Ben felt his cheeks flush as he realized that the naked bodies of the younger women were versions of the same body—that of Isabelle, the concierge. Only Louis-Philippe’s little grandson appeared even a bit uncertain about this curious scene in which he appeared; he was painted in profile, hands clasped behind his back, eyes cast down.
The picture shocked Ben. He was not offended by the monumental indecency. He had been to Holywell Street to browse the shelves of smut in the book and print shops. Nor was he surprised that his friend had produced such a lampoon. Lloyd Ashby was practically defined by his predilection for untoward jokes. One gift to Ben for his twenty-fifth birthday had been a private edition of Thomas Rowlandson’s illustrated poem, Pretty Little Games for Young Ladies & Gentlemen, With Pictures of Good English Sports & Pastimes—which Ashby insisted that Ben read aloud, to the delight of most of those at the party. When he uttered the phrase “flying fuck,” however, Lydia Winslow had started to sob, and had to be led from the room.
Rather, Ben was now flabbergast to behold such a rude fantasia executed so grandly and with such care. No work of art had ever produced such an effect on him. The Holywell Street pictures of anonymous whores and libertines were small, quick, embarrassed things. But this! This was perversity on a heroic scale. It was at least as scurrilous as any of Rowlandson’s dirty caricatures, but it lacked every convention of comedy—no sketchy line, no ridiculous leers and grimaces and winks, no patent fools and greasy, stumbling drunkards. The painting looked as grave and reverent as a portrait by Ingres. The king and his family (and Liberty) wore expressions of nonchalance and imperious self-regard. They were simply naked.
When Ben leaned in close for a look, he saw that the queen’s book was Tocqueville’s La Démocratie en Amérique. Stepping back to the precise spot where his friend must have stood working the day before, he shut his eyes, sniffling and squeezing out tears. He chuckled. The chuckle became a giggle, and the giggle exploded into a sound like a cawing crow. He let himself crumple to the floor, and there he sat and began to bawl, his left hand touching Ashby’s palette, his legs splayed like a child’s. After a minute or two he pulled himself to his feet, stumbled back to the cushions, and cried until he slept.
3
the evening of February 23, 1848
New York City
DUFF HEARD AND felt a rumbling from the front of the room and looked up from his book. One of his clients had just entered the tavern, and stood in the doorway stamping slush from his boots.
“Hey, Fatty,” he said. “I’ve got your buck if you’ve got your coins.”
Fatty Freeborn smiled around the cigar stub stuck in the corner of his mouth, wiped his sticky hands on his pants (molasses scum from his job at a bakery), and pulled a bundle from the pocket of his peacoat. Like forty other men Duff knew, once every month or two he brought the pennies he’d scringed and saved to Duff Lucking’s regular stool at Shakespeare’s. Duff would give a brand-new dollar for every dirty hundred pennies they brought him. Because of the lingering difference in value between cents (a hundredth of an American dollar) and old pennies (just less than one-twelfth of an American shilling), a hundred pennies were, in fact, worth $1.04. So Duff made four cents on each transaction, a profit for which he had only to sit in his favorite tavern for a couple of hours each week. The German who ran Shakespeare’s sometimes teased Duff about his little tabletop banking business, but Duff insisted it was entirely consistent with his hatred of capitalists—he was sparing blacksmiths and masons and butchers the indignity of slinking, hats in hand, into the prim-and-starch castles of the Bank of New York and the Chemical Bank to exchange their own coins. Duff suffered in his fellows’ stead, making a regular visit down to Wall Street with a cart to exchange a hundredweight of pennies, fifty dollars’ worth, for a three-pound packet of new Philadelphia dollars.
Duff emptied Fatty’s pennies into his satchel and handed over a silver dollar.
“Is Miss Lucking not here at the crib yet, Duff?” Fatty Freeborn said, with what Duff took to be a leer. “I’m wanting to hear some gossip of the theatrical world from our favorite actress.” Freeborn all but snickered as he uttered the last word.
A fury rose in Duff, as it always did when he felt his honor or sense of justice under attack, but he was accustomed to Freeborn’s smirking, and managed to temper his rage into a kind of cool menace. He forced a faint smile. “You know, Fatty, I have killed men.”
