Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Skaggs smiled. It had been a year since he had thought of that moniker, meant to promote his specialty of New York blazes and firemen. “If so,” he said, gesturing toward the telescope, “all thanks shall be due to the brilliant Germans.” The lenses of the camera and telescope were made in Munich, and the clock-driven mount invented by a Bavarian.

  “To hell with your goddamned Germans,” said Ben.

  Duff crossed himself.

  Ben uncorked the whiskey and swigged it. “I thought the telescope was French.”

  “Aha,” said Skaggs, remembering that Polly had been all day with the unctuous German painter they had met in Coloma, “indeed it is, French, quite right.” He lit the lamp. She was a trollop when you met her, sir, he did not say, so it should not entirely surprise you if, God forbid, she were to revert to that earlier condition.

  “Don’t be jealous, Ben,” Duff pleaded. It was nearly seven o’clock. “Shall we cook the salmon? We can keep Polly’s warm.”

  Ben drank some more whiskey and handed the bottle to Skaggs, who also took another slug, and another. Neither made any movement to descend to camp.

  “Now, the French,” Ben said, “the French are the race to whom we are indebted. Voltaire. Daguerre. My cousin’s husband.”

  “Nepotist,” Skaggs snapped.

  “I am in earnest now—it is the French inventing the new ways to live and think.”

  “Terrible new ways,” Skaggs said as he lit his cigar. “It is your French contriving to make over love as a science, meddling with ovaries and menstruation in order to tell us when we may copulate ‘safely.’ And it was a French quack,” he continued, “who contrived the cruel, stupid notion he called ‘nymphomania’ in order to define ordinary, unfettered female passions as illness.”

  Ben took another big gulp.

  Duff, appalled by this turn in the conversation, tried pushing it back in a more seemly direction. “The French want liberty, and risk their lives to gain it, again and again.”

  “Yes,” Ben said with the zeal of drink, “the revolutions. It is always the French struggling to lead mankind toward liberty and equality.”

  Skaggs did not reply immediately. He stared at the red tip of his cigar and blew smoke up toward the night sky. “What have their revolutions produced apart from death?” he said finally. “The French are the great engineers of modern killing. The flintlock. The guillotine. This hideously accurate new rifle bullet, their minié ball. Heating cannon shot to maximize the suffering…”

  Duff ’s scar stung, and he made the sign of the cross.

  “But, Skaggs, honestly,” Ben said, “you know it was the French whose assistance allowed the American Revolution to succeed.”

  “And your own very hero, Jefferson,” Duff added, “loved the French.”

  But Skaggs whiskeyed was not about to stop being contrary, even on the subject of his dearest Founding Father. “Jefferson held some incorrect opinions,” he said. “Nor do I mean the slaves. Or not only do I mean his slaves. I mean his view of the Indians. ‘The same world would scarcely do for them and us,’ he said. Oh, Duff, Jefferson would have happily murdered your girl and all her people. Stand and sigh and make your popish gestures all you wish, boy, but it’s the plain truth! ‘I leave it to you,’ he told his general, ‘to decide if the end should be the Indians’ extermination, or their removal.”

  Duff was already out the door.

  And Ben, wallowing in his own dark slough, vaguely and silently recalled a relevant foretelling by a certain Frenchman. I believe the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish, Tocqueville had written, and that whenever the European shall be established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race of men will have ceased to exist.

  “We are sots,” Skaggs said. “And I’m a mean and sour sot. Back to temperance on the morrow.”

  A minute later, they heard Duff shouting from below. They listened. He was hailing someone. Ben arose and ran.

  Skaggs heard the jingling bells of approaching oxen and wagon wheels. Polly had returned. “Ode to joy,” he said to himself with a large smile, “under the starry firmament.”

  April 13, 1849

  SKAGGS HAD HIRED a teamster to truck his purchase from Sacramento City to Ashbyville, and asked him to stop in Coloma on his way back to fetch Polly at the painter’s tent. It took all four residents plus Jack and Badger and the teamster the following day and most of the next to unload the wagon and finish the job. They used a crane, pulleys, chains, windlass, lever, and winch, powered by Jenny Lind and the oxen, to raise the two tons of Mexican wood and metal into place on the top of Mount Aetna.

