July 16, 1848
“WE WAITED FOR you last night at Orr’s until one, or later. God, was it hot.” Skaggs was making small talk. “But later, coming east on Canal, I saw a great blaze up in Greene Street, and decided that must be what kept you from joining us. You look tired, Duff.” Skaggs was filling time, trying to await Ben Knowles’s arrival so that he and Ben might together deliver the unpleasant and mysterious news about Polly they had learned from Whitman’s actor friend. They were standing in Prince Street, outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Skaggs knew that since the spring Duff had been attending morning Mass there every Sunday.
Of course, Duff already had learned the most unpleasant news about his sister. And he was surprised by this odd encounter with Skaggs, which made him suspect that Skaggs suspected him.
“We were over there in Greene until dawn,” Duff said, “Fifteen Engine was, along with seven or eight others. It was a big bakery burned, gallons of oil they stored were lit, and kaplow. Some houses next door and behind in Mercer caught afire as well.”
“Arson, do they believe?”
He shrugged and shook his head. For someone who hated to lie, Duff Lucking found himself lying rather a great deal.
“True they pulled a body out?” Skaggs asked. “That’s what some old loon this morning was saying. ‘Baked to a crisp in a bakery.’”
Duff nodded. “Burnt beyond recognition.” He paused. “But not any other deaths or even an injury.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Skaggs, I have a letter to post downtown.” He touched his pocket. He was indeed carrying an urgent letter, which he needed to deliver to an office in Fulton Street. “I must go.”
“Of course,” Skaggs said, but he was looking up at the trees behind them in St. Patrick’s cemetery. “You know, those elms there have grown a good twenty feet since I came to the city. Which demonstrates how elderly I’ve become.”
“Why have you met me here, Skaggs? What do you want?”
“Knowles and I decided to surprise you for your birthday—”
“My birthday was in May.”
“—belatedly, and treat you to a good Sunday meal. A young man cannot survive on communion wafers and priest’s wine alone.”
Skaggs now spotted Ben coming down Mott Street and hailed him. He looked grave and forceful. Before even a greeting could be uttered, Ben addressed them both.
“I have received a letter from Polly. She is not in Philadelphia, Duff. I know where she’s gone. And I am leaving in pursuit as soon as possible.”
When they sat down to lunch, Ben recounted the salient points of her letter. A young protégée of the actress Caroline Chapman’s, a girl of seventeen, was now playing the part of Florence Dombey. Polly had been sacked from the Dombey company because Miss Chapman had persuaded her good friend Burton of Polly’s “notoriety.”
There was an awkward moment before Ben continued.
Burton had told Polly he was especially anxious to avoid any embarrassment for one of his investors, who Miss Chapman had informed him was an old friend of Polly’s—Samuel Prime.
“Prime!?!” Skaggs and Duff said in unison.
“You know Mr. Prime?” Ben replied, sincerely surprised. “He is an acquaintance of my father’s as well.”
Skaggs shook his head. Duff clenched his fists, yearning at that instant to dispatch Mr. Prime the younger as he had done Mr. Prime the elder—and might have acted on the impulse had he known of Samuel Prime’s thirteen liaisons with Priscilla Christmas in the bedroom at 101 Mercer.
“She wrote,” Ben said, “that her last several years in New York have amounted to ‘an overextended stay in life’s greenroom.’”
“Greenroom,” Skaggs explained, was theater jargon for the parlor where actors await their turns to take the stage. And he explained to Duff why Caroline Chapman’s name sounded familiar—she had been the half-clothed actress Duff rescued along with Skaggs from the closet at the Lyceum Theatre during the fire in 1844.
The long and the short of it, Ben continued, was that Polly had decided to abandon acting and the theater and the city. She was traveling with Priscilla Christmas, whom she now considered her ward. The letter was posted on the seventh from the city of Buffalo (which elicited a groan from Skaggs), and Polly’s plan was to join one of the socialist communities in the West so that she and Priscilla could make a new start in a healthy place among people of good will.