Freeborn grinned back. “Come on there, hoss—am I not a first-rate customer of the Bank of Duff? A true businessman don’t threaten his good customers.” He spotted a group of his chums standing at the bar, which emboldened him. “And you ain’t killed men, Lucking,” he said loudly, “you only killed Mexicans.” The other boys chuckled, and Fatty turned to address them in an even louder voice. “He didn’t kill men, fellas—the damned straight truth is he only killed Mexican greasers.”
Duff ’s face flushed and he felt the sting of blood in his scar.
Staring hard at Freeborn, he plunged his right hand into the open satchel of pennies next to him on the bench, found his enormous Colt’s revolver at the bottom, wedged between his books, and made a fist around the walnut grip. Freeborn rocked back and forth on his heels, grinning. Duff imagined his satisfaction at watching the look on that fat face as the .44 ball flew toward it. And with that his anger was slaked.
He let go of the revolver, grabbed as many pennies as he could hold, and scattered them on the floor in front of Fatty. Then he tossed a second and third handful, like chicken feed.
“Take your pennies back. We’re finished.”
“Well, I am blowed! What a cracked one you are, Duff Lucking,” Freeborn said. The clatter of coins had attracted the attention of every man in the front of the saloon, and now, as Fatty laboriously squatted, grunting and red-faced, to retrieve them from among the gobs of tobacco juice, there were guffaws and hoots from the onlookers.
“And besides, I’d trade three of you,” Duff said, “for any one of Santa Anna’s men, I swear to God.”
Freeborn retreated to the smoky back cove of Shakespeare’s to play draughts and talk the cocky, artificial Bowery b’hoy talk with his bubs. Most were, like him, members of 25 Hose, what they called the United States Company, their firehouse only a few blocks away.
“Duff Lucking made a muss of you, Freeborn,” one said.
“Oh, gas,” he replied.
“We figured on seeing a real knock-down and drag-out,” said another.
“Gas,” Fatty said again. “I’ll knock down and drag you, Toby Warfield.”
“That was a prime show,” said a third.
But Fatty used his new silver dollar to buy gin-and-cherry cocktails for his whole crew, and the teasing subsided with each round.
Polly Lucking arrived at half past seven. They each turned and looked at her, saying nothing, expressionless, clip-clopping their clay draught pieces across the checkerboard tabletops, then glancing up front again. Their shared silence sharpened their lust and made them uncomfortable.
“That is a prime peach,” said Fatty Freeborn finally. “That is ninepence I’d be goin’ to the floor for anytime.”
At last the boys could smile and snigger instead of pining.
Duff jumped up as Polly arrived. He adored his older sister, felt proud of her smart manner and good looks. He wasn’t altogether pleased that she had entered the show business, given the inevitable innuendo of wolves and rats like Freeborn. Yet what Polly said was true: “A dollar is a dollar, and better an actress three hours a night than a four-cent-a-shirt seamstress twelve hours a day, or a house servant for all twenty-four.” He fretted that she had always been a bit too bright for her own good, and also too rash and too trusting. (It was her easy girlish trust of Mr. Nathaniel Prime—the late Mr. Prime, Duff was pleased to note—that had allowed the old scoundrel to defile her.) But she had also, during Duff ’s absence last year, grown into a genuine “quick woman,” brimming with new ideas about the water cur
e and phrenology and marriage and the female sex that she seldom hesitated to express. He watched Polly set her pasteboard box of baubles from Stewart’s on the deep windowsill near their table and hang her coat on a hook.
“Are you quite all right, Duff?” she asked as she sat. “You seem…what’s your funny word?—discombobricated.”
She could see his moods too well. It made him imagine that one day she might divine all of his secrets. Indeed, he ached to confide in her each of his anonymous manly deeds. The ache to confess in turn made him feel unmanned.
At their dinner together each week he demanded a look at the new pages of Polly’s picture album. She sketched graphite-pencil scenes of buildings and portraits of acquaintances, and sometimes pasted in flowers, twigs, bits of lace, ticket ends, newspaper headlines, all sorts of curious bits and pieces.
