From the beginning, Drumont feared that he had been spotted. The very morning following his conversation with Prime, his first morning of surveillance, he had watched the banker leave the building in a plainly agitated state twenty minutes after he had arrived, practically sprinting down the block to his carriage. And for the rest of that day he had not reappeared at all, or the next. But then on the third morning, Prime had come driving up just before nine as usual, and he’d stepped out of the barouche looking normal—dim and contented. Why had he been so perturbed two days earlier? Had he regained some piece of business that had threatened to go bad? Had his wife or a child sickened and then suddenly recovered? Or perhaps Prime had spotted him, and was now acting ordinary to give Knowles a chance to escape.
But surely not. Surely, sooner or later, Knowles would appear. He would do as his father had asked and pay a call. He would in any event need money, since all things in America except whiskey and meat were so dear. I do expect to see Mr. Knowles soon, Prime had said, and I shall be pleased to give him your message. But whenever Knowles finally did show himself, Drumont intended to deliver his message personally.
Alas, another wearying and fruitless day of vigilance was now ending, with no sign at all of his quarry. As always, Prime’s driver flicked his reins when the first big bell of Trinity chimed the hour, the carriage rolled to a stop at the door on the sixth chime, and Samuel Prime stepped from the building to the pavement on the chime of the inexistent seventh.
Drumont sighed and began his walk to his job at Monsieur Roux’s, watching Prime’s barouche as it quickly became one of the evening herd of carriages racing up Broadway toward the Park and beyond. He always kept an eye out for Knowles as he walked, and he was now taking a second, hard look at a man crossing Canal Street toward him…late twenties, tall, slender build, light brown hair—but the wrong eyes, sleepy and green, not quick and brown like Knowles’s. As Vidocq taught, the detective policeman must concentrate on seeing the face, not le maquillage du coiffeur, the mustache or curls that happened to decorate a face on a given day. Drumont was so busy mentally shaving another passing New Yorker, however, that he very nearly missed the dirty, crinkled advertisement on the wall directly behind and above the stranger’s head.
In fact, he did not understand what he had glimpsed until he was three or four paces beyond it—whereupon he stopped, swiveled, and rushed back to the spot. He put his palms against the wall and looked up to make out what words he could.
A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT by a native-English-speaking EYEWITNESS to the late REVOLUTION in the streets of PARIS which inaugurated the present GREAT & STIRRING EVENTS RIPPING ACROSS EUROPE AND THE WORLD!
A VERY INTERESTING lecture on the DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLE, VALIANT COMBAT, TRAGIC DEATH, AND INSTANT END OF TYRRANY! Presented by Mr. Benjamin Knowles, a well-known University graduate.
“Alléluia,” he said out loud. “Mon Dieu—merci, merci, mon cher Dieu!”
The two-faced parasite is indeed here, and not only is he still playing at revolution, Drumont thought, he is now puffing himself as some hero of the February streets! He is peddling his grotesque little Paris adventure—the murder of Michel—as if it were something entertaining and lofty, “stirring” and “very interesting.”
The poster, for an event weeks earlier, had survived because Duff Lucking had pasted it so securely, and high on the bricks. But by standing on tiptoe (damn the Americans’ stares) and stretching his arm, Drumont could just grab the loose corner and rip away the bottom strip of essential information—the Temple of Reason, Broome Street—and stuff it into his gun pocket.
39
July 30, 1848
Glee, Indiana
AFTER MORE THAN a week sharing their buggy little sleeping hut, Polly and Priscilla were happy when the first phase of their probation ended and they were moved inside the Hive. And Polly had been relieved to discover that every resident was assigned a private cubicle—including each member of the married couples—rather than the open barracks she’d heard that other communities maintained.
It was hard to know for certain who the married couples at Glee were, though, since everyone was always called by his or her first name. For instance, Polly hadn’t known that Harlan, the older man she’d met picking sweet corn the afternoon they arrived, was married to Philippa, one of the pregnant women, until Abigail had caused a small ruckus one morning during work assignments by accidentally referring to Harlan and Philippa as “the Tarboxes.”
On the same Sunday they were to sleep in the Hive for the first time, they were allowed to attend the weekly Conclave. Polly had warned Priscilla she might be bored, so she brought along paper, pencils, and a needle and thread to repair her old stuffed dog, one of whose tin eyes she sewed tight and whose seams she mended as the meeting proceeded. Billy sat on the floor beside her.
For nearly the whole first hour, James held forth excitedly on some new articles he had been reading—“in the German,” he noted, which made Polly think of Ben—by Prussian and Swiss archaeologists and anthropologists. Their findings proved, he said, that all of the familiar ancient goddesses of antiquity, including Aphrodite, his favorite, derived from a forgotten but supreme “mother goddess” worshiped by even older civilizations, and that those earliest societies were “true, full, communist democracies.” He smiled. “As well as gynecocracies.”
Eleanor, a widowed former schoolteacher, raised her hand.
“A gynecocracy, Ellie,” James said, continuing to smile, pausing meaningfully, “a society ruled by women.”
Most of the female consociates reacted the way James had intended, as if they had been told something marvelous.