Skaggs groaned again. “Good God, she’s gone and done it, headed off to become some species of Shaker communist ascetic, eating vegetables and singing hymns and talking with the dead. Does she say for which of the western utopias she’s bound? There are scores of such places sprouted now, like mushrooms in the dim wastelands.”
“She says she has a list of some dozen prospects,” Ben said, “from Ohio out to the Indian country, a list she acquired from your friend Brisbane at the Tribune.”
Skaggs shook his head and sighed.
“And there is nothing more?” Duff asked.
“No.” In fact, yes: there was also the joyful and shocking penultimate paragraph, the one Ben had reread a dozen times: You are the only man I ever loved. But during our final encounter I came to understand that you could never return that love once you were apprised of the true facts of my previous life & occupations. By which I mean this, plainly put: for seventeen months, from October 1846 until April last, I rented myself to men. Before writing “rented myself,” Polly had with a single fine line crossed out the phrase “sold my affections.”
“And you, Ivanhoe,” Skaggs said, “intend to find her and fetch her home?”
“I do intend to find her. If she is at the ends of the earth, I shall find her. And to stay with her forever if she’ll allow me.”
Duff stared in admiration: the ends of the earth. He had never heard anyone but a priest use that phrase. He felt a wave of love for Ben, and suddenly saw his chance. “I’ll come along with you,” he said, practically shouting, he was so excited. “West.”
Ben smiled, and clasped Duff ’s hand, thumb hooked to thumb.
“Wait, wait, wait…” It had fallen to Skaggs, of all people, to challenge their quest on practical grounds. “How shall you possibly find her? She has been two weeks on the road already. They might be anywhere between Ohio and the desert.”
“We shall obtain from Mr. Brisbane a copy of his little guide,” Ben said, “and follow it like a map from east to west. The only question is our fastest route. Speed is paramount.”
Skaggs saw that his friend would not be deterred. “Well, a steamboat to Albany, railways to Buffalo, then a steamer across Lake Erie. It sickens me even to describe the route. But you could be in Cleveland before the end of the week.”
He paused. “I cannot believe that I am describing a speedy arrival in Cleveland as a desirable thing.”
33
July 17, 1848
New York City
LAST EVENING, DRUMONT’S first day at his new job, Monsieur Roux had sent him downtown in a wagon with three other men to deliver a set of very grand étagères to an office of lawyers. When they’d finished, as they turned on Wall Street toward Broadway, he’d happened to glance at the number 42 and the name painted below it: PRIME, WARD & KING. And then he’d remembered—this was the firm that the grinning noddy at the Knowles office in London had mentioned. And at dawn, he had rushed to his room in White Street and found the scrap of paper—yes—then came straight back to 42 Wall to wait for the offices to open. Vidocq would be proud.
“Is that so?” Samuel Prime now said to Drumont. He was pleased by the visit, since he had been expecting a letter from Benjamin Knowles and had heard nothing at all. “And the two of you became acquainted in Paris, during the insurrections?”
“Yes.” So far, Drumont had not even had to lie to this polite American banker.
“And you both decided to immigrate to republican America, inspired by that terrible confusion.”
“Oui, yes, exactly true.”<
br />
“Well, sir, you are in luck, I believe—since according to a missive from Sir Archibald, his father, young Mr. Knowles has been in the city for months. And I certainly do expect to meet him before long, now that he must be settled. His father wishes him to oversee some new business interests. And when I finally encounter him, Mr. Drumont, I shall tell him that you are here as well, and give him your address.”
“No, please—I want to make a surprise?” Drumont forced his mouth into a big, stupid American grin. It worked.
“I see, of course. The joie de vivre, eh? In that case I shall post a note to you with his local address whenever I learn it.”
Magnifique. He was closing in. And Drumont was interested to learn that even as Knowles was trying to spread the germs of revolution to yet another country not his own, he was still employed in his daddy’s business—interested and pleased, in fact, since it meant the spoiled hypocrite deserved his punishment all the more.