As a child, she had had a precocious talent for drawing, which is why her father took her to Washington the summer she was eleven. Zeno and Polly Lucking had spent their entire visit in and around the Patent Office. He would find a patent model in the exhibit hall for her to draw, retire across F Street for a glass of sparkling hock, return to the exhibit hall, assign her another model to draw, drink some more hock, and so on. After a few days they’d returned home to the Clove Valley with a portfolio of eight excellent pictures, each slightly altered, of eight newly patented inventions, including a galvanometer, an induction coil, and a dog-powered butter churn. He’d dated each one 1833, three years previous. His scheme entailed sending a drawing and an indignant letter to the respective inventors claiming that he, Mr. Zeno Lucking of Union Vale, New York, had constructed an earlier, nearly identical device—and threatening a lawsuit unless he was granted a share of royalties. Because the government had employed no patent examiners back in the thirties, and issued patents more or less automatically, the plan might have succeeded. Before he took his own life in 1837, his flam seemed to be working: a lawyer for the galvanometer man had offered to pay Zeno Lucking $160 to quit his claim.
“Who is this, then?” her brother asked, turning the book to show her a blue-and-red colored-pencil drawing of a reclining girl of thirteen or so.
“Priscilla—Priscilla Christmas. A good girl. An intelligent girl.”
“The picture is very lovely, Polly. And so is she, by her looks.”
“I found her selling doughnuts at night outside the Bowery Theatre.” And submitting for miserably tiny bribes to degrading familiarities.
“She’s a project of yours now, is she?”
“Priscilla is a half orphan—her dad is a terrible drunkard who’s lost his job at a slaughterhouse.” Polly exchanged a look with Duff that acknowledged their own father’s awful, unemployed, gin-soaked end. “She was desperately circumstanced. I’ve got her going to public school is all. And helped her get a bit of regular, indoor work.”
Fortunately Duff did not ask his sister to elaborate and thereby make Polly tell him a fib. The regular work she had arranged was at Mrs. Stanhope’s house in Mercer Street. It consisted of an assignation once a week with Mr. Samuel Prime. Priscilla earned four dollars for her two hours every Friday afternoon, more than she had previously earned all week long in the streets selling stale cakes and her filthy person. And the new arrangement allowed her time for school. To Polly, it seemed a reasonable trade, all in all.
Their dinners arrived—boiled pullets for her, beef cutlets for Duff.
“And what of you, Polly Lucking? Regular work, I mean. You have appeared onstage only the one time since I’ve been back in the States.”
She looked at him askance. “You know as well as I that half the first-class theaters in town are rubble and cinders…”
This was an exaggeration, although he took her point: the Park Theatre was closed for renovations, and yet another new Bowery Theatre (destroyed in a blaze, for the fifth time) was under construction. For a moment his thoughts circled like a hawk, or a vulture, around an image of this latest Bowery blaze, which he had not actually witnessed. It occurred during his terrible final weeks in Mexico. And now his memories from his whole year of war…the scream and blast of batteries of howitzers and mortars, the bombs turning towns into dust and men into pulp, the musket balls whistling past, the hot iron approaching his face just beneath his eye, the smell of his own burning flesh…commingled with his eyewitness memories of those earlier Bowery Theatre fires to form a single cosmorama in his mind …Destruction and creation, the cycle of life.
His sister was still addressing him, still explaining the vicissitudes of a life in the theater.
“…and it is winter besides,” she added, retreating into the seasonal creephole of New Yorkers in every trade, an old annual habit of excuse-making that not even five straight boom years had checked.
“That’s my very point, Polly—for work between theatrical engagements, you might could sign on with one of the intelligence offices.” Duff had only lately discovered these agencies, which specialized in arranging employment for women at publishers and countinghouses and the larger shops.
Polly was having none of it. “Acting is my profession, Duff.”
“Of course, I know that, and a fine—”
“Why should I steal the job of some poor girl who wishes to scribble numbers on ledger pages…or stitch sheepskin and fold books for Harper Brothers?”
