Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  At the colony called Experiment, the founder invited them to stay on to talk about the European revolutions and Frederick Douglass and life in New York; Ben declined. “I’m afraid we must press on tonight to the Brotherhood Colony, and then to Mr. Warren’s Utopia.” After a brief bit of excitement at Brotherhood—where the community’s new conscripts Mary Ann and Priss turned out to be sisters in their forties from Harrisburg—they stayed the night in a barn. Ben insisted that they leave for Utopia at dawn and, if Polly was not there, proceed to Evansville on the afternoon steamer.

  UTOPIA’S FOUNDER, A printer and musician named Josiah Warren, had made his fortune as the inventor and manufacturer of a lamp that burned lard. In the years since, he had devoted himself to promoting his scheme for a new economic system, by publishing a newspaper called The Peaceful Revolutionist, and by setting up businesses and settlements in which profit was outlawed. The idea had sounded preposterous to Skaggs and Ben.

  The town was parceled out with streets and alleys into eighty quarter-acre lots which sold for a fixed price of fifteen dollars apiece. A dozen good houses were already built; a dozen more were under construction. A brick kiln and a mill were running full blast. Utopia was tidy and prosperous-looking—“extremely spruce,” Duff said.

  When they entered the dry-goods emporium, the so-called Time Store, the bewhiskered shopkeeper greeted them. Beneath his apron he was well dressed, and looked to be fifty. Like the other Utopians they’d asked, he told them no, he hadn’t seen Polly and Priscilla. He then turned to a large clock behind him—it read sixteen minutes past two—and moved a red-painted third hand forward to overlap the minute hand at the sixteen-minute mark. Duff and Skaggs and Ben exchanged glances.

  Skaggs asked for soap and candles and the man apologized, explaining that his shipment was due later in the day—and then moved the red clock hand forward half a minute. “No change for disappointment,” he said cheerfully.

  Skaggs also wanted a soft country slouch hat to replace his hard, tall city model, which had blown off his head and into the river at Niagara. And Duff was looking to buy a good traveling cup.

  “How much?” Duff asked about a particular pewter model.

  “I could give you an estimate now, sir, but here in Utopia, we tot up the final price of the purchase only when we are finished.”

  Skaggs whispered to Ben, “A company of riddlers.”

  Exactly fourteen minutes after they’d stepped into the store, they were finished—Duff had his cup, neatly wrapped, and Skaggs had pulled the new hat onto his head. The shopkeeper checked the clock, reckoned the sums in his head, and announced: “Thirty-four cents—twelve for the cup, and twenty-two for the hat.”

  The prices seemed impossible, half what they would be in New York, or less.

  The shopkeeper was smiling broadly now, plainly accustomed to new customers’ astonishment. He raised his palms and shrugged. “This is Utopia, gentlemen. No profit, and thus the lowest possible prices.”

  “Viva Utopia!” said Duff, surprising himself as much as Ben and Skaggs by the lapse into Spanish.

  “And exactly how do you manage,” Skaggs asked, “to operate without any profit?”

  The cup and the hat were made by a tinsmith and a hatter living nearby, he explained, and had required about one hour and one and one-half hours of the makers’ labor, respectively, plus the cost of pewter and felt. His own labor—the quarter hour he’d just spent attending to the sale, plus a half cent for the costs of lard for the lamps, freight charges, and the like—were added in as well. But no profit.

  “The profit not taken, the two bits you saved shopping here, will be saved in turn on buying bricks across the way, or flour at our mill, or in paying the neighborhood physician. And if you boys lived around here, and we could therefore rely upon employing your labor at some later date, you would pay only for the costs of pewter and felt and lard oil with cash money, and we would transact the rest of the trade using these.”

  From his till he pulled a banknote—rather, what resembled a crisp two-dollar banknote but was in fact a two-hour “labor note” printed by Josiah Warren for use along this hundred-mile stretch of the Ohio River Valley.

  The fellow anticipated questions before they were asked. He said that dickering meant that prices in Utopia fluctuated, as in any economy, but eggs generally cost about twenty minutes a dozen, milk forty minutes per gallon, twenty pounds of corn one hour, a pair of shoes between three and nine hours.

  “So much time spent calculating quarter hours and percentages,” Skaggs said, “would unparadise me.”

