Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Duff ’s left hand was in his coat pocket, touching his gold medal bearing a likeness of Saint Barbara, the patron of firemen (and miners). With his right he made the sign of the cross. He was smiling slightly.

  “I’ve never seen a man more pleased by burning buildings,” Skaggs said.

  “Destruction and creation,” Duff replied, “are the cycle of life.” It was the explanation Duff ’s father had delivered after almost any awful event. Destruction and creation, the cycle of life, Zeno Lucking would say with an angelic expression—not pleased, exactly, but more hopeful than resigned. To Duff it seemed as true in New York City as in the Clove Valley of his boyhood. Life required death. Renewal depended upon devastation.

  Skaggs winked. “Good for business as well, eh? The more this city burns, the more it builds, and the more it builds back up, the more they need, oh, say …gas fitters.”

  “I don’t want for work,” Duff replied, and that was certainly true. Most weeks he was paid eight dollars for gas work and another two or three dollars for sticking up advertising bills, and most months two dollars more providing a money-exchange service for saloon acquaintances. On top of those jobs he fought fires fifteen or twenty hours each week—for free, for the crazy manly joy of it.

  Duff was ready to head south now. The work here was done. He was off to his weekly dinner with his sister, and he had a gross of posters for a new play to paste around town later. He swung Skaggs’s tripod up onto his shoulder and lifted the box of plates by its handle. “OK?” he asked.

  “Why, yes, sir, Mr. Lucking,” Skaggs said, smiling at his friend’s bit of slang. He finished wiping the soot from an eyeglass lens, lifted the camera, and raised his free hand in a fist, punching the air as he started to walk west.

  “OK!”

  the same moment, the same day

  Paris

  “TO THE WARS, my boy, to the wars!” Ashby practically sang as he walked and occasionally skipped down the wet cobblestones toward the sound of the crowd and the drums. “‘He wears his honour in a box unseen,/That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home—’”

  Ben knew it was Shakespeare. “Henry V?” he asked.

  “All’s Well, act two, scene…near the beginning, in Paris, the French count and his friend. ‘To other regions/France is a stable…/Therefore’”—Ashby sped up, almost running—“‘Therefore, to the war!’”

  The chanting in the distance grew louder, and both men could begin to make out the words. “Vive la réforme!…Vive la réforme!…Vive la réforme!”

  As they came down the Rue du Helder, Ben got a look at the crowd through the darkness dead ahead.

  People filled both sides of the enormous Boulevard des Capucines, shaking the trees as they passed, many walking arm in arm. Most were workingmen, judging by their blouses, but sprinkled among the multitude were young people of a different class, university students in shirtsleeves, some women, journalists and clerks, bearded idlers who wrote or painted when they weren’t loafing and chatting in cafés. Three young men carried a painting on a bedsheet that was half as wide as the street, a picture of a bare-breasted woman wearing a red cap—a bonnet rouge—and carrying a musket at the front of a mob of men…a not-bad copy of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People at the Barricades.

  These people, so many hundreds, or thousands, were moving like the water in the rapids of a river, jammed into a channel and in their containment growing all the more turbulent and excited.

  Half of them carried props—a barrel stave, a red flag, a broken broomstick, a torch. All of them roared “Vive la réforme!” On “reform,” the marchers thrust their sticks and torches higher.

  “It’s…bedlam!” Ben said. The sight electrified him. His adolescence had coincided with the early days of the agitation in England for a universal right to vote. He had spent many daydream moments in Bonn and then at Cambridge imagining himself as part of the workers’ insurrections in Birmingham and Sheffield. But all of the Chartists’ rallies he had attended were orderly and dull. In England, he had never seen an unruly mob.

  “Mm-hmm. Extraordinary people.” Ashby, hands on his hips, had stopped. He was looking up, scrutinizing the building on their left. “This is number 7. Number 7 Rue du Helder! Do you recall who lives at this address?”

  Ben set his stuffed penguin on the sidewalk. “There is a revolution taking place fifty yards in front of us.”

  “I doubt it,” Ashby said, finally turning to Ben. “Louis de Franchi lives at number 7. I’ve never walked this block before.”