  Under the midday California sun the twelve-foot copper dome shone so brightly that when they looked at it they couldn’t stop smiling. Skaggs was abashed by its splendor. Ben said the observatory now looked like a Byzantine church, which pleased Duff. It was a small wonder of their world nearly finished at last.

  After their celebratory dinner, with Skaggs blissfully ensconced as a watcher of the sky and Duff hiking north to Hembem, Polly turned to Ben. The breezes off the river tousled her hair just as they had on their first evening alone together a year before.

  “I have a rather large proposal to make,” she said. “More than one proposal, actually.”

  66

  spring 1849

  San Francisco

  BEN’S TASTE FOR speed made him avid for reading histories. Books about the past compressed time, allowing one to whisk through centuries in a few hours. (Even in Decline and Fall, Ben had once calculated, Mr. Gibbon reduced each of his 1,500 years to a mere thousand words—every fortnight of the Roman Empire distilled to a single sentence.) He decided that Skaggs had been exactly right about 1848. Even as it was occurring it seemed like an account in a history book, bright and quick. And in California, the new year was unfolding in similarly dramatic, implausible fashion.

  As the temperatures warmed and skies cleared, three ships reached the Golden Gate on some days. At busy moments they had to await their turns to sail into the harbor. Hurry and rapacity were in the very air. More, faster, more, faster. At the end of April, a clipper arrived from New York around the Horn after only 125 days. The fastest on record! But almost immediately thereafter another ship arrived from Philadelphia in 113 days. The new fastest! And another company of New Yorkers managed to sail and paddle and steam to Panama and up to San Francisco in just 44 days.

  Every day, more hundreds of fortune hunters hustled into California and made for the Sierras, a thousand and then two thousand invaders each week by land and sea—most of them seasick or sunstruck and unsuited to the tasks ahead, but all feeling lucky to have finished their journeys alive, and giddy about putting icy winter and civilization behind them, about gliding into sunshiny California, about the outrageous liberties of San Francisco, and giddy too, of course, about the gold, the gold, the gold.

  Almost every vessel that brought them, however, became useless the moment it dropped anchor and its crew got a glimpse of the rapture: they came, they saw, they vanished. Their ships, 300-ton barks and 200-ton brigs as well as little 80-ton schooners, were simply left to rot in the water like discarded wrappings in the gutter.

  For those just arriving, San Francisco inspired panic. All the abandoned ships and nervous crowds increased the frenzy to get to the mines with pans and shovels and quack devices (Signor d’Alvear’s Goldometer, three dollars apiece) as quickly as possible, before the magic finished and the gold was gone. Ships could be wasted, but not time.

  However, when Polly returned to San Francisco in the summer—Ben, of course, had agreed to both her proposals—the sight of all those forsaken ships would not inspire her to race back to the mines but rather to sit quietly near the wharf and look, with pen in hand. She would try to depict on paper this queer, accidental, floating ghost city. She would draw in the style, as best as she could recall it, of the Italian artist from the book of etchings in Washington that had frightened and delighted her as a girl. Ben woul
d sit close to her, holding her ink bottle, and he would remember the Italian’s name—Giovanni Piranesi—that she had not been able to recall.

  67

  May 29, 1849

  Salt Lake City

  THE HARD LEATHER tip flew and reached its victim and cracked and retreated, all in an instant—and seven feet away, a little burst of pink and green confetti fluttered to the grass. On a warm afternoon in Salt Lake Valley, the bloom of yet another lady’s slipper had been targeted and struck. Each time, he had the feeling that the flower was surprised to disintegrate. The feeling pleased him. The designated enemies today were not the yellows or the purples or the pure whites, but the pinks and reds, any flower blossom with even a blush. It was an arbitrary choice, of course, like the rules in any game. That’s what distinguished games from real life.

  Around him in the meadow was a thirty-yard swath of elegant destruction, the beheaded stalks of two hundred wild daisies and clover and lady’s slippers like a vanquished and surprised-looking mob. His own long shadow loomed over them like a giant.

