Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  The girl was walking down Mercer toward him. He could see from her plain bonnet and ragged coat that she was only a scrubbing woman—no, a scrubbing girl, a kid, she was so young.

  Kid—that’s funny. Like a lamb. A little whiskey always made Fatty more humorous.

  She’s a pretty one, he thought. And then he had the idea that he recognized her. And so he did—it was that girl from last year, the black-haired girl in the alley behind the theater. The girl who’d disappeared around New Year’s, whose pale face and slender body he had imagined many times since. I’m there, he thought.

  The moment he swung into the street, aimed directly for Priscilla, she noticed him—and remembered. He had begun paying her nickels for a feel in the Bowery last summer, and then offered her two bits in November for a yankum, her first. He had been rough, and during their fourth or fifth encounter he’d started grunting terrible things in her ear as he handled and squeezed her—until she’d pulled away and said she wasn’t being paid for that, and threatened to stop taking his nickels or even his dimes. It was the freedom from nasty oafs like Freeborn that made her arrangement at 101 Mercer seem to Priscilla like salvation.

  She figured it was this looming encounter that had been the subject of her premonition in the parlor.

  If I hurry, I can make it up to Prince before he cuts me off…

  If I step quick, I can meet her before she passes the little alley that runs over to Greene…

  He bounded directly into her path, but because he had no waist, his laborious attempt at a bow looked like a sack of oats slowly tipping over.

  “Hallo, miss,” he said finally.

  Priscilla said nothing and walked past him.

  “But I know you,” he said, walking along beside her, still holding the whiskey bottle. “You know me. We can have our fun again! Besides that, it’s late for a pretty girl like yourself to be out in the street all by her own self.”

  Priscilla did not acknowledge him, or stop. Fatty swung in front of her so quickly she bumped against him. She remembered his sour smell—cigar and liquor and sweat and yeast.

  “I seen where you’re earning your coins now, miss. I seen you leaving that house at 101 just now.” He dug his free hand into his coat pocket.

  She had to stop herself from blurting out, Not two bits anymore, bub—four dollars! “I do not wish to know you any further, sir,” she said, affecting the chilly manner of an adult.

  Fatty pulled out a quarter and held the coin between his dirty thumb and forefinger right in front of her nose. He grinned, and she saw that he had lost an incisor since last year.

  “A yankum’s twenty-five cents, ain’t it, punk?” he said. “Two bits…and I don’t even need your little ninepence in the bargain.” He was such a funny fellow—two bits, no ninepence! He snorted.

  Priscilla had once overheard her father’s friends muttering “ninepence” when they were drunk, from which she inferred that it was a word for the female sexual organ. And she had overheard men on the streets calling prostitutes “punks.” But no one had ever said either word to her face.

  She started to walk on, jerking her shoulder away from his as she passed.

  “Whoa,” he said, stepping into her path again, “don’t make a muss. You wouldn’t want me to tell Duff Lucking the straight truth that his blessed sister Polly’s nothing but a damned whore at Stanhope’s.”

  He was bluffing. He did not know if the gossip about Polly Lucking was true, or if this little cunt was acquainted with her. But now he would find out the truth.

  He saw fear in Priscilla’s eyes. Such a sharp fellow as well! “You don’t want that. Do you?”

  “I do not know a Miss Lucking,” she answered.

  “I will tell. I will, you can bet on it. And you’d be the one to blame for all the terrible, terrible trouble and sorrow.”

  She looked down.

  “But I can keep secrets,” he said. “I can keep ’em good.”

  With not even a glance at him, she opened her school bag and pulled her handkerchief from beneath the book Mr. Prime had given her as a gift. She walked briskly left, ahead of Fatty, into Amity Alley.

  And two minutes later he cried out, groaned, squeaked, gasped as if he were choking. Now she remembered the noise of him as well as the stink. It was like a sound at the slaughterhouse where her dad had worked. At his instant of ecstasy, Fatty Freeborn sounded exactly like one of the animals in the slaughtering pen.