  Even Ben, at a certain point, refused to indulge Ashby’s capering. “I’ve no idea who Monsieur de Franchi is, and this is no time for us to—honestly, Lloyd, I think you—”

  “Là-bas!” a woman shouted from the top of the block. “Là-bas!” she shouted again.

  It was the girl from Montmartre—the stinkpot girl—her face illuminated by a torch. She was kneeling in the back of a four-wheeled cart at the top of the street. Her wrists were bound together with a leather strap but she had raised them to point at Ben and yell, Over there, over there. Three soldiers accompanied her.

  “Il est là-bas!” the girl shouted. “C’est mon ami anglais!”

  The very young soldier standing next to her gripped her neck with his hand. The taller of the two soldiers sitting in the driver’s box shrugged and nodded in a single motion, and as the cart turned down the Rue du Helder, he unclasped his repeating pistol from a steel hook on his belt so that it hung loosely in its leather sling.

  “Arrêtez,” the man in charge shouted without much urgency, “au nom de la loi.” Stop, in the name of the law.

  Now Ashby was paying attention. “Good Lord,” he said quietly. “It’s your girl, the grisette.” Remembering the wool liberty cap he had bought twenty minutes earlier, he wiped it off his head.

  “Did she actually call me her lover?”

  “Mon ami, ‘my friend.’ She is in serious trouble. These fellows are Garde Municipale. The rough lot. No making light with these thugs, Ben, understand? No calling him ‘John Dam,’ no humming ‘La Marseillaise,’ no jokes about Waterloo.”

  “Me?” Ben whispered.

  “Shhh.”

  The dray stopped very close, close enough for the horse to sniff at Ashby.

  As the leader, a sergeant, stepped down from the box, the boy in back handed him a torch. With it he walked toward Ashby and Ben, yanking down hard on the horse’s forelock and jabbing his elbow into its nostrils with his elbow, all in one move. The horse jerked back a half step, understanding its best course was to remain still.

  Once again, from not far away, beating drums, unmistakably a call to arms.

  “Bonsoir, Sergeant,” Ashby said, nodding, hands clasped behind his back.

  The tall, hard-looking sergeant stood in front of them, staring at Ben as Ashby spoke. His right hand rested on the pistol’s wooden stock, and with his thumb he rubbed its cock and hammer. He pushed the torch flame close to Ashby’s face to get a better look. Ashby smiled.

  Just down the block, the mob now filled the boulevard entirely. Their chant was faster and more urgent.

  “Michel!” the sergeant shouted, turning his head a few degrees left but looking squarely at Ashby.

  “Oui!” replied the soldier guarding the stinkpot girl. Michel, a boy in his teens, helped her climb out—gently, even politely, taking both of her bound hands in one of his, with his other just touching her elbow as she stepped down. Once she was in the street, he took up his musket, gritted his teeth, and put a hand around her neck more roughly than before.

  “Apportez notre Mademoiselle Révolutionnaire ici,” the sergeant said, “à ses…amis anglais.” His sarcastic pronunciation of revolutionary girl and English friends notwithstanding, he didn’t crack a smile.

  “Ashby,” Ben said, “explain to the sergeant that I first encountered her not one hour ago.”

  At the corner, the crowd was fiercer than ever, still jostling but now almost stationary. And just aro
und the corner, out of sight, the front ranks had come up hard against the infantry companies and cavalry squadrons of the regular army called out to guard the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The hundreds of troops formed a dam; the mob could not suddenly reverse its course as it pushed into the rank of bayonets. Ashby’s attention was riveted by the scene, each body full of agitation, each pushing and squeezing forward, but no one advancing.

  “Ashby! Speak to the man, please.”

  Ashby approached the sergeant with his hands still clasped behind his back. They spoke for a minute, and the sergeant pointed at Ben’s parcel.

  “Un…pingouin?” Ashby answered. The sergeant grew angry.

  “Caporal,” the sergeant said, “l’épée.” The driver turned around and reached down into the cart.

  “Excusez-moi, monsieur,” Ashby said to the sergeant, and stepped back toward Ben. He translated what he’d heard for his friend. “Marie here was wielding some sort of…ancient…explosive…dagger.”

  “What?”