Chicago
THE FIRST PART of Polly and Priscilla’s journey—the evening cruise up the Hudson past a dozen different fireworks displays, the trains to Buffalo, the week on the steamer across Lakes Erie and Huron and Michigan—had felt like an extravagant summer romp.
They were now in Chicago, having been disgorged from the Queen of the West onto a dock a few blocks from their hotel. The city—all the brand-new buildings and plank sidewalks and paved streets, the noise and bustle of thirty thousand busy-looking men and women—had made both of them a little homesick.
They’d dawdled a couple of days, but only a couple, for the city also made Polly eager to get on their way to a green prairie Eden. Although they did not need the eleven dollars, Polly sold her bracelet and two necklaces and all but three of her fine dresses to a woman in a shop. And she started making inquiries about the communities on Mr. Brisbane’s list. Mary Gove had given her the names of sympathetic Chicagoans—a reporter for the new Chicago Tribune, a phrenomagnetic experimenter, a homeopathic physician. All three encouraged Polly and Priscilla to investigate a certain farm in the hilly country between Terre Haute and Indianapolis, two days’ drive south. Polly liked the sound of the place. It was called Lovely.
For their last evening in Chicago, Polly decided they should have one more taste of the soft, sugary city life. Instead of once again sharing sausage and apples in their hotel room with one knife and no forks, they had dressed and descended to the dining room of the Sherman House. They sat at one of the tables looking out on the twilight hurry of Randolph Street. They devoured fried lamb chunks and sweet corn drenched in butter, and ignored the glances of some young grain dealers two tables away.
“How awful,” said Priscilla. “Do you know if any of the girls at number 101 were hurt?”
Polly had read an article in the Tribune about a large, suspicious fire in New York that burned three buildings in Greene Street and two more in Mercer. Given that the blaze had started in a bakery, and as far as she knew the only bakery in Greene was the big one that backed onto 101 Mercer, she deduced that Mrs. Stanhope’s had been one of the houses destroyed.
“‘No serious injuries,’ the paper had it—but one death, a man, inside the bakery.”
“I guess that counts as a blessing. I wonder if your brother battled the blaze?”
Polly shrugged. Poor dear Duff, she thought. The next morning, before their departure, she would wire a message telling her whereabouts.
“Do you think often of Duff and Mr. Knowles and Mr. Skaggs?” Priscilla asked.
In fact, Polly had managed to go since noon without thinking of Ben Knowles, her longest abstention since leaving New York. Whenever she did think of him, she tried to flush away the sorrow and desire by reminding herself of every awful second of that humiliating final scene in her room.
Polly nodded.
“I have had gooseflesh on my neck for days,” Priscilla said.
“Have you indeed?” Polly tended to ascribe Priscilla’s psychic perceptions to the stormy mental weather of adolescence, a lonely and imaginative girl’s fancies. On the other hand, if it was possible to send a letter a thousand miles through a copper thread in a second; perhaps…
“Yes. A very strong feeing that”—she smiled—“that you and I are both quite longed for in New York.”
Polly’s eyes flickered with skepticism as she took another bite of dinner.
“Honestly, I have the feeling quite strong,” Priscilla insisted.
“Strongly.”
“Strongly. Do you not think that Duff and Mr. Knowles miss us? And Mr. Skaggs as well?”
Polly finished chewing her lamb. “Friends come and go, and each of us has his or her own life to carry on, his or her own destiny to fulfill,” she said. She softened. “I am certain that my brother misses us, Priscilla, yes.”
“What do you suppose they are all of them doing right now? Duff and Mr. Knowles and Mr. Skaggs?”
“Your clairvoyant telegraph can’t tell us that, eh?” She reached over and playfully tugged on one of Priscilla’s corkscrew curls. “If you finish your salad, we’ll ask for a strawberry pudding.”
New York City
PRISCILLA’S SENSATION OF fervent male desire in New York was perfectly accurate, of course. But the strongest longing for Priscilla herself came from an unexpected party. Not Duff, though he thought of her often. Not her father, who assumed Prissy had gone off to board as well as fuck in her uptown meat house, wherever it was, and to give some slick pimp, whoever he was, the cut of her wages rightfully due her long-suffering dad.
