He walked on, toward the east. The only pedestrians he passed were a few prostitutes, and small groups of young men and boys chattering excitedly, the men and boys all striding in the opposite direction, toward the action.
New York City
GOING UPTOWN, they had been in a rush to get to the Granville fire, but for their trip back downtown Skaggs had hailed a Yellow Bird, overruling Duff ’s ritual protestations that the railway was faster than a bus. “But speed is superfluous,” Skaggs said, and Duff was mollified slightly by learning the word “superfluous,” which he wrote down in his vocabulary journal.
As the bus stopped near Gramercy Park, a well-dressed young mother boarded, carrying her infant. This was one of the fashionable New York babies, his hair dyed bright red and braided with coral beads and blue ribbons and tiny bells. He sucked milk from a glass bottle shaped like a breast. Duff was embarrassed and looked away. But Skaggs stared at the child all the way downtown, entranced by the flash of the silver nipple in the lamplight with each rhythmic suck and release. No bitter black India rubber for this lucky lad! And surely no swill milk in his glass tit. He looked at the baby—and pursed his lips, bared his teeth, and opened his eyes wide, then wrinkled his nose like a snuffling pig. The baby stared back, unamused, but the mother glanced over and smiled.
“How did you commemorate the Father of Our Country?” Skaggs asked Duff. The day before was George Washington’s birthday.
Duff shook his head. “Some of the fire companies held a Birthnight Ball, but I was, I was”—his scar stung—“busy. I was working.”
“Ah well, there will be more celebrations before long for you, I am sure.”
“How do you mean?”
“Have you not seen the Herald? President Polk’s man in Mexico City has agreed to a treaty.”
Duff nodded, said nothing, and continued looking out the window.
Skaggs changed the subject. “I understand your sister was reading today for a part in a Hamlet. She may be back on the stage soon.”
Now Duff looked at him and shrugged.
“Duff Lucking, you are still in a bad humor over your boys’ success with A Glance, aren’t you? Envy is a sin, my son, one of the seven deadlies.”
“No, I am glad that Frank and Ben have a hit.” Last week a new play called A Glance at New York had opened, about a firefighting Bowery b’hoy. It was written by Ben Baker, from Duff ’s fire company, and Frank Chanfrau, another man from 15 Engine, played the hero, Mose. Skaggs had seen the play (he’d cadged free seats as a member of the press) and told Duff that the arriving carriages outside the Olympic had extended for half a mile, and that the audience had stopped the show several times with applause.
“Here you are, then,” Skaggs said, pulling the strap. “Thanks again and off you go at Hewwwston,” he said, deliberately mispronouncing Houston Street to make it sound like the name of one of Duff ’s heroes, the Texas politician Sam Houston. Duff nodded goodbye.
Below Houston, the progress of the bus over to Broadway was slow. Half the road was blocked to traffic. Two Negroes were heaving dislodged cobblestones—chunks of the erstwhile Chatham Street, each stone half shiny gray and half filthy black—into a large wagon. A gang of Irishmen meanwhile raked gravel over the exposed and sunken roadbed. This was one of the celebrated new Napoleon-pastry pavements—gravel, planks, a layer of concrete, a thick layer of sand, finally a layer of flat, square-cut stone. These slick streets cost a million dollars a mile. But the new pavements would be (promised the politicians and engineers) so much quieter under the daily pounding and rolling of the city’s hundred thousand hooves and ten thousand wheels. The men of progress did everything in their power to increase the racket of the city, then noisily spent and sweat some more to mitigate the racket they had created.
Why did the grandees in swallowtails and top hats not simply say: We’ve gotten rich, boys, so we want to look rich, and also get a little richer in the bargain. Skaggs appreciated that money burned holes in the pockets of New Yorkers. And a thousand new millions had been conjured in Wall Street these last few years. He begrudged no one’s extravagance. But refrain, please, from pretending that your useless extravagance is virtuous because it happens to be yours.
