Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  “UN BILLET, S’IL vous plaît,” Ben said to the agent, “pour Dieppe.”

  The agent looked him over. “Vous êtes un Américain, monsieur?”

  Ben supposed that “Yes” was the right answer. His Foreign Office passport was in his pocketbook, but on the journey to Paris no official anywhere had asked to check it.

  “Oui,” he said.

  The man’s manner was unusually friendly and enthusiastic for such a factotum. Instead of writing out a ticket and asking for a fare, however, the man embarked on a cascade of explanation, long and complicated but evidently good-humored. Ben understood practically nothing. Finally, smiling, the agent finished with a question that contained the word “expérimental.”

  Yes. That struck Ben as precisely the right course. He would proceed experimentally in all things. “Oui,” he replied again, agreeing to do whatever the agent had proposed, and slid a twenty-franc piece across the counter. At this the agent’s smile turned more typically French. He held the coin up and tapped its edge with one finger—pointing to the profile of King Louis-Philippe. “‘Le roi des Français,’” he said, quoting the inscription. He shook his head. “Il est fini. C’est la fin de tout cela.”

  “Oui,” Ben replied. He is finished. All that is finished. This he understood.

  Good luck, as it turned out, was flowing his way. The agent had said that the new track from Paris to Rouen was barely completed, and would carry no regular passengers for weeks. However, on each Friday until then a two-car train was making an experimental run to test the new track, departing at five o’clock. Although no paying passengers were officially permitted to ride, the ticket agent would make an exception for Ben, un cadeau, as a gift, because he was an American and now France was a free republic, like America. In Rouen he could catch the regular train to Dieppe, on the Channel. “C’est parfait, non?” the Frenchman said.

  And perfect it turned out to be. For more than two hours, until one minute before five, Ben skulked cautiously in a corner of the station, touching the knife in his pocket whenever he felt a pulse of anxiety.

  As the locomotive got its full head of steam at the edge of the city, near Batignolles cemetery, the driver pulled the whistle. Ben took a deep breath, exhaling along with the engine, and pressed his face against the window of the coach as it hurtled at a mile a minute toward the sea.

  THE SUDDEN MONSTROUS lowing of the train whistle 150 yards away caused the sergeant and the priest to glance up from their two-meter hole in the earth of Batignolles. Sergeant Drumont would have preferred a grave for his brother among the lemon and juniper breezes in the hills above Ajaccio, on Corsica, but there was no family tomb and no money to ship the body. Anyway, Michel had grown up here. Thanks to his older brother Gabriel, who had brought the boy north when their mother died, Paris was Michel’s home, now and forever, the poor dear boy.

  BEN ARRIVED AT the dock forty minutes after the overnight Channel steamer was scheduled to leave, but the boat had been delayed to take on a skittish, odd-looking Frenchman wearing orange spectacles who arrived by coach in Dieppe with five trunks at the same moment as Ben.

  Unbeknownst to Ben, the man was wearing a wig and false eyeglasses—a disguise for his escape from France. Until yesterday he was the deputy minister in charge of Sainte-Pélagie, the prison where insurrectionists and radical journalists had been jailed. During their hours at sea Ben repeatedly sneaked glances at the fellow, wondering if he was connected to the Municipal Guard; Ben’s furtive attentions caused the deputy minister to imagine that Ben was a spy tracking him to England. At the Brighton Chain Pier they scuttled off in opposite directions as quickly as each could manage.

  February 25, 1848

  London

  THE LOCOMOTIVE JENNY LIND had Ben in Victoria Station before one the next day, and he stepped up to his own red front door in Bruton Street only a minute after the baker’s boy had left the afternoon bread. Ben picked up the wrapped loaf and brought the bag close to his face to breathe in the yeasty warmth…then remembered his resolve to resist the familiar and comfortable.

  He stepped inside, glancing down at the letters and magazines (The Graphic, containing the penultimate installment of Dickens’s Dombey and Son, and Punch, with the latest chapter of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair) that his man Dennis had laid out in neat stacks on the silver tray in the entrance hall.