  He had practiced for a hundred hours with the whip, maybe longer, and he was adept, more accurate than he had ever been in Algeria, when he had been paid and ordered to wield one. Perhaps, he thought, his skill here was proof of the virtue of amateurism. Or perhaps it was because he had never liked whipping human flesh, not even African flesh. His problem wasn’t so much the pain and bloodshed. Rather, he was uncomfortable with the ambiguity of any assault not meant to end in death: when was one finished whipping a man? Twenty lashes, thirty, forty—it was arbitrary, a game.

  He wiped the sweat from his brow and turned away from the botanical detritus toward the big boulders, the sandstone ridge, the desert, the setting sun, California. The March rains had been extremely heavy, which was supposed to mean that the snows in the High Sierra passes would be deep through April and beyond, according to his bunkmates who’d come from California last year. But now May was nearly over. The time had come to go west and finish the chase. He was to receive his final month’s pay packet on Friday, the first of June. They said that the fort of Captain Sutter, the Swiss patron of northern California, was five weeks’ ride from Salt Lake.

  He smiled. Knowles would be surprised, an unsuspecting red flower in his sunny field on the frontier.

  “Mr. Drumont, hallo.”

  He was startled.

  The girl, the damned girl he had been dispatched by the good Mr. Pinkerton to capture and return. Why had she come out here to the tall grass to haunt and bother him? Just when his way ahead seemed clear, she appeared, like a specter, and reminded him of his negligence and failure.

  “I was strolling to the springs,” she said.

  When they all finally reached San Francisco, he would contrive to put her aboard a ship and return her to New York. He would do his duty.

  “We have not seen you for some time,” she said as she came closer.

  Her husband was off in Cottonwood Canyon repairing some passing stranger’s wagon axle, she explained. He had worked every night this week to serve the travelers who had begun pouring in by way of Fort Bridger and Fort Laramie, all bound for the gold region. The mechanics and artisans and gardeners of Salt Lake City, he said cheerfully, would have a good year supplying the gold hunters.

  “The leaders say it is another blessing from God.” She shrugged, then smiled. “But it seems that you, Mr. Drumont, may have too much company on your expedition to California. The trail west will be like a city thoroughfare, they say.”

  “Yes?” He did not really understand.

  “The first mails are leaving the square for San Francisco tomorrow.”

  “Yes, yes.” Drumont knew that a Mormon post wagon was about to roll west. What of it? He despised small talk.

  “I shall write Miss Lucking tonight, and tell her that while I will not see her this season, Ben’s friend Mr. Drumont will join them soon. I shall let them know of your impending arrival.”

  No. This he understood. No.

  She continued to smile, thinking of her friend and San Francisco, and let herself chatter on, like the fourteen-year-old she was, in the violet twilight. “I will send a letter to Polly. And also write my father in New York, so the old scamp knows where his married daughter has wound up.”

  This he understood nearly as well. He understood, anyway, that Pinkerton would learn from Mr. Christmas of Drumont’s duplicity and failure. And that Knowles would be forewarned of his avenger’s arrival. A trap was closing. Drumont felt desperate.

  “No, to your father we will post your letter in San Francisco with our hand, no? And if we, you and Billy and I, leave from here in this week, perhaps Saturday—you can be ready in this time—then you will be with Polly yourself in July, you see her, talk with her. So this letter to post now to her has no sense to do, you understand?”

  Priscilla’s smile had turned rueful, apologetic. She sighed. “I was afraid that I had not made myself clear before.”

  “No, yes, you tell me before—you are to be now a Saint. I do understand this.”

  “But we will remain here, for good, in this valley. Billy and I have decided against seeking our fortunes at the mines, Mr. Drumont. We won’t be traveling on to California with you, not at all. We are remaining here.” She pointed at the ground.

  No. No. “No! I give you money to go away from Billy, and give money to him also. Hundreds of dollars. If you return to Mr. Prime. He want you in New York very, very hard.”

  Priscilla was too astonished to be frightened. How did Drumont know of Samuel Prime? Why had he said nothing before? Return to New York? “What?”

  “To be the maîtresse of Prime. To have rich things, good dress, to…lie with him more when he wish.”