  They all smiled.

  “Not to mention…well, surely you enforce vegetarianism or Perfectionism or some other angelic regime for which a sinner like me is unsuited.”

  The Utopian chuckled, shaking his head and waving his hands. “No ism of any kind against any man or woman’s wishes, I assure you. I have fought those bloody battles myself.” A few years ago downriver in Evansville, he explained, he had built a blazingly fast new press for his newspaper, but “a rough pack of the local pressmen,” worried the new machine threatened their livelihoods, had forced him to dismantle it.

  “Well, sir,” said Skaggs, preparing to leave, “as a fellow former newspaperman, I wish you great luck here.” He held out his hand. “I am Timothy Skaggs. My friends are Mr. Knowles and Mr. Lucking.”

  “It has been my pleasure, gentlemen. I am Josiah Warren.”

  The founder was filling in for the regular shopkeeper, who was at home that day assisting in the delivery of his first child.

  Before they left, Ben rummaged quickly through one of his bags and pulled out a green pamphlet to leave with Warren as a gift. Warren gave it a quick professional printer’s assessment—rubbing the cover stock, examining the binding—before looking at the title. It was Engels and Marx’s Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei.

  “I’m afraid your kindness would be wasted on me, Mr. Knowles,” he said, returning the booklet, “for alas, I know hardly any German at all.”

  Shortly they were steaming down the Ohio aboard the stern-wheeler Financier. The plan was to continue on to Evansville, but as they approached Cincinnati around dusk and saw the gaslights twinkling, Ben agreed to stop for the night. And once ensconced—eating pork chops, sleeping in clean, soft beds—they all found it harder to depart with the haste they had made during the previous two weeks. They were urban men, and while Cincinnati was known as Porkopolis, it was a true city, the largest west of Philadelphia.

  Finally, after a glass of wine, even Ben was nearly decided to stay for a half day—“to refit and recomfort ourselves,” Skaggs said, “to recuperate and reblossom from this”—he almost said this wild-goose chase—“from the rigors of our expedition. Frankly, Knowles, I need a break from our interviews with these smiling, doomed, moonstruck cenobites.”

  Duff checked his watch, took out his pencil stub, and scribbled S-E-N-OB-I-T-E, 8:28 PM. For some reason he could not explain, he had started to note the precise time as he recorded each new word in his vocabulary journal.

  “For all their occasional charms and considerable sincerity,” Skaggs continued, “these people sadden me. So many of them seem so gloomy beneath their cheerful, hopeful masks. And we must pause here for a day if only that I might recover from those pitiful harpists.” At the New Communia colony, the only music permitted was that played constantly on the farm’s lyres. They’d heard “Auld Lang Syne” four times in as many hours.

  “And Mr. Warren’s arithmetic society,” Skaggs said, shaking his head. “Oh my Lord.”

  “But you are good with numbers, Skaggs,” said Duff.

  “Yes, and I am adept at pissing as well,” Skaggs replied, “but I don’t wish to make that the foundation of my life, either.”

  Ben had been impressed by Warren—a sensible reformer, a man of vision but not fanatic. In Warren he imagined he saw an older version of himself, and all afternoon and evening he had daydreamed about some future Utopia of his ow
n…reunited with Polly…building their own community together…perhaps in the beloved valley of her childhood…

  “Mr. Warren is no humbug, Skaggs,” he said.

  “No indeed.”

  “And no zealot.”

  “I agree,” Skaggs said. “He is a fine American specimen. Religious enough that he seeks to improve man’s lot, and reasonable enough to appreciate that actual men only wish to be improved so far. Still, I am afraid that…in my case…”

  “They permit strong drink in Utopia,” Duff said. “I asked him.”

  “And of all the places we have visited,” Ben added, “they seem to be laying practical foundations to grow and endure…”

  “Gentlemen! I deny none of what you say! In a hundred years, the Ohio River Valley may well be a great democratic, socialist paradise from Pittsburgh to Cairo, with its capital in Utopia and a fine bronze statue of Josiah Warren calculating profitless sums. But for me, the problem of joining such a place would be the necessity of devoting so much of one’s thoughts to—to one’s own goodness, to the act of feeling virtuous. It would drive me crazy. In fact, I’m afraid it would only incite me to commit even greater antisocial outrages.”