  He paused. Among the letters was a small parcel, delivered by a messenger and printed with the return address of Ermen & Engels, the cotton cloth company. It contained an anonymous new twenty-four-page pamphlet with a green cover, printed in Liverpool Street. Its coauthor, according to the attached note, was his German friend Frederick, who had managed his own father’s mill at Manchester during the year Ben spent there overseeing the installation of new power looms in the Knowles mill. When they first met, Frederick Engels had called Ben his doppelgänger, but during that year, in fact, Ben had realized he could summon no authentic hatred of capitalism or its technologies, only of the dreary paternal drudgery of counting money and managing laborers. Engels was the very opposite of Ben, an anticapitalist who nevertheless reveled in overseeing his own capitalist enterprise. When Ben told his father that his friend called himself “a huckstering beast,” Sir Archibald had nodded approvingly and told his son that he “could stand to work up some spirit of the huckstering beast” himself.

  Exhausted and frowsy, standing in the vestibule of his house off Berkeley Square, Ben examined Engels’s new booklet. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, it was called, The Manifesto of the Communist Party. He tore the first pages apart with his finger and read the first sentence. “Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa—das Gespenst des Kommunismus.” His German was rusty, but his favorite tavern in Bonn ten years ago had been Das Kleine Gespenst, “The Little Ghost,” so he understood: “A ghost goes over into Europe—the ghost of communism.”

  “Ghost” was an odd choice of metaphor, he thought, very German. And then he thought of the late Lloyd Ashby, an accidental revolutionary, now an accidental ghost. Ordinarily Ben would not consider wading through such a work in English, let alone in German. Ordinarily the pamphlet would go directly to some out-of-the-way shelf, uncut and unread. But times were no longer ordinary. He would ask Dennis to cut the pages for him.

  5

  the same day—February 25, 1848

  New York City

  MRS. STANHOPE CALLED the fourth floor her “dormitory suites,” but to everyone else who worked in the house it was “the barracks,” for it contained the actual sleeping quarters of the four women who boarded at 101 Mercer. A privy closet had been rigged up as well, because Mrs. Stanhope considered it charmless for women to step outside to the backyard to use the jakes (a phrase Mrs. Stanhope despised) when gentlemen were present.

  But the largest of the snug rooms on the top floor was the upstairs pantry. There each evening Mrs. Stanhope set out plates of chocolate-covered walnuts and hard candies, and there was a shelf devoted to baking soda and vinegar. But this pantry was not mainly a place for keeping food. It was, rather, the largest, most specialized medical supply cabinet any of the girls had ever seen. There was a shelf of instructional books and pamphlets, including The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion and Mysteries of Females, or, The Secrets of Nature and Every Woman’s Book, or, What Is Love? There were pewter syringes and lengths of hose hanging from pegs. There was a box of plum-sized sponges from which long pink and purple ribbons dangled. There were, lately, several spring-loaded India rubber “circular dams” that Mrs. Stanhope had bought by mail from their inventor (and which none of the girls wished to use). There were tins and bottles of practically every powdered astringent in existence, strychnine, chloride of soda, bromide of potassium, and all the acids—prussic, carbolic, tannic, boric. And on the occasions when those sluices and baths failed to neutralize every stray animacule and zoosperm deposited by the hundred weekly patrons of 101 Mercer Street, the pantry also had its shelf of poisonous compounds intended to undo acc
idental conceptions: Dr. Van Hambert’s Female Renovating Pills, Madame Arnaud’s Modern French Regulating Medicine, Grigsby’s Infallible Antidote Tablet #2. The only patent medicines in the pantry with no proud maker’s name attached were the Scientific Mercury Ointment and the Unfortunate’s Friend, treatments for “blood poison,” as Mrs. Stanhope insisted that syphilis be called.

  The most reliable preventatives of disease filled a whole drawer of the pantry. Two gross of condoms arrived every month. And they were not the cheap fish-membrane or oiled-silk versions, or skimpy caps, but true “baudruches” (as the proprietress was pleased to call them), full-length French safes. And at 101 Mercer, each baudruche was used only once. Even in bulk they cost Mrs. Stanhope fifty-two dollars a month, but she knew that her patrons appreciated this gratuity. She had calculated that this fifty-two-dollar expenditure enabled her to charge two bits more per assignation. It was a similar calculus by which she had justified spending fifty cents a day for the “free” wine punch she served, and another fifty cents for ice in the summertime, and forty cents a day for her Croton water. Hospitality made sense if you could profit by it.