Dusk had come and the bus was moving again, past City Hall. Since last he noticed, a new transparency had been installed in the big illuminated frame just below the Park, and a knot of pedestrians stood there now, staring, spellbound by the hidden gaslights, the sheet of glass, the giant lithograph, and “the healthful, modern MIRACLE of Brandreth’s Pills.” At the very moment of Skaggs’s glance, a darkness enveloped and startled the spectators, and as a group they turned to gape: the huge Drummond Light on the roof of Barnum’s Museum had been fired up for the night, and Skaggs’s bus cast a moving shadow across the street, like a phantom leviathan swimming through the city.
Visiting bumpkins, Skaggs thought. With the rail lines already running halfway to Poughkeepsie and the whole length of Connecticut, country people seemed now to flow into New York City like water through the Croton pipe. All the chatter these days concerned the dumbfounding daily invasion of foreigners by sea—so many Irish! and Germans! and Jews!—but Skaggs generally welcomed that horde. The more the merrier. He was a democrat. But he wondered lately if New York might be losing its special tang, if his city might be getting a little too American.
Not that Skaggs was unsympathetic to yokels’ interest in New York City, given his own yokel origins. He had grown up in New Hampshire, the youngest child of the mayor of Hillsborough. He had been sent down in 1832 to board with his Uncle Gaster on Barrow Street and become a physician. But while Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons failed to make a doctor out of him (he was asked to withdraw in 1833), the city quickly transformed him into an urbanite. Except for his four-year exile in the West and his two months in Europe last winter, Skaggs had lived and worked and gallivanted in these same few miles of Manhattan for fifteen years.
At Ann Street he grabbed the signal strap. His customary technique—two gentle tugs—was a courtesy to the drivers, whose leather-shackled ankles were pulled by a thousand strangers a day. He dropped his six cents in the fare box and stepped off the bus—directly into a deep puddle of half-melted snow and blood that just covered a submerged mound of dung.
As the bearded, blue-spectacled, open-collared, sooty-faced, soggy-footed Skaggs shambled down Ann cradling twenty pounds of ungainly apparatus in his arms, and with each step dragging his soles along the stones to scrape off muck, he realized the impression he was making on passersby, who zigzagged to grant him wide berth. He was walking like some old syphilitic, slow and spraddling …Tabes dorsalis, he recalled now from his one year of medical training. If he were suffering from a venereal disease, it had not yet affected his memory, at least not that part of his memory devoted to the Latin names for venereal diseases.
Suddenly he had the sense of having watched this scene before—as if his own image, right now, had been laid over an earlier image, like a camera plate exposed twice. As Skaggs reached the door of his studio building, he recalled the scene from the past he was confusing with the present: he looked like a clown—a particular English clown, “Percival the Intelligent Penguin,” whom he had seen last year in Munich performing on the Max-Josephsplatz. He had been there to research a biography of Lola Montez, the Bavarian king’s notorious Irish hurdy-gurdy dancer and mistress. And Lola, in turn, made Skaggs think of Polly Lucking, whose visit he expected in less than an hour.
Paris
BEN’S ROUTE WAS serpentine: the barricades, thrown up by the insurgents to slow the deployment of troops, became more numerous as he headed east into the dark, hard, poor arrondissements. He tried to walk along one wide road, but mounds of rubble and trash had been erected at every block, and when he turned down a smaller street his way was blocked by still more barricades. Each was a mess of broken ladders and hundreds of pulled-up paving stones, washtubs and lampposts, two-legged chairs and broken
benches. At the center of one was a splintered piano, and stretching to each corner were piles of manure a yard high. Glass shards were sprinkled over the massive shit berms like sugar on a pudding, and two half-buried rat carcasses—the rats of Paris were much blacker than London’s—passed for raisins.
Ben saw a pair of children and a drunkard gathered around the remains of a burning carriage to keep warm. A boy no older than ten sat on an overturned chamber pot looking at pictures torn from a newspaper while he grilled some miserable bit of meat over the red-hot end of an axle. Ben found himself transfixed by a patch of heat-rippled air above the flames. And then, as he was about to walk on, he shook off his daze and realized that through the heat shimmer he was looking at the tops of Notre-Dame’s towers.
Dawn was breaking. The tile roofs around him were changing from black to red. Not twenty-four hours ago he had left London Bridge Station.