  For a long time, Ben and Duff made no reply.

  “I guess what you mean,” Duff finally said, “is that it would be like praying all the time.”

  “Yes! Like perpetually praying and sermonizing and for all I know confessing one’s meager sins. Precisely! Every day a Sabbath day, but with sweat and toil never ceasing—the worst of all possible worlds.”

  41

  August 4, 1848

  New York City

  DRUMONT WAS BEGINNING to enjoy America, and not only because his English had progressed from the fluency of an infant to that of a toddler. Compared with England or France, America—New York, at least—was highly advantageous terrain. There were scarcely any police, and no uniformed guardsmen or soldiers at all. A country where passersby in the street looked you straight in the eye and smiled; where any muddy teamster truly considered himself the equal of a gentleman; where strangers engaged in intimate conversation—“What is that fish you’re eating?” and “Never seen hair so short as you’ve got, like a beaver’s backside!” and “Ah, French, it’s all the news from over there, eh?” Such a madly fluid and eager place, he realized, was a perfect place for conducting espionage and guerrilla warfare. Vive la démocratie.

  In Paris, would such a man as Drumont, without any letter of introduction, be permitted simply to wander into the Banque Rothschild and up to the private offices of Monsieur Rothschild? And then be recognized courteously by Baron James himself, and engaged in conversation? Absolument pas.

  “Certainement,” Samuel Prime assured him in his office at Prime, Ward & King, “I recall you and our meeting quite clearly. You are an associate of Mr. Roux’s furniture firm, and you are seeking to reunite with your English friend Benjamin Knowles, Sir Archibald’s son. And you are Monsieur…Gabriel…Dumont.”

  “Drumont, yes, thank you very much, monsieur. I do not see Monsieur Knowles, I am sorry. Do you see him?”

  “In fact, I have not, but after receiving another rather urgent letter from his family this week, I made inquiries, and according to his landlord in Greenwich Village, Mr. Knowles has departed the city for points west.”

  “Points West? He is there? I must go to it. Where is this place, Points West?”

  “Ha! No, monsieur, ‘points west’ is no place—what I mean to say is that young Knowles has traveled west, to some locale in the western states, although precisely where, his landlord had no idea at all, I am afraid.”

  Drumont’s heart sank.

  “But the fellow did inform my man,” Prime continued, trying to cheer up his French visitor, “that Mr. Knowles had paid his rent in advance through December, from which one may deduce that he expects to return. Do you—vous comprendre? Your ami il a payé à décembre.”

  This news did not cheer Drumont. “En décembre? He go from here until décembre?”

  Prime shrugged and nodded wistfully. “C’est la vie, eh? The landlord said that Knowles has embarked on a lovelorn search for a certain young lady.” He thought of his own dear smiling fugitive girl and sighed, feeling the sweet anguish of passion and longing, his obsession with finding Priscilla Christmas, his beautiful child, his lost love. “C’est la vie. C’est l’amour.”

  Drumont, groping for some further clue, recalled one of the letters he had studied on the table in Knowles’s room. “Is his lady, do you understand, if she is…Miss Christmas?”

  “What? What did you say, sir? Who?”

  “Miss Priscilla Christmas. I know she is a friend of…of Benjamin. Do he go to her?” Drumont, seeing he had touched a nerve, wanted to husband his precious bits of intelligence. He thought quickly. Perhaps he could use his information as leverage. “I know where Miss Christmas is.”

  Prime quickly shut the door to his office. “You know?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Prime grabbed both of Drumont’s upper arms. “Oh! My good God, sir, you are a bearer of such good news! Such divine news!” Prime’s cheeks reddened and his eyes widened. “Gabriel!” He laughed in a way that struck Drumont as slightly mad. “My angel Gabriel! You have no idea the lengths I’ve gone to find her! I am paying a detective in the West twenty-five dollars a week to hunt—and now you arrive out of the blue with the very information I require!”