No, the man in New York who fretted most about her, and craved her with the ardor (in his own fervid reckoning) of Romeo for Juliet or Heath-cliff for Catherine, was Samuel Prime, Priscilla’s own Sammy Boy.
After Prime had learned, on that Friday afternoon in May when he’d appeared for his regular appointment, that his girl was pregnant and had quit the hireling life, his first reaction had been shock and grief and anger, almost as if he’d lost one of his own children. She had abandoned him, he could not help feeling. He’d insisted that Mrs. Stanhope tell him the girl’s true, full name, and the answer—Priscilla Christmas—had pleased him even more than her alias, “Minerva Spooner.” He’d thought of going to Polly Lucking and asking her to intercede…but the prospect of that encounter—Miss Lucking, you must persuade your protégée Miss Christmas to return to the brothel and submit once again to my animal passions—was too mortifying and ridiculous to consider. After a few days, his second, sensible assessment of the situation prevailed: that Priscilla Christmas was too fine and pure a creature for harlotry, and had redeemed herself before her young life was ruined entirely, may she go with God.
But unquenched lusts finally overwhelmed Episcopalian virtue. In the last weeks and months he had indulged in assignations with other women and girls in other parlor houses—beautiful young women, pretty girls, the finest houses—but each served only to sharpen his hunger for Priscilla, Priscilla, Priscilla. He was embarrassed by his feelings, but he could no longer resist or deny them. He knew it was mad, the love—the love!—of a respectable married man for a girl—a whore!—in her teens. But did the poets not say that all love is a kind of madness? And was not Romeo’s Juliet only thirteen when she gave herself over to her one true love? Samuel Prime reveled in the first lovesick misery of his forty-six years.
When he had seen the article about Saturday night’s blaze (“a well-known disorderly house in Mercer Street,” the Courier and Enquirer reported, was among the buildings that had burned to the ground, as well as a bakery and “the fine old home of the late Colonel Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs next door”), it was as if he had been delivered a terrible vision. Prime knew Laura Gibbs from Trinity Church, and at her behest made a donation each year to the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; he hoped the dear lady had escaped the fire unharmed. But his instant terror and preoccupation as he dropped the newspaper next to his poached eggs concerned Priscilla Christmas: in his mind’s eye he saw her dying hideously in the
flames—she and their unborn child together.
So for the last two days, Samuel Prime, ordinarily the picture of Knickerbocker calm and reasonableness, was like a man possessed. And when he finally found Mrs. Stanhope at the Arena, a sporting man’s saloon, he pulled her aside and sputtered, “Tell me she did not perish in the blaze! Tell me that Miss Christmas is alive!”
“But of course she did not die,” Mrs. Stanhope replied in her usual chatty and gracious fashion. “All of my ladies are just fine—and as you were informed in the spring, Miss Christmas is no longer associated with the house…Indeed, since her final and I trust quite satisfactory appointment with you, sir, she returned to the house only once, two weeks ago, to gather her personal things, for a journey west, I don’t know where, in the company of Miss Lucking, I believe to one of those states with all the i’s and o’s in its name. Perhaps her father has the address…”
Prime could barely keep from sobbing (in relief and gratitude that Priscilla was safe, of course, but also that she had been sullied by no other man since their last encounter). He was so unhinged, in fact, that he asked directly about the other aspect of his lurid vision—“I must inquire, madam, if the young lady was enceinte”—and then spoke even more bluntly when Mrs. Stanhope failed to understand his question.
“Is Priscilla definitely with child?” he nearly spat.
“Is, what, is…?” Mrs. Stanhope stuttered. She felt a panic, wondering about the most advisable answer. She had mentioned to him in May that Priscilla had been pregnant, using the past tense. But Prime was now in a deranged state, and Mrs. Stanhope wished to stay in the good graces of such a customer, given her plan to reopen her establishment at a new location. “Miss Christmas was indeed pregnant, yes, indeed, so I am reliably given to understand, sir.”
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