  Without another word, she turned to walk back to town.

  He grabbed her wrist. “I tell Billy,” he said, “and all the others too that you are the slut and the whore from the street.”

  This moment had been enacted before, last spring, in the alley off Mercer Street, and she had submitted then to Fatty Freeborn’s nasty fuck in order to keep Polly’s brothel life a secret. But now she had nothing to fear, and no one to protect.

  She looked him in the eyes. “Billy knows. I have told him of all my past wretchedness.” Her face formed the hint of a smile. “You cannot hurt me, Mr. Drumont.” She was calm.

  And then she shivered, and felt gooseflesh spread up her neck, even though the temperature was almost 80. One of her hunches was descending, the first since they’d left the States in the fall. Perhaps, she thought in that instant, the sensations were beginning again because Salt Lake City had grown so big, that the visions did indeed depend on some…urban ether. The image forming in her mind was not the usual muddy, moky swirl but strangely clear and sharp and jet black. The goose bumps swept down her arms and chest like a wind riffling grass.

  She understood her premonition only at the moment his fist struck her face. And her last, fleeting thought was pity for dear Billy.

  Drumont needed to finish the deed quickly, before she awoke, before she was missed, before his regular hour of return to the bachelors’ barrack. She was light as a child. He was behind the boulders in no time, and at the ravine twenty paces later. He could not simply flee; he wanted the wages he was owed; if he ran, they would come after him. The coup de grâce had to come from a single blow to make it appear plausible, a rock of the right size slammed once with just the right force on her temple, so that it seemed as if her head had hit the limestone after an accidental tumble down the steep escarpment above the springs.

  Priscilla was dead before the sky was dark over Zion.

  68

  June 19, 1849

  New York City

  IN JUNE THE city was as hot and stinking as any foul August, an early “heat wave,” as the newspapers called it. Some people believed the swelter made the disease extra deadly, the infection more virulent. Or perhaps the haze and sweat simply united the island’s whole half million into one a
wful, sticky, democratic mass, reminding each one constantly that somewhere in New York somebody, a new case, was cramping and retching and blasting quarts and gallons of thin, fishy soup out both quivering ends. Yesterday the grocer’s strapping son might die, this afternoon the laundress will fall to the floor with spasms, tomorrow the downstairs neighbor’s baby, or maybe oneself. And this accompanying epidemic of dread had a kind of demonic, self-fulfilling function: the mental disquiet, everyone believed, made the body more vulnerable to the disease.

  It was the June of the cholera. One hundred every day were dying now, Samuel Prime had read in the morning’s Tribune, maybe more—and in the western cities it was twice as bad. No one seemed to have any very good idea when the plague might run its course.

  He and his family were safer on Long Island, the scientific gentlemen and doctors believed, than in the miasma of the city, inhaling the same air exhaled by the wretched. So they had decamped to their refuge, as almost everyone in their circle had done. The lawns and gardens of Hurlgate, ten times as big as the Park, were separated from the pestilence and dying of Manhattan by a few hundred yards of water. Yet his proximity to the rushing East River itself seemed to have an antiseptic effect, as if the waters were scrubbing the edge of New York as well as keeping the city quarantined from the Primes. The well-to-do were by no means immune, of course: he knew people in Bond Street and the Fifth Avenue who had died, and today the papers carried the news of former President Polk’s death from cholera—albeit in Nashville, in the dirty South.

  Prime’s desire for cleanliness was no fetish, as school friends used to tease (“Sanitary Sam, Sanitary Sam”), and this contagion had surely proved his prudence correct. It was why, from his first intimacies with the other sex, he had insisted on young women, and as the city had grown filthier and more crowded, younger still. The youngest were the cleanest, he believed, not only less likely to fester with the French pox and other infections too horrid to contemplate, but cleaner in every way—freer from dirt, from moral impurity, from all the sluttery and snares of the world. Putting one’s nakedness atop an older whore, he imagined, would be like using another man’s handkerchief. Now, the girl…the pale fugitive girl—heavens: he was ashamed that for a moment the name of his secret youngest child’s mother slipped his mind—now, Priscilla Christmas had been spick-and-span.