He walked and walked, and finally reached the river.
In a punt bobbing at the water’s edge, a young woman lay asleep. Just above the boat, on the post to which it was lashed, he noticed a bronze sign: Pont Marie. Marie had been the stinkpot girl’s name. Crossing the empty bridge to the Ile Saint-Louis, stepping into the open air and the pinkish light raking the river, Ben felt exposed and vulnerable, and once on the island he feared he might be trapped. He was startled by the sound of men’s voices and the splash of oars, but it was only a laundry boat.
He saw a street sign, the Rue des Deux Ponts, and a blue tin number on a house, 39. Two Bridges Street, Ashby had said, your age plus half. Ben was twenty-six years old.
He found the concierge as soon as he stepped inside—or, rather, she found him, stepping from a shadowy corridor to block his way. She was younger than he. Her arms were folded.
“Bonjour,” she said, radiating suspicion and unfriendliness.
The girl there is your sister. “Bonjour, mademoiselle…Isabel?”
She thawed. Her arms dropped and her jutting chin receded.
“Oui, je m’appelle Isabelle. Etes-vous l’ami de Monsieur Ashby—Monsieur Knowles?” She glanced behind Ben toward the street. “Et où estil? Ashby?”
“Mort,” Ben said.
“Non.”
“Oui.”
“Non, non, non, non,” she said, quick and confident.
For an uncomfortable minute she insisted that Ben was making himself badly misunderstood, that he did not mean to use the French word for “dead.” Then she said that Ashby must be with his mistress: “Il est à l’appartement de Mademoiselle Juliet, certainement…”
Finally, in exasperation, Ben pointed at his eyes—“I saw him, dead, mort.” And then formed a pistol with his right hand, pointing the extended forefinger at his temple. “La Garde Municipale,” he said, and made the gunshot sound of boys playing soldier. His own pantomime of Ashby’s murder shocked Ben, and tears spilled onto his cheeks. He reached for his handkerchief but it was gone.
“Non, non,” the concierge said, and put her hands on the sides of her neck as she started to weep.
The studio was a loft, a large single room at the top of the house. It was dark, and neither spoke as they stepped in. She directed Ben toward a long pile of Oriental cushions stuffed into an inglenook, and poured a scoop of coal crumbs over the embers in the fireplace. She picked a newspaper off the floor and laid it on the fire too.
As he sat, sinking toward the floor with his knees in front of his face, he began surrendering to his fatigue, looking not at the fire but into the shadows, at nothing, with the rapt attention of a cretin or a saint.
Near him sat a green sharkskin-covered trunk serving as a table. The concierge struck fire, and he smelled the phosphorus as she brought her match near to light the candle. In the sudden bloom of illumination he found particular objects on which to fix his gaze. Placed around the candle on the trunk was a ceremonial Chinese knife, a couple of books, a rubber-covered tin matchbox, a red paper packet of Turkish cigarettes, a little dish covered with some crumbs of fried sage and salt. He remembered how shocked he had been in Glasgow twenty winters ago, at the first and last wake he had attended, when someone had placed a dish of salt on his dead grandfather’s chest.
Isabelle returned with a glass and a bottle of sweet Italian vermouth that she set on the trunk. “Merci,” Ben mumbled, and picked up the closest book. It was Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien. The other book was a Dumas story, Les Frères corses, in French—The Corsican Brothers. Ben had read it (in an American translation) at Ashby’s insistence; according to Ashby, when they stopped reading Dumas, they would stop being young. “I know I am supposed to read Balzac and Flaubert,” he had told Ben, “but I still crave the impossible coincidence. Give me Dumas, or Dickens.”
Ben opened the novella to a page at random, and his eyes alighted on a familiar name: Louis de Franchi.
Across the room Isabelle jerked open the heavy draperies covering the tall windows, filling the studio with bright gray morning light.
Louis de Franchi, Ben now remembered, was the young Corsican who dies in a duel in Paris, and whose twin brother travels to the city to avenge his sibling in a second duel at the same spot with the same pistol. Louis de Franchi was the name Ashby had mentioned last night, the reason they had stopped to look at the building at 7 Rue du Helder, the reason the girl Marie and the municipal guardsmen had happened to spot them. Lloyd Ashby had died because of their chance discovery of the address of a fictional character from a stupid story. Ben sighed deeply, then poured himself a glass of the red vermouth and sniffed it. It smelled like candy and tobacco, bittersweet.