  As he buttoned up and she carefully cleaned her fingers with her square of linen, she accidentally let a drop of his spunk fall onto his trousers.

  “You clumsy little”—with the back of his hand he struck the side of her face between eye and ear—“bitch.” The blow sent her stumbling back against the wall. “You just lost your two bits.”

  She did not flinch. She would not cry. She stood her ground. She let her eyes meet his for the first time.

  “What?” he asked.

  She didn’t reply, but for a disconcerting two seconds more looked straight at him, let her wadded linen napkin drop to the ground, and in a single motion, like a dancer, spun around and walked off.

  “A little flash-house whore’s life ain’t all satin and cocktails, now, is it?”

  She would not look back, she would not touch her throbbing temple until she was out of his sight, and she would not cry.

  “And no Christian God,” Fatty shouted, “would want it to be like that, neither, would he?”

  He squatted to snatch up her handkerchief—perfectly good but for his effusions—and stuffed it into his knapsack. And as long as he was down, he decided to uncork the opened Granville whiskey bottle for one final drink, to replenish himself for the long evening of sport ahead. Twice in one night, he thought. Such a virile b’hoy! He would volunteer to build the fire, and let each of the four other boys have his go with Sally in the penthouse before him—make himself look like a good hoss and also give his own manhood extra time to rejuvenate.

  As he started his hike east, he calculated. If he picked up Sally at the market in Pitt Street by half past six and built the fire by seven, they could all be finished with her by half past, then have her slit and cleaned and dressed and up on the stick by eight. Which meant they wouldn’t eat until midnight. He dug into his knapsack for one of his swiped sugar buns.

  Fatty was the one who had decreed that they should use just one name for all of the Jamboree ewes, and that it should be Sally, after the night a year ago when Toby Warfield, the dumb little chuff, brought a ram into their penthouse shack in the vacant lot on Avenue D. Everyone except Toby had refused to do the Jamboree deed with it. “We ain’t about to turn into a crew of buggerers, Toby,” Fatty had announced as he stepped into the open shed, toward his friend and the male lamb, and promptly cut the animal’s throat with his knife—while Toby, eyes shut and trousers around his ankles, was still fervently engaged with the animal’s hind end. That scene was, all the b’hoys except Toby agreed, the funniest thing they had ever watched in their lives. And they all agreed too (even Toby) that the ram’s meat somehow didn’t taste nearly as good and sweet as the Sallys’, either.

  6

  March 1, 1848

  London

  HOLY CHRIST!” BEN’S father shouted, loudly enough that a kitchen girl peeked out into the rear garden, wondering if one of Sir Archibald’s American opossums had escaped again from the vivarium. “Leave it to the frogs to lose an Englishman they’ve murdered.”

  “I plan to write to Tocqueville today on the Ashbys’ behalf,” Ben said. “I thought perhaps he might assist—”

  “Count de Tocqueville? In your new democratic republic of France, Monsieur le Comte will be lucky to escape the guillotine, let alone discover the whereabouts of your deceased friend. Have the frogs given Lord and Lady Brightstone any inkling as to precisely how or where they mislaid him?”

  “They say they are ‘making an investigation.’ But, Father, honestly, Paris was in such disorder, and if you had seen the morg
ue…they must have had a hundred bodies in the place. And the people in charge were…volunteers, I suppose. Certainly not true undertakers.”

  Sir Archibald Knowles—disgusted, outraged, excited—threw a handful of dead crickets into the wire-mesh fencing that surrounded his new menagerie. Sitting atop a miniature mountain constructed of shiny blue iron slag, one of his pair of monitor lizards sped toward the shower of manna, making thirty feet in three seconds.

  The seventh-richest man in Grafton Street (according to Sir Archibald) now turned to face his youngest child. “Well, there’s your revolutionists for you! The softheaded king surrenders after a single volley, and your victorious fools immediately start bungling things.” He raised his right hand and shouted: “Egalité, fraternité, callous bloody stu-pid-i-tay!” One of the toucans in the vivarium cawed, inspired by its master’s cry. “Mark my words,” Sir Archibald said to Ben, “the French will have an emperor again by next year.”