  “My French is not perfect. The girl is called Marie, they caught her smashing shopwindows with some kind of sword or gun, and she’s covered with black powder—so they suspect her of planting a bomb that exploded near a royal coach earlier this afternoon. And she’s blabbed to them, to prove her alibi, that she had had a bomb, but handed it off to you, and therefore couldn’t have planted it anywhere.”

  “Good God.”

  “Yes. I told him we know nothing.”

  “Rather than the truth.”

  “Ben, the truth in this instance is entirely too odd and implausible.”

  The corporal, a stout man in his thirties, was holding up an enormous hunting dagger. It had an old-fashioned flintlock pistol built into the hilt and handguard, the gun’s shiny brass barrel fastened snug against the engraved steel blade.

  “Le P-P,” the corporal said, shorthand for pistolet-poignard, pistol-dagger.

  “Cela appartient à mon grand-père,” the girl said, “simplement une antiquité.”

  “Silence,” the sergeant ordered.

  “Her grandfather’s,” Ashby said, looking at the curious weapon, “an antique.”

  “Une antiquité mortelle,” said the soldier Michel portentously, a deadly antique.

  “Silence, Michel,” said the sergeant, who had circled around behind Ashby. Ben and Ashby turned to face him.

  “Pourquoi cachez-vous votre bonnet rouge?” the sergeant asked, pointing his nose toward Ashby’s hands. “Le cadeau de votre petite amie révolutionnaire.” Where has the red hat gone, the gift from your little revolutionist friend?

  Ashby brought his hands to the front and affected an expression of casualness, as if surprised to find the bonnet rouge between his two fingers. This girl is no friend of ours. “No, elle n’est pas mon amie, et…et le cadeau…” As for the hat, we… “Nous…nous…nous—oh, dammit.”

  Then Ashby remembered: “Nous l’avons achetée. Pour deux francs.”

  Marie gasped. The corporal smiled. Michel said, “Ha!”

  “Ferme-la, mon petit frère,” said the unsmiling sergeant to Michel, Shut up, little brother.

  “Vous savez?” Ashby explained. “Comme…une petite plaisanterie? Pour mon ami ici, Monsieur Knowles.”

  The corporal snorted, and even the girl shook her head and smiled now. Trying to explain—that he had bought the red cap of the militants as a mere souvenir, that it signified nothing—Ashby had told the soldiers that he had bought the girl, paid two francs for her, as a little joke for his chum Mr. Knowles.

  With a smile and a shrug, Ashby stuffed the cap into his pocket. He was encouraged by the gaiety he had accidentally provoked.

  But the sergeant showed no sign of amusement. He grabbed the fingers of Ashby’s left hand and bent them back. He swung the flame of his torch to within an inch of Ashby’s open palm.

  “Poudre.”

  The sergeant grabbed his other hand, twisting the wrist and bending open his fingers with more dramatic violence.

  “Et poudre. De sa boule—sa bombe.”

  And indeed, black powder from Marie’s stinkpot was smeared on Ashby’s naked palms.

  The sergeant let go of his hands, threw them down.

  He handed the torch to his corporal and drew his pistol from its sling. He aimed it at Ashby’s chest.

  Startled and confused, the private, Michel, let go of the girl and took a step back so that he could hoist his musket. With its bayonet it was a good hand longer than he was tall.

  “Suivez-nous,” the sergeant growled at Ashby.

  “They want to arrest me,” he told Ben, “because of the powder on my hands from her filthy damned stinkpot.”

  “Caporal,” the sergeant said.

  The corporal, carrying a leather strap, hopped down from the wagon to bind Ashby’s wrists.

  The private kneeled and cocked his gun. “Par ordre du roi,” he said, “vous êtes en état d’arrestation.”

  “By the order of the king?” Ashby repeated with a smile. “Is that so? The king! And one of the king’s horses and three of the king’s men. This country really is so awfully French.”

  His jovial attitude confused the corporal, who looked back at his sergeant for clarification.

  “Looks like the pinch of the game, Aramis,” Ashby said to Ben, keeping his eyes on the soldiers. “I hope you are still the racer you were at Westminster.”

  “What?” At Westminster School half their lives ago, Ben had been a champion runner. “What?”