  Conversely, she preferred not to pay cash money for goods and services. She had worked out a barter arrangement with the physician who visited 101 Mercer every two weeks to examine the girls. (This “Dr. Jones” was, in fact, Dr. Simon Solis, introduced to Mrs. Stanhope by his old pal and Columbia College classmate Timothy Skaggs.)

  The recent proliferation of lust-houses up and down Mercer and Greene from Canal to Houston Street had weakened the counting-room will of most of the other brothelkeepers in the neighborhood and pushed prices down. The formerly superb place around the corner on Spring was now, late on some warm nights, attracting a small crowd of clerks and even mechanics smoking and spitting and laughing in the street outside; they paid no more than a dollar, and came and went in less than an hour.

  Lately too there was talk of the rich widow Gibbs in Greene Street selling her house, which was just behind 101 Mercer, and of the prospective owner planning to rig up the place as an eight-bedroom parlor house with polka music and free oysters. But Mrs. Stanhope was resolute. In her opinion the difference between a Mercer Street parlor house and a Squeeze Gut Alley public house was clear. Her women were not sluts. Discreet pandering and public lewdness, she told them, were two quite different things, each with a distinct clientele and different dynamic of supply and demand. Do the hot-coal eaters in Paradise Square or the little dogs leaping through flaming wood hoops on the stage of some Bowery free-and-easy compete with Junius Brutus Booth onstage at the Park Theatre? By no means. If tons of rough hemp cloth are in the shops for six cents a yard, does the price of silk brocade fall? It does not.

  Nevertheless, when Polly read in the Sun the estimate by some rector that one in ten young women in New York now “pursued the life of a prostitute at least a part of the time,” she was slightly alarmed. Nearly all New York men with money paid women for sexual companionship; the demand would continue to meet the supply. What disconcerted her was not the prospect of a legion of new girls drawn into the occupation, but rather the phrase “a part of the time.” Polly Lucking needed to consider herself unique. Except for the publishing assistant who had worked at 101 Mercer for a brief time last year, she was acquainted with no one else who worked as a prostitute a part of the time. Among the women of 101 Mercer, only Polly seriously pursued another line of work, and while her theatrical wages alone could not possibly allow her to live in the manner she maintained, she appeared onstage often enough that she could regard whoring as her sideline, a kind of lucrative hobby. (Not unlike her father’s Sunday afternoon outings up East Mountain when she was a girl, only successful: Zeno Lucking had spent hundreds of hours digging a crisscross of ditches deep in the woods, searching for a legendary cache of gold Dutch guilders.)

  She had enjoyed her enormous income this last year, but she also relished her visits to the house itself, its piped water, its cheerful colors, clean cushions, practical rules, and apple-pie order. She doted on its domestic comforts so much, in fact, that she’d decided from the first she should not live there, for she knew she would never want to leave. So Polly paid twelve dollars a month to live in two pleasant, respectable rooms in a building south of Washington Square. Yet even after expenses, she had put away $411 in the last fifteen months—managed to save, in other words, much more than she’d earned sewing slop shirts for two years in that dim, mildewy cellar on Centre Street.

  But what of the ruining act itself? Giving every private inch of herself over to the slobbering kisses and rough caresses and animal squirts of any anonymous brute with a few bucks? For a start, the price at 101 Mercer was five and (for Polly) ten dollars: the tariff kept out most of the roughest and stupidest and stinkiest slobberers. Polly found her assignations tiresome, sometimes pathetic, occasionally amusing, but seldom awful. Virtue and sin aside, it seemed to her like a chore, not so different from caring for the family’s sheep as a girl in the country—milking the seven ewes every morning, mucking out their pens once a week. What’s more, her chores at 101 Mercer were freely chosen. And the “parlor work,” as the girls called the talk and flirtation that preceded the hour or two of “bedchambering,” Polly positively enjoyed. As a seamstress she certainly never had the chance to exchange pleasantries with bankers and lawyers and dancing masters.