  Samuel Prime’s run of luck was beginning to seem to him fully providential. First he had managed to find Mrs. Stanhope, and learn that Priscilla had left for Ohio or Indiana or Illinois or Iowa. The next day, while delivering his sympathies to Mrs. Gibbs about the bakery fire that had destroyed her home in Greene Street, she had told him she didn’t believe the official story about the fire—she was certain that her house had been the arsonist’s intended object, because of her work there assisting fugitive slaves. In order to apprehend these enemies of liberty, whoever they were, Mrs. Gibbs had engaged the services of a brilliant policeman in Chicago, a young Scot she knew through his work for the Underground Railroad. And so now, Prime was employing the same man, the finest detective in the Old Northwest, to oversee the search for Priscilla Christmas.

  “Monsieur Drumont, Gabriel—where is my dear little dodger?”

  “I may not say.”

  “What? Perhaps you do not understand—I wish to have her address.”

  The Sherman House, Randolph Street, Chicago, Illinois. “I may not say. I may find her for you.” He would flash one tidbit of information, a piece of bait. “She is in your province of Eel-een-wah.”

  “In Illinois! Yes! You do know where Priscilla is living, don’t you? You must tell me! Tell me where Priscilla is, and I shall pay whatever you wish.”

  “No, no, Monsieur Prime, not money, it is a question of…of my…intégrité, understand? My respect professionnel.” He pulled his hand from his pocket and opened the palm to show his Baby Dragoon. “Understand, I too am a…detective. Un détective privé.”

  Prime complained that time was of the essence, but the Frenchman was unbudging, and Prime desperate. Drumont recited the relevant points of his résumé, only slightly embellished—his years in the Garde Municipale, half of those as senior sergeant of the ninth arrondissement, his work with the famous detective genius Eugène-François Vidocq. At length they managed to make themselves understood and came to terms. Prime would cover his travel expenses to the West, but Drumont would receive a fee only upon his successful return to New York accompanying the young lady. They shook hands enthusiastically, each believing he had gotten by far the best of the bargain.

  Cincinnati

  “YOU ENGLISHMEN ARE funny,” Skaggs said the moment they walked out of the big soap and candle shop into the morning glare of Main Street. “You are an unemployed, unshaven young—what?—rambler, and he is a prosperous, hardworking, middle-aged man of affairs—and yet here in the heart of America, in his very own place of business, you intimidated him w
ith your accent.”

  “Intimidated? Hardly, sir.” But even as he denied it, and although it had not occurred to him, he knew Skaggs was right.

  “Well, Ben,” Duff said, “he is the boss of the whole place, but as soon as he heard you talk, he did trot out like, like a butler from the back to help…”

  “I believe that Mr. Procter,” Ben replied, “was surprised simply to encounter a countryman and fellow immigrant.” And overwhelmed that the son of the great Sir Archibald Knowles had deigned to enter the Procter & Gamble Soap and Candle Company. “And pleased to satisfy my curiosity about his trade.”

  “You did ask a lot of questions,” Duff said.

  After six months’ holiday from all thought of factories, Ben had, for a few minutes, found himself fascinated by the particulars of American manufacturing—by the thought of Cincinnati’s slaughterhouses “doing” (as Procter had put it) one hog every second of every working day, a million hogs per year, and by Procter and his Irish brother-in-law being “the fortunate beneficiaries of an inexhaustible river of pure, creamy tallow,” the rendered hog fat from which they made their candles and soap.

  “‘Please, kind sir, why yes, of course, governor,” Skaggs teased, mimicking Procter in a ridiculous English accent.

  “We were in the damned shop,” Ben said, “for your ‘real soap and good candles.’”

  A young man wearing an enormous grin suddenly blocked their way.

  “I’ll be blowed if you three guys ain’t just passin’ through our dear Porkopolis for a day, maybe a week afore you move on? Yeah? Am I right? And maybe not afeared to head on out to the real Wild West, could be?”

  He pronounced his New York Boweryese (“blowed,” “guys”) with a southern accent, and what Ben took to be antique Chaucerian words (“afore,” “afeared”). And except for his slouch hat, he was fitted up in gaudy Bowery b’hoy fashion: a short coat with giant purple and gray checks, shiny silver waistcoat, greasy sidelocks that hung down beneath the brim of his hat and waggled as he talked. In one hand he held a cigar and a stack of pressed-paper handbills. He thrust the stack toward them, and like a card shark fanned out three of the bills. Printed by the American Society for the Encouragement of the Settling and Civilizing of Our Savage Western Territories, they were entitled AMERICANS AND FOREIGNERS: KEEP GOING WEST!