Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  The horses came to a halt and Joseph unfastened their check reins, a tiny ritual of liberation that often gave Ben a sympathetic sensation of relief. As he walked up the front step he heard another volley of shots from the hill—closer, louder, sharper—which caused Ben to form a mischievous thought: he would finally take possession of the double-barreled ten-gauge, no doubt still in its Groocock & Company wrapping paper, that his father had given him on his eighteenth birthday. He might actually have use for a gun now—or so, anyhow, Ben would enjoy saying to Sir Archie.

  New York City

  HIS THICK SPECS and beard notwithstanding, Skaggs certainly did not look like an old man. His freckles gave his face a youngish aspect, as did his quick smile.

  Yet the world he’d known as a youth was gone. Skaggs had been born during a war against the British, which now seemed impossibly quaint, back when the flag carried half as many stars. What’s more, he remembered Founding Fathers—when Skaggs was a boy, Monroe had been president and Jefferson was still alive. When he first smoked, friction matches did not exist. It was only in the previous decade that he had arrived in New York City, but it might as well have been another century. Photography was a fantasy. There were no one-penny newspapers, no private shops selling meats and fruits, no baseball, and precious few theaters or foreigners.

  For all that, and even though he was this very day turning thirty-five, Timothy Skaggs did not feel old. He still had all but three of his teeth, and his “social anatomy,” as he called it, remained in good working order, except on those nights when he consumed very large amounts of brandy or opium. He could still roister until dawn, and, as his father had put it in a birthday letter Skaggs received a few hours ago, he still filled his days and nights with “the pointless, puerile amusements of a conceited sluggard or first-class wastrel.”

  The elder Mr. Skaggs professed distaste for most new things and practically all new words, but last year he had discovered “wastrel” and could not resist using it as often as possible in his letters to his son. He had assumed that after failing to become a physician, Timothy would take up some respectable clerkish employment in Wall Street. For to Jacob Skaggs, writing satirical articles and trashy novels was puerile. Making daguerreotype pictures—a task engaging his youngest child at this very moment—was pointless.

  Timothy was most assuredly not, in his own estimation, a “sluggard.” He worked at several different jobs. None of his occupations, however, was likely to produce much in the way of wealth or reputation. It was unlikely but not impossible that he might yet blossom into the American Dickens or Thackeray. But both of those men, Skaggs knew with dispiriting precision, were only a year older than he, and they had become Dickens and Thackeray already.

  Skaggs had informed no one that today was his birthday. This particular March 10 struck him as too important to turn into one more excuse for an evening of sloppy toasts and rude jokes. He felt strangely sober, his mind atwitter with thoughts about unfulfilled promise, unknown destiny, undiscovered calling. Timothy Skaggs always wished to be and to appear blithe, so his present mood was highly uncharacteristic.

  It was not that he wanted for money, or envied the rich. Oh, he harbored a few small professional grudges against successful peers. He felt competitive, for instance, with Mathew Brady, whom he called “our ass-kissing, celebrity-worshiping, moneygrubbing camera boy.” Brady was only twenty-five. Among the stray fragments of information teeming in Skaggs’s brain were the birth dates not just of everyone he knew but—and this embarrassed him a little—of almost every well-known person near his own age.

  He really didn’t feel much jealousy toward the Great Men, however. He had known a few such personages.

  Such as Frank Pierce (aged forty-three). When Skaggs was growing up, Frank had been the most promising boy in Hillsborough, the most admired student at school, the most respected young lawyer in the state. After Frank resigned his U.S. Senate seat because his wife believed that life in Washington forced her husband to drink too much whiskey, Skaggs realized that men like Pierce and he were different creatures fundamentally. When Frank had enlisted as a private soldier to fight in the war, Skaggs wrote an article commending his boyhood acquaintance for his courage—his courage to admit that sweltering heat, disease, and carnage in Mexico was preferable to the same time alone with Jane Pierce in frigid New Hampshire. Timothy’s brother Jonah, a junior partner with Pierce’s law firm, pleaded with Timothy to send a letter of apology to Mrs. Pierce, which he finally wrote last summer after Frank fell off his horse in Mexico and broke a leg.

