’s open doors. “Franklin Evans!” he shouted. “The prodigal son returns already? Presto!”

  Ben turned to look. A pair of well-dressed young men had stepped inside, one slight and epicene, the other a tall fellow with a beard who traded nods and smiles with several patrons as he lumbered in. He had a loose tie, a big lopsided grin, and huge brows arching over bright blue eyes. Despite his graying hair, he was about Ben’s age.

  “Hallo, friend,” Skaggs said to the big, smiling fellow. They hugged and pounded each other’s backs.

  Ben stood and began to introduce himself. “I am Benjamin Knowles, Mr. Evans, it is very—”

  The man slugged Skaggs playfully as he stopped Ben. “No, no, my name is Whitman, sir, Walter Whitman—your disreputable companion harries me by that ridiculous moniker whenever he can.”

  “Not whenever, sir,” Skaggs said, “only in groggeries, only in groggeries.” He explained that Franklin Evans was the fictional, reformed-drunkard hero of an anti-liquor novel Whitman had written for money. “To his credit, however, Walt is the only man in New York sacked by more newspapers than I myself. And Mr. Knowles here, Walt, was in the streets of Paris in February.”

  Whitman’s face brightened and he took Ben’s right hand in both of his. “Terrible what’s befallen Paris now, terrible, ten thousand dead, they say—and splendid what they have been attempting, eh?” He gripped Ben’s hand hard and shook it. “How splendid to see the grip of the people on the throats of kings, eh?”

  Whitman introduced his friend, an actor named Henman Platt whom Skaggs knew slightly. He had called him a “spastic little clodhopper” in one of his pseudonymous reviews for the Evening Mirror.

  “I take it, then, that slave-land did not suit my favorite abolitionist after all,” Skaggs said to Whitman. “I had figured you to continue west to become a free-soil pioneer, a mountain man, an honorary Indian.”

  After Whitman’s celebrated falling-out over the slavery issue with the owner of the Eagle last winter, he had decamped to New Orleans to work for a newspaper there.

  “The city was a fine, gay place. Opera four nights a week! You would thrive there, Skaggs. But
the proprietor of the paper—an awful skinflint and dissembler, as it turned out. And, I must tell you, it was a horror, truly, to see with my own eyes men and women sold like animals. A salutary horror. We shall be starting a new paper in Brooklyn for which I should be pleased to have you write, if you are still writing, and not only making pictures.”

  “Alas, I continue to wordsmith, and would be honored to earn a few pennies from you, sir…as long as I am not required to pledge myself to your used-up Van.”

  “Slander!” Whitman replied with a smile, and turned to Ben. “Are you a member of our sorry guild as well, Mr. Knowles?”

  “Not a newspaperman, no, sir,” Ben said. “A recent immigrant, unemployed and quite possibly unemployable.”

  “A London man of affairs,” Skaggs said, “and perhaps the most rapturous lover of this country I have ever met. Present company excluded.”

  “Hurrah,” Whitman said, tapping Ben’s shoulder as if he were a friend, “and may your love be requited.”

  And may my love be requited, Ben thought to himself. I love you, Ben, she had said at last, in her bed, the very moment before he’d dashed it all. He had returned to that memory, her lips saying those words—I love you, Ben—a hundred times in the last twelve days. I will say that. I love you.

  As Whitman and his friend began to move toward the bar, Henman Platt paused and turned. “Oh, Mr. Skaggs—I was distressed to hear of your friend Miss Lucking’s hard luck with Burton. Do send her my kind regards.”

  “What?” Ben practically lunged at the man. “What’s that you said?”

  Platt put both hands up reflexively, as if he feared an assault.

  “Mr. Knowles,” Skaggs explained, “is Polly Lucking’s”—fiancé?— “beau.”

  “I—I—I,” Platt said, “only wish to express my sympathies, sir, for a fellow thespian…so badly cogged and so…ill treated by, by mean gossip and backbiting.”

  “This is all news to us, Mr. Platt,” Skaggs said. “Please explain.”

  According to Platt, the impresario and star of Dombey had been persuaded by another member of his troupe that Polly was insufficiently…innocent to play Dickens’s virginal Florence Dombey—and that some terrible embarrassment might accrue to the new Burton’s Theatre and certain of its investors if Polly Lucking appeared in the leading female role in its debut production. Burton had dismissed her from the company the very night before the players were to leave for their debut out of town.

  “Although I am led to understand,” Platt added, “that he had the good graces to pay her a full month’s wages when he sacked her. Fifty dollars.”

  Ben’s feelings churned and spilled in every direction, from jealousy to pity to rage to fear, bewilderment, and self-accusation. But he realized that his missives to Philadelphia had not gone unanswered, but had never been received. I love you, Ben. I will say that. I love you.

  NOT A MILE to the east, crouching on a greasy stone floor and working by the light of the full moon, his trousers smudged with flour, Duff Lucking was also filled with a toxic and desperate admixture of emotion on Polly’s behalf. But Duff ’s sorrow and shame were anticipatory. At moments such as this, a part of his mind always became, as he imagined it, a kind of holy parrot, screeching, Forgive me, Father…Forgive me, Father…Forgive me, Father…Forgive me, Father, even as other thoughts drifted through his mind as usual.

  And tonight those thoughts were all the odious ones that had driven Duff to break and enter the Enggas Bakery in Greene Street and take vengeance, his promises three months ago to Bishop Hughes and God notwithstanding. He thought of all the squalid rumholes and gambling pits through which he had tracked down Priscilla’s father on the nightmarish eve of Independence Day. He thought of the snatches of whispered conversation he’d overheard late that night between his sister and Priscilla about “101 Mercer” and their plan to “visit the house one last time” to collect Priscilla’s things “from Mrs. Stanhope.” And he thought of his mortifying exchange one evening last week at the firehouse, after he’d heard one of the boys sniggering about his cousin’s “night and morning of happiness at 101 Mercer.”