  Ben’s father welcomed any opportunity to grouse about troublemakers, incompetents, or the French. The instant revolution in Paris, and now this bizarre news of Lloyd Ashby’s misplaced corpse, piqued his indignation to full fire in just the way he enjoyed. Ben had not seen his father so happily perturbed since the celebrated Oxford priest John Henry Newman had converted to Roman Catholicism three years before, and Sir Archie personally lobbied the government to deport Newman to Rome.

  “Has anyone any idea at all,” he asked, “whose body it is they do have?”

  This morning, five days after Ben had returned to London and informed Lord and Lady Brightstone of Lloyd’s murder, a coffin from France had arrived by coach in Cadogan Place. The rough walnut box contained a hundred pounds of half-melted ice and the cold, naked body of a bearded young man who had been shot dead. The head was well buried in ice, so when the casket was opened Lloyd’s parents had seen the penis before they saw the face. They knew it was not their son because this corpse lacked a foreskin.

  “A Jew, according to Lord Brightstone,” Ben said to his father.

  “A Jew?” Mr. Knowles was surprised and genuinely curious. His regard for Jewish canniness was outsized, bordering on respect.

  “A poor Jew was careless enough to be shoved by some French coward in front of a musket? What a mess.” He stared at his feasting lizard. “You do know, Ben, you really ought to have brought the boy home yourself.”

  Ben had forgiven himself for leaving Ashby’s remains in the wagon, given that his own life was in jeopardy at the time. But his father had a knack for expressing any shred of self-doubt Ben was privately feeling. “Along with Sir Henry’s Spheniscus demersus, of course.” The disappearance of the precious African penguin had deeply disappointed Sir Archibald. He looked Ben up and down. “But I suppose,” he said finally, “that we should count ourselves fortunate. You are lucky to be alive.”

  He meant, of course, that his son was fortunate to have escaped death. Ben heard the meaning differently, however, as a general truism: One is lucky to be alive.

  “Indeed I am, sir,” Ben replied.

  His father had already started back toward the house. Ben saw that his rheumatic shuffle now combined with the ancient limp in his left leg to make it appear as if he were dancing a very slow jig.

  “I am off to Kent this afternoon. On what day and at what hour,” he said with his customary tone of mild bewilderment and irritation, “may I tell the boys that your train is scheduled to arrive?” It was odd that a man who owned factories would profess such disdain for the railway. But finally one night, after several sherries, he had explained to Ben his reluctance to travel by rail: the experience of surrendering his physical person to a machine, actually entering the thing and letting it fly him through space at ten times normal speed, made him feel as if he were intimate with…an apparatus. Furthermore, the first time he had seen a small steam engine operate, when he was a boy, the action of the engine—the in-and-out thrusting, the hot sputtering, the explosive, barely controlled apoplexy—struck him as a parody of carnal passion. The Knowles mills and mines now depended upon steam engines, but Sir Archibald did not care to see them work.

  “I arrive at the station at Sevenoaks Friday next, at half three,” Ben told him. He was tempted to add…barely half an hour after I leave London Bridge. By coach the trip took almost three hours.

  “Well, fine, then you can greet Monsieur Thimonnier on Thursday in King William Street—he wrote that he’s fleeing Paris, fleeing your drunken French heroes who invaded his factory and wrecked his sewing machines.” Sir Archibald stopped and turned to address Ben directly. “Given the havoc of your revolution, I should think Thimonnier shall be predisposed to do business with us on highly favorable terms.” In other words, the chaos in France might bode well for the business interests of the firm. The firm!

  Leaving his father’s house and strolling, Ben found himself humming a tune as he crossed Pall Mall. Then, in Regent Street, as a wedge of sunlight appeared on the pavement just ahead of him, he was inspired to sing the words of the song, out loud.

  “‘I jumped aboard the telegraph,/And traveled down the river,/The electric fluid magnified,’ la di dah di dah.”