The concierge finally left him alone in the studio. He saw now that he was surrounded by a dozen of Ashby’s finished paintings, all unframed, all but one sitting on the floor and leaning against the walls. Some were small, like the still life to Ben’s immediate left (a candle, a rubber-covered tin matchbox, a packet of cigarettes, a dish of nuts, two books, a bottle of red Cinzano vermouth), but a few were huge, five feet by eight. Most were portraits, and in most of those the people appeared much larger than life, big as monsters, all with slightly sinister smiles.
The largest painting was across the room suspended on an easel, facing away from him, the stretcher on the back of the canvas an eight-foot-tall wooden cross. It must be the new picture Ashby mentioned last evening, his political allegory inspired by Hans Christian Andersen. Last evening: That seemed impossible.
Ben loosened his bootlaces and sank back deeper into the cushions.
He stared at several of the paintings in turn.
As he sipped the red liquor, he noticed that the right cuff of his shirt was red nearly all the way round; it was blood from the floor of the wagon—Ashby’s or someone else’s.
Bells chimed continuously, from far away and nearby. He listened to the February wind rattling the windows, and to the coos and pecks of pigeons on the ledge outside. He listened to his own slow breathing.
Never in his life had Ben sat so long doing nothing. His mental state, he realized after a time, was not stupor but rather…equilibrium. Until this moment, his life had felt like a dull piece of theater, as if he were a player on a stage reciting lines and performing scripted motions. But now he no longer knew how his story would end, and this filled him with a terrible and joyful new understanding that one’s time on earth passed too fast to live life stintingly, to mope instead of plunging ahead.
It was impossibly romantic but indisputably true: fate had provided the chance to start anew. Not merely the chance, he amended, thinking of his dear dead friend—the duty. Ben Knowles had been a dutiful son. He had traveled to Paris as a dutiful junior banker and fetcher of stuffed penguins. One day he was expected to become, dutifully, the living Knowles in the firm of Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham. But for the first time in his life, Ben felt a sense of obligation and honor in his heart, as a fierce desire rather than a dull weight. He had a duty now to throw off the old fetters of filial and social duty.
Perhaps he was delirious. Perhaps all courage was a species of delirium, and all happiness a kind of stupefaction.
He arose, groaning as he made his way up from the sprawl of cushions. Approaching Ashby’s work area, he saw that his friend had vandalized a Chippendale tea table for his palette. Its ivory top was covered by a mess of streaks and dabs, most of the colors dry but the tiny puddles of white and dragon’s blood and chrome orange still glistening. In a small clearing at the edge of the ivory he had signed his name, ASHBY, in tiny, careful cobalt black letters, as if the random scramble of colors were a picture. Nearby were Ashby’s dozens of Winsor & Newton paints, the collapsible metal tubes laid out in two long, neat rows on a battered craftsman’s bench.
As Ben came around the easel and saw the work in progress, he gasped.
It was unfinished—the sky and the buildings lining the Rue de Rivoli were white, primed but unpainted. The Luxor obelisk, however, was fully rendered, as were the human figures in the foreground. Six people stood on a balcony at the rear of the Tuileries Palace, with the gardens stretching toward the great granite pole behind them. It was the royal Orléans family, accompanied on the left by the female figure of French Liberty that Ben had watched pass by last night on the Boulevard des Capucines. In Ashby’s painting, however, the mythical Marianne carried the flag but no gun, and not just she but all of the figures were entirely unclothed—except for the seated Duke of Nemours, who wore his naval officer’s triangular hat, which covered the genitals of his elderly father Louis-Philippe, the king, standing behind him. A book held by the queen, Marie-Amélie, just managed to obscure her pudendum, but those of her young German daughters-in-law, the Duchess of Orléans and the Duke of Nemours’s wife Viktoria, were partly exposed.
Heyday: A Novel Page 7