  Now Duff knew the nature of 101 Mercer’s business. Now he understood why his sister could afford to buy so many good dresses and books and chalks and pads of paper. Now he understood that the ugly things Fatty Freeborn had said at the blaze that afternoon in Wooster Street were true, understood that the “bit of regular, indoor work” Polly had arranged for Priscilla Christmas had not involved laundering or sewing. And after he understood all of that, he resisted the urge to break his promise and strike once again, but finally he realized what he had to do before he left New York City for good. From his reconnaissance he had discovered that the old lady at 94 Greene had closed her house and moved to Long Island for the summer, and that on Saturday nights the Enggas Bakery at 96 Greene baked its last buns and loaves by ten o’clock.

  And so there he was, past midnight on Saturday, with his leather satchel of U.S. Army sapper’s tools he had meant to put away for good; cutting fuse with his folding bowie knife and placing three charges inside and out; and arranging open canisters of coal oil like a line of pickets against the fence of its back neighbor, the house at 101 Mercer. He laid out plenty of fuse, a fifteen-foot length for the first charge, to give himself a full ten minutes to run around the block and warn the women of 101 Mercer that the bakery adjacent to them was ablaze, that they must evacuate their house. Although he thought it might serve their visitors right—the men, the whoremongers—to be incinerated.

  “The Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire,” he said out loud.

  The flour in the air made Duff sneeze. He was packing his things, maybe a minute from striking a lucifer and touching the fuse, when he heard a pound and a slam and a heavy footfall from the front of the building.

  “Hey!” came a shout. “Carl? That you? Still baking so late!” The voice was getting closer. “Who you gabbing with in there? I come back for my rye whiskey I left.”

  Duff grabbed his bag and his coil of fuse from the floor and tiptoed in four long, fast strides to the darkest corner of the room.

  “Carl?”

  The voice sounded familiar.

  “You hidin’ back there in the dark, tossin’ off in the lard like the dirty boy I knows you are? Show yourself, hoss, and we can take a nightcap together.”

  It was Fatty Freeborn—this must be the bakery where he worked. Duff got a whiff of his cigar and then saw the profile in the doorway not ten feet in front of him, that crapulent face and sideways mountain of flesh. He held a liquor bottle.

  “Carl?”

  Some grains of flour tickled Duff ’s nose and he strained to stifle another sneeze. But Fatty heard the choked strain of throat and sinus in the dark and turned sharply to his right.

  “Hallo, Freeborn,” Duff said as he stepped toward him, into the moonlight.

  “Hey!” Fatty shouted, and jumped back, but then relaxed when he saw who it was.

  “Why, what—you creepy goddamned sneak! I oughta smash you, Lucking! What are you lurking in here for?”

  “Working.”

  “What? Horseshit! There ain’t no gas hooked into this place yet. You’ve gone from shylock to thief now, is that it? Down to filching bread, are you?”

  Duff could see that Fatty was beginning to enjoy himself.

  “You know, this don’t surprise me altogether, Lucking, on account of what I heard about you the other day from a army bunkie o’ yours I met.”

  Duff started to rummage through the satchel.

  “Pennsylvania boy working here in the city now as a boilermaker, living at my boardinghouse. Pishey Wetmore? From your Company A. Pishey told me about how you disappeared in Vera Cruz, and at first they thought you turned chicken and run away…”

  Duff acted as if he were not dismayed in the slightest. He had just found the tool he needed in the bottom of his bag.

  “…but how then he heard they found you joi
ned up with those Irish traitors down there, the St. Patricks, killing your own American brothers on the orders of the Mexicans.”

  Duff set the satchel and the coil of fuse on the floor.

  “So not only is Duff Lucking the cat-lick brother of a whore—a whore, by the by, who I can fuck four different times at ten dollars a crack, now that I got some extra cash in the pocket.” He patted his coat, in which he had his blackbirding fee. “Not only is Duff Lucking a traitor and a whore’s brother, but a regular little bread burglar on top of all that.” Fatty shook his head, stuck out the forefinger wrapped around the neck of his whiskey bottle, and stroked it with his other. “Shame on you, ya sinful little bastard, shame! Shame, sh—”

  At the first “shame” Duff had opened his knife, and at the second he had propelled himself forward, and before the fourth “shame” left Fatty’s mouth, the blade had pierced a lung and nicked the heart. As Fatty stumbled backward, he hit a cask of whale oil and knocked open its bunghole, then slipped in the resulting slick and fell. Now sitting on the floor, he saw Duff ’s hand flying toward him a second time and tried to duck from the thrust, but instead merely presented his neck as the target instead of his chest.

  Duff stood up and looked down at Fatty in the moonlight. He was supine, pints of blood and whale oil puddling together around him on the floor. This wasn’t like in Mexico, where none of the men he’d killed had deserved to die. I have slain a monster, he said to himself. He needed to light the fuses and go. Destruction and creation are the cycle of life.

  Fatty grunted and squeaked and shook, tried to groan. His eyes were open wide, and filled with terror. Blood streamed down his chest. His shirttail had pulled out of his pants, exposing his hairless pink belly. He looked like an animal in distress, which made Duff feel sorry for him. Duff had butchered dozens of sheep as a boy in the Clove Valley, and had learned to cut the throats fast and deep, with a single stroke, two at most.

  This knife was barely half as long as the one they had used on the lambs at Easter. But it would be barbaric to let Freeborn gasp and quake and suffer any longer, so Duff crouched down and did what he had to do. Unfortunately for both men, the blade was too dull to make a good slaughter knife.