  How pleased Ashby would have been to see the commotion Ben was making. Two ladies in St. James’s Square turned to stare as he passed.

  “‘O, Susanna! O, don’t you cry for me,/I’ve come from Alabama, with my banjo on my knee!’”

  He delighted in saying Alabama, as he did all the mongrel Americanisms jammed full of syllables and vowels, like nonsense words invented by children—Appalachia, Allegheny, Kalamazoo, Mississippi, Monongahela.

  “‘I’m goin’ to Louisiana, my true love for to see…’”

  He stopped. Looming before him was the St. James’s Theatre. It was here that he had first heard “O, Susanna” performed—by a minstrel group last Christmas, accompanied by Ashby.

  7

  March 10, 1848

  Kent, England

  UNTIL HE JOINED in partnership with Messrs. Merdle, Newcome, and Shufflebotham, Ben’s father had been a manufacturer of muslin and importer of Malay rubber. But then he became a merchant banker, engaged in the far more respectable enterprise of investing money in other men’s grubby manufacturing and trading businesses. Until Queen Victoria named him a baronet last year (in return for various benefactions, including the £3,000 he donated to the university at Cambridge in honor of her husband’s appointment as chancellor), Sir Archibald Knowles had been merely Archie Knowles, pettifogger. And until the day, years ago, he had paid £14,000 for his country seat in Kent, Great Chislington Manor had been known as Little Titsey Lodge. A great fiction—Sir Archibald Knowles of Mayfair, London, and Great Chislington Manor, Kent—had been willed into being.

  Through the Kentish countryside, all the way from the station at Sevenoaks, Ben sat on the driver’s box next to his father’s steward. “Joseph,” he asked as they turned off the muddy lane down the Knowleses’ long causeway, speaking in a loud voice to be heard over the sound of wheels on gravel, “has Mrs. Warfield arrived?”

  “Yes, sir, early this morning,” replied the old man.

  This pleased Ben. Since his mother’s death three years ago, his sister, Isabel, was the one member of his family with whom he could talk with complete candor and affection.

  “She and Mr. Warfield. He’s come down early.”

  Ben’s cheerfulness shriveled a little. Roger Warfield was by all appearances a decent husband to Isabel, but he was perhaps the most tedious man Ben had ever met, and not only because he was a barrister who operated under the delusion that the world was fascinated by barristers.

  “And Master Philip as well,” Joseph said, pointing somewhere beyond the grove of silver birches and the old priory—a ruin rebuilt and reconstituted as Sir Archibald’s “museum of natural history.”

  Ben sighed. His brother worked for the government, in the Foreign Office, so he had assumed hopefully that Philip would need to remain in London to monitor the situation
in France—and the reports, increasing daily, of insurrection in Vienna and Milan and Bavaria. But Philip was here in Kent, no doubt accompanied by his sweet, glazed wife Tryphena. Their first daughter, Victoria, had died. Their second child, baby Helena—christened, not coincidentally, with the same name as the queen and Prince Albert’s latest infant—would be in London with its nurse.

  In the distance, Ben heard the brief thunder of gunfire, two shots, then a third, and the baying of dogs.

  “Sir Archibald and your brother,” Joseph explained. “Out with a leash of hounds for partridge and dove.” Leave it to them to shoot only the very prettiest birds. “But your brother waited on the ferreting for you to arrive, sir. And the rat-lamping.”

  “How thoughtful,” he said. As a boy, Philip had required Ben to carry the lamp into the barns at night so that he, Philip, could blast away at the scurrying rats. Gunning for rodents with his brother had been one of Ben’s inspirations to become an archer.

  He saw Joseph’s son, the gamekeeper, walking toward the back of the house carrying four slaughtered geese.

  “Your dinner party is early tonight, sir,” Joseph said. “Guests due at seven.”

  And guests as well? Ben had looked forward to spending some days in the country with his father and sister, explaining his plans. Joseph, Ben wished he had the brass and bad manners to say right now, you must turn the carriage around this instant—I have just remembered some urgent business back in London.