  “Time to scuttle—I to my hoyden, you to my Winsor & Newtons.”

  “What? Lloyd, no…”

  “Two Bridges Street,” Ashby said. “At number your-age-plus-one-half, the girl there is your sister. Ready?”

  “Ashby, I—”

  The sergeant was now angrier than ever. “Silence, Anglais!”

  “Once more unto the breach, dear friend—”

  “Ashby, I really do not…”

  But Lloyd Ashby had already turned and started his sprint for the Boulevard des Capucines.

  “Au nom du roi,” shouted Michel, “halte!”

  The sergeant closed one eye and aimed his pistol at Ashby’s back.

  Ashby glanced over his shoulder—was that a smile?—but he never stopped running toward the mob.

  Without thinking, Ben dropped his Galignani’s on the pavement, hoisted his package by the twine noosed around it, grabbed the penguin’s feet tight with both hands, and swung it like a cricket bat, hard as he could.

  The beak pierced deep into the flesh of the sergeant’s right hand the instant he fired his pistol, or perhaps the instant just before, and then the bird’s neck slammed down on the kneeling private’s long barrel.

  The crack of the pistol shot; the sergeant’s whinny of pain; the blast of the musket; the noise from the private like a cough resolving into a sigh. That was the sequence of noises, although later, as Ben reconstructed the moment—a review he would undertake a thousand times—the separate sounds merged into a single sound, a kind of awful chord.

  The sergeant had chased after Ashby, toward the mob in the boulevard, his pistol raised and his corporal close behind.

  Ben took the opportunity to run in the opposite direction, back up the street. Marie followed, but her cuffed hands made her gait a little slower and awkward, like…a penguin’s.

  And in the middle of the Rue du Helder lay the real penguin, a few feet from Private Michel Drumont, who was also supine, staring up at the painted blue number 7 over the door of the neoclassical building across the street. Blood squirted from a hole behind Michel’s ear. “Gabriel?” he said, alone and confused in his last living moment—for Sergeant Gabriel Drumont was by then at the far end of the block, running, preparing to fire a second ball from his repeating pistol…and a third and fourth, as many as it might take to stop the fleeing Englishman.

  Once again Ben failed to hear those individual shots, this time because their noise was subsumed by that of a great fusillade on
the Boulevard des Capucines, the sound of twelvescore muskets and rifles firing at once. To Ben the fusillade sounded unlike guns at all, nothing like the pop-pop, pop-pop of his father and brother and their friends shooting at woodcocks and grouse in the woods.

  Thieves aside, it occurred to him as he ran, did adults ever run?

  The crowd’s roar had grown both louder and higher-pitched, more of an ululation than a chant, more like a pack of dogs than people.

  the same moment

  New York City

  AFTER PERFORMING OR even reading for a role, Polly needed to walk to clear her mind and flush the electricity from her body. And this afternoon she had already walked a mile. By the time she turned right down Broadway, she had jettisoned the last dreamy figments of Ophelia she had feigned so well (she hoped) for the manager of the Greenwich Theatre.

  Without stopping, she glanced in the big window of the sewing machine shop. She heard the faint hum and syncopated chukka-chukka-chukka drumming. There was a new girl seated at the table in the window, like an animal in a cage. Polly had despised almost every day of her own time as a seamstress—working by hand, with only needles and thread—and wondered if the women in the window actually finished their shirts and handkerchiefs, or simply stitched and stitched, endlessly and pointlessly, ten times faster than anyone could sew without a machine.

  Approaching Chambers Street, she felt, as always, a rising anticipation. Momentarily she would be recognized in just the way she longed to be recognized, to be treated with fondness and even, she imagined, respect. Elsewhere she was, at the very best, another unattached young woman at large in the city, one of the new horde of nannies and maids and shop clerks and publishing girls. From the moment A. T. Stewart’s opened two years ago, just after her twenty-first birthday, Polly had been a habitué. She visited at least once a week, sometimes more often, and usually left with some new possession—a ribbon, a piece of sheet music, perfume, a pen, usually something perfectly inessential. Today, at least, she was on a particular errand—she needed to buy a costume for an upcoming performance, a chemise that could do duty as the Venus de Milo’s toga.