  Horace Greeley (aged thirty-seven) was the other Great Man whom Skaggs had known before Greatness was visited upon him. They had been young newspaper hacks together, fellow New Hampshire émigrés. Even then Greeley had held more serious opinions, of which he was more certain, than any young person Skaggs ever knew. Soon after they met, Greeley began referring to Skaggs as “Brat.” Most of the Tribune’s liberal ideas Timothy more or less shared (an end to the new business monopolies, freedom for the slaves), but Greeley’s fanatical rectitude (against alcohol, against tobacco, against prostitution) he could not tolerate. Hadn’t the both of them rushed from New Hampshire as boys in order to escape all that crabbed satrappery, not to carry the Moral War to Manhattan? During the winter of 1844, he became so weary of the virtuousness that for a while he stopped reading the Tribune on principle.

  No, Skaggs was not a big bug like Pierce or Greeley—no big bug would be found on a chilly Friday afternoon on the sidewalk at the intersection of Nassau and Fulton streets squinting into a camera with a yard of brown cloth draped over his head.

  Skaggs twisted the brass focus knob a final jot, forward and back, making the image on the glass a hair sharper. He adored focusing—it provided him the momentary happy godlike sensation of controlling one small spot in the universe. And, of course, he adored the opportunity (godlike as well) that photography afforded him to stare at people, to examine every detail of their eyes and lips, their bellies and bosoms, their fingernails and skin.

  The Blue Man lay on his side in the gutter a few feet in front of the tripod, illuminated by a column of sunlight, undoubtedly the day’s last. As Skaggs looked into his ground glass, studying the image (upside down, but so much more vivid than any unaided view through air), he wished it were possible to take a photograph depicting this poor riffraff ’s shade of blue. Not by exposing the plate to extra sunlight or hand-tinting the picture with paint, practices that Skaggs considered vulgar, but by some chemical means to capture the actual blue color on the plate. He had read in Scientific American about a Frenchman who had made such a picture, but the color image could not be fixed, and so disappeared; such evanescence struck Skaggs as worse than no color at all.

  All the while he was setting up his camera, which took a good ten minutes, the Blue Man had been humming the tune to “King Alcohol,” the Hutchinson Family’s hit about the evils of drink. When the fellow suddenly began to sing the words as well—

  “For there’s rum, and gin, and beer, and wine

  And brandy of logwood hue…”

  —it was too much for Skaggs. He pulled the little curtain of tow cloth from his head and replaced the cap over the lens. The song was increasing in volume as well. Passersby had been stopping to watch Skaggs and the Blue Man, and the song was attracting more spectators.

  “…And hock, and port, and flip combine

  To make a man look bluuuuuue!”

  “All right, sir,” Skaggs said to the Blue Man, “our moment has come. I am about to make your portrait. No jiggling for the next while.”

  “Whoopee!” the Blue Man replied. “I’m in the show business, the show business, the show business!”

  “If this were ‘the show business,’” Skaggs told him, “the wage would be more than the shilling I’m paying you.” He carefully pulled the viewing glass from the slot in the camera and replaced it with the plateholder.

  “But you are making me the star of Journalis
mville for an hour!” The Blue Man pointed at the small crowd behind Skaggs who had stopped to watch.

  “The star of Journalismville?” Skaggs said. “Is that what you said, sir?” He was startled now beyond mere amusement. Among these several blocks, an L-shaped district just east of City Hall and the Park, at least half of New York’s dailies and magazines and book publishers and lithographers had their offices. “Journalismville” was a coinage new to Skaggs, perhaps new to the world. As for “star,” he had never heard anyone outside the theater use the term. “Now then, sir—entirely still. Please.”

  “Is it sunshiny enough to make the picture?”

  “For the moment, yes. Are you quite ready?”

  “May I keep my mouth open? I go frightened if I breathe through only my nose for very long.”

  “By all means, do what you must to breathe,” Skaggs said, “but you must not move. Do you understand? I’ll count to ten, and when I’m finished you may sing and shout and jump all you wish.”

  He lifted the handle up to uncover the plate. In this position, the plateholder reminded him of a cocked guillotine, ready to snatch a tiny head.

  The Blue Man arranged himself in the gutter, resting his chin on one hand and opening his mouth wide.