“I only meant to suggest—”
“One must persevere. Just today, I applied to play Ophelia in a spring production. And the manager, who is a stranger to me, said he admired my style of acting. He said it was ‘unvarnished’ and ‘singular.’”
In fact, her commitment to perseverance was growing a bit shaky. Most managers and critics were not enthusiastic about her peculiar, understated stage manner. Her career had never gotten back on course, she reckoned, after her debut in 1844 as the rich Miss Tiffany in the comedy Fashion. The critic in the Evening Mirror had described her as “somewhat fetching but fidgety” and having “a quiet voice more like that of an actual society girl than an actress.” (The critic, who had signed himself “Boon Companion,” was in fact Timothy Skaggs—a pseudonym Skaggs had chosen not to disclose to either Lucking.)
“That’s excellent news! You know I fancy Shakespeare.” Which was true enough, as long as Bibbo the Patagonian Ape or some amusing fiddler took the stage between acts of the play. “But gosh, another Hamlet?” Since December, Duff had pasted up posters for three different stagings of Hamlet.
Polly said nothing. Their dessert came, cheesecake for him and a greenhouse orange for her.
“Don’t be angry,” Duff said softly.
She picked with her fingers at the plate of peeled orange slices flecked with powdered sugar. Then she looked up at her brother, straight on.
“‘What a piece of work is man.’”
He was encouraged. Polly’s teasing was preferable to her silences. He reached into his satchel. He dug down past a thousand pennies and brought out a book. She rolled her eyes.
“It’s a new one, Polly,” he said. “Based,” he added, pleased with the word he was about to utter, “on psychology.” He showed her the spine—Hints to Young Ladies Who Are Dependent on Their Own Exertions. Last month the readings were from Hints on Etiquette, and the Usages of Society: Containing the Most Approved Rules for Correct Deportment in Fashionable Life.
“I require no improvement,” she said as he turned the pages quickly, searching for some edifying passage. “Why do you waste your money?”
Polly knew she was his project. This was the reason she called her appointments at the house in Mercer Street “rehearsals” and “readings.” (Her occasional Mercer Street appointments: thrice weekly, four times at the uppermost.) This, she thought, looking at the carefully combed top of Duff ’s head, was why she sometimes considered abandoning Mrs. Stanhope’s parlor house…not to relieve her shame, which she felt only slightly, and which was assuaged by the several gold eagles she earned each week. Rather, she wearied of the dissembling required to protect her
brother from a truth he would find unbearable.
“Here!” Duff said. “‘A lady’s conduct is never so entirely at the mercy of critics as when she is in the street. Her dress, carriage, walk, will all be exposed to notice; every passerby will look at her; every un-ladylike action will be marked; and in no position will a dignified, ladylike deportment be more certain to command respect.’”
“I believe I am more than sufficiently ‘ladylike,’ Duff.”
“But there are rules. A thousand. More!” He turned a few pages and resumed reading. “‘Upon entering a room, she should not rush in headforemost; an elegant bend to common acquaintance; a cordial pressure, not shaking, of the hand extended to her, are all requisite to a lady. Her feet should scarcely be shown, and not crossed.’”
Unseen by anyone, Polly crossed her right ankle over her left.
The front door opened. It was their friend.
“Hallo, Skaggs!” Duff said. “Your new hero was here earlier. Edward Alfred Poe.”
For a moment Skaggs wore an expression altogether unlike himself, serious and unsure. As a contributor to last year’s new, short-lived satirical weekly, Yankee Doodle, Skaggs had taken part in the magazine’s regular bemocking of Poe’s morbid poems and spooky tales and prickly self-importance. Three weeks ago at the Society Library, he had attended a lecture by Poe, “On the Cosmology of the Universe,” intending to write a lampoon. But he had left at the end of three hours a changed man. Although he had not entirely comprehended what he’d heard, he could not stop thinking about Poe’s scientific facts (the earth flies around the sun at 66,000 miles per hour! the light from the nearest star takes three years to reach us!) or his hodgepodge of poetry and philosophy. Skaggs’s friends accused him of falling for one of Poe’s hoaxes. But he knew that he had witnessed some kind of incandescent genius.
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