  “AH! MY GOOD God!” cried Mr. Skyring, the dancing master. He and the bed shuddered. “Oh…oh…oh,” he mewed. “My my my my, yes…”

  Did husbands bellow out to wives in this fashion, or were speaking and moaning in bed among the unruly privileges for which men felt obliged to pay? And did married women reply to men’s ejaculatory exultations? As a rule, Polly did not respond in kind, although sometimes she punctuated the void with a sportive coo or sigh, as if to say: Well done, sir, and Let’s move along. But by his enthusiastic manner, Prosper Skyring—a man of sixty who visited the last Friday or Saturday afternoon of a month and always mounted her from behind—practically begged for a reply. And in this, as with his unorthodox physical practice, Polly indulged him. He was a sweet old boy, her favorite customer.

  “Yes,” she whispered back. “Yes.”

  She was, after all, an actress.

  “Elizabeth,” he shouted as he plunged himself into her triumphantly.

  After two or three softer thrusts, he pulled himself off and she felt his member graze the back of her thigh. She turned over to face him and pulled the blanket to her neck. She stared at his nakedness, examined it analytically—the way the “artists” at Heilperin’s Studios pretended to do, seated in their semicircle around the unclothed models, each holding his rented sketchbook and pencil.

  The euphemism among the women of 101 Mercer was “sausage.” At this moment, just after the act but with the spent organ still wrapped tightly in the thin skin of a baudruche, the nickname seemed especially apt—but it looked to Polly like a sausage in a funny dream where time runs both backward and extremely fast, the meat turning in a few seconds from hot and plump and juicy to soft and raw.

  When Skyring finally opened his eyes, Polly was fortunately looking not at his shrinking manhood but at his long white mane of hair, which had become wildly disheveled. The glimpses of tidy, well-furnished men in private disarray always pleased her.

  “Many thanks, as ever, Miss Bennet,” he said, giving his head a little dip as he pushed his hair back with one hand. “I am restored.”

  “My pleasure,” she said.

  “Ah, you are far too kind, my dear Miss …may I call you Elizabeth, Miss Bennet?”

  “Of course you may, Mr. Skyring.”

  Polly Lucking used several false names with the clients at 101 Mercer. With the first man she had entertained, on the night of All Hallows’ Eve 1846, she had decided to introduce herself, on the spur of the moment, as “Elizabeth Bennet,” and the next evening, with the next client, she was “Catherine Morland.” Later, with other men, she was “Betsy Bowditch,” “
Emma Woodhouse” and—her favorite, cobbled together from the names of her two most pious childhood acquaintances—“Presence Goodnight.” She kept a little index of her fibs in order to keep the identities consistent. In fact, she knew that some of the men used aliases as well, although certainly not Prosper Skyring, as fanciful as his name seemed. It was painted in nine-inch green cursive letters on the window of his dancing studio in Bleecker Street.

  Skyring retrieved his clothing from the armoire, and Polly pulled on her drawers and chemise. They were hand-stitched linen; she actually preferred the feel of soft muslin against her skin, but Mrs. Stanhope called factory-made undergarments “inexcusable inexpressibles,” and required the girls at 101 Mercer to wear linen. Corsets were required for the parlor hours too, of course, although Polly now left hers on the peg. She was thin, and her dislike of tight lacing—the whalebone busk felt like a dagger between her breasts—had a scientific rationale these days. Skaggs’s acquaintance Mary Gove, who was a medical lecturer and water-cure therapist, had told Polly that wearing a corset was actually unhealthy.

  Opening the draperies, she looked out and saw that a dusting of snow covered the intersection. The filthy gray cobblestones and piles of dung and bones and wet ashes were, for a few precious minutes, disguised under a new coat of virginal white.

  “Snow,” she said. “The last of the season, if we’re lucky.”

  Skyring sat on a stool, struggling a little with his boots. “The last of the season indeed,” he said, winking an eye, “for I won’t see you again until April.” He stood. “Misery!” he shouted, then stepped toward her and placed a hand lightly on each of her arms. “‘From you have I been absent in the spring,’ I forget the next, et cetera, and the next, ‘when daisies pied and violets blue, and lady-smocks all silver-white, and cuckoo-buds of yellow hue do paint the meadows with delight, the cuckoo then, on every tree, mocks married men, for thus sings he’”—he raised his voice a ridiculous couple of octaves—“‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’” He leaned forward stiffly from the waist and kissed her on the forehead. “‘Cuckoo!’”