  “Eh ah oh hay?” he asked, his lips two inches apart. Am I OK?

  “Very still, now.” Skaggs reached out and in one swift motion pulled off the lens cap. “One California…two California, three…” One of the fellow’s eyes twitched. “…eight California, nine California…ten.” He replaced the cap tight and shoved the dark slide down. “Excellent. Thank you, sir.”

  The Blue Man stood and took Skaggs’s two half dimes.

  BEFORE THE WAR, Duff Lucking had spent all his free time wandering New York City, by himself or with his young friends from the fire company. But now, if on a particular day he had no gas-pipe or postering job and the fire bells hadn’t rung, he tended to keep to himself in the rooms where he lodged, particularly during daylight. It felt safer.

  The sun had barely set but he lit his three lamps. He burned only coal oil; he blamed whale oil for his father’s bankruptcy, and therefore his death. The light cheered up the place and illuminated the pictures—the painting on velvet of No. 15’s firehouse, the engraved portraits of Jesus and the singer Abby Hutchinson, the colored-pencil drawings by his sister of his departed mother and father and siblings.

  He returned to his bed, the folded woolen child’s blanket tucked between his head and the wall, to read his new book. And he was so enraptured by Old Hicks, the Guide, or, Adventures in the Camanche Country in Search of a Gold Mine that he scarcely noticed the clamor of voices and wheels and horses outside in Orchard Street, rising the way it always did as afternoon turned to evening.

  He imagined himself riding west with the pure and heroic Texas Rangers along the Trinity River, entering the Peaceful Valley of Indians—“a new Eden of unsophisticated life” whose “graceful creatures had been shut out, by their steep hills in this enchanting recess, from any knowledge of the gloomy and bloody strife which man has been waging with himself and all God’s creatures since sin and death came into the world.” He imagined a pretty Camanche girl healing him with the steam of hot stones and cold baths. He imagined his duel with the evil French Count Albert. At a particularly brilliant passage he nodded and murmured assent.

  The great geniuses are and have been essentially savages in all but the breech cloth. They arrive at truth by much the same processes; they equally scorn all shackles but those of the God-imposed senses, whether corporeal or spiritual…

  With the pencil he kept on his lampstand he drew three quick lines in the margin.

  He looked up from the book. When he’d crossed the Rio Grande last fall, leaving the gloomy and bloody strife of Mexico, perhaps he should have ridden west and found his own Peaceful Valley, instead of returning east to the city.

  Kent, England

  BEN’S PASSAGE INTO his father’s library was blocked by the backsides of Sir Archie and an A.N.N.—one of the “awful nincompoop neighbors,” as he and Isabel called their father’s country acquaintances. He stopped two paces behind them.

  “It is an absolutely striking resemblance, sir,” Ben heard fat Squire Somebody-or-Other say to his host as he reached for a fresh Smoking Bishop. Sir Archie and his guest were looking toward the fireplace, alternating their glance up and down between Isabel Knowles Warfield and the oil portrait of her late mother. Both were in profile. Isabel was in some animated discussion with a man, another A.N.N.

  On Isabel’s other side stood her husband, Roger Warfield, and Philip’s wife Tryphena, who smiled dimly and faced the flames directly, heedless of the risk that the cosmetic wax on her face might melt, and ignoring the nuances of admiralty law that her brother-in-law Roger was explaining.

  And farther to their left, near the door to the print room, stood the Irish owner of the neighborhood’s new steam-powered flour mill. Philip was bragging to the miller and his wife about how he, Philip, had just persuaded the Lord Chamberlain to invoke the law against any fictional depiction of living royalty in order to prohibit a theatrical farce about King Ludwig of Bavaria and his mistress—Lola Montez, or, A Countess for an Hour—from opening in London.

  “It is a fine likeness,” Squire Whomever-It-Was said again to Sir Archie about Isabel, nodding as he sipped his sweet steaming drink.

  “Beautiful specimens both,” his host said. “Although the Lady Knowles,” he added, “had a self-assurance and a kind of natural”—Ben, overhearing, silently formed the word he knew was coming—“grandeur that my dear daughter cannot hope to possess. For that matter, which no young person possesses these days.”