When James opened the floor for new business, Billy asked if regular Christian prayer might be introduced into the liturgy of Glee. From the exasperated reactions, Polly could see that Billy must have made similar suggestions in the past.
“You, my young sir, have been a consociate for a mere six months—”
“Seven and a half.”
“—and I would suggest that as a new member of this community, Billy, still sloughing off your various Mormon…misconceptions, you give yourself more time to appreciate the full breadth and depth of our celebration of the divine at Glee. The Holy Bible—which some of us, sir, have studied since you were at your mother’s breast—is but one of our sacred texts.”
Billy stared at the floor.
Some votes were taken—whether the puce-and-red-striped stockings one of the consociates’ mothers had sent as a gift were acceptable (no); whether children of eleven would be allowed to go without shirts during the group baths in the creek (yes—including “our naiads,” as James called the girls); whether the limping, bloody fox found trapped in the silo should be killed to end its misery (tabled until next Sunday’s meeting); whether a carrot someone had managed to grow in a jar of water could be eaten, since it had never touched dirt (no); whether the community declared itself in support of slave insurrections across the river in Kentucky (yes, “if performed without loss of life”); and whether Glee would take in fugitive slaves seeking refuge (yes, temporarily, but not—the male members were unanimous on this question—as consociates).
Then came the weekly Session of Mutual Criticism. Hackadiah, a man on the Housekeeping Team who spoke with a nasal New England accent, said that that very morning, when he’d swept out the sleeping hut “the new PCs had occupied,” he’d discovered “three dead night-flies, two dead hawthorn-flies and another two mayflies, a dead gadfly, and the corpses of many honey-gnats.” Hackadiah sighed and shook his bald head. “Each one was broken and smashed.”
Polly was astounded. “I did not know,” she said, “that your sympathy for animals—”
James raised a forefinger. “Our sympathy, Polly.”
“We were not aware that, that bugs were to be spared as well.”
“Whenever possible,” said Harlan. Everyone nodded, and the insect massacre was noted in a large journal.
“And the guhr�
��s dow,” said a small man next to Hackadiah called Savage. Savage, missing a half inch of his tongue, could be difficult to understand.
“The girl’s doll,” a woman, named Charity, translated, pointing at Priscilla and her stuffed dog. A few other consociates nodded.
Now Priscilla was stunned. “I have no doll,” she said. “Jonathan is not a doll.”
“What earthly objection,” Polly asked, “can there be to a child’s toy?”
James sighed. “Priscilla is by no means a child, I should say first—but the Conclave has rather thoroughly debated and decided this question in many meetings long past. I happen to differ with the majority on this issue, but we are a democracy.”
In the winter, back when Glee was still called Lovely, it had declared itself firmly opposed to “the doll spirit” by a 27-to-22 vote. “Whereas playing with dolls is acting and speaking a lie,” the final resolution had declared, “and whereas playing with dolls tends to make us frivolous babies in thought and talk,” dolls were banned. And the seven dolls owned by the children at that time were immediately collected and ceremoniously burned in the Hive’s largest fireplace.
As the history of the doll issue was explained, Priscilla looked to Polly for consolation and tucked Jonathan deeper into her lap. Her breath quickened.
“It is a dog she has,” Billy said firmly, “not a doll. I was present at that Conclave, it was my first, and at the burning, and none of them that burned was an animal. They were all little girls, those dolls. That vote concerned only dolls.” He looked over at Priscilla. She was silent, but tears streamed down her red cheeks. “And she is a probationer, besides.”
Billy’s points of order carried the day, for the moment. It was decided that once Priscilla became a full consociate, the group would reconsider the issue of whether Jonathan—and stuffed animals in general—were contraband.
But the Housekeeping Team was not finished. Charity had her own criticism to lodge against Polly. This morning on the table in the sleeping hut “among the murdered flies,” she and Hackadiah had seen “a proscribed female apparatus”—a rubberized belt-and-cloth contraption Polly wore during her menstrual periods.
A clock began to strike and James shot to his feet. “Ah, six o’clock,” he announced with gusto, “and so we adjourn.”
AND FOUR HOURS later, after the same clock dinged its bell ten times, and outside the million summer insects produced their synchronized sawing, Polly heard the quick, light, sharp taps on the door of her little chamber. She had wondered about the protocol of the Hive regarding open bedroom doors in the summer heat.
“Yes?” she said softly. Her bed, like all the beds at Glee, was constructed of big oaken timbers, and made not the slightest creak as she sat up.
The door opened, and a cooling breeze shot through the room before it closed. In the darkness she could not make out the figure who stood at the threshold a very few yards from her face.
“It is I, my dear,” he whispered, “James. I have come for a love interview—to commune with you, if the prospect is pleasant.”
He had already stepped in close enough that she could smell the soap and sun on the flannel of his nightshirt. Commune? Polly knew the word, but not as a euphemism for copulate.
“Do feel entirely free to decline,” James said. “At Glee, no one is obliged or disobliged in these matters of affection and personal magnetism. Although I do confess that in sleeping with you, I expect something sublime.”
She was not shocked. Yet nor did she feel especially eager to take him. She had enjoyed her month of sharing a bed with no man. This taste of abstinence had been refreshing, like a forgotten piece of music or a dessert she had not consciously craved but was pleased to experience again. The day before, as she had looked out from the hilltop at Glee’s quilt of cultivated and fallow fields—wheat, oats, hay, weeds, wheat, oats, hay, weeds, wheat—she’d fancied that a piece of herself was now lying fallow, like the land, to replenish and rejuvenate.
On the other hand, it had been a month, as long as she had gone these last two years. And while she had been happy to disprove Ben Knowles’s awful suggestion that she indulged her animal passions uncontrollably, and that she suffered from some kind of mental illness—“nymphomania”—nor did she wish to feel tyrannized in her own mind by Ben’s disapproval.
Besides, James was handsome, and she was not immune to flattery—he had chosen her. (She did not know that during his previous two thousand nights at Glee, he had chosen, at least once apiece, all but four of Glee’s women.)
“Have you a preventative?” she asked as he sat down beside her.
“We do not employ artificial means of that sort. If we do not eat the tasty flesh of the beasts, should we not also refrain from disemboweling them for our…convenience?”
Condoms, he meant, were cut from the intestines of livestock; since angling was permitted, grudgingly, at Glee, Polly wondered about the possibility of fish-skin condoms.
“Our way,” he continued, sensing her reluctance as he lifted the sheet and climbed into bed, “is a matter of will. If you don’t want butter, you pull the dasher out in time.”
She took his meaning. (She also recalled Granby’s angry reaction in the barn, at the time inexplicable, when she had suggested loading the real butter with saltpeter.) And soon she understood why James was touching and stroking her face and neck and breasts and hips with only the fingers of his left hand, and why in his right fist the whole time he held a small, neatly folded napkin—in which he would catch the buttermilk splatter from his dasher.
New York City
DRUMONT HAD BEEN very excited and very proud. He had imagined that victory was nigh. The morning after he’d seen the poster for the lecture he went straightaway to the hall in Broome Street, posing as one of Knowles’s red republican friends, and easily wheedled his address from the manager.
He had proceeded directly to 171 Sullivan Street, where he found no concierge, and climbed to the second floor, knocked, then wedged open the door latch with the tip of his knife, and rushed inside…where he found himself all alone…and so altered his plan of attack from surprise to stealth, preparing to await Knowles’s return…
But within a few minutes, as Drumont inspected the rooms, it became plain that the apartment was uninhabited. There was furniture and china and cutlery, there were dozens of pictures and engravings on the wall—such a bourgeois, this revolutionary on the run—but hardly any clothing and no candles, nor a scrap of food. Knowles had already fled. But to where on earth now?
What would Inspector Vidocq do? Drumont closely examined the return addresses and postage stamps on three unopened letters that had been left in a neat stack on the table, two from England, one from Chicago. On the trunk next to the bed he found a newspaper dated July 18—he had missed Knowles by less than two weeks, which exasperated and encouraged him in equal measure. He pressed a palm on the mattress: feathers, of course. Again he felt simultaneous anger (he had never slept on a featherbed) and hope (such a pampered man could not escape Drumont).
And now he saw the next play in the game, the only move open to him. He would revisit Monsieur Prime, and use the one soft aristocrat as the means of finding his way to the other. He had no other choice—which was the way he preferred life to unfold.
40
late July and early August 1848
Ohio
SKAGGS COMPLAINED ABOUT the heat and weak coffee, the niggardly soaps and stubby candles and dirty bed linens. But, in fact, much more than Ben he was able to enjoy their zigzag journey through “the fresh-baked America,” as he called the states west of Pennsylvania. He would be pleased to see Polly again, and to rescue her from whichever species of utopia had bewitched her, but the hunt was for him secondary, a way to get the game going. He had come along to travel with his friends, to see the country again, to disorder his life a little.
And while Duff was eager to see Polly and Priscilla, and happy to be charged with a mission, mainly he felt relief
to be where nobody was likely to know him.
All three men were traveling because they were restless, but two were wandering. Only one was driven by love, and that made Ben their commander. It was he who kept them on the move.
They galloped through Ohio. After two long days on stages from Cleveland down to the Tuscarawas Valley, they reached a well-established German socialist community called Zoar—and the moment they learned that Polly and Priscilla had not been seen, they said thank you and goodbye. It was the same the next day at the Social Reform Community, then at Every Class of Every Nation, and at the Columbus Phalanx.
At the Brothers and Sisters’ Establishment, the eleven residents (down from twenty-nine two years earlier) were bitterly disappointed to learn that the men were not prospective recruits, and that the chance to enlist a pair of young female searchers had evidently passed them by. When the leader invited them to remain for a day to participate in a symposium on how they might persuade the state of Ohio to abolish capital punishment, as Michigan had done, the men begged off. After they boarded their next stage and went a few miles, Duff asked incredulously, “Is that right, they don’t hang you in Michigan no matter what?”
Skaggs nodded. “Not for murder—only for treason.”
Duff was silent for the remainder of the ride.
Heyday: A Novel Page 45