  “Neither possesses nor wishes to affect,” Ben said, giving both men a start as they turned to greet him. The neighbor bobbled his fresh drink.

  “The lurking commentator,” Sir Archie said, “is my younger son. Benjamin—Mr. Reginald Fishbourne.”

  “Alas, I never had the pleasure of meeting Lady Knowles,” said Fishbourne.

  Nor did I, sir, since my mother, Ada Mactier Knowles, the daughter of a Glaswegian loan jobber, died of consumption in the summer of 1845, two years before the queen was persuaded to award my father his baronetcy—and therefore “the Lady Knowles,” a posthumous imaginary creation, never existed.

  “A pity, sir,” Ben said, extending his hand to the man in greeting. “She was a remarkable woman,” not least because she was the only member of this family compatible with all of its members.

  Behind them came the bustle of guests arriving and handing coats to one of the maids.

  “Ah, it is our esteemed barnacle expert!” Archibald Knowles nearly shouted as he turned and saw who had entered. “Come and warm yourselves, Professor, before dinner.”

  Ben assumed his father was being jocular, that the man was some minor shipping magnate and that his father called him “Professor” because the fellow quoted Greek verse, or because of his vaguely donnish appearance—tall, thin, shambling. Archibald Knowles had quit school at twelve, and would no sooner invite a scholar to a dinner party, Ben knew, than he would bring a parson with him to bargain for cotton at the Royal Exchange.

  “This, sir, is our would-be renegado,” Sir Archie announced to the new man, gesturing toward Ben, “who managed to lose Sir Henry’s Spheniscus demersus in some filthy Paris alley. I’m only grateful I didn’t give him the Pinguinus impennis for safekeeping, eh?”

  When Archie was beginning his wildlife collection several years ago, with the plan of specializing in flightless birds, he had engaged an Icelandic hunter to find a great auk, Pinguinus impennis, on a rock in the North Atlantic near Iceland. He was exorbitantly pleased with that particular trophy—which he claimed to have acquired from “a Danish collector,” since killing the birds was illegal in Britain. As it turned out, Archie Knowles’s Pinguinus impennis had been the last living great auk on earth. If he had known that the species was now extinct, his pride of ownership would h
ave been uncontainable.

  The new man’s tired-looking wife smiled politely. Her husband, however, arched his eyebrows and practically grinned, and as he did so issued a fart so shockingly loud and long that Ben first thought he was hearing the sound of a piece of heavy furniture being dragged across the floor overhead.

  Then, even more shockingly, it turned out the man really was a professor.

  “This is my younger son,” his father said. “Benjamin—Professor and Mrs. Darwin.”

  “We are eager to hear of your adventures in Paris,” Darwin said as he extended his hand. He was at least a decade Ben’s senior, but his manner and look—bald head and thick, broad eyebrows—made him seem even older.

  “Misadventures,” Sir Archie Knowles said.

  “My wife lived in Paris for a time as a girl, studying piano.” Another fart boomed from Darwin, this one brief but much deeper and even louder than the first.

  Ben’s father had once or twice mentioned his neighbor, who lived in Downe, a few miles away. This was no mere “diddler with books and boys and foreign ideas,” as Sir Archie described the archetypal scholar when Ben had considered becoming a fellow at Cambridge, but a celebrated professor whose book The Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle was a popular success, a well-to-do professor married to a granddaughter of the millionaire potter Josiah Wedgwood. And a professor who would fully appreciate the creatures on display in the building down behind the birch grove. Now Ben believed he understood Darwin’s presence.

  But he did not. Knowles, Merdle, Newcome & Shufflebotham had made a recent investment in a fleet of vessels for carrying guano, so it was actually Darwin’s firsthand knowledge of Peruvian guano that intrigued Archibald Knowles. Sir Archibald had plenty of social ambition but he was still, at bottom, a practical man who never forgot that he was in trade. It was the fertilizer business that had made him befriend Charles Darwin, the prospect of buying the shit of cormorants and boobies for £3 a ton and selling it for £10 that had led him to solicit the company of a book-diddler. Ben knew none of this, nor that his father wanted his youngest child in the country on this particular day in order to provide suitably intellectual conversation for West Kent’s resident expert in South American bird droppings, and for his artistic wife.